What are "gayborhoods" and what opportunities and challenges have they embodied for LGBTQ people?     

 

A gay neighborhood has four features. First, it has a distinct geographic focal point. Second, it has a unique culture that makes LGBTQ people visible and makes them feel connected. Third, gayborhoods are residentially dense, with many people who live there identifying as LGBTQ. Finally, gayborhoods have a cluster of commercial spaces and nonprofit organizations that target the needs of LGBTQ people.

 

Gayborhoods incubate unique cultures, political perspectives, organizations and businesses, family forms, rituals and styles of socialization. In doing so, these areas stand guard against a peculiar problem of ancestry that we encounter as LGBTQ people: They help us to answer the question, "Who are my people?" And thus they renew a sense of our roots.

 

The opportunities and challenges that gayborhoods embody arise from their intimate involvement in nearly every aspect of modern life: from the municipal promotion of urban spaces to city planning and the shaping of real-estate values; from pride parades to protest events; and from the institutional development of LGBTQ communities to our civic engagement and ability to respect our own remarkable internal diversity.

 

In San Francisco's Castro as well as the gayborhoods in other cities, the population is increasingly straight, but there's still a concentration of  businesses that serve LGBTQ people. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this arrangement? Do you think this pattern is sustainable?

 

Gayborhoods continue to house what I call "anchor institutions," despite ongoing residential fluctuations. These distinctive facilities, which include bars, bookstores, cafes, churches, heritage sites, museums and theaters, are the primary engines of community building, and they ground the material culture of a group of people in a specific part of the city. Although change is a fact of urban life, anchor institutions in a gayborhood seal the area's character in the local imagination because anchor institutions are often more salient than are mere residential clusters.

 

Residential and commercial concentrations can each signal the presence of a gayborhood, but even as the former wanes, as is the case today in cities across the country, institutional anchors can still provide meaningful indicators of our ways of life. As a gay man in Boystown in Chicago told me, "As long as those businesses are still here, that's a big thing that keeps the perception in people's head that Lakeview is still gay." That the institutions are located in a physical place imbues the neighborhood with a home-like quality: Anchor institutions are powerful, and sustainable, because they make sexuality feel like a quasi-ethnicity.

 

Establishing LGBTQ districts create important cultural continuities across periods of historical change. People on the street might look different today than they did one, two or more decades ago, but a cultural district retains the area's historical significance. Cultural districts transform neighborhoods from a set of streets into places of meaning. The trick, however, is to prize the area's diversity, rather than reduce it into a Disneyfied space. How to do that is a topic for another conversation!

Alan (Bobby) Martinez studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved to San Francisco in 1977. Being both queer and Hispanic, he is particularly interested in the ways ethnic and LGBTQ cultures intersect with the built environment and the politics of urbanism.