‘Gayborhoods’ lose LGBTQ appeal in big cities
Residents in search of cheaper housing, better amenities
Cleve Jones has lived in the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco for nearly 50 years, almost from the day he graduated from high school in Phoenix and hitchhiked to California.
He has been a political and cultural leader, organizing gay men and lesbians when the AIDS epidemic devastated these streets in the early 1980s. He created the nationally recognized AIDS Memorial Quilt from a storefront on Market Street. He was a face of the anger and sorrow that swept the Castro in 1978 after the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Jones has helped define the Castro, dancing at its gay bars seven nights a week when he was younger, gathering with friends for drinks and gossip as he grew older. To this day, he is recognized when he walks down its sidewalks.
“Hi Cleve — I know who you are,” said Lt. Amy Hurwitz of the San Francisco Police Department, after Jones began to introduce himself.
But in May, Jones, 67, left for a small home with a garden and apple and peach trees 75 miles away in Sonoma County after the monthly cost of his one-bedroom apartment soared to $5,200 from $2,400.
His story is not just another tale of a longtime resident priced out of a gentrifying housing market. Across the country, LGBTQ neighborhoods in big cities — New York, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco among them
— are experiencing a confluence of social, cultural and economic factors, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, that is diluting their influence and visibility.
In a few cases, some LGBTQ leaders say, the neighborhoods’ very existence is threatened.
“I walk around the neighborhood that encouraged me for so many decades, and I see the reminders of Harvey and the Rainbow Honor Walk, celebrating famous queer and trans people,” Jones said as he led a visitor on a tour of his old neighborhood, pointing out empty storefronts and sidewalks. “I just can’t help but think that soon there will be a time when people walking up and down the street will have no clue what this is all about.”
Housing costs are a big reason for that. But there are other factors as well.
LGBTQ couples, particularly younger ones, are starting families and considering more traditional features — public schools, parks and larger homes — in deciding where they want to live.
The draw of “gayborhoods” as a refuge for past generations looking to escape discrimination and harassment is less of an imperative today, reflecting the rising acceptance of gay and lesbian people. And dating apps have, for many, replaced the gay bar as a place that leads to a relationship or a sexual encounter.
Many gay and lesbian leaders said this might well be a long-lasting realignment, an unexpected product of the success of a gay rights movement, including the Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage in 2015, that has pushed for equal rights
and integration into mainstream society.
There are few places where this transformation is more on display than in the Castro, long a barometer of the evolution of gay and lesbian life in America. It is a place where samesex couples crammed the streets, sidewalks, bars and restaurants in defiance and celebration as LGBTQ people in other cities lived cloistered lives.
It was the stage for some of the first glimmers of the modern gay rights movement in the late 1960s; the rise to the political establishment with the election of openly gay officials like Milk; and the community’s powerful response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
“Gayborhoods are going away,” Jones said. “People need to pay attention to this. When people are dispersed, when they no longer live in geographic concentrations, when they no longer inhabit specific precincts, we lose a lot. We lose political power. We lose the ability to elect our own and defeat our enemies.”
Jones’ departure has sent tremors through gay neighborhoods across the country, all the more so because it happened in the midst of annual pride celebrations marking the advances of the LGBTQ movement since the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, in June 1969.
“What I see in Houston is we are losing our history,” said Tammi Wallace, president of the Greater Houston LGBT Chamber of Commerce, who lives in Montrose, the city’s gay neighborhood. “A lot of individuals and couples are saying, ‘We can move to different parts of the city and know we are going to be accepted.’ ”
Daniel B. Hess, a professor of urban planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo and co-author of a book about the evolution of gay neighborhoods, said U.S. census data over the past three decades showed a decline in the density of same-sex couples in Chelsea and Greenwich Village in New York City, Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., West Hollywood in Los Angeles County and the Castro, which he called “America’s premier gay neighborhood.”
“Gay men are moving out of gay neighborhoods,” he said. “They are settling in other urban neighborhoods and close-in suburbs. And non-LGBTQ people are moving in and knocking down the concentration in gay neighborhoods.”
Hess said part of this was generational. The men and women who established these neighborhoods “wanted to segregate and be surrounded by gay people,” he said. “In contrast, when you ask young people today what they want, they would prefer an inclusive coffee shop. They don’t want anyone to feel unwelcome.”
Some gay leaders argued that the instinct to live in communities of likeminded people remained a powerful draw and that there would always be some version of a gayborhood, though perhaps not as concentrated and powerful.
“I say this as a gay man: It’s nice to live in a community where there are a lot of other queer people there, where I can go out and walk on the street to a gay bar,” said Scott Wiener, a California state senator who lives in the Castro. “Where I can walk two blocks to get an HIV and STD test at a clinic that won’t judge me.”
“We have to be very intentional of protecting these neighborhoods — and keeping them queer,” he said. “With that said, I also believe that the Castro is very strong and has very deep LGBTQ roots.”