There’s a front-page article in the Times today about how gay neighborhoods are disappearing — something beyond the ordinary demographic shift of neighborhoods over time. Some causes: skyrocketing real estate prices, straight people moving in, gay couples moving to the suburbs, a decreasing perceived necessity for gay people to band together, and the Internet.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the scheme of things, gay neighborhoods are a new idea, only having come into existence around 1969. The ebb and flow of physical cultural communities is natural. The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Puritans banded together, but their descendants spread out across New England and diluted their identity; the Jews of Brooklyn and Queens moved out to the suburbs of New Jersey and Long Island.
You don’t have to live in a ghetto in order to feel part of a community. We all juggle numerous identities inside ourselves. When I was a kid, I went to a public school five days a week like everyone else, but on Wednesdays after school and on Sunday mornings, I went to Hebrew school at our synagogue. I had Jewish friends and Christian friends, and I felt different kinds of affinities with each group — religious ties, school ties, generational ties.
In high school I was part of the drama crowd but also part of the yearbook crowd. In college I was part of a tight-knit group of friends in my dorm, but I was also part of a tight-knit men’s chorus and a tight-knit a cappella group. In fact, I got a rush out of switching identities depending on whom I was with.
It’s healthy to be part of more than one group, to mingle. The more you get to know other people, the less you will see them as The Other, as one-dimensional foes.
Meanwhile, people of common affinities will always seek each other out. I don’t much go to gay bars anymore, but I have my gay men’s chorus every week. My best friend at work is gay. And of course I’ve got my Gay Boyfriend.
It could be that gay neighborhoods were part of a special cultural moment and that that moment has passed. But nothing lasts forever.
I like your latest entry, I must’ve caught it mere minutes after posting :-) They’re pretty much my thoughts, about the disappearance of gay ghettos. There isn’t such a need anymore to band together in communities, the culture really has changed in the last quarter century or so. Your analogy to neighborhoods in NYc is apt – assimilation is inevitable, though somewhat sad at times. I really do miss having a gay neighborhood. No matter how tolerant and accepting, the majority of the world is straight, and sometimes its nice to be able to hang out with “your own kind”, with people who understand your experiences, where you never have to explain anything, and they don’t doubt your shared experiences. Even with guys I can’t stand, there’s a certain unspoken understanding of each other based on common experiences of being part of a reviled minority.
What drives me nuts is insular types who cling to the ghetto and are afraid or unwilling to step outside of it. I’m sad that it’s disappearing, but it really is inevitable, it’s the simple price of acceptance. I find those people incredibly sad and isolated – to block out the majority of life’s experiences based on identification with a single aspect of your composite self is just… sad. People who refuse to associate with straight people, or gays, or trannies, or drag queens, or Christians, or women, or men, or blacks or mexicans or whites or… or whatever other groups you consider “not one of us” drive me berserk. It’s a great big world and we’re all part of some minority and if you don’t make connections outside your enclave, well why act surprised when “they” are suspicious and frightened of you? They don’t *know* you.
Your boyfriend is gay?