Again proving itself to be a groundbreaking newspaper, the New York Times has spent a whopping 2570 words telling us what we already know: Hell's Kitchen's establishing itself as one of the city's most gay friendly neighborhoods.

For those of you not living here in the city we so often refer to as the "hell mouth", more and more fagalas have been eschewing the increasingly pricey Chelsea for the more affordable Hell's Kitchen. On the surface this sounds like a simple real estate-related migration. Upon closer look, however, Hell's Kitchen as hot property mirrors a larger national trend.

There's been a spate of articles on the "death" of the gay ghetto - that is, gay people are no longer colonizing swaths of cities as their own, but integrating into the larger melting pot, a sentiment journo David Shaftel echoes:

This new gay presence, however, is very different from what went before. In the West Village and Chelsea, gay culture was in many respects the prevailing culture. But in Hell’s Kitchen, the gay community is just one of many subcultures that share and sometimes compete for a common turf.

It's pure finances that motivate the 'mo migration more than anything else. After being rescued from oblivion in the early 1990s, Chelsea rapidly became one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York, thus forcing young queers to look elsewhere. Gregory Angelo - Next Magazine's former EIC - tells Shaftel:

When I started going out in New York as a gay man and making gay friends in New York it was all about Chelsea. By then the West Village was starting to look like something of a relic... I found there were enough young gay men and women who, like me, wanted to be a part of Chelsea but didn’t have the funds and couldn’t find an apartment there. So we all moved into Hell’s Kitchen.

And so it began.

Though Hell's Kitchen may not be as overtly gay, nor as welcoming - some residents still exercise caution in their public displays of fag-fection - this move may be one of the most prudent, progressive shirt lifter shifts. While gay ghettos may help foster more intra-queer relations (many of the sexual variety), it seems to us that gay people - like all people - are better off intregrating into their chosen cities. By cordoning our queer selves, we only perpetuate maligned ideas of queer separatism - ideas which fuel conservative notions of "special rights" and the such. Gays are just as American as anyone else and a geographical segregation does nothing to prove this. It is only in this way that gays can hope to find a space everywhere, rather than simply 8th avenue.