Leading with the apocalyptic news of this year’s cancellation of the Castro’s legendary Halloween Parade, The New York Times delves into the continuing erosion of neighborhoods which once identified as “gay”–and with which the gay community once identified itself.
These are wrenching times for San Francisco’s historic gay village,” Times reporter Patricia Leigh Brown writes. “With population shifts, booming development, and a waning sense of belonging that is also being felt in gay enclaves across the nation, from Key West, Fla., to West Hollywood, as they struggle to maintain cultural relevance in the face of gentrification.”
The piece goes on to quote Don F. Reuter, a New York author currently writing a book chronicling the rise and fall of the U.S. gayborhood: “Claiming physical territory was a powerful act, but the gay neighborhood is becoming a past-tense idea.”
“Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being Passe” [New York Times]
EdWoody
Cancelling Castro Halloween had nothing to do with “eroding gay neighborhoods.” It was done because people were SHOT there last year.
Qjersey
Young people just coming out CAN’T AFFORD to live in gay neighborhoods; they’ve all become genetrified places for upper middle class urbanites who think of themselves as “hip”
Paul Raposo
“they’ve all become genetrified places for upper middle class urbanites who think of themselves as ‘hip'”
Yep. When the straights move in, the gaybourhood dies. Same thing has been happening to the Church and Wellesley area of Toronto for years now. Nothing more annoying that visiting the area with a date and getting prudish looks from the straight people, as if we are invading THEIR turf.
http://www.churchwellesleyvillage.ca/
Jon
The same thing is happening in West Hollywood right now. We have a huge infestation of heteros moving in. I see straight people with babies every friggin’ day. It’s making me ill. Where have all the cowboys gone?
ggreen
There is all kinds of BS from everywhere over the Halloween cancellation in the Castro. BS mostly from folks that don’t live in the Castro neighborhood but have some kind of self-promoting ax to grind about Halloween. I have lived at ground zero for 20+ years. The world and the Castro have changed that’s part of life. Attitudes about the noise, the mess and the cost have been changing for years. Meanwhile the event got out of control. The event was based on the assumption that people would behave themselves and respect the neighborhood and it’s residents. As America has moved into the era of White Trash rule (Bush II) events that relied on self-control and respect for others (no matter how slight) began to fall apart.
Castro Halloween used to be about fun and clever costumes not booze and puking. Alcohol really put the final nails in the coffin. The celebration became more about booze than fun. It attracted troublemakers and underage kids by the bus load literally. Take a drunk macho shit head add his overweight girlfriend stuffed into a teddie two sizes to small and you have a recipe for disaster.
WWH
I would think it’s the city government’s fault. If New York can have a gun-free Halloween parade, any city should be able to. Gavin Newsome doesn’t care enough to put the resources into it because he’ll be off having wine and cheese somewhere on the 31st.
Heather_L_James
“Take a drunk macho shit head add his overweight girlfriend stuffed into a teddie two sizes to small and you have a recipe for disaster.”
I thought that was the recipe for Saturday night in (insert favorite state south of the Mason-Dixon line)?
As far as the death of the gayborhood, that is happening in virtually every queer enclave in the US; Dupont Circle, Halsted, WeHo and even here in sleepy little Cleveland’s Ohio City. That is the way of urban gentrification, gay folks move in, clean it up, and then sell it off to yuppies at four times the price. How do you think we are funding the furtherance of the homosexual agenda?
If we want to normalize GLBT, then we have to let the straight folks play, too.
hisurfer
When my friends and I fled the Midwest (1989) we scattered to San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, and Chicago. We used to joke that we should have our own ghetto in San Francisco, a Little Michigan, just like the other immigrants.
Small town boys will always need to go somewhere. I wonder where they’ll go now that the big cities are out of their price range.
Michael Bedwell
Whenever auslanders (New York, LA, INDIANA???) pontificate in print or TV or the Net about those of us who actually live in San Francisco generally and the Castro specifically (thanks ggreen for your points, too), we try to be amused, really we do. But, oh, where to start addressing the many “blind men and the elephant” selective and plain wrong perceptions in the NYT’s piece?
First, the author clearly doesn’t really understand San Francisco or she would emphasize that however much the Castro neighborhood might still be identified as “the” gay part of town, the beauty of “the city underneath the rainbow” is that it has, for years, been perhaps the most “out gay” permeated city anywhere in the US. One can see not just rainbow flags all over The City (and all the way down its main “mainstream” street throughout the month of June) but proudly out gay men and women throughout its 47+ square miles, walking hand-in-hand, not believing that they have to suppress their identity until they are safely within the borders of “the gay ghetto.”
Second, though there was always the random penis, breast, and buttock, despite the author’s delusionary claim, Castro Halloween was NEVER a “symbol of sexual liberation.” Perhaps the writer was confusing it with the Folsom Street Fair. Rather it has been a symbol there, as it was before on Polk Street when it centered “the gay district,†of gay identity association with fun generally and masquerade as it has been intrinsic to gays’ survival throughout Time. You’d be unlikely to immediately get the latter response polling the average frolicker in a giant Marge Simpson “head mask” or a dozen guys in matching drag displaying false furry vulvas with dangling tampon strings carrying signs that say “Dump Bush” or myriad Marie Antoinettes, but it’s there. We just never appreciated the ever-growing numbers of nongay, uncostumed gawkers (Chartered tour buses from Sacramento??? The horror!) and are no longer willing to risk being stabbed or shot or merely trampled to death for that experience.
And 94114 residents get that much of the local bitching about “cancelling Halloween” is being driven by those trying to exploit it politically against Mayor Newsom (sorry, WWH, if you are such an expert on him you should know that his last name only has one “e”)and the district’s supervisor, Bevan Dufty (one of its agitators has already run against him for the office) and attention queens of whom we always have an overabundance. I’ll happily pay to ship “community leader” Donna Sachet to your little post-gay burg toute suite.
The article paints a picture of major development changing the face and ambience of the Castro when, in fact, empty storefronts and stagnated growth is the real problem, exacerbated, e.g., by lunatic fringe queens who don’t realize that blocking the customer friendly, relatively inexpensive, and nutrition conscious Trader Joe’s from filling an empty space in the ‘stro only further enriches the conservative owner of Safeway at Church and Market. Pottery Barn? Please, madam, who do you think created that chotzke empire in the first place? It’s less a matter of “straightness†invading the Castro than gay conspicuous consumption coming home.
As much as anything, the Castro is going downhill because of witlessness that has been growing for years. As the biggest crowds descended upon the neighborhood in its “glory days” just to cruise and booze, most restaurant owners never felt the need (and too many still don’t) to offer much more than a greasy spoon when so many of their clientele was too drunk or drugged to taste food anyway. Whereas vino and cocktails remain very much a part of the North Beach scene, it has been destination place for decades for dinner and/or shows whether it be women strippers, comedy shows, Finnochio’s drag acts for tourists, drag icon for gays Jose Sarria at the Black Cat, or “Beach Blanket Babylon.†Josie’s Cabaret in the Castro lasted a while but too many of its performers confused flame with fame. I wish there were more of the ambience in the Castro one finds in North Beach at night but I wouldn’t want it to be any less gay and by that I don’t mean sexual.
The effect of AIDS on the Castro cannot be overemphasized. Some classier business such as the Obelisk closed when their owners died. The housing shift exploded as a result of neighborhood owners dying and their houses being snapped up by gays and straights knowing that the already absurd home prices were likely to get more insane and, in any case, the Castro remains one of the more attractive areas of San Francisco architecturally (not to mention weatherwise) because it never burned in the post-1906 earthquake fires.
Many AIDS survivors, even without its disillusioning influences, simply grew tired of living at gay sex ground zero, and moved to other neighborhoods and the suburbs for the same and many reasons once-younger nongays do.
But really, how many gay men, all other things being equal such as financial mobility, would choose Kansas City over San Francisco or any other highly gay-populated metropolis?
Yes, there IS a question of how much longer as a “symbol†of being gay such places will remain important, but the author defeats her own implied belief that death is near by describing how many gay visitors from across the country and the world still clog the streets on weekends. Sadly, I imagine many of them have the same reaction as visitors to Hollywood & Vine: is that all there is? (I would love to see the LGBT Historical Society find a permanent home there.) But they still make that pilgrimage for the symbolic and literal home of so much gay progress remains far more important to many than whether or not their feet can fit into Clark Gable’s footprints in front of [now] Mann’s Chinese Theatre in “Tinsel Town.†And it will for the foreseeable future and that is a good thing.
ggreen
Amen Michael Bedwell Id like to contribute to the deportation fund for Donna Sachet, if she takes fellow shameless self-promoter Gary Virginia with her!
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
As much as I detest Donovan and his so-called Catholic League, the open sexuality and bondage photos were simply inappropriate.
Heterosexuals have such goings on, too, and Hugh Heffner and his bunny culture is now institutional.
Not all heterosexuals approve of all the behaviours and actions within the heterosexual community.
Well, brother, neither do homosexuals have to imprimatur every act that goes under the name “gay”.
rjp3
Young gay people COULD still band together for fun and community by moving into less fashionable but edgy neighborhoods – just as the prior generations did.
To complain they are too expensive misses the reality that gay people were ALLOWED to call these space their own because nobody else wanted to live there.
Provincetown was a failed fishing village dump.
The Castro (and Haight-Ashbury)were falling down Victorians abandoned when the straights moved to the suburbs.
The South End in Boston was basically part of the Boston ghetto.
The current thriving gayborhoods are suburbs abandoned by wealthy straigths. Silverlake in LA and Wilton Manors near Fort Lauderdale.
Gays are still and underclass – but struggle neighborhoods will still welcome them.
Each generation if they want it can claim a new location – but the always get gentrified.
Dan Manrutter
Fewer young gays of this generation will head off to San Francisco and other large, expensive cities. They realize they are gay when they are 14, instead of 20, which was more typical of people of my generation (high school in the 60’s).
The only thing for us to do was troop off to a large city, to find ourselves. Most of us thought we were the only people in our entire small home towns who were gay. With the internet, young gays can meet the ones in their own backyard, and gain a whole heap of information about homosexuality as well. When I grew up, even a large local library had only one book on homosexuality, and it was written by a doctor who advocated various ways of getting rid of it.
I’ll tell you, reading about Tchaikovsky’s “Z” in his diary, was hardly jerk-off material. Everyone who was gay in literature wanted to get rid of it or kill themselves.
How many gay people, living in SF, the gay capital of the world, and one of its most beautiful cities, won’t be tempted to sell their house at some point, and make a fortune. (Renters will just want a nicer place for the price.) Still, it is going to be pretty gay for the next twenty years or so, or until the earthquake.
Dan Manrutter
Further, a reverse of the post-WWII exodus to the burbs can’t be ignored. Heading for the burbs was the big thing that created the affordable inner-city fringe areas, like Greenwich Village in the first place.
Greenwich Village took a few decades to gentrify, but Chelsea and Park Slope (Brooklyn)did it in about five years. It was like a few years of gays moving into somewhat seedy places, fixing them up, and then yuppies everywhere.
Statistics would be interesting. The number of young gay people who moved to large cities in the 1960’s vs. now.