365Gay Agenda Blog

The historic Castro Theatre.

What’s a ‘gayborhood’ and why is it important to LGBT communities?

Last night, I attended a talk at the San Francisco Public Library by Donald F. Reuter about his latest book, Greetings from the Gayborhood (published by Abrams Image).

“Gay + neighborhood = gayborhood: that urban area where we gay people are — or appear to be — the majority of visitors and residents,” Reuter writes in his chatty, informative little book. “But that’s hardly the whole story,” Reuter adds. “These enclaves represent social factors — economic, political, moral, and geographical — that came together in a unique way a few generations ago so that we could ‘come out.’…”

Reuters looks at the development of gay neighborhoods in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC. “Greetings” is chock full of photos and images of all those little things that go to make up a gayborhood, including gay magazine covers, matchbooks, and bathhouse promotional materials.

Reuter provides a brief history of the rise of gayborhoods through a schema that begins with the period he calls ‘That’s Entertainment’ (1946-58), followed by the period of ‘Present, but Unseen’ (1959-68). Then comes ‘the Golden Age’ (1969-78), the ‘Poster Boy’ (1979-88), ‘Gay is Good’ (1989-98), and finally, ‘Seeing the Forest for the Bush’ (1999-present).

Reuter’s informative, camp, entertaining little book is the size of a large postcard and is not intended to provide a detailed examination of the politics of LGBT communities. But I would essay that it is the rise of neighborhoods with large concentrations of LGBT people — as chronicled by Reuter — that has played a significant role in the rise of LGBT political power in the United States.

It was in 1978 that support from the Castro helped elect Harvey Milk the first openly gay member of San Francisco’s city council, the Board of Supervisors. And it was support from the LGBT community in Greenwich Village that helped elect New York’s first openly lesbian and gay elected officials to the City Council and the state Assembly and the state Senate in the 1990s.

So there are political implications in the development of ‘gayborhoods’ in cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. If we are where we are today — with the most LGBT-supportive major party presidential candidate in history — it is in no small measure to the empowering effect of the gayborhoods from the West Village to the Castro to Boystown and beyond.