Review symposium on There Goes the Gayborhood?

Gays come to the city; this is an old story. But how they come and what happens next, that is a newer story and one that informs Amin Ghaziani’s There Goes the Gayborhood? For urban scholars, those schooled in the classics of urban sociology in particular, the case of the gayborhood goes against the inherited analytic grain—in ways taken up with wide-ranging intelligence by a group of critics whose remarks follow this introduction. The distinctive demographic and cultural texture of a particular group has transformed the meaning of places and their occupants. Before there were gay people, there were “homosexuals” relegated to the “zone of transition”—the city’s social dumping ground where investments ceased while awaiting the higher and better uses to come. Granted some degree of refuge through this neglect, gay people’s beings could not be discussed much less be featured in urban analysis. The muck of deviance was residual. What a flip! In the new model of urban dynamism, gays come to be branded as creative heart. The ethnic groups and remaining subalterns may continue the trudge across the concentric rings and into the suburban sectors, but their distinctive potential dissipates as inter-mating and cordiality take their toll. There is, of course replenishment through the new migrants from around the world, sometimes celebrated for their “energies” (or at least cheap labor). But settlements of the other Americans—the great white washed—have become dynamically useless. The opinion surveys reveal that for no other group has public attitude so shifted as toward gays and lesbians—in an overwhelmingly positive direction. Indeed, the stigma system has almost been turned on its head: gays (the men in particular) are where it is happening. Good economic and networking cred comes from associating with their lifestyle, whether as gayborhood resident, once resident, or just part of the alliance. Of course, as Ghaziani notes, the US is not free of gay oppression, and some of it is systemic and violent. But the gayborhood, as it exists and is widely interpreted, sits as shining beacon: the ghetto on the hill not only for those whose sexuality makes them dream of such a place, but for anyone who dreams that powerful shifts in social and political life are possible.