Today, Atlanta’s gayborhood in Midtown is permanently marked by a rainbow crosswalk at the intersection of 10th Street and Piedmont Avenue. At a 1986 Human Rights Campaign dinner, King affirmed her “solidarity with the gay and lesbian movement.” Many prominent figures from the city, including Coretta Scott King, have drawn a line between the common struggle for blacks and gays. Here are the current gayborhoods by gender in 15 major American cities, how they’ve evolved, and the pressures they are facing today:Ītlanta, one of the nation’s largest black-majority cities, has a storied history of civil rights activism and has long been an oasis for minorities in the South.
The earlier study from UPenn found that Census tracts that started the decade with more gay men experience significantly greater growth in household income and population.īut the LGBTQ community can be both “victim and perpetrator.” The cycle of “regeneration” hasn’t slowed, and now gayborhoods are becoming too expensive for many in the queer community. Same-sex male households often follow, priced out of previous gayborhoods.
In a 2010 interview with the Observer, Sharon Zukin, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, suggested that same-sex female households could be “canaries in the urban coal mine,” signaling neighborhood change or gentrification. “In their often-trying search for safety, community, and opportunity over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, queer households have actively participated in-and often even spearheaded-many of the now familiar patterns of urban ‘regeneration’ in cities across the country.” Urban historian Gabrielle Esperdy terms this “lavender-lining,” the combination of the celebratory marking of Pride parade routes with redlining, the discriminatory and systematic disinvestment in neighborhoods based on race. Gayborhoods aren’t immune to these changes, but it’s important to consider that they might have contributed to some of it too.Īlthough the queer community cuts across race, ethnicity, and class lines, certain gayborhoods can be non-inclusive. Males, on the other hand, drive gayborhoods.Ĭities have undergone monumental shifts in the past two decades: “white flight” has reversed, pushing longtime city residents out housing prices have skyrocketed, creating an affordable housing crisis and shrinking wages have driven an expanding income gap. Overall, same-sex female households have lower index scores, suggesting that they are less likely to live in a neighborhood surrounded by other same-sex female households. The index measures the certainty of an area being a gayborhood. Same-sex females couples are also more likely to have children than their male counterparts. The gender wage gap hits same-sex female households hard-they have less household income than both same-sex male and different-sex households. Researchers point to two likely explanations for these gender differences. A 2015 study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Studies Center had similar findings, stating “lesbians are less spatially concentrated than gay men.” Two overarching trends emerge in the index: same-sex male couples are more likely to be concentrated where there is also a visible queer presence (parades, marches, and bars), and they are overall much more concentrated than same-sex female couples. Men like the nightlife, they like to boogie Here’s how the gayborhood index works in New York City: (More about the limitations in the methodology section.)
Still, this is some of the most complete data that we have. This project aims to paint a slightly more complete picture, combining several metrics to create a gayborhood index, but even then it admittedly underweights and undercounts areas with non-binary and minority populations.
traditional marriage, the male/female gender binary) of the queer spectrum and “rainbow-washes” any intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Most of the existing data sticks to a narrow view (i.e. Over time, this queer city migration helped form distinct enclaves, or “gayborhoods.” Today, they are often marked by rainbow crosswalks and strips of businesses flying Pride flags, but beyond the obvious markers, how do we measure these queer spaces? And more importantly, who gets included?Ĭurrently, there’s no comprehensive way to quantitatively measure gayborhoods, or even where LGBTQ Americans live. And today, they still serve as the North Star for many LGBTQ youth across the country. Decades before the “We’re here! We’re queer!” activism of the 1960s and 1970s, cities were a refuge for those society had kicked out. Cities have long been havens for queer individuals.