How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [17]
In focus groups, Professor Florida found that brainy young college graduates were looking for tolerant and diverse neighborhoods near the companies that wanted to hire them. A test, it seemed, was if there were rainbow flags hanging in windows. They saw such flags as a sign of openness and tolerance. And even if they were straight, they judged their future workplaces by their policies toward benefits for gay couples and domestic partners.
The Diaspora, Housing Values, and How Long Can a Neighborhood Stay Gay?
West Hollywood, California, the town next to mine, is a very strange place. It’s the gayborhood meets the shtetl. The town has a gay mayor and gay council members, but more than eight-thousand Russian immigrants also make “WeHo” home. The aging Russian-Jewish population coexists fairly well with the buff, young WeHo immigrants, whose average age seems to be twenty-five, but of course I’m imagining that second part. There are lots of apartment buildings that house the impossibly pretty young party boys. But there are older gay couples who stayed in WeHo after they bought into the real estate market in the 1990s.
In a 1999 interview with a real estate website, Josh Levin, a West Hollywood financial planner, described an area known as Norma Triangle, near Santa Monica Boulevard, where gay men had totally renovated the bungalows. “These are little homes built in the 1920s for railroad workers,” he says. “We say the neighborhood has been ‘fairy-dusted.’ There is not a street with homes that gays haven’t redesigned.”
But, as is happening all over the country, West Hollywood has become pricey. Those fairy-dusted starter homes are not within reach of young gay people, and so they are leaving for other neighborhoods, such as Silver Lake or Downtown Los Angeles. The dream of the gay ghetto is disappearing, in part because of assimilation, and in larger part because straight people are moving in and driving up the prices even further.
The staff of The Stranger, an alternative newspaper in Seattle, lashed out at this phenomenon in 1999:
The closest most gays and lesbians ever come to finding a promised land is moving to the gay ghetto—an urban neighborhood that is populated by, and reasonably tolerates, a large number of queers. Young, straight singles have moved in, followed by straight retirees, marrieds, and young families. With young queers forced to look elsewhere for housing, first-wave gay ghettos are on the decline, sapped of the energy and sex appeal of queer youngsters. Such is the sad story of Seattle’s Capitol Hill . . . And thus the great queer migration begins. Queers set out, like herds of faaabulous caribou, in search of the next gay ghetto. It happened in New York, it happened in Chicago, it happened in San Francisco—and now it’s happening here. All over the United States, young gays and lesbians priced out of established gay ghettos are colonizing new neighborhoods, seeking out cheap rents and opening trendy restaurants. In New York, young queers have abandoned the East Village and taken over Chelsea; in Chicago, young queers have left Lake View behind and taken over Andersonville, and in San Francisco, young queers have burst out of the Castro and taken over, well, everything.
And so the housing cycle is complete: Instead of just visiting gay neighborhoods, straight people want to live in them. Heterosexuals are like strange conquerors, wandering into an ideal civilization built for them and abandoned by the indigenous population. Nice card shops, nice bars, great coffee shops, interesting bookshops. Yes, gay neighborhoods are what any civilized person would want.
The Definition of a Community: It’s Got to Have a Bingo Night!
Conceived as a fund-raiser for AIDS organizations in 1993, Gay Bingo night in Seattle raises as much as $10,000 per night. It’s the perfect example of how the gay community can take a rather boring heterosexual standby and make it into vital, funny performance art. Seattle’s Gay Bingo is so popular that tickets sell out a week in advance, and it has spread