The Death and Life of Gay American Cities
There Goes the Gayborhood (Again)
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Hell’s Kitchen was my home for eleven of the thirteen years I lived in New York. To me, the neighborhood was the Hair 2 Stay salon in the basement of my apartment building, where the hairdresser once gave me a bunch of Thai basil from her Asian market. It was Minerva, who would complain about her knees in her Spanish accent as I hauled her grocery cart up four flights of stairs. It was Jay, a Korean immigrant who ran the dry cleaner down the block where we took our laundry because the machines in our building swallowed quarters like casino slots. It was the line cooks of the Shake Shack on one corner and the bartenders of the French brasserie on the other. It was the guy with the mullet yelling “Strippers!” outside a different kind of shake shack. And it was the Mid City Gym, where I’d occasionally train with an ex-convict named Bashar who, for his life of crime, found himself trying to bulk up twinks in what he called “a gay gym.”
This was daily life in the so-called “gayborhood”—and if you weren’t looking for it, you might not have noticed.
Gayborhoods are, of course, some of the most storied and celebrated urban neighborhoods: San Francisco’s Castro, Chicago’s Boystown, Boston’s South End, Washington’s Dupont Circle. In New York, Hell’s Kitchen was the last of three major gayborhoods, after Greenwich Village and Chelsea. The gays arrived in the Village when it was still shabby and not yet chic: cheap rents brought well-educated bohemians to what was then a working-class Italian-immigrant neighborhood, transforming it into a middle-class district even as its new denizens railed against bourgeois values. When Jane Jacobs moved to the Village in 1947, gay men and women sidled invisibly through the sidewalk ballet she celebrated lest they attract suspicious “eyes on the street,” retreating to a largely private life behind closed doors. Jacobs lived less than ten minutes on foot from the Stonewall Inn, but she left before the famous riots of 1969 brought gay men out of the closet and into the streets.
Stonewall didn’t transform the Village into a gayborhood so much as reveal the hidden one that had been there for decades. When gay men came out, they found safety, solidarity, and visibility in numbers there. This had a flywheel effect, too: the more gays who nested there, the more who flocked there. Institutions beyond the gay bar emerged to support the community: bookstores, coffeeshops, health clinics, community centers. That visibility could be translated into political power, as Larry Kramer did in New York and Harvey Milk did in San Francisco. You couldn’t have had ACT UP or Gay Men’s Health Crisis without the dense institutional networks gayborhoods provided. Before there could be “Milk for Supervisor,” there was Milk behind the counter of his camera shop in the Castro, organizing his community. The visibility of the gayborhood fostered broader public acceptance of gays, which eventually translated into political wins—and unanticipated losses.
As the well-heeled set moved into the Village, the high-heeled set moved north to Chelsea, and once priced out of there, they marched further north to Hell’s Kitchen. To be fair, each migration left behind not only gay bars and institutions, but an increasingly professional homosexual class amidst the gentry. By the time I arrived in New York in 2005, the Village had become the province of wealthy sophisticates, designer boutiques, and luxury cupcakes, Sex and the City’s vision of a neighborhood where gays were merely fashionable accessories to a glamorous heterosexual life. But you could still sing showtunes at Marie’s Crisis.
