Yaaas In My Backyard

There Goes The Gayborhood

Some weeks back I found myself in an online discussion about the prominence of LGBTQ-identifying lawmakers in the “yes in my backyard” housing reform movement. California State Senator Scott Wiener may be the most well-known elected gay YIMBY, but the list also includes three governors—Jared Polis of Colorado, Tina Kotek of Oregon, and Maura Healey of Massachusetts—as well as a number of local politicians everywhere from West Hollywood to Manhattan’s West Side. 

Naturally, I wondered why so many legislators are gay for housing. Is it a reflection of good taste? Or is there something inherent in homosexuality that predisposes these gays to favor more housing, beyond a desire to decorate more homes? 

Is that what the Gay Agenda was all about?

Perhaps there’s more to it. On the one hand, YIMBYism is a nonpartisan movement that cuts across all demographics, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that views of housing reflect proportionally the same way in the LGBTQ+ community as they do in the broader culture. But on the other hand, it is interesting that America’s only three gay governors are also all YIMBYs. 

Speculatively, it might suggest something about the experience of being gay in America. The three governors (and Sen. Wiener) are all Gen Xers. They would have come of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when the AIDS crisis was ravaging the gay community, sodomy laws were still in force in more than a dozen states, and a Democratic president was signing into law the Defense of Marriage Act and making “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” the official policy of the US military. Despite the growing acceptance of gays culturally during this time, gay people did not enjoy the full rights and protections of the United States Constitution.

This was still largely the status quo when gay Millennials such as myself reached adulthood. Sodomy laws would not be overturned until 2003 (they remain on the books in twelve states), “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” didn’t end until 2011, and the Defense of Marriage Act wasn’t repealed and gay marriage legalized nationally until 2015—less than a decade ago. Homosexuals were not fully at home in their home country until very recently, and many, sadly, are still not even welcome in the homes they grew up in.

If a connection exists at all, I think it might be more visceral, more intuitive—this sense of longing for home, and the difficulty (or impossibility) of finding one in the America of living memory. Perhaps, now that gays have been fully welcomed into the fold of American constitutional and political life, we can see how lousy housing policies have made finding and securing a home so lousy for so many others.

For the gay community, finding home has historically meant moving to the city and discovering “family,” in a way not unlike how immigrants from certain countries will cluster in specific neighborhoods in their new cities and towns. In US cities, these clusters became some of America’s most infamous and vibrant gayborhooods—Miami’s South Beach, San Francisco’s Castro, DC’s Logan Circle, Boston’s South End, New York’s West Village (then Chelsea, then Hell’s Kitchen). Though most of these neighborhoods have very diverse populations, the greater density of gays inevitably gave each a distinct character that manifested in displays of pride flags, street banners, gay bars and shops. Of course, today, these gayborhoods are some of their cities’ most desirable places to live in and visit.

But in the not-too-distant past, they were refuges. As Ben Wilson explains in Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention, gays have for centuries sought sanctuary in cities. But for most of that time, they had to live in

an alternate city, an underground world of places where it was safe to be yourself and a network of people who offered protection. The gay city existed in parallel with the straight city. Negotiating it meant constructing an entirely different mental map of the city and code of behaviour to avoid the dangers of violence, blackmail and arrest. You had to know which pubs, coffee houses, bathhouses and clubs were safe; you had to learn a series of visual codes and cues and turns of phrase. There were known places where men could find men of similar inclination. In other words, a gay person would have to know the city better than almost anyone, exploiting a range of public and semi-public places as sites of pleasure, companionship and safety against homophobic violence that only a big city can provide.

Of course, much of the gay underworld has come out of the closet, so to speak, and gay bars have become such regular fixtures of the urban nightlife scene that drag queens compete with bachelorette-party bridezillas for the title of biggest diva. But the city has long been a safe space, a place that gays and other “sexual deviants” could find and call home. In this sense, gays are natural urbanists. 

But YIMBYism is not the same thing as urbanism, and the YIMBY movement is not strictly limited to cities: housing affordability problems are affecting people everywhere from the rainbow-painted streets of the Castro to the leafy-green suburbs of Connecticut (and gay people live there, too). Similarly, urbanism is not only about housing. So while gays may be natural urbanists, it doesn’t necessarily translate that they are natural allies of housing reform. Indeed, some LGBTQ+ groups are in fact openly hostile to a movement they describe (falsely and uncharitably) as run by “techie gentrifiers and developer stooges.” 

Bitch, please.

Ultimately, being gay for housing is probably not innate like sexuality. Housing scarcity has become a salient political issue everywhere, but particularly in the gay-friendliest blue states that have also made it hardest to build new housing. So, I think the more likely, simpler explanation (Occam’s gayzor, anybody?) is that gay people are increasingly, uncontroversially occupying high stations in public life, and the political winds are blowing in the direction of building more housing. And as we all know, when there’s a fashionable new trend, those fashion-forward gays are the most likely to blow with it. 

Whatever the reason, the happy marriage of gay politicians and pro-housing policies is ultimately a reflection of positive change and progress in America. 

We can all take pride in that.

…but maybe it is?