The New York Times looks at the decline of gay neighborhoods such as San Francisco's Castro, where the annual Halloween parade was canceled this year. Also, there's a sidebar with blogosphere responses. National trends, according to the report, show "same-sex couples becoming less urban, even as the population become slightly more urban." An upside:
At the same time, cities not widely considered gay meccas have seen a sharp increase in same-sex couples. Among them: Fort Worth; El Paso; Albuquerque; Louisville, Ky.; and Virginia Beach, according to census figures and extrapolations.... "Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York," [UCLA demographer Gary Gates] said. "Now you can just go to Kansas City."
An increase in social acceptance of gay people is a large reason for the decline of traditional gay ghettos (the Times says "enclaves"), including uber-enclaves such as the Castro, NYC's West Village, and West Hollywood.
But the Times' story leads with a revealing description of what's become of the Halloween festivities in San Francisco, where "the once-exuberant street party, a symbol of sexual liberation since 1979 has in recent years become a Nightmare on Castro Street, drawing as many as 200,000 people, many of them costumeless outsiders.... Last year, nine people were wounded when a gunman opened fire at the celebration."
Sounds like a good place to get away from, no?
19 Comments for “‘There Goes the Gayborhood’”
posted by EssEm on
“costumeless outsiders” is liberal jargon for Latino youth gangs, but we are not allowed to describe what we see here in SF. You can bet that if they were white skinheads, we’d have big Take Back Halloween marches, but since they are POC, a group that can do no wrong, the place is caving. Now THAT’s a reason to leave.
posted by Rhywun on
I lived in SF in the late ’90s and for me the Castro was OK to visit once in a while but I would never have wanted to live there. My life revolves around much more than just gay, gay, gay.
posted by Ted B. (Charging Rhino) on
This is hardly surprising. Here in NJ, one of the afteraffects of passing state-wide gay-rights many years ago was the closing of many local gay bars. Once you didn’t have to go off-campus or downtown to a “special place” to have drinks with your gay friends, or to hold hands with your BF, the bars started to close. We had five gay bars in Trenton 20-years ago, now they are all gone. Most closed within a few years of the non-discrimination law, and their patrons have assimilated into the crowd at your local pub.
Now the same is taking place with gay neighborhoods and the traditional “gay magnet”-cities on both coasts.
posted by ETJB on
Most LGBT people cannot live in Castro due to the cost of living.
Do you know for a fact that the criminals were a Latino youth gang? They fact that they may be people of color, does not mean that they can not do any wrong.
However, it should mean that do not leap to conclusions or start trying to argue that people are more or less bigoted because of their race/ethnicty.
posted by Rhywun on
Most closed within a few years of the non-discrimination law, and their patrons have assimilated into the crowd at your local pub.
Huh? I think economic hard times is a more likely explanation. Your theory sounds nice but I have yet to see a whole lot of gay hand-holding or necking in any typical “local pub” here in NYC. I think the vast majority of us are going to be more comfortable doing that sort of thing in a gay bar for a long time to come.
posted by North Dallas Thirty on
Do you know for a fact that the criminals were a Latino youth gang?
As a matter of fact, we do.
But this year’s event became violent when, according to police, a dispute between members of a Visitacion Valley gang and a group from the Ingleside escalated into gunfire near the event’s main stage on the 2200 block of Market Street. Nine people suffered minor gunshot wounds, and a 10th was injured when she either fell or was trampled.
Of course, the supreme irony here is that the leftist queens who scream “racist” every time a person of color is arrested or prosecuted and who support thugs like the Jena 6 and their violent hate crimes against white people are the ones who are cowering behind their triple-locked doors tonight, screaming for the help of the police and justice system they regularly bash as “biased”, and hoping the poor misunderstood victims of society that they coddled won’t break in, steal everything, and knife them, or rake their windows with random gunfire just because they can.
posted by kittynboi on
What I think is absurd, is that the violent actions of some latino gang are being used by Stephen to argue that “gay ghettos” are bad, in his implication at the end that this means its good to get out fo a place like the Castro, even though the actual residents there had nothing to do with the violence.
posted by ETJB on
(1) Yes, surely if it gets published in a newspaper it must be true. If it is true it should be reported in a professional and honest manner.
(2) I did not ‘scream’ racist. I simply asked an hoenst question. The fact that a citizen is a person of color does not mean that they cannot do good or bad.
(3) As I have already explained, the Jena 6 involved issues of procedural due process rights. The fact that some one is accused of a crime, or has a particular race or color does not mean we abandon the law or the constitution.
(4) As Kittyboi pointed out, the actual residents have nothing to do with the acts of violence.
posted by kittynboi on
I was referring to the residents of the Castro, I wasn’t sticking up for the latino community.
posted by Brian R. Miller on
While the article is generally correct (the gay ghettos are dying as gay people enter mainstream life and the mainstream embraces queerness), it’s misleading to say the SF Castro Halloween party was cancelled due to a decline in the Castro’s relevance. It was cancelled due to a series of violent assaults — a stabbing and a shooting — that have marred the past few events.
The other thing that hasn’t been mentioned in the changing dynamic is the sheer cost of living in the various “gay meccas.” In the 1970s and 1980s, San Francisco’s Castro district and New York’s village were both some of the more affordable (and run-down) parts of town. Anyone with a decent job could afford to rent, or even buy, in those places.
Now, renting a decent apartment in the Castro requires a minimum of $1,500 per month in rent. With sensible rent outlay being no more than 1/3 of one’s income, that requires a post-tax income of $4,500 — or over $90K a year in income.
Even if you go for a very cramped, substandard apartment — or for more apartment than you can afford — the average gay person, like anyone else, is going to be spending most of his time working to pay SF’s outrageous rents and absurd taxes. So lots of gay people are opting for smaller towns that are gay friendly, or cities like Phoenix, Dallas and Atlanta that are more affordable.
I’m sure that if the Castro rents started to look like those found in Phoenix, the “mecca” would revive rather quickly. However, the presence of marriage discrimination in California has made it so only very high income people, or married couples both earning good incomes, can hope to make ends meet.
posted by North Dallas Thirty on
LOL….and ETJB demonstrates the mentality of the liberal racists; if the newspaper reports something bad about people of color, obviously the newspaper is lying and is not “professional and honest”.
And then this one:
However, the presence of marriage discrimination in California has made it so only very high income people, or married couples both earning good incomes, can hope to make ends meet.
Why? Do unmarried gays refuse to share expenses when they live together? Heck, you can merge your finances easily through the domestic-partner process.
posted by Brian Miller on
Why? Do unmarried gays refuse to share expenses when they live together?
Let’s play Pre-school Marriage Law so that ND-30 can understand.
Let’s say that John and Jane, two unmarried heterosexual people, want to move in together and buy a house together.
John and Jane go to create joint ownership of the house, which would divide up the mortgage and property tax liability.
“Oh poo,” they say. “Since we aren’t legally married, we have to pay a lawyer about $6,000! That’s about 1/10th of our down payment! Let’s spend the $35 and then we don’t have to do that.”
Across the street, Mark and Bruce, who are a gay couple living together, don’t have that option. So they pay the $6,000 and end up having to reduce their down payment on their mortgage, costing them several thousand dollars in extra interest. Let’s be conservative and say that the cost is an extra $4K in interest. The gays have already spent $10K more, and they haven’t even moved in yet!
Now, let’s fast forward a bit, to where the home is paid off after years of work. Mark and Bruce have already paid thousands of dollars in extra taxes to the feds and the state, since they’re taxed as two single people and transfers between them are treated as income over the “gift allowance.” John and Jane, on the other hand, have kept thousands of extra dollars.
Bruce is driving down the highway behind John one day. A drunk driver coming the other way jumps the median and crashes head-on into Bruce’s car, which collides with John’s. Bruce and John are instantly killed.
Bruce had the wherewithall to prepare as best he could for such a situation — spending tens of thousands of extra dollars in the process, but those tens of thousands of dollars couldn’t buy Mark the same level of legal protection that John bought for Jane with that $35 marriage license.
As a result, Jane sits grieving in her home, collecting Social Security benefits from John’s portion of the program, secure in her ownership.
Mark, on the other hand, doesn’t have time to grieve. Because federal law treats the transfer of Bruce’s half of the house, as dictated in the will, as income, he has to come up with 33% of the $400K assessed value.
Since he doesn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around, Mark has to sell the house and move in order to pay the tax liability.
End result: Bruce and Mark, who decided to spend tens of thousands of dollars extra versus John and Jane to live in the Castro, ultimately couldn’t stay. Whereas John and Jane could.
If you get to know a couple of gay people, ND, you’ll meet quite a few people who have had to undergo this process — especially in the last 10 years as housing prices have swollen.
posted by North Dallas Thirty on
A few problems with that….um, logic.
1) A lawyer who charges $6,000 to do a simple joint ownership or tenancy-in-common agreement is taking you to the cleaners.
2) Joint owners do not have to transfer funds between each other to pay; they pay their individual components of the mortgage.
3) Married filing jointly couples enjoy no particular tax advantages over single individual filers
4) Accepting Social Security survivor benefits only makes sense when you have none of your own, since they are significantly less than individual worker benefits. Indeed, the reason most older people DON’T get married is because Social Security benefits for married couples are potentially less, due to the cap on household payments, than for two single individuals living together
5) It is amusing that Bruce allegedly spent tens of thousands of dollars to protect them, but spent not a penny on establishing a living trust, which could have owned the house for them and specifically avoided the problem of transferring it — a solution known to millions of heterosexuals and to those of us who grew up on farms and ranches and were well-acquainted with estate transfers.
Aside from that, Mr. Miller, you do not need to change marriage laws to fix a single one of these. You need only make it simpler to set up joint ownership of properties, clarify that joint owners may pay jointly without requiring transfers of money between them, and repeal the estate and probate tax. Gays like myself were instrumental in lobbying for the changes to the Pension Protection Act of 2006 last year that assisted with exactly this, allowing retirement savings to be transferred to designated beneficiaries without being taxed immediately, just like spouses.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
I think that the core thesis of the NYT article is correct.
My partner and I moved from a gay-friendly neighborhood in Chicago to the farm where I grew up in rural Wisconsin, and I’ve been surprised, after two years, how easy it is to live as an open, out, gay couple, known to all and sundry. Quite a number of others do, too, and there isn’t any fuss about it.
I realize that there are still areas where living as we do would be difficult, but my guess is that there are now enough places where gays and lesbians can live openly that the “gayborhoods” are no longer needed in the way that they were twenty or thirty years ago.
Times change. In 1968, when I was twenty-one, no gay or lesbian would have dared to live as we now do. Today, it is not only possible, but doesn’t raise comment. We’ve seen a lot of change in this country, and I’m glad for it.
posted by Craig2 on
I’m not surprised at the deghettoisation reported here. New Zealand doesn’t have any ‘gay ghettos’ of our own, probably because we’re relatively
better mainstreamed. There have been no equivalents to US Pride marches for a while, for that matter.
And for that matter, isn’t the term ghetto deeply problematic?
Craig2
Wellington, NZ
posted by Hank on
Congratulations on your life Tom – sounds wonderful.
posted by Brian Miller on
A lawyer who charges $6,000 to do a simple joint ownership or tenancy-in-common agreement is taking you to the cleaners.
Only if you’re takling about a JO or TIC that ignores the tax implications and does the bare minimum — delivering an arrangement inferior to marriage.
You really ought to get to know some gay people ND-30 — it would give you some insight into the LGBT world.
posted by ETJB on
You saidL: “ETJB demonstrates the mentality of the liberal racists; if the newspaper reports something bad about people of color, obviously the newspaper is lying and is not “professional and honest”.”
More right-wing spin. I clearly did not say that. The fact that a newspaper is reporting on something bad that is being done by people of a certain race, religion, sexuality, etc. does not mean that they are dishonest or lying.
posted by H. (Bart) Vincelette on
When I lived in San Diego , quite a few years ago , I remember a real estate development company that was in the process of building condominiums in Serra Mesa. They got into some trouble when it came to light that they were only advertising the condo sales in Hillcrest , the gay ghetto of the city. They hoped to restrict sales to gays , as they knew that they would maintain and augment the property values.