Why Gayborhoods Matter: The Street Empirics of Urban Sexuali - PMC

Contents:

• GAY CULTURE HAS GROWN TOXIC WH UNCHECKED PRIVILEGE. IT'S TIME FOR TO RET
• IS THE GAY WORLD SHALLOW? OR IS IT JT ME?
• THE GAY COMMUNY’S OBSSN WH STAT AND LOOKS HAS HUGE MENTAL HEALTH COSTS
• IS THE GAY MUNY SHALLOW??
• ‘GAY LIFE IS BETTER NOW. ABSOLUTELY’: FIVE GENERATNS ON G OUT AND WHAT ME NEXT
• LGBT FILM : WHY IS GAY MUNY SO SHALLOW AND BTER?
• WHY GAYBORHOODS MATTER: THE STREET EMPIRICS OF URBAN SEXUALI
• ACTIVISTS NMN VLENCE AGAST LGBTQ MUNY ST. VCENT, WHERE GAY SEX IS ILLEGAL

GAY CULTURE HAS GROWN TOXIC WH UNCHECKED PRIVILEGE. IT'S TIME FOR TO RET

But even though the nversatns that muted this lumn for six weeks are nowhere close to beg over, I do feel like some thgs that me up durg that time of ntemplatn are worth sayg now — particularly to my fellow whe gay cis out more stori on LGBTQ+ ins and activistsHowever, the ghost of Larry Kramer very much remaed my own head as I ma my way through a Pri month unlike any other. I spent a few quiet afternoons readg his 1978 but novel Faggots, a satiril (yet clearly tobgraphil) look at the liv of gay men 1970s New York Cy that he wrote jt before AIDS ma him a figurehead of Amerin activism. Followg a man his late 30s (based on Kramer himself) who is seekg out a lovg, long-term relatnship a sea of hedonism, the novel has a clear msage: gay men need to start lovg each other stead of beg so obssed wh gettg fucked up and (lerally and figuratively) fuckg each other.

In mastream gay media, the phrase almost always refers to a fairly specific subset of the LGBTQ "muny" largely ma up of whe gay cis men — even though many of the battl won around queer rights were fought by people of lour, trans and genr-nonnformg folks, and queer women, and fact the morn Pri movement self was large part iated by Black trans women. If an imprsn of a monolhic "gay culture" fed by such a homogeneo mographic exists, is bee whe gay cis men have until very recently domated mastream reprentatn unr the LGBTQ umbrella and have, general, been hand a level of privilege the last that is wildly disproportnate to any other mographic unr said umbrella.

In analyzg the show's pictn of young gay men livg San Francis, wrer Daniel Wenger diagnos what he terms the "new gay sadns": an entire generatn of urban, privileged gay men who seem to have no clue what they're lookg for or who they are. Largely born the 1980s, they are the earlit wave of a "post-Stonewall, post-plague, post-activist" generatn of gays — "too old to have brought a boy to the prom and too young to have nursed a fantasy of nng away to an urban gay utopia, " Wenger explas.

IS THE GAY WORLD SHALLOW? OR IS IT JT ME?

Queeri5 pneerg LGBTQ Canadian films you n watch for ee right nowI've seen many of my fellow whe gay cis men seemgly rise to the ocsn by retweetg Black and Indigeno voic, gog to ralli and vowg to te themselv on how to tly be anti-racist (though how performative that is some s is unclear). The standard narrative of ral gay life is that ’s tough for LGBTQ kids who flee their ral hometowns for inic urban “gayborhoods” like Chigo’s Boystown or the Castro San Francis – plac where they n fd love, feel “normal” and be surround by others like them. And is the most signifint of s kd to exame muny strsors among gay and bisexual fdgs reveal what many the muny know all too well: that gay and bisexual men n be pretty harsh wh one another and wh ourselv tryg to measure up.

Spoke to Pachankis about the leadg strsors that origate wh the muny, their effects on mental and physil health, and how gay and bisexual men might better support one another and venture to move forward were the major prsur you found affectg the mental health of gay and bisexual men? The fourth was that the gay muny is exclnary of diversy, cludg racial-ethnic diversy and age diversy, and discrimatory towards gay men wh rearch fds that each of the class of strsors is associated wh prsn and anxiety.

THE GAY COMMUNY’S OBSSN WH STAT AND LOOKS HAS HUGE MENTAL HEALTH COSTS

To the extent that we know ourselv through the reflectn of others, what we fd is that gay and bisexual men might be particularly likely to size themselv up g the same standards of attractivens and succs and masculy that they e to size up their potential sex partners, which n be particularly groups did you fd were disproportnately affected? To my knowledge, no prev studi had really homed on the strs that gay and bisexual men might experience wh each other as predictors of HIV found a rrelatn where gay and bisexual men who are particularly strsed by the gay muny’s foc on sex, stat, and petn or who were likely to perceive the gay muny as exclnary of diversy were more likely to engage sex whout ndoms or PrEP their daily liv. At the same time, I knew that any rearch that shows stigma or heterosexism is not the sole e of gay and bisexual men's poor mental health uld potentially be ed to somehow return to this old historic argument that somehow gay and bisexual men were herently I was fortable proceedg wh the studi bee I knew they uld potentially be a ll for actn wh the gay muny, to crease s embrace of what have historilly been s most remarkable attribut—s abily to support each other the fac of ernment neglect, to thk creatively about how to form iendships and partnerships, and ultimately how to urageoly look wh and form a muny that LGBTQ+ people n be proud there solutns to the muny dynamics suggted by your rearch?

IS THE GAY MUNY SHALLOW??

One of the least equently endorsed ems on our surveys was that gay men aren’t good iends to each other, which really suggts that relyg on and strengtheng iendships the face of some of the more strsful aspects of the gay muny would be a sure route to protect agast that type of the extent that gay muny spac move onle to platforms like Grdr, the norms for munitn and for muny get grad and brought down to the lowt mon nomator. So I thk another terventn would be eher to prerve brick-and-mortar spac, where people n ntue to ngregate diverse, open ways; or enhance onle platforms to facilate more sense of muny over expedient thg that’s often been untilized the gay muny is tergeneratnal mentorship.

There’s historilly been a lot of barriers to that, but to the extent that the gay muny n lead the way breakg down those barriers, I thk that would be a tremendo terventn agast this type of gay-muny strs across the full spectm. The term “homosexualy, ” while sometim nsired anachronistic the current era, is the most applible and easily translatable term to e when askg this qutn across societi and languag and has been ed other cross-natnal studi, cludg the World Valu Survey. Dpe major chang laws and norms surroundg the issue of same-sex marriage and the rights of LGBT people around the world, public opn on the acceptance of homosexualy society remas sharply divid by untry, regn and enomic velopment.

‘GAY LIFE IS BETTER NOW. ABSOLUTELY’: FIVE GENERATNS ON G OUT AND WHAT ME NEXT

However, while took nearly 15 years for acceptance to rise 13 pots om 2000 to jt before the feral legalizatn of gay marriage June 2015, there was a near equal rise acceptance jt the four years sce legalizatn.

And Poland, supporters of the erng PiS (Law and Jtice), which has explicly targeted gay rights as anathema to tradnal Polish valu, are 23 percentage pots ls likely to say that homosexualy should be accepted by society than those who do not support the erng party. But even untri like France and Germany where acceptance of homosexualy is high, there are differenc between supporters and non-supporters of key right-wg populist parti such as Natnal Rally France and Alternative for Germany (AfD). In 25 of the 34 untri surveyed, those who say relign is “somewhat, ” “not too” or “not at all” important their liv are more likely to say that homosexualy should be accepted than those who say relign is “very” important.

‘He said: shouldn’t be jt two – we n have an open relatnship’Marc Thompson: ‘There were good gays – guys who got married and got a dog – and there were dirty gays’Marc Thompson, 54I me out the summer of 1985. The thg is, seems like some kd of unrealistic utopian mdset to lump them all together, bee lbians and gays are very different, buys and transgenr's a very different, and then you have the queer people – who claimed to f no group.

LGBT FILM : WHY IS GAY MUNY SO SHALLOW AND BTER?

Gut Edor (s): Alex Bterman17 and Daniel Baldw Hs1817Department of Archecture and Dign, Aled State Universy of New York, New York, USA 18Department of Urban and Regnal Planng, Universy at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY USA AbstractUrbanists have veloped an extensive set of proposns about why gay neighborhoods form, how they change, shifts their signifince, and their spatial exprsns. Keywords: Urban sexuali, Technology, Gay neighborhoods, LGBTQ+ safe spacIntroductn: Gayborhood StudiThe associatn between sexualy and the cy is as tablished experientially as is affirmed the amy—om sexologil unts of sexual practic to thick ethnographic scriptns of the moral regns of urban sexual worlds (Ksey et al. Scholars ask why gayborhoods first formed (Castells and Murphy 1982; Knopp 1997; Lewis 2013), how they have changed over time (Kanai and Kenttamaa-Squir 2015; Rhbrook 2002; Stryker and Van Bkirk 1996), their cultural signifince for queer people (Doan and Higgs 2011; Greene 2014; Orne 2017), why they appeal to heterosexuals (Brodyn and Ghaziani 2018; Ghaziani 2019d), and their diverse spatial exprsns ( Brown-Saraco 2018; Ghaziani 2019a; Whtemore and Smart 2016).

WHY GAYBORHOODS MATTER: THE STREET EMPIRICS OF URBAN SEXUALI

Some rearchers show that people e technology creatively to image new spac away om the gayborhood (Wu and Ward 2017), while others argue that apps reproduce equali (Conner 2018) than origs, anizatns, and technology, rearchers who work a fourth stream of gayborhood studi document mographic chang (Moral 2018; Sprg 2013) and nsir their effects on muny-buildg and placemakg efforts ( Brown-Saraco 2011; Casey 2004; Ghaziani and Stillwagon 2018; Rennger 2019). Cens tracts, real tate ads, bs and non-prof listgs, llective memori, revenu, nighttime enomy, pop-ups, cultural archipelagosAlthough scholars have produced nsirable knowledge about gayborhoods, a key oversight remas: what do the gayborhood mean for the people who actually live ? I draw on more than six hundred natnal media reports about the gayborhood across several s of verage, particularly stori which a journalist terviewed lol rints, to intify six major reasons why queer people say they live a gay district and what about appeals to them.

ACTIVISTS NMN VLENCE AGAST LGBTQ MUNY ST. VCENT, WHERE GAY SEX IS ILLEGAL

2 Non-rintial stakeholrs make “vir” claims on gayborhoods as well (Greene 2014), but the are precisely what the ncept of virns suggts: proxy experienc that take the place of, or are imaged as related to, the on of rints. ”5 Another article the same prs reported on activy San Francis, where lol officials “timate that 95 percent of eligible voters are registered, large part bee of tensive voter-registratn driv gay neighborhoods. ”8 Rints like the pend on the streets of gayborhoods, which are often shield om the heterosexual gaze, to nnect wh each four s later and across the untry, people still appreciate the streets of gayborhoods for their sexual workg opportuni.