There Goes the Gayborhood? by Ghaziani Amin;

Author:Ghaziani, Amin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Source: Doan (2007:66).

A city is a beacon of tolerance for some people who live in the suburbs or smaller towns.10 A gay man in Boystown explained, “That’s what we forget: in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and wherever in these big cities, people are tolerant or accepting. The problem is that most of America is smaller communities and less progressive towns … And the problem is that that’s where it’s too dangerous [to be out], and it’s still shameful or quiet or closeted. It’s nice to look at the big cities and say, ‘Yeah, gayborhoods are passé.’ Well, maybe in San Francisco. But not in Lander, Wyoming. We just ignore all these states as flyover.”

Consider next the story of a sheltered, suburban lesbian for whom the mere presence of a place called Boystown, and another area in Chicago that locals affectionately called Girlstown (which we know as Andersonville), helped her to come out of the closet. She had a “sudden awakening that I was a lesbian,” after which she promptly “broke off the engagement with my fiancé, who was a man.” She was afraid that she “didn’t know anyone who was gay” and so she did what many in her situation would do next:

I just went on the Internet, and I researched and researched. I was a teacher at the time, an art teacher. And I had remembered that there was a student of mine who had talked about a place called Boystown in Chicago. I had no clue about any of this; I was so secluded from all this. And so she told me about Boystown, and then she said something about a Girlstown. So I went on the Internet, and I found out where Boystown was, and I would go down to Boystown. I think I went to two bars, and finally something came up that there were a lot of lesbians in Andersonville. I was in awe, as far as like, “Wow, they’re everywhere.” It was just amazing to me. It was sensory overload. It was exciting. Then I eventually moved there.

We assume big cities and small towns offer very different lifestyle options. The former are tolerant places, we think, while the latter are less so. This is why some people call smaller, especially rural areas “flyover country.”11 As we saw in chapter 4, however, unexpected clusters are emerging in these areas.

To conclude this section, let us sit for a little while with a thirty-four-year-old masculinely self-presenting white lesbian who lives in Andersonville and a twenty-one-year-old white gay man from Boystown. For them, finding a way to the gayborhood was a matter of life or death. Carolyn (a pseudonym) moved to Andersonville four years ago from a small town in upstate New York. “No gay people lived where I lived. I didn’t know any gay people. I was the only gay person I knew,” she told me. Carolyn experienced “different scary events surrounding my sexuality where I lived,” which is why she desperately wanted to move to Chicago.

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