That may have been a minority position within the gay community in 1994 it seems to have become the conventional wisdom in 2014. "The New Jerusalem gay people have been striving for all these years," Collard wrote, "won't be found in a gay-only ghetto, but in a world where we are free, equal and safe to live our lives." As far back as 1994, the editor of Out Magazine, James Collard, wrote in The New York Times that a "post-gay" generation was emerging - a cohort of same-sex couples and singles that felt secure almost anywhere in the city and had no preference for living in an all-gay or mostly gay enclave. In truth, debate over the future of gayborhoods has been going on within gay circles for at least two decades. "We're everywhere in Seattle now," one former Capitol Hill resident told the Times.
In Capitol Hill, however, it declined by 23 percent. The Seattle Times ran a story in July under the headline "Is Seattle's 'gayborhood' vanishing?" The story focused on Capitol Hill, Seattle's recognized gay village, and noted that between 20, the number of same-sex households citywide had increased by 52 percent. The annual gay pride parade down the streets of Boystown has reached the point where, in the words of one gay participant, "There were more straight people than gay people."
Hello strollers." The gist of the article, which made liberal use of research by Ghaziani, suggested that gays weren't so much fleeing Boystown as being replaced through attrition by young straights, many of them with small children. In Chicago, whose Boystown neighborhood on the North Side was the nation's first gay village officially recognized by city government, a local website recently published an article that began "Goodbye gayborhood. At the same time, 2014 is a year in which the media has ramped up its reporting on a phenomenon to which it had paid relatively little attention before: the decline of cohesive gay enclaves in some of the country's largest cities. It is a year in which laws against same-sex marriage have been overturned in state after state, affording gay couples legal protections that seemed all but unthinkable just a short time ago. Historians writing years from now will likely see 2014 as a landmark year in the campaign by gay Americans for equal rights. "Ironically, however, we risk wiping queer sexualities, cultures and communities off the map." "The entire city is now a place where gays and straights blend together," Ghaziani writes. Titled There Goes the Gayborhood?, it expresses some of the same ambivalence in dealing with the combination of state and local laws and changing norms that has induced Chicago's gay population to move into districts all over the city, leaving behind the places that had earned the nickname of "gayborhoods" in the preceding two or three decades. Ghaziani's book deals with gays, not African-Americans. Strange as it may seem, I found myself thinking of Tim Black as I read a new book about Chicago by Amin Ghaziani, a sociologist who was educated at Northwestern University and now teaches in Canada. He was talking about black-owned bars and cafes, close-knit community churches, social clubs, gambling joints, insurance and mortuary businesses, and a host of other entities that brought energy to neighborhood life but disappeared or declined almost overnight once the invisible walls of the ghetto came down in the 1960s. But he was lamenting the disappearance of all the black-run institutions that gave the city's segregated black neighborhoods an atmosphere of security and autonomy in the face of widespread poverty and discrimination from the commercial and political elite that governed the city at large.
"You know," he said, "sometimes I think we made a mistake leaving the ghetto." We were discussing the challenges and opportunities that black people had dealt with in the years since segregation, when all of a sudden Black sighed and said something that startled me. Twenty years ago this spring, I had a long, candid conversation with Timuel Black, one of the lions of the civil rights movement in Chicago, a man whose activist career dates all the way back to his youth in the 1940s.