Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space

Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of

Sexuality and Space

Amin Ghaziani*

University of British Columbia

Research on sexuality and space makes assumptions about spatial singularity: Across

the landscape of different neighborhoods in the city, there is one, and apparently

only one, called the gayborhood. This assumption, rooted in an enclave episte-

mology and theoretical models that are based on immigrant migration patterns,

creates blind spots in our knowledge about urban sexualities. I propose an alterna-

tive conceptual framework that emphasizes spatial plurality. Drawing on the loca-

tion patterns of lesbians, transgender individuals, same-sex families with children,

and people of color, I show that cities cultivate “cultural archipelagos” in response

to the geo-sexual complexities that arise from within-group heterogeneity. Rather

than inducing spatially singular or scholastic outcomes, as some scholarship pre-

dicts, subgroup variations produce diverse yet distinct types of queer spaces. The

analytic frame of cultural archipelagos suggests more generally that we cannot cate-

gorize urban or social worlds using simple binaries such as “the gayborhood” versus

all other undifferentiated straight spaces. Thinking in terms of plurality provides a

more generative approach to advance the study of sexuality and space.

From Sydney to Singapore and Sitges: These are all distinct places, yet each demonstrates

with particular force a common insight: The city is a catalyst for sexuality—and queerness

in particular. It is not the only place where queerness lives, of course, but cities have

played a special role in cultivating queer cultures and communities “ever since the time of

ancient Athens and the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah” (Aldrich 2004:1719). The street-

level expressions of sexuality have varied over time and across places. In early modern

London, we encountered molly houses and in late nineteenth and early twentieth century

New York, interactions with fairies, trade, and wolves. In Hanoi, men would find other

men for sex at Hoan Kiem Lake, while public parks offered points of rendezvous in Delhi

(Hubbard 2012).

Motivated by a general understanding of neighborhoods as basic building blocks of

cities and a specific interest in the spatial distribution of morality, sociologists in the

Chicago School proposed frameworks like moral regions (Park 1915), hobobohemian

districts (Anderson 1923), and the world of furnished rooms (Zorbaugh 1929) that

populated the inner zone in transition of Burgess’s (1925) influential model of urban

ecology. By imagining the city as a sexual laboratory (Heap 2003) as well as a social one,

these studies outlined a “field of sex life” (Burgess 1928:415) that was situated in urban

∗

Correspondence should be addressed to Amin Ghaziani, Department of Sociology, University of British

Columbia, 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1; [email protected].

City & Community 18:1 March 2019

doi: 10.1111/cico.12381

C

2019 American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005

CULTURAL ARCHIPELAGOS

environments. A variety of “meeting places” (Forsyth 2001:343) provided opportunities

at this time for people who experienced same-sex desire to find each other. These

bars, cabarets, theaters, house parties, restrooms, and cruising spots were located in

bohemian sections of the city, such as Greenwich Village in New York for white gay

men or Harlem for blacks, which had reputations for “flouting bourgeois convention”

(Chauncey 1994:227).

With World War II came a new spatial imagination. Many servicemen and –women

who were discharged for their real or perceived homosexuality stayed put in port cities,

places like Washington DC, Seattle, San Diego, Philadelphia, Miami, and New Orleans.

As their numbers swelled, so too did a realization that they comprised “a legitimate mi-

nority group, having a certain quasi-‘ethnic’ status” (Epstein 1987:120). Consider that

the population of San Francisco had declined during the 1930s but grew by more than

125,000 between 1940 and 1950. Census data from 1950 to 1960 show that the number

of single-person households in the city doubled following the war and accounted for 38

percent of the total residential units (D’Emilio 1989).

A “great gay migration” (Weston 1995) to major American cities ensued in the decades

following the war. Bars that catered to them opened more frequently, and over time,

the first “gay ghettos” (Levine 1979) formed. The growing numbers of young men and

women in urban centers altered their cultural and political consciousness. Efforts to ar-

ticulate their identities and communities required “control of a given territory,” Castells

(1983:157) argues. Gay districts nurtured a powerful agentic ethos at this time.

Once thriving as collective expressions of queer life, some researchers argue that gay

enclaves, or “gayborhoods” (Ghaziani 2014b), are diminishing in density and are now

in a state of “demise” (Usher and Morrison 2010). Journalists lament that these districts

are “pass

e,” as the New York Times declared on its front page (Brown 2007), while schol-

ars document the demographic deconcentration of same-sex households in gayborhoods

(Spring 2013), the loss of “cultural icons” (Doan and Higgins 2011:16), and a “subcul-

tural forfeiture” (Harris 1997:7) that comes with sexual integration. Late-stage gentrifi-

cation, the global circulation of capital, changes in the flows of migration, liberalizing

attitudes toward homosexuality, social acceptance and assimilation, and the normaliza-

tion of geo-coded mobile apps (which have altered how places facilitate social and sexual

connections) are the most commonly cited culprits for the loss of control, or even interest

in controlling, queer territories. Some scholars predict that queer populations will merge

“into the fashionable mainstream” as “heterosexual customs” overwhelm the gayborhood

and contribute to its disappearance (Collins 2004:1802). Others anticipate a stochastic

“dispersing” (Ruting 2008:267) of queer people across the city.

Regardless of whether they ask questions about neighborhood formation (Knopp

1997; Lewis 2013), evolution (Kanai and Kenttamaa-Squires 2015; Stryker and Van

Buskirk 1996), or change (Rushbrook 2002), scholars who write about urban sexualities

from the position of an enclave epistemology (Abrahamson 2005) or an “immigrant

enclave model” (Logan et al. 2002:299) see a special relationship between groups

of people, their ways of life, and territorial clustering. Applied to the case of urban

sexualities, this approach requires us to make an assumption about the spatial singularity

of queer space. Think: The Castro. The Village in Toronto. The Chueca in Madrid. La

Rampa to the Malec

on section of Cuba. Le Marais in Paris. Le Village Gai in Montreal.

That’s where you go if you want to find the gayborhood. A similar assumption underlies

how we think about Davie Village in Vancouver, Soho in London, Sch

oneberg in

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Berlin, Zona Rosa in Mexico City, Ni-chome in Tokyo, and De Waterkant in Cape

Town (some scholars describe all of Cape Town expansively yet still singularly as “the

gay capital of Africa” [Visser 2002:87]—the same assumption emerges again). While

gayborhoods have “globalized,” existing today “all over the world” (Martel 2018:18),

each city apparently has one, and only one, gay enclave in its “mosaic of little worlds”

(Park 1925:40).

The assumption of spatial singularity has left its mark on research about sexuality and

space that was published in earlier years (Kennedy and Davis 1993; LeVay and Nonas

1995; Newton 1993) as well as current writings (Hayslett and Kane 2011; Orne 2017;

Podmore 2013; Sibalis 2004; Whittemore and Smart 2016). The most recent research

that I could find recommends that we shift our geographic focus away from the north-

east and the west coasts of the United States (it remains regrettably silent on interna-

tional comparisons) to the south and southwest parts of the country (Stone 2018). Do-

ing so would move conversations beyond the “great cities” of Chicago, New York, San

Francisco, and Los Angeles and incorporate more “ordinary cities” (Robinson 2006) like

Boise and Burlington or San Antonio, Ithaca, Reno, Wilton Manors, and Fargo. But even

here we find that same assumption: Queer life is curiously located in just one part the

city.

The assumption of spatial singularity and the enclave epistemology that structures it

produce a type of binar y thinking that seems to me self-evidently flawed, yet somehow it

is still entrenched in urban studies: Gayborhoods will persist or perish. There are many

alternatives beyond separate or integrated spaces, however, including queer friendly dis-

tricts (Nash and Gorman-Murray 2014) where straights are in the majority both residen-

tially and commercially yet “a significant presence of gay and lesbian residents, businesses,

and organizations are welcome nonetheless” (p. 760). The defining feature of queer-

friendly spaces is the mutual interaction among g ays and straights and their attempts to

“foster understanding across sexual difference” (Gorman-Murray and Waitt 2009:2855).

A 2009 story published in the Village Voice in New York entitled “The New Gay Neigh-

borhoods” (Lavers 2009)—notice the plural—describes an outcome that sociologists of

sexualities documented more than two decades ago (e.g., Stein and Plummer 1994) but

urban researchers have overlooked: Queer spaces defy expressions of singularity and uni-

formity. There is not just one queer space in the city, and no two areas are alike.

I am not interested in rehearsing “old gay ghetto debates” (Visser 2013:268) in this

essay: why they formed, how they are changing, whether or why we still need them,

or who they exclude. Nor am I keen on rehashing metronormative critiques (Halber-

stam 2005; Herring 2010). There is nothing surprising about the fact that queer peo-

ple live in small cities and towns, the suburbs, and rural areas. What concerns me

instead is the assumption of spatial singularity and the epistemological blind spots

and binaries that it produces in our knowledge about sexuality and space. Rather

than speaking about “islands of decay” (Wyly and Hammel 1999) or “islands of re-

newal” (Berry 1985)—or any “islands of meaning” (Zerubavel 1996) that carve out

a singular mental cluster, I propose that urbanists embrace the imagery of “cultural

archipelagos.” T he analytic frame of an archipelago, rather than an isolated island,

shows us one way to resist flattening the city into an artificial binary between the gay-

borhood versus all other undifferentiated and presumably “straight spaces” (Browne and

Bakshi 2011:181).

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One surprise that I encountered while researching gayborhoods was the unexpected

emergence of new clusters for specific subgroups of people. I call their spatial expres-

sions cultural archipelagos (Ghaziani 2014b). Most readers of There Goes the Gayborhood?

have focused on explanations for gayborhood change that I offered in the first part of

the book (people apparently have very strong feelings against the word “post-gay,” an

idea which is central in part one, and they have routinely reduced it to a straw man).

The propositions that drive the second part of the book challenge a pervasive theoretical

problem that appears in interdisciplinary writings on sexuality and space. Demographic

statistics, media discussions, and scholarship about gay neighborhoods suggest that they

are losing their cultural significance (Brown 2014; Delany 1999; Nash 2013; Spring 2013).

In this essay, I want to argue the opposite: The spatial expressions of sexuality are becom-

ing more diverse and plural. To illustrate the analytic purchase of cultural archipelagos, I

consider the location patterns of lesbians, transgender individuals, same-sex families with

children, and people of color.

LESBIAN NEIGHBORHOODS

In early studies on urban sexualities, sociologists ascribed territorial aspirations only to

gay men. Castells (1983:140) circumscribed the possibilities in 1983 when he argued,

“Lesbians, unlike gay men, tend not to concentrate in a given territory,” and so they “do

not acquire a geographical basis.” Unlike men, “women have rarely had territorial aspi-

rations” since “their world attaches more importance to relationships and their networks

are ones of solidarity and affection.” Lesbians, therefore, are “placeless.” This was so ob-

vious to Castells that he concluded, “[W]e can hardly speak of lesbian territory.” Some

later studies have echoed Castells’ claim. For example, Stein (2004:29) presents a quote

from a woman in Philadelphia who told him that lesbians “didn’t seem to live in any one

particular place.” The reflection led Stein’s respondent to a similar conclusion as Castells:

“Women never seem to congregate the way men do.”

Most scholars today reject the “simplistic assumptions” (Binnie and Valentine

1999:176) that lesbians are placeless, they lack a geographical basis, or they are with-

out territorial aspirations. Census data affirm distinct distributions at the county level

(Figure 1).

I do not mean to suggest that the location patterns of lesbians and gay men are identical

or orthogonal. They sometimes cluster in similar areas—in three cases, as the census

shows us: Provincetown, Rehoboth Beach, and the Castro—but “lesbian geographies”

(Valentine 2000) exist independently as well (Table 1).

Table 1 reports data from the 2010 Census. The gender differences that it shows arise

for several reasons. First, coupled women are more likely to live in rural environments

due to cultural cues about gender. One rural, gay Midwesterner confided to Kazyak

(2012:840), “If you’re a flaming gay queen, they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re a freak, I’m scared

of you.’ But if you’re a really butch woman and you’re working at a factory, I think it’s

a little easier.” Lesbians who perform masculinity in rural environments (by working

hard labor, for example) are not as stigmatized as effeminate gay men. This makes rural

places safer and more inviting for these women. Scholars call this the “gay and lesbian

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FIG. 1. Same-sex female and male couples in the United States.

exceptionalism hypothesis” (Cooke and Rapiano 2007): lesbians elect less urban areas

and places that have established lesbian rather than gay male communities.

Subcultural differences also matter. Lesbian neighborhoods consist of a cluster of

homes located near progressive businesses like coffee shops, bike shops, and independent

theatre companies. Although many cities have distinct areas for gay men and lesbians,

neighborhoods for women have a “quasi-underground character” (Adler and Brenner

1992:31). Boystown in Chicago attracts many more men, while Andersonville appeals to

CULTURAL ARCHIPELAGOS

TABLE 1. Lesbian and Gay Male Concentrations by Zip Code

Same-Sex Male Couples Same-Sex Female Couples

Zip Code Location Percent of All

Households

Median

Price per

Sq. Foot

Zip

Code

Location Percent of

All

Households

Median

Price Per Sq.

Foot

94114 Castro, San Francisco, CA 14.2% 671 02657 Provincetown, Cape Cod,

5.1% 532

92264 Palm Springs, CA 12.4% 146 01062 Northampton, MA 3.3% 187

02657 Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA 11.5% 532 01060 Northampton, MA 2.6% 189

92262 Palm Springs, CA 11.3% 136 02130 Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA 2.4% 304

33305 Wilton Manors, Fort

Lauderdale, FL

10.6% 206 19971 Rehoboth Beach, DE 2.4% 187

90069 West Hollywood, Los Angeles,

8.9% 481 95446 Guerneville, north of San

Francisco, CA

2.2% 197

94131 Noe Valley /Glen

Park/Diamond Heights, San

Francisco, CA

7.4% 564 02667 Wellfleet, Cape Cod, MA 2.2% 340

75219 Oak Lawn, Dallas, TX 7.1% 160 94619 Redwood Heights/Skyline,

Oakland, CA

2.1% 230

19971 Rehoboth Beach, DE 7.0% 187 30002 Avondale Estates,

suburban Atlanta, GA

1.9% 97

48069 Pleasant Ridge, suburban

Detroit, MI

6.8% 107 94114 Castro, San Francisco, CA 1.9% 671

Source: 2010 U.S. Census, analyzed by Jed Kolko, Trulia Trends.

women. In Boston, we have the South End and Jamaica Plains, respectively, while New

York has Hell’s Kitchen and Park Slope.

The same pattern applies in Canada. Davie Village is the visible gayborhood in Vancou-

ver, the place with nightlife, Pride parades, and rainbow crosswalks. Lesbians are more

likely to live and socialize on Commercial Drive. In Toronto, there’s the Church and

Wellesley gayborhood, but there’s also Queen West, which locals call Queer West.

The areas across North America that dominate our popular and scholarly

imaginations—Boystown, South End, Hell’s Kitchen, Davie Village, and Church-

Wellesley—are populated mostly by gay men (and straight tourists), but those are not the

only places where urban sexualities cluster. As one gay guide to Toronto notes, “ There’s

one thing you’ll notice pretty quickly about Toronto: queer culture is everywhere. The

notion of there being a single ‘gayborhood’ in the city is so last century.”

As with the

Village Voice story that I mentioned earlier, here again we see a meaningful reference to

plurality.

Third, women in general have less socioeconomic power than men (Badgett 2001).

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, women still

earn on average less than men—82 percent of what men earned in 2017.

Table 1 con-

firms that lesbian geographies are located in areas with a lower median price per square

foot.

Finally, lesbians are more likely to have children, and this creates different housing

needs (Bouthillette 1997). According to the Williams Institute, more than 111,000

same-sex couples are raising 170,000 biological, step, or adopted children. Among

those individuals who are younger than 50 and living alone or with a partner, nearly

half of LGBT women (48 percent) and a fifth of LGBT men (20 percent) are raising

a child under the age of 18. Among couple households specifically, 27 percent of

female and 11 percent of male couples are raising children. Finally, among lesbian,

gay, and bisexual adults who report ever having given birth to or fathered a child,

80 percent are female.

Gayborhoods are more likely to offer single-occupancy units

at high rents. This steers women, especially coupled women with children, to differ-

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ent neighborhoods in the same city—or it motivates them to relocate to nonurban

areas.

These four factors affect lesbian territoriality, motivating women to select different

places than gay men, but it is invalid to conclude that lesbians are placeless. Note as

well that there is never just one lesbian community or spatial cluster. Queer women’s mi-

grations are heterogeneous, and alongside the comparatively more visible gayborhoods,

they contribute to the analytic chain of cultural archipelagos.

TRANSGENDER PERCEPTIONS OF THE GAYBORHOOD

Few surveys ask questions that track the trans population. One meta-analysis of four of

the largest and longest running surveys in the United States found several problems

with how federal agencies conceptualize and operationalize gender (Westbrook and

Saperstein 2015). Some of the most reliable approximations come from the Williams

Institute. According to one of their reports, approximately 0.6 percent of adults in the

United States (1.4 million individuals) identify as transgender. Their findings also pro-

vide the first ever state-by-state estimates of the trans population (Table 2).

While these

data are not at the neighborhood level, they support broader arguments about spatial

plurality.

Discussions about gayborhoods emphasize the experiences of gays and lesbians

(and sometimes bisexuals, though less often) rather than trans individuals. In one

of my interviews, a lesbian who lived in Boystown asked me point blank: “And trans

folk? Where are they? We never talk about trans neighborhoods. And I don’t think

that’s the gayborhood.” Although transness is “more easily legible” (Nash 2011:203)

in the gayborhood and its social spaces since they permit “more possibilities for being

than places dominated by heterosexual normativities” (p. 199), many individuals still

report feeling invisible. Doan (2007:62) found that “the gendered nature of these

spaces,” or the ways in which gayborhoods enforce traditional gender norms, “results

in continued high levels of harassment and violence.” She surveyed 149 trans people

to learn about their experiences in the gayborhood. Thirty-three percent of her sample

reported “hostile stares,” 22 percent experienced “hostile comments,” and 17 percent

described instances of “physical harassment.” She also asked respondents “how safe”

they felt their city was for GLB versus trans people, respectively. Table 3 shows her

results. A third of trans respondents who lived in a city with a gayborhood felt that

the area was either unsafe or tolerable, at best, for lesbian, gay male, and bisexual

residents. Nearly half felt that the gayborhood was unsafe or tolerable for other trans

people.

In response to perceived exclusions and threats to their personal safety, activists have

begun organizing new types of spaces, called “queer pop-ups,” that celebrate nonbinary

gender expressions. These spaces are self-consciously styled in opposition to the “essen-

tialist expectations” (Nash 2011:203) of the gayborhood and gay bars. “I think about

queerness as a kind of radical self-expression and an encompassing of difference,” one

participant said to a colleague and me in an interview. Another added, “Pop-up events

have the opportunity to include folks who are not cis-gay men. That would be for me the

differentiator” (Ghaziani and Stillwagon 2018:79). In my earlier work, I showed that in-

fighting can be generative (Ghaziani 2008). The point I wish to make here is similar but

CULTURAL ARCHIPELAGOS

TABLE 2. State-by-State Estimates of the Transgender Population

STATE POPULATION PERCENT RANK

United States of America 1,397,150 0.58% -

Alabama 22,500 0.61% 15

Alaska 2,700 0.49% 33

Arizona 30,550 0.62% 12

Arkansas 13,400 0.60% 18

California 218,400 0.76% 2

Colorado 20,850 0.53% 27

Connecticut 12,400 0.44% 37

Delaware 4,550 0.64% 9

District of Columbia 14,550 2.77% -

Florida 100,300 0.66% 6

Georgia 55,650 0.75% 4

Hawaii 8,450 0.78% 1

Idaho 4,750 0.41% 43

Illinois 49,750 0.51% 30

Indiana 27,600 0.56% 23

Iowa 7,400 0.31% 49

Kansas 9,300 0.43% 41

Kentucky 17,700 0.53% 26

Louisiana 20,900 0.60% 17

Maine 5,350 0.50% 31

Maryland 22,300 0.49% 32

Massachusetts 29,900 0.57% 22

Michigan 32,900 0.43% 40

Minnesota 24,250 0.59% 20

Mississippi 13,650 0.61% 14

Missouri 25,050 0.54% 25

Montana 2,700 0.34% 47

Nebraska 5,400 0.39% 44

Nevada 12,700 0.61% 13

New Hampshire 4,500 0.43% 39

New Jersey 30,100 0.44% 36

New Mexico 11,750 0.75% 3

New York 78,600 0.51% 29

North Carolina 44,750 0.60% 16

North Dakota 1,650 0.30% 50

Ohio 39,950 0.45% 34

Oklahoma 18,350 0.64% 8

Oregon 19,750 0.65% 7

Pennsylvania 43,800 0.44% 35

Rhode Island 4,250 0.51% 28

South Carolina 21,000 0.58% 21

South Dakota 2,150 0.34% 46

Tennessee 31,200 0.63% 10

Texas 125,350 0.66% 5

Utah 7,200 0.36% 45

Vermont 3,000 0.59% 19

Virginia 34,500 0.55% 24

Washington 32,850 0.62% 11

West Virginia 6,100 0.42% 42

Wisconsin 19,150 0.43% 38

Wyoming 1,400 0.32% 48

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TABLE 3. Perceptions of Safety among Transgender Residents

City has a queer area

No Yes Total

How safe is your city for Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals? Unsafe 14 (16%) 1 (2%) 15

Tolerable 47 (55%) 19 (31%) 66

Safe 25 (29%) 41 (67%) 66

How safe is your city for Transgendered people? Unsafe 18 (21%) 3 (5%) 21

Tolerable 44 (52%) 26 (42%) 70

Safe 23 (27%) 32 (53%) 55

FIG. 2. Same-sex families with biological, adopted, or foster children under the age of 18 in the home. [Color

figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

at the spatial rather than intergroup level: Some queer spaces exist in a productive ten-

sion with gay spaces like the gayborhood and its bars, and they contribute to the overall

diversity of cultural archipelagos. One pop-up participant offered a useful analogy: “For

me, as a Black person, I would never be like, ‘There’s too many black-centered things

in the city.’ Because there literally are not.” The same logic applied to queer spaces.

“Even if there are specifically gay bars in the city, I’m never—in my mind, it doesn’t

make sense to be like ‘We’ve reached our limit.’ There should always be so many more.

Always.”

SAME-SEX FAMILIES

Implied in my earlier discussion about housing needs is a third example of cultural

CULTURAL ARCHIPELAGOS

FIG. 3. Same-sex couples with an African American Householder. [Color figure can be viewed at

wileyonlinelibrary.com]

archipelagos: same-sex families with children. Currently, more than 110,000 same-sex

couples are raising an estimated 170,000 biological, step, or adopted children. Those

couples who consider themselves “spouses” are more than twice as likely to be raising

children compared to couples who define themselves as “unmarried partners.”

Census

data from 2010 show that while same-sex couples are raising children across the countr y,

their distribution is not stochastic (Figure 2).

Childrearing among same-sex couples is most common in the Southern, Mountain

West, and Midwestern parts of the country. States that have the highest proportion of

same-sex couples with children include Mississippi (26 percent), Wyoming (25 percent),

Alaska (23 percent), Idaho (22 percent), Montana (22 percent), Kansas (22 percent),

North Dakota (22 percent), Arkansas (21 percent), South Dakota (21 percent), and Okla-

homa (21 percent).

When we examine metro areas, we see that same-sex families cluster

in economically integrated areas adjacent to regions that have a large population center

(Table 4).

One interpretation of these data is that the location patterns of same-sex families with

children contribute to the deconcentration of gayborhoods; same-sex families live else-

where, after all. This view is possible only when we conflate the study of sexuality and

space with the analysis of gayborhoods. By allowing for spatial plurality, we can identify

discernible pockets of concentration for same-sex families with children and interpret

them as components of cultural archipelagos rather than misrecognizing them as evi-

dence of outmigration from the gayborhood or residential dispersion.

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TABLE 4. Metro Areas with Highest Percentages of Same-Sex Couples Raising Children

Population below 1 Million Population above 1 Million

Metro Area Name % Same-Sex Couples

Raising Children

Metro Area Name % Same-Sex Couples

Raising Children

Grand Forks, ND-MN 65% Salt Lake City, UT 26%

Bismarck, ND 61% Virginia

Beach-Norfolk-Newport

News, VA-NC

24%

Hinesville-Fort Stewart, GA 46% Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI 22%

Laredo, TX 45% Memphis, TN-MS-AR 22%

Visalia-Porterville, CA 44% San Antonio-New Braunfels,

22%

Cheyenne, WY 43% Baltimore-Towson, MD 20%

Rapid City, SD 43% Columbus, OH 19%

Sioux City, IA-NE-SD 43% Hartford-West Hartford-East

Hartford, CT

19%

Brownsville-Harlingen, TX 42% Houston-Sugar

Land-Baytown, TX

19%

Longview, WA 42% Oklahoma City, OK 19%

TABLE 5. Top 10 States for LGBT African Americans

State Estimated LGBT African

American Adults

% LGBT among African

American Adults

% LGBT African Americans

among All Adults

District of Columbia 22,800 9.7% 4.48%

Louisiana 37,300 3.7% 1.11%

Georgia 73,800 3.6% 1.09%

North Carolina 66,200 4.5% 0.91%

Mississippi 18,900 2.5% 0.89%

New Jersey 56,000 6.7% 0.84%

Maryland 36,500 2.9% 0.79%

Alabama 29,800 3.3% 0.78%

Michigan 56,200 5.6% 0.71%

New York 106,000 5.1% 0.70%

RACIALIZED GEOGRAPHIES

Census data show that African American individuals in a same-sex partnership live in

areas where there are higher overall populations of other African Americans, rather than

areas that have large clusters of GLB people. More than one out of every four of African

American same-sex couples lives in Georgia, New York, Maryland, and North Carolina

(Figure 3). Of these households, 34 percent are raising children.

The 10 states with the largest percentages of GLB African Americans include DC,

Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, New Jersey, Maryland, Alabama, Michi-

gan, and New York (Table 5). This clustering is evident at the county level as well

(Table 6).

Zip codes associated with traditional gayborhoods are largely white. This made Nero

(2005) wonder in the title of his essay, “Why are the Gay Ghettos White?” Rather than

adopt a deficit approach like some scholars (e.g., Hunter 2015), I propose that we see

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TABLE 6. Top 10 Counties for LGBT African Americans

State

Rank

U.S.

County

Rank

County Same-Sex Couples

with African American

Householders

(adjusted)

Same-Sex Couples

with African American

Householder per

1,000 Households

(adjusted)

% Raising “own”

Children among

Same-Sex Couples

with African American

Householder

(adjusted)

2 1 Baltimore city,

Maryland

1037 4.15 38%

7 2 Lee County,

South

Carolina

25 3.69 6%

7 3 Bamberg

County, South

Carolina

21 3.51 16%

34Clayton

County,

Georgia

317 3.50 40%

95Macon

County,

Alabama

28 3.27 26%

26Prince

George’s

County,

Maryland

9538 3.14 29%

37DeKalb

County,

Georgia

829 3.05 31%

18Districtof

Columbia, DC

793 2.97 22%

5 9 Holmes

County,

Mississippi

20 2.96 58%

310Fulton

County,

Georgia

9672 2.57 23%

Nero’s critique through a generative lens. Gayborhoods are not without exclusions, but

they are only one expression of urban sexualities. The assumption of spatial singularity

is epistemologically harmful because it ignores the “spatial capital” (Centner 2008; Mace

2017) and creative placemaking efforts of queer people of color. This includes youth of

color, many of whom respond to the racial exclusions of the gayborhood by building sep-

arate communities, or as Greene (2018:168) argues, “refashion[ing] gayborhood street

corners” into “queer street families.”

When I was conducting interviews in Chicago, Alessandra, a Latina lesbian, explained

to me why she disliked the gayborhood: “Boystown is overwhelmingly white.” This did not

leave her “placeless,” as Castells would say, or without access to communities of color in

queer spaces. “There are pockets on the South Side that have developed into mini gay

areas,” she told me. These “mini gay areas” provide a counterargument to the claim that

Chicago has only one gay area. Alessandra rebutted, “There’s a distinct African American,

queer, female-identified community. There’s a distinct Latina queer community. There’s

CITY & COMMUNITY

a little bit of an Asian community. These spaces are separate from the white spaces, which

is Andersonville and Boystown. On the West Side, there’s this whole underground scene

of African American male parties, and they have their own scene that’s not connected

to Boystown at all, because they don’t feel comfortable going to Boystown....It’s the

exact same thing within the female world.” These efforts may not culminate into a formal

gayborhood, but to evaluate them by such a singular standard positions the gayborhood

as analytically hegemonic. Edith, another Latina lesbian in the city, showed me a different

map as well: “There’s a lot of queer people in different neighborhoods of color that build

their own spaces.”

The patterns that I found in Chicago exist in other cities as well. For example, the

story I referenced earlier about the “new gayborhoods” of New York noted that people of

color are forming unique settlements of their own in places beyond Manhattan. Jackson

Heights in Queens has become “an enclave for Latino gays.” Michael Lavers, the jour-

nalist, calls it “Hell’s Cocina—the city’s main Latino gayborhood”(Lavers 2009). It’s not

the only one in the city either, but rather “one of a handful of such outposts that have

sprung up in the so-called outer boroughs. Immigrants from Latin America and South

Asia have transformed Jackson Heights into a neighborhood teeming with ethnic restau-

rants, street vendors, and legions of flamboyant drag queens and macho Latinos.” In a

similar way, Fort Greene in Brooklyn has become “a bastion of gay Black professionals,”

so much that “it is called the Chocolate Chelsea.”

Charles Nero was right to wonder about racial exclusions in the gayborhood, but his

critique does not mean that queer people of color are placeless. What I saw in Chicago

and what is happening in cities like New York illustrates the powerful agency they have

in creating unique residential and social clusters. This is not to suggest that there are no

people of color in existing gayborhoods like Boystown, Hell’s Kitchen, or Chelsea, any

more than it implies that queer people of color who live in other parts of the city never

go to the gay bars that are based in those areas. The world of urban sexualities is spatially

plural and culturally complex.

LOOKING BACK, REFLECTING FORWARD

The study of sexuality and space has a long and interdisciplinary history, yet urban re-

searchers have adopted a “remarkably reluctant” (Hubbard 2012:1) stance toward it. This

is especially the case for sociologists, who demonstrate a “disregard for queer residents”

(Brown-Saracino 2008:7) and are “biased toward the experiences of people who claim

heterosexuality” (Moore 2015:245). The little we know about the spatial life of queer

people inflates their role in gentrification, focuses exclusively on their residence in gay-

borhoods, or narrows the analysis of social spaces to gay bars. The result is an incomplete

and distorted understanding about how queer people interact with the city. We cannot

be content with case studies that ignore the role of gayborhoods in the metropolis, but

neither should we conceptualize the city as a “dichotomy of gay/straight spaces” (Browne

and Bakshi 2011:1818).

I focused in this essay on the experiences of lesbians, trans individuals, same-sex fami-

lies with children, and queer people of color, but this is not an exhaustive list. Additional

clusters exist for seniors (many gay seniors “abound in areas not known for their siz-

able gay populations,” including North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and

CULTURAL ARCHIPELAGOS

West Virginia

[Misgav 2016]); suburban (Brekhus 2003) and rural queer people (Gray

2009); and immigrants (Carrillo 2017; Martinez 2015). The logic of intersectionality also

instructs us that people identify with more than one group at a time.

In addition to the location patterns of different subgroups of queer people, cultural

archipelagos also develop as gayborhoods form, evolve, and change over time. Consider

New York as an example. While Greenwich Village was the site of the famous Stonewall

riots in 1969, the queer nucleus has since shifted. The 2009 Village Voice essay that I cited

earlier, entitled “The New Gay Neighborhoods,” tracks a trend that is happening in other

cities as well: “Gay men, pushed out of Greenwich Village, went north of 14

Street to

populate Chelsea, then past 34

Street to Hell’s Kitchen. Now, many of them are pioneer-

ing some unlikely neighborhoods that are emerging as future gay neighborhoods”(Lavers

2009). HIV/AIDS incited some of this migration. In his 1995 Washington Post piece, Gary

Lee observes, “Hit by the AIDS crisis and changing times, the heart of gay New York be-

gan to gradually shift a decade ago to Chelsea, which borders Greenwich Village to the

north.” Later in 2002, a writer for the New York Times offered a similar assessment:

If Christopher Street was once America’s gay Main Street, today it conjures a gay Potemkin

Village. AIDS wiped out an entire cohort of gay men who had flocked there, even as Chelsea

attracted a younger generation of gay, mostly white residents by offering cheaper rents. Even-

tually, Eighth Avenue outpaced Christopher Street as the city’s gay standard. Until the mid-

1990s, when Chelsea took over, the West Village zip code, 10014, had indicated the most

populous gay neighborhood in the city (D. Lee 2002; G. Lee 1995).

Linger for a moment on the imagery of a “gay Potemkin Village.” Potemkin was a

Russian soldier, statesman, and one of Catherine the Great’s lovers. He helped her seize

power in 1762 by creating hollow facades of sham villages along the Dnieper River, hoping

to impress the European powers-that-be with Catherine’s supposed new conquests. From

this mythology was born the phrase “Potemkin village” to designate a veneer that seems

impressive but which lacks substance beneath it. To call Greenwich Village a gay Potemkin

Village seems unfair to me. I prefer to think about these neighborhoods as having a

symbolic relationship to one another; Even as businesses and residences shifted north to

Chelsea, the Village retained a queer reputation due to the location of Stonewall, which

is still a major symbol of queerness and an “anchor institution” (Ghaziani 2014a) for the

area.

After the Village came Chelsea, and now there’s Hell’s Kitchen. In her story for the

New York Times, Motoko Rich remarked, “For the last decade, Chelsea, on the West Side

just north of Greenwich Village, has been the epicenter of gay male life in New York. Gay

bars, novelty shops and coffee shops (notably, Big Cup, on Eighth Avenue), have drawn

pilgrimsfromalloverthecountry....[But]asmostlystraightfamiliesmoveintoChelsea,

gay residents are now gravitating toward Hell’s Kitchen and beyond.” David Shaftel, writ-

ing also for the New York Times, calls this a “new gay presence” (Rich 2004; Shaftel 2007).

In big cities like New York, gayborhoods have moved over time. Prior versions do not just

vanish, of course, but the assumption of spatial singularity veils our ability to see, let alone

theorize, the relationship between multiple areas.

Whereas the Village is an example of a symbolic (or Potemkin) gay village, Chelsea

and Hell’s Kitchen are more apparent, at least for now. How long this lasts before the

cultural archipelagos of New York expand further remains to be seen. “Despite Hell’s

Kitchen’s growing appeal to many of the city’s young gay men, an attraction fueled by

CITY & COMMUNITY

its strengthening gay identity,” Shaftel suggests that “many residents predict that the area

may never have the gay identity that Chelsea has and that the West Village was once

famous for, that it will endure simply as a gay-friendly district, less a scene than simply a

neighborhood.” His distinction between a scene and a neighborhood is intriguing. How

can we measure the difference between a gay neighborhood, a gay-friendly district, and

other kinds of queer scenes? How do “qualities of place” (Silver and Clark 2016) shape

their position in cultural archipelagos? These are new questions that emerge only after

we shift our analytic attention to cultural archipelagos.

I want to be careful in my concluding remarks to not overemphasize the position of the

gayborhood. Based on a nationally representative sample of 1,197 self-identified LGBT

American adults aged 18 years of age or older, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center

found that most respondents have never lived in a gayborhood—72 percent, to be exact.

Only 14 percent say that they have lived in such a place at some point in their life, while 12

percent said that they currently live in a gayborhood.

If 72 percent of LGBT individuals

have never lived in a gayborhood, then what does that imply about frameworks in urban

studies that restrict our analysis of sexuality and space to just those specific areas?

The conventional approach to studying urban sexualities adopts an enclave epistemol-

ogy, one that isolates single gay districts for analysis. To reflect on the theoretical paucities

of this approach, consider a conversation that I had with Jared, a 51-year-old, white, part-

nered gay man who has lived in Chicago for more than two decades. He told me about a

“biggie bang” that happened in the city and produced “little planets of gays” across the

map:

There is a pattern of movement of where people live. Let us say it is this “biggie bang.” Every-

body lived in Lakeview. There was no question at the time that the place to move was Lake-

view. All through the 1980s, it was really, really heavily gay. And then it exploded. Lakeview’s

not as concentrated anymore, and it will never be as concentrated. Now people are settling

in different areas. The explosion has made little minienclaves throughout the city....Now

you’ve got all these little planets of gays.

Jared identifies two features of queer spaces that I think are worth acknowledging: They

are protean (they change over time and reflect local place characteristics), and they are

plural (they are multiple and diverse). This realization generates more questions. Rather

than ask why a gayborhood forms, Jared inspires me to inquire about the causes of a

“biggie bang.” What triggers a spatial explosion that produces a “pluralization of sexual-

ity” (Brown 2014:1) across the urban landscape? What types of cities are more likely to

support cultural archipelagos? What factors constrain their formation? Similarly, rather

than relegate our analysis to just one gayborhood, we must inquire about the interrela-

tionship among the “little planets of gays.” How can we characterize the ecological dis-

tribution of the “variety of gay and lesbian enclaves” (Compton and Baumle 2012:1351)

that dot many cities today? If place characteristics affect “orientations to sexual identity”

(Brown-Saracino 2015:1), how do the features of queer cultural archipelagos affect the

worldmaking practices (Ghaziani and Brim 2019) that take place within and across the

chain? What elements do they share? Which are unique?

We need new conceptual tools. I propose that we redirect the study of sexuality and

space away from our preexisting assumptions of spatial singularity—evinced by a steady

stream of publications about individual gay districts—toward a cultural archipelagos

model of spatial plurality. New residential and leisure queer spaces are forming across

CULTURAL ARCHIPELAGOS

the city, and beyond its borders as well. They are not based exclusively in gayborhoods.

The analytic frame of cultural archipelagos can produce more sophisticated inquiries

into the relationship between sexuality and space, and it can advance an insight that is by

now vast in its reach on the ground yet inadequately represented in scholarship: Urban

sexualities are protean and spatially plural.

NOTES

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Census2010Snapshot-US-v2.pdf.

https://www.trulia.com/research/welcome-to-the-gayborhood/.

https://www.seetorontonow.com/toronto-diversity/queer-west/.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-earnings/2017/home.htm.

http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/LGBT-Parenting.pdf.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/How-Many-Adults-Identify-as-Transgender-in-

the-United-States.pdf.

http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/LGBT-Parenting.pdf

Ibid.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-demographics-studies/infographic-msas-may-

2013/.

Source for census data on LGBT African-Americans and African-American Same-sex Couples:

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Census-AFAMER-Oct-2013.pdf.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-demographics-studies/infographic-msas-may-

2013/.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/13/5-key-findings-about-lgbt-americans/.

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