The Gayborhood

The Gayborhood: From Sexual Liberation to Cosmopolitan Spectacle explores the lived experiences of LGBT+ persons in an era of heightened visibility. The contributors analyze the future of LGBT+ politics and look beyond the commercialized rainbow spectacle of gayborhoods into the communities and aspirations within.

The Gayborhood: From Sexual Liberation to Cosmopolitan Spectacle explores the lived experiences of LGBT+ persons in an era of heightened visibility. Gay urban enclaves, known colloquially as gayborhoods, illustrate the evolution of LGBT+ political capacity building. Since their emergence after World War II, gayborhoods have homogenized at the expense of women, transgender, and nonwhite persons due to neoliberal policies promoted by urban planners. Thus, their popularization and economic vitality correlate with a loss of collective identity and space for some inhabitants. While gayborhoods were once diverse and inclusive spaces that rejected normative institutions of marriage and assimilation into dominant society, the stakeholders of these areas have now unashamedly aligned themselves with conformity and profitability to legitimize their existence. The contributors within The Gayborhood invite readers to reflect on the future of LGBT+ politics and look beyond the commercialized rainbow spectacle of gayborhoods to the communities and aspirations within.

Introduction: Queering the Sociological Imagination

Christopher T. Conner and Daniel Okamura

Chapter One: Performative Progressiveness: Accounting for New Forms of Inequality in the Gayborhood

Adriana Brodyn and Amin Ghaziani

Chapter Two: Style and the Value of Gay Nightlife: Homonormative Placemaking in San Francisco

Greggor Mattson

Chapter Three: The Triumph of Collective Intimacy—Gay Collective Sex in New York City from the Late 1800s to Today

Étienne Meunier and Jeffrey Escoffier

Chapter Four: Gayborhoods as Criminogenic Space

Vanessa R. Panfil

Chapter Five: Disappearing: Gay Spaces and the Gay Singleton

Aliraza Javaid

Chapter Six: Erotic Capital and Queer Men of Color

Omar Ali Mushtaq

Chapter Seven: The Whiteness of Queer Urban Placemaking

Theo Greene

Chapter Eight: Beyond the Homonormative Framework: How Two-Mother Families in Poland Deal with Social Invisibility and Related Anxieties

Magdalena Wojciechowska

Chapter Nine: When the Gayborhood Isn’t Enough: How Trans Youth Utilize the Internet to Make a Digital Trans Neighborhood

Jonathan Jiménez

Chapter Ten: Gays Under Glass: Gay Dating Apps and the Affection-Image

Tom Penney

Chapter Eleven: Gayborhood Change: The Intertwined Sexual and Racial Character of Assimilation in Chicago’s Boystown

Jason Orne

Afterword: Somewhere Beyond the Gayborhood

C.J. Janovy