Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our ...society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are "gayborhoods" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospects for the future.
Drawing on a wealth of evidence--including census data, opinion polls, hundreds of newspaper reports from across the United States, and more than one hundred original interviews with residents in Chicago, one of the most paradigmatic cities in America--There Goes the Gayborhood?argues that political gains and societal acceptance are allowing gays and lesbians to imagine expansive possibilities for a life beyond the gayborhood. The dawn of a new post-gay era is altering the character and composition of existing enclaves across the country, but the spirit of integration can coexist alongside the celebration of differences in subtle and sometimes surprising ways.
Exploring the intimate relationship between sexuality and the city, this cutting-edge book reveals how gayborhoods, like the cities that surround them, are organic and continually evolving places. Gayborhoods have nurtured sexual minorities throughout the twentieth century and, despite the unstoppable forces of flux, will remain resonant and revelatory features of urban life.
Creating a Place For Ourselves is a groundbreaking collection of essays that examines gay life in the United States before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement. Along with examining areas with ...large gay communities such as New York, San Francisco and Fire Island, the contributors also consider the thriving gay populations in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Washington, D.C., Birmingham and Flint, demonstrating that gay communities are truly everywhere. Contributors: Brett Beemyn, Nan Alamilla Boyd, George Chauncey, Madeline Davis, Allen Drexel, John Howard, David Johnson, Liz Kennedy, Joan Nestle, Esther Newton, Tim Retzloff, Marc Stein, Roey Thorpe.
Since the COVID-19 has spread across the country, commercial establishments were temporarily closed or closed in succession and club events were cancelled in the gay community. The mood of ...self-restraint in behavior, such as avoiding the three Cs (closed, crowded, contact) increased, and there were periods when the city was deserted. The period during which testing opportunities were suspended due to the tight workload at public health centers was relatively short, and the situation has now nearly returned to that before the pandemic, although some centers have shifted to an appointment system for testing. However, the current slow growth in the number of tests is partly due to a sense of self-restraint and a decrease in activities for promoting testing.For those in the gay community who wanted to be tested but were unable to do so, the six community centers that have been established nationwide and the 10 NGOs that continue to conduct preventive awareness-raising activities targeting MSM have provided testing opportunities through face-to-face and internet publicity, utilizing commercially available postal testing kits. In one province and four prefectures, they have continued to provide testing opportunities in collaboration with private medical institutions. The actual number of users of the provided testing opportunities has been small compared to the total number of MSM, they are reaching the population with high testing needs. Although the postal testing service was the first initiative of its kind in the country, the postal testing company and the NGOs that were involved in each region worked together to provide better follow-up after the test results.Even amidst the COVID-19 epidemic, PrEP use has increased according to the results of the MSM and gay community survey, and the potential needs for a safe environment and regular testing are growing. In addition, condom-use behaviour has declined since before the COVID-19, and there is a concern that the attitudes of norm bearers regarding safer sex are changing. Therefore, it is necessary to develop preventive awareness-raising in a complex way. To make this a sustainable activity, a system to train and support party health workers working in community centers and communities is needed.
"It is a living museum of a long-gone Jewish life and, supposedly, a testimony to the success of the French model of social integration. It is a communal home where gay men and women are said to ...stand in defiance of the French model of social integration. It is a place of freedom and tolerance where people of color and lesbians nevertheless feel unwanted and where young Zionists from the suburbs gather every Sunday and sometimes harass Arabs. It is a hot topic in the press and on television. It is open to the world and open for business. It is a place to be seen and a place of invisibility. It is like a home to me, a place where I feel both safe and out of place and where my father felt comfortable and alienated at the same time. It is a place of nostalgia, innovation, shame, pride, and anxiety, where the local and the global intersect for better and for worse. And for better and for worse, it is a French neighborhood."-fromMy Father and I
Mixing personal memoir, urban studies, cultural history, and literary criticism, as well as a generous selection of photographs,My Father and Ifocuses on the Marais, the oldest surviving neighborhood of Paris. It also beautifully reveals the intricacies of the relationship between a Jewish father and a gay son, each claiming the same neighborhood as his own. Beginning with the history of the Marais and its significance in the construction of a French national identity, David Caron proposes a rethinking of community and looks at how Jews, Chinese immigrants, and gays have made the Marais theirs.
These communities embody, in their engagement of urban space, a daily challenge to the French concept of universal citizenship that denies them all political legitimacy. Caron moves from the strictly French context to more theoretical issues such as social and political archaism, immigration and diaspora, survival and haunting, the public/private divide, and group friendship as metaphor for unruly and dynamic forms of community, and founding disasters such as AIDS and the Holocaust. Caron also tells the story of his father, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to France and once called the Marais home.
Gay Voluntary Associations in New Yorkis a sensitive and insightful ethnography of social groups that have gathered around common interests in an urban LGBT population from the time of the AIDS ...crisis to the present. Anthropologist Moshe Shokeid examines the social discourse of sex, love, friendship, and spiritual life in which these communities are passionately engaged.
Drawn from long-term anthropological research in New York City,Gay Voluntary Associations in New Yorkuses participant observation to explore such diverse social associations and religious organizations as seniors groups, interracials, bisexuals, sexual compulsives, gay bears, and Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish gay congregations. As an outside observer-neither gay nor American-born-Shokeid examines the social discourse within these voluntary associations from a critical vantage point. In addition to the personal information and intimate expressions of empathy freely shared in the company of strangers at social gatherings, individual stories and experiences are woven into the narrative to illustrate the existential conditions and emotional template of gay life in the city. Shokeid's nuanced portrait of the affective relationships within these groups offers deeper comprehension of the social dynamics and emotional realities of gay urban communities in the United States.
The term "gay community" has been criticized for its inability to explain the pluralities in a specific cultural and political context. Based on in-depth interviews with 63 non-heterosexual males in ...Bulgaria, this study aims to revisit the theories of gay communities in a non-Western, post-communist context. The data from this study suggest that (1) the idea of a "gay community" is often rejected due to anti-communist notions and explicit engagement with individualism as anti-communitarianism; (2) belonging to a gay community is subjective, and initial verbal detachment from gay communities does not indicate a lack of factual belonging to such communities; (3) the concepts of "personal communities" and "family of choice" remain relatively irrelevant in the Bulgarian context; (4) the most significant factor for attachment to a gay community is the notion of "gay culture" and "gay scene"; (5) recent forms of "sexual attachments" have led to a certain political involvement; and (6) the "anti-gender campaigns" have revitalized the importance of gay communities and have brought an increasing number of respondents to certain involvement in gay communities and networks, challenging the theories of "post-gay" societies.
The minority stress process of internalized homophobia (IH) has been associated with a range of adverse health outcomes among gay and bisexual men (GBM). However, evidence is mixed regarding the ...effect of IH on drug use, suggesting the potential role of multiple mediated pathways. Researchers have linked depression, sexual anxiety, and gay community attachment with IH. Depression, sexual anxiety, and gay community attachment have also been linked with drug use and drug-related problems suggesting potential mediating roles. A U.S. national sample of 1071 HIV-negative GBM completed at-home surveys, including measures of sociodemographic characteristics, IH, depression, sexual anxiety, gay community attachment, and drug use and associated problems. Adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics, depression mediated the association between IH and recent drug use. IH was positively associated with depression, and depression was positively associated with recent drug use. Gay community attachment partially mediated drug-related problems. IH had a positive direct association with drug-related problems and a negative direct association with gay community attachment. Gay community attachment had a positive association with drug-related problems. IH was positively associated with sexual anxiety, but sexual anxiety was not associated with either drug outcome. Efforts to reduce IH among HIV-negative GBM are likely to have a positive impact on mental health problems, as well as reduce risk for drug use and drug-related problems. Gay communities could provide the social support necessary for reducing IH; however, emphasis on community level interventions that address factors that increase risk for drug-related problems remains important.
Social stressors stemming from within the gay community might render gay and bisexual men vulnerable to mental health problems. The 20-item intraminority Gay Community Stress Scale (GCSS) is a ...reliable measure of gay community stress, but the scale’s length limits its widespread use in sexual minority mental health research. Using three independent samples of gay and bisexual men, the present research developed two abbreviated versions of the GCSS using nonparametric item response modeling and validated them. Results indicated that eight items provided maximal information about the gay community stress construct; these items were selected to form the eight-item GCSS. The eight-item GCSS reproduced the factor structure of the parent scale, and gay community stress scores obtained from it correlated with other identity-specific social stress constructs and mental health symptoms. Associations between gay community stress and mental health symptoms remained significant even after controlling for related identity-specific stressors, general life stress, and relevant demographics. A four-item version was also developed and assessed, showing good structural, convergent, criterion, and incremental validity and adequate reliability. The eight- and four-item versions of the GCSS offer efficient measures of gay community stress, an increasingly recognized source of stress for gay and bisexual men.
Despite changing societal attitudes and acceptance of sexual minority individuals, gay men continue to seek out sexual minority-specific spaces. These spaces are often assumed to primarily consist of ...gay venues or neighborhoods in urban and metropolitan areas, but there is also a desire for less traditional gay spaces. To better understand the experiences of contemporary gay men forming connections in one such space and how these connections promote their well-being, the current study used a qualitative approach to provide an in-depth examination of the experiences of 41 gay men at a gay campground in the rural Southern United States. Results revealed six primary themes related to participants' experiences of the campground: (1) general community, social, and interpersonal connections; (2) gay-specific community, social, and interpersonal connections; (3) feelings of isolation and loneliness; (4) well-being; (5) representation and acceptance; and (6) external stigma. These findings identify some commonalities with more traditional gay spaces and also reveal several experiences, benefits, and drawbacks unique to engagement with a gay campground community. A better understanding of a diversity of gay communities is needed.
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