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Welcome To The Gayborhood
The University of Richmond recently created an LGBTQA Living and Learning Community in its Keller Residence Hall. Before the community even began, we hosted various meetings as a group to decide and figure out what everyone expected from the community. We outlined our hopes, fears, objections, goals, or critiques of the program. One main concern was the idea of this becoming a ‘gay ghetto’ that limited queer activism. It might become the only focal point of queerness at the University. We have done various education programs to alleviate these concerns and educate ourselves about queer history. We discovered an interesting parallel to our program: Gayborhoods.
Gayrborhoods are defined by Wikipedia as “A gay village (also known as a gay neighborhood, gay ghetto or by the slang gayborhood) is an urban geographic location with generally recognized boundaries where a large number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people live or frequent.” Some of the most famous gay villages include: Castro in San Fran, Greenwich in New York City, Boystown in Chicago, and Dupont Circle in DC.
I began to wonder if Richmond already had an undeclared gayborhood and if it didnt, should it? Over the next few months, I will be exploring the gayborhood topic in a series of articles. I am looking to inspire conversation about queer life in Richmond. Hopefully, this series will ignite a grander discussion about Richmond’s queer future. We will learn more out our city’s queer resources, organizations, alliances, spaces, hopes, and dreams.
As I continue to write this series about gayborhoods, I will be circling around the ‘goal.’ I am not arguing for it or against it. Instead, I am hope to focus on Richmond’s queer past, present, and future experiences. I am interested to see how people want to see their city’s evolution. I ask the readers to engage with this series, as a neighborhood requires more than one person.
I am in favor of some sort of concentrated queerish space. Some might argue that a neighborhood can be a large scale closet. However, its walls are not prisons but a refugee against relentless heterocolonizing. It is queer space of exploration, confusion, imagination, liberation, and freedom. This neighborhood grounds the queer experience into the physical. We can read, cruise, party, connect, dream, create, and celebrate in a space outside of cyberspace, judgement, normal, or hetero. Our neighborhood becomes an intentional community of support, exploration, activism, and liberation.
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6 Comments
More to the point, what would actually encourage queers to settle in Richmond and- by extension- Virginia? Gay neighborhoods are traditionally places of refuge for queers, and Virginia is hardly what I would consider to be a refuge.
The state government is actively hostile to protecting even the employment rights of its queer citizens, and at best the city government is indifferent to us.
DC is only an hour away, and New York and New England aren’t much farther. Speaking personally, I would feel much more comfortable living in a place in which I know that my property and employment rights are legally protected.
Realistically, when our state government is busying itself with requiring women to submit to ultrasounds before having an abortion, there is no reason to think that even the most rudimentary progress on queer rights in Virginia is anywhere close to the forseeable future. It is for this reason that I am actively trying to leave Richmond as I would prefer to live my life in a state that is at least not actively oppressing its queer residents. I cannot imagine what circumstances would cause any gay person to live or start a business in Virginia, especially when there are so many other places that are much more welcoming.
Liberation is all well and good, but when people’s livelihoods can be taken away through entirely legal means, liberation can only remain a dream.
I would be opposed to the idea of a “gayborhood”…I don’t like the idea of placing people in boxes, a convenient way of separating folks, because they’re not “one of us.” To me the wonderful thing about Richmond is that there are GLBT in the area. Whether it’s Rockett’s Landing or Westover Hills or Museum District or Glen Allen…Gayborhoods would make GLBT’S to cluster and their wonderful variety in other areas would be lost.
Seems like Carytown bears the closest ‘semblance to Richmond’s Gayborhood. Though not exclusively gay, there is a very heard LGBT population in the area.
Healthy*
wait a sec. – gayborhood is a recognized district that LGBTers frequent, a village – as in stores, meeting places, and a residential component as well. Do not take Dupont Circle as typical – salaries and real estate values are sooo not normal. Look at Marigny-Bywater in New Orleans, Commercial Drive in Vancouver, Ste-Catherine in Montreal are real gay villages due to their non-residential draw of LGBT throughout their metro area. LGBT residential improvements have stabilized these old neighborhoods, kept a mix of incomes, ages,and ethnic groups. LGBT local spending keeps many sorts of business in the black. Slum landlords remain. Majority LGBT residents? Sorry, that is not reality – and should it be?
Non-residential is the key -really!
Hi there! This is my first comment here so I just wanted to
give a quick shout out and say I truly enjoy reading your posts.
Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with the
same subjects? Thanks a ton!