aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

End of gay culture again

Uh oh, I expect Andrew Sullivan will trot out his end of gay culture argument again when he sees this:

This Halloween, the Glindas, gladiators and harem boys of the Castro - along with untold numbers who plan to dress up as Senator Larry E. Craig, this year’s camp celebrity - will be celebrating behind closed doors. The city’s most popular Halloween party, in America’s largest gay neighborhood, is canceled. [...]

For many in the Castro District, the cancellation is a blow that strikes at the heart of neighborhood identity, and it has brought soul-searching that goes beyond concerns about crime.

These are wrenching times for San Francisco’s historic gay village, with population shifts, booming development, and a waning sense of belonging that is also being felt in gay enclaves across the nation, from Key West, Fla., to West Hollywood, as they struggle to maintain cultural relevance in the face of gentrification.

My argument is not that these neighborhoods will stay or come back or are by any means relevant or necessary. Rather, it’s that a gay culture will continue to exist.

The Castro remains a top tourist destination for gay and lesbian visitors. But Joe D’Alessandro, president and C.E.O. of the San Francisco Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, and a gay parent who lives in the Castro, predicted that eventually the neighborhood would go the way of North Beach, “still a historic Italian neighborhood though Italians don’t necessarily live there anymore.”

I began my career working on the film Before Stonewall. The point of it was that there was a gay culture before. There was Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis and Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. There will be an after too.