Not in My Gayborhood! Notes

DC No Longer Has a Central Gay Neighborhood. Does It Matter?

Andrew Giambrone's article in the Washington City Paper questions the relevance of Dupont Circle as the central gay neighborhood.
The residential and institutional "fabric of LGBT life" has scattered throughout the city.
Dupont Circle was once nicknamed the "Fruit Loop" and synonymous with gay life.
Jeff Donahue: Any man living in Dupont Circle was considered gay until proven straight.
Giambrone argues that many of those who paved the way for Gay Dupont reflect on its waning days with "pride and saudade."
A new generation of LGBTQ citizens has expressed indifference over preserving the neighborhood’s queer reputation.
Fewer people acknowledge Dupont Circle as "gay central" during historical tours.
Gentrification has pushed younger queers east of Dupont Circle, creating new settlements in Logan Circle, Shaw/U Street, and NoMa.
Bars and cultural mainstays like Lambda Rising have closed.
Gay-friendly establishments mirror the residential diffusion of LGBTQ residents in the city.
Geocoded mobile apps like Grindr and Scruff have rendered cruising in gay bars obsolete.
Advances in LGBTQ rights have eliminated the imperative for young people to seek protection and community in Dupont Circle.
Bonnie Morris: Young people gained more rights, more people were accepted in their own families, and they didn’t have to go to a ‘gayborhood’ to get that feeling. She misses the sense of a subculture.
Online respondent: "DC [becomes] our Dupont."
Giambrone's prognosis for Dupont’s gay future looks grim.
"Gay Dupont may not be dead, but it’s slowed down considerably—as have those who vivified it."
Days after the article’s publication, a man killed forty-nine and injured fifty-three at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
Dupont Circle reemerged as the center of local LGBTQ life after the Pulse shooting.
Thousands gathered in Dupont Circle to stand in solidarity with Orlando’s LGBTQ community.
Groups organized sunset vigils to protect the community’s safe spaces.
Mourners transformed the Dupont Circle Fountain into a makeshift memorial.
Cardboard posters displayed messages like "Love Is Love" and "Prayers for Orlando."
Youths chalked the surrounding sidewalk with messages, including "Muslims Love Queers" and "Presente!"
People lingered in the Circle, sharing their feelings.
News cameras encircled the monument as journalists invited people to share their thoughts.
Many signed a giant rainbow flag and a banner bearing the words "Washington, DC Is on Your Side. Our Hearts, Thoughts, and Prayers Are with Orlando."
The memorial grew throughout the week.
The final additions included hundreds of lighted candles, some arranged in hearts and some spelling out the messages “LGBT” and “Love Is Love.”
A thunderstorm washed away most of the memorial the following evening.
People had returned to their daily and nightly routines by Friday.
Residents sipped their coffee while rushing through the Circle to work.
Homeless men collected their belongings.
Black men filled the park tables, playing chess and congregating around a boom box blasting Philadelphia soul.
Professionals sought refuge from the afternoon heat by eating lunch around the basin while children frolicked in the water.
Gray-haired men read newspapers, tourists reviewed maps, and Black and Brown women chatted while rocking white babies to sleep.
Runners jogged through the Circle while dogs pulled their humans from one end to the other.
Young white women gossiped while sipping iced lattes, their yoga mats nearby.
Muscular men in short shorts played on their cell phones while their little dogs explored the area.
The spirit energizing Dupont Circle that week had all but faded.
Only splatters of caked-on candlewax remained.
A year later, Dan Reed also investigates the declining salience of Dupont Circle in Washingtonian magazine.
Rising rents have displaced LGBTQ residents, scattering them throughout the city.
LGBTQ bars and other institutional anchors have disappeared.
New generations of queer folk embrace a digital queer culture and benefit from a tolerant political and sociocultural climate.
Deacon Maccubbin: “There’s less of a gay community in any particular neighborhood. We are everywhere. People feel free to live and party just about anywhere now. Which is great. We’ve come so far.”
Another author predicts a grim future for Gay Dupont.
Experts describe the gayborhood as a shadow of its former queer glory.
The cognitive dissonance between the two articles and the collective response to the Pulse tragedy reflects the tensions that animate Not in My Gayborhood!
Giambrone and Reed echo many scholars, journalists, LGBTQ activists, and everyday citizens who have displayed “a curious investment in the purported demise of the gayborhood.”
None of them are technically wrong; the vibrant cultures that once distinguished these districts as safe havens for LGBTQ people have diminished considerably.
Articles and books abound with evidence pointing to the institutional and demographic decline within gayborhoods and the notable diffusion of LGBTQ culture throughout cities.
Rainbow flags fly alongside American flags on quiet residential streets and in front of downtown businesses.
City halls and other municipal buildings commemorate Pride Month by lighting their facades in rainbow colors.
Drag queens fill reading rooms in children’s libraries as easily as they do gay nightclubs.
Same-sex couples confidently push double-wide strollers down populated sidewalks.
A 4IrS Pew Research survey revealed that pS percent of LGBTQ respondents had never lived in a gay neighborhood.
V: percent believed LGBTQ people should achieve equality by maintaining distinctly gay districts equaled those who believed in achieving full equality through complete integration.
The gay urban imagination has expanded to the point that the city itself has become one giant gay village.
Vincent: “Dupont Circle doesn’t seem as central to the gay community anymore because you can be out in virtually every part of the city. DC is now our Dupont.”
LGBTQ Washingtonians returned to Dupont Circle to publicly mourn and stand in solidarity with Orlando’s LGBTQ community after the Pulse shooting.
LGBTQ mourners reclaimed control over the fountain, reviving the practices, representations, and traditions that evoked their vision of the local gayborhood.
Once the space was no longer needed, these mourners relinquished it, allowing Gay Dupont to recede and the neighborhood to return to its present “postgay” alter ego.
Mourners around the world temporarily reclaimed and revitalized the very gayborhoods that scholars have relegated to obsolescence.
John Paul Brammer: “I didn’t realize until that June morning, when we blinked our eyes awake and were met with the aftermath of Pulse on our TV screens and news feeds, that queers have a built-in homing device. But we do, and mine kicked in.”
Thousands waved banners, brightly lit iPhones, and candles in plastic cups at Harvey Milk Plaza in the Castro.
People returned to the plaza days later to stage a kiss-in to protest the homophobia that allegedly sparked the Pulse shooter’s rampage.
Londoners flooded Old Compton Street in Soho the Monday after the shooting.
Chicago residents held vigils in Boystown and Andersonville, while Seattle’s LGBTQ communities mourned in Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill.
Gay rights supporters in Rome, Italy, held a vigil on Gay Street hours after their Gay Pride Parade.
Thousands lighted candles and laid flowers outside Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn.
The collective impulse to return to these gayborhoods after the Pulse tragedy reveals their enduring value as anchors of LGBTQ life in the queer public imagination.
This book explores the various people and practices that preserve iconic gay neighborhoods as areas of the city that privilege public expressions of sexual and gender identity.
Regardless of where LGBTQ people live and how the demographic and institutional complexion of the gayborhood is changing, LGBTQ citizens have not necessarily relinquished their sense of ownership over iconic gay neighborhoods.
Community stakeholders preserve their visions of place and community through place reactivation, the temporary revival of inactive place cultures within a space, neighborhood, or locality.
Actors can reactivate places as necessary to mobilize their vision of community and then relinquish them.
Place reactivation exposes the fleeting, shifting nature of places despite the locational fixity of space.
Places shift from one moment to the next depending on the community that occupies that space at any given moment.
Multiple conflicting places can exist in the same space simultaneously.
This book also contributes to the urban scholarship that challenges places as fixed, stable, and enduring.
Place reactivation exposes urban neighborhoods as “flexible in the hands of different people or cultures, malleable over time, and inevitably contested.”
Urban scholars often define urban neighborhoods through a single set of practices, narratives, and reputations, privileging the tastes and perspectives of existing residents.
As neighborhoods transition from one community to another, the place cultures of former communities do not necessarily disappear.
Cultural residues often remain in commercial and cultural institutions (e.g., churches, restaurants, and gay bars), historical monuments, and cultural events in public spaces (e.g., parades and festivals), collectively symbolizing the former communities’ presence in the area.
Former and symbolic communities may draw on these cultural residues to reproduce the traditions, routines, and practices that sustain their ties to the local area.
Local community ownership is not limited to property owners and existing residents.
Without claims of residency, various nonresidential stakeholders use their participation in a neighborhood’s sociocultural, economic, and political life to translate their symbolic attachments into expressions of community investment and ownership.
This relationship is referred to as vicarious citizenship.
Vicarious citizens draw on various socio-territorial practices to mobilize against perceived threats to their community vision.
Whether challenging the increased presence of heterosexual families in a local institution or the declining sexual culture in a gayborhood, vicarious citizens can exert a powerful influence over a local area by appropriating its space and reproducing its meaning.
As gay neighborhoods demographically and institutionally “straighten,” vicarious citizens may nevertheless mobilize their spatial practices as a form of self-enfranchisement, protecting their vision of community from threats of heteronormative and homonormative assimilation.
Gay neighborhoods reflect a unique moment in American history.
In the aftermath of the r:u: Stonewall riots, gay districts increasingly enabled many gay and lesbian communities to consolidate political and economic power within cities and thereby access the promises of the American Dream.
Placemaking also matters for many who are excluded from housing markets within these areas.
Many gay neighborhoods depended on vicarious citizens, whose participation in public spaces and local institutions vitally shaped the reputation of these neighborhoods as destinations that celebrated queer political and sexual cultures.
Many who found themselves excluded from the economic and cultural life of gay neighborhoods continued to develop complex geographies by refashioning public spaces within and outside their local communities that created and fostered their unique subcultures.
These geographies may not resemble the residential and institutional formations that we commonly associate with areas like Dupont Circle, they may constitute gay neighborhoods to those who rely on them as safe spaces in which to create and foster communities.
Gay neighborhoods will endure because LGBTQ citizens continue mapping queerness onto them.
LGBTQ citizens still value gay neighborhoods as safe spaces where they can publicly enact aspects of their gendered and sexual lives.

LGBTQ Geographies

LGBTQ communities have always relied on repurposing existing public places within cities.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gay people transformed public parks, monuments, and theaters into nighttime cruising areas.
YMCAs became bathhouses, and family restaurants transitioned into gay bars.
Gay men also refashioned bridges, storefront windows, and doorway entrances into meeting places.
Nightclubs and speakeasies easily hosted elaborate drag balls for Black gay communities in Black enclaves like Harlem and Bronzeville.
The gay worlds that emerged from these spaces fostered a “highly sophisticated system of subcultural codes—codes of dress, speech, and style—that enabled [gay men] to recognize one another and carry on intimate conversations whose coded meanings were unintelligible to potentially hostile people around them.”
Many gay worlds existed concurrently with a space’s more mainstream use.
Lesbians in Buffalo, New York, developed strategies to meet each other inside straight bars.
Lesbians referred to these spaces as lesbian bars to reflect their sense of safety in meeting other queer women there.
Sociologist Laud Humphreys reveals an extensive social world governed by unspoken rules and roles that ordered the practices taking place in public restrooms.
“Scattered gay spaces” reflected complex geographies where gay men and women navigated antigay hostility within the dominant culture and mitigated the isolation often associated with the pre-Stonewall era.
Anonymous, brief contact also proved vital in the persistence of certain gay worlds, such as those created in parks, public bathrooms, literary societies, and YMCAs.
Cruising in Washington, DC, parks “was nearly a nightly ritual each spring and summer during the early r:4Is.”
Gay men “could recognize that they were not the ‘only one’ and begin to develop a network of like-minded friends, and perhaps a sense of belonging to the larger community.”
Episodic in nature, these gay worlds were both fleeting and lasting.
Existing in the shadow of the dominant culture, many gay worlds cultivated communities at that moment, rising and falling as the production of place shifted from “straight” to “gay.”
Gay men and lesbians fostered restricted relationships that were limited to the places and the times they were together.
Cherry Grove, New York, became a weekend escape for upper- and upper-middle-class white lesbians who could not live openly in New York City.
Many of the platonic, sexual, and romantic relationships that developed among these women were primarily limited to the weekends and summers they could spend in that “magical place.”
The daily and nightly reproduction of queer places facilitated continuity that supported and maintained vibrant gay subcultures over time.
Certain commercial establishments earned reputations well beyond the immediate communities they supported.
Hotel guests knew the nights on which to avoid the hotel bars unless they wanted to face being labeled homosexual by association.
Gay men and lesbians developed the cultural repertoires and traditions that rendered these spaces essential community anchors.
Despite the anonymous and fleeting nature of gay and lesbian geographies in cities, their reputations allowed visitors and newcomers to easily access these gay worlds.
Harold discovered the fairies he was intent on meeting not in some dark alley or obscure tavern but the doorway of the Wrigley building.
Hidden gathering places had a reputation well beyond the city limits.
Lafayette Square was renowned as a cruising location.
Gay novels also fueled readers’ imagination about the city’s covert gay gathering spaces.
As many U.S. municipalities passed laws banning homosexual acts following the repeal of Prohibition, the few “gay bars” that existed depended on the reactivation of these spaces by their patrons.
The Stonewall Inn rebranded itself as a private bottle club.
The availability of spaces for congregating allowed gay men to develop a sense of loyalty through the places they created.
Gay men developed such strong place cultures within these bars that these spaces often developed a supraspatial quality, enabling place continuity across spaces.
After cities and the police forced the closure of gay establishments, new ones would open in their place where the same customs and traditions would endure.
Scholars easily dismiss these gay worlds as “fragile,” lying under the radar of the heteronormative culture.
Refashioning existing spaces with distinct “values, perceptions, memories, and traditions,” they developed unconventional yet meaningful forms of community attachment and identification.

Gay Neighborhoods and Vicarious Citizenship

The Stonewall Inn stood conspicuously on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.
The bar circumvented the New York State Liquor Authority by rebranding itself as a private bottle club.
The bar typically served watered-down, overpriced drinks without a license.
It had no fire exits and no running water behind the bar.
The unhygienic practices used by its employees to clean glasses were linked to numerous hepatitis outbreaks among its customers.
The toilet overran constantly.
The Stonewall Inn attracted a diverse cross-section of gay and lesbian patrons, including the most marginalized contingents of the gay community.
Police raids on the Stonewall were common.
The Mafia paid off the police regularly, so the bar typically reopened the following evening.
The police likely expected a “routine raid” on June 4$, r:u:.
As the police moved through the club, customers resisted: many refused to show identification to the police, and transvestites refused to go into the bathrooms for a police examination.
The crowd outside grew increasingly angry as they began taking stock of the injustices they had routinely endured at the hands of the police.
The first hostile act outside the club occurred when a police officer shoved one of the transvestites, who turned and smacked the officer over the head with her purse.
The crowd finally erupted after the police threw a lesbian patron who resisted arrest into a police car.
The police retreated into the bar and barricaded themselves “as all kinds of objects continued to crash around the police.”
Police reinforcements liberated the trapped officers as the violence against the police escalated.
Protesters openly mocked the police as they attempted to quell and dissipate the crowd.
Riots continued around the Stonewall over the next several nights.
Throughout the day on Saturday, as people stopped by to inspect the wreckage, slogans appeared in chalk on the walls encouraging support for gay power.
That evening many of the rioters returned, along with onlookers and tourists who supported the protests.
Eventually, the crowd spilled outside onto the street, prompting the decision to block traffic from entering Christopher Street.
Protesters started fires in trash cans and threw bottles at the approaching police officers.
A half century later both popular and academic scholars debate the Stonewall riots and their lingering impact.
Some consider Stonewall the “spark” that ignited the modern gay rights movement.
The Stonewall riots epitomize vicarious citizenship.
The appropriation of Stonewall evinced a spontaneous response among LGBTQ people from across New York City to state-imposed sanctions that denied gays and lesbians the right to visible communities.
The bar still “offered its patrons [four] crucial things: space, security, . . . freedom,” and a sense of continuity that comes with the bar’s longevity in the area.
When the police threatened that sense of freedom and safety, Stonewall patrons defended the only sense of community they had— and in doing so, they articulated their legitimate claims of participation as members of a visible gay community.
Gay neighborhoods became essential political and economic strategies for coalescing and fostering community for gays and lesbians to “come out.”
Establishing residential and institutional concentration became necessary for early scholars of gay neighborhoods to legitimate these territories as sociologically valid.
The sociologists Martin P. Levine and Stephen O. Murray challenged the prevailing assumptions of homosexuality as deviant, “strengthen[ing] the notion that gays and lesbians function like an oppressed minority.”
Manuel Castells connects gay homeownership in the Castro with the emergence of a gay movement in San Francisco.
Lawrence Knopp attributes the success of the Marigny neighborhood in New Orleans purely to the economic motivations of middle-class white gay men with aspirations of homeownership.
Unlike the gay communities in San Francisco, who relied on the Castro for social protection and to centralize political power, the residents of the Marigny held no such aspirations for coalition building.
Edmund White distinguishes Dupont Circle as the city’s only “gay ghetto” by its “dulcet” conventionality:
- the clean streets “crowded with strollers and cruisers,”
- the busy bookstores filled with gays and lesbians,
- the outdoor cafés where “you can sit outside under an umbrella, sip wine and snack on pate and watch the joggers huffing past or women in saris ambling by with their children.”
- “The sidewalks are clean,” he writes, “the buildings are low, the shops are fashionable, the overheard bits of conversation are up-to- date (the latest movie, the latest cheese store, the latest play at the Kennedy Center).”
Community belonging in iconic gay neighborhoods never depended on residential propinquity.
Housing markets in places like the Castro quickly priced out LGBTQ people, requiring them to find housing in areas where they could easily access iconic gay neighborhoods.
Gentrification in the Castro resulted in gays and lesbians developing cultural archipelagos in “all adjacent areas . . . reach[ing] the Dolores Corridor on the border with the Latino Mission District.”
The development of the Marigny resulted when gay men sought affordable housing near the French Quarter, which was “the center of gay social and cultural life in New Orleans.”
The attraction of gay nonresidents to gay neighborhoods resulted in shifting placemaking practices throughout the day depending on the specific communities that occupy the area.
Levine observes the peculiar shift of the gayborhood from a quiet residential neighborhood during the day to a crowded, noisy destination on nights and weekends.
“Participation in the gay world, for homosexual males, occurs after normal working hours,” he writes. “At such times, the areas are flooded with residents as well as with gay men from surrounding neighborhoods who travel in to participate in the local gay scene.”
The nightlife that dominates the cultural life of gay neighborhoods contrasts starkly with the daytime routines of the diverse families that live there.
Businesses and shops must now tone down the sexually graphic window displays to accommodate the gaze of impressionable children.
Various LGBTQ communities rely on strategies of ephemeral placemaking to preserve the area’s reputation as scholars connect the dwindling material culture to the erasure of iconic neighborhoods.
Gay bars and nightclubs now accommodate diverse LGBTQ subcultures that temporarily impose their subcultural capital to support their various communities.
The Pulse nightclub reflects this form of placemaking- the tragedy occurred on its monthly Latin Night, which attracted a different population of LGBTQ people than the nightclub might attract on other nights.
As gay neighborhoods residentially “straighten,” vicarious citizens develop strategies to exercise what the sociologist Henri Lefebvre calls rights to the city.
In the absence of residential or even social ties, vicarious citizens establish legitimate claims to ownership and interest in the affairs of that community through living out their daily routines in the gayborhood.
Same-sex couples display affection to one another on the streets without fear of homophobic retribution.
Gay and queer-identified men sashay confidently through the streets in high heels and short shorts, their faces “beaten to the gods” with brightly colored eye shadow and bejeweled lips.
Trans men and trans women rarely anguish over which bathrooms to use in gayborhood institutions.
Restaurants along the “gay strip” bustle with loud groups of brunching companions, recalling their sexual conquests in Dickensian detail.
Vicarious citizens position themselves as symbolic “old-timers” whose practices enforce cultural norms and protect traditions that align with their imagining of place.
As gayborhoods welcome LGBTQ populations unable to participate in the extant culture, these groups write themselves into these areas by imposing traditions and practices associated with their specific subcultures.
LGBTQ youths of color draw on street corner practices often associated with the street corner cultures of the South Side and West Side neighborhoods of Chicago.
These youths travel hours to participate in a community that symbolizes acceptance of nonnormative gender and sexual identities, only to find themselves excluded from the neighborhood’s cultural, economic, and institutional life.
The youths combine the cultural symbols of the gayborhood with the “codes of the street” to foster communities and make the gayborhood culturally accessible to them.
Challenging their exclusion from mainstream LGBTQ culture, they translate their placemaking practices into a cultural and symbolic investment that preserves the gayborhood as a safe space that fosters the free expression of gender and sexual identities.
Residency has never mattered in defining gay neighborhoods for many who identify as community members.
Drawing on the remaining symbols associated with their community, they reactivate the cultural representations and spatial practices within various gayborhood spaces to mobilize their communities and maintain their connection to place.
LGBTQ citizens draw on ephemeral placemaking strategies to preserve gay neighborhoods.

Learning from the Gayborhood

Neighborhoods belong to the people who inhabit them and extend well beyond those who establish legal residency there.
Inhabitants include former and displaced neighborhood members who return to their “old neighborhood” to attend weekly church services and those who make regular “pilgrimages” to ethnic enclaves to frequent restaurants and participate in cultural festivals to reconnect to their culture.
Ephemeral practices foster and preserve the place-based cultures aligned with a nonresidential community’s association with a neighborhood.
Place reactivation reflects a long sociological tradition of ephemeral placemaking in neighborhoods.
The sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh described the Rialto as a neighborhood of “queer contrasts between the shabbiness of the slum” during the daytime and its “colorful nightlife in which bohemia and the underworld may meet with the curiosity seeker and the slumming parties from the world of fashion.”
Later generations of urban scholars explored how poor urban communities activated places by refashioning the existing ecology of the urban neighborhood.
Studies overflow with rich vignettes of children transforming alleys and vacant lots into playgrounds and empty warehouses and factories morphing from gay clubs one night into straight clubs the next.
Scholars assumed a deficit framing to describe these acts of ephemeral placemaking.
Urban scholars have recently explored the varied uses of ephemeral placemaking as strategies for revitalizing contemporary cities that reflect the emergence of moneyed, highly educated urban cosmopolitans whose tastes and spatial practices collectively indicate strong preferences for street-level diversity and experiences of cultural authenticity.
“Pop-up” restaurants and events provide spontaneous amenities for these urban consumers.
Local governments and place entrepreneurs organize annual music festivals like Coachella to transform otherwise vacant lots into worldwide attractions.
Residential newcomers may transform local spaces into makeshift roundabouts, gardens, and dog parks as exercises of DIY urbanism.
Dot-commers in San Francisco deployed “spatial capital” to appropriate and refashion public parks in poor Black and Latinx communities into temporary places for exclusive networking events.
Skateboarders and parkour enthusiasts transform the architecture of parks and public buildings into courses on which to perform various tricks and skills.
Neighborhoods may hold different and sometimes competing meanings for the diverse communities that pass through them.
White gentrifiers transform the historically Black neighborhoods into “cappuccino cities.”
Newcomers may appropriate elements of Black urban life (i.e., the iconic ghetto) to illustrate their cosmopolitanism.
Black residents may defend practices performed around their churches and businesses as vital to keeping the neighborhood culturally accessible.

Studying the Not-So-Ordinary Gay City

With an estimated :.$ percent of its adults identifying as LGBTQ, Washington bears the distinction of being America’s “gay- est city.”
Washington's queer history rivals those of New York and San Francisco, with vibrant and visible communities dating back to the late nineteenth century.
Every year DC showcases its diverse LGBTQ communities in myriad events and celebrations.
Beyond its queer reputation, Washington, DC, evokes the image of a national community where citizens from all over the United States participate in the political process through local placemaking.
Nonresidents indirectly influence the city’s spatial organization by selecting congressional representatives and senators in federal elections.
Annual celebrations like the Cherry Blossom Festival and the Fourth of July and special events like presidential Inaugurations convene millions whose spatial practices disrupt residents’ daily and nightly routines.
Tensions arising from a gay (white) migration into predominately Black neighborhoods offer an additional lens through which to examine these dynamics.
Between 4III and 4Ir:, DC’s population exploded from a near-record low of Gp4,IG: to prS,4VV.
In 4IrI, the city lost its Black majority as white residents purchased homes in predominately Black neighborhoods like Shaw/U Street, Blooming- dale, and Petworth.
Washington preserves its chocolate city reputation by performing long-standing community traditions.
Black musicians perform on street corners to the dismay of white gentrifiers in adjacent condominiums.
My project began in 4IrI as an ethnographic study of three adjacent gay neighborhoods in Washington, DC, at various stages of development: the “iconic” gay neighborhood (Dupont Circle), the “current” gayborhood (Logan Circle), and the “emerging” gay neighborhood (Shaw/U Street).
The emergence of queer cultural archipelagos in Northeast and Southwest DC raised new questions for me about what constitutes a gay neighborhood.
I completed my fieldwork in three stages, beginning with immersive participant observation as a Shaw resident in 4IrI.
I revisited Washington over the next six years, collecting data at significant events during summer and winter breaks and holidays, and relocated to Washington for twelve months for my sabbatical in 4Ir$.
I conducted more-targeted participant observation, including shadowing the members of the Stonewall Sports kickball teams, who dominated the Seventeenth Street strip on every Sunday game day during their season.
Following the tradition of urban ethnographers, I immersed myself in the quotidian routines of these neighborhoods.
I conducted daily and nightly rounds in local gay institutions, sat in public parks and outdoor cafés, followed respondents through the neighborhood, and marched in parades and protests.
I observed myriad neighborhood-wide events: local street festivals, church services, community town halls, and block association meetings. The town halls elicited helpful community feedback on multiple local issues.
The interviews also clarified how participants navigated life in a constantly changing queer landscape inWashington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV).
Interviews focused on the subjects’ gender and sexual identities, residential histories, and personal and professional goals.
Consulting local Washington archives enabled me to situate these dynamics in their proper historical context.
I collected materials from the Rainbow History Project, the Capital Pride Alliance, the Historical Society of Washington, DC, and the Washingtoniana Collection at the DC Public Library.

Overview of the Book

These pages detail the diverse strategies that everyday citizens employ to keep iconic gay neighborhoods resonant in an age of queer assimilation into the mainstream.
Chapter r presents a historical “impression” of Washington’s queer landscape and connects the trends associated with the disappearance of Washington’s gay neighborhoods to a long-standing legacy of queer placemaking in cities.
Chapter 4 pivots to explore the subcultural logics and strategies that vicarious citizens use to develop community attachments to iconic gay neighborhoods and shows that the growing visibility of LGBTQ residential clusters in cities has not necessarily supplanted residents’ attachments to iconic gay neighborhoods.
Chapter S explores the role of institutional anchors as space abeyance signifiers.
Specific anchors may lie dormant for decades until another group threatens their existence, spurring the indigenous community into action.
The following three chapters delve into how community actors mobilize their community anchors and spatial practices into different forms of vicarious citizenship.
Chapter V describes normative vicarious claims—everyday routines and practices that monitor and reinforce norms associated with the area’s identity as a gay neighborhood.
Chapter G discusses radical vicarious claims, claims raised by what the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins refers to as “outsiders within.”
Chapter u considers how vicarious citizens mobilize normative and radical vicarious claims into political vicarious claims, claims that pursue community interests through local political and institutional channels.
The conclusion applies this framework beyond Washington’s gay neighborhoods.
Place reactivation and vicarious citizenship extend well beyond gay neighborhoods. They draw on the unique conditions of the contemporary city, where urban revitalization strategies and new technologies in communication and transportation allow vicarious citizens to maintain connections to local areas regardless of distance.