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This chapter briefly traces the history of adoption law and takes a look at some of the more tricky issues that surround this institution—cross-racial adoption and the role adoption plays in the formation of gay and lesbian families. It also shows how adoption reflects the major cultural trends in American life. Americans generally, in the age of expressive individualism, try desperately to fashion for themselves unique and satisfying selves; and discover, in a sense, who they really are. For adopted children, this can include a search for their “real” parents and the discovery of their true genetic code. Men and women can decide to have children or not. Adopted children, uniquely, have in a way the right to decide to have parents or not, or more accurately, to decide which parents to cling to.

This chapter examines why the residential repertoire of gays and lesbians has changed in recent years. Drawing on a comprehensive archive of more than 600 media reports, it takes a look at those lesbian and gay residents who live in gayborhoods, those who once did but have since moved out, and those who reject them outright. Like all news reporting, and judging from some dramatic headlines, journalists who write about gayborhoods contend with their own preconceptions and drama. It is possible that they consciously or unconsciously interview residents whose proclamations of gayborhood demise make for a captivating pitch. The chapter uses the perspectives of the media to elucidate how the assimilation of sexual minorities is affecting where they choose to live, and how those decisions can change the significance of gayborhoods across the country. These perspectives offer important insights on the lived realities of urban change in America.

This chapter turns to the streets of everyday life, and more specifically to Chicago, to determine how the national debate over gayborhoods looks, feels, and sounds to people on the ground. Chicago has two active gayborhoods: Boystown and Andersonville. The chapter examines how Chicago residents make sense of living in a city with multiple gayborhoods, and whether they consider Boystown and Andersonville culturally equivalent, or whether they think about them as different from each other. To address these questions, the chapter considers the perspectives of 125 self-identified gay men, lesbians, and straight residents, business owners, government officials, representatives of nonprofit community organizations, realtors, developers, and various public figures. It also analyzes the hopes and fears of other residents—their banal concerns and their greatest ideals about the gayborhoods that they more simply call home.

This chapter examines the perspectives of Chicago residents regarding the so-called “triggers” and how they are remapping the relationship between their sexuality and the city. Sexuality does not have a singular spatial expression. This is becoming truer over time, and it is a strong indicator of assimilation. Post-gays insist that they are culturally similar to straights, and they perceive many different neighborhoods in the city as possible places to live. The chapter considers how these two familiar mechanisms work as gays and lesbians pass through certain momentous junctures in their lives. These triggers include growing older, the coming of age of a new generation, and the Internet. Thus, the “idea of all gays living in one space,” if it was ever true, is now moribund in a post-gay era. The chapter also asks why there are mixed feelings about whether gayborhoods will remain meaningful for queer youth later in their lives.

This chapter examines how gayborhoods can persist in the present and how they will live on into the future. It is unrealistic to think that gayborhoods have always been around, that they will remain stable in their character and composition, or that they will never change. All neighborhoods, along with the cities that surround them, are organic, continually evolving places. However, it is equally naive to declare the death of the gayborhood. The chapter first considers demographic trends based on the 2000 and 2010 U.S. censuses before discussing the many different ways that our sexuality continues to direct the decisions we make about where to put down our roots. It shows that gayborhoods can reform from one place to another. This is evident in Chicago, where gays and lesbians have moved steadily north for more than a century now, colonizing one neighborhood after the next.

This chapter examines how Boystown can retain its queer character, how an increasing presence of straight residents affects this possibility, and how different types of sexual minorities perceive the cultural significance of gayborhoods in Chicago. Although Americans are more tolerant of gay people in general, one study, using nationally representative survey data from a Gallup poll, found that more than a quarter of Americans still prefer to not have them as their neighbors. Many gays and lesbians wonder about the right balance between inclusion and straight dominance in the gayborhood. The chapter considers the role of existing gayborhoods as safe harbors and think about how they can retain their cultural and institutional character despite the arrival of more straight newcomers.

This chapter examines how entire communities and specific groups migrate in ways that expand, evolve, and reinvent the very meaning and material expressions of gay neighborhoods. It asks where gays and lesbians will go next and identifies two main patterns. First, when gays and lesbians leave an existing gayborhood, many of them collectively relocate to another area in the city, a trend that can be called a revival. Second, specific groups like same-sex families with children, people of color, and lesbians make distinct relocation decisions. While gays and lesbians generally are more dispersed in a post-gay era than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, these two patterns suggest that they can creatively reattach some of the positive aspects of gayborhoods to the places where they move. As they make daily decisions about where to live and socialize, gay people invent and reinvent the very meanings and material expressions of gay districts.

This chapter explores thousands of other organizations, aside from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that are also active in the human rights movement. Many of them make distinctive contributions by focusing on abuses of rights in a particular country or locality; by addressing violations of rights suffered by discrete segments of the population such as gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples, women, members of racial, religious or ethnic minorities, or persons suffering from mental or physical disabilities; by dealing with a particular form of abuse, such as torture or the denial of freedom of expression; by using a particular method to promote human rights, such as litigation or the rehabilitation of torture victims; or by enlisting members of a certain profession, such as lawyers, physicians or journalists, in the struggle for human rights.