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The Happiest Ending

Amin Ghaziani

in There Goes the Gayborhood?

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 ... More

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.Less

Resonance

Amin Ghaziani

in There Goes the Gayborhood?

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 ... More

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.Less

Becoming “Boystown” in Neoliberal Chicago: A Critical Urban Morphology of the North Halsted–Broadway Corridor

Alex G. Papadopoulos

Larry Bennett, Roberta Garner, and Euan Hague (eds)

in Neoliberal Chicago

The chapter studies the circumstances under which, Boystown, Chicago’s iconic LGBT community/village, emerged in the 1960s, as well as the changing urban forms and structures that have defined it. It ... More

The chapter studies the circumstances under which, Boystown, Chicago’s iconic LGBT community/village, emerged in the 1960s, as well as the changing urban forms and structures that have defined it. It situates the Boystown phenomenon within broader urban development events in Chicago in the post WWII era, and explores linkages between local change and urban and financial regulatory frames at the city, regional, state, and national scales. The study focuses on the geographic core of Boystown, which is identified as the North Halsted Street-Broadway Corridor. It traces urban morphological change in the Corridor (its town plan of lots, blocks, streets, and open spaces, built forms, and building- and land-uses), as a means of illuminating the causes, agents, and structural forces that have produced Boystown.Less