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This book explores why gay neighborhoods are changing in the so-called post-gay era so as to better understand how shifting conceptions of sexuality—especially allegations that its significance is declining in terms of how we define ourselves and how we structure our everyday lives—affect where we choose to live. It examines the conditions under which gayborhoods can retain their resonance for certain people, despite ongoing gay flight and a steady stream of straight newcomers into them. It also considers the possibility that new gay and lesbian settlements are emerging, if we just know how and where to look for them. In the course of the discussion, the book highlights the multiple, seemingly contradictory meanings that gayborhoods have for both gays and straight residents; why those meanings matter; and how they inform the many material stakes that are involved for those who live in and visit these places.

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 book has explored the enduring yet evolving relationship between sexuality and the city, the causes and consequences of urban change, the diverse and dynamic cultures of a place, the experiences of a marginalized community on the doorstep of equality, and the protean meanings and material expressions of the gayborhood in America. Gayborhoods are artifacts of urban planning, but in the coming out era, they also embodied distinct queer cultures and communities. Today, however, they are straightening and becoming mainstream. The book concludes by suggesting that the queer spirit has become more plastic and portable in a post-gay era, which helps gayborhoods to evolve in exciting ways as many different gender and sexual minorities reinvent their relationship with them, and thus the city itself, in profound ways.