On a Saturday night on West Hollywood’s Santa Monica Boulevard, the sidewalks, dance clubs, bars and restaurants are packed. The crowd is made up of mostly men; mostly gay, joyfully, proudly and unapologetically gay men. This is West Hollywood after all, the community that’s been called America’s “Gay Camelot” because of its place in American gay life and culture.
It’s been a LGBT enclave in Southern California for decades. After West Hollywood incorporated in 1984, the city used its clout to champion issues of importance to the gay community. That included creating the country’s first same-sex domestic partnership registry in 1985 and drawing attention the sick and dying during the bleakest years of the AIDS epidemic, during which the city fought for more government help.
In more recent years West Hollywood’s gay residents have witnessed a series of LGBT civil rights victories, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage in California after a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision essentially abolished Propostion 8. That historic moment sparked a series of impromptu marriages at West Hollywood municipal facilities and celebrations on the street.
Most of its political leadership and many of its business leaders are gay and West Hollywood’s LGBT community feels more secure than ever before. But this has created new challenges and questions.
“And so now I think the biggest challenge is, where are we when we’re at a place that’s fully integrated?” says John Duran, a West Hollywood City Councilman and a veteran gay activist in the community. “We’re not only asking for a seat at the table, we’ve actually built the table.We’re chairing the table,” he says.
Beyond West Hollywood, many in the LGBT community also wonder what the future holds for America’s traditionally gay enclaves in an era of growing acceptance of gays by the wider society.
“If we are moving towards a time of full legislative equality, does this mean that gay neighborhoods face the prospect of being passé?” asks sociologist Amin Ghaziani, author of “There Goes the Gayborhood.”
Created partly as a reaction to the hostilities of the heterosexual world, Ghaziani says gay communities are now experiencing an identity crisis as the gay and nongay worlds increasingly mix and mingle and gays feel comfortable living openly in communities far from places like West Hollywood, San Francisco’s Castro District or New York’s Greenwich Village.
“There are in fact two trends occurring,” says Ghaziani. “There’s ‘de-gaying,’ which suggests that non-heterosexuals are moving out. At the same time, there’s a ‘straightening,’ of gay neighborhoods, which suggests that straight people are moving in, so what we need to think about then is how do we preserve these spaces without pretending that these kinds of demographic changes are not transpiring,” he says.