Amin Ghaziani
Consumer Affairs reported that the U.S. gay and lesbian population in 1990 clustered in coastal cities. By 2014, new hubs had emerged in Salt Lake City, Louisville, Norfolk, Indianapolis, and other places in conservative states, while traditional strongholds like Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York City, Miami, and Washington, DC, fell in the rankings of top residential locations.1 As we make similar decisions about where to live (or where not to live), and as those patterns change over time, we redraw the cultural cartography of the city. Seattle provides a stark example. Between the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census collections, the number of same-sex households increased in every single neighborhood—with one notable exception: the city’s most visible gay district of Capitol Hill. There, the number of male and female same-sex households plummeted by 23 percent (Balk 2014). Zoom next onto the streets of San Francisco. A 2015 survey shows that 77 percent of people who have lived in the Castro for ten years or more self-identify as gay or lesbian. The percentage falls to 66 for those who have inhabited the area for five years or less, 61 percent for those who moved in during the last two years, and 55 percent for those who arrived in the past year (Staver 2015). Such migrations are inciting a “new turmoil” across the country, the New Yorker notes, as more straights select gay neighborhoods as their home while queer people fan out to other parts of the city and the suburbs, and into rural areas as well (Greenspan 2014).
What can we learn from the gayborhood? Rather than ask why they first formed or explain why they are changing in recent years, as I have done elsewhere (Ghaziani 2014b; 2015a), in this essay I will use my experience with studying them as an opportunity to reflect on five methodological problems that they pose for researchers: how to sample hidden populations; how to interview in ways that capture the interactional tone of life on city streets; how to position demographic statistics in a cultural context; how to move beyond binary conceptions of urban spaces as gay or straight; and how to identify indicators of sexual geographies. For me, these inquiries collectively capture the spirit of “queer methods” (Brim and Ghaziani 2016), and I use them to offer advice to students and established researchers alike: once you embrace fluidity, multiplicity, and silences, you will realize that the systematic and the chaotic are compatible in queer spatial analysis.
Gayborhoods are not tightly sealed and walled-off districts; their boundaries are fuzzy. Existing studies in a number of disciplines have managed this problem by relying on census data to make inferences about the size of the gay and lesbian population and to identify the density of same-sex households in specific geographic regions. One common strategy is to create an “index of dissimilarity.” The statistic represents the proportion of minority group members (same-sex partner households, in this case) who would have to exchange places, usually census tracts, with majority group members (different-sex households) in order to achieve an even residential distribution: a neighborhood that replicates the sexual composition of the city overall. The index measures residential segregation and spatial isolation (Massey, Rothwell, and Domina 2009). Its values range from zero to one hundred, where zero represents total integration and one hundred signifies conditions of extreme segregation. Research shows that male and female same-sex households have become less segregated from all different-sex households between the 2000 and 2010 census counts (Spring 2013).
Scholars also use census data to create a “gay index” that ranks regions based on their density of same-sex households. Developed by Gary Gates and his colleagues, the index is expressed as a ratio of the concentration of same-sex couples in a geographic area relative to the overall population (Gates and Ost 2004). A value of 1.0 indicates that a same-sex couple is as just likely as a randomly selected household to live in the respective area. A value of 2.0 means that couples are twice as likely to locate in the area, while values less than 1.0 indicate that they are less likely to do so when compared to a randomly selected household. Studies that use the gay index show that same-sex couples are much more likely to live in cities like San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon; along with smaller towns like Provincetown, Massachusetts; Wilton Manors, Florida; Palm Springs, California; and Northampton, Massachusetts. City officials have taken a keen interest in this index because scholars who are visible beyond the academy, like Richard Florida, argue that it predicts economic competitiveness in a globalizing world (Florida 2002).
The 2010 census was the first in which government officials allowed respondents to identify themselves as married to a person of the same sex (Massachusetts pioneered legal same-sex marriage in the United States in 2005). Studies that use data from that particular census still produce low estimates of the gay and lesbian population, however, because the survey only counts coupled households. It excludes those who are not partnered (about a quarter of gay men and two-fifths of lesbians are in relationships at any given time). Those who do not live with their partner, those who are unwilling to self-identify as gay or lesbian, those who self-identify as bisexual, and those who self-identify as transgender also remain uncounted (Doan 2007; Doan and Higgins 2011; Hayslett and Kane 2011). These limitations raise vexing questions: What does it mean that same-sex marriage makes some of us measurable while concealing others? If we know where same-sex couples live, does that tell us where all queer people live? That the census renders an incomplete portrait is not up for debate—the survey still doesn’t ask about individual sexual orientation, sexual behavior, or sexual attraction, after all—yet it remains one of the few probability samples that we have about the national gay and lesbian population.
Having considered two common techniques that scholars use to describe the gay and lesbian population and its geographic expressions, let’s now think about possibilities for methodological innovations. I organize the advice that follows around a series of problems that I encountered as I was researching and writing my book There Goes the Gayborhood? I should note that these districts are generally white (Nero 2005), male (Browne 2007; Ghaziani 2015b), and middle-class in composition (Barrett and Pollack 2005). Thus, it goes without saying that we can generate even more principles based on the study of lesbian spaces and those inhabited by people of color, trans individuals, ball and drag subcultures, queer youth, suburban and rural migrations, and an examination of ephemeral spaces rather than those that are more enduring. What I offer here is an incitement to imagine a thing called queer spatial analysis.
Because they are a hidden population (Salganik and Heckathorn 2004), gays and lesbians are impossible to randomly sample. You can address this problem in three ways. First, remember that sexual orientation is a composite concept; what you learn depends on what you ask. Your options include questions about attraction or arousal (the desire to have sex or be in a romantic relationship with one or both sexes); behavior, acts, and contact (any mutual and voluntary activity that involves genital or bodily contact, even if an orgasm does not occur); or identity (socially and historically meaningful labels that guide how we think about sexuality). Here’s why measurement matters: if you define homosexuality by same-sex behavior, then you will omit gay virgins while including self-identified straight men who have sex with other men. If instead you define homosexuality by an identity label like “gay” or “lesbian,” then you will exclude those people who experience same-sex arousal or behavior but do not identify as such. You’ll also overlook those who identify as bisexual or queer, along with individuals who use language that is not tied to mainstream terms (e.g., “aggressive,” “in the life,” or “same-gender-loving”). Did you know that in the biological and health sciences, a single instance of same-sex behavior automatically can place an individual in the “homosexual” category regardless of the frequency of sex and whether the person enjoyed it (Savin-Williams 2006)? Following queer theoretic commitments to misalignments, the corresponding principle of queer methods is to be mindful about the components of sexual orientation—do not ignore, conflate, or reify them—and make conclusions based on the type of data that you gather.
My second advice is to use sampling strategies that approximate probability theory. I adapted a technique, developed by Matthew Salganik and his colleagues, called respondent-driven sampling (RDS). This method of data collection uses a variation of chain-referral, or a snowball mechanism that is sensitive to community structure, geographic clusters, and social networks. Krista Gile, Lisa Johnston, and Matthew Salganik (2015, 242) explain how it works:
RDS data collection begins when researchers select, in an ad hoc manner, typically 5–10 members of the target population to serve as ‘seeds.’ Each seed is interviewed and provided a fixed number of coupons (usually three) that they use to recruit other members of the target population. These recruits are in turn provided with coupons that they use to recruit others. In this way, the sample can grow through many waves, resulting in recruitment trees. . . . The fact that the majority of participants are recruited by other respondents and not by researchers makes RDS a successful method of data collection.
RDS is useful if your inferential objective is to understand how people who are connected assign meaning to their lives in specific spatial contexts, rather than calculating central tendencies that you hope to generalize beyond your sample. The logic of this approach to data collection is to study networks within a population, each of which is heterogeneous in its contacts yet still geographically clustered. The chain of friends and acquaintances in each network should be large enough to generate ongoing recruitment efforts, even if some seeds prove fruitless for you as you seek additional referrals. Multiple waves provide access to parts of the network that you may have missed otherwise, and they avail the small world problem of short network distance between any two people.
I started with twenty seeds. This number is larger than the one that Gile, Johnston, and Salganik advise, but I wanted to cap the upper end of my sample to around one hundred people rather than the thousands that are common in big data studies. Four of the seeds did not produce additional waves of recruitment. The other sixteen snowballed into a total of 125 interviews with gay and straight residents and business owners of two neighborhoods in Chicago. I lived in the city for ten years before I did my fieldwork, yet I knew only one out of the twenty-five straight residents of Boystown; six out of the twenty-five lesbians and gay men in Boystown; two out of the twenty-five straights in Andersonville; and seven out of the twenty-five lesbians and gay men who lived in Andersonville. Thus, you don’t need to be preoccupied with random sampling since the procedure assumes that a given population is fixed and unchanging. Chain-referral techniques are compatible with an understanding of queerness as mutable and group membership as fluctuating.
A third strategy is to maximize your efforts at representation by not relying exclusively on the census as your primary source of data. Andrew Whittemore and Michael Smart (2016) examined the street addresses of rental and for-sale properties advertised over twenty-six years in a weekly LGBTQ newspaper in Dallas. This type of data has its own limitations—“not all of this population can express their preferences in a capitalist land market,” they acknowledge (193)—but it can track change over time, provide more precise data points than the decennial census, diversify your data beyond business listings, widen your analytic scope beyond traditional enclaves, and dismantle the tyranny of the couple that the census promotes. If you decide to use this method, keep in mind that property listings are skewed toward trendy and profitable areas, and these often attract heterosexuals as well. If you rely too heavily on advertisements as a proxy for queer people, then you will underrepresent racial and ethnic minorities, women, people with lower levels of education, and economic variation. The more you can diversify your data the better.
Unlike conventional accounts that rely on demographic data and statistical techniques, I exploited the unique strengths of qualitative approaches, especially interviews, to explain why queer spaces are changing and to predict what will happen to them in the future. My decision was controversial. Some scholars argue that interviews capture ex post facto explanations for what people have already thought or done (Vaisey 2008). Others decry an attitudinal fallacy: what people say is a poor predictor of what they will do (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). Surveys can capture the prevalence of an attitude or snap judgments—in a feelings thermometer about sexual integration, for example—but these data exist at an individual level, and they are abstracted from lived experiences. When ethnographers encounter interview data like mine, they wonder about the situated nature of social life. What does it feel like to be a straight person living next door to a lesbian or a gay man? Or to walk along rainbow-lined streets next to same-sex couples who are holding hands?
I think that interviews can capture interactional tones if we ask questions about specific groups of people and the situations in which they interact, even if we weren’t around when the action occurred. For instance, I organized my conversations around a set of newspaper articles that presented common scenarios in gayborhoods across the country. One story from the San Francisco Chronicle was entitled “SF’s Castro District Faces an Identity Crisis: As Straights Move In, Some Fear Loss of the Area’s Character.” The article included a photograph of a woman, whom the reader assumes is straight, pushing a baby carriage on Castro Street with a rainbow flag visible behind her. Sitting next to my interviewee, I read aloud the following passage:
To walk down San Francisco’s Castro Street—where men casually embrace on sidewalks in the shadow of an enormous rainbow flag—the neighborhood’s status as a ‘gay Mecca’ seems obvious. But up and down the enclave that has been a symbol of gay culture for more than three decades, heterosexuals are moving in. They have come to enjoy some of the same amenities that have attracted the neighborhood’s many gay and lesbian residents: charming houses, convenient public transportation, safe streets and nice weather. (Buchanan 2007)
I then asked open-endedly, “What are your reactions to this headline, this photograph, or this story?” The question always generated a rich exchange.
Drawing on the principle of triangulation, I followed the same procedure with a second article. This one, published in the New York Times, was entitled “TURF: Edged Out by the Stroller Set.” The piece also included a photograph of a woman pushing a baby stroller, whom we again are to assume is straight, with two presumably gay men on either side of her who have been wedged apart by her stroller. I read this passage out loud:
It was supposed to be a kind of homecoming. Last year, Chris Skroupa and John Wilson sold their apartment in Hudson Heights, in northern Manhattan, and moved to Chelsea, where, as a gay couple, they already spent most of their time socializing. But they soon discovered that the neighborhood was changing faster than they expected. Home prices were rising, and many of their friends were moving to Hell’s Kitchen, a few blocks west of Times Square. In restaurants that used to be almost exclusively gay, they noticed an influx of straight customers, often with children in strollers. On a recent Saturday, Mr. Skroupa and Mr. Wilson went out for brunch and ‘literally less than one-third of the restaurant was gay,’ Mr. Skroupa said last week, pausing between bench presses at a New York Sports Club on Eighth Avenue. (Rich 2004)
The final story that I used to structure my interviews came from the Huffington Post. It was entitled “Boystown Gay Bar Bans Bachelorette Parties”:
Bar owner Geno Zaharakis sat one busy evening at the window of his gay nightclub, watching as groups of straight women celebrating bachelorette parties made their way along a strip of bars in Chicago’s gay-friendly ‘Boystown’ neighborhood. That’s when he made a decision now posted for all to see: ‘No Bachelorette Parties.’ Though the small sign has been there for years, it’s suddenly making a big statement amid the national debate over gay marriage. While most gay bars continue to welcome the raucous brides to be, Zaharakis’s bar Cocktail is fighting for what he sees as a fundamental right, and his patrons—along with some peeved bachelorettes—are taking notice. ‘I’m totally losing money because of it, but I don’t want the money,’ Zaharakis said. ‘I would rather not have the money than host an event I didn’t believe in.’ Gay bars are popular with bachelorettes, both for the over-the-top drag shows that some offer and for the ability to let loose in a place where women are unlikely to be groped or ogled. (Associated Press 2009)
We can use this type of data to learn about the subtleties of queerness and capture the interactional texture of city life. To do this, you need to organize your conversations around specific actors, concrete situations, and resonant symbols. Once you’ve done that, you then work with your respondents to unpack the meanings of these analytic elements. Using media documents in this way is also innovative because it reduces the threat of social desirability bias; my respondents were able to offer comments about the characters in a story without implicating themselves personally. This helped them to open up in ways that they may not have been able to do otherwise, thereby enhancing the validity of my findings. Be careful, though, about which vignettes you select. Although queerness can challenge reproductive logics, remember that many same-sex couples also have children. We need to acknowledge that the symbols we study acquire significance in particular places, times, and for certain groups of people—and that they do not have singular meanings. In the passages that I read aloud during my interviews, strollers and bachelorette parties were symbols that journalists regularly used as anathema to queer spaces. They were meaningful, richly resonant, and emic cultural codes that my respondents shared at the time of my data collection. As the times change, so too will the symbols.
A lot of research on queer spaces and spatial practices uses census data to create an index of dissimilarity. As a qualitative researcher, I knew that statistical scores were silent about attitudes and motivation. This motivated me to ask a different question: What is behind the drop in sexual segregation that demographers and geographers have documented? A bird’s-eye view of statistical desegregation is a powerful place to start, but it left me with little more than a numerical description of a phenomenon that demands a fuller explanation. Sociologists have a saying that we call the “Thomas theorem”: If people believe something is real, then it is real in its consequences. In other words, perceptions about sexuality should matter a great deal to you when you conduct a queer spatial analysis. In my book, I developed a qualitative counterpart to the dissimilarity index—a “dissimilarity meanings measure”—which I used to explain why lesbians, gay men, and even straight people choose to live in an area of the city that is widely recognized as a gayborhood. The lesson may be simple, but it is still worth saying: What a neighborhood means is more than the sum of the bodies that inhabit it or the central tendencies that describe it.
In addition to thinking about the cultural meanings of sexuality and space, rather than just the statistical distribution of same-sex households across census tracts, I would also encourage you to broaden your view of the city beyond a binary conception of gay or straight spaces. Consider that gay neighborhoods formed in North America after World War II. Many gays and lesbians were discharged from the military at this time for their real or perceived homosexuality, and rather than return home disgraced, some remained behind in major port cities. These spatial clusters grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. Gays and lesbians perceived these emerging concentrations as beacons of tolerance that offered some reprieve from heterosexual hostility (Weston 1995). Today, there is an emerging consensus among academics, journalists, and even residents that the significance of the gayborhood is changing. The wisdom that connects these observations spanning several decades is about the relationship between oppression and space: gayborhoods are “a spatial response to a historically specific form of oppression” (Lauria and Knopp 1985, 152). When the nature of oppression changes, so too should the spatial response. This is a key hypothesis of queer spatial analysis.
By making this move, you can uncouple sexuality from specific spaces, since gayborhoods, along with queer-friendly areas (Gorman-Murray and Waitt 2009) and queered straight districts, can exist anywhere in and even beyond the city. One surprising finding from my research is that cities with the highest percentage of same-sex couples who are raising children include Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, and Bismarck. This outcome should remind you of arguments from queer theory: power operates through the imposition of binaries like gay or straight, male or female, and masculine or feminine. These binaries have always inadequately mapped onto people’s lives. In early twentieth-century New York, a man could have sex with another man without anyone questioning whether he was “normal.” A world of “trade,” “husbands,” and “wolves” existed in a highly gender-segregated bachelor subculture alongside “fairies,” “third-sexers,” and “punks” (Chauncey 1994). The same thing is happening today with the rise of “dude sex” between straight-identified white men (Ward 2015) and “sexual fluidity” in women (Diamond 2008) and men (Savin-Williams 2017). When we apply this framework from sexuality studies to the city, we begin to see “cultural archipelagos” (Ghaziani 2014b, 133): the plural expressions of queer geographies.
If the phrase “queer culture” denotes the ways of life of queer individuals, and if those ways of life are merging with the mainstream as society embraces increasingly liberal attitudes toward homosexuality, then how can we detect distinct urban sexual cultures? The very idea of measuring queer cultures is thwarted in an era of acceptance, inclusion, and integration. What can indicate the presence of queer ways of life in a historical moment that is characterized by the dilution of cultural distinctions? What does queerness even mean in a context of “cultural sameness” or being “post-gay,” as I have called it in my other research? How can we think about the gayborhood as an observable analytic entity in a time when same-sex households are dispersing across the city?
My final advice is to be creative about the indicators that you use to identify queer spaces. Urban sexual cultures are observable, despite the integration of gayborhoods, through placeholders like anchor institutions and commemorations (Ghaziani 2014a). Anchors are organizations and businesses, such as bookstores, bars, and community centers that have a special resonance among queer communities. They are the primary engines of community building since they locate the material culture of queer people in a symbolically charged place. One resident told me, “Businesses are an important part of anchoring the gay neighborhood and defining it in the same way that ethnic businesses would help define an ethnic neighborhood.” Another added, “As long as those businesses are still here, that’s a big thing that keeps the perception in people’s head that Lakeview is still gay.”
Commemorations are a second analytic device that researchers can use to identify queer spaces. These range from municipal markers like rainbow crosswalks to recurring ritual events such as Pride parades and Dyke Marches. In a nationally unprecedented move, the city of Chicago in 1997 installed tax-funded rainbow pylons along North Halsted Street to celebrate the area’s queer character. Bernard Cherksov, formerly the CEO of Equality Illinois, explained why this was a historic decision: “With these pylons we’re saying, ‘This is our community space.’ People move in and out of this neighborhood for different reasons, but the community isn’t moving. Boystown is still here.” A professor at a local university agreed with this image of territoriality: “It is a political victory, an urban political victory to have any metropolitan or municipal authority allow you to fix identity to space. So many struggles are really about contestations of space. So, when you are allowed to plant your flag anywhere, I think it’s a victory for lesbigay identity politics because it says we are here or we were here: this is an important dimension of the city.”
Chicago is not alone in its efforts to install commemorative markers. In 1999, the Newcastle City Council became the first in the United Kingdom to announce that it wanted to actively build a gayborhood by designating a section as the “Pink Triangle.” In April of 2007, Philadelphia became the second American city to mark one of its neighborhoods as gay by renaming a portion of the Washington Square West district in Center City as “the Gayborhood.” The city added thirty-six rainbow flags underneath street signs that bordered the area, which extends from 11th to Broad and from Pine to Locust Streets. Finally, in 2013, Vancouver installed permanent rainbow-colored crosswalks in its Davie Village gayborhood. This was the first such permanent installation in Canada. Other North American cities that have installed rainbow crosswalks to mark and celebrate their local gayborhood include Austin, Texas; Key West, Florida; Long Beach, Sacramento, San Francisco, and West Hollywood, California; Northampton, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Seattle, Washington; Toronto, Ontario; and Victoria, British Columbia, among others.
Compared to racial and ethnic groups, queer communities lack a clear sense of ancestral linearity (Sedgwick 1990). The absence of awareness—who are my people?—induces collective amnesia about our lives. This is one of the most insidious and painful forms of homophobia. During my third year of undergraduate study, I remember feeling astonished when I learned that the history department was offering a course on “Gay and Lesbian History.” I had never imagined that such a class could ever exist. The narrowness of my worldview reflected the burden of queer communities in that historical moment, and still to this day, I think. Anchors and commemorative devices protect against the temptation or coercion to forget. They, like other preservation strategies (renaming city streets to honor queer activists, for example, or building LGBTQ museums), fossilize the culture of a group in space and enable a sense of permanence amid the inevitable realities of demographic migrations, gentrification, and development. That said, even those queer cultures that are based in a gayborhood involve more than a collection of organizations, businesses, and municipally sanctioned installations. Queer ways of life also encompass the symbolic meanings associated with the closet; genres of television, music, and literature; ritual events like Pride; the iconography of drag; camp; diverse family forms; and countless other measures that showcase unique subjectivities, aesthetics, and styles of socialization. None of this trivializes the analytic power that inheres in anchor institutions and commemorations, of course, since no single mechanism can explain the full range of variation in urban sexual cultures. What we need to do is to innovate our methodological portfolio in ways that increase the degree of precision in our observations about urban sexualities.
Queer studies is in the midst of a methodological renaissance, as Matt Brim and I noted in our introduction to this volume. David Halperin’s books How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002) and How to Be Gay (2012), along with the 2010 Queer Methods and Methodologies volume edited by Kath Browne and Catherine Nash indexed this shift toward methods by reframing fatigued questions like “What is queer?” and “What is queer theory?” to the fresh and lively inquiry “How do we do queer theory?” The principles that I have shared with you in this chapter offer several possibilities for queer spatial analyses. First, we need to retain our skepticism as we respectfully question the concepts and categories of conventional social science. The dissimilarity index and the gay index are valuable but not without inferential limits. An effort to queer existing protocols requires us to embrace misalignments, mutability, diversity, interactions, and silences. Remember as well that sexual orientation is a composite concept, implement chain-referral sampling techniques, access multiple data sources, and supplement statistical analysis with an understanding of what sexuality means and how it feels for your study participants. Second, queer methods are powerful because they clarify the conditions that make life livable (Brim and Ghaziani 2016). In this regard, I have offered innovative ways of interviewing that can capture the interactional tones of the city, the interstices where life is empirically rich. Finally, queer methods create space for the coherent and the chaotic. Concepts like cultural archipelagos, anchors, and commemorations are powerful because they enable you to conceptualize gayborhoods and other queer-friendly districts as analytically observable entities without naively denying the realities of residential and commercial change.
The volume in which this essay appears births an intellectual movement that has only just begun to develop in the humanities and social sciences. A new generation of scholars is interested in identifying queer protocols and practices that have been eclipsed by advances in queer theory. We share a concern with how to link an account of a situation (or “theory”) with a set of guidelines for gathering evidence about it (what I would call “methods”). The resulting notion of “queer methods” is paradoxical, provocative, and productive—and maybe a little counterintuitive too. While the queer ethic is deconstructive and antipositivist, an emphasis on methods invokes a sense of order and identifiable patterns. The genius of this volume is in its imagining of a new horizon of inferential possibilities.
1 The census first asked about same-sex households in 1990, offering hope for a revolution in how we study the gay and lesbian population. Unfortunately, the data suffered from validity problems because government officials recoded it. When a same-sex household identified as being married, the bureau changed the gender of the spouse to force it into the framework of a heterosexual married couple. Therefore, we need to be careful about how we interpret statistical data that use the 1990 census. For more on changes between 1990 and 2014, see Allen 2012.
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