But we do learn more about a less-recognized, less-studied gay neighborhood. Certain seminal events in gay history, like the AIDS crisis, which devastated a generation of gay men and radically transformed New York’s West Village, in particular, are only briefly mentioned. The decision to focus on Chicago, rather than, say, New York or San Francisco, has its limitations. Ghaziani, who is gay, lived in Chicago’s Boystown for much of the aughts, and he uses Chicago as the primary case study. To document the country’s changing gayborhoods, Ghaziani combines demographic analysis with an examination of forty years of newspaper reporting on gay neighorboods. But he documents a transformation that mimics that of earlier immigrant enclaves, triggered largely, he says, by the acceptance of gay men and women in the mainstream. Same-sex couples reported living in ninety-three per cent of all counties in the United States in 2010, prompting Ghaziani to conclude that, “gays, in other words, really are everywhere.” Ghaziani doesn’t think that this has wiped gayborhoods off the map-hence the question mark in his book’s title. According to the “index of dissimilarity,” which demographers use to measure the spatial segregation of minority groups, census data show that both male and female same-sex households became “less segregated and less spatially isolated across the United States from 2000 to 2010,” Ghaziani writes. Ghaziani argues that the rise of post-gay culture has introduced a new turmoil in gay neighborhoods: more gay men and women are leaving for suburbs and smaller cities, and more straight people are moving in. Rather, Ghaziani uses the term primarily to refer to a period in which more gay men and women have the freedom to define themselves beyond their homosexuality.) “Post-gay does not mean post-discrimination,” he writes.
“Actually, they generally do not even distinguish their friends by their sexual orientation.” (The "post-gay" concept is fraught, as it brings to mind the term “post-racial,” which refers to a time or place without racial prejudice and discrimination-a comparison Ghaziani seems to anticipate. “To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,” Silver said.Īmong those interested in Silver’s characterization was a sociologist named Amin Ghaziani, who has written a new book about America’s urban gay enclaves, “ There Goes the Gayborhood?” In his book, Ghaziani portrays Silver-and his notion of being “ethnically straight”-as representative of a new gay sensibility, which Ghaziani, among others, calls “post-gay.” “Those who consider themselves post-gay profess that their sexual orientation does not form the core of how they define themselves,” Ghaziani writes, adding that “post-gays” spend just as much time with straight friends as with gay friends. In an interview with Out, Silver spoke only briefly about being gay, but his comments on the topic attracted the most attention. After Nate Silver, the founder of the statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, correctly predicted the outcome of the 2012 Presidential election, Out magazine named him its Person of the Year.