Boystown

The anchor that fixes Boystown

Joseph Erbentraut writes in the Huffington Post about his feelings about Boystown, the primary gay neighborhood in Chicago:

Boystown. That billowing beacon of gay. When I first moved to Chicago, I was convinced the neighborhood would emanate a strange sort of gay magic – a combination of diversity, social justice and acceptance unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my rural Wisconsin upbringing.

Boystown represented a place where queers – a reclaimed umbrella term covering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming and more – would walk the streets and live their lives without fear of harassment. Where we could be open and free, our whole selves.

Two years later, those expectations I once had for the city-designated hub of Chicago’s LGBT community are surely naive, if not delusional. While Boystown offers the largest concentration of queer-centric spaces, the area’s overflow of saccarine gayness has had an increasingly sour, if watered down, taste. As the story goes, the gays “made it nice” and the straights moved in with their baby strollers and purebred puppies, driving out the young or otherwise non-corporate-type lesbigays and transfolk who don’t feel welcomed or can no longer afford to live there.

–Read the rest on Huffington Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.