Checking the news before going to bed one night recently, I found this interesting story: "After AIDS, gay neighborhoods may be victims of own success."
The Associated Press article went on to say how so many people are feeling pushed out of the gay neighborhoods around the country by richer, younger, straight families and it all got me thinking.
First off, I can't help but find fault with the title. How can there be an 'After AIDS' when AIDS is not over? For the more than 38.6 million people living with HIV, this is denial that is not only insulting and insensitive but also incredibly harmful. People are still dying from AIDS-related complications, and that now includes homelessness, starvation, isolation, and a multitude of side effects. To think otherwise is suicide.
Since I moved back into the Castro last year, I've heard the gentrification debate over and over. Most of the time it's not much of a debate, it's more like someone complaining that "other" team is taking over the neighborhood. "Too many strollers." "Straights are pushing us out of our neighborhood." On and on.
This raises some big questions in my mind, having been raised in a Puerto Rican family that grew up in the Mission District when it was almost exclusively Latino. I still remember all the complaints when neighbors were frustrated about "all the gays and lesbians taking over." Hmm. Have the tables been turned or is it just the natural ebb and flow of moving and evolving neighborhoods? Remember, the Castro was the Irish neighborhood only 50 or 60 years ago.
Some of us resent children of both hetero and homosexual parents being around. I believe if we don't raise and, at the very least, mentor children, the next generation will most likely be worse off than this generation. We are giving birth to movers and shakers, radical and non-radical. We are giving birth, literally, to our future as a community. But let's save that for a debating Pete Wilson.
Some of us say that we need a place where there's no hate violence or discrimination. Where might that be? I remember lots of stories of discrimination in the Castro in the last 20 years. No violence in the Castro? Only a few years ago, I was shot at while waiting for the 37 bus in front of Pasta Pomodoro at Noe and Market. Late last year a very good friend and leader in the community was attacked and raped at Sanchez and 17th. No violence? Then what's the purpose of creating Castro Community on Patrol?
Another school of thought proposes to create institutions and strengthen the historical stamp of the gayborhood. It's a long-range vision to have community institutions like the GLBT Historical Society and Theatre Rhinoceros housed in the Castro. This is working with change, instead of resisting its forward movement.
Maybe we should look at ways that we can create safe space wherever we are.
Maybe the time for those little islands of gayness no longer serves our community and it's time to take our gay/lesbian/bi/trans queer beauty to all corners and all over the in-between. Statistics show that gayborhoods are now growing in the Midwest. Maybe this is a sign that it's time to go and have a strong presence in each one of those red states so that they can become a little bluer.
And maybe we get self-assured and celebratingly stubborn about our identities and make allies and neighbors of those that don't want us to change but thrill in our amazing queer spirit. By this I mean we keep our window displays; we continue our LGBT traditions; we stand confident and firm in our daily ways of LGBT and queer expression and tell the detractors to tend to their own insecurities and become a positive voice of the gayborhood or move on.
Or maybe we continue looking at the world as "us versus them"; continue to believe that the LGBTQ community is limited to physical communities and thus never allow the sunlight to come into the gay ghettos in too many of our own hearts.
Kelly Rivera Hart is a native San Franciscan and longtime AIDS and community activist.