With rents on Capitol Hill going through the roof, it's time to start a new gay neighborhood. But where should it be? The Stranger investigates.
When out gay men and lesbians moved into rundown urban neighborhoods in the late '60s and early '70s, they rented apartments no one else wanted, started businesses on blocks where no one else thought businesses could thrive, and had sex under bushes that no one else wanted to have sex under. Neighborhoods like New York's East Village, San Francisco's Castro, Chicago's Lake View, and Seattle's Capitol Hill slowly gentrified, with hordes of gays and lesbians making these once dicey neighborhoods safe for florists, card shops, and sex clubs. The closest most gays and lesbians ever come to finding a promised land is moving to the Gay Ghetto—an urban neighborhood that is populated by, and reasonably tolerates, a large number of queers. For years, first-wave gay ghettos were kept lively and relevant by a constant stream of young queer migrants arriving from upstate New York, downstate Illinois, rural California, and eastern Washington.
And for years, young queers moving into these gay ghettos could rely on three things: cheap apartments, low-paying retail jobs, and lots of other young queers with cheap apartments and low-paying retail jobs with whom they could swap spit and various sexually transmitted diseases. But all that's changing. In neighborhoods where dirt-cheap apartments and too-trendy restaurants once peacefully coexisted, rising property values are pushing rents through the roof.... Gay ghettos are slowly turning into gay retirement communities, where the only queers who can afford to live in the East Village or on Capitol Hill are the ones who bought apartments and houses 20 years ago when they were still relatively cheap. Young, straight singles have moved in, followed by straight retirees, marrieds, and young families. With young queers forced to look elsewhere for housing, first-wave gay ghettos are on the decline, sapped of the energy and sex appeal of queer youngsters. Such is the sad story of Seattle's Capitol Hill.
Skyrocketing rents, soulless chain stores displacing independent businesses, new arrivals and interlopers ruining the neighborhood—you can read all about the death of Capitol Hill in a feature package that ran in The Stranger in October of 1999.
