New Books: Not in My Gayborhood!
Featuring Theodore Greene, author of Not in My Gayborhood! Gay Neighborhoods and the Rise of the Vicarious Citizen from Columbia University Press (2024). Not in My Gayborhood explores “gayborhoods” in Washington, DC, Greene investigates how neighborhoods retain their cultural identities even as their inhabitants change.
Get the book!
Not in My Gayborhood! Gay Neighboorhoods and the Rise of the Vicarious Citizen, Columbia University Press (2024)
Guest
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Theo Greene
And again, sometimes those claims to that community, that sense of attachment is so much stronger than people that purchase property and move in and pay taxes there. And so I really wanted to sort of engage and complicate what does it mean to live in a community, how the ways in which people live in that community shapes the sense of belonging, shapes the sense of ownership, and particularly symbolic ownership, how they can mobilize place and memory to be able to bring community together and fight for their vision of what the community should represent.
Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. You just heard from Theo Greene, the author of Not in My Gayborhood: Gay Neighborhoods and the Rise of the Vicarious Citizen, which was published in 2024 by Columbia University Press. Dr. Greene’s book investigates how place-making practices in LGBTQ+ communities of Washington, DC, have evolved in dialogue with processes of gentrification and displacement, and attends closely to the important role of race and racism in shaping these cultural and social practices.
Theo Greene
My name is Theodore Green. I am associate professor of sociology and Chair of the Sociology department at Bowden College in Brunswick, Maine, and my research broadly uses sexual communities to understand how the conditions of the contemporary city sort of reconfigured notions of community and belonging.
Emily
Thanks so much for joining us, Theo. Can you tell us about why you wrote this book? Why DC?
Theo Greene
So, I was a student at Georgetown University in the late 90s, early 2000s, and as a student there, as I was coming out and beginning to participate in the LGBTQ communities in DC, began to slowly see the movement of the gay neighborhoods from DuPont Circle sort of shifting eastward and moving into areas that were not only sort of consequences of urban blight, but also places that where African Americans lived in historically black communities. And so, when I moved to Chicago to start graduate school, I was particularly intrigued by an incident where a gay bar was opening across the street from a historic Black Church and what was interesting about that was, the church and the bar were across the street from each other. The city is often divided in what it's referred to as advisory neighborhood commissions, that deal with neighborhood issues such as, you know, sanitation and trash and building permits. The borderline between the church and the bar was the middle of the street and so there were a number of issues related to the church sort of wanting to protest the opening of the bar, but they were not in the proper jurisdiction, so it kind of plays out over time. And what ultimately happened was the bar was able to get its liquor license because the people protesting the liquor license were not residents of the community, but they were people coming in from Maryland and other parts of the DMV to participate in church on Sunday, but they grew up in the neighborhood, so that kind of sparked the research and wanting to understand gentrification and the processes of it.
Emily
DC is also, historically, sort of in this unique situation because so much public space is actually federally owned and stewarded – especially places like public parks. And you talk a bit in your book about this context, how that constellation of circumstances around federal desegregation in public space created a unique set of conditions for queer communities.
Theo Greene
Places like New York and after prohibition as places sort of, you know, clamped down and laws were sort of enacted to prevent the opening of gay bars and queer spaces, you often saw a lot of LGBT people coming to DC because of New Deal policies, right? They wanted to work in FDR's agencies and the parks and the monuments were such an important gathering place for queer people, not only in terms of cruising, but also in terms of meeting and picnics and opportunities, and that visibility was really surprising to me. The fact that people were having, you know, picnics on the Sunday afternoon outside the capitol or queer people were roller skating around the Reflecting Pool and Lincoln Memorial. I thought that was just such a fascinating way to connect to history, particularly given how you know Washington, DC in a lot of ways, we're all vicarious citizens of Washington, DC because it's the nation's capital, right? So, you know, you think about the fact that people march on Washington, they protest there. There is a sense of ownership that every American citizen has for Washington, DC and so to think about how even on a local level, you see so many diverse groups of people sort of making these unique kinds of claims to space, at a time when DC, again, was kind of growing and sort of being reimagined into a city as people were flocking there for government work during the Great Depression, I thought was really fascinating. And then the other component to it too, is the fact that the reputation of Washington, DC, is Chocolate City, so the fact that DC has a lot of northern qualities to it, but also is a very southern town. And so Washington has been deeply segregated for quite a while, for a long time, it still kind of is in many ways, and the ways in which despite that, you still saw this sort of vibrant black queer community that kind of also just popped out and emerged and almost mirrored in some ways, the white communities we saw in DC, I thought was very interesting.
And then I think the final thing I would say, in terms of you know why DC, in terms of its geography, has a lot to do with, I came at a time when you still could see the impact of DC and particularly Black DC ravaged by the 1968 riots that basically decimated most of the communities. I often used to joke about how I could go into Logan Circle once upon a time and saw all these beautiful houses boarded up and it seemed like overnight, like all of those places, just kind of just were revitalized and Logan Circle was just this vibrant community again, and so to see again, 30-40 years later, people finally beginning to sort of revitalize these parts of DC that were devastated by rioting, and ultimately then later the crack epidemics in the 1980s, was something that was also very interesting to me.
Emily
So, you’re trained as a sociologist, and you’re really attuned to these kinds of intergroup tensions and dynamics. But also the symbolic attachments that different groups and communities form over time to place, how those manifest in practice. What were some of your initial observations about DC?
Theo Greene
This value of people who didn't live in residential, in the neighborhood, in a particular community, but still felt these strong connections to it. And they would often act in ways that they were residents. And that was something I kept discovering in my research over and over again, that people kept saying, oh, we don't need Dupont Circle. We feel comfortable living anywhere in the community, and yeah, when you asked them what they did, they would say, oh, I wake up and I will go to Dupont Circle and grab my cup of coffee at my gay cafe. And then I would come home and go to the gay cleaners and go for happy hours. And I would go to Annie’s, which is a big restaurant in Dupont Circle. And so that led me to sort of think about how gay neighborhoods for a lot of queer people were important to them, not because they live there; because they participated in them. And so I developed the notion of vicarious citizenship, which is nonresidential forms of belonging.
And so I thought that was the end of the study and then fast forward, I started at Bowden. I was going to DC to do like a ethnographic follow up and the Pride parade came through Washington, DC, you know, and then later that night, the shooting at Pulse nightclub happened. And so, the epilogue, what I thought was going to be the epilogue to my book, ultimately became the introduction, as people kept saying, oh, we don't need the gay neighborhoods anymore and everyone came back to the neighborhood to collectively mourn on the tragedy that took place there. And so, it led to another three years of research to add the notion that people didn't even need the existing structures to feel a connection to the community as vicarious citizens. They can come back and recreate them. And so I developed the idea of place reactivation right next to vicarious citizenship to think about again, as changing landscapes, as the gay neighborhoods continue to change, as the landscape changes. That if people have collective memory, they can go back and revive their places as they needed to.
Emily
You mentioned this term, vicarious citizenship. Can you unpack that for us a bit?
Theo Greene
So, vicarious citizenship refers to exercises by people who are not residents of a neighborhood, but they are symbolic. They're self-identified. Sometimes they're former residents, sometimes they're displaced residents of a neighborhood, who again, come back because there's something about the neighborhood resonant to them so in the sense of gay neighborhoods, right, many LGBT people could not necessarily afford to live in them. They may live in adjacent or surrounding neighborhoods, but for them, the gay neighborhood is the space where they feel the greatest sense of attachment to it. And they will often act in ways to defend their right to be there. So the notion of this showing attachment, you know, public space of affection, feeling confident, being out and queer, are certain ways in which they are able to feel a sense of belonging to the community. And they often can police behaviors in terms of what is appropriate in those communities. They also can mobilize politically to be able to, again, defend their vision, even though as residential outsiders they still feel attachment to it. When I initially theorized vicarious citizenship, I often sort of highlighted the roles of anchoring institutions in terms of the spaces being there because I was thinking about a lot of structures like gay bars and Black churches, but as gay bars are sort of on the decline in terms of its importance, I discovered that again, it's not necessarily the institutions themselves, but the symbolic value of it. And so I developed place reactivation to sort of think about the notion that space may be something that's stable, but we are all placemaking. Place is space with meaning and so what happens is with place reactivation, people can turn on and off their vision of place based on how they need it and when they use it. So for example, Dupont Circle was an important the traffic circle was a very important place for LGBT people. It was an important anchor, for most days it's a park. But when the queer community needed it, such after the Pulse shooting, the Pulse tragedy, they turned on its queerness and did all the things that aligned with what they used to do with Dupont Circle. So they talked to this, you know, they took to the sidewalks, they created posters. They held vigils there.
And again, when they don't need it, they turn it off. And it was a park again, and one of the things I loved about place reactivation when I thought about it is historically, that's what queer people have always done a park is a park during the day, but it's a cruising site at night. It has its own geography, it has its own logic, it has its own set of rules. People in DC knew when to leave a restaurant because it's going to transform into a gay bar before it was transformed back into a restaurant.
And even more and more, as gay bars disappear, we see, you know, one night it serves one subculture. It might serve, you know, it might be a drag race viewing party one night and the next night, it might be a night for bears; the bear community and those different communities have different traditions and cultures they turn on and turn off.
Usually place reactivation involves again, place of signifiers, which again are these kinds of symbols that again are gathering areas that help remind people of the memory, of the reputation of a community. So, it could be a gay flag, it could be rainbow sidewalks, it could be an institution. It could be a park that, again, are containers of traditions that people can use to turn on and turn off place when they need it.
Emily
This is also really such a rich ethnographic study – it’s evident you were able to suss out some really complex and sometimes contradictory claims to space and culture in your interviews. And you also back it up with deep archival research.
Theo Greene
Well, ethnography was very useful to me, particularly as I discovered that in interview data people sort of had a belief in terms of what they you know, what they believed in the gay neighborhood, right. A lot of people said they didn't need it. They didn't – it wasn't necessary. But then again, there were so many ways in which the queer neighborhood was central to their lives, they just took it for granted because of what everything else in the world was saying about the gay neighborhoods no longer being necessary in the age of social acceptance and everything else. And so I think ethnography was very helpful to be able to think about the things that people were not saying, things people took for granted to take a very close investigation of how people really did, for a lot of people, the gay neighborhood continued to matter how they continue to celebrate it, how they continue to revive and recreate those spaces.
But the other thing that was important to me, which was archival component, you know a lot of times when we look at studies about gay neighborhoods, people rely on a lot of the same histories in some of the major cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and one of the things I discovered is that DC had a very rich history both as kind of a southern town that kind of made its way and kind of ascended into an important city after the war, but also thinking about the role of African Americans and African American LGBT people in terms of creating the space. And so I really wanted to be able to think about how the concepts I'm designing and the ways in which I was understanding communities and my ethnography was not new, but was an impact of a legacy of queer place making that was taking place there. So it was my way of also calling attention to the fact that different cities have such different trajectories in terms of how their LGBT communities sort of evolved and have changed overtime. And so I really wanted to illuminate that history and also give voice to the communities that live there, and what I discovered is that DC had a really great and rich history, has a wonderful archive filled with not only voices of, you know, the kind of usual suspects, the heroes, but everyday people, that sort of live their lives in Washington, DC. And so it was fun to illuminate some of that history doing that archival work.
Emily
Early on in your book, you lay out what you call a simple premise: neighborhoods belong to the people who inhabit them. I think that’s actually not so simple, it’s pretty radical! And it definitely gets at some of the dimensions of gentrification that you also explore in the book, but first I want to dig into the premise itself a bit more.
Theo Greene
I initially thought when I wrote this book, this would be a gay neighborhood story and I -- and again, the questions about the impacts of queer gentrification and thinking about the multiple stages of it, etcetera.
And the more I studied and thought about nonresidential belongers that come in, who feel a sense of communion to this particular space, whether that's LGBT people in terms of gay neighborhoods, whether that where black residents that would come to church on Sundays and triple park on the streets, to the annoyance of the new residents that live there.
I just saw again and again these layers of practices in terms of different communities that might come into the same space, and again, how different people have different associations with it, and so, I'm thinking about particularly, it really evoked for me that notion of rights to the city, the idea of enfranchisement belongs to people who should belong to people who inhabit the space that, that it, it's lived space that's lived every day. And so for me, I really wanted to amplify that, there are a lot of people especially in the era of short term rentals and tourist communities that come in and sort of implant themselves, that people still may come into a neighborhood and only come in because of their favorite coffee shop that reminds them of the history of the community. They may come in and participate in a rally or participate in a form of collective mourning or go to a parade or engage in these various traditions that really helps for them, keep their vision of community alive.
Sometimes those claims to that community, that sense of attachment is so much stronger than people that purchase property and move in and pay taxes there. And so I really wanted to sort of engage and complicate what does it mean to live in a community, how the ways in which people live in that community shapes the sense of belonging, shapes the sense of ownership, and particularly symbolic ownership, how they can mobilize place and memory to be able to bring community together and fight for their vision of what the community should represent.
Emily
A lot, but certainly not all, of these tensions seem to stem from dynamics of gentrification, which takes different forms depending on the geographic context, the incumbent residents and businesses, and of course the intersectional social identities of newcomers. Where do you see your work in these debates on gentrification?
Theo Greene
Gentrification literature is such a large body of scholarship. But one of the things that always struck me about much of that literature, it really focuses on what happens as a neighborhood transitions. It doesn't really think about the consequences of those who are displaced from those communities. And so to understand the fact that, yes, you may have these kinds of shifts and changes, but the old timers, if they're remnants of community, if there's symbols, if there's again, a collective memory, the people do come back, I think the thing I love about DC the most is you see so many cases where a policy happens or an institution closes and it will mobilize people from the tri-state area, who again, might remember that church or remember a bookstore or remember the tradition of having music playing outside of a phone shop. I think about the whole Go Go fiasco, if you ask about my conclusion. Again, when the residents sort of came in and had that, you know, wanted the owner to stop playing outside the speakers, it really just mobilized the whole community people and engage the conversation.
So, I think the gentrification literature is also, something that's of real vital importance, as I think about again, who belongs in a community and who has the right to make claims over whose vision of community is dominant and how that is marked spatially.
Emily
So, do you think that gentrification is also playing a role in the decline of gay bars, in DC and in other cities across the country? When did this trend really start?
Theo Greene
It has been for the past decade and I think was accelerated by the pandemic. And I think what people often take for granted is, everyone is sort of thinking about it as being reflection of the, you know, we think of as a post-gay moment where again, it's acceptance and the rise of dating apps. It's actually a casualty of gentrification.
Again, thinking about the tensions of space and place, you know many gay bars, the owner owns the place. They don't own the building. They don't own the space. And so oftentimes you see rents increasing, or developers feeling that they can redevelop it for something better. And the bars close, and then often zoning prevents them from relocating in certain places, which is what happened in DC for a lot of the bars.
And so, what's ultimately happening in a lot of places is some of the parties or some of the events often just move to a different location. And now what you see, and I've covered this in some of my previous work, is that bars become these containers from multiple different bars that once existed, they can cater to one subculture one night and the other the next. And so, you know, even though the physical spaces seem to be dwindling, there seems to be a very sort of vibrant response and reaction to nightlife that kind of has persisted. So yeah, the spaces are disappearing, but I think the places still in a lot of ways remain or are regenerating in some fashion.
Emily
What can policymakers and planners do, if anything, to protect these rights to place and place-making? How can these practices – like what you call place reactivation – be preserved?
Theo Greene
That's a great question and I think it was something that I kept circling around, but never really been able to articulate, primarily because as we see policies being enacted or we see shifts in terms of development or in terms of place, right, so much of what I discovered in terms of urban citizenship being exercised, where again, coming from below, the people from below. Thinking again about how people even as you see a neighborhood completely redevelop and there's luxury condos and things everywhere, and you still see street corner practices taking place there, right? Because people are so attached to, you know, a boom box playing Philadelphia Soul on the street.
I was really more attracted to those kinds of everyday sort of articulations. I think policy could be very difficult to sort of enshrine that in terms of policy. I think preservation does play a role and I think recognizing the neighborhood’s intrinsic value for different kinds of communities, I think is really, really essential. But at the same time, I also can see how that runs into a variety of problems too, for residents who are trying to live out their routines in the community and often find conflicts with people that come and use it because of these symbolic attachments to place. So I think it's very tricky to sort of it was very difficult for me to sort of think about like, what kind of policy interventions and more to think about what does it mean to be mindful about the fact that you may not have the only vision of what your neighborhood should do and what it should look like and who should belong there.
Emily
As we start to wrap up, I’m wondering what was the most surprising thing you learned during your research?
Theo Greene
That's a really great question. The most surprising thing that I have learned from this book was the powerful role that Black queer people sort of played creating their own communities in their own spaces. One of the things that was very, I want to be adamant about is I see a lot of ways in which scholars are now talking about ephemeral forms of placemaking as like these innovations of urban life in contemporary cities and that hasn't -- and I think that's a form of erasure for a lot of communities who because of circumstances and structural issues like segregation and racism, had to always do that. And so it was very important for me when I thought about, when I theorized these two concepts, was to think about black queer place making and things and transform it into an asset form of thinking. So I love thinking about, for example, the drag balls and the drag dinners. I really loved learning about William Dorsey Swann, who kind of predates Marsha P. Johnson as a trailblazer in terms of, I'm challenging the police in the late 19th century when they busted in on her birthday party and she sort of charged at them, and again I think about these really vibrant parallel worlds that existed that relied on very sophisticated forms of placemaking that, again, we take for granted because we often focus on, you know, urban blight. We focus on poverty, we focus on all of the deficits from framings around black urban lives. And so, I really, really was surprised. And I really love being able to illuminate the kind of agency, the kind of power, the kind of resilience, the imagination of Black queer communities, particularly as they could not escape their neighborhoods to be able to live their lives as LGBT people, and so that was the most surprising and joyfully surprising finding I think I discovered in my research.
Emily
There’s a lot of resonances in your book with work in Black geographies, and you draw this together with critiques of gentrification research, with the kinds of binaries drawn between different social groups that can’t account for Blackness and queerness at the same time, much less from a spatial perspective. Is this a throughline in your work going forward, too?
Theo Greene
There's so many different kinds of concepts in the book, and I think one of the things that I do want to emphasize is again the power of placemaking, particularly marginalized communities, and the value of paying attention to those dynamics. Because there's just so many ways in which placemaking is happening again over and above, you know, the kinds of development and the kinds of transformations we're seeing in the urban landscape. But I'm really sort of excited to see more and more about how forms of a placemaking is really sort of mattering, particularly after it in a post COVID context. I'm thinking about my upcoming project, thinking about the role of drag in terms of urban place making urban citizenship and it is, you know really exciting to sort of think about as we see the material landscape shifting and changing it doesn't necessarily mean that communities are disappearing.
Emily
So where are you at with that project right now?
Theo Greene
I'm finishing it. It's seven years and it's based in Portland, ME, where I currently live and again thinking as the core geography has sort of disappeared, right? The physical spaces drag becomes the one thing constant that has allowed could nightlife to persist, even if it's temporary, and so I've collected about 7 years of ethnographic research and I'm almost done with the interview process and we're about to enter again the archival phase of that because I really would love to trace drag as far back as I possibly can in terms of Portland, but yeah, I think again, it still isn't sort of extends my work in terms of thinking about how queer people are imagining their geographies in the face of economic and sort of, you know, cultural material decline.
Emily
My thanks to Theo Greene, author of Not in My Gayborhood from Columbia University Press. You can find a link to buy the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.