This week is Gay Pride week in Boston and tomorrow is the day of the annual parade through the South End. This is my seventh year in this city and, perhaps as a consequence, there’s a certain ho-hum quality to the parade this year. As some have grumbled, any festivity once associated with these affairs has become dampened by the endless procession of banks, churches, and, in an election year, politicians. In fact the only likely drama this year is going to be watching the gubernatorial candidates: I can’t imagine that Tom Reilly won’t appear, but I doubt he’ll get more than a frosty reception. Even the euphoria of gay marriage has already had its one-year anniversary.
Let others hash out debates between assimilation and seperation, between a parade of militant drag queens/kings and one of State Street and Bank of America gay employee groups, between sex radicals and bridal fairs; my sympathies hover between the two anyway. There’s a bigger issue here: the city no longer has a functioning gay ghetto and the bar scene is pale shadow of a metropolitan scene. The corner of Clarendon and Tremont, the focal point of the parade and what used to be an epicenter of Boston’s gay life, on any given week night is 80 percent straight these days. Pockets of lesbians, gay men and transgendered folk pop up around the city - Dorchester, JP, the wide swath of Cambridge, parts of Roxbury, Chelsea and Eastie - but everyone is too scattered out to cohere as a community.
One by one the bars close. Today I was walking from Chinatown and past the Theatre District and Bay Village and counted all the changes: Combat Zone bars gone, Chaps turned mostly straight, Luxor trying desperately to go straight. I remembered being at the Napoleon Club the night it closed. There are rumors you hear: maybe the Eagle will never shut down, but Man Ray’s demise is plausible, and Ramrod/Machine seems likely willing victim in the Sox real estate grab. That leaves just a small handful of establishments.
There are plenty of reasons for the decline of gay ghetto and bar scene. It’s the flipside of acceptance, since people part of their larger communities will feel less need to congregate in marginalized subcultures. It’s the result of an economic boom and a housing boom, whose one-two punch has drastically transformed social life in this city in ways we’re still coming to grips with. It’s exacerbated by the city’s tough liquor licensing and quirky zoning. It’s because of the Internet. It’s false consciousness among gay men themselves, who want to mainstream themselves, who want to belong, but perhaps need a supportive subculture more than they’re willing to admit. Whatever the reasons, the changes have come in a short period of time, during my tenure here. As far as gay life goes, Boston simply is not the city I moved to a few years ago.
What’s wrong with this? If we’re getting recognition of gay rights, recognition we couldn’t have dreamed of until recently, why worry about a few cruddy bars or a gay neighborhood? The selfish answer is that I want the latter. What’s more I think the gay ghetto still serves a purpose.
Stonewall contained within it the twin impulses of gay rights and gay liberation (two things so many people confuse, just as they confuse women’s rights and women’s liberation), but in itself the riot wasn’t a rights movement. It was a fight against police who wanted to shut a gay bar down. As revolutionary as June 27, 1969 was, the real revolution occured earlier. First, in New York in the 20s and 30s, then in the rest of the country after World War II, the political economic transformations of midcentury had given the conditions for a gay subculture based in bars. Even small cities like Worcester had a gay bar in the 1940s. Well before homophile organizations began tentatively asking for the rights of gay men and women, the bars were the space in which people adopted a gay identity, formed community and met mates.
The culture we’re in today is quite different, but those needs (identity, community and a pool of available partners) are still there, and they’re not always being filled, the Internet and Queer Eye notwithstanding. My fear is not exactly assimilation or selling out. My fear is that an unfortunate combination of market forces, anti-bar ideology, and a focus on rights will push us to atomized existence. This all may just be my life crisis that comes with being in one’s 30s. Or it could be Stonewall’s.
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