Gay Men: The Urban Marines

For a straight man writing an article about gay men, I feel there is one thing I need to announce right off the bat. I’m not gay. (Resisting the “not that there’s anything wrong with that” disclaimer. Oops, too late.)

Okay, now that the threat to my masculinity has been quashed, the article will continue. And it will continue by saying that I love gay men. Were it not for pioneering homosexuals, I’d be either paying too much rent or living in Upper Bumblefuck, and neither prospect appeals to me very much.

I was born in Boston (okay, Cambridge) and moved to New York City when I was four or five years old. A few years later and I found myself living in Washington, DC. Not in Bethesda, not in Arlington or anywhere else in Maryland or Virginia (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but in DC proper. So I’m a city kid by nature, and the few times in my life that I lived near strip malls were very depressing times indeed. If there isn’t a genuine deli or decent Chinese food joint within a five minute walk from front door, the neighborhood sucks, as far as I am concerned.

And living in a location that agreed with my vision of urban delight wouldn’t have been a problem, except for one little thing: the price of housing in DC went through the roof while I was living in Colorado. Funny thing about living in Boulder, CO – you don’t accomplish much, or at least I didn’t, so when I returned to DC in the late 90’s, I was broke, and my paycheck-to-paycheck existence (and that’s putting a positive spin on it) severely limited my domestic options. Living in a quaint little one bedroom apartment in a nice part of town was the idea; unfortunately, at the time, that idea cost more money than I made in a month, which makes it hard to pay rent.

Plus, I was still living my rock and roll lifestyle at that time (read: drinking too much and trying to get laid by women with low standards). So my options were limited; either reside out by the beltway or shack up with a sugar momma. And all the women I met were as economically challenged as I was, so that didn’t pan out too well, and off to Greenbelt I went.

Well, that really sucked. No offense to all you residents of suburban Maryland, but when the closest restaurant is McDonalds, sidewalks are few and far between and your neighbor owns a pickup truck that says, “You can have my handgun when you pry it from my cold dead hand,” well, that ain’t what I call city livin’, bucko. I had to get out. But how?

Then someone enlightened me: move into a shitty neighborhood in DC where rent is cheap. Okay, that’s an idea, but won’t a scrawny little white boy like me get gang raped in between muggings, I wondered?

Not so! As it turned out, legions of homosexual males had already, as my friend likes to say, “secured the beachhead” in many DC neighborhoods that were once considered folly for folk like me to tread. This was a phenomenon to which I was vaguely familiar, but it was not until I moved to Columbia Heights on 10th St. that I learned just how drastically changed the landscape was, largely due to gay gentrification.

As I grew accustomed to my new surroundings, I noticed that the neighborhood was much more diverse than I has imagined. For every three houses where families has lived for decades, there was a house, always newly painted and buttressed with an immaculate flower bed, which was occupied by a loving couple who defied the stereotype of the clubbing, promiscuous city bitch. The house I lived in was owned by a rural Pennsylvania-born lawyer who worked at Langley for the department of Homeland Security, single-handedly paying the mortgage while her husband stayed at home and pretended to look after the dogs (multiple canines are a must have for any new resident of the Eastern front).

And then it dawned on me – this had been happening ever since I was riding my Big Wheel growing up in the mean streets of Spring Valley, just inside DC on the Maryland border. Back in those days, during the early 1980s, if you drove down to DuPont Circle, you rolled up the windows and locked the doors. There were very few aesthetically pleasing storefronts; the houses for the most part were in various stages of dilapidation and all sorts on unsavory creatures roamed the streets, shuffling from their finished forty to their next drug purchase. The entire area seemed to have a pall of economic soot cast over it like a dirty throw rug.

You would never know it to look at it now. The DuPont Circle area has to be the most single thriving locale in DC – it has surpassed Georgetown as the spot for the hip urbanite with salaries in the upper five and lower six figures. Stores do not go vacant here, or if they do, they are quickly occupied in much the manner that a hungry hyena tears apart a fresh kill. This is the place to be. And the reason for the transformation is that gay men came in and made it their own.

For about two decades, DuPont Circle was endearingly referred to as the "Fruit Loop" by members of all sexual persuasions. It was exclusively the territory of the happening homo – of both sexes - whose tastes included great restaurants, great art and great sex with whomever. This became its identity, much like Castro in San Francisco – maybe not quite to that flamboyant extent (this is Washington, DC after all), but it was undoubtedly the gay center of the city. Much to the dismay of longtime residents who still consider DuPont to be their personal playground, today there are as many straight, single women living here as gay men; many of them are new residents, oblivious to the area’s past.

How did this happen? How did men who love men take over a scary section of our nation’s capitol and turn it into the city’s most desirable neighborhood?

More than anything else, these pioneers bought houses which were falling apart at the seams and lovingly restored them. The houses were given a much needed paint job, their foundations restored, their interiors renovated, their postage stamp-sized lawns transformed. Pretty soon, there were several houses that could be described as a “nice place.” This attracted more renovation and begat the arrival of upscale shopping choices and restaurants where anyone would want to eat. Straight people started living, working and socializing there, because it was worth it to do so, and you could all of a sudden feel safe.

Much of the reason for that safety is because of the community activism that exists with the same-sex ranks. When crime happens, and it does, gay people look out for one another, they band together and they do something about it. They hold meetings and they formulate plans to protect their investments.

Ironically but predictably, DuPont became a victim of its own success. A three bedroom house within a few blocks of the circle goes for a million bucks, and for a one-bedroom apartment, you can expect to pay around $1,500 a month, minimum. As a result, didn’t take long for the battle front to move eastward into the semi-ghetto.

Once again, gays led the charge into the edge of eastern neighborhoods in transition. I like to call Columbia Heights and the adjacent areas such as Petworth and Shaw the gentrification capitol, because anytime there is a house for sale in the area, it gets snatched up and re-done. This is the area where I live today, and every day it seems, a new house is being redone, refurbished and resold.

But this process is not happening without some tension. Long time black residents are not all happy with what is going on. While some may welcome the reduction of crime in the area and the improved appearance, it is clear that many black families cannot afford to live there anymore and are being forced out. An unknown spay painter has adorned the sidewalks in front of new businesses and newly refurbished houses with a “Stop Gentrification” stencil. Displeasure is being voiced but nothing seems to be stopping the economic juggernaut, mainly because most of the jobs are in of near the city limits of DC and people do not want to commute 90 minutes each way. And the Federal Government and its associated industries are not going anywhere, so the trend will likely continue.

While there are a number of factors driving the change, in the end, the number one factor in the urban revolution that DC has experienced is due to homosexual males forging ahead into places us straight guys dare not venture. And I say to you: thank you for my cheap rent, and good luck with the rest of the city.

Let me know when it’s safe to move to Anacostia, boys.

Evan Redmon is an assistant editor for a scientific journal. He has lived in Washington, DC for most of his life, with seven years of college down the drain in Madison, WI and four and a half years of doing nothing in particular in Boulder, CO. He has visited 39 of the 50 states in the Union (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and can be reached at evanredmon@yahoo.com.