Now gay people are only one of the many flavors you can enjoy as you hold hands through Piedmont Park, grab a meal with your man near Colony Square, or party at one of the Cheshire Bridge, 10th Street or Ansley-area venues. Were gay people slighted in some way, or does life, culture and society just evolve? It’s natural as time passes to romanticize our past and view our younger days through rose colored glasses, but what is it, exactly, that we’re missing?Īs acceptance, visibility and equality for gay people grew across the country, times were going to change for gay Atlantans whether Midtown changed with them or not.
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Again, not Midtown.įor a full breakdown of the numbers, see our Where We Are Going sidebar at the end of this article. Within the city, self-identified gay households are most prevalent in Avondale Estates, Decatur, North Druid Hills, Scottdale and North Decatur, with up to 50 gay-run homes per 1,000 households.Īnd when it comes to gay African-Americans, you’ll find the highest concentration of residents in the country – yes that’s nationwide – in Clayton County south of I-20 and in pockets just east and south of Downtown Atlanta. None of the top five areas for gay people in Atlanta are in Midtown.
That’s more than the nationwide average for any city with more than 100,000 people. To show how gay life in Atlanta has already changed from some people’s perception as the decades pass, the 2010 Census also shows that one in four same-sex households are raising kids in Atlanta. Census of 2010 was the first to ask about same-sex heads of household, and it gave us the first real numbers about where gay people live across the country, including pinpointing the “gayest” parts of each state and metropolitan area. Despite a very public battle with some gay residents and the businesses, he easily won re-election of the so-called “gay district” in a landslide sweep, collecting a majority votes from a wide swath of residents in the area, including many of the gay ones who remain. Wan, who recently launched a citywide campaign to become the next City Council President, proposed and successfully lobbied to put a time limit and moratorium on adult businesses. He told local LGBT paper the GA Voice back then, “I just don’t think that the gay agenda is only 24-hour bars and sex clubs.”
“There is going to be continued pressure from everybody to not be there anymore.” “The neighborhoods have been trying to find a way to sunset the grandfather,” he told gay blog Project Q at the time. “There’s obviously a demand in the market for ” Wan said as far back as 2012, when adult-oriented businesses were enjoying a grandfather clause to the frustration of neighbors in the Cheshire area at Piedmont Avenue. While many of us enjoyed those gone-but-not-forgotten sides of gay life and celebrated the freedoms of what some might call the more subversive parts of gay culture, others of us are part of the Midtown fabric that helped usher in the change, including Midtown’s gay Atlanta City Council member Alex Wan. Midtown is Post-Gay, and in the view of at least some of the city’s gay residents, everybody won. We can debate the legislation of morality and mourn the loss of some aspects of gay culture, but the battle for Midtown is essentially over. Straight bars far outnumber gay ones in the area, gay-dominant adult venues are being replaced with pricey condos, and the last vestiges of the Red Light District along Cheshire Bridge Road are being razed while you read this. The most famous 24-hour gay bar, Backstreet, and its infamous neighbor The Armory, closed more than a decade ago. There are not a majority gay men in every grocery store and restaurant from north from Ponce to Cheshire, and east from the Connector to Highland. Gone are the male prostitutes for male clients hanging out along Piedmont and West Peachtree north of 10th Street.
It isn’t happening it already happened – a while ago. Whether that’s a bad thing or not, and the opinions vary widely with each gay person you ask, the de-gaying of the gayborhood is long over. Then we spread out to make our mark on in-town places like East Atlanta Village and Old Fourth Ward, and every suburb within driving distance. We fixed up the place, and rich people moved in. What now? By Mike FlemingĪs some of the chatter goes, Midtown is being ruined by monied yuppies reversing the suburban flight of several decades ago, and gay Atlanta is suffering for it.