danmelton.net

AUSTIN’S RISE AS THE TOLERANT METROPOLIS

Gay men and lesbians are the canaries in the new-economy coal mine—if gay people can survive in a place, then so will high-tech workers, the people with the ideas that are now making economies grow .

Following the release of Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, cities across the United States jumped on the creative bandwagon to become cool destinations for the Creative Class dollar . One strategy involves becoming tolerant which stems from Florida’s three T’s of economic development: talent, technology and tolerance. Oakland, California wants to overcome its murder and racism reputation by establishing the parkway area as a gay district to stimulate the gentrification and coolness of its city. Being a city with high percentages of gay households, politicians used the Florida thesis to argue for a gay cultural district with the hope of capturing the gay dollar for gentrification which would signal the area as tolerant . Detroit is consolidating its gay community in the suburb of Ferndale to attract more gays and lesbians to the area with the larger goal of turning around its public perception of crime and intolerance . The Salt Lake Tribune even wrote about the possibility that gays may be key to implementing a high-tech future in Utah . While gays and lesbians have long been associated with gentrification–for an overview see Badgett –this new push also associates their presence with high-tech economies and the location decisions of highly educated human capital.

This article examines the tolerance thesis advanced by Florida by exploring how tolerance manifests at the regional level. Research shows a strong connection between tolerance and urban regions; residents from larger cities are more likely to ‘rub shoulders’ with diversity which in turns affects their opinions and perception resulting in increased political and presumably social tolerance. For Florida, gays and lesbians represent diversity; cities with large proportions of this population signal that the area is tolerant and open.

However, Florida’s focus on the mere presence of gays and lesbians as indicators of tolerance glosses over the history of these regions becoming tolerant. This work attempts to fill that void by proposing a model of how gay and lesbian scenes are created, as well as explain how political, economic and social tolerance results. In the following, I turn to Austin, Texas as a case-study. Florida exemplifies Austin as a model city, listing it as second in his creativity index. It has a thriving music and artist community, a very large gay and lesbian community and locations of many high-tech companies.

Austin was the second city in the nation to adopt a nondiscrimination ordinance inclusive of sexual orientation, ahead of San Francisco. How did tolerance occur in Austin and what can we learn from it? Through archival research and interviews, I present a case study of Austin’s gay and lesbian community from the late 1960s to 2006. I show that Austin was not always tolerant. The city at times actively attempted to repress the presence of gays and lesbians. Through organizing and mobilization, gays and lesbians formed a social movement that led to the tolerant environment we see today in Austin. Building from Austin and research on social movements, I present a staged model of gay and lesbian urban social movements.

This four-stage model—emergence, consolidation, expansion and assimilation—presents a conceptual overview of how tolerance manifests in Austin, with potential application across United States cities.