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Discussion

Above, I argued that Castro and Austin progressed through four stages, emergence, consolidation, expansion and assimilation. Does this four-stage model fit with other central cities in the United States? The results above show that as a city’s proportion of same-sex partnered households increase, so too, does the hate crime rate and political tolerance score. The relationship between these three variables points to a correlation that fits the model. There is also a negative correlation between location quotients and percent concentrated for the three levels (LQ 1, 2 and 3). As more gays and lesbians locate to a city and the city is known as tolerant, the residential community tends to spread out more. In Austin, TX gays and lesbians originally claimed space in two neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. However, as the entire city became tolerant and a network of gay and lesbian realtors developed, the residential community spread to over a dozen. Similarly, gays and lesbians consolidated into the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, launched a political movement, gained civil rights and then dispersed over time to all areas of the Bay region. While Castro maintains a very high concentrated rate of gays and lesbians, concentrated tracts can be found in Mission, upper and lower Haight, downtown and other neighborhoods.

Beyond the location quotient categories, the cluster analysis results demonstrate initial support for the four-stage cluster model of gay and lesbian urban social movements. Not surprisingly, over half of central cities can be classified as emerging. These cities exhibit very low political tolerance. They tended to have no city ordinances, low populations of same-sex partnered households and very low hate crime rates as a measure of social intolerance. Only about 2% of the same-sex household population lived in what might be classified as gay and lesbian neighborhoods (tracts with location quotients above 5). Paired with very small populations, the 2% concentration rate is insignificant.

This would be similar to Austin, TX in the 1960s. Most gays and lesbians were dispersed through out Austin, gravitating to the downtown area for socializing. Crimes were low or not reported. Politically, gay areas such as the downtown bars and a few parks were largely ignored. One thing this analysis did not capture was the possibility that these cities had a social movement, which could have failed. Wichita, KS and Omaha, NE are two examples of cities that enacted or came close to enacting ordinances. The social movements in these cities failed after political and social backlash.

Cities who can be classified as consolidated have low political tolerance and low location quotients. As a percent, the number of households concentrating is slightly lower than the emergence stage. This result presents possibly conflicting evidence. However, when one examines the aggregate population differences between consolidating and emerging cities, consolidating cities have nearly twice the gay population. The larger population suggests a larger concentrated base in key gay and lesbian spaces.

Consolidated cities also had the highest hate crime rate. This may be a result of the growing political tolerance in this group of cities. When gays and lesbians came out and politically organized in both Austin and San Francisco, they experienced hate crimes and acts of discrimination, especially during the period after enacted civil rights ordinances. As gay enclaves grow, evidenced by increases in same-sex households and civil rights, the visibility of gays also increases. If gays moved to enclaves because of intolerance, then we should see increases in intolerance as the community becomes visible outside that enclave. Anti-violence projects across the United States consistently find that June is the highest month of anti-gay hate crimes due the high profile nature of pride festivals .

Myslik writes that as the reputation “spreads in the media that an area is a gay neighborhood or queer space, the violence increases. Queer spaces become hunting grounds” (162). Loyd and Rowntree suggest that “people are more tolerant toward social and ethnic groups with low profiles. When alternative communities are overt, they become targets for criticism and annoyance” (81). A case-study of these 20 cities might confirm the relationship between political tolerance and social intolerance.

Thirty-six central cities can be classified as expanding. They had a higher concentration rate (LQ 5) but were also more dispersed at the lower level measure (LQ 1). Expanding cities had an average political score of 11 meaning that the total years of civil rights ordinances exceeded a decade. These cities had lower social intolerance than consolidated cities and more concentrated gay and lesbian neighborhoods (LQ 5 of 6%). Why the drop in the hate crime rates? Perhaps the expansion of organizations and city political tolerance has an effect. For instance, central cities in this stage are more likely to have anti-violence groups. While I did not find an effect in hate crime rates based upon the presence of anti-violence groups, they do have a documented effect on police training and personnel sensitivity.

In Austin during the 1980s, gay groups worked with the police department to change internal policies. While other cities were debating gays in the military in the early 1990s, Austin’s police department was openly welcoming and recruiting gay and lesbian officers. Finally, eighteen central cities had a political tolerance score of 28, meaning a combined total of nearly three decades of civil rights ordinances. They also had the highest location quotients, and the largest concentration rates at the highest measurement level (LQ 5 of 8%). While the lowest level measurement of concentration (LQ 1) was lower than the other cities, the actual percentage amounted to less than 4%. This appears to be a low number, but in terms of actual households, the 4% difference can mean 10 in the emerging group versus 1000 in the assimilated group.

A final item for discussion is the messiness in the categorical distinction between consolidated and expansive cities. Social movements are not clear-cut or time-dependent. Numbers simply fail to capture the richness each individual social movement contains in these urban regions. As the results show, the distinction between consolidated and expansive cities is low. This might result from pushback or resistance to civil rights laws and/or the dispersion of gays and lesbians into other realms of a city’s institutions. In Austin, the earlier adopted civil rights laws of the mid1970s were nearly lost as Christian fundamentalism swept through the city. However, organization and strategy kept this darker period of civil rights short. I do not intend these results to oversimplify the push-pull process that social movements go through at the urban level for gay and lesbian civil rights.

There are some limitations to this data set that, if accounted for in future research, might actually make the results stronger from concentration. Since I used central cities as the unit of analysis, I did not account for the regional dispersion of same-sex partnered households. This matters especially for larger, more assimilated cities. If gays and lesbians feel comfortable living all over the region, because of the ‘tolerance effect’ from a central city, then a central city analysis misses that dispersion. Future research could look at the concentration levels for an entire region, correlating hate crimes and political tolerance.