Boystown - meh

via HuffPo, by Joseph Erbentraut

Boystown. That billowing beacon of gay. When I first moved to Chicago, I was convinced the neighborhood would emanate a strange sort of gay magic - a combination of diversity, social justice and acceptance unlike anything I'd ever experienced in my rural Wisconsin upbringing.

Boystown represented a place where queers - a reclaimed umbrella term covering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming and more - would walk the streets and live their lives without fear of harassment. Where we could be open and free, our whole selves.

Two years later, those expectations I once had for the city-designated hub of Chicago's LGBT community are surely naive, if not delusional. While Boystown offers the largest concentration of queer-centric spaces, the area's overflow of saccarine gayness has had an increasingly sour, if watered down, taste. As the story goes, the gays "made it nice" and the straights moved in with their baby strollers and purebred puppies, driving out the young or otherwise non-corporate-type lesbigays and transfolk who don't feel welcomed or can no longer afford to live there.

But that's not what this column is about. In a system where the majority continues to hold final say over issues of the "minority," the straight community remains one of the most valuable and least realized assets to the queer movement's political progress.

Read the rest.