University of British Columbia Associate Professor of Sociology Dr. Amin Ghaziani read and signed copies of his new book There Goes The Gayborhood? at Lake View's Unabridged Bookstore Aug. 29.
"In this book, I explore allegations that iconic American gay neighborhoods are disappearing," said Ghaziani at the event, which drew about 25 people. "Rather than asking whether gay neighborhoods are changing, the question that I think ignores the reality that residential changes are inevitable, I ask how and why they are changing and what might we reasonably predict will become of them in the future."
Ghaziani grew up in Addison, Illinois, and lived in Chicago's Boystown for nine years. As a graduate student earning his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern Univsersity, Ghaziani visited Unabridged at least once a week to buy the LGBT books on sale for his personal library.
"I just think all the world appears so much more effervescent when passion and pleasure pursues the pursuit of your craft," said Ghaziani on the passion he has for his work.
"There were so many questions all the way through the end, which suggests people were engaged and they weren't simple questions," he remarked. "They were really hard and deep questions. I think people are thinking quite deeply about these issues and that makes me happy."
Ghaziani was also a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton Society of Fellows. Currently he resides in Vancouver, Canada, in the gayborhood Davies Villiage. Dedicated to bringing the study of sexuality into the mainstream of sociology, his areas of study include sexualities, culture, urban life and social movements.
"I have seen a consistent preoccupation with this question of what is happening in gay neighborhoods," said Ghaziani. "I've seen it in Chicago, I've seen it in New Jersey and I've seen it in British Columbia, Canada. This question is on a lot of people's minds from coast to coast and country to country. I would say existing districts are de-concentrating at the same time that new ones are emerging."
As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan he designed his own major in American social dynamics, which emphasized systems of injustice and oppression in the U.S. minority-group politics.
"After the summer of junior year I went to San Francisco on a field studies program where I worked at an organization for a time and then studied it ethnographically and it was that summer where I first realized I could channel my interests in political activism into the life of the mind and the professor who advised me at that time directed me to sociology," he said.
His interest grew over the years. An earlier internship with the Illinois Federation for Human Rights ( now Equality Illinois ) led him to discover the meaning of being in a gay neighborhood, which he said was love at first site. An organically developed interest in neighborhoods happened as a graduate student watching the changes in his own gayborhood.
"I like this subject matter because it presents an opportunity to think about the complexities that characterize life," said Ghanziani. "There are no simple answers or simple summaries about the demographic of changes that we're seeing in gay neighborhoods, so you can't offer stylized answers like 'this is uniformly a good thing' or this is uniformly a bad thing.' Nothing in life is that simple. This project offers me an opportunity to really showcase the complexities that make us who we are."
Before opening the book, the message is depicted with the book jacket. The cover has no photographs and is reminiscent of the urban motif of spray painting. The book's title and author's name appear with the artistic concept of negative space, and displays the gay pride rainbow.
"The premise of the book is this allegation that gay neighborhoods are disappearing," said Ghaziani. "So, I think there's a nice relationship between concerns about the disappearance—the death and demise of a gayborhood— and a title that capitalizes on negative space to create the presence of it being."
The title's question mark, he explained, is to inspire a conversation and a debate rather than make simplified and stylized assertions.
In working on the book, Ghaziani conducted 125 interviews in Chicago and used an additional 617 newspaper articles reporting on 27 different areas from across the country. Ghaziani explained he used the newspaper articles primarily to extract interview transcripts from the works of generations of journalists.
"One of the biggest surprises in this study is that gayborhoods are changing, yes, but it's premature to declare their death and demise," said Ghaziani. "I think that if we just look at changes across the census in existing gayborhoods we might be tempted to conclude they are in danger, but we need to ask follow up questions—namely: if gay people leave the gayborhood, where are they going next and it's the answer to that question that provides us with unexpected surprises. The stability of the pattern across so many different cities is noteworthy and surprising."
With his an interest in issues of city planning/ urban design, the author is not yet sure what the next book will be. However, as a result of living in Davie Villiage for the past three years, he said he is curious to compare the location with Seattle's Capital Hill and aims to think about how national context might effect the formation, preservation and change of gay neighborhoods.
"The bottom line is that I think plurality is the name of the new game rather than the death and demise of the one and only gayborhood in town," he said. "The reason why plurality is name of the game is that LGBT people are exceedingly diverse internally and in fact one of society's greatest myths is that we are all alike and when you disabuse the notion that we are all alike, not only do you see that diversity, but then you can map that diversity onto special patterns."
For more information, visit: aminghaziani.net/ .
