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Gay Cosmos

The Rise of the Gay Subculture and Urban Homophobia

Traditional patterns of homosexuality, although not uniformly well-regarded, tended to integrate homosexuality with the life of the whole community. Holism was the theme of traditional (that is, nonindustrial) societies, and subcultures of any kind were rare. The gay community that we all know, however, is a subculture, young in comparison to the prehistoric human adaptation to homosexuality and even in comparison to traditional patterns of homosexuality. The young gay subcultures throughout the world appear strikingly similar. Curiously, homophobia has arisen to confront gay communities even where traditional forms of homosexuality were well tolerated.

These facts can be explained by the theory that a gay subculture is a natural and perhaps inevitable result of urbanization. A subculture exists if a group has institutions, customs, social roles, and language uses distinct from those of the surrounding dominant culture. Logically the distinction of institutions is primary because given time the other differences would arise from the distinctive institutions. Historically, however, some of the other distinctions may arise first.

In all societies preferentially homosexual people are a small minority. In groups of all kinds, activists who establish and maintain institutions are a small minority. Gay institutions cannot occur in predominantly rural societies because homosexual activists, being a minority of a minority, are not found within any convenient area in sufficient numbers to establish and maintain gay institutions. The homosexual institutions that are sometimes found in rural settings are institutions of the whole culture. But because a city is a very large number of people in a small area, minorities—even some smaller than the gay minority—can have institutions.

Minority institutions have a variety of stated purposes, but the chief reasons people participate in minority institutions are to find romantic or sexual partners, to receive what are now called support services, and to experience the feelings of kinship and belonging that come from associating with one's own kind. In traditional societies people know one another well enough to know what and where their romantic prospects are, although they might wish for more of them. In traditional societies support services and the feeling of kinship are provided by traditional systems of kinship that are very different from urban families.

Anyone who has moved to a strange city can easily understand why gay people and people of other endogamous minorities desire to form their own institutions. Clearly, some motivations for the formation of minority institutions are internal to the minority and have nothing to do with the ways in which the majority may regard or treat the minority. That is, in an urban society without homophobia gay people probably would congregate and socialize among themselves, at least to some degree. Some people have argued that the gay subculture has been created by homophobia. While the gay subculture certainly has been shaped to some degree by the homophobia of the dominant culture, some kind of homosexual society could be expected to exist even in the absence of homophobia.

In the American gay subculture the first, the most distinctive, and the most important institution is the gay bar. Probably homosexual bars would be established in any city, being analogous to nongay singles' bars or the singles' fellowships of minority churches, and serving functions neither more or less important. But of course homophobia did exist in American cities, and gay bars in America developed to serve other functions as well. The bars became the port of entry to the covert networks, the nexus of information exchange, and the community center. Indeed, newer institutions of the subculture, often less distinctive for being formed on nongay models, still turn to the bars to register voters, to distribute flyers and newspapers, to raise funds, and to recruit members. It was no accident that the Stonewall Rebellion centered on a gay bar. Although many would like to believe otherwise, the gay subculture could hardly continue to exist without its core institutions, the bars.

In spite of well-meaning efforts to define "gay" as nothing more or less than "preferentially homosexual," the gay subculture cannot accurately be defined in terms of sexuality alone. Laud Humphreys's studies of sex in public places show that much homosexual activity occurs without the aegis of the subculture. The point of tearoom sex is that neither the participants nor the place is identified as gay. Obviously the subculture embraces only a portion of American homosexuality. And not everyone in the subculture is preferentially homosexual. Trade must, by definition, be of ambiguous sexuality. A fag hag is not a lesbian. Except where they have formed institutions of their own, heterosexual cross-dressers participate in the gay subculture, and the same may be said of transsexuals, many of whom never have sex with a person of the same anatomical gender. While sexuality is a central aspect of the gay subculture, the gay community is preeminently a cultural group. (And for that reason, systematic efforts to destroy the gay subculture are properly called "genocide" by the internationally accepted definition.)

Gaylike groups may have existed in the largest cities of traditional societies. We know of the entirely traditional serial bisexuality of the Athenian elite, but because the lives of ordinary people were not the stuff of classical literature, we have only hints that homosexuality among common folk may have been quite different. Rural people in traditional societies often claim to have heard of gaylike goings-on in the capital, but urban licentiousness is a common rural myth and these reports may merely mean that there was more of everything in the city. In any event, reports of recognizable rudiments of the Euro-American gay subculture go back only a few hundred years.

The typical early report is a sensational account of a law-enforcement action. Cases of couples caught in media res and anecdotes of individual cross-dressers prove nothing of the existence of a subculture. But when several score men in drag show up for a private party in a Midwestern city, some organization must be presumed. Drag is a prominent feature of many early reports. Perhaps drag was once a more prominent feature of the culture, perhaps journalists enjoyed describing the gowns in parody of society columnists, or perhaps authorities could not recognize gay events that did not include drag.

Descriptions of these events emphasize the lavishness of the festivities and suggest that the participants were of extraordinary means. But organizers would have chosen the largest facilities available, and probably participants made unusual expenditures for these special occasions—as happens for the special events of drag courts even today. Although no study of the economic structure of the gay community was done before the 1950s (Leznoff & Westley), the bifurcate structure found then had probably existed for a long time.

One branch of the community consisted of independent artisans and small-business owners; the other included service workers, unskilled laborers, and the marginally employed. In Marxist terms, the gay community of the 1950s consisted of petty bourgeoisie and lumpen proletarians—a particularly inauspicious combination in Marxist theory. People of these classes could be expected to dominate the visible gay community because they could best afford the risk of being identified as gay. The business owners could not be fired and could afford, perhaps, a minor scandal. The day laborers and dishwashers frequently changed jobs and their references were rarely checked.

The wandering poet and the bootblack, the opera singer and the dishwasher, the florist and the stevedore—much romantic drivel has been devoted to such pairings and much cynical speculation has supposed only money on one side and only machismo on the other. Perhaps such pairings are not so unlikely after all, but are the kind most likely to have been observed when middle-level managers, school teachers, skilled workers, and heirs apparent dared not appear even within a closeted gay community.

An understanding of the economic structure of the subculture clarifies much of its internal politics. One faction will react to AIDS by advocating closing of the baths; the other will think the baths to be the ideal place for safe-sex education. One faction will be Republican, although very nervous about the religious right; the other will think the Democrat party to be the natural advocate of gay rights, hardly feeling the need to explain the Democrat's back-burner treatment of gay issues. One faction will be Anglican; the other will go to the Metropolitan Community Church or practice some form of New Age mysticism or nothing at all.

The forte of the elite has always been private networking and covert organization. This kind of organization formed the underpinnings of a great gay intellectual movement that began in the latter part of the Nineteenth century. The American wing of that movement was primarily artistic and literary; we may say Whitman epitomized it. In continental Europe the movement seemed to have a more a scientific bent. The correspondence of this period reveals an extensive international gay network, but it reveals little of gay life. Correspondence proceeds in an elliptical manner with many vague references to conversations and privately circulated materials.

Carpenter, on poor data, discussed homosexual practices in many exotic places, but from him we learn little about gay life in Berlin, New York, London, or Paris. Whitman appears to have had little difficulty in identifying willing sex partners, but if he knew of a drag court or gay bar we are hardly informed.

Near the turn of the Twentieth century gatherings of inverts, so called at the time, turn up in the vice areas of large American cities, presumably reflecting willingness of vice area businesses to accept gay patronage. Evidence of the early association of gay institutions with red-light districts is preserved in gay language which still contains some loan words from prostitute patois including "trick," "trade," and "john." Gay institutions, of course, are no more identical with the businesses in which they occur than a church is identical with the brick-and-mortar building in which it meets. The institution of the gay bar first occurred in businesses owed by straight people—if "straight" is the right word for heterosexuals involved with organized crime. Vice lords could buy official tolerance of their gay-oriented businesses, just as they did for their other illegal enterprises. At the time no other political means existed that would have permitted gay gathering places.

One of the first mentions of a gay neighborhood is found in Carolyn Ware's account of Greenwich Village in the 1920s. She describes a "bohemia" of artists, students, and other creative people, some of whom were homosexual. These creative people, Ware reports, were being replaced by new arrivals who were "merely homosexual." Many of the earliest reports of areas now regarded as gay use the word "bohemian." Whether other writers mean this as nothing more than a code word for gay or whether a bohemia is a first step in the development of gay ghetto is not clear. Although urban sociology began in Chicago at about this time, reports of gay residential areas have not been found, but homosexuals are identified as patrons of the vice areas.

Virtually all studies of the gay community from the 1950s and after mention gay neighborhoods; by the 1960s terms like "homo heights," "pansy patches," and "fairy flats" occur in the popular press. Very little work has been done to investigate this phenomenon although no adequate understanding of the American central city can be had without some understanding of gay neighborhoods. Martin Levine found ghettolike concentrations of gay institutions in the major American cities, but whether these areas correspond to the residential concentrations and indeed, whether there is much reality to the residential concentrations themselves remain to be shown. Ethnic minorities can co-exist in the same neighborhood while remaining mutually invisible (Philpott), and it remains to be seen whether any gay neighborhood has the exclusive concentrations of gay population, comparable to the concentrations of Afro-Americans in their central city neighborhoods, that would justify the use of the term "gay ghetto."

Some of the first attempts at more or less public gay (homophile) organizations date from the period between the World Wars. The Harlem Renaissance appears to have had a strong gay component. A few names remain, but not much else. For example, the Zodiac Club in Harlem is mentioned again and again, but whether this was a gay club or not, or whether it was a mixed club or one of the Harlem clubs that catered to slumming whites is not clear. Some of this information is still in living memory, but will soon expire unless it is collected.

Two events of the 1940s did more to shape today's gay community than anything that went before. One of these events was World War II.

World War II brought gay people from all over the nation together and moved them through and to cities they might otherwise never have visited. The previously existing national network of some dozens of card-file queens was soon augmented by many of thousands of personal relationships among gay people of all stations of life. Gay people came to realize that the gay community of their hometown had counterparts elsewhere. The gay community and gay identity began to become national and international in scope.

Moreover, Churchill and the British Empire hardly being in a bargaining position, Roosevelt and Stalin declared self-determination to be on the post-war agenda. Soon after the war ended, India and China were free of colonial rule and most of Africa was on the brink of independence. Ethnic and racial minorities throughout the world raised their aspirations, and it is hardly to be doubted that gay people saw an analogy between their situation as a minority and the situations of the other minorities. In particular the black civil rights movement in the United States provided inspiration and tactical models for the gay liberation movement.

The other event of the 1940s was the release of Kinsey's study of male sexuality. Kinsey's estimate of the prevalence of male homosexual behavior was far in excess of any figure respectable authorities had thought possible. Virtually all previous data on homosexuality had been derived from studies of prisoners and mental patients. If Kinsey's numbers were right, then most homosexuals never became prisoners or mental patients.

Kinsey's report challenged pathogenic theories of homosexuality in two ways. First Kinsey revealed that homosexual men could be functional. Not only did most homosexual men stay out of prisons and asylums, but also some homosexual men completed college and were civically active. Second, men who could not be described as homosexual could nonetheless sometimes experience homoerotic arousal and did occasionally consummate homosexual acts. If some degree of homosexually were normal, greater degrees of homosexuality might not be pathological.

In the 1950s homophile organizations came to the fore. These civic and civil rights organizations were the more or less public face of the elite's covert networks. It was a daring thing in the witch-hunting 1950s to be associated with a homophile organization, but the members were hardly wild-eyed radicals. Many were Republicans. Most subscribed to the Eisenhower-era tail-finned American dream except that they envisioned a same-sex spouse in their ranch-style homes of the future.

The organizations offered themselves, their communities, and their individual members for study by scholars of several disciplines. The foresight, the faith in the justice of the gay cause and that truth would serve gay people, the trust placed in a tradition of scholarship with an untrustworthy past, the self-confidence: all are breathtaking to contemplate. Women scholars, notably Evelyn Hooker, Evelyn Blackwood, and Nancy Achilles, took up the offer and began to probe the gay community with the best instruments of psychology, cultural anthropology, and sociology.

As the results of the these studies came in, the homophile notion that gay is not so bad gave way to a liberating proposition: gay is good. In one experiment, standard personality tests were administered to homosexuals and to heterosexuals, and psychologists proved unable to distinguish the tests completed by homosexuals from those completed by heterosexuals. The gay subculture when examined in its own context seemed considerably less bizarre. In the meantime the majority culture was unwittingly doing its part to hasten the outbreak of the Stonewall Rebellion by producing a bumper crop of gay babies.

In retrospect, the confluence of progressive forces has a feel of inevitability. But in fact, the 1960s brought a great deal of hardship. Pathogenic theories of homosexuality could only be saved if the illness could be proved by producing something that could be passed off as a cure. Nothing outside of Nazi medical experiments is comparable to the aversion therapies that behaviorists applied in vain attempts to alter the nature of their homosexual victims. When the American Psychiatric Association finally voted to remove homosexuality per se from its list of diagnoseable disorders, some who voted with the majority seemed less convinced of the homophile position than outraged at behaviorist atrocities. That victims' sexualities remained largely intact in spite of such assaults is very dear evidence that homosexuality is fundamental and natural in some people.

The victory at the American Psychiatric Association was not perfect. Homosexuality remained a disorder in international classifications. Adolescents and children could still be diagnosed as having a gender disorder, which too often meant only that they did not express their genders in ways that pleased their parents. Someone who expressed dissatisfaction with his or her homosexuality could still be diagnosed with "ego-dystonic homosexuality," and some behaviorist treatments continued with supposedly voluntary victims—and of course in a homophobic society there always will be some homosexual individuals who believe that life would be perfect if only they could change their sexualities. Nonetheless, the official demise of the disease theory of homosexuality cut the ground from under those homophobes who pretended to have a rational basis for their prejudices.

Of course the American gay subculture did not develop merely through the attractive—or pull—forces that have been mentioned. The push force of homophobia was also at work. Anywhere that the homosexual population was large, homosexual bars might exist. That gay bars were for so long the only gay institutions and that they were associated with vice areas and bohemian neighborhoods is a result of the homophobia of American culture.

The roots of American homophobia seem very ancient. How people of Homer's time might have regarded homosexuality, we do not know. By Plato's time, although some forms of homosexuality were legal and sometimes admired, clearly some Greeks, including Plato himself, had some misgivings, and anti-sexual Greek cults terrorized Athens during the Peloponnesian wars. Whether painstaking exegesis of Leviticus can explain away the apparent prohibitions on homosexuality (see Boswell), Hebrew culture hardly embraced homosexuality warmly. These two traditions joined in the apostle Paul, and it would seem that a homophobe course for Christianity was set. So it would seem.

Yet, Paul was anti-sexual on a broad front. He approved of marriage only as the lesser of two evils—better to marry than to burn. Celibacy seemed to be ideal. The early church believed the second coming was imminent, but in the long haul celibacy is not a practical policy for any creed that hopes to expand its influence. For a long time the church in Rome consecrated both heterosexual and homosexual unions. The homophobia of Christianity as we know it today is relatively recent, being by various estimates, only 400 to 800 years old. Unfortunately, homophobia has rather thoroughly covered its tracks and we may never know much about the origins of European homophobia.

In recent times, however, we have seen homophobia arise where it had no basis in native traditions. As decolonization of the Third World proceeded after the Second World War, the new national governments often adopted homophobic policies even where traditional homosexuality had been tolerated, accepted, or approved. Two superficial causes of the new homophobia can be proposed.

The rhetoric of many of the new national governments was Marxist and the Marxist line is "homosexuality is a bourgeois disorder." I have been unable to discover it if Marx or Engels, who did more of the writing on cultural issues, ever wrote a word about homosexuality. Evidently the line on homosexuality came about for two reasons. Early in its history the Soviet Union experimented with communal marriage and took a propaganda drubbing on the subject. A puritanical sexual orthodoxy dominated communist thinking ever after. Then, too, as I have mentioned, the persons most likely to be visible in gay communities as homosexuals are petty bourgeois or lumpen proletarian, or in other words people of classes that Marxists do not much esteem in any case. That homosexuals were thought to be prostitutes, individualists, and intellectuals is very clear in the documents forwarded by the Communist party of Cuba to justify its homophobic pogrom.

In other parts of the Third World political discussion occurs in the language of Marxist rhetoric whether or not communist programs are actually contemplated—a fact that was often lost on the United States State Department during the Cold War. Sometimes state homophobia was the only aspect of communist policy that new governments ever put into practice.

The other source of the new-found homophobia of new nations was powdered-wig syndrome. Former colonies, though possessed of perfectly adequate traditional tribunals, tended to adopted European styles for the courts of their newly independent nations. Often this meant long robes and powdered wigs, even in tropical climates. This is the powdered-wig syndrome: new nations adopt exaggerated forms of the manners of their former colonial masters, perhaps in the attempt to seem respectable. New nations enacted homophobic laws, often tracking the language of the statutes of the colonial powers. Ironically, this occurred just as the statutes that served as the models were being repealed or liberalized in Europe.

Beyond the effects of Marxist influence and a desire to appear respectable, perhaps homophobia may be expected to arise with urbanization and industrialization for structural reasons. Urban identity is very different from traditional identity. In traditional society, Fred is Fred wherever he goes and whatever he does. Fred is known to everyone as a whole person. Even if his sexuality is not the cause of universal rejoicing, Fred stands a chance of being judged as a whole person.

In the city, the functions of the few institutions that existed in traditional society are distributed among many special-purpose institutions. Not only are there enough gay people to support a gay bar, but also there are enough young people for a graded school system, enough sick people for hospitals, enough money for banks, enough goods for specialized shops, enough old people for retirement homes, and enough people going in the same direction at the same time to support a public transportation system.

Fred is, in turn, a student, a patient, a client, a customer, an employee, the guy who lives in the apartment down the hall, a passenger, and not until he goes into a gay bar, a gay person. Urban institutions are specialized and are constitutionally incapable of dealing with whole persons. Identity, then, is fractured into many parts that are defined by the individual's relationship to whatever institution he or she is dealing with at the time. A hospital has a variety of available identities: patient, doctor, nurse, administrator, orderly, and so forth. When Fred is at the hospital, the most important thing about him—the defining thing—is his role in relation to the hospital. He is not first of all Fred, but is primarily one of the roles the hospital can deal with: patient, doctor, nurse, et cetera.

As a result, Fred is in the closet most of the time whether that is his intention or not. When he gets on a bus, he is a passenger. The driver wants him to have exact change, but ordinarily will not care to know who Fred sleeps with. Most of the time people are presumed to have a sort of minimal, relatively harmless heterosexuality. Fred is being strident and shrill if he challenges the public presumption of heterosexuality where sexuality is not relevant. Indeed, since sexuality really should have no effect on one's role in most institutions, and Fred really should not be treated differently because of his sexuality, Fred is tempted to accept quietly the public presumption of heterosexuality.

Sexuality, then, is a part of Fred's identity in only a few circumstances: when he goes to a gay bar or another gay institution. Unfortunately, this makes it very easy for gay people to be seen only as those people who go to those kind of bars and participate in those demonstrations. Some homophobia, as a special case of xenophobia, is bound to arise. In the city gay people are not really strangers any more than anyone else, but their gay identities are.

In general, prejudice against a minority tends to increase as the size of the minority increases. Evidently individuals of a very small minority are seen as interesting or exotic, but a larger minority may appear threatening. Preferentially homosexual people are a rather small minority in most societies, and those who are obvious are even fewer. In rural areas, even in America, one may find male and female couples and occasionally a flaming queen who are well tolerated locally. This may be excused with words to the effect, "That's just the way James is. He doesn't mean anything by it," even by adults who know perfectly well that there is a physical dimension to James's sexuality. That he is supposed not to mean anything by it is the local way of saying that James, and his few discreet gentlemen callers, does not seem to pose a threat to the majority culture's view of things.

Of course not many gay people in rural situations are treated as reasonably as James. Some are pushed toward the city by the force of homophobia; some are pulled to the city by the attraction of gay institutions; many go to the city because of a combination of push and pull forces. In reality, the gay minority probably is larger in urban areas. In perception, however, the gay minority is very much larger in cities. Gay identity tends to be expressed only in situations where gay people appear to be numerous. Gay people, of course, are a very large part of the participants in gay institutions. When a neighborhood is known to have a large gay population, it may seem that the whole of the neighborhood is gay. West Hollywood, for example, has a fairly large population of heterosexuals, mostly of retirement age, yet because of the concentration of gay institutions and the activism of gay residents, the nongay residents of West Hollywood are relatively invisible. Although the gay minority is not so numerous in fact, the perception of the gay minority as large may seem threatening to the dominant culture. This may contribute to homophobia.

Very few aspects of traditional culture are adaptable to city life. The same forces that make gay institutions possible—and that fracture identity so that there is such a thing as gay identity apart from a whole identity as a human being—also require profound changes in the ways nongay people live. For example, prostitution is a fact of urban life.

Professional prostitution is very rare in traditional society, although many cultures do provide some kind of readily available sexual outlet. Prostitution arises in the city exactly as other professions do: in the city one buys for cash many services which are provided otherwise in the traditional setting. Judith Levine has written: "Why is it worse to pay for sex than to pay for someone to listen to your intimate problems or care for your infant?" In traditional societies someone can be found to listen, to baby sit, and with whom to have sex simply upon one's personal credit as a member of the social group and often without the necessity of a formal payment. Naturally, one who habitually makes demands upon others without doing anything to meet the needs of others is soon detected in traditional settings. In the city, however, the dry cleaner has no way of knowing what sort of person the customer is. The dry cleaner has no way of knowing whether, if he cleans the customer's suit, the customer might ever do anything for him. Everyone is a stranger in the city and cash is a way of ensuring reciprocity among strangers. Little wonder then that sexual favors, like other favors, are in the city exchanged for cash.

A frequent complaint, especially in the new nations of the Third World, is the prevalence of male prostitutes in the cities. Even where traditions of homosexuality had existed, homosexual prostitution was viewed as something new and alien and as a corruption introduced by rich Americans and Europeans. The observation was quite correct that homosexual prostitution had not existed in the traditional culture. But neither had heterosexual prostitution.

Nongay observers might not approve of heterosexual prostitution either, but they would see that the bush romances of traditional culture had been transformed into the heterosexual prostitution of the city. Observers seldom recognize homosexual prostitution as a similar adaptation of traditional homosexual practices. Hustlers, like all entrepreneurs, seek customers with money and would be likely, as many other kinds of entrepreneurs do, to seek European or American clients. Thus homophobic theories that homosexuality is a foreign corruption may seem credible.

Confusion arises between urban institutions and traditional institutions that bear the same names. People may wish there were less divorce as there was in traditional times, but may forget that traditional marriages had little or nothing to do with romantic love. People may long for traditional family values without realizing that the structure, function, and definition of family has changed. People may dream of the traditional feasts at the traditional homestead and forget the horrors of complicated childbirth far from the city hospital and the other disadvantages of rural life. The urban home cannot be like the traditional homestead, but people wish it were otherwise.

With or without conscious demagoguery, with or without some traditional prejudice to expound upon, the majority is likely to express its dissatisfaction with its own urban adjustments by attacking the similar adjustments of the minority. It is much easier for a majority speaker to say that AIDS shows gay people to have been sexually irresponsible than it is to explain why there is enough demand for abortion to make the subject a matter of controversy. Traditionalist Japanese will decry that Japanese young people think "gaibar" is a native Japanese word; they will not recall that homophobia is not a native Japanese tradition either. In African capitals homosexuality will be denounced as "the white man's way" when in fact the policy of compulsory heterosexuality was what the colonialists imported.

What to do about urban homophobia remains a difficult matter. The out-of-the-closet movement certainly has helped the majority culture to view gay people more as whole persons, yet some people will not understand why it is necessary to introduce the issue of sexuality where its relevance is not obvious. Strangely enough, some people in the majority culture now think gay people are immensely numerous and powerful. But it is difficult to think that misimpression will be corrected by portraying the gay community as a collection of victims and the victimized.

As a considerable part of homophobia seems to arise from the facts of urbanization rather than any particular belief about gay people and as the public image of gay people can never be made to please everyone, perhaps the picture we draw of the gay community should answer first to the facts and then to needs of the gay community. Perhaps the attempt to tailor a gay image to suit the prejudices of the dominant culture is vain and pointless. Organizers in a Southern city recently decreed that drag was inappropriate for the annual gay pride parade. It is not a gay liberation, but a queer sort of liberation indeed that bans drag. Doctrinaire homophobes seldom cite drag as their principal objection to homosexuality, however much it may embarrass elements of the gay community who desire to present an image of being straighter than the straights.

Ultimately urban homophobia, like all homophobia, is primarily an affliction of straight people—although of course we cannot help but internalize some of the homophobic ideas of the surrounding dominant culture. Only straight people can rid themselves of the disorder of homophobia; we can influence that process only marginally, if at all. Urban homophobia seems to arise from the inability of some straight people to adjust to the realities of urban life. Where straights develop better strategies for adapting to urban life, homophobia diminishes.


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