If I have a gay identity, and I’d like to think I do, it formed while I was living in Boston. 

Up to that point, my sexuality was a muddled assortment of half-measures. But in Boston, in the early 1990s, I came all the way out of the closet. I began frequenting gay establishments and reading the gay press. I discovered the wide spectrum of sexual tastes and lifestyles, and I realized that my sexuality was a portal to something much more complex than I’d anticipated.

Nineteen years later, I moved to Austin, Texas, and was startled by its comparative lack of gay identity. Gays seemed dishearteningly disconnected from one another. There was no real gayborhood, no gathering spots besides the bars. Sure, there was a stray gay-owned coffee shop here and a vintage boutique there, but they did little to establish a sense of belonging or delineate a stomping ground. 

Texas was the first time I realized that gays were being forced to use social media to meet each other, and in the end, I resorted to finding people the same way. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that this was the new normal, even in cities where gays had plenty of their own places. For various reasons, we’re letting our urban territories die off. 

Returning to Boston last week for the first time since I left four and a half years ago, I could feel the absence of the community in which I came of age. The changes were well underway while I was still living there. But because I was well networked into the city’s gay infrastructure, if you will, I hadn’t really noticed. 

For approximately 15 of my years in Boston, I lived in the South End. This isn’t to be confused with South Boston—they’re as different as Allentown and South Buffalo. In the 1970s, the South End was a war zone of gang violence and drug commerce, but in the following decade it became Boston’s gay ghetto. As a friend put it oh-so-frankly last week, “the fags came in with their window dressings and throw rugs, did some dusting, and voila.” Trite, perhaps, but there’s truth in that statement. 

This idea of gay migration and urban gentrification is old news, but what’s noteworthy now is how so many cities are without these rainbow settlements. Just as we’ve integrated ourselves into the fabric of corporate America, into the institution of marriage and into the cycle of child rearing, we’ve also lost many of our urban strongholds. We told them we’re here, rather unapologetically announced that we’re queer…and guess what? They got used to it. 

So now what? Now we all live together, for better or worse. Kumbaya pluralism. Meh. 

I only use Boston’s South End as an example because it’s the one I’m most familiar with, but this is happening all over the country. And sure, some of it is just part of the pattern: once we’ve dusted and dressed the windows, we out-price ourselves and find another series of projects across town. What we’re not seeing, however, are new identities cropping up to help define our new gayborhoods as gay. They really aren’t gayborhoods, actually. That concept is dying — we seem to be letting it happen. 

Boston felt tense to me. Potentially seizure-inducing if I let it penetrate, but I tried to focus on visiting with the people to whom I still feel a closeness and not let the aggravating aspects of the city ruin it for me (as I did, on and off, for many of the years I lived there). Aside from my established relationships, however, if felt closed. Sealed off. No room at the Inn. People not only don’t smile at one another, they purposefully avoid eye contact altogether. Pinched gays go mincing down the sidewalk with an mixed air of inapproachability and irritation that creates a virtual force field around them. 

Simultaneously, the amount of hot tail on display would have any hot blooded human grinding against the nearest surface. The prevalence of tailored pants stuffed with bulbous, gym-shaped mounds of flesh (forcing the fabric to also pull on the crotch in the most revealing ways) was positively boner-inducing. The lyrics to John Grant’s “Snug Slacks” looped in my head for much of the week (find it on YouTube, it’s both funky and hilarious), but the mixed message between seeing all that ass on parade and the inapproachable vibe accompanying it was jarring: “Check out how beautiful I am, and while you’re at it, check out how you can’t have me.”

Boston always had a coldness to it, and it’s one of the reasons I left. But it felt to me last week as though it’d reached a new plateau of emotional unavailability. Part of this is because we’re more isolated than ever before. In cities all over the country, we don’t gather anymore. We’re paired off and have moved away. Or we’re still in town, struggling to pay market rent in the areas we beautified, leaving little time for social lives and psychosexual identities—”cheap” studios in the Fenway now run about $1,500 a month. Boston gays have invaded South Boston and neighboring Dorchester, but neither area feels particularly gay. And the South End itself may still house a few popular gay watering holes, but it lacks the homey feel that originally attracted so many people to it. My old apartment building has been sold and remodeled. Peeking in the doorway, I couldn’t figure out where my landlord’s apartment had gone—turns out it’s been swallowed, much like the cancer that took his life, by a retail establishment in the adjacent building. 

Interacting remotely does nothing to foster the sort of camaraderie that makes for healthy, long-lasting relationships. The lack of physical face-time has hardened us to one another, and not in a happy-to-see-ya way. It’s disheartening. We’re too busy trying to manage our big, complicated lives, we don’t have time to be gay anymore. It’s relegated to an app. It happens in the bedroom. It’s ‘what we do’ so much more now than it is ‘who we are.’ There’s an important piece missing. The disconnect was palpable to me last week, walking around the city where I learned about what it means to be a homosexual.

I have a friend that feels like Buffalo needs more gay unity. Needs more gay spaces. Needs more places we can own, where we can really be ourselves. He’s one of many people I’ve spoken with that think Allentown could be a more substantial gay ghetto, and maybe it could. But being in Boston made me realize that we’ve got it pretty good here. And there’s plenty of room for us right here within city limits…new territories we can settle that just might remain affordable for a while. We’ve got a shot at building something here that could be very special…let’s not fuck it up. Take time out to be gay, and if you’re at a loss as to what that means beyond scheduling a booty call, you’ve got your work cut out for you.