LGBT Populations in Studies of Urban Neighborhoods: Making the Invisible Visible

Abstract

When I first began my training as a sociologist, I learned about urban poverty under the mentorship of William Julius Wilson at the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality in Chicago. The 1990s were an exciting time to be in dialogue with the different schools of thought among those examining life in metropolitan areas. I decided to narrow my focus to the study of U.S. family formation and sexuality in urban contexts, and more than 20 years later I have not strayed far from those interests. The great ethnographies of urban neighborhoods have taught us many things about the ways individuals and families use that space, about the constraints imposed on them by community and larger institutions, about the role of the police in these neighborhoods, and the varied modes of surveillance of daily life. However, as I began the research for my first book, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (Moore 2011), I could find very few indicators of sexual orientation in these detailed studies of life in big cities. I searched through appendices, endnotes, as well as the primary content and theoretical framing of these books, but with few exceptions, the experiences of sexual minorities living in these areas were not represented as part of the social fabric of urban neighborhoods. Most ethnographic approaches to the study of city life are biased toward the experiences of people who claim heterosexuality. We do not see sexual minorities incorporated into larger analyses of family life in urban areas, or included, in studies of how the various social groups in a community work together or against one another in the acquisition of resources, against a threat of encroachment, or in numerous other situations as they arise in day-to-day living and survival. Ethnographers who spent months or years studying the detailed and mundane aspects of life in urban areas have devoted very little space in their published work to the existence of sexual minorities who also inhabit these spaces. Yet, we know they exist in these neighborhoods. Historians of LGBT life have shown us that sexual minorities have long flocked to urban metropolises (Chauncey 1994). Demographers have found that the largest numbers of same-sex couples reside in the country’s major cities (Gates and Cooke 2011). We know that African-American, Latino/a, and Asian-American sexual minorities tend to live in cities and towns with large numbers of their racial and ethnic group members (Gates 2012), and lesbian and gay people have historically been integrated into the everyday life of these communities (Carbado et al. 2002; Han 2015; Ocampo 2012). LGBT people in these neighborhoods congregate on the same street corners and building stoops as other residents, they patronize the same