Week 3 - West Hollywood

This week I walked along a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood famous for its gay-friendly culture. The neighborhood has an overwhelming amount of gay pride, with rainbow flags hanging from sidewalk shops and median flagpoles. The American Apparel has rainbow lights underlining their sign and there is even a rainbow crosswalk. The street (Santa Monica Boulevard) has two lanes on each side and are lined with palm trees. The median is wide enough for a cleanly paved dirt walkway decorated with artistic sculptures. The sidewalks were well groomed along with the people walking them - mostly young men. Many of the pedestrians had pet dogs accompanying them and the coffee shops, bars, and restaurants lining Santa Monica Blvd. are all high-end dining and shopping options. After seeing several tour buses pass down the street, I noticed it sold as a popular tourist attraction. 

The gay district in West Hollywood completely contrasts the homosexual neighborhoods David Sibley describes in "Mapping the Pure and Defiled." Sibley claims that homosexual men and women are part of a minority that is discriminated against as "moral pollution" and therefore confined to an undesirable area of a city. While the gay district of West Hollywood is designated to one area specifically, it is a clean, wealthy and desirable neighborhood to live in. 

The area of Los Angeles fits the description of a post-metropolis city given in lecture much better than Sibley’s description. The radical individualism present in the gay district of West Hollywood created a segregated community connected with the rest of the city through decentralized transportation networks (some buses, but mostly personal cars). The importance of this decentralized transportation network is displayed in the wide 4-lane street with a large, decorated median. The area was certainly service-sector dominated as I saw no industrial factories or manufacturing companies but instead boutique shops, restaurants, bars and nightclubs there to cater to the wealthier population of Los Angeles. Just as Professor Wilford described post-metropolis cities in lecture, there was no body or overarching structure bringing this segregated community together with any other part of LA, but instead it was “connected through decentralized social institutions and decentralized transportation networks.”

Sibley said that  "urban society provides further visions of purity and pollution where the polluting are more likely to be social, and often spatially marginal minorities, like gays, prostitutes and homeless... media representations are mostly fictional, imaginary constructions, but they draw on the same stereotyped images of people and places which surface in social conflicts involving mainstream communities and 'deviant' minorities." However, if this is the case, how come so many tour buses came through this part of Santa Monica Boulevard and desired to see the "gay district" of West Hollywood? I believe that the gay district of West Hollywood is more an example of Sibley's conclusion: "Historically, at least within European capitalist societies, it is evident that the boundary of 'society' has shifted, embracing more of the population, with the class divide in particular becoming more elusive as a boundary marker." I was happy to see the social acceptance and economic success of a minority that was so largely discriminated against in the past.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gay-marriage-20121108,0,1260230.story << This article found in the L.A. times talks about the legalization of gay marriage in the United States after the November 2012 election. This article further confirms the acceptance of gays into the community and the decrease of social differences between people of different sexualities in modern times. 11/9/12