Heads Up Collective Talks About Gentrification in the ‘Gayborhood’

“The initial reason [for the screening] was that it was Pride month,” explains Mel Pilbin, a member of Heads Up and a coordinator of the event. While the Heads Up Collective is not an explicitly queer-identified group, she explains, many of its members identify individually as queer, and took special interest in the evening’s theme.

“As queers, we’re all over the [gentrification] spectrum,” adds Julia Allen, also a member of Heads Up. “We’re privileged white men starting gayborhoods all over the country … we’re queers that are constituting the vanguard of gentrification”, and victims of gentrification as well.

The night’s discussion touched on all three of these roles. Cebastien Rose, a member of the now-defunct Queers and Friends Against Gentrification, discussed the creation of posh “gayborhoods” across the U.S., from Ferndale in Detroit to the Castro in SF. The idea of creating queer safe space is “a marketing strategy used to target middle and upper class queers,” he says, that excludes working class queers of color. “Safe for whom?” Rose queries.

Echoing Rose’s remark, Jose Toledo of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation avers, “Our safe is different from what other people’s safe is.” Segments of ‘The Rise of the I-Hotel’ screened at the event spoke to the unique space that was destroyed when the I-Hotel was cleared, after a ten-year fight on the part of its elderly Filipino tenants.

Discussants argued that queer white middle-class people have often been the first to move into working class areas populated mainly by people of color, providing a wedge to open these areas to increased numbers of privileged residents, whose presence ups rents and changes the character of the neighborhood. In light of this phenomenon, an audience member asked, should queer people not move into low-income areas – even if they, too, are driven there by sky-high rents? Speakers offered varying responses.

Pilbin stresses that “gentrification is often seen as a result of people’s individual decisions” but it’s also “an institutional problem, a strategy on the part of banks, developers and politicians to increase profit on a certain area.” Therefore, she concludes, “me moving out of my house in the Mission isn’t going to stop gentrification.”

Others respond differently.

“If you have race and class privilege … you probably shouldn’t,” says Angel Seda, a representative of FIERCE, an association of queer New York youth of color that produced the “Fenced Out” documentary. Still, he says, if privileged queer people do move into low-income neighborhoods, they should take the time to learn about those neighborhoods, and what established residents want.

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