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Winner, 2026 Outstanding Book in Community and Urban Society, Community and Urban Sociology Section, American Sociological Association
Gay neighborhoods are disappearing—or so the conventional story goes. In this narrative, political gains and mainstream social acceptance, combined with the popularity of dating apps like Grindr, have reduced the need for LGBTQ+ people to seek refuges or build expressly queer places. Yet even though residential patterns have shifted, traditionally gay neighborhoods remain centers of queer public life.
Exploring “gayborhoods” in Washington, DC, Theodore Greene investigates how neighborhoods retain their cultural identities even as their inhabitants change. He argues that the success and survival of gay neighborhoods have always depended on participation from nonresidents in the life of the community, which he terms “vicarious citizenship.” Vicarious citizens are diverse self-identified community members, sometimes former or displaced locals, who make symbolic claims to the neighborhood. They defend their vision of community by temporarily reviving the traditions and cultures associated with the gay neighborhood and challenging the presence of straight families and other newcomers, the displacement of local institutions, or the taming of sexual culture. Greene pays careful attention to the significance of race and racism, highlighting the important role of Black LGBTQ+ culture in shaping gay neighborhoods past and present. Examining the diverse placemaking strategies that queer people deploy to foster and preserve LGBTQ+ geographies, Not in My Gayborhood illuminates different ways of imagining urban neighborhoods and communities.
— Japonica Brown-Saracino, author of How Places Make Us and A Neighborhood That Never Changes
Not in My Gayborhood is at once timely and enriching. A needed account of the life, sudden death, and resurrection possibilities of LGBTQIA+ neighborhoods uplifting the Black placemaking at their roots.
— Marcus Anthony Hunter, author of Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation
This richly conceptualized work shows how Black and queer placemakers preserve the meanings of neighborhoods they have been priced out of. “We” may be everywhere, but this can feel like being nowhere until we converge on a fountain, bar, or street corner, and then the world is temporarily—but gloriously—ours.
— Greggor Mattson, author of Who Needs Gay Bars?: Bar-Hopping through America's Endangered LGBTQ+ Places
Going beyond conventional understandings of gayborhoods, Greene examines how LGBTQ people develop a sense of place in the city. The sustained engagement of his research in Washington, DC, is a model for ethnographers everywhere.
— Amy L. Stone, author of Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South
Greene insightfully documents how neighborhood identity evolves. His findings, moreover, are applicable to all neighborhoods with large concentrations of members of specific ethnic or religious groups. A productive contribution to the academic literature on gay urban culture.
A significant contribution to urban studies and queer theory. Its implications for urban planning and policy are crucial in recognizing diverse forms of community engagement and advocating for policies that support both residents and nonresidents.
A strong addition to graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in urban or community sociology, sociology of sexualities, and LGBTQ+ studies. I also think the book would be a compelling exemplar for qualitative methods courses.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Making Dupont Gay Again
1. “Still a Very Gay City”: A Historical Impression of Washington’s LGBTQ Communities
2. J’ai Deux Amours: The Promiscuity of Community Attachments in the Postmodern City
3. Places in Abeyance: Placemaking and the Construction of Community in Institutional Anchors
4. Heteros, Beware! Monitoring and Preserving Queer Culture Through Normative Vicarious Claims
5. “Presente! Presente!”: Place Ruptures and the Enactment of Radical Vicarious Claims
6. Political Vicarious Claims and the Art of Self-Enfranchisement
Conclusion: Place Reactivation and Vicarious Citizenship Beyond the Gayborhood
Appendix A: Map of Washington, D.C., “Gayborhoods” Referenced
Appendix B: Washington, D.C., LGBTQ Places Referenced
Notes
References
Index