The Gays Cancel Halloween!
This is the way it has always worked: the gays move into a shitty neighborhood and clean it up. Then eventually they grow old and move in with each other and possibly get dogs and babies and then, by this point, we straights have come in. Eventually ugly stores are built by straight people and the gays go. Then the gays—who have a much better skills than any of those idiots currently moving further and and further out on the J train—don't have neighborhoods anymore, but they don't really care, and their nutty gaytopian communities become, well, the West Village. Or the Castro! And so then the annual Castro Halloween party gets canceled and therefore the Times declares the Gayborhood to be dead.
Oddly enough for a pseudo-'gentrification' story, the Castro shindig party was canceled not because there are now too many babies and Pottery Barns but because last year someone shot nine people. Also there have been rapes and racial profiling and people kicking people with AIDS out of their apartments.
Sounds kind of hellish, actually, but we've never really liked California to begin with. But it could happen here!
All the gays are leaving the Castro, apparently, as they've left West Hollywood and the West Village and Key West. But where are all the gays going? Demographer Gary Gates explains:
"Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York," he said. "Now you can just go to Kansas City."
