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The Gay Penchant for Preservation

By Will Fellows

en years ago, the site of New York City's Stonewall Inn achieved listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Stonewall is significant because, in June of 1969, patrons of the Greenwich Village LGBT bar surprised raiding police officers by fighting back against their harassment. This event is largely considered to be the launch of the modern LGBT civil rights movement.

When the Stonewall Inn was added to the National Register in 1999, it was the first site among the more than 70,000 other listings to be accepted specifically for an association with the LGBT rights movement. One in 70,000 is an astonishingly small number, especially when one considers that gay men's vision and energies have been central to the life of the National Register of Historic Places since its inception.

From large cities to rural communities throughout the country, gay men have long been impassioned pioneers as keepers of culture – rescuing and restoring decrepit buildings, revitalizing blighted neighborhoods, saving artifacts and documents of historical significance. Though widely observed, this gay penchant to preserve has been typically ignored or dismissed as a stereotypical gay cliché, even by many gay men themselves.

As a gay man who has been preservation-minded since childhood, I decided to take a close and careful look at this. For several years, I immersed myself in exploring gay men's involvement in historic preservation, past and present. My book, A Passion to Preserve, presents a survey of the things that gay men have accomplished, as well as an analysis of why they did it – the key elements of their culture-keeping sensibility.

So, what drives the extraordinary gay male penchant for preservation? The typical facile explanations tend to revolve around things like gay men's disposable income, childlessness, social oppression and marginalization. In reality, I discovered a rather consistent pattern comprising five key traits.

• Gender Atypicality: Blend of masculine and feminine sensibilities and values.
• Domophilia: Great love of houses and things homey; a deep domesticity.
• Romanticism: Relating to the past in imaginative and emotional ways.
• Aestheticism: Extraordinary visual understanding and design-mindedness.
• Connection- and Continuity-Mindedness: Valuing a sense of flowing history and a relationship to the lives and possessions of those who have gone before.

As one gay preservationist observed, "Gay men are very sensitive to beauty. It's perhaps a hackneyed stereotype, but I believe in it – I simply know it. It's an aesthetic capacity, an appreciation of beauty in old things, the grace of a lovely, older house with elegant details. And when gay men are interested in something, they give it their all, tremendous amounts of creative energy and physical energy."

My own qualitative exploration of this phenomenon is complemented by the work of Gary Gates and Richard Florida. Gates documents a direct link between the revitalization of run-down urban neighborhoods – often initiated and propelled by gays – and the economic well-being of those cities. Florida demonstrates that the more hospitable a city is to what he calls the "creative class" (comprising gays and artistically-creative people of whatever sexual orientation), the more likely that city is to thrive economically.

In light of these findings, it seems useful to ask, "How can communities enhance their own well-being by fostering and supporting the gay passion to restore and preserve?" Here are my answers:

• Become as gay-friendly a place as possible. A place where LGBT of all walks of life can live comfortably within the larger community. This means a local culture that accommodates diverse ways of being a boy or a girl, man or woman.
• Recognize and support the natural collaboration of straight women and gay men – the dynamic duo of historic preservation.
• Value the whole neighborhood fabric, not just individual buildings, to both appeal to gay men's attraction to neighborhoods with richly-developed identities, and to benefit from their design-minded concern that often extends beyond their own properties.
• Support neighborhood improvement organizations as an outlet for gay men's exceptional levels of design-mindedness, volunteerism, civic-mindedness and philanthropy.
• Establish and enforce rigorous design standards to avoid aggravating and discouraging preservation-minded gays, who are often meticulous and long for others to be so.
• If you are lucky enough to have one or more in residence, cherish the gay preservationist whose inclination is to do serial restorations for the recurring thrill and satisfaction of putting neglected buildings back "the way they were meant to be."
• Keep in mind that an aesthetic/romantic connection and a continuity-minded value system are more central to the gay passion to preserve than are rational, financial-sense values, and that the gay preservationist is therefore more likely to see restoration possibilities that would not be recognized by others.
• Recognize and reward restoration and revitalization achievements through local events and media coverage.

And know that this is not just a big-city thing. Not all gays come from big cities and not all gays want to live in big cities.

As being gay becomes less a focus of hostility in American society, more and more gay men are choosing to live openly in smaller cities, small towns and rural areas. To the extent that smaller communities manage to attract those of the "creative class," they stand to benefit from the gay impulse to restore and revitalize.

And though they may not realize it, they owe a debt of gratitude to those Stonewall patrons who decided in 1969 that they weren't going to be pushed around anymore. Thanks to major cultural changes that have taken place in the decades since then, many LGBT people are now able to live openly, authentically and with integrity, which has positive consequences for the whole community.

Milwaukee resident Will Fellows is the author of "A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture" and "Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest," both published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

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