History of The Gay Village
The first gay village was established in Berlin in the 1920s and in Amsterdam in the 1950s. Prior to the 1960s and '70s, specialized gay communities did not exist as such outside Berlin and Amsterdam; bars were usually where gay social networks developed, and they were located in certain urban areas where police zoning would implicitly allow so-called "deviant entertainment" under close surveillance. In New York, for example, the congregation of gay men had not been illegal since 1965; however, no openly gay bar had been granted a license to serve alcohol. The police raid of a private gay club called the Stonewall Inn on June 27, 1969, led to a series of minor disturbances in the neighborhood of the bar over the course of the subsequent three days involving more than 1,000 people. Stonewall managed to change not only the profile of the gay community but the dynamic within the community itself. This, along with several other similar incidents, precipitated the appearance of gay ghettos throughout North America, as spatial organization shifted from bars and street-cruising to specific neighbourhoods. This transition "from the bars to the streets, from nightlife to daytime, from 'sexual deviance' to an alternative lifestyle" was the critical moment in the development of the gay community.
In the early years of the 2000s, a few community members of the Toronto Gay Village created an online community called Gay-Villager.com. This resource connects gay villagers from all over, to provide information for arts, travel, business, gay counseling, legal services, etc., which provides a safe and gay friendly environment for members of the gay community.
Read more about this topic: Gay Village
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history, gay and/or village:
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“How the mother is to be pitied who hath handsome daughters! Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality are nothing to them: they break through them all. They have as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards.”
—John Gay (1685–1732)
“Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)