They come to this Manhattan pier at night from Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, New Jersey. The black and Hispanic gays and lesbians say this is the only place where they can be themselves.

Here, boys in Timberland boots and fluorescent sweatshirts know they won't get beaten up for kissing each other, and girls with cornrows beneath backward baseball caps are not embarrassed to cuddle other girls.

"This was like the first place I could really be exposed to people of my kind, without having to worry about getting bashed," said Cliff Jones, 20, of Harlem.

Jay Jeffries, 65, is white and gay. He has lived for 40 years in the West Village, where he participated in the first gay rights marches. From his second-floor window he watches the roller-skating boys with boomboxes pressed to their ears and the fist-fighting girls wearing do-rags and jerseys.

He has never felt so out of place.

Residents such as Jeffries say they want the gays of the hip-hop generation to take their rowdiness elsewhere. They have demanded stricter curfews at the pier. They have lobbied to close a train stop on weekends to make it more difficult for gays from New Jersey to travel to the West Village, and to ban loitering in their neighborhood. They have suggested that park patrol officers -- who police the pier -- carry guns.

[...]

Bob Kohler, 80, a gay rights advocate who has lived in the West Village for 60 years, said the discrimination young people face in the West Village is no different from decades ago when gays could not hold hands in public. He said his neighbors simply "don't want black faces on Christopher Street."

But Jeffries, a playwright, said the newcomers disrupt the area. He can't sleep at night because they yell and curse outside his window. Sometimes they jump high enough to peep inside his apartment. He says he has watched drug deals and prostitution solicitations from his futon. He doesn't dare use Christopher Street when it gets dark because he said boys grab him and shout, "Hey, papi!"

Before, "You could walk down the street and not get mugged, and not get harassed. I wouldn't dream of it now," he said. "They come from a whole different background."

(I am still uncertain as to who is THE biggest repository of knowledge that I’ve ever met, you or Feral. )

But you are, undeniably and unmistakably -- and gloriously and proudly -- a New York City homo.

His insights are so sharp they can cut glass.

I hope I don't come across as the typical New Yorker.

Write, write, write! And gather your writings into a book, so there are no regrets later on omitting to download a precious piece.

Gay bar owners routinely call for the arrest of homeless people, many of them queer youth, for getting in the way of happy hour. Zephyr Realty, a gay-owned real estate company, advises its clients on how best to evict long-term tenants, many of them seniors, people with HIV/AIDS and disabled people. Gay political consultants mastermind the election of anti-poor, pro-development candidates over and over and over.

In 1998, wealthy gay Castro residents (don’t forget lesbians and straight people!) fought against a queer youth shelter because they feared it would get in the way of “community property values.” They warned that a queer youth shelter would bring prostitution and drug-dealing to the neighborhood. For a moment, let’s leave aside the absurdity of a wealthy gay neighborhood, obviously already a prime destination for prostitutes of a certain gender and drug-dealing of only the best substances, worrying about the wrong kind of prostitutes (the ones in the street) and the wrong kind of drug dealers (the ones who don’t drive Mercedes) arriving in their whitewashed gayborhood.

What is sad about the Castro (and similar gay neighborhoods across the country and around the world), and indicative of what gay people do with even a little bit of power, is that these same smiling gay men have failed to build community for queers (or anyone) outside their social groups.

Come to think of it...that article is worthy of an entire semester's analysis in a Queer Criticism class.