ABSTRACT
During recent decades, ‘gay ghettos’ have emerged in many large cities in North America and western Europe. The word ‘ghetto’ originated in 16th-century Venice and initially referred to an area of a city where local authorities forced Jews to reside. American sociologists of the Chicago School appropriated the word in the 1920s to designate urban districts inhabited predominantly by racial, ethnic or social minorities, whether by compulsion or by choice. By the 1970s, sociologists were applying the term ‘gay ghetto’ to neighbourhoods characterised by the presence of
gay institutions [like bars, bookstores, restaurants and clothing stores] in number, a conspicuous and locally dominant gay sub-culture that is socially isolated from the larger community, and a residential population that is substantially gay (Levine, 1979, p. 364),
