LGBT+ History Month / Philadelphia
Who Named the Gayborhood?
A headline in a free weekly, a borrowed Mister Rogers lyric, and sixty-eight pieces of painted aluminum.
There are around sixty-eight of them bolted to poles between Broad and 11th, and if you have spent any time in Center City you have walked under one without thinking about it. They are ordinary City of Philadelphia street signs, the green ones with the Liberty Bell in the corner, except somebody has fixed a rainbow bar along the bottom edge. Reflective sheeting on aluminum, ordered and installed by the city, at the city’s expense.
They are there because of a pun in a free newspaper.
A headline, not a speech
In October 1995, Philadelphia City Paper was assembling the section where it ran short, mildly snide previews of the week ahead. The lead item was OutFest, the National Coming Out Day block party that Philly Pride had started five years earlier and that had grown into what its organizers describe as the largest celebration of the day anywhere.
David Warner, the paper’s first gay editor, wrote the headline. Warner was from Pennsylvania and so was Fred Rogers, and the pun more or less presented itself.
It’s a beautiful day in the Gayborhood.
Philadelphia City Paper, October 1995
That is the entire origin story. No committee, no consultants, no community input process, just an editor on deadline borrowing from a children’s television show. Warner has said since that he was not trying to coin anything and that it was simply a fun pun
, which he wrote and then watched take on a life of its own.
One detail is worth correcting, because most retellings get it wrong. You will read almost everywhere, including in some very good local coverage, that Warner stood up at OutFest and declared it to a crowd. He did not. He typed it into a listings page. The most repeated sentence in the history of this neighborhood was, technically speaking, a caption.
What it was up against
The neighborhood’s official name, the one that appears on zoning maps and title deeds, is Washington Square West. It is a perfectly good name that almost nobody uses when making plans to meet a friend for a drink.
Developers spent years pushing Midtown Village, which is what you call a place when you want it to sound like it has a Sweetgreen. A handful of businesses still use it, and it has mostly stayed where it started, in press releases.
Before either of those, people just called it the gay ghetto. That was the working term, used affectionately and otherwise, and it carried all the freight you would expect. Warner has pointed out that 13th Street already had an identity before 1995, just not a flattering one.
So the field was a zoning designation nobody said out loud, a marketing invention nobody believed, and a phrase that was half slur and half habit. Against that, a joke in an alt-weekly was a genuinely strong contender.
The neighborhood was there long before the name
What makes the 1995 story more interesting than a piece of trivia is how late it arrives.
Camac Street, the narrow one running between 12th and 13th, was known as the Little Street of Clubs as far back as 1915. By the 1920s, 243 S. Camac housed a gay-friendly speakeasy called Maxine’s, run by a man named Ed King. That address has been queer more or less continuously ever since, and it is Tavern on Camac today, which makes it a strong candidate for the oldest continuously operating gay establishment in Philadelphia.
A block away, the Venture Inn occupied a building that started life in the 1830s as a stable. It took the Venture Inn name in 1931, had a quietly gay-friendly reputation through the 1950s and 60s, and became an openly gay bar in 1973 under owner Hans Lang.
So there were roughly eighty years of gay life on those blocks before anyone put a word to them, and that was not an accident. A name is a location. For most of the twentieth century, being easy to find was the risk rather than the goal, and the people who might come looking included the police, your landlord, and the newspaper that would print your name if you were arrested in a raid. You do not advertise the address of a place whose value depends on the wrong people not knowing it.
Which is why the joke only worked when it did. By 1995 it had finally become safe to be located.
It did not catch on overnight
The story usually ends with “and the name stuck,” which makes it sound like it happened in a week. It did not. A survey of local archives by PhillyVoice turned up no printed use of the word until 1999, four years after the headline ran.
It spread the way slang actually spreads, out loud and between people, long before anyone bothered to write it down a second time. Philly Pride helped by adopting it early and promoting the Pride parade as starting in the heart of the Gayborhood. From there it escaped the city entirely. The word now turns up in coverage of gay neighborhoods in places that have never heard of OutFest, and the local historian Bob Skiba, who has spent more time in this material than most, is fairly confident Philadelphia was first.
April 18, 2007
Twelve years after the headline, Mayor John Street stood on a Center City corner and dedicated thirty-six rainbow street signs.
Getting there took about two years of work, driven by the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus with backing from the Washington Square Civic Association and Councilman Frank DiCicco. The signs went up between Chestnut and Pine, from 11th to Broad. Thirty-two more followed in 2010, bringing the total to somewhere around sixty-eight and putting Philadelphia in a small group of cities, alongside San Francisco, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto, that have written their gay neighborhood into municipal infrastructure.
The rainbow crosswalks at 13th and Locust came later, and they produced the most Philadelphia detail in this whole story. When the stripes needed repainting, the work was folded into a PATCO elevator project, and the refreshed crosswalks were dedicated on a July 5, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the first gay rights demonstration at Independence Hall. One of the most photographed corners in queer Philadelphia got its refresh as a side effect of accessibility construction.
A name draws a line, and lines have outsides
Chestnut to Pine, 11th to Broad, is thirteen blocks. Once that goes up on a pole, you have not only labeled a place, you have given it edges.
Gay Philadelphia has never fit inside thirteen blocks. It did not in 1965, when the Dewey’s sit-ins happened at 17th and Chancellor, well west of any of this, and it does not now, with queer life spread across Fishtown, West Philly, South Philly and Kensington. The signs mark a commercial district rather than a population, which is fine as long as everyone remembers the difference.
The harder version of that problem arrived in 2016, when a recording made by a Gayborhood bar owner and a wave of complaints about racist door policies brought the neighborhood before the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations. The hearings led to city-mandated implicit bias training for bar staff. A district that had spent nine years advertising itself on street signs as the welcoming place had to answer in public for who it had actually been welcoming, and that reckoning is a story of its own that deserves telling properly.
It belongs here, though, because it marks the point where the name stopped being only a joke and became a claim that people could hold you to.
Still just a sign
Stripped down to its parts, the Gayborhood is a century of bars on a narrow street, a pun in a free weekly, and sixty-eight pieces of painted aluminum. None of that is really the neighborhood. The neighborhood is whoever happens to be standing under the sign, and that has changed constantly and will keep changing.
Camac Street has already outlasted the speakeasy, the raids, the gay ghetto years and every developer who tried to rebrand it. The signs will come down eventually too, replaced or damaged or quietly retired the way city hardware always is.
In the meantime, it is a good thing to be able to say that Philadelphia looked at a throwaway headline in a free newspaper, thought it over for twelve years, and then decided to make it permanent at public expense.
Go stand under one. The rainbow signs run from Chestnut to Pine between 11th and Broad, and the rainbow crosswalks are at 13th and Locust. Tavern on Camac, on the block that has been queer since the 1920s, is a two-minute walk away.