New York City Life Out and about in New York By Bob Yampolsky	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
同性愛者にも暮らしやすい街 ニューヨークタイムズ紙日曜版の結婚通知欄に、今秋から同性愛者のカップルの名前も載るようになりました。アメリカのゲイカルチャーの中心地といえばサンフランシスコですが、同性愛者の多さでは、ニューヨークは恐らく全米一でしょう。筆者の身辺にも、そのような住民が大勢います。

For many years now, The New York Times has published a section every Sunday of wedding announcements. Originally, this was reserved for members of New York's predominantly white, protestant, upper-crust families. But as times changed, wedding announcements for Catholic and Jewish couples began appearing, and then announcements for blacks, Asians and virtually all other ethnic groups. Granted, only couples from "good" families appeared, but the diversity on the pages nicely reflected the diversity of the city.

This fall, though, the Times broke new ground: It began publishing announcements of same-sex weddings.

Actually, the term "weddings" is inappropriate, as New York State (as well as every other state except Vermont) does not recognize same-sex marriages; these pages are now titled "Weddings／Celebrations." While announcements of traditional weddings say that a couple "was married," announcements of same-sex celebrations say a couple "declared their commitment" or "affirmed their partnership." In every other way, though, they are the same as the traditional wedding announcements, telling of the couple's family and educational background, their careers and, in some cases, even describing their courtship.

New York is not the gay capital of the country. That honor goes to San Francisco, where gay activism and gay culture are more fully a part of mainstream city life. But New York has always been a magnet for people who find their hometowns, for whatever reason, too narrow and constrained, and gays and lesbians have been no exception. Subject to harassment or alienation at home, they come to New York, and nobody cares what they are.

For this reason, New York has what must be the largest gay community in the country. (After all, it's a common lament among single women here that all the good single men are gay.) And more and more, this community is being accepted as just another element in the New York mosaic.

The center of the gay and lesbian (or, as the free weekly newspaper Gay City News puts it, the LGBT - lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual - community) is and has been Greenwich Village, which is the heart of New York's bohemian and counterculture life.

But even in more traditional neighborhoods (as in my own, the Upper West Side, which is the quintessential neighborhood for "breeders," i.e., heterosexuals with children), signs of gay life are becoming more and more commonplace.

In my neighborhood, the leading candidate for our state assembly seat is openly gay, and campaigns on a platform of protecting gay rights. My kids' school has a dance teacher (why elementary school students are learning dance, I can't say) who is so flamboyantly gay in speech and mannerism that he might as well be wearing a bright neon sign saying "I AM GAY." He is very popular among both children and parents.

On the corner from my building, right by the subway station, is a metal box offering copies of Gay City News. And in my building, in fact, there are a number of gay and lesbian couples: One teenage girl "has two mommies"; she is often busy babysitting for many of the small kids in the building. Magazine stands prominently display their selection of gay porn.

A popular TV sitcom, set in New York, has a gay lead. There is an off-Broadway play, which received excellent reviews, about a gay baseball star for a fictional New York team. In the middle of the fifth inning at Yankee Stadium, when the grounds crew is sweeping the infield, the PA system plays "YMCA", an old tongue-in-cheek gay anthem by the Village People (remember them?), and the crew and the fans dance in unison, making their bodies into the shapes of a Y, then an M, a C and an A. In the subways, you'll see HIV-prevention ads showing two men embracing with the slogan "BYOC (bring your own condom)."

So, is New York now a bastion of tolerance? It's hard to say. This summer, a rumor arose that a major-league baseball player in New York was gay, and speculation soon centered on Mike Piazza, the star catcher for the Mets (Nomo's battery mate, or nyobo-yaku, as they say in Japan, when he first went to the Dodgers). Piazza faced the press, solely for the purpose of declaring, "I date women." It was a rather silly episode.

In the end, though, the whole fuss may have been something positive: People realized that it was silly and, furthermore, that they really didn't care. New York really isn't in the vanguard of the gay rights movement. It's just that, in the end, New Yorkers don't really seem to care whether a person is gay or not: What's it got to do with me? I would imagine that for many gays and lesbians, this is precisely the reason that they have come to live in New York.

Shukan ST: Oct. 25, 2002

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