We could argue about which American cities are the most gentrified, but high up on everyone’s list would be New York and San Francisco.

The most gentrified neighborhoods of Manhattan? East Village, West Village, Lower Eastside, Harlem, and Chelsea.

The National Research Council’s 1993 report on the social impact of AIDS recorded Manhattan’s highest rates of infection in Chelsea (1,802 per 100,000), Lower Eastside East Village (1,434 per 100,000), Greenwich Village (1,175 per 100,000), and Harlem (722 per 100,000—clearly underreported). As compared to the Upper Eastside, for example (597 per 100,000).

As soon as the question is posed, one...

Key to the gentrification mentality is the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones. Mixed neighborhoods become homogenous. Mixed neighborhoods create public simultaneous thinking, many perspectives converging on the same moment at the same time, in front of each other. Many languages, many cultures, many racial and class experiences take place on the same block, in the same buildings. Homogenous neighborhoods erase this dynamic, and are much more vulnerable to enforcement of conformity.

AIDS, which emerged as gentrification was underway, is an arena where simple answers to complex questions have ruled. “Keep it simple” only works if you are an...

When novelist Kathy Acker died in 1997 at the age of fifty-one, she was poised to become recognized as America’s leading experimentalist. Her predecessors William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg had recently passed away, and it was—in effect—her turn. Shortly after her death, a conference was organized in her honor at New York University by her friends Avital Ronell, Carla Harryman, and Amy Scholder, and some of her works were reissued. But, truthfully, Kathy has quickly fallen off the radar. Her books are rarely taught, and younger writers seem unaware of her huge influence. What I tend to tell...

Why do artists move to cities? Because they want to be part of the creation of new ways of thinking. One of the reasons I have always loved being an artist in New York City is that we get to hear some kinds of ideas before they are widely available. We get to invent and hear new approaches as they are rawly, freshly born. And then we get to be part of the development of those ideas through conversations in living rooms, on subways, in the audiences of live presentations, in artists’ studios, looking at works in progress, watching rough...

Election Day, November 2008. It’s a new dawn for America. Barack Obama has triumphed at the polls and every constituency of people without rights in this country is united in the hope and determination that our system can work for them. Except one. While most of America is literally cheering, literally dancingin the streets, tears streaming down their faces, thirty-six thousand gay people who got married in California are devastated. On the same date that Obama was elected, four state ballot measures passed banning gay marriage, and two of those states—California and Florida—went for Obama. Arkansas, the...

The first gay book I ever saw was calledCycle Suck. It was on a shelf at the Oscar Wilde Bookstore on Christopher Street in 1975, next to some mimeographed pamphlets with titles like “The Woman-Identified Woman.” From the beginning, I have always known that this is as it should be. Separating distinctions between the sexually explicit and the politically necessary would never make sense. Yet, as I am writing this in 2009, a scandal erupts—first online and then in the mainstream print media. Amazon.com, the mail order bookseller mega-monster, got caught in what it called a “glitch.” In...