Ottawa’s Le/The Village: Creating a ‘gaybourhood’ amidst the death of the village Nathaniel M. Lewis Gender and Health Promotion Studies Unit, School of Health and Human Performance, Dalhousie University, 6230 South Street, Room 209, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4R2 article info Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Gay village Ottawa Canada Neighbourhood Gentrification Identity Queer abstract Gay villages, usually defined as spatially concentrated configurations of bars, entertainment venues, com- munity spaces, and homes associated with a gay-identified population, have received considerable atten- tion from urban geographers studying gentrification. Frequently, gay villages have been critiqued as commodified spaces that serve mostly upper- and middle-class patrons. Yet they are also culturally and historically significant sites of mobilization, community building, and identity formation. During the last decade, media outlets in some North American cities have begun to dismiss gay villages as ‘declining’ or ‘dead.’ In models of ‘gay village evolution,’ decline is often positioned as a natural end pre- cipitated by the commercialization and normalization of gay community spaces, the emergence of alter- native venues in out-of-centre neighborhoods, and recent advancements in gay rights that render ‘safe’ spaces unnecessary. Using the case study of Ottawa, Canada’s Le/The Village, a gay village designated by the municipal government in November 2011, this paper argues that gay village decline, more a dis- cursive trend than a foregone conclusion, is contingent upon both the historical and cultural particular- ities of cities and the intersecting subjectivities of those who encounter the village. The Ottawa case runs counter to discourse that dismisses gay villages as normalizing, over-commercialized, exclusionary, or simply passé. Using the narratives of 24 gay-identified men living in Ottawa, this article suggests that the absence of a village, as much as the creation and concretization of one, can perpetuate extant class and locational privilege within gay communities and that ‘new’ gay villages in smaller cities—perhaps more symbolic and psychic than capitalistic—may work to challenge the perpetuation of privilege. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction On November 4, 2011, six blocks of Ottawa, Canada’s, Bank Street were designated by Mayor Jim Watson and the municipal government as Le/The Village, the official gay village of the bilin- gual, mid-sized national capital (population 883,391) sitting roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal. The designation was unusual for many reasons. First, it marked the termination of a prolonged battle for the municipal recognition of a gay village in a medium-density commercial area with only moderate cultural or historical significance to the gay community. 1 Second, the desig- nation was temporally out of line with the trajectories of well- known Canadian gay villages such as Church-Wellesley (Toronto), and Le Village Gai (Montreal), which were designated as villages by the early 2000s and had roots in gay liberation movements of the 1970s (Nash, 2005, 2006; Podmore, 2001, 2006). Third, the des- ignation has come at a time when gay media in some North Ameri- can cities are proclaiming gay villages to be ‘declining’ or ‘dead.’ Employing the narratives of 24 self-identified gay men and key- informant community activists in Ottawa, Canada, this study an- swers the questions, ‘Why Ottawa?’ and ‘Why now?’ The findings challenge an established discourse of gay village evolution and an emergent discourse of gay village decline, both of which posi- tion gay villages as destined for decreasing relevance in the face of commercialization, gentrification, and advances in gay rights. In contrast, the recent drive toward gay village creation in Ottawa is rooted in social, historical, and demographic particularities that have shaped an alternative discourse of ‘need’ for a gay village. The case of Ottawa therefore challenges metronormative assumptions that the twin interests of economic entrepreneurship and gay political territorialisation (e.g., voting blocs) are the primary deter- minants of gay village creation, evolution, and decline (Collins, 2004; Ruting, 2008). As a population saturated with a long history of government surveillance and regulation, Ottawa’s gay commu- nity has followed a somewhat anomalous trajectory, characterized more by fragmentation and invisibility than territorialisation (Le- wis, 2012a). In the context of Ottawa and similar cities, claims that 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.004 E-mail address: nathaniel.lewis@dal.ca 1 In this paper, the term ‘gay’ refers broadly to communities of gay men and lesbians, but is also intended to reflect the self-identification of the participants whose stories inform the empirical evidence in this paper. The use of ‘gay’ also reflects the historic framing of gay villages as entrepreneurial and territorial spaces associated largely with gay men (Castells, 1983). Due to historic, gendered income and power inequalities, lesbians have often organized in more diffuse, informal ways that extend beyond the confines of the village (Adler and Brenner, 1992; Rothenberg, 1995). This does not, however, dismiss the potential relevance of gay villages to lesbian communities. Geoforum xxx (2013) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Please cite this article in press as: Lewis, N.M. Ottawa’s Le/The Village: Creating a ‘gaybourhood’ amidst the death of the village. Geoforum (2013), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.004