(Un)holy Toledo: Intersectionality, Interdependence, and Neighborhood (Trans)formation in Toledo, Ohio

Abstract

Research on large metropolitan areas dominates understandings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) urban lives. Investigating cities further down the urban hierarchy can nuance accounting of LGBT and queer place-making, neighborhood formation, and cultural politics. Comparative analysis can further illuminate the local foundations of place-based logics. Through the conceptual lenses of intersectionality and interdependence, this article looks at the appropriation and formation of Toledo's LGBT neighborhood, the Old West End, and its relation to another central-city neighborhood, Vistula; the development of the local LGBT and queer community more broadly; and the interrelation of these gay and queer neighborhoods with other social sites and spaces. This qualitative study involving oral histories and archival research demonstrates that community organizing and neighborhood (trans)formation depend on a host of socio-spatial conditions. Although LGBT neighborhood transformation is often conflated with gentrification, my findings suggest that intersectionality and interdependence play a large role in LGBT neighborhood transformation. The critical quality for development of the neighborhoods I investigated was an emerging arena for local lesbian and gay cultural politics, which relied heavily on an intersectionality and interdependence between and among religion, sexuality, and class.

对大都会地区进行的研究, 主宰了我们对于男女同性恋、双性恋以及跨性别 (LGBT) 城市生活的理解。向下探究位于城市位阶下层的城市, 则可细緻化我们对于 LGBT 与酷儿地方打造、邻里形塑以及文化政治的理解。比较分析能够进一步描绘地方逻辑的在地基础。本文透过相互交织性与相互依存的概念视角, 检视西班牙托雷多中, LGBT 邻里 “老西区” 的挪用与形成, 及其与另一座市中心邻里 “维斯杜拉” 的关联性; 在地 LGBT 与酷儿社群更广义的发展; 以及这些同性恋与酷儿社群和其他社会场域及空间的相互关係。此一包含口述历史与档案研究的质性研究, 证实了社群组织与邻里的形成 (及变迁) 取决于一系列的社会—空间条件。儘管 LGBT 邻里的变化经常被等同于缙绅化, 我的研究发现则主张, 相互交织性与相互依存性在 LGBT 邻里的变迁中起了重大的作用。我所探访的邻里发展的关键特性, 正浮现成为在地男女同性恋者的文化政治场遇, 而此一文化政治, 大量依赖宗教、性与阶级之间和之中的相互交织性与相互依存性。

La investigación que se realiza sobre grandes áreas metropolitanas concede notable importancia al tema de las vidas urbanas de lesbianas, gays, bisexuales y transexuales (LGBT). Al investigar en las ciudades de arriba abajo en la jerarquía urbana es posible establecer conexiones de LGBT con la aparición de lugares raros, formación de vecindarios y políticas culturales. El análisis comparativo puede ayudar a iluminar los fundamentos locales de la lógica basada en lugar. A través de los lentes conceptuales de la inteseccionalidad y la inderdependencia, este artículo concentró sus observaciones sobre la siguientes cosas: la apropiación y formación del vecindario LGBT de Toledo, el antiguo West End, y su relación con el Vístula, otro barrio del centro urbano; el desarrollo de la LGBT local y de la comunidad homosexual en términos más generales; y la interrelación entre estos vecindarios gay y homosexuales con otros sitios y espacios sociales. El estudio cualitativo, que involucra historias orales e investigación de archivos, demuestra que el proceso de organizar comunidad y la (trans)formación de un vecindario depende de una multitud de condiciones socio-espaciales. Aunque la transformación de un vecindario LGBT a menudo se asocia con aburguesamiento, mis descubrimientos sugieren que la interseccionalidad y la interdependencia juegan un papel importante en la transformación de un barrio LGBT. La calidad crítica para el desarrollo de los barrios que investigué era un escenario emergente de las políticas culturales locales de lesbianas y gays, que se apoyaba fuertemente en la interseccionalidad e interdependencia entre religión, sexualidad y clase.

Key Words:

• interdependence
• intersectionality
• neighborhood transformation
• religion
• sexuality

关键词:

• 相互依存性
• 相互交织性
• 邻里变迁
• 信仰
• 性

Palabras clave:

• interdependencia
• interseccionalidad
• transformación de vecindarios
• religión
• sexualidad

Research on urban gay neighborhoods lacks a strong emphasis on intersectionality and interdependence of individuals—and individuals working within and across groups—constructing those places. Through a case study of early neighborhood transformation in Toledo, a medium-sized city in the U.S. Midwest, this article investigates socio-spatial interconnectivity through the conceptual lens of intersectionality and interdependence. Although social categories intersect in myriad permutations, my primary interest settles on the intersections of sexuality with class and religion, because, as McCall (2005) noted, “it becomes necessary to limit other dimensions of the analysis … for the sake of comprehension” (1786). Furthermore, the intersection of these social categories has received far less attention in intersectionality research (M. Brown 2011). By coupling intersectionality with interdependence (J. Smith, Clark, and Yusoff 2007; G. Brown 2009), I further focus on interactions whereby groups and individuals, seemingly at odds, come together in meaningful ways, most notably in mutual cooperation to resist oppression and inequality and in how these relationships construct space and place.

Because urban gay neighborhoods have long been conflated with gentrification, this article also addresses interrelated gaps in the gentrification and sexualities literatures. Similar to gentrification scholars’ calls for looking at cities “down the urban hierarchy,” scholars of sexualities have called for investigations of cities outside the core of major metropolises in the Global North to provide broader perspective on the local specificities of processes of neighborhood formation (G. Brown 2008, 2009). This article expands the temporal and spatial dimensions (D. P. Smith 2002; Phillips 2004; Dutton 2005) of gentrification and sexuality research by exploring neighborhood transformation in Toledo's central city from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. In addition to its economistic viewpoints, the literature on gentrification provides rich accounts of the social dynamics of neighborhood transformation.

Geographies of Gentrification and Neighborhood Transformation

This article focuses on gentrification from the perspective of Warde's “collective action” as differentiated from the largely economic perspectives on production and consumption, which are most commonly associated with the work of N. Smith (1986, 1996) and Ley (1986, 1994). Others have sought to bridge the production and consumption divide (Galster 2001), and still others have attended to the social geographies of gentrification (Butler and Robson 2001; Butler 2007). The work of Caulfield (1989) and Butler and Robson (2001) illustrates that the processes of gentrification are nearly as diverse as the cities that experience it. Butler and Robson's (2001) comparison of three London neighborhoods, in particular, exemplifies significant differences among locales of gentrification as well as gentrifiers’ socioeconomic backgrounds. Noting this diversity of gentrification, Lees (2000) has argued for a quasi-discipline devoted to the geography of gentrification, much of which focuses on supergentrification in global or world cities. Consequently, the study of gentrification and its gentrifiers in cities further down the urban hierarchy or at other points in time is likely to be neglected in this new geography of gentrification.

Likewise, research on the largest cities of the global north dominates sexuality research, in which scholars have mapped various gay enclaves, paying close attention to the ways in which sexual minorities appropriate, create, or identify with their neighborhoods. Geographers and other scholars of sexuality continue to explore the ways in which sexuality organizes urban space, and many explicitly address the role of sexuality in processes of gentrification. Initially, the work by Levine (1979) or Castells and Murphy (1982) sought to locate and investigate the underpinnings of concentrations of gay men in certain urban neighborhoods. Additionally, Knopp (1997; see also Lauria and Knopp 1985) has further investigated the role gay men play in urban neighborhoods. While contributing to gentrification, this territorialization provided an important base for political, cultural, economic, and social formation. Researchers have paid less attention to lesbians’ engagement with urban space, more or less conceding to Castells’ presupposition that lesbians are more private or home-centered and, therefore, less involved in processes of gentrification (Castells and Murphy 1982). Rothenberg's (1995) study of Park Slope illustrates lesbians’ involvement in gentrification and how the neighborhood provides an important site for social formation and subsequent visibility. In West Hollywood, Forest (1995) investigated how gay men used media to further a strategy based on an “ethnicity model” to cohere a place-based gay image. Nash (2005) identified a similar minority strategy employed to conceptualize gay and lesbian identity, which activists linked politically and symbolically to Toronto's gay ghetto.

Few studies have investigated wider modes of interdependence and intersectionality in the formation of urban neighborhoods. The lack of intersectionality reflected in most studies would indicate that sexual minorities live in discrete nodes and only rarely interact or intersect with other social categories, although Podmore (2006) suggested that gay and lesbian neighborhoods are more dynamic or fluid and less isolated from other communities than other neighborhoods. This is especially so in light of current shifts in gay and lesbian visibility and status (G. Brown 2004), tenuous as these shifts might be.

Gorman-Murray and Waitt (2009) illustrated one of the shifts in the character of queer neighborhoods, that of the “queer-friendly neighborhood.” Most important, they analyzed the ways in which social cohesion between heterosexual and same-sex attracted persons was fostered and sustained. Social cohesion is not limited to queer-friendly neighborhoods (Butler 2007), but social cohesion in queer-friendly neighborhoods indicates little, if any, social conflict. Focusing on issues of homonormative modes of consumption in gay neighborhoods, G. Brown (2009) linked the economic and social lives of gay men and lesbians while illustrating the levels of interdependence between and among gay men, lesbians, and others.

These studies illustrate an emergence of research on interdependence and intersectionality, and they further suggest the importance of such inquiry to understanding the significance of collective action in shaping neighborhood spaces. The dominant foci on queer consumption and domesticity, however, occlude the role that various institutions, especially religious institutions, play in the formation of queer neighborhoods. Earlier research by Paris and Anderson (2001) provides an exception through their case study of a Washington, DC, neighborhood. Although they attended to the intersections of religion, sexuality, and neighborhood, they conclude that the presence of a Metropolitan Community Church, largely composed of sexual minorities, threatens to negatively impact the neighborhood at large. Although they acknowledge the importance of a spiritual space for those whom most mainstream religions have marginalized, ultimately their concern is how this congregation induces gentrification. Consequently, the authors render the neighborhood as not socially cohesive, not queer friendly. Because the authors obfuscate homophobia, one assumes perhaps that it is the queers who are unfriendly. At any rate, the study also illustrates indirectly the difficulty of decoupling marginal gentrifiers, or first-phase gentrifiers with moderate incomes (Rose 1984; Caulfield 1989), from processes of gentrification (Smith 1987), especially when marginal groups compete against each other for space. Although not named outright, intersectionality weaves throughout these examples of neighborhood transformation. The works suggest scholars must be more attuned to the ways individuals and groups, inhabiting differing social categories, intersect and how this constructs neighborhoods. Locating modes of interdependence, furthermore, can help explicate how some individuals and groups (trans)form neighborhoods through mutual cooperation, even in the face of opposition or tensions.

Intersectionality and Interdependence: Sexuality, Religion, and Class

In this section, I bring together two concepts, intersectionality and interdependence, to examine how individuals and groups claiming various identities cooperate meaningfully at the neighborhood scale. Geographers and other social scientists attend to the intricacies of various modes of interconnectivity, but geographers have focused less on intersectionality (Valentine 2007) and interdependence (J. Smith, Clark, and Yusoff 2007). Feminist scholars first deployed both terms, the former originating in critical race studies with a focus on the complexities of gender and race (Crenshaw 1991). The latter emanated from psychological development theories, focusing on differences between women and men in relation to ethics, morality, and care (Gilligan [1982] 2003).

Building on Crenshaw's initial work, McCall (2005) outlines three frameworks for investigating intersectionality: anticategorical, intracategorical, and intercategorical. An “interest in relationships among groups underlies” (McCall 2005, 1785) all three approaches. All three approaches also recognize that categories are fluid, not fixed. Intercategorical “begins with the observation that there are relationships of inequality among already constituted social groups” (McCall 2005, 1784–85) and “focuses on the complexity of relationships among social groups within and across analytical categories” (1786). To concentrate on the complexities of intercategorical intersections, this framework is less concerned with the dynamics within a single group but nonetheless acknowledges the relationship between individual and social groups insofar as it requires classifying individuals into analytic categories. The intercategorical approach to intersectionality attends to the simultaneity of advantage and disadvantage. As such, this perspective can address Valentine's (2007) concern that researchers have not fully investigated intersectionality in relation to “how privileged or powerful identities are ‘done’ and ‘undone’ ” (14).

Geographers have only recently begun to employ theories of intersectionality (Valentine 2007; Valentine and Waite 2011). Like most other scholars researching intersectionality, they have relied on the intracategorical perspectives, examining ways in which social identities and categories intersect on the body and how individuals produce their lived experiences or “identities of the self” (Fernandes 1997, 309). In a recent special issue of Sexualities, geographers and other scholars of sexualities examined the intersections of sexuality and class (Taylor 2011) while acknowledging the relative neglect of such intersections. S. Jackson (2011) highlighted the need for research on sexuality and class to explore classed identities among sexual minorities and how heterosexuality intersects with class and (uneven) class privilege. Theorizing intersectionality contributes to understanding the processes through which social categories are produced, although it “has paid scant attention to the significance of space in processes of subject formation” (Valentine 2007, 14). That attention, moreover, has focused on the sites in which intersecting subjectivity is lived or experienced by the individual and less on how intersecting identities and categories construct space—and even less on how groups and individuals representing different social categories and subjectivities intersect to construct space. In one recent exception, Binnie and Skeggs (2004) examined how consumption patterns in Manchester's gay commercial scene exclude on the basis of class.

Recently, geographers have explored the intersection of sexuality and religion, primarily in what McCall (2005) might call specific points of intersection within a single group—emphasizing individuals’ religious and spiritual practices. For example, Vanderbeck and colleagues (2011) focused on lesbian and gay Anglicans’ activism over their status within their religion, and Rouhani (2007) has looked at queer Muslim religious activism. Queer Spiritual Spaces (Browne, Munt, and Yip 2010) showcases the ways in which LGBT and queer individuals navigate and negotiate the shifting contours of diverse religions, emphasizing aspects of faith and spirituality more so than direct activism.

Although social scientists have given considerable attention to the Christian Right in the United States and its engagements with the state (Sharp 1999; Fetner 2008), Sziarto (2008) pointed out that scholars have paid less attention to more progressive religious organizations and that they often share “progressive stances on issues of gender, sexuality, and economic justice” (410). She examines how religion and associated modes of spirituality intersect and lend legitimacy to labor movements. Conversely, Valentine and Waite (2011) investigated how competing interests within the “equality strands” are managed and negotiated, namely, between religion and sexuality, including heterosexuality. Importantly, their research demonstrates how individuals from potentially competing groups intersect and navigate everyday spaces to avoid conflict.

Valentine and Waite (2011) examined “banal encounters,” but interdependence offers a lens through which to explore further the ways in which already-constituted social groups, and individuals constituting such groups, interact and intersect. Interdependence involves interactions that rely on mutual care, going beyond everyday friendliness. The term originated in feminist psychological scholarship to identify the “growing comprehension of the dynamic of social interactions” (Gilligan [1982] 2003, 74), namely, with concerns about care, ethics, and morality. As Gilligan ([1982] 2003) stated, “This ethics, which reflects a cumulative knowledge of human relationships, evolves around a central insight, that self and other are interdependent” (74). This framing is particularly apt for investigations of religion and sexuality, as many religious institutions continue to grapple with ethics of caring for sexual minorities and aspects of morality therein (Moon 2004).

Lately, some geographers have deployed the term interdependence as a way of thinking about social, cultural, and ecological interactions (J. Smith, Clark, and Yusoff 2007). G. Brown (2009) used the term to examine gay men's alternative economic practices and performances in relation to their spaces of consumption and domesticity. “In mobilizing the term ‘interdependence,’ ” he furthers an understanding of “unexpected social relationships” and interconnections “that engender hope and nurturing” (G. Brown 2009, 1500). Although Blokland (2003) evokes the term in relation to social interactions at the scale of the neighborhood, her examples limit interdependence to quotidian interactions between and among neighbors, which does not convey the high level of mutual care demonstrated in Gilligan's conceptualization of interdependence.

Interdependence differs from other terminology researchers use to harness various forms of social and spatial interconnectivity, such as social/cultural cohesion, social mixing, and social preservation. Governmental agencies in the developed world have promoted social mixing with a goal of social cohesion particularly among differing income groups in a neighborhood, thereby theoretically ameliorating so-called ills associated with concentrated poverty (Forrest and Kearns 1999; Lees 2008). Many scholars have critiqued social mixing as merely state-sanctioned gentrification (Lees 2008). Through her empirical research on social mixing, Rose (2004) offers ambiguous findings, echoing Butler and Robson's (2001) findings that social mixing does not inevitably result in integration or even significant interaction. Butler and Lees (2006) suggested that actual social mixing might be more pronounced among early, or pioneer, gentrifiers, whereas Rose provided a typology of gentrifiers’ (un)willingness to socially mix: “the ignorant/indifferents,” the “Nimbies,” the “tolerants,” and the “egalitarians” (Rose 2004). The latter two share a propinquity to Brown-Saracino's (2009) conceptualization of social preservationists. Brown-Saracino does not ignore the destructive forces of gentrification; instead, she analyzes the lived experience of both old and new residents as they seek to preserve a perceived authenticity threatened by neighborhood transformation.

Even when social mixing induces social cohesion, the result seems little more than superficial social interaction. Social cohesion is measured by a level of harmonious social relations (Rose 2004), ostensibly without any significant struggle. By coupling intersectionality and interdependence I seek to harness a mode of deeper interconnectivity, at the center of which individuals from different social groups interact and struggle together to resist modes of oppression.

With its attention to care and aide, interdependence provides a dynamic to demonstrate ways that intergroup intersectionality does not necessarily instantiate contention or discord but can potentially evince the ways that ostensibly competing groups, such as those based around religion or sexuality, can work together in cooperation and consideration of each other's welfare. This coupling, moreover, can help with more fully understanding the social and cultural dimensions of gentrification and neighborhood (trans)formation. Reciprocally, attending to the scale of the neighborhood, and its various constructions and interconnectivities, can further understanding of intersectionality and interdependence.

Intersectionality and Interdependence Through Oral Histories and Archival Research

This article explores points of intersection in two central city neighborhoods in Toledo, Ohio, from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s (with most focus on the late 1960s and early 1970s). Considerable change occurred in the 1960s, locally and nationally, in regard to issues surrounding sexuality. The events at the Stonewall Bar in New York City in 1969—as well as gay liberation in other large metropolises—have dominated research on LGBT and queer cultural politics. By 1964, moreover, Glass (1964) had first documented the effects of gentrification in London. By excavating Toledo's LGBT and queer history before 1969, my research predates Stonewall and its attendant activism while also showcasing the advent of gentrification in a medium-sized, Midwestern city.

Toledo's deindustrialization arguably began in the late 1960s (Porter 1987). With a population today of about 280,000, and three times that number in its metropolitan area, the city's population peaked at 384,000 in 1970. The context of a medium-sized, deindustrializing, Midwestern city is important because cities lower on the urban hierarchy are often neglected by both urban and sexualities geographies.

As a regional city, Toledo offers a diverse population while being small enough to expect significant modes of intercategorical intersectionality. This contrasts much of the literature on LGBT and queer communities in larger metropolises, which suggests that cultural politics and place-making are organized around much more discrete social categories (Forest 1995). A high rate of religious adherence, attendance, and diversity, furthermore, mark Toledo's religious landscape. Drawing on data from 2000, Warf and Winsberg's (2008) mapping illustrates this religious diversity at the county level. Although the data are recent, they nonetheless reflect the historic religious diversity as noted in the Old West End and Vistula's built landscape, dominated by Catholic and Greek Orthodox cathedrals, the towering steeples of numerous Protestant churches, as well as synagogues and a mosque.

This research originates from a larger ethnography I conducted in Toledo, Ohio, primarily from 2007 to 2009, wherein I investigated queer cultural politics. Much of my research focused on a wide variety of modes of intersectionality and interdependence, historically and contemporaneously, of which sexuality, religion, and class was one permutation. For this article, I used a total of twenty oral/life histories, none of which took less than three hours and some of which also required several follow-up conversations. I draw on most of the oral histories but specifically cite those of participants who were most influential in the nexus between religion and cultural–political organizing, involved in the subsequent neighborhood transformation and knowledgeable of other key actors. Participants included, all self-identified, men (twelve) and women (eight); gay (nine), lesbian (six), straight (four), and bisexual (one); white (sixteen), black (two), and Latino (two); and Catholic (seven), Protestant (five), Wiccan (one), and secular (eight). Sexual and religious identities, however, were not static over time. All respondents identified as middle-class, which is not uncommon in the United States (Weston 2004), even though many worked or had worked in manufacturing. To ascertain class background further, I asked respondents their fathers’ occupations. Almost all reported fathers who worked in agriculture or manufacturing. Toledo has a large share of blue-collar workers, but many of those have historically made middle-class incomes due to the city's rich history of organized labor.

Geographers have not widely engaged in oral histories, as data collection or a methodology (Riley and Harvey 2007; P. Jackson and Russell 2010). Yet, other disciplines uphold oral histories as a hallmark in accessing marginalized voices. Life histories offer personal biographies as well as memories of events, places, and people through narratives of identity. Oral history is particularly apt for my research focus because it allowed me to ask participants about general lived experiences as well as involvement in specific, past events and organizations. In collecting oral histories, I analyzed the content and the style of the narratives: what was said and how it was said (P. Jackson and Russell 2010). I, moreover, conducted the interviews in an open-ended fashion, directing the topic but allowing respondents to recall at their own pace while also allowing digression. When appropriate or necessary, I conducted oral history interviews with couples. Although unconventional in oral history methods, this allowed respondents to jog each other's memories, provide details, and correct or debate particularities. As I recruited most participants through snowball sampling, I gained backstory that allowed me to direct my otherwise semistructured interviews toward issues of coalition building across intersections of sexuality, religion, and class, as well as gender and race.

The collected oral histories also function as an “archival practice” (Shopes 2011, 453) or an “artifact-centered interview” (Riley and Harvey 2007, 349). For my research, I simultaneously created a material archive—newsletters, photographs, and other ephemera—during or after the oral history interview. Because Toledo does not have an institution dedicated to LGBT and queer archives, my collection helped further inform, analyze, and triangulate my research.

Neighborhood Transformation in a Medium-Sized City

I divide my findings into three significant nodes of intersection beginning around the mid-1950s until approximately the late 1970s. The first looks at the early character of the Old West End and the social life of a small group of middle-class gay white men who lived there. Their intersections with working-class youth prompted an early stage of sexual politics. Through the interrelationship of two central city neighborhoods, the second node examines local cultural politics premised on the intersections of sexuality, class, and religion. The third node investigates this intersectionality and interdependence that gave rise to a number of affirming congregations in the Old West End, increasing gay and lesbian visibility and augmenting local cultural politics.

Early Construction of an Urban Gay Neighborhood

The earliest record of a gay social life in the Toledo neighborhoods that I found dates to the late 1940s, but this sociality flourished through the 1950s and 1960s. By sharing photos and stories of his late employer from that time, one respondent, Tim, provided a vivid account of a group of gay male friends, acquaintances, and colleagues whose social life—clandestine yet vibrant—centered in their homes in the Old West End. This coterie of gay men lived in the neighborhood at a time most scholars would agree predates gentrification. Yet, these men occupied the neighborhood during a time of demographic transition.

This transition mirrored that of many central city neighborhoods in the United States. Starting in the 1880s, some of the wealthiest residents in the city built and occupied mansions in the Old West End. As one goes from south to the north, the neighborhood's architecture changes according to the particular style en vogue at a given time: Queen Anne gives way to neoclassical and neocolonial, which give way to arts and crafts. By the mid-twentieth century, many of the original, wealthy residents (and their immediate descendants) either aged out or partook in suburbanization, moving to the most elite areas of the city and region. By the 1960s, middle-class residents, including both white and black families and individuals, replaced those who had left according to U.S. Census data (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). High vacancy rates, however, characterized much of the neighborhood, especially its northern section, through much of the 1960s and 1970s, creating a surplus of affordable mansions, houses, and apartments.

Beginning in the 1950s, many of the gay men in this coterie worked as interior decorators, but others joined them, notably professors and small-time rentiers, who had either inherited wealth or owned nearby properties. Less affluent gay men also rented carriage houses and apartments in the neighborhood. These men socialized with each other primarily in their respective homes. Interior decorating, as a profession of gay men, often represents a stereotype. But, according to Tim, the interior decorators benefited, almost paradoxically, from this stereotype, as they could enjoy a certain level of “outness.” He explained, “Many clients felt that a gay interior decorator offered a sort of cachet.” They could reveal a certain desexualized aspect of their identities, but it was more or less rhetorical so that particular clients could consume this perceived cachet. The decorators served the wealthiest clientele in the area, most of whom no longer lived in the Old West End. Hence, their residences in the Old West End shielded them from their clients, thereby helping to separate personal lives from professional lives. Their homosexuality intersected with and limited the privilege associated with other aspects of their identities: that is, male, white, and middle-class. This limitation was substantive in that the cultural spaces of the gay men were not the cultural spaces of their clients, pointing toward the spatiality of intersectionality. This spatialized intersection between the gay men and their heterosexual clients was contained to the spaces of their work. As the gay men understood their social lives outside of work must remain more or less clandestine, they almost exclusively situated their social and sexual lives within the Old West End.

A few of the decorators as well as other gay men owned a small number of properties in the Old West End. The buildings included carriage houses, small apartment buildings, and mansions converted to apartments. Although this conforms to Knopp's (1997) insight that gay men's involvement with real estate is often to obtain social and economic security, the real estate ventures of the gay residents of the Old West End in the 1960s were on a much smaller scale. Involvement in real estate lends financial security to the individual rentiers; it also generated affordable living spaces, without the fear of homophobia, for other, less wealthy gay men, as well as a smaller number of lesbians. As one lesbian respondent noted, “There weren't a whole lot of [housing] options for gays or lesbians, especially if you had a partner—or even nonmarried heterosexuals” (Interview G). Gays and lesbians who had lived in the Old West End expressed the importance of these apartments as safe havens in addition to the added benefit of conviviality among other sexual minorities. This exemplifies a form of interdependence at the neighborhood scale, both economic and social, wherein gays across class categories depended on one another for safe living space and livelihood.

In addition to the small number of gay-owned properties, by the mid-1960s two properties in the Old West End, owned by heterosexuals, emerged as a haven for both gay men and lesbians. Colloquially and campily known as Faggot Terrace and Fairy Tower, these buildings surfaced among nearly all respondents’ narratives either as a place of residence or a place of socializing. For instance, one gay male told me about attending his lesbian friend's party:

It was the 1960s, late 60s, 1967, I think. My friend, …, she and I were both students at the university and involved in gay issues. She threw a party at Fairy Tower, on Fulton, and invited me and my partner, … I already knew gay people, but I met so many more [gay men and lesbians] there that night. We continued to hang out there, and a couple of years later, we decided to move to the Old West End—one place you could fit into. … The rent wasn't bad. And, our neighbors on the East Side [a low-rent, working class neighborhood], it didn't take them long to figure out, two single men living together on Fourth Street, that we were gay.

Another common trajectory that led gays and lesbians to the Old West End was indirectly through the attraction of Vistula's inexpensive rents. As one lesbian respondent explained:

I moved to Toledo [from a rural city in northwest Ohio] with no job, no education, and no car. Where was I going to live? [Vistula] was cheap, and I could walk to work [after having secured a job]. (Interview F)

Through word of mouth, she learned of the Old West End, namely, of Fairy Terrace, and decided “to move in with the boys,” referring to the high number of gay men living in those apartment buildings relatively hassle-free. Through word-of-mouth and direct interaction with those already living in the Old West End, the aforementioned coterie of gay men and other small nodes of gay residences quickly grew to a rather large and visible concentration of gays and lesbians that expanded to include other sexual minorities. Rothenberg (1995) identified this type of trajectory as “and she told two friends” (180). Gay and lesbian social networks, and not commercial space (Podmore 2006), therefore, constituted the community in the Old West End. The buildings offered affordable housing but, more important, the straight owner lived out of state, thereby reducing the scrutiny many respondents experienced elsewhere.

This section illustrates how some decorators laid the foundation for subsequent marginal gentrifiers (Rose 1984; Caulfield 1989), of moderate income, thus aiding the transformation of the neighborhood. Given the architectural diversity of the neighborhood, many of the decorators chose to live in the Old West End for aesthetic purposes. Caulfield (1989) complicates the role that aesthetics plays in gentrification, suggesting that in addition to perceived value of historic architecture, marginal gentrifiers also seek to fulfill an entanglement of needs and desires. For the interior decorators, the structure of their employment (Rose 1984) necessitated a socio-spatial distance between them and their clients. The Old West End best met their aesthetic, social, and spatial needs and desires.

Those who dwelled in the decorators’ apartments and carriage houses did not necessarily come to the neighborhood for the quality of its built environment—at least not as explicitly stated among respondents. Instead, they came for affordability, safety, and conviviality. Although the interior decorators and the later marginal gentrifiers relied on economic interdependence, their residential pattern reflects a form of social differentiation or class constitution (N. Smith 1986; Caulfield 1989), with most of the decorators living in mansions and the moderate-income gay men and lesbians living in apartments and carriage houses.

Removing marginal gentrifiers, as the work of N. Smith has done, from studies of gentrification erases the ways in which interdependence and intersectionality shape neighborhoods and the ones who construct those neighborhoods. McCall's intercategorical approach to intersectionality examines the simultaneity of advantage and disadvantage, as it also grapples with various complexities of identities such as class and sexuality. This core aspect yields a deeper understanding of neighborhood transformation, gentrifiers, and intersecting axes of disadvantage and advantage. In addition to interdependence, the early transformation of the Old West from an elite, wealthy enclave to a gay neighborhood illustrates this simultaneity of disadvantage and advantage. Advantage and disadvantage predicated these early residents’ desires and needs—or their very impetuses for moving to the neighborhood, whether for aesthetics, conviviality, safety, affordability, or distance. These individuals’ choices set the basis for what would later become more collective action.

As Butler and Robson (2001) argued, researchers must chart the various social interactions in neighborhoods not just through the lens of gentrification but through broader approaches to understanding socio-spatial dynamics. By the late 1960s, the Old West End had seen a small number of gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians move into a handful of buildings in the neighborhood. These marginal gentrifiers occupied only roughly connected nodes with a relatively low level of visibility in a neighborhood dominated by heterosexual families. Earlier gentrification research focused on marginal gentrifiers to understand the cultural and social underpinnings of neighborhood development, which I further investigate in the next section through the deepening modes of intersection and interdependence.

Class, Sexuality, and Religion: Intersections Within and Between Neighborhoods

The most successful decorators in this coterie of gay men located their businesses in the Uptown District, a neighborhood nestled between the Old West End and the downtown. Northeast of Uptown lies Vistula, Toledo's oldest neighborhood. With a landscape of tightly intermixed row houses, commercial buildings, and factories, the neighborhood was the locus of working-class struggles and the site of one of the three most important strikes for organized labor (Korth and Beegle 1988). Among the many places of worship in the neighborhood, five Methodist churches, struggling with varying levels of financial difficulty and low attendance, functioned under the same clerical leadership. In 1962 a minister, Chester, with his wife, Donna, moved to Vistula to oversee these churches. ¹ Both identified as white, middle class, and heterosexual. Originally from northwest Ohio, Chester had been involved in the civil rights movement elsewhere. He returned with the mission of serving the growing poverty, racial tensions, and labor issues in Vistula.

From 1965 to 1968, Chester worked with two other pastors in these five congregations. Simon, ² a white, heterosexual pastor, worked with teenagers, ministering to youth needs. As Chester remembered,

Many of these youths faced numerous problems and obstacles. … Some were involved in street gangs … and others were even homeless.

Dealing with pressures from home and on the streets, one gay teenage boy came out to Simon. Simon was supportive of the youth, who then introduced Simon to other gay youth, some of whom had been homeless.

Simon, moreover, met some of the gay interior decorators from the Old West End, who operated businesses in Uptown. He learned that many of these decorators housed or provided employment for some of the young gay men—especially those who had found themselves homeless or in trouble with the law due to police entrapment of homosexuals. These decorators often provided jobs in their stores and shelter in the floors above to poor, working-class gay boys and young men. This illustrates intersectionality, most notably of interclass contact but also intergenerational contact. Furthermore, this interaction evinces a mode of interdependence. At its core, the decorators attempted to provide economic opportunity and, in return, they received the benefits of labor. According to respondents, the decorators intended this setup to only be temporary. The interior decorators additionally sought long-term solutions, namely, through the help of the Methodist youth minister, thus demonstrating nurture and care, defining characteristics of interdependence (Gilligan [1982] 2003).

This interaction also provides a particularly spatial intersection. The 1960s commercial gay scene centered on the downtown and Uptown, proximate to where the decorators also operated their shops. Many of the working-class gay youth lived in Vistula, just north of the downtown, and many of the decorators lived in the Old West End, just west. Adams Street, or decorators’ row, represented a conduit where the twain met—a literal node of intersection of sexuality, class, and religion.

Meanwhile, Chester and Donna had befriended the churches’ organist, a gay man who came out to them. Through this interaction, Chester and Donna “developed a more intimate understanding of the issues facing homosexuals” as the organist confided in them. Chester, simultaneously, supported and encouraged Simon's work with teenagers and was becoming especially devoted to issues surrounding homosexuality and sexuality more generally, taking “seriously the Methodist doctrine that sex and sexuality should be nurtured and celebrated.” In 1967, after two years as youth pastor, Simon decided “to move on, having become burned out with the demands of working with street kids.”

Some of the interior decorators from the Old West End attended Simon's farewell worship service. Here, Chester made the acquaintance of one of the decorators, Henry, who had worked closely with Simon on gay youth issues. According to Chester, Henry “provided details about the gay youth and police entrapment of homosexuals.” Henry and other decorators had been helping a number of “people arrested on gay charges.” As one of the initial organizers of the inchoate local chapter of a national homophile organization, the Mattachine Society, Henry lamented their lack of meeting space.

By 1967, three of the original five churches, after disbanding their congregations, had become meeting and social spaces for various community and religious organizations. After having the organist vet the Mattachine Society, Chester continued more detailed meetings with Henry. Soon after, he dedicated meeting and community space to them in one of his churches. The group used the space for political organizing as well as a community space, activities that also welcomed LGBT youth.

During this time, activists established gay and lesbian rights organizations—called Personal Rights Organizations (PROs)—across Ohio's university campuses. Working with a lesbian University of Toledo student activist, the Toledo Mattachine Society, based on the campus, quickly merged its affiliation with PRO to broaden their mission and to include lesbian activists and leaders. The reinvented group elected the student activist, a lesbian, as its first president.

Chester continued to work with PRO and, according to him, “I was asked to be their ‘spiritual advisor,’ which didn't mean anything … umm … but, I mean, I guess, I guess that's really something.” For him, the intersection of religion and sexuality destabilizes his identity as a clergyman—an aspect of intersectionality often obscured as little attention is given in the scholarly literature to relatively more privileged identities such as the clergy (Valentine 2007). During his interview, Chester stated that his activism was simply a calling from God and connected to his faith, but direct proselytizing became secondary to his role as activist. After some hesitation, he shifted to discuss his direct activism and participation in the group: helping with PRO's annual fundraising balls; establishing its legal and tax designation as a nonprofit; mediating between the local police chief and PRO to stop entrapment of gay men; working with the local American Civil Liberties Union, National Organization for Women, and Democratic congressman for gay and lesbian rights; and successfully working to repeal Ohio's antisodomy legislation in 1974.

Interdependence implies mutuality, care, sharing, ethics, and morality (Gilligan [1982] 2003). This view of nurture fits well within much of Christian theology. As Moon (2004) pointed out in her ethnography of two Methodist congregations and their views of sexuality, the ministers and congregants had a tenuous relationship with explicit politics and a reluctance to participate in controversial matters—instead preferring to depoliticize what would be typically held as political. In contrast, Chester, and to some extent his fellow ministers, saw direct political activism as a valid outreach of their ministerial duties. Chester's work with PRO reveals dedication and commitment to equality and social justice.

Chester and Donna displayed a level of confidence and pride in their work with gays and lesbians before and with PRO. Although not overtly stated, they shared perhaps a disappointment when asked if and how many gays and lesbians attended church, stating, “Oh, a few would come now and then.” But they also acknowledged that the acceptance within the congregations was uneven. This inspired their activism within the Methodist church. In an essay, Chester takes up his call to challenge the church rather than conform to its “condemnatory attitude toward homosexuality, ostensibly firmly grounded in the Bible” (Chambers 1972). Chester continued to press for changes in the Methodist church at the local, statewide, and national scales, culminating in a direct engagement with and challenge to the church's national general conferences (Chambers 1980). Intercategorical intersectionality recognizes how individual, intracategorical identities link to broader social groups and, in turn, to levels of disadvantage or advantage. Identities of advantage—heterosexual, white, clergy, and male—mark Chester individually. This intersectionality positions Chester within respective groups, allowing him to scale jump with relative ease to engage social groups, namely, the various scales of the Methodist church, while acting as a representative on behalf of homosexuals as a broadly defined social category.

Whereas Chester questioned his importance as “spiritual advisor,” gay and lesbian respondents unreservedly exclaimed the importance of a “man of the cloth” (Interview C) in their midst. Regarding the aforementioned merger of the Mattachine Society and PRO, the student leader of the organization at the time, a white, gay man, explained:

Now I am an agnostic/Buddhist, but back then I was having some serious issues with organized religion but also with my faith, my relationship with God … I was quite excited when PRO started meeting [at the Methodist church].

In his essay, Chester (1972) recognized the difficulty many gay men and lesbians encountered with religion:

[C]onversations between homosexuals and ministers … often follow a pattern: beginning with a condemnation of “straight” society in general and the church in particular, the homosexual moves rather quickly to issues such as heaven, hell, and the judgment of God. For those brought up in a church environment, this situation is especially crippling.

Chester described sexual minorities’ views of societal and religious conventions at the time. Chester's religious acceptance informed gay men and lesbians’ cultural–political organizing; however, through their activism and everyday lives, they also reconciled their sexuality and religion independent of Chester or the Methodist church. In my archive containing PRO's early monthly newsletters, members frequently called for ecumenical exchange by contributing articles, calling for special meetings, and hosting speakers of various faiths and spiritual practices.

The desire to have ecumenical dialogue and the differing individual philosophies exemplify another type of religious intersectionality: denominational intersections. Some members did attend Chester's church, but others worshipped at the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and Unitarian Church in Detroit, as these had not yet come to fruition in Toledo. Childhood experiences, tradition, and personal expression informed respondents’ religious affiliations. Of the MCC, for example, one respondent stated, “I didn't mind it, but my partner thought it was too much like a Baptist church.” Although many had struggled with difficult experiences in their faith communities, it did not entirely “cripple” them, nor did they categorically disdain religion.

PRO considered its primary purpose “to build community,” which included the political and religious activism explained earlier, as well as socializing. To this end, PRO organized weekly coffee socials, rotating from house to house, where members would meet and interact. These occurred wherever a member host lived, so many took place in the Old West End, introducing nonresidents to the neighborhood. One working-class, white gay man explained making friends in the Old West End through the PRO coffees:

I was living in a trailer in [rural town] close to my work [at a factory], and I had gotten involved in PRO. … I hosted a social, and four or five people showed up even out there. … Coming to the meetings, yeah, introduced me to the neighborhood. Well, I already knew about it, but I was making more friends—had just come out—and I decided to move [to the Old West End].

In addition to the coffee socials, members hosted speakers in their homes, held rap and consciousness-raising sessions, and sponsored feminist reading groups. Again, many members hosted these events in their Old West End houses and apartments. PRO's ideal of “building community” manifested spatially as more and more gay men and lesbians moved to the Old West End for the sense of community experienced with PRO's social (as well as cultural and political) functions. PRO evinces the way in which local gay and lesbian organizations function under their own local logics (G. Brown 2008), locally as an organization whose coordination of social, political, cultural, and religious programming strengthened its overall goal of community building.

Unlike Rothenberg's (1995) study, this trajectory was generated by the cultural practices of collective action (Warde 1991), premised on intersections and interdependence. These forms of social interconnectivity, as organized by marginal gentrifiers, underscore the importance in understanding “the black box of culture” (Caulfield 1989). Gay men and lesbians built a flexible social structure around cultural politics instead of an essentialized rejection of the suburbs (Phillips 2004). In the next section, I examine the transformation of the Old West End into a gay and gay-friendly neighborhood through interdependence, marking the landscape with a diversity of affirming spaces of worship.

Interdependence in the Landscape: Reconciling Sexuality and Religion

With a growing family, Chester and Donna moved from Vistula to one of the large homes in the Old West End. Chester and Donna opened their home to the roving telephone helpline answered by members—but most often by Donna. Donna stated that she was pleased to be the primary contact, handling many different calls: crisis interventions from suicide threats; fielding questions from concerned, worried, and even angered parents; worries about faith and damnation; personal inquiries about sexual practices and “venereal diseases”; and general questions regarding the weekly PRO meetings. She shared how some questions initially made her feel uncomfortable, but she reaffirmed her intentions and commitment to providing not just answers to callers but also care and concern. Moreover, Donna's work with the helpline evinces a high level of interdependence. Her work involved mutual care while not expecting any reciprocity.

The presence of the phone line in their home blurs Chester and Donna's personal, political, and ministerial lives. They both partook in gay and lesbian activism, the spatiality of which extended to their home—consequently queering an otherwise heterosexual home. It further exemplifies a high level of interdependence, through care and morality. Further evincing the complexities of intersectionality (McCall 2005), Donna assumed the roles of caregiver and moral provider. Donna operated the phone line most Friday and Saturday nights, over which many respondents expressed gratitude. Whereas Chester addressed issues of morality in his activism and writing, Donna did so directly on the phone, for instance, by assuaging people's guilt about homosexuality or masturbation through her own moral fortitude.

For her and Chester, the mutuality lies in reconciling their faith and their concern and care for others. Social justice intertwined with their faith as they considered their political practice a calling from God. As this level of reconciliation transcended personal belief, Chester challenged conventional church doctrine as noted earlier. In addition, Chester initiated ecumenical dialogue among Protestant clergy in the Old West End, further illustrating his desire to reconcile religion and homosexuality.

Chester's activism on behalf of PRO helped secure a gay- and lesbian-affirming congregation, Central United Methodist, in the Old West End. In 1974, Central United Methodist's congregation voted to explicitly affirm LGBT congregants, almost a decade before the national body's Reconciling Congregations Program. Central United Methodist, with its explicit and unified affirmation, proved more accepting than congregations in Vistula.

Other mainstream churches in the Old West End soon accompanied Central United Methodist church. In the mid-1970s, the Unitarian Church began to affirm LGBT and queer individuals and offered space for various LGBT organizations. Soon after, an MCC established Toledo's own congregation in the neighborhood. The presence of these two welcoming, religious spaces decreased the necessity for those adherents to travel to Detroit. Later, St. Mark's Episcopal Church hired a gay-affirming, white, male, heterosexual priest. And, later still, the ministers of the Lutheran and Presbyterian churches began the process of making their congregations more welcoming to LGBT individuals.

In addition to the mainstream churches, the Old West End, in the late 1960s, became a locus for a Wiccan house of worship, with the high priestess nationally recognized as a leader in her attempts to counter negative public perceptions of Wicca. She equated her cause for positive visibility with the struggle of LGBT individuals. Her Italianate home functioned as her residence and a space for worship and she, too, offered this as a safe space for queer youth who had found themselves homeless. The neighborhood and local paper commemorated her death in 2004 (“Toledo ‘witch’ founded church” 2004). As one gay, white male respondent shared:

All young drag queens were drawn to Circe. She was a type of house/den mother. She would let them stay with her until they got things together. … She had been an RN, and she helped out many gay people psychologically.

Other respondents expressed respect for and acknowledged Circe's positive role in gay and lesbian lives. This intersectionality between religion and sexuality also held a high level of interdependence, through nurture and care. As a marginal, non-Christian religion, this further illustrates the extent of denominational intersections in the Old West End.

By the mid-1970s, the Old West End housed at least seven gay-affirming or gay-welcoming religious congregations. Most churches in the Old West End line Collingwood Boulevard, the avenue of churches, from which the city takes its sobriquet, “Holy Toledo.” As LGBT and queer individuals increased their visibility and further coordinated their cultural, political, social, and religious resources, the concentration of LGBT and queer individuals and groups continued to increase throughout the 1970s—from houses of worship to houses for socializing and meeting others in the LGBT community.

The reconciliation of religion and sexuality through just one church, the MCC, encouraged the migration of gay men and lesbians to its neighborhood—with the potential of exacerbating the most pernicious effects of gentrification (Paris and Anderson 2001). The location of seven houses of worship undoubtedly encouraged gay men and lesbians to locate to the Old West End. As one respondent noted, “It was a domino effect.” Yet, although one change led to another, the transformation did not transpire like carefully orchestrated dominoes. Instead, the vicissitudes spanned twenty years of “collective action” (Warde 1991), premised on the foundation the interior decorators had established through involvement in the Old West End and their forging a relationship with Methodist clergy.

The MCC exists almost exclusively for LGBT adherents. The other denominations represent a larger religious category, dominated by heterosexuals, where ministers and congregants reconciled (homo)sexuality and religion through modes of interdependence. Ministers, like Chester, reconciled sexuality and religion discursively through writings and ecumenical dialogue, but this manifested materially as well. Moving from a clandestine coterie to a marked landscape in the Old West End, a “queer-friendliness” emanated materially in the neighborhood, namely, through the houses of worship—but also the apartment buildings and houses that hosted meetings, parties, and the PRO coffee socials. Blokland (2003) represented religion as an important function tying resident to neighborhood, but its function is often static, if not waning. In the Old West End, on the other hand, residents, activists, ministers, and congregants—through their intersections and interdependence—constructed a socially and spatially dynamic religious landscape—one no less tied to neighborhood.

Gentrified neighborhoods differ from one another in character: old neighborhoods with historic architecture; those with a thriving, trendy commercial scene; or those built entirely anew on brownfields. When gentrification and sexuality intersect, scholars most often attend to the commercial scene and issues of consumption (Binnie and Skeggs 2004; G. Brown 2009). The Old West End, however, never offered a vibrant commercial scene. (Large-scale demolition has all but annihilated any commercial district.) Instead, the neighborhood offered architecturally impressive, yet affordable, housing. But, the rest of its cultural landscape is like no other in the literature. Instead of a vibrant commercial scene or shiny, new condos, its core consisted of church bell towers and spires intermixed with historic, private homes qua social spaces.

Meanwhile, in Vistula, the overseeing Methodist council who owned the community building chose to sell it to another, more conservative denomination, which Chester did not disclose to me. Although the new owners kept a community center open, they excluded the lesbians and gay men. The initial meeting space in Vistula, although lost, had provided a common space, a community space, not necessarily tied to neighborhood but tied to the embodied experiences of being other. Even when this closed, the ties created there persevered and remained in subsequent organizations. Many of those early members moved to the Old West End, thereby solidifying the presence of gay men and lesbians.

Queer-friendly neighborhoods are one of the various modes of queer place-making wherein gays and lesbians secure a high level of social cohesion (Gorman-Murray and Waitt 2009). The Old West End, however, contradicts any implication that queer-friendly neighborhoods are a continuance or evolution out of earlier gay ghettos and offers a new foundation for the study of emergent communities involving intersecting and interdependent people from diverse social groups.

Conclusion

This article elucidates a deeper mode of interconnectivity through the concomitant frameworks of intersectionality and interdependence. The case of Toledo, Ohio, suggests that high levels of interdependence and intersectionality facilitated the formation of the gay or gay-friendly neighborhood. These modes of intersectionality and interdependence specifically centered on the social categories of sexuality, religion, and class, which were already produced, constituted, and recognized but largely unconnected. With religion producing a large portion of the material and discursive inequalities faced by sexual minorities, religion and homosexuality are often at odds. Yet, this investigation of a medium-sized city and the local logics of lesbian and gay organizing through the aid of a religious leader illustrates that religion and nonnormative sexuality are not always acrimonious. Instead, the intersections among religion, sexuality, and class provide an exceptional case study of the social and cultural infrastructure created by marginal gentrifiers in a regional city. This study also illustrates the inherent spatiality of the coupling of intersectionality and interdependence. The intersections analyzed here relied on neighborhood space and the various sites therein: churches, businesses, homes, and the street itself.

The case of the Toledo neighborhoods, showcasing the convergence of religious and political issues, might be rare. It might be even more exceptional to have affirmed sexual minorities outright in the 1960s, especially in the absence of direct proselytizing. Yet, this interdependence was mutual insofar as the minister and his wife answered their religious callings through an ethic of nurture and care.

The scale of the neighborhood foregrounds the intersections of individuals, social groups, and social categories. This suggests that research on LGBT and queer neighborhood (trans)formation should explicitly entail a focus on intersectionality and interdependence. Through oral history and archival research, I was able to detail a mode of neighborhood transformation that advances understandings of how individuals and groups through collective action (Warde 1991) generate the social and cultural infrastructure (Butler and Robson 2001; Butler 2007) to cultivate high levels of social cohesion (Blokland 2003; Butler 2007; Brown-Saracino 2009; Gorman-Murray and Waitt 2009) through intercategorical intersectionality (McCall 2005) and meaningful levels of interdependence (Gilligan [1982] 2003; G. Brown 2009).

The spatiality of this interdependence encompasses multiple scales, sites, and identities. The navigation required interneighborhood dialogue; an interrelationship between house, individual, and institution; and a relationship wherein the neighborhood became a locus not just for its inhabitants but also for individuals elsewhere in the city and region to come to socialize, organize, and worship. To accomplish this, individuals forming various subjectivities coalesced around LGBT and queer cultural politics—as well as other related causes. Much work on intersectionality has mapped out how multiple identities or subjectivities intersect on individual bodies, but this research illustrates the ways in which these multiply identified individuals intersect in various groups and diverse spaces to address shared interests including religion and sexuality, class and category bias, sexual identities, people of faith, or otherwise.

This article investigated the intersections of sexuality, religion, and class. Because historical research in a medium-sized city presents its own limitations, such as attaining respondents or locating archives, further analyses of the intersections of sexuality, religion, and class could expand the work started here. Given the exceptional level of intercategorical intersectionality and interdependence in Toledo, researching neighborhood transformation in other cities down the urban hierarchy is in order (G. Brown 2008). By researching medium-sized cities, scholars of sexuality might uncover unexpected intersections in groups seen as hitherto discrete or competing. Research on smaller cities, furthermore, can help expand understandings of the social and cultural infrastructures of neighborhood transformation and further refine our understandings of gentrification's black box of culture.

I have detailed how the intersectionality and interdependence of sexuality, religion, and class have impacted the transformation of one gay neighborhood. No single study can include the broader permutations of intersectionality research. This attests to the inherent complexities in intersectional research regardless of approach. In this article, I acknowledge both intra- and intercategorical intersectionality, although attending more closely to the latter. The intercategorical approach is particularly germane to geographic and spatial scholarship. As it seeks to understand the complexities of social groups and categories and how this affects individuals, it has yet to be fully employed in issues of scale or spatiality. In this research, I deployed it at the scale of the neighborhood as I investigated the interactions of the individuals and the social groups they inhabited. But, of course, as geographers increasingly theorize intersectionality, we need to expand its possibilities. Geographers have already begun grappling, to a varying extent, with the permutations of identities and social categories: race, gender, ability, sexuality, class, religion, and so on. Much of this rests on the intracategorical approach, which has limited the scope largely to the scale of the body. The intercategorical approach, on the other hand, might aid analyses involving other scales. These permutations should also include dominant or hegemonic categories and groups. I echo Valentine's (2007) call for researchers to be more attuned to and problematize the ways intersectionality is mapped on, between, and among dominant individuals and groups. Deploying interdependence, in addition, offers researchers a conceptual lens to investigate the ways in which hegemonic and oppressed groups intersect and, through this mutual cooperation, challenge modes of oppression—at the neighborhood scale or otherwise.

Notes

1. I use the real names of both Chester and Donna. This was their preference, and their stories and identities would be generally recognizable among many past and present residents of the neighborhood as well as among many clergy.

2. I use a pseudonym here as well as for other people about whom I was told through respondents.

Appendix: Interview Respondents

	Interview A: Chester; white, heterosexual male; approximately 80 years old
	Interview B: Donna; white, heterosexual female; approximately 80 years old
	Interview C: White, gay male; approximately 70 years old
	Interview D: White, gay male; approximately 70 years old
	Interview E: White, gay male; approximately 65 years old
	Interview F: White, lesbian; approximately 60 years old
	Interview G: White, lesbian; approximately 65 years old