Recent comments about the couples and families with kids moving into the gay areas of Jomtien and spoiling our fun made this article all the more vivid in my mind. It seems that gays have a way of wearing out their welcome pretty quickly these days. I wonder if I can set my watch by how fast Fort Lauderdale goes the way of South Beach, or Jomtien for that matter.
Here is the article from Miami New Times:
Gays leave unfriendly South Beach for Fort Lauderdale
By Natalie O'Neill
January 14, 2010
[Gays in South Beach, mass exodus, Miami Beach, South Beach, Fort Lauderdale, gay lifestyle]
The makeup artist does not look happy. A bloody gash on his forehead is fastened with black stitches, scrapes cover his cheeks, and his eyes тАФ once lined with mascara тАФ are badly swollen. Tony Lopez hides behind a pair of sunglasses and explains why he looks so rough: "I got jumped for being gay."
Three days earlier, everything had been fine. Lopez, a 29-year-old employee of MAC Cosmetics, was celebrating the White Party тАФ the world's largest fundraiser for AIDS тАФ in South Beach. He dressed up, watched a drag show with two friends, and ordered a vodka cranberry cocktail at Twist nightclub.
It was 4 a.m. November 29 when he wandered by himself to the take-out window of David's Cuban Caf├й on Meridian Avenue near Lincoln Road. As he approached the line for food, an aggressive 20-something staggered up to him.
"Got a cigarette?" he asked. Tony shook a Marlboro Mild from the pack and handed him one.
Right then, a gang тАФ Tony remembers four men тАФ "appeared out of the woodwork." They shoved him into the alley behind the restaurant, yelled "Fucking faggot!" and began to punch him. He fell to the ground and tried to shield his head as they kicked him in the face.
"It crossed my mind to play dead," Tony recalls. "I felt completely helpless and degraded." Afterward, he stumbled a couple of blocks and passed out on the sidewalk.
When he awoke, nursing a concussion in a dreary hospital room, he realized his attackers hadn't bothered to steal his jewelry, wallet, or cell phone. They were more interested, he believes, in beating up a queer.
In the span of two months тАФ inside a small South Beach radius тАФ at least three violent attacks against gay men have taken place. One victim was a European tourist who walked away with bruises. Another was a popular club owner's boyfriend, who was told, "Get out of here, fag" before an attack.
The violence is a symbol of what the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) circle has felt for years: South Beach isn't the free-spirited haven of gayness it once was. According to state records, 75 percent of countywide gay hate crime in the past year occurred in Miami Beach, a place the rest of the world sees as a big, happy gay rainbow. In a five-year span, the State Attorney's Office reported 26 incidents, half of which were in Miami Beach. Victims include a lounge singer who was stripped naked and hogtied and a magazine publisher who was viciously beaten.
It's surprising when you consider South Beach's heyday as a sparkling gay playground, where oiled-up boys frolicked between wild foam parties and the hub of hedonism that was the Versace mansion. Nobody thought twice about casual sex in Flamingo Park or flamboyant public fashion shoots, and тАФ at its peak тАФ MTV was even there to glamorize it all.
Gay transplants morphed Miami Beach from a sleepy little island into Rio de Janeiro with an edge. There was a sense of easy living and infinite possibility. But most of that has vanished. Rents spiked, gays moved out, and tourists flocked in. Clubs that once hosted thousands of gay men per night closed, and hip-hop venues began to sprout. It's the nightlife equivalent of erecting a mosque next to a temple.
Meanwhile, a bigger scene has emerged 25 miles north. In Fort Lauderdale, gay entertainers find work more easily, queer yuppies can afford spacious homes, and transgender ladies feel safer walking to the corner store. South Beach, they explain, has grown tense.
Says former Miami Beach Commissioner Victor Diaz, who's gay: "I don't think police realize the degree to which there has been an alarming increase of these types of incidents on South Beach."
Shelley Novak, a cross-dresser who has performed in Miami Beach since 1989, is more blunt. "I won't walk alone in drag anymore," she says. "You can't go out at night without some thug yelling, 'Show me your pussy!'"
After midnight on a February night in 1999, two young women follow a 25-year-old gay waiter named James Gentry home as he leaves Twist nightclub. The long-haired brunettes taunt him before clawing his chest and stabbing him twice in the back with a knife. Cops call it "a random hate crime," and 21-year-old Besaida Cubias is eventually convicted of attempted murder.
Four months later, managers of the Publix on West Avenue find "kill fags" and "die fags" scrawled in the store elevator.
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The Office Depot worker is bored until Shelley Novak struts in. It's 4 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, and the queen тАФ who describes herself as "Barney Rubble in a dress" тАФ wears a blond wig and black heels. A few chest hairs escape from her red blouse.
She puts a large hand on her hip and points to a set of fax machines in the corner of the store. "That's where the bar used to be!" she declares and then turns to a stiff-looking employee. "You guys know this used to be a gay club, right?"
Welcome to Shelley's trip down memory lane. If she's feeling a tad defiant, it's because the place is her old stomping ground, one of dozens of gay clubs that have been replaced by corporate chains, expensive restaurants, and designer boutiques since the 1990s. The little tour, however, won't last long: She will soon be escorted out.
The warehouse-size store at 1771 West Ave. was once an enormous, throbbing gay club called Salvation. Beginning in 1997, it hosted 1,200 men a night under the glow of laser lights that beamed where stark fluorescent bulbs now illuminate rows of notebooks, printers, and pens. There are only four South Beach gay bars left тАФ compared to more than a dozen in the '90s тАФ and all would fit inside Salvation's cavernous space.
Shelley, whose real name is Tommy Strangie, is the unruly grandmother of Miami Beach drag. In the city's gay glory days, she entertained Gianni Versace and once threw up on Ricky Martin's shoes. With her animated facial expressions, raspy Boston accent, and rapid-fire one-liners, she was perfectly designed for the stage. But today, the 42-year-old seems melancholy.
Her complaint: Gay boys тАФ who put South Beach on the map тАФ feel pushed out of their own turf. It's both a financial and cultural smack in the face.
The first stop on Shelley's tour of forgotten gay hot spots: a Mexican restaurant called Barrio. "We used to pack in here like sardines," she says. Club kids would munch burritos before a night on the town, but it's now a doctor's office, where a sign reads, "Flu Shots." While Shelley leans against the building, two pale tourists stare at her as if she belongs on a novelty T-shirt.
As the leases of businesses such as Barrio ran out, gay owners noticed prices had tripled from the mid- to late '90s. Lincoln Road, for example, was once lined with GLBT bookstores, restaurants, and gyms. But the cost of commercial space on the strip jumped from $12 per square foot to $120 in ten years.
The thought makes Shelley frown, so she hops into her car тАФ there's no walking in those heels тАФ and rolls a few blocks to a venue once dubbed Liquid. Downstairs hosted an exclusive drag show in 1994. "When you were able to perform here," Shelley says, "you knew you'd made it." In the middle of a show, she once gazed into the audience and spotted Madonna.
The nightclub has been replaced by American Apparel, where skinny white mannequins display $40 tees. Explains Steve Adkins, president of the Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce: "[Gay] people just cashed out."
To afford leases in South Beach, nightclubs began relying on income from bottle service and private rooms. Dan Renzi, the gay cast member from The Real World: Miami (and a New Times contributor), describes it this way: "Most gay people won't spend $300 on a bottle every weekend; it's just a cultural thing." So an upscale hip-hop clientele тАФ many of whom were tourists тАФ took over the streets.
"It created an incubator for tension," says CJ Ortu├▒o of the human rights group SAVE Dade.
The landscape didn't scare Shelley away. Next stop on her tour: the grande dame of defunct gay nightclubs, Warsaw Ballroom.
Andrew Delaplaine, an entrepreneur and screenwriter, opened the venue on the corner of 14th Street and Collins Avenue in 1991 and began to throw decadent foam parties where naked men neck-deep in bubbles had anonymous sex. The club soon featured leather-clad go-go dancers, midget performers with pigs, and male strippers who pulled ribbons out of various orifices. "Back then, there was an edginess to South Beach," Delaplaine remembers. "It was a war zone."
There's no sign of grittiness these days. The space is now Jerry's Famous Deli, an upscale all-night diner. Out-of-towners clutch shopping bags and nibble $14 salads where club lines once stretched around the block. The sight seems to awaken Shelley's inner rebel.
Back at Office Depot, she grabs a box from the shelf and poses тАФ with a pouty face тАФ next to a company sign while New Times snaps a photo. A bespectacled manager frowns and points toward the door. "This used to be a sea of shirtless gay men!" Shelley complains on the way out. "Don't ask me where they went."
In the predawn hours of New Year's Day 2003, an effeminate 23-year-old named Earnest Robinson is leaving Twist when two straight clubgoers roll up in a car. They assume he's a woman and make a pass at him. When they realize he is a man, one shouts a slur and the other shoots him in the shoulder. Police later arrest Adrian Miller and Billy Ledan and charge them with attempted murder.
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Luis Ortiz was nervous as he arrived at his ex-boyfriend's apartment. Why, he wondered, hadn't his lover-turned-friend answered the phone in three days? This wasn't like him.
It was just after 5 p.m. August 29, 2004, a few blocks from Jackson Memorial Hospital. As he entered the rundown building, something didn't seem right. Outside apartment number seven, stereo cables were strewn about, and there was an eerie quietness.
He knocked loudly on the door, and when nobody answered, he frantically kicked it in. Inside the studio apartment, past a small kitchen, he saw it: the lifeless body of Henser Leiva on the floor.
The gay lounge singer had been stripped naked and bound by his wrists and ankles with shredded bed sheets. Someone had gagged him тАФ friends say with his own underwear тАФ and left him to die. There was "trauma around his neck area," according to court documents, "from his shoulders up."
Leiva, age 31, was an employee of Miami Beach restaurant the Forge and a singer at Jamboree Lounge on Biscayne Boulevard. He volunteered at local homeless shelter Camillus House and did research for Radio Cadena Univision.
Cops soon arrested Derrick Lamar Evans and Eric Johnson, both of whom fingered the other for Leiva's death. They choked him from behind, near his bedroom, and robbed him of a stereo, according to court documents. They were sentenced to 20 and 12 years, respectively.
Inside Jamboree Lounge, Leiva's boss, Juan Vayas, gestures to a small black stage where Leiva once crooned in Spanish. "Everybody here was so depressed after he died," the businessman recalls in a soft voice. "He was down-to-earth, never drank or smoked... he was so kind."
Although it was obvious to friends and activists that the killers were homophobic, the murder was never classified as a hate crime. The reason: The language of hate crime law is vague, and officers aren't adequately trained to notice and document the signs. (The charge is determined by the State Attorney's Office based on police reports.)
"Unless someone is spray-painting the word fag on your body, they don't consider it a hate crime," says Herb Sosa, president of Unity Coalition of Miami-Dade. In three recent police reports obtained by New Times, little or no reference is made to victims' sexual orientation or to anti-gay slurs.
The state's definition of a hate crime is "intentionally selecting a victim based on... race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation..." Guilty parties are punished more harshly, and the classification sends a strong message: You won't get away with intolerance here. But it's often difficult to prove.
Sosa shakes his head and adds, "Police numbers don't match our numbers, and that's a problem."
In Miami Beach, before 1990, gay bashing was rare. If it happened, few spoke up. One of the first well-publicized cases came in October 1991, when a motorist attacked a gay off-duty Miami Beach Police officer named Ambrose Simms. The officer was on his way to the gay club Sugar's when two men in a late-model car shouted a slur and chucked a beer bottle at his leg. He explained to newspapers he was targeted because of his sexual orientation.
The following year, Miami Beach Police appointed Simms to serve as a liaison for the town's growing gay population. By 1996, officers received sensitivity training they dubbed "a gay-specific lesson in diversity." The department later announced a hate crime hot line was ready to combat the behavior.
It didn't always work. This past fall, a string of gay-bashing incidents began in South Beach. On October 11, a chubby mechanic targeted a gay 31-year-old named Peter Morales on Washington Avenue. According to police reports, Diego Molina-Caceres "began to harass him, touching his hair and calling him names." He punched him in the head, knocked him over, and was then arrested.
Morales, whose boyfriend co-owns Twist nightclub, called the Miami Beach Police Department hot line twice. He got an answering machine. According to Commissioner Victor Diaz, Morales heard nothing back from officers for several days. (Morales did not return New Times' calls seeking comment.)
Others were more outspoken. Says Babak Movahedi, who owns Halo Lounge near Lincoln Road: "It's ridiculous to have a hot line if nobody's going to respond for five days."
Miami Beach Police spokesman Juan Sanchez contends he personally returned the call promptly. The phone "system notifies [me] immediately each time a victim leaves a message," Sanchez says. "He didn't call me back."
Three weeks later, in early November, a gay European tourist was attacked on Collins Avenue and left badly bruised, according to activists. (He did not call police.)
Then, on November 29, passersby found Tony Lopez, the gay makeup artist, lying unconscious on the sidewalk. He has since moved out of his apartment. "South Beach has gotten too ghetto," he says.
Spokesman Sanchez explains Lopez might have provoked the beating by kicking one of the attackers' cars. "A derogatory term does not necessarily constitute a hate crime," he says. "If it smells like one and looks like one, we're gonna report it."
On a warm night this past December, Herb Sosa is giving a speech at a vigil on Lincoln Road. The activist, whose brown locks tend to fall over his face, looks out at the audience, where about 30 people hold glowsticks in memory of murdered victims. "These things shouldn't happen anywhere," he says. "And they certainly shouldn't happen in South Beach."
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Originally Posted by Soi 10 Tom
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