Atlanta, one of the nation’s largest black-majority cities, has a storied history of civil rights activism and has long been an oasis for minorities in the South. Many prominent figures from the city, including Coretta Scott King, have drawn a line between the common struggle for blacks and gays. At a 1986 Human Rights Campaign dinner, King affirmed her “solidarity with the gay and lesbian movement.”

Today, Atlanta’s gayborhood in Midtown is permanently marked by a rainbow crosswalk at the intersection of 10th Street and Piedmont Avenue. But some residents see the crosswalk as a “headstone” for the area, a physical memorial of the de-gaying of the gayborhood as housing booms, rents rise, and straight couples move in. Katharine, 32, said it’s traumatic to be forced out: “The reason minorities live in the city is it’s a safe space.”

For now, same-sex male couples are still concentrated in Midtown, but they are noticeably less visible on the map to the east of the city, especially in the lesbian enclaves of Kirkwood and Decatur, colloquially named “Dick hater.” Although the gayborhood, like any neighborhood, might be in flux, residents still see the need for a dedicated queer space. Sara, 34, said, “We always say, ‘If you go 20 miles out of Atlanta you are in Georgia.’ You can’t leave downtown Atlanta without realizing you’re in the South.”

Austin routinely appears on lists of the most LGBTQ-friendly cities in the nation, but the Texas capital is a relative newcomer as a queer destination. It’s easy to understand that the blue dot in deep red Texas would be a bit of a late-bloomer. Only 25 people attended the first publicly promoted meeting of Austin homosexuals in 1970. And it wasn’t until 1990 that the city held its first official Pride celebration. Seth, 27, said there’s no mistaking you’re in the South: “On nearly every first date, you talk about your tortured coming out stories.”

Austin doesn’t have a traditional gayborhood, but it does have two queer nightlife strips: 4th Street (part of which is named after LGBTQ activist Bettie Naylor), where the crowd leans toward “gaggles of gay men,” and Red River Street, where the crowds are more diverse. In an interview with the Austin American-Statesman, Austin communications expert Steven Tomlinson said, “It’s worth asking why Austin never needed a Castro. Surely there were always enough gay people here to staff one.”

The other list that Austin routinely appears on might lend some clues: top cities for millennials. In his book There Goes the Gayborhood?, Dr. Amin Ghaziani points to two strong trends affecting younger LGBTQ generations. First, as society accepts the queer community into the mainstream, there is less of a need for a distinct gayborhood. Second, technology has made it so that you can pick up your phone to meet people instead of picking them up at a bar.

Massachusetts has led the rest of the country on LGBTQ issues for decades. In 1989, it became the second state to pass a law prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing, credit, and public accommodations. And in 2004, it became the first state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. Boston has been the backdrop for it all.

Boston has some distinct gender patterns, with same-sex male households heavily concentrated in the South End and same-sex female households a little farther out in Jamaica Plain. But the city’s traditional queer enclaves are undergoing rapid demographic and economic changes that have some residents asking, “When Did Boston’s Gay Scene Get So Straight?”

The city that gave us Facebook is also seeing the effects technology can have on its gayborhoods. You don’t have to go to a queer bar to meet other queer people anymore. Boston’s LGBTQ bars have been closing for the past decade. In 2007, the Boston Globe reported on it. In 2017, it was WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station.

Chicago’s gayborhoods are noticeably split by gender on the map—they’re even split by name: Boystown (Lakeview) and Girlstown (Andersonville). Today, Boystown is flanked by rainbow pylons and is home to the Pride parade, a dense cluster of gay bars, and the Center on Halsted, an LGBTQ community center that got its start as Horizons Community Services, the Midwest's largest LGBTQ social service agency. But Chicago’s queer history doesn’t begin or end with Boystown.

During Prohibition, the South Side’s Bronzeville, a predominantly black neighborhood, was the epicenter of the drag show and cabaret scene. Rising rents pushed the LGBTQ community from Bronzeville north along Lake Michigan to Boystown where it settled in the 1970s.

Those same forces are at play today. Girlstown, just to the north of Boytowns began to be a lesbian hotspot in the 1990s, centered around the success of local feminist bookstore Women and Children First. But residents are now mourning the area’s heyday, as same-sex male couples are continuing their migration north across the Boystown/Girlstown divide.

If Brokeback Mountain was the “gay cowboy movie,” Denver is the “gay cowboy town.” The Mile High City has hosted the Rocky Mountain Regional Gay Rodeo for the last 36 years, and is home to country western-themed bars like Charlie’s, regularly named among the top C&W gay bars in the nation. Charlie’s sits at an intersection of Denver’s queer community on Colfax Avenue—to the north is Uptown, with a male-leaning reputation, and to the south is Capitol Hill an area that identifies as more queer.

Denver’s Pride also traces this split down Colfax. Kristen, 25, said that in her opinion Denver’s parade was less about activism and more about capitalism, “There’s always at least one penis float sponsored by a vodka company.” But, Pride can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different communities. In 2016, the Pride celebration introduced an expanded Latino music stage. In an interview with the Denver Post, Carlos Martinez, executive director of the GLBT Community Center of Colorado, said that it was important to bridge the gaps between LGBTQ and Latino culture, “Back when I first came out, I would go to events and gay bars, and it was like, ‘Nobody here looks like me.’ Everybody was white.”

Denver, like Austin and Portland, doesn’t have a traditional gayborhood. Sarah, 26, said “Denver is very queer all over.” Same-sex male couples are concentrated in the center city in Uptown and Capitol Hill, while same-sex female couples are significantly less concentrated and tend to be east of the city. Sarah said, “Stereotypically, gay women are outside of Denver in Boulder.”

Houston’s gayborhood is southwest of downtown in the Montrose neighborhood, but the area is currently undergoing a lot of shifts. In 2015, the Pride parade was moved out of Montrose, its home for 36 years, and moved downtown. Malone, 30, who’s first Pride parade was Houston’s last in Montrose, said that at last year’s celebration she marched topless, “Downtown I couldn’t leave the parade route without putting my shirt on. When it was in Montrose, I could just walk in a bar with my nipple pasties on and not get hollered at.”

Montrose is home to a clustering of gay bars between Fairview and Pacific Streets and Grant and Hopkins Streets. But just a couple streets over new restaurants and sports bars touting craft beer and late-night eats cater to a different clientele. The queer community is even trying to reclaim one such bar named the Hay Merchant by calling it the “Gay Merchant.”

As Montrose evolves, Houston’s LGBTQ community has also started to settle in neighborhoods southeast of downtown like Third Ward and East Downtown and areas to the north like the Heights. Outside the city’s interstate loop is another story. John, 33, said “It’s like the Lion King meme, ‘What’s that dark place outside of Loop 610? We don’t go there.’” Houston’s got a long history of being progressive on LGBTQ issues: it became the largest city in the US to elect an openly gay mayor with Annise Parker in 2009 and it’s home to the GLBT Political Caucus, the South’s oldest LGBTQ civil rights group. But, Houston’s still in Texas, and Texas is still trying to pass “bathroom bills.”

West Hollywood, like San Francisco’s Castro and New York’s West Village, represents the very definition of a gayborhood. The Santa Monica strip has a dense cluster of gay bars and businesses (all draped in rainbow), wide crosswalks (painted in rainbow), and is where the male physique (sometimes also rainbow-clad) is on full display. But like many other big cities, the gayborhood and how it is defined is in flux. LA resident Asa, 23, said the queer community is expanding to areas like Silver Lake and Downtown LA, “West Hollywood is definitely still a gayborhood, but it feels much more mainstream, more plastic.”

West Hollywood, a haven for speakeasies and casinos during Prohibition, was largely ignored by the lax LA County Sheriff’s Department who avoided policing sexuality. Inside the city limits was a different story. In the 1960s, LA’s queer community became more vocal and visible and spurred a lot of the nation’s firsts, including: one of the earliest organized gay rights demonstrations, the first gay house of worship, and the nation’s first LGBTQ social service provider (now the LA LGBTQ Center). In 1984, West Hollywood officially became its own city, but a lot has changed since “gay Camelot” was crowned.

Dan, 34, uses the plight of Block Party, a store filled with rainbow kitsch that almost closed its doors, to illustrate some of the shifts, “You can get rainbow things at Target now. We are more mainstream but its hurting our community.” Autostraddle, a queer feminist website, reported in 2011 that the city that gave us the “The L Word” and the legendary Shane McCutcheon was increasingly upper crust and prohibitively expensive. And in 2014, the LA Times wrote that West Hollywood has seen a “development boom that has made the city a more hip, but not necessarily more gay, address.”

Sun-soaked Miami has quite literally planted its rainbow flag in the sand—the lifeguard stand at 12th Street Beach proudly shows off its Pride. Miami resident Chris, 33, says the area is home to gay men “on all points of the flamboyant and feminine spectrums.” Noticeably absent from the LGBTQ community in Miami? Women. They tend to be a little farther north in Hollywood.

In the 1990s, Miami became a refuge for many HIV positive men looking to live out their final days in the warm climate. The men formed a resilient community that built the foundations of modern-day South Beach, Miami’s gayborhood off the mainland.

Today, South Beach, like many big-city gayborhoods, has been confronted with rising rents and increased development, but it’s also been exacerbated by a spike in tourism to the south Florida city. These shifts have pushed some former Miami residents to relocate an hour up the coast to Fort Lauderdale. Miami also competes with Key West and Key Largo as a top queer destination.

New Orleans may be most closely associated with the Mardi Gras colors of gold, purple and green, but the rainbow is a close second. Taylor, 27, said “Costume is such a big part of it—it’s not only rainbow flags. Everything goes.” The city at the mouth of the Mississippi is home to a diverse LGBTQ population that has long been an important ingredient to the city. Robert Batson writes, “The iconic American melting pot did not melt in New Orleans.”

In the 1800s and 1900s, New Orleans, and particularly the French Quarter, was a creative queer stronghold: poet Walt Whitman had his sexual awakening here, blues pianist Tony Jackson wrote his hit “Pretty Baby” in a Bienville Street saloon, and playwright Tennessee Williams wrote parts of “A Streetcar Named Desire” in his Dumaine Street home. Despite this rich queer history, New Orleans in the 1970s was a much different place and the LGBTQ community was targeted with discrimination, police raids, and attacks. Until the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, a deadly arson fire at New Orleans gay bar the UpStairs Lounge in 1973 was considered the largest mass killing of LGBTQ people in American history.

Today, queer life in New Orleans is still centered around the French Quarter, home to a strip of rainbow flag flying gay bars on lower Bourbon Street including Café Lafitte in Exile, one of America’s oldest. Taylor said that New Orleans is so welcoming that really “Every bar is a gay bar.” Same-sex male couples have spread east into Faubourg Marigny, Bywater and the Lower Ninth Ward, while same-sex female couples have moved northwest into Bayou St. John and Mid-City.

In 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a West Village bar frequented “by people who were on the margins of gayness: the trans, the feminine men, the masculine women, the sex workers, the black, the Latino, the poor.” Six nights of protests followed, in what some say was the start of the LGBTQ rights movement. But the city’s queer history has much deeper roots and its LGBTQ spaces didn’t begin or end with Stonewall.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s “was surely as gay as it was black.” Harlem was home to the Clam House, a popular queer-oriented speakeasy that featured performances by tuxedo-wearing blues singer Gladys Bentley. In the 1940s, long before Fire Island became a queer summer destination, it was a sanctuary for LGBTQ creatives.

The West Village cemented its status as New York’s predominant gayborhood in the mid-to-late 20th century. In the 70s it was the epicenter of LGBTQ rights activism and in the 1980s the neighborhood was a leading voice during the AIDS epidemic. Today, the area is highly concentrated with same-sex male couples, but many say it’s a shadow of its former self. In the 1990s Chelsea was deemed the new gayborhood, then in early 2000s the boundaries moved north again to Hell’s Kitchen. Although same-sex female couples do live in these neighborhoods, they are more strongly concentrated in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But the queer community is even feeling the push outside of Manhattan. “I moved to ‘Dyke Slope’ when it was strong. Then it became Puppy Slope. Now it’s Baby Slope. We can’t fit between all the strollers there,” said resident Cynthia Kern in a 2006 interview.

Philly officially designated an area in Washington Square West from 11th to Broad Streets and Pine to Locust as the “Gayborhood” in 2007 (it even appears in Google Maps), but it’s unofficially been the city’s gay epicenter for decades. It’s home to a dense cluster of bars and anchor institutions like the William Way LGBT Community Center and an outpost of the Mazzoni Center, a healthcare provider for the LGBTQ community.

A string of incidents in 2016 is forcing Philly’s Gayborhood to confront racism and a lack of intersectionality, but the “City of Brotherly Love” is working to make its LGBTQ community more inclusive, launching the #MoreColorMorePride campaign and unveiling a new rainbow flag with black and brown stripes added.

Philly resident, Thom, 31, said it’s important to him to have an area where he feels comfortable walking down the street holding his boyfriend’s hand, but he recognizes the Gayborhood might not feel like a safe space for everyone. “If we want people to be invested in these communities we need to create safe spaces for everyone. At the same time, people are doing this without those neighborhoods.” Newer queer enclaves are emerging in West Philly and to the north in Germantown and Mount Pleasant where there is a higher concentration of same-sex female couples.

Portland routinely appears on lists of cities with the largest LGBTQ populations, but it doesn’t have a defined gayborhood. David, 40, said “Sometimes I wonder if Portland is almost the ideal actualized city. There isn’t a central space, but people are welcome and diluted throughout the city.” That dispersion is a double-edged sword. Longtime Portland resident Carole, 50, said "The good thing about Portland is that everyone lives everywhere. The bad thing is that we don’t have an intense community.”

Downtown is still the queer nightlife destination and home to Darcelle XV Showplace, named after the world’s oldest drag queen and host to the nation’s longest continuously running drag show. But the southwest portion of Stark Street known as the “Pink Triangle” or “Vaseline Alley” is on life support. LGBTQ bars began closing one-by-one in the mid 2000s to make way for new development. Economic forces play a part in the area’s transformation, as do wide social acceptance in Portland and technology. David said it wasn’t uncommon to go to a bar and see “80 percent of the guys on their phones.”

Portland’s gayborhood index maps show that the entire city could be considered a gayborhood. The most noticeable difference between the two genders is that there is a higher concentration of same-sex male couples downtown in the Pearl District. Same-sex male couples also tend to live west of the city, and same-sex women couples to the east. Carole, who lives in the southeast said “I can’t throw a stone without hitting another lesbian couple.”

The term “gayborhood” might be synonymous with San Francisco’s Castro, but the neighborhood wasn’t the first LGBTQ area in the Bay City. Before the 1970s, Polk Gulch was the epicenter of the queer community. And until earlier this year, when the Gangway closed its doors, Polk Gulch was home to the city’s oldest continuously operating gay bar.

Today, the Castro is still a stronghold for LGBTQ nightlife and where there is a high concentration of same-sex male couples. But, the entirety of San Francisco has seen a rapid transformation in the last decade. Rents have skyrocketed, tech companies and wealthy investors have scooped up properties, and many in the queer community, especially women and trans people, have moved across the bay to Oakland.

Despite the changes, San Francisco is still billed as the “world’s gay Mecca.” The city has taken steps to preserve some of its queer history, designating the nation’s first, transgender culture district and an LGBTQ leather culutre district in the last two years. But, the seismic shifts have some residents saying that the city is too straight, white, and corporate.

In 2015, Seattle painted permanent rainbow crosswalks to mark its Capitol Hill gayborhood, but some residents and data say the crosswalks might have come to the area too late. The Seattle Times reported in 2014, that the city saw an increase of same-sex households between 2000-2014 in just about every neighborhood. But Capitol Hill saw a 23 percent drop. Part of the shift can be explained by increasing social acceptance of the LGBTQ community (you no longer have to live in a gayborhood), and part can be attributed to economic pressures.

Locals say the city and Capitol Hill have been ”broverwhelmed” by the tech industry, causing a steep spike in rents and an uptick in LGBTQ hate crimes. Capitol Hill is still the go-to place for queer nightlife, with most of the gay bars clustered around Pike and Pine Streets. The neighborhood is also home to many queer institutions including Gay City, Seattle’s LGBTQ Center, and Seattle Counseling Service, started as part of the Dorian Society in 1969. Same-sex male couples are still largely concentrated in Capitol Hill and to the southwest in the Central District and Madrona. Same-sex female couples are farther south across interstate 90 in Beacon Hill and Mount Baker.

Seattle, like many major American cities is at a crossroads for how it thinks about its gayborhood and whether the term really needs to be spatial at all. After all, the queer center didn’t always exist in Capitol Hill. From Prohibition to the 1950s, Pioneer Square was the LGBTQ hub. The neighborhood was home to the Casino Pool Hall, known as “the only place on the West Coast that was open and free for gay people,” and Double Header, one of the nation’s oldest continuously operating gay bar until it closed in 2015.

Dupont, the nation’s capital gayborhood, is draped in rainbow. But, DC area resident Alissa, 27, says that’s true of pretty much all of Washington, “The whole city is gay. It’s hard to go anywhere without seeing a Pride flag.” That wide acceptance coupled with economic development and rising rents has decentralized the gayborhood—a trend seen across the nation.

Town Danceboutique, a popular gay dance bar will close on July 1 to make way for an apartment complex. Phase 1, DC’s last lesbian bar, closed in 2016. “I think there’s a juice bar or something there now,” said Alissa. Ed, 54, who moved to DC for the first time in 1989 said that technology is also having an effect. “Dupont used to be the place to be, but it’s an app world now. You don’t need a queer friendly bar to meet people.”

Currently a large concentration of same-sex male couples call Dupont home and are spilling into Shaw, a traditionally black neighborhood. Same-sex female couples are clustered just north in Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights and have stretched across the northeast border into Maryland. Maryland was seen as a cheaper, more liberal choice than the capital’s other neighbor, Virginia. Same-sex couples were able to get married in Maryland a year and 10 months before they were in Virginia.