Planning the Gay City: Incorporation, Redevelopment, and the Formation of West Hollywood

Abstract

This paper investigates the planning and development history of West Hollywood, California to understand how planning tools like incorporation and redevelopment consolidated a nationally and internationally recognized gay identity. Upon successfully incorporating in 1984, West Hollywood’s new, majority gay city council immediately passed some of the most progressive ordinances in the country, including a domestic partnership law, and subsequently pursued plans to redesign and beautify Santa Monica Boulevard, the city’s main thoroughfare. The political and built environment transformation of the city was part and parcel of the plan to fulfill the promise of the “first gay city,” a city that was not only safe and inclusive for all LGBTQ people, but also business friendly and fiscally responsible.
This paper traces the role of planning in consolidating and upholding the ideal of the first gay city and how, in the face of racist and gendered exclusions, this ideal persists. Using archival research and interviewers I examine the multiple actors, competing alliances, and their attendant motivations behind different phases of West Hollywood’s formation, and the disparate impacts for diverse sexual and gender minorities. Using a homonormative framework, the paper argues that planning was the perfect mode through which to consolidate a dominant gay identity for the first gay city, one that branded itself as inclusive of all LGBTQ people while primarily serving the political and economic interests of a predominantly white, cisgender, male, and middle to upper class constituency.