There Goes the Gayborhood

Roxi Rae hits the dance floor on a December Saturday night in celebration of her 24th birthday. Dressed in a tight green hooded top unzipped to her rib cage, with purple-bra-clad cleavage popping out the top, she pulls a girlfriend out to the floor, where they caress and grind to the strained vocals of AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long." The floor is soon packed, mostly with women, as Travis Brown shakes drinks behind the bar and neon lights spin across the room.

You might expect to witness such a scene somewhere near Pike and Broadway, but Rae and her friends are a good half-hour outside Seattle—in Kent. Welcome to Swank, a gay nightclub nestled between a vacant storefront and a China Star restaurant in a strip mall across the street from a golf course. A Shari's in the parking lot offers late-night sustenance, and from the club's front door, acres of commuter apartments and condos stretch as far as the eye can see.

It isn't exactly an intuitive location for a gay bar, but Brown, the owner (who formerly managed the Premier Club—now the Showbox SoDo—in Seattle), thinks he's getting out in front of a rising trend among gays and lesbians as they give up closet-sized studios in Seattle for more spacious homes in the suburbs. "I had heard that Kent is one of the fastest-growing gay populations in the state," says Brown, before drilling down further. "Gay couples."

Swank is actually the second gay bar to open in this South King County suburb. The other is Vibe, located about a mile away within walking distance of Kent Station. Two bars isn't exactly a scene, but it's a dramatic shift from the days when gays and lesbians stayed safely ensconced in urban neighborhoods like Capitol Hill. (See related article by Brian Miller.)

There was a time when people stayed on the Hill to avoid trouble, build community, and play together. For gays and lesbians, leaving the city for the suburbs meant putting up with taunts, if not outright violence. But as incidents of hate crimes and prejudice become more painful memory than current reality, young, gay Seattleites face a burden of an entirely different sort: the rising cost of real estate in the city, which has resulted in a proliferation of middle-class cultural minorities, gay or otherwise, in cheaper, suburban burgs.

Over drinks at Swank with Scott Woolsey, his partner of 22 years, Mark Blower says real estate was the deciding factor when the couple moved to Tukwila. "We had to move off the Hill to buy," he says, adding that while he encounters a fair amount of homophobia outside the city, as a gay couple, they're hardly alone in their new town.

Blower says that if life on Capitol Hill was as vibrant as it once was, he might be able to justify staying there, but as bars and clubs close down, the high price of a tiny condo in Seattle just isn't worth it. In Tukwila, they were able to get a place with a yard for their three dogs.

The two bars serving Kent's gay night owls have become somewhat segregated. Swank has increasingly become known as a lesbian hangout around town. According to Rae, who used to work at the joint, this is because of the nearby softball fields. Women would stop in after games and it kind of stuck, she says. This gives Kent exactly as many lesbian-targeted bars as Seattle has: one.

Gary Gates, senior research fellow at UCLA's Williams Institute, says census data, which tracks the number of same-sex couples, shows rising numbers of gays and lesbians living in the suburbs. Gates suspects that in addition to people moving out of the cities, there may be others who were there all along who are now more likely to identify themselves as their sexuality becomes more accepted among friends and neighbors.

The rising population in the suburbs coincides with numerical drops in gay and lesbian couples living in the city. In a study published last November, Gates found that census information suggests the population of gay couples in Seattle dropped from about 6,289 same-sex couples in 2004 to 4,695 in 2006. The margin of error, he says, is too big to say for sure if there are fewer same-sex couples living within the city limits, but "they're not dramatically increasing. If anything, the trend is flat or perhaps slightly on the decrease."

As the population of same-sex couples rises in places like Kent, entertainment crops up to meet their needs. Vibe is nestled among a row of small shops lining First Avenue South. It's part of downtown Kent's revitalization, which came on the heels of the opening of Kent Station, a transit and shopping center, in November 2005. In addition to the train station, a 14-screen AMC theater was part of the initial opening, as was the Ram Restaurant and Brewery. An event center is scheduled to open at the end of this year, all of which should make downtown Kent more of a destination, rather than just a place to get some shut-eye before heading to work in Seattle or Tacoma, says the city's economic development director, Ben Wolters.