Postwar downtown Philadelphia, or “Center City,” as it was beginning to be called, had the largest concentration of apartments and rental rooms in the “ City of Homes,” providing gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people with the privacy and urban anonymity they sought.
The war had uprooted millions of men and women across the country and exposed them to urban life here and abroad they had never seen before. The community and the geographical spaces it occupied played a vital role in the social and political struggles of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people locally and in the nation.Īfter World War II, Philadelphia’s gay geography, like that in many American cities, expanded greatly. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Center City neighborhood that became known as the Gayborhood formed in the vicinity of Locust and Thirteenth Streets. Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Back.
