Category: Data Analysis & Methods

Paris is Burning, Social Explorer, and tracking changes to the neighborhood: 1990 vs. 2014

My previous post mentioned the documentary Paris is Burning, which filmed drag balls taking place at the Elk’s Lodge at 160 W. 129th Street. Here is a description of the Elk’s Lodge from NY Mag’s 2009 Summer Guide:

Imperial Lodge of Elks (160 W. 129th St.)
Home to the drag balls that evolved into the competing drag “houses” portrayed in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which was mostly filmed here. Balls were held late at night because the rent was cheaper and drag queens were safer than on Harlem streets, where black-nationalist militancy had cramped the quasi tolerance of gay culture common in the neighborhood in prior decades.

To track changes in the neighborhood, I used the address of Elk’s Lodge and created five maps using Social Explorer to track demographic changes in the neighborhood using census data. I specifically picked the categories of race, education, and housing valued at $100,000 because a) the population represented in Paris is Burning was largely minority and b) a working thesis that the neighborhood may have gentrified – specifically, an increase in the neighborhood population’s education levels and housing values. These maps are by no means comprehensive nor have I checked my methods. These maps are for demonstration purposes only! 

Anyways, here are my maps: the 1990 map is left and colored green and the 2014 map is on the right colored blue – move the slider to see the changes:

To learn how to use Social Explorer, check out this great Youtube tutorial made by fellow ITF, Andrew Lucchesi with his then-colleague Darren Kwong: Exploring Social Explorer: Interactive Maps and Data Visualization for the Classroom. You can use the Pro version of Social Explorer by accessing it through the Brooklyn College Library Website > Databases > Social Explorer > create account with your .edu email address. 

Thinking about the future of New York: Queer and minority culture

Above is the trailer for the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning (released August 1991) that introduced the world to New York’s drag ball culture taking place at the intersection of Black, Latino, gay, and trans cultures and against the backdrop of growing panic and awareness about the HIV/AIDS crisis. The film has since been criticized by a number of people in and outside of academia, and I’ve embedded two examples below: the seminal critique by bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, and the article “Paris is Burning: How Society’s Stratification Systems Make Drag Queens of Us All.”

How does Paris is Burning relate to the topic of inequality and its role in shaping the future of New York? In his book There Goes the Gayborhood, Amin Ghaziani analyzes changes in populations in seminal “gayborhoods” like the West Village in New York. While the Brooklyn College Library doesn’t have a copy of Ghaziani’s book, it is available to borrow from a number of other CUNY libraries. An excerpt from a review in The New Yorker:

Ghaziani argues that the rise of post-gay culture has introduced a new turmoil in gay neighborhoods: more gay men and women are leaving for suburbs and smaller cities, and more straight people are moving in. According to the “index of dissimilarity,” which demographers use to measure the spatial segregation of minority groups, census data show that both male and female same-sex households became “less segregated and less spatially isolated across the United States from 2000 to 2010,” Ghaziani writes. Same-sex couples reported living in ninety-three per cent of all counties in the United States in 2010, prompting Ghaziani to conclude that, “gays, in other words, really are everywhere.” Ghaziani doesn’t think that this has wiped gayborhoods off the map—hence the question mark in his book’s title. But he documents a transformation that mimics that of earlier immigrant enclaves, triggered largely, he says, by the acceptance of gay men and women in the mainstream.

As the review notes, Ghaziani’s book uses Chicago as his case study rather than San Francisco or New York. Perhaps your research could explore the topic of inequality in New York by looking at the data of queer populations in New York – looking at the historic “gayborhoods” – and looking for changes in income, queer populations, and/or minority populations using the online tool Social Explorer. What kind of impact does Ghaziani’s argument have on populations like the people documented in Paris is Burning? What kind of information does the census data reveal and what kinds of trends might the data predict? Have demographic and neighborhood changes mean that Paris is Burning couldn’t be filmed in New York’s future?

https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5381/2016/06/16101213/hooks_paris-is-burning.pdf

https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5381/2016/06/16101213/Schacht_Paris-is-Burning_2000.pdf