**Clarification: Our girlfriends were taking the picture**

    As hard to believe as it seems, seven years ago, when I moved to New York I didn’t even know what the word gay meant. The first time I heard it was when I got into an argument with somebody in my class and they called me gay. When I found out that it meant homosexual, I was very puzzled. I didn’t understand how my fellow classmate came to that conclusion. Part of the reason why I was so confused was the fact that I came from a country in which homosexuality is not widespread and not widely accepted. I was very surprised to see that even two months ago when I visited Romania, my friends, whom I considered to be quite open-minded, were entirely opposed to homosexuality. While I am no expert in the field, I believe that has to do with the fact that they simply haven’t been exposed to it at all.
    As New Yorkers, we are exposed to homosexuality everyday. To many of us, seeing a gay couple walking down the street appears perfectly normal. Why is that the case? Homosexuality seems normal to New Yorkers because as Chauncey relates, the city has been the “Mecca” of homosexuals for over a century. In “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940,” Chauncey describes the differences and similarities of gay life in two of Manhattan’s best-known gay neighborhoods—Greenwich Village and Harlem.
    As Chauncey details in his book, The Village started out as a bohemian community whose cheap rents attracted artists in search of creativity. Naturally, artists’ liberal lifestyle led to the inception of a gay community that over time attracted many others. Chauncey also mixes race into the equation. Was it better to be a white homosexual than a black homosexual? Of course it was, because race has always been a more dominant segregating factor. Black homosexuals in Harlem had to hide their sexual preferences, while white homosexuals had gained more freedom and acceptance in The Village. Gay men and lesbians lived in Harlem at the beginning of the 20th Century, but their numbers greatly increased as a result of a mass migration of African-Americans fleeing from the Southern states following WWI. While it became known that The Village was home to the largest gay community, Harlem was home to the more exciting gay life, or as Chauncey puts it, “ the Village’s most flamboyant homosexuals wore long hair; Harlem’s wore long dresses.”
    As we have seen in most of the readings we studied so far, a very large component of any issue is perception. People have different perceptions of places due to stereotypes, even if they are not true. Perception is a big issue in this reading as well. In chapter 9 Chauncey talks about an “account of New York nightlife [which] noted that two women dancing together in a Times Square club elicited no comment, while in the village it would be taken as a sign of lesbianism.” As with many other things, appearances can be deceiving, but people choose to believe what they want. Since the Village and Harlem became notorious for serving as a heaven for homosexuals, there was probably extreme exaggeration when it came to gay and lesbian encounters due to people’s perception and to known stereotypes of those areas.
    A century ago, as is the case now, homosexuality was looked down upon, but I think that over time people came to terms with the fact that not all people are the same. If humans have different hobbies, different tastes, and different opinions, is it not normal that people also have different sexual orientations? While I am aware that even today many people still oppose homosexuality, New York, because of its amalgamation of ideas and plethora of different people has developed into a much more accepting community.