The young gays and lesbians stream from subway stops dressed in their flashiest gear: rainbow sunglasses, 6-inch-high gold wedge sandals, a fatigue-printed hoodie, a rhinestone-studded pink Playboy bunny bag.
Hundreds of them make their way through the West Village — home of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s — toward the pier overlooking the Hudson River, where a drag queen in a platinum-blond wig and gold bamboo-style earrings swishes past a group of boys in baggy jeans. One shouts, “Hey, baby!” and she stops. With her backside facing the boys, she bends over in her pleated denim miniskirt and flashes them.
They come to this Manhattan pier at night from Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, New Jersey. The black and Latino gays and lesbians say this is the only place where they can be themselves. Here, boys in Timberland boots and fluorescent sweatshirts know they won’t get beaten up for kissing each other, and girls with cornrows beneath backward baseball caps are not embarrassed to cuddle other girls.
“This was like the first place I could really be exposed to people of my kind, without having to worry about getting bashed,” said Cliff Jones, 20, of Harlem, whose neighbors don’t know he is gay.
Jay Jeffries, 65, is white and gay. He has lived for 40 years in the West Village, where he participated in the first gay rights marches. From his second-floor window, he watches the roller-skating boys with boomboxes pressed to their ears and the fistfighting girls wearing do-rags and jerseys.
He has never felt so out of place.
Residents like Jeffries say they want the gays of the hip-hop generation to take their rowdiness elsewhere. They have demanded stricter curfews at the pier. They have lobbied to close a train stop on weekends to make it more difficult for people from New Jersey to travel to the West Village, and to ban loitering in their neighborhood. They have suggested that park patrol officers — who police the pier — carry guns.
For decades, the West Village has welcomed gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual people of all backgrounds. It was here that a police raid — which happened frequently in gay bars in the 1960s — at the Stonewall Inn set off the most famous gay riots in this city’s history and fueled the start of the national gay rights movement. But old-timers still living in the West Village are more subdued now. While there are those who accept the young gays who flock to the village in the spring and summer, others can’t relate.
“They’re all out with their radios,” Jeffries said, “and they’re just hip-hopping all over the street.”
Most of the gay teens and 20-somethings who flirt, kiss, smoke, dance and gossip on the pier, across the street from apartments and brownstones, don’t know about the Stonewall riots, Jeffries said. “They’re another generation. These are the people who got the rights” because his generation fought for them.
“There’s no willingness to interact,” Jeffries said, “or to really treat us with the respect we deserve.”
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