The magazine noted that the gay couple enjoyed “puttering” around their spacious home and socializing with a group of lesbians from their neighborhood. In 1979, The Advocate, a gay magazine, profiled two men who lived together in a Denver suburb and who finally felt comfortable speaking publicly about their relationship. This activism opened the door for same-sex couples to legally raise children and, eventually, marry.Īfter these victories, a largely white, middle-class group of openly gay men and lesbians began moving to the suburbs for many of the same reasons as their straight counterparts. Openly gay and transgender residents were a part of this new suburban diversity.ĭuring the 1970s and 1980s, the gay rights movement challenged many medical, religious and criminal restrictions on homosexuality.
Census, over 60 percent of households in Lakewood were “married couple” households in 1980, only 41 percent of them were “married couple” households in 2010. Places like Jefferson County no longer looked like the suburban stereotypes of white nuclear families and cookie-cutter houses.
In 1970, the number of Americans living in suburbs exceeded the number in central cities for the first time. Sensing an opportunity, developers marketed new apartments to single residents and diversified the suburban housing stock. Government officials also prohibited discrimination in lending to unmarried people. States like Colorado made it easier for them to divorce. Many Americans in the late 20th century delayed their marriages. This divide between city and suburb started to break down in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, life in cities was not necessarily easy, as police in urban centers like Denver tried to close gay bars and clamp down on LGBT life. In the two decades after World War II, urban centers across the country attracted sizable LGBT communities. People attracted to others of the same sex have always lived in the suburbs, but discrimination often meant that most openly gay men and lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s had no other option than to live in older cities. They identified that lifestyle with low taxes, good schools, racial homogeneity, happy marriages and, above all, the well-being of children. Many middle-class residents of Jefferson County saw themselves as defenders of a particularly suburban way of life that was threatened by annexation from the central city. Lakewood is in Jefferson County just west of Denver, and it first incorporated as an independent city in 1969.Īt the time, local businesses and homeowners worried about attempts by neighboring communities, including Denver, to annex new land. Shutterstock Making suburbia ‘family friendly’ During the 1950s and 1960s, planners and builders designed new communities with few bars or other “moral hazards” and which provided ample space for churches. Realtors promised homebuyers a chance to live in safe neighborhoods away from urban vice. history to specifically exclude homosexuals from federal benefits, including mortgage assistance. Officials at the Federal Housing and Veterans’ administrations pushed banks to give mortgages to married men with children and forbade them to lend to Americans they suspected of “sexual deviance.” The federal government played a particularly important role in defining the suburbs as “family friendly” places after World War II. The movement of openly gay couples away from older cities defied the perceived connection between heterosexual family life and the suburbs that dates at least to the 1940s. Since the 1960s, many Americans have associated openly gay life with urban neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Castro District or Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.īut same-sex couples and transgender people are increasingly living outside of these traditional “gayborhoods.” Many of the national battles over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights have grown out of everyday conflicts between these new suburbanites and their straight-identified neighbors. Rather, the conflict happened in a particular place: Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb outside Denver. The conflict that led to the case did not just happen in the abstract realm of the law or the court of public opinion.