Joshua Wolter and his group of gay and straight friends often hang out on Brady Street, where last summer at the Brady Street Festival fashion show two males kissed on stage. People cheered. “That’s the East Side for you,” Wolter says.
And yet, three red letters – “F … A … G” – spray painted on a run-down warehouse just down the way, near trendy eatery The Good Life, remind Wolter that his sexuality is still unwelcome to many.
A fit, well-dressed 24-year-old who works 10 shifts per week waiting tables and bartending, Wolter isn’t shy about his sexuality. He says Milwaukee, where he moved from Racine at age 18, is relatively gay-friendly, and more livable than places like San Francisco and South Beach, Fla. But sometimes it’s hard to ignore the name-calling and graffiti in his neighborhood.
Depending on which experts you believe, Milwaukee is everything from a great to a poor place for gays. The city trails the nation in providing domestic partner benefits, yet the state has seen a spike in the number of people reporting same-sex relationships. Even as experts say Milwaukee must combat a brain drain to build a new economy, some residents wouldn’t want more college graduates if they’re gay.
“There’s really two Milwaukees,” says Patrick Flaherty, director of community relations for the Milwaukee Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center. You have the East Side, North Shore, Third Ward, Bay View and Washington Heights, where “you probably can get away with some public displays of affection,” Flaherty says. “Your neighbors will probably accept you; you won’t get funny looks going out to a romantic dinner.”
The Walker’s Point area near South Second Street made the 2006 top emerging “gay ghettos” list by GayGhettos.com. Over a dozen bars and clubs, such as La Cage, are located there. So-called gay ghettos are “empowering,” says Gregory Kompes, author of 50 Fabulous Gay-Friendly Places to Live, providing an area where gays feel comfortable being themselves.
But in Milwaukee’s suburbs, being gay is “still incredibly taboo,” Flaherty says. Even in the city, he points to incidents like one last January when three women were injured outside a Walker’s Point bar. They were hit with a car driven by a man yelling anti-lesbian slurs.
Still, Milwaukee has more than a dozen gay bars and an increasing number of places boasting mixed gay-straight environments, such as Art Bar and Trocadero. Several stores and cafes in the Third Ward and Walker’s Point are gay-owned or supported by gay investors, and several high schools, such as Shorewood, have gay-straight alliance groups.
Yet Milwaukee didn’t make Kompes’ list of top cities. Madison did, along with Chicago, Denver and Minneapolis. “I had to stop at 50,” Kompes says. “Milwaukee was two or three spots short of
getting in.”
Where did it fall short? Research by the Milwaukee LGBT chapter released in January 2007 showed that of the 20 largest Wisconsin private and publicly traded companies, only 25 percent offered domestic partner benefits, compared to the national average of 50 percent.
Unlike Madison, Milwaukee hasn’t passed notable gay-friendly legislation and has fewer openly gay politicians. Such openness means the candidates feel comfortable running and people feel confident voting for them, Kompes notes. The Victory Fund, which maintains a list of openly gay public officials in every state, lists only state Sen. Tim Carpenter and Milwaukee School Board member Jennifer Morales in this city. Madison has seven people on that list. Nationally, the number has grown significantly in just five years, Kompes says.
Wisconsin all but jumps off the charts in the number of citizens self-identifying as gay. The state’s number of same-sex couples grew from 8,232 in 2000 to 14,894 in 2005, according to a study by the Williams Institute. The 81 percent increase ranked Wisconsin second, just behind New Hampshire, in such growth.
The national increase in same-sex couples identifying themselves shows a greater acceptance in the general population, says Gary Gates, a senior research fellow with the Williams Institute. But the surge in Wisconsin could also represent a backlash against anti-gay marriage referendums appearing on ballots in recent years, including last November’s election in Wisconsin. “It could be that many lesbians and gay men felt … it was important to step forward and tell their real story,” Gates says. n
