Is the decline of Bostons gay bars a sign of an increasingly homogeneous city?
Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of “the long tail.” That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles – including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive. Could it also be that gay oriented spots aren’t really part of the long tail and are part of the mainstream. That certainly seems to be one of the reasons for a decline in gay bookstores; now gay titles are carried in Barnes & Noble and Borders as well as online retailers. That said, the article describes an interesting phenomenon whe
