From projo.com
 |  |
Rhode Island news
9.2.2001
Picket fences and gay neighbors
• In the 1990 Census, 27 of Rhode Island's cities and towns reported no gay male couples living together. Now, all of those communities have gay couples.
BY ARIEL SABAR
and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers
When a man and woman decided to move into the house next to theirs, on a quiet, leafy street in Warwick, Tony Caparco and Frank Ferri were quick to break the ice. They walked over, welcomed the couple to the street and introduced themselves: "We're your gay neighbors."
Such candor about a same-sex relationship might seem unusual in Warwick's Riverview section, a traditional neighborhood of porchfront American flags and driveway basketball hoops.
But in the 16 years since they bought a house there, Caparco and Ferri have become just one more stitch -- no more or less extraordinary than the next -- in the fabric of suburbia.
Caparco, 54, a store manager, and Ferri, 47, the owner of a bowling alley, invite many neighbors to backyard cookouts and Christmas parties. They helped the guy next door fertilize his lawn. They borrow tools from the family across the street. And they once organized the rescue of a neighbor when his boat ran up a sandbar on Narragansett Bay, whose waters glimmer just down the block.
"We were nervous about it," says Caparco of their decision in 1985 to buy a house in the suburbs, a part of America associated with two-parent families with children and conservative values.
Not everyone was accepting at first. One neighbor was overheard telling a joke at their expense; another gave them the silent treatment. But soon enough, these same neighbors were waving and stopping by to say hello or to praise their gardening.
Marianne Lafontaine and Tom Kane, the couple who moved last year into the house next door, were charmed when Caparco and Ferri brought them as a welcome gift a bottle of champagne and four glasses. Lafontaine and Kane have since grown so close to Caparco and Ferri that Lafontaine felt she could call them for help in the middle of the night when Kane was losing consciousness during a diabetic emergency. .
"I knew some gay people, but I was never really friendly with gay people prior to moving here," says Kane, 47, a higher education consultant. "Now, with Tony and Frank next door -- they're just regular guys."
THE 2000 CENSUS shows just how regular suburban same-sex couples have become, a national trend that is prompting a new look at the view that gay men are concentrated in large, politically liberal cities.
In the 1990 census, 27 of Rhode Island's 39 cities and towns, from Foster and Little Compton to Woonsocket and Westerly, reported no gay male couples living together. By 2000, those 27 communities were home to a total of 445 male couples, or 38 percent of the state's population of male couples.
Providence, meanwhile, ceased to be the unchallenged capital of gay male couplehood. From 1990 to 2000, the percentage of the state's living-together male couples who resided in Providence fell from 44 percent to 29 percent.
"It begins to sort of challenge the more typical definitions of the American family, and it says that indeed there are these nontraditional families present in everybody's community," says Gary J. Gates, a researcher at The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C., who studies the demographics of same-sex couples. "It tells us a lot about the tolerance towards gays and lesbians in the United States."
Polls bear this out. From 1992 to 2001, Gallup surveys have found, the percentage of Americans who said they viewed homosexuality as "an acceptable alternative lifestyle" grew from 38 percent to 52 percent.
The census also showed more lesbian couples living together in the suburbs. But the experts say that the presence of male couples in the suburbs -- or at least their willingness to identify themselves as such on a census form -- is newer.
Lesbian couples have long been more likely than gay male couples to live outside large cities, because they are much more likely to have children and because, like other women, they earn less money than men and are less able to afford city life. Also, lesbian couples have historically faced less of a stigma than male couples, and words cropped up in earlier eras to describe them: "sisters," "roommates," and "Boston marriage."
Experts say that the growing numbers of same-sex couples recorded in the 2000 census is less a product of actual growth than of the new comfort such couples feel toward government forms they once viewed with suspicion.
The 1990 census was the first in which same-sex couples living together could identify themselves as "unmarried partners." But that year came during a conservative presidential administration and widespread alarm over AIDS. In addition, the Census Bureau refused that year to count same-sex couples who identified each other as "spouses."
Gay-rights campaigners say that those factors resulted in a large undercount.
In 2000, gay-rights groups urged same-sex couples to check off the "unmarried partners" box on the census form in hopes of convincing policymakers that gays and lesbians were a powerful voting bloc and lived in every corner of the country. The effort seemed to work: the 2000 census found living-together homosexual couples in nearly every corner of the United States, including every county in Kansas and places as remote as Alaska's Kenai Peninsula.
IN RHODE ISLAND, the political climate for homosexuals has shifted markedly over the past decade. In 1995, the state became the ninth in the country to prohibit banks, schools, landlords, and employers, among others, from discriminating against gays and lesbians.
The legislation helped usher in a series of laws that made the state more hospitable to same-sex couples, from the right to hospital visits and a role in planning funerals to civil-rights protections for transsexuals and crossdressers.
Before long, Rhode Island had won a national reputation for tolerance in gay and lesbian circles. Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. flies a rainbow flag -- a symbol of the gay pride movement -- during the city's annual gay pride parade. The City of Providence is contributing $25,000 to the state's first gay and lesbian community center, and the General Assembly this year voted to extend health benefits to the domestic partners of gay and lesbian state workers.
"I was really surprised when I saw the pride flag on Providence City Hall," says Russell Turk, 33, a rehabilitation counselor who moved to Rhode Island from Chicago a year ago and lives with his partner in Cranston. "When we first moved here, we saw gay couples walking at WaterFire. And we saw gay people holding hands. We said, 'My gosh -- this is not Chicago.' "
For the past two years, Girlfriends, a San Francisco magazine for lesbian women, has ranked Providence among the country's top 10 most lesbian-friendly cities.
"People look at Rhode Island and much of the rest of New England as a generally supportive place for gay and lesbian issues," says Seth Kilbourn, the national field director for Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C. advocacy group that is the country's largest gay rights organization. "I would definitely place Rhode Island in the top 10 states of the country."
That reputation has helped push the state from 21st place to 16th place among the states from 1990 to 2000 in the percentage of households led by same-sex couples.
Though gay male couples have long lived on Providence's East Side and in Cranston's Edgewood neighborhood, the 2000 census shows for the first time that they live in every community in the state.
"There are lots and lots of us out in suburbia," says W. Fitzgerald Himmelsbach, Mayor Cianci's liaison to the gay and lesbian community, who says he has seen a small exodus of couples to suburban cities and towns. "They do feel comfortable. They feel like they're being accepted. I don't think they'd be checking the boxes [on the census form] if they didn't feel accepted in their communities."
Complaints of housing discrimination persist, but they appear to be a less serious problem than workplace bias. In the six years since the passage of the gay civil-rights law, the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights has received six complaints from gays and lesbians about housing discrimination, compared with 63 about employment.
One sign of the times is that two of the state's three openly gay legislators are from the suburbs: Michael S. Pisaturo and Nancy C. Hetherington, both representing districts in Cranston.
WHEN TONY CAPARCO and Frank Ferri celebrated their 20th anniversary together last month, the crowd of 90 who assembled at their house in Warwick included at least 10 of their neighbors -- most of whom were married, heterosexual couples.
At around 8 p.m., just before dessert, Caparco stood on the side lawn and gave a speech. He thanked people for coming and raised a glass for a champagne toast.
Then Ferri spoke. "Some of you have known us for 20 years, and have never seen us kiss." And so, just like that, with all those eyes on them, they kissed.
In their own way, they were making history. Not so long ago, in the early 1980s, they had kept to the sidelines at Providence's annual gay pride parade. Standing on the sidewalks, they tried to seem more like curious onlookers than participants. Ferri, in particular, feared being photographed by news cameras or recognized by patrons of his family's bowling alley.
"I think the feeling was that if your picture was on the front page of the paper, it would be an embarrassment to your family, because of the way society has shunned homosexuals," Ferri recalls.
"I guess I felt I was jeopardizing our business at the time if I had come out like that. I didn't want to do that. It wasn't just my business; it was the family business."
Ferri and Caparco had met at a Providence club where Caparco tended bar. Soon they moved together to an apartment in the racially diverse, blue-collar Washington Park neighborhood, on the Providence-Cranston line.
When a friend told them that a Victorian house was up for sale in Warwick, Caparco, who is also a talented designer, jumped at the chance to put his stamp on a new house. But there were other reasons for their decision to move.
"We were ready to look for a house together to kind of cement our relationship," says Caparco. "Buying the house together was a further commitment to each other."
Ferri strikes a lighter note: "I always dreamed of living in a big house with a big yard."
Caparco: "We got everything but the white picket fence."
During the first few months, some neighbors kept their distance.
With a wink, some were telling one another that a "Greek businessman" and "actor" had moved in down the street, an allusion to Caparco's dark mustache and Ferri's blue-eyed good looks.
"Nobody was negative," says Caparco, "but people held back.
"People didn't know what to expect. When they realized two gay men moved in here, they wondered whether it would change the complexion of the neighborhood."
Caparco and Ferri devoted a lot of time to fixing up the old house and designing an elegant perennial garden speckled with daisies, mums and hibiscus. An elderly neighbor was so taken with their yard that she snapped photos, and then left one on their front door, with a note: "You have a beautiful garden."
Another neighbor brought over cuttings, a third a wheelbarrow full of day lillies.
A retired Navy man next door -- the one with the tattoos -- started to keep an eye on the contractors working on their house, offering a daily report upon the couple's return from work.
When a neighbor with whom they had become friendly moved out, she told them she was screening prospective buyers to weed out bigots.
And the man who had given them the silent treatment appeared one day at their doorstep. A friend of the couple's had died, and the man had seen the newspaper obituary. The man accepted the couple's invitation to come in, sat down at their dining room table, and then gently offered his condolences.
"Once they realized we were pleasant, friendly good neighbors, and kept up our property, we won them over as good neighbors," says Caparco. "The fact that we were gay became secondary."
TWO YEARS AGO, Rodney Davis, 35, and Brian Mills, 29, left Providence for the same reason most people seek out the suburbs: they wanted a roomier place to live, more peace and quiet, and, not least, a parking place.
They saw a newspaper ad for a two-bedroom apartment in Cranston's Auburn section, a traditional working-class suburb of duplexes and triple deckers. Unfamiliar with Auburn, they did the sort of checking any renter does -- is the neighborhood safe, quiet? But they also had other questions.
"One of the things behind the scene you're always looking for is, 'Is it gay-friendly?' " says Davis, a computer graphics manager at a printing company. "When you move into an area, it's not just a place to lay your head. You want to feel invested in the neighborhood. You want to feel a part of it."
Davis and Mills spent three to four hours in what Davis called a "grid-pattern search," scanning the streets for signs of a live-and-let-live atmosphere. Davis was encouraged by the sight of a rainbow flag on a front porch.
Mills, a computer-technology coordinator at a Providence high school, liked that the neighborhood seemed to have its share of professionals. "If they're professionals," he says, "they've got a level of education, and educated people are usually more accepting people."
For added comfort, they checked their impressions with gay friends and Rep. Michael Pisaturo, the gay state representative, all of whom assured them that they would feel at ease in Cranston.
When the couple told the landlord that they planned to turn one of the two bedrooms into an office, the landlord didn't seem concerned. So they moved in.
Davis and Mills say hello to the people upstairs. But they have had less contact with their neighbors than have Caparco and Ferri.
Davis is occasionally recognized in the neighborhood because of his high-profile role as co-chairman of the Rhode Island Pride Committee, which organizes the annual gay pride parade. But otherwise, they have blended in to their new surroundings. Each morning, before heading to work, Davis and Mills kiss each other goodbye in the driveway.
"We find it very comfortable here," says Davis. "It's your basic everyday Rhode Island neighborhood."
Adds Mills: "It's people looking after their houses, going to work every day and looking after their families, and we do the same thing."
Before the 1995 passage of the state's gay civil-rights law, Davis and Mills said they probably would not have felt comfortable identifying themselves as a same-sex couple on the census form. Even though census forms are confidential, they would not have wanted to risk their responses' somehow coming back to haunt them.
"There was always that little fear, before 1995, that [landlords] could justify not having gay people in their household," says Davis. "But people are now beginning to feel more secure.
Whether with landlords or parents, he says, "the age of 'He's my roommate' has slowly disintegrated."
-- with reports from staff writer David Herzog.
Digital extra:
Learn more about the demographic shifts taking place across Rhode Island with more stories, charts, maps and Web resources at:
http://projo.com/news/census/
Picket fences and gay neighbors
• In the 1990 Census, 27 of Rhode Island's cities and towns reported no gay male couples living together. Now, all of those communities have gay couples.
BY ARIEL SABAR
and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers
When a man and woman decided to move into the house next to theirs, on a quiet, leafy street in Warwick, Tony Caparco and Frank Ferri were quick to break the ice. They walked over, welcomed the couple to the street and introduced themselves: "We're your gay neighbors."
Such candor about a same-sex relationship might seem unusual in Warwick's Riverview section, a traditional neighborhood of porchfront American flags and driveway basketball hoops.
But in the 16 years since they bought a house there, Caparco and Ferri have become just one more stitch -- no more or less extraordinary than the next -- in the fabric of suburbia.
Caparco, 54, a store manager, and Ferri, 47, the owner of a bowling alley, invite many neighbors to backyard cookouts and Christmas parties. They helped the guy next door fertilize his lawn. They borrow tools from the family across the street. And they once organized the rescue of a neighbor when his boat ran up a sandbar on Narragansett Bay, whose waters glimmer just down the block.
"We were nervous about it," says Caparco of their decision in 1985 to buy a house in the suburbs, a part of America associated with two-parent families with children and conservative values.
Not everyone was accepting at first. One neighbor was overheard telling a joke at their expense; another gave them the silent treatment. But soon enough, these same neighbors were waving and stopping by to say hello or to praise their gardening.
Marianne Lafontaine and Tom Kane, the couple who moved last year into the house next door, were charmed when Caparco and Ferri brought them as a welcome gift a bottle of champagne and four glasses. Lafontaine and Kane have since grown so close to Caparco and Ferri that Lafontaine felt she could call them for help in the middle of the night when Kane was losing consciousness during a diabetic emergency. .
"I knew some gay people, but I was never really friendly with gay people prior to moving here," says Kane, 47, a higher education consultant. "Now, with Tony and Frank next door -- they're just regular guys."
THE 2000 CENSUS shows just how regular suburban same-sex couples have become, a national trend that is prompting a new look at the view that gay men are concentrated in large, politically liberal cities.
In the 1990 census, 27 of Rhode Island's 39 cities and towns, from Foster and Little Compton to Woonsocket and Westerly, reported no gay male couples living together. By 2000, those 27 communities were home to a total of 445 male couples, or 38 percent of the state's population of male couples.
Providence, meanwhile, ceased to be the unchallenged capital of gay male couplehood. From 1990 to 2000, the percentage of the state's living-together male couples who resided in Providence fell from 44 percent to 29 percent.
"It begins to sort of challenge the more typical definitions of the American family, and it says that indeed there are these nontraditional families present in everybody's community," says Gary J. Gates, a researcher at The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C., who studies the demographics of same-sex couples. "It tells us a lot about the tolerance towards gays and lesbians in the United States."
Polls bear this out. From 1992 to 2001, Gallup surveys have found, the percentage of Americans who said they viewed homosexuality as "an acceptable alternative lifestyle" grew from 38 percent to 52 percent.
The census also showed more lesbian couples living together in the suburbs. But the experts say that the presence of male couples in the suburbs -- or at least their willingness to identify themselves as such on a census form -- is newer.
Lesbian couples have long been more likely than gay male couples to live outside large cities, because they are much more likely to have children and because, like other women, they earn less money than men and are less able to afford city life. Also, lesbian couples have historically faced less of a stigma than male couples, and words cropped up in earlier eras to describe them: "sisters," "roommates," and "Boston marriage."
Experts say that the growing numbers of same-sex couples recorded in the 2000 census is less a product of actual growth than of the new comfort such couples feel toward government forms they once viewed with suspicion.
The 1990 census was the first in which same-sex couples living together could identify themselves as "unmarried partners." But that year came during a conservative presidential administration and widespread alarm over AIDS. In addition, the Census Bureau refused that year to count same-sex couples who identified each other as "spouses."
Gay-rights campaigners say that those factors resulted in a large undercount.
In 2000, gay-rights groups urged same-sex couples to check off the "unmarried partners" box on the census form in hopes of convincing policymakers that gays and lesbians were a powerful voting bloc and lived in every corner of the country. The effort seemed to work: the 2000 census found living-together homosexual couples in nearly every corner of the United States, including every county in Kansas and places as remote as Alaska's Kenai Peninsula.
IN RHODE ISLAND, the political climate for homosexuals has shifted markedly over the past decade. In 1995, the state became the ninth in the country to prohibit banks, schools, landlords, and employers, among others, from discriminating against gays and lesbians.
The legislation helped usher in a series of laws that made the state more hospitable to same-sex couples, from the right to hospital visits and a role in planning funerals to civil-rights protections for transsexuals and crossdressers.
Before long, Rhode Island had won a national reputation for tolerance in gay and lesbian circles. Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. flies a rainbow flag -- a symbol of the gay pride movement -- during the city's annual gay pride parade. The City of Providence is contributing $25,000 to the state's first gay and lesbian community center, and the General Assembly this year voted to extend health benefits to the domestic partners of gay and lesbian state workers.
"I was really surprised when I saw the pride flag on Providence City Hall," says Russell Turk, 33, a rehabilitation counselor who moved to Rhode Island from Chicago a year ago and lives with his partner in Cranston. "When we first moved here, we saw gay couples walking at WaterFire. And we saw gay people holding hands. We said, 'My gosh -- this is not Chicago.' "
For the past two years, Girlfriends, a San Francisco magazine for lesbian women, has ranked Providence among the country's top 10 most lesbian-friendly cities.
"People look at Rhode Island and much of the rest of New England as a generally supportive place for gay and lesbian issues," says Seth Kilbourn, the national field director for Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C. advocacy group that is the country's largest gay rights organization. "I would definitely place Rhode Island in the top 10 states of the country."
That reputation has helped push the state from 21st place to 16th place among the states from 1990 to 2000 in the percentage of households led by same-sex couples.
Though gay male couples have long lived on Providence's East Side and in Cranston's Edgewood neighborhood, the 2000 census shows for the first time that they live in every community in the state.
"There are lots and lots of us out in suburbia," says W. Fitzgerald Himmelsbach, Mayor Cianci's liaison to the gay and lesbian community, who says he has seen a small exodus of couples to suburban cities and towns. "They do feel comfortable. They feel like they're being accepted. I don't think they'd be checking the boxes [on the census form] if they didn't feel accepted in their communities."
Complaints of housing discrimination persist, but they appear to be a less serious problem than workplace bias. In the six years since the passage of the gay civil-rights law, the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights has received six complaints from gays and lesbians about housing discrimination, compared with 63 about employment.
One sign of the times is that two of the state's three openly gay legislators are from the suburbs: Michael S. Pisaturo and Nancy C. Hetherington, both representing districts in Cranston.
WHEN TONY CAPARCO and Frank Ferri celebrated their 20th anniversary together last month, the crowd of 90 who assembled at their house in Warwick included at least 10 of their neighbors -- most of whom were married, heterosexual couples.
At around 8 p.m., just before dessert, Caparco stood on the side lawn and gave a speech. He thanked people for coming and raised a glass for a champagne toast.
Then Ferri spoke. "Some of you have known us for 20 years, and have never seen us kiss." And so, just like that, with all those eyes on them, they kissed.
In their own way, they were making history. Not so long ago, in the early 1980s, they had kept to the sidelines at Providence's annual gay pride parade. Standing on the sidewalks, they tried to seem more like curious onlookers than participants. Ferri, in particular, feared being photographed by news cameras or recognized by patrons of his family's bowling alley.
"I think the feeling was that if your picture was on the front page of the paper, it would be an embarrassment to your family, because of the way society has shunned homosexuals," Ferri recalls.
"I guess I felt I was jeopardizing our business at the time if I had come out like that. I didn't want to do that. It wasn't just my business; it was the family business."
Ferri and Caparco had met at a Providence club where Caparco tended bar. Soon they moved together to an apartment in the racially diverse, blue-collar Washington Park neighborhood, on the Providence-Cranston line.
When a friend told them that a Victorian house was up for sale in Warwick, Caparco, who is also a talented designer, jumped at the chance to put his stamp on a new house. But there were other reasons for their decision to move.
"We were ready to look for a house together to kind of cement our relationship," says Caparco. "Buying the house together was a further commitment to each other."
Ferri strikes a lighter note: "I always dreamed of living in a big house with a big yard."
Caparco: "We got everything but the white picket fence."
During the first few months, some neighbors kept their distance.
With a wink, some were telling one another that a "Greek businessman" and "actor" had moved in down the street, an allusion to Caparco's dark mustache and Ferri's blue-eyed good looks.
"Nobody was negative," says Caparco, "but people held back.
"People didn't know what to expect. When they realized two gay men moved in here, they wondered whether it would change the complexion of the neighborhood."
Caparco and Ferri devoted a lot of time to fixing up the old house and designing an elegant perennial garden speckled with daisies, mums and hibiscus. An elderly neighbor was so taken with their yard that she snapped photos, and then left one on their front door, with a note: "You have a beautiful garden."
Another neighbor brought over cuttings, a third a wheelbarrow full of day lillies.
A retired Navy man next door -- the one with the tattoos -- started to keep an eye on the contractors working on their house, offering a daily report upon the couple's return from work.
When a neighbor with whom they had become friendly moved out, she told them she was screening prospective buyers to weed out bigots.
And the man who had given them the silent treatment appeared one day at their doorstep. A friend of the couple's had died, and the man had seen the newspaper obituary. The man accepted the couple's invitation to come in, sat down at their dining room table, and then gently offered his condolences.
"Once they realized we were pleasant, friendly good neighbors, and kept up our property, we won them over as good neighbors," says Caparco. "The fact that we were gay became secondary."
TWO YEARS AGO, Rodney Davis, 35, and Brian Mills, 29, left Providence for the same reason most people seek out the suburbs: they wanted a roomier place to live, more peace and quiet, and, not least, a parking place.
They saw a newspaper ad for a two-bedroom apartment in Cranston's Auburn section, a traditional working-class suburb of duplexes and triple deckers. Unfamiliar with Auburn, they did the sort of checking any renter does -- is the neighborhood safe, quiet? But they also had other questions.
"One of the things behind the scene you're always looking for is, 'Is it gay-friendly?' " says Davis, a computer graphics manager at a printing company. "When you move into an area, it's not just a place to lay your head. You want to feel invested in the neighborhood. You want to feel a part of it."
Davis and Mills spent three to four hours in what Davis called a "grid-pattern search," scanning the streets for signs of a live-and-let-live atmosphere. Davis was encouraged by the sight of a rainbow flag on a front porch.
Mills, a computer-technology coordinator at a Providence high school, liked that the neighborhood seemed to have its share of professionals. "If they're professionals," he says, "they've got a level of education, and educated people are usually more accepting people."
For added comfort, they checked their impressions with gay friends and Rep. Michael Pisaturo, the gay state representative, all of whom assured them that they would feel at ease in Cranston.
When the couple told the landlord that they planned to turn one of the two bedrooms into an office, the landlord didn't seem concerned. So they moved in.
Davis and Mills say hello to the people upstairs. But they have had less contact with their neighbors than have Caparco and Ferri.
Davis is occasionally recognized in the neighborhood because of his high-profile role as co-chairman of the Rhode Island Pride Committee, which organizes the annual gay pride parade. But otherwise, they have blended in to their new surroundings. Each morning, before heading to work, Davis and Mills kiss each other goodbye in the driveway.
"We find it very comfortable here," says Davis. "It's your basic everyday Rhode Island neighborhood."
Adds Mills: "It's people looking after their houses, going to work every day and looking after their families, and we do the same thing."
Before the 1995 passage of the state's gay civil-rights law, Davis and Mills said they probably would not have felt comfortable identifying themselves as a same-sex couple on the census form. Even though census forms are confidential, they would not have wanted to risk their responses' somehow coming back to haunt them.
"There was always that little fear, before 1995, that [landlords] could justify not having gay people in their household," says Davis. "But people are now beginning to feel more secure.
Whether with landlords or parents, he says, "the age of 'He's my roommate' has slowly disintegrated."
Digital extra:
Learn more about the demographic shifts taking place across Rhode Island with more stories, charts, maps and Web resources at:
http://projo.com/news/census/
| ||||
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