Op-Ed: The Rainbow Village: Why Queer Survival Depends on Place

There are moments in a city’s life that will define its identity for generations to come, moments marked by political rollback, cultural erasure, and deepening housing crises, moments when neutrality is no longer an option.

For LGBTQ+ people, neutrality has never truly existed, least of all for those of us who are trans, queer people of color, undocumented, disabled, or living at the margins, whose lives are most immediately impacted by political and economic decisions made without us. Queer lives have long been shaped by decisions made without our consent, policies written against us, and spaces designed to exclude us.

What has sustained our queer communities, again and again, has not been inevitability or goodwill. It has been place.

Places where we could gather when the law was hostile. Places where we could live when families rejected us. Places where we could organize, love, mourn, and build power together. When those places disappear, our safety, memory, and future disappear with them.

This is why The Rainbow Village is not simply an idea, a development proposal, or a branding exercise, because cities make place real through housing policy, land use, and public investment, and those choices determine who is allowed to remain visible, safe, and rooted. The Rainbow Village is a civic duty.

West Hollywood exists because our LGBTQ+ forefathers and mothers, many of them marginalized, many of them targeted, understood that equality without permanence is fragile. They organized not just for recognition, but for control over land, housing, and institutions. The Rainbow Village stands firmly in that lineage. It asks whether West Hollywood will once again meet the moment, not only with symbolism but also with structure.

Erasure Is the Strategy

Across the United States, LGBTQ+ people are living through a coordinated campaign of erasure. Governments are banning our books, criminalizing our healthcare, defunding our protections, and scrubbing our very existence from public institutions. This is not about policy disagreement. This is about LGBTQ+ disappearance.

For many queer people, especially those of us without wealth, citizenship, or family safety nets, these attacks are not abstract political debates. They determine whether it is safe to exist openly, whether housing is attainable, whether healthcare is accessible, whether survival is possible.

In moments like these when institutions turn against us, history teaches that our queer communities survive by building our own.

Queer Liberation Has Always Been Built

The LGBTQ+ liberation movement is often reduced to moments of protest, but its real victories were structural.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera did not just resist police violence at Stonewall; they created housing and mutual aid through STAR for trans youth who had nowhere else to go. Harvey Milk understood that visibility without political power was temporary, and that cities themselves had to be reshaped. Larry Kramer forced governments and healthcare systems to act when indifference meant death.

These leaders were not symbolic figures. They were architects of survival.

Their stories remind us that progress is not permanent unless it is built into land, law, and civic life.

West Hollywood: From Refuge to Responsibility

West Hollywood became a sanctuary not by accident, but by necessity. LGBTQ+ people gathered here because policing was lighter, because difference was tolerated, because survival was possible. What followed was unprecedented. In 1984, LGBTQ+ residents organized, incorporated the city, and took political power. For the first time, government existed not to suppress queer life, but to protect it.

West Hollywood led where others refused to follow—on domestic partnerships, on HIV/AIDS response, on anti-discrimination protections, on cultural recognition. West Hollywood proved that queer governance was not only possible but effective.

But refuge is not static. If it is not renewed, it erodes. It erodes not only through cultural change but through displacement, rising costs, and the quiet loss of housing that makes belonging possible.

The Quiet Crisis: Housing as Erasure

Today, the most immediate threat to LGBTQ+ communities is not only homophobic legislation but also displacement.

Rising rents, stalled housing production, and market-driven development are pushing queer people, especially those of us already marginalized, out of the neighborhoods we built. When LGBTQ+ people, particularly those without inherited wealth or institutional protection, can no longer afford to live in the places that claim us as symbols, belonging becomes performative. Erasure no longer arrives only through violence; erasure arrives through zoning hearings, failed projects, and governmental inaction.

Thus, housing is no longer a secondary issue. It is at the frontline of the battle for LGBTQ+ equality.

A Rare Chance to Choose Differently

This context brings us to a rare opportunity which lies just beyond the horizon. The soon to be redeveloped West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station and Los Angeles County Metro Division 7 site in the heart of West Hollywood’s Rainbow District presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to decide what West Hollywood stands for now.

Without intention, this land will become another generic development—extracting value while stripping identity. That path is easy. It is also irreversible.

The Rainbow Village proposes a different future, a brighter more colorful future for West Hollywood and the LGBTQ+ community at large.

The Rainbow Village: Building Belonging Into the City

The Rainbow Village is a transit-oriented, mixed-use development rooted in the understanding that queer survival requires permanence. It is distinguished from conventional projects by its civic and symbolic commitments: a visible architectural assertion of pride, a dedicated LGBTQ+ Museum and Cultural Center to ensure our histories are preserved and told, and public spaces designed not to extract identity, but to secure identity in the West Hollywood’s long-term obligations.

The Rainbow Village is designed to address urgent housing needs while anchoring West Hollywood as a global center for LGBTQ+ community, culture, and civic life. It advances a public–private partnership model that treats collaboration as accountability, not compromise.

The Rainbow Village’s elements are both symbolic and substantive:

• An expanded rainbow campus that asserts visibility at an architectural scale,
• A Rainbow Arch Monument honoring resilience and continuity,
• An LGBTQ+ Museum and Cultural Center preserving histories too often erased,
• A Performing Arts Center elevating queer voices from the margins to the center stage, and
• A Convention Center that creates economic vitality without selling out identity.

Together, these are not just amenities. These are infrastructure for LGBTQ+ belonging.

Conclusion: Choosing to Be Proof

Across America and indeed throughout the world there are LGBTQ+ people being told by their communities and their governments that they do not belong.

What they need, what we need is not reassurance but proof.

Proof that there are cities willing to build protection into their foundations. Proof that queer life is not temporary, conditional, or symbolic. Proof that survival can be designed, funded, and defended.

West Hollywood has been that proof before.

For those of us privileged with the benefits of safety and visibility this city provides, the obligation now is not to speak for others but to help build conditions where others can remain, belong, and lead.

The Rainbow Village asks whether West Hollywood will be that proof again.

This is not nostalgia. It is responsibility.

Because place makes survival possible and cities decide whether that place endures.

And once built, The Rainbow Village can never be erased, and it sends an unmistakable message to the world that queer people everywhere have a place, that we belong, and that we will not be erased.

-Jeff McMullen