SoBe: The making of a gay community.

PATRON, EUGENE J. ; FORREST, DAVID W.

OVER the last decade, countless fashion and travel magazines have made it a cliche to say that beautiful bodies are as prominent a feature in Miami Beach's South Beach neighborhood as are the hundreds of lollipop-colored Art Deco buildings. In few other places of 30,000 people could 5,000 working models melt into the background among a populace that holds intensive workouts at the gym to be virtually a civic responsibility. It's as if the dynamics of fast-paced urban revitalization and gentrification have been appropriated by South Beach's buff residents for an unbounded corporal redevelopment plan to totally transform the landscape of their bodies.

Gay men in South Beach are the leaders of the pack when it comes to this quest for ever peaked muscle tone. The "South Beach Boy"--a V-shaped torso bristling with muscle--is routinely heralded by gay publications as the icon of what has been described as the new cult of masculinity. But, for all this, the reality of South Beach gay culture is something quite different. A Florida International University study conducted in the late 90's estimates that 25 percent of the gay male population of South Beach was infected with HIV--and this in a city that's had an identifiable gay community for barely over a decade!

Despite the loss of some of South Beach's most active gay pioneers to AIDS, the involvement of gay people in the area's historic preservation movement and the ensuing economic revitalization of the neighborhood has continually grown stronger over the last decade. The gay influx to South Beach unfolded in part because of the virus's spread through gay communities elsewhere. Since the late 1980's, gay men have viewed South Beach as a kind of refuge from the destruction AIDS has wreaked in some American cities.

"In 1989 I was living in New York, and at a low point in my life," recalls Tim Barnum, President of the South Beach Business Guild, the gay chamber of commerce. "Many people I had known had died of AIDS and with fewer and fewer friends left, it made it not so hard to leave. A lot of people in New York were buying apartments here in South Beach and so I moved. It was still pretty dead, but I stuck it out. The weather was nice, it was pretty and the environment was easy on the immune system."

Just as it had for generations of northern transplants before, Miami appealed to gay men as a place to escape the harsh realities of their home city for a paradise of sun, surf, and palm trees. But, unlike the freewheeling tropical paradise that catered to a newly mobile middle class of the 1920's to the 50's, South Beach in the early 1980's was a paradise lost: a vast collection of small, broken-down Art Deco buildings housing working-class retirees and Cuban refuges from the 1980 Mariel Boatlift.

The first group of new, still part-time residents to come to South Beach in the early 80's were well-seasoned in nursing urban neighborhoods back from neglect to health. Artists and restaurateurs who had breathed life into SoHo during the 1970's as New York's vital signs hit a critical low saw a broke--but mendable--urban skeleton in South Beach's Art Deco heritage. Gay men, both part of and closely connected to this group of pioneers, also seized upon South Beach as a place to rebuild their own broken lives.

"The original concept of the 'new' South Beach was as an arts community, geared towards connecting South Beach with the downtown scene in New York," says Louis Canales, an events promoter and publicist who helped arrange press junkets to bring reporters from publications like Details and Interview to South Beach in the mid-80's. "As the word [about South Beach] spread, it went from the arts community, to the trendy set, to gay men. It was not purposeful, the creating of a gay mecca; it just unfolded that way."

The existing infrastructure of residential space in South Beach was perfect for creating a gay paradise. Within walking distance of the beach, the majority of the buildings in South Beach were built as seasonal housing (studios or one-bedroom apartments) in the 1920's and 1930's when people came for three or four months. Converted into condos, these small spaces proved ideal for singles and helped to anchor the gay community.

The beginnings of the gay influx to South Beach also coincided with the development of promising drugs in the mid- to late-1980's to combat and control the opportunistic infections related to HIV, which had some initial success in prolonging lives. What's more, the widespread use of steroids to counter HIV-related wasting syndrome gave men back their physical strength, fueling a heightened idealizing of muscle development that corresponded perfectly with the warm-weather, body-conscious environment of South Beach.

South Beach was not only beautiful and fun, it was also cheap, a major consideration for HIV-positive men living on disability. Canales remembers, "You could rent a one-bedroom apartment in Morton Towers for $250 a month. You could eat at Puerto Sagua or Lincoln Road Cafe for a few dollars. You had the beach and you had perfect weather. You had a sense of being part of something bright." Reinforced by an influx of gay men flying down to spend weekends at the vacation apartments they had bought for far less than a weekend share on Fire Island or the Hamptons would cost, South Beach developed a pronounced hedonistic atmosphere.

On the surface, the party atmosphere of South Beach seemed to keep the HIV epidemic at bay. But paradises born out of trauma do not so much supplant reality as mask it. A key element in South Beach's ability to remain apparently unmarred by AIDS has been the transient nature of its population. As Canales notes, "Part of the problem was that when people went from HIV-positive to full-blown AIDS, they went back North to die. This created the illusion that there was not a problem here. Down here everybody would get a tan, get on steroids, look fabulous, then when they got sick they would go back to New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, or wherever they came from."

By leaving South Beach, these men with AIDS helped to preserve the paradise image as a carefree escape from other communities devastated by the epidemic. Although the number of HIV-related services increased in South Beach, the most visible sign of AIDS was not one of sickness, but instead of gorgeous people going to elaborate AIDS benefits such as the annual White Party. And while the annual World AIDS Day march in Miami and local AIDS activist groups folded due to lack of support, tickets to AIDS benefit parties costing $100 or more were snatched up by the thousands.

The advent of protease inhibitors in the mid-90's has begun to change the dynamics between South Beach, gay men, and other gay communities. Unlike steroids, which created a mere veneer of health and vigor, protease inhibitors effectively and dramatically reduce the level of the virus in the body to near undetectable levels, and this has given many HIV-positive men a renewed level of control over their bodies. Men once living on disability payments are now returning to the workforce, bringing a sense of normalcy back to gay communities throughout the country.

In turn, many gay men who consider moving to South Beach today are no longer looking to escape the devastation of AIDS in their home cities. What with the gentrification of South Beach over the last decade, they're basing their decision-as anyone else would-on the quality of life the area offers. The cost of living in SoBe has gone up, to be sure, but so has the quality of life in tangible, visible ways, notwithstanding the glamour factor associated with making the South Beach scene. "It's not that so many gay men are still coming down to partytill-you-drop," Can ales suggests, "but they have been given a second chance [by the new treatments]. They are coming to start new lives." Tim Barnum adds that many people who came to South Beach expecting to die are starting to drift back to New York and their home cities in the Northeast, while those coming to SoBe to make a permanent home are "less self-centered and more community-centered" than were the city's first gay pioneers.

The strengthening of links between identity and place within the South Beach gay community is part of a larger dynamic being played out in the general population of Miami Beach. As a resort community, Miami Beach has long placed more emphasis on its appeal to tourists than on quality of life issues faced by residents. But as trendy coffee bars, chic boutiques, and pricey restaurants continue to displace grocery stores and laundromats, community groups are grappling with the issue of creating a viable mixed use of limited space. The original vision of preserving the area's hundreds of Art Deco structures is being updated to consider the uses to which these restored buildings are to be put, and in the service of what group or groups.

Likewise, as new drugs stabilize their health, gay men are coming to view the reflection of their prowess and health not just by the buff image in the mirror, but in the kind of lives they build for themselves and the contribution they make to the community. The Dade Human Rights Foundation, a local, nonprofit gay funding initiative, undertook a study of the Miami Beach gay community with the focus on how to strengthen existing community organizations and establish new ones. The results showed people eager for ways to socialize outside of bars and clubs, particularly around sports and the arts.

Carl Wittman is quoted as having said of San Francisco and its appeal for gays and lesbians in the late 60's and early 70's, "We had to flock here from every other part of the nation, and like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it was so great here, but because it was so bad there..." Something similar happened to South Beach in the 90's, triggered in this case by a lethal disease. That a national catastrophe was partly responsible for a community's rapid revitalization is a paradox that may be unique to South Beach.

Eugene Patron is a freelance writer formerly of Miami Beach, currently living in Brooklyn. David W Forrest headed the Miami Young Men Survey, an HIV behavioral study, and now works as a social science research consultant in Miami.