By Rosemary Winters

The Salt Lake Tribune/Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah—Salt Lake City’s mayoral race is over with Democrat Ralph Becker’s landslide triumph. But the buzz of a “gayborhood” unfolding in the Marmalade area west of Capitol Hill is still ringing.

It was likely the only new vocabulary word tossed at Becker and his opponent, Dave Buhler, during their slew of debates. For many Utahns, it also may have been the first revelation that the reddest of red states has “gayborhoods.”

So what is a gayborhood?

In big cities, a gayborhood might center on a business district with bars, stores and restaurants catering to or owned by members of the GLBT community, but in Salt Lake City it has come to mean simply a neighborhood with a higher concentration of GLBT residents.

Marina Gomberg, director of membership and outreach at the Utah Pride Center, which is located in Marmalade, emphasizes that a “gayborhood” is not an exclusive thing.

“We’ve worked so hard to feel like we belong, we wouldn’t want anyone else to feel that feeling of not having anywhere to go,” she says. “The GLBT community embraces diversity as do many other communities.”

It’s not a new term, either. Philadelphia’s entrenched gay district is known simply as “The Gayborhood.”

But the debut of “gayborhood” into mainstream political debate here could be another indicator of Utah’s growing and increasingly “out” GLBT population.

From 1990 to 2006, Utah’s per-capita households headed by same-sex couples sprang from 38th in the nation to 14th, according to a study released this month by the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The author, Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the institute, also ranked the nation’s 50 largest cities by same-sex couples per thousand households, using 2000 Census counts and an average of 2004-2006 data from the American Community Survey.

Salt Lake City isn’t one of the top 50, but if it had been included, Gates says, it would have hit No. 13 in 2000 and vaulted to No. 8 in 2006, knocking Washington, D.C., down to No. 9 for density of households headed by same-sex couples.

Surprisingly, Gates found that conservative areas such as Utah, which passed a voter-approved constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in 2004, experienced the greatest gains in the number of same-sex couples. He attributes that leap to a general migration trend among the entire U.S. population to the West and the South, but also to a growing number of GLBT people who are “out.”

Many of the nation’s best-known gay districts are experiencing identity crises as gay residents move to other neighborhoods, no longer needing to live in so-called gayborhoods to experience social acceptance, according to a recent report in The New York Times.

But in conservative Utah, GLBT residents likely still gravitate to more liberal urban neighborhoods—and Salt Lake City is becoming increasingly progressive as evidenced by Becker’s blowout of Buhler, continuing the capital’s three-decade-plus streak of electing Democratic mayors.

“This downtown area has always been so diverse,” says real estate broker and Salt Lake City Planning Commissioner Babs De Lay, who prefers the term “more diverse neighborhood” to “gayborhood.”

“I sell a lot of downtown condominiums. We have a higher percentage of gay buyers than maybe out in the suburbs,” she notes. “Instead of 10 percent of the population being gay, we might have 20 percent” downtown.

Take Marmalade, so named for its historic orchards and street names such as Apricot. The popular and historically diverse neighborhood is nearly synonymous with West Capitol Hill, running from 300 North to 800 North and 300 West to the Capitol’s west side.

Q Salt Lake’s Aaron, who is gay and has lived in Marmalade since 1991, estimates up to a third of the neighborhood is GLBT. The Utah Pride Center is a natural gathering spot for the community and, in July, it began hosting Café Marmalade, a coffeehouse/GLBT library on the street level of the center’s office building.

Aaron was drawn to the area because of its multifaceted diversity and proximity to downtown. He also was able to buy, in 1990, a boarded-up, 1918 bungalow for $29,900 and renovate it for another $20,000.

“Gayborhoods just kind of happen,” says Aaron, who credits the gay community with leading home makeovers in the Avenues and West Capitol Hill in the 1980s and beyond.

“Gay people tend to gravitate toward where their community is, where the arts center is, where the better restaurants are,” he says. They “tend to flee places like Bountiful and Sandy to go to places where more progressive people will surround them.”