nothin “Gayborhood” Cleans Up | New Haven Independent

Gayborhood” Cleans Up

Alder Ellen Cupo, Hunter Ian Cupo Dunn and Alli Warshaw at Saturday’s cleanup.

Emily Hays Photos

Dominic Warshaw wanted to meet their neighbors.

Roughly 30 people came out Saturday to Lyon Street and William Street for a gayborhood” cleanup, with a dual focus on beautifying the blocks and meeting fellow LGBTQ neighbors.

You don’t notice until you’re already here” that the neighborhood is disproportionately queer, said Lyon Street resident Dominic Warshaw.

Warshaw has been picking up trash in Beaver Hills since last fall as part of an initiative started by queer singer Salwa Abdussabur.

A Lyon Street house waves a pride flag, redesigned by Daniel Quasar to be explicitly pro-trans and inclusive of Black and Brown queer folks.

Warshaw, who uses they/them” pronouns, wanted to do something similar in Wooster Square.

Since moving to Lyon Street a few years ago, they kept noticing more and more LGBTQ neighbors. Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, though, it’s been hard to make connections due to social distancing, mask mandates, and so much time spent within the confines of one’s home.

So Warshaw floated the gayborhood trash pickup idea with neighbor Sophie Duncan, who got excited about the plan too.

Alder Ellen Cupo, Hunter Ian Cupo Dunn and Alli Warshaw at Saturday’s cleanup.

They reached out to Wooster Square Alder Ellen Cupo, who pulled together rakes from the New Haven Public Works Department and gloves from neighbor donations. Warshaw’s fiancée, Alli Warshaw, brought a boombox given to her as a birthday present.

The organizers didn’t use social media to promote the event, only rainbow-themed flyers put up around the neighborhood. They were surprised to see about 30 volunteers come out over the course of the afternoon.

Cupo’s husband Ian Dunn ran around gluing together rakes that had fallen apart and finding more leaf bags for the group of volunteers. Cupo’s son, Hunter, contributed by dragging around a rake and pushing all the buttons on the boombox.

Sophie Duncan (pictured above) ran the meeting spot for the group and offered patches and temporary tattoos to the volunteers. Duncan loves stamps and carved vulture and raccoon stamps to print on the patches, to fit the trash scavenging theme.

Nearby, a chalk sign on the sidewalk advertised the trash pickup, with the additional slogan, Be the trash you want to see in the world.”

Warshaw and Duncan decided to offer prizes to the weirdest trash finds. Jill Richards (pictured above) likely won that category when she found a partial spine. Her guess was that the vertebrae were from a pig.

Other finds included a pair of underwear and some BB-gun ammunition.

Caroline Scanlan focused her energy on clearing leaves from the sides of the road. This helps stormwater drain off the street better and prevents flooding.

Scanlan helps plant trees all around New Haven as part of her day job with the Urban Resources Initiative. So she knows that leaves that have settled into the soil around street trees are fine for the tree. They should just be cleared away from the trunk to prevent rot.

Aside from Warshaw and an elderly man who walked by with a shopping cart full of recyclables, Scanlan was probably the most experienced in neighborhood cleanups. She thought Warshaw and Duncan had done a phenomenal job with the event by having proper equipment and prizes. All this helps volunteers feel valued.

She felt inspired to bring some of this friendly community spirit back to her part of East Rock.

The Making Of A Gayborhood

Sophie Duncan and her dog, Gromit.

Saturday seemed to be the first time someone officially called Lyon and William Streets a gayborhood.

No one interviewed by the Independent had moved to the neighborhood explicitly for the LGBTQ community; they had noticed the presence of gay, lesbian, nonbinary and trans neighbors later. Some had started to unofficially call the little area a gayborhood amongst themselves.

Duncan’s theory for how Lyon and William became so gay is that it’s a good street for dogs.

She moved to live with her sister in New Haven with the plan to get a dog, eat a lot of ice cream and find gainful employment.”

Duncan joked that she has now accomplished all three goals, so she can retire now.

Adopting a dog motivated Rhiannon Cappannelli (pictured above) to move to the neighborhood. She was living in another neighborhood where she felt less safe going on walks. She knew Duncan and the Warshaws already and decided to move nearby.

She loves that the area feels so friendly. When her corgi, Charlotte (pictured), escaped recently, other neighbors managed to stop the puppy and reunite her with Cappannelli.

Left to right: Jill Richards, Seth Wallace, Kevin McGuire.

Married couple Seth Wallace and Kevin McGuire were some of the most veteran residents of the street out on Saturday. The two have lived on either Lyon or William for seven to eight years.

McGuire remembered when he thought the two of them were the only queer folks on the street. The LGBTQ presence has become increasingly visible since then.

Maya Dunn does not live on either Lyon or William Street. She lives in East Rock, where she sees less of a queer vibe and more of a Yale-professors-with-kids vibe.

While she likes her neighborhood, she got excited to join the gayborhood cleanup after hearing about it from her sister-in-law, Ellen Cupo. It’s nice to be in queer spaces, where no one ever assumes she is a man or asks what team she plays for” (“which is none of their business”, Dunn added).

Left to right: Evan Cheng and Sebastian Duque.

Yale undergraduates Evan Cheng and Sebastian Duque hadn’t known they were living in a gayborhood until they saw the flyer advertising the cleanup. Duque noticed all the pride flags for the first time during the cleanup itself.

Cheng and Duque are living in a queer household on William Street for the semester, as an adaptation to Yale’s pandemic schedule where some students study in-person and some study remotely.

The two students are excited about their new understanding of their neighborhood and about getting to know their neighbors through future events.

When asked whether they had found any weird pieces of trash, Cheng reported that he had found a snake.

That’s not trash, that’s nature!” Duque laughed.

Other finds: lots of cigarette butts, a car part, a glass bottle drained of alcohol and a piece of a vape pen.

Queer neighbor — and Independent freelancer — Allison Hadley mused that making the gayborhood explicit is a positive thing. Even naming the neighborhood informally seems to have increased the communal spirit and friendliness. She recalled the way 10 neighbors jumped out of their homes to help a FedEx driver stuck during a recent snowstorm.

Hadley is looking forward to future gayborhood events, like an art day and garage sale, that neighbors brainstormed during the cleanup. 

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