How a blue-collar Ferndale became metro Detroit's gayborhood

Ferndale didn’t set out to become anybody’s gayborhood. It grew up early in the twentieth century as a tidy, working-class streetcar suburb just over the Detroit line at Eight Mile, the kind of place full of small brick bungalows built for auto workers. The transformation came later, and you can trace a lot of it to one building on West Nine Mile Road.

That’s Affirmations, an LGBTQ community center that started in 1989 out of a couple of Detroit basements — volunteers running a coming-out group and a phone hotline. It crossed into Ferndale around 1990, set up in an old downtown building, and kept growing until it opened a purpose-built 17,000-square-foot home on Nine Mile in 2007. Today it’s counted among the largest LGBTQ centers in the entire country, with counseling, support groups, and a youth program under one roof.

A center like that becomes a gravity well. Gay and lesbian residents, then the businesses that wanted their trade, then the restaurants and bars and a downtown that actually felt alive — they clustered around it through the 1990s and 2000s while a lot of inner-ring suburbs were fading. The city voted in a human-rights ordinance in 2006, and in 2008 elected Craig Covey, who’d led Affirmations and served on the council, as its mayor — one of Michigan’s first openly gay mayors.

The old auto-worker bungalows are still there, many of them, just with rainbow flags out front now. On a summer evening the stretch of Nine Mile near the center is busy with people walking to dinner past the warehouse-turned-marketplace down the street — a streetcar suburb that found a second life by becoming a place people felt they could belong.