BABY INFESTATION (via David Hill, The Bronx):

Lesbians moving out of ‘Dyke Slope’ (Ariella Cohen, 9/30/06, The Brooklyn Papers)

As the Park Slope mommies, daddies and Bugaboos multiply, a fringe group that once dominated a piece of the neighborhood has taken itself back to the fringe.

The fringe of the Slope, that is.

No one knows it better than Cynthia Kern. When Kern, the producer of DYKE TV, moved to Brooklyn in the late 1990s, her home base was Seventh Avenue. She could walk to the Rising Cafe, a lesbian hangout, and enjoy Sunday morning at the lesbian bookshop next door.

But by 2001, Kern was based on Fifth Avenue, and both the lesbian cafe and the bookshop had closed.

Now Kern and her girlfriend live in Windsor Terrace at the edge of Kensington, one of the F-line neighborhoods attracting a share of gay families.

“I moved to Dyke Slope when it was strong,” Kern said. “Then it became Puppy Slope. Now it’s Baby Slope. We can’t fit between all the strollers there.”

The Slope has always been a place that attracted groups in droves — police officers, Irish immigrants, Hispanics and then, brownstone-craving Yuppies. Lesbians hit critical mass in the neighborhood in the 1980s and propelled Brooklyn’s “gayborhood” into the alterna-tourist guidebooks by the ’90s.

But Kern felt that “Dyke Slope” was truly dead several months ago when she caught sight of a straight couple posing for a giggly photo under the “DYKE TV” sign on her office, the boyfriend pointing exaggeratedly at the reclaimed epithet.

“The word ‘dyke’ is a novelty now,” she said. “The small-town feeling of safety is gone now and has been replaced by cute stores selling cute outfits.”

By the end of the this year, Kern expects to take down the last DYKE TV poster and move the last specifically (and politically) lesbian business off of Fifth Avenue.

By the way they speak of the human future shall you know them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 5, 2006 1:54 PM