Greenwich Village

I admittedly knew nothing about the history of Greenwich Village before reading Gay New York, but was very enlightened toward the “Bohemian” subculture. The Village sounds like it was such a progressive place to be during the early 1900’s, and although it later became known for it’s “artistic” (artistic = homosexual?) endeavors, it seems like Bohemian culture was established with a genuine purpose.  The text mentions that it was easy to fit in and to find friends in that type of open-minded community, and that was obviously an extreme rarity anywhere during the 1910’s.  What I found to be depressing was the industrialization of the area after the War, due to the establishment of the subways, fighting the prohibition with local Italian wine, and the reputation that the Village that had developed for being this “artsy, modern center” and transformed it into something completely different. A subculture creates something beautiful and then mainstream society jumps on the bandwagon and sells it out - I thought high school was bad. Unlike what you would expect, the subculture didn’t die down, but it changed drastically and became this overemphasized and dramatized version. Although the subculture didn’t die, its reputation to mainstream society took on an expected alteration – from open-minded center for art and self-expression to "slum like" homosexual perversion. My question this week stems along the lines of believing that the media plays such a significant role in societal opinion of self-expression, and thinking that subcultures and other walks of life would be much more likely to be accepting and embracing of each other if we didn’t have so many bigots publishing work to dictate who is more elitist than who (subculture soap opera, anyone?) So I’d like to ask somewhat rhetorically, how has the media turned society to belittle you?