SAN FRANCISCO’S CASTRO DISTRICT was the first big-city neighborhood in the United States where openly gay people elected one of their own to represent them in City Hall. Harvey Milk, the man who was elected in this capacity in 1977, soon became nationally prominent as the leading spokesperson for gay and lesbian rights in a bitterly fought contest over a 1978 statewide ballot measure that would have banned homosexuals from serving as schoolteachers. The Castro’s mythical status was cemented by the assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone less than a year into Milk’s first term, and by the so-called White Night Riots that followed the lenient sentence given to Dan White, the former police officer who murdered them. Today the Castro’s terrain of hilly asphalt is a site of pilgrimage, its bars and restaurants home to a lucrative tourist trade and a gay nightlife scene.
A biography of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street
The Wagnerian turn of events in 1978 made Harvey Milk into the U.S. gay and lesbian movement’s first political martyr, and the Castro its first hallowed ground. It also set off a number of momentous events: the ascent to the Mayor’s office of Board of Supervisors president Dianne Feinstein; the notorious use of the “Twinkie defense” by Dan White’s lawyer, who argued that he had temporarily lost control of his faculties because of the sugar high brought on by eating Twinkies; and the White Night Riots, occurring the day he was convicted only of manslaughter, in which gays and lesbians stormed San Francisco City Hall, caused millions of dollars in property damage, and burned twelve police cars.
But how did the Castro come to be the world’s most famous gay neighborhood in the first place? Most accounts focus on two processes. First, gay artists, hippies, and radicals migrated to central San Francisco during and after the 1967 “summer of love” in the Haight-Ashbury district, nearly adjacent to the Castro. These adventuresome urban pioneers are said to have “discovered” the hidden charm of the picturesque Victorian houses that had suffered long years of neglect under a regimen of asbestos, tarpaper, and aluminum siding perpetrated by clueless heterosexuals. The second narrative centers on the mobilization of gay activists, including Milk, who demanded and won the right to be open about their homosexuality and obtain political representation.
Both narratives throw the spotlight on the people who built the Castro district rather than on the larger social conditions in which they operated. In point of fact, the “gayification” of the Castro was strongly affected by the processes of urban change and political development that were taking place at this time.
BETWEEN 1849 AND 1915, real estate developers built nearly 50,000 Victorian houses in San Francisco. One of the major developers claimed that his goal was to “transform the sandy wastes outside the business part of the city into … neighborhoods, composed of frugal and industrious people,” asserting that their great aspiration was to “serve the great middle class” of the young city (Bloomfield, 1978).
The area around the Castro Street commercial strip was just far enough from San Francisco’s northeastern core that its Victorian houses escaped destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire. This area, long known as Eureka Valley, or sometimes by the name of Most Holy Redeemer Parish, was populated by white ethnics, mostly Catholics, from the 1920’s—when the Twin Peaks tunnel brought increased traffic to the area—to the early 70’s. Nestled in a valley, unencumbered by tenements or high-rises, Eureka Valley in the 40’s and 50’s seemed to its residents to be almost self-contained. It was home to small business owners, church officials, schoolteachers, professionals, club organizers, and above all skilled, unionized workers in the waterfront industries of one of America’s busiest ports. The city’s gay and lesbian community institutions—its bars—were elsewhere, in the city’s dense northeastern quadrant near the waterfront. The Castro Theatre, built in 1924, was only one of several movie palaces in the neighborhood, but it was the sole one to survive the invention of television.
Having sifted through the historical record on the Castro, I concluded that the dense concentration of storefront taverns along the two or three blocks of Castro Street just below Market was at least as crucial a factor in its gayification as its Victorian houses. Bars had long been central cultural institutions for white men in America’s immigrant centers, and San Francisco, known as the “wettest in the West,” resisted federal and state enforcement of Prohibition.
The elderly men and women that filmmaker Peter Stein interviewed for his documentary The Castro (KQED television, 1997) recall that the two-block commercial strip on Castro Street alone had nine bars in the post-World War II period. “The consumption of alcohol on a Saturday night per capita was tremendous,” one man recalled. Liquor licenses were difficult and expensive to obtain, and when commercial properties changed hands in San Francisco, the licenses frequently remained in place, constituting a neglected feature of the Castro’s built environment. In 1950, men made up the majority of Eureka Valley’s employed adults, and among them, the largest fraction (46 percent) worked in traditionally blue-collar occupations on the city’s waterfront or in the skilled trades. Thirty percent of employed men and 66 percent of employed women worked in non-managerial clerical, sales, or service positions.
Eureka Valley’s homogeneity and stability reflected the profound racial segregation of urban housing markets in this period. The 1950 census shows that the population of the three Castro tracts was 99.4 percent white—a number that would drop to 96.6 percent in 1960, 86.1 percent in 1970, and 80.9 percent in 1990. One woman I interviewed, Leah Forbes, recalled that some of her neighbors were panicked by an African-American family moving in at 15th and Noe Streets: “Oh my God, there go the property values.” Forbes also remarked that “one of the big treats, on Sundays, after church, was to stop by the bakery and buy a loaf of bread hot out of the oven and carry it home.” The corner grocery store let customers keep a tab.
But the neighborhood’s economic foundation was beginning to deteriorate. Blue-collar jobs, homes, and families all began to leave San Francisco, replaced by white-collar office jobs in the newly built downtown skyscrapers. As shipping was automated and moved across the Bay to Oakland, so too did the waterfront jobs that Eureka Valley men had long held. In the 1950’s, the city’s banking employment nearly doubled, but maritime employment dropped by a quarter; the white population dropped thirteen percent while the black population increased 43 percent. National trends hurt San Francisco’s traditional industries, including timber, oil, and food processing, and companies also sought to escape the city’s powerful unions.
By the 1960’s, white blue-collar family men were increasingly moving to the suburbs, and the city’s adult population was growing younger, more white-collar, and more professional. Spending several nights a week drinking in taverns was not this crowd’s idea of a good time. The decline of the male-dominated, “family wage” economy of Eureka Valley was becoming untenable, and women and gay men were challenging longstanding norms. Above all, unlike their straight brothers, San Francisco’s growing gay minority patronized the bars faithfully. In 1969, gay liberationist Carl Wittman declared that “San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals”—and this would only become more true in the following decade.
The gay men and women who first made the Castro a gay neighborhood were hippies and other drop-outs from middle-class America. In crucial respects, they were as much dissenters from American mass consumer culture as they were its vanguard. Geographers Mickey Lauria and Lawrence Knopp noted in 1985 that “relatively low-wage gay renters seeking nothing more than a place to live are sometimes the catalysts in a central-city neighborhood’s upgrading.” They added prophetically that eventually this “first wave … may attract other more affluent gays to the neighborhood, especially if it is ripe for redevelopment.” Many, including Harvey Milk, were themselves displaced by sharp rent increases during the gentrification process.
Gay people were moving into the Castro because it was cheap. According to a group of urban studies scholars associated with geographer Neil Smith, a professor at the City University of New York, gentrification occurs when there’s a gap between an area’s “actual ground rent” and “potential ground rent.” Deindustrialization and white flight had deflated the value of Eureka Valley’s Victorians, pushing prices down.
In 1963, the Missouri Mule opened on Market Street near Castro, becoming the first bar in Eureka Valley to attract a predominantly gay clientele. Like most gay bars at the time, it was small and poorly lit, its windows painted over so people on the street couldn’t see inside. For David Valentine, a printer I interviewed, the presence of the Missouri Mule made Eureka Valley attractive after he quit The San Francisco Examiner, where he’d had to conceal his homosexuality carefully. He wanted to open his own print shop. “One of the reasons I had located my business up here was there was a gay bar across the street,” he recalled. Valentine rented a cheap, run-down flat on Market Street in 1968. “When I moved in there I was on an army cot in a sleeping bag, and worked on it for the better part of the year,” he said, “all the way up to putting finish on the floor and staining them a dark walnut and then recoating them with polyurethane.”
The gayification of the Castro was a transition from one masculine tavern subculture to another. The late Allan Bérubé, a gay man who was living in a Haight-Ashbury commune at this time (and author of the acclaimed 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II), recalled walking downhill into the Castro in search of bars that would tolerate groups of gay patrons. The process of succession in taverns was gradual. One bar even turned gay and then turned back, acquiring a straight clientele once again: “The Mistake on 18th near Castro is now straight and has a new name,” wrote a columnist in California Scene, a gay nightlife magazine, in 1971. “When a butch but older character there asked me if I knew the latest ball scores, I knew something was wrong.”
Gay hippies created communal living arrangements markedly different from those of the straight nuclear families around them. Newly arrived migrants moved in with friends from back home in the American heartland, in a process that closely resembled classic ethnic patterns of chain migration. Newcomers participated in an alternative economic and social support system, separated not only from the patterns of postwar nuclear family life but also from the regimen of government subsidies, mortgages, and bank loans on which the latter depended. Although its gay population was and is male dominated, lesbians gravitated there as well.
A key part of the Castro’s history, discussed at some length in the Shilts biography, receives only minimal treatment in Milk, namely the extent to which some Eureka Valley heterosexuals resisted the arrival of visibly gay people and businesses in the early 70’s. As Berkeley sociologist Manuel Castells noted in a chapter on the Castro published in the early 1980’s: “Gay settlement was opposed by property, family, and high class: the old triumvirate of social conservatism.” Straight residents fought back against the gay onslaught using strategies familiar to many urbanites, including that most tried-and-true tactic, violence, which took the form of gay-bashing and vandalism. They also used the apparatus of municipal government to curtail or criminalize “undesirable” ways of using the neighborhood, such as cruising. And an exclusive neighborhood association of business owners, the Eureka Valley Merchants Association, conspired to out gay business owners.
In the crucial summer of 1971, three or four area gay bars mushroomed to seven or eight. On Memorial Day weekend, Toad Hall opened, a bar that became a hit with gay men from all over San Francisco. The Muni Metro subway line under Market Street would soon make the area even more accessible. In May 1971, The San Francisco Examiner ran a profile of Eureka Valley, noting that it “is experiencing a big influx of very young and very hip people. Many ‘street artists’ have ‘discovered’ Eureka Valley and as a result the Castro and Market area has some of the best head, arts and crafts shops and galleries around.” Six weeks later, the Chronicle asked, “Will Eureka Valley become a new Haight-Ashbury?” and concluded, “Old-time residents undoubtedly hope not.”
Leafing through neighborhood newspapers from the period shows that two radically different populations were living near Castro Street. In the Noe Eureka Weekly Shopper, whose complete run from June 1971 to March 1972 is preserved in the San Francisco History Room in the downtown public library, you can glimpse the lives of older, longtime residents drawn together by bingo nights, parish musicals, and clubs celebrating shared Irish, Italian, or Scandinavian descent. In the summer of 1971, articles debated the opening of “new and unusual stores” and expressed “the feeling of seeing the city or the neighborhood seemingly taken-over by outsiders.”
In contrast, The Castro Village Other, available in the GLBT Historical Society, records the lives of gays, hippies, and radicals. In the summer of 1972, one young man advertised for a roommate who was “into bio-degradable detergents [and]into the spiritual trip.” Another wrote, “young and interesting Nordic-American male age 27, seeks friends, male or female for tripping and fun.” By August, a gay columnist wrote in California Scene that around Castro Street, “local residents have gotten uptight, the police are beginning to drop by the [gay]bars and roving gangs of youths (possibly taking their cue from their parents) are beating up gay guys on their way home at night.”
Gays and lesbians began to organize a response to this harassment. At a September 7, 1971, community meeting to elect a new chair for the Eureka Valley Police–Community Relations Council, the fifteen or so “straights” who showed up were dismayed to find some 300 gay men in attendance. One of two anti-gay candidates for the position, a California highway patrolman and president of the Most Holy Redeemer Parent–Teachers’ Guild, declared he was “fed up with all the hand-holding in the streets. My wife and child can’t go outside without being scandalized.” The lopsided turnout meant the two anti-gay candidates and their supporters walked out frustrated. The gay constituency elected their own candidate, a straight former policeman named Bob Pettengill who owned a Castro Street restaurant with a predominantly gay clientele. The Chronicle declared: “A Gay Victory in Eureka Valley.” The next month, a front-page article said, “San Francisco’s populous homosexual community, historically non-political and inward looking, is in the midst of assembling a potentially powerful political machine.”
For the next three years, tensions were fairly high. Toad Hall and other gay bars were repeatedly damaged in suspicious fires. In July 1973, the home of the pioneering gay Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) burned to the ground. Police continued to arrest gay men for dancing in bars and clubs and cruising in parks. By 1974, the Gay Activist Alliance had recorded sixty beatings of gays citywide in a three-month period, with the Castro having the worst record of all.
In late summer 1974, neighborhood resentments came to a head. Late at night on Labor Day, after the bars had closed, fourteen men were arrested in what the Chronicle called “a sweep to clear the Castro Street sidewalks.” They were charged with public drunkenness, obstructing traffic, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, and drug offenses. Harvey Milk, who had lost his first bid for supervisor the previous year, rallied others to defend the so-called “Castro 14,” charging that they were arrested solely because they were gay. A straight woman wrote to the Chronicle in defense of the police sweep: “The smell of pot almost knocks you out as you edge by. They have completely taken over Castro Street and I’m made to feel like an intruder in their own little world—me, a native of the district. They walk around in torn jeans with their private parts showing.” But before long, all charges were dropped. According to Shilts, this “sealed the neighborhood’s reputation as the new homosexual hot spot.”
Meanwhile, gay people opening businesses in the neighborhood found that the Eureka Valley Merchants Association (EVMA), in the words of printer David Valentine, “didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” In 1970 or 1971, when the EVMA refused to admit Ian Ingham, an antique store owner, he founded the Castro Village Association (CVA), made up largely of gay and hippie businesses. Even a relatively conservative gay shop owner complained in print about “the rigidly anti-gay, deeply Catholic Merchants Association.” In the Shilts biography, the conflict between the two business groups is depicted as a pitched battle. My research hints, however, that it may have been somewhat more fluid. Indeed, in December 1971, the CVA placed a front-page notice in the Weekly Shopper thanking the EVMA for its “unexpected, surprise and most welcome, substantial contribution” to promoting the CVA’s Christmas events. The following month, the same paper—the paper of the old-timers—even profiled Ingham as “merchant of the week.” In time, the Castro Village Association won out over EVMA. And “Castro Village,” a branding effort promoted beginning in 1974 by the CVA, became the most common way of referring to the neighborhood, gradually morphing into “the Castro.”
THE CASTRO today symbolizes the so-called “ethnic model” of gay politics, in which gays and lesbians behave like traditional urban ethnic minorities—choosing their own elected officials, patronizing their own small businesses, and honoring traditions in annual parades and festivals. The Castro also symbolizes the reputation of lesbians and especially gay men for gentrifying declining urban neighborhoods, a notion that Richard Florida’s bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) has popularized in recent years. But gay gentrifiers were only one factor of many in determining how Eureka Valley would evolve following the gay “takeover.”
Nearly all reminiscences of the Castro’s origins eventually turn to real estate. Decades before the housing bubble of the last few years, real estate in San Francisco underwent a long-term increase in value that transformed the Castro. The median value of an owner-occupied house in Most Holy Redeemer Parish rose from just $16,000 in 1965 to $138,000 in 1980, according to an archdiocese study. Those who bought cheap at the right time made a killing, while many others wish they had made such investments.
The central-city real estate markets where GLBT people are concentrated have undergone unprecedented inflation since the 1970’s. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that gays have profited disproportionately. Indeed, as late as 1980, gay neighborhoods in San Francisco on average had lower rents than non-gay neighborhoods, and the Examiner reported in 1982 that, citywide, gays were considerably more likely than straights to have low incomes. More to the point, political scientist Robert Bailey has shown that the single best predictor of gay residential concentration in U.S. cities is the proportion of renters in an area. As it happens, the Castro’s proportion of renter-occupied dwellings in the Castro—63 percent in 1950—steadily increased in the following three decades. Consequently, if home ownership is the normative American path to respectability and security, then the propensity of gays to rent rather than own imposes a limit on the association between gays and gentrification. Clearly, today’s hyper-gentrified gay ghettoes—from Chelsea to West Hollywood—are only one, historically specific model for what gay communities have been and are today.
In fact, the idea that gay neighborhoods are gentrified areas is surprisingly new. While surveying the academic literature on gentrification, I discovered that the 1964 essay in which the British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term “gentrification” actually contains a reference to homosexuals. But it is worlds apart from the cheery, corporate materialism of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Instead, Glass saw that what she called “the marginal men,” the “inbred intellectual and artistic circles,” and “the various ‘security risks’” were among those displaced by gentrification as other, more affluent Londoners pushed them, along with other marginal groups, out of the central-city neighborhoods. This comes much closer to a description of what has happened in San Francisco’s gay neighborhoods that pre-dated the Castro’s fame, including North Beach, the Tenderloin, and Polk Street. All of these districts embodied this earlier type of gay neighborhood, a far cry from today’s concept of the ultra-gentrified gay ghetto.
References
Bloomfield, Anne. “The Real Estate Associates: A Land and Housing Developer of the 1870’s in San Francisco.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 37:1 (March 1978).
Castells, Manuel. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (California, 1983).
Lauria, Mickey and Lawrence Knopp. “Toward an Analysis of the Role of Gay Communities in the Urban Renaissance.” Urban Geography 6 (1985).
Timothy Stewart-Winter, a PhD candidate in history at the University of Chicago, is completing his dissertation, “Raids, Rights, and Rainbow Coalitions: Gay and Lesbian Citizenship and the Remaking of Chicago Politics, 1950–2000.”
