Castro gay
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The Castro wasn't always a gay neighborhood. Two outspoken lesbians were elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1992, one of whom, Roberta Achtenberg, went on to be appointed a high-end official in the Clinton Administration's Housing Department. The beats expressed a basic rejection of American middle class values, especially the family and suburbanism, which coincided closely with early gay attitudes.
Some consider it to include Duboce Triangle and Dolores Heights which both have a strong LGBT presence.
Castro Street itself runs south through Noe Valley, crossing the 24th Street business district, and terminating a few blocks farther south as it moves toward the Glen Park neighborhood.
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Until the 1960’s, though, the Castro was largely a white working class Irish neighborhood known as “Eureka Valley.” A shift came during World War II, when many soldiers came to San Francisco and formed gay relationships.Many residents and established businesses were resistant, some fleeing to the suburbs and selling their homes cheaply, but others embraced the neighborhood’s burgeoning gay population. The element of immediate pleasure and fun that gays strove to establish in their daily lives found an emphatic echo and expansion in the hippie movement of the 1960s.
Gay Freedom Day in 1974, when the gay community was equally focused on the Polk Gulch area, as seen in this photo.
Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp72.085; © Greg Gaar Photography
Its best known hero was Harvey Milk, a former camera store owner who used aggressive door-to-door (and bar-to-bar, corner-to-corner) populist organizing techniques to get elected to the city's Board of Supervisors.
Sarria was born in San Francisco and performed each Sunday afternoon for fifteen years to full houses of 250 or more, using his role as Madam Butterfly to sermonize about homosexual rights and leading a sing-along of "God Save the Nelly Queens."
During the 1950s San Francisco also spawned the Beat Culture, which shared spaces and attitudes with the incipient gay culture.
The city was always known for its relatively libertine attitudes towards sex and pleasure. In most U.S. cities, such in-migration was typically that of ethnic minorities, mostly blacks, Latinos and Asians. Under Reagan many conservative assumptions were adapted to, and gay politics became more an interest group and less a progressive agenda.
By 1973 there were over 800 organizations.
The above-ground gay press in San Francisco supports an impressive three fat weeklies, Bay Times, Bay Area Reporter (BAR), and in the 1970's The Sentinel.
Prev. The Castro was, at the time, an intersection of trails that connected these European settlements.
In 1845, José de Jesús Noé was granted a plot of land called Rancho San Miguel, which spanned four thousand acres from Twin Peaks into both Noe and Eureka Valleys.
One and a half million soldiers, 10%+ of which were homosexual, were able to find each other more easily in the marginal districts of San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg, himself gay, wrote Howl and fought obscenity charges in 1957. It extends down Market Street toward Church and on both sides of the Castro neighborhood from Church Street to Eureka Street.
When Dan White was given a virtual slap on the wrist for this cold-blooded murder in a jury trial (the verdict of voluntary manslaughter was handed down on May 21, 1979) one of the biggest riots in SF history exploded in the Civic Center Plaza, known as the White Night Riot. But the Castro still has around 20 gay bars (depending on how stringently you define “bar,” much less “gay bar”).