The Golden Gate Bridge
Recently, two strong earthquakes shook Southern California - such reminders must give an edge to life for residents of San Francisco awaiting ‘the Big One’ (and this time even the basking Bay seals moved off). Imagine reducing your possessions to those you could grab in moments, fleeing as the house collapsed. However, some see more threatening cracks in the city’s fabric of gay liberation.
In 1963 the first gay bar opened in the area now famous as the Castro. It stood at 2438 Market, close to Castro Street itself, and was named The Missouri Mule. When it closed a decade later, thirty gay bars had come and gone, while others were arriving. By then the area was attracting same sex couples from the brashness of New York to the peace and beauty of the West Coast in confluence with the hippy movement and the hipster Beats. Love-ins on Haight-Ashberry met the Castro Clone (Levi 501s, check shirts, and ‘taches) as gay men distinguished themselves by a proud hypermasculinity.
Behind the quiet facade of his camera shop future gay martyr Harvey Milk dabbled in porn movies, newly desirable low rent houses became cells of gay activism, and long-haired marchers hoisted rainbow flags ( designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker) to show the way. When Milk was assassinated in 1978, demand for the rainbow flag increased dramatically.
When I visited the city with my boyfriend, a gay resident drove us in his open-top jeep from the Bay area where we were staying up to the Castro on a evening of golden warmth. Perching on the back, it was a wonderful experience, seeing for the first time to the left the white, domed town hall where thousands had gathered in a candlelit vigil when Supervisor Milk was shot. Now the Sean Penn movie has captured those epoch-making days for everyone. Arriving at the Cosmopolitan bar we were warmly welcomed and treated to a magnificent pizza ordered in by a lesbian lawyer who held court (so to speak) at the bar.
A view of the bay and Alcatraz
Repeated visits to the area (once named Eureka Valley) revealed much about gay life there now. A leather bar called Daddy’s whose harnessed and chapped devotees lined up langourously eyeing the competition to a background of dance music, had a barman who shouted, “No dancing” when my boyfriend decided to succomb to the rhythm. He carried on regardless. It was similar to our experience in bars. No drinking-up time as in England, but a cry of “State law” by barmen immediately on closing, and glasses snatched back, even if you’d only been served minutes before. Smoking had already been banned there, except on the odd bar with an ouside balcony, and I noticed a cigarette butt dropped in the street could cause a hissy fit among the tidy, health-conscious Californians.
Since 2005 there has been increasing concern over the influx of straight people into the Castro to live and work, causing something of a fightback from those afraid of the area’s gay identity being lost. More recent political moves under the Bush Administration to ban the highly popular Castro Hallowe’en celebration due to excessive noise, have sent more unwelcome tremors through this vibrant and valliant gay community. No wonder the streets were thronged when Obama won the Presidential race, as if better times might be permitted to prevail.
Perhaps the campest moment on our visit was when taking a helicopter ride over the city. A soundtrack of popular songs played on our headphones to deaden the noise of the craft. As we flew under and then over the Golden Gate Bridge Judy Garland suddenly burst into song with the lines, “San Francisco, open up your golden gates..”, and the queen in me just flew like Dorothy over the rainbow of history. This is still a place where dreams become realities.
By John Hartley
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