Interview and Transcript
Reese Uteda (RU): Thank you everyone for being here. I'm really excited to talk to you all. My name is Reese Uteda. I'm a graduate student in History at San Francisco State University and I am also a research assistant for OutHistory Executive Director Marc Stein.
I'm joined here today by Jen Reck, who is an Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Their work focuses on queer studies, research methods, and community-engaged scholarship, with research on LGBTQ+ life in San Francisco's Castro District, including questions of placemaking, equity, and queer displacement.
I'm also joined by Tina Aguirre, who is the director of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District, a writer, curator, and longtime nonprofit leader. They have extensively worked in LGBTQ+ cultural preservation and exhibit making and recently co-curated an exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Conjuring Power: Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements.
And lastly we have Gerard Koskovich, who is a public historian, curator, and book dealer based in San Francisco and Paris. A founding member of the GLBT Historical Society, he has spent more than four decades building LGBTQ+ archives and exhibitions and was awarded the GLBT Historical Society's Clio Award in 2020 for his contributions to LGBTQ+ history.
Thank you all for being here today. To start, I'd love to focus on the process behind this project, how it came together, who it's for, and what it means to produce a public-facing history of the Castro at this particular moment. So first, where will this pamphlet be available and who do you envision as the intended audiences?
Gerard Koskovich (GK): Tina, do you want to take this one for starters?
Tina Aguirre (TA): Sure, yes. First, thank you for having us. This is a great opportunity to talk about history with people who appreciate history, especially queer and trans history.
The original request that the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District made of Gerard and Jen was to write a brief historical statement that could be a part of our CHHESS [Cultural History, Housing, and Economic Sustainability Strategies] report. This is a report that is written for the City of San Francisco. What we quickly ascertained was that Gerard and Jen had way more material than was needed for that report, that really the brief for that, which was written for the CHHESS report section, was going to be maybe like eight pages, and what they shared was that they had much, much more than that. And that was intriguing to me, and so we had a discussion about if the district would be interested in publishing that. I think pretty quickly my answer was yes. And the audience is really everybody, I guess, especially people who are interested in queer and trans history, the Castro, movement building, and looking at the question, looking at the subject of how do we move past this moment, of let's say how do we look at racial, gender, and queer or class equity in terms of social justice? And how do we navigate oppression as it's happening globally, federally, and locally, with elected officials especially who act with great harm against us as queer and trans people.
Jen Reck (JR): And it's going to be available in many places. Currently it's available at Fabulosa Books, which is a bookstore in the Castro. The cultural district is distributing copies. It's also at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. We're looking to put it in other bookstores. It can be ordered through the mail through Fabulosa. So it's available in a lot of different places in San Francisco right now.
RU: Great. And on the role of what the city played in this and what the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District played in this, how did you navigate the balance between institutional involvement and critical analysis?
GK: I can jump in on that one right away, and that's that Jen and I, in agreement with Tina from the outset, said that as the historians, we have to have complete freedom to find the materials we wish to find and interpret them as we believe is most appropriate. And Tina deeply supported that. So we didn't have any ideological, or historiographical, or topical limitations provided by the district. Tina told us they were excited to see what we were going to bring along, and we did. I think it helps that all three of us share some fundamental values and some fundamental politics. So we came to the project with a commonality of purpose from the outset, but still we were left with the complete freedom academically and historically to research and interpret the materials that we found as we thought best.
TA: What I can add to that is that the City of San Francisco and its representatives who were co-authors of the CHHESS report, which has an acronym that I should know, but it's cultural heritage, economic sustainability strategies, I think, and housing. C-H-H-E-S-S. Though much of the report was co-written, the historical section was not up for their editing. They had the rights to edit almost everything else. They could not, and I was really clear, edit the history part. There were no historians, no experts on this, that we've encountered through the city. So they didn't have any authority over that.
JR: Yeah, and I think that kind of in line with what Gerard said, the three of us not only share an ideological commitment to an equity-based lens on history, but that's also the mission of the cultural district. And the cultural district's mission is to elevate voices that are often unheard in the Castro and increase equity there. And so the focus of the history is really in line with that mission as well. And I think in my experience of working with the city through the CHHESS report and with the cultural district, the cultural district program is one where the city and city officials in some sense know that there are things that are still to be learned about identity-based neighborhoods and communities. And so I think the history that we created and the information that we developed through this project actually taught people who work in the city things that they had no idea about. Because even the City of San Francisco sometimes views the queer community through a lens of just pure privilege. That it's just gay white men and that there isn't a ton of inequality that queer and trans people face historically or currently. And so I think that it's a good lesson for everyone.
GK: And I might add: and a lens that says all cisgender gay white men are upper-middle class and bring an enormous amount of privilege to their lives. Class issues are also one of the lenses that we brought to our analysis here to remind people that the story is much more complex and therefore much more interesting than they had imagined in some ways. And I suspect Tina and Jen share this, that at the outset we were coming into a situation in which there was a sort of folk historiography about the Castro in San Francisco and beyond, a widely shared tale of this gayborhood. And of course our historical research. My personal experience: I first set foot in the Castro a few months short of fifty years ago when I was an undergraduate. But also our perception as historians is that in that folk historiography, there must be something more. And the folk historiography is a bunch of privileged, middle class or better, cisgender white gay men showed up in the Castro in the 1970s and sort of invaded it and pushed people out and took it over and turned it into a world famous gayborhood. And that story, any historian would look at it and say, "That doesn't make any sense on its face. That's not how cities and neighborhoods work. That's kind of projecting our sense of the economic displacements that came with the dot-com boom and the tech boom, and imagining that that's the only engine for social and cultural change in urban neighborhoods, and so we'll just project that into the past." And Jen and I quickly found a story that is very little documented and vastly more interesting than that, but also that takes that folk historiography as an object of interrogation in its own right.
RU: Yeah, there are a lot of different themes that you explored in this booklet, contestation being one of them. Grappling honestly with exclusion and hierarchy and tension within the community itself and inter-community tensions.
And right now, I want to turn to some of those internal contestations over belonging, because it does make up a significant portion of the story. So, drawing on Allan Bérubé and other marginalized voices, you highlight how a predominantly white, affluent cisgender gay male culture came to dominate the Castro.
Why do you think that this gay identity so often became the sole organizing principle rather than an intersectional one that includes gender, class, and race?
JR: I can start. I think that when you look at the emergence of the Castro, in some ways it may have emerged out of a perceived necessity or some of the realities of anti-queer oppression that were occurring in that era. In the seventies, when the Castro became a visible queer space, claiming a public queer identity and coming out were really quite recent elements of the political movement building that was happening. That was a pretty new thing. And so expressing an identity of gay or lesbian out in the public was quite radical, and so in a lot of ways at that time, it was radical and exciting. It was a really joyful time. And the seventies was when things like the Lesbian Softball League were created and gay businesses became more visible. There began to be these community organizations and groups. And so claiming space in that way, in organizations, creating our own organizations, being in the neighborhood, was really radical. But an additional element of that, I think, is also privilege. So you have obviously a lot of different people in the community. And so, cisgender white men, middle-class cisgender white men, or wage-earning cisgender white men at that time could organize their lives as being around gay as kind of the core aspect of their identity and oppression. And it possibly was the main or only oppression that they experienced. And so that, combined with the material opportunities that they had available to them, allowed them to have a different kind of access to claiming space, owning property, and being publicly gay with less risk than like QTBIPOC [queer, trans, black, indigenous, and people of color] folks or lesbians. And so I think the kind of oppression combined with privileges was one of the things that contributed to gay identity being a sole organizing principle.
GK: Yes. I'd also point in that period to the mediation, the storytelling that was going on. And of course the principal source of capital for telling stories was mainstream media, whether print or film or television or travel guides, the travel industry, and so on. And the story that they were comfortable and happy telling was, "Why look, these weirdos have almost become normal middle class white people, sort of." And that became the story that was widely mediated for profit.
I also would like to go back a little bit earlier in the story to remind folks that this concept of belonging, when you look at the Eureka Valley District in the 1950s and early 1960s, the people who were starting to find a place of belonging there as homosexual men or women were largely working class. They were fleeing truly violent oppression, physical, economic, familial, faith communities, government across the United States, and finding a place of refuge in an old working class neighborhood that was going out of business where you could rent for nothing,
or buy for nothing, or set up a business for very little money. These were traumatized people coming from around the United States trying to create a new form of belonging. So before we then look at the ways that turns into a form of belonging dominated by a specific group of privileged cisgender white gay men, we might think about the fact that the early years were something much different and more complicated. And if we look at those first households of adult lesbians and gay men in the Castro that we've managed to document, well, we find a lesbian couple, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, moving in in 1953.
A gay couple was already living upstairs in the building when they moved in. We find a young African American man who was putting on parties for sailors, U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine working class men. We find Maurice “Mike” Gerry moving to the edge of the neighborhood in 1954. He ran a beauty salon and was basically a working class man. And so those early years, before that cultural belonging was fully formed or fully consolidated, it was people who belonged nowhere else who were coming to that neighborhood, and that included the working class and lower-middle class, cisgender white people coming to the neighborhood. So there's a kind of complex story there. Often when we talk about the Castro and the challenges, we forget the Castro's in the United States, where even now much of the country hates us and wants us dead, including cisgender white gay men. So it's a reminder to us, cisgender white gay men, that we are actually all in this together. And anyone who's telling us that, "Well, if we just push the T and the B and the Q overboard, everything will be fine," doesn't know their history. That's never been fine. And we've always been in this fight together. So I think the early years in the neighborhood remind us very, very starkly of that fact.
RU: So you mentioned a few people of color who were there in the fifties and sixties, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Daughters of Bilitis, are really canonical in LGBTQ history. What other ways did you see other queer, trans, and BIPOC community and coalition building emerge throughout the decades?
GK: I think I would point first to one of our real starting points. I often say that we find racism, sexism, classism, transphobia in the Castro. This is no surprise. It's in the United States of America. What is surprising is we also find pretty early on people who are trying to struggle against those attitudes, those people who came together early in the neighborhood to start building a sense of belonging and were working together. So Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon quickly became friends with Mike Gerry and went to his hair salon. They were probably the only lesbian women, and I'm sure Del was the only butch woman going to have her hair done at Mike Gerry’s hair salon, where all the clients were daughters and granddaughters of Irish working class ladies.
So we find one of our first instances where there's actual organizing to respond to this emerging consolidation of belonging primarily being for cisgender white gay men who could afford nice clothes and could go to a gym and had a certain amount of financial means and ability to organize their life around their sexuality. We also saw organizing to push back against that. So in 1975 there was a popular disco-dance bar called the Mindshaft on Market Street. Most recently, it was the club called Lucky 13. Like many of the establishments in the neighborhood, by the mid-seventies, when they were really going strong, and the end of the seventies, there were twenty-two bars and dance-bar gay bars and dance-bars in the neighborhood. They had tacit racist and sexist policies – two or three photo IDs required to be let in if you weren't a cute buff twenty to thirty year-old cisgender white gay man. And then if you were, well they didn't ask for those IDs. Or banning the wearing of open toed shoes so women in sandals or open toed heels were not let in. And at the Mindshaft, Bay Area Gay Liberation, one of the first radical groups in the neighborhood, organized a series of picket-line protests against these exclusions and ultimately forced the bar ownership to back down, to post signs formally stating they would not discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And to start hiring BIPOC staff, including one of our oral history sources, Isaako Si’uleo, who is a man of Samoan origin and who was hired in the aftermath of those protests. And we've seen over time an ongoing series of these forms of organized contestation against discrimination, exclusion, against the narrow constructions of belonging that emerged as the Castro became a major economic engine of gayborhood in the 1970s.
JR: Yeah, I think that you see examples of this throughout the whole history of the Castro. And I think that sometimes these stories aren't the ones that make it into the dominant stories of the Castro.
But I mean if you look at the 1980s, there was obviously so much activism in response to the HIV pandemic, but one example of the ways that lesbians stepped forward to support HIV positive gay men was by running lesbian blood drives in the Castro. And so, since gay men were barred from donating blood, lesbians collaborated with the Harvey Milk Democratic Society. One of the lesbians who we talk about in the booklet, Lenore Chinn, who's a Chinese American artist and activist, was one of the folks who helped organize these blood drives, just to help support the health and survival of gay men. There's a lot of other lesbian stories of lesbian coalition building and community development and activism. There was a dyke space that opened in like 1993 called the Whiptail Lesbian, Whiptail Lizard Women's Collective. And it was a lesbian lounge and community center. It was a women's only space, meeting space, art gallery. And that was one of the things in doing this history that I found out about that was like minutes before I moved to San Francisco. And I had never heard of this place, and these kind of exciting stories that you uncover doing this historical work is – it's just a great aspect of the way that you develop a history that tells more about the neighborhood.
But just one other example I'd like to share that I think is a really great example of how even in a very white cis male dominant space, people really carved out their own places within the Castro lot. Café Flore was one of the spaces that's famous for that, with so many political action committees and social events being planned there and activism being organized there. So one group that used the place in the nineties was an Iranian gay and lesbian political group and it was called Hasha, which means "in hiding" in Farsi. And ultimately it developed just because some queer Iranians met each other at different spaces in the Bay Area and the story of that whole, "Oh, there's more of us," getting connected and starting to form community. And so they wanted to form a group and recruit other folks from around the Bay. So they put an ad in The Bay Times, as often happened at that time. It had a phone number and you had to call the phone number and talk to a human, talk to a person to get the first line of review, to make sure you weren't trying to hassle them. And then to join the group, you had to meet someone at Café Flore because they were pretty much like, "If you're going to come to Café Flore, this is the gay spot." And so anyone who was going to come to Café Flore, they felt like that was another line of vetting because there was just a great risk of being outed to family or community, being at risk of losing their family. And so that organization kind of proliferated through the first part of the 1990s and did a lot of work trying to recruit more members and create space in the neighborhood as well.
GK: If I can just jump on and add a couple things to Jen's great presentation, we can look further back. So for example, we have the Full Moon Coffee House on 18th Street at Eureka Street from 1973 to 1975. This was a women's cafe and performance space run by lesbians. They lost their lease; that's why they moved out and closed down. And you rarely hear the story of that space and yet, just recently looking at some of the records, well I spotted that the great women's music pioneer Meg Christian recorded one of her albums in that cafe. That Pat Parker, the great African American lesbian poet from Oakland, performed there. That Elsa Gidlow, who was in her late-seventies, the great lesbian poet and radical salon organizer, presented her poetry there. That in fact this was this astonishing women's space in the Castro. Similarly, we had the emergence of either dedicated nights or entire spaces in the very restricted nightlife sexual economy that emerged to provide a welcome to people who didn't feel fully welcome in the other bars. And we can think particularly, for example, of the Pendulum, which opened in 1971 and closed in 2008, and it was a bar that particularly welcomed African American men and their friends. And I just recently found an interview with one of the founding owners, who explained that, of course, it initially had been a bar space that opened in 1967, went through two different names, and then in 1971 became the Pendulum. And the owner explained that they became a bar that was primarily welcoming for African American gay men because they were the one bar in the neighborhood that didn't ask for multiple IDs if you were black. And he, I'm pretty well quoting him, said, "All the other bars just wanted pretty white gay boys and we welcomed everyone." And that became a space of welcome. So those remind us of something else that may seem a bit perverse, these contestations around belonging. It is set in the larger framework of a country in which the people having these contestations don't belong at all. None of us. And so women, BIPOC people, working class people, trans people, young people, elders – the Castro was problematic and complicated for them, and yet many of them worked very hard to carve out a space to create forms of belonging within this difficult, contested, challenging culture, because outside of it, there was no possibility of carving out a space. At all. So there's a real complexity going on there if we only look at how the belonging wasn't working inside the Castro. Yet all these people said, "I'm going to keep fighting to belong here because if I go back to Knothole, Oklahoma, I'm certainly not going to belong. At all." So it's a kind of complex double-story where the internal critiques are saying, "We have a dream here, let's fully realize it, because it's not happening at all anywhere else."
And I also say that I just look to the courage and the ingenuity of the people of color, the women, the poor folk, the old folk, the young folk, who said, "We're not going to put up with not being included and we're going to demand our place here." I think it's also important to note that we have sources that we've found – there's a great sociological study from 1980, for example, where there are people who say, "I have no interest in trying to belong in the Castro. All those boring clones just put me to sleep. No need to fight my way in there." There are other places in San Francisco, Polk, Tenderloin, South of Market, where enclaves of LGBTQ life had formed. And so there were people who also said, "Can't be bothered to even try to claim a space in the Castro." And it's important to remember that. Certainly I recall as a little baby gay going to the Castro at the age of nineteen. I couldn't afford to go to gym. I was skinny. I couldn't afford the clothes they were wearing. I couldn't afford the haircuts. I couldn't afford the drinks in the bars and no one was going to look at me. So I hung out on Polk Street. I wasn't interested in the culture in the Castro particularly. But I was a pretty snotty teenager. This may have been when I was more like about twenty, twenty-one. And one of the things at the time was for the clones to wear a set of keys. If you wore it on the right, you were a bottom. If you wore it on the left, you were a top. And I showed up on the Castro wearing a set of pastel, plastic baby-teething keys off of my jeans as a kind of parody of how absurd this whole clone thing was and this ridiculous masculinity. But it also was a kind of resentment that this thing had been set up that I couldn't find my place in as a starving working class graduate student, whereas on Polk Street, well I fit right in. So the sense of belonging, there are many complicated angles for looking at that.
TA: I'll add here that an interesting way to approach this is that tourists and people who imagine the oasis of San Francisco have no idea about how it actually plays out. And then maybe ten, fifteen years later, show up and then if they're visiting, it's still pretty invisible right now. So people who come to San Francisco and go to the Castro might not personally experience ostracization or alienation because they're different. But if you move here, or if you stay here for a little while, or if you connect with locals, you quickly learn, O.K., where are the places that are fun? Where are the places that are cheap? Where are the places that I'm going to have a good time? And also maybe where you should stay away from, maybe not that block or maybe not don't go with him, kind of thing. A lot of the slutty people talk to each other and say like, “Don't go with him. He's dangerous or whatever; he's going to give you something you don't want.” And many of us grew up with the notion that we deserve better, or that somewhere over the rainbow we're going to be welcomed at that place in San Francisco because that rainbow is sort of the Golden Gate Bridge.
And then when we showed up here, I'm from San Diego, I showed up here, I still have the self-agency, the self-empowerment to say, “Well, it's not exactly what I thought.” And some people did say, "You know what, I'm not here for the clones, or I'm not here for X, Y, and Z." There are some people, like me, who were here for all of them. So I quickly found 16th Street in the Mission. I quickly found Valencia Street [in the Mission]. There were lesbian clubs that were down by De Haro Street that were really popular. There was The Box that was more out on Divisadero Street, and then the Polk and South of Market, and really everywhere in San Francisco, because there are horny people who work here, who live outside of San Francisco, who sometimes knew where to go if they wanted queer sex, even if they weren't queer themselves. And that meant that there's queerness everywhere. So even Armistead Maupin’s inclusion of the Safeway, I think it's out in the Marina, as a cruising place: it’s an example of how queerness really was everywhere, and some of us enjoyed all of it. I'm one of those people.
GK: I think it's also important for people who haven't lived in or don't know San Francisco well to remember that the half of the city in which all of this is taking place is a very small place. It's a very compact geography. One can readily walk from Castro and Market Street to the depths of Folsom and go to a fantastic leather bar. One can readily walk from Castro Street to 16th Street and Mission and go to Esta Noche or walk down and go to Amelia's on Valencia Street. Or in twenty-five minutes walk to the Polk and go to the bars there. These very distinct, culturally marked, and marked by culture, class, race, gender, these different scenes, were all within ready walking distance of one another. And it was possible, as Tina said, to treat it more like a department store rather than you only can be in one of those places. Go to the one thing you want to go to in the Castro, say to the Polk, and then drop down to South of Market and land up on Valencia Street. And you could do all that in one evening with very little trouble. So there was a, how to put it, kind of liberty to put together a montage of bits and pieces of belonging in different places when you didn't really feel like you fully belonged in any of them. But you could go shopping and get your whole outfit together by going to all of them.
JR: Well, and I think that one of the issues that comes up is that dominant cultural depiction of what gay San Francisco is, which gets proliferated out through media and representation, which tends to be the more Castro whitewashed image. But that wasn't invented in San Francisco and it's very common nationwide, worldwide even, about what the gay community is, and it doesn't always show the actual complexities of the gay community. And so it's that interesting interplay between people's actual experiences in San Francisco and the actual queer community in San Francisco. And all of these amazing things that Gerard and Tina were just describing as being: that is what the queer community is comprised of and the experiences available to people. And yet the Castro is held up, at least in dominant narrative, as a representation of what gay is and what gay San Francisco is. And it's part of it, but it's not everything.
GK: Right. And even the representation of the Castro itself is a very narrow slice of what's happening in the Castro. And that was really one of the things that Jen and I, with Tina's encouragement, were very much looking at what's behind this imaginary Castro.
What's going on here really? What are the complexities of demographics, of class, of age, the constant negotiations, debates, and occasional outright conflicts about how the neighborhood culture will be constructed? What were the benefits it offered and who could get them and who couldn't? That's a story that is not the story of the Castro that one sees in national and international media, where you get a very simple sort of sense of a kind of ongoing version of the 1970s gay cisgender white male lifestyle. Which, even in the 1970s, didn't really exist, except in a kind of mediated imaginary.
RU: Through this, I feel that the Castro is a place of action. Like you said, people felt that they maybe didn't belong at certain bars and they picketed, they protested, they created their own areas for themselves. And that legacy of activism was something that I saw throughout the booklet. And I'm just wondering, you mentioned Mission, SoMa [South of Market], Tenderloin, Polk Street, and there's a lot of queer history there. So what would a queer and trans history of those neighborhoods look like if they were centered? And how do those overlap? How are they different? How is the Castro different from those other gay enclaves in the city?
TA: I think they look very different and in many ways are based in much of the same experience of looking for liberation. And so there are leather folks, there are trans folks, there are women around Valencia and the Mission who all participated in social justice activism and protest that came out of the sixties and seventies. I think what's important to note here is that the Brown Berets, the Black Panthers, they're the student activists groups, especially out of San Francisco State and City College, and the organized Third World groups that came out of all of that informed the formation of Gay Liberation Fronts. And not only that; there were coalitions that were activated against the Briggs Initiative, against Anita Bryant, against American imperialism everywhere, but especially Central America, South America, and that there was a real allyship. But I don't think allyship really captures the kind of partnership that happened in the seventies. And then people like me who got here in the eighties, if we were lucky enough to be mentored by some of the people who were in those movements, we learned how what we were doing in the eighties was literally on the shoulders of what had happened in the sixties and seventies. So models of health promotion that came out of the UFW [United Farm Workers] and the Black Panthers. Models around cooperative housing, food sharing, workers, workers uniting. All of that came out of civil rights activism, labor, workers organizing. So there's a strong component of that in our history.
I think at the same time, it's not sexy to talk about that, and it's not sexy enough. It's not sexy enough, let's say, to make it into porn. What's fascinating in the booklet is that there's some porn that is literally situated in the Castro, or at least the cover photo of the porn, but God knows there was, and probably still is, a lot of sex in the Castro and literally the definition of sexy that includes that. I think there are a couple pictures in the booklet of organizing, which like if you look at the pictures of BAGL [Bay Area Gay Liberation] organizing, it looks like a tiny room that's too hot. Maybe it's smelly. Maybe people have been arguing for a long time. To me, they reminded me of when I saw ACT UP and Queer Nation in the eighties. And what it is is that organizing itself is a gnarly process. It's a long, arduous, difficult process that often does not lead to feeling good right here. I don't know anybody who thinks we're going to solve racism and all the problems that we have. So that means it's really generational in nature and that's just not very sexy to cover, but I think for some of us, the act of being an activist is sexy. So I think many of us have been doing this for a very long time, and it's because once we actually found what San Francisco was, we found our way to keep it interesting and active for us.
JR: Yeah. And then would you say, then, that in terms of that question of what those queer histories would look like if it was the queer history of the Polk or the Mission or North Beach, do you feel like the differing stories of what those neighborhoods were comprised of and what they were kind of contending with in the city, plus kind of these more global, larger issues that they were grappling with politically, do you feel like that would be a central element of the histories of those individual neighborhoods?
TA: I think if we look at, let's say, what came out of the Polk and the Tenderloin, there's a very strong working class, trans, sissy, people who came on the Greyhound to San Francisco. And then worked at bars. The Tavern Guild is a fascinating example of how queers supported each other at a time when there just weren’t institutional supports. And so that would be an interesting history for the TL [Tenderloin] and the Polk. The South of Market is all filthy. And degradation. It's built into leather scenes, so that's intentional use of that language, but that it's almost an offshoot of the sexual revolution and the clones. It's an exaggeration of the clones. The clones are Levi, but the leather really is South of Market. There's mixing of both. And they're different stories. And if you dive into each community, you're going to find sub stories. Because how did women, how did trans folks, how did people of color deal with, let's say, slavery and power in a leather context? And then if you add, like you look at lesbians and queer women and straight women who had sex with lesbians and the queer women in the Mission and all of San Francisco, there's going to be different stories. I think what often happens is it becomes a choice or it seems like we're forced to decide what is our history, as if it's one story. And instead, it actually is not. And it's not easily digestible. And often, we're not the ones who are invited to these interviews. I would say Gerard and I have known each other since I was a teenager in college, and it's only recently that I've started to get invitations to these conversations. Mind you, I've been in the background in nonprofit admin and doing fundraising, which is terribly unsexy, but I've also been doing history and arts and culture. And I'm very aware of all of what we're talking about. And it's new. I can tell you, like it's only been the last five years that I'm in this role that I'm actually getting invited to share as an equal instead of as a subject in these conversations.
GK: I'd add that we can take our hat off to some of our great colleagues. So for the Tenderloin, we can look at the marvelous work of Joey Plaster in his recent book Kids on the Street that really traces the 1960s and the Tenderloin and the amazing ways in which really deeply marginalized people – trans women, cisgender women sex workers, pushed out runaway-queer kids from all across the country who were living on the street or living in SRO's, a very economically marginalized setting – how they created forms of solidarity. Mutual aid and a kind of proto-political and then overtly political organizing that came out of their economic exclusion, their exclusion from the dominant sexual and gender system of the United States, from their radical left politics that they were learning on the streets. It's not the history of the Castro district, even the Castro district as it was emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, because it was a different demographic of people and a different economic group of people. Even the working class folks in the Castro: they were folks who managed to get a job as a waiter or an office clerk. They weren't rich, but they weren't living in an SRO. So you have a very different history there. Similarly, we can look at Nan Alamilla Boyd’s book Wide Open Town, which looks extensively at North Beach, and to some extent the Tenderloin in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to World War Two and seeing the ways in which North Beach as a kind of vice district created an interesting space for everybody that the dominant legal and social system regarded as people who were engaged in vice. And that included women sex workers. It included male and female impersonators. It included cisgender white gay men, and they all created space for themselves in that neighborhood alongside heterosexual selling vice businesses and bars running after hours. I remember Harry Hay, the co-founder of the Mattachine Society, telling me about going to an illegal speakeasy in North Beach in 1930 when he was a freshman at Stanford, and the owners of that speakeasy then went on in 1933 to found Finocchio's, the great long running female impersonation cabaret in North Beach. But Harry, a Stanford student, had to sneak around North Beach and go to an illegal speakeasy alongside all these vice businesses because it was a crime to want to get a drink as a gay man in that era.
So each of these neighborhoods have really long interesting histories in San Francisco, and often with very distinctive or notably distinctive demographics, economics that mark how their cultures evolve. South of Market, of course, we look to the great work of Gayle Rubin, who has done extraordinary work on the Folsom and how that emerged. And I love that Tina mentioned the Mission, because it's the neighborhood where I have lived for thirty years and it doesn't get on the map when people talk about LGBTQ neighborhoods in San Francisco. And yet that's absurd. The earliest bars we can document in the Mission were in 1962, 1963. There was a lesbian bar called the Pink Tarantula on Valencia Street in 1963. It was a neighborhood where there were remaining older generations of the white ethnic working class immigrants that had built the neighborhood in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. And then there were lots of immigrants from Mexico, Central America. So working class and poverty class folks. There were cisgender white, actual bohemians, people who didn't want to earn a living but wanted to create political, cultural, and social change. And you could work half time as a waiter and find a shared apartment in the Mission District. And spend half of your time raising hell instead of raising money. And that was in this neighborhood. There were radical sexual cultures in this neighborhood. I live around the corner from what is now a $1.5 million Italianate Victorian row house. But in 1970, José Sarria, our great drag pioneer, lived there for a year while helping run the Imperial Court. And that was less than a decade after José ran for the Board of Supervisors as the first openly gay candidate for elected office in the world. The only one that’s documented. José, of course, was Latino. One of his parents was Colombian, one was Nicaraguan, so he was first generation, grew up speaking Spanish. And in that same building, his landlord, who was a young gay man, was running a typing service in the basement. And then he decided, "Oh, I can't make enough money running a typing service. I think I'll transform it into a private fist-fucking club, the Catacombs." So that was shortly after José moved out and the Catacombs was in that basement. Who frequented the Catacombs? Well, lots of gay men who were hot for fist-fucking. But, for example, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe did a photo shoot there. Michel Foucault paid a visit but didn't like it too much. He preferred the bars South of Market. Three doors up the street in a 1940s bungalow was a then lesbian couple, Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia. And Gayle took over running the women's night at the Catacombs and was the DJ there for that fist-fucking club. So people rarely talk about the radical sexual history of the Mission District. And yet! And of course, a couple blocks over on Mission Street, they're still running an adult bookstore, as the technical term is, but it opened in the late 1960s and it had a very active video arcade where men went to drop quarters in a slot and watch a video. But in fact it meant that the guy from the hallway came in and you had some fun there in the little locked booth. Because you didn't have any place with privacy, you probably shared an SRO with three other people or lived with your family. And well, putting yourself in a video booth and dropping in quarters was the place to do that, but also a place to pick up people outside of your social class, to pick up people across racial lines, and that business is still operating in the Mission. So it's kind of surprising that the Mission hasn't taken on a position as one of San Francisco's known LGBTQ neighbors. Of course, here I’ve lived on Valencia Street for more than twenty years. It was Dyke Central. I live about four doors up from where Old Wives Tales, the women's collective bookstore, was located. The Thousand Fingers Women's Crafts Gallery was on this block. A couple blocks down was a car repair garage run entirely by butch dykes. Around the corner, when I regularly walk over to the Castro, I walk by sidewalk graffiti that says in huge letters carved into what was then the wet concrete, "PR dykes unite." Not public relations, of course. Puerto Rican dykes unite, and it has to date to the 1970s. So this is a neighborhood that is intermixed with immigrant communities, undocumented workers, the remains of old white ethnic working class communities, vast amounts of fantastic left organizing, women's organizing. There was queer and trans organizing going on as well. Of course, three blocks up from me is where La Rondalla was located, and Tina can tell you the story of Teresita de la Campeisina performances there. It's a neighborhood that has incredibly rich LGBTQ history. And it's a fifteen minute walk from Castro Street. And there was a lot of commuting going on during that whole era. And Dolores Park, which is a kind of boundary marker between the two, was overrun with queers from – it was probably a public cruising area as far back as we could trace, but there were already records of men cruising there in the 1950s. In 1961, there was a fatal queer bashing on the J-Church line tracks at Dolores Park. In 1971, there was a two-week entrapment campaign when the SFPD [San Francisco Police Department] arrested dozens of men for cruising there. So we have an early lesbian bar. We have a women's bathhouse. We have a fist-fucking club. We have a major gay men's cruising area and you have men and women going back and forth between Castro and the Mission in the 1960s. Tom Ammiano told me that one of his favorite bars was the gay bar that was there where Amelia's later opened. And there's a great article about the lesbian scene on Valencia Street by Pat Califia, who hadn't yet transitioned, that was published in The Advocate, in which they say "Valencia Street is the lesbian Castro Street." So they were already using Castro Street as the kind of model, and then here's the variations on that model. It's an interesting formulation because once again, it treats the place where it's cisgender white gay men with a certain amount of economic means that is treated as the model. I don't think that Pat Califia thought that it was; that's what everybody thought. And so if you wanted to start with what people reading The Advocate would understand, you had to say that. I'm sure if we talked to dykes at the time, they would say, "Castro Street is the gay Valencia Street, but it's not very interesting."
And for the Mission, I might add, we have a couple of other real pioneering moments. The headquarters of the Socialist Party was on Albion Street. It later became a kind of community rental hall. And in 1931, Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, the co-founder of the world's first homosexual emancipation movement, paid a visit to that building because there was an association. It was the German Working Men's Educational Association. So it was a German working class emigrant left social organization and community organization. So he paid a visit there. Right there, that same block, the second generation beat poet, Harold Norse, lived in a mid-block cottage behind a big apartment building, and in the 1960s, his guests included people like William Burroughs. There's a photo that Allen Ginsberg took of Harold Norse in his kitchen in that cottage. And then in that same block diagonally across the street was the apartment of Lou Sullivan, the founder of FTM International, and one of the great pioneers of making way for trans men to transition and receive the care that they needed while not having to say they were going to end up being a heterosexual man, which was the requirement. And Lou made the way for finding the services to be able to transition and be a gay man, to be who you were. That's all in one block in the Mission. Also the block where the first Mission-Dolores Church was located. So ground zero colonialism and imperialism and westerners arriving here all on one block in the Mission District. So that should be in every guidebook. And it's literally a ten minute walk from there to Castro Street.
RU: That's amazing. I also loved how you included all those addresses as well in the publication. So you can look it up and see how many people were maybe passing by each other on the street at different times and just really how every street has such a rich queer history. I mean, I’m a transplant from LA [Los Angeles], but I’m just uncovering this and I live in the Mission now and being a trans person, it’s incredible to learn that there’s so much history on every street in the city.
TA: Reese, I’m gonna share here that a source of history includes Horacio Roque [Ramírez], who's an academic who wrote about 16th Street in the emergence of a queer and trans Latinx community, and a movie that I made with Augie Robles called ¡Viva 16! in 1994. It's a video documentary that documented 16th Street as a Latinx corridor. And beyond what little we can find in terms of books or articles or movies, there are many ways of piecing together the history through the archives of the GLBT Historical Society. And I would say one way to look at that is looking for pictures or programs of galas, at galas celebrations. There was literally a group named GALA, Gay and Latino Alliance, and how, let's say, each group might have an award ceremony. And the award ceremony highlights maybe like in the TL, the best bartender, best bar back, best drag queen. And 16th Street, it was actually the same. There were similarities in each community, and then you have that for title holders, leather title holders. You have that for Grand Ducal Council and the SF Imperial Council where there are titles that really are a means for us to support each other through fundraising, but also build our self-esteem as a group, to build mental health as a group, and to help us come together even during periods of extreme plight or extreme oppression. The seventies and eighties were – we could easily point to many periods, many times when people felt like we feel today, and that it was important to come together on an annual basis and say, “We are doing good work. You are doing good work, so good I need to give you this award, and also we need a goddamn fabulous show and you better dress up and look good and feel good, or else we're all gonna ostracize you from the community.”
It really is kind of amazing how we encourage each other to come together to celebrate. And I don't know, I think it's really amazing how that pops up in every community.
RU:
That's great. I want to be mindful of your time, so I'll end with this final question. I mean I feel empowered and enlightened by this conversation. And I'm hoping that readers also with the booklet take something away. So what do you hope that readers, especially queer-readers, take away from this history and are left with?
TA: I'll share as the director of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District and publisher and I served as executive editor for the booklet that my hope is that people know that our history is actually diverse, and like Gerard and Jen have been sharing, that we are multitudes and there is a great deal to celebrate and our stories are different. They come together in maybe location, but in terms of narratives they're all over the place and that is good.
I think the other thing that I wanted to share was that right now many people might think that they're hopeless, that there's not a means to respond to what is happening on the federal, international, local levels, to erase us. And part of sharing our stories is to say, "No, we have been here, we know what to do and it's in our roots. It's in our DNA. It's in the formation of the community itself. Not only will we get through this, we've always been here. We will always be here. And goddammit, we're queer, so act up and do what you gotta do."
JR: Yeah, I would echo that. That's definitely what was on my mind as well. I think that there's a lot going around and going on right now that can make us feel discouraged and understandably scared and worried about the future. And I think all of those emotions are very valid. And thinking about our history and what we have gone through over the years and how we have prevailed in so many ways and through fabulousness, as Tina was saying a few minutes ago, the way that we celebrate. And actually try to cultivate joy and resistance even in the face of incredibly difficult times, I think is something that I hope people get out of it. And that recognition that history is a bumpy road, that this unfortunately is not the first time we have experienced some of the things that we're experiencing right now. And that we have tools and community power that we can access to respond to it. And I think touching on something Gerard said a little bit ago, I hope that through seeing some of the diversity of the history and some stories that expand the dominant narrative, that folks might see that we really should work in coalition and in collaboration as we respond to the world that we're in and just keep creating our culture. And then just the last thing is I hope that people get excited about history and excited about the stories. I teach queer studies and whenever I teach about queer history, my students invariably say, (a) "I didn't know any of this or like I knew very little of it." And (b) "seeing this makes me feel so much more seen and hopeful and seeing my ancestors, seeing this history, is powerful to me and important." And so I think for every marginalized community, learning our history is so vital to our understanding of ourselves.
GK: I would say there are a couple of things that I would add. One is that building a bit on what Jen said, that LGBTQ+ people are really exiles from time. Cisgender straight people learn about the past as a natural phenomenon the minute they're born, hearing stories from their parents, their grandparents, their faith communities, their neighbors, television, the internet, at school, in museums, at monuments, that they live within a flow of time and a sense that they have an inheritance. They're receiving a future ahead of them, something to leave when they're gone. That's a natural privilege that they don't even understand is in fact a cultural construct that they're receiving. And LGBTQ+ people, we have to go find that for ourselves. We have to seize it for ourselves. And working on this book with Jen, for me, part of it is that although I've been doing this work for nearly fifty years, it was a continual reminder that we're not done doing that. Here, look at all these things we discovered about this neighborhood where I first visited fifty years ago that I had no idea about, and it should be common knowledge. So it's a chance to really claim a place in time. I hope that people become excited about that feeling that you can have of “I belong in time,” but also to start work on helping other people claim that place in time.
The one other thing I'd say is that the booklet lays out a story around these debates about belonging, about negotiations, debates, conflicts. And I'd apply a model there that I learned from my great friend and colleague Amy Sueyoshi, who, when I worked with her and another colleague, Don Romesburg, on an exhibition on the fiftieth anniversary of San Francisco Pride, we worked on the first ten years of pride celebrations in San Francisco, where every two years a huge war broke out with eye-scratching, hair-pulling fighting about who got left out, who got left in, who was being discriminated against, who was doing the discriminating, who was correctly representing us or not correctly representing us. And yet people kept coming back to do this. And finally, Amy said, "We have to understand this not as a failure or a problem, but as a symbol of creative conflict." That within our efforts to negotiate a community, that's really a kind of coalition of people bringing different experiences, class backgrounds, racial and ethnic experiences, faith traditions, regional backgrounds, and so on. It's understandable that it's a big family reunion that happens after a big family fight, and that that's not a sign of failure. It's difficult, it's painful, but it's what Amy calls creative conflict. And we see in the book several instances where those periods of debate and conflict emerge into a new understanding, and a new way of working and living together, and a broader sense of what we might constitute. And so I think in the midst of these very trying times where we're all experiencing trauma, where that trauma isn't necessarily well resolved, where we might struggle with one another in ways that are hurtful and painful, that we can also remember that there's a creative conflict going on and that we're working towards better understandings. It's a tough negotiation, but I think it's worth it. And the fact that the Castro still exists as an LGBTQ neighborhood, when virtually all the other ones have vanished, suggests the creative conflict there has been highly productive. It's certainly not finished. How could it be? It's still changing human beings of different generations, ages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's going to be a permanent creative conflict, and that means permanent creativity as well. And I hope that that model is demonstrated in the way that Jen and I write about the change over time in this one neighborhood.
RU: Thank you so much, Tina, Jen, and Gerard, for being here. This has been a great conversation and I just really appreciate your time and thoughtful responses. And again, I'm empowered. I've learned a lot about the history of queer resilience, so I really appreciate it.
GK: Thank you.
TA: Thank you for having us.
JR: Thank you, Reese.