Walking Round The Castro

In the late 1960s, the summer of love was in full swing in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Love and freedom were in the air and hippies were streaming into the city. The nascent gay community gravitated along Market Street to what was to become the Castro district, where property prices were cheaper because the area was quite run down at the time. Media attention on the growing community, though often intended to be negative, only served to increase public awareness of its existence and men were soon arriving from all over America.

At the time, homosexuality was illegal. Simply being gay was enough to have you jailed with all the consequences that that had on the rest of your life. It's still the case that in 29 states in the US you can be fired from your job for nothing more than being gay. That the dismissal is almost certainly unconstitutional is neither here nor there. If you wanted to challenge it, you could, and you'd win, but you need to be prepared to see your name in the papers for several years.

Even after laws were repealed criminalising homosexuality, you still ran the risk of being committed to a psychiatric institution to be “cured”.

In 1973, Harvey Milk opened a camera shop in the Castro. The store is no longer a camera shop, but a display has been created of its heyday under Milk:

He and his partner lived in a flat above the shop:

Milk, as is well known, went on to be elected to the city's Board of Supervisors in 1977 – the first openly gay elected politician in the US.

He is commemorated with a plaque on the pavement outside his former store:

As well as having the access to the Castro Station subway platforms named after him:

The area became the gay capital of the world – an almost exclusively gay neighbourhood where gays could live, work, shop, go to the barber, see their doctor, dentist or lawyer and so on without ever interacting with heterosexual people. You may or may not find that an appealing, or even healthy, situation, but in the social climate of the day it was certainly understandable.

Today, it is still largely a gay area, though others, attracted by the village atmosphere and the beautiful Victorian houses, are moving in.

It's not unusual for a single floor in a house like this to sell for over $1 million. Not bad when you consider that you could have bought the whole building for less than $20,000 in Milk's day.

A large rainbow flag – originally created as a victory banner after Harvey Milk's election but now adopted by the gay community worldwide – flies at the corner of Castro and Market Streets.

There is a touching monument to the homosexuals who were imprisoned in concentration camps by the Nazis for being gay:

The triangle is filled with pink quartz to represent the pink triangles that the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear. It's not widely known that when the concentration camps were liberated, although the Jewish prisoners were returned to their homes, the gay prisoners were sent to prison to serve out their terms under German penal law.

Visitors are encourage to take a piece of the pink quartz away with them as a symbol of spreading gay tolerance over the world. Arguably the visitors to the monument are unlikely to be intolerant, but it's a nice idea. The supply of rocks is replenished annually.

Here is a view of Castro Street at night – on the left is the Castro Theatre.

All but the last of these pictures were taken during a walking tour of The Castro – a great way to see the story unfolding from the early days of persecution through to the present.

I was in the Castro the previous evening when it was mobbed with people celebrating the decision by a federal judge to declare unconstitutional California's 2008 law restricting marriage to heterosexuals. The San Francisco Chronicle carried a single word headline the next morning:

The most quoted part of the judgement was this:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license, ... Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

[Proposition 8 was the ballot, voted on and approved in 2008, defining marriage as between a man and a woman.]

The decision has already been appealed and it is certain that in the fullness of time it will reach the US Supreme Court. The battle is not yet over.