Castro district gay

Carole Migden, the second, led a budget committee to cut pay and benefits to city workers in her effort to be the responsible centrist lesbian, palatable to downtown. Then starting around the 1930s, the neighborhood became more of a working-class Irish neighborhood until the mid-1960s.

The first gay bar to move in was the Missouri Mule at 2348 Market Street (now part of Beaux) in 1963.

Then, catch a nearby Muni Metro line to Castro Station or take a rideshare the rest of the way.

Automobiles: ​Driving into San Francisco is a more leisurely way to reach The Castro, especially if you’re coming from other parts of California. Allen Ginsberg, himself gay, wrote Howl and fought obscenity charges in 1957.

Bars and nightclubs in North Beach and the Tenderloin became important sources of cross-pollination and expansion. 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.

The Castro wasn't always a gay neighborhood.

Gay bars grew from 58 in 1969 to 234 in 1980. In most U.S. cities, such in-migration was typically that of ethnic minorities, mostly blacks, Latinos and Asians. 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 land was sold to John M. Horner nearly a decade later, in 1854, and he laid out what he called Horner’s Addition, a grid bound by Castro Street on the west, Valencia Street on the east, 18th Street on the north, and 30th Street to the south. As the community developed, feasts, celebrations, street parties, public and private bars, and bathhouses and sex clubs, became the important forms of cultural expression and sociability, which in turn strongly influenced other communities in San Francisco and beyond.

These soldiers then stayed in the city after being discharged for homosexuality. And even today when LGBT people, either through economics or a greater comfort level are more diffused throughout the City, the Castro remains home to the largest number of gay bars and gay businesses in the City – perhaps more than the rest of the City combined.

For generations, the only humans to live in the present-day Castro neighborhood were the Ohlone Tribe.

Dykes on Bikes, a distinctive feature of SF Gay Pride parades.

Photo: David Green

The upsurge of anti-gay, homophobic feelings in the United States came to San Francisco, too. Not long after the election, a disgruntled conservative ex-cop who had recently resigned his seat on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, Dan White, entered City Hall through a side door (one which lacked a metal detector) and murdered Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk.

Gay politics became very focused on getting resources dedicated to the AIDS situation, or more practically, on the creation of an astounding network of self-help organizations. Unfortunately, the anti-gay feelings of the greater United States reached San Francisco in the late 70s, which were followed by the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk and the White Night Riot as well as the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

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.

Buses: Greyhound and Megabus drop off at the Salesforce Transit Center in downtown San Francisco.

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