Imagining the Village

The Castro, 1971-present

Eureka Valley, San Francisco, CA

Between 1966 and 1970, free love culture and anti-consumerism attracted many new sexual migrants to San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose. The free love culture, though not explicitly incorporating homosexual social and sexual relationships, led some hippies to view homosexuality through the lens of bodily pleasure. As this nascent scene first developed in Haight-Ashbury, just over the hill, Eureka Valley was still a quieter neighborhood dominated by families during the day. It was also dotted with dive bars characteristic of Irish neighborhoods in U.S. cities. That physical environment appealed to some gay hippies, who moved there in part attracted by the cheap rents.

By 1970 a sizable number of businesses that catered to gay men had opened in the neighborhood. The name Castro Village was introduced to differentiate the two-block stretch of Castro Street where these businesses were located from the rest of Eureka Valley. The Castro became the epicenter of gay cis-male--and to a lesser extent lesbian--social life in the city throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Its neighborhood politics were epitomized by Harvey Milk, an openly gay city supervisor elected in 1977, who was assassinated the following year and became a symbol for LGBTQ political campaigns worldwide.

The illustration of “The Wonderful World of Castro Village” was published in the Bay Area Reporter, the gay newspaper with the largest circulation in the city and it is the first time the area was presented as a self-contained village, rendered as a fairytale scene. It included caricatured depictions of only a handful of buildings, all freestanding and some completely reimagined as embodiments of their namesake. These landmarks included gay bars Toad Hall, Missouri Mule, and Midnight Sun, and several businesses that an outside observer would not associate exclusively with gay sociality: Jaguar Books, Alexander's Framing, Ryderwood Antiques, and Flowers Inc., among others.

The photographs of everyday activities in the Castro included in this section in this section include an information booth by the office for community-police relations, and people socializing outside Harvey Milk’s Castro Camera store, which became a de facto hub for LGBT political activities in the mid-1970s. During this period, nightlife, cruising, and politics were entangled and offer an example of modern gay territorialization.

A pair of photographs of The Toolbox bar, pre-and post-demolition, show a counterpart to the Castro’s clean-cut, village ambiance. The Toolbox was an important leather bar where a mural by Chuck Arnett reproduced in the pages of Life Magazine in 1964 revealed San Francisco’s gay underground world to a national audience.

Finally, Henry Leleu's photographs of gay-themed billboards from the late 1970s-early 1980s demonstrate the extent to which gay imagery and messaging were present in the urban landscape.

Imagining the Village

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