San Francisco’s Castro Street has gone through a number of personality changes over its history. For much of its existence it was the main thoroughfare of a working-class neighborhood, noted mostly for its modest stores, repair shops, and inexpensive restaurants. Eureka Valley (nobody called it the Castro then) was a family neighborhood, not rich but not poor either, solid, undistinguished, but a good place to live.
Then came the 1960s and the influx began; attracted by the nifty, low-priced houses and the general comfort level of a valley nestled in a bowl between Twin Peaks and Eureka Heights, gay people started moving in and making the Castro their own. By the 1970s Castro Street had morphed into Gay Mainstreet USA, the center of the gay community in San Francisco. Yet it hadn’t lost its roots as a working-class neighborhood; the old repair shops and cozy-comfortable restaurants remained, and plenty of retired older people kept the place reasonably sane.
But that has changed yet again with the influx of techies and millennials, mostly a mixed bag between gay and straight, probably with an emphasis on the hetero variety. Most of them have far more money than taste. The Castro has become a destination neighborhood, its zip code 94114 a bragging right, its house prices rocketing out of sight. The Castro’s days as a gay mecca are clearly numbered; increasingly it belongs to the young, well-heeled, and hip. Now it’s the gay couples who are huddled in their houses, grimly hanging on against the surging real estate prices and rapidly shifting demographics, much like their old-time counterparts from the Eureka Valley days.
Just as the Castro is losing its brief identity as a gay neighborhood (a persona it never inhabited comfortably), the political and communal powers-that-be have seen fit to transform the two blocks of Castro Street proper between Market and 19th Street into some kind of weird gay museum, what I’ve started thinking of as “Faggyland Inc.” It began with a simple enough notion to widen the notoriously crowded sidewalks and, while they were at it, repair the ailing sewer system.
That was all well to the good, definitely. But then the professional homosexuals got involved—those creepy uninvited do-gooders who turn being gay into some kind of personal crusade. They had to have their say, and thus the sidewalks now sprout plaques celebrating gay folks of the Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams variety, as if the only thing worth noting about them is their sexual orientation. The widened sidewalks are narrower again thanks to a profusion of fancy trees, overblown lighting fixtures—including some that spray rainbow hues hither and yon—and a pile of other stuff.
More to the point, it doesn’t look like a neighborhood any more. It looks like a theme park. Castro Street isn’t a place for the neighborhood residents to shop in any more. It’s a commercialized paean to gayness, and it oozes a trendy, discordant, and ultimately sad vibe. Even now it looks worn out, a blatant overdressed whore of a street intent on snagging the tourists, visitors, and cultural anthro types who find all this fagginess quaintly entertaining.
It’s going to look like an abandoned museum ten years from now when the last old gay couples have moved out or died off, and when American gay folks have achieved full transparence as just people like everybody else—an accelerating trend that shows no signs of abating.
Now that the umpty-million dollars have been spent on the retrofit, I have another proposal for the crass little pol who is responsible for most of the project: spend a little more, dig it all up, and return the sidewalks to their former state. At least that Castro Street had a real, honest-Injun history instead of today’s saccharine fakery.