Everyone hates the Castro.
That’s the impression one gets from reading recent newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and Internet chats. It’s also the impression I’ve gotten from friends and activist colleagues throughout the15 years I’ve lived here, most of which have been spent occupying a small yellow cottage just a few steps from 18th and Castro.

We hear that the Castro is hostile to people of color, lesbians and other women, young queers, old gay folks, people with disabilities, the leather community, transgenders, and heterosexual families. Women are angry because they feel invisible, unwelcome, or treated with derision. The neighborhood is alternately put down as simply a party for young pretty boys and steroid muscle queens, or a ghetto for aging white gay yuppies stuck in the 1970s. The chain stores are taking over, the homeless are out of control, partygoers trash the neighborhood nightly, and the restaurants are pricing themselves out of range for most people. The Castro’s lost the edge it had in the 1970s, sold out its politics, and abandoned the values and traditions of Harvey Milk. It’s too sexual or not sexual enough. Too radical or too assimilationist. It’s too white; it’s too het; it’s too expensive.

Why would anybody want to live here?

Because some of us love it. We love the Castro, despite legitimate gripes and constant whining. We love not only what it’s been and what it stands for historically, we love what it is today, despite its flaws. And we love that it is a neighborhood that many people care about, care about enough to speak out, identify problems and work towards a solution. We love it because it is home, crazy-making, unpredictable, but less problematic and imperfect as the homes in which many of us grew up.

A Focus for Idealistic and Hopeful Visions
Urban enclaves inhabited by special populations—which some people call “ghettos”—hold a special and symbolic position in the social imagination. They are certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. They matter to some of us in powerful ways because they are the geographic space onto which we project our most idealistic and hopeful visions. They are the focus of our passions, our misgivings, our ambitions, our conflicts, and our dreams.
This is true whether we are talking about Oakland’s historic position for African-Americans, the Haight’s relationship to hippies and counterculture folks, or Chinatown’s status due to Chinese-Americans. While each of these sites is distinct from the other (and from the Castro’s relationship to gay men), sharing some parallel issues and not others, these neighborhoods have been—and will continue to be—the sites onto which communities project their highly charged debates about values, visions, and politics. Because of this, there will always be many people who don’t merely critique the enclave in an attempt to improve it, but trash it, discount its value, and fail to understand why others find it meaningful.

Those of us who have kept our racial, ethnic, and/or sexual identities central to our lives—despite the current disdain for what liberals call “identity politics”—often make powerful emotional investments in neighborhoods that have been linked historically to our people. As a gay man—a white gay man—this neighborhood is very important to me. I celebrate its achievements, I gripe about its failings, I whine about its lack of parking. At the same time, I feel a commitment to continually struggle not only with the typical issues with which all urban neighborhoods contend (safety, neighborhood character, resources), but the special issues faced by enclaves that have powerful symbolic meaning to specific populations. Embedded in the very concept of a gay enclave are issues of inclusion/exclusion, hence it is critically important to struggle on an ongoing basis with the dynamic tension of who feel welcome here and who does not.

Facing Reality and Asking the Hard Questions
The Castro is not—and has never been—a site where all people—or even all queers—feel embraced. It has never felt like a safe haven to all and, from the start, people have argued that it is a mistake to equate the Castro with the entirety of the LGBT community of San Francisco. Read the queer press of the 1970s when the neighborhood was wracked with conflict about whether it was going to allow itself to be considered a gay neighborhood. Even when LGBT people faced homophobic police activities, when queerbashers picked us off one-by-one, when neighborhood groups tried to deny the new gay inhabitants, internal community debates were already ignited about the Castro. Did clubs engage in carding policies that barred people of color? Were there bars that discriminated against men with long hair? Were dykes welcome in all of the bars and businesses?
These are serious questions because access issues always have a profound impact on the climate of a neighborhood. Such questions are not new in our neighborhood. Rather than continue to merely target the Castro with all our justifiable criticisms, long-standing anxieties, and petty griping, let’s finally take some aggressive steps to confront the central challenges of the neighborhood in helpful ways.
Let’s start by facing a few of the difficult realities and questions that have no simple answers:

1. Despite its historic role in the formation of San Francisco’s LGBT community, let’s acknowledge that the neighborhood has now priced itself out of the marketplace for most LGBT renters and owners, especially those populations who fueled the Castro in its heyday: young people, the marginally employed, artists and cultural workers. We could take aggressive steps to change this—through zoning boards, tenant organizing, and the leadership of public officials to change local and state policies—but short of such actions, the neighborhood’s demographics continue to tip sharply towards affluent people and away from the middle class, working class, and poor. What does it mean when the residents of a neighborhood with great symbolic value are increasingly affluent, while the people who participate in the area’s non-profits, clubs, and street life are often of lesser means? How can the mix co-exist peacefully for the long haul? Can renters, homeowners, business owners and workers, club-goers, homeless people, and non-profit activists unite across their differences?

2. The Castro remains one of the whitest residential neighborhoods in San Francisco and census figures have shown that it is one of the “male-est” enclaves outside of Alaska. If we have neighborhoods weighted towards Latinos or Asian-Americans, is it okay to have a neighborhood with a demographic concentration of gay white men? If not, what steps should be taken to decrease gay white men in the neighborhood and attract others? If so, what are the responsibilities of the gay white men in that neighborhood to white women and people of color who are queer? What are their responsibilities to white women and people of color who are heterosexual? What are gay white men’s responsibilities to gay men of color? If a neighborhood is dominated by a population gifted with tremendous privilege based on skin color or sex, do the stakeholders in that neighborhood bear a special burden of examining privilege, ensuring access, and struggling against racism and sexism?

3. While many of us treasure the historic role the Castro has played in the queer story of San Francisco, and we continue to use it as a site for political rallies and community forums, the bulk of our community institutions—political, legal, cultural, religious, and social—are not located in the neighborhood or are relegated to its outer fringes. AIDS organizations, for the most part, exited in the late 1980s. The LGBT Community Center was deliberately sited outside the Castro, in part due to concerns about racism and sexism in the Castro expressed by white women and people of color at the time. Queer 12-step meetings, athletic events, family picnics, and bars and sex industry venues are increasingly situated in other neighborhoods. Does this shift represent progress or failure, adherence to a vision, or a violation of the ambitions of our earlier years?

Ultimately, it might be useful to finally debunk the romantic myth of a Castro that once welcomed all queers. In what ways are the legacies of 1970s gay liberation the source of both the neighborhood’s continuing unique place in the hearts and minds of many queers and the neighborhood’s continuing problems with racism, sexism, and classism? Is it possible to see the pre-AIDS Castro as anything other than a perfect paradise during a golden era of gay life? Can we begin see the 1970s—and Harvey Milk, disco/bathhouse culture, and the rise of the Castro—not through lenses that romanticize or demonize, but as a complex era which struggled with many of the same challenges we continue to face today?

Taking Action and Creating a Welcoming Neighborhood

What can be done to make this neighborhood more welcoming in the short-term?

First, clubs, businesses, restaurants, city departments, realtors, and non-profits should ensure that their workforce in the Castro is as diversified as the population of our city at-large and that staff members in the Castro are specifically trained to welcome all, rather than to screen out some in order to whiten or upscale the neighborhood. They must be trained to respectfully work across cultural differences. Journalists and public agencies should closely monitor hiring practices and respond fully to legitimate reports of discrimination.

Second, a truly representative neighborhood council should be initiated in partnership with our elected public officials to bring together members of all stakeholder groups and create a long-term plan focused on neighborhood access, climate, and resources. We need a council that includes all but is not dominated by any one faction—business owners, workers, renters, homeowners, party-goers, non-profit participants, police officers, public employees—and that serves as a place in which differences can be mediated, problems can be addressed, and planning can take place that represents diverse voices. And the council needs to be public, visible, and accessible to all who seek to observe its meetings. Such a council might consider adopting the New England town meeting style of government and annually hold a public meeting where constituents approve or vote down key proposals for neighborhood change.

And finally, those of us who live, work, club, dine, or receive services here might begin to make added efforts to greet one another with a friendly smile or a “Good morning,” rather than cast our eyes to the ground as we pass one another. These greetings may be easiest to toss out to others who seem to match our own race/class/sex/sexual orientations, but are even more valuable when we greet people across identity lines. The Gay Men’s Community Initiative recently started street actions where teams of gay men walk the Castro greeting other gay men. Let’s applaud this effort and extend it to greeting all people in our neighborhood. If we aim to be a village—a special village that challenges the hostile and impersonal nature of contemporary urban life—we owe it to ourselves to aggressively embody the change we seek.

Loving the Castro
I love the Castro. I love waking up early on Sunday morning and seeing late-night circuiteers and South-of-Market sex pigs returning home, early-morning exercise fiends lining up at the gym, and friendly merchants readying their stores for another day. I love living on a block that includes a Mexican taqueria next to what some still consider a Black gay bar, next to a Chinese laundry, next to a Sex-in-the-City shoe store, next to a gay men’s health center—all underneath a new-age yoga studio. I love the cool rainy winters when we collectively debate whether the sun will ever again appear, the warm springtime afternoons that hit just as the East Coast faces additional blizzards, and even those rare nights—just a few each year—where it’s too hot to stay at home and we cruise the streets, gossip at street corners, and line-up at ice-cream stores.
I love the Castro even as I struggle with the burdens associated with living in a symbolic gay enclave that could never live up to my own dreams and ideals for a queer neighborhood. I love the passion with which people debate the merits of the neighborhood, scrutinize new shops and clubs, and critique our public officials. I even love the old-timers who complain that the neighborhood isn’t what it used to be, the newcomers who bring their own vision of community, and all of us in between who care enough about community, neighborhood, and urban life to actually do something to make it better.

Eric Rofes is a long-time activist and community organizer who has lived in the Castro for 15 years. He has published 12 books and is a professor completing a book on gay men’s cultures of the 1970s.