San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Castro not living up to the legacy of Harvey Milk
Growing up on the East Coast, before I really knew San Francisco, I would dream about the Castro. Like a lot of young queer kids, the neighborhood seemed like a haven of the boundless, radical inclusivity that so often wasn’t present in our lives.
Each June, San Francisco’s leaders commemorate the giant pink triangle that’s installed on Twin Peaks and note the centrality of the area to the gay rights movement. In doing so, the city tells a story about itself and the Castro — one that reinforces my teenage notions of the neighborhood.
In recent years, however, there’s another story about the Castro that I’ve come to understand: This former hub of LGBTQ activism doesn’t know how to reconcile its reputation with what it really means to be a refuge.
“We have to give hope to that poor runaway kid from San Antonio … They need hope! A piece of the pie!” Harvey Milk told a New York Times reporter in 1977.
Part of what Milk was saying, in so many words, was that homelessness in America has a uniquely LGBTQ component — one born of bigotry.
Longtime residents assure me the Castro was once a place that genuinely lived up to Milk’s entreaty. You could come here with nothing and make a life for yourself as a young, relatively penniless gay waiter-cum-artist by bunking up with a few friends.
Now, the Castro is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. And as red states across the country ramp up their persecution of LGBTQ people, Milk’s runaway is less likely to wind up with a piece of the pie than in a tent, should they flee to the Castro.
“I think one of the most compelling stories for a lot of older queer people who might have more resources is the young person who comes to San Francisco and is looking for queer Oz and finds themselves on a sidewalk,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the Castro. Mandelman holds Milk’s former seat on the Board of Supervisors and found himself standing in opposition to the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club on the issue of sweeping encampments of those who don’t
accept shelter when it’s available, which he favors. (On Friday, there were 427 people on the waitlist for shelter in San Francisco.) Notably, the other supervisors who stood with Mandelman, Matt Dorsey and Joel Engardio, are also gay men.
Given the history of the Castro, the issue of homelessness “may create for queer people a sense of obligation and a desire to help,” Mandelman told me. At the same time, “any family has to figure out, ‘How much can we do? What is the limit?’ Because there needs to be some kind of boundaries.”
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins rightly drew criticism for her recent comments that San Francisco needs to make things “uncomfortable” for its homeless population. But Jenkins merely said the quiet part out loud. The Castro is among those city
neighborhoods that have been making things uncomfortable for decades.
This gap between rhetoric and reality in the Castro was already clear in the late 1990s when young LGBTQ people with nowhere else to go were drawn to the neighborhood. It struggled to house them in places where they were safe from homophobic or transphobic harassment, and efforts to establish even small emergency winter shelters in the Castro and neighboring Noe Valley were stymied by residents.
“The pushback from gay homeowners was vitriolic and mean,” recounted Tom Ammiano, who was the area’s supervisor at the time, “with a total dehumanization of young folks who had been kicked out of their homes. It is a dark stain.”
Around the same time, Jen
Reck, now an assistant professor of sociology and sexuality studies at San Francisco State University, sat down with several homeless LGBTQ youth of color — labeled as “the Castro Kids” by neighbors — to write about their experiences. Some had been physically assaulted and cast out of their homes when their families suspected them of being gay. All sought safety and community in the Castro, either at after-school programs for LGBTQ youth or at the Muni station. Yet they faced regular harassment from neighborhood adults and police.
“You would think that people who had gone through all those struggles as young folks would be able to reciprocate that help they were given,” one told Reck. “They became the people they probably deplored when they were young.”
Now, decades later, the Supreme
Court may review a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case from Grants Pass, Ore. The lower court case barred the enforcement of laws against camping on public property when a municipality is unable to make a reasonable offer of shelter. In September, a group of San Francisco businesses, organizations and self-described “neighborhood leaders” filed a friend-ofthe-court brief in the case to support what they called “common sense public safety laws” that would enable punitive responses to actions like sidewalk camping.
I was struck by how many names on the brief were affiliated with the Castro. There was the owner of Midnight Sun and the Edge, two long-standing gay bars; Welcome Castro, a “fabulously queer” shop; and homeowner and business organizations like the Castro Community Benefit District and Castro Merchants, among others.
How can we balance this with the uncomfortable fact that 38% of San Francisco’s homeless youth identify as LGBTQ? According to the 2022 point-intime count of the unhoused population in the city, 28% are LGBTQ, compared to 12% of San Franciscans, regardless of housing status. How can this city, which embraces and benefits from the populist legacy of Harvey Milk, turn around and treat the same people he spent his life trying to help like criminals?
“A lot of the people who are stepping up and promoting these policies should know better,” said Alex Lemberg, a community lawyer in the Castro. “It wasn’t that long ago that they were fighting for their own rights and truly, to see this less than 10 years after we got nationwide gay marriage is just appalling.”
“We drifted,” Ammiano said. “Part of it is denial, part of it, privilege.”
Maybe I was a bit naive when I read the friend of the court brief and was surprised. But I believe that small gulf in my cognition indicates just how effective that story about the Castro has been — and why the people listed in the brief made the choice that they did.