A Wizard of Oz Makeover for the Castro?

by Tommi Avicolli Mecca, 2007-03-27

You read it right. A Wizard of Oz makeover for the world’s queerest neighborhood. We’re talking rainbow arch and giant ruby slipper. That’s what some people in the Castro are proposing these days in order to revitalized what once was the most desirable place for LGBT folks to visit and live.

The neighborhood that once gave us out queer supervisor Harvey Milk, disco diva Sylvester and the outrageous antics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is no longer a popular queer tourist destination. At least not according to the latest issue of the Bay Area Reporter (BAR).

It gets worse. San Francisco didn’t even make it into the Advocate’s list of top ten cities for LGBT folks to live in. The Advocate is the country’s oldest national queer news magazine. What do Ferndale, Michigan and Missoula, Montana have that we don’t have? Obviously a place queers want to be.

When I moved into the Castro in 1991, the joint was jumping. Community nonprofits rented cheap office spaces above the shops. The NAMES Project AIDS Quilt was housed in a storefront near Castro and Market. Demonstrations and rallies were held almost every weekend. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, the corner of 18th and Castro was activist central, as politicos set up ironing boards and card tables to peddle their causes. Collingwood Park was a major cruising ground late at night. Admission at the neighborhood sex clubs was $5, and you could stay all night.

My first Halloween, I joined a group of Radical Faeries marching naked from 19th to 18th and Castro. We stood in the middle of the intersection and painted each other’s bodies, as tourists and cops looked on bewildered. I thought I’d be arrested. Instead, I was propositioned.

Everything changed with the dot-com boom. Realtors and landlords struck gold as thousands of suddenly wealthy 20-somethings rushed from Silicon Valley to find digs in San Francisco. In the Castro: Out went the nonprofits and long-term tenants, many of them people with AIDS. After the dot-com bust, speculators hurried in to turn every possible hole in the wall into a TIC (tenancy-in-common).

It was worse than a plague of locusts. More people with AIDS lost their homes. The Castro went upscale. The new Recreation Center next to Collingwood Park became home to a playground for kiddies that prohibits adults not accompanied by children. The sex clubs vanished. These days, the corner of 18th and Castro is more often than not inhabited by Girl Scouts selling cookies and dog and cat adoption agencies. No wonder the tourists find it all so ho-hum.

Transforming the Castro into a theme park dedicated to a gay icon of yesteryear won’t solve the real problem with the neighborhood: Its loss of identity. Without the rabble-rousing activists who used to call it home, the Castro is quickly disintegrating into a symbol of a bygone era that has no more tourist appeal than Betsy Ross’ grave.

Making the neighborhood affordable to activists and artists would go much further toward restoring the old Castro than all of the ruby slippers in the world.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class queer performer, activist and writer whose work can be seen at www.avicollimecca.com.