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The Castro District is San Francisco's most famous gay neighborhood, in the Eureka Valley and named for José Castro, a nineteenth-century Mexican general. It became the heart of LGBTQ life in the 1970s through Harvey Milk's camera store, and the rainbow flag was first raised here in 1978.
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A Street Named for a General
José Castro was a Mexican general and statesman who held the title of alcalde of Alta California in the 1830s, and his name is on this neighborhood because of a street. When a streetcar line linked Eureka Valley to downtown in 1887, the area that became the Castro began to grow, first as a working-class district settled heavily by Scandinavian and Finnish immigrants. For the first half of the twentieth century this was an unremarkable corner of the city. Then, in the late nineteen-sixties, gay men and lesbians began moving in, drawn by the cheap Victorian flats left behind by families who had moved to the suburbs — and the Castro began its second life.
The Camera Store
Harvey Milk moved to San Francisco in 1972 and opened Castro Camera at 575 Castro Street in 1973, turning a small storefront into a campaign headquarters. He lost three elections — two for supervisor and one for the state assembly — before the city changed how it chose its supervisors, and he won a seat in 1977. That made him the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. In office he sponsored a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation; it passed eleven to one and the mayor signed it. On November 27, 1978, a former supervisor shot and killed Milk and Mayor George Moscone at City Hall. Milk was forty-eight years old.
A Flag Sewn in an Attic
The symbol of this neighborhood was sewn by hand. In 1978 the artist Gilbert Baker and a collective of about thirty volunteers made the first rainbow flag in a San Francisco attic, an eight-color design, and raised two flags at the city's Gay Freedom Day parade on June 25, 1978. Two colors were dropped for practical reasons, and the six-stripe flag became the symbol of LGBTQ pride around the world. Stand at Eighteenth and Castro, the corner where many of the district's marches and protests have taken place, look up at the rainbow flags hanging from the streetlights, and end the walk at the marquee of the Castro Theatre, the 1922 movie palace that still anchors the neighborhood.