The Mayor of Castro Street

The development of the Gay Rights Movement in San Francisco is a wonderful example of the often central role of geography in urban social movements. As I sat in the Castro Theater watching Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch deliver excellent roles in Milk, I was struck by the strong connection between their activism and the urban environment.

Before he ever defines himself as a politician or an activist or even begins to imagine a movement, Milk maps out in his mind an imaginary line, “a six block area,” that will be safe and welcoming for gays in a city and a society that was overwhelmingly hostile toward them. Milk tells his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) that there should be at least one street in the world, at least one neighborhood, that is a haven for gay people. At the time, the Castro was a working class Irish-Catholic neighborhood. In the film, Milk builds this haven by identifying businesses that were friendly to gays and targeting those that were not for boycott, spreading outward from his own camera shop.

Some of the most rousing scenes in the film involved Emile Hirsch’s character, Cleve Jones, rallying thousands of people to the street to protest events such as passage of a ballot initiative restricting the civil rights of gays. The methods by which he gathered a crowd included not only working a mad phone tree, but running into the shops and bars along Castro Street and shouting that there was action going on in the street. Only through intense concentration of gays in the Castro could this be possible. In a sense, it was a ghetto- an area where a particular population concentrates, indirectly or by force, to seek refuge or become separated from the rest of society and its scorn.

The production of the Castro as a ghetto from both the inside and the outside increased violence but facilitated organizing. Milk and his followers exercised agency and self-determination by imagining a utopian node from which acceptance of gays could spread. However, building the district was hardly a “choice,” but rather a matter of survival because gays were not welcome outside the Castro as a group or as individuals. Concentrating gay homes, businesses and bars provided an easier target for police brutality. Ultimately, though, the ghettoization of gays through the formation of the Castro district provided solidarity and brought visibility to police violence. Just as Jane Jacobs tells us that eyes on the street make it safer, concentration of violent acts against gays in a specific geographic location helped ensure that the beatings and killings would not go unnoticed. Milk and Jones and others could act ask eyes on the street, channeling anger and outrage into organized disorder on the street.

Market Street was the nexus of this anger and organization, serving as a symbolic and a physical conduit of truth to power. When demonstrations threatened to boil over into rioting, Milk and his followers would march down Market Street to Civic Center Plaza right up to the doors of City Hall. The intensity of this imagery on film, the dense, noisy mass of people in motion taking action to make themselves heard, reminded me strongly of The Battle of Algiers. Like the native Algerian population storming down from the Casbah, the gay population forced San Francisco, and the nation, to listen to their cry for equal rights. Just as powerful, if not more so, was the image of thousands of people processing down Market Street from the Castro bearing candles after Milk’s assassination.

E. Mattiuzzi