A Gay Chaldean Priest, a Chelsea Queen, and one Hot Daddy
Only in San Francisco’s Castro!
Gay men have a culture, or at least collections of cultures.
Ingroup dynamics. Ways of being. Accents, body languages. Speedos, Sunday brunch, Broadway musicals, opera, and cocktails are stereotypes, but they contain grains of truth. When I was young, our culture was more necessary than it is today. We used it to identify one another. To recognize one another in a hostile world.
But when we came together in our Meccas, or ghettos as we called them then? Things occasionally got out of hand, in a comic sort of way! Don’t know what I mean?
Take a trip back in time with me to San Francisco of the mid 1990s, when the Castro was perhaps the most famous queer haven in the world. Meet some of the colorful characters who inhabited a subculture that’s slowly fading away.
Our Meccas are disappearing because we don’t need them as much as we once did, and that’s all for the good. But we’re losing something special as they disappear. Here’s a memory I want to people to have, of the way things used to be.
Imagine the Castro then, at the time probably America’s most outrageously in-your-face, over-the-top gay ghetto.
