What GLBTQ San Francisco had been through the 1960s, though significant, would not have necessarily led one to predict the massive influx of immigrants and the expansion of cultures and politics in the subsequent decade.30 John D’Emilio observes, “By the mid-1970s San Francisco had become, compared to the rest of the country, a liberated zone for lesbians and gay men.”31 Such growth was enabled by changing economic and demographic landscape of the city. San Francisco’s transformation from a manufacturing center into a metropolis of corporate headquarters, tourism, and conventions, depleted the population’s blue-collar, straight families in the many ethnic neighborhoods; consequently, it also enticed young professionals who found inexpensive housing in places like the Castro. Development politics were fraught, and tensions flared throughout the 1970s and beyond, inside and outside GLBTQ communities.32 With San Francisco’s development, however, accompanied by a growing reputation for sexual freedom, a GLBTQ homeland blossomed. D’Emilio explains that communities rapidly grew in a number of neighborhoods—Castro, Polk Street, Tenderloin, South of Market, Folsom Street, Upper Mission and Bernal Heights—constituting a “new social phenomenon, residential areas that were visibly gay in composition.”33
With such visibility came more immigrants, social and sexual networks and spaces, communications, businesses, civic groups, political organizations, movement mobilization and action, public festivals, and celebrations. Reporting on the “economic boom” and “political clout” of GLBTQ San Francisco during the 1970s, the Washington Post concluded that it was the “most open of any [homosexual community] in the nation.” Frances FitzGerald described the Castro as the “imminent realization” of gay liberation, “the first gay settlement, the first true gay ‘community,’ and as such it was a laboratory for the movement. It served as a refuge for gay men, and a place where they could remake their lives; now it was to become a model for the new society—’a gay Israel,’ as someone once put it.” Danny Nicoletta’s recollection is equally effusive: “Into the Seventies, people arrived in San Francisco from all over the world with hopes of creating a life characterized by the consciousness attributed to the Sixties communal, holistic, non-violent, mystical, theatrical, and avant-garde. A facet of this idealism for myself and many others was that we were people who were gay searching for a place to be open and honest about this part of our lives—a place without fear of the hatred and persecution which had kept us in closets for so long.”34
With such concentration, circulation, capital, and confidence, GLBTQ people also developed politically. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on its front page in 1971, “San Francisco’s populous homosexual community, historically nonpolitical and inward looking, is in the midst of assembling a potentially powerful political machine.”35 With the first gay rights marches, creation of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, Jim Foster’s path-breaking speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1972, and thriving lesbian-feminist communities, one might readily have believed the Chronicle’s hyperbole, which became all the more manifest as the decade unfolded. Jonathan Bell’s incisive analysis demonstrates that a broader confluence of contextual elements in California politics dating back more than a decade enabled such queer auspiciousness. From Bell’s perspective, left liberalism guided a generation of influential and ascending politicians who fused economic and civil rights in a progressive vision of inclusion; politicians who were influenced by and collaborated with grassroots activists and who helped create the conditions under which such disenfranchised groups could make gains through electoral politics. This is not to say that Willie Brown, George Moscone, Phil Burton, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Hongisto, and other key political players of the era were unfettered champions of or exclusively responsible for gay rights, as Harvey Milk’s critiques of superficial campaign courtship and battles with “the Machine” would later demonstrate. However, this analysis does help explain the conditions of possibility, “the distinctive contours of political life in San Francisco in the 1970s,” within and through which Milk could emerge, mature, and ultimately succeed as a gay rights and community activist with a populist vision articulated through the discourses of economic justice, individual rights, political power, solidarity, and coalition.36
But of course it was not only because San Francisco existed as the “political base” and “spiritual home of California liberalism” that GLBTQ people flourished.37 The intensifying, intensely satisfying, and interanimating dimensions of cultures and politics forged identification and identity, cultivated emotional bonds, deepened communities, fomented movement, and resulted in the sexual embodiment of freedom. Especially for gay men, such freedom was made all the more available and fluid by proliferating and booming bars, bathhouses, and clubs. With such growth came inevitable tensions, and there have been critiques, for example, of the gay male sexual culture.38 However, sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong argues persuasively that those committed to gay rights (interest group politics and legal protections), gay pride (cultural identity and visibility), and sexual pleasure (its enactment and commercialization) created a synergistic movement of “unity through diversity.”39 Armstrong observes, “The political logic of identity made it possible to reconcile pride, rights, and sexual expression,”40 despite differences among and the uniqueness of individuals, that solidified in economic power, political influence, and a sense of the collective instantiated through pleasure.
Significant, too, is the still broader context of national culture and politics, as well as the larger gay rights movement. Bruce Schulman writes in The Seventies, “[T]he emphasis on diversity, on cultural autonomy and difference, echoed throughout 1970s America. White ethnics picked it up, as did feminists and gay rights advocates and even the elderly. A new conception of the public arena emerged.”41 Contrary to narratives about cultural reversals and moribund activism, Dominic Sandbrook argues, “For all the efforts of the religious right and for all the talk of backlash against the legacy of the sixties, the fact remains that in moral and cultural terms, American society became steadily more permissive. More marriages broke up, more pregnancies were terminated, more children were born out of wedlock, and more gays and lesbians came out. In this respect at least, liberalism not only survived the 1970s but emerged triumphant.”42 Moreover, GLBTQ activism in particular should be understood as not only a legacy of the “long sixties” but as a distinctive influence on U.S. culture. Schulman goes so far as to conclude, “The gay rights movement transformed Americans’ understanding of homosexuality, and of masculinity in general” elsewhere he wrote, “Looking back . . . it is clear that the grassroots struggles for racial justice and sexual equality have exerted a more thoroughgoing impact than the liberal political economy of the Great Society.”43
Such superlative assessments are warranted by hard-earned achievements of GLBTQ people and organizations, and the widening visibility that came with them. The often-cited Time cover story, “Gays on the March,” from September 1975, remarked on the transformation:
There are now more than 800 gay groups in the U.S., most of them pressing for state or local reforms. The Advocate, a largely political biweekly tabloid for gays, has a nationwide circulation of 60,000, and the National Gay Task Force has a membership of 2,200. . . . Since homosexuals began to organize for political action six years ago, they have achieved a substantial number of victories. Eleven state legislatures have followed Illinois in repealing their anti-sodomy laws. The American Psychiatric Association has stopped listing homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, and AT&T, several other big corporations and the Civil Service Commission have announced their willingness to hire openly avowed gays.44
Little wonder, then, that even as the movement shifted from the brief revolution of gay liberation to the mainstay of gay rights reform (growing in numbers while contracting its agenda to single-issue politics), a heady mood of historic transformation pervaded. Like other GLBTQ people, John D’Emilio, himself both chronicler and activist, rode high on the collective effervescence: “The goals of activists had narrowed, yet activists in the mid-1970s almost uniformly displayed an élan that made them feel as if they were mounting the barricades. Activists increasingly engaged in routinized and mundane organizational tasks, yet they believed they were remaking the world.”45
Harvey