Castro Street, San Francisco

San Francisco is really a great city to be in. It has the laid-back feeling of a suburb yet contains enough excitement and activities to not be too boring.

A mention of Castro Street, the ever-famous gay neighbourhood in US. It has a history of LGBT activism. More recently, I have watched the movie Milk, which tells the history of how Harvey Milk started out from Castro and became the first openly gay nominated elected into public office in California state.

So I went with a friend (who I do suspect is slight homophobic. She feels sad that people are gay, and think there are more and more people becoming gay because of society acceptance towards homosexuals.) to do some sight-seeing. It was really a vibrant neighbourhood, given the impression that San Francisco's shops closes really early, plus there don't seem to be a lot of people in the area except for Fisherman's Wharf who essentially are tourists rather than locals.

So anyway, the neighbourhood was rather vibrant, bustling with cars and a lot of people walking around. Rows of restaurants that lead up the hill, bars crowded with truck driver looking men who are all gay. Big proud rainbow flags mark each building and almost every shop in the neighbourhood so you know exactly when you are almost towards the end of the place. Which is really different from New York. New York only have some restaurants with flags, kind of scattered, though everyone will know where exactly the neighbourhood starts and ends.

Happy that I took a point to go there (with a bit of pilgrims' feeling), I took a picture of Pride and the rows of streets with the flag:





















And there is this wonderful restaurant called Chow where we had dinner. Nice food and saw a lesbian couple sitting beside us enjoying dinner, next to them, were a family of 4 with kids. Everything was perfectly normal and it suddenly gave me this illusion on how the perfect world should probably be.











However, though I love the place, I still do not agree to the fact that all gay/lesbian should be living in their own neighbourhood like this. Essentially, I do not agree to a gay neighbourhood. This reflects the truth that homosexual are being rejected, and exactly that would be what you would do in reaction to rejection, form your own little nation of minority. Truely, I do feel that it should be in every neighbourhood, just like you would do the same for people working for different positions but staying just beside each other. You wouldn't have janitors forming a neighbourhood of janitors and another neighbourhood of cashiers, waiters etc. So why a neighbourhood of gay? If people are so persistent in getting racial equality, I think they should also view the same for homosexual and heterosexuals.

Besides the fact that this neighbourhood is gay, the place itself is great for good restaurants and bars to hang out. I think this is what we should be focusing on essentially, not just a place for the gays to gather.