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Both Optics, SHUT ONE EYE.’ Despite such enticements, its post-fire revival as the Imperial Music Hall flopped. The bill that over the years featured risqué comedy, serious stagings of Charles Dickens tales, scandalous can-can dancing, arias by opera diva Lotta Crabtree, and the agonizingly tuneless comic singer Big Bertha was reduced to a penny arcade and wax museum – a kind of Musée Mécanique Click here meets Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum. But the traditions established by the Bella Union continue to this day, in the vaudeville burlesque of Beach Blanket Babylon, soaring arias at the San Francisco Opera, and buskers of varying abilities that turn San Francisco’s sidewalks into ever-changing street theater revues.

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Many idealists headed ‘back to the land’ in the bucolic North Bay, jumpstarting California’s organic farm movement. A dark streak emerged among those who remained, including young Charles Manson, the Symbionese Liberation Army (better known post-1974 as Patty Hearst’s kidnappers) and an evangelical egomaniac named Jim Jones, who would command 900 followers to commit mass suicide in 1978. By the time Be-In LSD supplier Owsley Stanley was released from a three-year jail term in 1970, the party seemed to be over. But in the Castro, it was just getting started.

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PRIDE

By the 1970s, San Francisco’s gay community was fed up with police raids, done with Haight squats and ready for music with an actual beat. In 1959, after an opponent had accused then-mayor George Christopher of allowing San Francisco to become ‘the national headquarters of the organized homosexuals,’ Christopher authorized crackdowns on cruising areas and gay bars and started a blacklist of gay citizens. Never one to be harassed or upstaged, WWII veteran and drag star José Sarria became the first openly gay man to run for public office in 1962, in protest of police harassment of gay citizens of San Francisco. He won 5600 votes. Undaunted, he declared himself Absolute Empress of San Francisco, the widow and true heir of Emperor Norton.

When local media joined the growing criticism of the continuing raids, the crackdown stopped – a feat not achieved for years elsewhere, until New York’s 1969 Stonewall protests. Meanwhile, San Francisco gays had ditched hetero hippies in the Haight, headed over the hills to Victorian fixer-uppers in the Castro, and proceeded to make history to a funky disco beat.

By the mid-1970s, the rainbow flag was flying high over gay businesses, restaurants and homes in out-and-proud Castro. The sexual revolution had arrived, and gay San Francisco came out of the closet and frolicked in gay clubs and bathhouses on Polk St and in South of Market (SoMa). San Francisco author Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City serial in the San Francisco Chronicle fictionalized the eye-opening adventures of new arrivals on the city’s swinging scene in real time. Gay San Francisco had its own chroniclers, anthems (‘Over the Rainbow,’ ‘I’m Coming Out,’ ‘I Will Survive’) and businesses; now all it needed was an elected representative.

The Castro was triumphant when Castro camera-store owner Harvey Milk became the nation’s first openly gay man to become an elected official – but as Milk himself predicted, his time in office would be cut short by an act of extremist violence. Dan White, a washed-up politician hyped on Hostess Twinkies, fatally shot Milk and then-mayor George Moscone in 1978. The charge was reduced to manslaughter due to the infamous ‘Twinkie Defense’ faulting the ultrasweet junk food, sparking an outpouring of public outrage that came to be called the ‘White Riot.’ But White was deeply disturbed, and committed suicide a year after his 1984 release.

By then San Francisco had other matters weighing heavily on its mind. A strange illness began to appear in local hospitals, and seemed to be hitting the gay community especially hard. The first cases of AIDS reported in 1981 were initially referred to as GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, and a social stigma became attached to the virus.