CNN
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In 1965, Life magazine declared San Francisco the gay capital of America. And Castro was at the heart of it.
Perhaps the most famous “gayborhood” in the United States, it was home to some of the country’s most famous queer artists and activists in the 20th century. This is where America’s first openly gay male politician was elected, where the Pride flag was born, and where many gay, transgender, and misfits estranged from their biological families created new families of their own.
At the time, Castro was known as Eureka Valley, or Little Scandinavia. Young people flocked to San Francisco during the tumultuous 1960s, marked by protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the dawn of the hippie movement.
“The Castro District has become known for being incredibly welcoming to LGBTQ people, and I think that was built by word of mouth,” says Roberto Ordeñana, executive director of the GLBT Historical Society.
The San Francisco institution was founded in 1985 at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The goal was to collect as many memorabilia and ephemera as possible. Today, the collection includes everything from back issues of queer zines to original pride flags.
Harvey Milk and his legacy
The man who became the most prominent symbol of the LGBT rights movement in the United States was Harvey Milk. Born in New York state, he moved to San Francisco in 1972 and opened a camera store on Castro Street.
Harvey Milk: pioneering politician
The district’s name comes from this street, which is its main artery. Milk became politically active and founded the Castro Village Association, one of the first primarily LGBTQ-owned business groups in the country. His biographer Randy Shilts called him the “Mayor of Castro Street.”
In 1977, Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the country’s first openly gay male politician. He was one of the leaders who worked to defeat Proposition 6, a bill that would have required schools to fire gay and lesbian teachers.
“[Milk]crystallized the political hopes and dreams of a generation of out gay people in the aftermath of the gay liberation movement,” said Timothy Stewart Winter, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark who specializes in LGBTQ history.
Less than a year after his election, Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by a fellow city supervisor named Dan White.
After his murder, “he became a martyr,” Stewart-Winter says. Like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. a decade earlier, the timing of Milk’s assassination frozen him in history against the political and social upheaval of his time.
Since then, Milk’s name has become synonymous with the LGBTQ community.
In 2019, the U.S. Navy named a ship after him, a full-circle moment considering Milk, who served in the Korean War, was forced to resign from the Navy because of his sexuality. The ship was renamed USNS Oscar V. Peterson in 2025 in honor of a naval hero, after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he had “no interest in naming ships after activists.”
San Francisco International Airport (SFO) also named a terminal after milk.
But Ordeñana cautions against allowing Milk to become the sole representative of a large and diverse community.
“It’s important to us to honor Harvey Milk and others who did great work for our communities, but there are still stories like Sally Gearhart, a contemporary of Harvey Milk who worked with him on the Proposition 6 campaign, whose stories are pushed out of the mainstream narrative,” Ordeñana says.
Gearhart was a writer, teacher, and activist who founded one of the first women’s studies university programs at San Francisco State University.
“We want to make sure we cover the history of the most vulnerable people in our community,” Ordeñana adds. “That includes older people, that includes young people, and especially women and transgender people.”
Fifty years after Harvey Milk set up shop in the Castro, some might argue that the area has become a victim of its own success.
“On the one hand, the Castro is exemplary and a place that people associate with being gay. It’s a place where people go to be gay, but it’s also incredibly expensive and a place where the contradictions of late capitalism play out. There’s a huge housing affordability crisis happening across the country, and it’s really acute in San Francisco,” Stewart-Winter said.
“The technology industry has changed San Francisco,” he added, noting that the neighborhood’s gentrification is not a recent phenomenon.
Italian clothing brand Diesel opened a store on Castro Boulevard in the 1990s. These days, Apple and Starbucks hold court alongside locally owned taquerias and art galleries.
Harvey Milk’s camera store still stands at 575 Castro Street and is an official San Francisco landmark with a plaque out front and a mural of Milk on the wall.
Ordeñana said the historical society also wants to keep Castro’s gay history in the present tense in a rapidly growing and gentrifying city. The organization was able to raise enough funds to purchase permanent housing in the neighborhood.
“Obviously, LGBTQ people live everywhere. We’re part of every community. We’re part of every neighborhood. The Castro continues to be a destination for people visiting from all over the world. That’s why it was important to us to open this museum in the Castro that is available to tourists and city residents alike from all over the world.”
“I was born and raised in San Francisco,” Ordeñana says. “I’ve never left. I love traveling all over the world, but this is home.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated and republished in January 2026.
