The Castro

Everyone woke up super early and we were so excited for our first full day in SF. We rode our first trolley! Then we walked to Harvey Milks Camera Store, in the Castro, and started our walking tour. 

We learned all about the Castro in the 70s and it was so different from the way it looked today.
The podcast we were listening to described a neighborhood where rent was very cheap and the community was dedicated to a social justice movement. This differed greatly from the community we were walking through, as the area was peppered with fancy cafes and stores mostly catered to white men. In fact, while white male couples were seen everywhere, female couples and couples with a person of color were significantly less frequent. The narrator of the tour described several key spots that were a significant hotspot in the 70s that looked very different now than it did then. We ended our tour at City Hall as the narrator described the protests that occured then.  We were not able to go into City Hall, to see the stairs and other key artifacts described in the podcast because there was a Free Tibet protest going on outside of City Hall. It was interesting to watch because the podcast described riots and protest that happened in the 70s for Gay Rights and there was currently a protest going on.  After we finished the podcast, we ate a bagged lunch of PB&J in a small park right across the street from city hall.

After lunch we jumped back on the trolley and had time to explore the Castro. We learned about San Francisco's loose nudity polices, as a women decided to protest...NAKED...on the trolley tracks. Apparently, she had gotten in a fight with a trolley driver. It was...interesting. To continue the nudity trend, we went to hot cookie.  They had penis cookies and naked women cookies. A majority of the cookies featured males, there was only one female cookie. Regardless of the inequality, they were delicious! We continued exploring the Castro and eventually made it back to the start of our podcast tour, at Harvey Milk's Camera Shop. It is no longer a camera store, it is now an HRC store. That was interesting to many of us because the HRC is not truly representative to all of the LGBTQ community. It mainly caters to wealthily and white gay men. Many of us found it disrespectful to Harvey Milk's legacy, because he encouraged diversity.

We ended our day in the Castro by going to the GLBTQ museum. It was super small but it had a lot of interesting information about the struggles of the GLBTQ community. It did not feature a lot on women, different ethnicities, or trans people. It was mostly focused on white males. There was a small section on Harvey Milk and it featured the table that was in the movie, MILK.

Throughout the day, we saw lots of dogs. They were all so adorable and precious that a lot of our free time during the day was spent playing with the dogs.