Look at any crowd in San Francisco and the odds are that one out of three is gay. Walk down the street in this crossroad the gay community and you're likely to meet your neighbor, your doctor, the guy who fixed your television set, or perhaps your boss. Otherwise for gays from Des Moines or Duluth, a sort of heaven on earth. Castro Polk and Folsom the Sodom and Gomorrah of San Francisco if you disapprove of their orientation. This is where they play if they dare run the risk of being discovered. All nestled into a cozy hodge-podge of unplanned happiness at the foot of Twin Peaks.
Castro village the name given for roughly 20 square blocks of quaint jobs vaguely Victorian structures cut into living quarters and more than 15 gay bars. But when work is through one hundreds gather here in what many are convinced as the largest and most significant gay ghetto in the United States if not the entire world. They worked side by side with those of more conventional sexual preference and for the most part they are invisible. You can look around the city's many districts and be sure that gays, as many homosexuals prefer to call themselves, are part of the scene. A city with a uniquely liberal tradition that tolerates and perhaps even encourages the private and public meeting and marriage of men with men and women with women. San Francisco the Queen City of the West known to many for the Golden Gate Bridge and the cable cars known to far fewer as a haven for homosexuals. Now, we don't intend to take a point of view but rather we intend to suggest that more understanding might be a healthy overture and an enlightened attitude about the largest minority here. Read the text from the special reports below:ĭuring the past six months or so, several of us here at Channel 7 have been focusing our attention on the homosexual community of the Bay Area especially San Francisco, with the hope of presenting for you a report that would shed some light on the darkness of the gay scene and generally show that people of homosexual persuasion are no different except in their sexual preference. Watch the video above for the ABC7 special reports presented as they aired in 1976. "BAY GAYS" was shocking for its time and is stunning still today for how many of the issues still exist.
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Though the series focuses only gay men, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were also fighting their own battles for public acceptance.
The language used in this special has evolved over the years. Before Harvey Milk was elected supervisor, before the White Night riots that followed his death, before HIV and AIDS devastated a community, before same-sex marriage was legal. The four part series starts before the rainbow flag was a a symbol for a united community.