Love, Castro Street: Reflections of San Francisco

Katherine V. Forrest & Jim Van Buskirk Eds.

Publisher: Alyson Books

ISBN: 978-1-555839-97-0

PSRP: $16.95

Recognized as perhaps the world's most queer destination, San Francisco has a long, storied history of embracing-and influencing-gay and lesbian culture. Now, Michael Nava, Elana Dykewoman, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Jim Tushinski, Michele Tea, K.M. Soehnlein, and many others offer up essays and stories about why they love Castro Street.

 Editorial Reviews

This top-notch collection of more than two dozen personal essays is a luscious love letter to the queerest of cities. Most contributors wax nostalgic: Carol Seajay on the birth of Old Wives Tales, one of the earliest feminist bookstores; Victor J. Banis on life as the manager of a decrepit apartment building and its queer denizens in the heart of pre-AIDS Castro; Lucy Jane Bledsoe on coming to SF in 1976; J. Allen Sawyer on his decades-long love affair with the famed Castro Theatre; and Jim Duggins, with an offbeat account of his stint working among the hard-core convicts of Alcatraz. There aren't a lot of contemporary accounts: Kirk Read's "Notes on the Castro" and K.M Soehnlein's "First Days" revel in the sexual freedom they encountered when they both arrived in the city, not so many years ago, and Helen Zia's "Where the Queer Zone Meets the Asian Zone" celebrates the short window of opportunity in 2004 when lesbians and gays could wed. Most out-of-left-field essay? Former mystery writer and self-professed schoolyard sissy Michael Nava's love affair with baseball. 
--Richard Labonte, Book Marks