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From Little Scandinavia to Gay Mecca: San Francisco’s Castro District

It’s LGBTQ+ pride month!

I was fortunate enough to spend a few years living in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco which borders the infamous Castro district, one of the well-known meccas for gay pride. Walking a few blocks to 24th Street was a weekly thing for my sister and I when we did all of our shopping. One block up and a few blocks toward the downtown, we would hit the Castro district with all of its color, vibrancy, and enthusiasm and all of its rainbow flags and rainbow crosswalks. It was a place full of energy.

Photo Credit: A crosswalk in the Castro District painted with the colors of the rainbow flag, 13 October 2014: Pinpinellus/Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 4.0

But the Castro district (often referred to as “the Castro”) didn’t start out that way. In fact, its beginnings are much more humble. In the 19th century, the area was inhabited mainly by working-class immigrants of Scandinavian origin. Their hard work and love of their new country and the city are well documented in the 1948 film I Remember Mama. The film is based on the true story of a Norwegian family trying to make ends meet in early 20th century San Francisco and get used to the modernizations of American culture, including putting one’s money into a bank (a major theme in the film).

This Scandinavian enclave lasted until the mid-20th century. Several things turned the tide for the Castro. The 1950s marked a great shift in American living when people, eager for a safe and sane life after World War II, sought the suburbs and their own houses with a picket fence. Families fled San Francisco for the more sedate cities of the Bay Area like Pleasanton, San Jose, and Walnut Creek. Many Scandinavian families from the Castro moved out of their homes, leaving them empty, and the city was eager to fill these homes, so buying or renting a home was reasonable (hard to imagine in San Francisco) at that time. This coincided with many gay servicemen being released from the army and looking for a gay-friendly place to live. Later in the late 1960s, when San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district (just bordering the Castro) became wild with drugs and violence, many gay people there escaped into the more livable Castro district.

In the 1970s, the Castro was a haven for gay activists, the most famous being Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay politician to serve on California’s Board of Supervisors. In the 1980s, the Castro saw a darker side when the AIDS/HIV epidemic hit the nation, but today, it stands as the symbol of gay culture and pride. This year marks the first since the COVID pandemic when all the festivities associated with Pride Month in San Francisco will be out in full force and as this article makes clear, San Francisco still remains a safe place for LGBTQ+ people to live and thrive just as it was in the mid-20th century.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

Release Day Blitz for False Fathers (Waxwood Series: Book 2)!

False Fathers Front Cover Photo Credit: Photo Credit: Portrait of a Young Man, Ferdinand von Wright, 1860s, portrait, oil on canvas, Finnish National Gallery: BotMultichill/Wikimedia Commons/PD old 100 expired

Title: False Fathers

Series: Waxwood Series, Book 2

Author: Tam May

Genre: Historical Fiction/Coming of Age

Release Date: December 28, 2019

Sometimes no father is better than a false father.

At nineteen, Jake Alderdice is shy, contemplative, and passionate about art. With the death of his grandfather, shipping magistrate Malcolm Alderdice, he becomes the new family patriarch and heir to Alderdice Shipping and Alderdice Luxury Liner. After two years of mourning, he is ready to add to the family honor just as all the Alderdice men have, but as an artist, not a shipping magistrate. His plans are delayed with his mother announces the family will be retreating to Waxwood, now a fashionable resort town favored by the San Francisco elite, for the summer, fulfilling her father’s dying wish to “go back”.

On the train, he meets Harland Stevens, an enigmatic but charming older man, who has come to Waxwood as chaperone and guide to his college-aged cousin Roger and Roger’s friends. Mr. Stevens, or, as he tells Jake, “just Stevens”, takes an interest in the young man’s ambitions, and introduces him to the town’s most prominent gallery owner. But when Jake takes his paintings for appraisal, the man delivers a fatal blow — Jake’s mythology-inspired paintings are too original for the market of realistic landscape paintings favored by Gilded Age patrons.

Stevens seizes the devastated and wandering Jake and counsels him toward a more aggressive but moralistic path to manhood inspired by Teddy Roosevelt and Thoreau. Jake proves himself to be more studious and serious than Roger and his friends. Impressed with the young man’s determination to take over his grandfather’s business, Stevens introduces him to The Order of Actaeon, a secret society built upon those ideals favored by his idols.

But the path to emotional maturity and masculine identity is, Jake learns, a complex thing in the Gilded Age. Will his journey free him from the Alderdice family illusions, half-truths, and lies that have kept him a child, just as it did his sister Vivian’s six years before? Or will it lead him into the world of Actaeon, where the hunter becomes the hunted?

You can pick up your copy of the book at a special promotional price at the following online retailers:

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Excerpt

The afternoon sun had arrived with its vengeance of rising heat. Jake took out his handkerchief and wiped at his forehead. At the same time, he felt something inside him shiver. He couldn’t help but think of what Vivian would have said, if she had heard the tale. He knew she would have found it one more reason to avoid Stevens, as the story would have struck her as another way in which Roger had been right about the way in which Stevens and his father engineered their will against the will of others.

“I suppose your father understood you.” He put the handkerchief away and made a shot through the hoop in front of him.

As Stevens set down his mallet down, Jake felt the weight of his expectant eyes. “I thought you would change your mind.”

“Change my mind?”

“About needing guidance,” said the redhead. “You needn’t be abashed. Other young men such as yourself have come to me when they needed a father too.”

“I didn’t say I needed a father.” Jake looked at the tussled grass at his feet. “I only meant I would be grateful for any ideas you have for me about my new undertakings.”

“As you wish,” said Stevens, though his eyes sparkled in the sun.

About the Author

Tam May grew up in the United States and earned her B.A. and M.A in English. She worked as an English college instructor and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher before she became a full-time writer. She started writing when she was 14, and writing became her voice. She writes fiction about characters who find their future by exploring their personal past influenced by the time in which they live.

Her first book, a collection of contemporary short stories titled Gnarled Bones And Other Stories, was nominated for a 2017 Summer Indie Book Award. She is currently working on a Gilded Age family saga. The first book, The Specter, is now available, and the second book, False Fathers, will be out in December, 2019. She is also working on a historical mystery series featuring a turn-of-the-century New Woman sleuth. Both series take place in Northern California.

She lives in Texas but calls San Francisco and the Bay Area “home”. When she’s not writing, she’s reading classic literature and historical fiction, watching classic films, or cooking up awesome vegetarian dishes.

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How Small-Town California Inspired Waxwood, The Series

The old Southern Pacific train depot in Benicia. It used to be the entrance of the town and the last stop before passengers boarded the ferry that took them to the East Bay and San Francisco. I was told in the visitor’s bureau that the depot was placed there in 1902 and was functional until the 1940’s, when cars began to replace train travel in that area. Personal photo.

Last year, I was able to visit the San Francisco Bay Area, one of my favorite place of all time. During my trip, I saw Benicia, a small little town that I had researched quite extensively and I wrote a blog post about it here.

At the time, Benicia was the inspiration for the location of my upcoming historical mystery series, The Paper Chase Mysteries. What I didn’t realize until after I started to revise my upcoming book The Specter, was that parts of Benicia had infiltrated into my idea of the town of Waxwood, the town on which my Waxwood Series is based.

Element of Benicia make Waxwood a character as much as any other of the human characters. It’s a small, quiet, little town with the kind of slow-paced rhythm you would expect from small-town America. Right on the Carquinez Straight, it has a small pier where you can walk and enjoy the view of the hills and the Benicia-Martinez Bridge. People are laid-back and friendly. There’s a rich art community there with local artists displaying their work in small shops down First Street.

Here’s Vivian’s first impressions of Waxwood from The Specter:

By the time Vivian stepped off the train at the Waxwood station, early afternoon had settled in. She saw immediately what Mrs. Moore meant about there being “nothing there.” Compared to the city, Waxwood was half-deserted and nearly pitiful in its emptiness. She could see only the train tracks trailing a bay whose size was paltry compared to the one bordering the city. And yet, Vivian was at ease in this small village with its slowly moving waters and nearly deserted street. Even the station agent’s expression seemed bucolic as he smiled at her from his caged window.

Not an auspicious view for a town, perhaps!

As I mentioned above, Waxwood is a character in the series. It’s not just the place where the Alderdice family goes for their summer vacation, or the place where other characters in the series end up. Waxwood is as alive and changeable as the characters themselves.

The Waxwood Vivian visits in Book 1 of the series, which takes place in 1892, is not the same Waxwood she sees six years later in Book 2. Like all of America in the Gilded Age, Waxwood goes through some rapid changes. It becomes more commercialized, more touristic, less quaint and quiet. It has its own ominous presence and ghosts, much like the characters in the series. In this way, it mirrors the evolution of the characters, especially Vivian.

Why did I name the town Waxwood? The idea of the wax wood trees (which do not exist in real life, as far as I know) intrigued me. In The Specter, Vivian encounters the forest with another character, Ruth:

The hill they had ascended, though not so very steep, was crowded with tall trees with umbrella tops and a strange, glossy wood. Vivian slipped off one of her gloves. Her hand moved to touch the shiny tree. The matted sheen felt almost rough to the touch and a little sticky.
“The surface softens with the sun and hardens with the moon,” Ruth said. “It’s why they call them wax wood trees.”

Certain elements have always fascinated me and wax is one of them. Wax can be both pliable and unyielding, it can be creative, molded and shaped into anything you like. And it can be dangerous, as when a candle tips over with the potential to set a curtain or a room on fire. The wax wood forest has its own significance in the series, which is the subject for another future blog post.

To find out more about The Specter and pick up your copy at a special preorder price, you can go here.

To find out more about the Waxwood Series, go here.