People came out in droves but most were trying to huddle in the shadier parts of the Castro neighborhood for the 50th anniversary of the Castro Street Fair on Sunday, which is the city's last big street fair of the year.
Though technically not the 50th annual Castro Street Fair — the pandemic kind of messed up these numbers — this year's fair marked 50 years since Harvey Milk launched the first Castro Street Fair in his newly adopted gayborhood. At the time, the Castro was just taking off as the queer part of town, with Polk Street and the Tenderloin having long held that banner. Gay men and lesbians were drawn to the neighborhood's cheap rents — the Swedish and Irish families who'd occupied the neighborhood in earlier decades had largely fled to the suburbs — the burgeoning bar scene, and the somewhat sunnier microclimate.
Pride Weekend wasn't yet the major affair it would become within a few years — still called Gay Freedom Day, the annual Pride Parade wouldn't expand by popular demand to Market Street until 1975, and it was still more of a visibility protest.
But Castro Street Fair was and still is just a party, and part of the panoply of neighborhood street fairs that make San Francisco what it is from May to October.
Milk had a self-serving reason to launch the fair as well. As a neighborhood retailer, the proprietor of Castro Camera — 575 Castro Street, now the home of Queer AF — he wanted the Castro to have an event like North Beach and other neighborhoods had to boost the profile of local retailers.
Many of the retail booths at Sunday's fair were either political or from outside the neighborhood — the kinds of booths selling T-shirts, trucker hats, and dreamcatchers that you find at other night markets and such. But the Castro's bars all got a boost on Sunday as attendees all needed to find their beverages there. Unlike in previous years, and in keeping with the post-pandemic practice at Folsom Street and other fairs, fair organizers chose not to have their beer vending booths but to give that business to the bars and restaurants.
440 Castro, one of the last vestiges of the leather scene in the neighborhood, had a crowd outside most of the day, with a go-go boy dancing in one of the windows and lots of beer flowing. Meanwhile, down on 18th Street, Poesia Cafe was slinging Aperol spritzes all afternoon.
The 98-degree temperatures made for an unusually sweltering day in the neighborhood, with not a lot of escapes into air conditioning available. A group of neighbors on Hartford Street took advantage of the street closure Sunday to put out a lobster-shaped sprinkler device that overheated festival goers could run through, or just stand next to if they pleased.
And while the previous weekend's Folsom Street Fair usually enjoys the lion's share of scantily clad folk, Sunday's weather brought the harnesses and jockstraps out once more.
Also, unlike Folsom Street Fair, this fair was not wildly crowded, just pleasantly so. As Jukie Schweit, operations manager of the Folsom Street Fair, tells the Chronicle, "There is an ease to this fair, a strolling space. It doesn’t feel frantic or overcrowded.”
The fair's footprint, which included a section of Market Street near Castro, 18th between Noe and Collingwood, and Castro up to 19th Street, was larger than in recent years, when the fair had shrunk slightly and featured fewer stages. The line-dancing stage behind the Castro Theater was back, and Queer AF (which stands for Queer Arts Featured) had its own drag and entertainment stage up on Castro near 19th.
Thankfully, this year's fair didn't coincide with Fleet Week Sunday, and there were no fighter jets to distract from the fun.
The fair reportedly needs $200,000 in vendor fees and donations each year to break even, and we don't yet have a figure what the gates took this year in suggested $10 donations.
Top image: fsmith827/Instagram
