ReviewTourTravel
Aug 2019
What do the letters making up LGBTQ stand for? What do the different flags or symbols you might see at Pride mean? Who was Harvey Milk? What was the AIDS epidemic and how did folks resist? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, then the Cruisin’ the Castro tour is for you. It is a basic intro to white Gay and Lesbian culture in San Francisco in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s.
But if you are even passingly familiar with the Queer community and Queer history, you won’t learn anything new, and might even walk away confused and angry, as I did. Though Kathy does a good job pointing out the oft-forgotten role of Lesbians, for the most part she provides a very high-level gloss of historical information, often simply repeating information available on the plaques in the public squares. More problematically, she also often throws in factual inaccuracies and misleading statements, such as that there are no gay people in Italy because of Mussolini’s campaigns during WWII or that pansexual people “look straight.”
More disturbing than the poor quality of the tour however—you take a risk on that as a tourist--was that she went out of her way to summon the police to give a citation to a group of four homeless individuals sitting on the sidewalk along the tour route—at least one of whom presented as visibly Queer. When I asked her about this, she explained that she was afraid because she had previously been attacked by a homeless individual who was on drugs. While I certainly understand the fear of violence and her desire to protect herself and I, too, want to be able to walk down the street without fear, the individuals she reported were not attacking anyone--they were simply sitting on the sidewalk chatting. She explained that what they were doing was “illegal” and that she wanted to “help them” with their presumed drug abuse and mental health problems. This is particularly ironic, however, given that she started the tour explaining how same-sex liaisons were originally considered illegal and that LGBTQ folks were--and sometimes still are--considered to be mentally ill and in need of help. She rightly rejected those attitudes as discriminatory and against human rights but then did not further this logic to individuals whose only “crime” was not being housed.
Unfortunately, tourism does not benefit the host communities equally and tends to actually harm the poorest individuals. While I might have assumed that a GLBTQ tour would actively try to fight against such dynamics given that queer folks are highly overrepresented in the homeless population, SF tourist industry operators like Kathy have a vested interest in keeping tourists happy by keeping homeless folks out of public view--and indeed Kathy cited the tour’s presence as an additional reason she called the cops over.
I wish that someone had told me before I spent $28 on a poorly run tour that participated in the curtailment of homeless folks’ civil rights and the criminalization of poverty that I could have instead 1) looked up the terms in the first paragraph of this review to read about almost everything that Cruisin’ the Castro presented, 2) seen the exact same sights for free by simply walking around the neighborhood, 3) spent $5 to get into the GLBT Historical Society Museum & Archives for my history fix, 4) read an article by Toshio Meronek to know more about current issues faced by the San Francisco Queer (and homeless) communities, and then 5) still had $20+ left to donate to the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, the publisher of the StreetSheet newspaper that one of the folks Kathy reported to the police was selling as a means to support himself and to educate others about discrimination impacting unhoused folks. So now you have the choice to do something different.
Одговор домаћина
Aug 2019
Rachel, thank you so much for your comments. Its unfortunate that the tour didn't meet your expectations. Our city is plagued with illegal activities such illegal drug abuse, crime and trespassing. This is why our Mayor and Police Department are taking action to provide services for those in need as well as, safety for both citizens and tourist alike. Its too bad that you had to witness such illegal activities and the police issuing citations accordingly. Should you have finished the tour, you would have learned that the Castro does provides outreach services for homeless LGBTQ youth at LYRIC. Nonetheless, I would be more than happy to donate your $28 to the Homeless Coalition and encourage you to get involved in your city to support this cause.