Before the Creative Class

Abstract

During the summer of 1964, the Haight Theater in San Francisco operated briefly as “gay movie house” that screened B-movies, held drag shows, and hosted male physique contests. For Haight-Ashbury neighborhood activists, already engaged in a fight to block a planned freeway and reverse the attrition of white families from the community, the reopened theater presented an existential threat to the family-oriented character of the neighborhood. They saw the growing visibility of gay men in the area as a harbinger of social disintegration that could, if allowed to continue, result in the classification of the area as blighted, making it a candidate for demolition and renewal. The moral anxieties of Haight residents are best understood not simply as the manifestation of an inherent, latent homophobia but as part of the broader struggle of neighborhood activists to stave off the destructive impacts of urban renewal and freeway expansion. The episode reveals the degree to which taken-for-granted assumptions about the social and economic impacts of gay men on urban space have changed as postwar planning discourses about blight and social disorganization have been eclipsed by more contemporary narratives of gay-led urban revitalization and the productivity of creative capital.