It’s hard not to feel a little jealous of gay San Francisco in the 1970s. Those years were a time of rapid growth for the queer mecca of the Western world: Between 1972 and 1977, the city gained 100,000 new LGBTQ residents, about a seventh of its entire population. Centered in the Castro, a neighborhood that quickly evolved into a hub of gay life, the queer community in San Francisco was robust enough, dense enough, and resourceful enough to create its own small city within a city.

In the 1970s, TV networks were running some of the first big reports on gay people (and growing gayborhoods like the Castro). They had the vibe of a National Geographic safari. At that time, the concept of gay rights was so new to most Americans that reporters still had to explain to their audiences what it meant. But curiosity was starting to replace the previous decades’ contempt.

The mainstream coverage had one major benefit: Gay people across the country were learning that there were places where they could live full, integrated lives, with friends and art and love and sex and some hope of an eventual approximation of civil rights. On any given night in San Francisco, you could visit one or more of the dozens of lesbian and gay bars, women’s cafés, and bathhouses in the city. You could order a cheese omelet at a diner at 3 a.m. and end up sitting at a table with Sylvester, the gay disco icon. The Cockettes, a psychedelics-fueled drag ensemble, were doing midnight shows with glitter in their beards and their genitals hanging out. People attempted new methods of mutual aid and new structures for their sexual relationships. There was a sense that whatever gays were doing in San Francisco would shape a broader American gay culture and, quite possibly, change the world.

But gay life in the 1970s was also difficult, to an extent that is hard to imagine for queer people like me, who came of age in the 21st century. Gay sex wasn’t just viewed by some with scorn and disgust—it was illegal in most U.S. states (including California, until 1975). These sodomy bans provided the rationale for rampant police harassment and mass arrests. And entire professions were closed off to openly gay people, who were presumed criminals as long as the laws were in place.

In those years, there were lots of gays in heterosexual marriages, leading double lives. Queer kids in small cities could grow up not even knowing that there were others out there like them. Suicidality was extraordinarily common, even in the gayest city in America. And groups of straight men would routinely descend on the Castro and its surrounding neighborhoods to assault gay people for sport—and occasionally kill them, as in the case of a 33-year-old gay man named Robert Hillsborough, who was murdered in 1977.

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