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The history of The Gangway is as fascinating as you’d expect from a 107 year old gay bar. The Tenderloin was once the heart of gay San Francisco, now the only Queer bar left is Aunt Charlie’s Lounge. This is especially the case in a city where Queer culture is being museumized, while the actual places where the culture was built and fought for are disappearing. The fact that The Gangway was on the chopping block was common knowledge, there had been overtures from folks interested in buying the place since 2016, but up until now, nothing had seemed to materialize. Then on Sunday morning a number of posts popped up on Facebook with folks lamenting the abrupt closure of the 107 year old Queer bar.Ī 107 year old bar closing would be sad news anywhere, but it’s particularly painful in San Francisco where we seem to be losing institutions monthly. This way, I could look to see if public health officials sought to close down the majority of bars following the AIDs scare.Over the weekend many in the SF Queer community posted the sad news: The Gangway had suddenly closed down. If I can figure out my dataset in Carto I think it would be interesting to look at the businesses by decade through a heat map. Pair the use of drugs in bars with unprotected sex, these neighborhoods became hotbeds during the AIDs epidemic. Much like Chinatown, gay bars and clubs were closely linked with drugs and disease. I would not be surprised if certain individuals who did not want to associate themselves with the gay community would not frequent those areas.
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These businesses thus represent a social movement which was very much represented geographically in the city. The riot did not end the discrimination transgenders experienced daily in Tenderloin but it lead to the city to begin recognizing transgenders as citizens versus a problem that needed to be fixed.
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Plates were thrown and windows were broken, when the police were finally able to get the violent clash under control. Although the protest was ultimately unsuccessful, it was the first protest against transgender mistreatment. In response, the transgender community, which was often excluded from gay businesses, organized a protest at Compton’s Cafeteria. During this time, the cafeteria would frequently call police on transgender people who would visit the restaurant. The Compton’s Cafeteria, for example, is the location of the 1966 Compton Cafeteria Riot. Some locations on my map are sites of conflict between the gays and police authority. Threats persisted for this community however. Bars, bathhouses, and other places of interaction allowed gays to be open sexually. Gay shop owners and entrepreneurs empowered the community. Gay neighborhoods provided “certain spatial freedom”. Following his assassination, the gays of San Francisco politically organized in order to fight for gay rights. In the 1970s, the Castro elected one of the first gay American politicians, Harvey Milk. The Castro in particular became one of the first well-known gay neighborhoods in the United States.
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This created gay neighborhoods where they could live their lifestyles freely and open successful businesses. As the article on FoundSF points out, gay men and women congregated together for safety in numbers. I chose to look a set of businesses like the gay community’s because their locations reveals a similar spacial confinement experienced by other minority groups in San Francisco. “Other”, indicated by red circles, refers to spaces like cinemas and bookstores. The map on I posted on Twitter from FoundSF used Carto and was able to better visually communicate its data as a result. Blue and green circles on that map refer to the locations of bathhouses and sex clubs and purple circles show gay bars and clubs. Unless you zoom in, there is no clear way of telling where points lie. This version looks like a poor example of a map, like the select few we viewed in class. I was hoping to use Carto’s more advanced features to visualize this map differently.