Appears in the anthology Love, Castro Street, Alyson Publications, co-edited by Katherine V.  Forrest and Jim Van Buskirk.

My life has always been about movies. So many of my memories involve movie theaters and the films I’ve seen in them. I’m a movie lover, plain and simple. It’s usually not the box-like mall theaters of the 1970s and 80s that occupy my most cherished memories, nor the comfort and efficiency of today’s stadium seating multiplexes that inspire me. I’m not a church-going man, but I imagine the feelings a religious person has inside one of the world’s great cathedrals are similar to how I feel when I’m watching an exceptional film in a real movie palace. I’ve been in a number of them—huge, grandiose, impossibly ornate, and sometimes rundown theaters from the 1920s and 30s that have survived all the vagaries of the movie business for the last 80 years. These are my temples—with gold leaf cornices, curtains that part to reveal big screens, chandeliers, haunted balconies, and aging seats—offering you the sense that, when the right film comes along, you are sharing mysteries and secrets with the other people in the audience. I was fortunate enough to live within walking distance of one of the best for 20 years. It’s my St. Peter’s, my Mecca, my Chartres—the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

The first time I saw the Castro, it reminded me of a Mexican cathedral, albeit one with an enormous vertical neon sign and a marquee. I had come to San Francisco as a penniless twenty-something grad student tourist, on a stopover before continuing my cross-country drive down to school in Southern California. I’d been in love with the idea of San Francisco for many years, brought up on Tales of the City and Vertigo, and had my first glimpse of the Oz-like city as I drove across the Bay Bridge on a clear, beautiful summer day in 1984.

After parking my yellow VW Bug on Howard near Sixth Street in the infamous South of Market neighborhood, I settled into my tiny room at a gay hotel called The Anxious Arms and planned my first San Francisco excursion—to the gayest place on earth, the corner of Castro and Market Streets. Within the hour, I was walking up to Market to catch the Muni Metro subway, counting the three stops until I could emerge onto the street corner I had fantasized about since I was a dorky college student in mid-state Illinois.

I remember walking up the steps at the Castro Street Muni station and at first all I could see was this incredible blue sky. Then I saw all the men, gay men everywhere and of every sort. On reaching the top of the steps, I was disoriented by the huge intersection, the traffic, the people. I stood on the street corner as all those gay men moved around me, and I slowly turned a full 360 degrees, feeling like Mary Tyler Moore, taking in a place hundreds of times more magical than I could have imagined. Behind me were hills holding back a blanket of fog that threatened to spill over the crest and tumble down onto the city below. And yet this corner wasn’t a city at all. It was a neighborhood, a town within a town with shops, restaurants, and bars all crammed together like Main Street in the Chicago suburb where I grew up.

In one direction, Market Street, looking impossibly broad, sloped gently back toward downtown, but in every other direction, the roads all went up and over formidably steep hills, each hill covered with gingerbread houses and trees. Towering over this little town was the Castro Theater, an elaborate wheat-colored building with a two-story neon sign proclaiming not only the theater’s name, but also the name of area around it. CASTRO. Above the marquee, to the right of the sign, was a soaring rectangular window divided into 50 or 60 smaller panes, topped by another window—a half-circle that echoed the ornate, curlicued bulge in the roofline further up. Around and above these windows  was a plaster ornamentation of garlands, alcoves, and medallions, all painted the same wheat color except for tall accent columns of goldenrod on either side. When I came back at night, the theater was a riot of red and blue and yellow neon zig-zagging and curling up and around the sign and the marquee. The walls were up lit by floodlights and under the marquee, which extended out over the sidewalk, hundreds of light bulbs illuminated the inset entry doors of dark wood and the free standing ticket booth.

A year later, I became a San Franciscan, moving to the City with no job, no friends, no place to live, and no money. I had spent the previous 12 months in Southern California, slogging my way through the first year of a graduate program I had little respect for, dreaming of San Francisco and the Castro Theater. Like so many gay men and women before me, I gave in to the enchantment of the City. I dropped out of school and made my way north to the place that seemed more alive and more beautiful than anywhere else I’d ever been.