The Drive to San Francisco: Golden Gate and the Castro

You can feel San Francisco building before you see it. Driving south from Petaluma on 101, the hills go drier, the traffic thickens, the bay appears on your left in flashes between exits. And then you come around a bend and there’s the Golden Gate Bridge — red-orange against the fog, every bit as photogenic as the million photos you’ve seen of it, somehow still landing like something new.

I’d been in wine country almost a week. Before that, the Redwoods. Before that, the Oregon Coast. The trip had been building toward this city and I could feel the building was over.

The Bridge

Driving across the Golden Gate is one of those experiences that actually lives up to the hype. The towers come up on either side of you, the cables sweep down in perfect arcs, and through the gaps you can see Alcatraz and the whole bay and the city skyline rising behind everything like a backdrop someone designed. Five minutes to cross, maybe. Every second of it felt like I was inside a postcard.

I won’t pretend I was cool about it. I was grinning at the wheel, probably going too slow, definitely annoying the commuters. But I’d been traveling since Chicago — Empire Builder to Seattle, Coast Starlight partway down, drive through wine country — and crossing this bridge felt like punctuation at the end of a very long sentence. I’d earned the grin.

San Francisco from the bridge approach has a specific quality I wasn’t prepared for. The fog was sitting on the hills, and downtown was poking through it, and the whole thing looked less like an American city and more like something that had been invented by someone who wanted to make the rest of the country feel inadequate. I took in the view from the Marin side before crossing. Stood there longer than I probably needed to. Couldn’t help it.

Powell Street

After checking in and dropping my bags, I went to Powell Street to see the cable cars. Not going to apologize for this. The turnaround at Powell and Market is pure theater — gripmen spinning the cars on the turntable, the bell going, tourists lined up in a queue that stretches back half a block. The “One Powell” sign overhead like a marquee. It’s exactly as touristy as it sounds and somehow not worse for it.

I got a selfie with a cable car behind me. Huge smile. No notes. Twenty-three days into a trip, standing in San Francisco with the fog coming in and a cable car bell ringing behind me — if you can’t be a tourist in that moment, when can you?

The city hits you fast. There’s an energy here that doesn’t wait for you to settle in. I walked from the cable car stop down toward Market Street and it was immediately apparent that this was a different kind of city than anywhere I’d been on the trip so far. Chicago is loud and confident. Seattle is quietly sure of itself. Portland is weird on purpose. San Francisco is all of those things at once and also seven miles of hills and fog and the Bay, which is its own argument for why this place exists.

The Castro

But I didn’t come for the cable cars. I came for the Castro.

If you’re queer and you travel long enough, certain places start to feel like pilgrimages. Stonewall in New York. Boystown in Chicago. Montrose in Houston. The Castro in San Francisco is the one that other places are measured against — the neighborhood that more than maybe any other place in America showed what was possible when LGBTQ+ people claimed a space and decided they weren’t leaving it.

Walking into the Castro for the first time felt different than I expected. It’s not flashy. It’s a neighborhood — actual neighborhood, with dry cleaners and hardware stores and people walking dogs that cost more than my first car. The rainbow flags are everywhere, and the crosswalks are pride-painted, but the power of the place isn’t in the symbols. It’s in what’s soaked into the pavement.

Harvey Milk walked these streets. Opened his camera shop here. Gave speeches on this corner. Was murdered for believing gay people deserved to be represented in government. And the neighborhood survived that. Survived the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when whole blocks lost everyone. Survived gentrification and rising rents and cultural drift and all the usual forces that hollow out neighborhoods. It’s still here. Still queer. I think that’s the thing that hit me — not the history, exactly, but the persistence.

I stood on Castro Street as the sun went down and felt something I’d been feeling in small doses the whole trip — at Boystown, at Portland’s Powell’s Books with its small LGBTQ+ section, at every pride flag on a porch between here and Chicago. The feeling of belonging to something larger than any single moment. A community, a history, a fight that people before you waged so you could stand here and feel exactly like this.

That’s the actual name of the trip, right? Eat Gay Love. Not because every meal was great or every moment was romantic. Because traveling as a queer person through America is an act of claiming space. Saying: I’m here, and I belong here, and I’m going to order the nice thing off the menu and walk down the main street and take the photo.

The Castro is where that idea found its fullest expression. I had three more days in San Francisco and I intended to use every one of them.