The Military's Gift: How the Navy Made the Castro

San Francisco was the primary West Coast port of embarkation and return for the United States military during the Second World War. More than a million service members passed through this city between nineteen forty-one and nineteen forty-five: outbound through the Golden Gate, returning through the same channel to the piers along the Embarcadero.

During the war, the military began systematically discharging service members it identified as homosexual. The discharge came on blue paper, which gave it its name: the blue discharge. It was a less-than-honorable separation, neither fully dishonorable nor fully honorable. It cut access to the veteran's benefits the GI Bill provided. It explicitly outed the discharged person to families and future employers by its existence. Historians estimate roughly nine thousand service members received blue discharges specifically for homosexuality over the decades the policy was in effect, a span that reached well beyond the war years alone.

The standard procedure was to discharge these men and women in San Francisco, the last port before the ocean, and leave them there. They had a dishonorable paper in their pocket, no ticket home, and no particular reason to go home to families who now knew why the military had separated them. Many stayed. They found each other. By the early nineteen sixties, neighborhoods had developed in San Francisco with bars, restaurants, and services oriented toward a gay community that the military had, through its own punitive policy, concentrated in one city.

The Castro district's emergence as a center of gay life and gay politics in the nineteen sixties and seventies drew directly on that population, which the Navy had deposited here decade after decade.

It is among the more striking examples in American history of an institution inadvertently creating the community it had set out to suppress.