Artist Statement
San Francisco’s Castro District evolved from an Irish Catholic immigrant neighborhood known as Eureka Valley into a thriving “gayborhood” in the late 1960s. Those early years marked a brief but extraordinary period of liberation and community that would last little more than a decade before the AIDS epidemic devastated its inhabitants. Born in southern Idaho in 1974, I have never known life as a gay man without the looming presence of AIDS. I undertook this project to better understand the Castro as it exists today and to imagine how those early gay pioneers experienced a time of newfound freedom, visibility, and belonging.
To gain this historical perspective, I immersed myself in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. There, I discovered the work of photographers Crawford Barton (1943–1993) and Jean-Baptiste Carhaix (1946–2023) who documented life in the Castro from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the same time, I walked the streets of the Castro several times each week, photographing life in the neighborhood in 2026. As my own body of work grew alongside the archival images, I began pairing my photographs with theirs. I found myself wondering about the lives and fates of the people pictured in the historical photographs, yet I also recognized a continuous thread of joy, community, and free-spirited expression connecting the Castro of today with the Castro of its earliest years.