Forget Fisherman’s Wharf. Forget the Golden Gate Bridge. When tourists Michael Remaley and Greg Giancola arrived in town recently, they made a beeline for their No. 1 San Francisco attraction: the Castro District.
“It’s like making a pilgrimage to Mecca,” said Remaley, 24, a database manager from Philadelphia, as he stood outside the Names Project headquarters at Market and Castro Streets. “This is a place every gay man has to visit once in his lifetime.”
Remaley and Giancola are not alone. A survey conducted last year by Overlooked Opinions, a Chicago gay marketing research firm, named San Francisco the single most popular destination in North America for gay and lesbian tourists.
They come to snap each other’s pictures in front of the Castro Theater, to see where Harvey Milk’s camera store was and to stand at the corner of 18th and Castro, an intersection that carries as much cultural cachet as Haight and Ashbury did in another era.
Their effect on San Francisco’s $4 billion-a-year tourist industry goes far beyond the 250,000 to 400,000 people who come to watch the annual Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade, a June event for which hotel rooms are booked a year in advance.
No one knows exactly how many gay and lesbian tourists visit San Francisco each year or how much they spend, but tourism officials say the numbers are “very significant.”
Realizing the economic clout of two-income couples with high levels of education, few children and a propensity to travel, San Francisco tourism officials are working hard to lure even more gay and lesbian tourists.
“They represent a travel marketer’s dream,” said Sharon Rooney of the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, which advertises heavily in gay magazines and newspapers.
The Hotel Mark Twain near Union Square is advertising package deals for gay and lesbian travelers that include a Castro Funpak of coupons for discounts on food, drink and clothing at gay-oriented businesses.
“We’re not strictly a gay hotel, but we are a gay-friendly hotel, and we wanted to get the word out,” said sales manager T-Jaye Worley.
Like others in the travel industry, the Mark Twain is waking up to the potential of the gay market. With average household incomes of $51,325 for gay men and $45,927 for lesbians, they have disposable incomes far beyond the national average of $36,520.
And they love to travel. According to the Simmons Marketing Research Bureau, gays are twice as likely as the rest of the U.S. population to travel within the country and 17 times more likely to travel to Europe.
Out and About, a gay travel magazine, estimates the U.S. gay travel market at $17 billion a year. In reader surveys, said publisher David Alport, San Francisco ranks as “the ultimate in tolerance and comfort. No place else compares.”
The Philadelphia couple, Remaley and Giancola, cited one attraction that is echoed by just about every other gay and lesbian tourist in San Francisco: They loved being able to stroll down the street hand in hand without drawing glares and ugly comments.
Anti-gay violence is hardly unknown in San Francisco, but most gay tourists say they feel safer being “out” in San Francisco than in their hometowns.
It’s not just gay and lesbian tourists who want to see the Castro. The neighborhood was a popular stop on the itineraries of many commercial tours until San Francisco banned tour buses because of complaints from residents.
Smaller groups, though, still come through. Gary Lehner, who organizes gay and straight mini-van tours of San Francisco, says 90 percent of the tourists he takes through the Castro are straight.
“It’s a part of San Francisco just about everyone wants to see,” he said.
Gawkers, though, are not appreciated, and sometimes it gets even worse. Several years ago a tour guide with whom Lehner worked got into a fistfight with a local resident in the middle of Castro Street after the guide was heard making loud AIDS jokes to his customers.
For visitors to the Castro, one of the most sought-after diversions is Trevor Hailey’s four-hour walking tour. Hailey, a former real estate agent and nurse, combines an encyclopedic knowledge of gay history with a salty sense of humor that attracts gay and lesbian tourists as well as straight visitors.
Some landmarks are far from obvious. For example, there doesn’t appear to be anything special about the Twin Peaks bar at Castro and Market Streets until Hailey explains that it was the first gay bar in America with plate-glass windows.
“It used to be you’d go into a gay bar and ask two questions: When was it last raided, and where’s the back exit?” Hailey said. “Now you can sit in a window seat of the Twin Peaks bar for all the world to see.
“Especially for older gay tourists, it’s something you’ve just got to do in San Francisco. It’s like kissing the Blarney Stone.”
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Sidewalks in the Castro district are ramped for wheelchairs. Also, the Mayor’s Office provides a free “Guide to San Francisco for the Person Who is Disabled” and free brochures on access to mass and rapid transit. Write to Paul Imperiale, Disabled Access Coordinator, Mayor’s Office, City Hall, San Francisco, Calif. 94102.
