ABSTRACT
Things are apparently falling apart in modern America, or so it must seem to those who seek the truth about things, not in churches or Holy Books, but in the media world. If the state of California is the center of present and future folly in America, the state of Virginia is inheritor of a proud past. Jerry Falwell, along with Anita Bryant a leading opponent of places like the Castro, has long sought to resurrect what he supposed to be our best traditions. “By 1978,” according to FitzGerald, “the Castro had become the most active cruising strip in the city—and perhaps the country. Liberated gay women, in other words, turned out to be archtypically women, and gay men in the Castro archtypally men—as if somehow the genders had been squared by isolation from the other sex.” FitzGerald covers many other aspects of the Castro community with thoroughness and great insight.
