ABSTRACT
There is only one question remaining after Tuesday’s election-why is the rest of the country out of step with the Bay Area?
Carl Nolte (2000)
In a review of television specials set in San Francisco, cultural critic and college professor Stephen McCauley (1998) w rites about the city as a place of myth and legend. His students claim having spent past lives there, a m ode of orientation he finds otherwise reserved for places like “ancient Egypt, Machu Picchu, Petra; rose-red city half as old as tim e.” He observes, “San Francisco has achieved mythic status among the disillusioned and disenfranchised from all over. Surrounded by w ater and frequently shrouded in fog, it has become, in our collective imaginations, a kind of real-world Oz”— a fantastical place where people actually live. Continuing the m etaphors, he evaluates the public television docum entary “The Castro” as a neighborhood history of a marginalized group whose community has become so successful that many of its businesses cater to tourists; the whole neighborhood “has taken on something like a them e-park atmosphere: Gay world.” Perhaps what disorients McCauley is the sight of people at leisure on these streets-just as likely they’re not tourists.
