Castro Street Fair: Iconic Event
The Castro Street Fair began in 1974 as a small neighborhood gathering organized by merchants and residents of San Francisco’s emerging gay Castro district, and it grew into one of the city’s signature annual street celebrations. Jack Fritscher has documented it across more than a generation. His 1978 eyewitness essay, “Castro Street Blues 1978: or, Even Blue Boys Get the Cows,” captures the street scene as it happened, and his account of the very first Fair, in 1974, shows how a modest local event took shape as a community tradition. Decades later, Fritscher and Mark Hemry returned with a video camera for Palm Drive Video, and the result was the documentary Circus of Sex. The Fair is one of several San Francisco gatherings he has recorded, alongside the Folsom Street Fair, the Dore Alley Street Fair and the San Francisco Pride Parade, each treated as living history rather than entertainment. Read together, his reporting and later video give two vantage points on the same street: one made in the moment and one with the distance of experience. For a look at how the event runs today, visit the official Castro Street Fair website.
Visitors to this page will find the pieces gathered in one place: the 1978 essay, the account of the first Fair in 1974, and the Palm Drive Video documentary, along with photographs and a news clipping from the neighborhood’s early years. Each one approaches the Castro from a different angle, whether as reporter, participant or filmmaker. Because Fritscher lived and worked in San Francisco through the period, the pieces read as testimony from inside the community rather than commentary from outside it, which is why the Fair belongs among the icons of gay San Francisco history.
“Castro Street Blues 1978:
or, Even Blue Boys Get the Cows”
The First Castro Street Fair – 1974
Videos Documentary on Castro Street Fair: Circus of Sex
