‘The Castro’ a First-Rate Look at Bay Area’s Gay Neighborhood

Peter Stein’s Peabody Award-winning documentary, “The Castro,” is a superb history of a sliver of San Francisco whose size is much smaller than its international reputation as an enclave of gayness that grew, at times tumultuously, from a quiet working-class niche into a rainbow-flagged symbol for an entire movement.

This is first-rate filmmaking, at once intimate, poignant and humorous, a traditional-style account that is fixating throughout its 90 minutes without relying on bells and whistles.

As seen through archival film and the eyes of its residents and former residents, the Castro emerges here as the nation’s first truly gay neighborhood, a tiny corner of the city shaped by visionary homosexuals into a sort of gay sanctuary after they planted their flag there, in effect, as Europeans fleeing religious persecution did when landing on these shores centuries ago.

“The Castro” was first aired in San Francisco as one of a series of programs on the city’s neighborhoods by public station KQED-TV, and it succeeds admirably as an eclectic family portrait.

You get the city’s harassment of gays in the 1950s seeding the political activism that culminated in the 1977 election of Harvey Milk to the Board of Supervisors, his stint as the state’s first openly gay elected official ending with his murder.

You get the brash euphoria of the fanny-pinching pre-AIDS days and the more somber period that followed when, as one resident recalls, an entire segment of the district’s gay population seemed suddenly to disappear.

And you get the Castro of today, which, far from being a microcosm, some contend, is too white and upscale to embrace a truly representative cross-section of gays and lesbians. “Fascinating” describes both the neighborhood and the documentary memorializing it.

* “The Castro” airs at 10:30 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.