You Better Werk: Queer Union Busting and the Closeting of Labor in the Gayborhood

The first labor strike in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood at the Patio Cafe was a conflict over what defined the city’s “home” for homosexuals. By the mid-1970s, the blue-collar neighborhood whose tenants had fled to the suburbs and whose property value sank under deindustrialization had been given a makeover by up-and-coming gay residents. As a site of belonging, the Castro presented an arena of safe consumption predicated on the owning and staffing of private venues with gay (or gay-friendly) people whose public presence and sociability assuaged worries over supporting businesses that might accept the gay dollar but not the lifestyle. But when laborers working at the Patio Cafe petitioned to unionize, the illusion of community uplift shattered under the weight of demands for fair wages. Owners of the Patio Cafe resisted, precipitating a strike that attempted to denaturalize “the logic that workers should be willing to labor for less than union scale because of the like-lifestyle work situation”. In a schematic linking unorganized labor as a precondition for gay homemaking, the first strike in the Castro presented an alternative reading of how urban development metabolized post-liberation sexual ideology into a consumer model governed by inequality. Opposition to a homophobic society would be spun as a strictly internal affair, where union hires chafed against community vetting standards and where union interests challenged the leadership of neighborhood property owners. Studies of sexuality and economics understand the Castro as a space upheld by property and the police, but what remains less understood are its internal class dynamics and the enclosure of gay service workers forced to labor for less. “You Better Werk” reimagines the Castro as a domestic space founded on the rhetorical strategies used by property-owning classes and the conditions deemed necessary for the creation of a successful, albeit competitive, gay home.