Horn, Thomas: LGBT struggles

Abstract

Thomas Horn: I think you have to look at what the situation was generally in San Francisco at the time. There might have been a lot of gay people that lived here and quite a gay migration going on, but it wasn’t really that organized a faction, and in fact wasn’t at all at that time. If you look at San Francisco in general, it certainly did not have the progressive flavor that came to be so known for over time. If you look at the string of mayors prior to Mayor Moscone, you find some pretty conservative people. Mayor Alioto, Mayor Shelley, Mayor Christopher. It was a much more emphasis on downtown development. It was during this period that so much of the Financial District was built and so many of the high-rises were built, and there really wasn’t an emphasis on the civil rights struggle of the Gay community at all. I think that’s one of the reasons that the Gay community was trying within itself to organize, and you had factions of course within. You had one group that said “Well, we have to take government as we find it and we need to work within that establishment structure, and then you had other people who said “No, we have to create the structure ourself”. There was a lot of different opinions at the time.

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Type

Interview

Relation

The Moscone oral history interviews are part of the George Moscone Collection, MSS 328.

Contributing Institution

Holt-Atherton Special Collections and Archives, University of the Pacific Library

Rights Information

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