Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

For thirty years, I lived a short walk from the Castro District, and even before I’d been a San Franciscan, I’d gone to see movies at the Castro Theater, one of the few grand movie palaces that hasn’t been demolished or converted to a multiscreen cinema. I’ve seen hundreds of films in its dim, majestic cavern. Sitting there for film festivals, for classic Westerns and musicals, for the annual film noir festival, for the AIDS documentary We Were Here, for scads of Tarkovsky and Antonioni and the feature film about Harvey Milk that let us see the theater we were sitting in on the screen, I learned from the murmurs and sighs, the cheers and groans and snickers, to read the homoerotic subtexts, to note the camp, to call out the hate in the old films and the botched ideas in the new ones. Gay men taught me to read closely, to celebrate and critique, and to share in the jokes, even when we were (mostly) quiet in the dark.