Out in the Bay: The artists making Castro Camera Queer AF
Meet Queer Arts Featured (Queer AF), the team working to bring life, art, and community back to the historic site of Harvey Milk's Castro Camera shop.This week's Out in the Bay Queer Radio & Podcast episode was recorded at 575 Castro Street in San Francisco.
To a generation of San Franciscans, this was Milk's place. Milk, the late gay rights leader and San Francisco supervisor, lived upstairs and ran a camera shop in the storefront below.
In the years since Milk's assassination in 1978, the space has been a pilgrimage site for LGBTQIA folks. The Human Rights Campaign occupied the space for 16 years, and the Trevor Project had a call center there, but that ended last April when HRC moved out, as the Bay Area Reporter previously reported.The shop sat empty, save for a display on the history of the rainbow flag, for a year.
If you've walked by this spot recently you may have noticed that things are starting to spring back to life at the space. Something new is moving into Milk's old camera shop, something queer.Devlin Shand, Fadi Salah, and Erika Pappas created Queer Arts Featured in hopes of serving the queer arts community in the San Francisco Bay Area, a community Shand said is underserved: "We have currently 22 or 23 different vendors — all queer local artists — many of whom have never had their stuff in a brick and mortar space."Queer AF hopes to attract queer artists with an 80%-20% split of profits from art sales, versus the commercial gallery standard, 60%-40%, Shand said. "The foundational ethos of it really is to give space to queer people who have not had it historically, or emerging artists, disenfranchised artists, and artists who are underrepresented," Shand said.Queer AF holds its grand opening Friday, June.
