Stanford graduate John Newsome has devoted the last three years of his life to fighting racism in the city's LGBT community. He reluctantly became the public face of a community group that wrangled with a gay bar owner over his allegedly discriminatory business practices.
Newsome, 35, served as a spokesman for And Castro For All, the outgrowth of the Is Badlands Bad? campaign launched just weeks prior to Pride in 2004. Two years later bar owner Les Natali, who repeatedly denied the charges against him, reached a confidential mediated settlement with his accusers.
Throughout the ordeal, Newsome found himself both embraced and shunned in the LGBT community. The fight exacted an emotional toll.
So last August he quit his job as a senior administrator in the Oakland school district, and in December, Newsome returned from six weeks in South Africa to sell his Potrero home and flew back to the African continent.
A return to San Francisco was not certain.
"I went back with a likely end date in mind, but with a lot of flexibility," he said. "I was very happy in South Africa. It is a wonderful place."
Each time he planned to come back, he extended his sojourn. Then came the news this spring that he had been named a grand marshal at Pride.
"It made me realize San Francisco is home, that I can come home and feel great about my city and my community. Even if it is not perfect," said Newsome.
Newsome's past struggles with homophobia and racism guide his being an activist today. Gay bashed, and later shunned, while a high school student in Maryland, where he grew up, Newsome refused to let others' diminish his own expectations.
"I don't want people to experience what I experienced. My high school experience was horrible," he said. "I don't want black kids to be told they're not capable or gay kids to be bashed. I am doing the work for selfish reasons. I feel a sense of responsibility."
As for the Castro, he said the jury is still out on whether the neighborhood is a more welcoming place for people of color. There is still a dearth of black-owned businesses, he said, and no bar that African Americans truly claim as their own. The old Pendulum space, shut down for nearly two years, remains an open wound.
But Newsome does see promise and changes for the better. When a black florist's shop was spray-painted with racist graffiti this year, the first e-mails he received in Africa about the incident came from friends who are Caucasian.
"On some dimensions the Castro is far more aware and far more galvanized around the issues of inclusion than it was three years ago. The community's response around the KKK incident [at the florist shop] was remarkable," he said. "The closure of the Pendulum is still an incredible point of pain."
One day Newsome hopes to see a black-owned bar or soul food restaurant on Castro Street. Later this year, the organization he helped create plans to launch a new program whose goal is to see minority entrepreneurs open stores in the neighborhood.
It is a project he is "super excited about," said Newsome, because "a lot of people of color, especially African Americans, don't feel like they have a home or homes in the Castro."