‘San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals’. These words, which introduced Carl Wittman's gay manifesto, announced a new phase in the relationship between regionalism and subcultural protest. By the early 1970s, homosexual identity in America was being expressed, in part, as regional identity. This phenomenon resonated with the experience of the Beat and hippie subcultures. San Francisco came to be the regional base, the primary focus, the dominant framework of reference for both subcultural groupings. The gay movement carried this city–subculture linkage forward. Yet homosexual identification with San Francisco did not rise suddenly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were close connections between Beats in San Francisco and a thriving homosexual community. The turf or territory marked out by those two subcultures overlapped (in both a concrete and symbolic sense) and some key figures, like poet Allen Ginsberg, revealed this association through their lives and literature. Moreover, as has been suggested, the formative development of the Haight-Ashbury hippie community can be traced back to the time when a number of Beat Generation disciples moved into the district. Just before the district came to public prominence, an article in a San Francisco newspaper asked the question ‘Are Beats good business?’ and quoted a real estate agent who remarked that much of the credit for improvements in Haight-Ashbury living standards must go to recently arrived homosexuals.