© iStockphoto/Ariusz Nawrocki

Arthur Evans is dying. His doctors have told him that his long struggle with cardiovascular disease will soon take his life. Evans has heard such pronouncements before, and survived, so he is a bit skeptical.

After all, he has seen real death on a scale few can fathom — about 100 friends died of AIDS when the pandemic ravaged San Francisco. Now as World AIDS Day on Wednesday approaches, Evans wants to be sure that a chapter in local history is not forgotten: that Haight-Ashbury, now the Hippy Incorporated tourist destination, is remembered as a once-thriving, influential gay enclave.

“I called the Haight ‘the outer Castro,’” he said.

Evans, 68, a mannered dapper intellectual, is among perhaps only a handful of gay men who have continuously lived in the Haight since the 1970s. Gay men and lesbians were first attracted to the neighborhood during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Later, the area’s “lost gay heyday” peaked from about 1975 to 1985, according to historians.

“Everyone knows that the Castro was decimated” by AIDS, Evans said.

“The same actually happened to gay men in the Haight,” he continued. “The Castro mostly recovered its gay population. The Haight did not.”

From his apartment overlooking the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, Evans has had a unique front-row seat to the neighborhood’s evolution. When he arrived in 1974 (paying $180 a month in rent), he said, it was a decrepit, drug-infested slum; a few years later, the neighborhood was populated by as many as a dozen gay clubs, where Sylvester and other disco stars performed at haunts like the I-Beam.

The Haight had its own shade of gay, distinct from the political and commercial Castro — more embracing of a counterculture of artists and free spirits. “Many of the gay people in the Haight saw themselves as part of a larger community of bohemians,” said Don Romesburg, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Sonoma State University. “Gays were part of a broader mosaic.”

Then, what Evans called the “great wave of death” appeared in the early 1980s.

Paul Boneberg, executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, said, “Half the gay men in San Francisco were infected in the first wave” of AIDS, “and most died.”

Although Evans was never infected, he lost five roommates to the disease, including one who passed away in the apartment. “People would get sick, and they’d be dead within six months,” he said.

New arrivals of gay men and lesbians replaced those lost in the Castro, but that did not happen as frequently in the Haight. Evans said he believed the neighborhood was too gritty by comparison, and therefore less attractive to newcomers. Today only one gay bar remains, Trax, and Evans doubts that many in the Bay Area are aware of the role Haight-Ashbury played in the city’s gay history.

Katherine Powell Cohen, a San Francisco State University lecturer and Haight resident since 1987 who wrote “San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury” (Arcadia Publishing, 2008), remembers the neighborhood’s strong gay presence, but said she was not surprised that it had been mostly forgotten.

More than most other American cities, “San Francisco is fableized,” Cohen said, “and people often take what happens here and put their own desires, fears and prejudices on it.”

The Haight today is synonymous with a sanitized, commercialized version of the 1967 Summer of Love, leaving the impression that this is the whole story.

A broader trend, however, is also involved, Boneberg said, and that is “gay ghettos” slowly disappearing across the United States. AIDS played a role, but a more benign societal shift might be more responsible for the change: acceptance.

Gay men and lesbians today can live almost anywhere, no longer required to reside in clusters for safety or clout. The Castro is “extraordinary,” Boneberg said, as one of the nation’s few remaining thriving gay neighborhoods, due in part to the legacy of Harvey Milk, the slain gay rights leader.

But the Haight also has a gay heritage that needs retrospection, Evans said.

“This is part of the color of the portrait of the Haight,” he said, “and if that color is eliminated and people can’t see that color, then they get a mistaken view of the picture. This is one color, this is one voice, that’s been overlooked.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.