The Faerie Queene chocolate shop closed after a dozen years at Castro and Market Streets. "We were in the community but never 'of' the community," owner Jeoffrey Douglas tells Mister SF. Douglas struggled to survive in a storefront on the gayest street in America because he says the shop never appealed to today's gays. Though the gay community's famous good taste should have drawn it to Douglas's Confiserie Leonidas selection, the shop's sensibility was a repellant. "No sense of humor," he says of a gay community assimilating into the mainstream and away from past gay stereotypes and cultural icons like the group Radical Faeries. "A customer who just left said it best," according to Douglas, "He said, 'it's like you opened for a gay community that would have loved the place, but you forgot they were already dead.'" That, in addition to a substantial rent increase and neighborhood decay due to the chronically homelesss, is what Douglas says prompted him to shut the door on March 28, 2004.

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Detail VII: Hello Gorgeous!