Swimmer (ballet) Swimmer (ballet) Swimmer is a 42-minute ballet made by Yuri Possokhov set to music he commissioned from Shinji Eshima, plus existing music by Kathleen Brennan, Gavin Bryars and Tom Waits, for the San Francisco Ballet. The première took place on Friday, 10 April 2015 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco and it was revived by the company in 2016. Based on the 1964 short story by John Cheever called "The Swimmer," it incorporates the choreographer's vision of the United States while growing up in the Soviet Union. Other sources of inspiration included Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, J.D. Salinger’s The
Castro District, San Francisco of their sexuality. Many settled in the Bay Area, San Francisco and Sausalito. In San Francisco, an established gay community had begun in numerous areas including Polk Street (which used to be regarded as the city's gay center from the 1950s to the early 1980s), the Tenderloin and South of Market. The 1950s saw large amounts of families moving out of the Castro to the suburbs in what became known as the "White flight", leaving open large amounts of real estate and creating attractive locations for gay purchasers. By 1963, the Castro's first gay bar was opened called the "Missouri