The San Francisco Experience
January, 1980
The Broken Glass on the steps of City Hall was two inches deep. Four lines of police--men, actually, dressed in heavy shirts; some wearing bulletproof vests; carrying three-foot batons across their chests, theif faces hidden behind visors of plastic--stood in the glass, ducking bottles, cans, rocks and pieces of cement garbage bins that had been torn apart by the crowd. A hysterical policeman shouted, "Did you see them throw every fucking thing at us and us under orders not to move? Did you see it?" Everyone ducked as a pigeon flew over. To the left, another police car, so carefully painted baby blue for better community relations, went up in flames, making it the fifth of the evening thus far; the melting plastic wires in the cars made the horns short out so there was a steady moan, like cattle lowing. "It's like Crystal night," said a sergeant, "only you can't tell who the Brownshirts are."
"Cocksuckers," hissed a boy on the steps. "Cocksuckers."
It was the night of the day Dan White was found guilty of manslaughter for cold-bloodedly killing Mayor George Moscone and gay hero Harvey Milk. The crowd milled and waxed and waned, their faces twisted in the scarlet light, but what one could see were the faces of youth, glossy beards and manicured mustaches. Their bodies were lithe and muscular and T-shirted. Many wore whistles around their necks, which they blew, adding to the moan, a sharp screeching. If they went too close to the steps, the men in the blue uniforms charged in small phalanxes, swinging their sticks like scythes, bringing them down against the tide that could be dissipated but could not be stopped.
The next day, the homosexual man who took Milk's place on the Board of Supervisors would sum it up: "Now," said Harry Britt, "the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have hair-dressing salons but as people capable of violence."
•
They were, at one time, the limp-wristed boys no upper-class party could do without. Everyone knew, my dear, but nobody talked. They have been in San Francisco, in scattered groups, since the city was settled in the wild days of the gold rush. At the turn of the century, there was a man called the Queen Bee who ruled all gay life and passed the OK on any person coming into town. The present descendants of the Bee are the Empress and the Emperor, mere figureheads. José Sarria, the present Empress, who reminds me that Dr. Kinsey told him he was an "ideal third gender," is the unofficial historian of the gay community. He recalls, with undisguised glee, the "Baker Street Scandal" of the Thirties, when the police raided a tasteful Victorian home in the fashionable part of town and found the male scions of several noble families dancing with one another. In the Forties, José sang at the Black Cat, a literary salon/saloon in the building that now houses Melvin Belli's office. He did opera imitations, in full drag, and his heroines always died. He ended each evening by making everybody stand up and sing God Bless the Nellie Queens--"so that for just one moment they could be proud of it."
When the action in the bushes came to their attention, the city fathers had lights put up in Union Square (San Francisco's equivalent to Times Square). José remembers when it was legal for the paddy wagons to pull up to the bar and empty its contents like peanut shells. (There were several sections of the penal code that made this possible: a red-light abatement law and another having to do with "keeping a disorderly house.") The Cat repeatedly sued the Alcoholic Beverage Commission in attempts to keep its doors open: In 1951, in Stoumen vs. Reilly, the California Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal for the bar to be closed down simply because homosexuals congregated there. In 1963, however, the California Court of Appeal upheld an earlier ruling that the Cat had sufficiently violated the ABC code that guards public morals to warrant closing it down. And that was the end of the Black Cat.
In the Fifties, as one more piece of fallout from Senator McCarthy's bomb, the Armed Forces were "purged of homosexuals." The job was done, in some branches, by confiscating the address book of a "known offender," then dishonorably discharging every man in it. Thus ruined, many of the soldiers, both gay and straight, came to San Francisco--because once you are kicked out of the Army for being gay, you don't go back to Cincinnati.
By the Sixties, the population had grown enough to attract voluntary émigrés. Ken Maley, 34, was 19 when he came to the city in 1964 from a town of 1000 in the Midwest. Back near his home town, he had once gone to a bar where he knew men danced together and had sat in a corner and watched. "Don't bother him," he remembers the patrons saying to one another. "He's confused."
Later, when he told a straight friend about his visit, the friend asked, "Ken, did you go there to see them... or to find yourself?"
Once in San Francisco, he lived downtown in a Tenderloin hotel in a nine-dollar-a-week room where he and his lovers registered as brothers. ("Everyone knew. But everyone knew that you were as down as everybody else; everyone knew that you got enough shit from the outside, so no one was going to give you any more.") He remembers the scene as "You got picked up in cars and taken out to Land's End, walking the streets." He saw boys in make-up, holding cigarettes just so; he tried to learn to wave his hands in the air and failed. Everyone wore peg-leg pants that were so tight the hair on their legs came through. They had to clip it with nail scissors.
"When I first came here," says Maley, "it was not acceptable in the gay community to go to the baths--you were supposed to be looking for Mr. Right, for your prince to come. There was a place called The Rendezvous, where we called them the Rendezvous Dolls: You wind them up and they go home alone. It was so terrifying, making that first move... .
"There was a place called the Capri, where Pat Bond, the comic, was the door dyke. When the police stuck their heads in the door, she'd yell out and the lights would go up and you had to stop dancing. You had to always stay about six to ten inches away from your partner, just in case. You always felt there was something wrong with you. If it all stopped tomorrow, if they closed down the bars again, I would know in my own self they couldn't make me feel like a second-rate person again."
Maley is now a "public-relations consultant" whose major industry, as he calls it, is "selling queer." It is to Maley that CBS goes when it wants to make a documentary on gay life in San Francisco; he assists the growing siege of writers from out of town who stand at Castro and 18th Street and go into shock. He finds the right drag queen, the member of Fist Fuckers of America, the best private gym. He promotes Casa Sanchez, a condominium-development firm, helping to sell the condominiums at Sanchez and 17th Street, a converted laundry, where the one- to three-bedroom units, 55 of them, will sell for between $125,000 and $180,000. It is understood that the buyers of the condos should be gay, but it is illegal to say so.
Numbers are what finally made the difference: As more and more men got liberated letters from their friends and former lovers--letters postmarked San Francisco--more and more men left the little towns in the Midwest where people were beginning to wonder when they were going to get married. (There is a delicate green wrought-iron bench sitting at a convenient resting spot on one of the beautiful public paths that run up Telegraph Hill and overlook the San Francisco Bay. A local gay celebrity has placed a brass plaque on the bench that reads: I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.)
By mid-1979, in San Francisco there were seven gay gyms, untold numbers of gay bars, a gay tourist bureau, gay Realtors, gay doctors, gay dentists, gay therapists and psychiatrists, gay insurance companies, gay hotels, gay travel agencies, gay backpacking organizations, gay matchmakers, gay hair-removal services, gay holistic massage and even a gay version of est, called The Advocate Experience. Its founder is the president of the company that publishes The Advocate, a gay newspaper.
Gay lawyer Don Knutson, a member of Gay Rights Advocates, has lived here 20 years now and he can't remember the last time a bar was raided. The mask law (it is illegal to cover your face with an (continued on page 130)San Francisco Experience(continued from page 118) "intent to deceive") is still on the books but is not enforced. Sex clubs, as long as they remain private, are left alone. A recent Knutson case neatly bundles gay past and gay present into one elegant package. Last summer, British photographer Carl Hill got off a plane at San Francisco International wearing a Gay Pride button on his jacket. He and his lover, Michael Mason, were here to cover the Gay Freedom Day Parade for The London Gay News, the name of which was printed on Hill's T-shirt. He was immediately detained by an immigration official who asked him if he was a practicing homosexual. When Hill replied "Yes," he was told that he had the choice of returning to London on the next plane or of undergoing a psychiatric examination that would almost certainly result in his expulsion from the country. Hill had come up against U. S. Code, Title 8, Section 1182, Excludable Aliens, General Causes. The code has 31 subsections that include anarchists, drug addicts, alcoholics and the mentally retarded. Hill came under section (4): "aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, or sexual deviation, or a mental defect." The deviant, who'd soon see 250,000 of his kind march up the streets of San Francisco bearing banners like Dykes on Bikes, stayed.
He became an instant cause. The city's oldest and most prestigious large law firm, Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, offered to assist Gay Rights Advocates pro bono in the fight to prevent the examination. The night before the parade, Mayor Dianne Feinstein left her birthday party at the Fairmont Hotel to drop in on a gay celebration at Episcopal Grace Cathedral (where the Gay Men's Chorus sang Stouthearted Men). There, to a standing ovation, she publicly apologized to Hill, adding, "I suspect these things will not happen again." The next day, Hill and Mason led the parade. And Knutson, in a turnaround, sued the United States Public Health Service (in the person of the Surgeon General) on behalf of his client. "We're now the plaintiffs," he said, "and it feels terrific." (The case was dismissed in district court on Friday, August 3, 1979. U. S. Surgeon General Julius Richmond declared that homosexuality per se no longer was viewed by the Public Health Service as evidence of a mental disease or defect.)
•
A most tolerant town, San Francisco, born in the brazen days of the gold rush, when you couldn't tell a starving miner from the next president of the Wells Fargo Bank, so everyone was welcome. The town stayed open, accepting Beats in the Fifties, flower children in the Sixties and gays in the Seventies. It is a kind of grand experiment: How many flavors in the melting pot? How many tap shoes can dance on the head of a pin?
But the population of the city is small (660,000) and geographically contained--on three sides by water. Estimates of the gay population now waver between 100,000 and 175,000 people--from 15 to 26 percent of the population. Because the gay neighborhoods tend to clump near downtown, you have what one latino organizer calls "an inner city of wall-to-wall gays ringed by neighborhoods with families." He is exaggerating somewhat, but the impulse behind his words comes from a sense of being overtaken.
In Macy's, the new Lifestyle section sports bomber jackets and round-collared shirts and is largely staffed by men with lilting voices. Castro Street, once an Irish-Catholic neighborhood, where a few homosexual men moved to in the Sixties, has become a blooming, blossoming garden of gay delight. In L'Uomo, a store just off the main boulevard, two mannequins in nylon briefs face each other, crotches bulging; in another window of the same store, a mannequin crouches on its hands, ass in the air to passers-by. Around the corner, the Hibernia Bank has recently modernized, indenting its walls to create a minipark with planters in front. One imagines a thoughtful bank president designing the park, imagining it as a relaxing place for elderly women. Instead, it is referred to as Hibernia Beach; every day, men with short haircuts and tight T-shirts and flat stomachs and tanned legs--either stuffed into jeans or displayed in short shorts--lounge in the sunshine, remarking on the men going by, men who look so much like those watching that they have been dubbed, by straight and gay alike, the Castro Clones.
For many people these days, it's no joke. "I walk into the area and I feel uncomfortable. I see men who look like boys. It's a shock to look at them, because they're all dressed differently from others their age and they're all dressed the same. My experience is that I don't belong and it violates my sense of what's natural, a difference between generations."
The speaker is a man I will call Paul (none of the heterosexual people I talked to would allow me to use their names). He is an editor, an educated, well-traveled, thoughtful man who has lived near Castro Street for ten years. When he and his wife bought their Victorian house there, they were "thrilled" to find so many places to shop and eat so close to home. Gradually, however, they found themselves avoiding the area.
"As I park, and get closer, it's visceral. I feel a sense of menace. I think, Why do I feel this? and I can never decide whether it's because they're different from me, a xenophobia, or whether it's an aggressive energy in the air, an Us against Them, a male energy--forget homosexual--which is potentially volatile.
"It's a similar experience to being imprisoned, and there's rivalry and jostling for position. Faggots don't come out as faggots anymore, they come out as young male athletes--it's such a male world, a sexual parade, as if all these people were training for an unarmed militia. My immediate impression of the gay world is one of militancy.
"As I get closer, I see things that make me feel crawly. I see men holding hands, kissing, touching each other's asses, behavior that adults in America, in the heterosexual world, are not used to seeing. I feel this, too, as a kind of challenge. The Italians call it sfida, as if the right to behave contrary to conventions is being flaunted on a massive scale.
"When I walk down the street, now that I've lost weight and go to the gym, I feel as if I look more like one of them. I have short hair. And I get the eye. I feel as if I want to shout, I'm straight! I don't want to be mistaken. I saw graffiti in the bathroom at the movie theater, Macho men come out of the Closet! There is not so much of that anymore--the 'everyone's really a homosexual at heart'; but there's enough influence that you feel you have to defend yourself against it."
On Market Street toward Castro, the men on the balcony of The Balcony bar are stuffed in like asparagus spears, most of them naked to the waist. Two men near the railing are holding each other, kissing. The couple in the car with me, one of whom was once a member of SDS, hiss, "Faggots."
About a year ago, I began to hear that word again, a word seldom mentioned here for the previous five years. It was used, I noticed, by people who were liberal, who imagined themselves to be tolerant. It was used, when it was used discreetly at all, to refer to men in groups, men kissing and holding hands, men dressed alike.
Joshua, age 15: "I saw the Donahue show and on it were two sets of parents of gays and the audience brought up a lot of issues, like, how can they be cured? Why are they like this? And the (continued on page 234)San Francisco Experience(continued from page 130) parents were defending them, saying, you know, 'You don't cure someone who's left-handed, you don't cure heterosexuality, it's just a fact now.'
"And I agreed. But they should be a little more discreet. The making out on the street, it makes me a little bit sick. There's a sameness in the way they dress, and a sameness in the way they talk, and a sameness in the way they look. And the way they act pretty much is sort of dangling it in front of our faces. Like putting on a show. I have a feeling it might have been cute a few years ago, but it's making me sick and it's making a lot of the rest of the city sick. And I feel they're losing as opposed to winning by doing that.
"Because the longer they do it and the longer they flaunt it, it's not going to make people feel better about it. It's going to bring out more violence and more hatred as opposed to if they, not laid low, necessarily, but went through a sort of 'coming out.' Two centuries ago, if a man and a woman were seen doing that, were seen making out on the street--even kissing on the street--there was a bit of a tiff raised and everybody would gasp and it went through a period of centuries before it became just an accepted thing. I have a feeling that homosexuality here has gone through that period in about a year and a half. It's gone through everyone's acknowledging the fact that it's there and seeing it wide open--'Blah, we're here'--really fast, without having a period to, you know, sort out, come into it... ."
Joshua wears his hair long, his shirts large, his pants baggy ("I can't buy jeans anymore. It makes me look too much like them"). Last year, he was walking with his mother down Castro Street to visit a friend and "some guy whistled, and we both looked at each other and sort of laughed, because we didn't know who he was whistling at."
Later in the year, Joshua was going to visit the same friend and was alone on a bus. "This guy got off the bus with me. Obviously gay, he was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved tank-top shirt, boots, and his haircut, and the voice, and he started walking after me and he sort of whistled at me.
"Every woman I've told this to has said, 'Now you know how we feel.' I have a very slight tolerance for gays, but I've never been particularly bothered by them to a point where I wanted to yell or be physical or just real hate, real deep-down, public goddamn-it-leave-me-the-fuck-alone hate. When he whistled at me, though, I just cursed him out and ran like hell and he started running after me. I was right down at, like, 18th and Eureka, and it's not a good place to be cursing out gays. I jumped on a bus and then I jumped off and then I tried to call our friends and they weren't home and then I just started running."
"What did you think he was going to do to you?"
"I don't know, but I really had less interest than I could possibly say to find out. And I was a little scared."
"Your father says you decided to go to school out of town because there were so many gays in town."
"Yeah. Not only gays but all-around weirdos. I'd like to be the majority. Every time I come into the city from Mill Valley or take the Golden Gate Transit into the city, I find the first people I see are gays. And, you know, it's really the leather jackets, the flaunting it.... I sort of feel as though I'm running out of people who are like me."
•
Somewhere in the middle of Joshua's loathing and fear comes the question, What is it that they do in bed? And somewhere in the middle of that is the club known as the glory hole. It is a private club where gay men go to engage in anonymous sex, specifically by entering a booth that has holes in its walls, putting their penises through the holes and getting sucked off by someone on the other side. A glory hole is a sort of grand version of the public-toilet liaisons homosexual men were once forced to search out because of laws forbidding sodomy and vice squads that enforced them. In 1975, State Assemblyman Willie Brown introduced a bill in California making it legal for consenting adults to participate in sodomy, cunnilingus and fellatio in private. The bill passed. Glory holes, like other aspects of gay culture, are outgrowths of what was once forbidden--as if certain things that were once necessary because of restrictions became habitual.
I went to this place, the one called The South of Market Club, which is painted white and has the initials G. H. painted large on the outside walls. To get in, I disguised myself as a gay man [see page 254]. I used the membership card of an actor who goes to the glory holes occasionally when he visits San Francisco.
Entrance takes a membership card and two dollars. The room is about the size of a small gym or medium dance studio, with a balcony at one end. The floor is concrete. The ceiling is very high, maybe 20 feet or more. The area of concentration is four rows of booths, nine to a row. They are paired off, 18 to a side with a common wall between them. In the corner, there is a soft-drink machine that doesn't work, but for six dollars you can buy a vial of butyl nitrite, sold through a window in the back. The disco music is loud and, at the moment, it is playing We Are Family.
The man in the booth beneath the balcony is lighting a cigarette. With one hand, he strikes the lighter, while the other hand hangs on to a handle on the wall over his head. For an instant, his face and upper torso are frozen in butane light. His chest, sprinkled with grayish hair, is pressed firmly against the wall of his booth. Because of the dark, his hips have disappeared, so he looks disembodied, like a satyr hanging from a hook. Just as the flame goes out, he sighs.
Outside his booth in the dim red light, the men, many of them naked to the waist, walk up and down the aisle, opening and closing doors. The booths are painted white and are the size of portable toilets; the men enter and exit with frantic speed, as if there had been an outbreak of dysentery at a convention of bodybuilders.
The dance here is simple. Walk the center aisle. Choose a booth by picking at the doors. When you find one that isn't locked, enter. You are faced almost immediately with a wall that has an oblong hole in it, pelvis high, about four inches long. The paint is marked and in some places peeling. There are some graffiti on the walls: Gay Boredom. There are holes in each of the walls and a metal stool in the corner. There are handles screwed into the walls high above each of the holes.
As I enter a booth, I see a pair of thighs through one of the holes. The person in the booth to my right is standing against one of the side holes, occasionally rubbing his groin against the wall, his pubic hair splayed against the aging plywood. His penis is through the hole, so that at first glance from this side angle, he might as well be a girl. The ass is pale white and the legs are skinny. It reminds me of a photograph from Life magazine, a shot of a bunch of boys leaping into a swimming hole, all moons and sweet legs. He is breathing in short takes.
Through the hole next to my left knee, I see a piece of face, a partial mustache, a lock of hair, what appear to be brown eyes. The eyebrows arch expectantly. I frown, dig my hands into my pockets, pull my cap down, feel ungenerous. The face disappears.
Etiquette has it that if you are interested in the man next door, you rub your index finger along the bottom of the hole, as if you were checking for dust. This signals him either to place his cock through the hole or to receive yours into his mouth.
I leave that booth and try one down the aisle. Several men are walking the aisle. Squeak, slam. I peer through a hole of my new booth. A young man with a blond beard sits on the stool, his pants down around his Army boots, casually kneading his cock as if it were a kitten.
Someone knocks at my door, then marches on, and I am reminded of the poetic response of a gay friend when I mentioned this club. "Just when I'd stopped opening doors," he said, quoting a Stephen Sondheim lyric. "Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours." This friend tells me that this place is less anonymous than one might imagine. Each man is looking, he says, for a particular fantasy: the boy next door or a cowboy or a tough horny dude.
"He was extremely well endowed," my friend says, recalling a particular night. "Which is my thing. I'm a cock queen. I get my pleasure orally. And we had such a wonderful time together that we left the booths after we were finished and leaned against the wall, talking. And he said, 'I knew you were the one the minute I saw you.' And I wondered what it was, because, well, I'd say that 75 percent of the guys here are turned off by my smooth skin, my lack of a beard. And I was thinking, Well, maybe it was my great body. Then he said, 'You know what it was? It was your Weejuns. I just love Weejuns.'"
The search for fantasy stretches far beyond the glory holes. If my friend's partner liked fraternity boys, the men in The Trench, a bar down the street, like cops. You enter through a flap, like that on an Army tent, and are almost immediately confronted with a room full of men dressed in black leather: police hats, motorcycle jackets with studs, tight pants with the ass cut out (most men out of respect for the weather wear blue jeans underneath), chains across the chest and around the waist, keys dangling from one hip or the other (left side means you like to give it in the ass, right side that you like to take it), dark aviator glasses, heavy knight's gloves. Some men have managed to put together a complete San Francisco Police Department uniform, complete with 36-inch baton.
In the past ten years, there has been an evolution: from limp wrists to body-builders to macho, and the violence attendant in stripping an animal of its skin and wearing it. There are back rooms there and in other bars where, I am told, late in the night, orgies will take place. Over the bar hangs a T-shirt bearing the words Tuesday is Uncut Night, which means that uncircumcised men are particularly welcome that evening. Outside, the back yard of the Backstreet Bar, formerly the Black and Blue, is beginning to fill for what my friends call an "orgy alfresco." They say that at the Backstreet there is a motorcycle that hangs from the ceiling on wires. At midnight, at the first several bars of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the men bow down to the bike.
I have been told stories about the places where they have slave auctions on Wednesday nights, where they hang up boys by their thumbs, where they pour hot wax on their testicles, where a noose is hung around a neck to tighten just at the moment of orgasm. There have been murders, unsolved, related to the bars. Men have been picked up, taken out to the beach or to anonymous hotel rooms, where they are later found manacled and shot. No one knows if the killers are gay or straight. A friend of mine hired detectives when the nice young man who worked in her office didn't show for a week. They found him in a hotel room, his hands cuffed behind his back. He was dressed in leather and shot through the head. She had never known that he liked to exchange his neat suits for motorcycle gear and heavy chains and go down to The Brigg, where whoever it was who killed him had picked him up.
There are men who die of peritonitis (an infection of the abdomen caused by leakage from the intestine--women in the 19th Century used to die of it regularly after childbirth) or of internal bleeding after fist fucking. The authors of The Joy of Gay Sex point out that fist fucking is "extremely dangerous" and that if a man has been fucked and feels the symptoms of internal bleeding (chills, stomach cramps, fever), he should get himself to a surgeon, who is quite likely to reroute his intestine to a neat little sack on the outside of his body. They add, "Fist fucking is becoming more and more popular, usually as a side line among sadomasochists, but some men practice it tenderly and gently, almost as though it were a form of yoga." The whole fist, by the way, is not simply jammed inside the ass. You do it one lubricated finger at a time, then clench the fist inside. The danger is that you might tear the sigmoid colon, an organ made of tissue the consistency--as The Joy describes it--of "wet paper towels."
There is an ad in a local gay paper that reads: "You tell me about that embarrassing enema you got as a jr. high schooler and I'll reply, telling you about mine... ." An ad for the movie Born to Raise Hell, in which the action "develops as a series of brutal, yet beautiful, happenings on the screen." Ads for "fuck soup" and its neighbors on the gourmet's shelf, "cream of sperm" and "split pea with tits and ass"; ads for catalogs that sell harnesses for the face while someone "rides" you and, next to it, an ad for "exact replica--your endowment hard/soft sculpture." And, of course, there are the ads for "models and escorts"--"Paul, muscleman, 50" C, 19" A, 32" W, hung, good looks, vers."
Paul says that 99 percent of his customers are gay, "a real cross section of the gay community, younger guys, old guys, guys who are better-looking than me, regular customers, guys I've been seeing for ten years." He came here in 1967 and worked as a clerk, "modeling" on the side until it got so lucrative he gave up working for Pacific Gas and Electric. He charges $50 an hour in your hotel, S30 if you go to his apartment. He makes $400 to $800 a week.
"One person I had yesterday. I went over to this guy's apartment on Franklin. We went into the bedroom. He had a drink. I had a glass of water. He sucked me off for a while while I flexed. Then I screwed him for a while. He had one of those big rubber dildos. I stuck that in his ass. Then he sat on it while I stood on the bed, masturbating. I wore black-leather boots. He masturbated while he looked at me. When he had an orgasm, I had one. We had another drink.
"He had a beautiful cat, a white cat with blue eyes. Did you know that all white cats with blue eyes are deaf?"
•
It took the riot of May 21 to convince the city of San Francisco that its gay population was here in such numbers--and such strength--as to be impossible to ignore. While the riot began as the outraged reaction to the verdict in the trial of Dan White, it ended as a scream to be seen: "We are here," they said, "and we are not going away." And it was a riot different from the black riots in Watts, for example, because it took place not in a ghetto, not on Castro Street but in front of City Hall. It was a weird combination of both oppression and power. While truly powerful people don't take to the streets to express anger, truly oppressed people are not allowed to riot for several hours with marginal police response. "Could you see a group of 1000 blacks burning police cars?" asks an embittered black woman. "They would have dropped a small bomb on that crowd."
The police were definitely restrained, either by direct command or by the lack of any real order to disperse the crowd. Damages came to $250,000 and included 12 police cars, all the bottom and front windows at City Hall--115 in all--windows in stores on nearby Market Street and in cars parked nearby. One hundred twenty police and 45 demonstrators were injured. There were 28 arrests. Policeman after policeman echoed the words of officer Daniel A. McDonagh, who wrote an angry open letter to the Police Officers Association newsletter: "Every man looked at the others' eyes, searching for someone to tell us to go out and end all this mess, but the order was not forthcoming."
It left liberals in this tolerant town in (continued on page 250)San Francisco Experience(continued from page 236) dismay. The White verdict was to no one's liking: A man who had clearly killed two public officials had "gotten away with" voluntary manslaughter and a sentence of seven years, eight months. Those who were present in the courtroom could see how the jury had arrived at this seemingly incomprehensible decision: The jury was comprised of people very much like White. He was a former policeman, a former fireman, a man who believed in the traditional values of home, family and honesty. He was also, it was important to note, a man trained to fight in Vietnam, trained by the police in shooting guns, a man who believed in the ethic of macho--a man is a man is a man.
He had been betrayed, the defense was quick to point out, by the two politicians he finally killed. George Moscone, the mayor of the city, and supervisor Harvey Milk, the first open homosexual in San Francisco to be elected to office, were political allies who were elected on the strength of minority coalitions. Milk had worked against White, had counseled Moscone not to reappoint him after White had resigned his supervisory chair and then asked for it back. Defense attorney Douglas Schmidt wondered aloud how someone like White could have shot those two men. And he supplied the answer; White was suffering from manic depression, "a vile biochemical change, a mental illness."
The jury, people who worked in insurance, at auto repair, as secretaries and housewives--people who had children, who lived near White's neighborhood--heard his story over and over again. They heard confident psychiatrists testify to his illness. A mismanaged and probably ambivalent prosecution provided them with no evidence for premeditation. Verdict? Voluntary manslaughter. Conclusion: Dan White was a man like "us," frustrated and angry at political expediency, suffering from economic pressure, furious with two men whom he considered to be "out to get him."
It is not fair to assume that the jury went easy on White simply because Milk was a homosexual. Moscone was married and the father of four children. But what the jury stands for, in this unfolding drama, are the people who, like White, are growing invisible in San Francisco. Their stories, their fears, frustrations, hopes, dreams are not talked about here much anymore. They live in the outer neighborhoods, pay taxes, try to raise children. And they see a sprawling Sodom and Gomorrah at their gates.
Tolerant people who once welcomed gays to their children's piano recitals have started to feel the ground shifting underneath. The riot made them uneasy. But what side are they to take? While many felt anger at the White verdict and even sympathized with the riot, the suddenly apparent strength of the community that broke the glass was frightening.
Of 11 officials on the city's Board of Supervisors, only Harry Britt is gay. By 1981, says a savvy political reporter, there may well be three. Speculation aside, open homosexuals hold only two commissioned appointments in town; they had three until David Scott, former head of the city's Board of Permit Appeals, decided to run for mayor and was subsequently fired from his position--an almost routine political move--by the present mayor, Dianne Feinstein.
While at least one gay man, Leonard Matlovich, who came out in the Army and graced the cover of Time magazine, will run against Britt, straight candidates are running as well, spawning infighting in the liberal Democratic ranks: Britt supporters claim that his district should de facto be represented by a gay. This rankles neighborhood people, who don't feel that Britt has proved he can represent more than his own special-interest group. "We believe in marriage, having kids and being poor," says Idaree Westbrook, a black woman active in politics in the district. "Britt's philosophy runs against mine; he says what he can do for gays, not what he could do for me."
Britt does feel what he calls a backlash in town. "A lot of people," he says, "are having to deal with some realities they would prefer not to deal with. But I don't feel the riot has changed people's attitudes toward gay people in a negative way; I think it has perhaps brought to the surface a great deal more.
"On the other hand," Britt continues, "I think those events heightened people's awareness of our needs: I was taught to be nice to 'colored folks,' but when they started asserting themselves and demanding their fair share of society, all of a sudden I wasn't supposed to be nice to them. I was raised to feel that I was part of a majority, as a white male, and that we should be nice to everyone else. But all of us are minorities. This whole sense of all-American... maybe all-American means Vietnamese-American.
"I don't want anything from you that is a threat to you unless there's something about your image of yourself that's being challenged. We ain't going back to Africa is what I'm saying."
Last June 27, a local humor columnist, Arthur Hoppe, wrote: "Once again I watched the annual Gay Freedom Day Parade. Once again I was appalled... uneasy, guilt-ridden and, in the end, saddened.... I feel belligerence and hostility these days wherever homosexuals congregate. Because of it, I do my best to avoid gay neighborhoods, gay parties and gay bars. It makes me ill at ease, insecure and often a little frightened. Yet I think I understand it. I understand it for they treat me exactly as I once treated them.... I may not be prejudiced against individual homosexuals, but I am still prejudiced against homosexuality."
•
We are tolerant people, we say to ourselves. Many of us voted against the Briggs Initiative that tried to prevent gays from teaching in the schools, and the initiative failed. But there's a voice, hidden in the deeper waves of the brain, a voice uneasy and petulant: What if they have the power in the city; will they take care of the schools? Women who live near Castro feel safer at night on the streets than in any other neighborhood, but they feel like lepers, in the day, in the night, in certain stores, certain restaurants. There are bars where you just don't walk in the door.
So? says a second voice. So don't go into those stores, those restaurants, those bars.
And the first voice answers, Why the fuck not? This was my neighborhood before it was theirs.
Women are not allowed in certain discos because they are wearing "open-toed shoes," and if your shoes are closed, you are asked for two pieces of pictured I.D. During a tour of a private gay gym, surrounded by tawny bodies clad in black Speedos, I felt a flush of shame, as if my underwear had slipped down around my ankles, as if my body, which is not muscled or tan, is something to hide.
Are we like those liberals who wanted blacks to be free but not next door? Or are we coming to the edge of our understanding here in this sexual place, which carries our fears about ourselves as well as our inborn terror of people in groups? "It's the cult of it," says the pretty typist-bookkeeper. "They make me feel so much like just a little tiny person, alone."
Scene: a cottage overlooking San Francisco Bay. A Sunday brunch is in full swing. Enter a young woman writer for an East Coast newspaper. She has just seen a house for rent. "And it's not too bad," she says, excited, "only $650."
Her hostess sighs. "That's the place I told you about," she says. "They only rent to gays."
Adds another, "The last time I checked that house, they were very up front about it. 'We only rent to gays,' they said. And I said, 'But that's illegal.' And they replied, 'We don't intend to put it in the ad.'" Almost in one motion, everyone in the room clenches a fist.
Heterosexuals out here may look like a conspiracy, but we don't feel like one. We are fumbling about with our open marriages and our trial separations and our pathetic statistics: One out of four children will end up being reared by a single parent; one out of three marriages end in divorce. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the House of Representatives--upset over the governor's proclamation designating the week of last June 24 as Gay Pride Week--voted to call that same week Family Pride Week.
Stanley Keleman, therapist and director of the Center for Energetic Studies at Berkeley, says that as long as there is a loud defense of the heterosexual lifestyle, there is nothing to worry about. "But," he says, "when the entire sexual ethic is attacked, when the family is broken down and when being 'conservatively sexual' is labeled as dysfunctional, then I think we have something to worry about. Castro Street doesn't bother me. Homosexuals parading and loving each other don't bother me. But when they insist that we're all homosexual or that their ethic is equal to ours in terms of the culture or that there's an attempt to weaken the family and do away with sexual roles, then we're in trouble."
Harry Britt: "The point is that American society has not begun to deal with natural sexuality at all--that between us and natural sexuality there are these deep layers of cultural myths and avoidances. The visible gay presence challenges that. Gay people from the time we are born simply cannot buy the cultural attitudes toward sexuality. My boyish sexual fantasies were pretty tame in terms of heavy breathing and all that, but there was a very real sense that there was something I wanted that was very loving and very real from other boys, and that--from society's point of view--was bad. We are raising questions we've wanted to raise for so long."
"You say No, no, no--and then finally do it," says a gay man named Chet. "And then you've done something in defiance of great taboos and lived through it. It's really the way so many problems can be faced. You have to come out of repression. It's not just sexual. The problem is, many gays open the doors to sexuality and close them to everything else; a lot of men can only repeat that moment endlessly and never go on from it."
Chet tells of a friend from New York who came to San Francisco on a research stint. "He said he felt a most unpleasant atmosphere here, an underlying tension. He felt the whole attitude toward gays was very hypocritical.
"It may be," says Chet, "that The Gay Mecca is a past euphemism. It may be that we've changed from a mecca to the first lines of the war. Before, it was OK. People knew about it and it was OK, separate but equal. But the fight will happen here because of this city's openness. Harvey Milk ran on a gay platform. He was the first gay city official to be important, to have a voice. One of the things about the Dan White case is that no one mentions Moscone anymore.
"I am harassed more and more now. I was walking with a friend and some kids screamed, 'For he's a jolly good faggot!' Then I was walking the dog in the park and a car came up the road with four guys in it. They yelled out, 'It's because of people like you that we don't have a City Hall anymore.'
"I said, 'What?' And they sped away. I would like to have gotten to them.
"What did they think I had done? Who did they think I was?"
•
The parade undulated up the wide boulevard: Lavender Harmony Band, Parents of Gay People, Gay Fathers, Lesbian Mothers, Dykes on Bikes, Sexual Identity Center, Gays Against Nuclear Power, Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights, the Bisexual Center, Church of the Androgyne, Dentists for Human Rights, Gay Softball League, Order of Displaced Okies, Goat Hill Pizza, Gay American Indians, Gay Men's Chorus.
With flutes and banners and roller skates, floats and disco music and lavender balloons, for three and a half hours, the women (in sober greens and grays) and the men (three-piece suits to pink ballet tutus) took over downtown San Francisco on a foggy Sunday in June near brunchtime. The weather was cold and the wind was fierce, but still the crowds stood five deep as they watched up to 250,000 marchers strut up Market Street to the heart of San Francisco, City Hall, where three weeks before, thousands had rioted protesting the White verdict.
Onward they marched: The Reno Gay Rodeo, the Gay Freedom Day Marching Band, San Francisco Sex Information, Women Against Rape, Lesbian School-workers, Lesbians Against Police Violence. And each bloc of marchers was marked by the passing of a smiling, waving politician.
(text concluded on page 255, following "Crossing Over" on page 254)
Past the bums on Market Street and the discount clothing stores and Flagg Brothers Shoe Store, where the boys, fresh off the bus from Iowa, lean against the wall ("Let me do you, mister. Suck? Five bucks."). A tourist couple in permanent press took a home movie and smiled at a roller skater in nothing but blue-nylon Jockey briefs and glittered nipples. Chants: "Two, four, six, eight, do you know if your wife is straight?" A truck full of firemen in drag. The Gay Men's Chorus singing, "I'll soon give you ten thousand more."
Placards: The San Francisco V.D. clinic is proud of the gay community. Even Feinstein Masturbates--she's really a guy. The Lost Tribe: Lesbians and Gay Jews. I Love my Gay Dad. Our Time has come. And on the back of a gay dentist, I am a Tooth Fairy... .
The floats: Stud, The Stallion, The Trench, the bars that resemble Chinese tongs, receiving a loyalty beyond mere social affection: the leather bars for the boys who dress in black and blue; the fern bars for the thin Castro men. alternately called (by one another) clones and castroids. And the lighter-hearted disco bars that collectively make up the Gay Softball League.
The Society of Janus, with its signs, Consenting S/M is ok, and one of its members wearing a dog collar. Beneath pink cranes, the San Francisco Sex Information float floated by: A pink Cinderella and a pink prince blew kisses to the crowd. The "world's oldest gay softball player, 61," trotted along, waving, until the entire mix of genders was crowded into the park beneath the spreading chestnut trees.
"We are people who have suffered more than anyone else in the history of the world," screamed Robin Tyler, an entertainer, "and when we destroyed a little property, they called us violent. We were violated in the Inquisition, nine million of us were burned at the stake... one million of us were murdered by the Nazis... we were violated by scientists, who called us sick, violated by religion, which called us sinful, violated by society, which alienated us by taking away our family and friends. We were violated by the Government by denying us equal opportunity and equal rights and killing us for being homosexual.... Don't tell us about violence!"
And throughout the park, the people packed shoulder to shoulder screamed and cried and clapped hands and the air above them thickened into the same fever that had caught the crowd the night of the riot--a rebellious, threatening anger that grew out of outrage, out of humiliation, out of shame and, finally, out of power, faggot is beautiful.
And then the rage dissipated, quick as a swallow, into music.
"At a gay celebration at Episcopal Grace Cathedral, the Gay Men's Chorus sang 'Stouthearted Men.'"
"Glory holes, like other aspects of gay culture, are outgrowths of what was once forbidden."
"'I watched the annual Gay Freedom Day Parade. I was appalled, uneasy, guilt-ridden, saddened.'"
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