BARTab December 2010
“Rainbow Christmas”
Happy Holidays: Christmas Past on Castro
by Jack Fritscher
In the mid-1970s, “Rainbow Christmas” decked Castro Street. The merry gentlemen who owned bars were, at heart, community organizers. Boosting business through the Castro Valley Merchants Association, they took a cue from Cliff’s Variety Store whose year-round theme windows and little sidewalk festivals put fun in every holiday. Bars and shops, that everyday hosed clean their sidewalks, jingled up their front windows into festive jewel boxes. This was back in the innocent day before Prop 6, before assassinations, before HIV, before the Gay Men’s Chorus, before the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and before irony trumped human feeling.
At dusk our emerging tribe made Castro glow like a sugarplum Toyland. Mart Crowley was right in The Boys in the Band: “You know, Mary, it takes a fairy to make something pretty.” Even on a pub crawl from Toad Hall via Nothing Special and Badlands to the Midnight Sun, the Castro looked like one of those perfect miniature “Dickens Christmas towns” sold a-la-carte in gift stores. We had a good feeling of confidence in our world–like remembering all the pet dogs we loved in our lives.
Windows are the opposite of the closet. The Edward Hopper windows of Twin Peaks bar, once painted black to hide from the street, had been scraped clean as aquarium glass, revealing mistletoe hanging over its year-round senior prom. Inside, Liza’s Judy was singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Windows at Gilded Age Antiques, the Rugby Shop, Work Wonders, and All-American Boy sparkled with skating bears and bowing elves. At the drop-dead Obelisk boutique, shoppers hummed along with “Santa Baby” and “Feliz Navidad,” buying designer pretties only gay men know about: Wolford lamps, jewel-bib necklaces, diamante cuffs, fingerless mittens.
Straights elbowed up next to gays in those days before onward-marching right-wing Grinches stole Christmas. They knew where to shop, and brought their kids to tour the gleeful windows, to see lights and animated manikins and candy houses, and the Big Tree with the, so what, gay Santas. A line of movie-goers, cold as carolers, cocaine nipping at their nose, waited under the “lighthouse marquee of the Castro Theater” to buy tickets to the holiday roadshow: a new print of the gay survivalist epic Gone with the Wind, $2.50.
Swags of lights hung like lemon drops, way above the chimney tops of the Castro, where, outside the Elephant Walk bar, a drag queen sold mistletoe a buck a bunch, and a campy leatherman hawked his “chestnuts” roasting on an open fire in his portable hibachi. Fronting Hibernia Bank, barkeeps erected a fifty-foot tree festooned with 6,000 lights, and with ornaments handmade by local glitterati like Sylvester from the Hula Palace. Some witty Cockette topped the branches with a sequined red high-heel. Some wistful clone hung his storybook of Peter Pan in a boot laced with long scarlet ribbons.
Santas of several jolly genders, all bewhiskered, set chairs under the holiday tree, inviting men and women to sit in their laps for charity. For a dollar, partiers told Santa over a handheld mike if they’d been bad or good. (For another dollar, a nutcracking hot toddy could be delivered fa-la-la from almost any bar.) Nearby, a twink twinset of Little Drummer Boys (marching out of Drummer magazine) banged a toy-soldier beat, while whirling-dervish male dancers spun like dreidels on the corner sidewalk, costumed the way three kings of Orient are.
When the silent night-chill dampered the street hustle, the December party that ran through New Year’s surged on at the bars where, with inclusive room at the inn for all, pool tables of free food and pagan festivities welcomed anyone having a “Blue Christmas.” © Jack Fritscher Excerpt from Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982 at www.JackFritscher.com