BARTab October 2011
“Monster Mash: Gay Halloween”
by Jack Fritscher
Castro is our gay Nostalgia District. Ghosts haunt streets where great beauties once cruised during the Golden Age of the 1970s creating spontaneous public celebrations that changed the Irish neighborhood. Before we new immigrants arrived, Halloween on Castro had a life of its own. But how did we get there? What is the through-line of our Castro Halloween multi-origin story? Was there, like symbolic Stonewall, a defining founding of San Francisco Gay Halloween?
Long before Gaga and Glee, and six years before Stonewall, San Francisco GLBTs turned Halloween political when the City forced the legendary 1950s Black Cat bar to close forever Halloween night 1963. Even though City ordinances made cross-dressing illegal in public, Halloween had always been dragged out and celebrated, more discreetly, of course; but that fright night, even gays who were not habitues of the Black Cat made a statement by crowding into its costume party creating San Franciscos first popular culture gay Halloween, October 31, 1963.
This was two years after Jose Sarria (the First Queen of Halloween) ran for local office, and three weeks before the Kennedy assassination emboldened 1960s gays to ask not what others could do for gays, but what gays could do for themselves. With gay backing, Black Cat owner Sol Stoumen took his case to the California State Supreme Court that in a landmark affirmation ruled that even homosexuals have a right to congregate, including outdoors on Halloween.
Halloween: Cliff Notes
On Halloween in 1946 Ernie DeBaca [owner of Cliffs Variety] produced the first Halloween street party on Castro Street. It started very small as a children’s costume contest. The first year a four-legged stool served as a stage. Each child would stand on the stool and the crowd would applaud. The child with the loudest applause won. The tradition grew over the years with a flat bed truck serving as a stage with lights and a P.A. system. In addition to the costume contest there were musicians, clowns, jugglers and other types of entertainment; and there was an ice cream eating contest and a parade. This tradition of a childrens Halloween party continued through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It came to a sad end in 1979, according to the online Cliff notes, when, instead of hosting hundreds of local children, Castro Street had crowds of tens of thousands of rowdy adults fighting and breaking windows. Ernie DeBaca realized that his Halloween tradition had ended.
During the sixteen years after the Black Cat closure, its revelers had reclaimed Gay Halloween with a Tenderloin-Polk pub crawl. Bar-hopping turned Polkstrasse into a camp catwalk, until straight bullies rained on our parade. In 1979, Polk Halloween ran for safety to Castro. For years, Castro Halloween had also been evolving as a spontaneous evening well played around Cliffs kids party. However, with the Citys entire gay population suddenly flash-mobbing Castro, the force of numbers made Castro Halloween 1979 the second benchmark Halloweenthe go-to Halloweenuntil its 2006 termination.
That riotous 1979 night upset gay and straight citizens about public safety. During the melee on Castro, Ernie DeBaca was accidentally hit in the face by a tossed slice of smashing pumpkin pie. He felt disrespected for all he had done through the years for the changing community. So when thousands of adults surrounded his hundreds of children, he ended Cliffs kids party. Soon after, DeBaca died, and his family rededicated Cliffs as a spirited Halloween source for kids and adults.
Halloween 1979: San Francisco in Chaos
Years later, what an insight Cliffs historic last sentences of regret give to how some other straight San Franciscans bitterly continued to regard us incoming sexual Vandals on that October 31, 1979eleven months after Dan White shot Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone, and five months after the White Night Riot when the SFPD, chasing angry faggots away from the burning City Hall, ran us up Market and drove us down Castro, using their batons, beating queers screaming past the locked doors of Cliffs. Trick or treat Indeed There was a madness upon us all at that time, and a wilder madness was to come when the 1980s turned worse than a Halloween Horror House. San Francisco gentry were as scared of us as they were of the living dead, and this was four years before their GRID-locked terror of Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.
The sexually petulant Catholic Church, which had ordained me as an exorcist on Halloween 1963, the year the first gay bar opened in the Castro, feared us devils it could not cast out, and threatened to shutter the neighborhood parish. Thats ironic because it was Catholicism that in the year 609 invented the Eve of All Saints aka All Hallows or Halloween to christianize the pagan Celtic-Irish feast of Samhain (pronounced Sow-hen). Faced with a fag bar, many Irish families impelled by homophobia sold their happy homes in Eureka Valley quick and cheap in the 1960s. (This straight flight from the Castro was the first time the Irish ever ran away from any bar.) But to those fighting Irish we seemed like British troops occupying Ireland. Our sheer population growth was changing their City politics and their culture. Within two months after City pressure shuttered the Black Cat forever on Halloween 1963, the SFPD forcibly closed eighteen of the thirty existing gay bars.
From the 1950s to the 2006 end of Castro Halloween, City Hall historically disliked Halloween because it is the only night party among all the afternoon street fairs. Urban darkness can put a superstitious fang to the throats of religious moralists fearing, in their anachronistic medievalism, that in the twilight, under the full Harvest moon, and with the foggy wrap of night, the true blood of gay identity might arise like Satan.
By 1978, Irish-Catholic Army Sergeant Dan White, a bodybuilder who had returned from Vietnam in 1972 to see his City gayified, won election in 1977 in what the New York Times called a homophobic white district, and then with a gun acted out the romantic Irish role of an IRA terrorist fighting the occupying army. Golden Gloves boxer Danny Boy White was cast by fate as the dramatically perfect foil to the immigrant New York faggot, Harvey Milk, himself cast by fate in the romantic role of a crusading liberal politician.
Cliffs, Castro Theater, Vincent Minnelli, and Cross-dressing Oscar Winner Margaret OBrien
No wonder Castro Halloween 1979 was wild because 1979 was the Grand Finale to the Decade of the Gay Conquest of San Francisco. That year, one of the horde of local street photographers shot a paparazzi photo of a black drag queen with a pistol in handthe SFPDs worst nightmarerunning through the Castro Halloween Party on a screaming hunt for Dan White whom he found in several revelers costumed with the suit, tie, and sideburns of the altar-boy assassin who was our Bogeyman.
That Autumn 1979, San Francisco was suffering a nervous breakdown that ran from the horror of the Jonestown mass suicide of nearly a thousand San Franciscans (18 November 1978), through the Milk-Moscone murders (27 November 1978), to the White Night Riot (21 May 1979). Immigrations change business marketing to new communities. In its canny retail move from the Old School, New School Cliffs embraced us new villagers come with our torches and pitchforks, and helped further rebrand Halloween for gay grown-ups transforming American culture from binaries to diversities costumed one yard of Cliffs fabric at a time.
Cliffs present building at 479 Castro had housed the first Castro Theater. When, in the 1940s, Halloween hit the big screen at the landmark Castro Theater, the cross-dressing Margaret OBrien, age six, was starring in her Oscar-winning turn in Vincent Minnellis brilliantly scary Halloween sequence in Meet Me in St. Louis. Children growing up on OBriens defiantly fun gender-switch in the 1940s were in their twenties and thirties when in the 1970s they migrated to Castro. Minnelli, husband to Judy, father of Liza, helped create a modern gay Halloween consciousness, the way that legendary gay painter J. C. Leyendecker, who was the inspiration for the iconic Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, did inventing his beloved and subversive annual Halloween covers for the Saturday Evening Post.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Trans Wardrobe Malfunctions
Those Hallmark Card days were the pre-gay Castro Halloweens before Stonewall and the breakout of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe malfunctions at Polk and Castro bars featuring monthly Full Moon Parties that evolved from Polkstrasse and the Tenderloin to the Castro as High Halloween. Helping out Halloween in 1954, gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger based his classic Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome on a Halloween party, further liberating masks, ritualizing drag, and trickster shagging. By 1976, at midnight every Friday and Saturday, costumed audiences were acting out on stage the onscreen movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Strand Theater on Market Street. Rocky Horror, the ultimate gay Halloween movie, catechized the wiccan theology that Halloween is a gateway feast into the Trans world of the transmigration of souls from transexual transvestite Transylvania.
We get a camp thrill playing out our homosexual anxieties about homophobic threats in the B-movie vibe of horror-movie terms. With our gay self-expressionism so often built on cinema, we learn from the screen, as well as from our own intuition about homosexualitys pagan roots, absorbing the ancient feast of Samhain aka Halloween into the streets of gay popular culture, creating performance art out of ancient rituals, dancing, and vogueing under the Castro Theater marquee lit up one Halloween with the giant letters BOO
Hula Palace Halloween: Divine, Cockettes, Mapplethorpe, and Sylvester
In the early 1970s, the Hula Palace, at 590 Castro (at 19th) was famous as the artist-commune apartment where Halloween was celebrated 24/7/365. Lee Mentley, author of his autobiographical The Princess of Castro Street, told me: Our Hula Palace Salon was the scene of many organizational meetings for cultural events on Castro Street, starting with Harvey Milks first Castro Fair to other gay days including Halloweens. The Hula Palace was a gathering place for the Cockettes, Sylvester, Angels of Light, and the amazing Divine and Mink Stole. On nights like Halloween, our Hula Palace apartment turned into one large dressing room where artists could come and go in as many costumes as they could drag out of the closets. Once bedazzled we would take romps around the Castro and then come back for a make-over into a new persona. For Sylvester and Divine, Halloween was a chance for these famous stars to disguise their popular personas and play new characters to cruise anonymously through the masses and scare the horses and the macho boys afraid of lipstick. You remember, Jack, because you brought Robert Mapplethorpe by to meet us all.
My lover Mapplethorpe was so keenly interested in occultism in his photographs that The New Yorker dubbed him The Prince of Darkrooms. The most controversial gay photographer in history, who frequently shot his own Satanic portraits wearing devil horns, spent his first Halloween in San Francisco in 1977 looking for impish models.
As Halloween evenings turned to night, HRH Mentley, the Princess of the Castro, said, the feathers, wigs, and glitter would fall away, and the rubber masks, chaps, and military gear would come out By the end of the Halloween street action, our Salon with its open door was filled with men boiling over from the street orgy, moving from room to room, including the rooftop where some of us didnt know the Halloween party was over till sunrise. Then we would just roll over and tan.
The Hula Palace disbanded after Milks murder, and Castro Halloween carried on in the streets as well as in all the local bars with typical events such Halloween Disco at the I-Beam (1983) and the Leather and Feathers Halloween Party at the Eagle (1984). When the annual October/November orgy of the CMC Carnival ended in SoMA in 1984, the leather crowd integrated even more into Castro Halloween folding in a muscular masculinity beefed up from the 1970s and walking along with Radical Faeries who, like the Community United Against Violence (CUAV) can tell their own stories about their influences on gay Halloween.
In 1989, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence saddled up to run the Halloween cattle drive of thousands with crowd-control barriers and security gates accepting donations to pay for the infrastructure and the running costs of a Halloween Party the City was never fond of. Years before Twitter, Halloween was Facebook with masks: so flash mob, so anonymous, yet so valuable socially. Finally, with 500,000 people going bump in the night in 2002 when four were stabbed, and with nine were shot in 2006 by straights run wild, even the Sisters, who were volunteers raising dollars and security for Halloween (1990-19950, were not enough. With Audrey Joseph, the Citys Entertainment Commission, using tax dollars, took over management of Halloween in 2003; and from 2006 to 2010, having had to pay for 500 cops to police the event from HQ at the Safeway parking lot, the City drove a slow-motion stake through the heart of Halloween on Castro with public service announcements to party elsewhere.
Exotic Erotic Ball(s), Shootings on Castro
With the growing Monster Mash in the streets in the mid-1970s, Perry Mann organized a core Halloween community in 1978 by hosting his Nudist Ball in his Tenderloin building where the hundreds of revelers inspired him in 1979 to create the first Exotic Erotic Ball at California Hall on Polk Street, raising funds for gay political campaigns, and giving free tickets to blood donors. Manns Exotic Erotic Ball, beginning as gay, soon turned into a mixer teaching straights attracted to the event that Halloween wasnt just for kids. The Exotic Erotic Ball became so popular that for nearly 20 years, the event had to be held at the Cow Palace until Republican legislators caused the fete to close because the Cow Palace was state property (2004).
That, of course, drove more party-crashing straights into the mix of the gay celebration on Castro. Over time, thats how blood-thirsty suburban fangbangers, in a suspiciously Hitler Youth Brown Shirt tactic, began to shoot up Halloween causing the City to shut it down. Funny that no one tried to shut down the first Castro Street Fair (August 18, 1974) when an SFPD cop running through the crowd, .357 Magnum held high, knocked Drummer photographer David Sparrow and me to the ground in the jammed intersection of 18th and Castro as in the hot noon sunshine he shot to death a man in a trench coat, firing off a shotgun that had already wounded two women in the screaming crowd. By cosmic comic fate, in the front-page picture of the Monday Chronicle, there I was where I never wanted to be: standing over a dead body at 18th and Castro. Charmed, Im sure.
The First Occult Writings of Castro Street
From before Stonehenge to the rise of the Castro, homosexuality has been connected to wicca and witchcraft in practice and theory. Halloween helps us remember roots we cannot forget. Modern Gay Halloween grew exponentially alongside straight popular cultures interest in Satanic rituals and cults after the Manson Murders in Hollywood (1969) convinced American Christians that their culture was threatened by evil sex cults. Drummer magazine helped stoke the transgressive lore with its infamous gender-bending cover of the costumed Cycle Slutsbearded men in black lingerieshot by Oscar Streaker Robert Opel for the 1976 Drummer Halloween Issue.
In the early 1970s, Anne Rice and I, at the time unknown to one another, both sat in Castro cafes writing our occult books while redhead Jack Fertig, the astrologer, charting horoscopes in the Norse Cove café, was morphing into the fabulous Perp, Sister Boom Boom. (Writing is magic because it begins in spelling.) My book Popular Witchcraft (1972) and Rices novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) foreshadowed Castros Red Queen Arthur Evanss Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978). My nonfiction book, analyzing gay BDSM occultism at bars like Fe-Bes, featured the gay witch Frederic de Arechaga as well as San Franciscos most famous occult practitioner, the gay-friendly Founding High Priest of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey who had, according to popular legend, killed camp movie star Jayne Mansfield with a curse (1967), played the Devil in Rosemarys Baby (1968), and starred with Mick Jagger in Kenneth Angers Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) starring Manson Family killer Bobby Beausoleil which was filmed at the Straight Theater on Haight Street and in the Russian Embassy at 1198 Fulton Street. Rices book was beautiful gay romantic horror fiction partially filmed in San Francisco. Evans, who had formed the first Faery Circle in San Francisco during Halloween season (1975), penned his book as an expression of the neo-pagan Radical Faeries sex rituals and magical politics. Arthur Evans died September 11, 2011.
CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION OF HOMOSEXUALIY
Is the closing of Gay Halloween on Castro religious persecution? In 1957, British witch Gerald Gardiner succeeded in having centuries of anti-witchcraft laws abolished because he declared his revolutionary principle that witchcraft is the intuitive natural Old Religion predating the revealed thou-shalt religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Recently, the US military began hiring Wiccan chaplains ministering to Wiccan soldiers. Perhaps one way to end institutionalized homophobia and to achieve Constitutional protections of homosexuality is to declare Homosexuality itself an Old Religion. Unlike the three revealed religions that tell people from the top down who they are and what to believe, Old Religions, like homosexuality itself, are intuitive, springing from inside the nature of the person who requires no revelations from some outside boss with Ten Commandments.
Intuitive natural religions have the same internal source and flow as queerness. To be gay is to know that you are touched by something from beyond, something intuitive, natural, and wild that acknowledges ones personal nature. All humans were once pagans. Reminded annually by the essence of Samhain Halloween, is it time to launch a national campaign announcing we want our Constitutional right to our gay Old Religion back? Thats a smarter move than the age-old Halloween trick of tipping over an outhouse, or a Port-o-Potty on Castro, because Halloween pranks are supposed to stir up shite.