J:\JF Excerpts of JF writing for New Publication.wpd
Mapping the DNA of Gay “Identity” Bars
in the Titanic 1970s
Editor’s Note: Excerpted from Jack Fritscher’s award-winning Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982 which can be read for free at www.JackFritscher.com
Life on the sidewalks of 1970s Castro was bar culture. It spilled out of the bars into the streets where we Castro village people congregated after we left our 1960s hippie style in the Haight. In that first decade of gay liberation, “identity bars” helped define who we were and what we wanted. Bars on Castro, Folsom Street, Polkstrasse, and in the Tenderloin were parade and parody of the “diversity drag” that Walt Whitman embraced: leathers, feathers, construction workers, cowboys, musclemen, gender-benders, hippies, piss-elegant queens, imitation white trash, Vietnam-era military, and Castro clones, all sporting keys on the right (bottom) and keys on the left (top), and back-pocket bandanas coded in the rainbow flags of gay semaphore: red, yellow, black, brown, and purple for FF, WS, SM, and the whole alphabet of sex.
At Stonewall, gay character changed. In San Francisco, the intersection of 18th and Castro was the Gay Ground Zero destination for sex refugees fleeing homophobia from all across America. We shared a mutual homosexuality in our noble heads that worked its way down to our nasty bits. Ideals are universal, but sex is specific. Bars, which are the soul of gay small business, competed to exploit every personality kink, thereby creating more of the diverse culture they courted. We sorted our identities in the bars which, despite “discrimination,” enforced specific dress codes to great applause. Gay style diversified; the bars were our performance art spaces. We acted out with “perversatility” every gay desire that Father O’Grady, the priest from Our Lady, had denounced as sinful. Our mantra was: What you do with your body is the ultimate political act.
Gay liberation intended to mainstream everyone inclusively, but bar owners knew that hard dicks with no conscience thrived on the adrenaline of fetish, fun, fantasy, and fraternity. Specialty bars were where S&M bottoms cruised tops, johns found hustlers, and chubbies met chasers. SFPD-fetishists from the original Midnight Sun founded the Pacific Drill Patrol, San Francisco’s first uniform club. Country-Western dudes two-stepped the night away bumping buckles at the Devil’s Herd bar wearing cowboy clothes from Ed Wixson’s second-hand store, Worn Out West. Rollerskaters, every Tuesday night, chartered a bus from the Castro to a rink in South San Francisco where, dragged up like the Village People plus a tutu or two, we skated in roaring circles through streaming vapor trails of poppers.
Brawny loggers in plaid shirts and bears with beards bellied up to Bear Hollow by day and the Ambush by night because bear bars added another ten years to a mature man’s sex life. Disco dancers snorted their way into Alfie’s, the End Up, Trocadero Transfer, the Stud, and the I-Beam. Leather bikers, parked outside Castro bars for afternoons, decamped at night for Folsom Street running the leather-bar gauntlet from Fe-be’s to the Black-and-Blue, to Folsom Prison, to the Leatherneck, to the Arena, to the Ramrod, to the classic sleaze of the No Name which became the Bolt which became the Brig which became the Powerhouse.
By day, horny pub crawlers on Castro checked in and out of the Jaguar bookstore whose 25-cent admission served up the unofficial “back room” for Castro bars. By night, Castro fans of “stand-up sex,” slumming down to Folsom, crowded shoulder to shoulder in the after-hours pig piles at the Covered Wagon and at Mister Marcus’s pissoir, the Boot Camp. In a Sunday afternoon ritual, Castro and Folsom party boys met two blocks off Castro on Upper Market to hang out at the Balcony bar which we called the “Balony” because the “c” had gone missing from its sign. North of the Castro, sweater kveens bent elbows at the Lion Pub “fern bar” that had inspired the original Toad Hall as a danceteria. Older gents dressed in suits for “Happy Hour” swam like colorful tropical fish in the huge aquarium windows of the Twin Peaks bar crowning the corner of Castro and Market.
Like the evolution poster from the 1973 documentary Ascent of Man, we Castronauts first cruised Dick’s-on-Castro which became the dance bar Toad Hall, then—evolving into clones—we hit the Pendulum, the Badlands, the second Midnight Sun, the Elephant Walk, Bear Hollow, and—not so much—the self-descriptive alky bar Nothing Special. Castro bars were quite bourgeois while Folsom bars were wild, and Polk Street bars were their own special walk on the wild side. Polkstrasse hustlers of all kinds, after scouring the bars, hung out to meet johns from the Castro at the southeast corner of Sutter and Polk under an electrician’s store sign declaring “Any Object Made into a Lamp.”
Tenderloin bars were whisky, risky, and rough trade. Folsom bars were beer, leather, and S&M.. Polk Street bars were cocktails and chicken ala carte. All three were satellite to the core Castro bars where, in 1971, during daylight and evening hours, the first sense of neighborhood emerged during the Titanic 1970s when our first-class party cruised on, full speed, innocent of the iceberg of HIV that lay ahead. © 2010 JackFritscher.com