Night Flight 1977 and Stars 1978: Iconic Events
Night Flight, held New Year’s Eve 1977 at San Francisco’s Gay Community Center, was the lavish art-and-sex happening that Jack Fritscher later called “the first Manhattanizing party in San Francisco,” produced by Michael Maletta and featuring New York transplants like Night Flight producer Wakefield Poole and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who attended and would grace his first magazine cover on Drummer the following year. Fritscher covered the party for Drummer 20 in January 1978, and revisited it decades later in his book Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer, drawing a direct line from Night Flight and its 1978 follow-up, Stars, to today’s circuit party scene: “Before there was the White Party and the Black Party and the gay circuit parties, there was Night Flight.”