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2024-03-19T12:45:07Z
User contributions
MediaWiki 1.39.1
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Oral_History:_Jay_Rosenblatt&diff=28032
Oral History: Jay Rosenblatt
2018-10-16T15:22:35Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category: Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
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<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Oral History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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Jay Rosenblatt is an internationally recognized artist who has been working as an independent filmmaker since 1980 and has completed over twenty-five films. His work explores our emotional and psychological cores. They are personal in their content yet universal in their appeal.<br />
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<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/jayrosenblattfilmmaker&playlist=1" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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[[category:Film]] [[category: Oral Histories]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Category:LGBTQI&diff=28031
Category:LGBTQI
2018-10-16T15:20:15Z
<p>Jeff: Define LGBTQI as subcategory of Population/People</p>
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<div>[[Category:Population/People]]<br />
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[[Image:gay1$dykes-on-bikes-parade.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
'''Dykes On Bikes leading a San Francisco Gay Pride Parade'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: David Green''<br />
<br />
This page organizes all the material we've linked as related to Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender history in this project. You will occasionally find links out to other sites on the internet, and of course you are encouraged to create an account and add your own materials, links, etc.</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Population/People&diff=28030
Population/People
2018-10-16T15:18:39Z
<p>Jeff: rename Gay and Lesbian category to LGBTQI</p>
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<div>'''Curious about who has lived in San Francisco? Find out about who has made the City by the Bay what it is today!'''<br />
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[[category:African-American|African-American]]<br />
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[[category:Cambodian|Cambodian]]<br />
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[[category:Chinese|Chinese]]<br />
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[[category:English|English]]<br />
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[[category:Filipino|Filipino]]<br />
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[[category:French|French]]<br />
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[[category:German|German]]<br />
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[[category:Greek|Greek]]<br />
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[[category:Indigenous|Indigenous]]<br />
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[[category:Irish|Irish]]<br />
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[[category:Italian|Italian]]<br />
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[[category:Japanese|Japanese]]<br />
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[[category:Jewish|Jewish]]<br />
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[[category:Laotian|Laotian]]<br />
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[[category:Latino|Latino]]<br />
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[[category:Maltese|Maltese]]<br />
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[[category:Mexican|Mexican]]<br />
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[[category:Nicaraguan|Nicaraguan]]<br />
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[[category:Polish|Polish]]<br />
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[[category:Russian|Russian]]<br />
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[[category:Salvadoran|Salvadoran]]<br />
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[[category:Samoan|Samoan]]<br />
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[[category:Scottish|Scottish]]<br />
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[[category:Southeast_Asian|Southeast Asian]]<br />
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[[category:Vietnamese|Vietnamese]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI|LGBTQI]]<br />
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[[category:Famous_characters|Famous Characters]]<br />
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[[category:Mayors|Mayors]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Category:LGBTQI&diff=28029
Category:LGBTQI
2018-10-16T15:12:45Z
<p>Jeff: copied description from the Gay and Lesbian category</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
[[Image:gay1$dykes-on-bikes-parade.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
'''Dykes On Bikes leading a San Francisco Gay Pride Parade'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: David Green''<br />
<br />
This page organizes all the material we've linked as related to Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender history in this project. You will occasionally find links out to other sites on the internet, and of course you are encouraged to create an account and add your own materials, links, etc.</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Yoni_Ki_Baat:_South_Asian_Queer_and_Feminist_Organizing&diff=28028
Yoni Ki Baat: South Asian Queer and Feminist Organizing
2018-10-16T15:09:13Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''by Omsri Bharat, 2015''<br />
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[[Image:Addressing-injustice.png|left]] <br />
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{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" |'''To explore the intersection of South Asian feminism, sexuality, and queer history within the Bay Area, one has to examine the complexity of traditional South Asian culture, legacies of colonialism, and the effects of mass migration. This essay takes up such issues through an analysis of Yoni Ki Baat, a South Asian version of “The Vagina Monologues” founded in the San Francisco Bay Area that has created a space for South Asian women to discuss their experiences with culture, Westernization, and sexuality. Many other spaces of queer and feminist organizing within the Bay Area are mentioned, but only briefly. These other organizations deserve their own FoundSF pages and much more research.'''<br />
|}<br />
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<br><br />
<br><br />
<font size=4>Colonialism and Sexuality within South Asia</font size><br />
<br />
South Asians have, in the last few centuries, been in constant struggles to define what role<br />
westernization and globalization have had on their cultures and traditions, both in Asia and in the West. Since the 1600’s, colonial powers have sought trade and territories throughout South Asia, especially India. From the mid-19th century till 1947, the British Raj was in control of India. Among other consequences from British rule (some of these include establishment of the still-existent bureaucratic system, disestablishment of princely states, famine, etc.) the British greatly affected the concepts of sexuality, family, and gender normativity up through modern day. As Indrani Chatterjee, Professor of History at UT Austin, stated in ''When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia'', “In South Asia, British colonialism secured the legal permanence of conjugality and monogamous heteronormativity, and criminalized all other forms of attachment, embodiment, and livelihood. Above all, it was significant in objectifying gender and sexuality in dimorphic terms.” The British indeed even introduced the word “sexuality” and the bureaucratic categorization of sexuality into India. Prior to this, sexuality (it’s a pity that I can’t use a different word because in attempting to deconstruct this concept, I am using the same words that colonial powers gave to us) was much more ambiguous in South Asia, and the concept of “it-ness,” an undefined desire or gender or form was prevalent in religious texts and cults. With British rule, sexuality became much more connected to gender and body and there was an “increasing patholigization of sexual identity by genital characteristics and increasing attachment of the physical body to assessments of worth such as masculinity” (p. 950) The Western concepts of heteronormativity and sexuality reinforced patriarchal structures and traditional gender roles already present in the society. (1) Such roles and concepts of normativity already contributed to a confusion and adjustment within South Asian society, and this confusion was only magnified when the diaspora from East to West occurred more rapidly in the 20th and 21st centuries.<br />
<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Diaspora To The West</font size><br />
<br />
As migration to the West occurred, the already jumbled concepts of sexuality and decorum got even more convoluted. This occurred as early as the 1800s, when mainly Sikh, Punjabi men moved to the Americas to become migrant farmers and workers. Even in this time period, Americans and South Asians tried to make sense of the role that South Asians would have in society, and inevitably, this included decisions about sexuality. Nayan Shah, in his work, ''Stranger Intimacy'', discusses how the relationships (often queer) that would inevitably form among communities of migrant men would disturb heteronormative notions of sexuality and relationships. The state and legislature would condemn such relationships and often ascribe it to the “immoral” background of non-American, brown men. As Shah states, “the general process of defining marriage through racial boundaries and sexualizing and delegitimizing male-to male intimacy outside of marriage produced a subsidy for heterosexuality….policing what sex, marital ties, and progeny had the legitimacy of state recognition and the authority of market rights produced a simultaneous subsidy of whiteness with heterosexuality” (p. 125). In the West, intimacy became tied to economic success, and white heteronormative families were subsidized above all other relationships. (2)<br />
<br />
The San Francisco Bay Area, in particular, holds a unique place within this economic diaspora. Silicon Valley has long attracted a huge number of Indians to California, creating a large population of educated Desis (a broad word meant to encompasses people of South Asia and products of the diaspora from South Asia- also equated with “brown”) who have become very Americanized in some ways and retain their South Asian identity in other ways. This population holds a certain regard because they are most often educated and bring skills of entrepreneurism and technical ingenuity to our tech-worshipping hub in the Bay Area. At the same time, while they are valued as workers, there is a persistent feeling of alienness, a clear divide between those who are brown/immigrant and the other “tech bros.” The feeling of “otherness” once again places Desis in a position of being economically beneficial to America but perhaps not quite welcomed into mainstream society.<br />
<br />
While the clear divide between brown and white exists, we also live in an era that is obsessed with the “colors” of India, Bollywood movies, scantily-clad dance numbers. It’s a strange contradiction that Western imperialism is still a governing force, even while the West seemingly embraces certain parts of South Asian culture. In fact, it is perhaps a policing mechanism by Western imperial powers to accept the “safe” part of South Asian culture (exemplified by Bollywood) while condemning those parts that are considered unfit or insidious. Gayatri Gopinath, associate professor at NYU, discusses how “the fetishization of Bollywood as sexualized and gendered spectacle must be understood as yet another discursive mechanism that regulates and disciplines South Asian populations in the United States. The Bollywood boom, in this context, incorporates South Asians in the U.S. national imaginary as pure spectacle to be safely consumed while keeping intact their essential alienness and difference.” (3)<br />
<br />
In addition to the “alienness and difference” that Desis encounter, the brown tech population (and the tech population in general) within the Bay Area is majority male, creating issues of sexism and divides among genders. Desi males are in a strange place – they are not at the top of the social ladder in the Bay Area, but they also bring their traditional cultural gender norms to America, which gives them a sense of entitlement and mastery. They also internalize the misogyny of the tech world. Being devalued in society makes them more likely to try to exert control in other parts of their lives, often over their partners or in their misogynistic assumptions of gender roles and identities. Therefore, brown women or Desis who don’t identify with normative gender roles are sidelined and marginalized even more.<br />
<br />
The traditions brought from South Asia, the unique and pervasive influence of the Bay Area tech world, the exotification of Eastern culture, and the suspicion directed towards brown people after 9/11 – continue to influence concepts of South Asian sexuality in Northern California. With such an atmosphere, it is understandable that a counter culture would have formed in the Bay Area. This is especially true given the longer regional history of radical organizing. A few movements notably influential on any discussion of contemporary South Asian feminist organizing include: queer culture and activism, the feminist movement, and the rich history of brown activism in the Bay Area going as far back as the the 19th century Ghadar movement that was so prominent in Berkeley. (To learn more about these topics and much more, please go on the [http://www.berkeleysouthasian.org/ Berkeley South Asian Radical Walking Tour!] (4)<br />
<br />
Gopinath discusses the importance of creating a queer diasporic lens for South Asian issues that “becomes a way to challenge nationalist ideologies by insisting on the impure, inauthentic, nonreproductive potential of the notion of diaspora. Queer diasporic cultural forms suggest alternative forms of collectivity and communal belonging that redefine “home” as national, communal, or domestic space outside a logic of blood, purity, authenticity, and patrilineal decent.”(5)<br />
<br />
Bollywood) while condemning those parts that are considered unfit or insidious. Gayatri Gopinath, associate professor at NYU, discusses how “the fetishization of Bollywood as sexualized and gendered spectacle must be understood as yet another discursive mechanism that regulates and disciplines South Asian populations in the United States. The Bollywood boom, in this context, incorporates South Asians in the U.S. national imaginary as pure spectacle to be safely consumed while keeping intact their essential alienness and difference.” (5)<br />
<br />
In addition to the “alienness and difference” that Desis encounter, the brown tech population (and the tech population in general) within the Bay Area is majority male, creating issues of sexism and divides among genders. Desi males are in a strange place – they are not at the top of the social ladder in the Bay Area, but they also bring their traditional cultural gender norms to America, which gives them a sense of entitlement and mastery. They also internalize the misogyny of the tech world. Being devalued in society makes them more likely to try to exert control in other parts of their lives, often over their partners or in their misogynistic assumptions of gender roles and identities. Therefore, brown women or Desis who don’t identify with normative gender roles are sidelined and marginalized even more.<br />
<br />
The traditions brought from South Asia, the unique and pervasive influence of the Bay Area tech world, the exotification of Eastern culture, and the suspicion directed towards brown people after 9/11 – continue to influence concepts of South Asian sexuality in Northern California. With such an atmosphere, it is understandable that a counter culture would have formed in the Bay Area. This is especially true given the longer regional history of radical organizing. A few movements notably influential on any discussion of contemporary South Asian feminist organizing include: queer culture and activism, the feminist movement, and the rich history of brown activism in the Bay Area going as far back as the the 19th century Ghadar movement that was so prominent in Berkeley. (To learn more about these topics and much more, please go on the Berkeley South Asian Radical Walking Tour!) (6)<br />
<br />
Gopinath discusses the importance of creating a queer diasporic lens for South Asian issues that “becomes a way to challenge nationalist ideologies by insisting on the impure, inauthentic, nonreproductive potential of the notion of diaspora. Queer diasporic cultural forms suggest alternative forms of collectivity and communal belonging that redefine “home” as national, communal, or domestic space outside a logic of blood, purity, authenticity, and patrilineal decent.” (7)<br />
<br />
<br />
[[image:Omsri-Bharat Picture-1.jpg|240px|left|thumb|'''Yoni Ki Baat Program Cover, 2015''']]<font size=4>Yoni Ki Baat</font size><br />
<br />
[http://www.southasiansisters.org/events/ykb/ykb.html Yoni Ki Baat] (YKB) is exemplary of a radical, creative space that integrates a queer, diasporic lens to allow South Asians (primarily women) to gather and talk without reserve and without being afraid of judgment or retribution. The gathering/performance is distinctly a product of the San Francisco Bay Area, influenced by the large Desi immigrant population, the issues of gender and misogyny within Silicon Valley and the tech bubble, and the many legacies of counter culture. Topics explored during the event range from hair removal, to domestic violence, to the appropriation of yoga. Both the patriarchal traditions of South Asia and the colonial influence of the West are explored and challenged.<br />
<br />
YKB was started in 2003 by three Desi women; the idea emerged over a lunch at Udupi Palace, in Berkeley. These women came together through an organization called The South Asian Sisters, which aimed to bring together South Asian women and allied with similar groups. Sapna Shahani, Vandana Makker, and Maulie Dass were inspired in 2003 by the huge surge of South Asian organizational activity in the Bay Area, such as [http://www.trikone.org/ Trikone], the oldest South Asian LGBTQ magazine in the world that was started in the Bay Area, and [http://www.narika.org/about/ Narika], a non-profit founded in 1992 by South Asian immigrant women in the Bay Area that addresses issues of domestic violence and provide services. As South Asian Sisters, they wanted to, according to Makker, “carve out a space specifically for women in the progressive Desi community”. Their initial vision was to create a show based on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vagina_Monologues/ The Vagina Monologues], the hugely popular theatre program created by Eve Ensler, and use the unique experiences of South Asian women as specific episodes. Ensler promptly gave her permission and advice, and the was quickly organized through all volunteer effort. Today YKB is strictly volunteer run and is not a non-profit. (8)<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/VandanaClip1" width="500" height="30" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Conversation with Vandana Makker'''<br />
<br />
''Interview by Omsri Bharat''<br />
<br />
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<font size=4>Spotlights and Snapshots: The 2015 YKB (9)</font size><br />
<br />
'''Hair Removal:''' Always a hot-button topic in any South Asian circle, there were multiple pieces in YKB about hair removal and the connection of hairlessness to desirability. The pain, cost, tediousness, and embarrassment of something as seemingly innocuous as hair removal is deeply connected to being considered sexual and desirable. How is the notion that hair is considered ugly and uncivilized rooted in Western history and values?<br />
<br />
'''Abortion and motherhood:''' Many pieces in YKB confront pain and confusion around choices of motherhood, including abortion. They discuss the expectations of maternalism and the judgment of a woman’s choice that comes from all communities, from South Asian families to Western doctors. Ultimately, patriarchal stances in both cultures oppress many women who cannot or do not want to have a family or those women who are raising families but have many doubts and “non-maternal” feelings.<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/VandanaClip2" width="500" height="30" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Conversation with Vandana Makker'''<br />
<br />
''Interview by Omsri Bharat''<br />
<br />
'''Yoga and Appropriation:''' In the Bay Area, yoga is hugely popular. The ubiquity of this appropriated tradition creates confusion for people of South Asian descent who have to deal with a variety of factors including: first, the pervasive assumption of full knowledge of yoga and its origins by mostly white, upper or middle class people; second, the assumption that, because you are South Asian, you know all about yoga and all about an ancient culture that has many facets and many dimensions; third, that you, as a South Asian, are also jumping onto the yoga bandwagon…that in some ways, you too are appropriating an art that you know nothing about.<br />
<br />
These are just a few examples of themes that YKB explores. YKB is a fascinating example of how Western culture and South Asian culture can influence each other. In some ways, it is ironic that a show meant to talk about the diasporic experiences of women and the influence of the West was created because of an idea from a Western piece of performance. It makes clear that the South Asian community can use certain Western influences to their advantage. Gopinath puts it beautifully when she says ““The concept of diaspora…is double-edged in that it can undercut and reify various forms of ethnic, religious, and state nationalisms while simultaneously…it can work to foreground notions of impurity and inauthenticity that resoundingly reject the ethnic and religious absolutism at the center of nationalist ideologies. But the danger of diaspora as a concept, ironically, is its adherence to precisely those same myths of purity and origin that seamlessly lend themselves to nationalist projects.” Diaspora can perhaps be beneficial to South Asian feminists because it gives us a lens to explore the patriarchal and dangerous messages of both our home culture and the Western culture we’re born into, thus giving us more power to address such issues. Specifically within the San Francisco Bay Area, we can use this lens to analyze the unique positions of Desis and Desi women in Silicon Valley and to call out the misogyny and racism prevalent in these communities. YKB provides a starting point by creating a radical and relatable discussion ground. It started in the Bay Area, but it has gained so much traction that the show has gone national to campuses and communities all over the United States, creating a diaspora of its own.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Notes'''<br><br />
1. Indrani Chatterjee (2012). “When”Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia”. The Journal of Asian Studies, 71, pp945-962<br><br />
2. Shah, Nayan. ''Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West''. Berkeley: U of California, 2011.<br><br />
3. Gopinath, Gayatri (2005). “Queer Diasporic Critique in the Aftermath of 9/11”. Social Text, 23, pp84-85<br><br />
4. Berkeley South Asian Radical Walking Tour, 2/21/2015 <br><br />
5. Gopinath, Gayatri (2005). “Queer Diasporic Critique in the Aftermath of 9/11”. Social Text, 23, pp84-85<br><br />
6. Berkeley South Asian Radical Walking Tour, 2/21/2015 <br><br />
7. Gopinath, Gayatri (2005). “Queer Diasporic Critique in the Aftermath of 9/11”. Social Text, 23, pp84-85<br><br />
8. Interview with Vandana Makker, 3/24/2015.<br><br />
9. Yoni Ki Baat show, author attended 4/18/2015<br><br />
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[[category:Performing Arts]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Bay Area Social Movements]] [[category:2000s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=World_War_II:_Self-Discovery_for_Many&diff=28027
World War II: Self-Discovery for Many
2018-10-16T15:09:13Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Bill Brent''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$why-not.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''The 'Why Not,' one of San Francisco's first leather bars, 1962'''<br />
<br />
World War II plucked young people out of small towns across America and brought them together in sex-segregated settings on a massive scale. Many had their first homosexual encounters and formed their earliest queer alliances as a direct result of their participation in the service or the wartime labor market.<br />
<br />
Allan Sherman (a heterosexual) described this culture shock dramatically in his 1973 book, ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_A*P*E* The Rape of the A*P*E*]'', "There were 13 million of us drafted to fight for God and country, and every one a full-fledged, clean-cut, wholesome, decent, interchangeable American boy. We all kissed Mom and Dad good-bye at the railroad station." Then they were shipped out and whipped into shape by foul-mouthed, intimidating superiors. Soon the realization hit: "It was almost too good to be true. Everything in the army was obscene or pornographic."<br />
<br />
With fifty men sharing a latrine, toilet taboos vanished "in a symphony of grunts and smells and flushing noises." Privacy was nonexistent. "Answering nature's call meant subjecting yourself to loud and detailed criticism - perceptive and merciless descriptions of your sex organs, ranging from ridicule to glowing admiration." This became a game for many men, and a challenge for others. Soldiers soon learned to flaunt their genitals and brag about their toilet mannerisms. "Anyone who was modest about these was immediately and forever labeled a homosexual. (In those days, that was an insult.)" Suddenly, a generation of servicemen raised under the oppressively genteel mantle of American Victorianism were forced into an awareness of one another's most intimate body parts and bodily functions.<br />
<br />
San Francisco was the point of departure and reentry for many men involved in the war. Those searching for the growing number of gay bars and restaurants in this port town got an unknowing assist from the armed services themselves, who routinely posted lists of off-limits bars.<br />
<br />
Rather than returning home, many soldiers (and particularly those dishonorably discharged for homosexuality) stayed or settled in San Francisco after their service ended.<br />
<br />
''--Bill Brent, ''Black Sheets ''magazine, from which this material was excerpted.''<br />
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[[Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement | Prev. Document]] [[Gays and Beats | Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1940s]] [[category:1960s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Wonder_Women&diff=28026
Wonder Women
2018-10-16T15:09:13Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Molly Martin, originally published on [https://tradeswomn.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/wonder-women/ tradeswomn blog], republished with permission.''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Wonder-women-electric.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Wonder Woman Electric collective circa 1978: L to R: Val Ramirez, Pat Manns, Jean Ulbricht, Sylvia Israel. On top: Susanne DiVincenzo, Molly Martin. The van was painted by Jeanne Clark. On the other side is a black Wonder Woman.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Molly Martin''<br />
<br />
My first close-up encounter with drag queens took place in a Tenderloin bar when I worked as an electrician for Wonder Woman Electric in the late 1970s.<br />
<br />
An all-female collective of electricians, we did mostly residential work. But our regular commercial accounts included some of the multitude of San Francisco gay bars. Each of the bars catered to a particular subculture in the larger gay community. Lesbians had a few [[The Lesbian Bar|bars]] and coffee houses. But [[Before the Castro: North Beach, a Gay Mecca|bars for gay men]] proliferated. There were bars geared toward disco queens, the leather crowd, the sweater gays, uniform wearers, beach bunnies, cross dressers, fairies, bathing beauties–really more than I could even imagine.<br />
<br />
One day in the middle of the week I was called to a hole-in-the-wall bar in the Tenderloin. When I finally found a place to park the Wonder Woman van, it was blocks away and I had to lug heavy tool bags through streets lined with junkies and drunks. This was the bad part of town.<br />
<br />
I found the address on Turk Street, a nondescript brick front building. The door was locked, but I saw a discreet push-button near it. I pushed it and after a moment a beautiful young man, far more femme than I, greeted me. He wore matching coral pedal pushers, cardigan and mules with little heels. He did not look pleased to see me.<br />
<br />
“I’m the electrician,” I said hopefully. “Ok,” he said, looking me over. Then his perfectly lipsticked mouth curled into a little smile. “Come with me. We’ve been waiting for you.”<br />
<br />
A small town girl who’d only lived in San Francisco for a year or so, I had just barely come out as a lesbian and had little experience with [[Poverty, Social Isolation, Transsexuality|drag queens, transsexuals]] or transvestites, especially not the big city kind.<br />
<br />
Stepping from the gray Tenderloin street into that little bar was like entering the Harry Potter toy store at Christmas. Lights and colored decorations hung from the low ceiling. Glitter littered the grungy floor.<br />
<br />
I was surprised to see a good number of patrons at the bar in the early part of the day. Some sat at the bar, some at tables, but all looked fabulous. Most were men dressed in women’s clothing. Some dressed as over-the-top made-up drag queens, but most looked more like the gals from the office across the street, dressed in low heels and conservative skirts and blouses. I thought I overheard one of them say “fish” which was pretty funny considering I was the butchest thing in the room, wearing a flannel shirt, jeans and work boots.<br />
<br />
The bartender looked like a tough sailor just off the boat who’d thrown on a shoulder-length blonde wig and serious makeup—several shades of eye shadow and bright red lips outlined beyond their natural borders. He worked the bar in a tasteful tailored Donna Reed housedress, popped collar and pearls, and ran the joint with cutting sarcasm. I felt like I was encountering the Wizard of Oz and had to keep myself from jumping back like Dorothy did when she and her three cohorts first encountered him. A person could not help being intimidated.<br />
<br />
“Here’s what we need,” he directed me. “I don’t want the patrons to use the bathroom without my permission. They get in there, lock the door and stay. And, honey, we all know what they do in there.” I could only speculate. Drugs? Sex? Probably both. Lesbians had been known to use the bathrooms in our bars for such purposes. Where else could a couple go? And if they were quick about it and others didn’t have to wait too long, we were usually forgiving.<br />
<br />
The bartender continued, “I want to be able to push a button right here under the bar to unlock the bathroom door when someone wants to use it. Can you set that up?”<br />
<br />
This drag queen was also a Control Queen! I looked around the room at the disapproving patrons. I was going to be responsible for limiting their bathroom privileges. I was already the villain and I hadn’t even done anything yet. But I was certainly capable of installing a push button and door lock. It would be all low voltage, so I’d just have to put in a transformer and run low voltage cable. I wouldn’t need to run pipe or install junction boxes. “I can do that,” I said.<br />
<br />
I got to work, planning the job. Could I run the low voltage cable under the floor? Yes, said the bartender. There was a full basement. The beautiful young man ushered me down to the basement, a dank, spiderwebby space with a hundred years of grime on every surface. I had to figure out where to drill through the floor to run wires from the bar to the door lock. The job took me up and down the stairs and back to the van to retrieve materials. I focused on my work and I was relieved that the patrons went back to drinking and dishing.<br />
<br />
Finally the job was finished. I emerged from the basement coated in its crud, looking more than ever like a construction worker.<br />
<br />
“Let’s test it,” I said. I gave a nod to the bartender who pushed the button. The door buzzed open and, with a flourish, a patron entered the bathroom. It worked! Like electricians everywhere, I always got a thrill when I flipped the switch and my masterpiece (no matter how small) performed as intended. But I didn’t usually have an audience.<br />
<br />
These patrons understood drama far better than I. The dramatic moment of the day was all mine. It was as if I were making my big entrance, walking down the runway, head held high. They had all been watching closely and when the door opened, they let out a big cheer. I bowed to the applause. The dyke and the drag queens. One big happy family.<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Women]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Labor]] [[category:1970s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=White_Night_Riot:_May_21,_1979&diff=28025
White Night Riot: May 21, 1979
2018-10-16T15:09:13Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Rich-law-poor-law-some-fight-back-1979.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
''Leaflet distributed around the Castro and the Haight-Ashbury in the days directly after the White-Night Riot.''<br />
<br />
[[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless | DISH, DON'T SNITCH!]]<br />
<br />
[[Image:tendrnob$looters-on-white-night.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''As in many riots in the last decades of the 20th century, a joyful looting soon broke out, creating a party atmosphere . . . Xmas in May!'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Higgins''<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/pra-AZ0203" width="500" height="30" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Reaction to Dan White Verdict (May 23, 1979) (44 minutes long)'''<br />
<br />
''produced by the Fruit Punch Collective''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Addressing-injustice.png|left]] <br />
<br />
<br />
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" | '''On May 21, 1979, in an effort to voice their anger towards the unfair sentence of Dan White after killing Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk for their support in the gay community, the gay community along with supporters march and riot in the White Night Riot, ending with many arrests and looting. This first person account describes the police retaliation later that night in the Castro district where many are injured and arrested, and the riots’ aftermath where the city returns into one of disconnected people.'''<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
It was a warm evening. I was a student at San Francisco State but that afternoon I was heading down to the Strand Theatre on Market Street across from U.N. Plaza to see a couple of movies. I remember one of them was ''Hearts and Minds, ''the documentary about the Vietnam War. I had already seen it, but my girlfriend hadn't and she was an intense movie fan. As we rode on the bus a young man, quite agitated, jumped on and blurted out "It's only manslaughter!" We all knew, and quickly confirmed, that it was the Dan White verdict, which had been expected for several days.<br />
<br />
Less than 6 months earlier, former cop, resigned supervisor, and conservative psychotic Dan White loaded his pistol, put some extra rounds in his pocket and drove over to City Hall to exact revenge. He felt he had been bitterly betrayed by Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk when they agreed to appoint a political ally to political enemy White's resigned seat. He entered through the unmonitored side door and proceeded to Moscone's office, shot him in cold blood, and then, reloading his gun, he walked down the hall to Milk's office and blew him away, too. He ran away and surrendered to an old friend in the police department a couple of hours later. Dan White gave his old (and clearly sympathetic) friend a rambling, incoherent confession, occasionally crying, freaking out over the disintegration of his life.<br />
<br />
The defense invoked the now-famous Twinkie Defense, that Dan White was losing it because of the pressure in his life, eating too much junk food as one of the symptoms and causes of his temporarily insane behavior. The law-and-order, family-values, Ollie North clone (but clutzier), Dan White was a walking time bomb, gradually exploding under the pressure of failing to succeed on the system's terms. He embodied the violent backlash of straight society against the gay community's success, and the death squad approach of the powers-that-be toward individuals that seriously threaten their prerogatives. Dan White's murders of Moscone and Milk drastically altered the political direction of San Francisco, from a pro-neighborhood, populist regime to the traditional conservative, Chamber of Commerce administration of [[Mayor Dianne Feinstein|Dianne Feinstein]], but that outcome seemed incidental to the psychotic breakdown suffered by Dan White and the ensuing havoc he wrought. No plausible conspiracy theory has emerged linking White to a plan to remove the progressive leadership of the city. Fifteen years later we can see that is what he did. He can't since he committed suicide in 1986.<br />
<br />
As soon as we heard that verdict, we jumped off the bus and began walking quickly up Market toward Castro, expecting a spontaneous demonstration. When we crossed Church Street a wall of people across all of Market came angrily over the hill, heading down to the Civic Center. We quickly fell in to the raging crowd. A few buses had their overhead wires ripped down, but mostly it was a lot of fist shaking and chanting: "No Justice, No Peace!" and so on.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Whitenite-castro.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Spontaneous crowd gathers at Market and Castro after verdict, May 21, 1979.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Daniel Nicoletta''<br />
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[[Image:Whitenite-march.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Spontaneous march heads toward City Hall, seen here crossing Church on Market.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Daniel Nicoletta''<br />
<br />
A mob of at least 2,000 stormed around City Hall to the Civic Center doors. Police were arriving but staying back. There was no public address system, no organizing group, it was a spontaneous demonstration of rage at the blatant injustice of the verdict. People stood up on the stairs and spoke out their anger, their denunciations. I remember vividly Amber Hollibaugh giving an impassioned speech for a radical resistance by the community. Others spoke (or shouted) their demands for justice. Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver appeared on the balcony 100 ft. above holding high a candle. She was met with jeers and angry calls to come down and get out of City Hall! A number of different people began to attack the bars and windows of City Hall. I was standing at the foot of the stairs, within a scant 15 feet of the doors, even fewer from many of the speakers. After some minutes of angry speaking, a tac squad of police broke through to stand guard in front of the building. They were met with a shower of rocks and bottles and soon they retreated inside and the attack on the windows and bars continued until they were all broken. Meanwhile, many people were beginning to surge in whatever direction police appeared. As squads of cops appeared, people would run forward throwing rocks and waving sticks. I found myself in a group enjoying the wonderful experience of chasing a squad of about 10 police around the corner from our City Hall liberated zone. A bit later I was hurling pieces of concrete curb at a stationary line of police guarding City Hall. Again and again over the next two hours, cops retreated under mob pressure. Sixteen squad cars were captured and torched, hundreds of windows in surrounding governmental and financial buildings were broken. Fires were set in garbage cans along Market Street. It was a riot.<br />
<br />
[[Image:White Night riots.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Burning police cars in front of City Hall, May 21, 1979.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Daniel Nicoletta''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Rioters outside San Francisco City Hall May 21 1979.jpg]]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Crowd silhouetted by burning squad cars.'''<br />
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''Photo: Daniel Nicoletta''<br />
<br />
After a few more hours the police had retaken the streets. A squad of several dozen cops rode over to the Castro and staged a retaliatory riot, attacking the Elephant Walk Bar at 18th and Castro, smashing everything. They even pulled people out of surrounding doorways and bars. I heard of one man getting his leg severely bruised when they burst in on him at his kitchen table.<br />
<br />
Twenty-one were arrested that night, mostly around the Civic Center. The Chief of Police Charles Gain was blamed for being too wimpy and holding back his troops when he should have attacked. He defended himself by pointing out that no one was dead and only a few had minor injuries. We started the May 21st Defense Fund but most of our benefits over the next few months failed to raise any money. We got few donations. There was no community, gay or otherwise, that would stand in support of the people arrested that night, mostly because only a few of them were gay. The riot had progressed, as San Francisco riots do, from the initial angry crowd (in this case, of gays) to a gradual influx of angry young black and brown men who are spoiling for a chance to even the odds with the cops. The amazing sense of community that had existed during the riot evaporated within 24 hours. Many of us were confused by the contrast: the riot's euphoria temporarily intoxicated us with the sensation of true community. The aftermath returned us with a hard thud to a city full of barren crowds of disconnected people.<br />
<br />
[[Image:tendrnob$white-night-cop-car.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''A burning police car, White Night Riot, May 21st, 1979'''<br />
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''Photo: Higgins''<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/ssfWhitent1" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Rioting at City Hall'''<br />
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<br />
[[White Night Riot: A Policeman's View| A Policeman's View]]<br />
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<hr><br />
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[[Image:Tours-dissent.gif|link=Union of Concerned Commies 1979-1980, agit-prop theater and flyers]] [[Union of Concerned Commies 1979-1980, agit-prop theater and flyers| Continue Dissent Tour]]<br />
<br />
[[Failed Politician Slaughters Mayor and Supervisor--and the Cops Cheer Him On! |Prev. Document]] [[White Night Riot: A Policeman's View |Next Document]]<br />
<br />
<br />
[[category:TenderNob]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:Haight-Ashbury]] [[category:dissent]] [[category:riots]] [[category:White Night Riot]] [[category:Bay Area Social Movements]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=White_Night_Riot:_A_Policeman%27s_View&diff=28024
White Night Riot: A Policeman's View
2018-10-16T15:09:13Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Kevin Mullen''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Tendrnob%24white-night-cop-car.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''A burning police car, White Night Riot, May 21st, 1979'''<br />
<br />
May 1979: Prologue to [http://www.sanfranciscohomicide.com/ “Toughest Gang in Town”]<br />
<br />
In the early morning hours of May 22, 1979—on my orders—police formations marched back-step up Castro Street from 18th to Market, followed by a crowd of jeering demonstrators. As the oddly paired groups passed in front of the Castro Theater where I was standing, one of the crowd broke away and approached within 20 feet of me, where he loudly denounced me as a “pig-faced Irish motherfucker” before scurrying back to the safety of the mob. The irony wasn’t lost on me that my withdrawal order, which even then I knew would cost me dearly in the opinion of working cops, had also saved my detractor from getting his butt kicked by some very angry police officers. <br />
<br />
The string of incidents leading to what came to be called the [[White Night Riot: May 21, 1979|White Night Riot]] can reasonably be traced to events [[Kool-Aid & Twinkies|six months earlier]]. In November 1978, the city was shaken to its psychic roots when San Francisco-based Jim Jones led his People’s Temple followers in a mass suicide in Guyana. And when a few days later, on November 27, ex-Supervisor Dan White sneaked into City Hall and summarily executed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, it was almost more than the civic psyche could absorb. At first, though, the city seemed to come together in its grief. That night, more than 25,000 candle-bearing mourners formed up in the Castro, then made their way peaceably down Market Street to City Hall.<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/ssfHarveym1" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Harvey Milk's Last Words'''<br />
<br />
There they were greeted by the familiar voice of Joan Baez and the strains of “Amazing Grace.” Acting Mayor [[Mayor Dianne Feinstein|Dianne Feinstein]] addressed the group over pre-positioned loudspeakers, as did other civic leaders, including Harry Britt, Milk’s political protégé. Harvey’s recorded voice, taped three weeks earlier on the defeat of the Briggs amendment which would have prohibited gays from teaching in public schools, was broadcast to the assembled throng. The proceedings closed at 11:30 p.m. with a Felix Mendelssohn hymn sung by the Gay Men’s Choir. <br />
<br />
White had been arrested shortly after the killings and in April 1979 was placed on trial in Superior Court on what most saw as a double premeditated first degree murder. It looked like a slam dunk. To the extent that we thought about it at all, we expected some type of peaceful demonstration when the verdict came in, perhaps a replay of the march six months earlier. When the manslaughter verdict—with a top sentence of imprisonment for eight years—was announced on May 21, San Francisco’s gay community, along with many straights, was stunned beyond belief. There would be no Mendelssohn that night.<br />
<br />
The verdict was announced shortly after 5 p.m., inconveniently just after the entire police department day watch had reported off duty. Without any firm knowledge about when the jury deliberations would end, we had no plan in place. (Since the Los Angeles riots following the verdict in the [[The Rodney King Verdict Riots|Rodney King]] beating case, the announcements of jury verdicts in potentially volatile cases are often delayed until police can make the necessary arrangements.)<br />
<br />
A group formed up at Castro and Market, as they had so many times before, and proceeded to march to City Hall. There were reports along the line of march that the crowd was mostly peaceable with some violent elements. Photographs taken at the time, which I viewed later, showed signs saying “Avenge Harvey Milk.” Had I known of the signs at the time perhaps I would have done things differently. But I think not; by then it was too late anyway. When the marchers arrived at the Polk Street side of City Hall and found nothing to distract them from their outrage, they began to attack the face of the building. We called up reserve forces and made impromptu efforts to engage the mob with speakers sympathetic to their cause. It didn’t work. <br />
<br />
Some questioned whether events could have played out differently. “There’s nothing that could have been said that would have placated that crowd,” said Supervisor Tom Ammiano, then chairman of the Gay Teacher’s Coalition. “Emotions were running too high.” According to another view though, that of an injured demonstrator, “Harvey Milk was a street-fighter. . . . he could get that bullhorn and slow that crowd down. That’s what we lacked tonight.” Whether Harvey could have turned the crowd is open to debate, but I can’t help but think that if things had gone differently at several turns that night the outcome would have been different.<br />
<br />
In the late 1960s, in the midst of the anti-war demonstrations of that era, the department acquired a surplus military loudspeaker called a loudhailer. The self-contained, battery-operated unit could be heard a mile away. The unit also had a “curdler” feature which, when cranked up to full volume, was supposed to make listeners within hearing range defecate. Early in the disorder, I put in a call for the loudhailer to be delivered to City Hall. As luck would have it—again bad—nobody on duty knew where it was stored. It was found at 3 a.m. the next day, neatly nestled in its place in the Tactical Division Headquarters. <br />
<br />
In the meantime, we asked Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver to address the mob from the balcony in front of the Mayor’s Office with a police bullhorn. I joined her there and so as not to incite the mob with the appearance of my uniform, I hunched down behind the balustrade and extended my hand holding a lighted butane cigarette lighter above the rail. To the crowd below, the sudden appearance of a small disembodied flame from the embattled ramparts of the enemy citadel must have seemed like a sign from beyond the grave. Immediately, the shouting and rock throwing stopped and a reverent hush fell over the crowd.<br />
<br />
Lighted candles, first a few and then more and more, began to appear among the crowd. Who, I wondered, brings candles to a riot? Supervisor Silver, a sympathetic figure to those below, began to speak. The crowd applauded respectfully. For a time peace held the upper hand. In the end, the bullhorn was too feeble to be heard below, and the lighter became too warm to hold alight. The rock throwing resumed. The violence built until almost 11 p.m., when several police cars parked along McAllister Street were set afire by rioters. It was only then that we swept Civic Center Plaza and chased rioters as they trashed shop windows on Market Street and in the surrounding area. <br />
<br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/V_mvk4istzo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
Early May 22, a squad of police officers entered the Elephant Walk bar at 18th and Castro and routed the patrons in what many saw as a retaliatory “police riot.” The events of the night were capped by a police withdrawal from the Castro, dubbed “Mullen’s Retreat” in my honor by officers who would have preferred a different outcome. <br />
<br />
The White Night Riot has evolved into one of the founding legends of modern gay San Francisco—sort of a West Coast version of New York’s Stonewall riot. If Harvey Milk’s assassination was the Boston Massacre, White Night was Concord Bridge. Much of the after-action criticism centered on tactics and timing as the reasons for what went wrong. Some said we moved against the crowd too late, unnecessarily endangering officers who were forced to stand in formation in front of the rock-throwing mob. Others complained that when we did move, officers used excessive force. There could be no way of reconciling the views of those at opposite ends of the opinion spectrum. <br />
<br />
Still, tactics and timing aside, the tensions that characterized events in the late 1970s – from the Guyana mass suicide to the White Night Riot—can be viewed in a broader sense as the inevitable eruption in a long-simmering conflict between the San Francisco that had been, and city that was about to be—the death throes of the old San Francisco, you might say, amid the birthing pains of the new.<br />
<br />
''-- 2005''<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Kool-Aid & Twinkies|MORE White Night]]<br />
<br />
[[White Night Riot: May 21, 1979|Prev. Document]] [[The Tenderloin in the 20th century |Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:TenderNob]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:Haight-Ashbury]] [[category:dissent]] [[category:riots]] [[category:White Night Riot]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Turning_Sand_Into_Golden_Gate_Park&diff=28023
Turning Sand Into Golden Gate Park
2018-10-16T15:09:13Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = arial light> <font color = maroon> <font size = 3>Unfinished History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:ggpk$deer-1899.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''1899: deer meander through what is today the AIDS memorial grove between Middle Drive and Bowling Green Drive.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Private Collection, San Francisco, CA''<br />
<br />
When the idea of Golden Gate Park was first hatched, in the mid-1860's, the whole world scoffed: Everyone knew that the western half of San Francisco was an arid wasteland of [[Animals of the Dunes|barren sand dunes]], upon which nothing could be made to grow. The ''Santa Rosa Press-Democrat'', in 1873, wrote: "Of all the white elephants the city of San Francisco ever owned, they now own the largest in Golden Gate Park, a dreary waste of shifting sand hills where a blade of grass cannot be raised without four posts to keep it from blowing away..."<br />
<br />
[[Image:Gg-park-soccer-fields-before-astroturf 4616.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''These soccer fields at the far western edge of Golden Gate Park were difficult to maintain as flat athletic fields covered in grass, due to problems with irrigation and soil drainage. So the Parks Department sponsored a ballot proposition that passed in 2013 that will convert these fields--not back to sand as one might assume would be appropriate, but to a type of artificial turf made from recycled tires!'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson, 2014''<br />
<br />
Fortunately, San Francisco ignored the conventional wisdom and set about the task of creating America's finest urban park. The two chief requirements were fertilizer and water; the latter was piped in and distributed with the help of the [[Windmill|Dutch Windmill]] that still stands by the ocean near where John F. Kennedy Drive hits the Great Highway, while the former was provided in the form of the copious droppings generously bestowed upon the City's streets by the drays who were, until the 1920's, the mainstay of the local transportation system. Though no reliable estimate of the amount of horse-excrement collected for park fertilizer exists, the total undoubtedly ran into tens, even hundreds of thousands of tons.<br />
<br />
Despite its "natural" look, Golden Gate Park is a purely artificial paradise. One park gardener, asked to estimate how long the trees and plants would last if the irrigation were cut off, said "it'd be dunes again in ten or fifteen years ... though a few eucalyptus trees might survive." (And speaking of artificial paradises, Golden Gate Park has probably hosted more drug-induced mind-alterations per acre than any other patch of ground in the world.)<br />
<br />
[[Image:AIDS-Memorial-Grove 4497.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Entry to AIDS Memorial Grove in 2014, between Middle Drive and Bowling Green Drive.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
[[Image:AIDS-grove-path 4494.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Path through the AIDS Memorial Grove, 2014, where once sand dunes and fresh water ponds filled the landscape.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
[[Image:ggpk$sandy-origins-of-gg-park$aids_itm$aids-memorial-grove.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Mourners visit AIDS Memorial Grove, 1999'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Buffalo| Prev. Document]] [[Transplanted Traffic Barrier Becomes Shrine | Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:Golden Gate Park]] [[category:1890s]] [[category:1870s]] [[category:Ecology]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Parks]] [[category:2010s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Sisters_of_Perpetual_Indulgence,Inc.&diff=28022
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,Inc.
2018-10-16T15:09:13Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = arial light> <font color = maroon> <font size = 3>Unfinished History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Spilogo.jpg]]<br />
<br />
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are an order of nuns of all genders, sexualities, and spiritualities; who take vows to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt. What began as a spontaneous outing into the Castro, to challenge the "clone" mentality which had become so pervasive in the gay community, blossomed into a thriving organization. This random act of artistic provocation led others to take their vows and don the habit, so that by 1981, San Francisco had 18 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and a missionary order in Sydney, Australia. By the end of 2010, the Order in San Francisco had 86 active nuns and was joined by orders throughout the U.S., as well as, in Europe, South America, and Australia. <br />
<br />
Sisters everywhere work for the betterment of the communities they serve. They achieve this through raising funds for charities, educating the public on social issues, raising political consciousness, confronting attacks on queer people, and putting smiles on peoples' faces. The Sisters mix facts and levity, truths and theater to raise our communities in all aspects of their lives. While often being vilified by some who claim spiritual superiority, the Sisters have raised and given away more than $1,000,000 to <br />
a variety of causes. The Order has given grants to everyone from gay Cuban refugees abandoned in the Castro by their sponsoring churches to Catholic charities from around the country to emergency funds for people with AIDS and breast cancer.<br />
<br />
'''Origins'''<br />
<br />
Founded on Holy Saturday, April 14,1979, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,Inc. are an order of nuns of all genders, sexualities, and spiritualities; who take vows to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt. On that day Ken Bunch, Fred Brungard, and Bruce Golden donned the habit and ventured forth into the Castro from their home at 272 Dolores St. to challenge the "clone" mentality which had become so pervasive in the gay community. Making their way to 18th and Castro St., then known as "Hibernia Beach", the trio caused a stir. Encouraged by reactions of confused delight, the nuns made their way from the Castro to the gay beach at Land's End. By days end, the future Sister Adhanarisvara, Sister Missionary Position, and Sister Roz Erection had dropped the habit to spend the evening reveling in the fun they'd all had.<br />
<br />
In September of the same year several gay men, including Edmund Garron, went to a Radical Faerie gathering in New Mexico. Here they began to develop new modes of expressing and blending their masculinity, spirituality, and gayness. Returning to San Francisco with a renewed vigor, several of the men who attended began to see the potential for a higher purpose in the habit-wearing antics of their friends. Conferring with Sr. Adhi, Sr. Mish, and Sr. Roz; they began to organize. By March 1980, the name Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had been chosen and the design for the Order's wimple and habits was ready for production. By Easter Sunday of 1980, fifteen Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence would be making their debut in matching habits.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:Early_Sisters.gif]]<br />
<br />
'''Four early Sisters in 1980 habits.'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$sisters-of-perpetual-shades.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: David Green''<br />
<br />
'''"Dedicated to the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt." '''<br />
<br />
A gang of gay men who "consider themselves a bonafide religious order... We are very much dedicated to pre-Christian pansexual traditional religions, the nature-loving, sex-loving, pleasure-loving religions of the earth and that people celebrated long before patriarchal Christianity came along and started burning witches at the stake. Our goal is the re-liberation of sexuality based on real joy and sensuality, not fraught with guilt and games. We are joyous pagans and believe in the sanctity of the earth."<br />
<br />
Some of the Sisters: Sister Homo Fellatio, Sister Missionary Position, Sister Marie Ever-Ready, Sr. Sensible Shoes, Sr. Marry Rich, Sr. Loganberry Frost, Sr. Boom Boom, Sister Quaalude Conduct, Sister Stigmata, Sister Banana Nut Bread, Sr. Sleeze, Sr. Rosanna Hosanna Fellabella, and more.<br />
<br />
At a memorial service for Harvey Milk they used the traditional litany prayer form. They chanted, "let us deliver ourselves," interspersed with such phrases as "from the hatred of patriarchal religions," "from the Ku Klux Klan and Cops for Christ," "from greedy speculators," "from the two faces of [then] Mayor Dianne Feinstein."<br />
<br />
''--Burr Snider, SF Examiner, Sept. 23, 1981 ''<br />
<br />
'''The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence '''<br />
<br />
"... The fundamentalists--a group called S.O.S.-- are here on a crusade to drive the devil from Sodom, and the gays--plus the feminists, pro-abortionists, sexual anarchists, radical lesbians and various free-speech/free sex/free thought outfits--are here to tell them to go to hell--don't pass GO, don't collect 200 souls . . . a sort of entropy has set in . . . but uh-oh . . . The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, honey, have made the scene. Yes, it's the Sisters, San Francisco's sweetest street guerrillas, charging into the Square from the Stockton Street side in all their mock ecclesiastical-''cum''-high slut glory. A great unified howl of recognition goes up and a circle forms around their procession as the Sisters go dancing and chanting around Union Square, looking for all the world like as if somebody slipped some acid in the communion wine. The Sisters are simply the wildest, most outrageous irreligious vision you ever saw, an order of gay male glitter nuns . . . in habits and high heels, flashing dazzling smiles and sly good humor, oozing out miles of vamp and camp. Nobody ever told the Bible people they'd run into something like ''this'' on the road to Damascus."<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$sisters-of-perpetual-twins.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Two Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence kick back.'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$sisters-of-perpetual-kabuki.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''An almost geisha-like Sister of Perpetual Indulgence'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Gay1$sisters-of-perpetual-float.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''The Sisters on parade.'''<br />
<br />
''Photos: David Green''<br />
<br />
[[Image:12-unv-sist2.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Sisters attending the unveiling of Mona Caron's [[Time-Travelling Wall|Market Street Railway mural]] where they are immortalized.'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Richmond$sister-boom-boom.jpg]]<br />
<br />
[[Sister Boom Boom and JCC|Sister Boom Boom and the Jewish Community Center]]<br />
<br />
[[The Castro: The Rise of a Gay Community | Prev. Document]] [[The Black Cat Cafe | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Lesbian_Bar&diff=28021
The Lesbian Bar
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Tamson Manning, c. 1976''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$ladder.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''''The Ladder'', 1956-1972 ''' an Early Lesbian Magazine<br />
<br />
I had never been to a lesbian bar before. Gay discoteques certainly--in most cities (Paris, New York, Boston, San Francisco, London). They have the best music--but Lesbian bars are rare. This one was up the street on Broadway--one block up from Carol Doda's with her red neon tits, past the Exotic lady wrestlers, City Lights Bookstore--across the street from the Chinese bookstore.<br />
<br />
It is a small place--quite inconspicuous. I am with two girlfriends, the girl at the entrance tells us the entrance fee is two dollars. When we hesitate she says--How about one dollar--we pay and go in. There are about two men in the place and thirty or more women. One of the men sits quietly at the bar, the other sits in a corner table--by the pool table overlooking the dance floor. My first impression is that I am in a room full of tomboys.<br />
<br />
We sit down at one of the tables to watch the show--an all woman rock band. There is a very masculine looking woman playing the electric guitar. She has a yellow pompadour, Billy Holly--slicked back and a tattoo on her arm. The drummer is tall and thin--curly-headed Afro--wearing a Playboy shirt, and western cowboy boots--she looks like an English rock star in spite of the simplicity of her dress.<br />
<br />
The singer is dressed in a tight fitting red satin pant suit. Middle-aged, heavily made up--she takes the microphone and goes around singing from table to table--Las Vegas style. I look around at the people. Everybody seems to be in an excellent humor--the atmosphere is one of affection and gaiety. No overt displays of sexuality--a couple holding hands--or with their arms around each other.<br />
<br />
Sleeveless white t-shirts seems to be their favorite attire and boys' sneakers--No one is wearing a dress.<br />
<br />
The band plays a song from Stevie Wonder--couples get up to dance. One girl looks like Prudence Pimpleton -- Fearless Fosdick's girlfriend. Very square jaw and a scar on her cheek. A girl with bangs, tight white turtleneck dressed in the style of the bohemian '50s is dancing with another waistless girl in a green polyester shirt and a Jimmy Carter (southern liberal) haircut. She dances around him, wrinkles up her nose--gives him an Eskimo kiss.<br />
<br />
I am attracted by two girls across the floor. One Swedish looking blond in a leather vest and no shirt and her friend who has her arm around her. She is round faced and curly headed. I go up and ask the curly headed girl to dance.<br />
<br />
A plump girl in white--with a white cap comes up to me and asks me what I'm smoking.<br />
<br />
"Delicados--Mexican cigarettes--would you like one?"<br />
<br />
"No thanks. I tried smoking those last year in Mexico--but the whole time I was dying for a Marlboro."<br />
<br />
She goes off to move a piano--she's in the next group.<br />
<br />
The whole place starts singing the words to an old popular song.<br />
<br />
Two black men come in--I hear them say -- "Do you know what kind of a place this is?" Pimps they look like. They leave.<br />
<br />
Every five minutes another girl comes around to empty out our ashtray.<br />
<br />
Jody is self-conscious--too self-conscious to walk across the floor and go to the bathroom. I tease her. She waits until the floor is crowded.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$ladder-cover-1969.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Cover of ''The Ladder'', an early Lesbian magazine.'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$ladder-cover-homophile.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''A later edition of ''The Ladder''.'''<br />
<br />
''Images courtesy of Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California''<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Finocchio's: The Carnegie Hall of Cross-Dressing | Prev. Document]] [[FISSURES IN GAY 'MECCA' | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:North Beach]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Gold_Rush_Financiers:_Pioche_and_Robinson&diff=28020
The Gold Rush Financiers: Pioche and Robinson
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Mae Silver''<br />
<br />
[[Image:rulclas1$fla-pioche.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Francois L.A. Pioche'''<br />
<br />
F.L.A. Pioche and L.L. Robinson were business partners but they were also personal partners. Unmarried and living together until Pioche's untimely death, they were possibly a gay couple. That relationship, and their secrecy about it, possibly contributed to their obscurity in San Francisco history. Their contributions to the growth and development of this city, especially the rancho lands, were visionary and remarkable. San Francisco land records and deeds of the 1860s show Pioche and Robinson owning Rancho San Miguel land in Eureka Valley and Upper Market Street areas.<br />
<br />
When Pioche and Robinson were not actual partners in a project, they often acted in tandem, buying and selling from and to each other. In 1865, with H.M. Newhall and Peter Donahue, Robinson bought the [[United Railroads |Market Street Railway Company]] from Pioche. He graded Valencia Street hills to 26th Street as well as other streets in that area. Then he rebuilt the entire road. After he changed the energy source of the railway engine from steam to horsepower, he sold the company. This transit upgrading opened up the Rancho lands for more land development that Robinson and Pioche were planning.<br />
<br />
They were involved in some single land transactions but mainly in sales of the homestead associations they created. Homestead associations were a way for ordinary working people to buy land.<br />
<br />
For example, a prospectus of the Noe Garden Homestead Union owned by Pioche and Robinson showed an 1868 map of the area and described the terms of purchase: 368 shares for $450 cash; then shareholders paid $12.50 per month, starting Feb. 1868 to 1871. For a total of $1200 paid over three years, a working class person could own a piece of land in San Francisco.<br />
<br />
Pioche reserved a part of the Noe Garden Union Homestead property for himself. Its boundaries were Grandview, Elizabeth, 22nd Street, and Douglass. Interestingly, the 1857 patent map giving Jose Noe ownership of Rancho San Miguel, located Noe's first house on that same land Pioche labeled, "Pioche's Reservation." As indicated by this quotation in the homestead prospectus, perhaps, Pioche knew that: "This land was selected by Jose de Jesus Noe a great many years ago as the most eligible (sic) spot on the Rancho San Miguel to build his homestead. The soil is a rich loam and most of it is under cultivation." In addition to the Noe Garden Homestead Union Association, Pioche and Robinson owned other homestead associations in the city: Buena Vista Homestead Association, Market Street Homestead Association, Redwood City Homestead Association, and Visitacion Land Company.<br />
<br />
[[Image:rulclas1$ll-robinson.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Lester L. Robinson'''<br />
<br />
''Images: San Francisco Historical Society''<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Vigilante Committees |Prev. Document]] [[Employers' Association |Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:Power and Money]] [[category:1860s]] [[category:1870s]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:Noe Valley]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Famous characters]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Experiment_Called_Contact_Improvisation&diff=28019
The Experiment Called Contact Improvisation
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Keith Hennessy''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Contact-improv-dancing.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''John LeFan, Nancy Stark Smith and James Tyler in Mariposa Studio, 1978.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: courtesy of John LeFan''<br />
<br />
Contact Improvisation (CI) defies any specific definition or historical analysis. The dancer most often credited for CI's development is ambivalent about his role and some of CI's early participants have divergent stories about the development of the work. Following improvisational process and the intelligence of the dance itself, early practitioners resisted a suggestion to codify the form and certify the teachers. Telling a Bay Area history is further complicated by an attempt to counterbalance historical favoring of NY artists and histories. And most histories are reduced to narratives of single male heroes, dismissing or minimizing the significant contributions of women and collectives.<br />
<br />
In ''Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture'', Cynthia Novack tracks CI's roots to a variety of sources including: 1950's and '60s popular dance cultures, NY and SF avant garde dance-performance-theatre scenes, social movements for gender and sex liberation, somatics and new body therapies, and the influence of Japanese and Chinese martial arts forms, specifically aikido and tai chi.<br />
<br />
Before CI's unofficial naming in 1972 there were many experiments, exercises, performances and scores that engaged a new kind of touch and weight exchange; more engaged with gravity and less dependent on gender. Key American artists and events included Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, The Living Theatre, The Performance Group, Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton's LightFall, Nita Little's Crawling Under/Over score, Simone Forti's Huddle, Mary Fulkerson's Anatomical Release, Robert Ellis Dunn's composition class at the Cunningham studio and many more.<br />
<br />
Brown, Rainer, Forti and many others who were central to dance's evolution in the '60s and '70s spent time in the Bay Area working with Anna Halprin. A dance pioneer who moved to Marin County in the '50s with her husband [[Levi's Plaza | Lawrence Halprin]], Anna merged influences as divergent as the Beats, Fluxus, Civil Rights, human anatomy, child developmental movement, landscape design, experimental film, physical comedy, and a deep commitment to being in and listening to nature. Until recently Halprin's role in contemporary dance history has been under-reported. A major museum exhibit produced in France (presented in SF at Yerba Buena, 2008) and a wonderful new book, ''Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance'', by Janice Ross, recognize Halprin's seminal contributions.<br />
<br />
Contact Improv's birth is most often attributed to a series of experiments in 1972-73 instigated by Steve Paxton. Paxton had been researching, teaching and performing new approaches to dance (and life) with Merce Cunningham/John Cage, Judson Church Dance Theatre (1961-64), and Grand Union (1970-76). The Judson performances, by an evolving collective that included over 40 artists, are recognized by many as a key 'moment' in the evolution and rupture called post-modern dance.<br />
<br />
Paxton staged two pioneering events in 1972. ''Magnesium'', a project created during a Grand Union residency at Oberlin College in January 1972. The performance involved Paxton and eleven male students on a large wrestling mat in a near wild series of falls, leaps and collisions followed by Paxton's signature 'stand' or 'small dance'. The small dance is the micro movement of the body's balancing, adjusting, sensing and responding to gravity. The whole piece, documented on video by Steve Christiansen, lasted just over ten minutes. Local choreographer and dance advocate Brenda Way was working at Oberlin during this era and played a key role in nurturing early CI experiments.<br />
<br />
Six months later there was a five-day performance installation, or open process performance, at the John Weber Gallery in New York. With a $2000 grant Steve united 12-15 students and colleagues he'd met while teaching at Oberlin, Bennington, and Rochester to live and work together over two weeks. The performances, lasting five hours daily, were presented more as a visual art event/happening/installation rather than as a dance concert. Audiences were small, coming and going at their own pace. Christiansen videotaped daily providing immediate feedback to the impromptu company. In the video ''Chute'', a ten-minute montage of clips from Weber, we can recognize the falling, spiraling, yielding and flying of two bodies that has become a transnational language called Contact Improvisation.<br />
<br />
At the center of the experiment called Contact Improvisation is a (utopian?) proposal for democratic social relations reduced to its simplest form: an improvised encounter between two people. Referring to the usual choreographic process as a dictatorship of teachers and choreographers creating watered-down versions of themselves, Paxton attempted a less authoritarian form of leadership based on suggestion, invitation, improvisation, and collaboration (Novack, p. 54). CI reflects the counter-cultural context from which it emerged. Feminist and youth resistance to hierarchy and tradition responded to a harsh realization of the injustices of American 'democracy'. Challenges to consumerism and capitalist recuperation of culture led some people to an anti-private property lifestyle, inspiring artists to make art beyond product or object. Live, immediate, collaborative encounters were prioritized: the Happening, the Action, the Collective. By 1972, the Vietnam War was ending in disaster. Nearly 60,000 Americans and over two million Vietnamese were dead (Numbers are contested, no official Viet count). The leadership of the Black Panthers had been mostly killed by police or were in prison for life. Four white students had been shot at Kent State and millions had heard of vibrant queer resistance to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a NY gay bar. Paxton, reflecting back on the era and considering CI's development in Argentina and Israel during political crises in the 1990's, suggests that CI might be a shock absorber for social trauma.<br />
<br />
Soon after the John Weber shows, three of the dancers, Nita Little, Curt Siddall and Nancy Stark Smith, moved to the Bay Area. Home to the country's most influential counter-culture, the Bay Area featured a vibrant experimental performance scene that included historically significant artists such as The [[S.F. Performing Arts Library and Museum | SF Mime Troupe]], [[THE ACID TEST | Anna Halprin]] and the psychedelic drag family [[Cockettes | The Cockettes]].<br />
<br />
Theresa Dickinson moved to the Bay Area in 1969 after five years of dancing with Twyla Tharp and encounters with The Grand Union. Eager to work both collectively and experimentally she performed with the women's collectives Freefly and Motion and co-founded Tumbleweed in 1973. Initially a vehicle for Dickinson's choreography, the group became a collective in which all members created dances often using CI in both choreographic research and improvised performances. Consuelo Faust and Rhodessa Jones were among the dozen or so members. Dickinson recalled that, "Working collectively, intimately, and improvisationally turned out to be good preparation for Contact when it showed up."<br />
<br />
Contact Improv was first seen and practiced in the Bay Area in February 1973. Jani Novak, who had been a buddy of Dickinson's at the Cunningham studio in NY, organized a series called ''People Are Dancing'' which included choreographed and improvisational work as well as jams. Dickinson notes that it was common for the audience to dance after or even during the show. In February the series hosted Steve Paxton and the Oberlin/Weber dancers who were touring the West Coast with a show called ''You Come We'll Show You What We Do''. The group included Paxton, Nita Little, Karen Radler, Nancy Stark Smith, and Curt Siddall. The performances and subsequent jams were presented at both the Natural Dance Studio (owned by Nina Wise and Susan Jackson) in Oakland and at the Firehouse Theatre (now the Lumiere) in San Francisco.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Contact-improv-flyer.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Nita Little's flyer for the first ongoing Contact Improv class taught on the West Coast.'''<br />
<br />
Little taught CI at the Natural Dance Studio in September of 1974, which was, to her knowledge, the first official on-going CI class in California. She remembers the studio hosting a number of events in the mid-'70s including a CI Dance Marathon. She, Smith and others organized a Contact Symposium in 1975 to discuss issues. Meanwhile they were still getting together with Steve Paxton and others to tour CI under the name (and variations) of ReUnion. Smith printed a couple Contact newsletters while living in Marin County and in 1975 the newsletter evolved to become ''Contact Quarterly''. Based in Northampton MA, the biannual CQ continues to be a living archive for developments in the forms, communities, evolutions and reverberations of contact improv.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Contact-improv-2-men.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Early CI experiments at the Natural Dance Studio in Oakland, circa 1975.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: courtesy Nita Little''<br />
<br />
In 1976 two pioneering men's collectives gave their first performances in San Francisco, The Gay Men's Theatre Collective and Mangrove. The GMTC, influenced by feminist process and politics, created ''Crimes Against Nature'', a dance/theatre hybrid fantasia of coming out stories, radical critique and queer visioning. Mangrove improvised performances that included spoken text and physical comedy as well as the intimate and playful touch and weight that was common to CI. After meeting at local jams, five men - Curt Siddall, Jim Tyler, John LeFan, Aaron Hemmen and Byron Brown - performed at five different venues around the Bay Area. They charged $2 a show. Prioritizing performance improvisations Mangrove became one of the most visible CI ensembles through local, national and international tours.<br />
<br />
I asked Mangrove dancer Byron Brown about favorite moments that seem to define the time. He mentioned several, including: "Jani Novak doing Boko Maru evenings at a warehouse in SOMA where you were blindfolded, brought upstairs in a freight elevator, ushered into a large space with classical music, had your shoes removed and had warm oil poured over your feet before you could see anything." Mangrove collaborated with Tumbleweed (men and women's collectives together) and with Ed Mock, a Black jazz dancer and virtuoso improviser. Brown also recounted a Mangrove performance at Terry Sendgraff’s annual birthday event in which they wore paper suits that tore until the men were naked.<br />
<br />
Brown remembers, "There was an amazing alternative dance/theatre community in the '70s. It was alive and fluid with people collaborating in different ways as well as watching, visiting and supporting each other. There were many venues in the form of small and midsize studios where it was easy to work and perform and publicity was fairly easy and audiences were interested."<br />
<br />
Sara Shelton Mann, a protégé of Murray Louis and Alwin Nikolai, first danced Contact with Peter Bingham and Andrew Harwood in Canada. Illustrating the migratory lineage that makes dance history, Little reminded me that she was Harwood's first CI teacher in the mid-'70s in Vancouver. Mann founded Contraband in 1979 and moved to the Bay Area soon after. Mangrove dissolved into a non-profit called Mixed Bag Productions which produced a series of seminal projects and eventually was transformed into the administrative home base for Mann's Contraband, a company that integrated CI in research and teaching, and became a leading proponent of contact improvisation in contemporary performance.<br />
<br />
I asked Ernie Adams, who toured with Mangrove to Europe in 1980, how he would describe the Bay Area dance/performance scene during the 70's. Adams responded, "Experimental, collaborative, collective, youth oriented, sensual, sexual, artistically and spiritually driven, a quest for self, for an alternative to modern dance and ballet, a move away from abstract art, a move towards dance as life..." He concluded with, "It was a great time to be a dancer in San Francisco."<br />
<br />
[[Image:Cp-contactimprov.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Contact improvisation jam at CounterPULSE, 2006.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
Martin Keogh moved to the Bay Area in 1978 and started dancing CI in 1980. In his first year of study he worked with nineteen teachers. Keogh recalls, "I arrived doing contact at the first big apex of the form. In 1980 there were thirteen contact improv companies in the US and Canada. In 1980 Reagan was elected and things changed! By 1982 there was not one CI company still in existence." For a few years Keogh ran the only jam in the Bay Area at the Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. Then the Harbin Jams started which brought people together for intensive retreats, and inspired Andrew Clibinoff to propose an annual festival. Founded as a collaborative venture by many of the local teachers The West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival (WCCIF) became an annual gathering for the local community as well as a model for CI events around the world. Despite the gaps between funded dance companies and those who perform CI, contact-based performances are still frequent in much of the world, primarily in the context of the growing number of CI-related festivals from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires, from Rome to Seattle.<br />
<br />
<br />
''Keith Hennessy is the director of [circozero.org Circo Zero Performance], teaches at various universities and international festivals, and is a PhD student at UC Davis. This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of'' '''InDance Magazine'''.<br />
<br />
AUTHOR'S NOTE<br />
This is a first installment of a larger research project. Future work will include a discussion of Bay Area dialect or style. I apologize to any and all for errors and omissions. Your corrections and additions, personal stories and favorite events are very welcome.<br />
<br />
FOOTNOTES<br />
Paxton, Steve. CI Founders' Talk facilitated by Keith Hennessy at Cl36, Juniata College, June 2008.<br />
<br />
Novack, Cynthia J. ''Sharing the Dance, Contact Improvisation and American Culture''. University of Wisconsin: Madison. 1990.<br />
<br />
Ross, Janice. ''Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance''. UC Press. 2007.<br />
<br />
All quotes are from email or telephone interviews with the author.<br />
<br />
Grand Union (1970-1976): Evolved from Yvonne Rainer's ''Continuous Project Altered Daily'' in which rehearsal process was integrated into the performance. Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglass Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer.<br />
<br />
[[category:Dance]] [[category:Performing Arts]] [[category:Women]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Castro_Into_the_90s&diff=28018
The Castro Into the 90s
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Erik Scudder, 1997''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$names-project-quilt.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''The NAMES Project/AIDS QUILT: The outpouring of sorrow for the tens of thousands of AIDS victims found wide expression in the making and displaying of hand-made quilt panels, which ultimately filled the mall in Washington D.C. in 1995.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
<br />
After the political and social gains that were made in 70s, the Castro district faced a new enemy that emerged in 1980. It was a mysterious disease dubbed "Gay Cancer" and later, AIDS. It was killing gay men and as the death tolls continued to mount, the Castro began to change. The party was over. But the Band Played On. Bathhouses were [[Sex Panic Closes Bathhouses|shut down]] shortly thereafter to curb the spread of AIDS and the gay community went into action to educate not only its members but the world at large about AIDS and how to help those afflicted with it.<br />
<br />
Groups like Aids Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) and [[PRAYER WARRIORS|Queer Nation]] came into being. Many of their demonstrations shocked the world into knowing and realizing that AIDS was not exclusively a gay man's disease and that quick government action and research was needed to find a cure. The Reagan Administration dragged its feet and even refused to acknowledge the presence of AIDS until 1987. Ronald Reagan never even mentioned the word "AIDS" during his entire time as President. Hateful epithets and anti-gay smear campaigns emerged from the Christian Right led by Jerry Falwell, Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson, Lou Sheldon and Jimmy Swaggart.<br />
<br />
Still, the Castro District fought on and supported its own community. One of the ways this was done was by sewing panels to form a huge quilt called The AIDS Memorial Quilt. Each panel was sewn by a friend of a person who died of AIDS. The panel symbolized the person's life interests and became a unique way of remembering them. The Names Project at 2362 Market Street headquarters this unique memorial. Another was the multitude of support agencies that sprang up. Shanti, Project Open Hand, Stop AIDS Project and many others formed to support their community in ways the government could not or would not.<br />
<br />
But the Castro did change. New businesses replaced old, and new people moved into the Castro. Harvey Milk's camera store at 575 Castro Street is now home to a cosmetic store called Skin Zone. The Elephant Walk Bar (500 Castro Street--famous for the [[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless|White Night Riots]]) closed and re-opened as a restaurant called Harvey's. Once an enclave almost exclusively for gay men, babystrollers were now being seen. Straight couples began to see why the Castro was so popular: it was a quiet, charming area filled with Victorian and Edwardian architecture and it was the most accessible and convenient place to live in San Francisco. The Muni Metro underground station at Castro & Market Street provided easy access to downtown workers. Geographically, it was perfect.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$names-quilt-dc.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''The NAMES Project/AIDS Quilt in Washington DC, 1995'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
<br />
<br />
[[THE BURNING OF THE OLD STATE BUILDING | Prev. Document]] [[Drugs in the Gay Scene | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:Castro]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Castro:_The_Rise_of_a_Gay_Community&diff=28017
The Castro: The Rise of a Gay Community
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Chris Carlsson, 1995''<br />
<br />
[[Image:castro1$gay-castro$fair_itm$castro-street-fair.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Castro Street Fair, 1978'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:castro1$castro-street---in-the-kisser.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Castro Street Scene 1970s''' <br />
<br />
''Photos: Crawford Barton, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California''<br />
<br />
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" |'''Many across the United States consider San Francisco to be a “Gay Mecca” due to its large gay community located primarily in the Castro District as well as the city’s relatively liberal attitude towards sex. Until the 1960’s, though, the Castro was largely a white working class Irish neighborhood known as “Eureka Valley.” A shift came during World War II, when many soldiers came to San Francisco and formed gay relationships. These soldiers then stayed in the city after being discharged for homosexuality. In the 1950s, Beat Culture erupted in San Francisco and notoriously rebelled against middle class values, thus aligning itself with homosexuality and helped bring gay culture to mainstream attention. In the mid to late 1950s, groups such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society were born, as well as the Tavern Guild, which was the first openly gay business association. By 1969, there were 50 gay organizations in San Francisco, and by 1973 there were 800. Unfortunately, the anti-gay feelings of the greater United States reached San Francisco in the late 70s, which were followed by the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk and the White Night Riot as well as the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. All of these events have led to a network of self-help organizations as well as a vibrant and strong gay community in the Castro and San Francisco.'''<br />
|}<br />
<br />
Homosexuals across America consider San Francisco a "Gay Mecca" thanks to the rise of the distinctive gay community, primarily in the [[18th and Castro 1914-5 |Castro District]], centered at the intersection of Castro and 18th Streets, a block from upper Market Street. Some estimate that there are as many as 100,000 gay men and lesbians in San Francisco, out of a total population of approximately 750,000.<br />
<br />
The Castro wasn't always a gay neighborhood. Until the early 1960s it was primarily white working-class, predominantly of Irish descent, and better known as "Eureka Valley." But as the post-WWII trend of white flight to the suburbs drew more and more older San Franciscan families out, new groups moved in behind them. In most U.S. cities, such in-migration was typically that of ethnic minorities, mostly blacks, Latinos and Asians. This was also true in San Francisco, but thanks to several coincidences, SF also became home to thousands of gays, and the Castro is the district in which they decided to spend their money, put down roots and make a home.<br />
<br />
The city was always known for its relatively libertine attitudes towards sex and pleasure. The [[BARBARY COAST | Barbary Coast]] and the waterfront brought together travelers, sailors, transients and others in casual encounters far from the prevailing rules "back home." Hundreds of houses of prostitution flourished from the Gold Rush through the early 20th century, followed decades later by the rise of topless bars and strip joints, and the pornographic film industry (The [[Mitchell Brothers |Mitchell Brothers]] being the best known), all contributing to a sexual openness that gave San Francisco a reputation directly challenging the sexual repressiveness that prevailed in the rest of the country. This in turn made San Francisco an attractive destination for those deemed "outlaws" by the dominant morals of society.<br />
<br />
World War II provided a big impetus for the development of San Francisco's gay community. One and a half million soldiers, 10%+ of which were homosexual, were able to find each other more easily in the marginal districts of San Francisco. Thousands were discharged by the military for homosexuality and were released in San Francisco. Rather than returning to the hinterlands in which they would be stigmatized, many stayed on and after the war they were joined by thousands more who had discovered new identities in the crucible of war. The [[The Black Cat Cafe | Black Cat Cafe]] on Montgomery Street became home to a gay drag revue starring Jose Sarria. Sarria was born in San Francisco and performed each Sunday afternoon for fifteen years to full houses of 250 or more, using his role as Madam Butterfly to sermonize about homosexual rights and leading a sing-along of "God Save the Nelly Queens."<br />
<br />
During the 1950s San Francisco also spawned the [[Gays and Beats|Beat Culture]], which shared spaces and attitudes with the incipient gay culture. [[Allen Ginsberg|Allen Ginsberg]], himself gay, wrote ''Howl'' and fought obscenity charges in 1957. The beats expressed a basic rejection of American middle class values, especially the family and suburbanism, which coincided closely with early gay attitudes. Of course, it can be argued that a good deal of gay culture tries to emulate middle class America and its values, helping homosexuality to become more mainstream and less stigmatized. Bars and nightclubs in North Beach and the Tenderloin became important sources of cross-pollination and expansion.<br />
<br />
In 1962 police and alcohol control board harassment led to the establishment of the [http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt509nb9d7 Tavern Guild], consisting of the owners of primarily gay and bohemian establishments. The Guild became the first overtly gay business association and provided one of the first organizational backbones of the gay community. Earlier, in 1955, the [[Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement | Mattachine Society]] (one of the first ever gay organizations) had moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to San Francisco and eventually spawned ''The Advocate'', the nation's first gay magazine. The Daughters of Bilitis, the first openly lesbian organization, was founded in San Francisco, also in 1955. [[Mayor George Christopher| Mayor George Christopher]], a relatively conservative Republican, was criticized by an even more conservative challenger, Russell Wolden, in his 1959 re-election campaign for allowing the city to become "the national headquarters of organized homosexuals in America," but the establishment and local press criticized Wolden for harming the image of San Francisco and Christopher was re-elected.<br />
<br />
When it finally closed in 1963, The Black Cat had broken the barriers that prevented overtly gay bars from existing freely. A 1951 California Supreme Court decision banned the closing down of a bar simply because homosexuals were the usual customers. Manuel Castells convincingly argues in ''The Grassroots and the City'' that The Black Cat had also established an important cultural precedent for the gay community: fun and humor. As the community developed, feasts, celebrations, street parties, public and private bars, and bathhouses and sex clubs, became the important forms of cultural expression and sociability, which in turn strongly influenced other communities in San Francisco and beyond. The element of immediate pleasure and fun that gays strove to establish in their daily lives found an emphatic echo and expansion in the hippie movement of the 1960s. The anti-war and counter-culture movements in general provided a relatively pro-pleasure climate for gays.<br />
<br />
In 1969 there were 50 gay organizations. The famous Stonewall Riot in New York City in June 1969, led to an explosion of gay consciousness and self-organization. By 1973 there were over 800 organizations. Gay bars grew from 58 in 1969 to 234 in 1980. By organizing socially, culturally, and politically, the gay community came into its own in the 1970s. Its best known hero was Harvey Milk, a former camera store owner who used aggressive door-to-door (and bar-to-bar, corner-to-corner) populist organizing techniques to get elected to the city's Board of Supervisors. In fact, his election coincided with the establishment of a new coalition of progressive community organizations that together established a district election system in place of the downtown dominated at-large system, a victory which followed by two years the election of liberal state Senator George Moscone as mayor in 1975.<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$dykes-on-bikes.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Dykes on Bikes, a distinctive feature of SF Gay Pride parades.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: David Green''<br />
<br />
The upsurge of anti-gay, homophobic feelings in the United States came to San Francisco, too. In 1978, an ultra-conservative state senator put on the statewide ballot the Briggs Initiative, intended to ban gays from teaching in the public schools. With the energetic participation of Milk and thousands of newly self-empowered gay activists, Briggs was defeated by a sound majority. Not long after the election, a disgruntled conservative ex-cop who had recently resigned his seat on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, Dan White, entered City Hall through a side door (one which lacked a metal detector) and murdered [[Mayor George Moscone| Mayor Moscone]] and Supervisor Milk. When Dan White was given a virtual slap on the wrist for this cold-blooded murder in a jury trial (the verdict of voluntary manslaughter was handed down on May 21, 1979) one of the biggest riots in SF history exploded in the Civic Center Plaza, known as the [[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless | White Night Riot]].<br />
<br />
As [[Mayor Dianne Feinstein|Feinstein]] proceeded with the downtown expansion plans and put community initiatives on hold, gays fragmented along various lines. Under Reagan many conservative assumptions were adapted to, and gay politics became more an interest group and less a progressive agenda. Perhaps the class divisions among gays eroded the earlier Milk/Harry Britt tradition of gay leftism. The AIDS crisis struck in the early 1980s, with thousands of San Francisco's most creative, intelligent and exciting people perishing in the epidemic. Gay politics became very focused on getting resources dedicated to the AIDS situation, or more practically, on the creation of an astounding network of self-help organizations. Two outspoken lesbians were elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1992, one of whom, Roberta Achtenberg, went on to be appointed a high-end official in the Clinton Administration's Housing Department. Carole Migden, the second, led a budget committee to cut pay and benefits to city workers in her effort to be the responsible centrist lesbian, palatable to downtown.<br />
<br />
[[Image:DPN-cover5-scan.jpg]]<br />
<br />
The above-ground gay press in San Francisco supports an impressive three fat weeklies, ''[http://www.sfbaytimes.com/ Bay Times]'', ''[http://ebar.com/ Bay Area Reporter (BAR)]'', and in the 1970's ''The Sentinel''. The first is a more meaty rag, featuring very long pieces on many issues facing the gay community. ''BAR'' and ''Sentinel'' both carry a lot more advertising. Meanwhile, the underground gay press is exploding with dozens of wild 'zines, from the hardcore to the no-core to homocore. ''Diseased Pariah News, A Taste of Latex, On Our Backs, Raw Vulva'', there are blistering, often hilarious, often erotic writings from the daily lives of fags and dykes, bi- and transsexuals, and transgender individuals.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[The Bubble Bursts | Prev. Document]] [[Sisters--Against Guilt | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Irish]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Bubble_Bursts&diff=28016
The Bubble Bursts
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = arial light> <font color = maroon> <font size = 3>Unfinished History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$rich-poor-law.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Leaflet from the White-Night Riots.'''<br />
<br />
On May 21, 1979, the Dan White "[[Kool-Aid & Twinkies|Twinkie]] Verdict" was handed down. White received only a voluntary manslaughter conviction for the deaths of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. That night, hundreds of citizens (gays, angry straights, punks, and others) [[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless | rioted at City Hall]], smashing windows, looting nearby stores, and burning over a dozen police cars.<br />
<br />
[[White Night Riot: A Policeman's View|Police retaliated]] later that night with their own riot. They stormed a bar in the Castro, brutally beating customers and passersby. Some individuals were placed under arrest and a defense fund was formed. Punk bands like the Offs and the Blowdriers played benefits. Later a photo of the burning police cars would grace the cover of the Dead Kennedys' first album.<br />
<br />
It is important to remember that two men were killed, one straight, and the mayor, no less, and that there were underlying pressures contributing to that outburst of violence. The Dan White verdict may have sparked the White Night, but other factors fanned its flames.<br />
<br />
In his book, ''Gayslayer!'', Warren Hinckle said, "1978 and 1979 were the most emotionally devastating years in San Francisco's fabulously spotted history." Social and economic pressures arose in a city of 700,000 which had seen the influx of 100,000 homosexuals over a decade. Violence against gays (underreported in the mainstream media) increased throughout the '70s. Many gay men carried whistles to blow loudly in case of attack. According to Hinckle, "In an average month 30 to 40 muggings and stabbings by gangs of street toughs preying on gays are reported." There were also occasional unsolved murders stemming from the South of Market pick-up scene. No one knew whether the killers were queer or straight. Many folks regard 1978 or 1979 as the point where the San Francisco gay party of the '70s peaked and started sliding downhill.<br />
<br />
"It started crashing down with Anita Bryant," says Jack Fertig. "And
people said, "We've got to get serious, and we can't be a bunch of whackos, we've got to be responsible." And
that basically, Anita Bryant really pushed a lot of people out of the closet. We developed a political machinery."<br />
<br />
The San Francisco gay world was going through its adolescent phase. One of the less charming characteristics of adolescents is their tendency toward cliquishness as a means to define their world. There was also massive gay population growth, and perhaps due to the sheer overwhelming numbers, many people retreated a bit. Gay life became more factionalized and fragmented. As San Francisco lurched into [[The 1980s|the '80s]], the sense of community that had defined gay life in the [[The 1970s: Disco Fever and Respectability|early '70s]] seemed to get buried under a pile of special interests.<br />
<br />
-- ''Black Sheets' 'magazine<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$gays-and-cablecar.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Gay men turning a cablecar at the end of its line.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
[[HARVEY MILK A Reflection by Harry Britt | Prev. Document]] [[The Castro: The Rise of a Gay Community | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:dissent]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Black_Cat_Cafe&diff=28015
The Black Cat Cafe
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = arial light> <font color = maroon> <font size = 3>Unfinished History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$sarria-performing.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Jose Sarria, performing at the Black Cat, c. 1961'''<br />
<br />
''Photos: Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California''<br />
<br />
The Black Cat Cafe on Montgomery Street became home to a [[Before the Castro: North Beach, a Gay Mecca|gay drag revue]] starring José Sarria. Sarria was born in San Francisco and performed each Sunday afternoon for fifteen years to full houses of 250 or more, using his role as Madame Butterfly to sermonize about homosexual rights and leading a sing-along of "God Save the Nelly Queens..."<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/CarloMiddioneAtBlackCatAndOtherClubs" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Carlo Middione describes attending the Black Cat in the late 1950s/early 1960s.'''<br />
<br />
''Video: Shaping San Francisco''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$black-cat-cafe$black-cat_itm$black-cat.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''The Black Cat Cafe at 710 Montgomery Street'''<br />
<br />
When it finally closed in 1963, The Black Cat had broken the barriers that prevented overtly gay bars from existing freely. A 1951 California Supreme Court decision banned the closing down of a bar simply because homosexuals were the usual customers.<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$black-cat-cafe$sarria_itm$sarria-in-action.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Jose Sarria in action'''<br />
<br />
Manuel Castells convincingly argues in ''The Grassroots and the City'' that The Black Cat had also established an important cultural precedent for the gay community: fun and humor. As the community developed, feasts, celebrations, street parties, public and private bars, and bathhouses and sex clubs, became the important forms of cultural expression and sociability, which in turn strongly influenced other communities in San Francisco and beyond.<br />
<br />
''--Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Sisters--Against Guilt | Prev. Document]] [[Before the Castro: North Beach, a Gay Mecca| Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:North Beach]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:Famous characters]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_1980s&diff=28014
The 1980s
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essays</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''Part One by Will Roscoe''<br />
<br />
''Part Two by Bill Brent''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$gay-pride-parade.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Gay Pride Parade'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
<br />
In this brief history of gay liberation in America, two themes have repeatedly emerged, those of movement and community. The gay movement and the gay community are not identical. While they appeared and have developed in tandem, they have not always converged.<br />
<br />
Unlike ethnic minorities, gays are not born into a community; rather, they must create a community and continually re-create it throughout life. Community is important because it is the foundation for political action in the history of minorities. Individuals must have a reason to take risks, to pursue their grievances in the face of a hostile majority. For lesbians and gay men, community provides that reason -- it is the safe and nurturing space which makes coming out possible, imaginable and desirable.<br />
<br />
The crisis of AIDS throws the themes of community and movement into sharp relief. Clearly, our rights are threatened by the reaction to AIDS. And clearly, an active grassroots movement of gay people, willing to take risks to protect their rights, offers the best hope for countering anti-gay forces.<br />
<br />
Less clear, however, is the continuing need for building community. Despite the debates on the possible causes and factors involved in AIDS, nearly everyone agrees on the best course of action to prevent the disease. That is, to lead a healthy, balanced lifestyle, maintain a high self-image, and avoid exposure to infection. Nevertheless, as AIDS-phobia grows, public officials and gay political leaders alike are turning to negative sanctions against gay behavior. The move to close gay baths and other meeting places is a direct threat to the most basic gains achieved by the movement in the 1960s.<br />
<br />
The theme of community is at the center of this debate because it represents the positive alternative to negative sanctions. The positive approach, directing our energies and resources toward fostering a conscious, mutually supportive community, is not new---any more so than the call for a participatory and grassroots gay movement.<br />
<br />
Gay history provides inspiration to face today's challenges: in the courageous efforts of individual lesbians and gay men to forge networks of support in the face of brutal harassment; in the struggles to create gay organizations under the nose of McCarthy and his anti-gay witchhunt; in the Mattachine vision of a community based on a conscious set of values; and in the prophecy of Walt Whitman who saw in the experience of gay love a model of mutuality and equality that contained the essence of the democratic spirit.<br />
<br />
For any who might doubt the capacity to transform adversity into triumph, gay history remains a source of strength and ingenuity, available to all who seek inspiration for the next future we create for ourselves.<br />
<br />
''--Will Roscoe''<br />
<br />
'''Death in the 1980s'''<br />
<br />
On June 5, 1981, ''Morbidity & Mortality Weekly'' announced the mysterious presence of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in five gay men. July 3 marked the first public news of what was to become known as AIDS, as the ''New York Times'' published the first article on "the Gay Cancer," Two days later, ''Morbidity & Mortality Weekly ''announced the outbreak of Kaposi's Sarcoma among 26 gay men in the U.S.<br />
<br />
The week didn't get much better. On July 10, a major fire on Folsom Street destroyed the homes (along with art, photos, whips, etc.) of erotic artist Rex, radical sex photographer Mark I. Chester, and many other leathermen:<br />
<br />
''"In the aftermath of a major fire along San Francisco's Folsom strip in 1981, the media was quick to indulge in hostile voyeurism, and leatherfolk got burned in more ways that one. The apartment of photographer Mark I. Chester was partially damaged, and the press took this as an invitation to enter and publish a photo of his bondage equipment. The fire department set up a temporary morgue for the bodies of the chained and incinerated sex-slaves it expected to find (it did not)." ''<br />
<br />
(Scott Tucker, "Raw hide: The mystery and power of leather," ''Advocate'' #472, May 12, 1987)<br />
<br />
'''JACK:''' Somewhere in the early '80s -- I guess it was '81 -- one of the big, final blasts of this whole sexual abandon was at the Handball Express, down on Harrison, just off of Sixth Street, they had a party -- it was a hospital party -- for sick men.<br />
<br />
'''BILL:''' Oh, god!<br />
<br />
'''JACK:''' You could joke about things like that then. You could joke about being sick -- "Oooh! That's so SICK!" You could joke about death. [Pause] It was very youthful. It was very callous. As youth should be! You know, I'm not putting it down, but -- we had to learn a lot of things the hard way. And it's a lot harder than it could have been, or should have been.<br />
<br />
--''by Bill Brent, Black Sheets magazine''<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Sex Panic Closes Bathhouses | Prev. Document]] [[Harry Britt on History | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:1980s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_1970s:_Disco_Fever_and_Respectability&diff=28013
The 1970s: Disco Fever and Respectability
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Will Roscoe''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$gay-pageant-1975.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Gay Pageant 1975'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Crawford Barton''<br />
<br />
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" |'''The years between 1970 and 1975 saw more progress in gay rights than the previous two decades combined. Disco culture highlighted a new self-awareness in the gay community that created a celebratory self-image. By the middle of the decade, though, the gay men and lesbians began to diverge politically as they worked to define their new, more public lifestyles. Political agency moved into a more mainstream direction, with rising power for elected officials and lobbyists. 1977 proved to be a landmark year for the successes and failures of the gay movement, as politicians such as Harvey Milk and anti-gay Anita Bryant entered the national spotlight. While the gay community was a political force, it struggled to combat homophobia among the general public. Eventually, the gay movement from radical transgression towards assimilation and non-subversive action, with statements such as "we are no different except for what we do in bed” widely circulating in and out of the movement.'''<br />
|}<br />
<br />
The years between 1970 and 1975 brought more breakthroughs in the area of gay rights than those of the previous two decades combined. Few could have predicted the impact of the Stonewall generation: several states repealed sodomy laws, many cities adopted civil rights protections for gay people, lesbians and gay men were elected to public offices. Presidential candidates endorsed gay rights and local gay community centers received federal grants to provide services to gay people. And everywhere the driving beat of disco music heralded a new era in gay self-awareness.<br />
<br />
Disco provided the anthem for gay men celebrating the triumph of their struggle against self-hate and denial. The disco culture was, above all, a gay fashion. No longer had we to conform to stereotypes we had no part in creating. In the style, the flair and customs of the dance, gay men created a self-image out of their own fantasies and dreams.<br />
<br />
Women, too, created an affirmative culture in the 1970s, as the popularity of women's music provided opportunities for large numbers of women to gather and celebrate their own experiences and culture.<br />
<br />
By the mid-1970s, however, the cultural and political energies in the gay community appeared to be moving apart. Lesbians and gay men devoted increasing attention to refining the details of their new life-styles and identities. At the same time, gay organizations relied less on mobilization, turning to lobbying and vote-garnering to win limited, pragmatic concessions from the political styles.<br />
<br />
"Professionalism" became the movement buzzword. Groups like the National Gay Task Force (founded 1973) hired professional lobbyists to influence legislation and media coverage of gay people and achieved some success. But the days of active participation by a broad grassroots of gay people were largely over. The most political act of many gay people at the end of the 1970s consisted of casting their ballots according to the endorsements of the local gay Democratic club.<br />
<br />
The year 1977 proved another watershed for gay people. The successes-- and failures--of the movement were brought into sharp contrast by four events: Anita Bryant's campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Miami; the anti-gay murder of Robert Hillsborough in San Francisco; the overwhelming turnout of gay people across the country on Gay Pride Day; and the election of Harvey Milk as a San Francisco supervisor. While the gay community had emerged as a political force, its ability to alter the deeper levels of homophobia in American society remained limited. Advance and setback, one following the other, characterized the progress of the gay movement at the end of the decade. The string of victories that followed Stonewall seemed to be coming to an end.<br />
<br />
The tendencies of accommodation, assimilation and image-conciousness crept into the gay movement. Gay rights became human rights. Gay professionals, who disdained the colorful street actions of the Stonewall period, assumed roles as leaders and trendsetters within the movement. Lesbians and gay men were no longer encouraged to take action in the streets; the call was for voting power and economic clout.<br />
<br />
On the cultural level the official line became, once again, "We are no different except for what we do in bed" -- the position taken in 1953 by the conservatives in Mattachine. At the same time, a thriving, multi-faceted gay community had developed, based on the assumption that gay people are different and need specifically gay institutions, organizations, and businesses to meet their needs. This contradiction points to lingering insecurities that are not fully banished by the progress since Stonewall. In fact, at the onset of the 1980s, lesbians and gay men found themselves faced with serious challenges to both the political and personal gains of the previous decade.<br />
<br />
The AIDS crisis has imposed itself as the gay issue of the 1980s. After two decades of setting its own goals, the gay movement is faced today with an issue that no one wanted--or could even have imagined.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Folsom Street: The Miracle Mile | Prev. Document]] [[Coming Out into the 1970s | Next Document]] <br />
<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Castro]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=THE_BURNING_OF_THE_OLD_STATE_BUILDING&diff=28012
THE BURNING OF THE OLD STATE BUILDING
2018-10-16T15:09:12Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Kwazee Wabbitt, a.k.a. Michael Botkin''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$riot-police.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Scene from the Castro Sweep Police Riot of October 6, 1989 with police arresting Gilbert Criswell at the corner of Castro and 18th Streets.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
<br />
<div><br />
<flashmp3>http://www.archive.org/download/StateBuilding1991RiotSounds/RIOT1091.mp3</flashmp3><br />
</div><br />
''Sounds from the streets during the protest.''<br />
<br />
'''FROM ONE WHO WAS THERE:''' In early October of 1991 the gay community was simmering with anticipation. The state senate had passed the long-contested gay rights bill, AB101, by just one vote. While running for office the year before, Governor Pete Wilson had specifically promised to sign the bill when it came to his desk. Now he was hesitating, weighing the potential cost to his presidential aspirations. It was also the anniversary of the "Castro Street Sweep," a random cop rampage that had sent several innocent bystanders to the hospital. The honchos who ordered it got off with slaps on the wrist just a few days before the actual anniversary, October 6.<br />
<br />
On the ninth we heard that "Sneaky Pete" had vetoed the bill, and that a demonstration had been called downtown. We took the J Church to downtown, because I remember striding up North from Market Street on Polk, past City Hall and its empty park seeking the action. It was late in the day, just getting dark. At McAllister we paused. To our left, about a block away, was a large crowd massed around the steps of the brand new State building on Van Ness; beyond them were legions of cops in riot gear, defending it.<br />
<br />
Streaming down McAllister to our right was a growing swarm of several hundred Queers. Members of [[PRAYER WARRIORS|Queer Nation]], a kind of secular ACT-UP post-script, was at its peak at this time, and I recognized many friends from the Queer and street activist crowds, plus a few dark-garbed ''autonomen'' types. The main crowd looked less militant: "democratic" clubs and sectarians with banners and bullhorns listening to speeches. Without hesitating we joined the Queers, and I rushed about asking people what had happened, what was going to happen. "To the Old State Building!" was the only comprehensible statement I could get. This made sense: it was part of Sneaky Pete's dominion and the flashier new State building was clearly impregnable for the present. The mob skirted north on Polk en route to the building's main entrance on Golden Gate Avenue.<br />
<br />
Indeed, Old State turned out to be defended only by about a dozen cops in standard uniforms, not wearing helmets nor wielding riot batons. The crowd of several hundred gathered in front of building's main entrance, pushing the cops into a frightened half circle in front of it. I climbed a tree across the street from this, where I had a good view. Others began grabbing construction materials, conveniently at hand in neat piles in front of the Federal building, and using them as weapons. Bricks broke windows; 10-foot two-by-fours were used to smash them further, and awkwardly propped up to serve as ladders, with limited success.<br />
<br />
The cops remained trapped by the crowd, which was chanting stuff like 'gay rights or gay riots!' and hurling rocks at them. The cops unstacked some metal police barriers, deployed them around the entrance, and edged away from it, leaving only a couple of officers inside. The top honcho was frantically yelling in his walkie-talkie, but there was no sign of reinforcements. Here were no speeches and no bullhorns, only a milling, angry crowd, scenting retreat and fear. The barriers were swept up and wielded as battering rams!<br />
<br />
They made short work of entrance and the cops retreated within the building. They were not directly pursued, but some people now used the barriers as ladders to get in through the broken windows. I could see them running about inside from my arboreal vantage, could see flames beginning to lick up from northwest corner of the building.<br />
<br />
"Burn, baby, burn!" I yell. My voice carries well above the crowd. I chant it over and over, rhythmically, until some of the crowd picks it up. The cops are silent about 50 yards east on Golden Gate, just watching. Several hundred of us remained gathered between the entrance and the burning corner, somewhat bewildered by our success and wondering what to do next, how far to push it. The flames licked higher, and incendiaries vacated the premises; it looked like the fire was really beginning to catch and reach serious proportions.<br />
<br />
Suddenly a pair of fire trucks appeared behind the clot of cops, and several phalanxes of blue-coated riot cops formed up in ranks on Polk. A high honcho stepped out in front with a bullhorn and began to do a formal "this is a restricted area, anyone remaining will be arrested" statement. I was amazed. Such courtesies hadn't been observed at the Oct. 6 "Sweep" (Nor would they be, a few months later, during the [[The Rodney King Verdict Riots | Rodney King riots]]). Our retreat was still open to the south, if we wanted to take it. It certainly looked like the cops were going to allow it in the interest of getting the fire trucks up fast. No one said a word, nobody pulled any "going limp' CD crap; if we could set fire to the Old State Building AND get off scott free, so much the better. We began to deliberately withdraw and disperse.<br />
<br />
I lingered at the very tail of the crowd, trying to stay in the growing neutral zone between the cops and the rioters, trying hard to give off "I'm a neutral journalist" vibe. My black leather jacket and my boyfriend dragging me away by it defeated that pose. But we recognized a few friends from Street Patrol, also loitering at the rear of the retreat. All of us whipped out our distinctive lavender berets and put them on, and formed a line between the retreating crowd and the advancing cops.<br />
<br />
(Street Patrol was an anti-bashing group that patrolled the Castro on weekend evenings. It was at its peak around that time, with about two dozen members and 8 person patrols. We wore bright fuschia berets and were well known in the gay community and to the cops; some said we had gang, or at least Guardian Angel overtones, and I suppose there was something to that.) The colorful hats (plus the fact that we all wore black leather jackets) and our facility with collective action made us a clearly recognizable barrier between the opposing masses. Half of us faced forward, half backwards, to make our action all the more ambiguous: were we taking responsibility for pushing away the crowd, and defending the cops, or the opposite? The crowd was rabbit-quick to disperse, the cops, tortoise-slow to pursue. In five minutes we were back on Market Street; the cops had halted a block away and the crowd had completely evaporated. We walked back, exhausted, elated, towards the Castro.<br />
<br />
There had been absolutely no arrests, and not a drop of blood spilled on either side. I considered it an important victory for the community, a reaffirmation of the potency of the Queer Riot, and the legacy of the Stonewall and [[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless | White Night riots]]. Some guilty liberals lamented the shattering of a specially commissioned multi-cultural stained-glass window over the building's entrance; others bemoaned that the burned-out office contained workman's comp. claims. Gay stream opinion, usually hostile to direct action, was smugly supportive of the riot and the rioters, however. I had a glow that lasted for days.<br />
<br />
The glow definitely faded when I heard that several arrests had been made, weeks after the action, by identifying activists from tapes taken by a TV camera. I'd seen the camera at the actions but hadn't thought to impede its view or ability to record it; next time, folks, keep such things in mind. If the media can't keep from turning stoolie, they're not really "neutral" nor deserving of non-combatant status, are they?<br />
<br />
In an ironic twist, the activists were identified by two openly gay cops who acquired this information by attending a Queer Nation meeting. They'd claimed they were there on their own time, and there were no rules to exclude them; QN was a pure consensus organization, which meant that even one or two people could block a motion. The cops were allowed to attend a couple of meetings, and a majority of the old cadre stopped coming to meetings. It was one of the final nails in the coffin for a group that was already on its last legs.<br />
<br />
It was a very tight election year, and most of the charges were dropped. But several people had to do community service. But that Old State Building fire burns bright in my memory, a reminder of how quickly things can catch.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$police-motorcycles-oct-1991.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''A line of motorcycle cops of flanked a march from the Federal Building in Civic Center to the Castro on October 6, 1989'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
<br />
[[Image:DPN-cover5-scan.jpg]]<br />
<br />
''Michael Botkin, author of this short account, was co-editor of DPN ("Diseased Pariah News") for several years before he died in the early 1990s. DPN was a no-holds-barred journal of ribald and black humor by and for those with AIDS before the arrival of the cocktail that made it possible to live for years after testing positive for the HIV virus.''<br />
<br />
<br />
[[PRAYER WARRIORS | Prev. Document]] [[The Castro Into the 90s | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:dissent]] [[category:riots]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Strength,_Resilience,_and_Transgender_History:_An_Oral_History_with_Andrea_Horne&diff=28011
Strength, Resilience, and Transgender History: An Oral History with Andrea Horne
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Sasha Perigo, 2017''<br />
<br />
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" | '''Andrea Horne is a former actress, model, jazz singer. Most recently she was a social worker working with transgender women in the Tenderloin. She is also Black transgender woman who has lived in San Francisco for the past forty years. This oral history explores her experience in San Francisco in light of the broader history of transgender women of color in the city and highlights the need for the designation of the new Compton TLGB District honoring transgender history in San Francisco.'''<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/we6tzQOGezM?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Interview with Andrea Horne by Sasha Perigo, March 5, 2017'''<br />
<br />
''Video shot and edited by Rahim Romario Ullah''<br />
<br />
San Francisco has a long and well-documented history as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)-friendly city. However, some LGBT San Franciscans find the city less safe than others. Andrea Horne is one of these San Franciscans. She is a former actress, jazz singer, model, and social worker, as well as a Black transgender woman who has lived in San Francisco for the past forty years. I met her and her pomeranian Eartha Kitt for the first time on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the Women’s Building where we sat down to talk San Francisco history.<br />
<br />
“Although San Francisco has the reputation for being one of the most liberal and progressive cities in the world, I find it to be one of the most racist and classist cities in the world,” Andrea told me. “Everytime I say that to a white gay man they just have no idea what I’m talking about. ‘What San Francisco?! This is like Disneyland.’ And for them it is Disneyland.”<br />
<br />
Andrea speaks to the experience of many transgender people and queer people of color who have a tumultuous history of acceptance in San Francisco. Many queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) find that the mainstream LGBT rights movement has centered primarily on gay men, while more marginalized people in the LGBT community are pushed to the edges. Andrea Horne’s oral history is an example of the remarkable resilience and ability to carve out space for themselves that QTPOC have shown throughout San Francisco history.<br />
<br />
Andrea was a fifteen year old runaway when she first visited San Francisco for the Summer of Love in 1967. “I was with some friends, and we did stay in the Tenderloin, although all of the action was in the Haight,” she remembers. “We were relegated to the Tenderloin.” <br />
<br />
The Tenderloin is a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco formerly referred to as the “gay ghetto” due to the large population of [[Poverty, Social Isolation, Transsexuality|queer and transgender people]] who lived in the impoverished community. It was around the time of the [[Summer of Love?|Summer of Love]] that the [[The Castro: The Rise of a Gay Community|Castro neighborhood]] began to flourish as a home of gay male culture. While some gay men experienced newfound sexual liberation born out of a growing San Francisco counterculture, more marginalized members of the LGBT community’s movement was still severely confined. <br />
<br />
<blockquote>“If you were queer and people knew that you were queer, the police could beat you down in the street,” she said. “A lot of the queer people in the 50’s and the 60’s and 70’s were limited… It’s as almost as if there was a fence around the Tenderloin, and they couldn’t go outside of it in fear for their lives. Your life was at stake if you stepped over the boundary, because then you were asking for it.” </blockquote><br />
<br />
The Castro was not a refuge to all of these queer people. “The Castro has always been a little bit discriminatory against people of color,” Andrea said. There have been protests at gay bars in the Castro against discriminatory door policies that deny entry to people of color ongoing since the 60’s (Romesburg 2004). As recently as 2005, a gay bar in the Castro was sued for enforcing such a policy. The incident prompted the San Francisco LGBT Center to launch a program fighting racism in the Castro in 2006 (Sanders 2013). <br />
<br />
After a stint living in a castle while working as a model in France, Andrea moved to San Francisco for good in 1979. At the time she was working as an actress, model, and singer; she went on a national tour with the jazz band Pleasure after appearing as the covergirl on their 1978 album ''Get to the Feeling''. Tired of couch hopping on tour, she decided to buy her own place and was influenced to settle down in San Francisco by her friend, disco star, and gay icon Sylvester (Miller 2013).<br />
<br />
One of the first things Andrea noticed in San Francisco as opposed to her native Los Angeles was outward racial discrimination. “It’s harder being black in San Francisco than it is being transgender… I find in Los Angeles, as a person of color, when you go to Beverly Hills for example, they don’t know who your daddy is so they don’t fuck with you,” she said. “But in San Francisco, they know your daddy is probably not Jay-Z or Bill Cosby, so they follow you around the stores here. In LA they’d like to I think, but they know your daddy could be Will Smith. It’s not the same.” <br />
<br />
Though she settled down in the historically [[The Fillmore: Black SF|Black Fillmore neighborhood]], she saw the racial makeup of her neighborhood change drastically over the first decade that she lived in the city. [[Fillmore Redevelopment|The Redevelopment Agency]] bought out homeowners in the Fillmore and the Black middle class moved to the suburbs leaving a predominantly white neighborhood in its wake. Where the Fillmore Center luxury apartments stand today there used to be Black-owned Victorian houses.<br />
<br />
Despite the lack of representation of other trans women and people of color surrounding her, Andrea found spaces in San Francisco that felt like home, though she found that the number of spaces she felt safe in was heavily influenced by the fact that she can pass as a cisgender woman.<br />
<br />
“I can go anywhere I want to,” she said.“That’s not the same for my sisters and brothers who are clocky.” The term clocky refers to transgender people who are easily “clocked,” or identified as transgender. “I can say that now as a senior citizen, my beauty was my ticket to the world, and that’s just by accident of birth. That’s nothing I had anything to do with.” <br />
<br />
Local spaces where transgender women can feel safe have come and gone over the years alongside funding for AIDS research. “There used to be several a few years ago. The funding for any sort of trans spaces was sort of predicated on AIDS research funding. Since that’s diminishing now with the advent of PREP and less people are getting the virus, so is that funding that allowed us to create a safe space for trans people.”<br />
<br />
The API Wellness Center, a health organization for LGBT people and people of color that provides STD testing, hormone therapy, and HIV treatment among other services, as one of the few spaces left today (API Wellness). In the past, Andrea liked City of Refuge, a self-described “radically inclusive” African American church (Faith Street). City of Refuge also ran a program called Ark of Refuge which provided a homeless shelter and addiction services for HIV positive African American Transgender women (Bay Area Homeless Resource). Andrea mentioned City of Refuge has now lost its funding.<br />
<br />
One commonality between all these spaces was that the only way a space could be safe for transgender women and people of color was if transgender women and QTPOC were involved in creating the space themselves. <br />
<br />
Andrea explained: “Trans women are the ones that have it the worst. On a college campus today in 2017, a butch woman that looks like a man on a college campus, as long as she kept on the softball team or on the basketball team it’s all gravy. But still today, a boy that looks like a girl, they still get shade, let’s face it.” <br />
<br />
Andrea’s statements are based in facts. Though it’s important to note that transgender women are themselves women, not boys who look like girls, this transphobic misconception causes trans women of color to face rates of violence far above and beyond the rest of the LGBT community. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that between 2012 and 2015, the vast majority of the LGBT people murdered in hate crimes were Black and Hispanic women (Park and Mykhyalyshyn 2016). Trans women and a QTPOC have a shared lived experience of these statistics that others in the LGBT community lack.<br />
<br />
Later in life, Andrea went back to school and started a career in social work where she worked to provide a safe space for other transgender women. Andrea grew up in a well-educated family that expected her to go to college, but her plans changed when she came out as transgender. <br />
<br />
“I transitioned when I was 15, and although that doesn’t seem like a big thing today, forty years ago that was a hell of a big thing,” she said. “My mother had a PhD in psychiatric social work. She had pull in the state and the county so I had electric shock therapy and the beat down.” <br />
<br />
Electric shock therapy is a form of conversion therapy that involves providing electric shocks to the brain in order to condition the subject to associate their gender identity with pain. The National Center for Lesbian Rights views this treatment as “extremely dangerous and, in some cases, fatal” and it is now outlawed in several U.S. states.<br />
<br />
Lack of parental support is unfortunately common for transgender youth. The 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that over half of trans people have faced “significant familial rejection.” This leads an astounding 57% of trans youth without parental support to attempt suicide, as opposed to just 4% of trans youth with supportive families (Trans Student Educational Resources). In Andrea’s case, lack of parental support caused her to run away from home and put her education on hold for over a decade.<br />
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She was working in the restaurant business when she was first inspired to go back to school. <br />
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“I was just trying to make it. I was working in a strip bar as a cocktail waitress. These men always used to give me their cards, and they were all doctors and lawyers. These idiots couldn’t even put a sentence together!” she recalled. “Their ignorance inspired me. I thought, ‘I can do that too!’” <br />
<br />
Following her career experience, Andrea received a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management. Soon after, Andrea fell into social work by accident. When an opportunity opened up for her in social work, she jumped at it. <br />
<br />
“About 15 years ago, social help organizations realized that they needed to actually hire people that looked like the clients,” she said. She found her time in social work meaningful, and she keeps in contact with many younger trans women today acting as an informal mentor. <br />
<br />
“I do know that everyone needs a cheerleader,” she said. “Everyone needs a little loving guidance. When so many trans kids and trans people are rejected by their families and kicked out into the street to fend for themselves in this fucked up world, they spend their youth and all of their energy just trying to survive. They don’t have the resources to educate themselves, and they don’t have the support to elevate their position.” <br />
<br />
The number one piece of advice Andrea has to offer a younger trans woman today is to get an education. She clarified that she did not necessarily mean going to university, but it does mean learning a marketable skill. “That way you’re not relegated to a back alleyway existence. And so many trans-women are relegated to back alleyway existences, they still are today.”<br />
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Though Andrea has since retired from social work, she acknowledges that this kind of community-based work still needs to be done. Transgender women and QTPOC in San Francisco continue to be treated differently than their peers in the LGBT community. A debate within the San Francisco LGBT community broke out in 2016 when San Francisco Pride released plans to increase police presence at the annual pride festival in response to the anti-LGBT mass shooting in Orlando earlier that year. Though the decision was intended to protect parade attendees, many transgender people and QTPOC felt alienated by this decision, as their communities have a long history of harassment and violence at the hands of police. San Francisco Pride ultimately ended up maintaining the planned police presence at the parade, causing Black Lives Matter to pull out as a parade sponsor (Wong 2016).<br />
<br />
Andrea herself has experience with police violence. When she was 17 years old she and trans woman friend of hers were assaulted by police while walking down the street in broad daylight.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“We’re walking down the street, and the police come out of nowhere. Twenty cars. They beat us with billy clubs in the middle of the street. In the middle of the afternoon. They arrest us for prostitution, and they take us to jail. My friend’s father got her out of jail, so I was left there by myself. The police said, ‘You can’t go to court dressed like that.’ I just had on a t-shirt and jeans. They said, ‘You have to put on this.’ As I turned around over there, there was a dead body laying on a cart with the toes up and a tag on the toe. They made me put on the dead person’s clothes, and then they laughed at me when I was naked changing. They said, ‘What kind of broad are you going to make? Ha ha ha!’ They made me put on the dead person’s clothes which were filthy and covered in bugs.<br />
<br />
“The police said that my friend ran up to their car and said, ‘I know what you Paddies want in this neighborhood! I’ll give you a blowjob for $15.’ Then they said I ran up to the car, moved her out of the way, and said, ‘I’ll do it for $10.’ So they just made me a ten dollar hoe with these clothes on. The public defender, the way he looked at me I’ll never forget it. Of course he believed it. Everyone believed that I said that. What can you say when you’re 17, and you’re in jail?”<br />
<br />
“That’s just one example of what the police do to trans women when they think they can get away with it.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
Andrea is one of many transgender women in San Francisco who have had an experience with police harassment or violence. For much of the twentieth century, “female impersonation” was outlawed in San Francisco. Police would use this ordinance to harass and arrest trans women off the streets of the Tenderloin simply for being themselves (''Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria''). Transgender sex workers in San Francisco have reported multiple recent instances of police officers abusing their power to sexually assault them before or during an arrest (Hay 1994). A study conducted by the San Francisco LGBT Center in 2015 found that just 40% of transgender people of color thought that police would help them if they were in need.<br />
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There is one recent development in the fight for transgender rights in San Francisco that Andrea is excited about—the designation of the Compton TLGB District. When private developers proposed a new building within the Tenderloin neighborhood last year, local activist Brian Basinger of the Q Foundation and SF AIDS Housing Alliance and others kicked off a campaign to preserve sites that are historically significant to the transgender community (Pershan 2017). Most notably, the site of the former Compton’s Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor Street marks the spot of a 1966 riot where transgender women, sex workers, and queer people fought back against police harassment in the first act of documented queer militant resistance in the United States (Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria). The Compton’s Cafeteria riot was a revolutionary display of queer self advocacy. While often overlooked in history books, it actually took place three years before the much more widely recognized Stonewall Riot that took place in New York City in 1969.<br />
<br />
Basinger won his battle and the first transgender historic district in the country was designated in the Tenderloin by Supervisor Jane Kim earlier this year (Flores 2017). In memory of the riot that took place at the Compton’s Cafeteria, the district is named the Compton TLGB District, TLGB standing for transgender, lesbian, gay, and bisexual, a variant of the more frequently used initialism LGBT which centers transgender people. The designation requires developers to set aside $300,000 for the creation of a transgender community center in the city and a fund to support businesses and nonprofits serving the transgender community (Pershan 2017).<br />
<br />
Janetta Johnson, Executive Director of the local nonprofit Transgender Gender-Variant Intersex Justice Project and a founding member of the Compton's Historic District Coalition, emphasized the mission of the district to grant opportunities to a historically neglected population. <br />
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“We’re taking a neighborhood where we were trapped and abused and turning it into a place of healing and opportunity. Part of the reasoning for the Compton’s District is to give a type of reparations to black and brown transgender women, who were the subject of great violence here for so long,” Johnson said.<br />
<br />
Andrea agrees wholeheartedly. “It’s more than a step in the right direction. It’s more than revolutionary. I think it’s epic, and I think that it will affect the economic future of transgender people [in San Francisco],” she said, expressing her gratitude to the grassroots activists, many of whom are friends of hers, who have fought for the designation of the district.<br />
<br />
As for the politics of now establishing the district, Andrea herself has not gotten involved. She joked that she tries to stay out of politics, “because I’m not power mad. I’m already fabulous. I don’t need anything to make me important. I’m already important.”<br />
<br />
This teasing comment gets to the heart of an important trend in San Francisco history: transgender people and queer and trans people of color’s remarkable resilience. No matter the political climate, trans people and QTPOC in San Francisco have carved out safe spaces for themselves within the city. The Compton TLGB District is noteworthy because transgender people are finally receiving recognition, but the strength and fortitude that has guided the establishment of this district and that has helped trans communities thrive in otherwise hostile spaces? That’s always been here.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Sources Cited</font size><br />
<br />
"#BornPerfect: The Facts About Conversion Therapy." National Center for Lesbian Rights. N.p., 6 Dec. 2016. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
"About Us." API Wellness. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
"City of Refuge Community Church." Faith Street. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Flores, Nigel. "Jane Kim establishes first TLGB District in the U.S." ''The Guardsman''. N.p., 8 Feb. 2017. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Grant, Jaime M., Lisa A. Mottet, and Justin Tanis. ''Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey''. Rep. National Center for Transgender Equality, 2011. Web. <br><br />
Hay, Jeremy. "Police Abuse of Prostitutes in San Francisco." Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network. N.p., 1994. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Miller, Johnny. "Disco star Sylvester dies of AIDS, 1988." SFGate. Hearst Communications, 12 Dec. 2013. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Park, Haeyoun, and Iaryna Mykhyalyshyn. "L.G.B.T. People Are More Likely to Be Targets of Hate Crimes Than Any Other Minority Group." ''The New York Times''. 16 June 2016. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Horne, Andrea. Personal interview. 5 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Pershan, Caleb. "SF To Designate Nation's First Transgender Historic District In The Tenderloin." SFist. N.p., 31 Jan. 2017. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Romesburg, Dan. ''Racism and Reaction in the Castro: A Brief, Incomplete History.'' U.C. Berkeley, 2004. Web. <br><br />
Sanders. "Racism in the Castro: Race and sexuality in the queer community." FourTwoNine. N.p., 12 Apr. 2013. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
''Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria''. Dir. Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman. KQED, 19 June 2005. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
"Support Trans Youth." Trans Student Educational Resources. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Taylor, JT, and Jasmin Serim. ''San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer & Intersex Violence Prevention Needs Assessment''. Rep. San Francisco LGBT Community Center , Jan. 2015. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
"The Ark of Refuge." San Francisco Homeless Resource. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
"The Castro." Bay City Guide. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017. <br><br />
Wong, Julia Carrie. "LGBT people of color alienated by San Francisco Pride's plan for more police." ''The Guardian''. Guardian News and Media, 22 June 2016. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:2000s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Society_for_Individual_Rights_(SIR)&diff=28010
Society for Individual Rights (SIR)
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Bill Brent,'' Black Sheets ''magazine, 1998''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Sirlogo.jpg]]<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$sir-pocket-lawyer.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Society for Individual Rights Pocket Lawyer'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Sirpamphlet.jpg|360px|left]] As queer San Franciscans began to reap the hard-earned benefits of past two decades of organizing, the United States began to experience a profound social upheaval. The Society for Individual Rights (with the delightfully dominant acronym of "SIR") was formed in September 1964.<br />
<br />
SIR represented a new breed of homophile organization, one which was assertive and self-confident. Where earlier political bodies such as the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis had been assimilationist out of necessity, SIR was liberationist out of righteousness. It was also more democratic and inclusive, and this new style would become a model for gay political organizations to follow.<br />
<br />
One remarkable aspect of SIR, which seems obvious only in retrospect, was that it recognized the need to create a "community feeling." This was the first time that large numbers of gay men and women participated openly and freely in a gay political entity. SIR welcomed any activity that its members had the initiative to organize. Parties, dances, and entertainment of all kinds packed its calendars, along with bowling leagues, bridge clubs, meditation groups, art classes, and more. It operated a thrift shop stocked with goods donated by the gay male community and staffed by volunteers. In cooperation with the Public Health Department, it educated the gay male population about venereal disease. And in April 1966, SIR opened the first gay community center in the nation.<br />
<br />
SIR's glossy monthly magazine, ''Vector'', was widely available on newsstands throughout the City. It provided a forum for discussions and news on gay political progress. Local trends were highlighted; in 1968, ''Vector'' even published a thoughtful issue devoted to leather!<br />
<br />
Within two years, SIR was the largest homophile organization in the country. SIR and the Tavern Guild enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. SIR held fundraising auctions in the bars, which attracted patrons, and bars donated food and drink for SIR's parties. SIR's effective campaign against VD was due in part to the bars' willingness to display educational brochures and posters.<br />
<br />
The homophile movement also found allies in the socially concerned Protestant clergy, such as the Reverend A. Cecil Williams and Ted McIlvenna, a young minister who later became instrumental in San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. The alliance eventually led to the formation in December 1964 of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual.<br />
<br />
To raise funds for the fledgling organization, the ministers planned a New Year's Eve party for the gay community. In an era when the police arrested citizens and revoked liquor licenses for same-sex touching of the most innocent sort, holding a public gay dance was tantamount to a confrontation.<br />
<br />
On the [[New Year's Eve Jan. 1 1965: A Night for Gay Rights|night of the dance]], dozens of uniformed officers stalked California Hall, with police cars and paddy wagons parked in front. Police photographers took pictures of each of the 600 guests in a blatant attempt at harassment. Two days later, the ministers held a press conference condemning the police. They accused the police of "deliberate harassment and bad faith" and charged officers with "intimidation, broken promises, and obvious hostility." The police had overplayed their hand. ACLU lawyers, angered by the incident, took the case to trial. According to the ''Chronicle'', "complaining officers sat with mouths agape" as the judge ordered the jury to return a verdict in favor of the gays. The ministers validated the charges of police harassment in a way that the words of a homosexual individual did not.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Comptons.JPG|720px|thumb]]<br />
<br />
'''Compton's Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor, c. 1960s.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Shaping San Francisco''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Turk and Taylor 1971 from Phil Davies FB.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
'''Corner of Turk and Taylor, 1971, with Compton's Cafeteria decor visible foreground right.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: courtesy Phil Davies, via Facebook''<br />
<br />
In August 1966, a Tenderloin cafeteria became the site of a showdown between gays and police. Compton's, at the corner of Turk and Taylor, was frequented by hustlers and queens, One night, a policeman grabbed at one of the queens, and rather than tolerating the harassment, she threw her coffee in his face. Fighting erupted as angry young gays broke out the windows, threw dishes and trays at the officers, and burned down a nearby newsstand. The next day, drag queens were barred from the cafeteria, and a picket line sprang up. That night, protesters smashed the premises' newly installed plate-glass windows.<br />
<br />
[http://vimeo.com/1667849 Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria clip] from [http://vimeo.com/frameline Frameline]<br><br><br />
<br />
Thus, almost three years before Stonewall, San Francisco's gay militancy was born.<br><br><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Gays and Beats | Prev. Document]] [[1966 Vanguard Sweep | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:Polk Gulch]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Sister_Boom_Boom_and_JCC&diff=28009
Sister Boom Boom and JCC
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = arial light> <font color = maroon> <font size = 3>Unfinished History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Dr. Weirde''<br />
<br />
'''Where The Nun Runs the Men's Locker Room'''<br />
<br />
'''Jewish Community Center''', 3200 California Street. One of San Francisco's most beloved weird characters, Jack Fertig, a.k.a. Sister Boom Boom, worked here at the reception desk for the Sports Center. Sister Boom Boom, who ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1982 as the "Nun of the Above" candidate, was a frequent spokesnun for the [[Sisters--Against Guilt | Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence]], a group of drag-queen nuns dedicated to the expiation of stigmatic guilt and the promulgation of universal joy. With respect for personal religious beliefs, the Sisters would often satirize hierarchs and institutions, religious and/or political. <br />
<br />
<br />
[[Russians in the Richmond |Prev. Document]] [[Get Your Ashes Hauled |Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:Richmond District]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:religion]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Jewish]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Shameless_Hussy_Press,_1969-1989&diff=28008
Shameless Hussy Press, 1969-1989
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Lauren Kivlen, 2015''<br />
<br />
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" | Shameless Hussy Press was founded by Alta Gerrey in Oakland in 1969 and was the first feminist press in the United States. Shameless Hussy is responsible for publishing over fifty titles including the first books by four women who would later become internationally prominent feminist writers: Pat Parker, Mitsuye Yamada, Ntozake Shange, and Susan Griffin.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
[[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 1.jpg|350px|right|thumb]] <br />
<br />
'''Shameless Hussy '''<br />
<br />
''i am one of the true hussies; <br><br />
''i have no shame; <br><br />
''i was a housewife, and <br><br />
''stretched from the housiness of it (hus) <br><br />
''and the wifiness of (wif/hus-wif) to <br><br />
''a woman who cant bear wifedom (hussy) / i<br><br />
''grew beyond the house, like alice after eating <br><br />
''too many cookies. exactly what i did; i ate <br><br />
''too many cookies; lovers, poetry, moving my <br><br />
''body in a new way, an old way, the way women <br><br />
''like me have always moved, largely; with great <br><br />
''motions beyond our allotted sphere, with more <br><br />
''need than fear, and more grace than shame.[1]<br><br />
<br />
'''—By Alta'''<br />
<br />
A new kind of literary scene began to take shape in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. These decades marked an era in which poetry came to the streets, and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman could be found prophetically reciting their poems from soapboxes on Grant Avenue. The voices of these and other poets resonated throughout the city in pop up coffeehouses and pocket-sized poetry book series. Graham Mackintosh at White Rabbit Press and David Hazelwood of Auerhahn Books had great success publishing works by Jack Spicer, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia and others.[2] Writers were driven by a desire to break with literary and social rules, expanding the boundaries of what could be said and how it could be said. Despite the revolutionary character of these transgressive writings, they reproduced a radical literary scene that was dominated by white middle-class males. Not for long. A Nevada-born single-mom was about to transform this scene forever. <br />
<br />
With the burgeoning second-wave of feminism close behind her, Alta Gerrey (aka Alta), founded the first feminist press in the United States: Shameless Hussy Press. She says, “I started the first feminist press in [the second] wave of feminism in America. At that time, 94% of the books printed in the US were written by men. I called the press Shameless Hussy because my mother used that term for women she didn’t approve of, and no one approved of what I was doing.”[3] Founding the first feminist press in the U.S. was no easy task. Alta ran the press for 20 years in the midst of death threats and persistent sexism. Through the hardships, Shameless Hussy Press managed to make significant contributions to the history of women’s literature. Shameless Hussy is responsible for publishing over fifty titles including the first books by four women who would later become prominent, internationally known feminist writers: Pat Parker, Mitsuye Yamada, Ntozake Shange, and Susan Griffin.<br />
<br />
Alta was born in 1942 in Reno, Nevada. In 1954, her family moved to Berkeley so that her brother could attend the California School for the Blind. She attended UC Berkeley in the early 1960s, but dropped out to teach in Virginia where protests over segregation / integration had led to the closure of public schools. In an interview about the experience, she said, “Obviously they didn’t need some white chick from California. I found out my job was to fight racism in my own community among whites.”[4] Upon her return to California a few months later, she began to question the institution of marriage and explored this in her early writing. In 1970, her second marriage to poet, John Oliver Simon, ended in divorce. By this time, Alta had moved to Oakland where she organized a commune that provided refuge for women escaping abusive marriages; it was here that Shameless Hussy Press was born. Like many independent and leftist presses at that time, Shameless Hussy operated on a shoestring while Alta, a single mother, scraped by on welfare. <br />
<br />
By the late 60s, feminist writing communities were beginning to take shape around the country in what were called, “small group meetings.” Alta says, <br />
<br />
<blockquote>“One of my neighbors had one; a woman named Leonore invited six of us over for dinner one night; and another woman named Marilyn invited a few people over for afternoon tea. We started reading that there were women’s groups getting together and we realized that’s what we’d been doing at Susan Griffin’s house.”[5] </blockquote><br />
<br />
Alta, Susan Griffin, Pat Parker and others in the group had all been writing for years, but none of them could get published. She remembers,<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“I couldn’t get published except by my ex-husband. Susie [Susan] Griffin couldn’t get published. I knew she was a great poet. Pat Parker couldn’t get published and I knew she was a great poet. I’d lived with John Oliver Simon for three years, and I saw him publish and print his own books. He had taught me how to print. When I realized that all you had to do was put paper in a printing press and have it come out and fold it, and call it something . . . if you did that for eight pieces of paper, folded them, and called it something, it was a book. So I learned how to make a book. I had been reading Anaïs Nin’s diaries, and I knew that she and Henry Miller had made books on a letterpress. When I found out that the only person who would publish me was my ex-husband, and no one would publish Susie, and no one would publish Pat, I thought, I think I can do this.”[6] </blockquote><br />
<br />
[[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 2.jpg|330px|right|thumb]] Alta read anything she could get her hands on by women writers. She found ten poems about being a woman and put them all in the first book she printed—an anthology of women’s poetry called ''Remember Our Fire''. She published 250 copies and started taking them to local bookstores, Cody’s Bookstore and Up Haste being the only two bookstores that agreed to sell them. “And a miracle happened,” Alta remembers, “We sold out in six months.”[7]<br />
<br />
The early success of Shameless Hussy did not come without hardships. Alta received multiple messages threatening to take her life and destroy her press. “When I say I got death threats I’m not kidding,” Alta says. “People threatened to destroy my press, my physical AB Dick 360 offset press.”[8] Alta took the threats very seriously. Not wanting to endanger her press or her daughter, she picked up everything and moved to San Lorenzo. “I had to move to the suburbs and get a post office box and an unlisted phone number, because the kind of people who were making the threats were terrified of the suburbs. They were scared to go out there,” she says.[9] Diana Press, another feminist press founded in Oakland, received similar threats but decided against moving their location. [[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 3.jpg|left|260px|thumb]] One night in 1977, the press’s workshop and books were destroyed in a raid led by unknown suspects. They had only published 3 books when they got wiped out. One was a children's coloring book.[10] About two years later, evidence surfaced that it had been a group of women who were responsible for the crime. After the raid, reflecting upon the threats she received, Alta claimed that it was women who were threatening her also.[11] Alta remembers that Mama's Press, also in that area of Oakland, suffered the same destruction in 1973 or 1974.[12]<br />
<br />
Despite the opposition, Shameless Hussy Press would publish over fifty books between 1969-1989. During the first five years, using her AB Dick 360 offset press, Alta physically produced all of her books herself--printing, collating, and stapling each one. “Then I physically shlepped them around,” she remembers. “I didn’t have a driver’s license at the time. I physically took them in boxes on the bus, to the two bookstores.”[13] Small press distribution companies were not in existence during this time. Shameless Hussy books were distributed with the help of Alta’s friend, Alma Cremonesi. Alma went to women’s conferences with books while Alta took boxes to American Library Association conferences and American Booksellers Association conferences.[14] Finally, in 1974, Shameless Hussy was featured in a catalog of women’s groups and businesses. By this time, about a dozen women’s bookstores had appeared in the American landscape, and they all ordered Shameless Hussy books.[15]<br />
<br />
[[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 4.jpg|280px|right|thumb]] The last book that Alta printed herself was Ntozake Shange’s, ''For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf'' in 1974. She remembers,<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“By this time I had a printing company that I worked with, so I wasn’t doing the books myself. The last book I did myself on my AB Dick 360 out in the garage was Ntozake’s. The reason I did it, because by then I could have hired another printer to do it, was I loved Ntozake’s book so much that I wanted to print it. So For Colored Girls is the last book that I printed.”[16] </blockquote><br />
<br />
[[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 5.jpg|200px|left|thumb|'''Ntozake Shange''']] Alta’s working relationship with Shange was unexpected. She had met Shange’s sister, Thulani Davis, at a poetry reading in the San Francisco Public Library. Amazed by Davis’s work, she offered her a business card for Shameless Hussy Press. Davis never sent Alta a manuscript, but her sister Shange did.[17] The manuscript, a series of 20 poems called ''For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf'', told the stories of seven women of color who had been oppressed by racism and sexism.[18] <br />
<br />
<blockquote>''“somebody/ anybody<br><br />
<br />
''sing a black girl's song<br><br />
<br />
''bring her out<br><br />
<br />
''to know herself<br><br />
<br />
''to know you<br><br />
<br />
''but sing her rhythms<br><br />
<br />
''carin/ struggle/ hard times<br><br />
<br />
''sing her song of life<br><br />
<br />
''she's been dead so long<br><br />
<br />
''closed in silence so long<br><br />
<br />
''she doesn't know the sound<br><br />
<br />
''of her own voice<br><br />
<br />
''her infinite beauty<br><br />
<br />
''she's half-notes scattered<br><br />
<br />
''without rhythm/ no tune<br><br />
<br />
''sing her sighs<br><br />
<br />
''sing the song of her possibilities<br><br />
<br />
''sing a righteous gospel<br><br />
<br />
''let her be born<br><br />
<br />
''let her be born<br><br />
<br />
''& handled warmly.”[19]<br></blockquote><br />
<br />
'''— from Ntozake Shange’s, ''For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf'' '''<br />
<br />
Shortly after being published by Shameless Hussy, the series became a broadway hit in New York as a choreopoem performed with dancing and music. <br />
<br />
In addition to Shange’s work, Shameless Hussy also published the first books by three other women who would later become notable feminist writers. “It’s funny how famous some of the authors got,” says Alta. “Susan Griffin got really famous.”[20] [[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 6.jpg|right|240px|thumb|'''Susan Griffin''']] Known to her as “Susie”, Griffin is now considered one of the most influential feminist writers of the 20th century. She and Griffin belonged to the same women’s group in Berkeley. “Susie and I found each other in her kitchen,” Alta remembers.[21] Alta recognized Griffin’s talent and published her first books, The Sink and dear sky. Her poetry aimed to publicize rape as a political act.[22] Alta, Griffin, Judy Grahn and Pat Parker would have long discussions about how political their poetry should be. “We would argue about how political should we make stuff. Should we stick to the personal. Susie kept saying, ‘the personal is political.’”[23] Griffin is now recognized as a prominent eco-feminist writer. Her work draws connections between the destruction of nature and the marginalization of women.[24] <br />
<br />
Shameless Hussy also published Pat Parker’s first book, Child of Myself in 1971. Parker is recognized as one of the first black lesbian writers in the United States.[25] [[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 7.jpg|220px|left|thumb|'''Pat Parker''']] She met Alta through Alta’s ex-husband, John Oliver Simon, who had asked both women to be editors for his literary magazine. Alta remembers that Parker used to go to late night porno shows in Oakland as a way to relax: <br />
<br />
<blockquote>“She came over to my house and said, Alta, I think there’s a reason I like to watch naked women. I said, yeah, what’s that? She said, I think I like women. I said, well a lot of us like to watch naked women, Pat. She said, no, I mean I really like to watch naked women! So a few months later she wrote a poem about it, brought it to me, and said, Alta, I think I’m a dyke! Do you know any? I said, well Judy Grahn is writing a book called ''Edward the Dyke''. She said, who’s Judy Grahn?”[26]</blockquote><br />
<br />
Soon enough, Parker, Grahn, Griffin and Alta became, as Alta says, “The Big Four.”[27] In addition to knowing the women in “The Big Four,” Parker was also close friends with Audre Lorde. She and Lorde exchanged visits and letters until her death.[28] Parker died of breast cancer in 1989.<br />
<br />
In 1976 Alta met English professor, Mitsuye Yamada. Yamada was born to first-generation Japanese immigrants, and spent her early life in Seattle, Washington. In 1942, Yamada and her family were interned at Minidoka War Relocation Center, Idaho.[29] Shortly after meeting Yamada, Shameless Hussy decided to publish her work ''Camp Notes and Other Poems''. [[Image:Lauren Kivlen Shameless Hussy 8.jpg|right|300px|thumb]] This groundbreaking series expressed the weight of her experience living in a Japanese Internment Camp, capturing the pain she felt at being perceived as an outsider.[30] Alta remembers,<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“After Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes came out we learned that it was the first book since 1947 that had been published by a Japanese-American about her experiences in the camps. There had been two books published in the 1940s, and they had both gone out of print.”[31] </blockquote><br />
<br />
It didn’t take long for ''Camp Notes'' to become a success. UC Berkeley professor of literature, Bob Yamada, discovered the book at a store in Berkeley and incorporated it into his syllabus. “Once a professor picks it up it’s such a breakthrough,” Alta says.[32]<br />
<br />
During the mid-70s, other feminist presses also had a breakthrough. Presses appeared across the nation, as did women’s bookstores, and feminist publications were becoming more widespread. The First National Women in Print Conference had been organized in 1976 by June Arnold and Daughters Publishers, and Feminist Bookstore News came out as a way for women’s presses, authors, bookstores and illustrators to stay in touch.[33] The Bay Area, in particular, transformed greatly with the wave of the women’s movement. A Woman’s Place Bookstore was founded in Oakland, and Carol Seajay started her own women’s bookstore in San Francisco ([[Carol_Seajay,_Old_Wives_Tales_and_the_Feminist_Bookstore_Network|Old Wives Tales]]) with a loan from SF’s Feminist Credit Union.[34] In San Francisco women made the Mission Dolores neighborhood theirs. Women created their own cafes (Artemis Cafe), bath houses (Osento), dance bars (Amelia’s), art groups ([[Mujeres Muralistas|Mujeres Muralistas]]) and salons (Garbos — a lesbian-owned haircutting shop).[35]<br />
<br />
The climate for feminism and small press distribution had changed dramatically by the mid-80s. Feminist, gay, lesbian and other independent presses and bookstores flourished with the emergence of alternative book distributors, such as the Berkeley-based Bookpeople.[36] Feminist newspapers, journals and magazines were also thriving. “People weren’t threatening my press in the 1980s like they had in the 1970s,” Alta says. “That was a great relief. And there were so many women’s presses. It was like mushrooms. It was wonderful! I didn’t feel as isolated. And libraries were excited about our work. It began to be really clear that the historical movement that we were a part of was not going to be ignored. That was a wonderful thing.”[37] <br />
<br />
But by the 1980s, Alta was tired. She had wanted to close the press in the early part of the decade, but chose not to because one of her employees, Jennifer Stone, told her she couldn’t close the press while Reagan was in power. “So I didn’t quit,” remembers Alta. “But the press shows that the last ten years I was tired. The press shows it and the books show it.”[38] Shameless Hussy officially closed in 1989 after twenty years of publishing. The last book Alta published was a series of her own poems called ''Deluged with Dudes''. The book, which was about relationships with men, was released when lesbian separatism was at its height. “People were upset by ''Deluged with Dudes''. I knew they would be,” Alta says. “Shameless Hussy started with ''Letters to Women'', which were love poems to women. And it ended with ''Deluged with Dudes''.”[39]<br />
<br />
Shameless Hussy and other early feminist presses played critical roles in the development of early women’s liberation. Art, poetry, and literature shaped the ideology of the movement and made it accessible to women. As feminist, Deborah Gerson, says, <br />
<br />
<blockquote>“[Women] weren’t taking a, sort of, Marxist framework or even a black liberation framework, they were creating their own framework. So, there’s a way that all these presses then, we could share and look at it...Alta did it and Judy Grahn’s the ''She Who'' poems or ''The Common Woman'' poems, those seven portraits, like ‘Oh! This is what women’s liberation is!’...There’s a way that all of this writing really increased the level of understanding of each other and of the collectivity we were calling women in need of liberation, you know. There was a kind of subtlety and specificity to our understanding that couldn’t be gained by just rhetorical or analytical pieces.”[40] </blockquote><br />
<br />
Thanks to Shameless Hussy, the voices of Pat Parker, Susan Griffin, Ntozake Shange, Mistuye Yamada and others have inspired women around the country and the world. Shameless Hussy’s contributions to the history of women’s literature and to the feminist movement have been invaluable. As the history of Shameless Hussy demonstrates, the women’s movement has made great strides toward liberation, but Alta believes that women still have work to do: “Feminism will never be dead as long as women are being beaten by their husbands, or raped, or sold into sexual slavery, or don’t get paid as much as men, or can’t get good health care. We have to have feminism. That’s how we become free people.”[41] <br />
<br />
<font size=4>Notes</font size><br />
<br />
[1] Alta, ''The Shameless Hussy: Selected Stories, Essays and Poetry'' (New York: Crossing Press, 1980), 1<br><br />
[2] Stephen Vincent, [[Poetry_Readings/Reading_Poetry_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area|The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language and Performance]] (1981), excerpted, Shaping San Francisco’s Digital Archive, (accessed 3 Apr. 2015).<br><br />
[3] ''She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry'', dir. by Mary Dore<br><br />
[4] Jennifer Stone, “Alta: Shameless Hussy,” ''City Miner'', (Fall/Winter 1976): 10-11, 42-45. <br><br />
[5],[6],[7],[8],[9],[11],[13],[14],[15],[16],[17],[20],[21],[23],[25],[26],[27],[31],[32],[36],[37],[38],[39],[41] Alta Gerrey, interviewed by Irene Reti, ''Alta and The History of Shameless Hussy Press'', University Library, UC Santa Cruz, 2001.<br><br />
[10] David Armstrong, ''A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America'' (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 157<br><br />
[12] Per email with Alta Gerrey, August 5, 2015.<br><br />
[18],[19] Ntozake Shange, ''For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf'' (Oakland: Shameless Hussy Press, 1974)<br><br />
[22] Maggie Humm, ''Modern Feminisms: Political, Literary, Cultural'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 75<br><br />
[24] Susan Griffin, [http://www.susangriffin.com/Bio.html “Bio,”] Susan Griffin, (accessed 28 Mar. 2015)<br><br />
[28] Alexis De Veaux, ''Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde'' (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 167-169<br><br />
[29] Mitsuye Yamada, [http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf5d5nb2wc/entire_text/ “Biography,”] ''Guide to the Mitsuye Yamada Papers'', (acccessed 28 Mar. 2015)<br><br />
[30] Mitsuye Yamada, ''Camp Notes and Other Poems'' (Oakland: Shameless Hussy Press, 1976)<br><br />
[33],[34],[35] Elizabeth Sullivan, "Historical Essay," [[Carol_Seajay,_Old_Wives_Tales_and_the_Feminist_Bookstore_Network |Carol Seajay, Old Wives Tales and the Feminist Bookstore Network]], Shaping San Francisco’s Digital Archive, (accessed 8 Mar. 2015). <br><br />
[40] Interview with Deborah Gerson by author, May 7, 2015.<br><br />
<br />
<br />
[[category:Women]] [[category:Media]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Literary San Francisco]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Sex_Panic_Closes_Bathhouses&diff=28007
Sex Panic Closes Bathhouses
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Gayle Rubin''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$folsom-prison.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Gay Nightclub Prison, 1970s'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Crawford Barton''<br />
<br />
''Before there were any openly gay or lesbian leaders, political clubs, books, films, newspapers, businesses, neighborhoods, churches or legally recognized gay rights, several generations of pioneers spontaneously created gay bathhouses and lesbian and gay bars. . . . [G]ay baths and bars became the first stages of a movement of civil rights for gay people in the United States. . . . Gay bathhouses represent a major success in a century-long political struggle to overcome isolation and develop a sense of community and pride in their sexuality, to gain their right to sexual privacy, to win their right to associate with each other in public, and to create safety zones where gay men could be sexual and affectionate with each other with a minimal threat of violence, blackmail, loss of employment, arrest, imprisonment, and humiliation. . . . ''<br />
<br />
As a historian, it is clear to me that yet another government campaign to dismantle gay institutions, even in the well-motivated attempt to stop the spread of AIDS, will only backfire. . . . Instead of wasting its time defending its bathhouses, its bars, and its very right to exist, the gay community must be allowed to devote all its resources, including the bathhouses, toward promoting the research, health programs and safe sex educational measures that will save lives. (Brub 1984)<br />
<br />
While bathhouse closure may appear tangential to the impact of AIDS on the leather community, the links are strong. Bathhouse closure exemplifies the way in which public policy decisions driven by misplaced passions often had unintended and unanticipated consequences. As with other sexually transmitted diseases, early attempts to explain and combat AIDS often assumed a profoundly moralistic cast that had little connection to the exigencies of epidemiological intervention. Sex prejudice, sex moralism, and sex panic often powered analysis and policy. (Brandt 1988; Brub 1988; Patton 1985; Triechler 1988)<br />
<br />
Proponents of bathhouse closure, such as Randy Shilts, argued that their program was an obvious common sense measure to save lives. They portrayed the debate about closure as one pitting public health against civil liberties. Shilts in particular wrote as if public health professionals were in agreement on the desirability of closing the baths, and that only political considerations were preventing them from doing so. (Shilts 1987)<br />
<br />
On the contrary, bathhouse closure, far from being an obvious public health measure impeded by political pressure, was a case of political pressure overwhelming public health considerations. Public health professionals were not unanimous about the necessity or desirability of closing the baths, which stayed open in most other cities. It is ironic that while there are still no legal gay bathhouses within the San Francisco city limits, establishments in nearby municipalities such as Berkeley and San Jose have continued to thrive.<br />
<br />
It is arguable that what mattered in the long run was changing behavior, not its location. Closing the baths may have actually impeded the progress of safe-sex education. Even in situations where the ownership did not cooperate, safe sex was spreading, like the epidemic itself, from person to person, through sexual contact, as men would engage each other in discussions of what they were or were not about to do. Wholesale closure eliminated opportunities for sex education along with opportunities for sex. At the baths, the concentrated populations of those at high risk for AIDS provided opportunities for educators to disseminate condoms along with written guidelines for AIDS risk reduction. (Murray & Payne 1988; Bolton 1992)<br />
<br />
The social costs of closing the baths were treated cavalierly. Those who pushed for closure appeared to assume that nothing important or good ever happened in the sex palaces. They failed to recognize the baths and sex clubs as important institutions that served many needs within a diverse gay male community. (Brub 1996) The major gay baths had deep pockets and expensive attorneys, and could afford a protracted legal fight. By contrast, many of the leather clubs were relatively small operations in which a dedicated owner had invested most of his capital and a great deal of personal commitment, and they could not afford prolonged litigation. Calls for closure quickly claimed most of the specialized leather, SM, and fisting sex clubs even before any city actions were taken, and as the agitation intensified, most of the men who ran the leather clubs elected to shut down and limit their losses. The wider social and economic fallout from closure was also substantial. While the owners of bathhouses were frequently vilified as greedy capitalists (and some undoubtedly were), the debates never grappled with the importance of the baths to gay male social life or the economic impact of closure on the gay economy.<br />
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New sexual spaces eventually began to reemerge by the end of the 1980s. Many were small, some were dirty, and most were ill-equipped and lacking in the accumulation of small improvements that had made the older clubs comfortable and sexy. Some of the clubs lacked even the most basic of the amenities taken for granted in the old facilities. The infrastructure of semipublic sex was degraded as a result.<br />
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This began to change only in 1992, with the opening of Eros and Blowbuddies, two clubs that permit only safe sex on the premises. They have been followed by others, and something of a sex club renaissance is now underway. The infrastructure of gay male commercial sex is being slowly rebuilt. Nonetheless, few of the current facilities can compare with the sex palaces of yesteryear. Nostalgia for those well-developed installations has contributed to recent calls in the local gay press for removing all of the regulations put in place by the closure campaigns. Instead, new regulations have been adopted. Removing the regulations might hasten the recovery of baths and sex clubs, but some changes are irreversible. One of these is the displacement of the gay and leather communities from the South of Market.<br />
<br />
''--Gayle Rubin, excerpted from "The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather, 1962-1997" in ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture'' (City Lights: 1998)<br />
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[[Image:Aniteatthebaths.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''This flyer was produced in 1983.'''<br />
<br />
'''A Nite at the Baths'''<br />
<br />
Experts on ASSES will be available to answer YOUR questions:<br />
"What do I do when they declare my apartment an official health hazard?"<br />
"When the baths become health clubs who will make sure the only thing we pump is iron?"<br />
"How can I buy condoms without the clerk thinking I'm straight?"<br />
"Do I need to take my bodily fluids to a toxic waste dump?"<br />
<br />
Acquired Surveillance-System Efficiency Syndrome (A.S.S.E.S.) is sweeping our community with guilt and repression. Spread by intimate contact in the seedy backrooms of politicians and bureaucrats, ASSES threatens to deprive us of our civil rights. Its victims--typically promiscuous politicians--are overwhelmed by delusions of superiority and the need to police other people's behavior. There is no cure for ASSES once it strikes.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, WE have all the answers and know what's best for you. At this intensive one-night workshop, your favorite gay leaders will offer their own lives as models for you to follow. You CAN survive sex in the age of Big Brother:<br />
MENTAL MASTURBATION--the hands-off approach<br />
PHONE SEX--anonymity with safety, the best of both worlds.<br />
COPING--feel better by guilt-tripping others.<br />
OBEY AUTHORITY--who needs S/M? The bureaucrats and politicians will give you all the discipline you need.<br />
PLUS: "Getting Off by Getting Votes"-an alternative to sex from SF's favorite gay supervisor.<br />
<br />
Lick ASSES before it licks us!<br />
(Wondering where it all leads to? You don't have to swallow it. Laws, regulations, vice squads and politicians never solve problems, they ARE the problem. We can make our community a safe and healthy place to live WITHOUT their help. If you're concerned, say so. . . A message from Housewives for Safe Sex, PO Box 11622, SF, CA 94101.)<br />
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[[Coming Out into the 1970s | Prev. Document]] [[The 1980s | Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:SOMA]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1990s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=San_Francisco_Pride,_Chelsea_Manning,_and_Queer_Assimilation&diff=28006
San Francisco Pride, Chelsea Manning, and Queer Assimilation
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Caitlin Carmody''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Addressing-injustice.png|left]] <br />
<br />
<br />
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" | '''In 2013, activists in the LGBTQ community quickly organized around the proposal of Bradley (Chelsea) Manning—which was then rescinded—as a candidate for Grand Marshall in that year's SF Pride Parade. The controversy regarding Manning highlighted problems in the evolution of the largest LGBT gathering in the nation and indeed in the gay rights movement itself. From parade officials' support of the military to legalization of gay marriage to the Manning contingent as the largest non-corporate contingent in the parade, politics within the movement is explored.'''<br />
|}<br />
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<br />
In April 2013, San Francisco Pride seemed to take an exciting step with the nomination of queer military whistleblower Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning as a grand marshal for the 2013 Pride parade. Manning would not have been present for the honor, as she was in military custody facing life in prison for revealing war crimes committed by the United States during the war in Iraq. But Daniel Ellsberg, fellow whistleblower and famed leaker of the Pentagon Papers, was happy to accept the honor on her behalf and represent her in the parade. In nominating a queer military whistleblower, Pride was making an important statement about the values of the gay rights movement; grand marshals “are the public emissaries of Pride. They represent a mix of individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community. With the help of community input, Pride selects these groups and individuals as Grand Marshals in order to honor the work they have put into furthering the causes of LGBT people.”(1)<br />
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[[Image:Pride_in_our_whistleblower_2242.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
'''Manning contingent was the largest in SF Pride march, June 2013.'''<br />
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''Photo: courtesy [http://www.privatemanning.org/featured/taking-pride-in-bradley-manning Private Manning.org]''<br />
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No sooner had this honor been bestowed upon Manning when San Francisco Pride Board President Lisa Williams released a statement revoking the honor. The statement indicated Manning's nomination had been an error committed by someone within Pride going rogue and “never should have been allowed to happen.” Williams wrote: "Bradley Manning(2) is facing the military justice system of this country. We all await the decision of that system. However, until that time, even the hint of support for actions which placed in harms [sic] way the lives of our men and women in uniform— and countless others, military and civilian alike — will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride. It is, and would be, an insult to every one [sic], gay and straight, who has ever served in the military of this country." The response to Williams' statement from the more radical edge of the gay rights movement in the Bay Area was swift and furious. Williams' statement seemed to many on the “queer Left” as horribly illustrative of an ongoing tension within the movement for gay rights: are we looking to join the system, imperialism, war, and all, or are we opposed to the rotten status quo and want to radically transform it? Had Manning not “made significant contributions to the LGBT community” in revealing U.S. war crimes in Iraq? Do queers not care about militarization, racism, imperialism, and massacre in the name of patriotism and “freedom”? <br />
<br />
Pride president Lisa Williams said naming Manning as a grand marshal would be an insult to everyone who had ever served in the military; for me, what seemed the biggest insult was Pride taking the side of the U.S. military and its war crimes, elevating the military to untouchable status: “Thou shalt not utter a word against war,” was Pride's party line. It was alarming to see the leadership of one of the largest gay pride parades in the world completely uncritically endorsing what they called “the military justice system,” as if such a system dispenses what we all call “justice.” It was also alarming to hear them condemn Manning’s actions, which they erroneously claim “placed in harm’s way the lives of our men and women in uniform -- and countless others, military and civilian alike.” Many people, including many former members of the military, characterized Manning’s actions as an important act of dissidence, blowing the whistle on U.S. war crimes, and saving countless human lives by throwing a wrench in the U.S. war machine. It was not Manning’s actions, but the U.S. military establishment, that place in harm’s way, and actively end, the lives of many people, civilian and military, U.S. and Iraqi alike (though Pride seemed not to care about dead Iraqi civilians). Pride’s statement via Williams was also alarmingly repressive: not a hint of support for Manning’s actions would be tolerated. Hardly the endorsement of free speech and dissent one would hope for from “gay rights leaders.” <br />
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/1OX8RY6PHD8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
''Video: courtesy [http://www.privatemanning.org/featured/taking-pride-in-bradley-manning Private Manning.org]''<br />
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Meanwhile, in a quiet but important shift, for the first time ever Pride allowed a military recruitment booth as an exhibitor at the SF Pride Parade. The message was crystal clear: this is not a radical, dissident show of pride and resistance, but a celebration of the status quo and gays' inclusion in it. Clare Bayard, a longtime San Francisco queer organizer on issues of racism, militarism, and war with Catalyst Project, said of military recruitment at Pride: "It's shocking, but not surprising. Since the community response was so loud and clear when Pride threw Bradley Manning under the bus, they've found another way to reassert their role in trying to defang a queer liberation movement with a long history of challenging militarism." (3)<br />
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In response to Pride's rejection of Manning as a grand marshal, supporters of Manning decided to nominate her as “Community Grand Marshal” and marched in the parade in her honor. Organizers of the contingent expected to draw a few hundred people, but the “Bradley Manning Support Network” contingent drew over 2,000 people marching in support of the jailed, queer military whistleblower whom SF Pride had pointedly turned its back on. The energy in the contingent, which spanned four city blocks, was high, with many people carrying signs that read “When they came for Bradley Manning, I spoke out,” “I'm Proud of Bradley Manning,” “Shame on SF Pride,” and “Bradley Manning Walks With Me.” Others carried signs reflecting the intersectional demands of the left leaning part of the gay rights movement: “Stop violence on LGBT people” and “Smash racism, sexism, and bigotry,” In the part of the contingent where I marched, we chanted loudly throughout the march, “L, G, B, T, Bradley Manning Speaks for Me, L, G, B, T, Q, Bradley Manning Speaks for You” and “They Say Court Martial, We Say Grand Marshal!” Other than several people belligerently booing us, the response from the crowd was overwhelmingly positive. There were some seemingly befuddled people as well: “Why are these gay people carrying signs saying “Shame on SF Pride” while they march in the SF Pride parade?” their faces seemed to say. Luckily, marchers had lots of informational materials to hand out, and did so. In other parts of the contingent, people played and danced to music, did flash mobs, and the Brass Liberation Orchestra played rousing brass tunes for queer liberation. One longtime queer activist who has lived in San Francisco for 30 years told me that nothing except marching in support of Manning could have convinced her to march in the Pride parade, which she said had long since become a sellout. <br />
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[[Image:Blo 2263.jpg|720px]] <br />
<br />
'''Brass Liberation Orchestra rocks the Manning continent at SF Pride, June 2013.'''<br />
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''Photo: courtesy [http://www.privatemanning.org/featured/taking-pride-in-bradley-manning Private Manning.org]''<br />
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The controversy over Manning's inclusion as a grand marshal in the 2013 San Francisco Pride Parade felt like a stark and important referendum on the direction of the gay rights movement. San Francisco Pride took place the weekend of June 27 through 29, 2013. Just the day before, on June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down California Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Gay marriage was now legal in California in addition to 15 other states, and the federal government no longer defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. President Obama's administration had not even defended the Defense of Marriage Act in court for the last two years; the national tide on gay marriage seemed to have officially turned. People in the gay rights movement had a variety of responses to these Supreme Court victories, from unequivocal jubilation to hesitant celebration to absolute disavowal of marriage as an institution. But in San Francisco, with Pride weekend coming on the heels of a victory for the most heavily resourced gay rights battle of the past decade, the overwhelming response seemed to be “Pride is going to be SO AWESOME!” People wanted to celebrate this victory with rainbows, glitter, dancing, and jubilance. <br />
<br />
The large Bradley Manning contingent in the 2013 Pride parade was the largest non corporate contingent and second in size overall only to Google.(4) It seemed to me to be emblematic of the radical backlash against the mainstream gay rights movement and its assimilationist agenda. While searching for and waiting in a very long line to use a porta potty a long ways from the Manning contingent, I watched other individuals, floats, and contingents. The mood was, while not completely apolitical, certainly very celebratory and not very fierce, angry, or radical. Everywhere I turned there was a corporate float or a well branded (read: rainbow on corporate logo) corporate employee: Wells Fargo, Google, Clear Channel, Kaiser Permanente, Bank of America, BMW, Facebook, Macy's, Salesforce, JP Morgan Chase, Twitter. I was reminded of a protest photo I'd seen awhile ago that read: “Stonewall was a riot, not a brand.” Where was the anger about the economic crisis caused by the very banks marching in the parade whose nefarious practices have left many queers homeless? Where was the outrage about the displacement of low income queers due to astronomic rent prices driven by the tech industry? <br />
<br />
Is this what success looks like? Is this what liberation looks like, to have corporate giants flocking to the “largest LGBT gathering in the nation?”(5) Is this the best that the largest LGBT gathering in the nation can do, to open its arms to corporate giants wreaking havoc on queer communities, and reject a queer whistle-blower who alerted us to war crimes committed in our name? “NO” was the resounding answer from 2,000 people at Pride that day, and I hope that number continues to grow. <br />
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[[Image:Free bradley manning 2247.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
''Photo: courtesy [http://www.privatemanning.org/featured/taking-pride-in-bradley-manning Private Manning.org]''<br />
<br />
'''Notes'''<br />
<br />
1. http://sfpride.org/parade/grand-marshals.html <br><br />
2. At the time, Manning was still going by Bradley. She has since made public that she now goes by Chelsea. <br><br />
3. https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/26-8 <br><br />
4. http://www.popularresistance.org/over-thousand-in-bradley-manning-support-contingent-at-sf-pride-2013/ <br><br />
5. http://sfpride.org/celebration/ <br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:2010s]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Downtown]] [[category:Bay Area Social Movements]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=San_Francisco_Police_Hold_a_Scandalous_Orgy&diff=28005
San Francisco Police Hold a Scandalous Orgy
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = arial light> <font color = maroon> <font size = 3>Unfinished History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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[[Image:tendrnob$california-hall.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''California Hall at 625 Polk in the mid-1990s.'''<br>''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
'''Das Deutsches Haus, a.k.a. California Hall, 625 Polk Street.''' In the early 1980's, this prime example of German Renaissance-style architecture was the scene of a notorious sex party celebrating the graduation of new San Francisco Police Department cadets. In one particularly celebrated incident, the cops handcuffed a cadet to a chair and forced him to submit to oral copulation by a female prostitute. The cadet, who was gay, felt humiliated, and the event became one of the landmark scandals of the Feinstein administration.<br />
<br />
This building also hosted a [[Society for Individual Rights (SIR)| New Years Eve party]] thrown by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in 1964, which led to a serious police scandal and helped shift gay-police relations in San Francisco.<br />
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[[Mitchell Brothers |Prev. Document]] [[The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) Hearing and Riot of 1960 |Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:TenderNob]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Polk Gulch]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:LGBTQI]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=SOMA%27s_Gay_Leather_Kings&diff=28004
SOMA's Gay Leather Kings
2018-10-16T15:09:11Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Gayle S. Rubin''<br />
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[[Image:soma1$leather-master-and-slave.jpg]]<br />
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'''S/M Gays at Folsom Street Fair mid-1990s.'''<br>''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
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South of Market has been undergoing so much rapid change in recent years that many of its current habitues are unaware of or uneasy about its recent past. The newspapers endlessly repeat a mantra of how brave pioneers -- usually restauranteurs catering to an "upscale" crowd -- have wrested the area away from the "lowlife" elements that once made the area "undesirable." This point of view rests on the assumption that it is "right" and "good" when "disreputable" populations such as gay people, the poor, or people of color are displaced by wealthier, whiter, straighter, more "respectable" folk.<br />
<br />
[[Leather Kings | Gay "leathermen"]] are one of the most visible and least understood of the ostensibly vanishing groups of SOMA aboriginals. Reading about the world of leather in the straight press is a bit like reading the reports about indigenous peoples written by dumfounded missionaries in the heyday of colonialism.<br />
<br />
When I see the disappearance of its gay population used an indicator of the South of Market "renaissance," I am reminded of the ways white settlers in North America spoke of the Native Americans they displaced.<br />
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The gay male leather presence South of Market has diminished substantially in recent years. But leathermen are still an important population in the area, coexisting uneasily with the new ''arrivistes''. On this occasion of the sixth Folsom Street Fair, they will be out in force. It is appropriate to recall who they are, how they got here, and that they have a legitimate stake in the neighborhood and its future.<br />
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''--Gayle Rubin,'' excerpted from "Requiem for the Valley of the Leather Kings," originally published in ''Southern Oracle'', 1989<br />
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[[SOUTH OF MARKET/SOMA |Prev. Document]] [[Folsom St Gulch 1970s |Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:SOMA]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1990s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Roots_of_Urban_Resistance,_1998&diff=28003
Roots of Urban Resistance, 1998
2018-10-16T15:09:10Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Richard Walker, 1998''<br />
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''This is an excerpt from "Appetite for the City," originally published in ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History Politics Culture'' (City Lights Books: San Francisco 1998), ed. by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters''<br />
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The contrariness of San Franciscans to the annihilation of their city has been exceptional, as has the success of antidevelopment politics. Simple defense of living space and neighborhoods against the wrecking ball has played its part, to be sure, and so have the organizing efforts of dedicated radicals and the peculiarities of local political structures. But these visible parts of civic resistance need roots and soil to grow in, and here San Francisco demonstrated for a time a most favorable economic, political, and cultural substratum.<br />
<br />
[[Image:downtwn1$aerial-of-embarcadero-freeway.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''The [[The Freeway Revolt|Embarcadero Freeway]] separates the [[The Ferry Building|Ferry Building]] from the city in this 1958 photo. The Ferry Plaza had been a central gathering point for generations of San Franciscans and visitors prior to marching up Market Street.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library''<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Under the Economic Volcano</font size><br />
<br />
Economics undergirds so much, and it is hard to escape San Francisco’s legacy of wealth. Cities have been wellsprings of modernization and modern life because of their capacity to siphon wealth from many corners of the land (and overseas), concentrating and multiplying it in a narrow space. California has, moreover, been one of the greatest engines of economic growth in the world over the last fifty years. While Los Angeles outgrew its northern rival before World War II, the Bay Area has been singularly favored by the wars in the Pacific, its financial complex, and the growth of electronics.<br />
<br />
That prosperity erected new pyramids downtown, but also helped generate opposition to the business vision of civic progress. It brought many new residents to the city in the first place, as California’s booming economy generated millions of jobs and supported a large public sector. This magnetic field of opportunity drew everyone from ex-GIs enrolling at the Art Institute in the 1940s to computer hackers in Multimedia Gulch in the 1990s. It called up people of every class, from the professionals in the Marina district to immigrant workers in the Mission. It provided a cushion for those who did not come for economic reasons, whether beats, students, hippies or gays, and allowed them the freedom to create subcultures that reinvigorated the city. The mass character of those bohemian elements was unprecedented, and can only be explained by the economic liberation of the young. The civic surplus even supported many of those who explicitly opposed redevelopment, whether businessmen like Duskin, bohemians like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or gay activists like Milk. <br />
<br />
Prosperity worked its magic more effectively as long as rents remained low enough to allow artists, refugees, and those outside the mainstream to survive, if not prosper, in the inner city. The long slump in central-city investment due to depression, war, and suburbanization had left property markets relatively untouched for two decades. The confluence of economic growth without property speculation through the 1950s was ideal for nurturing the countercultures that mushroomed in San Francisco. Conversely, the heating up of real estate in the seventies and eighties drove out many of the marginals; as old commercial space disappeared, the affluent crowded into gentrifying neighborhoods, and mortgage markets overflowed with easy credit.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>A Republic in Miniature</font size><br />
<br />
American leftists are prone to beg the question of the origins of urban protest by reference to grassroots movements and to reject any class analysis of such upheavals. Others refer vaguely to the middle-class character of the antigrowth movement. Neither interpretation will do. In San Francisco the balance of classes has tripped up the business elite in their efforts to command the civic skyline. The Downtown capitalists do not rule the roost in so clear-cut a fashion as in other cities. This weakness (relative, to be sure) is sometimes attributed to schisms such as those between the Spreckels and DeYoungs or Giannini and the Anglo-Saxons of Montgomery Street, but there is little evidence for a falling out in the postwar era within San Francisco, when the real fight was with the East and South Bay. Instead, difficulties came from below, and from three different directions. <br />
<br />
To begin with, San Francisco has a curiously skewed class distribution because of its role as a commercial, financial, and corporate center as well as a government and public service node that is heavy on administration, education, medicine, and foundations. The division of labor tips toward upper-level managers, professionals, and technical workers, including doctors, lawyers, journalists, accountants, computer programmers, and administrators. This makes the city’s class structure bulge in the middle. Add to this the skilled workers who keep business and the city running through supporting roles in printing, electrical, office machines, carpentry, technical writing, and the like, and the working class skews upward as well, with wages well above the national average.<br />
<br />
At the same time, the workers of San Francisco have historically been well organized and able to hold their own against the bully-bosses, through union militancy and political activism. Racial exclusion reinforced working-class strength and the sense of rough equality among European Americans of diverse backgrounds. At the end of World War II, San Francisco was a union town and working-class leaders were powers to be reckoned with. Although key unions cut a deal with big business and Mayor Alioto to support Downtown building, many workers still carried memories of militancy and class hatreds in their trouser pockets. This is manifest in the old Filipino, white, and black longshoremen, and sailors fighting against the destruction of their hotels. Worker empowerment and good wages fueled class struggles rather than dousing them, brought alliances between skilled and unskilled male workers, and blurred the edges between the working and middle classes. <br />
<br />
Finally, rapid growth and personal mobility have had a permanently destabilizing effect on the class system, top to bottom. The massive influx of people into California, and rapid turnover at all levels, has frequently meant that class allegiances are poorly formed, with individualism in the ascendant. Moreover, a certain wage and rank mobility and the rapid formation of new businesses by aspiring people of skill (from Esprit to Wired) has reinforced individualist aspirations. The effect has been to strengthen the middle-class outlook of San Francisco, a further petty bourgeoisification at the expense of both ends of the class spectrum. Curiously, this has not made San Franciscans less but, instead, more liberal, and even libertarian, in the face of power plays by big business. This contrasts with Los Angeles which, with a similar class structure, has always been more conservative.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Lifelines of Liberality</font size><br />
<br />
Politics is more than the geometry of class forces, and the liberal bent of San Francisco’s citizenry cannot be explained by the mere presence of a working-class or petty bourgeois bloc among the electorate (nor by race, in the white postwar era). Electoral politics have been so progressive that they have won San Francisco the moniker “Left Coast City,” making it a liberal island in a sea of California Republicanism. Voting patterns have a clear geography, with the east of Twin Peaks tilting consistently to the left (with its own political microgeography based on race, class, and sexual orientation). Worse for the business interests, the east side has been the part most impacted by development. <br />
<br />
Behind this liberalism lies a political culture forged out of the class standoff between capital and labor in the early twentieth century. That political culture includes high voter turnout, political clubs, freewheeling initiatives, and weak mayors. Capital could not vanquish labor from the political landscape of the city, so it has had to go through progressive Republicans such as Sunny Jim Rolph and Warren Christopher or pro-growth Democrats such as Joe Alioto and Willie Brown to get its business done without mobilizing class opposition. At the same time, a liberal Democratic party apparatus could be stitched together that owed little to capital, as was done by Harvey Milk’s Gay Democratic Club, and Phil Burton, who became a civic, state, and national power from the 1950s to the 1980s.<br />
<br />
Part of the aims and accomplishments of this political culture has been to dispose middle-class people toward organized labor and to weaken their allegiance to the burghers of Pacific Heights. This sort of position is rarely rationalized in terms of class, but rather as libertarian independence from all power blocs and sympathy toward the oppressed. As a result, any number of transgressive political bridges were constructed in the postwar era across conventional boundaries of class and race formation. Harvey Milk organized gay men across the class spectrum, turning personal liberation into political power. Burton got his start by uniting Chinatown and white workers of the hotel districts, then brought in middle- and upper-class liberals from the eastern half of the city. Civil Rights activists and the Burton machine forged alliances between African Americans protesting black removal and white liberals opposing Downtown expansion. Meanwhile, the beats and hippies contributed by their rebellious race-mixing and incorporation of black culture into their practical critique of the oppressions of bourgeois expression and repression.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>A Taste for the City</font size><br />
<br />
Neither can politics stand alone as an explanation for widespread opposition to the spatial incursions of the Downtown. The protagonists of urban preservation were inspired by more than distaste for capitalist power plays, particularly since so many of them were (petty) bourgeois in background or aspiration. Nor were they simply defending hearth and home. People rallied to protect urban life as they knew it. The everyday urbanity of San Francisco is undergirded by a webbing of popular culture and public vitality that sustains the city; the wellsprings of affection for urban life flow from many quarters. All opponents of redevelopment, of whatever origin or neighborhood, had experiences of urbanism to draw on and visions of civic space as a public good. These experiences inspired people and got their backs up against the destruction of San Francisco (often after drawing them to the city in the first place). Such urbanity is rarely taken into consideration by leftists, even proponents of the postmodern turn. Yet the density, commingling and variety of the city, and inhabitants’ ordinary encounters with the urban world, have real effects on consciousness and action.<br />
<br />
It helps that San Francisco had a rich cosmopolitan tradition to begin with. The city was the urban oasis of the West in the nineteenth century. The Victorian makeover of the last quarter of the century rebuilt the city as a stage set of middle-class rowhouse respectability and upper-class pomposity, but left the vast redoubt of the working class lying South of Market, and the public secrets of the Barbary Coast and the waterfront on full display. After half the city was erased in the catastrophe of 1906, San Francisco was rebuilt along radically new, vertical lines. The central districts were reconstructed at a much higher density as hotels and apartments. Thousands of multiple housing units were purpose-built for businessmen, saleswomen, clerks, longshoremen, and the whole gamut of the urban labor force. These were, moreover, intentionally done in a modern style, with the latest improvements, as an explicit alternative to the suburban house; these were meant to be homes for urban living. This was the high tide of dense urbanism, full of pedestrian life, bright lights, and popular entertainments along the Great White Ways such as Market, Mission, and Fillmore. Many San Franciscans still occupied this urbane space after World War II, long after it had been junked in favor of the suburban model for American cities.<br />
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The rebellion against Downtown was not fought by denizens of the past but by the city’s postwar occupants, many of whom were new arrivals. At the very moment when most Americans were fleeing the central cities, others fled in droves to San Francisco to escape dystopian suburbs and to create their own utopias. This was urban renewal of a different stripe. It brought African Americans into the Fillmore district during the war, along with the first gays discharged from the military. Next came former GIs who had seen the city in passage from Toledo to Guam and had fallen in love with it. The pioneering beats drifted in after the war, finding refuge in North Beach and the Fillmore; they were joined by growing numbers of alienated white youths in the 1950s. Students came from around the country, swelling the ranks of those cutting ties to bourgeois domesticity. <br />
<br />
After the beats established San Francisco as the countercultural capital of postwar America and student rebellion heated up in Berkeley, the Bay Area became a new sort of urban oasis. Hippies overran the Haight, a district on the decline (bordering the Fillmore), with spacious Victorians and cheap rents. Gays flocked to the queer Mecca of the Castro district in the 1970s (the Castro was another working-class neighborhood emptying out). Gay liberation jump-started the yuppie era and its celebration of personal indulgence among the well-paid middle classes spawned by Downtown’s office revolution. <br />
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For the beats, hippies, gays, and yuppies the city itself was an object of celebration as well as a place of liberation. More than housing, it promised tolerance, promiscuous mixing, cheek-by-jowl density, public life, and a landscape to delight the eye. The beats fit easily into North Beach’s Italian community, with its traditions of anarchism, café chatter, and public display. Beat sculptors used the rubble of building demolitions for their found art. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a founder of City Lights Bookstore, was a protester at the razing of the Montgomery Block. A local judge refused to censor Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Hippies painted up the Victorians of the Haight, held their Be-ins at neighboring Golden Gate Park, and listened to rock in the nearby Fillmore Auditorium. Urban space served as a critical resource for the flowering of gay life, providing collective self-affirmation and protection in the face of a hostile world. Few people outside the police department gave a damn about enforcing heterosexuality. Gays pioneered the improvement of Victorian housing and the South of Market, and they were leaders in the preservation movement. Yuppies had good, city-based jobs and bought city homes to go with them. They sought the kind of urbane culture they had witnessed on student travels to Europe and Latin America, and took to gentrifying Victorian and Edwardian neighborhoods with a vengeance. <br />
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<font size=4>Contrary Spirits</font size><br />
<br />
Along with the spirit of urbanism, San Franciscans, particularly intellectuals, have moved in counterflow to mainstream ideas of modernity. Despite living at a crossroads of American capitalism, where money, commerce, industry, and commodities bray from every corner, they developed a critical distance from the sirens of modernism and modernization. In short, they never bought wholeheartedly into the ideology of progress. This was by no means true of nineteenth-century San Francisco, the Las Vegas of its time. Over the years, the lust for money-making at the cost of land and landscape had been blunted.<br />
<br />
The first meek turning away came as San Francisco’s second generation bourgeoisie sought to erase its ragtag origins in the mining districts and create a semblance of civilized urbanism modeled after eastern cities. San Francisco’s burghers eschewed the sinewy modernism of Chicago in favor of Victorian fiddle-faddle (though such buildings were thoroughly modern in construction). A second turning away came at the end of the century, when third-generation burghers rejected Victoriania but also refused the modernism of Prairie or Bauhaus for the historicism of the Shingle, Renaissance, and Mediterranean styles. More generally, they fell under the sway of the Arts and Crafts movement; nowhere was the radical romanticism of William Morris embraced more fervently than in California. So dominant was the cultivated rusticity propagated by Bernard Maybeck that modernism finally came to the Bay Area in the 1930s clad in redwood and rough-hewn planks suitable to the regional myth of the naturalized city. Contrast this with Los Angeles, which abandoned historicism in favor of high modernism in the 1920s, and never looked back.<br />
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[[Image:Cushman-aug-31-1954-ferry-bldg-and-ferry-eureka-approaching-P07299.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''August 31, 1954, the ferry Eureka approaches the Ferry Building.'''<br />
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[http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/ ''Charles Cushman Collection: Indiana University Archives (P07299)'']<br />
<br />
[[Image:Irish1$ferry-bldg-with-ferries-1912.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
'''Ferry Building with departing ferries, 1912'''<br />
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''Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library''<br />
<br />
The leading contrarian of the Progressive era was John Muir, a mechanic and naturalist turned rustic bohemian and transcendental mystic, whose crusading zeal and savvy propaganda for the mountains of California launched the American environmental movement. The most popular writer of the time was Jack London, and Frank Norris was not far behind. Both made nature the backdrop for their greatest novels, while pushing the critical reach of literary realism to the limits of respectability. And both, despite their contrasting social origins, were thoroughly imbued with the petty bourgeois streak of independence and self-righteousness of their home city. Journalists Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair were cut of the same cloth, one moving east and the other west in the course of their careers.<br />
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The New Deal era found San Francisco at the head of labor upheavals with the General Strike of 1934 and the cultural turn toward social realism in painting, photography, and literature, another flux of contrary modernism. Diego Rivera spent his first years in the United States working here, where he left a host of local acolytes. Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand, and the f64 movement redefined photography both in subject matter and in art. Ansel Adams broke away to follow Muir’s vision of pristine nature. Contrarian writers nurtured in isolation around the region between the wars included Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, and Eugene O’Neill. <br />
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After the war, San Francisco was propelled from cultural Hill Station to the global focal point for a generation of youth rebellion and countercultural experimentation. Many beat writers were restless New Yorkers drawn to San Francisco because their sort of ragged poesy and vagabondage was irresponsible, even deplorable, in New York’s literary and political hothouse. San Francisco offered the right combination of urbanity and obscurity to ferret away New York’s mantle as the cultural capital of modernity, and to begin in a marginalized, noncommercial, anarchistic way to stumble toward postmodernism. When realism gave way to abstraction in the visual arts, San Francisco leapt on the boat from New York in the glory years of abstract expressionism at the Art Institute in the late forties. But the counterflow of local culture twisted back into a figurative turn in the 1950s and, in the hands of Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, and Jess, shifted constructivism toward the political art of the 1960s. Musically, black jazz briefly merged with white poetics; then the Bay Area sound of Dave Brubeck went off on its own iconoclastic tangent.<br />
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The Beat Generation slid easily into the rebellious sixties, with politics and counterculture in closer dialogue in the Bay Area than anywhere else. Rock was the voice of the new generation and San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium the launching pad for its most innovative bands, such as Big Brother and Jefferson Airplane, or the black-white combustibles of Sly and the Family Stone and Tower of Power. The most enduring were those epigones of laid-back licks, the Grateful Dead. Psychedelic poster art was a kind of Jugendstil gone mad, while clothing took a lurch back to Victoriana. A familiar strand of the counterculture was an affection for nature, running from Kenneth Rexroth, the key intellectual bridging the 1930s and 1950s, to Gary Snyder, beat poet and Zen master of bioregionalism today. Disaffected hippies and students took to the countryside by the end of the sixties, seeking a rural utopia after their urban one had failed.<br />
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Gays were largely white and middle class and had more disposable income than earlier countercultures; nonetheless, they were social pariahs. They elevated the joyful abandon of civic sinning to a level not seen since the closing of the Barbary Coast. Gay liberation exceeded even the beats and hippies in its flouting of social convention and confirmed San Francisco’s reputation as a refuge from small-minded America. On the other hand, the counterculture’s rejection of consumer culture was swamped by the hedonistic rush of gay pleasure-seeking (not without contradiction: hedonism fell afoul of the AIDS epidemic and consumerism split the well-heeled from poor gays and lesbians).<br />
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As the eighties dawned, the San Francisco counterculture had achieved an unexpected degree of mainstream acceptance. The yuppie consumer culture carried some of the spirit of refusal against American domestic rectitude, ushering in the “latte leisure class,” as well as gay sensibilities in architecture, dress, and the arts. The yuppies’ affluence and consumerism eroded the radical basis of urban culture, but distinguished the Bay Area’s petty bourgeoisie as a world-historical force in the realm of consumption: nouvelle cuisine, hot tubs, wines, personal computers, the Nature Company, backpacking gear, New Age music, Esprit and Gap clothes, and more spewed from this fount of liberatory self-indulgence. <br />
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The beats, hippies, and gays represented a very ungenteel sort of bohemianism that was more confrontational, more political, and more bizarre than ever before in this country. Rexroth, Ginsberg, and the rest showed a ferocious independence and spiritual refusal to follow orthodox parties, preferring a left anarchism that is a touchstone of San Francisco’s political culture. The New Bohemianism was absolutely critical in forming the political consciousness and urbane outlook of the Bay Area, moving the middle class decisively to the left of the American mainstream, celebrating the frightful asymmetries of urbanity and re-igniting a radical romanticism that went far beyond the aesthetics of Arts and Crafts, the mystical environmentalism of John Muir, or the manly socialism of Jack London.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>What Next?</font size><br />
<br />
San Franciscans can be justly proud of their record of opposition to the bulldozer of progress, but such resistance has decided limits. Downtown expansion was contained on the north and west, only to cross Market Street and trigger the radical transformation of the South of Market to Mission Bay. Property speculation fell into the doldrums for a decade after 1985, but has picked up again. Downtown’s growth is limited more by the property cycle than by social protest. As the city’s economy went into the tank in the worst depression in fifty years, job loss (30,000 in San Francisco) laid waste thousands of lives. Political conditions around the state and the country have deteriorated, as the triumphant demagogues of the right put the screws to urban Democrats, the intelligentsia, working people, immigrants, and the poor. Even in San Francisco, bourgeois reaction is out of the closet, where popular struggles had locked it up for half a century, and the ruling class is more interested in sweeping the streets of the homeless and cutting wages than in meeting the needs of the people. <br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the wellsprings of opposition have been drying up. The left is worn out, gays have been preoccupied with AIDS, yuppie exuberance is gone. High rents put the squeeze on the counterculture, and outcast youth today are more likely to be homeless than bohemian. Wages and union strength have eroded, and the working class has been recomposed as largely foreign-born Asian and Latin peoples who face greater obstacles than their white predecessors, and whose political and organizational presence is just awakening. At the same time, the skilled hotshots of computing, multimedia, and brokerage are more inclined toward monetary payoffs and expensive cars than to the public duties and pleasures of civic life. A fine and noble epoch is over and done with much as the Gold Rush era of libertine opportunity faded away in its time. San Francisco has not sunk as far as the rest of America (Dole got only 17 percent of the vote in 1996), but the survival of the city as a decent place to live is by no means assured. <br />
<br />
<font size=4>References</font size><br />
<br />
THE BEST CASE FOR THE PECULIARITY of San Francisco’s petit bourgeois class structure is still Carey McWilliams, ''California: The Great Exception'' (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1949). I make the same argument for recent years in Walker et al., “The Playground of US Capitalism?” This view is rejected, I should add, by Peter Decker, ''Fortunes and Failures: White-Collar Mobility in 19th Century San Francisco'' (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) and Gray Brechin, ''Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin'' (Berkeley: University of California Press), who argue for the dominance of the big bourgeoisie. The fine social history by William Issel and Robert Cherny, ''San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) stands somewhere in the middle. <br />
<br />
EVERYONE AGREES, HOWEVER, that the city has been politically progressive (liberal to left) during most of the postwar era. This is well documented in Richard DeLeon, ''Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991'' (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), and backed up by John Jacobs, ''A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The historical antecedents of this political tilt are presented by Philip Ethington, ''The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Bill Issel, “Business Power and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1900–1940,” ''Journal of Urban History'' (1989) 16(1), pp. 52–77 and “New Deal and Wartime Origins of Postwar Urban Economic Policy: The San Francisco Case” (unpublished manuscript, Department of History, San Francisco State University, 1995). This is corroborated by Roger Lotchin, “World War II and Urban California: City Planning and the Transformation Hypothesis,” ''Pacific Historical Review'' (1993) 62/2: pp. 143–71.<br />
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ONE FOUNDATION FOR THIS LIBERALITY is undoubtedly the strong labor movement of the past, which is well treated by McWilliams but in more detail by Issel and Cherny, and Michael Kazin, “The Great Exception Revisited: Organized Labor and Politics in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1870–1940,” ''Pacific Historical Review'' (1986) 55: pp. xxxx, and ''Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era'' (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), and David Selvin, ''A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco'' (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). Kazin and Selvin understand the curious class makeup and outlook of San Francisco workers, who were mostly skilled and highly independent. <br />
<br />
ANOTHER WELL-REHEARSED THEME is the cosmopolitan character of the city, and its freewheeling, tolerant, and even libertine ways of life. See, for example, Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1933), John Findlay, People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Paul Groth, Living Downtown, Irena Narell, Our City: The Jews of San Francisco (San Diego: Howell-North Books, 1981), and Glenna Matthews, “Forging a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture: the Regional Consciousness of San Francisco and Northern California,” in Michael Steiner and David Wrobel, eds., Many Wests: Essays in Regional Consciousness (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, in press). <br />
<br />
SAN FRANCISCO HAS A LONG BOHEMIAN TRADITION of wayward intellectuals and iconoclastic artists going back to the Gold Rush. This is surveyed by Frances Walker, ''San Francisco’s Literary Frontier'' (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1939), Oscar Lewis, ''Bay Window Bohemia: An Account of the Brilliant Artistic World of Gaslit San Francisco'' (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1956), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters, ''Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from its Beginnings to the Present Day'' (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1980). The intellectual counterculture stole the national spotlight with the coming of the beats in the 1950s. On that era, see Jerry Kamstra,'' Stand Naked and Cool Them: North Beach and the Bohemian Dream, 1950–1980'' (San Francisco: Peeramid Press, 1981), Michael Davidson, ''The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Rebecca Solnit,'' Secret Exhibitions: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era'' (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991), Richard Candida Smith, ''Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Linda Hamalian,'' A Life of Kenneth Rexroth'' (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). <br />
<br />
BY THE END OF THE BEAT ERA, the counterculture had become a mass movement, led by hippies, as described by Sherri Cavan, ''Hippies of the Haight'' (St Louis: New Critics Press, 1972), and Charles Perry, ''The Haight-Ashbury: A History'' (New York: Random House, 1984), and was joined by the political high tide of the civil rights movement, student rebellion, antiwar actions, and the rest of the sixties. The latter history has not been adequately told for the Bay Area, but see Max Heirich, ''The Spiral of Conflict: Berkeley, 1964'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), Gene Marine, ''The Black Panthers'' (New York: Signet Books, 1969), and Albert Fortunate Eagle, ''Alcatraz, Alcatraz: The Indian Occupation of 1969–71'' (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1992). The best treatment of the sixties in the Bay Area is by an Australian, Anthony Ashbolt, in ''Tear Down the Walls: Sixties Radicalism and the Politics of Space in the San Francisco Bay Area'' (doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, 1989).<br />
<br />
ON THE GAY REVOLUTION, see Allan Bérubé, ''Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two'' (New York: The Free Press, 1990), Manuel Castells and Karen Murphy, “Cultural Identity and Urban Structure: The Spatial Organization of San Francisco’s Gay Community,” ''Urban Affairs Review'' (1982) 22: pp. 237–59, Randy Shilts, ''The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk'' (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), Mike Weiss, ''Double Play: The San Francisco City Hall Killings'' (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982), and Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, ''Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area'' (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996).<br />
<br />
ONE HAS TO BE CAREFUL not to romanticize a social order that was accompanied by vicious racism. On this see Alexander Saxton, ''The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), Susan Craddock, “Sewers and Scapegoats: Spatial Metaphors of Smallpox in Nineteenth Century San Francisco,” ''Social Science and Medicine'' (1995) 41/7: pp. 957–68, Albert Broussard, ''Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954'' (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), and Kazin, ''Barons of Labor''. The civil rights movement was relatively strong in the Bay Area; however, there is little documentation on this.<br />
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[[INS Building-Old Produce Mkt |Prev. Document]] [[Dr Weirde on Dirty Harry | Next Document]]<br />
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<hr><br />
<br />
[[Image:Reclaiming-san-francisco.jpg|170px|left]] This article is excerpted from "Appetite for the City," originally published in [http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100049340 ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History Politics Culture'', a City Lights anthology] edited by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, & Nancy J. Peters (City Lights Books, San Francisco: 1998)<br />
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[[category:Labor]][[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Redevelopment]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Downtown]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Transit]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Remembering_Harvey_Milk&diff=28002
Remembering Harvey Milk
2018-10-16T15:09:10Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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<font size=4>A Reflection</font size><br />
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''by Harry Britt''<br />
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[[Image:tendrnob$dan-white-strikes$milk-demo_itm$milk-1995-march.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Annual candlelight march in remembrance of Supervisor Harvey Milk. This is 8th and Market in 1995.'''<br />
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''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Pi7dlPBGDgI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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'''Harvey Milk describing his three lives as renter, small businessman, and supervisor, having just been evicted from his own storefront on Castro after a 300% rent increase.'''<br />
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''from documentary Pushed Out for Profit by Optic Nerve and Charles Bolton, 1978.''<br />
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[[Image:gay1$milk-portrait.jpg]]<br />
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'''Harvey Milk, gay activist, city supervisor, businessman.''' <br />
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''Photo: Crawford Barton, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California''<br />
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[[Image:gay1$milk-and-longshoremen.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Harvey Milk talking with some Longshoremen during a campaign.''' <br />
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''Photo: Crawford Barton, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California''<br />
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I never know what to say about Harvey. The one thing that was clear and powerful about Harvey was that he was hard to control. He went to institutions of power without a sense of "what do I have to do to get people to be nice to me?" but with a sense of "here I am, you better get your act together pretty quick," and it just got worse and worse. There was always a miraculous quality he had, of being able to bring people together, of being able to say to people who have been treated like scum all their lives, and had desperately tried to maintain some sort of relationship with society, to let go of all their protection without killing themselves. To be supporting enough and loving enough and reassuring enough that he could take people as screwed up as people like me and convince us to march with him, or to hand out leaflets with him, or to somehow identify as gay people, with the possibilities that he was ostracized. That's a magnificent thing for a person to do. I suspect that's what parents do, if they're honest, with their children. <br />
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He wanted to teach the world to say the word "gay." He wanted to teach the gay community to say the word 'gay.' The question for them was not "do you believe in the system," but "what are you going to do with your own history?" Because he did not believe in the system, and he did not like other gay people who did believe in the system, very much. He liked the people who hated the system, but caring enough to be able to wallow in that pigpen in order to have their own history together. He wanted July 4th to be the national holiday for queers. Not because he fought to gain the patriotic symbols, but because they were ''the'' symbols. They were America's proud patriotic sense of itself, and he wanted us to define whatever was central for them as ours. By raising the flag, we're asserting who we are, we're claiming our history, we're claiming a nation, even though that nation does not perhaps deserve to be claimed. <br />
<br />
[[Image:Harvey_milkAAD-2932.jpg]]<br />
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''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''<br />
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He believed that you cannot have a sense of power and fulfillment as a human being without somehow engaging history. That the closet is a lonely, weak, fearful and dark place. And all the strategies that help people come to terms with their history are strategies that destroy the freedom and dignity of the person who does that. The reason this worked, just like it worked for Martin Luther King was that in the streets of this city, Castro, Valencia, and Polk, where gay people gathered to get away from history, to get away from Texas in my case, or Alabama, or Oakland, or San Rafael, or Hillsborough, or wherever. People came to the Castro at least to try to believe that there was a safe place and a place you could touch one another and not feel all that crap laid on our shoulders. That's where the community came to be, that enabled us to reach out for a little more. <br />
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I've never been a separatist, I am certainly not a separatist, but I don't believe that you can move from a sense of self with no self-esteem to a sense of power without going through that kind of experience. And the sad thing that it may be true that it's hard to go from a sense of no power to a sense of power without going through some sort of silly little boy/girl accommodationist strategies. God Harvey hated those. He wanted us to see that the first step for historical effectiveness or political effectiveness was to see history for what it is, that all of the institutions and all of the laws and all rules weren't designed for us, and especially that making queers happy was never a dominant priority for the powers in western culture (or any other cultures either).<br />
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I guess if you want to get the quintessential Harvey Milk the best place is his will, that amazing document left to his people in which he wanted to make it very clear that people that had found a place for themselves within the political system... ''that is not enough'', they were the vilest of the lot. And he wrote that will more I think than for any other person, to point that out, because he did not trust Mayor Moscone, who like most all straight politicians surrounded himself but that's the whole dynamic of the system the Harvey Milks of the world get the attention of the system and they respond by dealing with the suck-ups, if you pardon the expression. And that's the dynamic, and Harvey hated that dynamic, he hated empowering those people, and his statement was fundamentally saying if you really care about me, about my life, don't let my life be empowering those kind of people. It was fundamental to Harvey, and it's fundamental to people involved in social movements.<br />
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<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/ssfHarveym1" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Milk's Last Words'''<br />
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[http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ma-Mo/Milk-Harvey.html Straightforward biography of Harvey Milk]<br />
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[[Harry Britt on History | Prev. Document]] [[The Bubble Bursts | Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Famous characters]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Housing]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Redevelopment_in_South_of_Market&diff=28001
Redevelopment in South of Market
2018-10-16T15:09:07Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''by Gayle S. Rubin''<br />
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[[Image:Soma1%24land-rush-1990s.jpg]]<br />
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'''SPUR Graphic: The South Of Market Land Rush.'''<br />
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{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" |'''Redevelopment in San Francisco began in the early 1950s, targeting so-called "blighted" areas for "slum clearance" and new construction. San Francisco’s South of Market (SOMA) redevelopment process was planned early and combined with hotelier Ben Swig's plans for the area, eventually led to today's Yerba Buena Gardens, itself a contested outcome. The Redevelopment juggernaut rolled over other neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s in addition to SOMA, but by the 1990s SOMA redevelopment resulted in conflicting social uses in the western South of Market, where gay leather bars persisted next to straight night clubs and Costco.'''<br />
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''"This land is too valuable to permit poor people to park on it."''<br />
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--Justin Herman, Executive Director, San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1970 (cited in Chester Hartman, ''The Transformation of San Francisco,'' 1974)<br />
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<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/CarloMiddioneOnWorkingForJustinHerman" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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'''Former Redevelopment Agency official Carlo Middione describes getting hired at the Agency and what working for/with Justin Herman was like.'''<br />
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''Video: Shaping San Francisco''<br />
<br />
''The South of Market area for many years has been recognized as an area of blight producing a depressing, unhealthful, and unsafe living environment, retarding industrial development, and acting as a drain on the city treasury. This study of 86 blocks is concerned with the problems of blight and with ways and means of improving the area through the use of the redevelopment process. . . . The South of Market Area ranks among the most severely blighted sections of the city, along with Chinatown and the Western Addition. . . . [T]he conditions of blight are such as to be highly conducive to social disintegration, juvenile delinquency, and crime. . . . The present wasteful use of potentially valuable land must be stopped if the South of Market area is to become a well functioning part of the city's environment.''<br />
<br />
--Redevelopment Agency of the City and County of San Francisco 1952, 12<br />
<br />
Dreams of urban renewal drove a great deal of postwar urban planning and politics. Redevelopment promised cleaner, more livable, and more prosperous cities; in practice, it often eliminated low-cost housing occupied by poor and working people and replaced light industry, warehousing, and wholesaling with high-rent offices, fancy hotels, and expensive restaurants. Urban renewal also provided opportunities for large and politically well-connected developers to amass huge fortunes, often subsidized by public funds.<br />
<br />
Some of San Francisco's biggest redevelopment projects have been in the [[Fillmore Redevelopment|Western Addition]], the Embarcadero just [[INS Building-Old Produce Mkt|north of Market]], and in the South of Market. The Western Addition, then one of the city's largest concentrations of African American residents, was targeted for redevelopment in 1954. In 1959, the old wholesale produce district and waterfront area north of Market were designated as the Golden Gateway/ Embarcadero/Lower Market Redevelopment Project Area. As early as 1953 large sections of the South of Market were approved for redevelopment by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. At that time, the South of Market still contained light industry. It housed the bus terminals and the cheap hotels for transients, seamen, and other single working men. While the main streets were lined with low-rent commercial businesses, a working-class residential population occupied the smaller side streets and alleys. Many of the charities serving the urban poor were located in the South of Market, which had a substantial concentration of homeless, drug-addicted, or alcoholic street people. The district, with its lower rents and physical proximity, was ideal for housing the service businesses for the large downtown firms. These factors made it a juicy redevelopment plum. (Hartman 1974, 1984; Hoover 1979)<br />
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In 1952 the Redevelopment Agency of the City and County in San Francisco released its first comprehensive proposal, which called for displacing the residential population in favor of more industry. Then, in 1954, today's Yerba Buena and Moscone Convention Center were foreshadowed when local developer Ben Swig unveiled a San Francisco Prosperity Plan. Swigs plan included a convention center, a sports stadium, and several high-rise office buildings. Much of that ambitious agenda has been accomplished, and the sports stadium now also looms as inevitable. One obvious prerequisite to South-of-Market development was the removal of the 4,000 residents and more than 700 small businesses. . . . In 1966, following final official approval of the plans by the Board of Supervisors, land acquisition and relocation began in earnest. (Hoover 1979, ix)<br />
<br />
Then in 1969, local residents and owners formed [[TOOR (Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment)|Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOR)]] and filed the first of the many lawsuits that delayed redevelopment and reshaped its ultimate manifestations. During the period of political and legal wrangling, the old neighborhood was significantly dismantled. Housing was demolished and entire streets disappeared. But the construction of new office towers and public buildings awaited the outcome of litigation, so the new neighborhood remained largely unrealized. In the interregnum, different kinds of residents and enterprises flowed into the disrupted niche. There were plenty of vacant buildings, both residential and commercial. Rents and land values were cheap, until speculation and resurgent redevelopment activity began to drive them higher. Street life at night was sparse. The streets emptied out when businesses closed and the daily work force departed. Parking at night was plentiful. The South of Market became a kind of urban frontier. The area began to attract artists looking for affordable studio space, musicians in search of practice venues, squatters who occupied the abandoned factories, and gay men. The relative lack of other nocturnal activity provided a kind of privacy, and urban nightlife that was stigmatized or considered disreputable could flourish in relative obscurity among the warehouses and deserted streets.<br />
<br />
Redevelopment had suddenly escalated in the late 1970s. As Chester Hartman observes, South of Market redevelopment spanned the political lives of five mayors [[Mayor George Christopher|George Christopher]], [[Mayor Jack Shelley|John Shelley]], [[Mayor Joe Alioto|Joseph Alioto]], [[Mayor George Moscone|George Moscone]], and [[Mayor Dianne Feinstein|Dianne Feinstein]]. (Hartman 1984, 24) Moscone was elected in 1975. His administration was more oriented to neighborhood concern and consequences of downtown growth, and his appointments to the Planning Commission reflected these priorities. (xvii)<br />
<br />
Dianne Feinstein became Mayor when George Moscone was [[Kool-Aid & Twinkies|assassinated by Dan White]] in 1978. Feinstein's friendlier stance toward development was reflected in an unprecedented building boom and in a marked increase in the pace of urban renewal in the South of Market. Among Dan White's legacies is a measure of responsibility for the accelerated Manhattanization of San Francisco in the 1980s. The convention center named after Moscone, who might have opposed its construction, was completed in 1981. That year, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) released a report on South of Market development and held a conference to promote its findings. The flier for the conference showed Mayor Feinstein about to fire a starters pistol for the developers preparing to sprint across Market Street in quest of the South of Market Pot O' Gold. Sticking out from under the Pot O' Gold is the hand of someone crushed beneath, an apt image for the fate of the old neighborhood. Leather bars in old Victorian houses were not suited to compete with new high-rise, high-rent buildings or even the mid-level eateries and other enterprises that would service them. Long before AIDS was a factor, conversion to straighter, more respectable, more expensive bars and restaurants was well underway in the South of Market. Redevelopment is now rapidly invading and encircling the Folsom. At the northeast corner is the Moscone Center and the Yerba Buena complex, which includes two new museums and a performance center. More large civic projects and many private developments are planned. What remains of the leather bar area is within a few blocks of Yerba Buena. At the southeast corner is a large and growing retail complex which now includes Toys R Us, the Bed and Bath Superstore, Trader Joe's, and an entire city block devoted to a huge Price-Costco warehouse store. An Office Max store has recently opened just behind the San Francisco Eagle, one of the remaining leather bars. The back of the Costco parking lot faces the Eagle on one corner and the Lone Star, another leather bar, on the other. Shoppers laden with carts of paper towels and a year's supply of Windex are not a promising mix with gay men dressed in leather. The potential for conflict and violence along these ruptured territorial membranes is immense.<br />
<br />
In October 1995, three men attacked and severely beat a patron leaving the Lone Star. He dragged himself over to the Eagle to obtain assistance, and his assailants were soon apprehended as they stood in line to get into a nearby music club, the DNA Lounge, which had once been a leather bar named Chaps. It is difficult to imagine how these businesses and populations can continue to coexist. The differences of scale between Costco and the leather bars in size, capital investment, and mayoral benediction are extreme. It is quite evident that if anything gives, it will not be Costco.<br />
<br />
--excerpted from "The Miracle Mile, South of Market and Gay Male Leather 1962-1997" © 1997 by Gayle S. Rubin, in ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture'' (City Lights Books, 1998)<br />
<br />
'''REFERENCES'''<br />
<br />
Averbach, Alvin. 1973. "San Francisco's South of Market District, 1858-1958: The Emergence of a Skid Row." ''California Historical Quarterly'' 52(3):196223.<br />
<br />
Bean, Joseph W. 1988. "Changing Times South of Market." ''Advocate'' (California supplement) (29 March) 47.<br />
<br />
Bérubé, Allan. 1984. "The History of the Baths." ''Coming Up!'' (December).<br />
<br />
--1988. "Caught in the Storm: AIDS and the Meaning of Natural Disaster." ''Outlook'' (Fall).<br />
<br />
--. 1993. "Dignity for All: The Role of Homosexuality in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (1930s-1950s)." Paper presented at Reworking American Labor History: Race, Gender, and Class conference. Madison.<br />
<br />
--. 1996. "The History of the Bathhouses." In ''Dangerous Bedfellows,'' eds. Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism. Boston. South End Press.<br />
<br />
--. Forthcoming. ''Shipping Out.'' New York: Houghton-Mifflin.<br />
<br />
Bloomfield, Anne B. 19956. "A History of the California Historical Society's New Mission Street Neighborhood." ''California History'' (Winter 98).<br />
<br />
Bolton, Ralph. 1992. "Aids and Promiscuity: Muddles in the Models of HIV Prevention." ''Medical Anthropology'' 14:145223.<br />
<br />
Brandt, Allan M. 1988. "AIDS: From Social History to Social Policy." In Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, eds.,<br />
<br />
--. ''AIDS: The Burdens of History.'' Berkeley: University of California Press.<br />
<br />
Caen, Herb. 1964. Column. ''San Francisco Chronicle'' (July 3).<br />
<br />
Caffee, Mike. 1997. ''The Story of the Fe-Be's Statue, As Told by Its Sculptor,'' Mike Caffee. Unpublished manuscript.<br />
<br />
Chauncey, George Jr. 1985. "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War One Era." ''Journal of Social History'' 19 (Winter):189211.<br />
<br />
--. 1994. ''Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890-1940.'' New York: Basic Books<br />
<br />
--.The Death of Leather. 1985. ''San Francisco Focus'' (November).<br />
<br />
D'Emilio, John. 1983. ''Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<br />
<br />
--. 1989a. "Gay Politics and Community in San Francisco Since World War II." In Duberman, Martin Bauml, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., eds., ''Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past.'' New York: New American Library.<br />
<br />
--. 1989b. "The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America." In Kathy Peiss, Christina Simmons, and Robert Padgug, eds., ''Passion and Power: Sexuality in History.'' Philadelphia: Temple University.<br />
<br />
Evans, Arthur (aka The Red Queen). 1982. Milk Milked. Letter to the editor, ''Bay Area Reporter'' (24 November) 6.<br />
<br />
Freedman, Estelle. 1987. "Uncontrolled Desires: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960." ''Journal of American History'' 74(1):83106.<br />
<br />
Fritscher, Jack. 1991. "Artist Chuck Arnett: His Life/Our Times." In Mark Thompson, ed., ''Leatherfolk.'' Boston: Alyson.<br />
<br />
Garber, Eric, and Willie Walker. 1997. "Queer Bars and Other Establishments in San Francisco." Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. Unpublished data.<br />
<br />
Gregersen, Edgar. 1983. ''Sexual Practices: The Story of Human Sexuality.'' New York: Franklin Watts.<br />
<br />
Hartman, Chester. 1974. ''erba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco.'' San Francisco: Glide Publications.<br />
<br />
--. 1984. ''The Transformation of San Francisco.'' Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld.<br />
<br />
Hoover, Catherine. 1979. Introduction. In Ira Nowinski, ''No Vacancy: Urban Renewal and the Elderly.'' San Francisco: Carolyn Bean.<br />
<br />
Issel, William, and Robert W. Cherney. 1986. ''San Francisco 1965-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development.'' Berkeley: University of California Press.<br />
<br />
Knapp, Don. 1983. "A 20 Year Cycle." ''Bay Area Reporter'' (10 March) 13.<br />
<br />
Mains, Geoff. 1984. ''Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality.'' San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press.<br />
<br />
Murray, Stephen O., and Kenneth W. Payne. 1988. "Medical Policy Without Scientific Evidence: The Promiscuity Paridigm and AIDS." ''California Sociologist'' 11(1/2):1354.<br />
<br />
--. "Off-Beat Rough Toward Chic Very Fine." 1988. ''New York Times'' (September 15).<br />
<br />
Patton, Cindy. 1985. ''Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS.'' Boston: South End Press.<br />
<br />
Port of San Francisco. 1997. "Waterfront Design & Access: An Element of the Waterfront Land Use Plan." Draft (May 7).<br />
<br />
Redevelopment Agency of the City and County of San Francisco. 1952. "The Feasibility of Redevelopment in the South of Market Area" (June 1).<br />
<br />
Rubin, Gayle. 1994. "The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960-1990." Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan.<br />
<br />
--. 1997. "Elegy for the Valley of the Kings: AIDS and the Leather Community in San Francisco, 1981-1996." In Martin Levine, Peter Nardi, and John Gagnon, eds., ''In Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS.'' Chicago: University of Chicago.<br />
<br />
Shilts, Randy. 1987. ''And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.'' New York: St. Martins Press.<br />
<br />
Starr, Kevin. 1995-6. "South of Market and Bunker Hill." ''California History'' (Winter).<br />
<br />
Thompson, Mark. 1982. "Folsom Street." ''Advocate'' (8 July) 2831, 57.<br />
<br />
--. 1991. ''Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice.'' Boston: Alyson.<br />
<br />
Triechler, Paula. 1988. "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification." In Douglas Crimp, ''Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism.''<br />
<br />
Walker, Willie. 1997. "Gay Bars, Bathhouses and Restaurants in San Francisco 1930-1969." Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. Unpublished data, charts, and graphs.<br />
<br />
Welch, Paul, and Bill Eppridge (photographer). 1964. "Homosexuality in America." ''Life'' (26 June) 66-80. <br />
<br />
<hr><br />
<br />
[[Image:Tours-redev.gif|link=Mayor George Christopher]] [[Mayor George Christopher| Continue Redevelopment Tour]]<br />
<br />
[[Introduction to the SOMA|Prev. Document]] [[Former Residents of SOMA |Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:SOMA]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:redevelopment]] [[category:housing]] [[category:LGBTQI]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Queerly_Shifting_Affinities&diff=28000
Queerly Shifting Affinities
2018-10-16T15:09:07Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Keith Hennessy''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Dykes-on-bikes-pride-2011 2325.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Dykes on Bikes has led the annual Pride March for many years, a tradition that still holds today (seen here in 2011).'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
[[Image:2Ammiano 8228311480 edb5bc14ed z.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Tom Ammiano, Ed Lee, and [[Mayor Willie Brown|Willie Brown]] at [[Mayor George Moscone|George Moscone]] and [[Remembering Harvey Milk|Harvey Milk]] memorial at San Francisco City Hall, November 27, 2012.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Steve Rhodes''<br />
<br />
Tom Ammiano is as queer as a $3 bill. He flames. There are homophobes, and others who fear difference, who couldn’t get past Ammiano’s voice. The rest of us would have been proud to have him as mayor, partly because of that queer voice. But he’s a tough sell, especially to the wannabe upper classes. They are terrified of losing unearned privileges to the policies of an unapologetic leftist and community-based politician. Resistance to Ammiano among many well-employed and propertied homos is rooted in a messy fusion of internalized homophobia and neocon class terror. Ammiano’s “voice” outed all who identified with it, linking us proudly to San Francisco’s history of radical sexual politics and progressive socio-political agendas. <br />
<br />
A veteran of gay comedy (and public classrooms), Ammiano always begins his speeches with a joke, often a silly sexual innuendo. He flaunts himself as a sexual libertine but not as actively sexual. In contrast, Willie Brown is a ladies’ man, doubly more masculine than Ammiano because he’s not only hetero but also dating in public. Brown flaunted being a bachelor. A smart dresser with a big budget for stylish suits and hats, Brown could easily mix with financial district executives, opera house socialites, and leaders in African-American communities. With a girlfriend by his side, we might imagine that he’s got an active sex life, something we don’t assume for most politicians, many of whom struggle to appear happily married. Virility gets votes. Unfortunately, even the toughest nelly isn’t perceived as virile. In a homophobic culture we miss the courage, wisdom, and power in a queer queen’s wit.<br />
<br />
If San Francisco had a more sizable black community, and if Brown was an identified member or ally of that community, he would never have been elected mayor of San Francisco. White fear of black power is too massive (yes even in Subaru-liberal San Francisco). Fortunately for Brown, a cruel history of city planning, gentrification, and police harassment had reduced the African-American population by 40% since the 1970s, making San Francisco safe for a black mayor. During Brown’s tenure as mayor this steady population decline continued, despite the economic boom which marked his first few years, and despite the number of people of color appointed by Brown to manage city bureaucracies. <br />
<br />
Black and queer male sexualities are projections of a mainstream culture heavily invested in racism and (hetero)sexism. Usually they are found at opposite ends of the male sexuality continuum, framing the idealized masculinity of the middle-class, white, married man. This ideal is sporty yet tame, neither too macho nor too effeminate. In four short years the mayor’s contest went from the sexual margins, Black King against White Queen, to Gavin Newsom’s election, which marked a return of the chief’s job to the sexual center.<br />
<br />
In the 2003 mayoral race between Gonzalez and Newsom, the attractiveness of the candidates inspired media stories, volunteer recruitment, citywide gossip, and even real votes. Regardless of their class, political, ethnic and marriage status differences, there seemed to be a similarity in how they were viewed sexually. According to the press and to my own informal surveys, both men were attractive not only to San Francisco’s legendary underclass of ”poor” single women (“Woe is me, all the good men in SF are gay!”) but to gay and bi men as well. It didn’t matter that the rest of us thought they both needed serious hair, body, and wardrobe makeovers, because that meant we were still talking about what they looked like! Up against these post-gay metrosexuals, Ammiano’s gayness seemed almost quaint, passé, and definitely not sexy. It’s beyond me that anyone of any sexual preference could waste a minute on the sexy quotient of these guys—but I haven’t considered any politician to be sexy since Trudeaumania swept my homeland in 1968. (Pierre Trudeau was a young, single, artsy, bilingual intellectual who always wore a rose and promised to keep Canada from dividing into two nations—and I was eight years old!)<br />
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After the 1999 election in which Ammiano galvanized a progressive voter movement but didn’t succeed in toppling the Brown regime, many of us, including Ammiano, assumed that the following four years would be one long campaign to “take back San Francisco” and elect Tom as mayor. Of course, Brown, the corporate media, and many of San Francisco’s richest citizens spent every day of those four years humiliating and marginalizing Ammiano, who not only went on his own divisive offensive but got caught in the compromises of building consensus—something he didn’t do in his short, fiery campaign. I was one of many who felt like the next election ought to put Tom Ammiano in the mayor’s office but what seemed like an obvious outcome became more and more unlikely. <br />
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<font size=4>Gay Shame, a Virus in the System</font><br />
<br />
It is a global consensus that San Francisco is the gayest city in the world, even if Stonewall & ACT UP are phenomena of New York City, gay marriages happened in Europe first, and Sydney’s Mardi Gras might be more fabulous. Nonetheless, San Francisco’s biggest public event is the annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Parade and San Francisco is known around the world for its queer pride, culture, and politics. LGBT people can be found in all the major corporations headquartered here and City Hall has not been without queer representation since the landmark victory of Harvey Milk, our most famous martyr.<br />
<br />
Tension between radical and reformist queers is older than recorded gay history. A visible chasm seemed to open up during the AIDS years between the multi-issue, poly-gendered, anarchist-inspired politics of [[PRAYER WARRIORS|Queer Nation]] and the more established gay and lesbian organizations and politicians. Assimilation of radical currents into the mainstream is an ongoing process. In recent years a new post-gay radicalism has emerged to challenge assimilationist tendencies in queer culture and activism. Fusing anarcho-class war tactics with camp fabulousness and sexual liberationist ethics, Gay Shame made a splash challenging [[Mayor Gavin Newsom|Gavin Newsom]]’s war on homeless people, that is, Care Not Cash, when he first proposed it as a member of the Board of Supervisors in 2002. The rise of Newsom’s visibility was met with increasing resistance from, and therefore visibility of, Gay Shame. Their actions, which call for participants “to dress to terrifying excess” have included genderfuck, trash fashion shows outside Newsom’s properties (do millionaires have homes or just properties?), interventions to the Pride Parade protesting corporate sponsorships, and postering the city with the Right to Have Sex in All Bars. Just when we thought that all the freaks and innovators had left town due to the rising costs and decreasing joy of everything, Gay Shame proves that San Francisco continues to evolve lineages of artist-activist provocateurs.<br />
<br />
When some anti-Ammiano LGBT citizens hosted a fundraiser for Newsom at our new center (that’s the LGBT Center to non-queer people), Gay Shame showed up to protest. The cops instigated a police riot, violently attacking unarmed queer activists, resulting in hospitalizations, a dislocated shoulder, and broken teeth. In their own way Gay Shame had already ”declared war” on Newsom (and the state), but this was an unjustifiably brutal response from the city. Responses in the queer community revealed strong ambivalence not only to Gay Shame but also to “politically correct” or “street activist” queers. The lack of solidarity revealed the lack of queer consensus in the upcoming mayoral elections . . . and [[Progressive Euphoria and Disappointment In Mayoral Election, 2003|Gonzalez]] had not yet entered the race.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Gay-marriage-march-on-Market-Street-Nov-2007 5254.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Pro-gay marriage march on Market Street, November 2007.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Further Political Divides within Queer and Progressive Constituencies</font><br />
<br />
We had advance notice that all was not consensual in the Castro-centered queer political scene. In the 2002 District 8 election for Board of Supervisors (representing the Castro and Noe Valley), Bevan Dufty, the favored candidate of Willie Brown and a supposedly deteriorating Democratic Party machine, defeated two progressives, Tom Radulovich and Eileen Hanson. All of the candidates were queer (only in the Castro!) so the election was won and lost on the politics and affinities of class and gender. Hanson, Radulovich, and their friends, advisers and funders failed to predict that they would split the Left/progressive vote. Their political shortsightedness lost the opportunity to build the anti-Brown, anti–big money solidarity on the board. I think Radulovich should have stepped down and helped to elect Hanson, a dedicated activist and uncompromising critic, to a board that has only one woman. But he didn’t (and neither did she) and they split the vote. Dufty won and queer solidarity in LGBT San Francisco seemed weaker than ever. <br />
<br />
Before Gonzalez had entered the race there was already discontent about Ammiano at both ends of the queer political Right/Left spectrum. This surprised me. I had expected everyone from Republican queers to the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club and even the NIMBY clean queens (the ones who tear down club and performance posters, resist queer youth shelters, and try to illegalize panhandling) to oppose Ammiano. But I hadn’t anticipated San Francisco’s more dedicated street and community-based activists abandoning Ammiano, especially when it was clear that Newsom’s campaign was growing in dollars and influence. I could smell the shift but I couldn’t pinpoint it. A couple of months before Gonzalez entered the race I encountered him at a juice joint in the lower Haight. While waiting for his two shots of wheat grass he asked me what I thought of Ammiano and his chances at beating Newsom. I shared with him my queasy and confused prediction that even though I had expected everybody I knew to enthusiastically back Ammiano, maybe it was too late, that he no longer had the mass community support he would need to inspire his campaign. I assume that many others must have similarly answered this question because two months later, Gonzalez was running for mayor against Newsom. With the backing of board progressives, he declared that he was the only hope to beat Newsom.<br />
<br />
Gonzalez garnered grassroots support from many communities within the queer political spectrum. Queers previously affiliated with Ammiano, including liberal progressives and direct-action radicals, joined the Gonzalez campaign while Ammiano was still in the race. Ammiano’s affiliation to the Democratic Party was a nonissue when all candidates were Dems but suddenly it seemed hopelessly pre-Seattle, last-millennium-stale compared to Gonzalez’s risky and passionate switch to the more visionary yet marginal Green Party. The Gonzalez campaign mirrored and then exceeded the thrill of Ammiano’s movement-building campaign four years earlier. In the final month of runoff there were house parties for Gonzalez touching many queer constituencies and subcultures. In reaction to both Bush and the recent win of Schwarzenegger, Gonzalez supporters sought to differentiate San Francisco from right-wing corporate apologists.<br />
<br />
There is a relatively new phenomenon that I call the Burning Man factor,” which is having a significant influence on Bay Area (and beyond) art, culture, and now—maybe—politics. The Gonzalez mayoral campaign benefited directly from the e-mail network and affinity group subculture of Burning Man, an annual, noncommercial, desert art fest and gathering that attracts over 25,000 people from around the globe (yet the majority of whom come from the Bay Area). Gonzalez, by age, subculture, and neighborhood (lower Haight), matches the Burning Man demographic. The late summer “Burning Man” gathering is one of several emerging strains of alternative culture that helped to fuel Gonzalez’s fall campaign. <br />
<br />
Despite the thrill and the promise of something completely different, there were Ammiano supporters who felt betrayed by Gonzalez and his supporters. They accused the Gonzalez campaign of homophobic and secretive tactics, which undermined public confidence in Ammiano. Although these core Ammiano people were willing to be quiet in their objections, participating in a progressive/Left unity against Newsom, most refused to participate in the Gonzalez campaign during the runoff. Ammiano disappeared for a couple of key weeks during the runoff and delayed endorsing Gonzalez until after rumors of conflict and mistrust had spread widely. This feeling of broken trust, although it peaked during the election, continues to divide some queer and progressive activists.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Married-for-life 5287.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Married couple at 2007 pro-gay marriage march on Market Street.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Newsom, Queer Basher or Gay Superhero?</font><br />
<br />
When Gavin printed out real wedding licenses in April 2004 he instantly became an internationally famous gay activist. I overheard and read about gay men declaring that they would support Newsom for the rest of their lives, which is pretty scary, considering Newsom’s youth and ambition. It was a shrewd move, but this adopted son of the ruling class didn’t care about queer people, any more than he cared about homeless people. His “compassion” is not distinct from either his political ambition or the assumptions of his class and community. <br />
<br />
Many would agree that Newsom’s marriage action was an attempt to win support from the nearly 50% of San Francisco voters who had supported Gonzalez. I don’t think Newsom was going for the Gonzalez “people,” most of whom did not have gay marriage high on their priority list. Nonetheless, Newsom had been exposed by the Gonzalez campaign as a conservative lacking compassion and he needed to regain some of San Francisco’s socially liberal center.<br />
<br />
Spending time with my boyfriend on Valentine’s Day outside City Hall among at least 1,000 homos wanting to get legally married, it was odd that I only knew one person in line. The vast majority of the wedding crowd were neither street activists nor campaign volunteers. The cars of the couples doing victory laps included new SUVs, a Jag, a BMW sports car, and other fancy new cars. These were mostly well-employed, comfortable Americans who happen to be queer. There was an element of subversion and historic justice to the proceedings but it was not a radical crowd by any means. Still, it was euphoric. We also waited in line for an hour or so the next day, Sunday, before being turned away again. I heard that the lines Monday were the longest of the whole weekend, in the rain! <br />
<br />
At worst, the whole thing was a stunt without legal spine, not dissimilar to the “Care Not Cash” initiative: a wild and probably illegal, or legally inconsequential, move that galvanizes a particular aspiring and security-obsessed constituency. The queerness of this constituency is much less a rallying point of solidarity than their desire for the right to make money. Newsom’s advisers knew that the opposition to gay marriage by right-wing Republicans and religious extremists did not represent significant votes or funds in San Francisco. The opposition to cutting homeless welfare checks by over 80% also lacked electoral power, in spite of its vocal visibility. With both of these political stunts, Newsom’s team displayed a crafty ability to manipulate public symbols—much more strategically important to Newsom than long-term change. <br />
<br />
<font size=4>A Downward Spiral Before the Next Uprising</font><br />
<br />
We’ll never know what would have happened if Gonzalez had stayed out of the race and if all the progressives on the Board of Supervisors had backed Ammiano. We do know that the once-upon-a-time inevitable trajectory toward a progressive gay mayor, which began with Harvey Milk’s election in 1977, was now on hold. The lineage of progressive gay politicians on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors will end, at least temporarily, when Ammiano’s term is complete. <br />
<br />
[[Image:GLBT-national-hotline-contingent-2011-pride-march 2353.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''GLBT National Hotline contingent at the 2011 Pride March.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Sfpd-march-in-2011-pride-march 2391.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''San Francisco police officers march in Gay Pride parade, 2011.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Pride-2011-b-of-a-float 2399.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Bank of America float at Gay Pride March, June 2011.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
Public “queerness” is defined these days by consumer queers on network TV teaching the world to conform, or at the other end of the spectrum by anti-assimilationist queers puking in the streets about corporate sponsorship. Queer visibility and engagement is both more pronounced and more nuanced than ever before. An entire generation is coming of age with many more options for political affinity, within and beyond queer cultures and identities. Our newest generation of sex and gender radicals suggest that San Francisco will continue to be a pioneering home for experiments in sexual and gender liberation, symbiotic to the city’s large minority of progressive, anarchist, and Left activists. Despite class and nationalist tensions, queer culture and politics have the potential to inform and inspire a politics of solidarity, sensitivity, pleasure, and justice. Whether this will result in a significant challenge to a politics of cuteness and comfort remains to be seen, especially within a context of increasing economic and psychological fear.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Tax-mormons 5284.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Pro-gay marriage demonstrators on Market Street, 2007.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Gay-is-ok 5313.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Gay marriage demonstrators at City Hall, 2007.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Postscript</font><br />
<br />
When straight folks marry, the license has no role in the ceremony. After the wedding, the couple retires to some back room and takes all of thirty seconds to sign a piece of paper that will live the rest of its life (until death or divorce) in a file or drawer. At City Hall on Valentine’s weekend 2004, each married couple would exit City Hall waving their blue-trimmed, officially stamped paper. Many couples posed for photos with their paper and others paraded around City Hall in cars (often with dogs or kids) holding their licenses up to the window. Traffic stopped. Horns blared. Bystanders cheered and cried. The magic of this moment will have political reverberations for years to come. Rarely has a municipal document carried such weight.<br />
<br />
Seth Eisen and I never did get married—because we never got up early enough. We made an appointment but the state ended the joyride before our date arrived. Now, instead of being one of the 4,000 couples in limbo, we’re one of millions around the world whose partnership remains legally invisible.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Royalty-at-pride-march-2011 2360.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''[[Emperor Norton|Self-proclaimed royalty]] has a long history in San Francisco, and has been extended in the Gay culture regularly.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
<br />
[[Image:The-political-edge.jpg|left]] published originally as "Queerly Shifting Affinities: Notes on the Ever-Diversifying Queer Political Classes in San Francisco, the Gayest Little City in the World" in [http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100341720 ''The Political Edge''] ed. Chris Carlsson (City Lights Foundation: 2004)<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:2000s]] [[category:Power and Money]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Poverty,_Social_Isolation,_Transsexuality&diff=27999
Poverty, Social Isolation, Transsexuality
2018-10-16T15:09:07Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
The local San Francisco Equal Opportunity Council was responsible for allocating the monies flowing to San Francisco from President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty. Originally millions were targeted at four neighborhoods, defined based on ethnicity and historic discrimination and impoverishment: Chinatown, the Mission, the Fillmore/Western Addition, and Bayview/Hunter’s Point. The Tenderloin was only added after two years of organizing and agitation by neighborhood residents and organizers from area churches and social service agencies. <br />
<br />
'''Drag Queens of the 1960s and 1970s'''<br />
<br />
''Image: Anthony Friedkin''<br />
<br />
[[Image:The-Gay-Essay-Drag-Queen-1960s-1970s-Black-and-White-Photography-01-694x1024.jpg|240px|left]]<br />
<br />
The Tenderloin effort, which brought federal relief to the “Central City Target Area” (also including blocks south of Market in addition to the contemporary Tenderloin district), was path-breaking for the entire country in redefining the what was understood as “disadvantaged,” and thus eligible for federal anti-poverty support. The new Central City Target Area was largely inhabited in the mid-1960s by poor white residents, many of whom were homosexuals, impoverished elderly, abusers of drugs and alcohol, and young runaways and cast-outs. The social stigma attached to these “categories” (which largely derived from a sense that individual moral turpitude or personal failure was responsible) had made this poor population harder to include in public anti-poverty support.<br />
<br />
But, as Martin Meeker has shown, a “coalition of liberal ministers, gay activists, and Central City residents worked together to produce a new poverty knowledge focused less on racial discrimination and cross-generational poverty, but much more on social isolation and its causes.” The Central City Target Area was the first time homosexuals (and others at the margins of mainstream acceptability) received benefits from the welfare state based on their different ''way of being''. Moreover, with this new sense of entitlement came a growing awareness of a shared identity, and with it a growing commitment to dignity and basic civil rights—the foundation of today’s widely accepted LGBT movement. The 1960s Tenderloin activists didn’t try to minimize the role of race in defining poverty, but argued that social marginalization and individual isolation were also key factors, thus augmenting the mix of economic and ethno-racial factors already in play.<br />
<br />
As it happens, this was contemporaneous to the rebirth of [[Glide Methodist Church|Glide Methodist Church]] and the entry of Rev. Ted McIlvenna to Glide and the Tenderloin. He recognized the population in his new neighborhood, began a Young Adult Project, reached out to the only public homosexual organizations at that time, the [[Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement|Mattachine Society]] and the [[Daughters of Bilitis|Daughters of Bilitis]], and by July 1964, participated in the founding of the [[Gay History and Politics in the Tenderloin|Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH)]]. Phyllis Lyon of the DOB also became McIlvenna’s secretary during this period.<br />
<br />
[[Image:The-Gay-Essay-Drag-Queen-1960s-1970s-Black-and-White-Photography-05-1024x692.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
'''Drag Queens of the 1960s-1970s.'''<br />
<br />
''Image: Anthony Friedkin''<br />
<br />
Transsexuality came of age in the Tenderloin in the mid-1960s too, arising from the confluence of gay organizing, anti-poverty claims on behalf of the isolated and socially marginalized [[Finocchio's: The Carnegie Hall of Cross-Dressing|“deviant” characters]] in the Tenderloin, and the emergence of a medical approach to changing gender. The new ideas about gender started with the famous Christine Jorgensen sex-change operation in 1952, but by the mid-1960s was entering more widespread acceptance due to the work of Dr. Harry Benjamin and other clinically trained professionals—Benjamin’s 1966 publication of ''The Transsexual Phenomenon'' was the first book-length treatment of transsexuality and helped create a new orthodoxy in medical and psychotherapeutic circles. Dr. Benjamin ran his summer practice from an office off Union Square, just blocks from the thriving gay drag (“queen”) scene on Turk Street that included El Rosa, Sound of Music, Chukkers, the Camelot, and the Hilliard, along with other establishments in the surrounding streets.<br />
<br />
In August 1966 the now-famous [[Society for Individual Rights (SIR)|mini-riot at Compton’s Cafeteria on Taylor and Turk]] took place. Police rolled in to carry out what had been routine roustings and mass arrests of queens and gays, but for the first time the patrons of Comptons fought back, smashing windows and fighting the police with shoes and handbags in the streets. Early historians of San Francisco’s gay community wrote in 1998 that “the Tenderloin’s legacy of transgender militancy contributed significantly to early gay liberation efforts in San Francisco,” leading to the establishment later of the Gay Liberation Front, which evolved into the Gay Activist Alliance, which founded the Helping Hands Center on Turk Street to provide support and services for transsexuals as part of its overall mission. <br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:1960s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Postwar_Sex_District&diff=27998
Postwar Sex District
2018-10-16T15:09:07Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''By Libby Ingalls''<br />
<br />
''Adapted from "Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco," by Josh Sides,''<br />
''Journal of Urban History 2006; 35; 355''<br />
<br />
Commercial sexual entertainment and prostitution have been a fact of life in San Francisco since the first days of the Gold Rush. As the city grew and evolved over the decades, sex for sale has reinvented itself, adapting to changes in attitudes toward sex, legal criteria of obscenity, urban development, and city politics. What began as a bawdy district anchored by brothels appealing to transitory miners, evolved into a more fluid, integral part of San Francisco, ultimately leading to a new phenomenon with the sexual revolution of the 60s and the immense profitability of the sex industry.<br />
<br />
The proper place of sex in the city has been debated since 1849. In those early days, the [[BARBARY COAST|Barbary Coast]] district housed most of the brothels, with [[Gold-Rush Era Prostitutes|prostitution]] being the main business. The district also offered other forms of sexual entertainment, including crude burlesque, belly dancing and other sexually explicit dance forms, saloons with half-clad waitresses, and peep shows.<br />
<br />
[[Image:1890 Barbary Coast ladies AAB-6669.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Barbary Coast "Ladies" in 1890.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''<br />
<br />
The various crusades against sexual entertainment, usually by Christian groups, made little progress when sexual permissiveness and political corruption prevailed. Attempts to crack down on prostitution just caused it to move to another street or neighborhood. The status quo was further maintained by protection money, often paid to police officers, and at least one mayor, Eugene Schmitz (in office 1902-07).<br />
<br />
[[Image:Barbary Coast 1913 AAB-6694.jpg|720px]]<br />
<br />
'''Crowds on Pacific Avenue during height of Barbary Coast in 1913.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''<br />
<br />
This was all to change in 1911 with the defeat of the Union Labor Party, and public sentiment turning against San Francisco as a “wide-open town.” At the same time, the city was about to host the [[SAILING TO BYZANTIUM: 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition|Panama-Pacific International Exposition]] of 1915, and the business elite, who had collectively pledged $4 million toward the Expo, feared the notoriety of the Barbary Coast would discourage visitors. They pressured [[Mayor "Sunny Jim" Rolph|Mayor James Rolph]], who personally tolerated prostitution, to effectively shut down the Barbary Coast. Rolph’s new policies outlawed prostitution, dancing in any saloon, the presence of females in saloons, and the issuance of any new licenses for saloons. Newspaper magnate and owner of the ''SF Examiner'', William Randolph Hearst supported the mayor with a series of articles on the evils of the Barbary Coast, encouraging the mayor to replace it with “decent fun.” The new police commissioner, James B. Cook, jumped on the bandwagon with his own campaign to close down the sex district. Then in 1914 the California voters approved the Red-Light Abatement Law, fining property owners where prostitution was taking place, sealing the fate of the Barbary Coast, for the moment anyway.<br />
<br />
As is the nature of prostitution, it doesn’t just go away, it moves on; in this case, to the Tenderloin. The migration of the prostitutes coincided with the shift in the neighborhood’s chief theatrical entertainment, burlesque, from witty, satirical, imaginative performances to exposure of the female body. <br />
<br />
[[Image:Sally Rand at Music Box Theatre 1939 AAD-2974.jpg|left|Sally Rand performing at Music Box Theatre, 1939 / Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library]] Sally Rand, the infamous strip tease artist of the 1930s, performed at the San Francisco International Exposition of 1939, then opened a regular stint at the Music Box on O’Farrell. Local imitators followed, and soon burlesque and strip tease performances were supporting a thriving neighborhood commercial sexual economy.<br />
<br />
It wasn’t long before North Beach got in on the action and revived its own thriving nightlife. Three main influences brought this about: the Repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the [[Treasure Island Fair: Golden Gate International Exposition|1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island]], and the opening of the gay nightclubs, [[Finocchio's|Finocchio’s]] and [[Before the Castro: North Beach, a Gay Mecca|Mona’s]]. This time, however, nightclubs were more timid, advertising themselves as “theatre restaurants” with sophisticated floorshows and musical entertainment. Property owners wanting to increase real estate values emphasized this new respectability and international appeal. Seeking a connection with the 1939 Exposition, they built an archway on Pacific and Kearny reading “International Settlement” announcing their intended transformation of the Barbary Coast. Promoting respectability by property owners, however, could not stop the opening of new clubs, commercial sexual entertainment, and the resurfacing of San Francisco’s reputation as a wide-open town. A new dimension was the growing gay population, fueled by the administrative role of San Francisco in [[World War II: Self-Discovery for Many|World War II as the point of disembarkation for gay men]] dishonorably discharged from service in the Pacific.<br />
<br />
But by the mid-1950s, commercial sexual entertainment again came under attack, this time by ideologically driven proponents of McCarthyism. Their charge: sexual perversion could lead to communist sympathy. In the name of national security and patriotism, prostitution was once again targeted. Republican [[Mayor George Christopher|George Christopher]] won a landslide victory in 1955 on an anti-vice, pro-business platform, and thus continued a well-orchestrated campaign of the 1950s to wipe out public and commercial sexuality from North Beach. As part of the cleanup, Pacific Avenue, the former heart of the Barbary Coast, was transformed into a wholesale interior decorating supplier district, Jackson Square.<br />
<br />
Try though political and business interests might to control North Beach, the free and independent spirit was irrepressible. In the mid to late 1950s, North Beach attracted an influx of writers, poets, artists, and free thinkers with the cheap apartments and numerous cafés and bars. The most notorious Beats, [[Allen Ginsberg|Allen Ginsberg]], Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, stayed only briefly in North Beach, leaving by 1956, but their legacy continued on in the aura, imagination and landscape of North Beach. Nightlife thrived once again.<br />
<br />
A defining moment came in June 1964, when [[Where Topless Dancing Began|Carol Doda]] performed her topless swim dance at the Condor. Dozens of similar acts followed, attracting thousands of tourists, servicemen, conventioneers, and locals, matched only by the original [[BARBARY COAST|Barbary Coast]] before 1913. Out on the streets, pedestrians could peer through picture windows and view topless dancers. <br />
<br />
Religious leaders were up in arms, joined by “legitimate” nightclub owners fearing the competition, and the North Beach merchants arguing that the weekend congestion hurt business. Added to this was the controversy over the question: was topless dancing obscene, and, therefore, illegal? [[Mayor Jack Shelley|Mayor Jack Shelley]], the first Democratically elected mayor in 50 years (elected in 1963), ordered a raid to bring the issue to court. Two judges acquitted the dancers and owners of the topless nightclubs, paving the way for the spread of topless and bottomless entertainment. Massage parlors, as fronts for prostitution, were not far behind, followed by a proliferation of pornographic bookstores and pornographic movie houses. In 1966 the city populace rejected Prop 16, a ballot initiative that sought to tighten obscenity laws. The sexual revolution was in full swing. For gays and straights alike, unfettered sexual expression was seen as a right rather than a frivolity. By 1970 there were 47 hardcore pornographic bookstores and 28 pornographic movie houses, in North Beach, the Tenderloin, Polk Street and South of Market, along with dozens of peep shows and strip clubs. <br />
<br />
With obscenity laws crumbling, the sexual revolution on the rise, and public opinion supporting civil liberties, post-war sex districts became a feature of America’s large cities. Enter Hollywood. Here was rich fodder for the gritty films of the 1970s. Narcotics had infiltrated sex districts, but nothing like the seediness Hollywood invented, featuring hustlers, murderers, pimps, and prostitutes. Granted there were arrests for petty theft and prostitution in North Beach, but the highest rate of violent crime remained in other neighborhoods. Nevertheless, inflamed by films, the specter of violence persisted. The city once again took action, this time with [[Mayor Dianne Feinstein|Dianne Feinstein]] leading the charge.<br />
<br />
Dianne Feinstein was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1969, becoming president in 1970-71, 1974-75, and 1978. Her campaign against the sex district started with an ordinance to remove signs, followed by an attempt to prohibit sex businesses from operating within 1,000 feet of another. Downtown business elite concerned with business and real estate values strongly supported Feinstein, who herself had personal ties to downtown development. Opposition to Feinstein came from Harvey Milk, the ACLU, and mothers of Bayview Hunter's Point, as the zoning stipulations left Bayview Hunter's Point as the most obvious place for the sex businesses to move, with its warehouses and open spaces. <br />
<br />
The Board of Supervisors rejected the zoning ordinance, but Feinstein continued to fight for controls of pornography and reduction of commercial sexual entertainment. The controls did come about, but ironically Feinstein had very little to do with it.<br />
<br />
Outside factors were far more effective than Feinstein’s efforts. First, there was the introduction of the VCR that allowed potential customers to stay home for their entertainment. Secondly, the AIDS epidemic led to the [[Sex Panic Closes Bathhouses|closing of gay bathhouses]], sex clubs and other venues of sexual activity. And third, the rapid rise in the value of downtown commercial real estate brought an influx of young, affluent residents seeking food and entertainment in North Beach, and property values there began to soar. The old haunts of North Beach were getting priced out of the market. By the early 1990s only four of the original 28 strip clubs of North Beach remained.<br />
<br />
Times again changed, and today there are at least 10 strip clubs drawing thousands of tourists. The nightlife is once again thriving, offering all sorts of adult entertainment: nightclubs, tours of North Beach Gentlemen’s Clubs, peep shows, massage parlors, and escort services of all sorts. The sex industry has taken on a life of its own, establishing itself as an integral part of the landscape and contributing so significantly to the economy of San Francisco that no one wants to disturb it, for now.<br />
<br />
[[category:1900s]][[category:1910s]][[category:1930s]][[category:1940s]][[category:1950s]][[category:1960s]][[category:1970s]][[category:1980s]][[category:1990s]][[category:Gold Rush]][[category:North Beach]][[category:Dance]][[category:LGBTQI]][[category:Bayview/Hunter's Point]][[category:Tourism]][[category:Mayors]][[category:Gentrification]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Patient_No_More:_1977_Occupation_of_Federal_Offices_in_San_Francisco&diff=27997
Patient No More: 1977 Occupation of Federal Offices in San Francisco
2018-10-16T15:09:07Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''This content is reposted with permission from the website at the [http://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/patient-no-more/introduction Longmore Institute at San Francisco State University]. ''<br />
<br />
[[Image:504 image by Anthony Tusler.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Protesters gather at UN Plaza outside federal building in San Francisco on April 5, 1977.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Anthony Tusler''<br />
<br />
This is the story of a remarkable, overlooked moment in U.S. history when people with disabilities occupied a government building to demand their rights. Known as the “Section 504 Sit-In,” the protest profoundly changed the lives of people with and without disabilities, and paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.<br />
<br />
On April 5, 1977, American people with and without disabilities showed the world the power of grassroots activism. In San Francisco, more than 100 people began a twenty-six day occupation of the Federal Building to insist on getting civil rights. Four years earlier, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 had made it illegal for any federally funded facilities or programs to discriminate against disabled people. One signature from the Head of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) stood in the way of the law taking effect. People waited and waited. At last in 1977 frustration turned into bold action. A diverse coalition launched protests across the country. San Francisco's occupation was the most significant.<br />
<br />
[[Image:C13Map.jpg]]<br />
<br />
''Line Drawing of a US map showing the location of HEW offices where protests first took place: Washington D.C., Boston, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, and Denver.'''<br />
<br />
On April 30, 1977, San Francisco's Section 504 occupiers emerged victorious from the longest take-over of a federal building in US history. A national disability rights movement was born. This pivotal moment led to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) signed twenty-five years ago on July 26, 1990.<br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GQBVGKa-PoA?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qq5pAxxRmEQ?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<font size=4>Occupiers Take the Department Of Health, Education, and Welfare Offices</font size><br />
<br />
'''DAY 1 TUESDAY APRIL 5'''<br />
<br />
Demonstrators at ten federal offices across the US demand that President Carter's Administration sign the 504 regulations without watering them down. Sit-ins begin in SF and D.C. San Francisco:A large group enters the HEW offices and over 100 are locked in for the night. Community organizers from Delancey Street the residential rehabilitation program for substance abusers, bring food; Salvation Army provides blankets and mattresses. Washington D.C.: 300 protesters heckle Secretary Joseph Califano to sign the 504 regulations unchanged. Many stay in the HEW office overnight.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 2 WEDNESDAY APRIL 6'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: After sleeping on the Federal Building floor, over 100 people wake to their first full day of the sit-in. Washington D.C.: The occupiers leave the building — no food or access to medicine and unsympathetic guards made it impossible to stay. Other Cities: Protests fizzle out without community support.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 3 THURSDAY APRIL 7'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: At least 130 people now at the sit-in. HEW officials turn off hot water, reduce phone lines to two pay phones, and limit all other phones to incoming calls. HEW prohibits occupiers leaving the building from re-entering.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Dailylife by HoiLynn D'Lil.jpg|756px]]<br />
<br />
'''Protesters gather around a cluttered office desk to plan next actions. The HEW offices at 50 United Nations Plaza became the office of the ‘Section 504 Emergency Coalition.’'''<br />
<br />
''Photo by HolLynn D'Lil''<br />
<br />
'''DAY 4 FRIDAY APRIL 8'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Occupiers learn that Los Angeles protest is over. Congressman George Miller visits the sit-in. Delancey Street and a few local businesses donate food. Eight people participate in the hunger strike. [[Black Panthers|Black Panther Party]] sends letter of support. A small group protesters celebrate the last day of Passover inside the fourth floor elevator.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 5 SATURDAY APRIL 9'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' reports that the occupiers are now 150 strong. 504 Coalition issues press release urging supporters to come to the sit-in for most up-to-date information. Hunger strikers remain in high spirits. Occupiers join committees to handle daily tasks inside and duties for keeping the protest going; a routine develops and each day counts.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 6 SUNDAY APRIL 10'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Easter service held at 10am followed by an egg hunt for occupiers’ children in the Federal Building’s courtyard. US congressman George Miller speaks to occupiers and urges them to remain. California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation Director Ed Roberts, sends a telegram to President Carter. Pay phones are jammed with coins; occupiers can’t communicate with anyone outside.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 7 MONDAY APRIL 11'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Protesters give daffodils to arriving HEW staff. Congressmen Phillip Burton and George Miller announce that a semi-official “hearing” will be held inside on April 15th. More than 120 protesters now in the building discuss concerns about the regulations being diluted. Buttercup Restaurant, Brick Hut lesbian cooperative in Berkeley, and Glide Memorial Church donate dinner. Neighborhood pharmacists help with medicines. Channel 7 journalist Evan White commits to telling the protest’s story, reports on his travels downtown in a borrowed wheelchair.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 8 TUESDAY APRIL 12'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Organizers have one incoming phone line. Congressman Burton pressures Regional Secretary for HEW, Joseph Maldonado for three more lines so protesters can obtain food and medical supplies. Georgia Senator Julian Bond visits the protest and connects event to the 1960s civil rights movement. CA assemblyman Tom Bates sends a letter of support signed by forty-six members of the California Assembly to President Carter. City Council of Pacifica passes a resolution supporting the demonstration. Thirty Junior National Association of the Deaf students participate in a vigil outside the building.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 9 WEDNESDAY APRIL 13'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: CA assemblyman Milton Marks asks Maldonado to let sit-in numbers numbers return to 150, allow in eight ASL interpreters, and restore the phone lines. SF protesters learn of Washington D.C. activists’ vigil to support them. Committees monitor press coverage, raise money to support the occupation, and prepare for next day's hearing. Women's rap group builds bonds. Wheelchair races in hallways let off steam.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 10 THURSDAY APRIL 14'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Daily food deliveries from the Black Panthers, Glide Memorial Church, and others sustain the protesters.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 11 FRIDAY APRIL 15'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: 10:00AM—4:00PM congressmen Miller and Burton hold hearings inside the occupied building by declaring room 406 a “satellite office of Congress.” Individuals from diverse groups give testimony on 504 regulations. ''SF Chronicle'' reports that most of the original 150 protesters remain inside. Outside hundreds attend a public rally. [[Senator Alan Cranston: Hawkish Dove|Senator Alan Cranston]] sends telegram of support.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 12 SATURDAY APRIL 16'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: After a long meeting, occupiers elect delegation of twenty-five to go to Washington D.C. to put pressure on Secretary Califano to sign 504 regulations. Concerned for their health, some occupiers leave to join supporters outside.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 13 SUNDAY APRIL 17'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Conditions get more difficult inside the Federal Building and some protesters report developing body lice and crabs. But food keeps coming and hopes remain high as protesters make plans for going to Washington. SF protest has raised $5,000 to send the delegation, including significant funds from International Association of Machinists (IAM).<br />
<br />
'''DAY 14 MONDAY APRIL 18'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: [[Mayor George Moscone|Mayor Moscone]] has mobile showers and towels brought in but local HEW officials push back. Moscone gains White House permission; portable showers are installed.<br />
<br />
[[Image:DAILYLIFEBOTTOM by HoiLynn D'Lil.jpg|756px]]<br />
<br />
'''In the lobby of the Federal Building at UN Plaza.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo by HolLynn D'Lil''<br />
<br />
'''DAY 15 TUESDAY APRIL 19'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: About seventy-five remaining occupiers vow to hold the fort while eighteen of them and seven attendants fly to Washington. Washington D.C.: Newly arrived San Francisco protesters travel in a rented windowless Hertz truck with a hydraulic tail lift to Califano’s house to hold a candlelight vigil until dawn. Most stay at the Lutheran Place Memorial Church, sleeping on foam mattresses on the floor; eat food provided by local Washington IAM.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 16 WEDESDAY APRIL 20'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Protesters learn that [[Ed Roberts: The Father of Independent Living|Ed Roberts]] plans to visit Washington D.C. to lend support to protest. Washington D.C.: With little sleep, San Francisco delegation meets Senators Alan Cranston and Harrison Williams in Congressman Phillip Burton’s office. Protesters discover that few restrooms in the Capitol are accessible.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 17 THURSDAY APRIL 21'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Protesters hang on; committees still active; in downtime some play cards, musical instruments, eat home-cooked food from Black Panthers, talk late into the night. Washington D.C.: SF delegation spends day lobbying; gives up on meeting with Carter or Califano after repeatedly being rebuffed. Group of eight meets with Stuart Eisenstat, Carter’s Chief Domestic Policy Adviser. Evening vigil held outside the White House.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 18 FRIDAY APRIL 22'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Four protesters return from D.C. and hold an evening press conference with demonstrators outside the SF Federal Building. CA assemblyman Milton Marks and around 100 supporters attend. Washington D.C.: Armed police block entrance to national HEW office as SF delegation tries to meet Califano. Senator Cranston and twenty-eight colleagues write or sign letters of support. Protesters remain hopeful.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 19 SATURDAY APRIL 23'''<br />
<br />
Washington D.C.: Day of rest; protesters deal with hot, sticky weather.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 20 SUNDAY APRIL 24'''<br />
<br />
Washington D.C.: SF delegates lobby outside Carter’s First Baptist Church; President escapes through the back door. Protesters plan rally in front of the White House for next day.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 21 MONDAY APRIL 25'''<br />
<br />
Washington D.C.: Lutheran pastor, the Reverend John Steinbruck invites Carter and Califano to prayer breakfast with the protesters but gets no response.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 22 TUESDAY APRIL 26'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Over 100 protesters remain inside the Federal Building; dozens of Bay Area supporters continue demonstrating outside. Washington D.C.: SF delegates and over 100 demonstrators march in front of the White House and hold a rally. Parallel events take place in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Hartford, CT.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 23 WEDNESDAY APRIL 27'''<br />
<br />
Washington D.C.: SF delegation protests in front of a hotel where Califano is holding an event. With their press passes, occupier Michael Williams and journalist Evan White gain access and corner Califano with difficult questions. Most SF delegates fly home, six remain in Washington.<br />
HEW Secretary Joseph Califano Signs the Section 504 Regulations<br />
<br />
'''DAY 24 THURSDAY APRIL 28'''<br />
<br />
Califano signs the Section 504 regulations without fanfare. News of success spreads fast; some protesters worry it might be a trick. San Francisco: Protesters are elated; vote to wait for Washington group to return so everyone can leave the building triumphantly together. Occupier Margaret (Dusty) Irvine ends twenty-one day hunger strike. Washington D.C.: Here too news spreads quickly and protesters worry that changes have been made. By end of day, attorneys confirm that Califano did sign the regulations unchanged as protesters had demanded from the beginning.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 25 FRIDAY APRIL 29'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Protesters clean up the HEW offices; they celebrate one last night in the building together; bonds are strong and not everyone wants to leave; they vow to carry on the disability rights struggle.<br />
<br />
'''DAY 26 SATURDAY APRIL 30'''<br />
<br />
San Francisco: Late morning the occupiers leave the building together; to cheers from many HEW employees and federal security staff, they join a large public rally on UN Plaza and toast their victory with champagne.<br />
<br />
[[Image:SUCCESSOF504 SFEX Bancroft.jpg|756px]]<br />
<br />
'''Occupiers and their supporters in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza celebrate the signing of the Section 504 regulations.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: San Francisco Examiner via Bancroft Library''<br />
<br />
On April 28, 1977, Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), signed the Section 504 regulations. Protesters in San Francisco stayed for two more days to clean up and say good-byes. Everyone was energized by this huge accomplishment; there would be no turning back.<br />
<br />
The San Francisco occupiers came from the entire Bay Area, which had attracted many people with disabilities. In fact, Berkeley’s disabled population increased from an estimated 400 in 1972 to 5,000 in 1976. Why?<br />
<br />
:::• The growing Independent Living Movement employed people with disabilities, fostered disability pride, and gave advice for living in the community.<br><br />
:::• California had a personal care attendant allowance.<br><br />
:::• Good weather and more curb cuts on sidewalks than any other city made it easy to get around.<br><br />
:::• Like other immigrants, disabled newcomers found support from people who had already paved the way.<br><br />
:::• Everyone who wanted change could find social movements with like-minded people.<br />
<br />
[[Image:CIL4.jpg|756px]]<br />
<br />
'''Berkeley's Center for Independent Living (CIL) attracted many people with disabilities. Everyone in this group photo participated in the Section 504 occupation. '''<br />
<br />
''Photo: Center for Independent Living''<br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WCX9NvQl_eY?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
When the sit-in began, nobody dreamed they'd be there for nearly a month. Most arrived with nothing. Some risked losing jobs and relationships. For many, this was the first time they had slept away from home. Despite hardships, they also found camaraderie as they talked, played cards, sang, partied, made friends, and fell in love.<br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ap8EZkWtTRY?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<font size=4>The Untold Stories Of The 504 Protests</font size><br />
<br />
:::• Even people who were there cannot agree on how long the sit-in lasted and how many occupiers were in the building.<br><br />
:::• A lot of HEW employees supported the protest<br><br />
:::• The key role of lesbians and radical organizations like the Black Panther Party is only now beginning to emerge.<br><br />
:::• Women wheelchair riders led the San Francisco 504 Protest.<br><br />
:::• Many disabled people thought the San Francisco protesters were too radical and believed it was wiser to work within the system rather than against it.<br><br />
:::• Some occupiers got past the Federal security guards with relative ease; a few even snuck off for showers or to the beach.<br><br />
:::• Deaf people participated in the sit-in but the Deaf community has mixed feelings about the Section 504 regulations because mainstreaming in education threatens Deaf language and culture.<br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sfvWOESpHZ4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<font size=4>504 and the ADA</font size><br />
<br />
'''“WE SET THE STAGE FOR THE ADA”'''<br> <br />
''—Organizer Judy Heumann, 20th Anniversary Celebration''<br />
<br />
Without Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, there would be no Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The 1973 Act served as a template for the more comprehensive law passed in 1990. 504 gave ADA advocates evidence that disability rights could benefit many without adding a huge burden on society.<br />
<br />
:::• Because 504 defined disability flexibly and took prejudice into account, the ADA could be about civil rights rather than medical diagnoses.<br />
:::• By building in ideas such as “reasonable accommodation” and “avoiding undue hardship,” Section 504 ensured that the ADA would always be about compromise.<br />
:::• After the long wait to have Section 504 signed, those who wrote the ADA made sure that it had to be signed into law within one year.<br />
:::• Section 504 and the battle to have it signed forged a generation of disability activists who would help draft and pass the ADA.<br />
:::• Because the Section 504 protests and legislation grouped people with many different disabilities together, there would be one big ADA instead of mini-ADAs for each impairment group.<br />
:::• The Section 504 protest lit the spark for a national disability rights movement and national disability organizations that could promote and defend the ADA.<br />
<br />
[[Image:BRUCELEE by HoiLynn D'Lil.jpg|756px]]<br />
<br />
'''Inside his Federal Building office during the Section 504 protest, HEW employee Bruce Lee posts a hand-made sign ‘504 is law now make it reality.' '''<br />
<br />
''Photo by HolLynn D'Lil''<br />
<br />
Thanks to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, people with disabilities have the right to:<br />
<br />
:::• Accessible public buildings<br><br />
:::• A public education alongside nondisabled peers, without extra costs or put into “separate but equal” schools<br><br />
:::• Freedom from discrimination in federal employment and related benefits<br><br />
:::• Freedom from discrimination in federal housing, healthcare and other assistance programs<br><br />
<br />
<font size=4>Kitty Cone Victory Speech:</font size><br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HQ3kcSgAX-w?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[category:Dissent]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Women]] [[category:African-American]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Bay Area Social Movements]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=PRAYER_WARRIORS&diff=27996
PRAYER WARRIORS
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by George Neville-Neal''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$queer-nation-flyer.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''A Queer Nation flyer'''<br />
<br />
I moved to San Francisco from Boston via a short stint in Mountain View in August of 1990. At the time I was 23 years old and just out of college. When I had left Boston a bunch of my friends, I found out later, had taken bets on how long it would take me to join a "radical" organization. At the time I didn't think I was that radical, I felt that most of my friends in Boston were just very middle class, and boring. They were nice people, they just didn't seem interested in changing the world, or even their local circumstances. In Boston I had been the most out and loud queer that many people I knew knew. I felt that this was their problem, and I still do.<br />
<br />
In some ways they were right. It took me about 2 weeks to find out about Queer Nation, a radical queer group of about 60 people that had its meetings at [[THE WOMEN'S BUILDING|The Women's Building]] in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. When I went to my first meeting in early September plans were already under way for a big protest to confront a rabid right wing preacher named Larry Lee and his Prayer Warriors.<br />
<br />
The concept that this preacher had come up with was to use all the militaristic imagery he could and to "inspire" his flock to do battle with evil. Pictures were shown on the news of these folks all dressed up in camouflage outfits screaming and praying in big auditoriums.<br />
<br />
This year (1990) he had decided that Halloween in the Castro was the evil to do battle with.<br />
<br />
The Halloween party in the Castro was still a pretty big deal at this point, but not so big that it had to be moved to Civic Center where it is now (1997). It was also at this time much more queer than it is now. It was just a huge street party where everyone could let it all hang out. You'd see the most amazing drag, as well as lots of people having a good time. It was a party for that neighborhood and really wasn't something for everyone. Our plan was to prevent the Prayer Warriors from crashing the party.<br />
<br />
Other than a couple of demonstrations that I'd gone to in College in Boston (one to voice support for an equal rights bill that would include Sexual Orientation as a protected class and the other against the CIA recruiting on my college campus) I'd never really been involved in a big demonstration. The next several weeks were involved in getting out the word on the protest and figuring out what our plans were going to be to block these lunk heads.<br />
<br />
When I joined up with QN I immediately joined the media focus group.<br />
<br />
I liked to write and was really into working on press releases and newsletters. We had a few meetings where we worked on the press release and the weekly newsletter, Queer Week, which was a paste up job of 4 pages. One of the major pushes for this protest was to get our press release to as many media organizations as we could.<br />
<br />
The protest didn't just involve QN, there were other groups who were involved, including The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and others who escape me now.<br />
<br />
I'm sure we did have a plan for that night, but I never knew what it was, except for one point; don't let the Prayer Warriors get near The Castro. Their plans were to be bussed in to the Civic Center Auditorium, about a mile from the Castro and start off with a rousing prayer meeting. When they arrived we were there to meet them, and so was the SFPD.<br />
<br />
The Cops kept us away from the Warriors as best they could but it was a thin line between us. It was amazing to me to see all these crazed dykes and faggots, most in leather jackets covered in bright luminescent stickers, screaming and taunting these bigots. This was the kind of thing I had really jones'd for in college and now I was in the middle of it.<br />
<br />
I was there with my friend Roger, and lots of other people who would eventually become friends and acquaintances. Roger and I had met a couple of months before and had started hanging out a lot. He was part of a core group of friends that I still am very close to to this day. We egged each other on to block the street and do other things which the cops said we weren't allowed to do.<br />
<br />
The array of people was amazing. There were probably 1,000 protesters at this demo. Some group (I think the Sisters) had built a huge golden cross on a float whose main beam was a big penis. It was an amazingly shocking sight, and one that made me grin from ear to ear.<br />
<br />
These people were crazy, and it was a crazy I really liked. We had cut all the ties loose and weren't taking shit from anyone. Everyone was chanting stuff like, "Hey hey, ho ho, homophobia's got to go", and "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, fucking bigots go away."<br />
<br />
At one point the cops had gotten us across the street from the auditorium and now a stand off began. Most of us were standing on a grassy area across a 40' wide street from the auditorium. At this point a group of demonstrators marched out into the street and faced off with the cops, who formed a phalanx.<br />
<br />
The scene looked like this. There were 100 to 150 demonstrators on my right as I faced the building and on my left were about 50 cops facing off with them. A cop came on the loudspeaker to threaten people with arrest if they continued to block the street. The demonstrators sat down right in the middle of the street and linked arms. The cops stood off to the left and kept threatening to arrest them. The stand off lasted about a half hour, while the rest of us chanted and screamed. Roger and I had both not planned to be arrested so we stood off on the grass with the majority of the demonstrators, chanting and singing. My adrenaline was rushing like mad. It was awesome.<br />
<br />
While we were chanting and singing a very attractive woman, I thought, called me by name. I was surprised as I didn't know this person at all. Actually it was a guy I knew from QN in the most amazing drag I'd ever seen. I'd only ever seen bad drag, but he was really good at it. It changed my mind about drag right on the spot. It was an instant consciousness raising. I no longer thought that drag queens were sad and pathetic (which is what many people think whether they're willing to say it or not.) Here was this beautiful man as a beautiful woman, in my state it probably had even more of an effect than it would have normally.<br />
<br />
At some point we heard an announcement that the Prayer Warriors had decided to not march to the Castro. We had actually won! All of us formed up into an impromptu parade and WE marched off to the Castro to join the party. It was amazing to me that a group of crazy queers had beaten a group of down home, religious right, fanatics. Of course we were on our own turf, but still, I had never seen this happen. Once at the party we all hung out and celebrated our victory.<br />
<br />
After the party I walked up hill to where I was living and turned on the news to see if we'd made it. Not only had this made the news (CNN) but the anchor, David Goodnow, was reading our press release on the air. That was the coup de grace and the thought I went to sleep with.<br />
<br />
Though I was involved with QN for another year or so after that I still remember that demo as a personal turning point into radical circles and thinking that I could really change the world. It's a belief I still hold.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[FISSURES IN GAY 'MECCA' | Prev. Document]] [[THE BURNING OF THE OLD STATE BUILDING | Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:dissent]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Oral_History:_Harry_Hay&diff=27995
Oral History: Harry Hay
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Oral History</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''Interviewed at 501 Ashbury Street, June 1996, by Chris Carlsson''<br />
<br />
Describes early gay pickup scene at Finocchio's as well as Presidio guardhouse, being in the streets during the [[1934 Big Strike|1934 Big Strike]], the [[Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement|Mattachine Society]], evolution of gay identity, and more.<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/HarryHayAdvocate&playlist=1" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe> <br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1920s]] [[category:1930s]] [[category:1940s]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:labor]] [[category:Oral Histories]] [[category:Performing Arts]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Oaktown&diff=27994
Once Upon a Time in Oaktown
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Michael Flanagan, originally published in the'' [http://www.ebar.com/bartab/article.php?sec=barchive&article=62 Bay Area Reporter] ''March 12, 2015.''<br />
<br />
<font size = 4>'''Remembering the lesbian and gay communities of the East Bay'''</font size><br />
<br />
[[image:Three-faces-of-telegraph-BAR.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''An illustration published in the ''Bay Area Reporter'' about three East Bay gay-owned businesses.'''<br />
<br />
''Image: courtesy'' Bay Area Reporter<br />
<br />
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, or so the old adage would have us believe. There is a worse fate, however: to be forgotten and fade into obscurity.<br />
<br />
A few months ago at one of the G-Spot events on gentrification at the GLBT Museum, a woman from the East Bay asked when the museum became interested in this topic. Aside from the fact that the question seemed odd (since the museum has only been open since 2012), it got me thinking about queer spaces in the East Bay and the role gentrification has and has not played there; because not too long ago there were several lesbian and gay communities there.<br />
<br />
Lesbian and gay history in the East Bay stretches back at least to the 1950s. Many of us know that the Black Cat in North Beach challenged the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) in the state for the right to serve gay patrons.<br />
<br />
What you may not know is that around the same time, the festively named Mary's First and Last Chance, a lesbian bar at 2278 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, also challenged the law and won (in 1959). It sounds like a lively bar, too. Nan Alamilla Boyd told of an ABC report in her book ''Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965'' which had this encounter:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>''Helen Davis, a policewoman, was on the premises in May of 1956 with another policewoman, Marge Gwinn. Buddy, a female waitress, greeted the policewomen who were later joined by the lesbian, Shirleen. Shirleen told Marge, 'You're a cute little butch.' Shirleen later grabbed Marge and kissed her. Buddy the waitress said just to watch it and that if they continued to do that they should go to the restroom.''</blockquote><br />
<br />
[[Image:WatkinsLP-JD Doyle site.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Mary Watkins album cover, photographed at The Brick Hut.'''<br />
<br />
''Cover image: courtesy of JD Doyle, [http://queermusicheritage.com Queer Music Heritage]''<br />
<br />
My own first encounter with LGBT culture in the East Bay came in the 1970s when I was a buyer for a record store and got the Mary Watkins album ''Something Moving'' on Oakland's Olivia records for the store. The album cover featured a photograph of the Brick Hut restaurant, a worker-owned feminist collective in Berkeley. A song titled "The Brick Hut" featured lyrics from lesbian poet Pat Parker. <br />
<br />
So when I moved cross-country and started working at a record store in Berkeley, one of the places I would stop by for breakfast was the Brick Hut, which was at 3017 Adeline Street at the time.<br />
<br />
In an article for KQED titled "LGBT Pride: Remembering the Brick Hut Café," collective member and later co-owner Sharon Davenport recounts:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>''When AIDS hit a group of customers affectionately named the Shattuck Street Fairies (SSF), we became a refuge and an information outlet for AIDS awareness.''</blockquote><br />
<br />
I remember it as a great and funky breakfast spot (I was thrilled when I got to see the "Women Invented Cheese" poster from the back cover of Mary Watkins' album).<br />
<br />
The Brick Hut lasted from 1975 through two moves until March 24, 1997, when economic woes forced their closure. Their last location was at 2512 San Pablo Ave. <br />
<br />
'''Oakland scene'''<br />
<br />
Ollie's was another center of the women's community in the North Oakland/South Berkeley area. With a performance space named after ''The Well of Loneliness'' author Radclyffe Hall, the bar at 4130 Telegraph Avenue presented dance bands, Olivia artists, film nights, art exhibitions, theater and more.<br />
<br />
They had a monthly calendar and presented special events like masked balls. There was also a restaurant on premises (Yermama's) in the early 1980s. Ollie's was open from October 1980 to December 1988.<br />
<br />
Fault lines in the community were apparent when the article "Amelia's Celebrates Ten Years While Ollie's Closes Its Doors" appeared in ''Coming Up!'' in December 1988. Carolyn Clone, an entrepreneur from Los Angeles, had opened the weekly event Code Blue in San Francisco and Ollie Olivera (who owned Ollie's) warned, "These places could be gone tomorrow, and the lesbian community would have nothing."<br />
<br />
Clone thought "the women's scene seems quite healthy in San Francisco."<br />
<br />
Olivera may have had a point, however. Between 1988 and 1991, five lesbian bars in the Bay Area (Ollie's, Baybrick, Peg's Place, Maud's and Amelia's) all closed. Clone left the Bay Area for Miami in 1993 (you can read more about her exploits in Florida by looking for "The Great Lesbian Club Wars" at the ''Miami New Times'' online).<br />
<br />
The women's community in the East Bay also had two bookstores. A Woman's Place, which was at 4015 Broadway in Oakland, and the longer lived Mama Bear's at 6536 Telegraph.<br />
<br />
Mama Bear's had an art gallery and was a coffeehouse as well. When asked why they were closing by the ''Bay Area Reporter's'' Zak Szymanski in March 2003, co-owner Allice Molloy said, "We're old."<br />
<br />
All kidding aside, Mama Bear's exited the independent bookstore business at a very good time, before facing the onslaught of online booksellers which put other feminist and gay bookstores (like Boadecia's Books in Kensington and Different Light in San Francisco) out of business.<br />
<br />
There was also a lively men's scene throughout the East Bay in the '80s and early '90s. Aside from the Steamworks, which is still going strong in Berkeley, there were two other bathhouses, the Alameda Steam Bath Co. at 1001 Santa Clara in Alameda (which billed itself as "the East Bay's busy daytime bath") and the 73rd Ave. Baths at 2544 73rd Avenue in Oakland.<br />
<br />
And to keep up on the lively bar scene in the East Bay, there was a column by Nez Pas, known in real life as Peter Palm, the co-owner of Revol at 3924 Telegraph with his partner Ralph Tate. Nez Pas kept his readers up on the community events in Oakland, Walnut Creek and Hayward. <br />
<br />
'''East Bay action'''<br />
<br />
[[Image:BARchive 80s-ads.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''A few ads for East Bay gay and lesbian businesses that appeared in the ''Bay Area Reporter'' from 1980-1983.'''<br />
<br />
''Images: courtesy'' Bay Area Reporter<br />
<br />
In the early '80s there was a group of bars near Lake Merritt. The first Bench and Bar (there have been three) was at 120 11th Street and was near the Lake Lounge at 1591 Madison and Lancer's, a disco at 3255 Lake Shore Avenue. In 1984 the Paradise Bar & Grill opened at 135 12th Street and billed itself as something special when you don't want to fight the traffic into the city.<br />
<br />
The ''Bay Area Reporter'' advertised the East Bay bars in the early '80s with a map (not quite to scale; it makes Vallejo, Walnut Creek and Hayward look as if they are as close to one another as Berkeley and Oakland):<br />
<br />
<blockquote>''In 1982 the East Bay offers a fresh alternative. Come on over and stay awhile.''</blockquote><br />
<br />
Later in the decade there was a triumvirate of bars that billed themselves as "the Telegraph three," which included Bella Napoli at 2330 Telegraph, Town & Country at 2022 Telegraph (which was in business until 1998) and Cabal's Reef at 2272 Telegraph (the last of these bars to survive, it closed in 2007).<br />
<br />
One of the things which is clear from Nez Pas' columns was that these bars appealed to the people who had grown up and worked in the East Bay. The bars offered Super Bowl specials, chili cook-offs and pool tournaments as well as being involved with the Imperial Star Empire (the court system of Alameda and Contra Costa counties).<br />
<br />
Another thing that comes through is the increasing impact of AIDS in the East Bay. Throughout the 1980s, more and more information is given about benefits for various East Bay charities.<br />
<br />
And then, the closing of bars began. <br />
<br />
'''Changes'''<br />
<br />
On Oct. 1, 1987, this item appears in Nez Pas' column:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>''Yes, it's true. As of Oct. 31, Revol will just be a memory. The building has been sold, and the new owners are going to convert it back into six storefronts. Feelings are a little too sensitive right now to mention much more.''</blockquote><br />
<br />
In 1985 Nez Pas put together a list of bars he remembered in the East Bay going back to Mary's First and Last Chance. There were fifty bars in that list.<br />
<br />
While reading through this material, I was struck that these were working class men (Peter Palm was a teacher and his partner Ralph Tate was a commercial ship's captain) in a working class city and they worked and played hard while trying to keep their community and city together.<br />
<br />
Much was made in the gay press about gay men "nesting" in the late '80s and early '90s. I suppose this, combined with those who fell ill, contributed to the failure of many of the bars in the East Bay.<br />
<br />
Another factor was the pull of the bars from San Francisco, which remained vibrant during the early '90s. Regardless, there seems to have been a generational break from the time of the earlier bars to the time of effective AIDS treatments in the mid-'90s and this has held over to today.<br />
<br />
It's important to remember that there are still bars in the East Bay. The Bench and Bar, moved and renamed Club BnB, and its upstairs companion bar Club 21, both remain a lively draw in downtown Oakland, as does the White Horse in North Oakland. The Pacific Center continues to act as a LGBT center (at 2712 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley).<br />
<br />
As Oakland has one of the highest percentages of lesbian and gay populations in the country, we should look to areas near these bars to rebuild community.<br />
<br />
But we should also remember that when we talk about what factors build up and tear down our institutions, gentrification is not always the central factor and that sometime other historic factors come into play.<br />
<br />
Nez Pas died on Dec. 23, 2006 in Reno (he was living in Palm Springs at the time) and Ralph Tate died on June 2, 2001. This column is in memory of their work with the community.<br />
<br />
''Thanks to East Bay photographer Daniel Lloyd and Jim Hall and to the Oakland Public Library for their assistance in researching this article.''<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
Listen to a 10-minute podcast at ''The Memory Palace'' on the [http://thememorypalace.us/2016/06/a-white-horse/ White Horse Bar]<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Women]] [[category:East Bay]] [[category:North Beach]] [[category:Gentrification]] [[category:Buildings]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:2000s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=New_Year%27s_Eve_Jan._1_1965:_A_Night_for_Gay_Rights&diff=27993
New Year's Eve Jan. 1 1965: A Night for Gay Rights
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Amanda Harbrecht''<br />
<br />
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"<br />
| colspan="2" |San Francisco is known as an important center for LGBTQ rights. A significant but often overlooked event in the history of this movement is the 1965 New Year’s Ball and subsequent police raid. This event brought attention to the police discrimination against homosexuals, it challenged the imagined and experienced landscape of homosexuals at the time, and it represented the beginning of new political influence exercised by homosexuals.<br />
|}<br />
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[[Image:ExaminerMardiGrasBall.jpg]]<br />
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'''Photo by ''San Francisco Examiner'' photographer Ray “Scotty” Morris, January 1, 1965.'''<br />
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''Photo: [http://www.glbthistory.org/ GLBT Historical Society] of Northern California''<br />
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The mid-to-late-1900s represented an important time for the LGBTQ community. As part of an effort to identify and recognize historically important sites for the LGBT movement, the National Park Service compiled an interactive map of sites that may qualify for national landmark status.<br />
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[[Image:Map lgbtq-sites.jpg]]<br />
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'''Historic sites associated with LGBTQ life in San Francisco.'''<br />
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''[https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=1uN8gCmo2xJI5zjIWRzMStjJSgh8&amp%3Bamp%3Bw=640&amp%3Bamp%3Bh=480&ll=37.77851664661829%2C-122.44651615627441&z=14 Google Maps]''<br />
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Red tags indicate sites that are already on the National Register of Historic Places, which primarily includes locations of LGBTQ associations. Blue tags represent sites that either are not listed, or are listed but not in relation to their LGBT significance. As seen by this map, San Francisco represents a main hub for this cultural revolution in the U.S. Within San Francisco, neighborhoods including The Castro, the Mission District, and South of Market, are especially populated with tags. Amongst these markers is one located at California Hall between Turk and Polk Street.<br />
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[[Image:California-Hall P1100348.jpg]]<br />
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'''California Hall on Polk Street at Turk.''' ''This is the site where police raided a New Year’s Eve Ball in 1964. This New Year’s Ball was important for three reasons: it brought attention to the police discrimination against homosexuals, it challenged the imagined and experienced landscape of homosexuals at the time, and it represented the beginning of new political influence exercised by homosexuals. ''<br />
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''Photo: Chris Carlsson''<br />
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The [[Gay History and Politics in the Tenderloin|Council on Religion and the Homosexual]], or the CRH sponsored the New Year’s Eve Ball. This group was formed in order to increase discussion between clergy and homosexuals. The organization’s goal was to promote homosexuals as belonging and being a part of mainstream society (Sides, 2009). Despite the CRH having filed the proper permits and even meeting with the sex crime department of the SFPD, problems with the police arose that night. Over 20 officers showed up blocking the intersection, photographing event attendees, and harassing them.<br />
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[[Image:CitizensNewsV7Police3.jpg]]<br />
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'''Police photographer outside hall. Movie cameraman in background.''' ''The photo above features one such photographer for the police, not inconspicuously photographing the event attendees. In the background someone filming the event can also be seen. This type of invasion of privacy for the event and its guests showed a clear disregard by law enforcement for this community and their rights as citizens. There were even a few arrests made (Sides, 2009). CRH leader Chuck Lewis can be [https://www.lgbtran.org/exhibits/crh/Room.aspx?RID=3&CID=15 heard describing the event and the arrests]. In the clip Lewis explains that there were two still photographers taking pictures of everyone who came and left, as well as a movie camera filming the night. He also explains that police squads repeatedly entered the private event for “fire inspections” (The Council of Religious and the Homosexual). ''<br />
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''Photo: courtesy [https://www.lgbtran.org/exhibits/crh/Room.aspx?RID=3&CID=14&AID=111 LGBT Religious Archives Network]''<br />
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While certainly unfair and unprovoked, this police raid was far from an anomaly. Police raids of gay bars and clubs were frequent occurrences. The New Years Eve 1965 raid actually served the homosexual community due to the unprecedented media coverage that followed. For years the abuse and discrimination of homosexuals by the police had been off the radar, but this event had been intended as an opportunity for homosexuals and heterosexuals. Amongst the lesbians, gays, and drag queens, the event was also attended by clergymen, their wives, their friends, and even their lawyers (Sides 2009). The publicity that followed was unprecedented and served to bring the struggles of the homosexual community to the attention of mainstream America. Press conferences and newspaper articles alike raised awareness of this event and sympathy for the LGBTQ community. This negative press was so powerful that it represented a decrease in police power. No longer were police free to harass the homosexual community; hence forward, “the SFPD stopped arresting gay men for doing ‘what was wrong’ and only arrested them for a ‘violation of the law’” (Sides, 2009).<br />
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The police raid of the 1965 New Year’s Ball also challenged the imagined and experienced landscapes. Both the way public spaces were perceived, as well as how people interacted in public was changed. Public spaces had never been safe, much less welcoming for the LGBTQ community. The LGBTQ community imagined San Francisco as a safe place for them to be themselves, yet many conservatives saw San Francisco as having no place for those groups. As Sides notes, “Because many San Franciscans believed that public spaces could only serve mutually exclusive social purposes, the gay revolution provoked heated, even violent, exchanges over the destiny of urban space” (Sides, 2009). Even in spaces that were supposed to be designated for the gay population, there could be repercussions. Police raids of gay bars and clubs were frequent, as well as officials shutting down establishments for the gay community. It wasn’t until a Supreme Court ruling in 1951 that overtly gay bars were protected from being shut down because of their clientele. The bar behind this case was the [[The Black Cat Cafe|Black Cat Café]] on Montgomery Street. The Black Cat Café was an important location for the gay rights movement for other reasons as well, including its role in developing a sense of fun and humor for the gay community. <br />
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[[Image:CitizensNewsV7Ball1.jpg]]<br />
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'''From the New Year's Day Ball at California Hall, published in ''Citizens' News'''''<br />
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''Photo: courtesy [https://www.lgbtran.org/exhibits/crh/Room.aspx?RID=3&CID=11 LGBT Religious Archives Network]''<br />
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Even once these bars had achieved a certain level of legitimacy, they were still far from free spaces. Most bars did not allow touching or dancing. This was one reason private dances were so important to the LGBTQ community (Sides, 2009). They allowed a greater freedom for those individuals where the experienced landscape could be one where they were able to be themselves. This can even be seen in the events leading up to the 1965 New Year’s Eve raid. When CRH members had met with officials originally, the police argued that no one at the event could be dressed in drag to which the CRH members pointed out that it would be a private event and hence the police could not dictate dress (The Council of Religion and the Homosexual). Again, this is another example of the conflicts between private and public spaces and the disagreements that existed regarding those spaces.<br />
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It was the first gay rights case the ACLU got involved with (The Council of Religion and the Homosexual). After the ACLU won the case, the police department actually appointed a liaison to the LGBTQ community (Yogi, 2007). Thanks to the publicity generated by the CRH, the event was brought to the attention of San Francisco [[Mayor Jack Shelley|Mayor John Shelley]]. He held [[Thomas J. Cahill: SF Chief of Police|Police Chief Thomas Cahill]] responsible, and inquired into a full account of what had transpired (Yogi, 2007). The event also created greater awareness around the CRH, which increased their power and influence. The group’s next initiative was to organize San Francisco’s first candidates’ forum for gay and lesbian voters. As Yogi writes, “Within just over a decade, these nascent efforts built to a point that [[Remembering Harvey Milk|Harvey Milk]] became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors” (Yogi, 2007). These are all examples of the changed political climate that was a direct result of the New Year’s Eve raid.<br />
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'''Bibliography:'''<br />
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Sides, Josh. ''Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.<br />
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The Council of Religion and the Homosexual. The LGBT Religious Archives Network. [https://www.lgbtran.org/exhibits/crh/Exhibit.aspx?P=I Online Exhibit]. Accessed November 12, 2016.<br />
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Yogi, Stan. “The Night San Francisco’s Sense of Gay Pride Stood up to Be Counted.” [http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/The-night-San-Francisco-s-sense-of-gay-pride-2572316.php SF Gate]. June 24, 2007. Accessed November 12, 2016.<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:Tenderloin ]][[category:Polk Gulch]] [[category:Civic Center]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=NIGHT_STICK:_A_Novelized_Account_of_the_May_21_Riot&diff=27992
NIGHT STICK: A Novelized Account of the May 21 Riot
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
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<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Steven Marks''<br />
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[[Image:No-Apologies-1979.jpg]]<br />
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'''''No Apologies'' poster features a burning cop car.''' <br />
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''Art: Paul Mavrides''<br />
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At City Hall. There's a crush of people at the top of the stairs, around them several hundred more. There's no focus here. Chants picked up and passed through the crowd, clashing from one part to another: "MUR-DER... MUR-DER...MUR-DER..." Nobody can speak, the bullhorn doesn't work. They're shouted down. Everyone's paying attention to the people behind the speakers, at the doors of City Hall and white lights suddenly flash on and you see the tops of people's heads moving frantically around a little space there, people standing around watching... The faces of speakers, a parade of our gay celebrities, fade in and out: Harry Britt, Sally Gearhart, Leonard Matlovich... a woman with a guitar... break of applause... who is it? Then, later, even a priest, who leaves the soonest under a barrage of hissing... "NO MORE BULLSHIT... NO MORE BULLSHIT... NO MORE BULLSHIT." I remember seeing Ruby Rodriguez, the street comic everyone calls the Chicken Lady: "Now I want everyone to listen to me. I've got something to say here..." and later standing on a car roof haranguing people to stay when a sudden rippled of panic comes through, "They're coming, the cops are coming!" and people start to swell into the street. But no, the cops aren't coming in yet and the movement subsides.<br />
<br />
When I first ran into Robert, I had been wandering around the crowd, never standing still, always looking for the best vantage point, the best people to stand near. Sometimes chants coming up of "NO MORE VIOLENCE! NO MORE VIOLENCE!" But then something would break, another window at the doors of City Hall, and others would clap and cheer. I was... I wanted to stand only near people who cheered at the crashing. I didn't want to think about the ones chanting against violence. What violence? Where are these people with their chants when gay people get beaten up, when Harvey was assassinated? I was somehow afraid... and too angry at the same time. But there was no place, no best place to be. How could I let out what I was feeling? More than just clapping when a window broke? I ran into Robert then. He told me he heard about it on the radio, it had been officially declared a riot. But it was just this aimless gathering, a press of people at the doors of City Hall, waiting, watching, not leaving, wanting Something To Happen. And the thoughts in my head now - not about Dan White or Harvey Milk or the verdict or even my own rage. It's just the anxiety: I have to do something. I had reached this logical, intellectual conclusion that something must happen here and I felt a compulsion to take action, to be more than a bystander.<br />
<br />
Robert is flushed with excitement. "We have to do something Steve. What will get these girls going?" The people with the bullhorn trying to speak think they can do the opposite - keep us from doing anything. They each take a turn trying to sway the crowd. But you can't hear them for all the chants and shouting and confusion. Yet each believes he or she will be the one the crowd will listen to, they can convince everyone to go home, to break their attention from the stairs of City Hall. But none of them succeed. They've always told us what to do - to vote, to give money, to do this or that, year after year. You realize their attitude is that they are going to teach you how to behave politically. Like we're not thinking or feeling the whole time. They're always exhorting us to do something that always serves their political needs (like getting elected). But there's resistance here tonight. A moment of silence. Then broken by noise or a chant from the top of the stairs, suddenly TV lights go on and attention shifts. There's a chant for Sally Gearhart, "LET HER SPEAK! LET HER SPEAK!" For a moment it is quiet and she starts to say, "No one is more enraged tonight than I am..." and then we know the next part, Part Two.... BUT.... HOWEVER... "but Harvey Milk wouldn't be breaking these doors here tonight..." And a chant goes up, "BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!" How would she know what Harvey would be doing? In 1972 or 1973, when Harvey was considered a freak by the City's political establishment, Harvey might be throwing the first rock. Or at least standing consentingly nearby, with his wonderful sweet boy smile. Then, of course, Harvey the San Francisco Supervisor would probably have been more inclined to be the charismatic leader who turned by the angry crowds -- to send outraged letters and telegrams to elected officials the next morning.<br />
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Then there's a little light. A small light appears above the stairs, from the second floor balcony. People strain to see. Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver trying to speak from a bullhorn. Can't hear her. People shouting. She keeps trying. We can't hear her, and then she's gone, appearing again at the top of the stairs, coming out from the broken windows of the doors. She's still trying to talk through her bullhorn, fiddling with the knobs, moving from one side of the steps to another, through the thick crowd. Robert says he wants to get the bullhorn. "I know just what to say to make these people go wild. Steve, how can I get that microphone?" "I don't know. Maybe you could ask her for it. Nobody can hear anyway."<br />
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I look out over the crowd from the top of the stairs, where Robert and I are standing. It is dark now, night time, and the size of the crowd has continued to grow, rings on rings of people and now there are a couple thousand people or more, spreading out across the street, into the edges of the Civic Center Plaza. Robert and I wander around the top of the stairs for a while. I'm still anxious and excited. You could look through the shattered glass and see a formation of cops at semi-attention, legs parted, sticks resting in hands, white helmets, dark blue jump suit anonymous, shifting weight, stepping aside coolly when a spike from the grillwork around the door comes sliding through the broken windows. There are a few people, recklessly brazen, a couple are drunk, holding cans of beer in brown paper bags. They seem crazed, possessed. Suddenly yelling at the cops inside, screaming at them, calling them pigs. Then turning to talk to a friend or bystander, laughing and smiling. Then arguing with some men in the crowd trying to tell him how bad it is for our image... "They killed Harvey. Fuck it, fuck this shit," whirling around and one guy jumps up, pulls a piece of wrought iron grill, people step back for a moment as the iron flies up, thrown at the highest windows still unshattered at the top of the doors. I'm afraid of shattering glass but Robert pulls me in closer. Leonard Matlovich pushing and shoving some guy around, practically beating him up to keep him from being "violent." Others trying to form a line by linking arms in front of the doors to keep the "violent" ones away from City Hall, but they don't have enough people to complete the line -- they were all from the Advocate Experience or some gay democratic club -- (too bad later, when the cops finally came in, these fine distinctions of our "image" offered so little protection). Robert grabs me by the wrist, "Steve, what are we going to do? I can't believe these people are just standing around like this. This is stupid. I can't believe these queens...."<br />
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Karen strained her attention to the top of the stairs. What should she do? What was her responsibility? She had been one of Harvey Milk's aides and was almost appointed in his place. She's there with some man in wire-rimmed glasses who keeps feeding her with suggestions. But Karen's genuinely distressed. "What should I do? I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe it." And the guy with her trying to be detached and intellectual, "They're all crazy. They can't be dealt with. It's out of control." "Should I talk? Should I try to talk?"<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$gay-rights-graphitti.jpg]]<br />
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'''Gay Rights grafitti after White Night, 1979.''' <br />
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''Photo: Crawford Barton, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California''<br />
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IF DAN WHITE WAS BLACK, LATINO OR GAY, TO THE GAS CHAMBER HE'D BE ON HIS WAY -- graffiti on Hayes Street. Two young black women, both with their hair straightened and cut off even right at the back of the neck. "Hey! What's happening man? This is great!.... Yeah man, this is all on the radio, far out." For some it really is a party. They laugh and jump around. And I stare at them. They really don't have any reason to care. They laugh. It is a joke for them.<br />
<br />
Five days before the riot I was at Carl's apartment in the Castro. He was counting out piles of flyers for the Harvey Milk birthday celebration, scheduled for May 22. Carl was checking off piles of flyers on a list of neighborhoods and locations throughout the city. "I'm just afraid that the verdict will come out that day. Honey, I'm afraid we're going to have trouble." Last weekend in the Castro a cop with a reputation in the neighborhood for being an asshole tried to arrest some poor character for stapling leaflets up on telephone poles. It led to a full-fledged confrontation right there, Saturday afternoon, hot spring day in the teeming Castro. Cops call in reinforcements, then, faced off by a crowd of several hundred gay men pouring of the bars, shouting "DAN WHITE WAS A COP! DAN WHITE WAS A COP!" And the cops end up retreating up Castro Street, each step back they take instantly filled by a surge of the crowd, pushing forward.<br />
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Carl is on the phone now: "Listen that cop is back on the street today. Yes... he's on the beat again. I don't care. He said he'd be off the beat. It's the same one... yeah, Tom. That's what I thought he said. Well, he's out there right now. Listen we're having that street party next Tuesday. The verdict could come in then... Well, you just tell him that if Tom is still on the beat there could be trouble. A lot of trouble. I'm not kidding. Doesn't Harry realize what's going on?"<br />
<br />
Images of City Hall: walking back from the Strand Theater, through UN Plaza out to Civic Center Plaza, and a full moon fills the corners of the sky with pure pale neon glow. "Steve, let's throw this rock. Come on, let's do it together. What do you think will happen?" "Well, maybe you could do it round there, on the other side of the bush..." And Robert heads off around the bush again. I look around nervously but no one seems to be watching. I see the little rock fly up and bounce off the granite wall. Robert comes back panting, "Fuck. I missed. Did anyone see?" Then someone else comes around, I see through the bush someone trashing around, looking for something -- a stick bounces off the window -- then a rock hits and makes a small hole in the glass. Some guy wanders off. Nothing happens. There're no more rocks here so Robert has us go around the steps to the other side. There's a long string of newspaper vending machines linked together with a chain. Robert and I slip behind the bush there. He hands me a rock, "Come on, Steve, it's your turn," and I slip all the way around the bush, taking glances behind me, and throw my rock at the window but it bounces off. Heart pounding I come back, some people on the abutment above look at us. Robert throws a bottle that crashes against the wall and throws another rock and finally a window crashes. We slip out suspiciously from behind the bush -- there are a few more people now, milling around the sidewalk and the building. Something else is thrown. And Robert is excited. It's snapped. It's been snapped. He grabs both of my hands, "I've got to find something else to throw..." and he's off looking for rocks. I turn around and the newspaper machines are right there. I walk up slowly. The image of what I'm to do burning in my mind. Turn -- walk past them -- look around. Then I walk up and kick one, kick it over -- walk a little ways -- and push over another, slam it down and other people now picking them up and throwing newspaper machines, breaking the chain linking them, smashing them open. One gets picked up, carried overhead and thrown against the face of City Hall and someone's into the papers and papers thrown up in the air and flying around, people standing on car tops, some guys gathering paper together into a pile. And I notice, they're all cute disco types, in a circle, crouching down, match held to papers and the first flames of the night leap up. I lose Robert. Flames leaping out of a trash can on the corner. Then I see Robert, he's hurling a huge rock through a window, he spins around and suddenly falls, gets up limping. "They're coming! The cops are coming!" And a line of cops, helmets, visors, blue jumpsuits, run in quick from the Grove Street side. <br />
<br />
I feel like I'm running on air. They try to set up a line in front of City Hall but rocks start flying. I see cops, sticks up, cops bent over, they pick someone up and retreat under a barrage of bottles and rocks. Did they get someone? Was it Robert? Was he hurt? When the cops retreat people move back in again. I see a group of women running along the front of the building, by the huge window wells covered with steel grates. Newspaper torches flying over to the building then up and into the broken windows. Glass shattering, crashing, each window, each piece, one by one. Inside they lower venetian blinds after all the glass is broken out and objects start to thud on the floors of the offices inside, and the glimpse of white visor tip of the cop inside lowering the blinds draws a cry and a new barrage of rocks and bottles appearing out of nowhere. Some leather guys shaking a parking meter back and forth in wider swings until it pops out of the sidewalk and two men carry it off and throw it whole at the building, others chipping away at the newly broken cement to make more rocks and missiles. In Grove Street, in front of Larkin Hall, there's a roar of motorcycles. Cycle cops are coming in! But I look again and it's all the leather men, Folsom Street types, running their bikes into a huge circle in the intersection. <br />
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At the foot of City Hall Robert is helping some women lift one of the steel grates from the window well and then forming a line to help women climb into the well, start piling wood and barricades in the basement and setting it on fire. (While on the other side, a local gay reporter, thinking of "our image: (and no doubt of the impression he can make on command post big-wigs), spots the fire and calls for help to put it out.) I ran into Lanny standing on the sidewalk across from the front of City Hall. Riot activity swelling around us we can't help taking advantage of the camp opportunities -- as if we were suddenly on TV: "Why gosh, Steve! It's all quite festive. And I almost missed it! Except I heard something on this guy's radio..." "Oh, yes, it's been officially declared a riot." "Well, what are they doing over there? That's severe." Off by the side of the stairs a fire is started under a bush, flares up and for a while threatens the tree above. I start to tell him about the newspaper machines and what happened (I thought) to Robert and at that moment Robert walks up. He's exhilarated. There's a cut above his eyebrow, purple red blood partly dried. "Where have you been? I was afraid the cops got you." "Oh, I fell down and hit my leg, here, on my shin, really hard. Here, hold this." He hands me a chunk of cement. He tells us about helping the dykes get into the basement -- and we joke about the stereotype of lesbians and gay men not being able to work together. Then Robert is impatient and excited. "I've got to get rid of this rock." And he wanders off. <br />
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I step off the sidewalk, following. "What should we do?" I point out a stranded police car there on Polk Street. "Well, we do seem to have an unfortunately stranded police vehicle here..." Robert's rock dents the side, mine bounces off the rear widow. But then there are others. Other rocks, and a parking meter rammed into the side and the front window and a guy with a garbage can smashes the top of the car, crashing can, windows popping out, mirrors snap off, hood bashed in. Then there's ten guys trying to turn the car over, Robert in the middle. Then from somewhere, some guy tosses newspapers into the front seat and a book of matches. It went up so fast everyone was surprised. People gathered around the area, applauding and cheering. Then suddenly afraid of bullets going off or the gas tank exploding. Some people shout to get back. I catch Lanny at the sidewalk and stand across the street with him. I see one lone person, one of San Francisco's flashier sissies, dressed tonight like a boy in a sailor outfit, standing hands in pockets staring at the cop car burning, unconcerned with explosions or bullets -- it's a film we're all watching -- parts we picked long ago -- we know how the story goes.<br />
<br />
''in '''Vortex''', Issue #1, Fall 1980, San Francisco''<br />
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[[White Night Riot: A Policeman's View|MORE White Night]]<br />
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[[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless | Prev. Document]] [[Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement | Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:Haight-Ashbury]] [[category:dissent]] [[category:riots]] [[category:White Night Riot]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Morals_in_1852&diff=27991
Morals in 1852
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
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<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Primary Source</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''Annals of San Francisco, 1855 ''<br />
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[[Image:annals$el-dorado-gambling-house-1853.jpg]]<br />
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'''El Dorado Gambling House 1853'''<br />
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Residents of a few years standing--the landmarks, by turns, of the ancient village, town and city, began now to disappear. These perhaps had made a fortune, and sown their "wild oats" in the place. They now retired to the Atlantic States or Europe--to home, in short--to enjoy their gains at ease, astonish quiet neighbors with their wondrous tales, speculate on the future of San Francisco, and become disgusted and ennuied with the slowness, tameness, decorum and insipidity of the conventional mode of existence they were leading. New faces and new names were rising into importance, in place of the earliest pioneers and the "forty-niners." The majority, however, of the first settlers had faith in the place; they relished its excitements, as well of business as of pleasure; they had no family or fond ties elsewhere, or these had been long rudely broken; and so they adhered to San Francisco. Many of these persons had waxed very rich, in spite of themselves, by the sudden rise in the value of real estate, or by some unexpected circumstance, while others, after expending a world of ingenuity, wickedness and hard work, remained almost as poor as when, hopeful and daring, they landed in the ship's boat at Clark's Point, or when the tide was high, at the first rude wharf that ran a short distance out from the beach at Montgomery street. <br />
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There is a fascination in even the loose, unsettled kind of life at San Francisco. Of many who have left the city, after a residence of years, and when they have accumulated a handsome fortune, a considerable number have gladly returned. For many months, perhaps for even a year or two, the immigrant thinks he can never worthily or rationally enjoy existence in such a place; so he determines to make a fortune as soon as possible, and decamp forever. But fortunes are now made more slowly, and the old citizen--a few years here make one old in sensation, thought and experience--changes his sentiments, and he begins to like the town and people for their own sake. The vices and follies, the general mode of living--that frightened and shocked him at first--seem natural to the climate, and, after all, are by no means so very disagreeable. If he returned to settle in ultra or pseudo-civilized and quiet States, he would surely feel himself but a "used-up" man; so he continues where he made his money, still to feel, speculate and enjoy, to work and contend with real men, in their keenest and strongest characters.<br />
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''- Annals of San Francisco, 1855 ''<br />
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<iframe src="http://archive.org/embed/HarryHayOn19thCenturyRemittanceMen" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0"></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Harry Hay, founder of the first gay rights organization the [[Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement|Mattachine Society]], describes the 19th century phenomenon of the "remittance men."<br />
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''Video: Shaping San Francisco, 1996''<br />
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[[Condition of the City 1851 |Prev. Document]] [[Duels in 1852 |Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:Annals]] [[category:1850s]] [[category:LGBTQI]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mattachine:_Radical_Roots_of_the_Gay_Movement&diff=27990
Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Will Roscoe''<br />
<br />
[[Image:gay1$radically-gay-cover.jpg]]<br />
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'''Harry Hay in the 1930s'''<br />
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<iframe src="http://archive.org/embed/HarryHayOnLanguageAndLabelsInThe1930s" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0"></iframe><br />
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''You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives ... A man of low morality is a menace to the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.'' --Senator Wherry in ''N.Y. Post'', 1950<br />
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It may come as a surprise that the gay movement not only began in the 1950s, but that its founders were former communists and radicals. Harry Hay, who wrote the first call for a gay movement in 1948, had been a party member for 20 years, active in [[July 5, 1934: Bloody Thursday|labor organizing]] and cultural work. The fact that these organizers had already spent most of their lives outside the mainstream no doubt prepared them for the risks involved in forming a gay organization.<br />
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The modern gay movement in America began in Los Angeles, a city that symbolized the mobile, affluent lifestyle of Americans after the War. The Mattachine Foundation (to be distinguished from the post-1953 Mattachine Society) was formed in the winter of 1950 by a group of seven gay men gathered together by Hay. The name refers to the medieval Mattachines, troupes of men who traveled from village to village, taking up the cause of social justice in their ballads and dramas. By sharing and analyzing their personal experience as gay men, the Mattachine founders radically redefined the meaning of being gay and devised a comprehensive program for cultural and political liberation.<br />
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In 1951, Mattachine began sponsoring discussion groups. Years before women's "consciousness-raising groups," Mattachine provided lesbians and gay men a similar opportunity to share openly, for the first time, their feelings and experiences.<br />
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The meetings were emotional and cathartic. From 1950 to 1953 attendance snowballed. Soon discussion groups were meeting throughout California. As Dorr Legg described it, "The thing was growing. Never was there a mass movement in America like it. There were tens of thousands of people in the L.A. area involved with it.... You could go to a Mattachine meeting every night of every week, year in and out." Groups began to sponsor social events, fundraisers, newsletters, and publications.<br />
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In April 1951, Mattachine adopted a Statement of Missions and Purposes. This encompassing vision of gay liberation stands out in the history of the movement because it incorporated two important themes. First, Mattachine called for a grassroots movement of gay people to challenge anti-gay discrimination. At the same time, the organization recognized the importance of building community: "Mattachine holds it possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge, as a consequence of its work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow-minorities . . . the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish peoples."<br />
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This ideal of a gay cultural and political community with a unique place in democratic society linked Mattachine to Whitman's vision of a hundred years earlier.<br />
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The discussion groups proved effective in building gay consciousness. In 1952, the Mattachine founders pushed forward into political action. That spring, when one of the original members of the group was entrapped by the Los Angeles vice squad, Mattachine decided to mobilize the community and challenge the case in court.<br />
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Under the auspices of the Citizen's Committee to Outlaw Entrapment, Mattachine hired a lawyer, raised funds, published newsletters, and distributed leaflets. When the jury was unable to reach a verdict " and the case was dismissed " Mattachine claimed victory. An acknowledged homosexual had beaten the vice squad and been acquitted in court!<br />
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Encouraged by this success, Mattachine took an even bolder step the following year. In 1953, the group sent questionnaires to local political candidates, asking them to state their positions on gay rights issues.<br />
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In March, a local newspaper columnist wrote an article about this "strange new pressure group," noting that Mattachine's lawyer had been "unfriendly" when he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Of course, at this time McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt was at its peak.<br />
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The article set off a panic among Mattachine members, who were horrified at the thought of their activities being linked to communism. In the controversy that followed, two conventions were held and opposing sides took shape. These conventions were unprecedented public meetings of gay people, attended by delegates representing hundreds of discussion group participants.<br />
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Conservative delegates questioned the organization's stated goals, challenging the idea that gay people were a minority. They claimed such an approach would only encourage hostility. Mattachine board members, however, argued that "we must disenthrall ourselves of the idea that we differ only in our sexual directions and that all we want or need in life is to be free to seek the expression of our sexual desires."<br />
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While efforts to adopt anti-communist resolutions failed at the conventions, the original leadership was shaken. They, too, feared the consequences of a government investigation of Mattachine activities, which would expose the identity of members and destroy the movement. So, in May 1953, the founders resigned, turning the movement over to the conservatives.<br />
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Unfortunately, the new leadership shared none of the vision or experience of the original founders. They drastically revised the goals of the organization, backtracking in every area. Instead of social change, they advocated accommodation. Instead of mobilizing gay people, they sought the support of professionals, who they believed held the key to reform. They stated, "We do not advocate a homosexual culture or community, and we believe none exists."<br />
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The results were devastating. Discussion group attendance fell and groups folded. The small core of members that remained, in San Francisco and other cities, invited psychiatrists to speak to them and sat patiently through the homophobic diatribes of these "experts," to prove their "impartiality." As Barbara Gittings said, "At first we were so grateful just to have people--anybody--pay attention to us that we listened to everything they said, no matter how bad it was.... It was essential for us to go through this before we could arrive at what we now consider our much more sensible attitudes."<br />
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[[Finocchio's | Pickups at Finocchio's c. 1930]]<br />
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<iframe src="http://archive.org/embed/ssfHAYBVDCT" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0"></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Harry Hay describes gay sex before zippers, c. 1930'''<br />
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''Video: Chris Carlsson, 1996''<br />
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[[Image:Mattachine-Society-4th-annual-convention-1957-Sheraton-Palace-SF via-Gerard-Koskovich-FB.jpg]]<br />
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'''Mattachine Society 4th annual convention program, 1957.'''<br />
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''Image: courtesy Gerard Koskovich and GLBT Historical Society, via Facebook''<br />
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[[NIGHT STICK: A Novelized Account of the May 21 Riot | Prev. Document]] [[World War II: Self-Discovery for Many | Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1930s]] [[category:1940s]] [[category:1950s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Leather_Resilience&diff=27989
Leather Resilience
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
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<div>[[Image:2.gif|64px|left]] [[Image:Bending-over-backwards-icon.jpg|100px|right]] '''Listen to an audio description of the gay leather "Valley of the Kings," part of the "Bending Over Backwards" walking tour:'''<br />
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<iframe src="http://archive.org/embed/Stop2Leathermen" width="500" height="30" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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[http://archive.org/download/Stop2Leathermen/Stop%202_%20Leathermen.mp3 mp3]<br />
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''voice: Patrick Simms''<br />
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[[M.D.C. AND THE VATS|Next Stop on "Bending Over Backwards" tour]]<br />
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<hr><br />
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'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''by Gayle S. Rubin''<br />
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[[Image:gay1$indulge-poster.jpg]]<br />
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''Indulge'' poster by Michael J. Williams<br />
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'''Changes and Continuities in the Leather Community'''<br />
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Against all odds and expectations, the San Francisco gay male leather community has weathered AIDS, sex panics, and urban renewal. The structures of leather social life have undergone substantial change. But the community and its culture have adapted and survived. For example, AIDS has unquestionably contributed to substantial erosion among some leather institutions, particularly the gay motorcycle clubs. Many major clubs and the events they sponsored did not survive into the 1990s. The Warlocks, one of San Francisco's oldest motorcycle clubs, is among those that vanished, and important events, such as the CMC Carnival and the Satyr's Badger Flat run, have also been suspended.<br />
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[[Image:gay1$leather-resilience$satyrs-1966_itm$satyrs-1966.jpg]]<br />
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'''Chuck Arnett (left) and Bill Tellman (right) at 1966 Satyrs Badger Flat Run'''<br />
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However, while some of the older institutional forms are foundering, new ones are thriving. Virtually every public event in the gay male leather community raises money for AIDS, and much of leather socializing now occurs at AIDS fundraisers.<br />
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Moreover, there is a palpable, visible recovery taking place. New clubs are being founded, new bars are opening, and leather businesses are once again flourishing. A few of these are in the Castro, but most are still in the South of Market. The Folsom is still the central focal point for local leather and it remains a magnet for leather tourists.<br />
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The leather occupation of the South of Market is thinner and more dispersed than it once was. The leather bars and businesses are interspersed among the music halls, upscale restaurants, and big-box warehouse stores. The intermingling of gay or leather sites with straight or mainstream undertakings has meant a loss of the very privacy that once drew leathermen to the South of Market. The leather presence is also more episodic. Where there used to be leathermen constantly thronging the Folsom, such hordes now only appear for major leather holidays and festivities. Two street fairs are important in maintaining the Folsom's leather ambience. In 1984, a group of community organizers and housing activists decided to start a street fair in the South of Market. The Folsom Street Fair was intended to make a political statement that the South of Market, far from being an empty slum in need of urban renewal, was already occupied. The fair, it was thought, would bring together and display all the disparate elements of a vital and viable neighborhood. Thus the fair has never been an exclusively gay or leather event. Nonetheless, the founders included leathermen, and given the strong presence of leather in the area, the fair has always had substantial leather participation.<br />
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Like most San Francisco street fairs, the Folsom Street Fair has entertainment, sales booths, and opportunities for political organizing, fundraising, and education. While most commercial booths feature generic street fair merchandise like polished rocks and mediocre pottery, the fair is also a showcase for services and crafts directed at leather consumers. These include piercers, makers of bondage furniture, whipmakers, and purveyors of other SM equipment. SM clubs do small-scale rummage sales to raise funds, and various community service organizations hand out literature and sign up members. The Folsom Street Fair has become an occasion for the leather community to come out in force and in full dress.<br />
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A second South of Market street fair was started in 1985 on Ringold Alley. It was called the Up Your Alley Fair, or Ringold Alley Fair. In 1987 the Up Your Alley Fair moved to Dore Alley between Harrison and Folsom. A single nonprofit organization now runs both the Folsom Street and Dore Alley fairs. These street fairs have become important social and economic events for the leather population.<br />
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Although AIDS has made the leather community smaller, it has also made it tighter and more socially integrated. Suffering and the sense of common struggle have drawn people together. Leather society is certainly more gender-integrated than it was even ten years go, and it is also more nationally confederated and politically cohesive.<br />
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In the long run, the South of Market is probably lost to the leather population, despite the stubborn vitality of a few remaining strongholds. San Francisco's entire eastern waterfront is about to be rebuilt, and what is left of the old docks, piers, factories, warehouses, and low-cost housing along the bay is about to be replaced by large and expensive edifices of concrete, glass, and steel.<br />
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A new baseball stadium planned for China Basin will anchor one end of this expansion, and there are plans to rebuild the bay front all the way to Pier 70. Several mammoth projects for Rincon Point, South Beach, China Basin, and [[MISSION BAY| Mission Bay]] are in the planning stages or awaiting approval. (Port of San Francisco 1997) This would take the rebuilding boom almost to [[Brief History of Bayview-Hunters Point | Bayview-Hunters Point]], one of the last strongholds of African American residents within the city limits. On the other side of Bayview-Hunters Point, a new half-billion-dollar football stadium and retail mall will anchor the southern limit of the city's eastern flank. New condominiums, malls, offices, and sports facilities will occupy much of what little is left of the city's last major strip of light industry, low-rent commerce, and low-cost housing. There are no leather bars or low-income residents in the blueprints for these developments. If the leather community must leave the South of Market, it may establish itself in some other urban niche. But finding any corner of the city left unmolested by large-scale construction is becoming an increasing challenge. Nonetheless, the leather community has shown itself to command robust social reserves, surprising economic vigor, and flexible adaptability. Despite the repeated losses of key individuals to AIDS and the implacable march of urban renewal, the gay male leather community has continued as a viable and evolving social form. For now, leather continues to be a vital part of the mix in San Francisco's extraordinary South of Market.<br />
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''--Gayle Rubin, excerpted from "The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather, 1962-1997" in ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture'' (City Lights: 1998)<br />
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[[Leather Kings | Prev. Document]] [[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless | Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:SOMA]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Leather_Renaissance_Ends&diff=27988
Leather Renaissance Ends
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''by Gayle S. Rubin''<br />
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[[Image:soma1$leather-slaves.jpg]]<br />
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'''Slaves await auctioning at Folsom Street Fair, c. 1995'''<br>''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
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By 1978 the Folsom's days as a [[Leather Kings | gay]] and leather Mecca were already numbered. Redevelopment of South of Market, which had been stalled for years by court cases and political maneuvering, was accelerating. After the assassination of [[Mayor George Moscone|George Moscone]] in 1978, [[Mayor Dianne Feinstein|Mayor Feinstein]] made rapid development a major goal of her administration. The Moscone Convention Center was quickly built. It was soon surrounded by the expensive skyscrapers, office buildings, housing complexes, and glitzy shopping centers that have increasingly encroached on the old low rent commercial neighborhood. The massive redevelopment began to drive up rents and land prices. Low rent leather bars could not compete easily with higher rent yuppitoria.<br />
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As development began to transform the area, city officials, the police department, and the Alcoholic Beverage Commission (ABC) threatened the leather bars more directly. In 1978, the police and the ABC came down on the leather bars with a series of raids and visits that drove several out of business. New parking regulations made it difficult to park cars and bikes at night without getting ticketed. By the time the impact of AIDS began to hit in 1982 and 1983, the economy and stability of the leather bars had already been undermined. When leather bars began in waves from 1983 to 1986 to close and be replaced by straight oriented businesses, it appeared as though AIDS were responsible. But the impact of AIDS on the leather community South of Market only deepened a crisis already underway.<br />
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Whatever their causes, the changes are indeed breathtaking in scope. The block of Folsom between 7th and 8th epitomizes this drama of urban succession. This block has a lot of leather history. Moving east down Folsom from 8th St., there used to be at the end of Rogers St. a large space used for both gay and straight SM gatherings. It is gone, and Cafe Milano sits on the corner. Across the street, the Border Cantina occupies the former site of a lesbian bar, The Bay Brick Inn, which in turn replaced a leather bar called Headquarters. Across from the Border Cantina is the corner of Hallam Alley. Dozens of leathermen used to live on Hallam Alley and Brush Place. They were among those who lost their homes in the Folsom St. Fire in 1981. New buildings are only now being built on several lots that have been empty since the fire.<br />
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At the corner of Folsom and Hallam, the Watering Hole is located on the site of the old Red Star Saloon and the Barracks. The Watering Hole is the only gay bar remaining gay bar on the block. Next door is Eddie Jacks. The Stables and Templar Hall (former clubhouse of a now defunct gay leather organization) used to be located between Hallam and Langton. These have been succeeded by Rings, Buster's News, and Julie's Supper Club. Along this block, the "Miracle Mile" has become "Restaurant Row."<br />
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The intersection of Folsom and 11th St. is another vivid indicator of profound change. Ten years ago, leathermen traveled a circuit between the various bars, baths, and eating places. When they prowled the streets on weekend nights, 11th and Folsom was a major passage. It was bounded by Febe's, the Drummer Club, and Chaps. Men would pass this corner as they walked between the Eagle and Ambush at the southwest of their territory to the Brig and Ramrod further east and north.<br />
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Now there are far fewer leathermen on the streets. And the intersection of 11th and Folsom, once the heart of the Miracle Mile, has become a formidable barrier. The Oasis has replaced the Drummer Club. Febe's has become the Paradise Lounge. Chaps is now the DNA. On weekend nights there are hordes of straight teens hanging around the rock clubs and affluent adults going to the restaurants nearby. To get from the Eagle to the Powerhouse or My Place, a leatherman has to navigate through crowds that are often hostile and sometimes violent, or avoid the corner altogether.<br />
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While gay leather no longer dominates the nightlife of the Folsom, it is not true that "leather is dead" or that it is not still a substantial presence in the neighborhood. There is still a large and viable gay male leather community, and much of it is still located South of Market. A few of the bars have hung on. There are new businesses catering to the community, including an art gallery, a publishing company, and a number of private social spaces. The leather community has become more privatized, and its ability to occupy public space in the Folsom has become more limited and occasional.<br />
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However, the Folsom is still a magnet, a piece of sacred ground, and a powerful symbol. Leathermen are no longer the major population on the streets at night, but they are always present. They come out in great numbers for special events such as the Dore Alley Fair, held every August, and the Folsom Street Fair, held each September.<br />
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''--Gayle Rubin,'' excerpted from "Requiem for the Valley of the Leather Kings," originally published in ''The Sentinel'', 1989<br />
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[[Folsom St Gulch 1970s |Prev. Document]] [[Where Devil's Dictionary Author Sold His Soul for Coin |Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:SOMA]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:LGBTQI]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Leather_Kings&diff=27987
Leather Kings
2018-10-16T15:09:06Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''by Gayle S. Rubin''<br />
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[[Image:gay1$sf-leatherwalk-1996.jpg]]<br />
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'''September 1996 San Francisco Leatherwalk on Castro Street.'''<br />
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''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
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What is "leather?" Leather means many things, but since the mid-l950's, it has been a central symbol for a complex gay male sexual subculture. The imagery of leather comes primarily from the gear worn by motorcycle gangs in the 50's, and by urban street gangs whose style of dress similarly included boots, jeans, and motorcycle jackets. Motorcycles and leather jackets came to symbolize power for the powerless. These styles and meanings were popularized in the 50's by movies like ''Rebel Without a Cause'' and ''The Wild One''. Gay men who rode bikes or wore leather did so for the same reasons as straight youth: to express toughness, masculinity, independence, and personal (as opposed to institutional) power.<br />
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In addition, leather has specifically sexual connotations whose cultural roots are not entirely clear. By the early 1950's, associations of leather with fetishism and sadomasochism were well established in both gay and straight erotica. Some of the gay men who adopted leather garb did so for reasons shared by straight women and men who wanted to express an interest in kinky sex.<br />
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A gay male subculture organized around these imageries of leather coalesced after World War II. By the mid-50's, the first bars catering to the leather crowd had appeared in major metropolitan areas. In San Francisco, the first leather bar opened in 1962. This was the Why Not, located in the Tenderloin and managed by a legendary figure named Tony Tavarossi. The leather bars did not migrate [[SOMA's Gay Leather Kings |South of Market]] until the early sixties, when the Tool Box opened at Fourth and Harrison.<br />
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''--Gayle Rubin,'' excerpted from "Requiem for the Valley of the Leather Kings," originally published in ''The Sentinel'', 1989<br />
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[[Image:gay1$blackfire-cover-man-1992.jpg]]<br />
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'''November 1992 Blackfire Cover Man Contest.'''<br />
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''Photo: Rick Gerharter''<br />
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[[Gay Street Life |Prev. Document]] [[Leather Resilience |Next Document]]<br />
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[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:SOMA]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:Castro]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=La_Veinte_and_a_Half&diff=27986
La Veinte and a Half
2018-10-16T15:09:05Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
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<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''By Francisco FloresLanda and Edgar Morales''<br />
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This small group was like a sidebar to La Veinte, they congregated on 20th between Valencia and Guerrero where Donald Arana, “The Araña” (spider) lived. They claimed a partial stake in [[La Veinte (The Pool Hall)|La Veinte]] due to being familiar with the guys from there, they also went to the pool hall to play. Donald, my brother Jaime, Juan Wong of Guatemalan and Chinese origins, Mike “el Ruso,” Roberto Tafoya—el Alboroto (The Commotion), Gallinita, Rafael, Julio, el Peruano—Hector Guzman, El Chino—Carl Ng, a real Chinese, and others were some of the guys in the crew. They were a calmed down version of La Veinte they mostly drank and went to dances together. Or, sometimes they would go to the movies at the Tower Theater, a Spanish language movie house, by opening a side door and running in. The talent show at the Tower, was a favorite time to sneak into the theatre.<br />
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Besides these activities, some of them hustled on homosexuals. Homosexuals would invite them to their places get them drunk and show them porno in order to have sex with some of them. For the homosexuals they were boy-toys and lavished money, liquor and presents on them. Eventually they paired up with their favorite fellows. Eventually many of these people learned to hustle exclusively on [[Chicano Gay Poets|Latino homosexuals]] and used this lifestyle to survive and make money. Peruano—Hector Guzman became the couple with La Condesa (The Countess) after someone else. Donald was a Nicaraguense and he coupled with Roberto Lopez, even after he married, he would have Roberto over for dinner with his wife and him. <br />
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Gays were not called gay at this time and many could be found cruising up and down Mission Street picking up teenagers, others could be found picking up kids at the Greyhound Bus Depot or the East Bay Bus Terminal. Among the fellows of La Veinte y Media and these gays they would hold parties with a lot of drinking and porn movies and they would play music and dance. I suppose eventually the lines blurred and it was men having sex with men. Culturally, the machismo of Latino men won’t permit themselves to be homosexual or bi- when in a homosexual relationship but in essence, they are in a homosexual relationship. They consider the other guy as being the gay one and themselves as hetero male, or in today’s vernacular—the top. <br />
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An episode concerning La Veinte and a Half. Once when twentieth and a Half were having a drinking binge at Dolores Park it came up we were going to fight the Landers St. Boys, a group of boys who lived on Landers St. the why I never found out. We walked over to their haunt and Francisco Marin spoke to them he made peace with them and we wound up drinking with them.<br />
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[[Image:Doggie-diner-18th-and-Mission.jpg]]<br />
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'''Doggie Diner at 18th and Mission, c. 1970s'''<br />
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''Photo: Francisco FloresLanda''<br />
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<font size=4>The Doggie Diner @ Mission & 18th Sts.</font size><br />
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The [[Doggie Diner|Doggie Diner]], a fast food diner, wasn’t a gang, it was a spot, a meeting place, like today’s malls, it was also a social network. The trademark was a head of the wiener dog wearing a bow tie and a chef's hat it was centrally situated on Mission at 18th and was perfect for a meeting spot for Mission youth, even the architecture was great for those inside to talk with those outside, the barrier windows were that low. It was open 24 hours a day (See picture). It even had a great parking lot where car clubs and teenagers who could afford a car could gather. The driveway on Mission St. permitted the passengers to stop and chat with whoever was around. There was constant local foot traffic. On weekends, there was a constant flow of teenagers seeking the party: “Where’s the party?” was all one had to utter to find the party. A story Marin used to tell was about how “El Tarzan” once pulled an employee through a small service window because he had disrespected one of his friends. <br />
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Before BART construction destroyed the ambience of Mission Street as a plaza, where residents would take a stroll hundreds of people would take a walk or go the movies at the New Mission, the Grand, the Tower or the Tower theaters. In those days, there really was a small town feel to Mission Street where neighbors said, “Buenos Dias” to each other. After the construction ended things did not go back to normal.<br />
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[[La Veinte (The Pool Hall)|previous essay]] / [[Folsom Park|continue reading]]<br />
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[[category:Mission]] [[category:Latino]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:crime]] [[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Nicaraguan]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Kool-Aid_%26_Twinkies&diff=27985
Kool-Aid & Twinkies
2018-10-16T15:09:05Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
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<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>"I was there..."</font></font> </font>'''<br />
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''by Paul Krassner from ''Remembering Jonestown, Dan White, and the two weeks that ate San Francisco'' (appeared originally in the [http://www.sfbg.com ''Bay Guardian''] Nov. 24, 1993)''<br />
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[[Image:Eat a twinkie beat the rap david-goldberg-80s-a-cultural-essay-13.jpg]]<br />
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'''Shot in January 1984. Dan White had just been freed from prison after serving 5 years for the assassinations of George Moscone & Harvey Milk. The image was shot during the resultant demonstration.'''<br />
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''Photo: © [http://davidgoldbergimages.com/project/the-80s-a-cultural-essay/ David Goldberg]''<br />
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It's been 15 years since the Jonestown massacre, and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Those of us who lived in San Francisco then were at the epicenter of an emotional earthquake that encircled the globe. What happened in Jonestown was inconceivably evil. What happened in City Hall was devastating. We walked around in a daze of sadness, only to have our outrage further intensified each day as new details were revealed in the media.<br />
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<font size=4>A Slimy Creep</font><br />
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Jim Jones, founder of the 8,000-member [[JONESTOWN, S.F.|People's Temple]] on Geary Boulevard, once asked Margo St. James, founder of the prostitutes' rights group COYOTE, how he could obtain political power. She answered sardonically, "Arrange for some of your women to have sex with the bigwigs." Jones in turn offered to supply busloads of his congregation for any protest demonstration that COYOTE organized, but Margo declined.<br />
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"I thought he was a slimy creep," she told me.<br />
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Margo's instincts were correct.<br />
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Jones had potential recruits for People's Temple checked out by his representatives, who would rummage through the recruit's garbage and report on their findings -- discarded letters, food preferences, and other clues. Temple members would visit the homes of recruits, and while one would initiate conversation, the other would use the bathroom, copying names of doctors and types of medicine. They would also phone relatives of a recruit in the guise of conducting a survey and gather other information. All of this data would then be taped to the inside of Jones podium, from which he would proceed at a lecture to demonstrate his magical powers by sensing the presence of an individual and mentioning specific details.<br />
<br />
When the People's Temple moved to Guyana and became Jonestown, Jones would publicly humiliate his followers. He required them to remove their clothing and participate in boxing matches, pitting an elderly person against a young one. He forced one man to participate in a homosexual act in the presence of his girlfriend. There were paddle beatings and compulsory practice suicide sessions called White Nights.<br />
<br />
On November 8, 1978, Leo Ryan, a congressman who had been investigating Jonestown, was slain at the Guyana airport, along with three news people and several disillusioned Temple members. Jones then orchestrated the mass suicide-murder of 900 men, women, and children, mostly black. Those who refused the flavored drink mix laced with potassium cyanide were either shot or received lethal injections. Jim Jones either shot himself or was killed.<br />
<br />
And then, one week later, while we were still in a state of utter shock, along came a second earthquake.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Let Those Bullets Blow Open Every Closet</font><br />
<br />
Dan White, a former cop, resigned from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors because he couldn't support his wife and baby on a salary of $9,600 a year. He obtained a lease for a fast-food franchise at Fisherman's Wharf and planned to devote himself full time to his restaurant, the Hot Potato. However, White had been the swing vote on the board, representing real estate interests and the conservative Police Officers' Association. With a promise of financial backing, White changed his mind and told the mayor that he wanted his job back. At first Moscone said sure, a man has the right to change his mind.<br />
<br />
But there was opposition to White's return, led by [[HARVEY MILK A Reflection by Harry Britt|Harvey Milk]], who was openly gay. Milk had cut off his ponytail and put on a suit so he could work within the system, but he refused to hide his sexual orientation.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Harvey milkAAD-2932.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Harvey Milk'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''<br />
<br />
I met Harvey Milk when he ran a neighborhood camera shop, and I watched him develop into the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King. Had he lived, he might have been elected the first openly gay mayor.<br />
<br />
But he already envisioned the possibility that he would become a martyr. After he was elected supervisor, he taped a message for his constituents that included this prophetic fear and hope: "If bullets should ever enter my brain, let those bullets blow open every closet in this country."<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/ssfHarveym1" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Harvey Milk's Last Words'''<br />
<br />
Milk warned the pragmatic Moscone that giving the homophobic White his seat back would be seen as an anti-gay move. Even a mayor who wanted to run for re-election had the right to change his mind.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Dan WhiteAAD-3065.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Dan White'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''<br />
<br />
On Sunday evening, Nov. 26, a reporter called Dan White and said: "I can tell you from a very good source in the Mayor's Office that you definitely are not going to be reappointed. Can you comment on that?" White replied, "I don't want to talk about it. I don't know anything about that," and hung up. He stayed on the couch that night, not wanting to keep his wife awake. He didn't get any sleep himself and just lay there brooding. He decided to go to City Hall on Monday morning.<br />
<br />
When his aide, Denise Apcar, picked him up at 10:15, he didn't come out the front door as he normally would; he emerged from the garage. He had gone down there to put on his service revolver, a .38 special that he always kept loaded. He opened a box of extra cartridges, which were packed in rows of five, and put ten of them, wrapped in a handkerchief so they wouldn't rattle, into his pocket.<br />
<br />
Because of rumors that Jonestown assassins had been programmed to hit targets in the U.S., metal detectors had been set up at the front doors of City Hall. When White went up the stairs to the main entrance, he didn't recognize the security guard monitoring the metal detector, so he went around to the McAllister Street side, entered through a large basement window, and proceeded to the mayor's office. After a brief conversation, he shot George Moscone twice in the body, then two more times in the head, execution style, as he lay on the floor. The Marlboro cigarette in Moscone's hand was still burning when the paramedics arrived.<br />
<br />
White hurriedly walked across a long corridor to the area where the supervisors' offices were. His name had already been removed from the door of his office, but he still had a key. He went inside and reloaded his gun. Then he walked out, past Supervisor Dianne Feinstein's office. She called to him, but he didn't stop. "I have to do something first," he told her. Harvey Milk was in his office, thanking a friend who had just loaned him $3,000. Dan White walked in. "Can I talk to you for a minute, Harvey?" White followed Milk into his office. White then fired three shots into Milk's body, and while he was prone on the floor, White fired two more shots into Milk's head.<br />
<br />
George Moscone's body was buried. Harvey Milk's body was cremated. His ashes were placed in a box that was wrapped in Doonsebury comic strips, then scattered at sea. The ashes had been mixed with the contents of two packets of Kool-Aid, and they formed a purple patch on the Pacific. Harvey would've liked that touch.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>The Trial</font><br />
<br />
In 1979, I covered the trial of Dan White for the ''Bay Guardian''. Defense attorney Doug Schmidt didn't want pro-gay sentiment to pollute the verdict. He wasn't allowed to ask potential jurors if they were gay, but he would ask if they had ever supported controversial causes, like homosexual rights, for instance. There was one prospective juror who came from a family of cops -- ordinarily Schmidt would have craved his presence on this jury -- but then he said, perhaps gratuitously, "I live with a roommate and lover." Schmidt's next question: "Where does he or she work?" The man answered, "He" -- and the ball game was over -- "works at the Holiday Inn."<br />
<br />
The day before the trial, the assistant D.A. who was handling the prosecution was standing in an elevator at the Hall of Justice. He heard a voice behind him speak his name "Tom Norman, you're a motherfucker for prosecuting Dan White." He turned around and saw six police inspectors. He flushed and faced the door again. The cops were his drinking buddies, and now they were all mad at him.<br />
<br />
In his confession White had stated "I don't know why I put [my gun] on." And at the trial, psychiatrists offered reasons ranging from the psychological (it was a security blanket) to the practical (for self-defense against a People's Temple hit squad). But as Jack Webb, a former police officer and member of the Police Commission, told me: "An off-duty cop carrying his gun for protection isn't gonna take extra bullets. If he can't save his life with the bullets already in his gun, then he's done for."<br />
<br />
<font size=4>The Twinkie Defense</font><br />
<br />
The late J.J. Rodale once claimed in his magazine, ''Prevention'', that Lee Harvey Oswald had been seen holding a Coca-Cola bottle only minutes after the assassination of President Kennedy. From this he concluded that Oswald was not responsible for the killing because his brain was confused. He was a sugar drunkard. In a surprise move, Dan White's defense team presented a similar biochemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on the compulsive gobbling of sugar-filled junk-food snacks.<br />
<br />
This was a purely accidental tactic. Dale Metcalf, a Merry Prankster who became a lawyer, told me about the evening he happened to be playing chess with Steven Scheer, an associate of White's attorney. Metcalf, a health enthusiast, had just read ''Orthomolecular Nutrition'' by Abram Hoffer. He questioned Scheer about White's diet and learned that while under stress White would consume candy bars and soft drinks.<br />
<br />
During the trial, one psychiatrist stated that on the night before the murders, while Dan White was getting depressed about the fact that he would not be reappointed, he just sat there in front of the TV set, binge-ing on Twinkies. In court, White just sat there in a state of complete control, bordering on catatonia, as he listened to an assembly line of psychiatrists tell the jury how out of control he had been. One even testified: "If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place." In the corridor, Berkeley psychiatrist Lee Coleman denounced the entire practice of psychiatric testimony as a disguised form of hearsay.<br />
<br />
And so a shrewd defense had transformed a double political execution into the White Sugar Murders. The jury's verdict was guilty, of voluntary manslaughter, and White served a little more than five years in prison. The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie was seven years. When Dan White was released, that Twinkie in his cupboard would still be edible.<br />
<br />
'''The [[DISH, DON'T SNITCH!: D. Dangerous I. Information S. Seems H. Harmless |White Night Riot]]'''<br />
<br />
In the evening of the day the verdict was handed down, I was relaxing at home, smoking a joint and remembering how in 1975, as a state senator, the progressive George Moscone had been the author of a bill to decriminalize marijuana. I was trying to unwind from the trial and was contemplating the implications of the verdict. Patty Hearst had been kidnapped, kept hostage, and brainwashed, but she was held responsible for robbing a bank. Whereas Dan White had not been kidnapped, kept hostage, and brainwashed, but he was not held responsible for executing two government officials.<br />
<br />
My reverie was interrupted by a phone call from Mike Weiss, who had covered the trial for ''Time'' magazine. He was calling from a phone near City Hall, I could hear crowds screaming and sirens wailing behind his voice. He had to yell: "There's a riot going on! You should get here right away!"<br />
<br />
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/ssfWhitent1" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
'''Rioting at City Hall'''<br />
<br />
Reluctantly, I took a cab. When I arrived, there were a dozen police cars that had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the angry shouts from a mob of 5,000 gay men. On the night Harvey Milk was murdered, many of them were among the 30,000 who had marched silently to City Hall for a candlelight vigil. Now they were rioting, utterly furious at the Dan White verdict. But where were the cops? They were all fuming inside City Hall, where their commander had instructed them to stay -- armed prisoners watching helplessly as angry demonstrators broke the glass trying to ram their way through the locked doors.<br />
<br />
Suddenly the police were being released from City Hall. As I and others walked north on Polk Street, the cops were beginning to march slowly in formation not too far behind us. But the instant they were out of view of City Hall, they broke ranks and started running toward us, hitting the metal pole of a bus stop with their billy clubs, making loud, scary clanging noises. They had been let out of their cage and they were absolutely enraged.<br />
<br />
I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee. I fell to the ground. The cop ran off to injure as many other protesters as he could. Another cop came charging at me yelling, "Get up! Get up!"<br />
<br />
"I'm trying to!"<br />
<br />
He made a threatening gesture with his billy club, and when I tried to protect my head with my arms, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my ribs. The cops were running amok now, in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming, "Get the fuck outta here, you fuckin' faggots, you motherfuckin' cocksuckers!"<br />
<br />
I managed to drag myself to the sidewalk. I had a fractured rib and a punctured lung. The injuries affected my posture and gait. I still walk with a limp, and its all Dan White's fault.<br />
<br />
In October 1985, White committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes in his garage. He taped a note to the windshield of his car: "I'm sorry for all the pain and trouble I've caused."<br />
<br />
<br />
[[White Night Riot: May 21, 1979|MORE White Night]]<br />
<br />
[[White Night Riot: A Policeman's View|A Policeman's View]]<br />
<br />
[[Failed Politician Slaughters Mayor and Supervisor--and the Cops Cheer Him On!|Prev. document]] [[White Night Riot: May 21, 1979 |Next Document]]<br />
<br />
[[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Famous characters]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:TenderNob]][[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:Haight-Ashbury]] [[category:riots]] [[category:White Night Riot]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Jon_Sims&diff=27984
Jon Sims
2018-10-16T15:09:05Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
<br />
''by Allecia Vermillion<br />
<br />
''San Francisco Museum and Historical Society'' Summer 2009<br />
<br />
<br />
Jon Reed Sims was born in 1947 in Smith Center, Kansas—the geographic center of the nation’s 48 contiguous states. However from an early age, relatives said Sims showed more sophistication and musical ability than most residents of the small wheat farming town.<br />
<br />
After studying music composition at Wichita State University and earning a masters degree in music at Indiana University, Sims moved to San Francisco to be a music teacher. He taught high school band in Daly City, but ultimately devoted himself full-time to developing gay and lesbian musical groups throughout the Bay Area.<br />
<br />
Sims is best known for founding the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band (now called the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band) and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. In 1978, he decided the local Gay Freedom Day parade could use more music. He posted fliers around town, ultimately gathering together a few wind and percussion instrumentalists to form a marching band.<br />
<br />
What was supposed to be a summertime-only effort morphed into a permanent fixture. Today, the marching band claims to be the world’s first openly, publicly identified gay cultural art group.<br />
<br />
Band members would joke about Sims’ Kansas heritage, calling him Dorothy and likening their marching to following him down the yellow brick road.<br />
<br />
Sims’ lesbian and gay chorus group ultimately spawned a variety of musical offshoots, including a concert band, jazz band, swing choir, string orchestra, ragtime ensemble, even a trombone ensemble. Every group shared Sims’ founding commitment to promote gay and lesbian culture.<br />
<br />
Thanks to Sims, hundreds of gay men and women across the Bay Area found mainstream acceptance through the universality of music.<br />
<br />
The groups he founded earned a variety of accolades and spawned similar organizations across the country. In 1981, the Gay Men’s Chorus embarked on a nationally acclaimed tour of the country. The former band teacher from America’s heartland had become the patriarch of a large-scale movement that helped dispel prejudice and bring gays and lesbians into the mainstream through their musical talents.<br />
<br />
However Sims’ musicians contributed more than music to the city. He formed the gay marching band in 1978, at the height of Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell’s anti-gay movement. California was hotly debating Proposition 6, which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in public schools. That same year, the Gay Men’s Chorus made its debut performance at a candlelight vigil at City Hall after the assassinations of [[HARVEY_MILK_A_Reflection_by_Harry_Britt|Harvey Milk]] and [[Mayor_George_Moscone|Mayor George Moscone]].<br />
<br />
In a 1982 newspaper interview, Sims said he was burned out, suffering exhaustion-related symptoms he compared with hepatitis. Two years later, in January 1984 he was diagnosed with a little-known disease called AIDS. He died six months later, on July 16. <br />
<br />
One week after Sims’ death, more than 1,500 people attended a service at [[Grace_Cathedral|Grace Cathedral]] to remember the gifted musician. Attendees wore rainbow-colored armbands and entered under a rainbow archway of balloons. The service made the front page of the Examiner the next day.<br />
<br />
When Sims died, so little was known about AIDS that his obituary in the San Francisco Examiner included a definition of the disease. At that time, AIDS had claimed the lives of 200 men in San Francisco, and 2000 nationwide. Sims’ death expanded awareness of an often-misunderstood disease that would go on to ravage San Francisco’s Francisco’s [[The_1980s|gay community]].<br />
<br />
As one friend said in Sims’ newspaper obituary, he gave gays “an alternative to the baths and the bars.” Sims’ cultural impact was evident at the Jon Sims Center for the Arts, which closed in November 2006. The center once located at 11th and Mission in the South of Market neighborhood was named in his honor and was dedicated to education and cultural arts among the city’s gay, lesbian, and transgender community.<br />
<br />
<br />
''More resources from Jon Sims' legacy:''<br />
<!---John Sims obituary, ''San Francisco Examiner'' July 17, 1984<br />
<br />
''San Francisco Examiner'' August 4, 1984<br />
<br />
''San Francisco Examiner'' January 27, 1982---><br />
<br />
[http://www.sfgmc.org San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus]<br />
<br />
[http://sflgfb.townalive.com/about/history/ San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band]<br />
<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:Performing Arts]]</div>
Jeff
https://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Harvey_Milk,_the_First_Openly_Gay_Elected_Official_in_California:_Not_Your_Typical_Candidate&diff=27983
Harvey Milk, the First Openly Gay Elected Official in California: Not Your Typical Candidate
2018-10-16T15:09:05Z
<p>Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"</p>
<hr />
<div>'''<font face = Papyrus> <font color = maroon> <font size = 4>Historical Essay</font></font> </font>'''<br />
<br />
''by Darby West''<br />
<br />
[[Image:Harvey-Milk-Danny-Nicoletta-and-Scott-Smith-Nov.-23-1977.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Harvey Milk, Nov. 23, 1977, after successful Supervisor campaign.''' <br />
<br />
''Photo: Dan Nicoletta, Bancroft Library''<br />
<br />
Harvey Milk was more than just the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. He was an embodiment of a movement. His approachable demeanor paired with his empowering words of wisdom led Milk to gain supporters of all kinds, especially those who never felt like they had a voice before. Starting off as a small businessman working at his camera store in the Castro, Milk became involved in his neighborhood politics, and soon decided that his passions and ideas were too important not to share. Milk ran for office three times before he finally won a spot on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He made a large impact on the city even though he was only in office for 11 months before he was assassinated. However, Milk’s legacy did not die with him; he is still very important to the LGBT community today. <br />
<br />
[[Image:Harvey-Milk1.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Harvey Milk in the 1978 Gay Pride Parade.'''<br />
<br />
''Photo: [http://www.sfgayhistory.com/?p=442 SF Gay History]''<br />
<br />
This is an image of Milk at the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco in 1978, the year he was murdered. Milk knew that an assassination was possible, but he did not let this threat silence him. Usually people with political power, especially after the Kennedy Assassination in 1963, were more protected at large public gatherings, however, Milk can be seen in this photograph sitting on the roof of a car, one with the people. He is dressed like the crowd behind him, he is holding a sign just like many of the people behind him, and he has joined in marching down Castro St. for a common cause, the right to be gay. Harvey Milk did not change who he was so that he could become a part of San Francisco politics, he took advantage of the fact that he was different and promised to give the minority groups and LGBT community a voice. <br />
<br />
The main battle Milk fought during his short time in office was against Prop. 6. This proposition was called the Briggs Initiative because it was sponsored by John Briggs who was a state legislator from Orange County. The goal of this proposition was to repel gay rights in areas of California including San Francisco. If passed, it would have banned gays and lesbians, and possibly anyone that supported gay rights, from being able to work in California’s public schools. Below is a poster-sized ad in support of the proposition that claims all gays and lesbians live an “immoral and perverted lifestyle” and that parents should support this initiative to protect their children. One of the main supporters of this movement was Dan White, a fellow member on the Board of Supervisors with Harvey Milk. Milk, openly being gay and holding power, fought hard against this proposition because it knew that being gay or lesbian did not affect how men and women were able to do their jobs. White was very against anything that had to do with gay rights and this started to show in regards to this initiative and began his heated relationship with Milk.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Briggs Initiative poster.jpg]]<br />
<br />
'''Poster in support of Prop 6” <br />
<br />
''Image: courtesy [http://gloriajfhistoryofthecastrosf.weebly.com/the-briggs-initiative.html gloriajfhistoryofthecastro].'' <br />
<br />
Dan White was a large supporter of the Prop. 6. He stepped down from his position on the Board of Supervisors after Prop. 6 was defeated because he was extremely homophobic and could not support gays and lesbians being able to work in the public school system. Tensions got even higher when White then asked for his position back on the board after realizing that his quick step down left a major hole on the board that needed to be filled and could potentially be filled with a gay sympathizer. Sadly, on November 27th 1978, Harvey Milk’s worst fear was realized. He was [[Kool-Aid & Twinkies|assassinated in city hall along with Mayor Moscone]].<br />
<br />
Just nine days before his assassination, Milk eerily recorded a speech just in case something tragic happened, and the recording was only to be listened to after his death. His recording said, “This is Harvey Milk speaking on Friday November 18, 1978. This tape is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. …I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for—an activist, a gay activist—becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid or very disturbed…. Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, at any time” (Harvey Milk, ''The Times of Harvey Milk''). Milk’s support of very controversial ideas led to him making numerous enemies, like his killer Dan White. Milk stated that he does not want people to be angry because of his death, but rather he wanted people to use his death as a platform to become even stronger. “I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine” (Harvey Milk, ''The Times of Harvey Milk''). Milk’s last words in his speech then become his legacy that ensured that he would be the everlasting empowering voice for anyone who identified themselves as being different, especially anyone that was gay. “All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door…” (Harvey Milk, ''The Times of Harvey Milk''). Milk’s death aligned very closely with the Prop. 6, that was just defeated that would not allow gay and lesbian to work in public schools. Instead of just supporting the coming out of teachers, Milk encourages people of every profession to come out “let them know you are just like them and you are everywhere.”<br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0jbNPqxk90g?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
''From The Times of Harvey Milk''<br />
<br />
The night after his assassination 40,000 walked through the streets and held candlelight vigils. There was no violence and barely any talking, just 40,000 people coming together under a common cause and mourning the death of a man that meant so much to them and their community. The Castro felt this devastating loss of their gay leader more than any other district, but the people of the Castro took Milk’s advice and did not let this tragic event silence them or keep them in the closet. Even now Harvey Milk is seen as one of the most inspiring gay activists in history and his quotes still power the movement today.<br />
<br />
<font size=4>Bibliography</font size><br />
<br />
[http://www.biography.com/people/dan-white-17169664#! “Dan White Biography.”] Bio.com. Accessed November 10, 2016. <br />
<br />
Milk, Harvey. “Harvey Milk’s Last Words.” [[Remembering_Harvey_Milk|Speech]], Played after His Assassination, San Francisco. <br />
<br />
''The Times of Harvey Milk''. Directed by Rob Epstein. United States, 1984.<br />
<br />
[[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Castro]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Famous characters]]</div>
Jeff