DRUMMER FEATURE ARTICLE
©Jack Fritscher. See Permissions, Reprints, Quotations, Footnotes

Satyr Satire...

Castro Street Blues 1978:
or, Even Blue Boys Get the Cows

Years from now when you read this
--and you will read this--
remember The Way We Were (1978 Style)
by Jack Fritscher

            My express purpose in this feature essay was, as stated explicitly on the Contents page, to reflect ourselves to ourselves then, and to bury a self-aware time capsule of the way we were, “1978-Style,”so history would–my constant invocation word–remember, because, up to that time, so much of gay history had been destroyed and forgotten.

            Drummer in the 1970s was a magazine for literate and older (30-something) men, and never really changed as the 80s and 90s became addled with MTV.

            This article was written to present the photographs David Sparrow and I shot at the Castro Street Fair.

            Because in the 70s we all knew we were over the moon as no generation–including the Roaring 20s–ever had been before, my satire tried to nail gay pop culture with real names, real places, real attitudes, real slang, and real dish, because we all knew–like group common knowledge–that no future generation would believe what heights we reached because no such party could last. We gay men in the 70s were a group of people who, except for our sexual preference, had virtually nothing in common. We weren’t fools or victims of circumstance, but regular people who happened to be gay when history suddenly opened up and put our preference in play. We were so not-organized that anyone who thinks there was a gay white male fraternity or conspiracy to keep out minorities and women gives too much retro-credit to their own socialist hindsight fantasies. Within that group, as a couple, David Sparrow and I were real people who really loved each other, and worked together, and made a life.

             Twelve of the photographs were shot by David Sparrow and me posting John Trojanski’s name–with his permission–on the credit line, again, as always, to divert publisher John Embry. John Trojanski was, in fact, one of my real-world employees whom I had hired on my writing staff at Kaiser Engineers where I worked the whole time I was driving Drummer. I levitated him into Drummer because Drummer needed the photographs he sometimes took and the articles he would sometimes write if pressed hard enough. I liked his work, and I liked working with him on several Drummer pieces like “Footloose” in Drummer 29, May 1979. We had both been Catholic seminarians, and I commissioned him to write a piece about seminary life: “Getting into the Habit: Sex in the Monastery, My True Experience,” in Drummer 25, December 1978. My expression of this theme is in my novel, What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, which as the pre-quel to the Drummer novel, Some Dance to Remember, explains how an altar boy grows up to become the editor and chief writer for gay magazines like Drummer.

            For “Castro Street Blues,” I wrote the captions for our twelve photographs to illuminate what was actually in the pictures. “The big ‘S’ and the little ‘G’ were, of course, syphilis and gonorrhea, two sexual “colds” that, by policy, we hardly ever mentioned in Drummer. One caption points out that the tiny marquee of the Castro Theater does actually read “Liza Minnelli! Cabaret & New York New York.” Talk about double-features in heaven. The “Rent-A-Pose” was a wild bodybuilder in the door of the designer gift store, the Obelisk, that became A Different Light bookstore where Mark Hemry and I have videotaped over the years little documentaries of so many authors reading.

            “Castro clowns? Castro clones? Victor or victim?” That caption, spinning out of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” did a couple things pointing out that the photo is a reflection in a mirror. My lover David Sparrow can actually be seen shooting the shot: a perfect passive-aggressive autograph. The caption also played with the name of the man in the photograph: Victor was having great ups and downs about managing or owning–I don’t remember which–the Castro bar called Moby Dick.

            The satire of the pope and the belly dancers in their harem drag was meant to poke fun at all religious garb. The “Macho Macho Men” was a send-up of the Village People who were only once mentioned in Drummer when I made a crack about them in response to a “letter to the editor.” In the 70s, men understood the Village People as comic and commercial images of stereotype rather than Drummer’s images of men dressed similarly as the archetypes of homomasculinity.

            The thirteenth photograph was taken by the ever-reliable Efren Ramirez who shot many Drummer pictures. Ramirez himself collected a dozen photographers for the article he wrote, “On Gay Photography,” published in Drummer’s sibling magazine, The Alternate, Volume 2 #8, January 1979. Although Robert Mapplethorpe and other photographers refused to be profiled because they did not want the limiting adjective “gay” to label their work, Ramirez included: Crawford Barton (whom I interviewed in 1990 some years before his death) with one of the first photographs of a heavy-set bear; Jeff Clark; Roberta Dill; Hal Fischer; Sandra Graham; Ginny Lloyd; Robert Opel; Blair Paltridge; Greg Reeder; and Fisher Ross. Efren Ramirez described himself: “Efren Ramirez is the author of a photographic collection, In Pursuit of Images. He has an M. A. in Art History and Photography from San Francisco State University. With many years’ experience as a photographer, his work has been published in various gay magazines and newspapers. His project for 1979 is to expand his survey, In Pursuit of Images, on a national scale with an eye to a major exhibition in the U. S. Interested gay photographers may contact him by writing: San Francisco Arts and Letters Foundation, PO Box 99394, San Francisco 94109.

            Gay-studies paleontologists may examine two things: 1) that in this 1978 essay are bits and pieces that are directly quoted from Some Dance to Remember, the historical novel of San Francisco which I had been writing in my journal since 1970; and 2) these photographs are part of the on-going graphic documentaries I shot of gay culture beginning with the Gay Freedom Day Parade in 1973 on Super-8 movie-film to the dozen video documentaries Mark Hemry and I have shot together since 1984 of Gay Pride, Folsom Street Fair, Castro Street Fair, and Dore Alley Street Fair.

            Additionally, in my short story, “Rainbow County,” written in 1974, I analyzed, by including quite a bit of gay history, the siren call of the Castro. I’ve always thought that all the stories people told about how they journeyed to San Francisco in the ’70s were positively Chaucer, which is why I have often, as in this story, named as the hometown of my characters, the mythical small Midwestern town of “Canterbury.” In the story, which is like a two-person one-act play, a young gay immigrant lands in Lloyd’s Barber Shop (actually Floyd’s Barber Shop) upstairs over the Elephant Walk bar on the southwest corner of 18^th and Castro. The historical thread is how men came from all over to the intersection and once there, after creating fraternity, almost immediately, created “attitude.”

            The lead line for this Gay Immigrant’s Tale is: “In the gay world, everything is always reversed and Through the Looking Glass, and Over the Rainbow. He was looking for the Face of God at 18^th and Castro. There, at the other foot of the Rainbow Arch from Oz, he found Rainbow County.”

            The story opens, fixing 18^th and Castro, mythologically. “ On the last day of spring, June 20, 1973, at high noon, at the corner of 18^th and Castro in San Francisco, Robert Place found the Face of God in a pornographic photograph. Not that he was given to dirty pictures. Rather, he had been drawn, by some–what?–thing to this neighborhood, by some thing he had vaguely heard or read or sensed that...had everything to do with whatever was intersecting the intersection which was inventing its flamboyant self even as he watched....He had walked all four of the single-block arms reaching out like a cross from the main intersection which was more like ground zero than anything he’d expected even in California. Everything rushed oingo-boingo right up at him: the omelet-brunch cafes with cake made out of, go figure, carrots; the dandy little flower shop near the corner kiosk where a one-legged ancient eye, maybe the world’s oldest newsboy, hawked the call, “Chronicle!” like the last screech of a dying species; the loud beer bars with slender young men in white tanktops and baseball caps posing and partying in windows open to the street; the chic boutiques selling nothing anybody would ever need after a nuclear attack.

            “All of it was alien to him. Or he was alien to it. He had entered foreign territory. Fear–not so much the fear of the unknown, but more like the human animal’s fear of his own kind–bristled the shorthairs on the nape of his neck. The unexpected thrill of temptation put him on edge....

            “Until that bone-bright noon hour when Robert Place actually witnessed what looked like the campus of the world’s most flamboyant boys’ college, he had little more than a tourist’s curious Kodak hope that there, at that world-famous intersection, he’d see people unlike any of the people back home in southern Illinois, people stranger and more festive even than the hippies he’d seen on TV in the Haight, people, who, rumors persisted, had always existed, the way bohemians and gypsies and magicians, all of them outlaws, had always existed, even before the Druids, but had never been seen before, at least nots in broad daylight, in such visible numbers....

            “Because of his uneasy feeling that he already recognized these new people even if he did not know them, Robert Place immediately affected toward them a distanced attitude which he knew camouflaged his ground-glass fear he might, in fact, be one of them, whatever they really w were.”

            The barber Lloyd, who is almost blind, sits in his shop overlooking 18^th and Castro, his eyes as big as the eyes of T. J. Eckleberg overlooking the events in The Great Gatsby. He says to Robert: “I spend all day looking out the window. Take a look. You’ll see. What a parade. It looks like half of Noah’s ark. The stag half if you catch my drift.”

            I admit I was at an early age very influenced by the short stories of Tennessee Williams, particularly the title story of his collection One Arm, as well as his “Desire and the Black Masseur.” I tried a bit to apply his eye to the Castro phenomenon. “Castromania” quickly became “Castrophobia.” The story continues, as Lloyd shows Robert magazines like Young Adonis, Mars, and Physique Pictorial. Looking at the pictures in these magazines, Robert freaks internally at his own gush of coming out. “Robert, in fact, sat helpless in Lloyd’s barber chair. He made small gurgling noises as he turned the pages. Back in Canterbury, he had only imagined what he would find out west. But he had not found it; it had found him. His hand clutched his throat as his breath finally, totally, slid out of him. He suddenly saw how life was going to be with him. Really be with him. Really in control of him. The thought took root like mandrake in his heart. He had never considered until that minute that everything he was about, had always been about, had masked the slow flowering fact that he was not different from all those men and boys cruising arm in arm in the street below. The same wild lemming call that had summoned them from everywhere had summoned him from the south-midlands to them, to this city, to this very intersection, to this catbird seat in Lloyd’s Barber Shop looking down on something that was totally new to him, but also totally known.

            “He was not sure he like the convergence.

            “What the fuck was Rainbow County?”

            And that precisely–about the “Bali Hai” siren call of 18^th and Castro–is the historical question.

            The point of quoting this short story as “back story” regarding Drummer is that I came to edit Drummer’s pages with a certain exhibited sensibility and feel for living among the gay lib pioneers. That was precisely why publisher John Embry hired me when he moved Drummer to San Francisco. When it came time to write Drummer’s 1978 satire, “Castro Blues,” what was behind it as subtext was the 1974 “Rainbow County.” I had a deep familiarity–and frank affection–for the intersection and its radical symbolism which continues to this day, for me, as both “history” and “nostalgia.” What once was the Sodom-Oz “18^th and Castro Model” for white gay males has become, in the twenty-first century, a Model of Mecca for lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people from all around the world. As a destination on the freedom bus, Castro’s siren call, as an inclusive “Rainbow County,” continues.

            The short story, “Rainbow County,” is also intentionally a bit of homage to the voyeuristic suspense films of Alfred Hitchcock–particularly his voyeuristic Rear Window as well as his homosexual Rope and his San Francisco Vertigo. It’s title is a salute to Ross Lockridge who wrote one of my favorite novels, Raintree County, and then locked himself in the garage and committed suicide–even before the film with Eva Marie Saint and that legendary gay-man-straight-woman coupling of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. It was published by Larry Townsend as the title story in Rainbow County and Other Stories, L. T. Publications, 1997. At the national Book Expo America in Chicago, that Larry Townsend edition won the “Best Book 1998 Small Press Book Awards for Erotica and Sex” in a field of gay, lesbian, and straight fiction and nonfiction.

            The companion piece to “Castro Blues” titled “Gay Deteriorata” is on page 38 of Drummer 21, March 1978, and was reprinted in Some Dance to Remember, Reel Two, Chapter Four. --Jack Fritscher, February 21, 2000

©2000, 2003 Jack Fritscher

The feature article as published in
Drummer 24, September 1978