Thirty-two

Skyline over the Bay, 2012

When I was a boy, I played a solitary game with a lacrosse ball and the two story wall in the back yard of one of the houses we lived in. I bounced the ball off the wall according to arcane rules, and received a fixed number of points if I caught it. most throws were for 3 points, and 7 such throws consecutively gained me 21 points for a victory. I had to score exactly 21, which is, as you know, 3 times 7. My favorite numbers from my earliest memories have always been 3, 7, and 21.

But if I missed or overplayed one of the catches, the next available winning score was 32. Not sure why, but those were the rules. And I'd have to do some dipsydoodle throw with a non-three score to get there.

I'm thinking about 32 because today, New Year's Day, is the 32nd anniversary of my moving from Vancouver to San Francisco. January 1, 1981. Long ago and far away. Little did I know that it was a turning point in many ways. Reagan was inaugurated a few weeks later. AIDS was in our midst even though we did not know. Vancouver was on the cusp of being completely rebuilt, and San Francisco was a little further away from having its countercultural soul ripped out of its chest by an avalanche of filthy lucre.

But none of that interfered with my beating heart as I climbed on the plane that day. I was in tears as I waved goodbye to best friends; we'd spent New Year's Eve in a waterworks of a party at my old place. I left behind my partner, Gary Bandiera, who would join me a few months later.

Boundaries in life are funny things. Even when you see them, as I did 32 years ago, it is hard to comprehend what the flavor of life will be on the other side. And it has been many flavors. I have been a gay activist here, a student through three degrees, a nurse to my numerous friends impacted by the plague, and now a higher education professional. A long 32 years.

And in this upcoming 33rd year, I will celebrate in my adopted home my 60th birthday. It is a long way from a boy throwing a ball against a wall  and trying to avoid having to count to 32. I've counted to 32 a different way now, and can only hope that I can continue to count.

First blog post in over a year, but bound and determined that there be many more.

Photos by arod.

I Picked Up Two Monks Today

I picked up two monks today as I was driving back from my Sunday morning dog walk through Fisherman's Wharf and North Beach. It was at Scott and Eddy; they were standing there all a-crimson and orange be-robed. Late-middled-aged white guys, one had a guitar case. The intersection was slow and as I waited, the seeming leader of the pair put out his thumb and gave me a little smile. I waved them in on a whim, and off we went. They needed to go to 22nd Avenue and Fulton, an entrance to Golden Gate Park most proximate to the day-long concert in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.

The guitar-laden of the two got into the back. These were big fellas, and I have a tiny car with a large dog of occasionally dubious temperament in the back seat. So there was some maneuvering. The transplanted suburban yuppie Frau-mit-Kindern in the giganto SUV behind me, impatient, pissily swung around to pass and gave me that little lippy look that really deserves a good slap if said slap would not sully the hand that delivered it. But, whoops, I have two Tibetan monks climbing into the car, so I stilled my pique and calmed my heart and diffused into the joy of the sublime.

The guy in the back kept chatting away as if I were not there, so I interrupted and focused entirely on the guy in the front seat. He explained their particular devotions which are ecumenical in the Buddhistic sense, though it seems that the central affiliation is with the Kagi sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

It turns out that the Moody Blues is playing the park today. I told him that the first concert I ever attended was the Moody Blues at Massey Hall in Toronto. According to their web site, "Massey Hall was a gift from the Massey family to the city of Toronto in 1894. For over 115 years, its famous red doors have welcomed audiences to a stunning array of events, personalities and artists. It has earned a unique place in Canadian music history." It's a cranky old building, but famous for its sublime acoustics. We broke in that night ... it was November 29, 1969. Perhaps I should do a 40th anniversary celebration. I do not remember the concert very well, but I remember breaking in with my friend Sara who was expert at it. We managed to get into the Mariposa Folk Festival for free once also. I was very nervous in both cases ... I do not have the constitution that would be required for criminal activity, even back in those days when I participated in the notion that everything ought to be free. That notion is still around, but only CEOs actually practice it legally.

Back to the monks. I told them that my friend Michael Merrill, dead these 20 years, was a co-founder of the Hartford Street Zen Center, and that I had been a guarantor on the initial real estate purchase. Their web site says it was founded by Issan Dorsey, but that is a long-standing myth. Issan was a distant adviser as I remember, but he was such a larger than life character that the tale is juicier when he is founder. But it didn't happen that way. I must have all that paperwork around somewhere since I never throw anything out. Perhaps I willl send it to them some day in favor of historical accuracy.

The front seat monk thanked me for my efforts given that he lived at Hartford Street for a while.

I told him that Michael had died at the hospice at Hartford Street, and then quickly corrected myself as Michael actually died in a hospice on Geary Street. He tried to die on Hartford Street, but in extremis he was moved to Pacific Presbyterian Hospital and pumped up with fluids. They have their own hospice on Geary Street, and Michael clung there to life for two more weeks. He died as I drove south to the Pac-10 tournament in 1989 with my friend Jack Green, who is also now gone.

But I didn't tell that to the monks. We kept it light. I didn't want to be proselytized; one has to be "catholic" in the rejection of religion. Swanning around in red and orange is certainly less damaging to human life than being a papist or a fundie or a mahometan ... what's in a name ... but it is still delusion. Warm fuzzy delusion, but delusion. Of course, one does not want to be put into a position where it would be necessary to bring up the bloodthirsty history of the Tibetan lamas as they actually ruled. They were rather fond of extractive torture ... eye-gouging, tongue snipping, amputation ... in aid of their hegemony. And that's the point with religion: it's all cutesy when people are blessing each other and wandering around in a haze. But religion in power, even near power, is always brutal.

I figure if I ever were to find myself in a prison, though, I would be a Buddhist. Perfect religion for atheists, they have a rich literature unlike the literature-starved post-Sumerian monotheisms that dominate the world, and the meditation would pass the time nicely.

None of this came up with my monks. I liked the guy in the front seat. The fellow in the back seemed non-plussed that his conversational dominance had been usurped by the driver of the ancient Honda Civic. Maybe he was just grumpy ... I can grok that.

I pulled around the corner at 22nd and Fulton and they piled out. The front seat monk gave me his card and invited me to drop him an email if I needed a blessing or anything. I admit I was tempted ... that is how religion gets to you. I smiled, but did not proffer my hand. I don't think monks like ot be touched.

No pics yet. I am still channeling my inner Aperture, and I should be able to make it a more worldly effort shortly.

Saturday in the City

I went downtown today. I've been going downtown again lately since my roommate RL suggested that I cure my eternal schlumpiness ... my word, not his ... of dress casual by letting Macy's do it for me. This all started with the new glasses, my first pair of all-day bifocals, whose fashion-forward frames are handmade by the German outfit Mykita. You have to check out the web site ... it is almost a parody of the features of German design that they lampoon on Saturday Night Live. Still, they are cool glasses, and they had the effect I solicited from them. They changed my sight lines.

Life in the broad masses, even for us eclectic do-it-our-own-way types, has a certain feel of longue durée, and it is worthwhile taking each little blip on the horizon, each change of yarn in the knitting, as a way to revisit commonplaces and habits. True even for those of us who seek out habits and hang on to them.

So I have been upgrading the haberdashery with the aid of Leland, fourth floor salesman. Leland is an elegant middle-aged, impeccably dressed black guy who has to be gay, though I have no warrant on that. He interrupted me chiding my fabulous ex, Richard, for daring to assert that I might try something different, and he has led me through this intense process of dressing like a grown up. Two pairs of shoes, four pairs of dress pants, five shirts, three ties, and sundry accessories later, I am looking a while lot better. Still not good, gawd noze, but better. It's been fun.

So I went downtown today to pick up the latest altered pants, and ended up in the Daily Grill Where I ordered a martini and a slab of seared tuna. The waiter, an older guy with a surfeit of personality reminiscent of bygone days in San Francisco, asserted with jocularity, when I took a pick of the eats, that this was his intellectual property. I volunteered to give him a plug and I hereby do ... he is Ken --------. Alas, he does not have a computer, so he will not see this, but if any friend of his stumbles across my little screed, please let him know that I fulfilled my part of the bargain, and I enjoyed his service.

Ken also asked what I was reading, and was impressed that I was reading Herodotus. He is currently reading a biography of Patton, before which he read a biography of Walt Disney. He also scorned MRU, the major research university where I count stitches just in time to get the nine that feeds me and pays for my new duds. He was schooled, evidently some time ago, at Cal, as was I. I variously told him that I had been in printing for life, that I have a PhD, and that I work for MRU. He did not ask that I stitch this unlikely pastiche into a whole cloth and I did not volunteer. I originally planned to use this post for such a stitching .. but that would seem contrived.

Martini consumed, Ken tipped, Herodotus stowed away, I took one of San Francisco's classic streetcars home and had a nap. That was Saturday in the city.

Photos by Arod, today, in downtown San Francisco

Milk ... and Gay Rights Right Now

We saw Milk last night at the Castro Theater ... certainly the best place to see it given that most of the events happened within two blocks of there. I went with Ian and his lover Andrew and with my sainted ex, Richard. Ian and I were in gay liberation together in the 70s in Vancouver, BC. (I used to call Ian by the pseudonym Frobisher in the blog, but I am not sure why I am so circumspect and I am changing that effective now.)

What to say: it was a great movie, I was near tears from beginning to end, clutching at air. Sean Penn's Milk is perfect ... the only time I forgot he was not actually Harvey Milk was when he had his shirt off and when they showed his backside as he spoke in front of San Francisco's magisterial City Hall ... Milk just was not that buff. The Cleve Jones character was perfect ... I know Cleve, though never well and not recently.

The one historical complaint which must be made is that it failed to show the gay movement. In reality, Milk did not invent the movement, but he did ride it and to some degree inherit it. It was not Milk or Jones running from bar to bar that got those thousands of gay people to march at different times. It was the broader movement and the broader mobilization. When things happened, people knew to go to Castro and Market. At the time of the Briggs Initiative, the main local organization, never mentioned in the film, was BAGL (Bay Area Gay Liberation) ... I googled it and found virtually no references to it, although an obit for the recently deceased activist Hank Wilson mentions the name in passing. BAGL was a mass organization with a very sharp curve from nothing to everything to nothing again. It is natural for a heroic film to slide on the history in this fashion; it is more than a little painful given that the history of this era is being written by the few survivors and often by those opposed us at the time given the terrible toll from AIDS.

But aside from this problem, the film masterfully recreated the feel of the era. The apartments felt real ... disorganized and eclectic ... the meetings were real ... chaotic and sui generis. The street was like it was. Toad Hall, the bar that the cops raided ... I loved that bar. It was the hippie bar, sylvan and dark and magical sexy. The film was nostalgia on that level; I want those heroic moments of discovery and creation back ... that's what it said.

Worth noting too that the film did not "PC" the scene ... Gay Liberation was overwhelmingly a movement of gay men and of us, overwhelmingly white. We could not get women involved both because of the open hostility of feminism and because of the unfortunate tendency of the political lesbians of the time toward non-activist lesbian separatism. I do not have a straightforward answer for why more black and Asian gays did not get involved ... one cannot lay it solely at the door of community hostility because white gays also had community hostility. But the fact is that gay men made Gay Liberation, and without us it would not have occurred. There is no shame in that, notwithstanding the ceaseless and vitriolic and dismissive rewriting of history that we have to endure. Not sure how accurate the character of Anne Kronenburg is (I'll check the spelling later), but there were always one or two lesbian gay liberationists who were often shunned by mainstream feminism. In Canada, we had the recently deceased Chris Bearchell; that was pretty much it!

San Francisco was ground center of the movement. Notwithstanding that the modern movement was invented in New York. The key events occurred in very short order here. (I was an activist in Vancouver through this period in an organization called the Gay Alliance Toward Equality, GATE; we were in ready contact with San Francisco through our friend Michael Merrill, who is pictured with Harvey Milk in the immediate previous post on to this blog, and through various other activists including Howard Wallace who is still "on the pavement", as it were.) I was chilled again to see and hear Anita Bryant, the boogey man if ever there was one; I return to her below. She succeeded in turning around our gains in Dade County and in Wichita, and also in Eugene and St. Paul which then and now were viewed as liberal. You see, then as now, it was legitimate to hate us alone ... you're allowed to do it even if you cannot openly hate almost any other group; nowadays Mexicans come close to us, but still the haters have to be careful with them and refer to their immigration status not their national name.

The Briggs Initiative almost certainly failed because of how far it over-reached. But we beat the damn thing, and that was our first electoral victory, and still one of very few. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the film in Milk's role in defeating the initiative. At the time, I was a lefty, radical gay activist (never actually a GLFer ... see previous post ... though I tended to have knee-jerk ultraleft sympathies which were kept under control by Maurice Flood, about whom I have written before). I saw the victory then as the work of the BAGL type organizations and the mass mobilization. It is obviously more complex than that. All that said, the victory was euphoric.

And then the assassination ... it seems so natural now, like it was always fated. But it was a thunderbolt. Remember that the gay explosion had the feel of an extension of the counterculture because it took place in that context and often in that milieu. We felt we were part of the new history, irresistible, always moving forward, inevitable, unbeatable. Milk's assassination brought us back to the world like an airplane slamming into a mountain. Like so many turning points in history, it was a bit of an accident. What if Milk had gone to the bathroom and White couldn't find him. What if he had delayed or had a meeting. White didn't know any of that. He went there to kill Moscone, and then take out the fag. Shots were heard, people were wondering what was happening. What if someone had raised the alarm.

That is not how it occurred and its inevitability of is bolstered only by the fact that it did occur.

But the lesson of the film is this ... as I wrote yesterday ... Gay Liberation has always been about civil rights. And the civil rights of gay people are revolutionary because they challenge the dominance of religious control of morality and the state. True then, true now.

So in the spirit of Harvey Milk, I am going to take up once more the debate in which I was involved yesterday in regard to Bob Ostertag's frankly retrograde and compromisist approach to the gay marriage struggle. It has quickly devolved into what evidently started it ... a way for gay ultralefts to provide cover for a centrist president-elect who threw us under the bus. That's how I see it. I support this centrist president-elect, and I believe that a rational centrist is precisely what we need in this country. But the celerity with which he betrayed us must be noted, and we have a moral duty to ourselves and an ethical duty to everyone to point it out loud and clear. Whether that is a protest at the inauguration or through the ample public space for debate and demonstration is up to those who choose to make their voices heard. It is not up to a cadre of compromisers peddling half-truths and shibboleths. Sorry Bob ... I have nothing but respect for you ... but you are wrong-headed on this.

I somehow got onto a mailing list on Facebook ... I assume because Bob and I are friends ... which illustrates this underlying point. One person pointed out that Melissa Ethridge if giving cover to Rick Warren; this is what someone wrote to this mailing list (spelling errors not corrected):

Check out Huff Post. Melissa Etheridge is in our camp!
WAR IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT.

We can stop GAY. Incs and Andrew Sullivan's plans to
disgrace us at the obama inagural.

Gawd noze what "WAR IS OVER" means. But I do have to point out that the success of the gay marriage protests were precisely because activists went over the heads ... or under the feet ... of the official gay organizations and organized for themselves in a modern, more-electronic version of the same stuff we did in the 70s.

Milk would have been on the side of the activists, not the ultralefts.

Then this note today on the same mailing list:

One last thought. Obama lent his image and quotes to the No on 8 campaign. He did not have to do this, it was a huge favor to our community and probably one of the reasons we did not lose in a landslide.

East Bay black politicians like Wilson Riles, Keith Carson and Maudelle Shireek have been raising our cvil rights issues for a long time in front of audiences where there wasn't a gay person in the room. I wonder what they would think of a protest at Obama's inaugural.

So some decide to thank him for this by protesting a 60 second speech by an evangelical who's mind can be changed. That is if you believe change and personal growth are possible. A friend of mine, J.-P.-, i have no idea of her sexual orientation but i know she has a mighty fine spirit, is marching in the inaugural parade and will carry Jamiacan and rainbow flags in support of us. I would hate to have a predominantly white group rain on her parade or embarrass her. It was at my behest she carry a rainbow flag rather than an HRC flag. We'll let Andreew Sullivan do that. Obama is a bigger person than I. I would be thinking "what a bunch of $#%^ing ingrates.

Hard to know where to begin with something like this ... the inventions about East Bay politicians are particularly laughable. I am not identifying the author because some day he should be ashamed of this, and he is a well-known and respected street-level AIDS activist whose entire career bespeaks courage and commitment; I respect him deeply. But his views here are, in a word, reactionary.

What Milk taught us by his example is that we must speak truth to power. Not when it is convenient for the powerful, but always. Not when it is comfortable for us, but always. Every time. Without exception. Gay Liberation is not about race and cannot be subsumed under race. It is not even about gender, in my view, though certainly the trans-folks raise compelling issues about social constructions of gender. It is about loving whom you want to love and having sex with whom you want to have sex. It is about gay people being full human beings in every sense, and having inalienably the same rights as are inalienably a part of every other free person.

So back to Anita Bryant ... as I noted above, it was chilling to hear her voice and remember how her hatred spread its dark wings and cast a shadow over our lives. There is not a whit of difference between Anita Bryant and Rick Warren ... he has himself said that he entirely agrees with the positions of James Dobson, a virulent homo-hater, except in "tone". And that alone is what distinguishes the Anita Bryant homo-haters from the Rick Warren homophobes. Tone. Nothing but tone.

Tone and the smile of a preacher will get you a kick in the teeth. That's what Obama gave us, and it has been crushing. He should have known better, but he did not. Who is going to show him what we mean and what we demand?

What would Harvey have done?

On my way to a Christmas party at Richard's ... I will try to illustrate this with some photos tomorrow or on Boxing Day.

Things are getting creepy ...

Halloween in the air. The World Series on the boob-tubery, as I like to call the TV. Tonight's game delayed by heavy rain in Phillie, and right now, bottom of the first, 2 on, nobody out and the total babe from UCLA, Chase Utley, at the plate. Beautiful, stud, intelligent, athletically gifted ... and a totally cool name as well. Some guys get it all.

The creepy part of the World Series from where I sit is that it involves the fake franchise with the fake stadium, the Tampa Bay no-long-Devil Rays. I never root for a team from Florida, and I certainly never root for a team with a scale model of a cupcake for a stadium ... unless they were playing the Dodgers, of course.

Lots of Halloween around town, but still no commitment from the city that gay folks will be able to celebrate Halloween in the way we know how. The totally creepy, grey-complected Bevan Dufty had a creepy opinion in the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's gay paper of record. He writes: "Through the second annual "Home for Halloween" campaign we are communicating - again - that there is NOT a party in the Castro. The streets will not be closed. There is no stage. There is no party. In short, unless you live and work in the Castro, there is no reason to come here that night."

Screw you, Dufty, and the lame jackass you rode into town. Gay guys have always made their own parties whether or not that pleases the homophobes and their simpering, slobbering apologists.

Later in his tiny-minded "opinion" he writes this about that much overblown shooting incident that led to his pissing on everybody's fun: "Two years ago, one person with a weapon marred an evening that had otherwise been one of the more peaceful in recent years." In other words, one idiot ruins it for everybody, and then Bevan "I am a hero in my own little mind" Dufty plays fake-daddy to all the straight yuppies who scorn us and brush past us in their me-me-me search for a latte and self-congratulation.

Alas, young gay guys today have no sense of what it took to win gay liberation, and they cave to the midget Dufty's by their abstention and flight. So we're screwed, and in being screwed, we have to pretend we are led by tiny, tiny men.

Sorry about the obscenity folks ... but the assault on Halloween in our neighborhood boils my blood ... in case you hadn't noticed.

Another creepy item in the BAR last week about Prop K which would legalize prostitution in San Francisco. Seems that all the progressives have lined up against it with this classically fallacious logic expressed in an article that turned my stomach: "While I certainly think consenting adults ought to do whatever they want, the situation on the streets is a different reality," said Chiu, a former chair of Lower Polk Neighbors [and a supervisorial candidate]. "Many unconsenting adults and children on the streets are forced into prostitution." Of course, forcing people into prostitution would still be illegal if consenting prostitution were legalized, but such subtleties are lost on the sex-haters. Of course, pimps beating up their whores would still be illegal, but that old canard is whipped up by fake-progressives who dare not, even in liberal San Francisco, be tarred by the brush of supporting the right of people to screw freely when they feel like screwing freely ... even if there's a price. Jeez, people work at MacDonald's for minimum wage, but that isn't illegal.

The campaign against prostitution is religious ... it says that the state must control the body according to the dictates of paternalistic bastards dead these three thousand years.

I'm for adults deciding for their own reasons to have sex when and where they want to, and I'm for the state getting out of everybody's pants.

I'm for the state getting its wrinkled puckered nose out of Halloween.

And I'm for the Phillies over the Rays.

Photos by Arod: top is an installation on the art fence surrounding the Project Artaud, middle is from a bar on Haight Street, bottom is from an abandoned gas station on Market at Sanchez ... they quickly deleted this art and now the lot is being turned into more housing for the unwelcome yuppie scum who haunt our city ... call me cranky, see if I blanche.

Watch Yer Mood, Dood

So, I've been in something of a black mood, as anyone who has suffered through my last few posts will know. Not unusual for me to be in a bad mood in July because this is the month before I go to press with the course catalog at the major research university (MRU) which pays my bills. The stress level gets titanic ... it is not just the pressure of chasing down all the myriad details and confirming that everything is true and grammatical and spelled correctly. It's more the maddening blizzard of email ... the dozens of requests for information that I have securely stored on my web site. For crying out loud, some people send me email asking me the location of a building where I am holding a meeting. Duh ... look at a map. I edit about 2500 course descriptions ... when I am done they are like little materialist koans, all tight and intertwined and thick with content. I cannot bear flabby prose, and in this job I get to root it out.

So I get a little crazy.

I am a little less stressed because, for perfectly rational reasons that are too particular to worry about here, my big boss decided that the book can arrive 2 weeks later than in previous years because we are going live with a web site the day that class registration opens. That means a 10-day press-date reprieve ... I kept saying it was like having a death sentence commuted to life no parole. I was giddy. 10 extra days makes the whole thing a piece of cake. So I am taking tonight off .. .really, an evening off in July is pretty rare in this journey.

And I am a little lighter of mood. Light enough to muse that blackness of mood appears to the natively pessimistic as simply absence of the dross of happiness ... the absence of the illusion that things are on some level okay. So I am not withdrawing from the bleakness of some of these last few posts, but rather affirming that there is something to be said for finding a little joy despite knowing.

So to find a little joy, yesterday I took my lunch hour to watch the first half of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (I am working mostly at home) and watched the rest of it before I fell asleep. It is about a remarkable man, Mark Bittner whose gentle intelligence is the other motif of the film ... i.e., other than the spectacular images of the parrots. The film is about Mark the drifter who found a temporary home, more like a squat, in a ramshackle cottage on Telegraph Hill after a couple of decades of bumping around North Beach like lots of other over-the-hill after-the-fact beatnik types. (For those not from San Francisco, North Beach is only slightly north and not a beach at all. It is in the shadow of Telegraph Hill where the parrots roost and feed, and it is the fabled home of the beatniks of the 50s.) From this shack he established a relationship with a flock of Cherry-headed Conures, and later wrote a book and was the subject of a film by Judy Irving who he later married and with whom he is now living in the gardens of Telegraph Hill.

So things turned out well. Notwithstanding that there is a chilling interlude in the film where this frigid middle class married pair slowly manages to choke out that they are tossing this unique man out of the little shack where he had been living rent-free. The pair is so slimy, so assured of their privilege. What ensues is heart-wrenching. Mark has to give up the wounded parrots he has rescued and nurtured to a rescue group. He has to say good bye to his avian friends including the unique Connor (I think) who is of a different related species for the rest. He has to move in with human friends in the East Bay ... San Franciscans shudder when someone has to move to the East Bay. We watch as his shack is demolished, and then we see the suburban "architectural" monstrosity that replaced it and the for rent sign.

What would it have taken for those peacock-proud middle class homeowners ... obviously rich enough to buy the most prime real estate in San Francisco and then renovate it from top to bottom ... what would it have cost them to make a little space of Bittner, to be the patrons of this kooky San Francisco legend? Would it have in any way substantially reduced the vast excesses that are theirs? Of course they don't have to. But that is the difference between the San Francisco of memory and the increasingly suburban greed that crowds in and destroys the very reason these people came in the first place.

At least those creeps get to live the rest of their pampered lives in the shadow of that ignominious exposure of how shallow run their souls.

It makes me think of the middle class again ... another sampling of the same middle class whose passivity and satisfaction and indulgence enabled the extended livelihood of the Junkers who led Germany and Europe to disaster in 1914. Now we all want to be middle class ... by "we all" I mean the entire species except for the infinitesimally tiny minority of the super-rich ... and I am lucky enough to be one of those who are middle class. Great work if you can get it. But we are no more than ostriches if we do not examine the unresolved contradictions of the middle class ... the tendency to equate their own comfort with good, the failure to use the gifts they are given, the casual rationalizations. In the modern American context, reduce it to this: the planet is going to hell because middle class Americans figure they must drive monster SUVs or their children's lives will be forfeit.

But prices must be paid. And the dread of those prices is hard bedrock of pessimism.

See how easy it is to work back from a little glimmer of happiness to underlying despair. But it should also be easy to work the other direction. If you look at Mark Bittner's site now, he is a happy man ... married, writing, living on the same Telegraph Hill from which he was so callously evicted. He has been a vocal defender of the wildness of the flock which only he tamed and then only for the few moments that the flock granted him.

This post has been written in three sittings, and by that it is probably a little disjointed. If some respite from my present travails presents itself, I will search for some photos from Telegraph Hill. Even better, I will walk the dog there on Sunday morning and take some new pix.

Art and Hanging Out

I am in the midst of my annual MRU course catalog production madness ... this year we are implementing a new software called Author-it and that is challenging and exciting and daunting. Have been working a lot from home which is very efficient, but also has the curious effect of failing to shield me from the immediacy of my emotions. Today I had a little meltdown that would not have occurred if I had been at work. So I took an early lunch, watched an hour of 48 Hours and then returned to the fray refreshed if not actually happy. By the by, that 48 Hours featured the sad story of a 16-year-old who slaughtered two friends in a drug-induced haze with a shotgun. He got double life. Meanwhile, in Canada, the Globe and Mail reports that Canada released a 42-time hit man killer and child molester on compassionate parole because he is dying.

Saturday Night: Found myself at an art opening for a fascinating young gay and deaf painter by the name of Philip Chanin, a friend of mine. There's a strange YouTube experience here. I am a skeptical art opening ingenue ... by proclivity if not by reason of any depth in the art critical genre ... but Philip won me over in the course of three or four meanders through his work. He favors a certain amount of glitter in the combination of bright and glowering colors ... I think his greater success is when he uses it in moderation. Many of his paintings are large heads, frequently earless, that confront the viewer starkly and opaquely, notwithstanding the vivacity of the rendering. It was the eyes, I think, that drew me in ... staring and demanding, windows into meaning and moment, the emotion apparent but not decipherable. His faces are demanding, not inviting. My encounter with them required that I give in to them, and perhaps that is how they came to grow on me as I submitted to their silent imposition.

The best of the head paintings were in his bedroom, the private collection of his lover Bob Ostertag, a musician, composer, and performance artist of long acquaintance. I snuck a photo of one of them, but I am loathe to upload it here without permission.

But it was another painting that came to represent the evening for me ... I noticed it right away in the hall because it had a sticky beside it ..."SOLD". But that clue to its uniqueness did not cause me to stop and examine it. I am afraid that sometimes I am too beholden to unexamined prejudices in matters in which I am not expert ... o what a terrible confession, and one that exposes me as not as unique as I might prefer in my phantasmagorical and internal perorations ... and I just missed what had made this at-that-point anonymous buyer stop by that painting. Later he told me that his mother, who is by his description a successful buyer of unknown artists, advised that when he buys young artists, he should look for the pieces that are different from the others for they will be the ones sought after if the unlucky young artist becomes a lucky old artist.


I felt that taking a pic of the bought painting would be wrong and I did not do it. Later I wished that I had because it became such a moment.

My roommate RL brought his friend Daniel ... also a painter ... and it was he who turned out to be the buyer. I was as impressed by his thoughtfulness about art as I was by his evident bitterness. Take "impressed" to mean "made an impression upon me" rather than "favorably impressed." Notwithstanding the bitterness and my own tendency to scowl at bitterness, I liked Daniel, and made a point not to indulge myself in any fury if our discussion turned confrontational. A good plan, as it turned out.

RL, Daniel and I decided to leave after a couple of hours of the meander described above. Bob asked me to stay because a musician friend of his planned to perform, but hunger stemming from a delayed dinner drove me out. I am such an emotional sop ... I still feel bad that I left early. Oh well. The three of us wandered along Valencia looking for eateries that were open, not crowded, not loud, and not yuppie. Ended up at a sushi place on Church near Market.

It's been a while since that discussion, and I should have written the details down a little sooner. I wanted to cue Daniel into telling me why he paints, but we ended up talking about the state of the gay movement. I said above that Daniel was bitter, but I would prefer to say the more precise notion that he proffered a bitter stance. I should not really comment about whether or not he actually "is" bitter ... and I do mean that in the Clintonian sense of it depending upon what the meaning of "is" is. At one point he complained that he didn't like Gay Day because he doesn't see why people should have sex in public ... I told him I thought that was a profoundly conservative approach to looking at gay politics. He didn't like that, but we continued the discussion ... in fact he pressed to continue it up to the moment where we parted company with him at the foot of our hill to home. Then he told me that he appreciated our discussion because I had not caved to him as many evidently do.

I like the guy and I hope he becomes more a part of our circle. I describe the discussion briefly, and perhaps not as favorably to him as I should, because it got me to thinking about youth and age, in particular gay youth and gay age. I remember in my much more activist youth that I was very bugged by old guys who countered my steadfast and frequently un-nuanced political views ... more than bugged, it enraged me and I would get yell-y and obnoxious. I got the more enraged when they proffered a sage stance, as it were, treating me benignly. So I was playing a game on my old self and not being fair, I guess ... perhaps I should have argued more passionately.

But Daniel is a young gay man in an era when the movement is something that has been taken away from them, something alien to them, in the form of an establishment even if it does not have the power of an establishment. I think the gay rebels of this era mistake that establishment-like behavior as having actual social power over them, and they associate the only gay community that exists in a physical with that political establishment. So if the gay guys in the Castro are an aging bunch of householders, and the political movement is a bunch of Democrats slicing up a tiny pie, then gay life and gay community is illegitimate. In my, alas, angry way, I think that is a lot of what I was trying to say in the my piece on Gay Day. Young gay men live lives, increasingly, that have nothing to do with gay community ... they can easily come to straight friends as community, and see the Castro-gay-guy-Demo-establishment as alien, and by back formation fail to remember that the fight for gay liberation is still very young. So, as I noticed at Gay Day, the young gay guys who came tended to be coupled ... perhaps they see in the current movement the advantage of marriage rights. (And, as I noted, the young lesbians hung with themselves in more exuberant modern rendition of the separatism that has always haunted our movement.)

These are generalizations based on observation but not study. I want the Daniels of our world to be modern gay liberationists. Not my choice, and the forces at work on them seem to press in another direction.

So back to where we started in this post. There did not seem to be any ideological content in Philip's work, but there was a straining to see and to project. Notwithstanding the seeming horrors of distorted and wrenching figures, this work is not dark and it presents an optimism and vivacity and screaming for life. I'd like to see Daniel's work ... I rather suspect that it features a darkness, but one that might also be deconstructed into life and urging ... just a guess. He prefers large canvases, and the painting of Philip's that he bought was one of the most narrative of the works on display, so I suspect that they have a narrative quality. I am permanently fascinated by active minds ... and this evening of art and hanging out was a rather too rare excursus into two new fascinating minds in my life.

Top photo by Arod of Philip Chanin and one of his pieces. Middle photo from Philip's web site; click on the photo to go to a slide show of his work. This piece actually was written in several sittings, not a good idea for blogging. The pressure of this year's course catalog work is sitting heavy, and I go back to my labors soon after I hit "Publish Post".

Parking Fantasy

I've been so cranky ... undermined by a low-bore cold that will neither mature into something worth staying in bed for, or just go away so I can resume my quotidien grousing. My blogger "dashboard" is littered with unfinished posts, every one of which shares only this ... irreducible irrascibility. Can't quite see my way out of it, so I am going to fall back on a post I have written in my head many times: how to solve the parking woes.

Oy.

The key to understanding parking is to see it as a natural resource which is undervalued and largely given away free. ANd it is free parking that has allowed the suburban nightmare to choke the life out of this country and turn the vast masses into giant consuming vacuum cleaners ... mommy, I want more, more, more ... so let's hop in the SUV, head to the mall, and get the country further into debt.

So parking should always cost. But such an initiative cannot be merely punitive; it must be configured such that it encourages the desired behavior, and discourages the undesired behavior. So a city like San Francisco should announce a plan that will be successively introduced over a number of years so all can prepare, and it goes like this.

Start by constructing a series of satellite parking garages. Anyone can park for free, but there is an exit charge. It is the same charge if you stay for an hour, a day, a week, or a month. Perhaps the city might have to charge minimum monthlies to prevent people from abandonning vehicles or stockpiling them.

Vehicles should be divided into types by gas mileage ... maybve five types. And the exit charge should be multiplied by the type number. So, let's say that the exit charge is $5; a monster truck is $5 x 5 = $25. A Prius is $5 x 1 = $5.

100% of profits from the operation go to public transit.

Meanwhile, the city also has to build parking meter kiosks at every corner in the city. Parking on city streets is no longer free. The principle is that any car that parks pays something when it parks. There should be three ways to be assessed: purchase a subscription that comes with a GPS device; purchase parking using your cell phone; purchase parking at the corner kiosk. Street parking whould be per hour with variations depending upon time of day. You have to set the price so that it behooves the driver to leave the car in one place for longer. So a good driver citywise is one who parks his Prius for a week then drives a little on the weekend. But someone who drives his Prius to work every day, needs to pay more than $5 a week or he is better off than the former guy. So a day of city parking should be more than a dollar. Again, there should be a multiplier based on mileage per gallon.

100% of profits from the operation go to public transit.

All of this is eminently doable given modern databases and GPS. If the city applied to this problem the same intelligence the Walmart applies to tracking its plastic consumer froth, we'd pull it off easily.

There would have to be other sorts of payoffs. People with garages would have to rent the curb which they reserve for their own use. I park in a garage, but no one is paying the city for that curb. Why does the city give that resource away for free? And every private parking lot should be required to charge people an exit charge, 80% of which goes to public transit. So it you go to Home Depot (although there is none in San Francisco), you pay the $5 to leave just as if you were parking in a city garage. And the city would have to crack down on the explosion of fraudulent handicapped parking permits; fraudulent handicapped parking costs the city millions and creates the need for far more handicapped parking spaces than are needed. I see it every day ... able bodied people with a sticker running from their car, leaving it on the street for hours. Drives me nuts.

The effect of making people pay to park on the street and to pay only when they exit from parking garages or lots would be to benefit clustering of businesses, and to reward people for walking.

That is the broad idea. More on this later. Perhaps even some photos. I promise to get out of my funk shortly and start posting something other than fevered bureaucratic yearnings.

Nirvana and Daddy's

Ended up in a gay bar last night. That doesn't happen very often any more. But there I was on Castro at 10 o'clock, and there was a bar with the pounding music and that big scrum of men, and I just thought I would walk to the back and back again. But a little context.

My good friend Louis and I had dinner at Nirvana, a self-styled Burmese-Californian place on Castro that I quite enjoy. Louis writes a fascinating blog on food and Amsterdam and sundry other topics; I think you will findhis 2007 trip blog (triplogue?), Amsterdam for Free, good reading. So we drank martinis and ate noodles and seafood and engaged in the rollicking discussions which are our friendship. Louis loves food and gives fascinating blow by blow descriptions of selcting, preparing, and serving it, most especially in Amsterdam which he visits annually. I always come away from a conversation with him feeling pangs at not being in Amsterdam right now ... it certainly is one of my favorite cities in the world.

We parted company as Louis mounted up on his Segway ... he is one of the original Segway guys, and to see him peel up the very steep Noe Hill to his home on the summit is thrilling and certainly a little unnerving. And I walked slowly up Castro heding home in the opposite direction from Louis.

Castro at night on a Friday is still pretty much entirely gay, but it is not young gay in the way it used to be. It is not that older guys and middle-aged guys did not hang around in the 70s and 80s, but rather that there were lots of young guys. There was everybody. That was the era of the clone ... boots, tight blue jeans, T-shirt, and lumberjack shirt ... a look I found sexy then and still do. On any evening, but especially the weekends, gay guys of all ages hung out in droves on Castro. But now it appears that young gay guys take little part in what we like to call the gay community. Partially this is real estate ... the gay community consists largely of refugees who collect in cities, and so the young guys are naturally less able on average to afford the real estate. But partially it is choice. I think they grew up taking gay liberation for granted, and they live much more comofrtably interspersed and unaggregated among their straight peers. That's what it seems. I don't actually know.

What I do know is that Castro Street is a decidedly middle aged and older gay street now. And the bar which enticed me, Daddy's Bar at 440 Castro is certainly a case in point. As I noted, I decided just to walk to the back, and back again. "Walk" is an odd word. "Slither" might be more accurate. I am good at bar-slithering, having practiced it more or less nightly for a couple of decades, and so I slowly and with easy strategy, made my way to the back through the press of bodies, up the 4 or 5 stairs, and past the back bar. That was my undoing. The back bar, with a big bald guy working his crowd like a trapeze artist, pouring and pulling and tilling and talking all in a swoop. I had a double Maker's Mark straight up, and I might better have decided that a single was sufficient because they evidently pour their doubles very liberally at Daddy's.

So there I was at the bottom of a mine pit of men with a tumbler of whiskey in my hand ... and this is quite literally the first time I have been in a gay bar in a year at least. So I propped up the wall and took to sipping and studying the passing manhood. It was as if everyone I had been cruising with 15 years ago was still there only 15 years older ... and no one new had come in. I counted four guys possibly under 30. Nevertheless, or possibly consequently, it was a friendly loud boisterous crowd of round and tall and bald and scruffy men, some just fat, some built, not very bloody many of them lean by any definition. I saw precious little of the shark-like cruising in which I partook so valiantly those decades past. This was about grooving to the incessant beat, and shouting the moral equivalents of huzzahs above the loud roil of the crowd. I enjoyed myself, and the drill of the noise was soothing, as I have always found it so in gay bars.

I slowly re-slithered the path I had pioneered earlier, stopping to prop up the odd post or wall. I let my Maker's Mark warm in my hand and in my throat, sip by sip. And when my glass was finally dry, I emerged, quite drunk, equally nostalgic, and feeling warm towards my gay brothers who have survived and still practice the art, warts and all.

Gotta walk the dog, so I'll try to add a few illustrative pix later.

Fag-Baited in the Castro

Yes, fag-baited in the Castro in front of my house by a pert pretty early-20s-something female school teacher leaning out the window of her vast SUV planet killer bought for her by her parents in Kansas.

Back in the early 80s, I was fag baited a few times in the Castro. I remember a bunch of christians driving by and scraping their fingers in the "shame on you" symbol as Gaetano and I walked hand-in-hand ... this was at a time when the christians were routinely invading the neighborhood and staging little performance autos-da-fe, as it were. I was once threatened, and scared, by a group of cholo dudes yelling "fag" from a fast car screaming around the corner at 16th and Market late at night. And some kid once showed me a knife ad gave me the finger through the window of a bus at Castro and Market. All those were in the 80s. Once in the 90s a decrepit foul homeless guy screamed "fag" at me at Castro and Market.

But tonight was the most unsettling I have ever experienced in this neighborhood.


I really do not like SUVs ... and I especially can't bear the really big ones. Cities are drowning in brain-dead, me-me-me, SUV driving. I hate it when they buzz you, I hate it when they run stop signs, I hate it when they conspire to destroy our planet. So, Wednesday last, I arrive home from the dog walk, blissful from the oxygen notwithstanding the fatigue from a long day of labor in the modern work force ... and there in the driveway is this enormous blood-sucking SUV with those blinding "screw-you" lights flooding the front of the house, idling, and this tiny little missy blabbing away on the cell phone. You know, I would have let it slide if the thing hadn't been idling. But it stuck in my craw. I tried to get her attention, but she turned so she wouldn't have to look at me. Well that did it.

I have a voice that can crack concrete. I can project right through the president-for-life black-tinted windows of the most armored gargantuan SUV ever made ... and so I let fly with a "Hey" just slightly below the decibel level of a 747 preparing to take off. Little missy snottily powers down the window, and I told her ... let me not quote exactly ... to get her friggin planet-killer out of the driveway. She bleated something about how she didn't tell me how to live so ... I cut her off and said to get her planet killer out of the driveway. This went back and forth, and at some point she tried to excuse her behavior by proclaiming "I'm a school teacher" and "my parents bought me the car." It had Kansas license plates. And when I still insisted that she park somewhere else, she stated, "You're a homosexual so you're being mean to me." I'm pretty sure that is exactly what she said. I know I heard "homosexual." I suppose part of my problem was that that she had no more wit in her tiny gray matter than to fag-bait as repartee.

Little missy, on the dole from her Kansas-bound parents, can afford to invade the heartland of gay liberation and fag-bait her neighbors who express their considered opinion that it is an obscenity to drive an SUV larger than the houses in which 75% of the world's population live. I figured that she was raised religious given the snake-spitting manner in which she recited the word "homosexual". I called her on the fag-baiting, at which point she looked at me pissy, and backed out and went away.

Unsettling ... this neighborhood is going straight, and that is the result of the real estate crisis and 'publican favoring of the rich in public policy. Not much one can do. People can go where they want, and that is the way it should be. But it raises two issues for those of us who were around before and during gay liberation. Firstly, roughly 99.99% of all neighborhoods in the world are straight. There are perhaps a half dozen, maybe 10, gay neighborhoods in the United States, and in a decade, there will be none. We've already seen the self-righteous new helicopter parents in this neighborhood demand that gay bookstores not display erotic images, and we'll see more of that. And we'll see coddled little missies gay-bait their neighbors casually and out of that special haughty preciousness that is the gift of over-protective parenting to everyday life.

But secondly, and more significantly, when we came out publicly during the high days of the gay movement, we did so not just as individuals and groups of individuals ... we also did so as people, primarily men, who had relocated and collected ourselves in neighborhoods. We had behind us a place ... really two places, the neighborhood and the bars. In Vancouver, we used to call the bars "the ghetto" ... a lot of gays guys used that language ... you'd say, "what are you doing tonight," and the reply would be "I'm going to the ghetto," which meant going to the bars. So the neighborhoods were then and have been a source of strength and organization and creativity. I know everybody likes to assume that the intermingling of open gays into other neighborhoods presages the "happy" elimination of a distinction between gays and straights, but only those ignorant of history, whether coyly or foolishly, would deprive us of the ability to fight back should our militant enemies seek to move against us. Not having neighborhoods will make us more vulnerable.

And that is what is so unsettling. The little shit in her monster SUV felt perfectly comfortable gay-baiting, just as comfortable as she feels in driving a planet-killer in a crowded city for which she has no native feel. The history and edge and charm of our city were built by its rebels and misfits and free-thinkers, and not by the rich or by the coddled ... and we are increasingly at danger of becoming just another suburban hellhole drowning in SUVs and prams and plastic packaging and the self-centered.

Gay liberation consciously took as its models women's liberation and the black movement. But the truth is that we are more like Jews, minus the genealogical and religious angles, than women or blacks. Just as with the Jews, for millennia we have been the ever-present other, always available for a timely pogrom should the powerful or the ideological or the sanctimonious feel the need for it. It is hard to imagine a full-scale attack on Jews in America, but when you think of the social dislocation of the decline of the empire over the next decades, it is not hard to imagine gays taking the brunt of some misplaced rage. We are, after all, the target of the single most virulent religious and ideological hatred in America today. One of the two main political parties has come to power in large part by attacking us.

I have been reading Tom Reiss' The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, the story of a Jew born in Azerbaijan who masqueraded as a Muslim prince in the gathering gloom of Nazi Germany. The Jews of the 20s in Germany played huge roles in society, as do gays today. They had been supporters of the war, they were nationalists, they were integrated into the economic engine as it by turns sputtered and roared. They lived and worked side by side with everyone else ... but none of that saved them.

Would the Kansan school teacher in Papa's SUV come to our aid if we are attacked? Or would she view it as a real estate opportunity?

I fulminated over this post for a long time ... and when I fulminate, I do not write. I am sitting in the garden on a beautiful day as my ex pulls out the winter's weeds. I will try to write something happy soon. Photo by Arod of some street art that appeared in an abandoned gas station at Sanchez and Market in the Castro. They plan to build condos there now; perhaps there will be room for a few more Kansan remittance babies.

Tiny Minds ...

Tiny minds make tiny cities, and the pencil sharpener Supervisor Bevan Dufty who personally killed Halloween is just the sort of civic midget that would turn San Francisco into a day care center for lobotomized adults. We had a little correspondence. I wrote him a note in much the same terms as my post on Halloween. He replied:

Thank you for your message. To me it's not cowardice to protect the public safety of the neighborhood. It's what I was elected to do.

I’m relieved that we saw a safe event last night. That said, I was saddened to take steps that were dramatic but necessary.

We certainly want to create an Office of Special Events and involve people in planning for 2008. I am all too aware that a non-event strategy will not be workable with Halloween on a Friday next year. We have much to do for next year, but I feel we've turned a corner and have some good things to build upon.

I wrote back to him:

Thank you for your note. I wrote a post on my blog here: http://arodsf.blogspot.com/2007/10/halloween-shame.html

The problem is that you did NOT have an event, so to claim you had a SAFE event is an oxymoron. I spent the most formative decade of my life in the gay liberation movement in the 70s, and what guaranteed our impact was that we did not run from a challenge. You did. In doing so, you committed a terrible affront to gay people, our history, and our creativity. I still believe that it is shameful, and when compared to the risks to our lives that we took in creating a gay movement, it is cowardice. If New York can run Times Square on New Year's Eve, not to mention Halloween in the Village, then we can run a costume party
on Halloween just has we have done for decades.

If you believe that you deserve electoral support from gay people, you can undo the damage by guaranteeing a Castro event next year. Frankly, it's like the old adage ... if you don't the heat, vacate the kitchen.

The two things that really boil me about his reply are the "safe event" piffle and the Office of Special Events.

Safe, safe, safe. Safety is the rage ... Detroit sells SUVs because they are safe, notwithstanding that they are not safe, that they induce people into an orgy of bad driving, that they are deadly for the entire planet. But they're big and mean and heavy and ugly, so they must be safe. Soap sellers fool people into buying anti-bacterial soap because it is safe ... but it is not safe, it is dangerous, and it fools people into thinking that killing everything will make us safer. Politicians sells us "safety" in the form of "tough" prison sentences, but we are less safe because we have created monster criminals out of petty thugs, and we have created a prison gang culture that kills relentlessly far beyond prison walls, and we have created a reward system for rogue prosecutors to punish everyone, innocent or guilty, with a metaphorical death penalty. And of course poor dumb dubya sells us safety from terrorism, but he has made the world infinitely more dangerous, painstakingly built a platform upon which terrorism is thriving, and driven the reputation of this country lower than at any point since Vietnam.

Dufty is just one more in that long line of fear-mongering snake oil salesmen who promise that his special balm alone will guarantee your safety. But it won't ... it just creates ignorance and fear and makes our lives less colorful.

Now the Office of Special Events. By the time that Kublai Khan had completed the conquest of Song China in 1276, he had made sure to establish a Ministry of Rites to oversee public ritual. He patronized the arts, especially drama. In this, he was in line with previous Mongol conquering practice that had collected artisans from the far-flung corners of their new realms. Kublai Khan understood the role of ritual and celebration in the lives of a people. (The careful reader of my screeds will note that I have moved on in my reading from Genghis to Kublai; I am nearly finished John Man's rollicking if not precisely scholarly Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China.) He also understood the need for a monarch to control both the people and his bureaucracy. Notwithstanding the monarchical reign of Mayor Gavin Newsom who will be acclaimed rather than re-elected a few days hence, we do not have the pleasures and agonies of a Kublai Khan. We have to rely on re-cycled accountants like the plain gray dank Dufty.

Mongol warrior or pencil sharpener, an official should be able to create an "Office" when he sets out to do so, or he should "vacate the kitchen". Dufty failed. He does not have the clout, what the Chinese might have called the mandate of heaven. In this case, it is the mandate of the merchants' associations or the homeowners' grousing clubs. So, having failed in stitching together yet another bevy of mournful civic hand-wringers, Dufty kills the "special event." Tiny minded ... and cowardly.

Now they like to proclaim that they ... the "they" here are the hand-wringers and their pencil-sharpening goatherds (refuse to fear the mixed metaphor) ... can start with a clean slate. Nonsense. The Halloween celebration in the Castro grew from history and struggle and pride and art. I promise you, they will try to bring children into this thing, they'll do anything to relocate it, they'll fulminate and mealy-mouth all year long, and they still will not be any closer to where they should have started in the first place: provide the services, police the perimeters, engage the celebrants.

And don't turn into a squawking, the sky-is-falling, prancing chicken in the face of one small episode.

Tiny minds make tiny cities. If we are to be remade as a city filled with Bevan Dufty's, then let us call things by their real names and change our name from San Francisco to Smallville.

Previous post on Halloween Shame in the Castro here.

Halloween Shame in the Castro

So the grey-complected bureaucrats, shivering in their dank shuttered offices in self-righteous fear of the lusty and boisterous city they haunt, have managed to do what homophobes and the cops of earlier eras never could ... they killed Halloween in the Castro. Shame on them. Shame especially on Supervisor Bevan Dufty, a gay man, who does the work of the homophobes.

As I write only a few blocks from the darkened streets of the historical core of the gay revolution, they have closed public transit and strong-armed merchants and bar-owners into closing early. They have barricaded the sidewalks so revelers cannot take the streets. They have banned parking not to make room for merriment or celebration, but to make room for their own police-state tactics. They did this in the name of "safety" because of a few fringe bad episodes in an otherwise exuberant celebration of hundreds of thousands of people.

It is not coincidental that this occurs a few day safter the New York Times features a story that does not lament the decline of gay neighborhoods ... are they passé, it asks. It's ostensibly about social change, but actually about obscene real estate prices. I believe that the moral force behind killing Halloween here is a combination of grumpy old gay property owners who begrudge to current youth the fun they had in their own youths, along with the new smiling straight property owners who pat themselves ceaselessly on the back for finding a neighborhood where they can be cool. Neither group wants our history except, perhaps, in a tasteful library display.

We need our history because it is a visceral reminder of the fact that we have had to fight with our bodies and our lives for the freedom we have. We conducted that fight in living memory. Stonewall happened when I was 16. When I was 10 in 1963, on the day of Halloween, the reactionary San Francisco city authorities revoked the license of the epochal Black Cat, a well-known gay hangout. The "nelly queens" celebrated one last time that Halloween, drinking non-alcoholic beverages, and the place closed forever.

Halloween in the Castro, 1997

Gay people celebrate Halloween, the great gay holiday, because it is a festival of difference ... it is visceral play of the dialectic between appearance and reality. Look at it ... night plus costumes plus play plus blasphemy ... what is not gay about that? Many groups may claim Halloween, and so be it, but Halloween is ours. It is celebration of transgression, and our lives through no fault of our own have been transgressive since the dawn of christianity. The bastards cannot take it from us ... but the bureaucrats did. They stripped it from our heartland. How heartless.

Halloween in the Castro, 2006

Guys spend all year creating magnificent costumes. This has been a decades long focal point of creativity and expressiveness that allows our deeply creative community to strut its stuff, to show the world that we may be out there, but being out there is a great way to live. But such considerations of expression and creation are too much for the tiny minded civic school-marms. A pox on you, Dufty. Shame on you

Before gay liberation, the drag queens of Toronto used to march back and forth between the Parkside Bar and St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street to the jeers and pelting of a mob ... the pelting lasted until 1980, but the Halloween party goes on. I am reliably informed that similar parades of drag queens occurred in many cities but I do not have a reference at this point. But we had the guts to do it, and we had the guts to suffer the taunts and the attacks until we could mount a movement to secure our liberty.

Halloween in the 70s and 80s in the Castro often featured violence much worse than the couple of incidents that form the "casus belli" against gay Halloween for our grey bureaucrats. CUAV, Community United Against Violence, was founded in 1979 to fight back against gay bashing, and it actively patrolled the neighborhood. The police in those days were of precious little help. As the celebration grew and grew, the police came to play a better role. Now they have been enlisted to kill the fun.

This city likes to pretend that it is the "city that knows how." No way, now. This is a city that cannot run a transit system, that cannot pave its streets, that cannot clean up its garbage, that cannot help its homeless, that cannot provide affordable housing, that can no longer serve the artists and misfits and refugees who make it what it is. Tourists come to San Francisco because it is different. But it is less and less different every passing hour as we are invaded by smug suburbanites and SUVs and nervous lookie-loos with no more creativity than the blister packs of the consumerism that is their only joy.

Now the city meekly claims it cannot manage a large, popular, recurring event. New Orleans can manage Mardi Gras, but San Francisco can't handle Halloween. New York can manage Halloween in the Village not to mention Times Square on New Year's Eve, but San Francisco can't bring itself to do the same. The city that mourns its lost bids for the Olympics whines and snivels that it can't handle happy people in costumes on the streets. For crying out loud, Pamplona can handle mad bulls rushing through the streets clogged with human beings, but San Francisco, o poor San Francisco, can't manage a street fair. Shame on the bureaucrats. Shame especially on Dufty, who would know better if he had an ounce of sense of who we really are or where we came from or what we have done. It is especially disheartening that Mayor Newsom, who has fought the good fight for gay marriage, does not understand what a kick in the nuts this is. Think big, Gavin. Don't be a grey-complected bureaucrat like teeny weeny Dufty whose political career is over and who will go nowhere. We need the bold, not the meek, in office.

In the background, I have just watched a 1997 History Channel documentary narrated by Harry Smith, called A Haunted History of Halloween, that doesn't bother to mention gay people at all, even as they show pictures of the celebration in Greenwich Village. Our history is perpetually silenced. It is one of the chief methods of eliminating us. When the City of San Francisco silences our annual celebration of ourselves, it is complicit in that strategy. Closing the Castro Halloween Celebration is homophobic, and it is a stain on the careers of those politicians who established the policy, and on the city where we have fought for our liberation for a century. Shame on San Francisco. Shame.


More ranting on this subject here!

Cranky

One-game playoff between the Rockies and the Padres for a spot in the playoffs. I can't stand the Rockies ... partly because they have risen above their lot in life as permanent basement dwellers in a year when the sainted Giants are, well, basement dwellers .... and partly because they are the one team in baseball that has more or less openly embraced the notion of sports as Christianity in action ... I kid you not. I like the Padres because I spent two short vacations in San Diego and had a fine time. I'd hate both of 'em if the Giants were in contention.

Anyway, just back from dinner in the other room, tied 6-6 in the bottom of the 11th. Baseball, sweet baseball.

I contrived yesterday to get home from a day of running around reading in odd places and doing the week's designated shopping in time to catch the closeout from Kruk and Kuip, the Giants' great announcers. Horrible season notwithstanding the Bonds drama. I'll probably remember it more for watching the sublime sunset of Omar Vizquel and the sweet sunrise of young Tim Lincecum. The joy of baseball is not only in the winning, because winning for any given team, in an ultimate sense, is very rare. I know that Yankees' fans believe that they are entitled to it, and that is what gives everyone else such gurgling pleasure when the Yankees fail. I can only hope that their skulking into the playoffs by the wild card route is a prelude to a collapse that will make them once again beat their breasts and prance around like captive and gelded lions.

But notwithstanding the joys of watching the game, a year of a storied team stinking it up as the Giants have done is just about enough. I have written in support of Bonds, but here is an article that takes a darker view. Sorry to be a wimp, but I agree with it even without retracting my own sunnier pose here or here or here or here. I want a team next year that runs and plays with emotion. This can be a tired town, effervescent only insofar as it bubbles over in sloppy praise for itself. I think that Giants management has tended to make teams that play to that dynamic. Let's go the other way. Let's pretend we are youthful as we were in the several storied epics of San Francisco history ... the 49ers, the post-war era, the beat, the hippies, the gay revolution. Nothing going on here now but high-fructose-corn-syrup-slurping midwesterners in Chinese-made clothing crowding around Fisherman's Wharf imagining that they are bathing in a history that is, in point of fact, alien to everything they have been led to believe that they ought to believe in. Nothing going on here except self-absorbed should-be 'burbanites spending vast wads of filthy lucre that they do not really own on real estate that will shortly bankrupt them ... and ruining a great city in the process.

Let's at least have a baseball team. Let's at least have a baseball team that is better than those prayerful teetotalling poseurs from Denver. Lets's at least have a baseball team that does better than the Dodgers.

Four Days

It's been a lovely four days off, and now the hours fade and it is time again for the routine. I am sitting at the kitchen counter, a Planter's Rum Punch in hand courtesy of RL, my inimitable bartender and roommate. I can face "the routine" only because I am practiced at it. If I think about it, well, it becomes a nightmare. But why think ... just drink.

As we drink, a few thoughts ...

Further thoughts on that old fag, Mr. Craig: IM, my oldest and best friend, suggested today that I add the frankly obvious note that the man was clearly entrapped. Tea room sex, as it is properly called, is not exactly new. Laud Humphreys wrote about it in his seminal (if you will pardon the school boy pun) Tea Room Trade. The essence of what we can know is that when Mr. Craig tapped his foot, he only proceeded to rub his hand along the base of the divider because the good sargent tapped his foot. We have mutual foot-tapping, people. Those who do not foot-tap will suffer no further inconvenience. By reason of this pas de deux, we are all saved from a closet queen fascist and now Idahoans will proffer a standard 'publican hypocrite. We can only assume that the new Senator has been vetted for unassailable heterosexuality ... and by that I am not suggesting that he dressed up in a diaper for a New Orleans hooker like certain impeccably heterosexual Senators evidently did ... of course, in that case, there was no guilty plea so all is forgiven.

A few films populated this long long weekend: As I have mentioned before, decades of not being cinematically inclined have made for pleasant, if unnerving, surprises. I caught a PBS screening of Witness for the Prosecution on Friday night. Nothing much to add to what is undoubtedly a large web of commentary other than to say that the whole film is Charles Laughton. On the closet theme, of course, Laughton was evidently gay, at least by the testimony of his wife who plays the comic nurse in this piece. At any rate, it was an entertaining two hours notwithstanding the excessive focus on the courtroom. Strange to see how forthrightly the plot develops notwithstanding the length. Modern films sometimes want to languish, almost as if lingering proves the auteurishness of the auteur. The stagier Billy Wilder keeps it at a reasonable clip. All you have to know going in is that there will be plot twists and you pretty much figure it all out. Loved Marlene Dietrich, but then I'm an old fag ... smile ...

And then there was The Queen which I finally saw last night. Again, not much to add to what has been said. Helen Mirren is the queen ... you never for a moment doubt that the real flesh 'n blood queen is there on your TV screen. The rest of them are good enough, and Tony Blair is a believable portrayal even if he never convinced me that he was a prime minister. But Helen was all she wrote, and all that you need to know about the film. As a 50-something Canadian living amongst the primitives, and one who was fashionably anti-monarchical and an unfashionably ideological socialist those decades ago, it is with some sheepishness that I admit that I have come to admire the old queen. A bit like religion I guess ... there is no truth in the myths, and considerable danger in the hierarchy, but the occupant of the institutional chair gives you a certain warm security ... like a pocket warmer or a pair of knit mittens. I thought she came out well in the film, and in a definable sense the film is a defence of the monarchy. Note that the "victims," Diana and her boys, are not acted but only portrayed in news footage or by anonymous actors seen only from the back. They are not real ... Mirren is real.

BTW, Charles got the bum's rush; he is actually a lot more substantial a man than portrayed. Put it this way, in the fairy tale sense: if Diana had been an old hag with a big wart on her chin to whom Charles had been forcibly married, and if Camila were a wee slip of a lass devoted to her man and he to her, then this would be a fairy tale romance. But Camilla is a horse and Diana is a glass slipper, so Charles has to play ugly, and this has become the ultimate fractured fairy tale.


Another museum: My newly minted membership to the de Young also admits me to the Legion of Honor. And so on Sunday, I headed out there to see Rembrandt to Thiebaud: A Decade of Collecting Works on Paper. Spectacular. Pity they produced such an underwhelming catalog. Museum hounds salivate over catalogs. I'm sure it is a losing proposition economically, but any great exhibit deserves a lavish publication for the devoted to devour. Anyway, a couple of notes on particular pieces ... I'll try to fill in the bibliographic details in the next few days ... and I will add a few more after dinner ...

White Horse in Baghdad, Christopher Morris, 2003. Low horizon, almost sepia colored. A tank with a crew in Baghdad in the background, and a white horse galloping down a road, going gawd nose where. The horse, dirtier in color than the sky, seems to gleam against the gloom of its surroundings. As I look at it, the horse seems to recede from reality, as if it cannot really be there. Barely visible against the backdrop of a low wall, two trios of men, walking abreast with their hands on their heads.


I ended the weekend with my favorite walk with Loki along Fisherman's Wharf and back through North Beach. Perhaps more on that later ... the important thing is that ... this is a post ... and dinner is ready.

Photos by Arod.

Walking with Loki

I have a sick fish, a Rotkeil who lost a battle for supremacy with his mate in a 40 gallon community tank. He is now exiled to a 10 gallon holding tank until the 60 gallon tank finally has an acceptable ammonia level. I don't want to discuss that. But this fellah keeps getting ill in his isolation tank ... not eating well, all that. So I had to take the dog down to the Polk area where my aquarium dealer of 15 years, Justin and Ady of Ocean Aquarium, hold court. Justin says not to worry, just watch and wait. No meds.

But that means that Loki and I get to walk in the Polk area ... along Polk to Pacifc and then back via Hyde to California.

The Polk area is just plain filthy these days, and the city seems to ignore it. It has always been a pretty scummy area, but it is getting worse in a lot of ways. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was one of three known gay areas of town ... probably the oldest of the three, though not the original in any sense. When I moved here, it was famous for its hustlers who pretty much lined the street ... always on the east side. Back in those days, long before the Internet, and even before pagers and ads and all that, there was every kind of whore ... from the real skanky drug addicts to nervous amateurs testing the waters. Now it is only the real desperate drug addicts, and it is hard to tell if they are really whores. Walking down the street at 6 in the evening on a weeknight, you really don't want anybody to touch you.

Once we left Polk Street and went east to Hyde Street, we're in an extension of Chinatown, and not the upscale part at all. Cheap restaurants and what feels like wall-to-wall nail shops ... nail shops ... call me out of touch, but I missed the memo on nail shops. And how a neighborhood can support a couple dozen of them escapes me. Need to spend a little more time thinking about that.

Wide array of folks walking the groceries home ... Asian of all ages, young white guys, middle aged office worker women, plenty of rough looking types. The usual mad traffic of the incompetent tank-driving types running stops signs and roaring around tight corners. Still, an eyeful.

We find a mural on the side of an African restaurant at California and Hyde. Seems like a metaphor for global warming and all the fun flooding we will get to swim in. Had to step around various garbage and organic compounds to take the pic. One of lots of crazy eateries hidden in the back streets ... a couple of French type bistros, one Italian place that looked good, and lots of cheap Chinese places that allure for romantic reasons but probably would deliver more heartburn than hearty good eating. This African place is right on California, so probably gets some foot traffic. You get the sense that most of these places, though, survive off locals in this dense urban mélange.

Down the road is the John Barleycorn pub that will probably be closed because it lost its lease. Click on the link for the save the place site. They write: ”The John Barleycorn, one of San Francisco's hidden gems for nearly 40 years, is being forced to leave. Luisa Hanson, the new owner of the property at 1500 California Street, the building which houses the Barleycorn, refuses to discuss any renewal of the lease, which expires in June. At issue is not only the continuance of the Barleycorn, a center of the community and an asset to the city as well, but the economic future of the neighborhood of Lower Nob Hill. The Barleycorn, with its cable car benches, church pews from Old St. Mary's and other historic furnishings, is the right size and scale for this neighborhood. Its replacement will be resented, and perhaps shunned, leading to the economic demise of any subsequent business, particularly for a proprietor who turns a blind eye to neighborhood tradition."

Just down the street is a boarded up place ... that is what happens when you kill John Barleycorn and put in a fly by night restaurant bound for failure. Growl.