by Alia Volz
* * *
May 15 dawned chilly and gray, with heavy rainclouds that defied both the drought and predictions of fair weather.
“It’ll clear up,” Doug kept saying.
Fretful, Mer tossed hexagram after hexagram, repeating the same questions until the answers contradicted themselves. “It will be fine,” she agreed, even as the first raindrops splattered the skylights.
They were halfway to Mount Tamalpais when the drizzle became a deluge. Doug gritted his teeth all the way up the mountain while Mer puffed on a joint to calm her nerves. Barb, in the back seat beside the turkey, was sewing finishing touches into Mer’s coatdress. Guests were already waiting in their cars beside the road. Faces blurred through sheets of water cascading down the windows.
“This is positively biblical,” Mer said.
“We need an ark,” Barb added.
Doug twisted in his seat. “Would you two stop with the negativity pictures?”
Mer wiped mascara from her cheeks. Why were the omens turning heavy? How could the I Ching have misled them?
“Fuck a duck,” she said, putting a plastic poncho on over her muslin underdress. She charged through the rain to the nearest car. Mer scrambled from back seat to back seat, asking if anyone knew where they could go. A restaurant? A sheltered patio? A freaking cave?
Finally, a couple who owned a crystal shop near Fisherman’s Wharf offered their nearby home among the redwoods. The woman’s parents happened to be quietly celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary at the house that day, and there was no way to warn them of the impending arrival of seventy-five longhairs. But what better way to celebrate a wedding anniversary than with a wedding?
The ceremony was about to commence in the living room when sunbeams pierced the cloud cover outside. The rain let up. Everyone moved out into the backyard. Drops plinked from the redwood branches, catching sunlight so that everything sparkled.
“We are here today to witness the union of two spirits that have known each other through many lifetimes and have connected on this plane as lovers,” Lewis Bostwick began. He led the guests through a group meditation. “Grounding in matter, grounding in the body, grounding in this moment in time.” Then Susan Bostwick spoke of the importance of honoring each other through spiritual and sexual union.
They exchanged vows. Mer: “I vow to you my affinity and devotion, my queendom to complete your kingdom.” Doug: “I vow to maintain a constant space within our relationship, as yin to your yang, as yang to your yin, as man to your woman.”
The rings came out: rainbow wire for Doug, wood-grain metal for Meridy. Jeep had fashioned the ring from copper and brass with a core of nickel; the metals swirled up the band to form a yin-yang symbol at the center. No one had seen it before the ceremony.
Doug held the wood-grain ring up in a shaft of sunlight. “This ring! It’s so beautiful!”
He passed it around to guests, drawing oohs and wows, until Mer grew impatient. “All right already, give me the damn ring!”
The older couple celebrating their anniversary stood with fingers entwined throughout the service. And that seemed to Mer like the best omen of all. There would be obstacles, but love would prevail. Perhaps the I Ching had steered them right after all.
* * *
I pore over a contact sheet of photos from the wedding. It begins with the two of them clowning before leaving the warehouse. In one shot, my dad dips my mom into a movie kiss. They look fresh-faced and happy. No war between them yet. Next comes the stormy hillside, a cluster of cars, and people huddled in trench coats and blankets, shoulders hunched. The atmosphere is so dismal, you can barely see the trees. Then the rustic Marin home, the relaxed smiles, the doumbek drums and flutes. The ceremony among the glittering redwoods. My mom beams, holding court with her friends, her curls fluffy from the rain. My dad stands tall; how proud he looks before his community.
Meridy and Doug on their wedding day.
In one of his love letters, my dad wrote, “You have the bearing of a Queen, and I am proud and animated to be standing at your side. You give my Kingly game the softness it so desperately needs, at the same time that you are enlightening my softness with your strength.” I can see that in the wedding photos: they elevate each other; they feel powerful together; they believe themselves in charge of their own world—what my mom dubbed the “great Volz empire.”
10
Ride That Brownie
A kiss could be an act of rebellion, and in Eureka Valley 1977, boys kissed wherever they wanted: in bars and cafés, in doorways, or right out on the sidewalk. Castro Street buzzed with a heady mixture of celebration, sex, and defiance.
Freshly married and entering her second trimester of pregnancy, Mer had looked for a new route to open; a baby would cost money. Her nausea was abating and she felt glowy. In addition to her Saturdays on Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach, she added Fridays in Eureka Valley. Within weeks, it became her largest run.
The street had disco fever and Mer dressed for it. On the second Friday in June, she wore a cobalt-blue turban, sparkling turquoise top, flowy blue harem pants, and Candie’s mules.
Among her first stops was Hot Flash of America, an eccentric shop on Market Street operated by an erudite, bespectacled pornographer named Wakefield Poole and his friends. The store’s motto was “Everything you want but nothing you need!” You could buy a nineteenth-century French chifforobe, a 1940s gas pump repurposed as a tropical fish tank, or a rubber chicken. And you could get your hair cut in a salon overlooking the sales floor. A wildly creative party scene bubbled out of Hot Flash. The guys bought dozens of brownies every week and often sent Mer to new customers, including Michael Maletta, a hairstylist across the street who was becoming famous for throwing disco bashes of unprecedented opulence—early forerunners to modern raves.
After that, Mer stopped at Café Flore, Finnila’s Finnish Baths, and other key spots before turning onto Castro Street. A couple of doors down from the art deco splendor of the Castro Theatre, she ducked into the Village Deli, a small café with rotating art exhibitions and floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto the street.
“Heya, Mer!” Kissie called, balancing plates on her forearms. “Be right there.”
Mer took a table near a window to people watch. Outside, men stood in clusters and rows, hips cocked, bodies draped over cars and newspaper stands, draped around each other. Levi 501s and engineer boots were de rigueur. They were mostly white, mostly twentysomething, mostly mustachioed. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” was blaring in the café, a little saccharin for Mer’s taste, but the boys liked it; hips pumped in their jeans.
Kissie was a tough, buxom New Yorker with a wild mop of blonde hair. Mer thought she looked like a Roller Derby Queen, like she could throw a hell of a punch. After dropping off the plates, Kissie pecked Mer on the cheek, smelling of cigarettes and April Rain essential oil.
Mer ordered a latte and Kissie ordered eight dozen brownies—which Mer dropped off in the café’s tiny kitchen on her way to the funky bathroom in back before returning to her seat by the window. When Kissie brought the latte—no charge—she slipped Mer $120 for the eight dozen brownies. “You know Falcon Studios?” she said. “The porno place on Eighteenth?”
“I’ve walked past it.”
“Ask for Steve. He’s bugging me to get you over there. Oh, and Robert; he’s a cook at the Neon Chicken.”
Charging past with a sandwich exploding with sprouts, another waiter chimed in, “Don’t forget Robbie!”
“I told her about Robert,” Kissie said.
“No, the other one,” he called over his shoulder. “The twinkie ice cream scooper at Double Rainbow.”
“Oooh, that Robbie. Yeah, go see him, too.”
Three new customers. And if the first weeks were an indication, those three would turn into ten. Word of mouth had carried her since the earliest days on the wharf, but in this neighborhood, it was more like a scream.
“Dancing Queen” faded into th
e driving bass line of “Over and Over” by a local diva named Sylvester who sang in a soulful falsetto and could whip any crowd into a sweat-soaked frenzy. This was the song of the moment on Castro Street, bumping from cars and bars, and bounding down from second-story windows, Sylvester’s voice riding high over the horn breaks. The song was about being friends and lovers at the same time. It seemed to speak directly about this community—an elaborate Celtic knot of lovers and friends and acquaintances that was impossible to disentangle.
* * *
“They are part of what they call ‘the gay world,’” wrote a journalist for Life magazine in 1964, “which is actually a sad and often sordid world.” The sensationalized fourteen-page spread called “Homosexuality in America” included statements like “Often the only signs are a very subtle tendency to over-meticulous grooming, plus the failure to cast the ordinary man’s customary admiring glance at every pretty girl who walks by.” The authors supposed that gays were lured to urban centers by anonymity, established community, and careers in “interior decorating, fashion design, hairstyling, dance and theater.” Out of four cities named as hotbeds, Life—with its average monthly readership of 8.5 million—proclaimed San Francisco America’s “gay capital.”
This hadn’t happened overnight. Covert gay and lesbian establishments had flourished off and on since the Barbary Coast days. During World War II, the armed services set out to purge “sexual psychopaths” from its ranks, issuing thousands of undesirable discharges, known as “blue tickets” for the color of the paper. As a major administrative center of the Pacific theater, San Francisco became what historian Susan Stryker calls “something of a dumping ground for homosexuals dishonorably discharged from military service.” Rather than face their families in disgrace, many opted to start fresh in the winsome city.
Blowback was intense. A series of sensational headlines—SEX DEVIATES ESTABLISH NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS IN SAN FRANCISCO and HOMOS INVADE S.F.—prompted bloody crackdowns in underground bars and city parks. Even when charges got dropped, police habitually reported names and workplaces to newspapers for public shaming. When cops enforced the 1863 ordinance forbidding anyone from wearing “dress not belonging to his or her sex,” a Mexican American drag performer and activist named José Sarria encouraged queens to pin signs to their frocks reading, I AM A BOY! Arrests were made anyway, but the officers looked ridiculous in court. Sarria ran for the board of supervisors in 1961, becoming the first overtly gay political candidate in US history. Later that decade, the hippie phenomenon further telegraphed San Francisco as a haven for those who didn’t fit the mold in their hometowns. Under the banner of free love, one could sometimes experiment with same-sex romance and simply be seen as a flower child.
Law enforcement tried to stem the tide. In the early seventies, according to journalist Randy Shilts, the SFPD busted an average of 2,800 gay men per year on public-sex charges—as compared with about 60 per year in New York City. In 1971 alone, 110 San Franciscans were sentenced to 15 years to life for “sodomy and oral copulation.”
That same year, the words GAY LIBERATION blazed across the cover of Life magazine’s annual Year in Pictures issue. The piece, titled “Homosexuals in Revolt,” featured images of men and women in confrontations with police. At seventeen, future activist (and occasional brownie customer) Cleve Jones stole that issue of Life from his high school library while living in Scottsdale, Arizona, and hid it under his mattress to read and reread. For Cleve, the article was a clarion call.
He wasn’t alone. By 1976, police estimated that out of San Francisco’s 700,000 or so residents, 140,000 of them were homosexual (about one in five). Less hysterical estimates had it closer to 100,000, but as Shilts writes, “The guesswork left the estimators looking like medieval monks trying to figure how many gays could disco on the head of a peninsula.”
San Francisco had become the place to come out of the closet.
“It was a visual thing,” Cleve tells me. “Every week there were like a thousand more gay boys coming in—and gay girls, who were mostly up Valencia Street. It was electric! You didn’t have to be political, or even all that bright, to know that you were being allowed to participate in something the likes of which really had never been seen before.”
* * *
Meridy had blazed through one duffel bag of brownies and was almost sold out of the second. At the corner of Eighteenth and Castro streets, she maneuvered through a forest of bare shoulders in front of the Hibernia Bank—a stretch of sidewalk that on sunny days got so crowded with shirtless boys that it earned the nickname Hibernia Beach. Halfway up the block, she ducked into a small, cluttered photo lab called Castro Camera.
Mer’s customer there, Scott Smith, was a handsome dishwater blond. Scott co-owned the shop with a lanky, opinionated Long Islander named Harvey Milk, who was making his fourth bid for political office, his third try for a seat on the board of supervisors.
In previous lives, Harvey had been a high school jock, a lieutenant junior grade in the navy, a numbers cruncher on Wall Street, a Goldwater Republican, and a stage actor and associate producer. By all accounts, he was a terrible businessman. He’d taken up politics impulsively in 1973 after becoming outraged at the bureaucratic obstacles confronting small businesses and the financial shortages public schools were facing. These weren’t specifically gay issues. Harvey championed labor unions and housing rights, and stood against all forms of discrimination—not only homophobia. He even circulated a petition to save the last “straight” bar left in Eureka Valley from greedy landlords. Though gay liberation was central to his platform, Milk was civic-minded in an earnest, big-picture way that won voters of all persuasions. His first campaign slogan had said it all: Milk Has Something for Everybody!
Mer rarely encountered Harvey at the camera shop during her Friday runs, though she often saw him out in the neighborhood, registering voters, passing out literature, chatting with constituents, cruising. The 1977 election would be Harvey’s best shot—the first year that supervisors could be elected by district instead of by an at-large vote. This was crucial for Harvey, who might win on his own turf but didn’t stand a chance in a citywide popularity contest. But Supervisor John Barbagelata, who’d narrowly lost the mayoral race to Moscone, was challenging the switch to district elections and had gathered enough signatures to require a special referendum set for August. The referendum would either make or break Harvey’s chances of becoming a supervisor. His “human billboards”—handsome young men holding campaign signs—lined Market Street. As part of an image revamp after his first defeat, Harvey had sworn off drugs and bathhouses, and traded his hippie ponytail for an above-the-ears haircut.
But just because Harvey had gone clean didn’t mean the rest of his crowd had. Scott always bought a couple of dozen brownies, as did Harvey’s boyfriend, Jack Lira. Between the young photographers who hung around the photo lab, the comings and goings of the campaign being run in the back room, neighborhood guys lounging on the tattered maroon couch, and the floppy-eared mutt who greeted visitors from a 1950s barber chair near the window, the little camera shop was always buzzing.
* * *
Even as the gay liberation crowd staked out territory in San Francisco, an antigay movement was gaining steam in Florida, led by an orange juice spokeswoman, pop singer, and former beauty queen named Anita Bryant. With her voluminous coiffure and Miss Oklahoma smile, Bryant had become the face of homophobic bigotry. “As a mother,” she often said in interviews, “I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children. Therefore, they must recruit our children.”
Her organization, Save Our Children, had run television ads juxtaposing baton-twirling majorettes from the Orange Bowl parade with racy clips from Gay Freedom Day. “But in San Francisco,” the voice-over intoned, “when they take to the streets, it’s a parade of homosexuals. Men hugging other men. Cavorting with little boys.”
Lesbian and gay communities responded with a national boycott—or “gaycott,”
as it was called at the time—against Florida citrus. In San Francisco, some bars stopped serving screwdrivers and tequila sunrises altogether; others offered half-price drinks to customers who squeezed their own juice from California-grown oranges.
Equating homosexuality with child molestation seemed outrageous to Mer, but it worked in Florida. In a special referendum on Tuesday, June 7, 1977, the people of Miami-Dade voted to overturn recent legislation meant to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination in housing and employment. After dancing a jig for the press, Anita Bryant intimated that she planned to take her antigay campaign on the road—all the way to California.
On the night of what became known as Orange Tuesday, an impromptu protest erupted on Castro Street. It moved through the City, building to an estimated five thousand people, with Harvey exhorting the crowd through a bullhorn. The rally continued well past midnight.
Secretly, Harvey saw Bryant as the best thing that could happen to the gay liberation movement—and as grist for his own political mill. As he said in a speech a few months later, “In the two weeks before and after Dade County, more was written about homosexuality than in the entire history of mankind. In every household they talked about it; they may have said, ‘You fucking queens,’ but they talked about it. And that was the opening of dialogue.” It gave the movement a focal point, drew people out of closets, and politicized the apolitical.
Brownie customer Bruce York happened to be visiting his parents in Florida when the referendum happened. “I came out to my father at that time,” he recalls. “I was so horrified and taken aback by that whole thing. I just firmly expressed my displeasure and said, ‘This is who I am.’” Upon returning to San Francisco, Bruce, who’d avoided politics until then, started going to protests.
