When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  I was determined to get a job as soon as possible, but it wasn’t easy without a permanent address or telephone. I didn’t have many clothes either, and keeping them and myself clean was a challenge. I also had no degree, training, or apparent skills.

  Wandering around south of Market Street one day, I passed a print shop in between a couple of leather bars and spotted a Help Wanted sign in the window. The job was bicycle messenger, delivering rolled-up architectural blueprints in long cardboard tubes to architects’ offices scattered throughout downtown. The guy in charge asked me if I knew my way around town: “I’m not paying you to get lost.”

  I assured him I knew it like the back of my hand. First stop: the gas station down the street, where I successfully negotiated a free street map from the hot Latino man behind the counter. We both enjoyed it.

  Aside from nearly getting run over and crushed by a 30-Stockton bus near Union Square, my first day went fairly well and by the end of the day I felt like I was learning my way around. I asked the boss when we’d get paid, and he said not for two weeks. So that was a problem. Tom, my host, was clearly depressed, and my presence in his tiny studio probably wasn’t helping his mental health.

  A couple weeks later it was almost Thanksgiving, and I was all alone. Tom went somewhere without telling me, and I had no money or food. A handsome older guy named Bob Stemple picked me up on Polk Street. He looked like he had money but he was so cute I would have gone home with him anyway. He was shy but sophisticated and educated. Bob’s bed was big and warm and just across the street from Tom’s place, and I felt safe with him immediately. When my stomach wouldn’t stop growling, he gave me a bathrobe to wear and took me to the kitchen and fed me. Bob had been in New York during the Stonewall riots and I was eager to hear his stories of the already fabled altercation. I spent the night and he made breakfast before sending me on my way. It wasn’t until I was digging for change in my pocket for bus fare later that I found the twenty-dollar bill he’d put there while I showered.

  A few days later it was raining on Thanksgiving. Tom was still gone. I hadn’t missed a day of work or even been late once, although it was hard getting up cold and hungry and early enough to walk the mile or so to the print shop south of Market. I was glad for the holiday nonetheless, and resigned myself to another night of tuna and crackers on the floor with the radio and the mice.

  When I woke up on Thanksgiving morning I spotted an envelope shoved under the door. It was so cold I stayed in my sleeping bag on the floor for as long as I could before running to piss. When I opened the envelope there was a note from Bob saying he was out of town, but wishing me happy Thanksgiving. There were also two twenty-dollar bills. I wanted to cry. Bob’s Burgers was open all day. I went first for breakfast, then again for a big-ass T-day dinner with a bunch of boys I found alone and hungry up and down the street.

  Another gay kid worked at the print shop, a skinny Mexican boy with long hair named Joey. When I told him my situation he immediately invited me to stay with him and his buddies at the Leland Hotel on Polk Street. It didn’t seem the least bit odd to me when we entered the building by climbing up a fire escape ladder in the alley around back.

  That first night at the Leland was grim. One of the resident drag queens had slashed her wrists with a razor and run up and down the halls splattering blood everywhere. In Joey’s small room about a half dozen boys were sleeping two to a bed, with more on the floor. In the following days, talking with the boys, I soon realized that while all of us had jobs of one kind or another, it was almost impossible, on minimum wage, for anyone to actually save enough money to pay the first and last months’ rent, security deposit, and utility turn-on fees required to get an apartment. So one guy would rent a hotel room and then we’d all pile in and stay until the management caught on.

  And we hustled. There were about eight of us, mostly Mexican and Filipino. We worked as food servers, dishwashers, or bicycle messengers during the day and panhandled on the sidewalk at night. We passed out flyers advertising passport photo services in front of the Federal Building. We made sandwiches at the Haven and sold Quaaludes, acid, and weed downstairs. We let older men blow us for twenty bucks in their cars parked on side streets. We “dined and dashed,” sprinting out to the street from restaurants after eating without paying the bill. We did whatever we had to do, because we were hungry and it was too cold and scary to sleep outside at night.

  Every night after the bars closed, we’d meet up at Bob’s Burgers on Polk at Sacramento and those who had money would treat those who didn’t to a meal. For some of us it was the one meal of the day we could count on. Sometimes we’d go to the Grubstake Diner on Pine Street, which we loved because it was in an old railroad car but mostly because a really cute guy named John-John worked behind the counter.

  After two weeks my first paycheck arrived and it was my turn to rent a room. But there wasn’t any money left over for food. It started to feel like we were trapped, but one of the boys, a tall white kid named Hans, had a plan.

  “We’re gonna be houseboys,” he announced late one night after too many days of cold rain and no hot meals. “We’ll go live with some rich old queen and do the dishes and clean the house but keep our jobs on the side and save money. Then we can get our own place.”

  Annie Peebles was on the radio, singing, “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” I said OK. I was so sick of peanut butter sandwiches and the smell of our mildewing clothes and sleeping bags.

  A few days later Hans introduced me to James and Maurice. They were not a couple, just two old friends sharing a large house on Twin Peaks. Maurice owned a small travel agency on Geary Street, across from the Clift Hotel. They seemed nice enough but they were very fat and James reeked of whiskey.

  “If we have to sleep with them I can’t do this,” I warned Hans, “no fucking way.” Hans assured me that sex was not part of the deal. I was still kind of scared and I asked Bob if he would be willing to meet these guys and check them out for me. I was seeing Bob once a week. He was always good for advice and also had some really cool stories. He was also a good cook and generous, slipping twenty or forty bucks into my pocket when I left. Bob met the guys and said it was OK. Fortunately he was right. James and Maurice let us stay with them for several months up on Corbett Street. They paid for food and clothes and never laid a hand on us.

  I called my folks occasionally. They made it clear they wouldn’t help me financially unless I returned to Phoenix, school, and therapy. But we stayed in touch with brief conversations charged with their gentle but disapproving anxiety. It eased their minds somewhat now that they could reach me by telephone and had an actual address for me.

  One day Maurice called me to the telephone, and I was astounded to hear my grandmother’s voice. She was in town, and wanted to take me to dinner.

  “But Grandma, what on earth are you doing in San Francisco?” I asked. Grandma lived all the way across the country in Birmingham, Michigan—a few miles north of Detroit.

  “Well, I want to see you, of course. May I take you to dinner tomorrow?” Helen Jones was close to 70 but still traveled on her own quite a bit, from her home on Southfield Road where she and my Papa had lived for so long.

  She picked me up in a taxi the following evening and took me to one of the old classic seafood places on Fisherman’s Wharf, an area most of my friends and I avoided as a tourist trap. But there were some good restaurants, and Grandma took me to one of the best.

  I’d scrambled earlier, trying to find some clothes that would be respectable (and clean) enough for Grandma Jones, and was embarrassed entering the taxi when I saw how beautifully she had dressed for the evening. Helen Jones was a class act, extremely gracious, always elegant without being showy or ostentatious, and she hugged me without comment on my clothing, ponytail, or hygiene.

  My grandma was educated and worldly but came from hardworking Indiana frontier stock. She took a keen interest in politics, as did Papa, and both were devoted Democrats and staunch supp
orters of the civil rights movement and organized labor. She and Papa had known the Roosevelt family and our family pantheon of heroes included FDR, Eleanor, and, of course, the Kennedys.

  At the restaurant, the maître d’ seated us at a table with stunning views of the bay and the waiter arrived to take our orders, standing a bit behind me to my right and addressing my grandmother. After taking her order, but without looking up, he enquired of me, “And for the young lady?”

  I looked at Grandma’s suddenly twinkling eyes and the tight-lipped smile I’d known my whole life and lowered my voice to the butchest bass I could muster, responding, “I beg your pardon, but I’ll have the halibut, please.”

  The poor waiter turned bright red and apologized profusely, “I’m so sorry, sir, all I saw was the ponytail—please forgive me.” Grandma just grinned.

  She would tell this story at every major family gathering for over forty years to come, ending each recitation by exclaiming, “And you know, Cleve handled it just perfectly; I could not stop laughing, but that poor waiter, oh my goodness.”

  Grandma had traveled across the continent to take her firstborn grandchild to dinner and to deliver a clear message: “You are my grandson and I love you unequivocally and always will, no matter what.” She would live a very long life and all who knew her were happy for that.

  Hans got hired at a fancy restaurant and I soon quit the print shop and got a job selling Time Life books over the telephone out of an office in the magnificent old Flood Building overlooking the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market. With commissions it paid more than the messenger gig, and there was little risk of injury or death at the hands of Muni bus drivers.

  Woolworth’s was on the ground floor of the Flood Building. You could get a great lunch for just a couple bucks. Long-haired hippies, downtown office workers, hustlers, hookers, and little old white ladies with fox stoles all mingled at Woolworth’s. I can still smell the meatloaf. I worked four hours a day regularly, from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday at Time Life Books, and picked up other jobs as I could get them. I made enough money to pay for my room and other expenses plus set aside about fifty dollars a month, sometimes more.

  The flexible hours and short shifts at Time Life left me plenty of time to explore the city and hang out with my friends. All the kids in our little gang were under 21 and most were black or brown, so we couldn’t get in many of the bars or clubs except for one or two on Polk Street and a couple more south of Market, where we knew the doormen would look the other way or where we could get in through a back door. Some of the gay scene was still up in North Beach, where José Sarria had once held court at the Black Cat, singing “God Save Us Nelly Queens” at last call. José also ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors back in the ’60s and was one of the founders of the Tavern Guild and the Society for Individual Rights. By the time I got to town, the Black Cat was a distant memory and North Beach was crowded with tourists from the hinterlands gaping at Carol Doda’s bright pink blinking neon nipples. But Empress José was still a force to be reckoned with, presiding over the Imperial Court, one of the community’s most unique and enduring social structures.

  Polk Street was still the center of a gay scene that was changing rapidly. There were lots of gay bars in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, south of Market and on upper Market Street near Castro. The Castro area was then called Eureka Valley. The famous Twin Peaks was there, as well as a hippie bar called Toad Hall. There’s a Toad Hall on 18th Street now, but that’s actually at the site of the old Pendulum, which in the ’70s was the only predominantly black gay bar in San Francisco. Back then few gay people lived in the Castro; most of the residents were families who had lived in the area since Scandinavian, Irish, and other working-class immigrants first settled there at the turn of the century.

  One day Hans came home from work and announced that his boyfriend wanted him to move in. I was also getting antsy and didn’t like the rules imposed by James and Maurice that forbade visitors in the house. I’d been seeing a hot boy named Ric, who had big brown Greek eyes and a yellow Pinto. I introduced Ric to tequila on New Year’s Eve, and he got arrested when he screamed “Fuck you, pigs” at the cops who were hassling people.

  I also liked staying out late on my own sometimes, and it was scary walking up the hill after Muni shut down. The Zebra killers were still on the loose and people were getting shot all over the place, including a young social worker on Potrero Hill named Art Agnos, who survived the attack. Many years later Art would give me my first “real” job, and even more years after that would become mayor of San Francisco.

  Lots of people were getting shot in the fall of 1973, not just in San Francisco. In Chile, right-wing military leaders—backed by Nixon and the CIA—ousted Salvador Allende from power and installed the brutal dictator General Pinochet. We read the news but within months would start to meet the political refugees from Chile whose own stories were far more chilling than the reporting we’d seen, including two young gay men who had escaped from the National Stadium, where thousands of suspected leftists had been imprisoned and many executed.

  There was some good news: Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match. She wouldn’t come out as lesbian until 1981 during a palimony lawsuit, but we all knew.

  Late one Friday night I was hanging out with the gang at Bob’s Burgers when our pal Shoki, a skinny caramel-colored kid with wild black hair, walked in. We hadn’t seen him around in weeks and waved him over. He was living in a communal household up on Central between Haight and Page and described in hilarious detail his new roommates. They sounded wonderful and I said so.

  He grabbed my hand. “Girl, you should move in, there’s a room opening up on the first.” I went to check it out the next day and fell in love with the old Victorian flat and its residents.

  Silas was lean and mustached and handsome and smart. He had a very expressive face and I see him in my mind now, running his fingers through his mustache and nodding his head back a bit with smile and twinkly eyes and jumping eyebrows. And Dora—like Silas, he was smart and had long, straight brown hair, with a broad grin, strong cheekbones, and a beard. He didn’t talk much and painted the walls, floor, and ceiling of his room canary yellow. Ten years older than me, Dora had been a draft resister, Silas explained to me one night. He had risked prison and only been spared by a US Supreme Court decision. Patrick was Irish but sounded Long Island Jewish and wore an Afro hairstyle with Egyptian jewelry. And there was Rhoda Dendron, who actually wasn’t much of a queen at all and hated the drag name we’d given him, but protested so vehemently and with such forced masculinity that we couldn’t possibly agree to call him Ron, or Mike or Jeff or whatever his real name was. Shoki’s real name was Gary Comfort, which I thought was a beautiful name, but he hated it: “It reminds me of my father.”

  Of the bunch, I was one of the few who used my family-given name. We were all creating ourselves from scratch. There was no map, no instructions to follow. We were all in uncharted territory and we knew it.

  I moved into the front room, with a bay window over Central Avenue, a block from Haight Street and Buena Vista Park. In those days if you were young and gay and walking around San Francisco you would pass other young gay people on the street and you would make eye contact and smile and say hello because you knew that you had something in common with that person; you had both left behind your family and hometown and probably your church and your friends and everything else you had, to come to this. You didn’t have to be political or educated or even all that smart to understand that you, that we, were part of something brand new, something that had never been seen before. And a big part of that, maybe the most important part, was that word: we.

  Late at night, talking with Silas in the kitchen while the others slept, we would imagine what we could become.

  “So what you’re saying is that gay people need to see themselves the way Jewish people and black people see themselves?�
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  Silas nodded. “Yes, but not exactly. We have to be careful when we compare ourselves to other minorities like Jews or black people; there are similarities but also differences. But yes, we need to think of ourselves as a people. We’re more than a subculture. Or we could be.”

  We were all talking about it, dreaming about it, imagining what it could look like and how it would feel. Most of us, just two years or two months or two days earlier, had thought we were completely alone in the world. Somehow, we got the word, packed our bags, and stuck out our thumbs or jumped on a Greyhound to get the hell out of wherever we were and head for San Francisco.

  Thanksgiving was coming and we decided to have a party. We took turns on the telephone line we shared, calling everyone we knew, and Shoki hand-lettered little invitations to pass out to our friends on Haight and Polk and at the Stud. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, President Nixon announced on TV that he was not a crook and we all just about peed ourselves laughing.

  “Oh girl, we need a party in the worst way,” intoned Dora. “This country is going to shit… I do like Senator Ervin though.” Silas volunteered to head up the grocery shopping; he’d somehow gained the use of a car on weekends. Lugging groceries on the bus was a pain in the ass.

  About a week before Nixon’s declaration of non-crookedness, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) shot and killed Marcus Foster, superintendent of the Oakland School District, across the Bay from San Francisco. Everyone was shocked by the murder. Foster had a reputation as a progressive and conscientious administrator in a tough district but had agreed to the imposition of identity cards in the Oakland schools, which was denounced by many leftists. He was popular in the African American community, but according to the communiqué from the SLA, Foster was a fascist.