When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

In an attempt to fit in better, I decided to cut my hair. It had not been cut in seven years, and when I hesitated Scott pulled out the shears and hacked off my long ponytail in one quick cut.

  My second lesson was to experience the life of a hotel employee. There in the basement of a grand old five-star hotel in Bavaria, I joined the ranks of the hotel workers, the backbone of the hospitality industry across Europe and around the world.

  In the steamy hot bowels of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof I toiled on the line of the industrial dishwashing machines night after night, on the graveyard shift with the Moroccans and Greeks and Tunisians. The waiters, dumping tray after tray laden with dirty dishes all night, were mostly Italian and Austrian. The housekeepers were Turkish, Polish, and Kurdish women. There were also three old Austrian veterans with various missing limbs or digits, who mostly sat around drinking beer, smoking, and remembering the good old days fighting with Rommel in North Africa. Only the managers were German.

  It was hard work. I’d take the tram from our place by Karolinenplatz around 8:15 p.m. to Marienplatz, then walk the remaining few blocks over to Promenadeplatz and the hotel. At 9:00 p.m., as the graveyard shift commenced, towers of dirty dishes would just be returning to the kitchen after their brief transit to the luxury rooms above, laden with foie gras, caviar, fine wines and champagne, and other treats for the hotel’s wealthy clientele.

  The hotel dishwashing machine belched steam in our faces as we lined the conveyor belt, loading the dirty dishes, glasses, and utensils at one end of the deafening apparatus and unloading at the other. The floors were slippery with steam and grease, and the waiters, busboys, managers, and dishwashers collided in the narrow passageways.

  When our shift ended at 5:00 a.m. my ears would be ringing, every muscle in my body aching, and every inch of my body covered by a thin film of smelly kitchen grease. I’d drag myself home and usually have time to draw a bath in the household’s one tub, located in the kitchen, before my roommates would need to get in and make breakfast and go to their jobs. I was 20 years old and strong, but the work was hard.

  Munich was Adolf Hitler’s base and it was heavily damaged by Allied bombers during the last year of World War II. By the time I got there in ’75, the architecture was a mix of classic prewar structures with a few remaining examples of Nazi architecture, as well as the 1972 Olympic Village and the modernist Bauhaus-influenced new buildings replacing those that had been in the vast swaths destroyed by the air raids.

  The same tram that took me to work most nights also went north to Schwabing, the bohemian district of Munich since the late 1800s. Thomas Mann had lived there, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Even Lenin had lived in Schwabing. Several universities and the Englischer Garten were nearby, and while it wasn’t the intellectual and political epicenter that it once had been, it was still a great place for strong coffee during the day and beer, music, and drunken boys at night.

  Scott found a gay club called Cozy up in Schwabing. Getting admitted was a pain; you had to knock and wait for the doorman to check you out through a peephole. If you were dressed respectably and reasonably attractive, you got in.

  I met a very handsome and elegant Austrian boy at Cozy, named Kurt. He lived in Innsbruck and invited me to visit. We began a low-key affair that lasted through the summer and into the fall. On weekends I’d take the train to Innsbruck to stay with him. Kurt lived in a beautiful apartment up on the mountain overlooking the valley, accessible by gondola. The snowline was low that summer and we would drink beer and smoke cigarettes and sunbathe on fold-up lounge chairs in the snow. At night, he’d prepare a delicious dinner from fresh ingredients we’d picked up in the market by the train station just hours earlier, pour big glasses of the local red wine, and then we’d have sex and talk about rock and roll and theater and the clubs, but never anything about his family or politics. Something about the way Kurt deflected any political talk or inquiries about his family led me to believe that the reasons for that were probably best not explored.

  There was a lot of that going on in Europe at that time as a new generation—my generation—came of age and began asking difficult questions of their parents and grandparents. It’s one thing if you’re having that conversation in Pennsylvania or Arizona, but it’s quite another thing when you’re having that conversation ten miles southeast of Dachau.

  Or maybe there’s not that much difference between Munich and Pennsylvania or Arizona at all. Every land has its history, its genocides, its triumphs, and its shame, depending on where you look, how closely, and when.

  As the months went by Scott and I settled into our one big room on Barer Strasse. We each had a single bed, small writing table, and chair, pushed up against opposite walls. We shared a couch, wardrobe, and chest of drawers, and between us, in middle of the room, was an oil-burning furnace. Each room in the building had one, and the oil for our room was delivered twice a week—if we had enough money. Homesick, we listened mostly to American and British music on a turntable borrowed from Rico—the Temptations, the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, and Nina Simone, always being as careful as possible not to scratch the records because it was so hard to find good music in Munich. Audiocassette players were becoming more popular, and a few of our friends began sending us mixtapes they had created for us. The tapes were much more durable. Scott would crank up Aretha singing “Respect” and we would dance around our room like it was Sunday church—it helped us stay warm.

  Oktoberfest began with parades of the biggest horses I’d ever seen, dragging the beer wagons. The mayor tapped the first barrel and five million people commenced drinking the strong Oktoberfest brew. Scott and I checked out some of the noisy tents at Theresienwiese and walked home, picking our way carefully over and around the puddles of vomit and the groaning Bierleichen (beer corpses) littering the sidewalks. We agreed that Oktoberfest was really not for us.

  It got cold early that year, and some mornings the drinking water in the carafe that we brought to our room each night before bed was frozen as we hopped around, snorting great clouds of steam as we struggled to fire up the oil stove or run, cursing, to piss. There were seven of us sharing the one toilet in the hallway. It had no heat at all, which was a miserable thing but also, if nothing else, a powerful deterrent against lingering in the WC.

  Eventually we pushed our two beds close and huddled together under thick wool blankets by the oil stove, drinking tea and reading our magazines and novels and International Herald Tribunes while outside, under cover of darkness, the German winter marched in and seized the city.

  CHAPTER 10

  Homesick

  IT TOOK FOREVER FOR MAIL TO GET BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN THE West Coast of the United States and Bavaria. Even if you spent a few extra dollars or deutschmarks for airmail, it might be two or three weeks before your letter made it from Munich to San Francisco or vice versa. In those days, much of the regular mail was still transported across the Atlantic by ship.

  It was also challenging to make transatlantic telephone calls, even in the mid-1970s. Specially marked telephone booths offered international connections, but they were few and expensive and often ate your coins without completing the call. There were also telephone facilities at the American Express office. American Express at that time functioned as something of a de facto State Department; almost every US traveler abroad carried their traveler’s cheques, which came with the right to use American Express offices as postal addresses. I, and almost every other American kid I met on the road, mailed home letters with approximate dates we’d be in various cities to receive mail at the local AmEx office, and also used them—as Scott and I had—as rendezvous points.

  Now that Scott and I had been on Barer Strasse for over six months we were receiving regular mail from the US, much of it from San Francisco. Doug Norde, one of my friends from gay liberation in Arizona, had moved to San Francisco and began to write regularly. I also maintained a correspondence with Howard Wallace and a few
other friends and sent regular postcards to Henry in Vancouver.

  I miss writing and receiving letters. There was something very satisfying about the writing of them, the dating and location references, the folding and the selection of stationery and stamps. Postal correspondence was something of an art, and the sending and receiving of letters was sort of an exchange of small gifts.

  We were getting a lot of mail from friends back home then, and as the winter days grew shorter and colder we warmed ourselves with news from California, including regular copies of San Francisco’s gay newspapers, the Bay Area Reporter (BAR) and the Sentinel, which would typically arrive on Barer Strasse about six weeks after printing.

  We read in the German newspapers in late September that President Ford had narrowly survived an assassination attempt in San Francisco, thanks to a heroic bystander who lunged in just in time to deflect Sara Jane Moore’s bullet—but it wasn’t until the copies of BAR and Sentinel arrived that I realized I had met the hero who saved President Ford’s life.

  His name was Oliver “Billy” Sipple. We weren’t friends by any means, but he was a regular at the old New Belle Saloon on Polk Street. The New Belle was an institution, primarily due to the exuberant performances of the house celebrity, David Kelsey, who sang and played piano, synthesizer, and organ—often simultaneously.

  Billy Sipple was a decorated Vietnam veteran, a Marine and a kind of messed-up guy who just happened to be right there when crazy Sara Jane raised her arm and pointed her revolver at the president of the United States. Sipple grabbed for the weapon and the president survived. Sadly, Sipple didn’t do so well.

  He wanted anonymity and begged the media not to use his name. He was still in the closet, traumatized by what he’d seen in Vietnam and terrified by the sudden exposure. It seemed that everyone but Mr. Sipple wanted the world to know that a gay man had saved President Ford’s life.

  Harvey Milk was running for city supervisor again that fall. I saw in the month-old copies of BAR that he’d cut his hair, bought some secondhand suits and was running a real campaign, despite the craziness that always surrounded him. Milk told the press that Sipple was gay.

  With Sipple refusing interviews the press continued to focus more on Milk as one of the city’s most visible gay political figures. A month after the Sipple affair, the second Castro Street Fair, organized by Harvey and our mutual friend Rick Slick, occurred just in time to register new, young gay voters for the November election. All this may have helped, but Harvey Milk still lost his campaign for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that year. Again.

  Despite the defeat, I could tell he was getting more serious about it. The change in his dress and demeanor, the increasingly articulate presentations on multiple issues, and the good humor all made him seem more and more like a credible candidate for public office. I’d had only a few conversations with him, mostly while cruising the boys at 18th and Castro, but I knew that Harvey was becoming a real leader even before I fled the German winter for a few months back in California.

  The other big news out of California as 1975 drew to a close: Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation, authored by State Assemblyman Willie Brown and State Senator George Moscone, ending criminal sanctions against homosexual conduct between consenting adults. We were free at last. Sort of.

  It may be difficult for subsequent generations to understand the implications and effects of criminal status, but it might help to start with the fact that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, between two thousand and three thousand gay men were arrested on felony sex charges every year, almost all as a result of sexual entrapment, in hip and liberal San Francisco alone. Their crime: sexual contact between consenting adults of the same sex.

  One cold night on Barer Strasse one of Scott’s coworkers came to our place for dinner and brought with her a stack of records and mixtapes including the Mamas & the Papas, the Beach Boys, and Jefferson Airplane. After dinner we listened to music, drank good Bavarian beer, and smoked strong black hashish from Afghanistan smuggled in by Klaus. Scott put on the Mamas & the Papas. When they started singing “California Dreaming” I got all teary and looked up at Scott, who nodded and smiled.

  “You want to go home for a while, huh?”

  Outside, Klaus and I shared a cigarette and he showed me his new Volkswagen van.

  “Yes, very cool,” I said.

  He gave me a sly grin and opened the back doors. “Get in, man, check out the woodwork on the paneling.”

  I jumped in the van and, indeed, the interior was covered with fine wood paneling. “That’s outta sight, Klaus, really cool.”

  He grinned again and did something with his fingers to a panel which then slid aside, revealing a hidden compartment easily large enough to conceal 5 or 6 kilos of hashish.

  “I’ll be going to Afghanistan in the springtime. Come back from California in time for summer and we’ll make a party.”

  I readily agreed, “Far out.”

  I still had the return portion of my ticket from London to Montreal. A few days later, promising Scott I would return by summer, I boarded the train for London.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ten Million Queers

  SO HOW MANY OF US DO YOU THINK THERE ARE, ANYWAY?” WE WERE sitting in the bay window of Doug Norde’s apartment on California Street between Larkin and Hyde and I was asking a question many gay people were asking in the early months of 1976.

  I’d left Munich six weeks earlier. After stopping in London for a couple weeks, I used my return ticket to get back to Montreal. I hitchhiked to Detroit and surprised Grandma with a visit; then took Greyhound across the frozen country to California.

  Doug tipped his head back, looked at me over his wire-rimmed glasses, and exhaled Lark cigarette smoke through his nostrils. He still had the same blond surfer haircut he had when we met back in Arizona at Gay Liberation. But now he had a mustache to go with the tan and the blond. He looked even cuter, but he wasn’t nearly as political as he had been when GLAD was zapping Village Pizza in Tempe. He’d taken a job as a bank teller and seemed more interested in furnishing his new apartment than manning the barricades. But I was happy that he’d made the move north; almost everyone from GLAD was now in the Bay Area.

  “Well, how do you define ‘us’?” Doug responded. “Kinsey says ten percent of American men have sexual experiences with other men.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not a real number. I’ve had sex with lots of so-called straight guys and they’re never going to come out or fight back. And what about the women, the lesbians, what percentage of women?”

  Doug agreed, “I think the definition of ‘us’ is people who say ‘us.’ It’s those of us who know what we are and identify ourselves as gay and feel some connection to other gay people even if we’re still closeted to our families and at work.”

  I asked again, “So how many of us do you think there are?”

  He hesitated. “I think we’re maybe five percent.”

  “Men and women together?” I asked. He nodded.

  “That’s what I think, too, how many is that? I can’t do math.”

  Doug laughed as a cable car clattered past on its way up Nob Hill. “The population of the United States now is two hundred and fifteen million people. So five percent of that is over ten million people, almost eleven.”

  We sat in Doug’s bay window, looking out at California Street and down the hill towards Polk Street, and considered the possibility of the existence of over ten million gay people in the United States.

  I laughed and stubbed out my cigarette.

  “What’s funny?” Doug asked.

  “Just a few years ago I thought I was the only one in the whole wide world.”

  “Me too.”

  From Polk Street I could hear the thump of the bass and the click and buzz of crowds gathering, and knew that another Friday night was about to begin. I imagined all the others getting ready for Friday night—not ten million, of course, but those who had gotten away an
d come to this city; those who had fled and found each other, we few thousand who were now ready to declare ourselves, to march, to organize, to dance, and to rise.

  The music was loud at The City, billed as San Francisco’s largest gay entertainment complex, and the place to disco in January 1976. Located up in North Beach, at Broadway and Montgomery, the club was not particularly convenient and suffered from the patronage of heterosexual tourists, but it was still a whole lot of crazy. It was called Cabaret when I first got to San Francisco; and while it wasn’t nearby, it was easy and cheap enough to take a cab through the Broadway Tunnel from the north end of Polk.

  We saw a lot of acts at City that spring. The Pointer Sisters and Sylvester performed frequently, and Charles Pierce as well. But the song of the spring was moaned and groaned and exclaimed by all the faithful on all the dance floors in every city: “Love to Love You Baby.” Donna Summer defined the Disco Spring of 1976.

  More new music coming out was definitely not disco, however. We started hearing about bands like New York’s Ramones, and the Sex Pistols and the Clash from London. The punk scene in San Francisco began to gravitate around a former Filipino restaurant in North Beach called Mabuhay Gardens. It was edgy and raw and a counter to the heavily produced and monotonous disco beat.

  As if to match other cultural shifts, San Francisco had a new mayor as well, a handsome and charismatic Italian American liberal named George Moscone. As a state senator, Moscone had cosponsored, with then state assembly member Willie L. Brown, the repeal of the sodomy statute that defined sex between consenting adults of the same gender as a felony.

  We had a new drug to go with the new music and the new mayor: MDA, precursor of all the “let’s roll, touch me, let’s dance, kiss me, I love you, let’s dance, take off your shirt, you’re beautiful, let’s dance” drugs to follow. But it was a poor substitute for Quaaludes, in my book. MDA, and MDMA, Ecstasy, molly, E, X—whatever the name, they didn’t work for me; they made me anxious and sweaty and teeth-clenchingly uptight. I also disliked speed, an aversion that probably saved my life about thirty years later.