When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  Make fun of the music as much as you want (I do frequently) but the disco era provided many gay men, and some lesbians, with our first glimpse of a gay world, even if that world was limited to just a few blocks in the central neighborhoods of San Francisco and a handful of other cities in North America, Western Europe, and Australia.

  Along Polk Street, we now had fifteen blocks of gay bars, restaurants, bookstores, dance clubs, and street cruising. There were more bars and cruising scattered throughout the Tenderloin. There were at least a half dozen gay bars and dance clubs in Haight-Ashbury, leather bars and clubs along Folsom and adjacent streets, and a few along upper Market Street and on Castro. There were mixed bars, bars for boys, and bars for girls. Lesbians hung out at Maud’s, Peg’s Place, Scott’s, the Artemis Café, and other clubs, many on Valencia Street in the Mission District.

  We went dancing almost every night, usually after a meeting or a reading or a film at the Roxie or Castro Theatre. I went to all the venues but my favorite place remained the Stud bar on Folsom. The DJs there played some disco but with a blend of rock, blues, punk, and Motown. It was the most diverse crowd of any gay bar in the city at the time.

  On the best nights we danced until closing, then headed for the baths around two a.m. all sweaty and stoned and ears ringing, to stand—still dancing—in the shower under the hot blast of water, then soak in the steamy giant hot tub as the DJ mix of the O’Jays, Fleetwood Mac, and Earth, Wind & Fire pulsed through the house sound system. Maybe you’d find that dark-eyed boy you saw in the shower, and you’d take his hand and go upstairs and make out on a skinny bunk on the dark rooftop deck. You wouldn’t ask his name but you’d fuck, then doze, then wake with your cheek on his chest. You’d feel the heat of his skin on your face, his hair between your fingers and the cold fog coming in on the wind across your shoulders, and you’d hear that sound again, rolling softly across the sleeping city, of the foghorns in the bay.

  When we weren’t dancing or fucking, we were marching. Marching for the Sandinistas and against Nicaraguan strongman Somoza. Marching for the Filipino people and against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Marching in solidarity with the people of Chile and against the murderous General Pinochet. Marching against nuclear power and offshore oil drilling. Marching for equal pay for women in the US and against apartheid in South Africa.

  In San Francisco and many other cities, movement was building to create social and cultural structures specifically for gay men and lesbians that were independent of both the traditional bar scene and the mainstream cultural world. Gay film screenings, video projects, poetry readings, lectures on gay history and literature, and community theater groups began to offer an alternative to the Mafia-owned bars.

  In the early months of 1976, Provisional Irish Republican Army bombs ripped through London’s West End. A peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter won the Iowa presidential primary. Britain dissolved the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention and assumed direct rule. Patty Hearst was convicted of bank robbery. The military took control of Argentina. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia. And just south of San Francisco, two guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started a new company called Apple.

  I’d gone back to my telemarketing job at Time Life, selling books over the phone to bored housewives in Livermore, Santa Rosa, and Milpitas. After work, a bunch of us would usually have a beer at Dave’s Bar around the corner. Kristi Oleson, a smart and sassy straight girl from Wisconsin, loved the gay boys but had a tendency to fall in love with us. We hung out with Joanne Stacher, who was secretive and spoke beautiful Italian. Rick Dillenbeck was another friend; I’d met him on one of my very first nights in San Francisco, at the Haven, where I’d first met Sylvester. Rick was seeing a writer named Adam Block—I didn’t like him because he was mean to Rick, who was beautiful and smart and kind. Ken Herriot was totally straight, and so hot with his blond hair and broad shoulders that I could barely look at him. He was a bit older than me, more than a little mysterious, quite possibly dangerous. One night he looked at me over his glass of whiskey and said, “You know, for a gay guy, you’re a pretty hip little dude.” I melted. Jack would take me to some of the oldest dives in the Tenderloin and we’d drink all night long, listening to the jukebox play old show tunes and Streisand and Garland, with the wrinkled queens and the hustlers and the other beaten-down folks who’d wander out of the rain or cold clinging fog, seeking scotch and a place on a stool.

  One evening at work in the Flood Building, I had only been at my desk for half an hour but was already beyond impatient waiting for the shift to end. I paced back and forth, tethered to my desk by the phone line as I dialed and dialed, interrupting people’s dinners to try and sell them books from the American Wilderness Library. Most of the thirty or so people working the phones in the room were new to me, hired while I was in Europe. Whenever we made a sale we’d ring a bell on our desk and the supervisor would make a check next to our name on the big sales chart by the window overlooking Powell Street. When we were selling, the ringing of the bells would boost everyone’s enthusiasm. When we weren’t selling and the bells weren’t ringing, it was like a morgue. This night was dead.

  I decide to try to loosen things up by reviving the “nom de phone” contests I had enjoyed the year before. So I dialed another number, and when the woman answered I exclaimed loudly in a theatrical baritone for the entire room to hear, “Hello, Mrs. Harrison? Hi, this is Willie Loman calling for Time Life Books, how are you this evening?”

  Mrs. Harrison didn’t get the reference, but someone seated a few desks behind me apparently did, as I heard a loud guffaw followed by an unfamiliar voice saying, “Something tells me they aren’t reading a lot of Arthur Miller in Milpitas these days.”

  There was a new boy working at Time Life. He was so fine.

  His name was Marvin Feldman and he was from Providence, Rhode Island. He was a bit shorter than me, and had enormous blue-grey eyes and thick dark lashes and a mop of curly brown hair over his ears just touching the nape of his neck. I looked back at him over the partitions on our desks, and he grinned at me with his big white teeth and made a funny little movement with his hands that I understood to be his Miss-Liza-Minnelli-is-getting-excited impersonation. It made me laugh right in the middle of pitching Mrs. Harrison of Milpitas to buy High Sierra or Wild Alaska, and soon everyone in the room was giggling, making up names and ringing their bells and racking up sales.

  Marvin and I had our first date that night, at the Stud of course, down at 1535 Folsom Street. We danced and drank white russians, and Marvin told me everything about Manhattan, where he had many friends. Since he’d been a little boy, Marvin and his family would take the train down from Providence to see theater, especially musicals, on and off Broadway. I didn’t know much about theater, but my own mother had taken me to see touring productions of Carousel and Oklahoma! as well as dance concerts of most of the leading choreographers and companies. So I could almost hold my own with the conversation, but he was so funny and so clever with his dance moves and impersonations that I soon shut up and just enjoyed his charisma and cuteness. I knew immediately that I would love him for the rest of my life. I could tell he loved me, too.

  When the bar closed, he took my arm and we walked all the way to the Castro, with him talking nonstop about a new musical called A Chorus Line that would soon be coming to San Francisco. Marvin had many friends who were actors, dancers, costumers, and designers, and he had stories about each of them and the neighborhoods they lived in and the clubs and restaurants and theaters they patronized in New York. I told him about my adventures in Europe, the French boys, and my dear Scottie back in Munich on Barer Strasse. He wanted to hear all about Scott and we took turns naming all the places we hoped to visit in our lives. It was a two-mile hike or more back to the Castro but we never stopped talking, and I couldn’t take my eyes off his face.

  Doug and I were now sharing a little apartment on 19th Street at Collingwood, and as Marvin and I
trudged up the hill my excitement and anticipation increased. Soon, I knew, his lips would be on mine in my drafty little room with the bay window and a futon on the floor.

  We reached the front door and Marvin looked up at me with those beautiful blue-grey eyes and smiled. “I think we’re going to be friends, Cleve. Sisters. Forever.”

  Fuck.

  But Marvin was right. And I was right, too. And we would love each other for the rest of our lives.

  We made plans to go to the East Coast right after the Gay Freedom Day Parade at the end of June. I crammed my clothes into a backpack and caught a plane and flew to New York, where Marvin met me with his friends. We made a quick visit with his parents, Sydney and Esther, up in Providence, followed by a weekend in Provincetown out on Cape Cod. I was back in New York for the Bicentennial celebrations, the parades and fireworks and the tall ships sailing on the Hudson. To be more precise, that is what I’ve been told and I’m pretty sure I was there but, honestly, I don’t remember any of it.

  I wasn’t an activist then. I would become one eventually, but at that time I did not yet see myself as an organizer or a leader, I saw myself as a foot soldier in the movement and as an active participant—not a bystander or observer—in a particular and extraordinary moment in history. I think that all of my friends felt some degree of obligation to at least show up, be counted, and stand with our brothers and sisters and to be as fierce and fabulous and free as possible. We understood that our experience was new and noteworthy, and I think many of us believed or hoped that it would someday be celebrated.

  In the summer of 1976, as we observed the 200th anniversary of the Republic, I was an ordinary 21-year-old gay American man, having the time of my life while remaining completely unclear as to what on earth I was going to do with it.

  CHAPTER 12

  Back to Scott

  I RETURNED TO EUROPE, AND SCOTT, AS SOON AS I COULD, FLYING INTO Frankfurt sometime in early July. It was one of the hottest summers on record and all of Europe sweltered in the heat and oppressive humidity.

  The train from Frankfurt dropped me off at the München Hauptbahnhof and I lugged my backpack onto the #8 tram, then walked the last few blocks from Karolinenplatz to our battered old house on Barer Strasse, grinning all the way. When I reached the building I stood on the sidewalk and whistled Puccini beneath Scott’s window until finally his laughing face appeared and he flung open the window, exclaiming, “It’s about time! Come in, come in, come in.”

  Walking into his room, kept cool by the thick walls of the old house, I smelled the nag champa incense, the curried vegetables he was cooking, and hashish. I saw the oil furnace, silent in the summer heat, the Egon Schiele posters on the wall. I heard the Beatles’ “Got to Get You into My Life” and the sound of Rosemary’s voice chattering in German and Ted’s dry drawl as they watched over the food bubbling away in the communal kitchen with the tiny gas stove and the big old bathtub. Scott looked more beautiful than ever in his red and yellow sari, and I felt his love for me so strongly. It was the same love I felt from Marvin, something wonderful that I could trust and count on forever. We hugged and laughed and then got quite high and ate a wonderful Indian feast.

  Scott had a couple weeks of vacation due from his job murdering mice at the Planck Institute, so we packed our swimsuits and started hitchhiking south, across the narrow westernmost part of Austria and then down through Italy, stopping for a while in Florence to see Michelangelo’s David and wander through the Uffizi Gallery, where Scott found Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and giggled, “Venus on the half shell.” One afternoon we cruised the Ponte Vecchio, where a skinny pickpocket nabbed my passport, but I chased him through the narrow maze of streets and caught him and punched him hard until he gave up and threw the precious document over a railing to the street below, where Scott scooped it up. I was pissed but also exhilarated.

  We bummed around Rome, but it was hot and humid and we wanted water and beaches and a chance to tan before the Bavarian winter. We took the ferry from Brindisi to Piraeus, spent two days in Athens to check out the Parthenon and the museums, and then took another ferry to Mykonos. We knew we’d soon be spending the last few dollars and deutschmarks we had; Mykonos has been pricey since the ’50s. We slept till noon, took a little boat over to Super Paradise Beach, hung out there with hundreds of beautiful men from all over the world, then headed back to town to nap, eat a late dinner, and dance all night at Pierros, one of the most famous gay bars in the world. I visited Pierros many times, over many decades. It remained a touchstone for the emerging global gay men’s community for some forty years.

  All these years later, when I think of Mykonos and Pierros, I always recall the song “La Vie en Rose,” which seemed to play every time I walked in—version after version over the decades, from Edith Piaf to Louis Armstrong, Donna Summer to Grace Jones, each also covered by a long progression of lip-syncing drag queens in front of the green foil-covered wall by the tiny dance floor. I don’t think I ever left that bar alone, not once. Give your heart to me / and life will always be / la vie en rose.

  I took Scott to tiny Kea, where Sue and I had camped out the summer before.

  We hiked away from Kea’s little village and stopped finally on the giant rock perched above the sea. We’d purchased some bottles of wine and water, and some rice and onions. I found the fishing hooks and line undisturbed under the rock where I had left them and sat on the rock fishing while Scott stretched some of his many Indian scarves over sticks for shade.

  We stayed for many days, sleeping on the beach, diving and swimming and drinking cheap red wine and frying on our campfire the little fish I caught easily from the rock. Scott had his fashion magazines and I my Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. We took turns taking photographs of ourselves draped in scarves in the water. Occasionally hiking to the nearest village for wine, water, bread, and vegetables, sometimes a lemon, we’d pick wild sage and thyme to season our fish and spend hours each day on the small sand beach just west of our camp, building elaborate sandcastles (me) and art installations (Scott). And we lay on our backs every night, staring up at the clear Mediterranean sky full of stars and talking about what we imagined our lives would be like.

  It was one of the most perfect times of my life. When it was time to leave, we returned our fishing gear, a knife, and the frying pan to their hiding place and, beneath it all, Scott’s beloved fall issue of L’Uomo Vogue, thick with page after page of couture and beautiful Italian models. I covered them with a large flat rock and vowed, like General MacArthur, to return one day: “I shall return.”

  Scott, a somewhat reluctant participant in the ritual, scowled, “Well, when you do, bring me back my magazine.”

  Summer was almost over and it was time for me to go back to California.

  CHAPTER 13

  Anita Bryant

  ON THE FLIGHT FROM FRANKFURT I MADE MYSELF AS COMFORTABLE as possible and settled in with some Vonnegut novels—Slaughterhouse Five probably, and maybe Cat’s Cradle. Although I read and slept a bit, I was eager to return to San Francisco and hoping for something more substantive than endless hitchhiking, clubs, and sex. But as my plane touched down in San Francisco, I didn’t have a clue.

  That was OK, because nobody had a clue. Gay boys and lesbian girls were arriving every day: pulling up in Greyhound buses, hitchhiking that last stretch on I-80 from Sacramento or up the 101, or landing at SFO or chugging in on the last legs of an old Chevy from Omaha. Thousands of us arrived every year, transforming the city into a political and cultural capital for the new movement, still called “gay liberation.”

  I went back to work at Time Life and continued hopping from one apartment to the next. I spent a lot of time at the Roxie Theatre on 16th Street back then, especially to see documentaries. Film had always interested me, and documentaries melded film with my other interest—politics. There was a Marxist film collective called Cine Manifest, and one of its founders, Stephen Lighthill, was teaching some classes at City College
of San Francisco. I enrolled and signed up for some film and political science classes. I ran into Bob, who’d looked after me during those first months on Polk Street. He was living in a beautiful little house on Vulcan Stairway, a magical set of stairs climbing the hill overlooking the Castro. Bob had an extra room and offered to rent it to me. It was one of the loveliest places I had ever lived, but I was slightly disappointed to realize that Bob no longer was interested in me. Apparently I was now too old for him! Marvin and I resumed where we’d left off; he needed a place to stay and Bob agreed to let him live in the small basement guest room. Eventually Marvin and I rented a nice Victorian flat on Collingwood Street between 19th and 20th Streets. Marvin studied theater at San Francisco State University while working at the Island, Dennis Peron’s pot club and restaurant on 16th and Sanchez.

  Harvey Milk ran for the California State Assembly in fall 1976 against Art Agnos, one of the few survivors of a Zebra attack. Agnos worked for Assemblyman Leo T. McCarthy, who ran the local Democratic Party along with the Burton brothers. Agnos had a great résumé, and his campaign consultant, Richie Ross, was a smart and aggressive organizer who’d come to San Francisco via the United Farm Workers campaigns in the central valley. Agnos had all the endorsements, including that of the gay Alice B. Toklas Club founded by Jim Foster. Agnos also had almost unlimited access to funds, while Harvey’s typically chaotic all-volunteer campaign struggled every day to stay afloat. It truly was “Harvey Milk vs. The Machine,” as the white-on-blue campaign signs began to proclaim in apartment and storefront windows across the eastern half of San Francisco.

  I voted for Harvey Milk that November but was not particularly interested in him, the Democratic Party, or traditional politics. It seemed to me Agnos probably had more experience, but I wanted a gay man to win, so I voted for Harvey, figuring that they were both quite similar liberal Democrats. Agnos won, but only by a few thousand votes, and in his acceptance speech he pledged to introduce legislation banning job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation every year until it became law. He would keep that promise.