A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  A new plague has struck the city. A bug, originating from Brazil, is killing the fuchsias, and as San Francisco is the fuchsia capital of North America, media coverage is almost as intense as it is on AIDS.

  TO THE OPERA HOUSE for the Joffrey Ballet: Britten, Shostakovich and Brahms. The Britten is Les Illuminations, his greatest work in my opinion. Rimbaud’s poems (and Britten’s music) constantly evoke the beauty of the male body: “Promène-toi, la nuit, en mouvant doucement cette cuisse, cette seconde cuisse et cette jambe de gauche”, and these lines mean little—

  Oh! nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps amoureux.

  O la face cendrée, l’écusson de crin, les bras de cristal! Le canon sur lequel je dois m’abattre à travers la mêlée des arbres et def air léger!

  —if “canon” is not cock and “mêlée des arbres” not pubic hair. (The throbbing, hushed chords that accompany the singer here marvellously suggest the most tender love-making.)

  The trouble with turning this into a ballet is that the music is so busy supporting and interpreting the poems, and the poems so deftly floating on top of the music, that dance is an intrusion—the unwanted man in a three-way, disturbing what is already perfection. It is annoying that Ashton’s choreography makes not one gesture towards the homoeroticism of the words or the music, but concentrates entirely on the feverish drug-induced vision in each poem, something Britten’s music plays down. Cecil Beaton’s costumes—camp, witty, and looking as if they belong to a quite different ballet—only add to the confusion.

  Surely the combination of Britten, Rimbaud, Ashton and Beaton could have given us a gay masterpiece! But—the date: 1950. Nobody dared to think in those terms, then.

  FILOLI, HALF-WAY BETWEEN San Francisco and San José, is a neat, well-designed but essentially uninteresting mock-Georgian mansion. We are not here for the house, however; its gardens attract people in such numbers that the first available Saturday one can visit them is next October. Fortunately mid-week is less popular, but it is tedious having to join a large party on a guided tour of a garden. I want to sit on the lawn, crush herbs in my fingers, smell choisias and roses, gaze as long as I like at water lilies, hydrangeas, rudbeckias, maidenhair and tea trees, the dazzle of hibiscus and bougainvillaea. It’s not allowed. Why does everything in this country have to be so organized?

  IN SAN FRANCISCO, on the Crookedest Street in the World, I look at bougainvillaea and hydrangeas uninterrupted. On Twin Peaks see the whole city spread out for my inspection: the Bay, the bridges, Oakland, Berkeley (with its campanile visible for once), the mountains beyond. I think of the Devil taking Christ to the top of the mountain and showing him all the kingdoms, and I wonder if he would have refused this one.

  I find a few bits I wrote just after I arrived in 1980. “He has white teeth, bronzed skin, sun-bleached hair.” “Fire-crackers left from July the fourth festivities explode all day, all night. Until I’m told what they are, I think they are gunshots.” “Every fleshly pleasure supplied, yet it has the highest suicide and alcoholism rates in the world.” “An elegant Gothic church with

  white towers, green spires and gold weathervanes. The city is an adult’s toy-box.” “Too many ugly electric cables and telephone wires.” “The Golden Gate Bridge—I can’t believe I’m actually walking on it.”

  All true.

  HAVE A GOOD DAY—have a good one—enjoy your day— there you go—take it easy—ya betcha—have a good trip—is that right?—well, what do ya know!—well, how about that!— Holy Smoke ! — goldarnit—goddammit—durned—how ya doing?

  The meaningless small change of American conversation is better than the genteel politeness of British chit-chat; it’s warmer, earthier, more alive. And they think the British accent is so gorgeous; that we speak the real English!

  Violators are towed away here (cars, not rapists), and unpaid bills “become delinquent”.

  On the whole the British are less welcoming, less open, less patient, less willing to help strangers. According to my experience.

  But a gay bar is a gay bar is a gay bar. So is a man in one’s bed, and a good fuck, and a bath-house quickie. Blessed internationalism! If cocks could speak, there would be instant Babel: thank God in every country they only want one thing—to come.

  IN THE WALT WHITMAN BOOKSHOP a few weeks ago, I signed all twenty-five copies of The Estuary that were on sale. Every one has sold!

  XVII

  RENO OBSERVED FROM the California mountains is a collection of buildings dumped in the middle of a desert, and immediately prompts one to ask: what is it doing here? It’s a junction—the main route west to San Francisco crosses the only highway from Oregon to Nevada and Arizona, and it was the last place of refuge before the covered wagons, en route for California, tried to cross the sierras; death, from exposure and starvation, struck the party who, instead of wintering at Reno, carried on and stopped by the Donner Lake. It’s an attractive town in some ways, despite the gruelling desert temperatures and the flashy casinos; there are many pleasant Victorian houses and the park, on both sides of the Truckee River, is tree-filled and green.

  People come here for the same reason they visit any town in Nevada—to take advantage of its peculiar laws: it is easier to get married or divorced here than in perhaps any other place in the civilized world; bars are open twenty-four hours a day; prostitution is legal; and, above all, gambling is not only permitted, but positively encouraged by the state government, which obtains the money it needs by taxing casinos instead of personal income. The gambling inevitably leaves its mark on the physical appearance of things—in downtown Reno casinos are more in evidence than supermarkets; hoardings that announce the benefits to be grabbed in each palace of pleasure assail the eye; and at night an enormous quantity of electricity is used by every establishment to try and upstage its competitors with a glittering display of lights and signs. The result is brash, ugly and depressing.

  Inside a casino it is everlasting night. There are few windows and no clocks—the management does not want to remind the punter that it is time to go home. The decor is tasteless, the lights confusing, and the slot machines chirp unceasingly, like a million crickets, as they greedily swallow more and more coins. A casino is never empty. Where do all these men and women come from, one asks—the population of Nevada is only three quarters of a million. At Winnemucca, a town of six thousand inhabitants miles from anywhere in the desert, the night life is extraordinary—cars coming and going, crowds! of people, drinking haunts and casinos packed. A place of equivalent size in England would not have a soul on its streets after 11 p.m. and it would be in darkness. The people come from all over America, of course, for there is no other state like Nevada, none that offers this kind of hedonism so brazenly and on such a scale. Arriving from California it is like being in a foreign country. No sophistication, no sense of beauty—just gaudiness and vulgarity. The landscape, too, is quite different: the sierras suddenly stop and there is desert, a not particularly interesting desert of sage-brush. History, as much as geography, accounts for the differences. Nevada was the Wild West, and it still is. It defies federal laws in a way unknown in California. It’s remarkably lax, for instance, in enforcing drivers to obey the fifty-five m.p.h. speed limit; and billboards scream this or that motel or casino at you for mile after mile on its freeways. Even on remote mountain roads there is an advert for something or other to spoil nature untamed. It’s as if Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautification of the Highways Act had never been put on the statute book.

  What, one wonders, observing a mousy middle-aged woman sweeping the floor of a casino at two o’clock in the morning, is the nature of people’s private lives in Nevada? Like anywhere else? It’s hard to imagine. And what is the status of religion? Nevada’s first settlement was a township of Mormons, and though there are still communities of Latter-Day Saints, how was it Mormon puritanism, as an influence, died totally, whereas it still dominates neighbouring Utah?

  Phil and I have come for the national
gay rodeo which is held every August, and a most enjoyable weekend it turns out to be. The atmosphere in town relaxed and welcoming—it’s Reno’s biggest event of the year, and the citizens ignore whatever prejudices they might have as they contemplate the money thirty to forty thousand gay people will spend in three days and three nights. Not that there are likely to be many prejudices; we’re not in Kansas or Nebraska, and Reno, small though it is, has a number of gay bars, discos and bath-houses.

  Our tickets include a country and western hoedown and a barbecue. (The latter is an excellently-cooked New York steak, potato salad, beans and grapes.) At the hoedown cowboys in jeans, plaid shirts, bandannas, and a variety of multi-coloured felt, leather or straw Stetsons, waltz and two-step. A hat is essential, for the daytime temperature is over a hundred degrees, so we buy a couple from one of the many booths outside the rodeo grounds. One hundred degrees: and the snow-peaked mountains are clearly visible to the west. The dancers may be Castro clones or middle-class executives who normally wear suits, but one thing in which we always excel the straights is our flair for costume: background, class, origins are hidden by the cowboy drag. It’s as if a bit of history is being re-enacted, or one that never was is being created—the gay dancing which the real gay cowboy pioneers could not have indulged in.

  Next morning we spend in the throng outside the rodeo grounds, drinking beer and strolling from stall to stall. All kinds of gay knick-knacks and souvenirs on sale, and pictures, pottery, jewellery, food and drink; fairground booths—throw three balls and the cute butch guy in the brief swimming costume will drop into a tub of cold water: another dollar goes to AIDS funds. Not unlike the Castro Street Fair. Then, all afternoon, the rodeo itself; thousands of gays in the stadium. I’ve never been to a rodeo before, and I discover—as with so many things in America that I’ve seen at the movies and found not quite credible—that it is just as it looks on celluloid. The bucking broncos buck, their rear legs rearing high in the air, and the bareback riders clutch on, defying gravity, waving their hats, and for thirty seconds become the darlings of the crowd; bulls snort and paw the ground, breathe heavily and raise the dust; cows are lassooed and kick as high as the horses; superb piebalds charge at incredible speeds: and I begin to notice one difference between the movies and this real-life spectacle—the animals usually win. Very few people get the better of them, which is as it should be; being lassooed, dragged to the ground and sat on is probably not a pleasant experience. Final score is something like gay men and women—14; cows, bulls and horses—49.

  The heat is so draconian I almost faint. But all afternoon dark clouds like bruises build over the mountains; by evening a strong hot wind is blowing in off the desert, and there is a lurid sunset—all shades of pink, orange and purple staining the edges of the clouds. A storm seems very likely, but it does not happen. We drink in various bars, meet other gay couples, and eventually go in a crowd to a disco that doesn’t look promising—it’s a long way out of town, virtually in the desert. But it’s the best disco we’ve been to for months, real Night Fever stuff: we can actually dance. Poppers in an enormous bottle on the counter, courtesy of the management. Some beautiful cowboys.

  FROM RENO TO VIRGINIA CITY, which is not quite a ghost town, for seven hundred people live here; once there were twenty-five thousand. Gold greed began it and fire ended it, as in Bodie—but the history of the two places is very different. Despite the man who discovered that electricity could be made to travel long distances, Bodie was brutish and nasty; in Virginia City one could be piss-elegant. The world’s largest vein of gold—the Comstock Lode—was found here, and as a result Virginia City had an opera house, twenty theatres, a hotel which boasted the biggest elevator west of Chicago, a railroad, Mark Twain, the first telephones in the West—and a tradition of culture. One can still drink in saloons which have their original counters, mirrors and decor, and buy groceries in stores unchanged in a century. The train, complete with whistle, huge chimney and cowcatcher, still operates. The life-styles of the present inhabitants, however, clash badly with what they are trying to preserve. Cars are allowed on Main Street, and, being Nevada, the inevitable slot machines abound. Every house is privately owned; high prices are charged for the viewing of each little bit of the past and tawdry souvenirs are offered to the tourist. Even so, it’s possible to immerse oneself in the feel of the place and be astonished, as at Bodie, that history so recent can be utterly unlike now. We don’t see this in Britain: our nineteenth century is not far away—so much of it we live with and use. In the West of America some of it is as antique as the Pyramids because life here has changed so quickly and so totally.

  IN CARSON CITY WE LOOK at Nevada’s capitol, a diminutive building for a state legislature, about the size of San Francisco’s public library. Nothing much of interest here: old maps and portraits of gloomy Governors. Little of Nevada’s history, no clues to the oddity of its laws, no explanation of how the city got its name. When we emerge we find it’s been raining. There is a lovely smell of wet grass and petunias.

  Over the mountains to Tahoe; more storm clouds, and the lake is steely grey. Pine forests. Summer cabins. Deserted ski-slopes. It’s three months since I was here and there was twenty feet of snow on the ground: all gone. The lake is so big that it’s easy to avoid the tourists and enjoy the scenery, but the inhabited southern end is dreadful. There are two towns—Stateline, Nevada, and South Lake Tahoe, California—but they run into each other and are, in effect, one. South Lake Tahoe doesn’t have Stateline’s hideous casinos, but it’s an awful example of the worst kind of ribbon development—shoddy souvenir shops, ugly motels, and cheap bad restaurants, all plonked down in some of the most beautiful landscape imaginable.

  TALES OF THE CITY by Armistead Maupin is a volume of short stories that originally appeared in the SF Chronicle. It’s an affectionate, accurate, and sometimes caustic portrait of San Francisco. Gay life in particular comes over effectively—warts and all. Amusing, too, are the frustrations of hetero Brian, dishy and sex-starved, who has considerable problems in finding women to fuck, and, when he does, problems in persuading them that he is not gay. It reminds one of the corny joke about how many straight men are required here to screw in a light bulb: answer—both of them. Or the rhyme on some tee-shirts in Castro clothes shops:

  Come to San Francisco City

  Where the women are strong and the men are pretty.

  Tales of the City was published in 1978 and was followed by More Tales of the City (the same recipe, but not quite so funny), then Further Tales of the City, in which the whole idea grows a bit threadbare. The Chronicle is currently doing a fourth series, even though the wit has lost its edge, cliché is strong in every sentence, and the characters have become so two-dimensional that their reactions and comments are tediously predictable. Michael, who is gay, is visiting London—and Chronicle readers therefore now get a weekly dose of misinformation about British gay life. Examples: Michael can buy Gay News, though it ceased to exist four months ago; reads a paper called Capital and Gay, is unaware of the Champion, though he’s living in Notting Hill and bought Gay News to check on the pubs; and finds Harpoon Louie’s a stone’s throw from the Coleheme and just like an American bar. Most irritating of all, because it perpetuates a myth common in the States, Maupin’s tales depict London as very shabby and dirty, and the Brits—paralysed by roaring inflation, unemployment and a weak pound—as poverty-stricken and depressing: the clones, for instance, in the Coleheme are a sad, pale reflection of their mighty brothers on Castro Street .

  San Francisco is one of the worst cities I know for litter and dog shit, and Americans, it seems to me, have just as much, or as little, money to spend as we have. I haven’t found a United States groaning with unparalleled affluence.

  RECENT RESEARCH SHOWS that if pregnant rats are subjected to severe stress the male rats that are born will behave like females. The head of the Institute for Experimental Endocrinology in East Berlin, Dr Dorner, says that this is how huma
n homosexuality is created. He interviewed two hundred gay men born during the Second World War and found that seventy per cent of their mothers had had moderately or severely stressful pregnancies. The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle devotes a whole page to this rubbish and though it doesn’t go so far as to suggest that Dr Dorner is right, it implies that he could be.

  Several basic points of common sense are ignored here: they seem so obvious that they are hardly worth mentioning. But should this diary fall into the hands of a neanderthal straight— or gay—here they are:

  1. How does Dr Dorner account for the homosexuality of the thirty per cent whose mothers had no history of stress during pregnancy?

  2. A survey of two hundred people is so small that it can’t claim for itself any reliable scientific truth.

  3. If Dr Dorner had interviewed two hundred straight men in the Second World War, he would probably have found, considering what was happening at the time, that seventy per cent of them also had mothers whose pregnancies were moderately or severely stressful.

  4. It is quite absurd to think that human homosexuality in males has anything to do with being female. A man who likes to fuck another man is not indulging in an activity that could be called, in any sense of the word, “female”.