Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  I had no idea it would be two years.

  “You’re out of uniform,” the photographer said.

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “Jesus, look down there.” A few black kids were playing bongo drums at the foot of the hill, and a girl in a multicolored ankle-length dress was walking past followed by a young man in torn Levi’s and a bell around his neck.

  “You’re a little late,” Jim said. “It’s changed a lot and it’s still changing.” He was sunburned and thinner than I remembered, and his eyes looked very bright.

  “I’ve got an idea for a magazine,” he said. “San Francisco Arts. You want to work with me on it?”

  I shrugged. “Sure—why not?”

  We would get as far as the cover, a good one—a promising start. But that was it. Jim disappeared and I decided I’d had enough of working on magazines.

  I spent the next month exploring, finding out where the bank was, the grocery store, the coffee shops, and getting a history of the area from the few old-timers who’d hung on while the district changed—radically.

  The original Haight-Ashbury was a middle-class section of the city, most famous primarily because it was the entrance to Golden Gate Park. It was a mixture of blue-collars and blacks slowly slipping toward a middle-aged gentility. Old Victorians made up the bulk of the housing.

  The area was ready for a makeover—and it got one it had least expected. Students from San Francisco State started to sift in, attracted by the low rents. So did some of the beats, forced out of North Beach by higher rents and plunging necklines. Added to the mix were the nascent rock groups who would rent an inexpensive Victorian where they could live and practice together. It was the bands that created the concept of sharing—if one hit it, they shared their good fortune with others who weren’t so lucky.

  Leavening the mix were the Diggers and the Mime Troupe and a few beats who had gotten to the area early. There were also some of the middle-class types who had a little money and wanted to buy a Victorian and remodel it. Few of them held on to the bitter end.

  Drugs were common, and some of the users went overboard. (Later, almost all did.) Pot was illegal, though Timothy Leary’s development of LSD was gradually becoming popular. Leary insisted that taking it was a religious sacrament, a way to find the soul within. As a sign you had taken the “trip,” a friend who had taken it previously gave you a string of beads to wear around your neck.

  It didn’t take long for newcomers to turn the beads into costume jewelry.

  In the winter of 1967 the exiled beats from North Beach, the Mime Troupe, the Diggers, the rock groups, and the displaced hippies held a party in one of the meadows of Golden Gate Park. It turned out to be popular beyond anybody’s expectations. Twenty-five thousand showed up to listen to the bands, have a picnic with the free food, smoke some pot, and a few of the more adventurous took “acid” trips. A number of couples made love in the bushes (having sex was one of the first things to be liberated—saying “yes” was far more prevalent than saying “no”).

  It was one terrific party. The motto was DO YOUR THING, and those in the meadow certainly did.

  The underground press—the Los Angeles Free Press, the Oracle, the Berkeley Barb—gave it extensive coverage. The mass media wasn’t far behind. This was something to write about besides war and politics.

  The white middle class was already registering a massive opposition to the “good life” and especially the war. Younger people had become aware of the vast gap between who they were and who they thought they were, between the lives they were actually leading and the lives they were pretending to lead.

  Haight-Ashbury was where an optimistic reality existed, and soon cars and buses, trains and planes were headed for the coast. Things were better out there, and far from least, THINGS WERE FREE!

  The sources for things that were free had always been their parents—but then something was expected in return. In Haight-Ashbury the only thing that was expected in return was for you to show up. It was flower power—“I love you, man!” It didn’t take too many months for the mantra to become “Any spare change?”

  Nothing was really free, and some of the kids who flooded in had nothing but the clothes they wore and no talents or skills and resorted to selling the one thing they did have: themselves.

  The churches tried to help, but the law prevented that—churches weren’t allowed to house you after 10:00 P.M. without permission from your parents. And most of those who had departed home without saying good-bye or were runaways weren’t about to call home for help.

  By the time most of the original Haight-Ashbury had folded its tent and stolen away, sex had become a medium of exchange, the same as pot. A few of the kids saw what things were really like and called home for an airline ticket back. For the others, if they were hungry and needed food or were cold and needed shelter and couldn’t find a crash pad that wasn’t already crowded with twenty to a room, the answer was simple. There was always somebody willing to feed them and let them bunk in for the night.

  There was no real structure to the Haight; a city of seven hundred thousand hadn’t been prepared for the influx of a hundred thousand of the soon-to-be-disillusioned; there were few city organizations designed to cope with it. It was a case of no mama, no poppa, no Uncle Sam.

  The Haight became Lord of the Flies a generation later.

  For the rest of the country, it was entertainment.

  There was enterprise, of course. The empty storefronts began to sport new signs—the Garuda and the I/Thou coffeehouses, the Insomnia Bookstore, the Krishna Temple, the God’s Eye Ice Cream Parlor, the Print Mint, the Drugstore Café, the Bead Freak, the San Francisco Earthquake Pillow Company, and a month or two later, Love’s Hamburger Stand (Love helped a lot of kids stave off starvation).

  Some of the more enterprising kids sold copies of the local underground press—The Haight-Ashbury Tribune, Love Street, and others. These were cluttered with photographs of nudes and ads for young men who wanted to be models. The nude photos were a big help in peddling the papers to the tourists, who came through the area in tour buses or in cars with the windows carefully rolled up. The kids paid a quarter per paper and sold them for a dollar.

  (The publisher actually had another business—selling nude photos of boys in his mail-order business. Some of the boys were young, very young.)

  Confession: I was a star reporter for both the Berkeley Barb and especially The Haight-Ashbury Tribune (under the pen name of “Harry Happening”). The Barb paid its writers with bananas and sandwiches. It took me a long time before I lost my idealism writing for the Tribune. I thought I was doing a public service telling it like it was when in reality I was merely filler around the nude shots.

  There came a time, after a few months, when I seriously questioned what the hell I was doing there.

  And then I met Jesus.

  It was late one night and I’d just bought some old art nouveau postcards from one of the shops.

  Suddenly a kid stepped out of the shadows and handed me a sack of greasy french fries.

  “Have one, man—they’re pretty good.”

  He looked like the Jesus you saw in Sunday school—soft brown eyes and brown hair falling to his shoulders; thin, handsome face; and a knowing expression in his eyes.

  I took one—he’d been right, they were pretty good. Not to be outdone, I held out my postcards. “Take one,” I offered, “any one.” Then I changed my mind and held back on a miniature of Sarah Bernhardt that I really liked and said, “But not that one.” I suddenly realized I’d reneged and said, “Hell, take any one.”

  He put his hand on the Bernhardt card and for a moment Haight Street fell away and his eyes held mine like a pin holds a butterfly. “Any one?”

  “Sure,” I said stoutly, “any one.”

  “Then I’ll take this one,” he said—and took a different card.

  He was playing Jesus and probably putting me on, but for a moment I had been caugh
t up in a biblical parable on the honesty of generosity. I was either generous or I wasn’t. Which was it?

  I glanced at the remaining cards for a moment, and when I looked up, he was gone. I hadn’t even heard his footsteps when he disappeared into the shadows.

  A parable on generosity was the last thing I’d expected in the Haight. I wanted to see him again but I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t.

  XVI

  AFTER THE FEW weeks it took to get settled I regularly walked over to the Haight to look up friends who weren’t space cases.

  I developed a routine where I’d take the scenic route to Haight Street and either the Garuda or the I/Thou coffeehouses for coffee and doughnuts, depending on who was there.

  I walked over to Fifth Avenue and took a sharp left past the flat where a dope dealer named Carter had been dismembered by an angry meth head. Then it was down to Golden Gate Park—on chilly mornings the paths through the park were not very crowded, but sometimes you’d meet hippies who smiled and said “hello,” and on gray days a smile helped a lot.

  Once in the park I would keep to the right until I came to the children’s playground, where there was a carousel and a little petting zoo for the kids with goats and rabbits and a weather-beaten old cable car up on blocks in which the kids played on warm days.

  The park was almost deserted, and there was nobody sitting on Hippie Hill, but a couple of older teenagers were stretched out on a bench at the front of it. One of them was a deserter from the marines who had asked if he could crash the night before but had never shown up. He apologized, mumbling, “Gee, man, I’m sorry I didn’t show. I got all fucked up.” His pupils were so large there was no irises left. There was no sense rapping when there was nobody home, so I said, “It’s cool, man,” and continued walking up Haight Street.

  New stores were popping up even in the past month. The most significant was the Psychedelic Shop, the focal point for newcomers looking for friends or wanting to leave notes for those who’d come before or would come later.

  Fat Maxey was already in residence at Garuda with a cup of coffee and a plate of chocolate doughnuts in front of him. Maxey was a good friend and my favorite hippie—though he really wasn’t a hippie. He was a bystander, an observer, a historian of sorts who could tell me what I had missed in the Haight, especially what it had been like if I had only arrived a few months earlier.

  “I used to hang out around State and when I drifted over here a few months ago, there was a lot of kids acting out. Some of them did everything but wear a halo.” Two bites of doughnut disappeared. “It’s going downhill fast. I understand the Dead have already pulled up stakes and went to live in Big Sur. Don’t know where the Jefferson Airplane went but they left here about the same time. Probably Sausalito or someplace else in Marin.”

  “I wondered about Janis Joplin,” I said.

  Maxey looked surprised. “Pushing a baby carriage down Haight Street with a bottle of Southern Comfort in it? Pure bullshit—if you don’t have a story to tell, make one up.” He grinned. “Maybe the kid you saw that night was the real McCoy. Came back to see how God had fucked up his world.”

  The first chocolate doughnut had disappeared.

  “Some of the other old-timers are leaving—the Diggers for one. They set up a ‘free’ store—they called it the ‘Free Frame of Reference’—and it’s falling apart.”

  I looked blank and Maxey said, “They got a garage on Page Street where they handed out free clothing—you leave what you don’t need, take what you do need. Everybody needed, what they left were pretty much rags.”

  I remembered passing by it and thinking it was just a junk shop. I glanced at my watch and got up.

  Maxey looked surprised. “So soon?”

  “Got an interview with Father Harris.”

  Haight Street in the morning was at its best. The shopkeepers were opening up, people on the street smiled at you, and nobody was tripping. It was too early for the dealers to swarm the streets, and the flood of tourists had yet to arrive.

  Father Harris ran the All Saints Episcopal Church on Waller, a block up from Haight. It was a quiet Sunday morning, and he was ticked off by the latest indignities suffered by one of his parishioners that morning. She was eighty years old and had her purse snatched on her way to church.

  “I tried to help them during the summer,” Father Harris said. “It cost the church a lot of support—many of them moved away because they didn’t want to raise their kids here.” He sighed. “The parish used to be noted as one that had a lot of children. I miss the children.”

  What did he think would happen to the parish, to which he had devoted his life?

  He shrugged. “The bishop knows what we’ve done here. He won’t let the parish sink.”

  In a letter to the members of his parish, Father Harris later wrote: “If the church is to be true to itself, it won’t confine its ministrations to those who support it financially. The church is not a private club for like-minded individuals.”

  In the basement of the Hamilton Methodist Church, the vibes weren’t good. A girl was saying to her friend, “It used to be so nice here—now it’s uptight all the time.”

  At a table in the corner, the manager was talking to five punks sprawled out in the chairs around it. “I’ve run this place for nine months and never had any trouble. Then you guys come in. You look like hoods, you act like hoods.”

  Outside, the street was beginning to wake up. A kid who’d lived in the area for two years screamed angrily at the world, “Goddamnit, they walk up to you in broad daylight and steal your guitar right out of your hands!” In the Garuda coffee shop, a kid was talking of being mugged on Ashbury, just up from the Panhandle.

  The area also had its martyrs. In late spring, Ernest Beatty, a young professor of English at San Francisco State, came to work at the All Saints community affairs office—at his own expense. He had visited the church several times during the spring, admired the work that was being done, and offered to contribute his summer. By this time the Diggers had more or less fallen apart as an organization, and it was Beatty who built up the office. In a few weeks he was heading the entire operation.

  On July 11, he was found dead in bed of a massive stroke.

  Most of the kids on the street had never heard of Ernest Beatty, or if they had, never remembered his name. For them, the only martyrs on the scene were their fellow dealers who had been busted.

  None of them showed up for his services. None of them posted notes or signs regretting his passing.

  It wasn’t all bad—not quite. The Straight Theater started opening its doors at night for free happenings. For the people who performed there, the audiences were startling. Margaret Fabrizio gave a harpsichord concert one night, and the theater was packed with teenage hippies who were deathly quiet during the performance and gave her a standing ovation when it was over. Another time the Jane Lapiner Dance Company performed a modern ballet titled Bodies, where five performers (three girls, two men) were nude. Again, rapt attention—no snickers, no catcalls. (The cops tried to bust the performers but the hippie audience crowded in toward the stage and the dancers got away.)

  Not every performer got a standing ovation. One night in the I/Thou a kid borrowed a guitar and sang and played and was quietly applauded (he was passably good at both). He thanked the crowd and played again … and again. The crowd got edgy—the kid sounded like he was drunk or on speed—and somebody reclaimed their borrowed guitar, and when the kid started to sing a cappella, the crowd booed him down. There was the general I/Thou hubbub for a few minutes, and then a loud voice said, “Christ, kid, be a man.”

  But a man was the one thing the kid couldn’t be, and the I/Thou sat in shocked silence except for the crying of a little queer kid lost in his loneliness.

  A week later a photographer and myself trekked over to Berkeley to see what was happening in a protest at People’s Park. At a similar protest some days before, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies had used shotgu
ns to break up a demonstration. A student, James Rector, was killed and carpenter Alan Blanchard permanently blinded. The deputies claimed they had only used birdshot. They had actually used 00 buckshot, which can kill—and did. Buckshot was also used to fire at the backs of fleeing demonstrators.

  The buckshot was used, according to the sheriff, because he was undermanned and he didn’t want to abandon Berkeley “to the mob.” He also admitted that some of his deputies were Vietnam War veterans and treated the protesters as if they were Vietcong.

  Today was going to be the biggest protest of all. The police were there, and so was the National Guard. The park itself was fenced off with barbed wire. I couldn’t believe it and touched it, pulling back some bloodied fingers.

  I thought that some of the protesters would get clubbed, and several killed—maybe a lot of them killed.

  Governor Reagan was dead set against “Communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviates” taking over the Berkeley campus. (He was obviously in total ignorance of the Haight.) For this demonstration, he had sent in twenty-seven hundred National Guardsmen, and there were also the police and the sheriff’s deputies.

  I wondered just where the Vietcong were hiding.

  Nobody knew for sure what was going to happen, but I was certain there would be casualties. So was the photographer. The crowd started to gather at about noon. I estimated about five thousand people or more—much more. There were crowds of students, women in flat heels and not too much makeup, medical students with Red Cross armbands, and radicals passing out proclamations or charging a nickel or a dime for them as souvenirs of the occasion.

  It kept occurring to me that if Reagan wanted a bloodbath, he just might get one.

  I wandered over to People’s Park No. 2 and wasn’t much impressed—it didn’t look much like a park to me. It didn’t compare with empty lots back in Chicago where neighbors got together and turned the lots into vegetable gardens. There were several plants trying to grow in hard-packed dirt, withered flowers, broken green things that the crowd had mashed flat. I wondered if grass could scream.