Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  The hippies did not appear out of a void. They were creatures of a disturbed leisure society. Beneath its prosperity, America was haunted by dark realities: the assassination of JFK, the escalating Vietnam War and the draft, the eclipse of the civil rights movement, and the rise of black militancy. The fissures in American society that had been covered up by the great resolve-driven unity of World War II were widening and could no longer be ignored. As Charles Perry notes in his insightful The Haight-Ashbury: A History, in dealing with this situation, the original hippie community drew on the bohemian ethos of self-discovery and self-assertion, as most recently enunciated by the Beats. But the hippies differed from the Beats in important ways. The Beats tended to see themselves as victims, they identified with blacks, and their writings had a nihilistic tone. The hippies didn’t see themselves as victims, identified not primarily with blacks but with American Indians, and rejected nihilism. In short, they were less alienated from society than the Beats were, and for that very reason more independent (but also more naïve). With their raging against the cold war and the Man and normative sexuality, the Beats were trapped in the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave. The hippies simply walked out of jail.

  Like all revolutions, the hippie one was ignited by specific local actors and events, from the benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe thrown by a young ex-businessman named Bill Graham, to the canine-loving Pine Street communards who opened a concert hall called the Family Dog, to the advent of the “heavy hippies” known as the Diggers, who provided free food, sarcasm, and gravitas to the carnival. The trail is too convoluted to retrace here, but one aspect of it is too weird and wonderful to pass up. If something as shapeless and free-form as the hippie phenomenon can be said to have a beginning, it came when the self-invented San Francisco band the Charlatans went to play at the self-invented bar the Red Dog in Virginia City, Nevada.

  This gig united the ethos of the Old West and the nascent hippie one in a weird and wonderful way. When the town sheriff went to the club’s opening night, he politely asked one of the club’s owners, a peyote-eating wild man named Don Works, if he could check his revolver at the door. Works took the sheriff’s gun, expertly twirled the chambers, fired two shots into the floor, and handed it back, saying, “Works fine, sheriff.” The ghost of Mark Twain, who worked in Virginia City as a reporter before his ill-fated stint as a scoop-grubbing “lokulitems” in San Francisco, would have cracked up.

  The dances rocked on, the bands got better, the acid kept coming, and the word got out. By summer 1967, tens of thousands of young people from across the country and around the world were making their way to the Haight-Ashbury.

  City hall was none too thrilled about the invasion. As David Talbot recounts in Season of the Witch, the authorities refused to help deal with the urgent health crisis that erupted, leaving David Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, to fight his noble battle single-handedly. But other key players in the city reached deeper into San Francisco’s wild and roistering past and welcomed the hippies. Chronicle editor Scott Newhall had no personal affinity for the hippies—he was a jazz and martini guy—but he made sure his paper defended them. Herb Caen showed up on New Year’s Eve at the Fillmore to welcome in 1967 by dancing to Jefferson Airplane. The Chronicle’s tolerant tone played a crucial role in shaping the Bay Area’s attitudes toward the hippies.

  In the end, the hippie explosion was really about three things—grass, rock, and acid—and what they did to people’s minds. That’s why you can’t really write a history about it. It’s like writing the history of a moving, infinitely fractured dream. As a piece in issue no. 9 of the hippie newspaper the Oracle put it, the Haight was “an abstract vortex for an indefinable pilgrimage.”

  Or, rather, for tens of thousands of indefinable pilgrimages—hundreds of thousands, if you count all the people around the country who didn’t physically make it to the Haight but traveled there nonetheless. Leonard Cohen once said, “The revolution has to take place in every room,” and the secret history of the hippie era is found in documents like the following letter sent to the Oracle by a young woman from New York:

  Dear Oracle People,

  This is a plea for help.

  I am being held prisoner. I am the prison that holds me captive and I can’t seem to escape myself.

  Up until a few months ago when I took my first trip, I thought there was no reason to be alive and was about to settle on merely existing … trying to get by the next fifty years or so that way. But I saw that there is more.

  But New York City is an awful place. The Lower East Side cannot be believed as to what it does to human dignity and freedom. It seems everyone is looking West and all anyone talks about here is when they are leaving for the Coast.

  I am afraid. What if it isn’t as it seems … as acid has shown me life ought to be. I’ve heard so much … read so much. Your paper is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. But because I’m not just stifled by the environment but by my self … it is a very hard thing to summon the courage to act and come there. Like anyone, I’ve been stepped on a lot and have reacted by learning the futility of my words and rarely find the courage to do more than smile at a friendly face …

  If someone has read this far—please, please could someone, would someone take the time to write me and tell me the right things so I won’t be afraid to come to San Francisco. Please … something concrete—a name, an address—something to come to. I need direction and I think maybe I could give a lot if someone would help me … or even better, need my help. Thank you.

  Love,

  V.M.

  NYC

  The entire history of the era we call the sixties, everything good, bad, and indifferent about it is contained in that one heartbreaking line: “What if it isn’t as it seems … as acid has shown me life ought to be.” There is, of course, no answer to that question. But what remains inspiring about the hippies, for all their foolishness and narcissism, is that they tried to find out the answer. They pursued intense experiences for their own sake. As much as Cabrillo and Portola, they were explorers, but the terra incognita they ventured into was inside them.

  Forests have been sacrificed by people pondering the legacy of the sixties. There is a sense in which the question is irrelevant. What is the legacy of an epiphany? The societal impact of a vision? When a reporter at the Human Be-In, the gathering at the Golden Gate Park Polo Field, which as much as any event was the climax of the era, asked Allen Ginsberg if it would last, he replied, “How do I know if it will last? And if it doesn’t turn out, who cares?” There was no odometer for those inner voyages, no gold medal awarded after a wrestling match between an angel and the spirit of gravity. But there is a human legacy: All those people who listened to the music, sought the light, took the acid, or smoked the grass opened the doors of perception in their own way, and emerged when it was all over to carry on their lives, to find new ways to make connections with the ineffable, or just to live as deeply and richly and decently as they could. The true motto for the sixties was Nietzsche’s aphorism “Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.”

  Not everyone was able to walk down from the magic mountain and keep going. Some people burned out; others became California cartoons, simultaneously blissed-out and prone to inane conspiracy theories. But many did, and America is better off because of them. The spirit of the sixties, which is really just another way of saying the free spirit, lives on in the enriched lives of a million normal people.

  And it lives on in the music that drove the sixties. It would almost have been an ex post facto repudiation of the whole crazy episode if its soundtrack had been all Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. But it wasn’t. A masterpiece like Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxter’s, still as avant-garde as it was the day it was released (Bill Graham hated it, saying, “There’s nothing on it you can hum”), captures the creativity, the daring, the brains, the sheer vitality that pu
lsed through San Francisco during that once-in-a-lifetime explosion.

  You could choose a hundred sites in the Haight to epitomize the hippie era. But unlike the Beats, whose rebellious noir spirit comes to life in darkened streets, the site cannot be urban. The corner of Haight and Ashbury does not evoke the spirit of the sixties any more now than it did when busloads of gawkers drove past it with Richard Brautigan holding up a mirror to the windows. The hippie era needs open skies.

  So it’s better to wander into Golden Gate Park. First to the Children’s Playground, in honor of the essentially childlike, innocent nature of the whole crusade. Then across the big meadow to Hippie Hill, where the unruly tribes once gathered. And then over the road to the Lily Pond (formerly known, in an apropos coincidence, as Hobo Lake), one of the most magical places in the park, whose giant tree ferns and ancient chert folds give it the look of a dinosaur-haunted grotto in the Jurassic era. Who knows how many hallucinated pterodactyls rose into the air here in those bygone days?

  And from there, anywhere. As the Airplane sang in “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil”:

  If you were a bird and you lived very high

  You’d lean on the wind when the breeze came by

  You’d say to the wind as it took you away

  That’s where I wanted to go today …

  Chapter 43

  The Greatest of These

  18th and Castro Streets

  There are many heroes in the history of San Francisco. There is Father José María Fernández, the city’s first whistle-blower, who lost his position and his mental health standing up for the Indians in his charge. There is U.S. Navy Lieutenant Frederick Freeman, shouting “Sock it to ’em!” as he fought the inferno on the wharves. There is Donaldina Cameron, who dedicated her life to saving Chinese girls from sexual slavery. There are the three Muni employees, black and Native American and white, who stood up for a Japanese American man who wanted to work. There are the three faculty wives who led the fight to save the bay. There is David Smith of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, who stepped forward when the Summer of Love threatened to turn into the Summer of Death. There are the neighborhood groups that organized to stop the freeways, and the preservation groups that stopped the wanton destruction of the city’s architectural heritage, and the citizens’ groups that fought the razing of the Western Addition.

  But of all the heroes in the city’s history, the ones who most truly epitomized the spirit of the gentle saint for whom the city was named were San Francisco’s gays and lesbians during the AIDS crisis. Confronted with an unprecedented and unthinkable horror, San Francisco’s gay community transformed itself into a gigantic family—comforting the sick, burying the dead, fighting for justice, and demanding that society live up to the ethical tenets without which no civilization is worthy of the name. It was an epic of compassion, commitment, and love that went largely unseen, but can stand shoulder to shoulder with any heroic feat performed in any war.

  To anyone who had a front-row seat for the erotic bacchanalia that was the Castro in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the idea that any kind of heroism would come out of it, other than the ability to have sex with eight men in one night, would have seemed about as likely as Mother Theresa becoming a pole dancer. As a taxi driver, I had that seat. For years, several nights a week, I got to observe the Castro in its full glory. And it was a sexual madhouse that would have led Tiberius to sell his Capri villa and buy a one-way galley ticket to San Francisco.

  Before we revisit that epic debauch, however, we need to briefly trace the history of gays in San Francisco. Despite the city’s loose reputation, open homosexuality scarcely existed before the 1930s. Cross-dressing “queens” promenaded down Market Street, and there was some action in the Tenderloin and in the old Embarcadero YMCA, but the city’s gay population was small and secretive. That began to change during World War II, when servicemen, straight and gay, flooded into town and bars like Mona’s, Finocchio’s, and the Black Cat Café began catering to a bohemian crowd that included gays and lesbians.

  The Black Cat was one of the most intriguing bars in America. The onetime haunt of John Steinbeck and William Saroyan, it began to attract increasing numbers of homosexuals in the 1940s, who happily mingled with Beat poets and longshoremen. The bar became a center of the so-called homophile movement, a groundbreaking advocacy movement that included the Mattachine Foundation and the Daughters of Bilitis. The Black Cat’s most famous performer was José Sarria, an amazingly ahead-of-his-time figure famous for performing Bizet’s Carmen in drag on the city streets, where he would merrily dodge the vice cops. Sarria urged the bar’s patrons to be open about their sexuality and at closing time would lead them in a rousing version of “God Save Us Nelly Queens,” set to the music of “God Save the Queen.”

  The unamused authorities, determined to stamp out “sexual deviancy,” or at least force it deep underground, harassed the Black Cat mercilessly, finally forcing it out of business in 1963. In 1961, police raided the Tay-Bush Inn (located, unsurprisingly, at the corner of Taylor and Bush) and arrested more than 100 homosexuals, the largest such raid in the city’s history.

  But the forces of sexual repression were barking up the wrong city. The publicity created by the homophile movement began to draw national attention to the gay scene in San Francisco. The crucial event, oddly, was a two-part Life magazine series in June 1964 about homosexuality in the United States. The article’s claim that homosexuals preferred California because of its “easy hospitality” (an unexpected legacy of the Californios) became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A character in Jack Fritscher’s 1990 “memoir-novel” Some Dance to Remember says, “An engraved invitation to every faggot in America wouldn’t have caused more of a sensation.”

  Gays and lesbians began moving to San Francisco. An ill-advised 1965 police raid on a homophile gathering at California Hall on Polk, which infuriated the numerous straight attendees, proved a watershed in police relations with the city’s homosexuals. No longer would the city’s police have carte blanche to harass gays and lesbians. (The Reichstag-like California Hall seems to attract police idiocy: In 1984 cops got in trouble for handcuffing a gay cadet to a chair onstage, where a hooker gave him a blow job.)

  The floodgates opened. Between 1969 and 1978, close to 30,000 gay men moved to San Francisco, along with thousands of lesbians. By the mid-’70s, gay men had claimed four distinct neighborhoods: Polk Street, the Tenderloin, South of Market, and Castro Street. As Josh Sides notes in Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, “At no time in the history of the world had as many openly gay men claimed as much urban terrain as they did in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s.”

  When I moved to town in 1971, there was more gay action on Polk than on Castro. But that soon changed. The Twin Peaks bar at Market and Castro opened in 1972; it was one of the first gay bars in the country to have picture windows, a development fraught with symbolism. And once a critical mass was reached, the party was on.

  For 10 years or so, starting around 1973, the Castro District was the world’s biggest sexual candy store. They were giving it away all night, every night. Driving down Castro Street you almost had to put your windshield wipers on, there was so much testosterone being sprayed around. Guys were grinding pelvises on every corner. There were more hard-ons than in a pool full of ninth-grade boys being taught how to swim by Brigitte Bardot. It was so out of control that as a straight man, I had to make up a thought experiment to understand it: Imagine if you and several thousand other young, good-looking, horny straight men were plunked down in a vast pickup bar filled with every conceivable variety of attractive women, all of whom—here is where the thought experiment requires considerable willing suspension of disbelief—wanted to have sex with you, not after four dates, or two months, or some unspecified period of time that they could use to ascertain that you were not a bozo, but immediately. Tonight. In 10 minutes. Change the women to men, and that was the Castro. The wh
ole scene can be pretty much summed up by the immortal Flight of the Con-chords song “Too Many Dicks (On the Dance Floor).” Except that there weren’t too many. There were enough for everyone.

  As a taxi driver, I got hit on a lot in the 2 A.M. desperation. I confess I trimmed my sails into the prevailing sexual winds a few times. One time a gay man on the corner of Fillmore and California was trying to flag a cab. I pulled up at the same moment another cab did. The fare looked at both of us, wavering. To my eternal shame, I batted my eyes at the guy. Saying coquettishly, “Oh, I’m in a Yellow mood today,” he chose me. I felt like a low-down lying ho’, but I took his $5 anyway.

  It was all good clean dirty fun, and it seemed like it would go on forever. But a dreadful visitor had slipped into the party, like the costumed figure of Death slinking through Rio’s Carnaval in Black Orpheus. Its presence was announced on December 10, 1981, when the gay newspaper the San Francisco Sentinel ran a story by a registered nurse named Bobbi Campbell. The piece opened, “I’m Bobbi Campbell and I have ‘gay cancer.’”

  That September, Campbell had noticed he had some purple spots on his feet. He went to the doctor, who diagnosed Campbell as having an extremely rare disease called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Normally KS, as it came to be called, was found among elderly Jewish or Italian men, but for some reason, a lot of gay men were getting it. Campbell courageously decided he wanted to be the “KS Poster Boy,” alerting gays to the dangers of this mysterious new disease. A few weeks later, he convinced the Star Pharmacy, on the corner of 18th and Castro, to put up photos of the purple blotches that had begun to cover his body.

  Anyone who has ever been diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they got the news. One’s life divides into Before Diagnosis and After Diagnosis. Campbell’s poster had that effect on a young graduate student in creative writing named Ed Wolf. In David Weissman’s deeply moving 2011 documentary We Were Here, Wolf recalls the night he saw the poster.