Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  I’ll never forget it. There was a great double feature at the Castro, Casablanca on the big screen. I ran down to the Star Pharmacy because we were going to smoke some dope and I didn’t have any papers, and on the window there were these little Polaroid photos that this young man had taken of himself. The first one was of him opening his mouth, and inside there were these little purple splotches. And big purple splotches on his chest. There was a handwritten note that said something like, “Watch out, guys. There’s something out there.” Oh my God, it made this huge impact on me. Then I got stoned and watched the movie, but the whole movie I was just thinking about that. I went to see the movies with this friend of mine named Michael. And he had woken up recently with this splotch in his eye. He kept going, “What is this? What is this?” He had been going to the eye doctor. It turned out to be KS in his eye. So it was right there in the movie line with us. Like it was already there.

  “It” was not only there; it was already widespread. HIV probably arrived in San Francisco in 1976. By 1979, 10 percent of the city’s gay men were probably infected. By June 1981, about 20 percent were infected. If there were 1,000 gay men in the Castro Theatre that night, 200 were probably infected—and more than half of them would die.

  The posting of Bobbi Campbell’s photos was like the tolling of a dark bell. And what made it more terrible was that it tolled not just for individuals but also for an entire community. As more and more gay men came down with dreadful, little-known diseases like Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and as more and more of them began to die, every gay man in San Francisco realized that he, too, could die. By 1997, 15,548 San Franciscans had died in the epidemic—more than all the Californians who were killed, wounded, captured, and missing in World War II. It was one of the most horrific ordeals ever visited upon any community of people in the world.

  But even as the disease relentlessly spread, the party in the Castro raged on, like the Masque of the Red Death in Poe’s nightmarish story. Cognitive dissonance prevailed: Men standing in line at the vast Club Baths at Eighth and Howard jokingly called the address “AIDS and Howard” but went in anyway. After a media scare in the summer of 1982, the attendance at the bathhouses, the primary vectors of infection, went up. Public health officials who suggested that the bathhouses be closed down were denounced as moralistic homophobes. In 1983, when AIDS activist and Democratic political aide Bill Kraus called upon gay men to change their lifestyle by giving up the bathhouses, writing, “We gay men can transform this epidemic into our finest hour,” he was called a “sexual Nazi” and a self-hating gay.

  This reaction was tragically misguided, but it was at least partly understandable. As Randy Shilts argues in his groundbreaking book And the Band Played On, the gay community reacted to the epidemic with the classic five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In 1983, it was still in the anger stage.

  Straight San Francisco was still slower to spring into action. In a move that summed up prevailing attitudes, Mayor Dianne Feinstein in December 1982 reluctantly vetoed a domestic partners bill that would have given gay couples the same rights as married ones. Feinstein was the most progressive Democrat in the country on gay issues, and San Francisco the most enlightened city. But as Shilts points out, “For all the acceptance gays had gained, homosexuality was still not accepted as equal in the city they called Mecca. A prevailing morality that viewed homosexuals as promiscuous hedonists incapable of deep, sustaining relationships ensured that it would be impossible for homosexuals to legitimize whatever relationships they could forge.” Even the liberals who supported gay rights tended to stereotype gays as free spirits and free agents who eschewed family and other commitments. Gays were seen as a lot of things, but caregivers were not one of them.

  But from the earliest days of the epidemic, some San Franciscans had rolled up their sleeves and gone to work. One of the places where they worked was Ward 5B at San Francisco General Hospital, the nation’s first AIDS unit. Almost all the patients at 5B were dying. And everyone who worked on the ward, in those early days when AIDS was as frightening as Ebola, was a volunteer.

  One of those volunteers was Ed Wolf. In We Were Here, he recalled how he responded to an appeal from an organization called the Shanti Project, asking people to be buddies with people who had AIDS. The sensitive, serious Wolf had not been a successful cruiser in the gay bar scene, but when he met the man he was assigned to befriend, he said he realized that “my way of being with gay men was perfect.” He took the Shanti training and began working at 5B. There he made a discovery that touched him profoundly. “This is where I started to encounter lesbians coming to work on the AIDS unit with all these gay men who were dying,” Wolf said. “It was so moving because certainly gay men were not making a whole lot of room for lesbians, let’s put it that way. So I got this sense of this group of people who were really caring for these men who were dying.” From cleaning bedpans to donating blood to the most crucial task of all, simply providing loving support to frightened young men who were about to die, San Francisco’s lesbians were in the front ranks of the fight from the beginning.

  They were joined by other San Franciscans, straight and gay. The city was still reeling from the 1978 assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk and the appalling massacre at Jonestown, but its citizens rose to the occasion. Like Eileen Glutzer, a young woman who had come to the Haight-Ashbury in the hippie era, stayed in the city, and become a registered nurse. Glutzer volunteered to work on 5B. As she told Weissman, “I remember my mom saying, ‘Why do you have to do this?’ Because I’ve already put my mom through a lot of stuff. And I remember saying to my mom, ‘Mom, I didn’t choose it. It chose me.’ Because you’re there. And this terrible thing is happening, and you’re a nurse, and you can help. And sometimes that’s just helping somebody die. But you know, I couldn’t turn my back to it.”

  Or a retired grandmother named Ruth Brinker. When Brinker realized that many people with AIDS were suffering from malnutrition, she started a meal service called Project Open Hand. The charity that started with meal deliveries to seven people grew to serve more than 1,000 meals a day.

  But the foot soldiers in the great war were gay men. Death is a touchstone: It strips people down to their essential nature. And the AIDS epidemic revealed a strength, a compassion, and a grit in San Francisco’s gay community that had been obscured by the wild partying. In a deeper sense, the crisis created the gay community. Organizations sprang up everywhere, dedicated to everything from providing housing to lobbying for more funding to medical care to psychological support to pet care. These community efforts, combined with the city’s increasingly muscular response, became known as the “San Francisco model.” To this day, it remains the international standard for fighting AIDS.

  But the deepest, darkest battles took place inside gay men’s hearts and minds. By a dreadful irony, a culture devoted to youth and physical beauty was ravaged by a disease that destroyed both. The hideous visibility of AIDS made an already terrifying disease still more terrifying. When I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at age 39, I used to dread having to go to the hospital and mingle with other cancer patients: I once saw a middle-age man who was obviously dying, and the sight was too frightening. But there was no hiding AIDS. The first time I saw a man with full-blown AIDS on Market Street, I thought he was 80 years old. It wasn’t until I got closer that I realized he was probably only 30. There were so many emaciated men in the Castro that it looked like Auschwitz. Those suffering from KS were covered with purple blotches and spots. Infected gay men in San Francisco saw men who were worse off than they were every day. Those who were not infected had to confront the gaunt faces and ravaged bodies that could soon be theirs—and until the first viable AIDS test was introduced in 1985, they had no way of knowing if they carried the virus. This meant almost every gay man in San Francisco was living under a sword of Damocles, knowing that the next time he looked in the mirror he might discover
that he had contracted a disease that would not only probably kill him, but would also disfigure him and possibly blind him and destroy his brain.

  The Castro was ravaged by something that felt like more than a disease. It felt like a medieval Triumph of Death—and whited sepulchres like Jerry Falwell were quick to assert that the plague was “God’s judgment.” And it was not just right-wing bigots who failed the simple test of human empathy. Some parents of dying AIDS patients did as well.

  Standard hospital protocol gave biological families the right to decide who saw patients in the critical care unit. On Ward 5B, one mother refused to allow her dying son’s longtime lover to remain in the room. “I’m his mother and I don’t want any faggots in this room,” she said. “And I don’t want any of those nurses who are faggots. They did this to him.” The young man began to cry but was unable to speak because he was on a ventilator. He died a few days later and never saw his partner again. As a result of this episode, AIDS nursing coordinator Cliff Morrison instituted a new policy. Henceforth, the patients on 5B would decide who could visit them.

  So San Francisco’s gay men became each other’s family. They took care of each other and laughed with each other and held each other’s hands when they were scared and, when the time came, buried them. To me, the most overpowering image in We Were Here is a still photograph of a heartbreakingly young man with KS. His sweet face is covered with purple spots. He is smiling radiantly at the camera. Next to him are two other men, equally young, and on their faces are the same radiant smiles. It is a San Francisco Pietá.

  In Plays Well with Others, his novel about being a young gay artist in AIDS-ravaged 1980s New York, Allan Gurganus says, “Maybe more important than any single work of art we had yet made—we’d founded this ragged-ass impromptu village. Insane, fleeing towns of ten thousand in order to found another just two hundred strong. But its unity would lead us, goad us, bully us—toward our greatest masterpiece—the nursing, cheering, burying of our own.” Gurganus’s words are just as true of the gays of San Francisco. As Bill Kraus, who did not survive the epidemic, said, it was their finest hour.

  Today Castro Street has bounced back. It may not be the nonstop party that it once was, but it’s full of life. Walking down it, it’s hard to imagine the plague years, and it’s almost too painful to try. All those young men died and they will never come back. But something besides death came out of those terrible years. It is not something that is easy to put into words. But St. Francis of Assisi, who gave away all that he had when he saw a poor man in need, would have recognized it, and bowed his head.

  Chapter 44

  Rota Fortunae

  South Park

  The first time I saw South Park it was 1972 and I had recently moved to San Francisco after leaving my shipyard job in Newport News. My father was one of the inventors of biofeedback, and when I came back to the Bay Area, he got me a job running a sleep experiment paid for by the company that invented the waterbed. The company was hoping to be able to run ads saying “Scientific research proves you sleep better on a waterbed.” Every night for a month or so, I hooked up electrodes to the heads of subjects and monitored their sleep cycles, which I recorded on an EEG machine. It was a peculiar experience, trying to stay awake all night in a little office next to the Chinatown Gate on Bush and watching the automatic pens on the machine make cryptic spiky patterns on the unfurling paper as the subjects’ brain waves jumped and twitched. Unhappily for the waterbed company, the results proved inconclusive. But I was getting paid, and the job left my days free to wander around San Francisco.

  One afternoon I took a long walk south of Market Street. I walked for hours. I went down the old Skid Row on Third Street, past a dingy hofbrau and bar called Breen’s, which had a faded sign that read “Sliced before your eyes since 1925.” Bums slumped in doorways. I walked down Folsom. I had no idea where I was. It was all gray and industrial. I walked and walked. Cities were new to me, and it was all fascinating. Late in the afternoon, going up Second Street, I saw what looked like a little park. I headed toward it.

  I found myself in a peculiar little oval. It looked like a Dickensian mews that had seen better days. There were a few decaying Victorian houses on it, next to some run-down buildings that looked like auto parts stores or the like. The center of the oval was a decrepit patch of grass, covered with litter and dog shit, ringed by a few sad benches. A bum stumbled across the grass holding a pint bottle. At the far end of the oval, five or six old black men were standing around a rusty trash can in which a fire was burning. Acrid black smoke blurred the weary late afternoon sky. I walked reverently by the men. I felt like I had stumbled on a dark and holy and weirdly ancient urban secret, one that I had been looking for without knowing it. I never forgot that moment.

  Flash forward 28 years to 1999. San Francisco is a dot-com madhouse and its lunatic heart is South Park. The desolate oval where those old bums once warmed themselves at garbage-can fires is filled with young hipsters in neo-Beat haircuts and $300 shoes, all holding on for dear life to a rocket heading for the money stratosphere at the speed of stupidity. Every 10th person sitting with a laptop at Caffe Centro is a multimillionaire. Most of them are under 40. A lot of them are under 30. They are working for startups that have big plans to sell pet food online. The VC boys are throwing $10 million at anything with a “.com” at the end. On Jones Street atop Nob Hill, where it’s impossible to park, people are simply leaving their Mercedes and BMWs on the sidewalks at night, writing off the $200 ticket. It’s a money orgy.

  I’m in the middle of the pile. Four years earlier, I had left my union job at the San Francisco Examiner to help launch an online magazine called Salon.com. Salon had started out as eight people sharing a floor with an architect’s office on Main Street. Most of us were former Examiner staffers who were lured away by Salon founder David Talbot. Only later did Talbot inform us that he had started the whole thing with only a $75,000 investment. We had no idea what we were doing. We started out publishing biweekly and put original artwork on every story. In 1999, we’re a daily, the Internet has driven the financial world insane, and Salon has just gone public. The stock is trading at $10 a share. I have 85,000 stock options. I am 46 years old and am rapturous at the idea that I and a few other ink-stained wretches will be the first journalists in the history of the world to get rich. On the back of an envelope I scrawl the names of the cars I want to buy. A Jaguar, a Morgan … Will that leave enough for the country house?

  Flash forward 13 years to 2012. South Park is quiet. There are no more bums and garbage-can fires, but the hipsters who used to sit on the grass like a flock of rich pigeons are gone. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the city emptied out like a bawdy house full of politicians during a raid. So did my bank account. Thinking it would go up—ah, the eternal recurrence of tulipmania!—I never sold my Salon stock. It became worthless, and because I had compounded my idiocy by exercising my options, I had to pay $110,000 in taxes on money I never made. Salon stumbled along, breaking stories and carrying on the San Francisco tradition of maverick journalism—and losing lots of money. It turned out that there was no business model for a general-interest online publication with a large paid staff. Eventually I, along with a lot of other people, was laid off.

  I take some solace in the fact that the whole bizarre dot-com episode was in the finest San Francisco tradition. The city was discovered as the result of a series of comedic errors, settled by drunks and runaways and mavericks, and exploded into urban existence as a result of a mass outburst of greed unparalleled in history. A few got rich, but most did not. For some 49ers, the gold rush was a disaster. But for most, it was a great adventure, one they would not have missed for anything. At the beginning of his ur-Gonzo masterpiece Roughing It, the former miner and San Francisco newspaperman Mark Twain dedicated his book to his friend Calvin H. Higbie, “in memory of the curious time when we two were millionaires for ten days.” Twain knew that after you’ve seen the elephant and are lef
t with only a big pile of shit, all you can do is laugh.

  So yes, it would have been nice to have gotten rich. But I got to work for almost 15 years at a magazine where we published what we wanted and had no bosses except ourselves. That was worth more than a pile of stock options. So at least I tell myself.

  It’s fitting that South Park was the center of the dot-com boom and bust, for South Park is San Francisco’s ultimate boom and bust neighborhood. In 1854, an Englishman named George Gordon laid out 17 elegant brick houses on an oval surrounded by Second, Third, Bryant, and Brannan Streets. The reason Gordon chose this site is found in the 1856 San Francisco Directory, which describes it as “the only level spot of equal area, free from sand, within the city limits.” The floral park inside the oval was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence to which only residents had the key, a patrician setup still irritatingly observed in Gramercy Park in New York City. South Park became the city’s first fashionable neighborhood, home to Senator William Gwin (who built the city’s first ballroom) and other Southern aristocrats, who threw grand dress balls, musicales, theatricals, and less formal gatherings called “kettledrums.” But South Park’s Gone with the Wind period did not last long. In 1869, a road was cut through the hill at Second Street, ruining the character of the neighborhood. Soon the social elite had moved to Nob Hill, which had been made accessible in 1873 when the cable cars began running.

  South Park never recovered its cachet. It was home to the city’s first Japantown, then was swallowed up by the vast working-class area known as South of the Slot. Today South Park has benefited from the gentrification at Mission Bay and AT&T Park, but it has not regained its dot-com glory. It remains an ex-patrician remnant.