But back to when it was thick and glistening and alive. I mean life, never knowing what was going to happen.
—Michelle Tea, 2000
I moved to San Francisco for the windows. The city was a peep show. Before moving there, I visited often. I glimpsed figures in the bay windows of Victorian houses living bohemian, mysterious, randy lives. After one Pride march, I stood at a friend’s kitchen sink, and a drag queen waved and laughed across the light well. I’d idle with pals on fire escapes and front stoops, checking out passersby. I got high on the proximity of other people visibly eager to do irresponsible things. I’d come away from San Francisco with not just my own experiences, but the impression of experience happening around me. The streets were like advent calendars: I wanted to open each door and reveal a bisexual hippie, leather daddy, elegant transvestite, friendly bull dyke wielding tattoo gun, sleazy yogi, stoned poet, skateboarder too lazy to resist my advances. I wanted to eat it all up.
First, in the summer after I met Famous, I rented a room on 16th Street in the Mission district. The area was a glorious effluvium of nag champa incense and taqueria grease and smoke from crack pipes. The whizz and click of passing skaters brought me to my window every time. I’d skip around the corner to a kooky Wednesday night party called Baby Judy’s. I’d drink margaritas at Puerto Allegre with skinny boys who later gave me head with great care and devotion. Even the blow jobs were different from Los Angeles: they were not just a function of mouth and penis, but an experience of the whole body, whole room, whole city. In the evenings, the fog drifted in, and it might as well have been spiked with a philter, the way poppers were once poured into smoke machines in discos. When Famous came to visit, I figured he fell in love with the place as much as with me.
Upon returning from my spell in London, I moved into a new place with three young women who all dyed their hair raven black and indulged my lovelorn state. We hadn’t deliberately chosen to live in the Castro district, but an opportunity presented itself to rent an affordable flat in a refurbished Victorian on 17th near Castro Street. The many gay bars surrounding us lined up like a parade of types—leather, jock, queen.…But this being the Castro, the village where upstart homosexuals settled in the wake of the city’s seedier gay ghettos, the edges of those archetypes were dulled. There was a softcore leather dive, diner-style tourist trap, pinball joint, place with a cruisy horseshoe-shaped bar frequented by black men, video bar that screened Ab Fab episodes weekly, low-ceilinged bungalow with sports on the TV and more than one hole-in-the-wall for old-timers.
Of course, like gays themselves, gay bars can be fickle and go through phases. On Market Street, Detour was a half-assed leather bar with blackened windows, black walls, a red laser that flashed subliminal messages onto clouds of dry ice and chain-link fencing on the go-go platforms. The site had in fact been the first gay bar in the Castro—the Missouri Mule, a lounge opened in 1963 featuring Vivacious (some say Vicious) Vivian playing honky-tonk piano on Sunday afternoons. Across the street from Detour was a Top 40 club for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd called the Café. Apparently it used to be lesbian, but eventually they were only allotted a once-a-month party called Lips. The rest of the time it was taken over by screeching young men from the suburbs and the possessive straight girls they brought with them. They squeezed onto a balcony and hollered down: Come join us. I’d roll my eyes and rush home with my takeout tom kha kai and Superstar Video rental. I rarely went into the bars. They were just background noise as I drifted alone pining for Famous.
There was a time in the Castro when cars struggled to get past the throngs of young men in tight jeans. Those crowds had dissipated since AIDS. Here and there, symptoms of the epidemic remained visible on the streets. Emaciated men leaned on canes. It was the first time I’d seen Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. I overheard the words you AIDS motherfucker hurled in a domestic dispute between the next-door neighbors while I sat in the bath attempting not to steam the ink on my newest letter from London. ‘As for the famous gay life of the city,’ wrote Edmund White in 1980, ‘I sensed it rippling all around me, just beyond my reach.’ By the late nineties, the same could be said for the city’s infamous gay death.
The Castro had proven resilient, but was now placid and somewhat steely. Before I moved in, I really went there only for the annual street parties, Pride or Halloween, so witnessed it at its most bacchanalian. Costumed revelers leaned out of upper-floor windows and perched on fire escapes. It seemed then that the Castro was still, as the journalist Frances FitzGerald described the place in the late seventies, ‘a carnival where social conventions were turned upside down just for the pleasure of seeing what they looked like the wrong way up.’ One Halloween, there was a kerfuffle on the front steps of a center for sober alcoholics, the Castro Country Club. At the first sign of trouble a neighborhood watch pounced, each of its members wearing a leather jacket with a pink triangle on the back: The Pink Panthers, someone said. Another year, I was startled to come upon a man being fisted atop a bus shelter.
So it took some adjusting to move into the neighborhood and discover its day-to-day character to be so uptight. Men scuttled between obligations, which often entailed brunching. They sighed with exasperation, leaving their eyebrows aloft judgmentally. On a Market Street sidewalk, I nearly collided with a middle-aged man, each of us moving sideways to let the other pass but in the same direction. I presumed we would laugh together: Shall we dance? Instead, he barked imperiously: Everyone knows when this happens to step to the right. I was baffled. DOES everyone know that? I checked with friends.
I’d imagined that homos moved to the city out of rebellion. I hadn’t considered entitlement as a motivating factor. ‘I was white, male, and middle class, and I had gone to Harvard,’ one gay man confided to Frances FitzGerald in 1978. ‘I thought I could do anything I wanted, so I resented having to conceal something as basic as sex.…The solution was to move here.’ These newly empowered gay men were territorial creatures. In the Castro, they were in their own way colonialist, displacing Irish Catholic families, who had already begun trickling into the suburbs following industrial decline. Now those Irish factory workers, longshoremen, stevedores and cops were replaced by middle-class gay men wearing variations on those uniforms as fetish. The old families began to refer to them as the invaders; within gay vernacular, the lookalikes among them were the clones.
The term clone stuck because it was (according to the Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures) ‘as if every individual were an exact copy of some original “liberated gay man”—5’9”, 29-inch waist, 29 years old, gay white male (GWM).’ The clones slouched on corners, in neat mustache and bulging jeans, like a casting call for a cigarette ad. They swaggered down the street, checking one another out furtively with, as FitzGerald put it, ‘a slightly hostile air about them.’ Another journalist, Randy Shilts, itemized their wardrobe: used blue jeans, $2; flannel shirt, $1.50; hooded sweatshirt, $1.75. ‘The new gay fashion matched a new gay attitude,’ he wrote. ‘The clothing spoke of strength and working-class machismo, not the gentle bourgeoise effetism of generations past. The politically conscious men of the Castro did not mince or step delicately down the street; they strutted defiantly.’ If, in 1978, the corner of 18th and Castro was the crossroads of the gay world, it was an economy of fungible goods: As Shilts recounted, ‘drugstore cowboys eyed laundromat loggers winking at barfly jocks.’
As the clones pullulated, the look came to represent not Whitmanesque radical sensualists but self-interested zombies. A ‘doped-up, sexed-out Marlboro man,’ wrote the sociologist Martin P. Levine, with a ‘“mefirstism” implicit in the pursuit of unbounded self-gratification.’ In a 1978 article in the San Francisco Sentinel, the trend was derided as ‘a new kind of mindless, wanton consumerism, the purchase of a mass image.’ Since forever, it seems, each type of gay has been convinced the other types were giving gays a bad name. The wealthy elite disdained clones, who lived for the fleeting moment like a hit of poppers, too scattershot to contribute to the community. The long-haired Trotskyites scoffed at both those populations for their respective forms of conspicuous consumption. The sweater queens in cashmere and preps in Brooks Brothers shirts checked in and out of the scene, too good and yet not good enough to be full-time gays. The drag queens were regarded as giving into the myth that every gay man had a woman’s soul. The leathermen donned their own form of drag—‘a mask of masculinity,’ as the narrator of the 1970 documentary Gay San Francisco suggested.
The constant policing of authenticity added another layer to the animus, as well as to the cruising. On weekdays everyone would read Armistead Maupin’s newspaper serial Tales of the City, published as a novel in 1978. His character Michael ‘Mouse’ Tolliver, a clone-ish softie himself, laments the experience of meeting men—‘nice mustache, Levi’s, a starched khaki army shirt…strong…’—and trying to resist visiting their bathrooms lest he encounter ‘the giveaway, the fantasy-killer.…Face creams and shampoos for days.’ Mouse was only being wistful, but the underlying effemiphobia was pernicious on the scene. Masculinity can be something that gay men project onto one another, only to snatch it away at the first sign of inauthenticity—that they hadn’t rolled out of bed looking ruggedly handsome, but required a beauty regime to get that way.
* * *
For a brief spell, I sold the men of the neighborhood their face creams and shampoos, in my part-time job at an organic apothecary at 575 Castro Street. A bubble machine affixed to the storefront eaves puffed a whimsical froth over the street. The business was owned by a couple with antithetical personalities, which made it a challenge to impress either. One of the men had resplendent eyebrows that stood an inch in front of his face; he did the accounting, was wired but focused. The other appeared softer at first—the wife, I thought—but I could tell I made him twitchy. I had butterfingers in his presence, and he disapproved of how I apologized for every mistake I made. I deferred to their right-hand, a redheaded Southern gentleman in his late twenties who carried himself with unforced alacrity. He regularly schlepped a ladder out front to top up the solution in the bubble machine. When he and I noticed a customer exiting the shop wearing a bandanna in a back pocket, he showed me the hankie code chart taped to the wall behind the dispensary, and we used it to assess the depravity the man was flagging. I was shocked: yellow, on the right! As much as anything else, it seemed impressively anachronistic. I tried to envision what color I would wear if I were uninhibited.
A smiling woman with short gray hair brought groups of people by nearly every day. Her walking tour was called Cruisin’ the Castro. It turned out the site we occupied was once the camera shop of the legendary Harvey Milk, who had gone on to serve as an openly gay city supervisor until his assassination in 1978. He and his partner, Scott Smith, took the space—and number 573 upstairs—as their residence five years before that. They put a sign in the shop window that read We Are Very OPEN. Soon that was joined by posters for demonstrations and neighborhood meetings. Young people loitered on the old sofa and salvaged barber chair. But Milk was forced to abandon the space when his landlord raised the monthly rate from three hundred and fifty to twelve hundred dollars. On his way out, Milk posted those figures in the window. According to Randy Shilts, at the shop that took over, three hundred and fifty dollars was the price of a single crystal vase. From 1968 to 1978, real estate transactions in the Castro increased seven hundred percent. ‘Business space on Castro Street is tighter than a pair of 29-inch waist Levi’s,’ a San Francisco Examiner journalist cracked in 1979. It was estimated that twenty-five to thirty thousand gay people, mostly men, had moved to the neighborhood and spilled into the surrounding area—as Frances FitzGerald quipped, ‘painting and refurbishing as they went.’
By the nineties, a sense of entitlement permeated the street. In the evenings, I traded stories with my roommates, always worded cautiously, about the snippiness we’d encountered that day. Sasha worked at the garden shop across from the apothecary, and came home exhausted by customers’ bonsai demands. The occasional free love freak still swept through the neighborhood—one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence on roller skates, a Radical Faerie on a unicycle—but mostly the population was high earners fond of khakis and eggs benedict. (Homonormative, the style would later be labeled.) Life was tranquil, but edgy under the surface. Every time I went to Walgreens, I was braced for someone to flip, at which everyone else would fall foul of one another. It was hard not to perceive the neighborhood as vituperative. I would have preferred to dismiss it as inconsequential, but this was the place where gays were testing out a gay economy and gay etiquette, and I was put off by what they were telegraphing. One day, I arrived at work and spotted on the notice board, between ads for crystal healing and guitar lessons, an FBI wanted poster for the serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who’d made the news for murdering Gianni Versace, and was suspected to be stalking gay men in enclaves like ours. I was convinced he was hiding out in our basement, and told my roommates so. Gay against gay seemed to have reached a grotesque peak. Having dissociated from the identity, I just didn’t want to be caught in their crossfire.
* * *
Nearly every day, I’d pass the large windows wrapping around the corner of Castro and 17th: the Twin Peaks Tavern. Its name was outlined in neon on a jutting sign in the shape of the iconic hills to the west. On either side of the building, long metal box arrows pointed toward the corner door, illuminated by a sequence of flashing colored bulbs in the spectrum of the rainbow. I glimpsed silver-haired men in button-up shirts inside; I had the impression of them as pallid and hunched, and as loners even while I observed their gestures of fraternity. I decided the place was little more than a banal backdrop in the comic strip of my life.
The building was erected in 1883, then stuccoed and detailed in a Mediterranean revival style forty years later. From 1935, it was an Irish dive bar, Gus and Bye; back then its windows were painted on the exterior and blocked with paper inside, presumably so wives didn’t glimpse their husbands drinking. When the couple MaryEllen Cunha and Peggy Forster—the girls—took over in 1972 and renamed it Twin Peaks, they opened up its facade: it is considered to be the first gay bar in town, some say the nation, to be fronted in large plate glass. The girls insisted this was not a political stance; the windows were uncovered simply because they wanted to look out. But the bar was also unabashedly gay. They later turned the light-up arrows on the facade into rainbows by dipping each individual bulb in paint.
The girls thought they’d make do with one additional employee, but within days it was clear they’d require more help. They hired a group of bartenders—the boys—and uniformed them in white aprons. A formidable pre-Prohibition back bar was hauled in while the windows were out. The unique stained-glass lamps suspended throughout the room were custom-made. The girls envisioned an upscale, comfortable place where professionals could mingle; it was the gay version of what was then called a fern bar—straight pickup joints where the stigma of sleaziness was assuaged by potted plants and Tiffany lamps, mismatched Victorian furnishings in the mood of grandma’s living room and classy elements like ladies’ nights. The first fern bar may have been TGI Fridays in Manhattan, opened in 1965 next door to an apartment building where hundreds of stewardesses resided. San Francisco had Henry Africa’s, a saloon of palm trees and mounted taxidermy; its proprietor, a war veteran in tiny running shorts, changed his name to that of the bar. At the Twin Peaks, ferns did hang in the windows, until the boys tired of watering them and they were done away with.
The big windows provided unobstructed views of the street life, but also meant passersby could peer in. At first, lawyers and doctors would head instinctively to the recesses for fear of being spotted and facing reprisal at work, but gradually became accustomed to the exposure. The place immediately attracted an older clientele, survivors who’d emerged from miasmic burrows and plunged into the fishbowl. Their median age gave the bar its morbid nickname, the glass coffin. Elder gays had been doubly invisible, and in the windows of the Twin Peaks, they were a portent the street’s perpetual adolescents didn’t necessarily want to behold. Then AIDS came, and several of the popular bartenders there died—David, Paulie, Mike, Art and Clint, the boys—so the glass coffin took on a wretched second meaning.
The bar’s visibility did not so much provoke as normalize. It could be an example of what the critic David Halperin has called ‘desexualizing’ in order to promote a wholesome, agreeable gay identity. Initially, the girls laid down house rules that banned signs of homo affection at the Twin Peaks: it was a ‘no touch’ bar. In other cities, such edicts were imposed by the mafiosos who ran gay bars. In San Francisco bars run by queers and allies, it became a form of self-policing. Standards were scrupulously maintained at the Twin Peaks, where the glass meant every move was on display. Had the gay bar been beaten into submission?
The historian John D’Emilio wrote that after the Second World War ‘the spread of the gay bar contained the greatest potential for reshaping the consciousness of homosexuals and lesbians. Alone among the expressions of gay life, the bar fostered an identity that was both public and collective.’ In effect, the status of the gay bar was declared legal in the verdict of the 1951 California Supreme Court case Stoumen v. Reilly. Two years before, Sol Stoumen, the straight proprietor of the Black Cat in North Beach, had lost his license on the grounds that his place was a hangout for homosexuals. ‘All was not so gay, gay, gay as usual yesterday at the freethinking Black Cat,’ reported the San Francisco Chronicle. Stoumen faced the loss of his business; his lawyer, Morris Lowenthal, fought his case on civil rights terms. After a series of appeals, the verdict of the state’s highest court finally restored the Black Cat’s license, and in doing so established the right of queers to congregate. The ruling was seen as a landmark.
But it was in some ways a pyrrhic victory: the decision qualified that a bar could still be shut down for being disorderly with proof of immoral acts on the premises. In other words, homosexuals had the legal right to hang out together as long as they weren’t doing homosexual things. This was seized upon by moralists, or politicians posing as such. In 1955, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control—the ABC—was formed, then given broad authority by a subjectively drafted new code passed unanimously into state law, which stated that providing a resort for sexual perverts was cause for losing a liquor license. The ABC officers dressed in plainclothes and carried firearms (but didn’t pack heat while undercover in gay bars, so as not to be found out while being felt up).
In 1956, agents reported they’d been hit on at the Black Cat, and the bar’s license was revoked again. In the years-long, costly appeals process that would follow, Lowenthal wielded the Kinsey Report to argue homos aren’t categorical pervs. That September, thirty-six women were arrested at a lesbian bar called the Alamo Club and jailed for frequenting a house of ill repute. Only four pleaded not guilty. The newly formed lesbian advocacy group the Daughters of Bilitis prepared a guide, ‘What to Do in Case of Arrest,’ which instructed readers never to confess to specious accusations. The criteria for what makes a disorderly establishment was debated in courts: Could it, as one ABC agent suggested, include ‘swishing movements, high-pitched voices, or limp wrists’? Once again, the greatest transgression appeared to be gender deviance.
In 1959, another appeal over a revoked license was brought before the California Supreme Court—this time, by the Oakland bar Mary’s First and Last Chance. At the initial hearing, which had resulted in the bar losing its license, police testimonies were brought up saying women there dressed mannishly, danced together and kissed; that one lesbian told a policewoman ‘you’re a cute little butch’; that two men, one gray haired, whispered together forehead to forehead before announcing they were ‘going steady.’ But the ABC didn’t cite this evidence in its final decision, instead resting its case on the fact of ‘sexual perverts, to wit: Homosexuals’ being there. It was common knowledge that it was a hangout for homos; the ABC must have figured that was enough. The supreme court, however, decided that while those scandalous scenarios would have indeed made the case for an affront to public morality, the ABC hadn’t proven their veracity nor factored them into the basis of the decision. Relying on evidence that homos were merely present wasn’t sufficient. Mary’s First and Last Chance had its license restored. The verdict reaffirmed the Black Cat decision by reasserting the legal distinction between status (being homosexual) and conduct (acting on that).
As a result of the ruling, another San Francisco bar, the Handlebar on California Street, also began trading again. Its newly emboldened owner proceeded to report that he’d undergone nearly two years of extortion from police. Other proprietors came forward reporting shakedowns by cops and the ABC. The press dubbed this the gayola scandal. The spotlight backfired on the homos. Officials would be brought to trial, then defend themselves to the jury as moral crusaders battling seedy bar life, and be acquitted. Politicians courted public favor by declaring war on the city’s homosexual problem. The police stepped up its tactic of deploying hot cops in tight trousers to ensnare patrons. There’d been no related felony convictions in the first half of 1960; there were seventy-six in the first half of the following year.
In the late summer of 1961, the biggest vice raid of its kind in the city’s history took place at the Tay-Bush Inn, when the plug on the jukebox was pulled at a quarter past three in the morning. Eighty-nine men and fourteen women were hauled to jail as seven loads in three paddy wagons. In the end, all but two charges were dropped. The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen—the eyes and ears and, according to his Pulitzer Prize, conscience of the city—wrote a scathing piece that highlighted how the mayor’s office scapegoated these men and women while moneyed queers luxuriated in stylishly decorated homes, not perverted but eccentric. ‘The only moral,’ Caen wrote, ‘if it’s a question of morals: Don’t be a poor One. Don’t be a poor anything.’
In 1963, the Black Cat’s license was permanently rescinded on the eve of its annual Halloween party. Halloween was traditionally the one night the police loosened their grip. (Randy Shilts called it the homosexual high holiday.) By the next Halloween, twelve of the city’s thirty gay bars had been closed—five of them within one week—and proceedings were under way to bring down another fifteen. But gay bars were learning to play by the state’s rules, as vague as they were, by toughening their own policies in anticipation. Customers could be themselves as long as they kept to themselves. Soon enough, gay bars proliferated across the city. From the eighteen remaining in 1964, there were an estimated hundred and eighteen within a decade.
The Twin Peaks aimed to be an establishment above reproach. It long remained one of a network of lesbian-owned ‘no touch’ bars known for exceptional circumspection. A kiss could get you shown to the door. Such cautious bar owners created a cultural implication from the legalese: since homosexual status was acceptable before the eyes of the law, it could make for an upstanding identity; because homosexual conduct was enough to get a place shut down, making a show of desire was considered a disgrace to the community. Even as public attitudes liberalized in San Francisco, the terms set by the state had become internalized, so that comportment was treated as a matter of self-respect. As MaryEllen Cunha put it, ‘It was for the best. Who wants to sit in a bar and watch people misbehave?’ She and Forster envisioned an unimpeachable gay lifestyle: dignified, restrained, professional. What they put on view in those big windows was their standard of decorum.
* * *
With time, passing that glass monument on the corner, I found myself thinking not only about how it reified the gay liberation narrative of the transparent and visible, but about its opposite—the hidden and opaque. Specifically, I thought about Michel Foucault. Though it would be amusing to imagine him at the Twin Peaks, his intense bald head resting on the glass, it would not have been his scene. Rumor had it that Foucault once spent time in the leather bars, bathhouses and sadomasochistic dungeons around Folsom Street. In his book Foucault in California, Simeon Wade quotes his idol: ‘I actually liked the scene before gay liberation, when everything was more covert. It was like an underground fraternity, exciting and a bit dangerous. Friendship meant a lot, it meant a lot of trust, we protected each other, we related to each other by secret codes.’
Through the majority of Foucault’s lifetime, gay bars maintained a recessive relationship with the street. They had inconspicuous facades and occupied cellars. In her book Wide-Open Town, Nan Alamilla Boyd explains how queer-owned San Francisco bars in the postwar period constructed what she calls spatial defenses: back entrance, covered windows, dance floor sequestered in the rear, a discriminating hostess on the door. The owner might opt to tend bar herself, from which her domain could be surveyed. Dimming the lights allowed the staff and patrons to suss out a newcomer before being seen themselves. But such fortified architecture also offered something other than protection: a clandestine thrill.
Three years after the Twin Peaks opened its windows, its spatial inverse, the Catacombs, a private club for sadomasochism and fisting, was established in the basement of a Victorian house on 21st Street. Its founder, Steve McEachern, had run a typing business out of the basement until he began to build the dungeon as a birthday present for his lover. The Catacombs developed into its own kind of institution—a homespun, hardcore version of the gay bathhouses in the city where men gathered not just for sex but to exhibit art and watch movies. Apart from periodic crackdowns, the bathhouses were often left alone. If there were going to be gays, at least they were doing it behind closed doors in the steam. The historian Allan Bérubé contended that sex in establishments that were separated from the general citizenry created ‘the first urban zone of privacy, as well as safety, for gay men.’ Assembly Bill 489, which permitted sodomy and oral sex between consenting adults in private, became California law at the start of 1976, and destabilized the legal ground on which the state could prosecute homosex on private property.
The Saturday night fisting parties at the Catacombs had an exclusive guest list comprising referrals that grew out of the local chapter of Fist Fuckers of America—sometimes referred to in code as Final Faith of America—which overlapped with the secretive circuit called TAIL—the Total Ass Involvement League. Guests of the Catacombs were required to reserve ahead. They arrived promptly, and relaxed in a front room—smoking weed, greeting friends and touching up their manicures. The two back rooms were the bridal suite, dominated by a four-poster waterbed, and the dungeon, its walls and ceilings mirrored, lit only by Victorian gaslights. ‘Just walking into that room,’ wrote the critic Gayle Rubin, ‘could put a person in a leathery mood.’ There was, among other equipment, a seven-foot cage, a suspended hospital gurney and a wooden bondage cross. Cans of Crisco were chained next to each handmade leather sling; on the average Saturday, the Catacombs went through nearly forty pounds of the stuff. The floor was perfectly sanded. The soundtrack moved from lubricious disco to moodier, sometimes menacing tracks, plus the occasional in-joke like the sound of a flushing toilet. The bisexual kink legend Cynthia Slater, a lover of the owner Steve McEachern, brought a few women along, and the men got used to their presence. One of those guests, Pat Califia, eventually introduced Friday night women’s parties. Now Patrick Califia, he has observed ‘a firm sense of balance existed’ among the clientele: ‘You could be as big a sexual outlaw as you liked on Saturday night, but come Sunday, cooking a fabulous brunch was every bit as important.’ But Califia also confides that all the hairs on his body stand up when he recalls the intensity of his first time fisting: ‘That illusion of holding another person’s beating heart in the palm of my cupped hand.’
In the early hours in late August 1981, Steve McEachern, who had been cavorting on the waterbed, suffered a heart attack and died in the arms of his partner, Fred Heramb. The club was re-created in a smaller location. Then the spread of AIDS threatened to undermine the legality of the bathhouses, glory holes and sex clubs. Health officials, politicians, business groups and gay activists (who variously agitated for total liberty or safety through regulation) collided, often with intense vitriol, over the fate of these sites. Few bathhouse owners could be persuaded to post info about health risks on their premises, lest they spoil the mood. At the Catacombs, though, Heramb maintained impeccable standards, and a sign read Wash Hands after Every Fuck. Shoulder-length veterinary gloves were provided in lieu of condoms. By 1984, the bathhouses were being ordered to close down as a matter of public health, and that year the Catacombs was shut down, too. For such a secret club, it’s had an outsize impact on the study of queer social spaces. Gayle Rubin contends that such a sensitively run environment nurtured empathetic relationships as much as any aboveground institution. Covertness was integral to that. To Rubin, the Catacombs was where ‘sexual heretics’ could be ‘insulated, as much as possible, from the curious and the hostile.’
The subculture scenes were not always in shadow; they could provide a polestar. Bill Eppridge’s photograph of the South of Market motorcycle bar the Tool Box was printed in Life magazine back in 1964, the opening spread of an article entitled ‘Homosexuality in America.’ (Subtitle: ‘A secret world grows open and bolder. Society is forced to look at it—and try to understand it.’) In the image, leathermen stand in front of painted avatars in a mural by Chuck Arnett (who arrived in town on his motorcycle and took a job tending bar there). Arnett’s figures are strong-jawed, almost Frankenstein-ish. Their black jackets merge until they become the dark room. In one corner, a woman in sunglasses and her male companion appear to be making for the exit. The shot was strategized by Hal Call, president of the homophile organization the Mattachine Society. The bar owners and regulars may not have quite shared in Call’s urge for high visibility, but somehow the remarkable photo shoot happened. The story goes that the men who appear in the picture gave their approval over a shadowy Polaroid similar to the final pick, not anticipating the distinguishability of the image that eventually ran across two pages.
After the Life article, men from as far as India wrote to the Mattachine Society for advice. The exposé inadvertently served as a tantalizing promotion for the city. For many readers, homosexuality hadn’t previously been named. Now the identity was inextricably tied to a place. According to the historian Martin Meeker, the owners of the Tool Box were forced to sell because they couldn’t keep up with the waves of gay tourists. The bar regulars saw imitations of themselves show up, wearing the motorcycle gear but without a hog parked out front. South of Market—the terrain of warehouses abuzz with metal benders and plastic molders by day, and leathermen come nightfall—became synonymous with the homomasculine scene. Ultimately, its gathering spots—nearly thirty, by one count in the early eighties—may have amounted to a string of theaters at which unconvincing plays were performed nightly. Edmund White quipped of another leather bar: ‘At the Black and Blue the customers are so butch they swill Perrier water right out of the bottle (the bartenders jam the lime down into it).’ But the ruse was beside the point, or was the point exactly—the men didn’t come to the city to be who they’d always been, but who they wanted to be. They didn’t move to a place they knew as a reality but one inscribed on their imagination.
When the Tool Box was torn down for redevelopment in 1975, its murals remained. This is a very San Francisco story: The leathermen wall stood exposed, some reckon, for another couple of years—near a freeway ramp bringing drivers into the city. One leather columnist, Mr. Marcus, dubbed the South of Market district the Valley of the Kings. He called the old-fashioned Polk Street scene the Valley of the Queens. And the Castro was the Valley of the Dolls.…I imagine plastic Kens, on which genitals are nothing more than a mound. The Castro had become the city’s acknowledged gay center, and the image it transmitted was upbeat, bright, perhaps castrated. The banal windows of the Twin Peaks Tavern represented this prevailing message of gayness as well adjusted and benign. The panes reflected not the kinky nor the hostile, perhaps the curious, mostly the ambivalent—me as I passed daily. I did hear the rumor that a black-painted Victorian on Castro between 18th and 19th included a dungeon, but the notion seemed little more than silly, the way its facade announced itself like a teenager in a satanic t-shirt. Living in the Castro was not, for me, like being a kid in a candy store; gay culture had instead become a shopping mall, with one hackneyed look after another on display for window shopping.
* * *
The Famous Blue Raincoat came to the city each summer, staying for as many weeks as he could. In San Francisco, he was an intrepid flaneur. He scrambled through the brush along the ocean’s edge; once, he chanced upon a cruising area dressed in a Boy Scout shirt he’d found in a thrift store, and beat a hasty retreat when he ignited strong passions. He scampered up the hills south of the city where, urban myth had it, rodents and insects still carried the Black Death. He strolled Valencia Street in the Mission, peering into shop windows at Santeria talismans, art deco antiques, unfamiliar meats, taxidermy. How a city could be so compact and yet so expansive fascinated him. On the third summer, Famous simply stayed.
We’d had enough of the endings. On the morning he was scheduled to fly back to England, at the cusp of his visa’s allotted ninety days, Famous did pack his suitcase, a bulky old thing. We let inertia take over: He was not actively, prosecutably staying. Rather, he was neglecting to leave. We just let the time slip away, waiting for a cab to the airport that nobody called, acutely aware as the hour arrived for check-in, security, final boarding.…We played dumb with time. I invented ridiculous excuses: We got the date wrong, got stuck in traffic.…We became elated when we imagined his name announced over the intercom—This is the final call.…
Some confused weeks passed, through which the fugitive continued to live out of his suitcase as if not admitting his crime to himself. My roommates didn’t mind him being there for a while. Having Famous around was no more bother than bringing some wildflowers inside. Wanting to send something to his parents to reassure them of his well-being, Famous packaged up leaflets about local heritage sites, just as he used to mail envelopes to me from London stuffed with nightclub flyers and soft pornography. At the post office, we stood in the long line, chatting about moving out of the Castro and into our own place. Everything was nerve-racking. Oh shut UP, cried the voice of an incensed man behind us. We turned around but not all the way. We had no desire to test him further. Oh, I’ve seen you two before, he hissed. Prancing around the neighborhood, jabbering like two queens.
I knew the queens he spoke of. They caterwauled from the balcony of the Café. I was indignant. Surely I was a phlegmatic observer on these streets. I did all my best mincing indoors among small groups of friends. And Famous mumbled—even I couldn’t make out a good deal of what he was saying. Moreover, I was still undecided over which kind of gay I wanted to be. I certainly hadn’t decided on queen. If anything, I was a starling, imitating the calls of other species. I was a fake replicating other fakes, the way a starling can mimic a mockingbird. But mostly we were uncertain and impressionable. We wanted to be better students of gay history. But there was no way to convince a bitter homosexual of all that. We clammed up, once again terrified of gay men.
To get to the post office, we passed Harvey’s, named in homage after Milk’s assassination (supposedly by a real estate developer who didn’t exactly concur with his politics). Before that, it was the Elephant Walk. Opening a couple of years after the Twin Peaks, it took a cue from its predecessor, foisting large picture windows onto the corner of 18th and Castro Streets. On Sundays in the late seventies, the disco diva Sylvester sang in falsetto there, wearing sequin kaftans. Most of the men in the audience were his opposite—more of the same clones. Sylvester’s biographer, Joshua Gamson, wrote that the clone culture ‘was about gender, and it was about fucking, but it was pretty much the opposite of gender-fucking.…Queens didn’t fit unless they covered up their nelliness with a mustache and packed it away in jeans.’ Yet somehow, Sylvester—black, androgynous, the antithesis of a regular guy, idiosyncratic, too much—relieved the clones of the fear of their own femininity. Sylvester was an icon of a neighborhood in which he was otherwise an outcast. He could have represented the fairy that each of those boys had the potential to be, or may have once been. Because he was larger than life, his sissiness so super, they weren’t actually at risk of becoming Sylvester—they couldn’t if they tried. I imagine the sparkles of Sylvester’s garments catching the light and dazzling the men’s stares, as if refracting their insecurities.
In 1978, Sylvester released ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).’ Realness was not only a drag term about passing as a woman, it simultaneously called into question what it is to be an authentic man. Sylvester’s feel is pointedly not am; like the theorist Judith Butler’s chosen example of ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,’ I take the feel as positing our identities always lie in the aspiration. Until his death in 1988, Sylvester was a de facto ambassador within the Castro—not delivering cautious diplomacy between contentious factions, but providing a glimmer of the imagination, as if causing the street an otherworldly leak. Sylvester’s look was visionary, and I suspect had some trickle effect: in footage of a Castro street party from 1982, I’ve detected a few slippages in the clone monolith, my attention drawn to one boy plainly dressed but with a single feather earring.
* * *
In 1985, a group of sociologists published the book Habits of the Heart, arguing that a real community must be a ‘community of memory,’ meaning one that remembers its past, including painful stories of shared suffering. Where history is forgotten, they wrote, community degenerates into lifestyle enclaves. Lifestyle ‘celebrates the narcissism of similarity,’ and elevates private concerns—namely, leisure and consumption—above the common good. The academics announced: ‘When we hear phrases such as “the gay community” or “the Japanese-American community,” we need to know a great deal before we can decide to which degree they are genuine communities and the degree to which they are lifestyle enclaves.’ They could call it whichever they pleased, but if they were talking about the Castro, they risked ignoring how a group of people can rally to deal with duress in the present, as gays and their allies demonstrated during the AIDS crisis before combination therapy. Is it community enough that, as Joshua Gamson wrote, ‘Living people had their hearts broken many times over, and carried shrapnel stories from one memorial service to another. A woman carried the ashes of a friend around town in a Gucci bag. A man convinced his lover to let go into death by reminding him of what it had once felt like to let his rectum relax around a fist. There was the man who gave douches to a young friend constipated from morphine, and a woman who brushed the teeth of a friend who had gone blind and mute at thirty.’
Those ashes in a Gucci bag make a complicated symbol of the intersection of loss, honor and decadence within a ‘community of memory’ that’s often blatantly unremoved from commerce. Whether some would prefer otherwise, capitalism has been the context, and financial transactions have been used as a mechanism in civil rights. The critic Michael Warner points out that in the lesbian and gay movement, ‘the institutions of culture-building have been market-mediated: bars, discos, special services, newspapers, magazines, phone lines, resorts, urban commercial districts.’ There will, of course, be compromise when a group’s institutions are private concerns. (Gayle Rubin compared gay bars to sports teams—fans may be possessive, but the owner could be tempted away to another city.) And Warner further wrestles with the fact that these sites are dominated by those with capital—namely, middle-class white men. That said, it’s the reality that businesses have been consistently present in the advance of gay liberties. Money is part of the story.
Randy Shilts wrote of how Harvey Milk used the civil rights movement in the South as a model—a bus boycott doesn’t work unless the bus companies are losing money. Around 1974, a couple of years into his tenure as a shop owner, Milk amended his pet slogan gays vote gay into gays buy gay. In one of his famed moves, Milk got behind labor leader Allan Baird’s boycott of six beer distributors who refused to sign a union contract. Baird already had the support of Middle Eastern and Chinese grocers. Milk’s rallying of the gay bars tipped the scales: five of the six beer firms agreed to the pact. Milk and Scott Smith then launched a gay bar boycott of the only holdout—Coors—effectively demonstrating their demographic’s spending power. Between 1977 and 1984, according to Milk’s protégé Cleve Jones, Coors saw its share of the giant California market drop from forty to fourteen percent. Meanwhile, Allan Baird ensured that gays were getting union jobs driving for each of the other beer distributors. It was Baird who gifted Milk the battered red and white bullhorn that would go on to rouse fed-up gays and survive the wrath of police batons until it earned its place as a protest icon.
The clarion call through the mouthpiece may have been ‘out of the bars and into the streets,’ but the bars themselves could be staging grounds for resistance. (‘The bars were seedbeds for a collective consciousness that might one day flower politically,’ John D’Emilio wrote.) The Tavern Guild was founded in the early sixties; it was to some extent a weekly drinking party, but also said to be the country’s first gay business association, largely formed to combat harassment and intimidation through solidarity. It began at the Suzy-Q on Polk Street, one of whose bartenders was elected the first leader. Guild members fixed drink prices as a means of discouraging competition. Because the survival of venues was precarious, a loan fund was established for failed bar owners and out-of-work staff. A phone tree allowed members to keep track of the movements of the ABC on a given night, passing along a warning when a raid seemed imminent. The Tavern Guild bars distributed the ‘Pocket Lawyer,’ a wallet-size guide of what to do in case of arrest published by SIR, the Society for Individual Rights.
In 1973, the Twin Peaks was admitted into the Tavern Guild. That was also the year the guild formed a softball league: eight gay bars would compete against one another, with the winner going on to play the police. At ‘the second annual baseball game between the gays and cops of San Francisco,’ the former were represented by the boys of the Twin Peaks. According to the gay newspaper Bay Area Reporter, the chief of police threw out the first ball, ‘lavender and glittered for the occasion.’ Drag cheerleaders waved pompoms in front of the large crowd gathered to watch the Fuzz vs. Peaks. Red, white and blue balloons were released. Cops and clones in matching mustaches became friendly rivals in a field under the sun. (The B.A.R. detailed: ‘A special cheer rose from our throats, deafening, at the introduction of Walter Scott, son of the Chief, who had trouble keeping himself tucked into his cut-offs, necessitating constant re-arrangement, to our amusement.’) The Twin Peaks boys were victorious 9–4 over Police Department Central. That night, squad cars parked all over the intersection in front of the Twin Peaks, their sirens flashing. This time, they hadn’t arrived to make arrests, but to salute the winning team.
Perhaps it’s down to this rapport that the tavern was spared during the White Night riots on 21 May 1979. The Elephant Walk down the street took the beating. That day, the jury had returned their decision in the case of Dan White, the former supervisor who’d shot to death his colleagues Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The verdict of voluntary manslaughter was shockingly lenient. On the day of the killings, White had entered City Hall through a window with a loaded .38 Smith & Wesson and two more chambers’ worth of hollow-point bullets. But his defense attorney presented a string of psychiatrists who reasoned that the defendant, a wholesome former cop, was incapable of premeditation: one reasoned that White, being a considerate man, had chosen to crawl through the window in order not to embarrass the police officer manning the metal detector. It was reported police officers and firemen raised a hundred thousand dollars for Dan White’s legal fund. When it was announced that he’d been given the lightest possible conviction, the story circulated that cops could be heard over police radio singing a celebratory rendition of ‘Danny Boy.’
That night, an estimated five thousand protesters took to City Hall; some pulled parking meters from the sidewalk to use as battering rams, some made shields of garbage can lids. Others fought with tree branches, chrome prized from buses, slabs of asphalt. One squad car was lit on fire, then another, until a whole block of them burst into flames—‘their melting sirens,’ Randy Shilts wrote, ‘screeching into the cool May night.’ The cops, having lost the battle at City Hall, were sure to wage war in the Castro. For whatever reason, their primary target was the Elephant Walk. Officers with hidden badges jumped onto the bar, swinging their truncheons at skulls. They shouted cocksuckers and faggots. Men were beaten just outside. Up the street, the Twin Peaks battened down the hatches: staff lowered the lights and locked the Dutch door. The patrons lay under tables, and the place went unscathed.
The next day would have been Harvey Milk’s forty-ninth birthday. A street disco had been planned, and it went ahead. The regal Sylvester performed. At one point some twenty thousand revelers sang happy birthday, dear Harvey.… A protest was held that night in New York City across the street from the site of the Stonewall Inn, with placards hoisted into the air, some of which simply read ‘We All Live in San Francisco.’
Famous could live in San Francisco, but if he were to truly reside there, we needed to get gay married. At the time, this was not an actual possibility. We were taken aback to come across the END MARRIAGE stencils on pavements throughout the city. At first we figured it was an anti-gay campaign. But the message was end marriage altogether. The activist group behind the campaign, Gay Shame, believed that queers should disrupt and challenge institutions—marriage, military, marketplace—not endeavor to join them. They despaired at gays waving rainbow flags made in sweatshops. They wanted gay people to think critically and follow the money, especially the pink dollar. The objects of their ire included greedy gay landlords, exploitative corporations, discriminatory bar owners, pathetic assimilationists and disingenuously reformed police marching in pride parades.
Gay Shame began as an annual event in Brooklyn in 1998. The acerbic term had been played with previously. In one instance, the critic José Esteban Muñoz proposed a gay shame parade: held in bitter February instead of summer, it would require its participants to wear drab colors, carry signs no bigger than a business card, refrain from chanting and march in single file—not through the center of town but some remote location. Early on, the San Francisco contingent of Gay Shame did organize an event that chimed with Muñoz’s poignant joke: a party in an edgeland called Tire Beach. Another event was a Goth Cry-In. It seemed, though, that the group’s intent was generally less about introspection and more about being enlightened queers rebuking benighted gays—in which case, shame was not a reclaimed affect, but a verb: a wagging finger.
We’d begun to identify members around town—on Valencia Street in front of Modern Times bookstore, where they held their meetings, as well as at sloppy house parties. They were like muddied lost boys and tank girls, always looking exhausted from sex or a brawl. They wore t-shirts with the sleeves ripped off and could be detected from a distance by the stink. They rode bikes without helmets and swish-swaggered down sidewalks. They were adorned in scrapes and bruises, as well as slogans proclaiming various grievances. Each of them seemed to have a magnificent ass and be writing a book.
They were so fierce and committed I figured they must be right about everything. Yet there was a sticking point: I was open to the idea of gay marriage. If it kept Famous with me, out of jail and not deported, we were willing to be grooms. So when Gay Shame members rode by on their bikes with their agitprop patches, Famous and I lowered our heads. They made us feel so realpolitik. It was as though they could look through Famous and me, and detect that if there was a secret ballot, we’d secretly vote for gay marriage. The correct choice among shamers was against. They saw marriage as a way for the state to regulate bodies and deprivilege those who fell outside the patriarchal institution. But we just sought relief.
To its opponents, marriage was exclusionary, which would make Famous and me love protectionists. It was private, rendering us love capitalists. But in fact the mess we were in made neither complacent, and both vulnerable. I constantly feared the authorities banging down the door. (We’d moved to a little basement apartment perched at the edge of the city. Damp and shabby, it was well appointed as a hideaway.) But on the question of immigration, Gay Shame could retort: What about couples where neither member is a citizen? I was ashamed that my situation was never the worst. In the house I grew up in, marriage was seen as a triumph. Mom and Dad got hitched just five years after antimiscegenation laws were banned in the 1967 US Supreme Court case improbably named Loving v. Virginia. For my parents, marriage was redefined as lived—worth fighting for not because it is a complete and flawless institution, but because it has the potential to evolve and change.
Ultimately, shame didn’t seem to be the right tactic for a debate around hospital visitation rights or partner separations or child custody. Shame, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote, is a ‘conversation-stopper.’ The cultural theorist Elspeth Probyn ventured, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been shamed for not being a heterosexual, but I have been shamed for not being a good homosexual.’ Gay Shame made a powerful statement in calling out bloodsucking landlords and hypocritical corporations. But they were unlikely to listen to a bunch of malodorous misfits. In a sense, that may be all Gay Shame was intending—to ask, rhetorically, Have you no shame? To experience shame may require belief in a standard to which one aspires and fails. So the powerful had no shame, while Famous and I burned with it.
One late afternoon in May, we found ourselves back at that familiar intersection of Castro and 17th, between the Twin Peaks Tavern and the Bank of America on Harvey Milk Plaza. The bank had recently closed down, its windows boarded up like they were after being smashed in the White Night riots twenty-three years ago almost to the day. On this afternoon, the shuttered building served as the backdrop to a makeshift stage. A banner announced: GAY SHAME AWARDS 2002. The categories included Making More Queers Homeless, Best Target Marketing, Exploiting Our Youth and Helping Right-Wingers Cope. The activists had descended upon the Castro to make a point about complacency and greed within the gay mainstream. I’d concur the rampant consumerism was troubling. Identity had become a commodity. Gays enabled one another’s body fascism and luxury. (Soon after that, the Bank of America became a Diesel store, where two twink sales assistants plus a fellow customer gathered round to salaciously convince me to go down a size on low-rise jeans.)
We missed the handing-out of Gay Shame Awards to absent villains. I’d later hear the ceremony culminated in the burning of a rainbow flag. We arrived in time for the afterparty. A 24 Divisadero bus was abandoned where it had been thwarted by the group’s makeshift barricade. A sofa and turntables had been dragged into the middle of the street, which was thrumming with dozens of dancing bodies. Cops stood bemused beside the vacated bus, hands on hips. Some of the activist-revelers were dressed in natty sequins and dapper suspenders, while others went for grotesque, including at least one set of joke-shop rotten teeth. There were roller skates, and skateboards ridden by boys wearing only boxers. Animal prints clashed with horizontal stripes underneath torn fake fur. Bras and jockstraps migrated across bodies, now worn as wrist- and headbands. One of our upstairs neighbors was there, resembling a fierce Debbie Harry with faint mustache and thick gold eyelashes. Along with a doppelgänger, she towered above us on stilts. Willowy straight boys cuddled their girlfriends yet managed in context to present queer.
The members of the innermost clique had a palpable intensity about them—they were serious pirates. One of the core members, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, was resplendent in makeup applied as if every orifice in her face leaked glitter. Her mottled dress formed tumescent folds at the seams and shoulders, looking very Yayoi Kusama. Her lavender teased wig sprouted American flags, plastic flowers and a doll with a wide knitted skirt—the sort used as a toilet roll cover. Her shoes were constructed of pieces of paper bearing the Prada logo. Someone else’s gown was made of shopping bags from The Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch. An older man wore nothing at all but a backpack; he waved a tiny pennant: ‘Queers Against Capitalism.’
The music spat through the speakers: ‘Fuck the Pain Away’ by Peaches, ‘Stars’ by Sylvester. The dancing began to include passing tourists and the sort of San Francisco hippies who’ll join in anything. It’s not your revolution unless they can belly dance. The old white gays in the windows of the Twin Peaks looked on with mild curiosity. They appeared so conformist, I was ashamed on their behalf, even as they may have been ashamed of the freaks on the street. The men in the bar were from another era, when the homo prefix really meant same. Toward that likeness, the Gay Shamers on the street were homophobic. They were aggressively individualistic: fabulous, unsightly, sexy, fat, a total mess. Their street party was not a dialogue but a harangue.
The following year, Gay Shame would protest a fund-raiser at the city’s new lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community center for its association with the mayoral front-runner, Gavin Newsom, whose policies on homelessness were disdained by the left. The police wound up exerting such force that one demonstrator was hospitalized with a shattered tooth. Reports spread that gala attendees looked on, even cheered, while safely ensconced in the glassy edifice. Those status quo gays found Gay Shame to be at best a nuisance, at worst a scourge on their hard-won respectability. They didn’t want their vision of community critiqued; it had just been enshrined in the form of a big, transparent building. Sycamore later wrote, ‘Those arrested at the Center were held in jail for up to three days and faced charges as ridiculous as assault on a police officer (four counts for me) and felony “lynching,” an antiquated term for removing someone from arrest.’ It was as though the police skirmishes of previous decades were on the cusp of returning, but with less clear delineations of us and them.
But on this occasion on Castro Street, I witnessed only the few cops present shaking their heads at the disgraceful display, perhaps raising eyebrows at Gay Shame’s appointed mediators. When the remix of ‘Deceptacon’ by Le Tigre played, Famous and I finally joined in, guided by the bratty, anthemic vocals from curb into street. It was satisfying to dance in public in a disruptive and disorganized way. We smiled at acquaintances. Evening threatened to creep in the way it does in San Francisco—as a bright white haze. We were like characters in a movie who, as a matter of survival, disguise their difference in a crowd in an attempt to blend in. The challenge here was how to look inconspicuous among the conspicuous. (Adam Phillips: ‘Shame measures the distance between who we experience ourselves as being, and who we would like to be.’) Surely, we were detectable—traitors willing to become gay moderates for a green card. I was certain at least one person present was aware of our position from previous conversations. Still, I relaxed. I found myself wondering what the evening might hold in store, and if it could possibly end in a margarita or threeway.
From what I could tell, the gay men in the windows of the Twin Peaks just carried on with their drinking. The blinds in the huge windows were half drawn like sleepy eyelids. Those men had been around. They’d seen worse vitriol and better parties. Just because they wore chinos now didn’t mean they didn’t have battle scars beneath. I thought of them as fathers whom we were rebelling against simply because they existed. We were pretending we were orphans, having run away into our own backyard. By participating, I was dancing against, but did that mean denying my genealogy? We glanced around, feeling shamelessly pseudo, hoping no one would detect our failure of pure radical spirit.