I was not thinking about the world. I was not thinking about history. I was thinking about my body’s small, precise, limited, hungry movement forward into a future that seemed at every instant on the verge of being shut down.

—Wayne Koestenbaum, 2003

We used to gaze at the fog romantically. Then Famous and I moved up the hills into that fog, only to find it cold and wet. We lived on a dead-end street in the musty basement of a crumbling clapboard house that clung to the edge of a cliff over several lanes of freeway. It didn’t only feel like the limit of the city; everyone who visited immediately called it the End of the World. We salvaged chairs from the sidewalk, splurged on houseplants, threw spaghetti on the kitchen wall to test its readiness and basically became lesbians.

The only queer bar in the neighborhood, the Wild Side West, was a lesbian bar in denial. After it was described as a ‘super cool dyke bar’ in Betty & Pansy’s Severe Queer Review, a caustic guide to San Francisco, the owners scoffed and corrected them: the Wild Side West was a neighborhood bar. Future editions of Severe Queer Review read: ‘This is a neighborhood bar in Bernal Heights (an area populated by lesbian homeowners). When you come through the door, do not be dismayed to see half a dozen middle-aged women with salt-and-pepper brush cuts smoking cigars and playing cards—they are just neighbors. The interior of the bar is a delight and says much about the history of the neighborhood. The two female owners (apparently good friends and roommates) opened this establishment over forty years ago. If you are a “neighbor,” you might like it.’

The Wild Side West was named for the 1962 movie Walk on the Wild Side, starring Barbara Stanwyck as a New Orleans madam and woman’s woman. The bar was founded in the East Bay, hence the qualifier in the name. It resettled in San Francisco as a frontier-style saloon with a massive antique cash register, fireplace, piano. People said Janis Joplin once made love on the pool table. In the bricolage back garden, at the bottom of a rickety staircase, swing chairs sheltered beneath the trees, glass bottles were buried upside down in the soil and broken toilet bowls served as flowerpots. Later I’d hear those toilets had been dumped on the doorstep (or hurled through the window) in objection to the two women opening for business. Their repurposing was as pragmatic as it was allegorical. Ultimately, the owners’ disavowal of the lesbian descriptive spoke to a pioneer mentality—live and let live, just don’t slap a label on it.

  

I, however, adopted an epithet: fag. I started calling myself that after my upstairs neighbors did. There seemed to be a lot of commotion and glamour on the third floor. A revolving cast of genderfuck roommates flung their arms out the windows, hollering down to scruffy friends, like a Muppets production of Tennessee Williams. A boa feather or glitter eyelash would tumble down the fire escape into the backyard. Then at some point, Michelle and Rocco moved in. I met Michelle first; she looked like a cigarette girl and wrote highly acclaimed books under the name Michelle Tea. She introduced me to her boyfriend Rocco, who as a rapper went by Katastrophe. He said right off: Oh, I’ve seen you before at the bus stop. I thought, who’s the cute fag? Rocco was still binding before top surgery. He would crack up so heartily it made him crouch. The phrase Tender Hearted was inked across his chest. He quipped that Famous and I could provide him sartorial inspiration. We wore old ski jackets, beanies that fell over our brows, corduroys with thrashed hems. Rocco had just tossed that comment out, but it was immensely flattering coming from someone who was transitioning and therefore, I figured, deliberate about such things. We could, in turn, take cues from Rocco. It was like we’d lifted masculinity together in a heist, and now divvied up the booty.

What got me was the way the word moved through Michelle and Rocco’s lips: fag was a firecracker, not a disorder; neither was it cringeworthy or falsely optimistic.…In other words, not gay. The word sounded masculine and flaming at the same time. Fag had long been used to indicate a femme, and while that probably hadn’t changed, I realized that I had once perceived that femme-ness as a lack, something taken away from my masculinity rather than added to it. Now I was loopy with the idea that I could weave effete through the masc. In 2001, a new publication on pink paper launched—Butt, billed as a ‘fag mag’ or ‘fagazine.’ One cover proclaimed in bold type: ‘INTERNATIONAL FAGGOT MAGAZINE FOR INTERESTING HOMOSEXUALS AND THE MEN WHO LOVE THEM.’

I was convinced that meant me. I was giddy with identity. Fag snuck up on me, and I welcomed it. Fag was sexy. It was street. Famous was a scofflaw fag, the way he shirked immigration laws. I quit my editing job in a huff and became a dropout fag. To be a fag was to be a bandit. I liked the way fag looked from the outside. It made me want to fuck myself. For me, identity wasn’t about finding something within—a cicada biding time in my underground—but about sensing myself out in the world. Looking at it that way, identity could be, as Famous put it, photosynthesis.

  

To thank us for feeding their cat, Michelle and Rocco took us to dinner at a popular new spot in the Castro called Home. The hostess seemed to weigh the idea of denying Michelle’s reservation. We were disheveled and misshapen compared with the preppy gay men there. They were high on cosmopolitans and ceviche. All these men tuck their shirts in, I commented. Yeah, growled Michelle, like a teenager itching for a brawl. These motherfucking shirt tuckers. I was impressed with her finding an internal rhyme on the spot.

It was all about the language. We tried to speak with a sense of place, like bell hooks, with an inflection that told where we’d been. Since at least the fourteenth century, faggot meant a bundle of sticks tied together for fuel, used in the Old World to burn heretics alive. A person condemned as such might be forced to carry a thorny faggot for a period as a mark of shame. Now I chose to lug the faggot stigma around with me. I wanted to bestow honorifics on friends, too. Dyke had such a cool ring to it. There’s conjecture that dyke evolved from deck—as in a young man decked out in his best clothes. F-to-M stood for female-to-male and accounted for the journey between. The terms were imperfect, but fierce.

I didn’t use queer in conversation—queer was academic. It was convenient, sexless. I used words that were about libido, leaked precum, were a bit handsy. Queer was about slipping through categories, whereas I preferred words to firm categories up—otter, pig, cub, kitchen top, bossy bottom, slut—denoting the types I wanted to fuck, then write about later using the slang. I doubt any of us actually believed the categories were impermeable or fixed—but they were delectable, puerile, created mutualities, cracked us up. To me, anyway, queer seemed serious—somehow adult; it worried.

*  *  *

Growing up wasn’t an option. San Francisco is an immature city. I was under the influence of Michelle’s book Valencia. The first lines: ‘I sloshed away from the bar with my drink, sending little tsunamis of beer onto my hands, soaking into the wrist of my shirt. Don’t ask me what I was wearing. Something to impress What’s-Her-Name, the girl I wasn’t dating.’ Named for the Mission district thoroughfare Valencia Street, a promenade for baby dykes and bulldaggers in tool belts, Michelle’s book chronicled a certain moment in San Francisco just before I moved there, when she and her pals were caught in a cycle of questionable moves and subsequent overprocessing. By the end, the protagonist is profoundly changed, but it seemed more fun to exist in the book’s earlier sections, when she took every substance she was given with a rascally grace.

In a quieter passage, the narrator discovers the writer Eileen Myles, then recites a favorite poem to two friends who stand outside her house in the wet night—‘a kind of reverse serenade, calling the words out my window, and Laurel cried and George smoked a damp cigarette and then Laurel hung by her knees from the bottlebrush tree.’ Like Michelle, Myles had given up booze and found clarity, but I wanted to dwell in the inebriate passages, like ‘we felt so much better drinking and smoking and seeing a future.’ I ignored the fact of both writers getting sober. I went out to bars to be literary. I drank to create content. If I earned a reputation for making trouble, it was so that I could write about it the following morning: making a pass at a twink in a bathroom, who then hit his head on the towel dispenser; being told I looked depressing by a British girl who encountered me alone reading Factotum; going home with the boy we called Raised by Wolves, who proceeded to rip apart my American Apparel t-shirt from the v neck. I found myself taking more risks, because failure had a second life—it could spin a yarn. There was an agency in the retelling, in the self-deprecation and of course self-mythologizing. Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.

  

The writing scene in San Francisco was vivified by events like open mic nights for lezzies at the Bearded Lady café and a literary series held at Eros, a gay men’s sauna, but in the lobby so that it was open to trans people and everyone else. These continued a long albeit jumbled tradition. I’d always heard about the city’s dual reputations as a muse for writers (lots of hyperbolic men) and a magnet for homos (lots of drama queens). But they were told as two discrete stories. Of course, gay and bohemian are porous states of being, as are the boundaries of their terrains. In 1953, the poet Peggy Tolk-Watkins, ‘queen of the dykes,’ established the Tin Angel in North Beach. The folk singer Odetta recorded her first album there. The next year, Miss Smith’s Tea Room opened on Grant Avenue, a lesbian pickup spot with sawdust on the floor and beat poetry on Wednesdays. In 1955, two of Tolk-Watkins’s fellow Black Mountain College alumni set up The Place on Grant Street, where the gay poet Jack Spicer would host Blabbermouth, a weekly open mic. Also that year, Allen Ginsberg read the first part of Howl at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. Later that night (at the ‘big happy orgies’) Ginsberg thought, ‘at last a community.’

The national media collapsed the city’s various new literary strands into the beat generation. In order to stir up outrage about San Francisco hedonists and oddballs—‘a pack of unleashed zazous who like to describe themselves as Zen Hipsters,’ as put by one magazine—an emphasis was placed on the freaky sex. One journalist pointed to homos as the hardcore of the movement. The 1957 obscenity trial over Howl and Other Poems made the book a best seller. Through the next year, national newspapers and magazines furiously tsk-tsked and cast scorn upon the permissive city, incidentally enticing more curious gays to visit. One reason San Francisco became so gay is down to the bad press.

The historian Nan Alamilla Boyd is careful to differentiate between the kooky and the queer in the North Beach scene. While the two may have overlapped, maybe just for a night, the beatnik and gay communities might be considered distinct, especially if we’re talking about the gender transgressions of femmes—a very different pose from the mystic masc of the beats. Male homosexuality was more likely to be considered hip when it was gruff and riotous, earthy in the tradition of Whitman, screamed in lupine lines like Ginsberg’s one about being sodomized by motorcyle saints.

Then there’s Robert Duncan, gay and a poet, who would have scoffed at being called a gay poet. In his 1944 essay ‘The Homosexual in Society,’ he teased at disclosing his own sexuality, then interrogated the validity of identity altogether. This was very pre-post-gay of him. To Duncan’s mind, claiming minority status is evil because it splinters a higher good, the universal. ‘Almost coincident with the first declarations for homosexual rights,’ he wrote, ‘was the growth of a cult of homosexual superiority to heterosexual values; the cultivation of a secret language, the camp, a tone and a vocabulary that are loaded with contempt for the uninitiated.’ Duncan was fatigued by too many salons ‘where the whole atmosphere was one of suggestion and celebration.’ There, homos used an argot built on ridicule. He’d found himself nearly indoctrinated (as if in a ‘rehearsal of unfeeling’), his own voice ‘taking on the modulations which tell of the capitulation to snobbery.’ But Duncan decided not to speak that way. The lexicon was ‘a wave surging forward, breaking into laughter and then receding, leaving a wake of disillusionment.’ My impression is that he considered language to be wasted when it conformed to type.

*  *  *

My little sister once reported that she had described me in her high school sociology class as living in San Francisco, working for a magazine, having studied theater at a university in Los Angeles. You see, her teacher announced into a microphone, Jenny’s brother is a typical gay. With friends, I joked in portmanteau—about things that were clichgay, about how we spoke with gaydences. When I was still living in the Castro, Jenny came to visit and remarked on the trios of men strolling past: Why do gays have to come in threes? I supposed because they were one another’s security. They all looked squeaky clean. I took her to the Pilsner Inn—low-key, for a gay bar, with pinball machines and a pool table. The men inside were reasonably fuss-free. Still, it reeked of cloying cologne. Jenny stumbled onto the sidewalk. I think I’m allergic to gays, she groaned before vomiting.

I knew what she meant. Some of us were allergic to ourselves—or had an intolerance to the construction of gay, to its trappings. We’d witnessed the generation just before us react to a plague by morphing into invulnerable cyborgs: hairless, perfumed like bubblegum, with overdeveloped muscles displayed in tight clothes—what Famous called a sack of melons. I beheld the bathroom counters of gay men lined with dozens of bottles of potions, as if attempting to sterilize themselves with grooming. But those who resisted—the anti-gay authors and Gay Shamers—seemed unsporting. I wanted to be pro- something. Now that I was happily self-identifying as fag, I needed a new fragrance.

I stopped wearing deodorant. Famous, with relief, followed suit. His odor is celery and mine is pencil shavings. It was a revelation to discover that we came with an aroma we didn’t have to pay for. Why do people use ‘the armpit of America’ as a pejorative? demanded a handsome young jerk we took on a camping trip to Big Sur. His Sea and Cake t-shirt smelled of marijuana smoke and salty sweat. We drank Sierra Nevada under tall red trees and arrived home scented with bonfire. We made pheromonal friends who wanted to reside in the armpit of America, in one another’s. When a boy only just past nineteen pursued me and I took him to bed, I automatically pushed him into my pit. He resisted. I lost my erection. I can tell you don’t like me, he said. It was actually a question of pheromones—specifically, that he didn’t want to bury his face in mine. I could no longer hang with boys who weren’t after a skunky, veiny, furry tussle. I’d come to realize what kind of fag I was. Dirty.

We got in touch with our bodies, and wished to dwell in the era of our birth. We turned to the next best thing: seventies pornography. Our stinky friend Stuvey lent us the DVDs of the Joe Gage trilogy, starting with Kansas City Trucking Co., released the year Famous was born, 1976. The films were skunky, veiny, furry—with sex scenes in the sagebrush, rest stop toilets, roadside bars, auto repair shops, shacks. Men watched one another, licking a palm insatiably before moving it down to the mushroom head on the upward curved tool protruding from the fly of their grubby jeans. The men had shaggy chest rugs and their hairlines were receding. They spoke slowly like they were stoned yet urgently like they were horny. I caught wind that dykes also watched the Joe Gage films. They liked the grit and, so some claimed, the dicks, too. Men externalize pornographically, one sex-positive lesbian commentator explained, and if that was the case I was pleased to share the phallus for their scopophilia. The Joe Gage trilogy added up to a love story—aggressive, but tender. The films also featured extended scenes of driving big rigs in the crepuscular hours, imbued with a deep violet melancholy. Being a fag, it turned out, could be close to the earth—it could be about not the glossy advertisements of our chimerical selves, but a wide-open expanse. For the first time, I saw the possibility of faggotry to be sublime.

  

Edmund White characterized San Francisco in the late seventies as ‘a sort of gay finishing school, a place where neophytes can confirm their gay identity.’ This was pretty much unchanged. My default classroom was the Phone Booth, a noncommittal gay bar—one local paper categorized it as a ‘gray bar’—in the Mission. There was a Barbie doll chandelier, but no rainbow flag. Historically gay, its mix now included scruffy straight boys (mountain goats) and girls in ironic secretary blouses (feathered fancies). White also observed San Franciscans in the late seventies who held PhDs in art history but took jobs stocking shelves in supermarkets. (He wrote: ‘Just before I left San Francisco someone drew me aside and said, “You know, you have a habit that’s considered rude out here: you always ask people what they do. When they realize you don’t mean what they do in bed, or which drugs, they’re offended.”’) This was also still the case. People worked retail, odd jobs, part-time. Nine-to-five had little meaning. When boys wanted to get in touch, I told them I’d be at the Phone Booth.

I would stare into the chalkboard above the urinal. There was occasionally a stick of chalk to hand; otherwise, a message could be written with a licked fingertip. The surface was gradually accumulating a varnish from layers of marker graffiti. I would piss out the five-dollar offer—Pabst Blue Ribbon plus Jack Daniel’s shot—while decoding the scribbled palimpsest: I contemplated that chalkboard as if it were laden with meaning like a Cy Twombly painting. I needed the bar to be rife with significance in order to justify being in it again.

I could tell what the night had in store by the number of bicycles out front. The bouncer gave a look of recognition and, I detected, faint disapproval. The double doors featured a pair of trompe l’oeil red British phone boxes (K6 model). If he was in a mood, Famous would point out the inaccuracies. The K6 was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, an architect of cathedrals. Its design is classical in proportions. In England, there may be no smaller architecture that’s as revered: certain kiosks have Grade II status—the only listed buildings I’m aware of that smell of piss and are decorated with flyers for prostitutes.

The bar was once the watering hole for the gay men who worked as switchboard operators at the AT&T building across 25th Street. The Phone Booth opened in 1951; under new ownership in 1974, it was promoted in the B.A.R., the gay weekly. The ad featured the slogan We’ve got your number…and an illustration of a man with GQ feathered hair, unbuttoned shirt, jacket flung over shoulder and skintight flares, one foot in a phone booth. For years, the back pages of the B.A.R. were a gallery of ads for bars and clubs, featuring drawings of stars, sunsets, desertscapes, sailors, cowboys, lions seducing handsome nude men. After the onset of AIDS, these were almost wholly replaced by promos for phone sex. The Phone Booth’s name was an incidental portent of how gay men would come to cruise.

Around the time we started hanging out there, pay phones began to head toward extinction. I was preoccupied with the relationship between people and places, and noted the realms I inhabited were conspicuously mortal. My local bar was named after an endangered object, and moreover was situated in a neighborhood being gentrified beyond recognition. I’d taken a job in a video store, where people would ask all the time how soon we’d go out of business. This was my domain: I loitered in the fading-away.

  

At the Phone Booth, we dressed like seventies clones. Not in a kitschy way, it’s just that the uniform (hoodie, jeans, checked shirt, Converse)—what the artist Hal Fischer, in his 1977 photo project Gay Semiotics, identifies as ‘basic gay’—had become the default style for hipsters in the aughts, gay or straight. The boys at the Phone Booth wore jeans with a low rise, their flannel shirts inching up as they gesticulated, revealing the fuzz on their bellies and the smalls of their backs. (Roland Barthes: ‘Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?’) Cyclists rolled up the right leg of their jeans to avoid catching in the chain, their calves swiped with black grease. The hoods of sweatshirts were up, thick cotton foreskin. A quintessential item was the foam-front, mesh-backed trucker cap, like the one on the head of the musician Arthur Russell, our fag patron saint. He couldn’t give a fuck about genre—experimental composition, country, disco—and was ahead of his time that way.

We grew beards. The initial days itched. It was amusing to watch each other’s facial hair bloom, like curious new werewolves. Mine was asymmetrical and partly red. Our shaggy faces reminded me not just of seventies porn but of the painting by Gustave Courbet in which he depicts himself meeting his wealthy patron on the road to Montpellier. Courbet doffs his hat, but then so does his wealthy benefactor. While the patron’s ginger beard is pilose and groomed, Courbet’s wiry thicket stands several inches in front of his face, as if semierect. Our beards were not just uppity like that—they were perverted, their bristles perfumed with the sudor of scrotum.

The majority of the Phone Booth clientele was probably straight, yet somehow the atmosphere was predominantly gay. This was an advantageous situation; the straight boys respectfully gave the impression they might capitulate. Ostensibly straight boys whom I kissed there included a construction site foreman, a professional skateboarder and an acrobat. Somebody would always put ‘Family Affair’ by Mary J. Blige on the jukebox, with its message about leaving one’s situations behind at the door. As much as gay, the bar identified as late twenties. The 2003 edition of the Severe Queer Review quotes graffiti observed on a wall at the Phone Booth: ‘I’m 28 and I can still get a boner.’ Sometime after midnight, I’d glance at the bar’s clock, and reality would hit. The clock face was stamped 1974, the year of my birth. Thirty years old approaching, I’d become an old barfly already. I was finally a regular at a gay bar. And yet, what kind of gay bar? A kind of gay bar.

  

An honest account of the gay bar must include bisexual, pansexual, confused, questioning, transitioning bars. As a matter of fact, the Black Cat, whose 1951 victory at the state supreme court established the right of homosexuals to congregate, was one of those that flitted about the spectrum. In the forties and fifties, the spot on Montgomery Street was, in the words of Allen Ginsberg, the ‘greatest gay bar in America’—but precisely because of the fact that it was ‘totally open, bohemian, San Francisco…and everybody went there, heterosexual and homosexual.’ He elaborated: ‘All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. All the poets went there.’

The Black Cat’s resident performer, José Sarria, had begun going there with his sister in the forties; they made a bet over who’d win the affections of their favorite waiter, and José won. He covered shifts for this lover, and was ultimately hired on himself. José started singing there in the early fifties, wearing a bit of makeup and his mother’s earrings to accentuate his allure. The story goes that one night, a woman in the crowd suggested he try on her heels. They fit, and she told José to keep them. He performed in those shoes four nights a week on a stage of pushed-together tables to a crowd of two or three hundred. This transformed the Black Cat: José became the Black Cat, as he put it himself.

He switched to red high heels and became iconic. José was known to travel around town in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by his propman. On Sundays, he performed satirical operas at the Black Cat. In his staging of Bizet’s Carmen, the heroine was out cruising in a city square, dodging vice cops. He would alert the crowd to the current movements of the police—the ‘blue fungus.’ To José’s mind, patrons of the Black Cat were leading a double life—uninhibited in the bar, conforming everywhere else. He gave pep talks: ‘There’s nothing wrong with being gay—the crime is getting caught.’ At the end of his opera, he commanded the audience to stand and, with arms around each other, sing ‘God Save Us Nelly Queens.’ This sometimes spilled out into the night air, as he serenaded the walls of the vicinal city jail for the sake of any gays who happened to be in custody. In the early sixties, José ran for San Francisco city supervisor. He lost, but garnered enough support that after his campaign nobody in town ran for office without courting the gay vote.

*  *  *

In 1964, the best-named gay activist of the era, Guy Strait, self-published an article entitled ‘What Is a Gay Bar’ (and laid out with the headline in French—‘Qu’est-ce Que C’est? Gay Bar’). According to Strait, while homosexual men had long sniffed out hotel lobbies, public squares, dive bars and gentleman’s clubs with a tacit reputation, a true gay bar was something different. His first rule for a gay bar was its ‘freedom of speech’—the use of idioms and unguarded sex talk. (Anyone who wanted to be schooled could order Strait’s own Lavender Lexicon: A Dictionary of Gay Terms and Phrases for two dollars.) Strait contended that while a cruisy hangout could fly under the radar, a gay bar might be forced to shut down based on the conversations. ‘Gay bars are not the best pickup spots,’ he wrote, ‘but they are the safest; they are not the worst thing that has happened to society and may well be one of the best.’

The poet Aaron Shurin has told of his first gay bar, the Rendezvous in the Tenderloin, in the mid-sixties, also using the framework of linguistics: ‘They had long hair and misty eyes, they had lean stomachs and tender kisses, they had hard-ons in company and interlocked smiles; they were made of silly gestures and dramatic arches and too-muchness and high language, of alliteration and sibilance and “sensibility.”’ We wanted to go there—the Rendezvous may have been closed by then, but back to what remained of the old school (Hole in the Wall, Cinch Saloon, Gangway, Ginger’s Trois, Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the Stud, the Eagle) in the ghettos of the Tenderloin, Polk Gulch, South of Market. Other scrappy young fags descended upon these spaces along with us. The daddies must have noticed this with mixed feelings, but we preferred their company to our prissier peers. We’d hitherto known gay bars architected as aspiration and escape; they were neutered. These rougher spots could be raunchy or campy, neighborly or lugubrious, but what they shared in common was the sense of being built from the bottom up. We went to sex clubs and saunas, where we were frequently obliging. We went to clothing-optional beaches. (Naked on the sand, we picked up a boy while the guy he was dating had his nose in The Ethical Slut.)

We made friends with gay boys who were not hostile. They were frisky and nice. They were stoned. They were allies, not mere competition or a potential fuck, though possibly the latter. They did not have six-packs. They flashed tattoos at picnics. We sat in the grass at Dolores Park hoping to track a case of chlamydia that had infiltrated our circle by drawing a tree of who’d slept with whom, and it turned out that nobody was separated by more than two degrees. I thought I must be liberated. We’d go dancing and at the end of the night our pal Jesse would say, Jeremy, that guy you were making out with on the dance floor? I’d nod. Just so you know: NOT cute.

It wasn’t supposed to be about lowering standards, but reassessing the standardized image of sexy. Gay liberation in the seventies had helped replace the fetish for servicing straight guys with a mutual eroticism between gay men. After AIDS hit hard and stigmatized that very generation, ‘gay’ sexuality often privileged straight dudes again. The city’s gay video stores were filled with DVDs of broke straight boys, amateur military men, cocky skaterboyz.…We watched as many of these as we could, and were thereby informed that straight guys were hotter—scruffier, and yet cleaner when it came to disease. A bulk of the M4M hookup listings on Craigslist included the winning adjective ‘straight-acting.’ I think a lot of us had grown tired of all that, and were eager to see one another as multidimensional beings—handsome, funny, literate, flaming. HIV-positive status was something to work with, not recoil from. And homosexuality could be homo again—as in being attracted to somebody who reflected and affirmed aspects of your own faggoty self.

We knew other fags around town to say hello to, to flirt with aimlessly, which seemed very San Francisco in the seventies. At Dore Alley, the most anything goes of the leather street fairs, we hung out with new acquaintances like Matthew and Ricky. Matthew, tall and curly haired, was always just arriving back from a survival weekend, still in some of the gear (waterproof trousers, muddy boots). I climbed onto his shoulders like girls used to at stadium concerts. Ricky’s shoulders were slighter, and exceptionally hirsute. He had a bayou accent, and smelled of patchouli. They both grinned constantly—a sharp turnaround after years of gays holding their lips tightly like they’d just received bad news.

Sunday was the beer bust at the Eagle. A ten-dollar plastic cup was refillable out of the kegs until the afternoon turned to evening. On our first visit, we handed cash to a man in a leather vest with frizzy ginger chest hair, then pulled back a hide curtain to enter into the armpit. The place was a miasma of male odor. It smelled of all the places where a man’s body folds. The admixture of booze, cigars and barbecue made a heady blend. I was astonished to enter a zone of such obscene stink.

The leathermen put up with us; perhaps it pushed them to perform. There was a lot of nipple-tweaking and slapping. The large patio was like the anarchic deck of a pirate ship. The troughs were an intense scene for the undinists. Being pee-shy next to a piss fiend was irksome, but then again I was on their terrain. Cock and ass fell out of chaps. The older men were at ease, a little gruff, nobody unfriendly, the bartenders hunks. The social circles kept to generations, so that we were segregated in proximity, but the grown-ups, even if they ignored us kids mostly, were pressed so close that the fur on their backs brushed us, and I was convinced we were ultimately united.

Daytime drinking was somniferous—like afternoon sex, lazy and sunkissed. I’d look at Famous, detect a slight unease on his countenance, and understood. This was it: the wild west, pioneer town, edge of the continent. There was a faint disenchantment to each day. The city was an overcast Oz. The denizens fought against the ennui with emphatic weirdness and genuine goodwill. But I thought I detected a desperation lurking beneath the way people pushed boundaries. Such were the downcast thoughts of the third or fourth beer.

We picked up a beautiful young man with blond curls in a sleeveless top, smiley but laconic. I decided we must be in his story—surely he was the lead. I struggled all the way down Harrison Street with him on the back of my bike. We toppled at least twice. He stood on our bed in small briefs, his furry thighs apart, looking like the Greatest American Hero, his hand on the ceiling, and we learned the distinctive scent of blond males. We saw him on a subsequent night picking up somebody else at the Cinch, a long, narrow cowboy saloon on Polk Street; generations had begun to overlap there, too. One man, wearing bulging jeans, mirrored shades and a blank expression, always assumed the same position against the wall between the toilets and the smoking deck, looking like a cardboard cutout of gay cruising. I finally got that he was posing. Whether or not he made contact was not the point; he got off on his stance and all its raunchy potential.

  

By then, Famous and I had moved into an apartment above El Rio, the most kindhearted bar in the city, another gray bar, I guess: the slogan was ‘…your dive.’ The top half of the Dutch door was kept flirtatiously open during business hours. A shuffleboard ran the length of the front half of the bar. In the capacious back garden: lemon trees, romantic pergola, giant Carmen Miranda, tropical plants, oysters on the barbecue every Friday evening. The bar staff was like an earthy Star Trek crew: baby dykes working toward a PhD; maricones; Tracy Chapman types; grungy F-to-Ms; Josh, the doughy straight boy. (Famous adored him to the point he’s referred to cute boys as Josh ever since.) El Rio was run by a handsome blonde woman who gave us carte blanche when we threw an occasional party there. We’d task Josh with moving speakers and chairs.

Mr. M, the landlord, opened El Rio back in 1978 as a Brazilian leather gay bar. He was a stoic giant. He’d moved to the woods north of the city, and it was easy to picture him there. When he first showed us the apartment, he resembled a big black bear trapped indoors; I began to have doubts about taking the place because it shrank in his massive presence. But Mr. M charged cheap rent in exchange for the compromise of living above the din. I did my best to ignore the bass reverberating through the floor and juddering across our bathwater, the cacophony of bottles dumped late at night, the stench of stale beer and bleach in the morning.

Sunday afternoons were the legendary salsa party. The whole patio throbbed with the dance, and if I wasn’t at the Eagle, I sat and watched from the fire escape. It was a bohemian status symbol to party on Mondays: there was a one-dollar well drinks special, and some DJs with impressive record collections hitched on so that it became the hippest night of the week. We ambled downstairs. I’d call out, If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em—as if it were a chore to join in. We skipped to the front of the line, but the gossiping, preening crowd at the bar would be five or six deep. I ordered gin so cheap I didn’t recognize the label, two at a time, double-fisting. To get into a bathroom was such an ordeal people adopted the strategy of ducking into the sketchy dive bar next door until eventually it gave in and became a gay bar, too. Our pals ran upstairs to our place to pee. The crowd was a mix, but the fags sensed one another through the blur of everyone else, so that we had our own bar within the bar, as I’m sure the baby dykes and heterosexual hipsters also did.

  

On Thursdays, like a wolf pack, we took over Aunt Charlie’s, a poky dive bar in the Tenderloin with a single covered-up window, blocked from the inside by a claw crane machine called Ye Olde Gift Shoppe. The geriatric drag queens delivered classic glamour: the Hot Boxxx Girls. But the new Thursday night party was something different. We were first invited to Tubesteak Connection by Spider, who manned the door. The DJ, Bus Station John, played ecstatic sets of arcane disco, hi-NRG, Italo and boogie. He was in his forties, and wore a thick mustache, muttonchops, flat cap. Bus Station John gave the appearance he might be prickly, but he called us child. He was there to bear witness, to testify, using rare tracks from what he called ‘the golden age of gay,’ the period between Stonewall and AIDS. The music was our time machine. We were conscious the discs he put on the turntable may have come from the collections of deceased gay men.

Each Tubesteak flyer design was pasted together with a glue stick and scissors. A guileless young jock from a skin flick might feature, but so could a caricature of an aging queen with ascot and blubbery lips. At the heart of the oeuvre were the divas: Joan Crawford, Candy Darling and, most often, Grace Jones. On the night of Tubesteak, all the bulbs in the place would be replaced with red ones. Sleazy movies and drag ball footage played on television screens covered with red film. Blowups from seventies porn mags of hairy, sweaty men were taped onto the mirrored walls and scattered on the bar. Their erections set expectations high. The place surged with faggy testosterone; it was as though all of that porn-in-public stripped us of our inhibitions. Bus Station John knew what he was doing.

Between eleven and midnight, the neon sign above the bar—spelling out Aunt Charlie’s—would be turned off, and eventually a strobe light shattered the tiny dance floor into pieces. The maximum number of randy young fags who could possibly fit squeezed their way in. Somehow, we still made the space to dance expressively. There was Matthew, back from another trek through the wilds, his arms spread wide as if proselytizing. There was Ricky, you could smell his patchouli. The carpet was going threadbare underfoot. Our enthusiasm threatened to make the records jump and skid. I have never heard this song before, I said to Famous repeatedly. Bus Station John would politely decline to divulge the name of the track. The mix was far from seamless: it halted and lurched. There were lots of vocals—so many sisterly, triumphant, empowered, positive messages. Piano lines rolled through the room like illuminated ships pulling into a city harbor.

Bus Station John told a local paper: ‘There’s not just a gap, but a chasm between generations that AIDS created. Their absence is felt by those of us who are old enough to feel it. But the younger ones are never going to know about them unless we tell them.’ We went out to be told. We went out to feel it. We went out to experience how it used to be, and Bus Station John was happy to be our gay liberation daddy. A mature writer for a gay newspaper reported that the seventies bathhouse vibe at Tubesteak Connection was ‘so authentic, people were actually cruising!’ For years, checking one another out meant scrutinizing—a potential rival, possibly diseased, the type of gay who gives gay a bad name. Here, we recognized instead—saw the others’ strength and sense of humor. The dancing was not posturing; it was celebration and foreplay—finally, like Aaron Shurin reminisced of his gay bar, we too knew ‘hard-ons in company.’ Some boy would pull me into a deep kiss after midnight. I was aware I did not look untouchable: anything remotely expensive-looking about me was on discount by that late hour. So I got used to the attention—boys handling my damaged goods. Once, when I had just arrived, already blind drunk, someone locked his mouth over mine, depriving me of air to the point where I thought I might pass out or vomit. On another occasion, an inebriated skateboarder—new to town—decided to come home with Famous and me, and then did throw up, behind a dumpster on the street. He shook his long burgundy hair, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and continued to our place to have a glass of water and give head.

My impression was that young fags were less fearful of catching HIV. We were safer-sex natives, and now better edified about what truly constituted risk. We understood that the word risk had become moralistically equated with doom—that life is risk, you don’t give up living. Some among us were positive already. I caught wind of others who were reckless or didn’t seem to care, as if HIV was too outdated to catch. But for whatever combination of reasons, San Francisco felt sexy again. San FranDisco. At another party, thrown in the basement of a club on Larkin Street, I pulled back a heavy curtain to reveal a dozen or so young men with their erections out, some standing to be serviced and others on their knees. They were hip, slender boys with sideburns and falling-open lambskin-lined jackets and unbuttoned Dickies. I thought I was jaded but the high quality of males in this dark room was surprising. We looked at the pals we’d arrived with. They shook their heads broadly. No way, one mouthed. All such huge dicks, the other whispered. Famous and I waded in, touching the tops of heads like mossy stones as we went. We pulled ourselves out of our pants and dropped to our knees. At some point, I was lifted out by a lanky lad with an Irish accent. I thought he wanted me to go down on him, but he was rescuing me.

In his hotel room, he said, I knew you were too good for that. Yet he’d been telling Famous and me about how back in London, where he lived, he hailed taxis with the explicit intent of servicing the drivers. In his heroic act of saving me from the orgy, he’d dragged me back to a very nineties style of casual hookup that was furtive, even hostile. He yanked me out from a scene he found distasteful in order to have unsensual, awkward, somehow socially acceptable, private sex. The young man was in the city on business. The hotel furniture had underlit ledges; at the press of a button, bland electronica piped in. The blinds were drawn. We could have been anywhere. I wished I’d stayed at that party. I didn’t want to be in this room, cut off from the city. San Francisco was a beautiful problem that wasn’t meant to be solved. I wanted to get back into it.

*  *  *

We’d go hiking in the sunburnt hills to the east. To dry out was how we put it, referring to the fog in our lungs, not the booze. I’d scout ahead to find a suburban gay bar we could visit on our way back. We’d find ourselves the only customers in a windowless barroom, gazing at the ghost-town dance floor. With nothing else to do, we read the listings in the bar rags about other gay places in the region.

We took a couple of younger fags up to the woods along the Russian River, following the tradition of daddy bears who’d made a gay resort of a town called Guerneville. In the parking lot of the Rainbow Cattle Co., a rustic saloon—very seventies porn—a lone man with dark stoned energy shared his potent joint with us, then lifted me up to crack my back. I guess he could tell I’d been the day’s driver. I wriggled away and we walked off, very paranoid, through the empty streets under the redwoods. Back at the motel, I went out for a cigarette on the porch, and a middle-aged man stepped out from his room next door. Magical, he said. My dream came true this weekend: I had my first threeway. I expressed my approval and didn’t tell him about mine. The forest around us buzzed, but with more than a hint of menace. Much later, I’d learn that the proprietor of the Rainbow Cattle Co., who also owned other bars in the area and in San Francisco, had been shot dead on his secluded property, along with one of his young employees.

One Valentine’s Day, Famous and I traveled to Oakland to see a Wolfgang Tillmans video installation at the California College of Arts and Crafts. When we entered the dark gallery space, the video wasn’t playing. We picked up a remote control and walked around pressing the Play button aimed in all directions. Eventually a mature woman, hunched, wearing a Christmas sweater, arrived in the lobby. Oh, she said. Raymond took us all to lunch. The video isn’t playing? It’s supposed to be. Oh, I can do that. I think I can. Do you know Raymond? He’s a very famous artist. Then she walked around the room pushing Play as we had, but with two different remote controls, one in each hand.

Finally, the video played. Lights (Body) depicts the rigging above the floor of a nightclub. A deep house remix whaps and hisses. The lights rotate and flash. Tillmans locates the viewer in the rafters, omnipotent over the communal experience below. The mechanical sequencing of the lights does not spoil the magic, but adds to it. The mirrored squares of a disco ball reflect the alternating colors. There is no evidence of the clubbers below, the sweaty throng of bodies, except the specks of dust that dance in an oscillating light beam. In the exhibition notes, Tillmans pointed out that dust is mostly human skin. Famous and I watched the video several times over. We’d come all that way. We thought about the dust, how we were inconsequential yet expansive, mortal yet transcendent—not so much in a spiritual way, just that we are constantly escaping ourselves. The flecks intermingled, having fleeting affairs. I believed the interactions to be homosexual, but this was dust—literally posthuman. The video made me consider the nightclub as a site of loss—losing inhibitions, your friends, your possessions, yourself. It’s a place to find something through abandonment.

On the way back, we stopped for a beer at the White Horse on the border of Oakland and Berkeley, which may be the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the country, if that’s not Café Lafitte in Exile in New Orleans, both opened sometime around 1933. A few wisecracking lesbians in baseball caps perched at the bar. The warm, lived-in vibe was at odds with the glass box dividing the center of the place. It had been constructed for smokers, and left standing after that was deemed a bad idea. The glass formed an interloping waiting room, housing a pool table and a mural of a carousel, with a large mirrored horse at its center. The band Erase Errata recorded an eighty-second song about it: ‘The White Horse is bucking. It smashes you with its hoof. It wants you to go for a night of gay dancing. So picture yourself at the White Horse. And picture yourself among the beautiful. And picture yourself alive.’ The lyrics may be ironic, but they assert something many queer people know well: an unshakable fondness for the only gay bar in town. It’s not about holding out for a good night, but rather a letting go—accepting the gay bar’s unconvincing promise of escape.

*  *  *

Famous and I entertained ourselves with the final stage in our infiltration of the city’s gay terrains: we would reclaim the Castro. Over the years, the neighborhood seemed determined to make itself unlikable. Its rows of self-improvement businesses—vitamin shops, gyms, waxing, pet grooming—were like acts of denial: of AIDS, of different states of ableness, of character and grit. I heard reports of racism at the door of the bar with the best pinball machines. It was the same old trick of forcing people of color to show multiple forms of identification. The situation was made doubly unsavory by word the owner was in the process of buying up the bar opposite, which catered to a black crowd.

But the Castro could also endear. At the Faerie Queene chocolate shop, a man who looked like Santa Claus shoveled fudge. Feathery pixies dangled in the window display. The grand movie theater was designed in the style of a Mexican cathedral, and an organist played ‘San Francisco (Open Your Golden Gate)’ on a mighty Wurlitzer which descended as the film began. Such elements, at once campy and earnest, and the area’s storied, problematic history made us want to see the district anew. It seemed wrong to consider ourselves too good for the enclave when what it stood for was much bigger than our two small bodies. Perhaps I’d never really given it a chance.

We weren’t sure where to start: the bars on 18th Street off Castro (the Mix, Midnight Sun, Men’s Room, Moby Dick) each seemed the same as the next. We settled on Moby Dick. We liked it in the afternoons, when sunlight streamed through the windows over the pinball machines. A massive fish tank offered phallic coral as a conversation starter. The bar’s whale logo, easily mistaken for a splashy cock and balls, was another talking point. Suspended from the ceiling in the center of the bar were back-to-back monitors playing a loop of music videos—anonymous Europop deemed appropriate for any gay bar anywhere. The videos involved trench coats and sports cars and trysts in hotel rooms lit in ice blue. Often, the singer would rotate toward the camera in a slick white Eero Aarnio ball chair.

We did not go to Moby Dick to cruise. The dimly lit bathroom did have mirrors over the troughs, but they were mounted too low for fruitful glancing. On a windowsill were small blank cards on which to write a message for another customer. This I learned when a man handed me one with a vehement proposal on it. Everyone else was looking at Famous, or Stuvey when he was along with us; both of them held a torch for the bartender, Stanley, with his sandy-colored mustache and hint of a paunch. Famous kept losing at pinball and would trot to the bar to ask Stanley to trade a dollar bill for quarters. Stanley’s friend Dane was an embarrassingly handsome brunette who worked at Harvey’s, two blocks down. We clocked that Dane would saunter over after his shift for interbar gossip. One night, he leaned in close to Famous between the pinball machines. Famous was draped in the gypsy scarf he bought at a cabinlike thrift store in Malibu Canyon. It was printed with roses and edged in gold fringe. We were convinced it once belonged to Joni Mitchell. Famous wore it over his boy clothes—jeans, hoodie—like it was a no-big-deal juxtaposition. Adoration came over Dane’s matinee idol face. He whispered through cupid’s bow lips, millimeters away from Famous: I keep seeing you. Everything you do is perfect.

  

Moby Dick was established in 1977 by Victor Swedosh using money inherited from his family’s panty hose fortune. The bar was wood and brass, the clientele collegiate types. Moby Dick was also briefly—for some four years from 1980—the primary disco label in San Francisco. This was headquartered at 573 Castro Street—where Harvey Milk once lived above his camera shop. The label’s output includes the thirteen-minute clone anthem ‘Cruisin’ the Streets’ by Boys Town Gang, a filthy late-night narrative that mentions the potential effects of ‘a big ol’ boy nine inches or more’: He ‘might make you sore,’ but ‘absolutely guaranteed it won’t be a bore.’ The song becomes audio pornography, climaxing in an orgiastic police raid. The label’s dance floor filler ‘Jump Shout,’ by Lisa, name-checks Los Angeles clubs Studio One and Probe, of which it makes a couplet with the action in the strobe. The next song on Lisa’s album was ‘Sex Dance.’

In David Diebold’s oral history of the Moby Dick label, one producer summed up the company culture: ‘Too many bosses, too many queens, a lot of jealousy.’ A former employee recalled, ‘I thought I was at home working with my own kind.…Let me tell you there is more jealousy, back-biting, dishonesty and corruption in our own ranks than any other group I’ve ever seen.’ More than one interviewee details the copious amounts of drugs. Party favors trickled in from the weekends at the Trocadero Transfer nightclub, the bender only leveling off midweek before heating up again. According to Time magazine, Moby Dick Records folded in 1984 when seven of its ten core employees died of AIDS.

  

I would try to get everyone to finish their drinks so that we could move on to someplace else. You’re always looking for something better, Stuvey’s latest boyfriend said. I thought that was the whole point. If nobody could be bothered, there was Orphan Andy’s, the diner with hunky waiters, open all night long. It was like a seventies time warp, an old C-print by William Eggleston. I couldn’t decide if it was a cozy sitcom diner or amphetamine den; it seemed to slip between, to transmogrify as if by some greasy alchemy.

If Famous and I had the energy to dance, we did so at a large, newish place called the Bar on Castro. Betty & Pansy’s Severe Queer Review reminds me that the site was formerly the Castro Station, ‘hangout for the most grizzled queens imaginable.’ Betty & Pansy continue: ‘The whole front was open, not unlike the “fourth wall” in a surrealistic scene of tired decadence. Grandpappies in leather chaps with sagging asses, pierced dicks and/or visible cock rings would face the sunny street from their darkened corners. They beckoned you closer with a nod of their head, since one hand was filled with a cocktail and the other a smoldering cigarette or cigar.’ Transformed into the Bar on Castro, it became the slick opposite. (Betty & Pansy: ‘The reeking mystery smell was replaced by the gentle waft of faint cologne.’)

I would have despised it at one point in time. And yet we always seemed to luck out and be there on hip-hop and R&B night, when one floor-filler played after another: ‘Magic Stick.’ ‘Milkshake.’ Thin black homos danced using a broad range of levels—arms upheld like malfunctioning windshield wipers, then crouched low like gliding toward a ski jump. ‘1, 2 Step.’ Girls pushed their palms out from their chest, doing the uh-oh. They threw their heads to the side as if being told a secret. ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot.’ Extensions and hoop earrings whipped across the floor. ‘Get Busy.’ On the benches, in front of pink padded vinyl walls, boys with sideburns that tapered to a fine point would pop and vogue.

One night there, a pale boy with brown hair and small bones danced nervously near me. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt unbuttoned twice like a waiter just off duty. His neat black trousers had a sheen that made them look inexpensive, yet managed to fit his taut thighs as if bespoke. I wanted to relieve him of his well-behaved clothes. It was obvious he was new in town. I’ve dropped out of seminary, he confided. Welcome to San Francisco, I replied. We attempted to discuss questioning one’s faith and migrating from the East Coast while dancing to ‘Naughty Girl’ and ‘Pon de Replay.’

Get this. I updated Famous by the bathrooms. He was looking pallid under the fluorescents. Back on the dance floor, Famous greeted the failed priest with his usual courtesy, though he’d begun to sway. I had plenty of questions for the priest. I tried to tease him with badinage that I was too gin-soaked to sustain. Wait, where’s your friend? the priest inquired several songs later. I looked around. Something like ‘It Wasn’t Me’ by Shaggy was playing. It was true that Famous was nowhere to be seen. The priest and I searched. We patrolled the edges of the dance floor, looking like two undercover ABC agents back in the day. We left the bar, speculating Famous may have gone for fresh air. We glanced this way and that. There he is, the priest pointed.

Famous was in a fetal position on the sidewalk, several shop fronts away. Jesus, I said. Are you ok? asked the priest. Famous rose weakly, then glared at me with as much resentment as he could muster. Where WERE you? he shot. Lost in the music, I protested. Why was he so far away? Famous explained that the bouncer had ordered him to move along because the sight of him was bad for business. He took a deep breath. Tonight…, he said, I briefly had the experience of being homeless on the streets, and I’ve seen the full gamut of humanity. Famous centered himself. Somebody spit on me, he reported. And somebody gave me ten dollars. He handed me the crumpled bill he’d been clutching in his fist.

  

It didn’t seem likely the priest would phone, but he did. By then, we were living in yet another place, a converted storefront halfway up a red-hued hill. We’d adopted the routine of seducing new boys by taking them to the summit. The grid of streets below hummed and crackled. The twinkling city was bounded by fog and the deep, cold bay, which was bedded with decomposing suicides. There is nothing like it, we all agreed. I recalled how when Famous first visited the city, we took psilocybin and sat atop another hill, overlooking the rooftops. He’d said, I’m sure I’ve seen this exact view in a dream. We kissed and believed in fate for five minutes, then he went pale and let me know he’d better go back to my place to barf. Now we were growing restless with the town. I was beginning to perceive the city as an island.

I looked over at the boy. He was so unexpected. He hadn’t come here to be an experimental artist like other new arrivals we took up the hill, who discussed Anne Carson or arcane disco producers, did cartwheels, picked us up and twirled us around. Some had lived in New York. They were insubordinate and avant-garde already. This boy, in the calm upheaval of his tentative apostasy, was wise and guileless at the same time, as if fallen to earth and landed in a weird city, but he must have chosen it with the notion that he too could belong.

Back at ours, Famous kissed the priest for the first time, like he’d hurt him if he didn’t go gently. We undressed him and, as I’d imagined, his well-behaved clothing looked out of place on our cracked concrete bedroom floor, with its clashing, overlapping rugs and Famous’s hippie scarves and my smelly t-shirts that our tortoiseshell cat embarrassingly drooled over as she nuzzled into the steaming pits. We took him into our bed fumblingly. I pulled down his boxer briefs. Even his erection seemed polite and amenable. I moved back up from it, and we all took turns going down—one on two, two on one, but always returning to one another’s faces, an act of reassurance, a reciprocal confession.

Oh, he murmured. He’d cum already. I recalled another new boy in town who had done the same thing—even quicker, shot in his underpants one minute in. This point of comparison made me realize I’d become that guy: the creep who stalks fresh meat. You see them at it in the bars, with a susceptible new twink each time. You want to warn the boy, but figure it’s a rite of passage for him to go through. Later, the boy will see that man with another initiate and think the same thing. Famous petted the priest’s chest reassuringly. You must have a lot built up, Famous said. I know Famous to be confident and egalitarian when he is naked in bed after a threeway. He thrives in that tender hour, when the boy can’t bring himself to get out of the bed and leave, so we prolong the hoarse-voiced conversation, while the possibility hovers of it all starting up again.