On October 6, 1989, a gray Friday, Mer had wrapped up her run in the Castro and was driving to a customer’s house with a delivery when she passed a protest at city hall. The pink-triangle logo of ACT UP caught her eye. There was a parking space, so she snatched it. She could spare an hour.
ACT UP, the raucous, radical activist group that had roared to life in New York two years before, had now spread to several major cities. Even within the gay community, some people found them too extreme, but Mer admired their chutzpah. She didn’t attend meetings, but she sometimes joined protests. ACT UP coupled the serious study of potential new treatments with disruptive actions. They stormed news programs, heckled bureaucrats, burned effigies, and doused themselves in fake blood. Demands included transparency in FDA approval processes, early access to experimental medications, inclusion of women and minorities in drug trials, and involvement of activists in designing those trials to ensure that patients’ needs would be prioritized over the interests of scientists and pharmaceutical companies.
In time, the combination of headline-grabbing drama and procedural innovation would produce tangible changes—including expanded access to unapproved drugs for terminally ill patients. The FDA usually took about nine years to approve new drugs—a death sentence for many people with AIDS. In the depths of the plague, what was there to lose?
Mer eased into the crowd and soon ran into friends. Some of the protesters looked very frail; a few were in wheelchairs. Mer got swept up in chanting. Demonstrators wearing skeleton masks unfurled a large black banner reading, BASEBALL = DEATH, a reaction to Mayor Art Agnos’s proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new ballpark for the Giants—funds the activists wanted spent on treatment. The rally wasn’t huge, maybe two hundred people, but there seemed to be as many police as protesters.
The cops weren’t being friendly.
When the group marched up Market toward the Castro, police hemmed them onto the sidewalk, rapping the shin of anyone who stepped into the street. The crowd thickened as they moved, joined by the after-work crowd and people like Mer who couldn’t resist a protest. At Castro Street, Mer split off and headed back to the car to finish her deliveries. It was after she left that the night went mad.
Mer heard about it the next day. ACT UP had held a die-in, with some forty protesters sprawling in the street while others painted crime-scene outlines around their bodies. Another fifty people sat in the intersection and refused to move until the cops dragged them into paddy wagons. Demonstrators blew whistles and taunted the police.
The tipping point was undefinable. Suddenly, police were laying into people with billy clubs and kicking them with heavy boots. Like any Friday evening, the Castro was thronged with folks heading home or out to dinner, but the cops weren’t differentiating between protesters and bystanders. “They hit me with their billy clubs when I went to help a woman,” one man told a reporter. “I was just on my way home from work. I wasn’t even part of the protest.” Police forced people to line up against walls and trapped patrons inside shops and restaurants. After dark, a phalanx of officers in riot regalia marched up and down Castro Street, threatening to arrest anyone out of doors. One cop was heard repeatedly yelling, “We declare martial law!”
The Bay Area Reporter ran a multipage spread under the all-caps headline, CASTRO HELD HOSTAGE. Over subsequent days, reports about police using homophobic slurs and excessive force flooded the Office of Citizen Complaints. Though ACT UP was far from universally popular, riot cops stomping down Castro Street seemed like something from a totalitarian nightmare.
“I have been in San Francisco since 1977, marched with Harvey Milk and have participated in many (if not all) public demonstrations since. The police haven’t reacted like this since the White Night Riots of spring 1979,” wrote Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, a founding mother of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. This harked back to the night of Dan White’s manslaughter verdict when police had marauded in the Castro. “Whoever orchestrated the crackdown on ACT UP Friday night lost more than they gained,” the Sister concluded. “There is nothing that will make a queen more radical than having to sit in a police van for two hours without her nail polish!”
The Castro in 1989 stood in stark contrast to the prior decade. Harvey Milk was a martyr from a distant yesterday; death was now an everyday occurrence in a community powered by the sobering resilience of the sick and grieving. Anita Bryant and her cohort were mosquitos compared with this Goliath epidemic. Yet bigotry was still so much a part of it—because anyone could see that the plague would have been taken seriously from the start if the early victims had been suburban housewives instead of gay men. And at the end of the day, overzealous cops still cracked queer heads.
Later that month, I was stretched out on my mom’s bed in our Fourteenth Avenue flat getting ready to watch game three of the World Series. A bookish, awkward eleven-year-old, I couldn’t have cared less about baseball. But the Giants were battling the Oakland A’s, our neighbors from across the bay, and even non-sportspeople like me had to see it.
My mom was hustling around the room, getting ready to leave for dance class. She had changed a lot since we’d seen Oprah Winfrey—rail skinny in tight jeans and a black turtleneck—strut across the TV screen pulling a Radio Flyer wagon heaped with jiggling pig fat. Oprah had lost sixty-seven pounds on the OPTIFAST diet. My mom signed up.
Between January and October of 1989, she didn’t chew so much as a sprig of parsley. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were shakes made from little packets of powder and eight ounces of water. Between “meals,” she sipped broth. It was one thing having a mother who didn’t cook, and another having a mother who didn’t eat. I watched her melt away, losing eighty-nine pounds in nine months.
Now she was reintroducing tiny portions of bland food. My mom adopted a new style for her thinner figure. She clamped on heavy silver jewelry, slung wide leather belts with giant flying saucer buckles low around her hips, and sawed the necks out of her shirts so her shoulders showed. She got an asymmetrical haircut like Sheila E.’s and lined her blue-green-amber eyes with kohl and purple eyeshadow. She sweated through dance classes five days a week.
Meanwhile, I still lived on microwaved meals and pizza delivery. For the baseball game, I had nuked a bag of popcorn and drowned it in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
My mom adjusted her leg warmers. She bent to kiss me good-bye just as jittery white lines began scrolling down the TV screen. The sound seemed to come from the south: a deep, resonant rumble that grew thunderous, like a stampede of buffalo in a western. The house began to dance.
“Get in the doorway!” my mom yelled.
I hurried over with her, my feet uncertain on shaking ground, and braced myself in the doorjamb like they taught us in earthquake drills in school. I don’t remember fear so much as the sensation of being wide awake. This was both impossible and inevitable: the Big One. The world was breaking open and it was insane and horrible and somehow wonderful—that something so surprising could happen on a banal Tuesday. I heard crashes from around the house: a large ceramic cat tumbling to her death, dishes leaping from cabinets, my model horses diving to the floor. The quake rocked itself out. An eerie silence followed.
We picked our way down the hallway to the front door. Outside, the high gray sky seemed to spin overhead. Then one distant siren multiplied into many. We rode out the first aftershock standing in the street, a rough jittering of the asphalt. The world blurring because my eyes couldn’t keep up. The electricity was out, and the phone lines were jammed. We sat on our stoop, my mom still in her leg warmers, until dusk stirred cold winds that chased us inside, where we lit candles and unrolled sleeping bags on the living room floor. The earth shuddered as aftershocks rolled through the night.
Measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale and lasting fifteen seconds, the Loma Prieta earthquake was the biggest to hit San Francisco since 1906. More than a mile of an Oakland freeway’s upper deck collapsed onto the lower deck, trapping motorists. Once power was restored, we watched endless aerial footage of the pancaked stretch of freeway, crunched cars visible through the cracks. There were dramatic rescues, interviews with stunned survivors, tears for those who didn’t make it. Sixty-three people died—forty-two of them on the collapsed freeway. Thousands were injured. Newscasters kept marveling about baseball having saved an untold number of lives since people were positioned in front of televisions at 5:04 instead of driving in rush-hour traffic.
Hardest hit in the City was the Marina, a clean, ritzy neighborhood, the natural habitat of the San Francisco yuppie. It was also the birthplace of Sticky Fingers Brownies back in 1976 when the Rainbow Lady had peddled magic brownies from a pouch over her shoulder on Fisherman’s Wharf. That area had been constructed on landfill—some of it rubble from the 1906 quake—which dissolved. My mom and I volunteered at a makeshift shelter in a Marina school, serving food to rich people suddenly rendered homeless. Nature didn’t care about wealth. The plague didn’t care either. Beauty, talent, affluence, kindness, taste, smarts, determination, love—none of these things kept people safe.
The quake of 1989 was the exclamation point at the end of a devastating decade. Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch was right to raise the specter of Bloody October—that awful month in 1978 when Jonestown and the assassinations of Milk and Moscone sent the City staggering into the violent spring of 1979. The seventies had died with gunshots and a riot; the 1980s died with a riot and an earthquake.
Even now, when I close my eyes and think of home, I envision San Francisco as seen from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Transamerica Pyramid towers above a modest, low-slung skyline blurred by a veil of mist. Our skyline doesn’t look like that anymore; it has morphed into an ice-cube tray of office buildings like any ordinary city. Our tallest building, the Salesforce Tower (what many locals refer to as the “sky dildo”) is the first bit of skyline you’ll see from almost anywhere in town as well as from the Marin Headlands and the Oakland Hills and probably outer space.
When I consider what my hometown has become—the homogeneity, the wealth, the cultural sterility—I think of AIDS. So much death all at once left a vacuum. There were vacancies ready to be filled by tech innovators and money makers, a fresh wave of newcomers who arrived during the first dot-com bubble of the 1990s. This new gold rush economy would burst in 2001 only to balloon again a few years later.
When I tell people I was born in the City, the typical response is a variation on a theme: “I never meet San Francisco natives!” or “You’re a unicorn!”
I’m first generation, nothing special; I know people whose families run five generations deep. But I still see techies as an invading force—here to colonize, pillage, vanquish. In a city limited in size by its geography (as Manhattan is, too), when new people arrive, others must leave. Change is always violent to what came before.
Today, I live near our old Fourteenth Avenue flat. Maseratis prowl our formerly low-key district. My immediate neighbors, a white heterosexual couple with two young daughters, own a late-model Audi, a new BMW, and two SUVs. My hometown becomes less recognizable every day. I’m irked by the money, the flashy cars, the e-scooters, the souped-up strollers. And yet, those strollers carry home-baked San Franciscans, native sons and daughters like me. They may grow up feeling inseparable from this new San Francisco as I felt inseparable from the city that made me. Someday they’ll be usurped, too. People like us seem to be part of every era here: locals who watch helplessly while their hometown is stolen by outsiders. Knowing that San Francisco thrives on cycles of mass migration and collapse doesn’t make the loss less keen.
My dad was in Willits when the earthquake hit, too far north to feel the tremors. Unable to reach us by phone, he watched the news cycles closely. Undoubtedly, he saw Kali in the rubble—the Hindu goddess of nature’s wrath. After all, he’d been expecting a massive earthquake since the seventies. I’m sure he was worried about me. We must have spoken as soon as the phone lines opened, though I don’t remember the conversation.
I don’t recall much of him from this period at all. I visited a few times a year, but those weekends blur in my mind. I remember a shifting series of houses in Willits, none of which were home to me. I remember Ruthanne’s overstuffed oatmeal couch, its unpleasant softness. And my dad’s record collection, always in the same window-paned cabinet that had housed it since I was a baby.
In health care, he’d found a calling and a career that would sustain him for decades. First as an orderly, then as an LVN, and finally as a home-care nurse, he put in long hours on his feet. He complained bitterly about my mom’s “easy drug money” and “unrealistic lifestyle”—how a poor workingman couldn’t compete.
Mostly, I remember his absence. An empty space shaped like him. I remember the ache of needing someone who didn’t seem to need me as much. He was my first heartbreak.
My mom doubled down on our relationship. We took mother-daughter road trips, had salon dates, and spent foggy afternoons at the old-timey arcade behind the Cliff House, where a nickel would send toy racehorses galloping around a track or make a miniature lion tamer crack his whip.
Late in 1989, Mer received a small inheritance from her mother’s death three years before. Together, we discussed what to do with the money while driving around between deliveries. I could get braces to fix a widening gap between my front teeth. We could upgrade our beater car. Or we could take an extended trip to Mexico, just the two of us.
Of the three options, we settled on the least practical one—also the most whimsical, magical, and adventurous. My mom met individually with each of my sixth-grade teachers and convinced them to assign my schoolwork in advance so I could do it on the beach.
For six weeks, we lived in a small cabana in Zihuantanejo, Mexico, upstairs from a beach with gentle waves. We rode horses, bounced on banana boats, worked on our tans, and bought each other dozens of inexpensive tchotchkes for Christmas, which we wrapped sitting back-to-back on the Mexico version of the barge: la barcaza. We took water taxis to Ixtapa and crashed fancy resort pools, sipping virgin piña coladas with our pinkies in the air.
Months after our Mexico trip, my mom came through on a promise she’d made when I was six years old. Ever since we’d sold Acorn, I’d harbored a fantasy of having my own horse. I’d kept up with weekly riding lessons in Golden Gate Park and periodically brought up the subject, wheedling, swearing that I was totally responsible enough. Finally, my mom agreed that if she sold a significant painting in an upcoming show we’d get a horse with the money.
“Of course,” she says now. “I didn’t expect it to happen right away.” A week later to the day, a self-portrait sold from the gallery for five thousand dollars.
We bought Tango, a scrappy pinto mare with a marking shaped like a goose on her face, and boarded her at a ramshackle barn on the outskirts of the City. Trails snaked to a wind-whipped stretch of beach. Every day after school, my mom drove me half an hour to the barn and returned for me at dusk. My mare, who was a little high-strung, would tremble as soon as her hooves touched the beach. I’d contain her until we got to the water’s edge where the sand was packed hard and turn her loose. We’d thunder through the surf at a dead gallop, Tango’s mane whipping my arms, icy Pacific water splashing my thighs. I fell off countless times, sometimes trudging all the way back to the barn from the beach. But it didn’t matter; I’d found my place in the world.
Tango’s board, feed, vitamins, vet bills, farrier bills, and tack cost hundreds of dollars a month. After a while, I started competing. Then came professional trainers and expensive horse shows and specialized gear. “Well,” my mom sometimes quipped. “It’s cheaper than a lifetime of therapy.” Of course, I owed the horse to drug money. That and a mother who didn’t trivialize her kid’s dreams.
We weren’t rich, at least not usually. When money was tight—what my mom called “scrapey”—she stressed and schemed and tossed hexagrams and made phone calls until something gave way. When money flowed, we spent it. One Christmas, we went to Civic Center and handed out one hundred five-dollar bills to homeless people.
There was no savings account, no medical insurance, no college fund; we had no credit cards and no assets. We never bought a house, a new car, designer clothes, or the latest technology. I never did get those braces. But when I needed a horse, I got a horse.
Rummaging through a box of my mom’s photos, we find her old address book from this period. She flips through it, muttering, “Dead . . . dead . . . almost certainly dead . . . dead . . .” She pauses. “Hmm . . . What happened to Mark? I think he died, but we can try looking on Facebook.” She shakes her head, scans the next page, then stops, her brow furrowing. “Aww . . . oh boy . . .” Her eyes, huge and watery, find mine. “Remember Phillip? My good friend?”
I do. After we moved back to San Francisco in 1987, Phillip Gaston became my mom’s handsome go-to date for comedy clubs or nights at the opera. Tall and sturdy, with wavy blond hair and dimples and a smile that consumed his whole face, Phillip looked like an actor from a soap opera. He favored classy blazers and polished leather shoes. He’d been HIV positive for years but remained healthy. I remember when that changed. Bouts of clumsiness and disorientation led to a diagnosis of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. Extremely rare prior to AIDS, PML attacked the myelin coating that protected the brain’s nerve fibers, causing dementia and loss of motor functions almost like a series of strokes. Phillip died about six weeks after his diagnosis. He didn’t waste away or suffer KS lesions. He died beautiful, senile, unable to walk or form words. It hit my mom hard.
“I can’t do this right now,” she says. “Too depressing.”
She puts the address book back in the box.
I remember the dismay I felt as a child at seeing loving couples who’d been together in my earliest memories split in half. Barry lost Gino, his musical collaborator and life partner. Sian lost his beautiful Abel and never got over it. Decades later, he still goes into seclusion for weeks around the anniversary of Abel’s death.
My mom often describes the “phenomenon of the last man standing.” How out of a big group of close friends, there would be one guy left alive to carry all the memories, all the guilt.
“It’s just, you know, difficult,” says Lou Briasco, a longtime brownie customer. “Because I didn’t expect to be here now.” For thirty-four years, he ran the same tiny luggage shop on Market Street that he and a friend (deceased) opened in 1982. Lou was diagnosed HIV positive in the mid-1980s and thought for sure he was a goner. But he survived. And kept surviving while the people in his social circle died. Lou, who lived with his dog in a small apartment above the shop, kept the business going mostly to stay busy. Lou’s lease came up in 2016; faced with the inevitable rent hike, he finally decided to close. He says he’s lost more than fifty friends to AIDS.
That number seems to be common among the survivors I know: fifty loved ones dead.
Problems arose that you might not imagine. Like the superabundance of stuff: antiques and knickknacks passing from friend to lover to friend, collections growing exponentially as more people died. The last man standing would find himself buried beneath an avalanche of keepsakes.
When Wayne Whelan arrived in San Francisco in 1986, he was amazed at the quality furniture and antiques abandoned in dumpsters and on street corners. In need of cash, he began collecting and reselling found treasures at flea markets. Among his new neighbors was Val DuVal, an occasional drag performer who ran a chaotic custom dress shop out of his cluttered home. Wayne rented a window in Val’s space to sell some of his antiques, and the two became close. When Val’s health gave out, Wayne helped nurse him through his painful last weeks and ended up inheriting the shop—which he renamed Therapy. For years, Wayne gathered and sold the beautiful trinkets and stylish furniture left behind by the dead, eventually moving into a larger space on Valencia Street. Some objects passed through Therapy multiple times when customers who’d bought them also succumbed to the plague. At estate sales, Wayne would find himself staring at the peculiar mementos kept at bedsides near the end. Why this button or this teacup? he’d wonder. What was important about this? A day came when Wayne couldn’t take it anymore. His store was full of ghosts, everything saturated in heartbreak. He gave up on antiques and switched to new merchandise.
Dan Clowry left the Village Deli after a change of ownership. When a good friend fell ill, Dan became his caretaker. The disease kept coming for more friends until Dan was running himself ragged trying to help them all and still support himself. Finally, he figured, What the hell, and went back to school to become a nurse. He helped launch the AIDS unit at Mount Zion hospital, which soon shifted to UCSF.
Back in the warehouse days, Dan and Kissie would sell two gross of Sticky Fingers brownies while Mer did her Castro run. Now Dan kept a reserve of brownies in his freezer to sneak into the AIDS ward for patients who were wasting. “They came up with a medication that was supposed to stimulate appetite,” he recalls. “But because it was new, they were being very cautious with the dosing. And I was like, ‘This doesn’t do anything, just give them pot.’” He and some other nurses also let patients smoke weed out the windows of their hospital rooms. “We were lucky that we had windows that opened,” Dan says. “We got some complaints now and then, but I didn’t care.”
I ask if the doctors on the ward knew about this. He feels sure they did, though it was something no one spoke about. “What was [pot] going to do,” Dan says, “kill them?”
January 25, 1990, at around 1 a.m., ten narcs with sledgehammers and a search warrant burst into Dennis Peron’s flat on Seventeenth Street. The cops ordered Dennis and his lover of more than ten years, Jonathan West, to lie on the kitchen floor while they ransacked the house for weed. Jonathan was emaciated and covered in KS lesions, so the cops made a show of putting on latex gloves before touching him. “Do you know what AIDS means?” one officer said. “Asshole in deep shit.” Upon noticing a framed photograph of Peron with Harvey Milk, an older cop launched into a rant about how much he’d hated “that fag” back then.
At first, SFPD told reporters they’d found between two and three pounds of marijuana in Dennis’s flat but later admitted that it was only four ounces of bud—no scales or packing equipment. Nevertheless, they booked Peron for possession with intent to sell and carted him to jail, leaving Jonathan alone in the flat.
A few hours later, narcs raided 663-A Castro Street, where Dennis’s associate, Steve Heselton, was living with another friend. That search was more fertile, turning up “40 pounds of marijuana, two pounds of hashish, a pound of ‘magic mushrooms,’ and about $6,000 in cash,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This was, of course, Dennis’s stash, but he’d learned long ago that he was too hot a target to risk keeping his product at home.
Dennis spent the night in jail worrying about Jonathan. When he finally slept, he dreamed about a large room full of sick people, some in wheelchairs. He saw men and women, young and old, all races, sitting together, laughing, and sharing cannabis. Dennis awoke convinced that he’d had a vision of the future. He would create a public medical-marijuana dispensary where people like Jonathan could gather with friends to smoke pot, unashamed of their infirmities.
When Dennis’s case came to trial ten months later, Jonathan testified. By then, he weighed about ninety pounds and could barely walk to the witness stand. In a hoarse whisper, Jonathan insisted that the weed had been his, and that Dennis, as his caretaker, had kept it and rolled joints for him.
The judge let Peron off with one year of probation, citing a lack of evidence that the four ounces of marijuana were for sale. According to Dennis, she also scolded the arresting officers, telling them she never wanted to see another case like that again.
Two weeks later, Jonathan died. He was twenty-nine.
This was the year that AIDS became the leading cause of death in the United States for men aged twenty-five to forty-four.
Dennis vowed to spend the rest of his life fighting to legalize marijuana for “all the other suffering Jonathans of the world.”
“Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” This bold statement came from the DEA’s own chief administrative law judge, Francis L. Young, in September 1988. “By any measure of rational analysis, marijuana can be safely used within supervised routine medical care.”
This ended a sixteen-year court battle to remove marijuana from Schedule 1 classification. After considering extensive testimony from doctors, patients, law enforcement, and policy wonks, Judge Young wrote an unequivocal sixty-nine-page decision concluding that marijuana must be moved to Schedule 2 at the federal level.
It was a powerful moment in weed history. Reclassification would enable doctors to prescribe marijuana when medically appropriate. American researchers could finally explore its potential (most studies related to cannabis as treatment were happening in Israel, Brazil, and elsewhere). Everything seemed poised to change.
But an administrative law judge can only make recommendations about federal policy; they can’t force the government’s hand. And this wasn’t what the new Bush administration wanted to hear from the DEA’s leading judge. Bush and his cronies ignored the decision, clung stubbornly to Schedule 1 classification, and continued the tradition of stonewalling medical marijuana.
That same year, the first cannabinoid receptor was identified in the brain of a rat, followed in 1992 by the major discovery of the endocannabinoid system—a complex network of receptors and transmitters found throughout the animal kingdom; even sponges have them.
In humans, the endocannabinoid system helps regulate immune activity, pain response, appetite, memory formation, and other functions. Receptors have since been found in the kidneys, lungs, liver, white blood cells, gut, spleen, and central and peripheral nervous systems. To be clear, this system functions whether or not we use cannabis. It just so happens that some chemical compounds in marijuana fit our native receptors like a key in a lock.
Research into the possibilities this presents is still in its infancy. In the United States, it’s severely hampered by the federal government’s resistance to viewing marijuana as anything other than a party drug. We’re left with a plant that appears ideally suited to interacting with the human body and brain—and a government that discourages unlocking its medicinal potential.
Even so, the medical-marijuana movement gained steam all over the country. Not only in San Francisco, and not only among gays and hippies. In 1990, Harvard University researchers surveyed a third of the country’s oncologists. Of the 1,035 who responded, 48 percent said they would prescribe marijuana if it was legal. Most of those also admitted that they’d already recommended it as an antiemetic.
A hemophiliac from Florida named Kenny Jenks had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion and unknowingly infected his young wife, Barbara. The Jenkses were both wasting badly and suffering intolerable nausea. Someone in their AIDS support group suggested pot. The couple was straitlaced, but they were starving to death. After smoking the first joint, they found they could eat a little.
The Jenkses soon got busted for growing two pot plants in their yard. While awaiting trial, they heard about the Compassionate IND program—the one created to provide Robert Randall with marijuana for his glaucoma. It was almost impossible to get certified. (Only one AIDS patient had been cleared so far, and he’d died ten days later.) But the Jenkses were perfect candidates: conservative, white, heterosexual, monogamous. They took their plight to the media. In 1991, the government agreed to supply them with pot.
The win made headlines. The government was immediately flooded with applications from AIDS patients clamoring for legal access to cannabis.
Bush’s response was to abruptly shut the Compassionate IND program down. The handful of people already cleared would continue to receive their government weed, but all pending applications would be cancelled without review.
Back in San Francisco, Dennis Peron was channeling his grief into action. He’d been an activist for decades, but Jonathan’s death stoked the flame. “It’s not just about marijuana,” he became fond of saying. “It’s about America. It’s about how we treat each other as people.”
In 1991, Dennis got Proposition P on the ballot, a resolution declaring that the city of San Francisco supported medical marijuana. It passed with 79 percent of the vote.
Prop. P was toothless; it had no force of law. But it let city officials know how voters felt. Encouraged, Dennis launched the first San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club in a flat on Sanchez Street in the Castro. This endeavor harked back to the Big Top Marijuana Supermarket of the 1970s—but with crucial differences: the new club was staffed by people with AIDS and catered to the needs of the sick; and unlike Dennis’s previous ventures, this one operated in the open.
Dennis fully expected to get arrested and make his case in court. But at the apex of the AIDS crisis, city officials were ready to let it slide. By that point, San Francisco had the highest per capita concentration of HIV cases in the western world. On average, thirty-one people were dying of AIDS-related conditions every week in the City. Even Republican Mayor Frank Jordan, a former police chief, signed a resolution ordering the SFPD and the DA to make medical marijuana their lowest priority. Dragging dying people to jail didn’t look good.
Peron soon relocated to a more prominent space on Church and Fourteenth streets where he could serve a larger population. As historian Martin A. Lee points out, small underground cannabis clubs sprang up around the country as word spread: New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Little Rock, Key West, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. But none of these other facilities operated openly—and with the acquiescence of city government—like the one in San Francisco.
Around this time, Cleve Jones’s health took a nosedive. He’d been touring frenetically with the quilt, hiding his worsening symptoms and making excuses for canceled appearances. When he could no longer pretend, his family helped him buy a cabin on the Russian River. His T-cell count dropped to a perilous 200 and then tanked to 23 (a healthy range being 500 to 1,600). When his chronic pneumonia developed into the deadly Pneumocystis carinii variety in 1994, Cleve figured he was dying.
In a last-ditch effort, his doctor, Marcus Conant, got him into an experimental drug trial through the “expanded access” program ACT UP had wrestled into being. Cleve’s regimen combined AZT with two other antiretroviral drugs, ddC and 3TC, plus minuscule amounts of Bactrim; he was horribly allergic to the latter, but he needed it to fight pneumocystis. He vomited relentlessly on this combination, eventually dragging pillows into the bathroom so he could sleep next to the toilet. The pills wouldn’t stay in his stomach.
An old friend named Shep, whose lover of many years had recently died, came up from the City to nurse him. “Poor Sheppy was so brave,” Cleve says, thinking back. “He knew I was giving up, so he came.” Shep knew all sorts of tricks from nursing his partner. To get a little nourishment into his patient, he’d place a tiny cube of chicken, a single broccoli floret, and one ravioli on an oversized plate. “You only have to eat this much,” he’d say.
The vomiting persisted. Late one night, Shep brought a lit joint into the bathroom. Cleve, who could barely breathe as it was, waved the joint away. But Shep talked him into a small toke. Cleve coughed painfully, but he stopped retching. With a second careful hit, the nausea receded. After the third puff, Cleve leaned back against the bathtub, and sighed, “Damn, dude, I’m hungry.”
He couldn’t smoke much because of the pneumonia, but by alternating tiny hits of pot with small portions of edibles, Cleve was able to tolerate the meds, which began to work. A couple of weeks later, he awoke in the early morning to a gentle mist wending between the redwoods surrounding his cabin. He heard birds twittering and felt his stomach growl. He had an erection for the first time in many months.
He was going to live.
Poor Brownie Mary couldn’t stay out of jail.
In July 1992, the sixty-nine-year-old got busted yet again for baking with pot—this time at a friend’s house in Sonoma County. Instead of taking a plea deal like before, she decided to fight. “If the narcs think I’m gonna stop baking cookies for my kids with AIDS,” she famously said at a rally, “they can go fuck themselves in Macy’s window.”
The old lady baking illegal cookies for the dying made great news copy. With her thirteen years of volunteerism and her grandmotherly cheekiness, she became a press darling. Mary had gotten coverage in California before, but this time her story went international. The London Times ran a piece. Dr. Donald Abrams saw the bust covered on TV in a hotel room in Amsterdam. Mary appeared on The Maury Povich Show and Good Morning America.
When she testified at a hearing on the implementation of Prop. P at city hall in August, Mary received a standing ovation. Supervisor Terence Hallinan called her the “Florence Nightingale of the medical-marijuana movement” and ushered in a resolution proclaiming August 25 Brownie Mary Day in San Francisco.
In November, Sonoma County Municipal Judge Knoel Owen made the unorthodox ruling that Mary could use medical necessity as a defense if she submitted the names and conditions of the patients she supplied with dosed baked goods.
The DA threw in the towel. After dropping the charges, he said, “If her attorneys feel that medical necessity should be a defense to charges of violating the marijuana laws of the state, then they should take their case to the state legislature.”
And that’s what they did.
Four years later, Proposition 215, coauthored by Dennis Peron, passed a statewide vote in California.
Two months before the vote, the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement had raided the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club, which had relocated to a converted warehouse on Market Street that Dennis liked to call his “five-story felony.” The two-year sting had involved fake patients, surveillance, and forged doctors’ notes. It culminated with a showy raid by one hundred black-clad state agents using a battering ram. They ransacked the club, demolishing art and furnishings, and wreaking chaos. The club was forced to close, but in November 1996, the proposition won anyway.
The Compassionate Use Act, as it was called, had received support from some surprising corners. Financiers included multibillionaire philanthropist George Soros and CEOs of the Men’s Wearhouse clothing chain and the Progressive Corporation. A groundswell of activism was also rising from within communities of color harmed by the drug war. Iconic California rappers like Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Cypress Hill put smoking chronic back on trend—more fashionable than it had been since the sixties. There were rallies, smoke-ins, and benefit concerts. Undoubtedly, some of the 56 percent of Californians who voted for Prop. 215 cared more about dismantling unjust drug war policies or legalizing weed altogether than about medicinal use. But by centering the debate around compassion for the gravely ill, the medical-marijuana movement tipped the scales.
Because cannabis still was—and still is at the time of this writing—a Schedule 1 narcotic, Prop. 215 had to be worded delicately so as not to directly contradict federal marijuana laws. Police officers could still arrest everyone, including terminally ill patients, for any and all marijuana offenses. But the new legislation created a viable defense in court provided that the accused could prove they were using marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation. Doctors, meanwhile, couldn’t legally prescribe cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug, but they could recommend it as a matter of free speech.
There were many battles ahead. In response to Prop. 215, the director of the Clinton administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy threatened to bar doctors from participating in Medicare and Medicaid and revoke their prescription licenses if they recommended cannabis. A group of physicians and patients lead by AIDS doctor Marcus Conant waged a six-year battle for their First Amendment right to discuss marijuana as a treatment option—eventually winning before the Supreme Court. California cannabis clubs, even when left alone by city and state cops, were still subject to federal DEA raids. The legal headaches went on and on. But Prop. 215 was revolutionary; it was the first medical-marijuana legislation in the United States built to stand up in state criminal court.
On the foggy morning of January 15, 1997, a fifty-one-year-old Dennis hosted a tearful reopening ceremony outside the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club at 1444 Market Street—which, at the request of city hall, would become a nonprofit. As the ceremonial ribbon was snipped, Dennis said, “America is never going to be the same!”
He was right. As of 2019, forty-six states have enacted laws supporting medical marijuana; eleven states (plus D.C.) permit adult recreational use. The trend of state-authorized cannabis use grows with every voting cycle.
All of this is in defiance of federal law. But the wall is beginning to crack. A group of determined parents with epileptic children, led by a neuroscientist named Catherine Jacobson, got the FDA to approve a nonpsychoactive CBD-based drug called Epidiolex for two rare forms of epilepsy in June 2018. Three months later, the DEA reclassified Epidiolex under Schedule 5. The rescheduling pertains to this specific drug—no other CBD extracts and nothing containing THC—but it’s the first plant-based cannabis drug that doctors can legally prescribe in the United States.
Meanwhile, a quasilegal CBD market booms in states that allow it—from all manner of infused edibles and drinkables to oils, lotions, suppositories, and even supplements for pets. According to the New York Times, CVS and Walgreens have both announced plans to carry CBD merchandise in certain areas. A 2017 study documented that 69 percent of the products tested contained either more or less CBD than advertised. Marijuana is sometimes portrayed as a miracle panacea able to prevent—even cure—a dizzying array of illnesses. Although recent revelations about the endocannabinoid system suggest terrific potential, the science is still young and impeded by federal prohibition. Through its unwillingness to reasonably regulate cannabis, the federal government may be exposing consumers to irresponsible operators.
In today’s San Francisco, where recreational marijuana is permitted, one sometimes sees techies casually vaping cannabis on lunch breaks. If only they knew the wild and heavy history behind that right. The AIDS crisis is painful to conjure, painful to relive. Easier to let the past fade, to toke up and forget. But we would not have legal weed today without yesterday’s losses.
Since the first reported deaths in 1981, people had been waiting. Waiting for the cure, the vaccine, the ray of hope. Waiting for the government machine to develop a sense of urgency.
In late 1995 and early 1996, the first protease inhibitors reached the market. This new class of drugs blocked an enzyme necessary for the virus to mature and replicate, arresting its progress in the body. Taken in combination with other medications—what became known as the “cocktail”—protease inhibitors began to extend lives. People rose from their deathbeds, a phenomenon some doctors described as the “Lazarus effect.” 1996 was the first year since the epidemic began that the CDC reported fewer AIDS-related deaths than the year before. The tide turned.
Abel, Sian’s lover, had died nine months before the first protease inhibitor was released—while the new class of drugs was navigating the layers of FDA testing and bureaucracy. Gino, Barry’s partner, died twelve months too soon.
I’m often struck by the waste of potential. The unpainted paintings, the uncomposed music, the undesigned buildings, the unwritten books. “It’s very frustrating because here I am at the pinnacle of my career,” Randy Shilts told 60 Minutes a few months before his death in 1994. He’d written And the Band Played On, a groundbreaking chronicle of the epidemic’s early years. “I could do literally anything I wanted in the world of journalism, and you’re left with the strange feeling that your life is somehow finished without being completed.”
Protease inhibitors didn’t stop the dying in the United States—and certainly not abroad; by late 1996, an estimated 23 million people were living with HIV worldwide. But for those who could obtain the new drugs, survival became one possible outcome. On August 13, 1998, the Bay Area Reporter carried a stunning headline in gigantic red print: NO OBITS. It was the first week in seventeen years that San Francisco’s major gay paper hadn’t received a single obituary to run.
Sometime during the early 1990s, Dennis Peron threw a party. My mom doesn’t recall if it was for Christmas or a fundraiser or a birthday, or if it happened at the first or second San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. The room was crowded and fogged with skunky smoke. Out of the haze hobbled a pudgy, curly-haired woman in owlish glasses.
“You must be Brownie Mary,” my mom said. “I’m Mer, also known as the Brownie Lady.”
“Hey, you’re the one who never got busted!”
“And you’re the one who always did.”
They had both, of course, been hearing about each other for years. It was something of a joke among mutual friends that they were never seen in the same room at the same time, like Superman and Clark Kent.
The industry veterans shared a hug and a laugh before the crowd pulled them in different directions.
Someone posts a lovely tribute to Brownie Mary in a nostalgic Facebook group. A long comment thread follows. People share memories of Mary, her kindness, her delicious ganja treats.
I can’t help but notice that a few of the comments are actually about Sticky Fingers. One woman writes, “I had PLENTY of her brownies back in the day. She had that storefront in the Mission, and every Friday we would gather a group, and everyone would grab a dozen. The first and best edibles ever, and they were pretty affordable as I recall too, I think 20 or 25 a dozen!! The bags used to have cute sayings on them too, I may have one in storage. RIP Mary.”
I decide to respond only because her memory is so specific (and my mom is not dead). “You’re thinking of my family’s business,” I write. “Sticky Fingers Brownies.”
The commenter seems dubious. “Ok,” she writes, “I know how I can tell for sure. What was the last message printed on the paper bags when they closed?”
That’s easy: Give it up and you get it all.
Next thing I know, she’s messaging me to ask for the recipe. Sure, she can buy all kinds of cannabis products at legal dispensaries now. But as she puts it, “The good old days of edibles is changed.”
The Brownie Mary/Brownie Lady confusion pops up regularly, though I almost never say anything. They were part of the same zeitgeist. And if my mom slipped through the cracks of history, that’s just fine.
It means she got away with it.
Late one chilly autumn night in 1998, Meridy realized that she was free to move on.
At fifty-one years old, she was living alone in San Francisco, involved in an unsatisfying relationship, and wrestling with a cocaine habit that had gotten out of hand. She had been diagnosed with diabetes and was suffering peripheral neuropathy in her feet—especially painful on cold nights like this one. Her lifestyle was catching up.
She was still selling weed to make ends meet, but with cannabis clubs proliferating, the marijuana underground was not as lucrative—not as necessary—as it used to be. The City seemed full of ghosts, so many friends gone, so many memories. Her child had grown up; I was turning twenty, living with roommates; I had a job and friends, and was chasing my own life.
Mer felt superfluous in more ways than one.
She pictured a warm beach in Mexico. Maybe, she thought, it’s time to get out of the biz . . . Like most of her big decisions, this one came down to three I Ching coins rocking and rolling in the palm of her hand.
Mer pulled together $900 and bought a ticket to Puerto Vallarta. She found a small apartment walking distance from a gay beach and set up an easel under a palapa. She drew colorful oil pastels of men on the beach and sold them for twenty dollars a pop. Between her gift for gab and hustle, the fine portraits she could turn out while her subjects sunbathed, and a favorable exchange rate, she rustled up enough business to get by. Within a year, she’d found representation and a ritzy gallery to carry her larger paintings, which sold well enough to expats and tourists to support a modest lifestyle. She would stay there for ten years. And she always knew she could unfold her portable easel under a palapa if things got “scrapey.”
After twenty-two years in the weed business, Mer took a classic page from the dealer playbook and played it clean: escape to a tropical paradise.
She never dealt weed again.