Page 126 - Some Dance to Remember

96 Jack Fritscher

and Castro with nine roommates. They called their Victorian flat the
Hula Palace, so dedicated was its decor to thirties’ and forties’ Deco.
From windows draped with flowered fabric, they surveyed the growing
phenomenon of the Castro. Once a month, they opened their doors: a
poet reading in one room; a photographer exhibiting in another; a dancer
pirouetting among the palms in an archway while a scene from a two-
character play was read. Sylvester, young, black, and not yet a star, sang
for the elite. The infamous performing group, the Cockettes, sat about on
white-wicker chairs dreaming up their stage names: Pristine Condition,
Filthy Ritz, and Goldie Glitters. Mink Stole and the two-ton actperson,
Divine, both East Coast crossovers from filmmaker John Waters’ Balti-
more entourage often sat in state, holding the A-Group in hilarious thrall.
In 1973, the Hula Palace combined with two other flats full of neigh-
bors to throw a tasteful, gargantuan garage sale. Their corner, that Sun-
day, was so spontaneously mobbed, Sylvester couldn’t keep himself from
singing for pure joy in the middle of the intersection with his two backup
singers, the Weather Girls. The Hula Palace’s extempore garage sale blos-
somed exactly one year later into the first Castro Street Fair.
Everybody was an excited, uncloseted refugee, come from somewhere
under the rainbow to Oz aspiring to accomplish something openly gay
and grand. Whitman’s all-gender barbaric Yawp was howled in the streets
round the clock. The Castro Cafe changed from greasy spoon to a sort of
Algonquin Club for writers. Claude Duvall established the Noh Oratorio
Society in his communal apartment. Harvey Milk, clerking his own cam-
era shop, developed, besides film, a neighborly interest in politics which
early earned him the sobriquet, “The Mayor of Castro Street.” Liberation,
as a pop culture movement, was more than sex; it was tea and art, rights
and outrage, parties and bars, costume and creativity, the fun and celebra-
tion of inventing one’s new self, free, within the group identity.
The good times rolled. Word was out. Cross-country long-distance
lines lit up like the telephone scene in Bye Bye Birdie. San Francisco
called like Bali Hai. The crowds on the sidewalks doubled. A man was
a tourist one summer and a resident by the next. Robert Kirk, walking
a block to work from the Hula Palace to the Midnight Sun, purposely,
one afternoon, spoke to everyone he knew, stopped and talked, not just
waving a passing hello. Ninety minutes and 118 men later, he arrived at
the Sun where everyone knew everyone else. The parade of immigrants
was wonderful, and the melting pot was hot, but the population explosion
meant there were no degrees of separation. Everyone knew everything
about everybody. The next day, Robert Kirk, overwhelmed by all the sex

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