Page 129 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 99

in woven baskets! Up with the Levolor blinds! Fairy dusting, buying a
dump and making it pretty, changed the look of the Castro. The Chronicle
and Examiner took notice. Remodeling the bourgeois Victorians created
homes and laid-back jobs for gay entrepreneurs otherwise unemployed
back in those tie-dyed, Day-Glo days when, as Solly said, “Every faggot
on Castro claims he’s a carpenter.”
The early gay renaissance saved the classic Castro Theatre from demo-
lition to make way for condos at the crossroads of Market and Castro.
At the eleventh hour, the Castro Theatre, long since a second-run grind
house, was restored to its movie-palace glory and declared a historic
landmark, running repertory cinema, and featuring between the nightly
double features a live organ recital that always ended with Jeanette Mac-
Donald’s “San Francisco” to remind the audience that they had arrived
where they had always wanted to be: in a City risen from rubble while a
dizzy soprano warbled.
The Castro crowds grew. Hippies worked the street shaking donation
boxes for the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. An artist with colored chalk
drew huge Sistine Chapel heroic figures of muscular naked men on the
sidewalk; his transitory street artistry was erased by thousands of pairs of
cowboy boots, combat boots, hiking boots, high-heeled sneakers, and toe
shoes. Male belly dancers took up Sunday afternoon residence in front
of the Hibernia Bank filling the air with drums and tiny finger cymbals.
Street traffic gridlocked at 18th and Castro. Cars and pickup trucks and
motorcycles ate up the parking.
Things happened.
A gay man who had a bit part in Chinatown went berserk inside his
giant-tired Ford F150 in the middle of the intersection of 18th and Castro,
rubbing Oil of Olay all over his face, screaming in three languages how
moist he was. At the same corner, a woman, early one morning, aided
only by gay bartenders with white towels, gave birth to a baby on an 8
Market/Ferry Muni bus. A robber was shot to death by a cop in front of
the Hibernia Bank, right in the street in the middle of the crowd, during
the first Castro Street Fair. The Chronicle the next morning printed a
photo of the street scene with Ryan caught standing near the dead body.
A runaway roofing truck aflame with hot tar slammed into a car on 19th
Street and burned two young women to Death.
Castro was a cruising ground. Everyone was young and in heat. Cas-
tronauts jammed the sidewalks. Dopers and drinkers weaved in and out
of the bars. Small-time dealers, loitering in the doorways up and down
Castro, brazenly hawked joints and speed and Quaaludes. Men hung out

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