Page 151 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 121

“The priests made me crazy.
“You try not jerking off for twenty-four years and see if you’re not
weird. I feel like filing a class-action suit against the Catholic Church for
every boy who was terrorized into a seminary in the fifties.”

8

In the early days when hippies were in flower, Ryan and Teddy joined
the soldiers grouping in the South of Market arena. Three years after
the 1967 Summer of Love, the smell of incense and pot drifted quietly
from the Haight-Ashbury, through the Castro, and down to the light
industrial area of Folsom and Harrison streets, south of the Market Street
Cable Car Slot. Peace, love, and granola gave way to leather, drugs, and
performance-art sex.
Already seeded at the corner of 4th and Harrison, the embryonic
Tool Box, the leather-bar archetype, forecast the SRO high times blowing
in the wind. LIFE magazine, always fast at sniffing something new and
kinky, splashed the Tool Box across its pages almost exactly five years to
the day before the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village pitted angry
gays who were mad as hell at the NYPD’s fag-bashing helter-skelter bar
raids. “The ‘Gay’ World Takes to the City Streets” LIFE warned, June 26,
1964: “A secret world grows open and bolder. Society is forced to look at
it—and try to understand it.”
“My dear,” Solly Blue said. “An engraved invitation to every faggot in
America couldn’t have caused more of a sensation. Reading LIFE’s expose
in Iowa was like discovering a travel agent’s dream brochure. Destiny
called me bag and baggage. Garland should have gotten a commission.
For years she’d been warbling how San Francisco lets no stranger wait
outside its Golden Gate. And who in America is stranger than we?”
Not since word from Sutter’s Mill told the miner ’49ers there was
gold in them thar hills had any proclamation started such a stampede
west. Gay liberation was announced, not unsympathetically, like a social
pregnancy in LIFE. It was born, slapped and screaming, at Stonewall. But
what diamond worth its B-movie weight doesn’t carry some mummy’s
curse? Liberation’s first angry unity quickly fragmented. Gay lib, birthed
as a seemingly homogenous group demanding civil rights, turned fast
to factions. Put the blame on Mame, boys. Once a gay man or lesbian
woman goes over the rainbow, long-closeted rage turns fast to individual-
ized outrageousness. Stonewall’s choral chant, “Out of the bars and into
the streets,” turned into a zillion soloists singing “I’ve Got to Be Me,” “I

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