Page 152 - Some Dance to Remember

122 Jack Fritscher

Did it My Way,” and everybody’s favorite tune in the key of Me, “Fuck
You, Girl.”
Unity in numbers, which brought media and political strength to
the group, surprised everyone with a slow reverse-English spin that bred
intranecine discrimination. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to be gay to get into
a gay bar. Generic gay became specific gay. Dress codes were enforced. The
Tool Box, all leather and Levi’s and boots, nailed a pair of tennis shoes
to its ceiling with a sign reading “Stamp out Sneakers.” Put the blame on
Brando, who, a few years earlier, unlike the straight arrow John Wayne,
thrust an alternative, skewed, inner perversatility on American masculin-
ity, pulling on a leather jacket and cap, thrusting a thousand pounds of
combustion power between his legs, creating a new off-center aggressive
way to be male.
That’s pop culture. A movie today; a lifestyle tomorrow.
The first men wearing the first leather in the Tool Box were in the
throes of their mid-teens’ sexual-identity crisis when Marlon in The Wild
One rode across drive-in screens. Stereotyped by society as sissy boys,
they could not fit into that slot anymore than they could square peg into
heterosexuality. Sometimes men, forced to ride sidesaddle as the token
high-school queer, suddenly, defiantly, straddle saddle, coming of age,
encouraged by the silver screen, seeing ways they can be, seeing the way
they have to be, because in their secret hearts they already are that way,
and the hell with everyone else.
San Francisco’s first masculine visionary was Chuck Arnett. He arrived
in the City as the lead dancer in the road company of Bye Bye Birdie, and
never left. Adept at set design, Arnett adapted the movie images of The
Wild One to the wall of the Tool Box. He painted the gigantic mural that
first focused national attention in LIFE that something to do with a special
breed of men was happening in San Francisco. He changed Brando and
James Dean into archetypal black-paint silhouettes, new images of bikers
and musclemen and construction workers, against which men measured
themselves and their tricks. Arnett’s clarion mural, spread across two LIFE
pages, signaled across America a new image of homosexuals. Men read
it, burned their sweaters, packed their bags, and headed west. That Tool
Box issue of LIFE started the migration to San Francisco that caused both
South of Market and Castro to happen. The floodgates were open.
Ryan’s Journal:

South of Market. May 14, 1970. The Tool Box bar is jammed
with men in Levi’s and black leather. The music is loud rock.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK