Page 352 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

334 Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Linotti’s ancient barn on Pleasant Hill Road outside Sebastopol in Sonoma
County.

May 21, 1979 (Monday): Mixing business with pleasure, I spent the
afternoon balling with a man named Kurt Baron playing with his rack,
hoists, and sling as a fun preparation to use his dungeon for a Drummer
photo shoot. At twilight the White Night Riot erupted. Ten years after the
Stonewall rebellion in New York, angry gays attacked San Francisco City
Hall, and set twelve SFPD squad cars on fire protesting assassin Dan White’s
light sentence based on his junk-food “Twinkie Defense.” In retaliation, the
SFPD charged into the heart of the Castro clubbing their way down Castro
Street, and beating gay and straight patrons inside the Elephant Walk bar
th
at 18 and Castro. See my “Tough Shit” entry “Bloody ‘Marys’ at Elephant
Walk” in Drummer 30 (June 1979), page 72. On May 23, 2005, The New
Yorker, page 38, named 18 and Castro “perhaps the gayest address in the
th
world.” Once again, the East Coast failed to understand the West Coast
with too little too late. Even before 1990, 18 and Castro had turned into
th
the postmodern, dirty, ugly debris field of the colorful “Titanic 1970s.” By
th
Saint Valentine’s night, February 14, 2007, 18 and Castro had become its
own private Bangkok diversified with attractive bar-hopping young Asian
sex tourists trailing laughter and cologne and cigarette smoke, and with
homeless Caucasian beggars—some of them ghosts of the “70s Past”—the
last of an extinct species crying out its bird call for “Spare Change.”
“To me this part of the city always seemed joyful/but now is just hor-
ror and nothing more.” —Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Search for a Home,”
Roman Poems
When did the changing Castro neighborhood become the Fourth
World? The Fourth World is the entropy that comes after the fall of the
First World, the Second World, and the Third World.

May 22, 1979 (Tuesday): The 6 PM Castro Street party, originally
announced to celebrate the birthday of Harvey Milk—then dead for six
months, turned into a peaceful protest against the SFPD. Under the mar-
quee of the Castro Theater, I, age 39, met Mark Hemry, 29, for the first time.
In the year 2000, after twenty-one years together, we two marriage activists
were joined in a civil union in Vermont. In 2003, we married in Canada.
In 2004, we married on the grand staircase of San Francisco City Hall
on Valentine’s weekend during Mayor Gavin Newsom’s “Winter of Love”
named after San Francisco’s legendary 1967 “Summer of Love.” On June 20,
2008, we were one of the 18,000 couples married legally in California before

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-16-2017
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