OutLines

I swear Richard Nixon went on nationwide television to resign the presidency on the very day I was flying back to Germany, an avowed out-of-the-closet expatriate. Five years later, in 1979, when I found myself repatriating to the States, I had become radicalized by the gay left in Germany. So when I arrived (by Greyhound from Boston, hung over) in San Francisco, I came looking for the grand experiment in gay community known as Castro Street. Like many gay pilgrims before and after, once I got here, I abandoned myself to the city, and jumped into the never-ending party.

The gay activist upstarts populating the Castro and led by Harvey Milk represented a very different kind of gay political vision from the one I had carried with me from Germany. They were mavericks even in 1970s gay boomtown San Francisco; a solidly established, if very quiet gay and lesbian community already had a long tradition of working within the political culture of the city.

By the time I arrived in August 1979, San Francisco was still in shock from the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana (Jim Jones had moved his People's Temple there from San Francisco's poor black Fillmore neighborhood) and recovering from the double assassination of city supervisor Harvey Milk (representing the gay Castro district) and Mayor George Moscone. That summer Castro Street overflowed with young gay men, mostly buff, white twenty-somethings in 501 jeans and flannel shirts. Gay bars had sprouted like mushrooms after a hard rain, all across the city. Bathhouse culture was in full swing. The leather scene centered around Folsom Street was thriving. The old gay commercial heart on Polk Street still thrummed. Hippie-bohemian Haight-Ashbury had plenty of gay commercial life as well. Discos and designer drugs were all the rage. Recent reformist gains for legal recognition of gays and lesbians had opened the floodgate of endless, exuberant celebration.

On the ground, life as I experienced it in those years, before and during AIDS, was larger than life. Every day I got up I felt, as many of us did, that I was participating in making history. This was the time when Armistead Maupin, then a local columnist, was writing twice-weekly columns, called "Tales of the City." We read his installments as a kind of open collective journal.

In retrospect, it all seems heartbreakingly innocent and naïve. Even at the time, many of us were saying to each other, "This is too good to be true; something is going to happen." Even as "everyone" was being embraced, many people were feeling left out, invisible or shunned. "Gay" began looking very white, male, and comfortably middle-class. And, just as sexual identity politics shifted focus to queer and multicultural, AIDS hit, and hit catastrophically hard. Castro Street was ground zero. An entire generation of gay men were fodder for a precision-pinpointed genocide. Because San Francisco is a city of dense neighborhoods, and much smaller than L.A. or New York, the AIDS epidemic was inexorably palpable and ubiquitous.

Castro Street became a ghost town--many businesses and most bars folded overnight. I remember thinking that this is what the Black Death must have felt like. And for five years, Ronald Reagan could not even say a word about AIDS. We in gay San Francisco lived with an acute awareness that the president's Republican regime clearly was waiting for all the fags to die. What had we been celebrating?

To give a more accurate personal account, I have to admit that I arrived in San Francisco a full-blown, raging alcoholic. I got sober two years later, initially through the assistance of Eighteenth Services, one of the first-ever alcohol and drug treatment facilities for gay men. I learned to appreciate much more keenly the vast scope of the gay community in San Francisco, as well as in the Bay Area and northern California more broadly. I even escaped a ghettoized existence of my own making.

In 1981 I got sober, became infected with HIV, and returned to graduate school, never expecting to survive to the end of my studies. In 1993, Ph.D. in hand, I accepted a teaching post in Boston, still not expecting to live much longer. When I moved back to San Francisco in 2005, after 12 years in Massachusetts, I discovered my crazy, wild, maddening, beloved city much changed. In fact, I had completely missed the dotcom boom-and-bust, one of the defining events of recent times here. And there were more ghosts waiting to haunt me than I could shake a stick at.

Les Wright is currently a freelance writer, film reviewer, and independent scholar, living in a cushy garret in San Francisco's bourgeois-bohemian Noe Valley; he is also a former men's support group facilitator at the Men's Resource Center for Change. Click here to read Part 2 of his column on San Francisco, which appears in the Spring 2007 issue.