CLOSING DOWN QUEER SAN FRANCISCO??

A. Five Rivers Converge

Five social rivers are now flowing strongly in San Francisco:

¨ The economic "success" so welcomed by our City leaders which is converting SF into both a "dot.com" center and also into as much of a bedroom satellite of Silicon Valley as is Santa Clara county a bedroom satellite of SF - this economic success is driving up rents and so driving out creative people, lesbigayer and straight, who work part time at relatively low-wage jobs so they can pursue their artistic vocations (Kirk Read, "SF, gentle readers, is over," Bay Times, Sept 14). It is also pushing cultural groups out of the SOMA (formerly low rent area South Of MArket Street); e.g., Theater Rhinoceros, Theater Artaud, Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco Cinematheque, American Indian Contemporary Arts, Art Explosion studios, Brady Street Dance Center plus 500 bands lost their rehearsal space at Downtown Rehearsal and have lost several of their performance venues, etc., etc.

¨ Straight-thinking businesses displace lesbigayer-targeted businesses: Two years ago there were three lesbigayer gyms in the Castro (one of three heavily lesbigayer areas in the City, often accorded primacy as "the gay center" of SF). Now there is only one gay gym, Muscle System and rumors are floating that its owner is selling out its prime site on rapidly gentrifying Hayes Street. Plus, 24 Hour Fitness and Gold's have recently opened/taken over gyms in the Castro and they overtly discourage gay behavior so they can add straight customers to their client mix.

¨ The emergence of a 90s gay-clone: straight-acting, straight-thinking gay boys who party til dawn at Club Universe, EndUp, etc. savoring bottled water, speed and ecstasy over alcohol and who, when not at real or mini white parties, work in corporate America as straight-appearing "Normals."

¨ The loss of a generation of gay mentors to HIV for young men just discovering the forbidden zones where their cocks are leading them.

¨ Increased governmental harassment of gay play -- done by multiple, very distinct units of government, but all targeting gay sexuality:

· Increased action in the past few months by the California ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) to close bars in the Castro and the SOMA which show porno flicks or where gay sex occurs, thus creating a VERY chilling effect on these bars.

· The San Francisco police in the SOMA have also become much stricter about imposing rigid rules checking for ecstasy and other drugs in dance venues, rules which are heavier when the clubs are aimed at gaymen (e.g., 1015 Folsom recently).

· San Francisco's Department of Public Health has been the loudest governmental voice demonizing gay sex for what turn out to be obvious lies - according to their own statistics: "increased rates of rectal gonorrhea," "surges in rates of syphilis infection," "HIV infection rates at Sub-Saharan levels." And thanks to the DPH's myopic public health policies, SF is the ONLY major city in the world where no gay bathhouses exist - and it is supposed to be the gay mecca? This despite bathhouses being proven as an effective way to reach many gay and bi men about safer sexual practices.

B. ECONOMIC SUCCESS SPURS ANTI-QUEER CURRENT

Where do these anti-queer currents come from? Rather than coming from some type of "conspiracy," I want to suggest that, paradoxically, these events seem to reflect two types of "success": First this city has had great success in attracting "with-it" straight folks who work in Silicon Valley but want to live where things are happening. Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc. are deadly dull in the evening and, hey, its only a thirty minute drive from the corner of Guerrero and Duboce, so let's live in the City and drive to work! A short stint recently as a driver for Super Shuttle impressed on me that Highway 101, the main freeway south from SF, is totally tied up with commuters going away from SF from 7 AM on as well as coming north into the City; further, Interstate 280, the only other freeway south, is always stopped up a bit later in the morning, and this happens only in the south-bound direction towards Silicon Valley.

The second success is that San Francisco may be the only city where most citizens are well aware of and "tolerate," even accept, that gaymen and lesbians are prominent in certain sections of the City as well as in government, in politics and in the media. Thus this may be the one city where citizens know that gay sex clubs exist unlike, for example, Seattle where high level people involved in the county government there, just for example, had no idea that there are three gay sex clubs within a block of each other in the heavily lesbigayer part of the city. This increased tolerance and awareness in SF means that it is, indeed, NO BIG DEAL to be gay or lesbian here (though when my boyfriend and I walk in China Town or above North Beach holding hands, this still gets surreptitious stares and startled looks - have not tried it in the straighter, bedroom district of SF, the Sunset yet!).

This increased tolerance of lesbigayers has, perversely, made it more profitable for businesses (both straight and lesbigayer owned) to aim for a customer mix including both straight and lesbigayer people. They do this by banning overtly lesbigayer activity such as, amazingly enough for a friend of mine at Gold's Gym recently, kissing his boyfriend - NOTHING MORE! - behavior which would not even be given a second thought if it involved a man and a woman. The assistant manager in addressing my friend's protest at this action said "Gold's is NOT a QUEER gym." Many other examples of this dequeering process at Gold's have been given in recent letters to the editor in San Francisco's main lesbigayer newspaper, the Bay Area Reporter.

The result is that an alliance of straight and of assimilationist LBG people with money is invading San Francisco's prime lesbigayer areas, the Castro and the SOMA, to earn profits from lesbigayer customers AS WELL AS straights. They want to have their cake (lesbigayer-$) and eat it too (affirm straight values to get straight customers). We have recently lost not only the lesbigayer Market Street Gym, but (i.) the Leather Zone on Market Street closed the day after SF's big lesbigayer leather carnival, Folsom Street Fair; (ii.) the former gaybar, the Phoenix, is being transformed into a bigger Walgreens; (iii.) a gaybar Castro Station aimed at 70s clones has been transformed into the Bar on Castro with the pool table put out of sight in a back room, a back patio opened and sofas - of all things - added across from the bar giving a veneer of chicness that is repugnant to us from the 70s and is very appealing to 90s clones. (iv.) Similar changes have metamorphosed the bar Badlands into a magnet for 90s gays. (iv.) The gay erotic play spaces that used to exist on Castro Street have gone, as have they from several places recently in the SOMA.

Some of these changes are overtly aimed at attracting straights in addition to the lesbigayers who formerly attended (e.g., Gold's Gym) and some seem aimed simply at attracting straight-acting gays (e.g., Bar on Castro - though when I was there not to long ago with a hot twenty-something, two women hit on him, which he found quite amusing and played along with; they were followed by two guys hitting on him. This mélange was certainly "queer" and was rather delicious, I must admit!).

Thus these changes in businesses targeting straight-acting lesbigayers PLUS some straights work because

i. the proportion of lesbigayers who are straight-thinking is increasing and may well be bigger than the proportion who act like 70s gays and

ii. straights are more tolerant/accepting of people who are attracted to others of the same sex.

Both these changed marketing demographics reflect the rise of a new generation of gaymen who take it as NO BIG DEAL that they can easily find cocks to suck, mouths to pleasure them and butts to fuck after a short search in an AOL chatroom, where they see themselves shown positively in South Park, in ads by Ikea or even for the VW Golf. But is this new gay cohort able to know how precarious this "freedom" is?

C. A HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF GAYMALE SOCIETY

Perhaps one of the most significant social costs of the HIV epidemic is the loss of a generation of gay mentors for young gaymen who are just coming out. Gaymen maturing in the 90s discovered their fascination with theirs and others' cocks on their own in a world where President Reagan's conservative movement for less government and more individual rights - EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO SEX - dominated American thinking. This was a time when the Government refused to grapple with the HIV epidemic for years (unlike the Reagan team's alacritous response to "Legionnaires Disease"). This legacy of refusing to admit that a new sexual disease was wiping us out continues to be a major constraint on the Government's response to HIV because their hands are STILL - twenty years later - tied behind their backs by religious conservatives.

Gaymen in their twenties grew up without older gaymen they could connect with and surrounded by the major media being gay tolerant, saying, usually implicitly, unconsciously and hence most powerfully, that being gay is NO BIG DEAL and, hey, lesbian is chic! After all, there are well-known, well-accepted (at least in their buffed media snapshots of) people who are lesbian, bi or gay: David Geffin, Melissa Etheridge, Ellen DeGeneres, Rupert Everett, Ian McKellen. And we are all into buffing our bodies (using a bit of andro along with Mark McGuire), tattooing, piercing, leather and such style accessories. That is all "Gay" is: just a style of living, a lifestyle, freely chosen, and lesbigayers are, at their cores, "no different" from straights!

This loss of older gay mentors for gaymen now in their 20s means there is no way to transmit the experiential knowledge of how new and how fragile our institutions for discovering and worshipping queerly are. This fragility is heightened by the marked shift toward more conservative thinking among the population at large, including lesbigayers and especially among gay newbies, the twenty-somethings fresh off the straight boat who are still forging their own individual paths in ignorance of the larger queer culture around them which involves more than getting high a few times/week.

For this assertion there is anecdotal evidence from, for example, friends telling of lesbigayer acquaintances working for big corporations in SF's financial district. Other evidence is offered by the lack of response to the Save The Castro efforts as well as to the bathhouse initiative last summer - trying to reopen gay bathhouses in SF - if one can disassociate this tepid response from antagonism towards some of its more prominent spokespeople. Yet even this antipathy towards "activists" - is there a worse put-down now? - is a product of the libertarian currents flowing strongly in this country since the 80s. The desire for less obviously gay clothes and behavior (except at "special" events: dance clubs, circuit parties, Dore and Folsom Street Fairs, etc.) supports and reinforces the push to market products in the Castro towards less overtly queer people: the 90s clones LIKE to buy straight-looking baggy clothes for everyday wear. Tight Levi's are so passé (but so many young things seem unable to avert their eyes from betraying their interest in certain anatomical details).

Hey you nitpickers: I too know gaymen in their twenties who are NOT what I here refer to as 90s clones - they are as openly sex positive as anyone. And I also know many geezers my age who condemn me and my activist, exhibitionist type with the same value judgments hurled by the most assimilationist 90s clones. But I do think that over the past twenty years there has been a major generational shift in the deepest attitudes towards "queer" (= most disgustingly bad behavior according to dominant standards of what is "normal"; also = rejection of this banishment by means of flagrant violations of "normal"). It appears that HIV ripped a generational hole in the fabric of gaymale networks. This raises the question of whether the lack of such a hole in the fabric of lesbian society has resulted in a less sharp cleavage in attitudes between 70s and 90s lesbians. I would like to know.

D. GOVERNMENTAL DEMONIZING OF GAY SEX - IN SF OF ALL PLACES!

This more straight-oriented thinking among gaymen reflects the major swing rightward in dominant values and perspectives accompanying the Reagan Revolution in the 60's-70's in California and in the 80's in the nation as a whole. This increased conservatism has led recently to the crackdown by the ABC on gay bars showing porn and by the SF police on dance clubs. As a change of pace from my research work, I have recently started working at a SOMA bar and the emptiness, the hollowness of SF's queer culture is striking on weekdays: there are NEVER more than 10-15 men in most SOMA bars at any time other than Fri-Sat evenings. The Fair weekends (Dore, Folsom and Castro) bring an enormous influx of out-of-town visitors who are attracted largely by SF's queer reputation. These occasional queer episodes seem to mask the lack of queer players within regular commuting distance of SF.

This dearth of gay bar clients also jeopardizes SF's status as a "Queer Mecca:" Berlin, and even Amsterdam, are now much more "happening" places. For just one example, that of a long-standing incubator of queer culture in the Western world (going back to the bar where Christopher Marlowe was allegedly killed in Elizabethan England): Not only is there a world-leading lesbigayer museum in Berlin, but there are several orders of magnitude more gay bars in Berlin than in San Francisco, including two to three times as many leather bars (source of much perverse social invention in gay culture) and there are lively nurturing throngs of men seven days/week unlike in San Francisco where this happens at most two nights/week - - plus the bars in Berlin close (if at all) at 7 AM compared to 2 AM in SF. The after-hours dance clubs in San Francisco make up for this a bit, but they are dominated by gay newbies.

This more conservative social river now flowing in all of America gives a dark lining to the greater awareness that exists among SF's straight citizenry of lesbigayers in their midst. It means that sex clubs here cannot be covertly permitted to have private spaces for men to have sex, unlike most of the rest of the country where, as in Seattle, most citizens are unaware of gay bathhouses. This public ignorance in cities other than SF means that public policy concerning bathhouses in those cities can be guided by enlightened public health officials rather than by cowering elected officials.

Any change which empowered gaymen to make their own decisions in private, alcohol/drug-free spaces about the use of condoms, etc. would provoke widespread public discussion and, indeed, furor in SF. During the effort a year ago to get an initiative on the ballot to reopen bathhouses here, the two major newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, made blatant just how shallow is acceptance of gaymen here: We are OK as long as we play by straight rules and as long as sex among men is kept hidden since it is disease-breeding and disgusting. They satirized gaymale sex as "bathhouse roulette," cartooned us as ghouls in a cemetery, and the Chronicle's prince of sarcasm, Ken Garcia, condemned us for seeking "dangerous liaisons." Even many "liberal" straights see gay sex as an "abomination" even if this religiously charged word is no longer used explicitly. These papers will not permit any surreptitious move in SF to undo the ban on private spaces which was ordered by a court in 1984 and is now mandated by the city's Department of Public Health, despite its being headed by a gayman, a person considered by some to be a queer quisling.

The consequence of prohibiting private spaces in SF's sex clubs has serious consequences: It makes the three officially sanctioned sex clubs that do exist in SF off limits for gay and bi men who have no private spaces of their own for gay sex but whose ethnic and ethical backgrounds make sex in public spaces UNTHINKABLE. This has the result that these men sometimes end up getting themselves so drunk that "it just happens," being done in totally dark places which are well known, are readily available, are very popular and where any notion of safer sex is impossible. Thus the ban on privacy in sex clubs amounts to an encouragement of unsafe sex! This is a reality that our SF Dept. of Public Health overtly turns blind eyes and ears to.

E. THE CONFLUENCE OF SOCIAL CURRENTS …

The confluence of these social currents of rising rents, increased governmental harassment of gay play spaces aimed at imposing straight values and the increased conservatism of our culture so far has been met with a collective shrugging of the shoulders at this harassment: "NO BIG DEAL"! We are losing our cultural, our living and our play spaces in SF. It doesn't matter that the new owners of Gold's or whatever other straight-targeted businesses invading the Castro are "gay-friendly." This increasing dominance of businesses in the Castro by "gay-tolerating" and "gay-friendly" people rather than by people actively developing queer institutions and culture means "queer" is being swallowed up, being dissolved into a slightly less hostile mainstream culture of straight-thinking people. What hope is there of developing queer culture under rules formulated by people who think straight in their ethical centers, whose core sexual values put monogamy and procreation at the top?

Is there any end to such heterosexist takeovers of LBGTQ institutions in the Castro? Having Gold's, with its national straight-attracting brandname, take over the premier lesbigayer gym in the Castro is like having Westin Hotels take over the gay B&B's in the Castro, or having the Gap take over Body-Body (a chic store for gaymale party clothes), or Time-Warner-AOL take over Jaguar Adult Books. Will the Southern Baptists take over the Metropolitan Community Church next (it would complement their Jews For Jesus effort!)?

Forces now flowing in SF that many see as unconnected (crackdown on dance clubs and gay bars in the SOMA, tepid responses to efforts to keep the Castro queer and to the bathhouse initiatives due to a prevalence of conservative newbies, rapid shrinking in the amount of housing affordable to people making low wages) happen to be occurring at the same time. This confluence of social currents is working towards eliminating queer culture in SF!

F. … IS MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER "CONSPIRACY"

Does this confluence of anti-queer currents result from some "conspiracy" of "evil right-wingers"? To see such a broad, powerful wave formed by such disparate sources as the product of a cabal of badly intentioned people diminishes the real threat to queer culture; namely, the enormous inertial force of America's antisex, erotophobic bias that underlies most thinking and public policy here, that gains its power by unconsciously, thus invisibly, guiding people to similar conclusions (sex/porn is dirty - keep it "private," out of bars, tightly policed; such sex serves no positive purpose) that only appear to be coordinated.

Unlike the forces working to eliminate queers in Germany in the 1930s and unlike our usual stories about "evil" forces, this inexorable pressure to absorb and/or push out queer culture from SF is not the result of some cabal of right-wingers or a conspiracy of moral crusaders. It is not that such crusaders aren't trying or, more ominously (as the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California has documented), that San Francisco's real estate interests and the City's planners haven't been trying for fifty years to displace gay institutions beginning with pushing gay bars out of "the Embarcadero" which has now been fashioned into the linchpin between, on one hand, the biggest tourist destination on the West Coast, Fisherman's Wharf, and, on the other hand, the biggest financial center in the West.

No such collusion or coordinated action by different people is needed. All that is necessary is that people accept the same values: sex is primarily for procreation and any other "use" is shameful. This mindset eliminates queer as a viable cultural force. This mindset in many gaymen also makes impossible any effective protest against the harassment of gay play by various governmental units, so this harassment is gaining more and more force. Will we end up having ANY real gay bars with edge left in the SOMA, or will we be left only with places for poseurs, as has sadly happened to the bar, Hole in the Wall?

Looking to a small number of people responsible for dequeering and desexing the Castro and the SOMA makes the real issue appear much smaller than it really is. It is not the Mayor's fault, or the owner of Gold's Gym on Market Street, or the Pottery Barn which is coming to the Castro that, by itself is causing the loss of queer culture. It is the confluence of ALL these events, each happening according to its own logic. It so happens that these individual "logics" are socially coordinated by the over-riding anti-sex (or, better, "keep sex private") conservative mindset in which we swim.

G. ANY HOPE TO CONTINUE QUEERING CULTURE IN SF?

Queers are pioneers attempting, as Jean Cocteau said to carry out "the clearing of a land left much too uncultivated" ("le défrichement d'un terrain reste trop inculte," p. 17 in Jean Cocteau: Erotic Drawings. Annie Guédras (ed.) 1999). Institutions cannot nurture new perspectives, new ethics, new values and new esthetics if they are guided by people who think according to America's established, "normal" values. This cultural development can only happen in a creative fabric of overlapping networks of diverse types of gaymen and lesbians existing in one place. It cannot happen by having California's lesbigayers distributed in small gaggles in Redding, Chico, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, San Jose, Oakland, Modesto and Stockton, small groups of people who stay in the towns they grew up in - not forced to move to the Gay Mecca of SF - because, hey, they get to see lesbians and gaymen on TV and, so, being gay is NO BIG DEAL. But this fabric of networks of gaymen and lesbians queering culture is just what the "economic success" of the Bay Area, with its lack of urban transportation, esp. between midnight and 6 AM, is imperiling.

Some, eager to find quick solutions for the economic pressure pushing creative people out as more and more low rent buildings are knocked down to build yet more office buildings and expensive apartment buildings, have proposed creating Art and Land Trusts. For example, the proposed San Francisco Community and Art Land Trust would be "a nonprofit corporation that raises public and private funds, purchases property and holds it in perpetuity" (SF Chronicle 19 Oct 00 D6). But are perpetual trusts a good answer to maintain a seething brew of artists challenging mainstream ways of thinking and of creating in unexpected ways? Typically such trusts are run by self-selecting boards of trustees who are accountable to no one, and certainly not to poor, raging, let alone queer (i.e., worse than despicable according to conventional morality) artists. Or they are appointed by the powers-that-be, hardly a recipe to encourage cultural innovation which might mock the dominant economic interests in this city.

Perhaps our biggest hope lies with markets also: The Great Big Wave of biotech, dot.com and other venture capital arriving in San Francisco in the past two years appears to be slowing down to something more like a trickle. This is because the investor craze that was dropping such gobs of money in "dot.com" companies has ended, the NASDAQ has dropped to a low and IPO's (issuing publicly traded stock in new startups so the founders get rich) have shriveled up. So the investor craze that was behind all the recent jump in development projects and rising rents in San Francisco will slow down greatly also. This makes unlikely the 38,000 evictions which were projected by the San Francisco Bay Guardian (18 Oct 00, p. 16) to be carried out to make room for the 60,000 new office workers that would be required by 2003 by the development allowed under the Mayor's development policy framework.

It is a meager basis for hope that the current economic boom in SF will level off. Given the confluence of these trends, will SF continue to have preeminence as a center for leather events, for porn and queer film-making, for queer film courses (e.g., at the Harvey Milk Academy), for queer and LBGT writers and legal activists, etc.? Are "queer voices ... being edited out of SF"? as Jessica Powers wrote in the Bay Times (12 Oct 00, p. 3) Will Queer SF become a hollow shell, no more than a marketing opportunity to sell beer and to maximize the pocket books of organizers, as has SF Pride Day and towards which the San Francisco LG Film Festival and the Castro Street Fair seem to be moving? Queer culture, to grow, must continue to birth its nuggets (new erotic, esthetic and ethical conventions as well as new types of art and writing) as it has done historically: undercover, not as well publicized commercial ventures but rather as small house gatherings of exhibitionists/voyeurs, private clubs for bondage, for fisting, for erotic hypnosis, for pumping, all operating well within the queer forest past the fringe of bars, theaters, leather stores, etc. -- with this growth conditional on enough of us being able to scratch together enough money to continue to live in SF.

We might beware the example of the rapid fall of Berlin as the Queer Mecca of the 1920s - a fall greased by the many "tolerant, enlightened" people who said of the brownshirts' rapid-fire victories vilifying Jews, Queers and Leftists in the 30s in Germany that this was a passing phase, that they would wise up when in power, that reason would prevail over such bigotry. In fact, Paragraph 175 was intensified, and enforced for real again in the 1930s and continuing long after the Nazis were gone into the 1960s after seeming to be a dead letter in the 1920s in Germany. What are the parallels to the sodomy laws on the books of not much less than half the states in the U.S. and about which there is little activism - but which make us illegal in most of the land area of this country? Is there a chance for activism to regain a valued place in our social space in San Francisco, let alone the nation - or is this all just NO BIG DEAL?

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After thirty years of teaching economics (Princeton University in NJ, University of California at Davis, Middlebury College in VT), Richard Cornwall retired two years ago to live in San Francisco where he now partially support himself as a temp worker while he theorizes how to queer political economy.

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