Tolerance Part 2

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Last weekend I attended the 60th birthday party of Tom Balk who is the father of my good friend Aubri Balk who flew in from New York where she now lives to surprise her father. I’ve been to several parties at the spacious Balk residence in the Castro. Aubri’s mother Michelle is usually the host and life of the party. She is quite a character, in another life she was probably a vaudevillian stage performer. There was a small open bar set up in the backyard offering champagne, beer, wine, and an assortment of proofed booze. The crowd was a little older and definitely more indulgent than parties I had recently attended. When a gaggle of gay neighbors arrived the energy of the party picked up a few notches. The straight men kept to themselves for the most part but the wives and gay men started partying like it’s 1999. They were hootin and hollerin and having a blast with Michelle being the main instigator of the madness. It was all in good fun. That’s how it usually is with parties at Aubri’s parents house.

Round midnight after getting liquored up pretty good Mickey (Aubri’s ex boyfriend), Rad ( a cool dude who I just met), and I decided it was time to hit the pavement. It’s about a 20 minute walk back to my neighborhood north of the Panhandle right through the heart of the Castro. On a Saturday night the Castro is like Mardi Gras. The sidewalks are packed and the bars are overflowing. Mickey had been dropping hints all day he wanted to hit one of the Castro bars on the way home. Mickey is a barfly straight up. He’s one of those people who can walk into any bar in any part of the City and know at least half the people in the place. It wasn’t too difficult to get Rad and me to comply. Mickey steered us to a bar called Moby Dick (perfect name for a gay bar) on the corner of 18th and Hartford. Moby Dick is a popular neighborhood bar that has been around for 30 years. I’ve biked past it many times but this is my first time actually going into the place. It’s a cavernous bar by San Francisco standards. The first thing you notice walking in is the huge fish tank above the bar. The neon blue illumination from the fish tank and the multicolor glow from the four large screen televisions provided all the interior lighting for the place giving it a disco feel but nobody was dancing. The place was wall to wall humid people, some playing pool in the back and most in groups of threes, fours, and fives, conversating and enjoying the liquidity. The mix of gender was about 70% men and 30% women. Mickey and I and one other guy were the only brothas in the place. We worked our way through the crowd to the bar front and center and bumped into four dudes that new Mickey. Of course I was not at all surprised. The guy is know in all corners. It turns out these guys work with Mickey and Rad. Introductions were made and the guys started talking shop. Since I wasn’t privy to the workplace details I spent my time perusing the scene and checking out the crowd. Being 6’5” as I am it is the logical thing to do. One of Mickey’s buddies pick pocketed his wallet and produced a crispy $100 bill. The pilferer looked at me with a big grin like the cat the got the canary and said “He won’t care.” and in the next 10 minutes ordered three rounds of Cazadores tequila shots on Mickey’s dime. I’m part agave, tequila is in my blood so the shots went down without a fight. Since I had been partaking of the nectar all day and I wasn’t looking for a date I decided it was a good time to say my goodbyes and head for the casa. The semi short walk was enough to sober me up. I reflected on my brief foray into Moby Dick and decided it wasn’t any different than many of the other bars I have been to in my life (quite a few). All that was missing was the skirt chasing rituals. I’m still not sure how that all plays out in a gay bar. Nobody at Moby Dick hit on me, grabbed my butt, or gave me funny or dirty looks. Gay men can usually tell straight guys from gay guys and they respect the boundaries. I could do a whole night of drinking and socializing at Moby Dick no problem. It had a fun and festive atmosphere and the people seemed down to earth and were enjoying themselves. When gay people get together they know how to have a good time. Overall I’d say generally speaking gay people have a better time socializing with each other than straight people do. In all my years living in San Francisco I have never met a gay person who was lonely or didn’t have a ton of friends.

The Castro like much of the City has been gentrified and has become more mainstream in its outward appearance. In my early days of living in the City one of my roommates was a waitress at Sparky’s Diner located on the east end of the Castro on Church street. Sparky’s was the place to go to get your grub on after the bars closed. The only other places to go were the Lucky Penny and Denny’s and those places were strictly for out-of-towners. My roommate worked the late night shift with one of the members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters were a group of men who dressed up in nun habits and gowns, crucifixes, leather, chains, fish net stockings, and white Elizabethan face paint. They’ve been showing up at all the gay themed events in the City since the early 80’s. They’re a combination performance/activist group. They had lots of friends and imitators in and around the Castro who liked to hang out at Sparky’s during the witching hours. I would often see men walking around the Castro in outrageous drag, day and night. It was a normal part of the scene. The 70’s Castro dress code of handlebar mustache, tight t-shirt, jeans, and motorcycle boots of the Harvey Milk days is long gone and if you were to take one of the many tour busses through the Castro you’d be hard pressed to see any guys in drag. It’s even hard to find them in the Tenderloin which used to be Drag Queen Central. In the Castro it’s no longer Halloween 365 days a year. The Folsom Street Faire and the Gay Pride parade are still going strong but other than those few days the Castro looks like Anytown USA. Like many minority groups in America gays and lesbians are mainstreaming their look to gain greater acceptance from the Moral Majority. They want to get married and raise families like everybody else. Rapists, murderers, serial killers, Satanists, and Atheists are allowed to marry but our society doesn’t want to extend that right to gay and lesbian people. When you have been around gay and lesbian people and know them from experience it just seems ridiculous to deny them marriage rights. They are human beings, no better and no worse than other human beings. When are we going to get off the high horse?