AS THE WORLD TURNS -- THE CASTRO

In the Fifties in Portland, OR, when I first began to be old enough to travel around the city alone via bus, I was always careful to sit on the side of the bus where I could see the old warehouses where gypsies lived.  The doorways were draped so it was impossible to see in, but the women often sat on chairs along the sidewalk.  Darkly beautiful, wearing bright flowing gowns, they might have been up to something nefarious since they were in the shady part of town, but to me they only represented glamour in the original sense of magic.

Our house was near the corners of NE 15th and Alberta.  In my childhood it was a European immigrant neighborhood: Swedish bakery, Scots doctor, Greek grocery store, and so on.  Alberta, of course, was named for Queen Victoria’s daughter.  After I had grown up and left, the neighborhood turned black and the street I had walked to elementary school, Sumner, was considered a gang street where cops went carefully.  At night there was shooting.  The shops and the apartments on top of them deteriorated.  

Then gays and hispanics moved in.  Now Alberta is an arts and bodega street.  My mother lived in the same house until 1999.  A cousin of mine lives up 15th a few blocks, across the street from the doctor’s house my paternal grandparents bought when they came back to the States from Manitoba.

So when doing research for another project, I came across the history of the Castro District in San Francisco, less well-known than the “hippie” Haight-Asbury, I was intrigued.  I’ve always been interested in enclaves and bubbles of culture, where they come from, how they morph, and where they go.  This applies to both Valier and the Blackfeet Rez — it’s part of their charm, their historical flavor.

All-male Miners' Ball

I was surprised to learn that in the 18th century the area was Russian.  In 1809-1917 Finland, then a satellite of Russia, used the settlement to serve merchant and naval fleets with a heavy Finnish participation.  Finns are tough, practical, and free-thinking, with the liberal wing of the Lutheran church overlapping enough with Unitarians that the clergy serving Montana’s Finn communities hired Unitarian ministers.  Many Finns settled in SF during the Gold Rush.  Finnish Club No. 1 was established in the Castro District in 1882.  A bathhouse was built about 1910.  After the disastrous 1906 earthquake and fire, many Finns moved to Berkeley.

A decade or so after WWII when many families had left because of prosperity that produced suburbs, two new concentrations formed.  I’ll directly quote from Wikipedia:  “The U.S. military dishonorably discharged thousands of gay servicemen from the Pacific theater in San Francisco during World War II (early 1940s) because of their sexuality. Many settled in the bay area, San Francisco and Sausalito. In San Francisco an established gay community had begun in numerous areas including Polk Street, the Tenderloin and south of Market Street. The 1950s saw large amounts of families moving out of the Castro to the suburbs in what became known as the "White flight", leaving open large amounts of real estate and creating attractive locations for gay purchasers. By 1963, the Castro's first gay bar was opened called the "Missouri Mule”.

This is one of the unintended and rather unacknowledged consequences of WWII, another attempt on the part of government to control the nature of populations.  The Navy’s failure to understand that gays can be tough enlisted men meant that when were surprised by individual examples, the gay men were pushed out.  Since they were clustered on the mid-California coast, they magnetized into a functional community.  

A parallel example might be the Native Americans who formed communities along the coast in order to work in the factories that supported the war effort.  A second set of Native Americans arrived in cities when Eisenhower tried to extinguish the reservations by sending the people to cities, but not supporting them there, so that they ended up in ghettos, making common cause with blacks and hispanics who had also come to build ships and planes, but were at loose ends when the war ended.  The groups had been mostly rural, which made them sympathetic to each other.  And they were all stigmatized.  Black Power taught Red Power.

“Beat culture erupted in San Francisco in the 1950s with a rebellion against middle class values and thus became aligned with homosexuality and other lifestyles not part of mainstream culture. The beat poets who relocated to San Francisco from New York flourished in San Francisco's permissive atmosphere, and some like Allen Ginsberg were openly gay.”  This literary dimension easily merged with academic study of gays, called “queer studies”.

Being gay was neither rural nor urban, and not related to skin color, but, in addition to natural sexual preference, came out of military background, working-class.  Not so much the officer elites.  Wikipedia:  “Some of the culture of the late 1970s included what was termed the "Castro clone", a mode of dress and personal grooming that exemplified butchness and masculinity of the working-class men in construction—tight denim jeans, black or sand combat boots, tight T-shirt or, often, an Izod crocodile shirt, possibly a red plaid flannel outer shirt, and usually sporting a mustache or full beard—in vogue with the gay male population at the time. . .”

Cross-dressing exploded into a show biz performance art that might or might not signal trans-sexuality.  Presentation as advertising was the idea, in the sense of big birds with splendid plumage.  Today people can change physical gender.

Alfred Laliberté's "Les petits Baigneurs," 1915 restored 1992 at Maisonneuve public baths, Montreal, Quebec

“Public” baths exist where people have no bathrooms at home, as in immigrant tenements, and were meant as a public health measure.  Urchins were made to bath naked to so they could be checked for sores and bugs.  With an all-male gay community used to communal showers, baths were a natural venue.

Then came HIV/AIDS and a new kind of war, just as deadly as combat.  The men rallied to comfort each other, but despair and terror crept through lives.  Still, it didn’t extinguish the identity of the area as a special community that has now expanded to LGBTX, people who are in solidarity to defend their right to be different.  But then they had to defend their right to be the same, as in marriage and raising children.

The next challenge is upon them now: a form of “gentrification” which is not focused on reclaiming the graciousness of the housing, but rather on crowding in tech workers for the cyber-industry.  The world is based on change, each new phase displacing the old.

I watch all this from my celibate redoubt much in the way that I watched the gypsies from the bus, a kind of sympathetic outsider.  Unitarian congregations often share buildings with the Metropolitan Church.  They are not monsters to me.  But they do have a bit of a dark edge.  Like military people.  Or rez folks.

"GENTLE WARRIORS" by Geoff Mains: a Review

“Urban Aboriginals” was a focused orderly account of a sub-culture.  “Gentle Warriors” is a murder mystery, but with no single assassin and a host of victims.  It is a complex and entirely believable interweaving of many elements of the San Francisco gay and straight forces in conflict brought to a climax by the idea that HIV virus was deliberately designed as a weapon of mass destruction targeting gays.  This idea is then turned around to deliberately target those who block the protection of the vulnerable, including gays.  

Mains was uniquely qualified to write this book because of his background.  I would include his Brit/Canadian/far-north identity.  This sort of idea mushrooms up in the aftermath of crisis.  One of my ministerial cohort, a classmate at seminary, lost his final church because he believed and asserted that 9/11 was not the work of Middle Eastern terrorists, but rather the planting of explosives by the CIA, only triggered by the airplanes.  We like our enemies familiar and named.

Always I’m delighted to find a powerful book that is about the part of the continent I know, and not just the major cities.  Mains used his knowledge most effectively in the Metis character of Marc, who is a mystic and knows the forest.  The sex scenes (both extreme and simple cuddling) are for me less moving than the visions of near-muskeg, fusion of a different kind.

Chapter 19 is a “vision” by Marc that moves the issue from sex politics in SF to a broad “ecology of evil.” (My phrase.)  He is sitting on a stump near the beginning of the northern muskeg, looking “into the tangle of stems and sedges and sphagnum at the bog’s moist edges. . . Here was Labrador tea, cloud berry and crowberry, blueberry bushes and various wintergreens.  Here was bog laurel, and throughout, the brilliant tiny red coins of swamp birch that clung tenaciously to the delicate branches of the little bush.”  He sees “a late-blooming one-leaf orchis, its delicate spike of tiny flowers poked tentatively into the cold air, its base lost in a tangle of browned sedges.” . . . 

Given this specific, he draws a principle:  “Here was that rare and special side in each of us; here were those hidden delights we refused to recognize or actively suppressed.  By denying them in ourselves, in others, we created hostility, fear.  And so often when others chose to express those very feelings, to live those delights, we stoned them with hostile envy.”  

Louis Riel

This is the “Gentle Warrior,” a person of vision, skill and generosity who can allow others to be different.  In the background hovers the spirit of Louis Riel, mystic, who tried to lead the Red River Rebellion, a breakaway community on the Northern prairie.  In the year this book was published, I was teaching in Heart Butte where many of Riel’s followers had taken refuge to avoid being hung in Canada.  Their descendants had mixed with Blackfeet.  Some of them were gay, as is true of every place.  But I had not expected to meet Riel in this book!

Here are the characters we follow in the order that they appear in vignettes.

1.  Marc, the Metis, begins the story.  He’s been tending bar at the Ambush in SF.

2.  Gregg, ex-Marine racked with PTSD.  He’s guiding his motorcycle down the streets of the West Hills of Portland, OR.

3.  Sam, who’s gripped by an ingenious plot, and Brian, his lover, are driving south through a winter storm, stopping for supper in Grants Pass.

4.  Back to Gregg remembering how he connected with his group of plotters in the past.

5.  Allan Bennett, straight, a politician out of the “House of Cards”, also plotting.

6.  Back to Sam and Brian, trucking through the Siskiyous, while over the radio comes the news that Ed Stevens has admitted that he helped the CIA deliberately create AIDS and spread it.

7.  Gregg was previously married to Ed’s sister, Jo-Lyn, who is the only female main character, who tries to take action on her own fundamentalist terms, and ends up collateral damage like all the others.  Jo-Lyn’s connection to her nursing infant is as erotic as any of the encounters between leather men.

These characters, along with a few others, weave in and out of the plot line in a “long arc story” worthy of a television series.  Some of it comes directly out of Mains’ experience and other parts derive from news accounts, books, and long evenings of listening to unguarded talk.  The central obsession is that AIDS was knowingly imposed on a whole category of men for political reasons disguised as moral reasons.

Those were early times, so the detailed and specific knowledge of the actual virus that we have accumulated now -- the proof (still doubted by some) that HIV was a species jump from SIV, specifically from the chimp version, though it can jump from gorillas or gibbons as well -- the proof that the virus was slipping around like an evil shadow at least a hundred years ago -- the knowledge that it usually (but not always) takes more than one brief exposure to be contagious but is satanically hard to get back out of the blood once it takes hold -- the actual ports of entry on each cell and the specific places on the genome that allow those two key ports to exist -- all this was unknown at the time.  

Because Mains is coming at this unfinished tragedy through multiple storylines, it conveys a lot of information about how lives are affected and why anyone would continue exposure because of their intense passion for physical relationship.  It’s a premise often followed in heterosexual novels.  In fact, some of those historical novels pick up on the mystical principles of courtly love and irresistible fate.  Mains is frank about the greed, fear and viciousness of humans who have power and always want more.

There are 59 short chapters, the first and last both belonging to Marc.  This character brings to awareness a kind of new religion that comes from appreciation of the complexity of both the cell and the cosmos, and marries that ecologically to the nature of human society.  “Another sister on this terrible guillotine of life, this machine that kills so coldly, that slices with presumptuous accuracy, so disdainful of charity.”  

The last paragraph of the book is this vision:  “At a window in the city where one can watch the Sun God climb Mount Parnassus, lifting his train of fog up the hills as he goes, a man wipes the tears from his face and smiles in remembrance.  The owl hoots one final time and sinks into silence.  The passage has been made, the message given.  It’s time to go on.”

That’s the message of both biochemistry and forestry -- process: life goes on.  But for all his warrior-words and their explosive charge, he’s a botanist.  In his tangled bank it is the plants that struggle against each other.  No mole gobbles worms, no wolf pack brings down a moose.  It’s the humans who are unreasonable and needy.

This book was published by Knights Press.  The editor-in-chief at the time was Tim Barrus.  He was able to get the book into Geoff’s hands just a day before he died.  This morning when I looked, “Gentle Warriors” was available as a pdf online.  I hope that means more people can read it.