I Was There (For a Moment)

In 1980 I went to California for the first time. My mom had a business trip and she took me and my sister along for five days in San Francisco, hanging out with family friends while she worked, and five days in Los Angeles, visiting her kooky cousin L. Three things of note happened on that trip.

The first thing of note was that I got one of the two horrendous sunburns I remember, the ones that presumably have some relation to the almost-melanoma I had when I was 22. I think it was at Muir Beach or maybe Baker, but the main thing I remember is how the strips of dead skin pulled right off my back a few days later.

The second thing of note was that we went to the Castro Street Fair. It was the one day that my mom wasn't working, and my recollection is that we heard there was a street fair and thought it would be fun. Can that possibly be true? Could we really have had no idea what the Castro was? In the newspapers we read or signs we saw or whatever it was that lead us there, was there really no mention of what made the Castro Street Fair THE CASTRO STREET FAIR? Perhaps. For the Castro Street Fair in 1980 is my first recollection of encountering gay life, perhaps even gay people.

So there we were with my mom, and there were the bare butts and leather chaps and bandannas and bright-hued tank tops (we bought pink and blue for my dad--what were we thinking?). There were the men hanging off balconies cheering the drag queens, and the men making out in the street, and the men doing all sorts of other things we probably averted our eyes to. I don't remember women.

It was about as much fun as could be had at the premier gay event on the planet without being a gay man--and really, that was a lot of fun. It also was a crucial event in my own political development. I mean, there I was with my mom, in case anyone has forgotten that crucial detail, surrounded by gay men living their lives out loud, really out and really loud. They were the norm and we were the minority and it was all perfectly normal. Since then, supporting gay rights has been perfectly obvious to me.

It was only years later that I realized that we had been present at an historic moment. The first cases of K.S. appeared in 1981. By 1983, even I, far away from the Castro, knew a gay man who had died of AIDS. By 1990, when I moved to Berkeley, the Castro was full of ancient-looking young men, hobbling toward their last days, and everyone talked about ACT UP and Queer Nation and AZT, not whether to go to the baths or the tea dance. The Castro Street Fair in 1980 was the peak of an era that nobody knew was about to end. If I wanted to go super-cliched here, I'd call it the end of innocence. But that's too cheesy even for me.

Anyway, this article reminded me of all that.

Oh, and the third thing of note that happened on that California trip was that I stopped eating meat. But somehow that story seems anti-climactic (even if it does include my cousin L telling her kids to say their mantras on Big Thunder Mountain), so I think I'll stop.