by Alia Volz
Harvey would soon tack a new introduction onto his stump speech, a play on Bryant’s claim that gays were out to recruit children. “My name is Harvey Milk,” he’d say. “And I’m here to recruit you.”
* * *
Meridy was wrapping up her Friday run when she noticed clumps of people drifting toward the intersection of Market and Castro streets. Some carried protest signs: ANITA BRYANT SUCKS ORANGES! SAVE OUR HUMAN RIGHTS! BOYCOTT FLORIDA ORANGE JUICE; SQUEEZE A CALIFORNIA FRUIT! Mer heard whistles and the first bursts of chanting.
She knew she shouldn’t risk getting arrested while holding cash from her sales. But she had missed the big protests earlier in the week and wanted a piece of the action. She joined the crowd, promising herself she’d leave at the first sign of cops. “Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight!” she chanted, staying with the group down Market Street as it grew to about eight hundred. At Civic Center, where police presence thickened, she caught a BART train back to the Mission.
At the warehouse, Mer flopped onto the bed, exhausted. Music drifted up from Doug’s studio: Earth, Wind & Fire. Blood pounded in Mer’s feet. Then Doug appeared in the doorway. “What happened? It’s late.”
“Oh, I was at a protest. That cow Anita Bryant.”
“Everything go all right with the brownies?”
Mer rolled onto her side, unbuckled the army satchel, and pulled out a fistful of twenties and tens. “I could’ve sold twice as much,” she laughed. “They love us!”
* * *
“It was an energy thing,” Sian Van Cortlandt tells me. “It was something living and breathing, something really powerful.” Sian worked at a men’s clothing store on Castro called City Island Dry Goods. “It would be, literally, a buzz. Late Friday afternoon, what I call the ‘coconut wireless’ would start up, like jungle drums beating: Today’s the day for the Brownie Lady, the Brownie Lady, the Brownie Lady! And then it was like, She’s up the street! She’s up the street! You’d be running around the store and going to friends, ‘How many do you want? How many are we going to buy?’ Then she would come in wearing a big purple poncho with the bags strapped across her chest like Pancho Villa. We’d chat, and then she’d go off to make someone else happy.”
I ask my mom to reconstruct her Eureka Valley sales run and get a forty-five-minute answer. She sold at coffeehouses, hair salons, sex clubs, novelty shops, florists, delis, bookstores, hardware stores, luggage stores, pet supply shops, chiropractors, bakeries, real estate offices, travel agencies, bathhouses, and myriad restaurants, bars, and discos. As editor in chief of Drummer magazine Jack Fritscher recalls, she was “like a milkman making a delivery.”
By 1977, gay men had so thoroughly claimed the twelve blocks around Castro Street that you could almost forget that it had ever been otherwise. But this was new. For generations, Eureka Valley had been a quiet, working-class district of Irish, German, and Scandinavian families. A couple of low-key gay bars settled in during the 1960s. Then four appeared all at once in the summer of 1971. Two lesbians bought the Twin Peaks Tavern on the corner of Castro and Seventeenth streets and quietly made history—likely the first gay bar in the nation with plate-glass windows, the goings-on visible from the sidewalk. Eureka Valley had been gradually emptying since the mid-1960s as blue-collar jobs shifted from the waterfront and city center to the suburbs. There were vacancies. Gay businesses cropped up like wildflowers in spring.
Eureka Valley was neither the only gay neighborhood in San Francisco nor the first. North Beach came earlier, as did Polk Gulch—which still had more gay bars than Eureka Valley in 1977. The leather scene, along with many bathhouses and sex clubs, rollicked South of Market. Transgender women and other gender nonconformists carved out space in the Tenderloin and on Polk. The heart of the lesbian community beat in the Mission.
Factions that would later unite under the LGBTQ+ banner didn’t all get along in the 1970s, as historian Josh Sides points out. Several women’s spaces kept strict policies against allowing men through the door; a few also banished transgender women as infiltrators. Some gay establishments projected misogynistic attitudes and “boys only” policies, especially in the macho environs South of Market. “Leave your fag hag girlfriend behind,” advised a writer for Drummer, adding that the action on Folsom Street “gets too heavy for female company.” Bisexuals were widely dismissed as dabblers.
Eureka Valley became a world unto itself. It was unique in that it mimicked an all-American small town—but with a disproportionate population of young men in tight jeans. Mainstream dailies ran articles on the area’s growing economic and political clout. A trend emerged of same-sex couples buying Victorians in disrepair and refurbishing them with fresh paint jobs and refinished floors. By 1977, the area looked less blue-collar and more like the Castro of today: clean and well kept, cheerfully painted, and expensive. Poet Aaron Shurin described it as the place “where gay men came to live out their bourgeois fantasies.”
Meridy ready for a brownie run.
Which didn’t mean they hadn’t come to party. “The men of our dreams are on the streets every single day,” a twentysomething-year-old Minnesota transplant named Mark Abramson wrote in his diary, “just waiting to be unwrapped and experienced on the spot . . . I’ll never get through them all.” At two a.m., when the bars closed (by California law), crowds surged into the street, dispersing between discos, sex clubs and bathhouses, all-night diners, or cruisy parks. Music pounded through the hours like a ticking clock. When liquor sales resumed at six a.m., bars filled again even on weekdays. This was a far cry from the sleepy residential neighborhood of a few years before. Eureka Valley had changed so drastically that the name no longer fit. Newspapers, both gay and straight, waffled over what to call it: the Castro Corridor, Eureka Village, sometimes just the Village. Harvey leaned toward Castro Village. The name pinballed for months before coming to rest as the Castro. Residents could stay right there and have everything they needed without ever spending time or money in the straight world. “A whole neighborhood,” Randy Shilts writes, “where it was safe to swish down the street.”
Now Sticky Fingers Brownies was there, too. “That run was huge,” my mom tells me. “It was the hugest! And I was really good at it, and I did it in high heels half the time. And pregnant!”
Mer rang the doorbell to Sylvester’s flat. She clutched his address scrawled on a scrap of paper. The singer had put the word out on Castro that he wanted the Brownie Lady to visit.
Mer had danced to Sylvester and Two Tons O’Fun countless times at City Disco, the Palms, and at home on the turntable. Sunday afternoons at the Elephant Walk, people flowed out of the bar to dance right in the street, traffic be damned. He seemed, somehow, to appeal to many factions at once—equally beloved by drag queens, leathermen, lesbians, clones, blacks, and whites, even straights. With his new single, Sylvester was becoming a national star. Local queen makes good.
A young man with long wavy blond hair came down to let Mer in, and she followed him upstairs. Battered antiques, lush fabrics, and erotic art were strewn about the flat amid half-unpacked moving boxes. She rounded a corner, and there was Sylvester: black, bold, and beautiful, stretched out on a tasseled velvet divan and wearing a glittery gold turban, purple blouse, wide-legged pants, and rings on every finger.
“Girl, don’t mind the mess,” Sylvester said. “I’m just getting started here.” He spoke in a smooth, lilting voice that belied his powerful pipes. “Make yourself comfortable and tell me all about you.”
Mer eased herself into a frayed, ornate chair. Her feet throbbed. Someone passed her a fresh joint, and she slipped into easy rapport with the singer, the beginning of a camaraderie that would last for years. Sylvester bucked every stereotype and didn’t seem to give a shit about trends.
He’d risen through the hippie era with the Cockettes, a radical genderfuck theater troupe that performed with beards, genitalia doused in glitter, clothing from every decade, and outsize headdresses—creating wh
at John Waters called “complete sexual anarchy.” That was ancient history. But Sylvester was still lightyears from the hypermasculine Castro clone look that dominated the scene then. He wasn’t trying to pass as female either. Sylvester, Mer would learn, didn’t tolerate labels. “I’m not a drag queen,” he’d say with a flourish of fingers. “I’m Sylvester.”
Thereafter, she stopped by every Friday to do a deal and hang out for a while—a welcome break from the long walk around the neighborhood. It was always easy to land in that sumptuous environment and hard to take off again.
* * *
Sticky Fingers wasn’t the only game in the Castro, as Mer soon found out. Since her first run, customers had been telling her, “Go see Dennis at the Island. He’ll get your angle.” And the way it was said—something in the inflection—gave Mer the impression that Dennis had a “biz” of his own.
One June afternoon, she walked into the Island restaurant on Sixteenth and Sanchez streets loaded with her duffels of brownies. It was cluttered and casual, with mismatched furniture, reclaimed wood, and abundant plants. She asked at the counter for Dennis, and a hippie popped up from one of the couches nearby.
“What can I do you for?” Dennis was petite and impish, with long shaggy hair and messy bangs. He spoke in a reedy Bronx accent and wore a ratty T-shirt, cutoffs, and flip-flops, eschewing fashion altogether.
Mer offered him a sample.
Dennis cheerfully unwrapped the brownie right there, sniffed it appraisingly, and took a bite. “Mmm,” he said, admiring the green-tinted grease the brownie left on his fingertips. “Gooey!”
He bought two dozen right off the bat.
Little did Mer know that their futures were entwined.
* * *
“When Sticky Fingers started coming around,” Dennis Peron says, “the Island café was my place. It was a great restaurant. Anything went. Anything. You could smoke pot. You could fuck there if you wanted . . . . The only thing we didn’t have was really good food.”
In later years, Dennis would be known as the single person most responsible for reforming marijuana laws in California. He says he’s been busted for cannabis twenty-two times. The first arrest was right after returning from Vietnam, where he’d been assigned to the army morgue during the bloody Tet Offensive. While bagging corpses, Dennis resolved that if he survived, he was coming out of the closet; life was too short. Upon being processed out through San Francisco in 1969, he headed straight for Golden Gate Park to start his new life as a gay hippie. Days later, he got arrested for possession of a joint. Dennis was tripping on LSD at the time of arrest and couldn’t stop giggling. “Hey, you, shut up,” an officer said, which made him crack up harder. The cop had Dennis stripped buck naked and locked in a cell alone. Dennis suffered flashbacks, hallucinating that he’d been captured by the Vietcong. It was a frightening night. By morning, his fear had morphed into anger. He vowed to dedicate his life to legalizing weed.
Dennis opened the Big Top Marijuana Supermarket in his home on Castro Street. Clients could choose from an array of products: marijuana from around the world, hashish, kief, and brownies. The vice squad mounted a massive sting in 1974 and arrested Dennis and forty-three of his employees and customers.
While serving part of his sentence through a work-furlough program, Dennis opened the Island in a long-vacant storefront. “I lovingly restored it,” he says. “No two spoons matched, no forks matched, no plates matched, no chairs matched, nothing matched! I found it all in the garbage. I decorated that whole place with garbage, but 250 people could sit down in 250 chairs.”
Like my mom, Dennis was better at finagling than cooking; he hired friends to create one of the first entirely organic vegetarian menus in town, serving macrobiotic stir-fries and stoner classics like peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
Undaunted by his bust, he also reopened the Big Top. When smugglers knocked on his door and offered him three hundred pounds of high-grade bud at a blowout price, Dennis became the self-proclaimed King of Colombian.
Dennis’s ganja empire ran on sincere idealism. He never took money seriously and would hide cash in random places, like dirty laundry baskets, then forget about it for months. He didn’t want to be rich, so he looked for ways to invest in his community. “That marijuana formed a lot of businesses around the Castro,” he says. “Marcello’s Pizza. Brad was my man there. I said, ‘Hey, Brad, I got three hundred pounds of pot. Take ten and start selling it.’ Falcon Studios, the porno place: ‘Steve, I got tons of pot. Please take ten pounds!’ Also, I helped Harvey Milk. ‘Here, Harvey, there’s some money in your pocket, but I don’t know how it got there. It’s not from me.’”
Though Harvey didn’t use drugs anymore, he and Dennis were close friends and associates. He held staff meetings and threw parties at the Island. That Dennis might have slipped him a little something for the campaign seems not at all unlikely.
* * *
The next time Mer stopped at the Island, Dennis wanted to talk volume. “How many of these lovely treats can you whip up?” he said. “You bake ’em, I can move ’em.”
He invited her up to the Big Top to see what he’d created, but Mer demurred. Her gut wasn’t giving her the green light. Later, she tossed hexagrams about selling at the Big Top. The results seemed risky. She trusted Dennis personally, but he’d been busted before, and the cops would have their eye on him. She decided to proceed with great caution. She avoided going into the Island and the Big Top. Instead, Dennis would send his lover to meet her in a parking lot, and Mer would have everything set to do the transaction swiftly. And she always tossed hexagrams beforehand, trusting the I Ching to keep her safe.
* * *
The official line in San Francisco was tolerance and equality. The gay and lesbian community—now flexing muscles as a voting bloc—had allies in high places. Foremost among them was Mayor Moscone, who’d championed the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill that decriminalized sodomy in California. There was also the chief of police, Charles Gain, who told the Bay Area Reporter, “If I had a gay policeman who came out, I would support him 100%.”
Both Moscone and Gain were on shaky ground with the SFPD rank and file. Looking back, retired sergeant Jerry D’Elia tells me, “From a police officer’s point of view, Moscone was one of the biggest double crossers in the history of the police department, because he had promised us that if we supported him, he would choose a chief from within the ranks. And the first thing he did was get Gain.”
Charles Gain was the first chief in fifty years who’d never served on the SFPD. Originally from Texas, he had been chief of police in Oakland during the racially dynamic years that gave rise to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. His conciliatory posture toward black activists earned him a reputation for being forward-thinking—along with a no-confidence vote from his own force. Moscone brought him in as a reformer, and Gain wasted no time. He banned drinking on the job and made examples of those who disobeyed. And he encouraged racial minorities and gay people to join the force. He also ordered the department’s black-and-white patrol cars painted white and baby-blue, which he thought projected a more humanistic image—much to the embarrassment of old-timers on the force.
The SFPD was predominantly Irish Catholic, conservative, and resistant to change (despite efforts toward racial integration, Josh Sides points out, the force remained 85 percent white and 95 percent male as late as 1979). Cops took their grievances to the press. “First he calls us alcoholics,” one officer grumbled. “Now he’s calling us fruits.” Some policemen called their chief Gloria Gain behind his back.
On the county side, Sheriff Hongisto had also proven himself a gay ally, causing chagrin among his men. He had used personal vacation time to travel to Florida and campaign against Anita Bryant’s referendum. While he was away, the 250-member San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association composed a telegram to Anita Bryant. “We consider your opinion to be a sacred right,” it said. “We applaud the stand you have taken and admire y
our courage.” The president of the association told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We’re not trying to buck the sheriff . . . He’s supporting the Coalition for Homosexual Rights [sic] and that’s his thing. We can say what we’d like to say.”
The liberal attitudes were being imposed from the top down.
D’Elia recalls that during his patrolman days, back when his beat included a stretch of gay establishments South of Market, he’d sometimes take flak from other officers. “How can you go into those fag bars?” D’Elia shook it off. “First of all,” he tells me, “it was my job. Second of all, I couldn’t care less, you know, as long as everybody’s okay with it.” D’Elia admits that he was more open-minded than many of his colleagues, some of whom had “stupid hostility” toward gays and lesbians.
Meanwhile, violent attacks were spiking. “By 1977,” wrote journalist Warren Hinckle, “a decade after the famous hippie ‘summer of love’ in the Haight Ashbury, gays were experiencing a summer of terror in the cradle of the counterculture.” He cited reports of thirty to forty muggings and stabbings per month by “street toughs” targeting gays. Given the unfriendly history between law enforcement and the City’s homosexuals, victims were sometimes reluctant to turn to police for help when gay bashers marauded. Castro locals organized street patrols and handed out police whistles for people to summon help from neighbors in case of an attack.