When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  None of my friends had ever heard of the SLA or its leader, Cinque, before Foster’s murder, but many of the people I hung out with now claimed to know people, who knew people, who knew people… Someone resurrected one of the World War II posters cautioning “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and plastered it all over town. Some of the SLA members were purported to have lived at Peking House, a communal house we had visited for potluck feasts. Others were rumored to have come out of the Venceremos Brigade or the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.

  It was all very dramatic and thrilling, but I had been profoundly influenced by the Quakers and could not allow myself to believe that violence, let alone murder, was the way to build a revolution and a new world. Also, it seemed clear to me that the other side had all the guns.

  Thanksgiving arrived and Silas took us all shopping, and I loaded up the back seat with fresh fruit. We all had our assignments, and mine was to make the fruit smoothies we’d serve with the vegetarian feast we were preparing. I borrowed an enormous blender from a kid I knew who worked at a juice bar, and as soon as we got home I began peeling and slicing the fresh papayas, mangoes, pineapples, oranges, grapefruit, and kiwis I’d purchased. As the guests arrived I added the crushed ice, organic vanilla yogurt, and my secret ingredient: Orange Sunshine LSD.

  Shoki put Bette Midler’s new album on the stereo, cranking up the volume for our favorites, “I Shall Be Released” and “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.”

  The smoothies were a huge success. After an hour or so one of the guests, downing her second serving, commented, “That Cleve, she’s a regular Betty Crocker, that one.”

  From the sofa, Silas, finishing his fourth, exclaimed reverently, “No, no, no, no, she’s Our Lady Betty of the Holy Blender.”

  It spread rapidly through the growing crowd: “Betty Blender, Betty Blender!”

  I finally had a drag name of my own.

  The Zebra killers were busy that December of 1973. Another half dozen attacks occurred, many of them fatal. One was on Divisadero Street at Haight, just a few blocks from our flat, on a corner we walked by almost every day. It wasn’t a particularly cold winter but the fog was thick and the air was even thicker with rumors and apprehension. We tried to travel in groups and avoided walking at all after sunset. The black neighborhoods were saturated with cops who were clearly baffled by the brutality and lack of apparent motive in the attacks. Some said the killers were Black Muslim “Death Angels”; others whispered of CIA involvement. Then the killing stopped.

  On February 4, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped publishing heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. On the pavement, just down from our flat, someone spray-painted the SLA’s seven-headed cobra symbol and their slogan: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!”

  Dora was not impressed and rolled his eyes, asking, “Shouldn’t it rhyme?”

  Silas agreed. “It doesn’t exactly trip from one’s tongue, does it?”

  In March the Watergate Seven were indicted by a grand jury and even Silas moderated his cynicism sufficiently to wonder if Nixon might possibly—“please, Goddess”—end up in jail.

  In April the Zebra killers struck again and shot five people, killing all but one. The police, infuriating the black community and civil libertarians, detained hundreds of African American men at random checkpoints across the city.

  Just a block away from our place was Buena Vista Park. A decade later it would be all cleaned up by Dianne Feinstein, with manicured paths and amazing panoramic views of the city, bay, and bridges through the old eucalyptus trees, but in 1974 the park was wild, overgrown, and more than a little bit crazy. Cruising there one afternoon I met a guy named Bobby Kent. He played piano, and was friends with and played with Sylvester, the singer I’d met in the crowded dining room at the Haven. He had a big, kind of goofy smile and a pile of red hair. We were both checking out the boys and he asked me if I wanted to see something really cool. We walked up almost to the top of the park and then he led me up a tiny narrow path through dense undergrowth to the base of one of the oldest and tallest eucalyptus trees in the park. I followed him as he began to climb up the tree; about 20 feet off the ground the branches parted to reveal a gingerbread trim Victorian tree house hidden another 10 feet up.

  I laughed out loud. “Far out, man, I’ve walked by here a hundred times and never even noticed.”

  Bobby grinned, “That’s ’cause I come up here every couple days and cut fresh branches for camo. You can help. Check it out, man.”

  The tree house was a perfect little rainproof wood room, just big enough for two. On a small shelf was a wooden box and next to that what I thought at first was a Bible but turned out to be a leather-bound book of blank pages. “Let’s see if anyone has left us a present,” said Bobby, and he opened the box. “Ah hah.” He lifted his fingers, revealing a small ball of black hashish.

  We smoked and leafed through the pages of the book. There were entries dating back 18 months, poems, love notes, messages (“Tony, I was here on Tues. the 21st but u were not. I miss you. Try for next week—Harley.”), also drawings, cartoons, and pressed leaves and flowers.

  It began to rain and we stretched out as best we could and dozed listening to the rain in the trees around us. When the rain stopped we got ready to leave and Bobby pulled something out of his pocket and placed it in the box where the hash had been.

  “What’s that?”

  Bobby grinned. “That’s one of the rules of the tree house. First rule: keep this place a secret. Second rule: you always leave a gift for the next person.”

  I opened the box and saw what Bobby had left, a small amethyst crystal.

  Most mornings, I’d get up and have some coffee and maybe some fruit or granola and yogurt while I read the Chronicle. Everyone I knew began the day by reading Herb Caen’s gossipy morning column. Then I’d roll a couple joints and head over to the park. Gay men had made the park our own; one rarely encountered anyone else there. We’d stroll and share joints and disappear into the warrens and nests and dens we created in the undergrowth. On sunny days the burrows would open up to naked guys fucking or dozing in each other’s arms in the dappled sunlight.

  One afternoon I climbed into the tree house to find it already occupied by a very cute guy, a bit older than me. Totally my type: sweet face, flat tummy, longish hair, and bright smiling eyes, his name was Erich. He told me he flew hot air balloons. We would meet, off and on, in the tree house for months to come, smoking weed and making out and having sex while the City hummed below us.

  “Postcard for you, Cleve—who’s Scott?” Shoki was bringing in the mail and waved the card at me. “Whoever he is, he’s writing to you from Is-tan-bul. Who do you know in Turkey, girl?”

  “Give me that, it’s from Scott, the boy I spent Christmas with.” I hadn’t found the nerve to face my family back in Phoenix for the holidays; Scott and I instead took a Greyhound to his parents’ place in Manhattan, Kansas. Pat and Warren, his parents, were warm in their welcome, and Scott’s younger sister and brother, Sue and Peter, were as beautiful as he was—and kind, smart, and compassionate.

  I had met Scott at a Gay Liberation picnic in Tempe the year before. I was sitting on the grass with some friends and looked up to see one of the oddest-looking boys approaching. He was quite tall, with a beautiful face and long auburn hair. He was wearing beaded sandals, gold glitter knee socks, and lederhosen with suspenders over a crisp white dress shirt. Yellow feathers depended from each ear lobe and a gold and yellow Indian-print scarf encircled his neck.

  Scott could wear anything anywhere with grace and dignity. No matter what the scene or situation, Scott would be completely elegant and poised. Adults, children, and animals all understood immediately upon making his acquaintance that this was a being unlike any one had encountered before.

  We knew we were brothers for life from the moment we met. Now Scott was off on his great adventure and, according to the postcards,
getting ready to travel across Turkey to Afghanistan. He closed his message with a plea that I come join him soon. The postcard showed the Strait of Bosporus and the bridge connecting Europe to Asia. I wondered what the Turkish guys were like.

  Silas knocked loudly on my door. “Hey, wake up, we’re going shopping!”

  It was early. I groaned, “Silas, what the fuck, man?”

  He responded, “We are going grocery shopping, courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst and SLA General Field Marshall Cinque.”

  As a precondition to the negotiations for releasing Patty Hearst, the SLA demanded that the Hearst family donate millions of dollars worth of food to poor people in the Bay Area. The first attempt to distribute the food had turned into a complete disaster when an unexpectedly huge crowd had showed up, panicking workers and freaking out the media. The then governor, Ronald Reagan, was quoted on the evening news as saying, “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism,” as thousands of hungry poor people lined up for the canned food, rice, and frozen turkeys.

  We were there as much for the spectacle as for the free food. For many years, until it finally disappeared from my cupboard, I kept a package of Rice-A-Roni on which had been stamped the seven-headed cobra of the SLA.

  A neighborhood nonprofit group, the Western Addition Project Area Committee, took over the distribution of the food at about a dozen alternating sites, not just in San Francisco but also at locations around the Bay Area, for over a month. It was completely insane, but out of the chaos emerged a nucleus of progressive activists who within the next years would register tens of thousands of new voters, mostly young and radical. In coming years, those new voters would elect George Moscone to the mayor’s office and enact district election of city supervisors, which in turn set the stage for a new style of politician, eventually represented best by a pony-tailed gay Jewish guy from New York named Harvey Milk.

  There wasn’t any parking at the church where the food was being handed out, so Silas double-parked and tossed me the keys. “Watch the car.” I sat on the hood and beheld the unfolding scene.

  Soon a very skinny white guy with ridiculously tight jeans came over and started talking. After about twenty minutes an equally skinny girl with really big silver hoop earrings and long blonde hair joined us. I liked them both. They both seemed so interested in where I was from and what I was doing with my life, and the boy kept giving me these steamy looks. I prattled on until Silas, Dora, and Shoki returned with arms full of groceries. We piled in and drove off for home.

  Silas asked, “Why were you hanging out with those two?”

  “I don’t know. They seemed cool. He was kind of cute, do you think he liked me?”

  “I’ve seen them around lots lately, they live in one of the People’s Temple houses.”

  “No shit, that place on Geary?”

  “Yeah, but those two live over on Potrero Hill. In a Temple house. You should stay away from them; they’re all fucking zombies. That’s why they’re so skinny—they don’t feed them any protein so their brains can’t work. And if anyone invites you to a weekend up in Anderson Valley, don’t get in the van.”

  Dora chuckled at that, “That’s for damn sure, don’t you get in that van, Betty Blender.”

  We didn’t know it, of course, but as we were driving home with our groceries, representatives from Jim Jones and People’s Temple were signing the last documents relating to the purchase of large tracts of land deep in the jungle a few miles southwest of Port Kaituma in the South American nation of Guyana.

  A couple of weeks after that, Patty Hearst participated in the SLA robbery of the Hibernia Bank branch on Noriega Street, and declared she had joined the revolution. She announced that her name now was Tania.

  Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!

  CHAPTER 5

  Struggling for Solidarity

  SAN FRANCISCO’S THIRD ANNUAL GAY FREEDOM DAY PARADE ON JUNE 30, 1974, was bigger than the organizers had hoped. Over fifty thousand participants marched and danced in tight jeans, wild costumes, and outrageous drag through the streets of San Francisco.

  Harvey Milk and his boyfriend, Scott Smith, had opened their little camera store on Castro Street a few months earlier, and they entered a “float” in the parade that was nothing more than a decorated shopping cart pushed down the street by Scott. Onlookers cheered and called out to Harvey, already something of a character in our very small and tightly knit community.

  President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, the first president in US history to step down. Facing certain impeachment by the House of Representatives, he had little choice. We followed the Watergate hearings and impeachment proceedings avidly and cheered when the eloquent Representative Barbara Jordan, an African American member of Congress, addressed the House Judiciary Committee on July 25, saying, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

  Sitting in our living room watching, we were very impressed by Rep. Jordan’s speech. “Tell it, sister!” shouted Patrick.

  “She has to be a lesbian,” said Dora.

  “Definitely,” agreed Silas.

  “Absolutely,” said Shoki.

  I concurred, “No question.”

  When Gerald Ford was sworn in as the nation’s 38th president the day after Nixon resigned, he told the nation, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” Then he granted “a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which, he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in…”

  Silas was more than annoyed. “That goddamn lying piece of shit motherfucking asshole should rot in prison,” he shouted at the television.

  The postcards from Scott continued to arrive, from Bodrum and Isfahan and Kabul, and I traced his progress on a map of the world that I taped over my little desk as he traveled from Turkey, to Iran, to Afghanistan. He ended each postcard with the same invitation: “Join me,” and instructions on where to write to him.

  I started to work more hours at Time Life Telemarketing. It was the most god-awful boring job I could imagine, cold calling total strangers during dinnertime and trying to sell them one or more of the Time Life Books series. I was embarrassingly good at it, especially after our manager, Jo Sivers, taught me that by lowering my chin while I spoke I could also lower my voice.

  To help pass the time, many of us adopted noms de téléphone: “Hello, Mrs. Smith? Hi, this is Willie Loman calling from Time Life Books, how are you this evening?” Only rarely did anyone get the joke.

  Jo Sivers was a straight Native American woman from the Papagos Nation near Gila Bend, Arizona. She liked gay men, and there were quite a few of us working for her in the corner office over Powell and Market. We were a motley crew at Time Life, partly because it didn’t matter what we looked like or what we wore—all our interaction with customers was over the phone. One of the shift managers was a guy in his late fifties named Jack, a serious alcoholic who would take me out drinking in the old bars of the Tenderloin. Another was C. J., whose stage name was Rio Dante. He worked for years with the most famous female impersonator of all time—the fabulous Charles Pierce. C. J. took me to see Charles perform, introducing us backstage one night at Cabaret, a nightclub in North Beach.

  There were three four-hour shifts at Time Life Books each day, so one could choose to work morning, afternoon, or evening, leaving time for other jobs, classes, or auditions. In my free time, I’d hang out in the tree house, attend political rallies, and sneak into dance bars like the Stud and the Mind Shaft. The Mind Shaft (not to be confused with the infamous New York leather bar of a similar name) was a dance bar on Market Street between Church and Sanchez Streets. I had a dancing buddy named Shondelle and we’d meet there several nights a week. Shondelle and I were both skinny and twenty years old, wit
h very long hair and fey hippie ways. We’d dance to songs like “Don’t Rock the Boat,” “Love’s Theme,” and Gladys Knight’s “On and On,” and swing our hair around like there was no tomorrow.

  A few nights that year we ventured up to North Beach to see Sylvester at the Cabaret. From our first brief meeting on Polk Street, I’d been fascinated by Sylvester and his journey from child gospel star to gay disco legend. He’d performed with the Cockettes, a psychedelics-inspired group of performers founded by Hibiscus (George Harris). In 1974 Sylvester’s reign as Queen of Disco was still a few years away, but in 1972 he had become the first openly gay recording artist signed by a major label.

  I’ve known many queens in my life. Some wore drag only for performances; some lived their personas 24/7. Some were people we now know as transgender. But most lived relatively bland daytime lives as accountants, bank tellers, or waiters, slipping into sequined splendor late at night beneath the lights and smoke of the clubs. There are all kinds of queens, of course, but the truly great queens I’ve known all shared one quality: beneath the pancake makeup and rhinestones, under the bravado and bitchiness and camp, they were kind and gentle people. In my early years in San Francisco I was so often helped by the queens and transsexuals—they sheltered me, fed me, clothed me, and taught me how to stay alive and out of jail. They were among the very first to imagine a gay community, they took the greatest risks, and they were fierce and uncompromising. We’re not supposed to use the word “tranny” anymore; it’s now considered offensive. But where I lived, it was always a term of endearment.

  At some point in 1974 I met Howard Wallace and Claude Wynne, two people who would have a huge impact on my political beliefs and eventual activism. Howard was older, a tall, lean white guy, kind of handsome, who’d come to San Francisco from Denver in the late 1960s. Claude was younger and shorter than Howard, a black guy in his early 20s from New York City. Both had come to gay liberation and gay activism via the New Left movement of the late 1960s. In 1975 they were among the founders of Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL), a group that would grow rapidly into one of the largest gay liberation organizations in the country at that time. I also met Arthur Evans, whose face I recognized from one of the photos in Life magazine in 1971. He had been part of the Gay Liberation Front and then the Gay Activists Alliance in New York.