A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  The Queen has a mixed Press. Several editorials thunder away on the extravagance and frivolity of the monarchical system; some even sound as if the War of Independence had never finished. Lots of demonstrations, particularly by the Irish. Katya celebrates her fiftieth birthday at a “Free Ireland Now” rally. No American I’ve talked to has any idea of the complexities of the crisis in Ulster. It’s seen as a simple colonial problem, wicked Brits and enslaved Paddies. Nothing I propound, despite my impeccable Southern Irish origins, can shift them; Dermot Keogh, who comes from the University of Cork and is, like me, a visiting professor at San José, has the same difficulty. We are in a minority of two.

  PHIL AND I JOIN KATYA and her family for a picnic in Golden Gate Park. While we’re eating we hear gunshots, and later, looking at the news on TV, we learn that a seventeen-year-old girl who was sitting in the rose garden has been shot dead by a maniac.

  ST PATRICK’S DAY and I see a sticker in a window—VICTORY TO THE IRA. A black on 18th is wearing a green wig.

  CLICHÉS IN STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS: America is the Great Melting-Pot, the Land of Opportunity, the Land of Freedom. Unemployment, discrimination, prejudice, limits on freedom exist here as much as they do in any other democracy. An opinion poll published today says Americans are the most satisfied, the proudest, the most God-fearing people on earth. For satisfied one could read, self-satisfied; for proud, insular; for God-fearing, hypocritical. There is less evident chauvinism than in France, but many Americans cannot conceive of anything interesting or important outside the United States. News coverage on radio and TV, in the papers, is quite astonishingly inward-looking, except for the focus on Israel—there is always something on Israel: the fifty-first state. Stories from Britain consist of little more than what the Queen is wearing. Of the twenty-eight pages of news in this Sunday’s Examiner and Chronicle two are devoted to the “World.” Three items in all, in between the adverts—American journalists kidnapped in El Salvador; Reagan’s views on the presence of Israeli troops in Lebanon; and the only topic that is totally un-American, and apparently worth printing, is the weakness of the franc since the socialists came to power in France. Perfect way to breed a nation of the uninformed.

  Americans don’t see that their medical system is indefensible by any civilized standards, that their urban life is more violent, their banking in some ways more antiquated, their telephone system less efficient than that of some European countries; that they aren’t God’s chosen people. And I was not happy to be asked at the End-up disco this weekend for proof of my identity. I had nothing with me to say who I was and had to come home to get my driving licence. ID is a reminder that America imposes some restrictions on “freedom” that we would not tolerate in Britain.

  There are innumerable compensations, of course. Politeness, openness, warmth: you can arrive at the most remote part of anywhere at 3 a.m. and find coffee, a meal, gasoline, a bed. Cheap booze, cigarettes, petrol; good restaurants and reasonable licensing laws; the weather (in California, but not this week); the landscape; the leafy suburbs (even San José is preferable to Ealing); the space. The baths.

  And San Francisco.

  THE GAY PAPERS AT THE MOMENT are almost entirely concerned with AIDS. New theories—it’s caused by parasites; its incubation period is eighteen months to two years. The death toll is rising, and some people have died quite horribly. More and more people are more and more worried. Mythology grows too. An AIDS sufferer was recently refused admission to a Castro restaurant—as if the disease were infectious like the common cold, or a lethal germ one could catch from an unwashed plate.

  Yet I couldn’t resist the temptation to go to the Watergarden on Good Friday. Not much action, although it’s a holiday for some workers; the scare is emptying the bath-houses. I have to make do with being sucked off by a man I really didn’t find attractive at all.

  JANOS’S MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY. A lengthy phone call, the dreaded subject not aired. One of his brothers had said to him earlier in the week that Mom didn’t really want to talk at the moment, didn’t know what to say to her eldest son. She’ll cope, I guess, if the subject is never mentioned again, if he returns to Seattle always alone. He’s cross that nothing was discussed, that he couldn’t bring himself to mention Jim, that he said, “7 am having dinner in Los Gatos tonight.” His parents will change, he thinks. I doubt it. That is how the world is.

  EASTER SUNDAY. Behind Los Gatos, walking through the monastery grounds and up into the hills. The guard monk, the one with the Corona Corona cigars, accosts me with a stupid question about English grammar: “When should you use single inverted commas as opposed to double inverted commas?” He is a bore.

  I have never seen it so lush. There is a profusion of weeds and wild flowers: sourgrass, miner’s lettuce, dandelion, California poppy in bloom, new leaf on escallonia and poison oak, white feathery pom-poms of blossom on eucalyptus. No pungent scent now of fennel, but smells of greenness, of things growing. A brook in full spate where last October there was a dried-up water-course and silence. San José spread out below us with its dark pines and office-block temples, and there is no smog in this changeable, blustery weather.

  A grove of olives: new silvery leaves, and last year’s fruit ungathered on the branches or squelched underfoot.

  I think of the days spent up here in my sickness—the fall heat, the shafts of sunlight, the dryness and dust—and I realize how attached I’ve become to this landscape, that it’s grown into me as much as a distant view of Dartmoor or Haldon, the slit of the Exe estuary, the cathedral’s twin towers.

  I cook dinner for twelve at Katya’s. One of those rare parties at which the chemistry between people is superb. Dennis and Paul captain teams for charades; Anne, who isn’t aware that the sexual orientation of half the guests is different, tries to mime “King” in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mystified, we venture “hat”, “uniform”, and (several times) “queen” (as in Elizabeth). “Why did you keep saying queen?” she asks. “I kept pointing at David—King! King!” I glance at Phil, and we both fold up in helpless laughter.

  Katya, mischievously, has asked Sarah and Harriet (who are together again) to pop in for a drink; she wants Phil to say “I’ve heard so much about you!” Neither turns up; another crisis, Katya says, is brewing, or by now has fermented. How many crises do there have to be before the mixture explodes?

  XII

  LOS ANGELES. Suddenly, after the wettest winter since 1849, the temperature is eighty-five degrees and the sun is with us all day. I drive down with Katya to stay at her cousin’s. Irina has been married seven times to four different men, and is depressed because her plans for an eighth marriage—to one of her former husbands—have not materialized. She is a pleasant, relaxed, interesting woman; and I’m happy just to talk to her and Katya and sunbathe in her garden or by the ocean—she lives at Redondo Beach, only minutes from the sea. I tell myself I ought to be exploring gay Los Angeles, but I can’t be bothered. Three years ago I trolled up and down the Santa Monica Boulevard, gazing at the “hitch-hikers” and thumbing rides myself. Now I lie on the sand, reading a novel set in sixth-century Byzantium, listen to the sea, and watch the beautiful surfers.

  Being near the ocean, Redondo Beach is without smog. Not so inland at the moment; driving up the Pasadena Freeway to the Norton Simon Museum I pass close to downtown LA, and the tops of the skyscrapers are almost invisible. None of the mistiness is fog; it’s all petrol fumes. What this must do to the health of the Angelinos, I guess, is something worse than sore throats and streaming eyes.

  San Francisco is not old even by American standards, but it gives one the feeling it has lasted, and, earthquakes or not, that it will last. It has that rich blend of setting, architecture, lifestyle and atmosphere which makes any great city different from any other—unique, of itself, a quality that is only San Franciscan, Parisian, Venetian, etcetera. Los Angeles has nothing of this. In area it is the biggest city in the world (ninety miles across) and, t
ogether with its satellites and suburbs, it has a population of nine million; But it has only existed in its present huge and sprawling shape since the Second World War. You feel it will not, unlike San Francisco, last, that it will vanish as suddenly as it came into being, choked to death by its exhaust fumes. Not so long ago it must have been an earthly paradise—a thin coastal strip at the foot of the mountains, an almost ideal climate, golden beaches and glorious warm surf. Now it’s a spectacular monument to the human capacity for destroying the environment—a ruin achieved not over centuries, but in half an average man’s life-time.

  “You’ll hate it,” people said before I first came here. “It’s all smog and freeways.” All smog and freeways it is, but I don’t hate it. I usually enjoy Los Angeles—for a brief while. I’d go mad, however, if I lived here. I don’t find its freeways confusing, though they’re invariably traffic-packed; at all times of the day it is rush hour. Unlike anywhere else in the world, where a motorway is a relief, it’s relaxing here to drive in the stop-go of traffic lights and one-way systems. Angelinos have no concept of car-pool, unlike San Franciscans; in ninety-nine out of a hundred cars there is only one person. The waste of petrol! The cost of petrol! The stink, the smog caused by petrol!

  Los Angeles does have its attractions, of course. For a European, to be in Hollywood, or to find oneself standing on Sunset Boulevard, is initially as dream-like, as awesome, as the sight of Buckingham Palace or the Eiffel Tower is to an American. Sunset Boulevard! Can little old me really be here? The Hollywood Sign is indubitably impressive and it doesn’t look, despite Dory Previn’s song, as if it’s constantly saying “cheese”. The houses and gardens up in the mountains at the back of Hollywood are beautiful. (Those of neurotic Beverley Hills are not.) Cypresses everywhere: parts of LA are great garden suburbs— the buildings almost entirely hidden by trees. I love the eternal sunlight and the heat: the evening heat in summer when the mountains, reddish at this time of day, glow like an enormous hot brick, and seem to gasp with relief that the intense baking has finished for a few hours. The sunsets over the ocean—long bands of vivid orange—and the star-studded skies, nowhere better seen than from the Hollywood Bowl (smog permitting): I remember a concert there, Bartok, Liszt and Brahms, played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Giulini; as it began, search-lights were pointed at the sky to tell planes to keep their distance, and every pause in the music was filled with the whispers of a million crickets. The night wind was warm on the skin—we needed no clothes other than shorts. Touch, as well as the ear, satisfied.

  And another delight is surfing in a rough sea at Malibu.

  THE NORTON SIMON has at least one major painting by anybody of any significance from Botticelli to Picasso—with four curious omissions: no Giotto, Constable, Turner, or Leonardo. The best Sisley I’ve ever seen—a snowy landscape so cold it draws you in till you feel the ice. More Degas than in the Jeu de Paume; fine collections of Henry Moore sculptures and Picasso drawings of bulls. Rembrandt’s Titus, Zurbarán’s only still life.

  The museum is large; after two hours I can absorb no more though I haven’t seen everything. It started only thirty years ago; almost all the exhibits, therefore, must have previously been in private hands. In this brief period it has amounted to something that can rival—for example—the Rijksmuseum. And it’s the work of one man. The speed of it—is that only possible in Los Angeles, the city that’s grown from almost nothing to the world’s largest conurbation in forty years? As if the inhabitants know it can’t last?

  MY ONLY GAY MOMENTS are eating with Scott—an old friend—at a gay restaurant in Pasadena. (The song may revel in the fact that Pasadena is where the grass is greener, but the smog is so bad here that it’s killed the palm trees. The city replaced them with plastic palm trees. The smog then rotted the plastic. Or so I’m told; I guess the story is apocryphal—Pasadena has palms like anywhere else. And the little old ladies of both sexes look alive and well.) Scott’s house, in Glendale, is in one of LA’s leafier corners. An odd house, full of character, tea-planter style on a hill of San Franciscan gradient, surrounded by trees and hanging, trailing flowers. But it stinks of cats, which isn’t even preferable to car exhaust.

  WE WENT DOWN, and return, on 101; Highway 1, the pretty route, is closed at Malibu, Big Sur, and Pacifica—washed away by the storms this February. But 101 has compensations—the detour over the San Marcos pass is a proper mountain road: the landscape all green, and I remember it withered by months of sun. The coast at Santa Barbara is the California of one’s dreams and fantasies: mountains almost tumbling into the golden sands and Riviera-blue sea. Three years ago on Highway 1, I saw Big Sur shrouded in fog, and I came back over the San Bernardino Mountains: soaring peaks, pine woods, great boulders. Distant LA was hidden in a smog cloud, an unnatural purple. The Joshua trees, scrub and sand of the Mojave desert; then groves of almond, peach, nectarine, orange, lemon, and apricot in the Sacramento valley. This time, by 101, from San Luis Obispo to Salinas, a long, long, green plain.

  HARRIET IS NOT THRILLED that Sarah disappeared at Easter, for ten days this time. She hints to Katya that the balloon is about to go up. Watch this space!

  Gary calls from Spearfish. He doesn’t think he can cope with a trip to San Francisco; the big city would unnerve him. It isn’t that big, I point out. Well… he wants to go down to Las Vegas as soon as he graduates, and from there to Dallas at the end of the summer to get settled in. It’s a pity we won’t meet, he says, but perhaps “it wasn’t meant to be.” A very flaky individual, this guy; he has a lover in Dallas, I presume, and for some reason doesn’t like to tell me. As Americans say, it’s time he got his ass in gear.

  TWO MURDERS, CARBON COPIES of each other in the evidence, motives and verdicts. A youth, portrayed by the defence as “confused”, “from a difficult home background”, kills an older gay man, chops the body up with an axe, and burns it and the victim’s house, then drives off with his car, money and various possessions. The defence rests on “He made a pass at me.” (No witnesses corroborate this statement.) In both trials, the jury is so scandalized by the thought of a man making a pass at another man that they bring in not-guilty verdicts, despite the fact that the murderers confessed to their crimes, and one of them had been living in a sexual relationship with the person he killed. The leader of Sonoma County’s Coalition for Human Rights (not a gay organization) says that this means if he winked at a woman she could now slaughter him with an axe, burn his body, confess, and go free. It wouldn’t happen, of course; it’s not straights who are denied justice.

  Other recent events: an ambulance driver refuses to take a Castro man suffering from peritonitis to hospital because the patient is homosexual… Oregon throws out a gay rights bill … gays are beaten up and robbed on the 24 Divisadero bus…

  THE MAYOR OF CASTRO STREET by Randy Shilts is essential reading for anyone who wishes to discover how and why San Francisco became gay Mecca. It’s also essential reading for the student of politics, for it is a fascinating account of the struggle for, and the manipulation of, political power: an inefficient, conservative administration, out of touch with the needs of the day, being swept aside by reforming elements that are destroyed by the assassin’s bullet.

  One may think that the political manoeuvrings of a city council are small beer, but San Francisco’s mayor and Board of Supervisors wield far more power than their British equivalents. The mayor is no ceremonial figurehead, but the chief executive; San Francisco’s government is the only one in the United States that rules not just the city but the surrounding county too. And small though it is, San Francisco has national prestige and influence quite out of proportion to its size.

  The mayor of Castro Street in Shilts’s book is Harvey Milk, the first openly gay public official anywhere. He was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977, and with the real mayor, George Moscone, was shot dead a year later by Dan White, ex-policeman, ex-supervisor. The book is extremely good on Milk as man and politician, and c
harts his rise to fame with meticulous detail. It is also excellent on the killings and the subsequent travesty of a trial—Dan White was found not guilty of murder but of voluntary manslaughter; the ineffective prosecution was possibly in cahoots with the defence, and the jury was packed with working-class anti-gay conservatives from Dan White’s constituency. Ludicrous evidence purporting to show that the accused was not a cold-blooded murderer was allowed in court: his addiction to cupcakes and junk food, one psychiatrist said, caused his body metabolism to change. The jury believed this. The gay community, on hearing the verdict, reacted with unprecedented anger: they smashed the windows and doors of City Hall, petrol-bombed police cars, and sent over a hundred policemen to hospital. The police retaliated by assaulting gays in Castro and destroying the Elephant Walk.

  The historical account of the American gay movement in the 1970s is well done, as is the history of Castro itself—its development from a working-class Irish community, living in tumble-down housing, to the present gay ghetto with its smart, chic Victorians. Why San Francisco, as opposed to anywhere else, became gay Main Street is given full and interesting explanation—it has not been a phenomenon solely of recent years, but has its roots deep in the city’s origins and its century-old reputation as the most relaxed, carefree, and colourful of places.

  Journalistic hyperbole sometimes mars the writing, and it is a pity that the implied audience is the San Francisco gay—had the author been aware of readers outside Castro, some of the assumptions and details would have been a little less confusing. His obvious dislike of liberal, aloof Dianne Feinstein means that she fills more of the text than is necessary; the ebullient and affable George Moscone, on the other hand, is not given enough space. A serious omission, too, is an analysis of why Dan White killed Moscone and Milk. The conspiracy theory is interesting, however—White may have been egged on by policemen who strongly disapproved of Moscone’s regime for its pro-gay stance and its determination to clamp down on corruption and violence. There is no doubt that some policemen regard White as a hero for what he did, and have comforted and consoled him during his imprisonment; in 1977 they were discussing the possibility of “removing” Moscone and his liberal police chief, Charles Gain. That the San Francisco police department is still in many ways corrupt and violent is borne out by a recent series of articles in the newspapers, describing the unnecessary beating of suspects—particularly if they are gay or Latino—, the training of recruits in violent methods, and the refusal to take steps against thugs physically assaulting gay people.