by David Rees
It’s a triumph of organization. It takes four hours to go by, and hundreds of groups are represented: the gay political clubs, Gay Fathers (with their children), Gay Mothers (with their children), a cable car full of Parents of Gays, Gay Farmers, Gay Businessmen, Gay Teachers, the Gay Men’s Chorus, the Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, Gay Karate, Gay Methodists, Gay Catholics (dozens of them), Gay Mormons (five), Gay Atheists (their banners read: CURB YOUR DOGMA-BORN-AGAIN ATHEIST), Gay People in the Arts, Fat Gays, Gay Doctors, gay anything. There are cable cars, vintage cars, ordinary cars, floats, people on foot, motorbikes. The Dykes on Bikes lead, as always, in “a symphony of tuxedos, tee-shirts and black leather” as the Chronicle lyrically says. And it’s an accurate description—scores of bikes, two girls on each, blasting horns, cheering, shouting, waving. Then the sombre part: the AIDS victims, some in shrouds in a cable car, but most on foot, waving and smiling as much as the dykes. Political heavyweights—out Congresswoman, state senators, the mayor of Berkeley, the gay sheriff of Hayward, the city’s supervisors— wanting our votes, but also they’re enjoying themselves just being here. Some exquisite drag. We walk behind the last float to City Hall where the thousands mill about on the grass of the Tenderloin, to the puzzlement of the tramps whose open-air home this is. Bands sing and play music here, and speakers speak all afternoon. In nearby streets are rows of portajohns with lengthy queues; the nearest parking lot is quicker, and so many cocks piss through its wire fence into somebody’s yard that the trees may wither. Beyond the loos are the hot dog stalls, beer stalls, the innumerable stalls of various groups hawking their own particular version of gay liberation. For two dollars I stand behind a cardboard nun, don a wimple, and have myself photographed with arms round Sister Freeda Peoples and Sister Missionary Position. The crowd is happy, relaxed, enjoying itself; Phil and I talk and joke and flirt with innumerable strangers. My WANNA FUCK? tee-shirt helps: “Had any offers?” or “When?” or “No thanks” or “How much?” or even “Yes please” are some of the responses.
Eventually we sit on the grass, drink more beer, and listen to the music. A cute young guy leaps on to an obelisk and begins to harangue the crowd: he’s a born-again Christian telling us AIDS is God’s curse for screwing with our own sex. The crowd jeer and shout so much his words are lost. Some climb on to the obelisk and snatch the leaflets he’s holding, scattering them to the four winds. A girl takes off her clothes and wiggles her bare breasts a few inches from him, then a parade marshal forces him to stop: but a few moments later he’s at it again, standing this time on a park bench. Emboldened, I suppose, by the alcohol, I walk up to him and fondle his cock. A closet case! He does not flinch at all!! The marshal tells me, in no uncertain tones, to behave myself, and informs the Christian that the police have been asked to remove him. The Christian vanishes, disconsolate, into the crowd, after picking up the few leaflets he can find. I feel sorry for him. In a way, admire him. Oh yes, he’s insulting us and deserves what he gets, but there’s something pathetic and sad—and brave—about being the odd one out in a quarter of a million happy people. Did he see himself as one of the angels abused in the streets of Sodom, and gain comfort and strength from that thought? But he certainly did not mind my hand stroking his cock. In a year or two will he be marching with the Gay Atheists?
We eat in an unusually deserted Castro (they’re all Still outside City Hall), then go to La Galleria for a special Gay Freedom Day dance. La Galleria is a converted warehouse miles off on the waterfront side of the Bayshore Freeway. The floor is vast, and though a great crowd is discoing, there is more room to move than at the End-up or the I-Beam. The music is good. Stairs lead to balconies where people look down and watch the dancers; we climb right up to the top and see couples lying about on plush carpets, screwing.
We don’t stay long. Friday we were packing, Saturday moving house, today—this. We’re exhausted. Monday, I ache in every muscle.
I AM AT KATYA’S NOW, settling in again. Silence. Sun all day. A racoon walking down the middle of the sleepy, dusty road. My room has two windows: outside one is a bottle-brush in full flower and a giant fuschia; outside the other a tangerine tree covered in fruit. The darkness at night is total. Yapping of distant dogs.
I work on the new novel, and in the evenings stay indoors. Watch movies on video. Drink wine. Go daily to the gym. Spend little money, and sleep well, though Phil is not in my bed now.
I miss him, of course.
JULY THE FOURTH, AND TO CELEBRATE the loss of the American colonies we are at Alan and Nils’s house eating and drinking with almost everyone gay we know and a hundred others. The garden is like a garden restaurant, with tables, waiters, flags and balloons. I flirt with a black who has great biceps and what is obviously a cock of immense proportions.
Sultry weather—ninety, ninety-five. In the evening, at Los Gatos, we watch from the windows fireworks explode downtown. Airless and humid indoors, sweaty in bed, and I fear I won’t sleep. Phil is with me tonight. We fuck, and I do sleep. The next day, a delicious cool breeze.
AT A DISCO IN SANTA CLARA I meet a man who really turns me on: loose-limbed and long-legged, very muscly, and a forest of thick dark hair from the throat down. The July the fourth black produced the same desire in me—to be screwed into the middle of next week.
Odd.
I make a date with this guy—and he doesn’t turn up.
TERRORIZED NURSES FLEE FROM DEADLY GAY PLAGUE yells a headline in the Weekly World News, and what follows is a piece of journalism of the most utterly irresponsible sort. It is intemperate in language—“The wildfire epidemic of lethal AIDS disease has spread a blanket of terror across America so overwhelming that even nurses are quitting their hospital jobs rather than look after its helpless victims”—and untruthful in content—“There are a great many doctors who believe it can be spread through the air or food. It’s no longer called the ‘gay disease’. Everybody is now in danger of getting it.” Doctors have said over and over again that it cannot be spread through the air or food, that everybody is not in danger of getting it, and that no nurse or physician attending an AIDS patient has ever caught it. The English of this piece one would consider laughable (its splendid mixed metaphor—wildfire spreading an overwhelming blanket) if it were not for the fact that its purpose is to create fear, panic, and an anti-gay backlash.
Recent AIDS news is mildly encouraging: in the past six months there has been a drop in the number of new cases when a doubling of the numbers had been expected. The reasons for this are not known, but speculation revolves round the possibility that a virus is perhaps not the culprit after all; or, if it is, it has mutated, as some flu viruses do, into a benign form. People may have contracted the disease but not so severely that they are prone to opportunistic infections, or they are somehow building up antibodies that can deal with it.
The bath-houses, however, have fallen on really bad times. One in San Francisco went bust recently, and held a bankruptcy sale. What of, I wonder. Gloryholes, empty popper bottles? Men?
XVI
I TAKE OFF, ALONE, FOR A WEEK. Driving south in a seventeen-year-old Corvair which is much admired by every gas station attendant I talk to. Ralph Nader had the Corvair branded as dangerous, so it was withdrawn from the market and now has a rarity value. I can’t find anything particularly dangerous about it. This is Nils’s car: borrow it, he said; we use the Cadillac (the Fleetwood Brougham d’Élégance!)— drive to the Grand Canyon if you like. The generosity: would any British person do likewise with his car? Old though it is, it has only twelve thousand miles on the clock, and it is in superb condition.
On Aptos Beach I watch dozens of brown pelicans who have made their home on a battered hulk a few yards from the shore. They take to the air in twos and threes and skim low over the water. Their movements are astonishingly graceful—wings outspread, they look like exotic umbrellas floating without effort on the wind currents. But their eyes stare downwards all the time; they float with a pu
rpose. They stab the waves at a very oblique angle—four degrees, maybe five—then zoom, for a moment, just under the surface, reappear and fly on, no doubt having fed well. Arrogant; kings of the sea. The fish population must suffer from massive, constant nervous breakdowns.
The hulk on which the pelicans live was once a dance hall, but it caught on fire in the 1920s and nobody bothered to rebuild it. Once a Mecca for charlestoning humans: noise, smoke-filled air. Now only birds.
MONTEREY, PICTURESQUE in that sense of the word used of fishing ports in Devon and Cornwall: boats, harbour walls. The sea blue-black like Stephens ink, the same colour as the Aegean, Homer’s wine-dark. Cliffs, inlets, shell-white sand. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, but instead of the tarted-up scene I’d imagined— old warehouses converted to Steinbeck souvenir shops—it’s dilapidated and largely torn down. I drive round the Monterey Peninsula, famous for its pines, the last bastion on earth of the Monterey cypress; then on a beach, sunbathe for an hour. Otters lying still as logs in the sea-tangle, or diving, frisking, swimming backstroke. Sea lions toiling slowly up the rocks. Their movements are clumsy, involve a great deal of effort. Not surprising, as they have no arms. Sociable animals. They sit on the rocks, nuzzling and preening, barking their heads off.
Spectacular mountain and cliff road south, to Big Sur. Point Sur is California’s Mont St Michel, but instead of an abbey there’s a lighthouse; no cluster of huddled buildings, but grass; and the causeway is sand, not road. This is far from anywhere else: not out in the wilds, but beyond the wilds. In the evening I eat salmon in Monterey, at a restaurant overlooking the harbour. Another dazzling performance of otter antics.
A day of sun and sky, rocks, light on a ruffled, wrinkled, heaving sea.
MORE ANIMALS. SEALS ASLEEP, an occasional flipper twitching. Do they dream? Shapeless things. A skunk. The first I’ve ever noticed; smaller than I’d thought. It is lifting its tail to fill the night air with its evil smell: I do not stop.
But I do stop in Yosemite when I see a fox trotting peacefully up the other side of the road. Very much like an Alsatian, but smaller; dingy and grey in colour. Nasty yellow eyes. Instead of running off as I expect, it halts, turns and looks at me, then opens its slobbery jaws. This I realize is no fox. It’s a wolf.
It seems to be wondering how I would taste, so I drive on. A moment later its friend comes out of the forest; looks left, looks right, looks left again as a well-trained dog reacts on a pedestrian crossing; then it lollops over the road and disappears between the trees.
THE MONTEREY CYPRESS SURVIVES in crevices in the cliffs, allowing the winter storms to batter it into twisted, violent, writhing shapes. Its foliage is an extraordinarily vivid green, as emerald as fields in Ireland after rain. The sequoias in Yosemite are just as odd—the world’s tallest living things, three hundred feet or more in height. (California boasts a crop of ultimates: excluding Alaska, Mount Whitney is the highest mountain in the United States; Bad Water in Death Valley, well below sea level, is the lowest point on the North American continent, and Tahoe the biggest lake; the bristlecone pine is the world’s oldest living thing; the Bay Bridge is the longest bridge in the West; etcetera.) The sequoias can’t be much younger than the bristlecones: one, called the Grizzly Giant, is two thousand seven hundred years old. The colossal soaring trunks of these trees are reddish in colour, are ramrod straight, and they seem to disappear into the heavens. It’s impossible for the eye to absorb all the details. A few have been vandalized—the middle of the trunk of the sequoia known as the California Tree has been cut out. You can walk through it, even drive a car through it.
Why have they endured? They are immune to disease, and they’re fire-proof. Yes, fire-proof wood! They have one failing: their roots spread rather than dig deep, so in the winter gales some of them fall over.
YOSEMITE, OF COURSE, IS MAGNIFICENT; particularly the sunken glaciated valley in the heart of the sierras. That glacier worked like a laser beam; the valley walls are three thousand feet of sheer drop. Half Dome is precisely what its name says, a mountain one side of which is vertical, the other a gently sloping curve. At dawn, at sunset, the granite of Half Dome, El Capitan and the Cathedral blushes pink or glows like orange fire. Waterfalls tumble over the edges—Yosemite Falls, though it’s the world’s second highest waterfall, is not one great single plunge as is Niagara; it hurtles down its mountainside in three stages. This year, because of the long bad winter, there is a prodigious quantity of snow on the peaks, and the waterfalls are tremendous torrents. In 1980 there was no snow here in July, and I climbed the boulders to the foot of the Bridalveil Falls; now spray soaks me to the skin before I can get near them. The Merced River is icy green and swift— recently melted snow.
I drive to the top of Glacier Point, and gaze down the three thousand feet of wall to the green river, the toy village, the postage-stamp swimming pool, the ant-like cars. Then look up at jagged summits, snow and sky.
At night this sky is thick with stars, and there are shooting stars whizzing across the heavens at unimaginable speeds.
The problem with Yosemite is people. It’s famous, accessible, and organized. You cannot, in the valley, get away from the other humans, their litter, their artefacts. But the valley is only one small bit of the National Park, and had I time and inclination I could back-pack and live rough in these mountains for days on end, and see not humans but bears and wolves.
I drive out of the park via Tuolumne Meadows, the unpopular route because nothing lies to the east of the sierras in the way of cities, just the Nevada Desert. Also the road, though an easy climb as far as the ten thousand feet summit of the Tioga Pass, is not easy thereafter. The Tioga was shut this year till the beginning of July; as I drive on, the snow is still deep under the fir trees, and the air is cool. I don sunglasses to stop not sun-dazzle, but snow-glare. The descent is a thread without safety barrier clinging to a mountainside all loose scree. I’m happy, after this pass of gloomy grandeur, to reach level ground at Mono Lake, which is deep blue and flat.
I STAY AT A MOTEL IN LEE VINING, a village of one hundred souls on the shores of Mono. The lake is fed by several rivers but has no outlet; the water evaporates as it does in the Dead Sea but it’s not so saline. Swimming is possible, and there are fish—zillions of brine shrimps. Three quarters of California’s gulls nest here and live on the shrimps. There is a remarkable absence of humans: it could be a tourist spot, but perhaps, like Big Sur, it’s just too far from anywhere else. The lake’s bird life, because people are rare, is teeming.
I lie on the lake’s edge, nude. There is not one man-built thing to be seen: no fence-post, telephone pole, car, empty Coca-Cola bottle. The, vegetation consists entirely of sagebrush which stretches to the horizon and beyond. A feeling of huge open spaces: distant mountains in Nevada; sky; a warm wind—the west as a pioneer might have seen it. The wind on my skin, brushing the hairs, stiffens my cock. A good place to fuck, this sandy desert. No need to check if anyone can see. I have no man with me, however.
Growing out of the lake and on the shore (the water level has dropped in recent years) are bizarre stalagmites called tufa, formed over the centuries from calceous deposits and fossilized algae. Some are twenty feet high. They give the whole region a look of moonscape or the surface of planets in science fiction’s outer galaxies. A dust storm on the lake’s eastern side adds to the feeling that I’m not really on Earth at all.
I travel along dirt roads to Bodie, a ghost town—I am definitely on this planet in a very well-preserved piece of its history. Not somewhere abandoned when the Gold Rush went sour, but a place that continued mining until 1932 when matches, carelessly struck by a small boy, caused a fire that destroyed nearly all of it. Its remoteness and punishing climate—freezing winters and scorching summers—meant that it was a very wicked town (at one time there were constant lynchings, saloon-bar brawls, stage-coach hold-ups, and a murder at least once a day) and that it changed very little in the seventy-odd years of its life. What is here
now is therefore a Wild West museum: wooden Victorian houses with their simple utensils and plain furniture. One of the saloons still exists (there were sixty-five in all), so does the theatre, a church, a hotel, the bank vaults, and the schoolroom—complete with desks and textbooks. The theatre contains a fascinating collection of the last century’s products: mining implements, domestic hardware, family photographs and letters, two funeral carriages with black plumes, and the red light from one of the many brothels. It was in Bodie that someone had the harebrained idea of rigging up wires to make electricity travel long distances. He experimented, much to the amusement of the townspeople, and it worked. The idea was exported to the rest of the world, so we can iron clothes more efficiently now, freeze food and see well enough to read after dark … and so on. Maybe it wasn’t such a wicked place after all, this dinosaur.
What was it like to be gay in Bodie? Did ecstatic fucking and delicious sucking help those blizzard winter nights to pass? There is nothing in the record, of course, to show that any homosexual lived here, but… one in ten, one in ten. The pale stalagmites at Mono, only a few miles off, remind me of the pillar of salt on the road to Sodom.
THE TEMPERATURE IN YOSEMITE AND MONO was a pleasant mid-eighties, with a cool night wind. I left Los Gatos in mid-heatwave: a very uncomfortable one hundred and two, the house stuffy, almost stifling in the late afternoon. Even the tangerine tree looked tired. I return now to a chilly weekend in San Francisco (but a warm Phil), fog, and a thin drizzle releasing earth scents, flower scents. A hint of fall.
One may regret the fog of San Francisco summers, and agree with Mark Twain that the worst winter he ever spent was the summer he lived here. But without the Golden Gate to let in the cool moisture, this part of, California would lack lungs, air conditioning, an open window to blow the staleness from a frowsty room. The Sacramento Valley would overheat, become desert, and much of the world’s almond, orange, lemon, grapefruit, peach and pear crop would not exist.