For My Brothers: A Memoir

For My Brothers

A Memoir

Mark Abramson

Published by Minnesota Boy Books at Smashwords.com

For My Brothers © 2014, 2017 Mark Abramson

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Published originally by Wilde City Press, 2014

Re-released by Minnesota Boy Books, February 2017

Cover Art Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This memoir got its start in the spring of 2012 when Kirk Read invited me to take part in a series of workshops called: THE BIGGEST QUAKE - New thinking on the San Francisco AIDS epidemic, culminating in three amazing nights of free public readings at the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco's Castro district. In addition to Kirk, my fellow Quakers Brontez Purnell, Dr. Carol Queen, Ed Wolf, Julia Serrano, Justin Chin and K.M. Soehnlein inspired me to continue telling my part of the story. Everything I read at the church on those three nights is included in this book.

I owe a great debt of thanks to Owen Keehnen in Chicago. Although we have yet to meet in person, his encouragement, keen eye and love of history convinced me that these stories were worth telling and kept me on track while writing their first drafts. Others who lived through the AIDS years were helpful in jogging my memory, providing names and details, particularly performers Gail Wilson (who also remembered the lyrics to her Fireman's Song), Sharon McNight, Wayne Fleisher, Michael John Frangella, Bradley Connlain, and my dear friend and birthday-mate Rita Rockett. I also want to thank Roddy Williams at the AIDS quilt, former Bay Area Reporter columnist Wayne Friday, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik, and authors Armistead Maupin and Anne Rice for their memories of specifics. Thanks to the San Francisco LGBT Historical Society and especially their managing archivist, Marjorie Bryer, who arranged for us to use some of the wonderful photographs of the late Robert Pruzan. I am grateful to everyone who brought this book to fruition, especially Ethan Day and Geoff Knight at Wilde City Press, and my editor Jerry Wheeler. I am indebted most of all to those who are no longer here to tell their own stories, my gay brothers who nurtured me, inspired me, and taught me how to laugh death in the face.

FOREWORD

When Mark Abramson first contacted me, I had just published Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow. Mark emailed that he was working on a story about a trip to Chicago with John Preston and was looking for the address of Renslow’s popular leather bar The Gold Coast in the early 1970s. I reread the email and shook my head at how small the world can be. Early in my writing career, John Preston had been kind enough to take me under his wing. He mentored me with advice and introductions, but he was even more helpful by just being there and giving me the confidence I needed at that point in my life.

I told Mark about my connection with Preston, and he wrote back saying that he and John had been roommates in Minneapolis and again in San Francisco while Preston was the editor of The Advocate. John eventually moved back to the East Coast, but Mark stayed in San Francisco. Mark asked if I’d be interested in reading the piece he was writing about my mentor. Of course I was. It seemed fated. After reading the story, I made some suggestions about rearranging and expanding it. He then sent me another section he had written about Preston. This tale was just as engrossing, and I knew Mark had the pacing and clarity of a great storyteller.

Although I was in the middle of finishing the biography of another gay Chicago legend, Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria, I asked to see what else Mark was working on. Mostly these were assorted stories from his years as a bartender, events producer, and activist in San Francisco. He said he was thinking about writing a memoir about living through the epidemic. I told him I thought it was a terrific idea. As someone who had spent the previous year or so piecing together history from the AIDS era and before, I knew how crucial the preservation of first hand accounts from the period could be.

Before I knew it, I was involved and then engrossed—energized by the pieces I was reading. The sections came in two and three page installments at a pace of a couple a week. My primary function in the evolution of the memoir was that of informal editor, advisor, and mostly cheerleader. It was easy to encourage something so worthwhile and compelling. I was just thrilled to be a part of the process. Most stories needed a bit of work, some expansion or cutting or added explanation, but I never doubted their relevance and power. This was great stuff. Mark was at ground zero of the epidemic as a bartender in various San Francisco gay taverns since the late 1970s, through the darkest days of the epidemic, and into the new millennium. He had a lot of history to share.

Overwhelmed by the fear and devastation all around him, Mark responded by stepping out from behind the bar and doing more. The AIDS era required action. With his musical skills as well as his experience in staging and booking bar talent, Mark co-produced several early AIDS fundraisers including the Men Behind Bars shows, Pier Pressure, the Bare Chest Calendar contests, and many other creative ways to raise money. Oftentimes tinged with drugs and alcohol, the resulting tales are raunchy, hilarious, sweet, gritty, and poignant in a way that makes history pop from the page. Mark has created a brilliant snapshot of San Francisco during that turbulent time, and watching it come together was thrilling. By the time For My Brothers was completed, Mark’s personal story had expanded to include the larger story of love and loss in that pivotal time in our community’s history. The AIDS epidemic is the mere backdrop for the rendering of a larger picture and a bigger story as well. The disease is a catalyst for capturing the heart and soul of a city, an era, and the resourcefulness of a community. But mostly, it is the story of people.

Mark has an amazing gift for bringing these mad and wonderful characters to life and infusing them with a vibrancy that never falters. He remembers the men and women he has known in his roles as a bartender, friend, activist, and lover. He captures so many colorful and dynamic people, gone before their time, leaving so many dreams and such potential unfulfilled, and he does it without being maudlin. For My Brothers even has celebrity tales with Sylvester, Edith Massey, Al Parker, Connie Francis, Randy Shilts, Eartha Kitt, Johnnie Ray, and more.

Many of the people in these pages have been forgotten, but thanks to Mr. Abramson and his brave, funny, and sometimes audacious memoir, they have not been lost. They are ready to be discovered (or rediscovered) and enjoyed. For My Brothers is an account of personal loss and survival, the chronicle of a man reviewing his past and trying to make sense of that turbulent era. The people and lives contained in these pages deserve to be remembered and thanks to Mark’s skilled storytelling they will be. Just pull up a barstool and get ready for a great story.

Owen Keehnen

FOR MY BROTHERS

… A Memoir

Mark Abramson

Chapter One

When a young man believes that he only has a short time left to live, his most logical response might be to spend his remaining days living as hard and as fast as he can. At least that was my gut reaction to the AIDS pandemic. It was also my excuse for every excess during those years. I had spent three seasons tending bar at The Woods, a big gay resort north of Guerneville, California, when the long, wet winters started taking their toll on my summertime enthusiasm for living in paradise. By the winter of 1983-84 when I started packing up my belongings and moving back to San Francisco, one rusty old pickup truckload at a time, we had heard about AIDS up north, but it hadn’t taken over our lives. In my conversations with other bartenders at the Russian River, it had only affected friends of friends or maybe an ex-boyfriend’s former roommate or…

You remember that hot bodybuilder couple from Tiberon? They come up every year for a couple of weeks in July and drag guys out of the hot tub for three-ways in their cabin. The redhead’s a flight attendant for Delta. They both drink Dewar’s and soda…you know them.

Yeah, what about ’em?

One of them died.

The red-head?

No, the other one. He got some kind of pneumonia and went into the hospital and died the next day.

How old was he, anyway?

Twenty-six.

My ex-boyfriend, Jonathan Berdell, was one of the first people I knew with AIDS. He had bought the house on Orchard Avenue that lured me up to Guerneville in the first place. We’d discovered back when we first met that we’d both moved to San Francisco the same month—July of 1975—with less than two hundred bucks in our pockets. We were about the same age too, although I don’t remember his astrological sign, much less his birth date. Like a few other industrious gay men I knew, he created his own business. In Jon’s case, he bought, restored, and resold cheap real estate in the Haight, the Castro, the run-down Western Addition, and now the Russian River, all the while holding down a high-paying job as a hospital administrator. Jon had his whole life planned out. He was going to retire young and travel and live comfortably off his investments. I heard him vow more than once, I will never work a day after forty!

I met Jon on the dance floor at the Music Hall, a disco on Larkin Street. I spotted him a few feet away, and I thought he was cute, the thick, dark hair on his bare chest glistening with sweat in the flickering lights of the mirror ball. Gay gyms were just starting to catch on in the late 70s and he obviously worked out. He invited me home that night to a Victorian house he owned on Fell Street. I could hardly wait to get him out of his blue jeans, and I was happy to discover that his legs, thighs, and ass were just as well-muscled as his chest and arms.

The next morning, I met his roommates Bob and Bobby over coffee. Bob was a few years older than us, with a gray beard and a deep voice to match his butch demeanor. Bobby might have still been in his twenties, as Jon and I were, and he reminded me of myself—friendly, funny and horny all the time. All four of us soon became good friends. We danced a lot in those days, rarely missing a Sunday T-Dance at the I Beam on Haight Street. We divided our nights between the Music Hall, Trocadero Transfer, and Dreamland, the latter two located south of Market.

When Jonathan bought the house on the Russian River, we all became like family. Jonathon and I had long ago stopped having sex with each other, but as is so often the case with gay men after the fireworks cool down, we developed a comfortable and caring friendship. I rented the main part of the river house, which was on two levels and led directly out to the pool. Bobby rented the second floor apartment above the driveway for the first year. All of us worked to convert the garage into a fancy little studio apartment with a big deck facing south toward the flower and vegetable garden. It was very high-tech with track lighting everywhere, and we painted the walls gray with white woodwork. Gray was the in color that year. That apartment was supposed to be Jon’s, but sometimes Bob stayed there or else Bob pitched a tent on the lawn if all of us had guests.

When Jon was diagnosed with AIDS, he traveled to the same clinic in Mexico where the actor Steve McQueen had gone to cure his cancer, and we all know how that turned out. When Jon returned from Juarez to his gingerbread Victorian on Fell Street, he hired a live-in nurse whose duties included operating a new stainless steel gadget that squeezed the juice from the calves’ livers that he had delivered fresh every morning. He drank it raw.

I was drinking upstairs at Chaps bar on 11th and Harrison on a Sunday afternoon, standing at the railing checking out the guys at the main bar below me when I heard of his death. My Australian buddy, Kym Whittington, was tending the balcony bar off to my left with the sun shining through the windows, silhouetting him. I was probably still stoned from the night before. Bob and Bobby came up the stairs, walked over to me and said, Jonathan died this morning.

He was one of the first people I knew who got AIDS, but not the first person I knew who died from the disease. Maybe the raw liver had bought him some time. Who knows? I just remember standing there with a drink in one hand, holding onto the rail with the other, while the music pumped and the laughter of strangers echoed through the cavernous room. I was already numbed to the news of death by that time. I remembered what Jonathan had always said about never working a day over forty. He was right. When he died that morning, he was still in his early thirties.

Jonathan’s roommate Bobby had his own business laying linoleum floors. He drove a white van, the back of it filled with so many rolls of new linoleum he didn’t have much room for anyone or anything else. One rainy winter night when Bobby and I both lived at the Russian River, we each went home with someone we met at one of the bars in Guerneville. My trick lived high above the flood plain off Old Cazadero Road. In the morning the rain had stopped and the sun, so rare that time of year, shone through the gaps in the giant redwood trees.

I drove down through the winding canyon toward River Road until I came around a corner and saw that the road ahead was underwater. I couldn’t tell how deep it was through the murk, so I stopped and debated whether I should try to drive through it. I didn’t like to drive that beat up truck through water unless it was pretty shallow because I could see the ground through a hole in the floor. I noticed something white in the giant puddle up ahead. It was flat, like a huge, white tabletop submerged under a couple of inches of water. Then I heard someone calling my name. It was Bobby, stepping out from behind a tree on the opposite side of the water and zipping up his pants. He was soaking wet. Have you got a light? he yelled at me. At least I saved the joints that were on the dashboard!

The white thing in the water was the roof of Bobby’s van. That was how deep the puddle was. He told me he had climbed out the window as it started to sink, but he’d managed to grab two joints he’d rolled that morning and held them above his head as he swam to dry ground.

I yelled across, Wait right there. I’ll come and get you. I backed up my pickup, turned around and found another road a little higher that led me back to where Bobby was waiting on the other side of that flooded low spot. He jumped in and we smoked one of the joints on our way back to Orchard Avenue where Bobby called AAA and his insurance company.

We used to listen to the local radio station for weather forecasts, road closures, and predicted flood levels. I didn’t mind being flooded in for a day or two if I had enough warning time to stock up on groceries, batteries and reading material. Sometimes I drove into town to the Rainbow Cattle Company, the gay bar on Guerneville’s main street, to find someone who wanted to come back and share my food and have sex for a couple of days. When the power went out, I couldn’t read once the sun went down, so sex was always a good way to pass the time. One day we heard on the radio that anyone who was flooded in and needed help should spread a white sheet on their roof or on their driveway or lawn so that it could be seen from a helicopter. Bobby said, A lot of good that does us. Don’t they realize this is a gay neighborhood? Nobody has white sheets!

Bobby left us long before he died. He fell in love with a guy named Ray whom I never even met. He went from being a big party-boy to being the foreman of Ray’s rose ranch outside of Petaluma. They got rich—or Ray already was—and famous for their flowers and beautiful pictorial coffee-table books about gardening. One of their books even had a foreword by Martha Stewart. I don’t remember how I found out Bobby died a few years later. His name wasn’t listed in the obituaries in the Bay Area Reporter. I bought one of their books on growing fragrant plants, mainly for the picture on the cover of Bobby dressed in bib overalls and holding a rake, surrounded by flowers and grinning from ear to ear. Most of the pictures I have of him, he’s either dressed in Halloween drag or he looks very stoned. I prefer to remember him healthy and happy, smiling and in love.

I first got to know Roger as a weekend customer at the Woods. He never lived at the Russian River, but he was good friends with one of my bosses and we all partied together. When I came down to the city on my days off, I often stayed at Roger’s apartment on Seward, a little two-block street that curves around the hill above the Castro. My old boss called me there one day from the Woods Resort, asking me to produce the Mr. Northern California Drummer contest again. I had started it and the Mr. Russian River Contest a year or two before. I had also started the yearly bartenders’ bash and any other gimmick I could think of that would bring people and money up from San Francisco outside of the peak tourist months. Those of us who spent winters on the river were always broke and horny. Fresh meat is rare in the off-season, and resort towns become tragically inbred.

I agreed to produce the Mr. Drummer weekend for a thousand dollars plus expenses. This time was easier because I was already in the city. I could line up contestants and sponsors, judges and entertainers without having to drive back and forth all the time. I spent hours at Drummer Magazine’s office south of Market planning events ranging from a Thursday night welcoming party through Sunday afternoon’s T-Dance when the winner would be announced. I found vendors to set up booths to sell their wares all weekend—lubricants, poppers, leather goods, sex toys, and the like. On Friday and Saturday we held pre-judging rounds both inside the old Hexagon House and outdoors beside the clothing optional pool on the west side of the main building, which was away from the road that led to Armstrong Redwoods State Park.

For judges, I lined up Alan Selby, founder of Mr S Leather, photographer Robert Pruzan and Jim Cvitanich, who had been Mr. San Francisco Leather the previous year. I knew Jim as a bartender at the Pilsner Inn on Church Street. Jim followed me around that weekend of the contest like a lost puppy, watching everything I did and helping me out when he could have been socializing. Most of San Francisco’s leather community was there.

Years later, when Jim and I had become friends and business partners, I realized that he really didn’t like many people. That must have made it hard to be a bartender, but with his bouncy pecs and beautiful gym-toned body, he might have made even more tips being rude. Lots of people are into that sort of thing. The dance floor headliner Saturday night was Eartha Kitt, who had a disco hit at the time, Where Is My Man? That afternoon I rehearsed the eight contestants to carry Miss Kitt on a velvet-covered platform above the heads of the crowd across the middle of the dance floor at midnight and then carefully lower her to the stage.

I found out later that Eartha Kitt was also booked at an earlier gig that same night at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. One of the major jewelers near Union Square had decked her out in a million dollars worth of diamonds for her number. When she finished singing, guards took the diamonds back to the store and someone led Miss Kitt to her limousine. They told her that now she was going to perform her disco hit for a much younger crowd at a gay club across town.

I can only imagine the look on her face when they took the diamonds from around her neck and hustled her into the back of a limousine where she was trapped for an hour and a half after being told it was only a short ride. The limo pulled up to the side door of the Woods Resort at a few minutes past 11 p.m. I got word that she had arrived, so I ran outside to show her to her dressing room and tell her about the eight half-naked muscle boys who were getting ready to carry her to the stage at midnight. Right now they were busy pumping up, oiling their bodies and slipping into their matching black Speedos.

When I explained the situation, Eartha Kitt said, "I’m going on now or I’m not going on at all!"

I couldn’t get those eight contestants ready in time. She gave me a couple of minutes to go in and alert the DJ, Paul Dougan, the lighting man, Steve Mart, and the sound engineer, Bruce Trondson. I also grabbed a few of the beefiest guys on that side of the dance floor to form a human wall to create a path from the edge of the stage to the eastern door of the building where she was waiting.

The next thing I knew, she was on stage doing her number and the crowd went wild. This was one of those songs that everyone was dancing to everywhere you went that season, and here she was—LIVE—in our presence. But before long, she was taking my hand to steady herself as she came back down the stairs from the stage. She hadn’t even performed for five minutes. I couldn’t believe it! The crowd was still cheering behind us, and she said to me, You guys are too much!

Five minutes and she was back in the limo on her way to catch a flight out of SFO. Most people we’d booked at the Woods stayed on stage for as long as the crowd kept cheering. I said, Yeah, Miss Kitt, so are you. Way too much, that’s for sure. She took my remark as a compliment, but I really meant that she cost way too much for such a short performance. I’ve always considered Eartha Kitt, with her trademark growl and sex-kitten attitude, as more of an icon than an artist, anyway.

Morgana King was the only other singer I could remember who’d left without doing an encore. When I told her in the dressing room that the audience was going nuts out there, she said, Oh, they always do that. She didn’t even sing A Taste of Honey or talk about what it was like being in The Godfather movies. Her car must have been halfway to Santa Rosa before the crowd stopped stomping and cheering. Etta James played there twice a year. Her shows never started on time, but she would sing all night. Most entertainers loved the sound of applause and would take all they could get, but not Eartha.

The next day beside the swimming pools at the Woods I heard everyone talking about what a great time they had the night before. They got to see Eartha Kitt live on stage in person. Maybe they were all too stoned to notice that her show only lasted a few minutes.

Chapter Two

There was a lot going on in San Francisco in the 1980s besides AIDS. The Castro had changed in subtle ways since I’d lived there in my twenties. I had come back from the Russian River dozens of times to visit the old neighborhood, as well as South of Market, but when I moved back, the changes became more apparent. Hardly any of the guys wore long hair past their shoulders anymore. Butchness had always been in among the South of Market crowd, and now it was spreading to gay men elsewhere, even those who weren’t into leather. The Castro Clone look was starting to catch on – boots and Levis, plaid Pendletons, tight t-shirts and tank tops – as more and more of my friends joined the gym. Hooded sweatshirts could be zipped up when the fog rolled in and fleece-lined denim jackets were perfect for San Francisco’s chilly summer nights. The clone look of gay San Francisco would never become anything like the Calvin Klein ‘heroin chic’ look that came along in the early 1990s. If you were gay in SF in the mid-1980s, being overly thin didn’t mean chic. It meant you were sick.

When our friends began to die, we tried hard to hold on to our shared sense of humor. As the plague wore on, it became vital. Drag queens played a big part in keeping us laughing. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had just been established in 1979 before I moved up north. They were even more visible by the time I moved back in 1984, taking on the role of both educators and fund-raisers to combat this mysterious new health threat. Sister Boom-Boom had even run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1982. Her campaign poster depicted her on a broomstick flying over City Hall. It trailed purple smoke that spelled out Surrender Diane, an intentional misspelling of Mayor Feinstein’s first name. Boom-Boom didn’t win a seat on the board, but she got 23,124 votes. The next year, she set her sights even higher and ran for Mayor against Dianne Feinstein. If nothing else, she would go down in history for forcing the city to pass the Boom-Boom Law which required candidates for public office to register under their legal names.

The Sisters seemed to me to have captured the energy that began with previous drag troupes, the Angels of Light and the Cockettes. The Sisters’ type of drag blended in-your-face street theatre with gender-fuck political activism. They were not to be confused with the drag queens who ran for titles like Miss Gay and Empress and Grand Duchess. The titled queens raised money for charity too, but most of them tried to look as pretty as possible doing it. And some of the same men who donned dresses and high heels to compete for drag titles and crowns might also have closets full of leather which they wore to vie for the sashes of Mr. SF Leather, Mr. CMC Carnival, Mr. Drummer, or Emperor or Grand Duke, although maybe not in the same season.

One fun event each year was called The Closet Ball. Gay bars sponsored contestants who spent weeks gearing up for the big night. They had gowns created for them, learned to walk in high heels and, most importantly, made sure their friends bought tickets to cheer them on. One of the rules for this contest was that these guys could never have officially been in drag before, although my understanding was that officially came with a good deal of leeway. At the start of the Closet Ball, each contestant came out in male attire, looking as butch as possible. Then they had one hour to go back stage, shave, get fully made-up and dressed and come back out to be judged in elegant gowns and ladies’ wear.

Although these events provided a way for gay men to express themselves as well as to entertain and have fun, in those days they were also crucial in raising money to combat this rapidly spreading disease. The Federal government under the Reagan administration was far too slow to react, so new service organizations sprang up to fulfill a variety of needs. Older ones like the Shanti Project, which began in the Bay Area in 1974 to provide support to people with life-threatening illnesses, shifted its emphasis to people with HIV/AIDS. In the early years of the epidemic, at least, this was primarily gay men.

In the winter of 1983-84, Jim Cvitanich had an idea to put on an AIDS benefit variety show featuring area bartenders, since so many of them were frustrated performers. Divine had been in town with a play called "Women Behind Bars at the Alcazar Theatre, so Jim decided we should call our show Men Behind Bars." He told me that ever since we had worked together on the Mr. Drummer contests at the Russian River, he thought I’d be the perfect person to help him put together this one-night show, and we decided to make it a benefit for Shanti. Somehow that one night turned into ten years of my life.

Jim first wanted to do the show at Chaps, since the landing at one end of the room was visible to everyone in the bar and would make a good stage. They already had a sound system, and we could bring in a piano. I convinced Jim that we should go bigger by holding the event in a real theatre and assembling a live band in the pit. I had played the saxophone and clarinet for musicals in high school, college, and at the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre. I missed doing that.

Jim told me he’d always dreamed of doing something at the old Victoria Theatre on 16th Street in the Mission, so we talked to the owners, Bob and Anita Correa. They were wonderfully supportive of the idea. We scheduled our first "Men Behind Bars" show on a Monday night in January. All seats were ten dollars, and we were allowed to set up our own bars in the lobby and on the balcony and keep all the profits. Bartenders who claimed that they had no talent besides tending bar eagerly volunteered to do just that.

With Jim Cvitanich outside the Victoria Theatre

Photo courtesy of Michael John Frangella.

But to have no talent is not enough! is a line from Gypsy, Jim’s favorite musical. He decided to use that as part of the show, so we rewrote the lyrics to You Gotta Get a Gimmick and put together a take-off on the song with himself and two other sexy bartenders demonstrating what made their bartending skills special. Our original plan was to use only bartenders in the show, but we soon added others—friends of bartenders, bar owners, cocktail waiters, bar backs, bouncers, and basically anyone who had ever set foot inside a bar. Then we invited the San Francisco Tap Troupe to give the show some class.

The B.A.R. leather columnist, Mister Marcus, agreed to emcee the production , a virtual guarantee that he would promote the hell out of it in his column, and I suggested getting a guest star for the finale. Val Diamond was one of my favorite cabaret acts when I worked at the Woods Resort. I got to know her when she sang at the Russian River several times with her back-up trio, Crosswinds. They’d all been performing together since their high school days in Hayward, California. By 1984, Val was the star of the world’s longest running musical revue, Steve Silver’s Beach Blanket Babylon at Fugazi Hall in North Beach, but they were dark on Mondays. When I called her, she told me that she’d thought about doing an AIDS benefit ever since her friend, the original Mr. Peanut, the tap dancing Planter’s Peanut Man in Beach Blanket Babylon, died of AIDS. We got Scumbly Koldewyn of Cockettes fame to play the piano. I played tenor sax. Though I don’t recall all the other musicians, I do remember that we sounded pretty good.

A group of bartenders from the Ambush did a hilarious belly dancing act years before big hairy men were called bears. These guys showed off their bellies dressed in beads and lace with lots of jewelry and finger cymbals. At least one of the bartenders at the Pilsner—Ron Brewer—was a member of the Barbary Coast Cloggers, so he got them to perform in our show. The touring company of Dreamgirls was in town and someone called to offer us its star, Linda Leilani Brown, as long as she didn’t perform anything from the Broadway show.

Ed Stark put together a Swan Lake number he dubbed Le Grande Ballet de Nothing Special with some of his bartenders from his bar on Castro Street. Edwin Stark, aka Edwina Ballerina, was one of the cleverest people I ever met and eventually became one of my best friends. The story goes that he and his lover Jack South rode their motorcycles from Kansas to San Francisco in the late 1960s and discovered a hippie/biker bar on Castro Street called the Club Unique. It had beaded curtains, fake Tiffany lamps above the bar with mismatched mirrors framed and scattered across the walls and the ubiquitous smells of stale beer and cigarette smoke. The Castro was just over the hill from the Haight, and the old-timers said that Janis Joplin used to hang out there drinking Southern Comfort. They even pointed out which stool she liked best. When Ed saw the bar for the first time, he took one look around and said, Club Unique? There’s nothing special about this place. He and Jack bought the bar and renamed it The Nothing Special.

Ed had taken ballet classes since childhood. He told me he’d auditioned for and been accepted by the drag troupe called Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo when they were formed in 1974, but decided that he couldn’t be out on tour dancing while trying to run a busy gay bar in the heart of the booming Castro district.

In the first Men Behind Bars show, we set some precedents that we followed in the years to come. Although most of the show was live, we ended the first act with a medley of lip-sync hits of the 1960s. Three black drag queens did the Supremes. One of them was Empress Connie and maybe the other two were contestants for royal titles that year. So many title contests went on that I couldn’t keep track of them. All the years we produced Men Behind Bars shows, we tried to include as much royalty as we could find. Drag queens, like bartenders, had friends who would buy tickets to come and see them. Some of the title holders were bartenders too.

Pat Montclaire wouldn’t become Empress of San Francisco for a few more years, but she was a bartender, and we used her in the first Men Behind Bars. Her lip-sync to Lesley Gore in the first act finale was lousy, but she was well-loved, and her transformation was amazing. Pat had silicone breasts surgically implanted long ago, which made her change from a rather frumpy balding man into a ravishing female beauty even more astonishing. She was also one of the sweetest people in the world, at least to me.

Another part of that first act finale was a group of four bartenders from Castro Station and the Brig. They called themselves The Foreskins and did a medley of boy-group songs from the 1960s that included Rama Lama Ding Dong and Blue Moon, at the end of which they mooned the audience to thunderous applause.

Each year’s second act finale featured The Follies Men. The major prerequisite for being a Follies Man was a gym membership, the ability to learn a few basic dance steps, and the willingness to appear on stage in little-to-no clothing. Val Diamond’s big closing number in that finale was Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love? from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with the Follies Men supporting her. Our one rehearsal with Val was on the Saturday afternoon prior to the show in a warehouse space down an alley South of Market. I knew Val would never find the rehearsal space on her own, so I gave her directions to the Ramrod and told her to meet me there.

Since we only had that one rehearsal with Val, the band, and the dancers, we ran the number two or three times and decided we were good to go. That first year’s show was only a one-night performance on a Monday in January. We had no idea it would be a sell-out, much less the beginning of a tradition. In the finale, Val flubbed a couple of the lyrics and some of the bare-chested back-up boys might have missed a few dance steps, but nobody cared. By that point, the audience was