BijouBlog

Hi folks! Will here. Today's blog will be a bit of a departure from the last few in that it will be primarily a "Photo Essay" courtesy of my trusty Pentax K-1000. Although considered a beginner's 35mm SLR, it was good quality and easy to use! From the mid-70s 'till the mid-80s, when it was replaced with a Nikon SLR. Yes! I used some of that "pin money" from my porn adventures to buy lots of nice toys! LOL.

Although this was not the first S.F. Pride parade, it was my first. I had only been in town since September of 1976. And, during the weeks leading up to this event, I became increasingly excited to see it. My partner Tommy as well as many of our friends went on and on about how festive it was going to be and all of the beautiful people that were going to attend. So, I immediately got out my Pentax and made sure it was in perfect working order.

Pride parade and all of its political beginnings.

The glee and beauty exposed at the parade!
 

Fashionable footwear on the floats.

Roger Magan (left) and Tommy (right) both high as a kite! Roger was instrumental in my move to SF. And, Tommy was there when I arrived!

A dear buddy and laser mouth cut up – DJ Tom Junnell from Oil Can Harry's disco.

Tommy's bestie Crysler wearing an original Stud t-shirt.

The very political theme of this year's parade equating Anita Bryant and Hitler.

The “Orange Lady” Anita Bryant was getting more pie in her face!

June in San Francisco is one of the most stellar months, weather-wise. The sky could not be any bluer nor the Sun any brighter. With the temps climbing into the mid-70s, it was shirts-off weather for sure. And, that is exactly what happened - with both men and women! Although it took a decade or two for S.F. to reach the Sodom and Gomorrah heights of the Folsom Street Fairs, this parade for its time was pretty "edgy!"

Tommy and I had a leg up on a lot of the parade revelers in that we lived a mere two blocks from Market Street - the parade route. We decided to walk a few blocks downtown where the crowds were really piling up. I climbed atop a (Walk/Don't Walk) traffic signal for my photo perch. I guess I was up about 8' – 10'... a perfect vista. Although I got a lot of choice photos, I did miss out on taking pics of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone who both attended. As this was the era of Gay Empowerment both fiscally and politically, it was great to have our heroes with us!

One star that did not escape my lens was Sylvester. At this time he was quite a rising musical talent. Originally, he performed in neighborhood venues. But, that soon morphed into national and international attention! As I mentioned in a former blog about The Castro, Syl and I became friends. He came into the bar where I spun records (The Badlands) to say hello and drop off new releases (that I was delighted to play - on the spot!).

Sylvester at the 1977 SF pride parade.

A long shot of Market St. (the parade route) and the many revelers!

The ever popular women's contiengent from Oakland, “Dykes on Bikes!”

Carmen Miranda – move over!

On this sea of floats talent abounded.

San Francisco's royalty of the day in all of their splendor.

Voicing our rights!

Again!

So many wonderful names and faces were in this crowd! Many became life-long friends. The experience was dazzling and it became an annual affair for me. It has been great to recreate this time capsule. I hope you enjoy! Will.

Thank you to Will Seagers for use of his photos.

 

Bio of Will Seagers:

Will Seagers (also credited as Matt Harper), within his multifaceted careers and participation in numerous gay communities across the country in the '70s and '80s and beyond, worked as a print model, film performer, and DJ, just to name a few. He made iconic appearances in releases from Falcon, Hand in Hand, Joe Gage, Target (Bullet), J. Brian, Steve Scott, and more, including in lead roles in major classics like Gage's L.A. Tool & Die (1979) and Scott's Wanted (1980). He brought strong screen presence and exceptional acting to his roles and was scene partners with many fellow legends of classic porn.

George Ferren, a close friend of Will's frequently mentioned in his blogs, was a major figure in the San Francisco music scene in the '70s/'80s. His current music is available for your pleasure on Soundcloud: BY GEORGE

 

 

You can read Will Seagers' previous blogs for Bijou here:
Welcome Matt/Will
What's For Dessert?
On and Off the Set of L.A. Tool & Die
Wanted, Weekend Lockup and Weekends in Hermosa Beach
Honeymoon in the Palms
Birds of a Feather
The Stereo Maven of Castro Street
The Pass Around Boy
The Ecstasy and the Agony
Fitness and Fantasy: The Early Gyms
Chasing the Boys and Chasing the Sun: My Story of Sun Worship and Where It Got Me
Becoming Invisible
The Reverse Story of Dorian Gray
Pin Money
One Organ Leads to Another! Part 1
The Wheels of Steel
Feast and Famine: The 1970s to the 1980s
An Alphabet Soup of Powders and Pills
Merry Christmas (and Getting Re-Organized)
Now and Then
DEEP INSIDE THE CASTRO: The Badlands
DEEP INSIDE THE CASTRO: Moby Dick Bar
DEEP INSIDE THE CASTRO: "Just Another Stroll Down the Castro!"
Diving Into SoMa/Folsom: Hamburger Mary's
Diving Into SoMa/Folsom: Long Live the Stud!
Diving Into SoMa/Folsom: Club Life..."Hit me with your Rhythm Stick!”
A "Split Ticket" - SoMa/Folsom and The Haight!
Back to Basics: "Staying Vanilla in a Flavorful Culture!"
A Little Secret

 

25 years ago, Chicago experienced a deadly heat wave; 739 heat-related deaths occurred in Chicago over a period of five days. Most of the victims of were elderly, poor, and parallel to the demographic of the victims of coronavirus death toll, people of color, who could not afford air conditioning and did not open windows or sleep outside for fear of crime.

The hottest day was July 13, where the temperature soared to 106 °F (41 °C). The weather had been exceptionally hot and humid for some days before. At that point, I was working in an air conditioned office in at a low-level law firm support staff job.

I was also in the primal, exciting throes of my first major BDSM relationship (in fact, relationship of any kind), albeit a long-distance one (he lived in New York). Essentially, I was expending my energy on living LGBTQ rather than a career.

I had bought a condo. It was not air conditioned. I could not afford at that point to purchase and install the special air conditioner needed for a casement window.

 

After another boring day at the office, I figured I would take cold showers and sleep my way through it. If it got really bad, I was going to see If my brother would perhaps let me stay with him and his family (I was not counting on that option; family support was generally limited in scope during that period).

I got home. The electricity went out.

I called an elderly neighbor, one half of a gay couple in the building I was very good friends with. He said he was fine, and he was waiting for his partner to get home.

Then I remembered: a former friend of mine and I were scheduled to see a performance by a lesbian called The One-Woman Sound of Music.

He showed up at my place, and we were thinking, go to the play, which was in an air conditioned building with functioning electricity, come back to my place, and see what happens.

The play was literally a scream (her imitation of the Mother Superior saying “The borders have closed” especially), though the overly lecherous captain impersonation (too many jokes about “teddies”) was a bit coarse. Still, I was impressed with her energy and commitment.

 

Anyway, we got back to my place. No electricity.

We talked to my next door neighbors, who were fleeing down the staircase with luggage to find a motel.

My friend said, “You can’t stay here.” I fumbled for underwear, socks, and a shirt in the darkness, and we went to his place, a condo he shared with his somewhat … er … “older” partner.

I spent the night, the partner made frittatas in the morning, and by the afternoon I was back at my place. The lights were on. The humidity had decreased, I was getting a lake breeze, and I relaxed.

I called my partner/Sir in New York City, who told me to thank my friend. I called my elderly neighbor. He told me he was able to fall asleep, waking up only briefly bathed in sweat.

Meanwhile, an apocalyptic scenario was occurring. Just a couple blocks south of me, people had been trapped in elevators. Even in the gentrifying and gentrified north side of Chicago, swaths of neighborhoods were without electricity for a couple weeks. People slept outside and at the lake (according to my grandmother, a common occurrence in her life when air conditioning was primarily limited to movie theaters). Food rotted in refrigerators. People fled the city.

And people died. So many people in areas that I still have never visited.

Source: National Weather Association

 

A couple weeks after the event, I wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune, which was published. I claimed a “hot but cold” Midwestern culture of not knowing one’s neighbors and racial segregation was responsible. An anonymous person mailed me a piece of paper with Nazi symbols on it.

It’s almost become a cliché to talk about LGBTQ persons choosing a family, having to choose and build one because of familial and social rejection. I think the story reveals that like blood family, the “gay family” looks out for each other.

Compared to so many people who suffered in that heat wave, I lived a life of comparative privilege. What’s really tragic is that many who died couldn’t or even, in some cases, wouldn’t get help from not just their blood families, but from a human being. For them, the borders were indeed closed, and for many like them, they still are.

Recommended reading: Klinenberg, Eric (2002). Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

The current national anthem of the United States is extremely difficult to sing. As someone who has done some professional singing and is now currently trying to rejuvenate his voice, trust me on this one.

It keeps plunging down into low notes or what some vocal pedagogues call chest register, which can drag the rest of the voice down, and at the end, one is supposed to sing a high note on an “ee” vowel, “land of the free.” Because of this difficulty, it even gets transposed down even lower, which means it ends up sounding like a growling monotone.

The composer, Francis Scott Key, was aiming for a heroic line that matched the bombastic lyrics, and he perhaps was thinking of situation like those that occur at baseball games where one listens to trained singer sing it.

Times have changed in that manner, and unfortunately we have been subjected to travesties like the dreadful yowling of Roseanne, or in the manner of many pop singers, adding to what is already difficult by adding vocal turns and coloratura and the like (perhaps to keep the voice flowing as it tries to surmount the line’s irregular see-sawing movement).

Vocally it’s problematic, but regarding the text, many have complained about the militaristic imagery, especially “rockets’ red glare/bombs bursting in air.”

More significantly, given the social changes now occurring because of the Black Lives Matter movement, some activists say the United States should replace “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Why? Its lyrics were written by Francis Scott Key, a slaveholding lawyer who expressed white supremacist views.

Songs that some have suggested as replacing it have included “America the Beautiful,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “My Country ‘tis of Thee” “God Bless America,” and “Lift Up Every Voice and Sing.” John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Dolly Parton’s “Color Me America” are also on the list.

See this link for some performances of the some of the above songs.

I have in the past tended to move with the “America the Beautiful” replacement crowd. Why? It’s easy to sing, with a range, and more significantly, meter that matches many of the hymns people were used to singing in church. In fact, it’s got the same meter as “Auld Lange Syne,” the common meter, which means one can sing the lyrics and melody for each song interchangeably.

Common hymn meter - Source: https://poemshape.wordpress.com/category/guides/about-common-ballad-meter/

 

Now, some have noted the text by Katherine Lee Bates tends to read like a travelogue or landscape; it doesn’t really proclaim and develop an idea as much as describe a landscape, vast mountains and plains and “spacious skies” surrounded by “shining sea.” But that’s the part of the lyrics we usually sing. There’s much more!

In 1893, there’s the verse:

God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free

Which was then changed in 1904 to:

May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine

The 1893 verse actually sounds more radical, given the context of the previous lines, which refer to “liberating strife,” which could refer to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, “once or twice” events that liberated Americans from “selfish gain.” Ultimately, war is vain and degrades the human person to a number, an impersonal body, rather than as earlier in the verse, “a precious life.”

Katherine Lee Bates - Source: https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/cambridge-harvard/katharine-lee-bates/

 

In 1904, and in a later revision in 1911, one encounters stereotypical imagery of heroes sacrificing themselves for America and tying in more the Manifest Destiny idea. The result of the liberating strife veers between martyrdom and material prosperity; I am getting more than a hint of the Prosperity Gospel. Success, in whatever shape or form, means one is blessed by God.

Overall, this conversation ultimately ends up being a “tough call,” and as the LGBTQ Pride Flag has now undergone a transformation to include people of color, one wonders if the traditional staples need to be cast aside as we confront the injuries in the name of those American, using Bates’ word, “glory tales” that oppress rather than liberate, enclose rather than include.

Update of the Pride flag with black & brown stripes introduced at 2017 Philadelphia Pride as an inclusionary revision highlighting people of color

2018 update of the Pride flag by artist Daniel Quasar that also includes the Trans Pride flag colors

 

Music moves flexibly in time; it’s not an immobile statue in physical space. As long as there is someone to sing a song, it will exist.

Ultimately, the act of singing itself is an act of vulnerability but also empowerment. Every time one sings, one re-creates, just as all are “crowned with good,” because they were created in the image of the Divine.

Greetings P(r)icksters,

Still sitting here with an idle shot glass. Illinois just moved to Phase 3 on reopening which allows for some businesses to reopen, restaurants to serve outdoor seating. Phase 4 will permit fuller openings, indoor dining and bars to open with strict limits on the number of patrons we can have at one time. Here in Chicago, we will move to Phase 3 next week and hope, hope, hope Phase 4 by the end of June.

This down time has given us at Touche some time to tackle a few projects that would have been hard to do if we were open. The big job is refinishing the main bar. The bar in the front room has wooden cabinets and front with black counters and bar top. There is a nice wooden bar rail that runs the length of the bar but years of elbows and such have worn down the finish.

So we began a couple of weeks ago to remove the cabinet doors, sand them down, re-stain them and then polyurethane layers to keep them clean. This past week, we began the project of stripping off the old bar countertop and then sanding down the top and bar rail. Today we finish this process by cleaning up all the dust.

Next week it will be time to stain the wood rail, then the polyurethane and, last, install the new countertop. Trying to do this with the bar open would have been a nightmare. We would have had to do it in sections to be able to serve and add several more days to complete. Guess there is one good thing about being shut down.

Since this past Memorial Day weekend would have been IML weekend in Chicago, we hosted a Zoom leather party on Saturday. It was my first time doing something like this and it seemed to go fairly well. We had about 100 folks log in during the three hour event, with many hanging around all night. Being new to Zoom, I did not fully realize that folks could message each other or the whole group at the start and was concerned why folks were visible but not seeming engaged. It finally dawned on me that they were busy chatting with each other.

Lots of compliments, “glad you hosted this” and more let me know that it was a success. I’ll be planning more in the next few weeks while we wait to get the bar back open.

Right now, I am finalizing plans for when we do reopen. Guidelines for reopening will limit our capacity to 50 people at one time, so there goes any thoughts about big events. We will just focus our attention on safety procedures for when we have guests, keeping seats and counters sanitized, etc. But the big changes will be how we operate with limited crowds.

First of all, we will limit the space open for customers. Touche has the main bar in the front and our Club Room bar in the back. This area was originally a garage behind the building - an auto shop, so it is fairly large. Years ago before this space became Touche, the previous owner had connected the two buildings and built a bar in the old garage space.

When we reopen, we will not open this back bar, keeping the crowd to the main bar. That way the place won’t look deserted when the small crowd spreads out between the two bar spaces. Plus I can save on the A/C back there, now that summer is here. along with the coolers running to keep beer cold.

Another change will be the crowd itself. Before the shutdown, you could see that guys were already staying home as the virus spread, and our numbers were coming down. One question will be how many are ready to venture back out once we reopen. Less travel means less visitors, too. So we may be lucky to get 50 guests at one time.

A third change would operating at a 50 person limit. Much as I hate to admit it, some folks feel they can hang at a bar without spending a dime. Going back to our days with the Great Lakes Bears, we’d have a packed house and a line of guys waiting to get in to the wee hours. After the demise of the GLB and competing bars for the bear crowd, we no longer had lines outdoors but still did about the same bar ring. This told me we had guys taking up space inside that were not drinking, or “sucking ice” as we call it.

To make sure we can make enough sales to stay profitable, we may institute a drink minimum on weekends to ensure that if you are in the house, you are supporting the house. It’s a whole new world.

While I am figuring out when we open and what we will do for fun, go ahead and grab my P(r)ick this Week and make your own fun. It’s warming up so let’s enjoy the great outdoors this week. My first P(r)ick this week is Rangers from Surge Studio. Directed by Al Parker himself, this 1984 outdoor epic (shot in the Sierras) focuses on the exploits of the ever-vigilant, ever-patrolling park rangers (beefy, tattooed Chris West and lean Nick Rodgers) and the campers they come across.

Moving from the Sierras to northern California, my second P(r)ick this week is California Blue from 1983. The late, great cutie Scott O'Hara (the of the one time Biggest Dick in San Francisco) stars in and narrates this excellent little collection of sun-soaked scenes. This vintage gay porn movie is set in California, with beaches, redwood forests and the like, and it's definitely blue.

Enjoy a Bijou Classic to beat the stay-at-home blues (and beat something else).

David

To order from Bijou, visit bijouworld.com, call 800-932-7111, or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

We still relive the past. I read Time magazine. Last month they put out a special issue honoring 100 women of the past century to mark the anniversary of women's suffrage in the US. (I could go on about having to allow women, minorities the right to vote but I'll leave that for another time.)

Sometimes, I get a magazine like this, one that presents a lot of history or extremely in-depth coverage of a news event or person that I keep as a reference for the future. This issue of Time is one such example.

I like history, to understand where we came from, how our history was shaped by the world at that time and perhaps why folks have their current thoughts or actions.

Growing up, most of the history we were taught in public schools of the 50's and 60's was pretty much "white washed." The contributions of blacks, Native Americans, women, etc were not present in our books.

So this issue of Time that gave me a small glimpse of these 100 women that had such a remarkable impact on our world and our history is a real treasure.

I am happy that I knew several of those listed, I remember some from the news of my lifetime like Indira Gandhi & Golda Meir (we have not yet had a woman lead our nation) and others I am coming to learn about now.

Our history lessons should include all parts of our history, not just what the famous white guys did, but also the women, black folks, natives and immigrants who have made or are shaping our nation and world.

But history is repeating itself today.

I am familiar with the McCarthy era of the 50's. I learned about the accusations of being communist, blacklisting writers/actors, etc and all. But I missed the part one of these women had in bringing that era to a close and wish we had her in our Senate today.

Margaret Chase Smith was a Senator from Maine and she stood up to McCarthy in the senate. They were both Republicans but she challenged his witch hunt with her Declaration of Conscience. One of her comments in the Time article was this:

"I don't want to see the Republican Party rise to victory on the four horses of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear."

Perhaps the Republicans need to study a little more of their own history. They seem to have hopped on the ride pulled by those same four horses today as they have embraced these four - fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear - as the way to govern and lead our nation.

Such a shame.