Sex, Drugs & Disco: San Francisco Diaries From the Pre-AIDS Era

By Mark Abramson

In the 1970s, thousands of young gay men flocked to San Francisco. Mark Abramson, author of the best-selling "Beach Reading" mystery series and the AIDS memoir "For My Brothers," was one of them. In a time and place where sex was free, drugs were cheap, and the driving disco beat felt like it would go on forever, he landed in the great gay Mecca fresh out of college, reconnected with his old friend, the writer John Preston and soon encountered such interesting people as Harvey Milk, Sylvester, Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood and Vincent Price. These are his raw, uncensored diaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Abramson
• Release date: Mar 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370231256

Mark Abramson

Mark Abramson is the author of the best-selling Beach Reading mystery series published by Lethe Press. He has also written the non-fiction books "For My Brothers," an AIDS Memoir, and "Sex, Drugs & Disco - San Francisco Diaries from the pre-AIDS Era" and its sequel, "MORE Sex, Drugs & Disco." His next book "Minnesota Boy" is a memoir about his coming out years while in college in Minneapolis.

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Sex, Drugs & Disco –

San Francisco Diaries from the Pre-AIDS Era

Published by Minnesota Boy Press at Smashwords.com

© 2015, 2017 Mark Abramson

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Originally published in the US and Australia by Wilde City Press 2015

Rereleased by Minnesota Boy Press, February 2017

SEX, DRUGS & DISCO

San Francisco Diaries

From the Pre-AIDS Era

Mark Abramson

In the spring of 1975, I graduated from the University of Minnesota and left Minneapolis for San Francisco. I intended to move to Boston for graduate school to study poetry with Anne Sexton, but she committed suicide the previous October, so plans changed. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop might have been my next choice, but I grew up on a farm near the South Dakota and Iowa borders and moving someplace that close to home didn’t excite me at all.

I had never been to San Francisco. I had friends who visited often, and they always told me I would love it there. I was playing my saxophone at the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre when one night at rehearsal my friend Carl Beck, an actor, told me all about his weekend trip.

"Sunday afternoon I was at a bar called the Stud on Folsom Street, and Etta James just appeared out of nowhere and sang! And later that night, I saw Rudolph Nureyev at the Ritch Street Baths. Mark, San Francisco was made for you. Forget about Iowa!" But I already had.

Eager young men had flocked to northern California for the Gold Rush of 1849. A hundred years later, San Francisco hosted the beatniks, fueled on cigarettes and coffee, followed by the hippies in the 1960s with dreams of peace and free love while they smoked pot and dropped LSD. That same sense of freedom must have lured all of us young gay men in the 1970s, stoked on beer and poppers and libidos running wild. I might have told my family I was heading to graduate school at San Francisco State, but like the thousands of other gay men who arrived here during those years, I was going West in search of one thing—thousands of other gay men. I’ve kept a diary for most of my life. This book starts with the first entry that I made on the day I arrived in San Francisco.

About the Journal: I've inserted comments from present time in bold, serif font, so the reader can distinguish between past and present.

PART 1

20th and Rhode Island – Potrero Hill

Wednesday, July 9, 1975

Early morning sunlight streams through the window of the train. We crossed an unseen border and entered California in the night. I woke to the sound of a train whistle and saw the hazy lights of a depot at Redding, but that was hours ago. This morning I will set foot in San Francisco for the first time. After this cross-country camping trip with my family, stopping to visit relatives all along the way, I am ready for a new life. I was planning to stay with my old boyfriend, Matt, who moved out here last winter. He wrote me that he got a job tending bar at a disco on Market Street called the Mind Shaft and an apartment with a bunch of guys on Page Street with plenty of room for me. His postcards always said things like: San Francisco is ready and waiting for you. Get your ass out here!

I tried to call him last night from my sister’s house in Oregon. One of the roommates answered. Matt? He doesn’t live here anymore. He moved back East with some guy he met. I guess it was love at first sight. You know how that goes. Were you the guy who was planning to stay here? Gee, tough luck, huh?

He also mentioned that the couple of boxes I had shipped ahead were in the way. My family was in a circle around me, so I pretended I was talking to Matt and everything was fine. What else could I do? I wasn’t going back to Minnesota with them. I have two hundred bucks in my pocket. I don’t know anyone in San Francisco or where I’ll sleep tonight, but I’ll deal with that when I get there.

Golden Gate Park a few hours later –

I boarded a bus at the train station and crossed a huge gray bridge into the city. I checked my suitcase, typewriter, and saxophone and walked up and down some of the steepest hills I have ever seen. It’s my first day in San Francisco, and beautiful men are everywhere. Guys here really do wear keys dangling from their belt loops and colored bandannas in the back pockets of their blue jeans. The color or whether it’s on the left or right is supposed to indicate what their sexual desires are, but it’s hard to believe that everyone I’ve seen so far with keys and handkerchiefs is gay.

I walked for miles before I remembered that my old friend and roommate John moved to California a while ago to become the editor of The Advocate, so I bought a copy from a newspaper box on the corner of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue. It’s published in San Mateo. That must be a suburb. It took a long while for the receptionist to get through to Mr. Preston on the phone. When she finally did, John said, Mark, we’ve got to get together! Where are you staying? I’d love to see you. After I told him what happened, he said, That sounds just like Matt to flake out on you. You should stay with me for a while. You can water my plants when I’m traveling.

John said he wouldn’t be home until later, so he told me how to take a streetcar out to his sister Betsy’s place and to get a key from her. She lives in a commune on Oak Street in the Haight/Ashbury district. I just left there. It was a big old flat full of junky treasures with the doors and windows wide open and people wandering in and out through a patchouli-scented haze of marijuana smoke. Betsy wasn’t home yet, so I have to go back after she gets off work at her temp job and get the keys before I find my way to Potrero Hill.

I walked into Golden Gate Park and heard music coming from a concrete band shell that looks like a Greek ruin. There were seven saxophone players, all sexy black men. The sign says: Summer Soul Festival. This neighborhood is full of hippies left over from the 1960s. I am horny, but I’m so exhausted that I’ll probably need weeks of rest on John’s floor before I’m able to do anything. I can’t wait to see him!

When I was in college, John Preston founded a community center in Minneapolis called Gay House. I don’t remember our first meeting, but it must have been there, before I was old enough to get in the bars. He and I and four other guys later lived in a gay commune on Portland Avenue in South Minneapolis. Later still, we were neighbors in a building a couple of blocks south of the Guthrie Theater. I called it our Mary and Rhoda phase, since I lived upstairs from him and everyone identified Minneapolis with The Mary Tyler Moore Show then. I thought of John as the older brother I never had. We got on each other’s nerves, but we always remained close friends. We took the train to Chicago for long weekends, and we once hitchhiked to Kansas City and back during a wild summer rain with hail and thunderstorm that lasted four days. John Preston would later become famous for writing books like Mister Benson, Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, and the Alex Kane series. I never realized his cult status as a pornographer until after he died, when everyone seemed to refer to him as Mister Preston or simply by his surname. He was always John to me.

(Photo of John Preston 1972 by John Hustad courtesy of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota Libraries.)

Friday, July 11, 1975

Last night I had my first trick in San Francisco. It sure took me long enough—more than twenty-four hours. I checked out the four bars on Castro Street that John recommended: The Twin Peaks and Toad Hall in the first block and the Elephant Walk on the next corner. The Midnight Sun is a few doors down, across from the Sausage Factory. I met a guy named Bob who asked me, Do you want to go fuck?

I liked his directness. We took a cab to his apartment on Twin Peaks. It was painted white with dim lights, huge potted trees, antiques, and oriental rugs. He left me alone to get undressed and when he came back, he was just wearing boots and a jock strap. He had a great body, but he made grunting noises and said lines as if he had memorized them from a porno movie: Yeah, you like this big tool, huh? and Show me that hot wet shaft. He was pleasant afterward, considering how tough he acted earlier. I don’t know what time it was when he told me his old man would be home soon, and he called me a cab. From the top of Twin Peaks to the top of Potrero Hill cost three seventy-five with tip. Money goes fast.

Sunday Morning, July 13, 1975

Last night, my first Saturday night in San Francisco; I started on Union Street at a boring poetry performance with tambourines and castanets. Then I went looking for the bars on Polk Street. The only one I could even get inside was the ‘N-Touch, and it was packed. I exchanged glances with one guy, but he disappeared with friends. At one a.m., I headed home on the #19 Polk bus, but block after block it filled up with single men who all got off at Folsom Street. John had told me this was the middle of the leather scene. I got off the bus too and followed all the horny footsteps until I saw a sign that read Folsom Street Barracks. I’d heard some guys talking about this place on Thursday night when I was on Castro Street.

It reminded me of a squalid rooming house, three floors of long hallways and big rooms with bay windows that opened onto the sleazy night alleys South of Market. The sounds of men having sex were everywhere. Most guys didn’t bother wearing towels, but threw them over one shoulder and walked around naked. Some wore jock straps or jeans and boots. I left my clothes in a locker and wandered around in a towel like we do back home at the Locker Room in Minneapolis. I saw men in full black leather and others in nothing but bare flesh. The Folsom Street Barracks…what a wonderful dive!

I found a dim corner room with bunk beds. A tall blond guy came toward me, smooth and lean, built like a swimmer. I started blowing him, and he gestured toward an empty top bunk. Since heat rises, we were soon drenched in sweat. I rimmed him and got his feet against the ceiling so I could fuck him hard. Then we kissed and held each other, tongues deep and hot, our bodies slick. He told me his name was Martin, and he gave me his phone number.

As I got ready to leave, I went to take a shower, and the place was still packed with masculine thirty- to forty-year-old guys with thick moustaches, well-maintained bodies, and wicked minds. They were everywhere! I am going to like San Francisco just fine!

Friday, July 18, 1975

John is out of town, so I have his car and this apartment on Potrero Hill to myself. Martin and I went to see a movie called Jaws last night and laughed at the scary parts. Later on we shared an It’s-It cookie and ice cream bar—a San Francisco tradition—on Polk Street, or Polk Strasse, as the locals call it. Then we came here, played the stereo, and had sex in the living room. I found some amyl nitrate in the freezer, and it seemed a waste not to use John’s king-size bed, so we moved into his room.

This morning we took showers and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge—my first sight of it. We followed a high winding road until we came to a sign warning us that we were on government property. I parked there at the roadblock, and we climbed a fence up a hill of ferns and bright orange poppies toward the sound of waves crashing far below, but we couldn’t see them through the fog.

Martin told me the caves in the hillside were gunning posts to protect the bay in wartime. I thought about pulling him inside one of the caves, but a truck stopped far below us, and a man in a uniform looked up at us through binoculars. By the time we got back to the car, a Jeep was approaching. I told Martin we might know too much and would have to be destroyed. The Jeep followed on our tail halfway to Sausalito.

Monday, July 21, 1975

John returned from New York last night and took me to the No-Name Bar and Folsom Prison on the corner of 15th and Folsom. That one has a hidden back room behind a fireplace. A man beckoned me to follow him there. Later, at the bar, he bought me a beer and said his name was Jim Locker. I figured it was spelled G-Y-M Locker and that it must be his porn star name. He offered me a ride home, but John had lost his apartment keys earlier. I told him I had mine, but I couldn’t find John. I was loaded, so I let this gym locker guy drive me home, and I waited up for John to buzz him in. I looked at the piece of paper where he wrote down his name and phone number and he spelled it J-I-M.

Wednesday, July 23, 1975

It is late afternoon, and I am sitting on the floor while the sun pours its last white drops of light across me and the dusty air. I have been in San Francisco two weeks, and the radio spits out the news like a gumball machine. I walked the streets today, shopping the job market, trying on qualifications, cramming my pen into too-small blanks while bejeweled ladies smiled up at me and I smiled back.

I went to Aunt Anne’s Employment Agency and the gay one at SIR - the Society for Individual Rights. They had a handful of jobs I needed a car to get to or wasn’t qualified for. They sent me to the YMCA. I walked six blocks, and they were just closing—told me to come back at quarter after one. I went to David’s Employment Agency. David was a puffy queen with diamond pinky rings. He asked, How tall are you? How old are you? Are you gay? Would you shave your facial hair for a job? He said I could be a towel boy at one of the bathhouses for a hundred a week. He wouldn’t say which one. His fee was two hundred—half a month’s pay. I might have been tempted if it weren’t for the fee. I think Aunt Anne’s charges less. I’ll call her back tomorrow.

Reading back over my journals, I skim pages of dull paragraphs about the weather or everything I ate that day and how much it cost, but sometimes I barely mentioned events that I still remember clearly. One of the first mornings after John Preston’s trip, I found him sipping coffee and reading the San Francisco Chronicle by the window of the Potrero Hill apartment with the view of the fog burning off under the Bay Bridge behind him. He looked up at me and said, Mark! Guess what! Virginia Woolf is on TV tonight!

You mean the writer? I was still half asleep. I thought she was dead.

No, silly…the movie! Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it! Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton! What a great idea! I’m off tomorrow, anyway. Whatever you do today, be back here by eight o’clock tonight. We’ll go out afterward.

I had never heard of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that evening John came home, set down two glasses, a bucket of ice and a bottle of scotch on the coffee table and announced, This is the only way to watch this movie. Every time they pour a drink, we pour a drink!

I don’t remember much about the movie, but we finished that bottle of scotch and went out afterward. Johnny Walker introduced me to some of the worst hangovers I had ever known, but we went out almost every night during those first few months in San Francisco. On one of my first trips to the No-Name with John, I headed to the toilet after I’d had a few drinks. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness when an enormous man sidled up next to me. I wondered how many cows had died to cover him in black leather. I moved sideways to make more room, and I stared at the ceiling. We didn’t have mirrors over the urinals in the bars in Minneapolis. At first I heard my piss hit the porcelain, but even with the loud music, it sounded different. I looked into the mirror and then down. The huge man held a beer bottle so that I was filling it. As I buttoned my Levi’s, he lifted the bottle to his lips and gulped it all down. Then he burped and threw his head back to let out a laugh I later described to John as maniacal. John laughed too.

Friday, July 25, 1975

Last night at Folsom Prison, a guy came up to me and said, Hi, you’re looking good. I’m Jack. Do you want to spend the night together?

I said, Sure, so we took a cab to the Hyatt Regency, where I got to see those elevators from The Towering Inferno. He retrieved his car from their lot and drove me to his place across town while telling me he’s a teacher in a public school in Castro Valley. That’s nowhere near Castro Street, but I’m not sure where it is. He lived in another beautiful San Francisco apartment on a hill with great views, four cats, and dozens of plants and antiques and art. The only thing wrong was a framed photograph of his parents beside the bed. They looked like bony religious people. It was intimidating trying to fuck with this guy while his parents watched. He was nice enough, though. This morning we had the usual coffee and cigarettes and watched the Friday cliffhanger episode of The Young and the Restless. We exchanged viewpoints on where the plot might turn from here. I still had twenty bucks in my pocket and John owes me fifteen he borrowed the other day. I’ll get through the weekend.

Friday, August 1, 1975

Three weeks in San Francisco now, and Wednesday was my first day of work remodeling the flats on Bush Street with Wayne, the owner. He told me to be there at nine a.m. and to bring a change of clothes because I was sure to get dirty. I got the feeling he wanted to watch me change in front of him, but I didn’t mind. He's kind of sexy for a landlord.

Now I’m in the sun on the deck of his house near the panhandle. We took the afternoon off for lunch, but I think we both knew why we came here. He gave me a tour and when we got to his bedroom, we attacked each another. Now he's working in the garden while I watch and smoke cigarettes and write in my journal. We got very stoned and now we’re drinking cold white wine in the hot sun. Wayne heard a rumble and started talking about earthquakes. He told me about an old woman up the street who lived through the big one in 1906 when she was a child. He said, Helen has never forgotten that sound.

This heat feels like Los Angeles in Day of the Locust, and I expect Karen Black to appear any minute. Will I ever stop wondering if I made a mistake? Will I ever stop worrying about being broke? I’m just stoned. This is California and the sun is shining. This is how the world is supposed to be. I should be at peace amid the smells of the garden growing. I want to be held, and I crave freedom at the same time. I wonder if seeing a therapist once a week would be a lot like going to church every Sunday.

Wayne owns this house and several other investments with a partner I have never met. It was their bed we had sex in. I wonder if I will ever have a house and a life with a lover and still want to fuck around with any twenty-three-year-old saxophone player from Minnesota who comes along. I shouldn’t smoke so much pot, even on nice days. It makes me paranoid.

Monday, August 4, 1975

I am floating on codeine after the crash. Judy Mintier, one of John’s important lesbian friends, is in town from Philadelphia. We ate dinner at the Washington Square Bar and Grill last night, and we showed her the bars south of Market. Leaving the No-Name, we were so drunk I asked John if he wanted me to drive, but he wouldn’t hear of it. We sped down Folsom Street, a car swerved in front of us, John jerked the wheel, and we slammed into a parked VW that broke a fire hydrant.

John and Judy’s heads cracked the windshield. I was on the console between them. I opened my eyes to see a delicate spider’s web of bloody glass shattering the red and yellow flashing lights into patterns. Then strange faces were peering in at us through streaks of blood. The fire hydrant spouted a huge fountain of water in the night.

They piled the three of us into an ambulance, and we sat with the other battered bodies in the emergency room at General. We waited until five in the morning to see a doctor while people in worse shape were swept in off the streets. Some couldn’t wait. A man with a knife in his chest was rushed past us. Another had a gunshot wound. The gaping hole stared at me. Bags of blood flew through swinging doors. A woman with her legs tied to a stretcher smoked cigarettes. She fought and spat and swore at us as if we were to blame. Nurses yelled at the overdoses, shaking and slapping them. How many did you take? Come on, talk to me! What time was it?

I held Judy’s legs under the linen sheet, and her body shook while the doctor stitched her skin. Only her clenched fists showed. I rubbed her ankles and heard John moan behind the drapes, waiting his turn. This morning, Warren, the bartender from the No-Name, came to drive us home to Potrero Hill. Today, John’s lips are blue and swollen. He was hurt the worst, and he feels guilty that we were in danger. We’re home now, watching the fog roll in as the sun sets. I ache and swell and hear sounds of distant sirens, still out there doing their job for someone else.

Tuesday, August 5, 1975 – Golden Gate Park

My strength is returning. Martin and I had a picnic of tuna sandwiches and fruit among these huge old trees. He told me this is called Hippie Hill. He is napping in shorts and a white T-shirt, a portrait of a boy on a hillside, his tousled hair streaked with sun, his smile gone to sleep now, body spread across a field of clover. I want to forget about the accident and press my lips to the skin that winks out from under his clothes at the small of his back.

An hour or two later

I am home alone. I did kiss Martin’s back and rubbed his chest and fingered his nipples and stroked his hair while he purred like a kitten. I think of him as a thing of beauty I can’t really afford to buy but can enjoy visiting at the museum. We watched two dozen Chinese tourists with silver crosses around their necks riding rented bicycles. They built a pyramid of laughing people and took pictures of each other while Martin took pictures of them. We walked to the conservatory and saw begonias in huge bright splashes of color, and then we walked down Haight Street until a bus came.

Sunday, August 10, 1975

Yesterday, Martin cut off my shoulder-length hair. I was getting tired of it, but I feel invisible now. It looks fine short, thick and full and wavy, but now I look just like every other guy on Castro Street. I will never be mistaken for a radical or a rock star. I have become just another pretty boy in brown hair. Not too pretty, but pretty enough. Martin hurried to finish my haircut because he was invited to a pool party in Oakland with a much older man. He was at least thirty, but he had a friendly smile and a great body in tight clothes. Today Martin is going to a beach near Carmel with another older man for another day in the sun. He calls them commitments. I wonder if they’re paying him for it.

After Martin left yesterday, his roommate, Robert, invited me to stick around for dinner with a houseful of their friends, some lesbians and a straight couple. One of the women looked like Miss Florida of 1960 still trying to hold on to her polyester beauty in 1975. We all went to North Beach to a live show called Beach Blanket Babylon Goes Bananas. It had tap-dancing tumbleweeds and Christmas trees. The lead actress, Nancy Bleiweiss, started out as Glinda, the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz, and then she turned into a cowgirl with four feet of blonde curls, and finally Carmen Miranda, hence the bananas in the title. She was a big hit with the camp-crazed audience. The show was in a crowded hall with waitresses running up and down selling overpriced wine after we’d already paid five bucks each to get in.

John Preston and his boyfriend, Warren, the bartender, just left for the Second Annual Castro Street Fair and invited me to come and meet them. I should go and try to find them with my new haircut and five bucks. I don’t have a quarter for the bus, but I can get change at the corner store, take a #19 at Polk and transfer to the #8 on Market Street. I feel isolated up here on Potrero Hill.

Later at the Castro Street Fair

I am standing at the counter of a crowded café, thinking of my old friend Susan Nelson and wishing I could channel her energy. She was in law school with Jack Baker when he was on the cover of Time magazine as the University of Minnesota student body president after running as an openly gay man. During my last year of college, I sublet Sue’s apartment on the West Bank of the Mississippi. It was filled with pictures of San Francisco hippies she knew. I might be seeing some of the same people today at the fair. Maybe that’s why she came to mind. People hand me flyers, phone numbers, and samples of things they want to sell. I stick free stuff in my backpack and even talk to people, as Susan would, though I am intimidated by their beautiful bodies, bare, tanned flesh,