San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate!: Memoir

By Larry R. Oberg

The stories in San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate! recount episodes in the life of a gay man over six turbulent decades, from the Second World War until the present day, and place each in the political and social context of the period. They detail gay life in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, the infamous Boys of Boise affair, AIDS in the 1980s, and the principal protagonist's effort to reconcile his sexuality, his socio-political leanings, and his love-hate relationship with the country of his birth. It ends with his reflections on life and approaching death. These stories detail seminal events in gay history and paint a personal narrative that is amusing, serious and often touching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456866037

Larry R. Oberg

Larry R. Oberg, librarian emeritus of Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, is the author of numerous scholarly articles and travel reports. In 2003, a list of the 100 most influential publications in the history of librarianship, a citation study published by the American Library Association, included two articles written by him. In another ALA-sponsored research report, published in 1998, he was identified as "the most prolific college library author."

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Copyright © 2011 by Larry R. Oberg.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2011901945

ISBN:       Hardcover     978-1-4568-6602-0

                 Softcover       978-1-4568-6601-3

                 eBook            978-1-4568-6603-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 01/28/2015

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Miggie

Wolf Boy

The Bonsai Tree

My Own Private Boys of Boise, a Cautionary Tale

San Francisco-Paris

A Moveable Feast

San Francisco,Open Your Golden Gate!

Miss Vantz

It Was a Swell Party!

Une mort très douce

John, the Mormon Boy

Kelly and the Death Wish

My Own Private Boys of Boise Redux

J’ai tué mon chat pour toi

Renoir et moi

Chloe

Acknowledgments

A LL MEMOIRS RESIDE in a nether world between autobiography and fiction. Gore Vidal suggests that a memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history … Memoirs can never be wholly true. Others often recall events in a much different light. As one ages, the past fades and like our dreams cannot be recaptured with unerring accuracy, which, in any case, was not a quality that I sought. I confess to having contributed a fictional quality to all of the stories in this volume. While they mostly recount the truth of what was, they also recount another truth, perhaps greater still, the truth of what could have been.

Many people, some of whom figure prominently in these stories, have kindly, but always critically, reviewed the text as it developed. Two people who, from the beginning, offered unlimited encouragement and support are Denis Simard, without whom these stories would never have been written, and Dominique Boivin, a superb translator and literary consultant. Susan Rumsey kindly guided me through the publication process. The others include Gerald Baker, Marvin Bechtel, Réjean Bergeron, Greg Berry, Natalie de Blois, Martin Castro, Lorry Foster, Michael Godsey, Sonya Kaufman, Mark Mentges, Paul Laperrière, Danielle Laperrière, Seth Randal, Tomas Fernandez Robaina, John Russell, Al Salazar, Alan Verta, Miguel Viciedo Valdez, and Bruce Weaver.

When I was quite young, my family lived for a brief period in Boise, Idaho. While we were there, my mother made the acquaintance of an extraordinary woman who ran a bookstore by day and wrote poetry by night. Among Nancy Stringfellow’s many wonderful poems is Report from Grimes Creek after a Harsh Winter. I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing a few lines from it in the concluding paragraphs of Chloe, the final story in this volume.

Larry R. Oberg

Quebec City, Quebec

2011

Miggie

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all;

and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony,

because it take them unaware.—A. Lincoln

I T HAD SNOWED heavily for two days; and the route south, the one we were following, was now closed. The closure had forced us to a halt after two hours of difficult, if uneventful, driving. Holed up in a small inn some one hundred miles from home, equidistance really, between starting point and destination, we waited for the highway to be cleared.

In the restaurant, I remember my father ordering a steak.

The meat is always tenderest near the bone, he remarked. My mother, still visibly shaken by the news that had compelled us to undertake this risky winter trip, ordered a salad and said, If the road isn’t cleared soon, we’ll need to reserve a room for the night. I ate my hamburger in silent bewilderment, wondering if my grandmother was dead yet. By the age of two, I had begun calling her Miggie, an inexplicable nonsense name that had stuck. Most of the family came to refer to her by it as well.

Hilde was a nurse and had looked after Miggie for a number of years.

She’s dying, she told my mother over the telephone. You should come immediately if you wish to see her before she’s gone. My mother disliked Hilde intensely. Married to one of her older brothers, Hilde was German and fit a stereotype common during those years. She liked to control events and people.

My mother was French and somewhat fragile. The war was still raging in Europe, and she seemed to hold Hilde accountable, at least for some small share of it.

The storm appeared to be clearing when we left home, but the intensely cold and blustery weather was unsettling. Few travelers had ventured out. The road, my father noted, was like a sheet of glass.

We stopped only once, to allow him to attach chains to the rear wheels. He laid them out carefully in a manner, he said, that would not force him to crawl under the car and then backed onto them. The operation, however, required that he remove his gloves in order to fasten the chain hooks.

My hands are freezing, he remarked as he slid back behind the steering wheel, and the goddamned wipers are covered with ice.

By midnight, the storm had stopped entirely. The state department of highways at last made the decision to send a snowplow through to open a single lane of traffic. Our car, and two others that were also waiting, were allowed to follow it. The snowplow moved slowly and it frustrated us not knowing when we would reach a point where we could continue without its help.

Perhaps an hour later, my father stopped the car. Both he and I stepped out into the freezing night air to take a leak. The storm had passed and the clear night sky was a brilliant intense blue, the stars startlingly bright. I glanced over and, for the first and only time in my life, I saw my father’s penis. An electric shock passed through my body.

Look! my father cried. A bright falling star, of rare intensity and volume, streaked across the night sky, its arc echoing our two streams of urine that were staining the snow yellow.

That has to have been a huge meteorite! he exclaimed.

What time is it? my mother demanded. She lowered the car window and stared intensely at my father, then said softly, "Ma mère est morte." She rarely spoke in French anymore. When my father came to the States from Sweden at the age of twenty-four, he spoke only rudimentary English. His French, however, was passable and it was this linguistic concurrence that helped to bring them together.

Don’t be foolish, my father retorted, his tone of voice definitive. Coincidences like that only happen in the movies.

She’s dead, my mother repeated. My father checked his watch.

When we arrived at my grandparents’ house, perhaps an hour later, my mother’s sisters, brothers, and their spouses were gathered in the kitchen drinking coffee and exchanging hushed opinions.

You’re finally here, one of them remarked as we entered.

Miggie had died an hour earlier at the local hospital and they were concerned about how best to tell my grandfather who, from exhaustion, was sleeping unaware in his bedroom. It was finally decided that my mother, the youngest of the siblings and his favorite, would awaken him with the sad news. She went into his room, silently closing the door behind her. In the living room, I listened sleepily to the radio, but I could still hear my grandfather’s strange high-pitched yelping cries of pain.

When did she die? I asked my father.

At two-thirty, he replied

Was it … My voice trailed off

Yes, he replied. It was exactly two-thirty.

I thought long and hard about the significance of coincidence and the tumultuous events of this marvelous night, events imprinted with beauty and horror, that would mark indelibly this, the sixth year of my life.

Wolf Boy

How smooth must be the language of whites,

when they can make right look like wrong,

and wrong like right.—Black Hawk (Sauk)

O H, THEY’RE JUST kids.

Billy’s mother was hardly sympathetic when the old lady knocked at her door in a frantic effort to keep Billy and his friends from harassing her. Boys will be boys, and you should not take what they say or do too seriously. Later, she scolded the three of us, Billy, Jim, and me, not for having harassed the old lady, but because, as she said, she did not want people like that coming around the house.

Kamiah was a small, isolated, dirt-poor town located on Nez Perce tribal land. Numerous Nez Perce lived there, but only on the outskirts, not in the town itself. My father, an engineer, most often worked out-of-state on large construction projects, dams, highways, and airports. My mother and I followed him wherever his work took him. But when he was not employed as an engineer, he sometime accepted temporary, less highly qualified work with the Idaho State Highway Department in order that we might make ends meet. It was a temporary fill-in job that brought us to this remote panhandle region of northern Idaho some three months earlier.

Dirty old black indian! Billy cried as we approached the old woman who was walking slowly toward us along the road. Jim and I said only, Yeah, Billy.

But suddenly and furiously she turned on us, saying, You are mean kids. Why are you calling me names? I have two sons in the army and they fight in the Pacific for you and your people. Go away and leave me alone!

This was the first time she had stood up to us when we taunted her and I was taken aback at the audacity of her remarks. Billy, I think, was also surprised, still he glanced over his shoulder and muttered, Stupid old woman.

When I told my mother what had happened she was concerned, but not angry.

"I think it would be better if you stopped running around with this bande de petits galopins, especially Billy. You should not associate with people who treat other people badly," she said firmly.

She let it go at that and then showed me the hand-crocheted lace tablecloth she had bought from a woman who had been going from door to door in a desperate attempt to sell it.

"The workmanship is excellent, as good as we see in France. She wanted ten dollars for it, but I didn’t have that much money in the house, so she said I could have it for five. Its worth so much more than that. I felt bad about buying it from her;