< PreviousJack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 142Jim Stewart with black rawhide, self-injecting a needle of Nirvana. We were such bad boys then. Another photo I took at Paul Hatlestad’s place. I shot a silver straw and rocks and lines of blow laid out on a black silk top-hat. Paul later placed the top-hat on the martyred Harvey Milk’s casket when it lay in state at City Hall. My pièce de résistance was a triptych in a brushed steel frame. The center panel was an ebony and silver crucifix, bound with black rawhide, shot against folds of black velvet. The two side pan- els, hinged to swing free, were both taken from a single negative reversed. It was a quarter profile shot of Rocky Ramirez, bound to a cross, against the black background bar-light of the Leather- neck. It was from the series of pix I had taken at the Leatherneck for a Drummer article on hot leather bars. I merely flipped the negative to create two malefactors facing each other. The triptych was the first to ring up the red “sold” sticker. Gregg’s fine-line drawings reflected variations on the same themes. One was a Pop Art drawing of a Hoover vacuum cleaner with a silver straw and razor blade titled “Super Sucker.” Another was a continuous line drawing of three nuns with long straws ascending from their noses upwards to cumulus clouds titled “Heavenly Stash.” Over the next month, Gregg and I transformed my flat on Clementina into an ad hoc and credible art gallery. We moved all the furniture and things on the walls out of the double front living rooms, the front bedroom, and the hallway. They were crammed into either The Other Room or the big back kitchen. Only the black-leather tuxedo couch I bought on the cheap at Unclaimed Freight remained, in the bay window of the front room. The walls, from wainscoting to ceiling, were repainted, cov- ering the rectangular imprints of “ghosts of pictures past” left behind by the kind of tobacco patina more often found in French cafés. We installed a track strip of can-lights the length of the hallway. The old theater spotlights I had mounted on the ceilings of the double living rooms were perfect for gallery display. Our invitation featured a shadow and ghost of a man pissing toward three toilets in the back of the Leatherneck. We invited in Max Morales, who set up his sound equipment in the overcrowded Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues143 Other Room, where he could build the intensity and tempo of the music as the crowd grew, and then bring it back down as closing time approached. We hired a leatherman to impersonate a uniformed security guard, whom we posted at the bottom of the stairs to forestall any problems with party-crasher bullies. Joelle and two of her girlfriends agreed to handle sales. Allan Lowery donated beer and wine from the Leatherneck bar. Paul Hatlestad brought his hand- some houseboy to tend bar. Filmmaker Wakefield Poole, fresh off his hits Boys in the Sand and Bijou, agreed to record the opening on his 35mm camera, complete with shoulder-mount sun-gun. We all wanted this show documented as evidence, for the South of Market Artists’ Association, that what was happening here was more than dirty fag pictures for straight slummers to snicker at. Less than a week before the show, Gregg and I were sitting on the living room floor assembling frames, polishing glass, and attaching photos and drawings to pre-cut mats. We hoped it all came together as the cutting-edge event we wanted to stage. “Shall we have the last of the toot?” Gregg said. He slid my antique mirror with razor blade and silver straw across the carpet. “Let’s,” I said. We had polished off my bindle over an hour before. Gregg laid out four fat lines of Bogotá’s best. We took turns snorting lines and waited a minute or less for the euphoria to set in. “Ahh,” we both sighed at the same time. “Back to work,” Gregg said. He reached for the glass cleaner. “Out of glass cleaner,” he said, as he held up the empty spray nozzle bottle. “Have any more?” “I never clean my windows. I get more interesting light through them when they’re dirty and streaked. The filth casts film noir shadows across naked bodies I shoot in the late afternoon sun.” The coke made this somehow sound very profound to us both. We sat in silence for a moment. Then funny. We both laughed. “Do you have any more at home?” I said. Gregg had brought over the now empty bottle of glass cleaner from the all-male com- mune where he lived.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 144Jim Stewart “Coke or glass cleaner,” Gregg said. “Either,” I said. “No. Neither,” Gregg said. “Any vinegar,” I said. “Vinegar?” “Vinegar and newspaper clean glass better than glass cleaner.” There was another pause. “Do you have any?” “No.” “What we really need is another bindle,” I said, as I pulled out my wallet to check my cash supply. I was low. “I don’t have enough.” “Let me see what I have.” We each snuffed our noses, gave long sighs, and laid out our money on the carpet, just as the coke was reaching its peak of perfection. We had just enough for another bindle. “But what about the glass cleaner?” I said. “When we’re famous, and art critics and historians are writ- ing about us, do you want them to say they spent their last dime on cocaine or on Windex?” “I’ll call Paul,” I said. “Maybe he’ll have some vinegar, too.” He did. Opening night of the Double Exposure show was all we had hoped for. Both Gregg’s fine-line drawings and my photos sold well. Some of the hottest men, movers and shakers in the leather culture South of Market showed up at the top of the stairs on Clementina Alley to add their macho sweat and talents to the inside street theater that our opening reception turned out to be. There were just enough glitches to lend interest to the night. At one point, a young nerd-hippie showed up at the door. The uniformed “security guard” questioned the validity of his invita- tion. I was called down the stairs to straighten it out. He had been given the invitation by a friend of a friend of a friend. I invited him up. He got an eyeful and a hard-on. He had a beer before he went back to Berkeley, but showed up again at the public viewing the next day. He came back three times. He also came three times. Gregg and I saw to that.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues145 In the small toilet-only room, I had laid out a mirror with a razor blade and straw on the back of the toilet tank below two framed pictures. One showed two naked Colt models tweaking each other’s tits; the other was of two bare-breasted late 16th- century women; one pinches her sister’s nipple while the other offers a ring. As the beer flowed, the line for the only toilet grew longer and longer down the hall. “Stop sucking cock in there and get out. We all have to piss.” The door slowly opened. Joelle and her two girlfriends squeezed out the door snorting up the last of the coke. “We’re not cocksuckers, honey, just pussy lickers,” Joelle’s younger tart cooed. The waiting piss-line burst out laughing. We ran out of beer. Allan rushed off to the Leatherneck two blocks away to bring back more. “You won’t run out at the bar?” I said, when he returned. “Hardly,” Allan said, “Looks like you’ve hijacked all my customers!” For the rest of October and the first weekend of November, Saturday and Sunday afternoons were open house for the tem- porary art gallery on Clementina. Saturdays were slow. Sundays turned into an at-home salon. Timmy Meeks, the houseboy I shared with Joe Taylor downstairs, answered the door, passed the hors d’oeuvres, and, in the small toilet room, pleasured anyone who was willing. One afternoon twin Grace Jones clones with shaved heads joined the small group gathered on the floor around the leather tuxedo couch in the front room. A bald man in his 50s was talk- ing, like animated charades, regarding the difference between art and pornography, between hardcore and softcore. “When you get to be my age,” he said, “it’s all soft.” “Like hell it is, Daddy,” one of the Jones clones said. “What’s your name?” the other clone said. “Doug.” The dark willowy twins flirted with Daddy Doug for the rest of the afternoon. They all seemed to enjoy the frolic they were giving each other. At five o’clock we closed for the day. I never saw the Jones clones again, but Daddy Doug became a good friend. Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 146Jim Stewart He told tales of life as a maturing leatherman; of trips to Greece, where dark Mediterranean hustlers took him for Mr. Daddy Dollars until, exhausted from pleasure, he told them he was an unemployed taxi driver who spent his last dime to reach Athens; of cheap rental rooms in the Zee Hotel on Eddy Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where he took hustler boys he picked up in front of Flagg Brothers’ shoe store on Market Street. He made senior sound sexy. I took glamour shots of Daddy Doug with his woven metal butcher’s glove and my gambler’s pistol, with his leather aviator’s helmet and riding quirt. I wove them into my next show at the Ambush. The Double Exposure reception was October 13, 1978. On Halloween, October 31, 1978, I was building a catwalk for a fundraiser against the Briggs Initiative or Prop 6. If passed it would outlaw gays and gay supporters from working at any level in the California public schools. The fundraiser was in a large cavernous two-story building near the northeast corner of Castro and Market Street. It had an inside balcony across the back, from which I helped Wakefield Poole project various slide shows and a short film of Kate Smith singing God Bless America. Gays are patriotic and American. The fundraiser was organized as a Second World War USO canteen. A dollar a dance, a dollar a cup of coffee. Red, white, and blue bunting and American flags decorated the hall. Some dressed as soldiers, some as 1940s pinup girls. The catwalk was for people to strut their stuff as they entered in Halloween drag. In the front corner was a tiny office where Harvey Milk had moved his Castro Camera shop. He didn’t do much business there. He was busy at City Hall. “Are you sure that thing’s not going to collapse?” Harvey Milk said, as he nodded at my catwalk. He had just come into the building on his way to his new minuscule camera shop. “It’ll be fine,” I said. I finished toenailing the support struts in place. “Some of those queens are pretty hefty. The last thing we need is a disaster here,” Harvey said.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues147 “Everything’s safe,” I said. On November 5, 1978, I closed the Double Exposure show. On November 7, 1978, the Briggs Initiative was soundly defeated by the voters. On November 18, 1978, over 900 followers of San Francisco- based cult leader Jim Jones’ People’s Temple committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Congressman Leo Ryan, who had flown to Jonestown, Guyana, the day before to investigate, was assassinated on the small airstrip by gunmen from Jonestown. So was most of his party, and the news camera- man who had accompanied him. My pal, Mike McNamee, who was a TV cameraman, had been asked to fly to Jonestown with Congressman Ryan. Fortu- nately, Mike did not have a current passport. Another cameraman was assigned to the Congressman’s investigative trip. On November 27, 1978, Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot to death in city hall by ex-policeman, ex-fireman, ex-supervisor Dan White. Everything had not been safe.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 148Jim Stewart Camille O’Grady Bell, Book, and Candle 1979: photo by Jim Stewart. Next >