Party politics Why has the West Coast gay movement long had a more brazen sense of festive political theater than its East Coast counterpart? BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

IN MILLENNIUM APPROACHES, the second play of Tony Kushner’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winning trilogy Angels in America, it is revealed that God has left his customary home and moved — where else? — to San Francisco! And this was before the City by the Bay, also known as Sodom by the Sea, began issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. For 30 years, San Francisco has been a gay and lesbian mecca. Now, as Tony Kushner implied more than a decade ago, it may be heaven on earth.

By all reports, the same-sex-marriage frenzy gripping San Francisco has turned into a let’s-get-married Mardi Gras. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is serenading the long lines of same-sex couples outside City Hall. Hotels are offering special honeymoon rates for wedding parties. Local flower shops are covering the steps of City Hall with rose petals. Students from the University of California at San Francisco baked a giant wedding cake for the couples. And professional musicians are volunteering their services to couples who want musical accompaniment for their City Hall weddings. (Of course, this can go too far. A lesbian friend who lives in San Francisco called me last Thursday and claimed she was going to shoot the next group of gay men singing the Dixie Cups’ 1963 hit "Chapel of Love" on the street corners of the Castro. She had passed three that evening alone on her way to a restaurant.) Isn’t this — the unleashed joy of communal celebration — what marriage is supposed to be about?

Indeed, the festive antics of West Coast San Franciscans have thrown into sharp relief how the rest of the country, particularly East Coast Massachusetts, has dealt with same-sex marriage. While we were having a color-within-the-lines civics lesson — otherwise known as the constitutional convention of February 11 and 12 — newly elected San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom simply decided on February 12 to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. (According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the city has already issued more than 3200 marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. Most are from the Bay Area, but others have traveled from more than 20 other states, and some have come from as far away as Venezuela, Switzerland, and Thailand.) But then, ’Frisco has long been known for its party politics.

FROM THE MID-19th century, San Francisco was called, in the parlance of the day, a "wide-open town" — meaning that it was the kind of place where practically anything goes. Not only was the city rife with gambling palaces, opium dens, all-male dance halls (not so much homosexual as homosocial because of the predominantly male population), and male and female brothels — dubbed the "Barbary Coast" — it was also a haven for all kinds of immigrants, from gold-seeking Latin American miners to fugitive Southern slaves. By the 1930s San Francisco had a thriving bohemian arts community. After World War II, thousands of lesbian and gay veterans, many of whom had come out during the war, moved to San Francisco and founded one of the largest, most open queer communities in the US. In the 1950s the city gave rise to the newly emerging Beat culture, and in the 1960s hippies and flower children made it the nation’s countercultural capital. Overlapping with these trends were San Francisco’s queer communities — lesbians, gay men, and transgender people — who lived in a sexual demimonde descended from the shenanigans of Barbary Coast culture. By the late 1960s, San Francisco had become a last stop for queers around the world.

This history had a profound effect not just on gay culture, but on gay political organizing. From the 1960s onward, San Francisco’s queer communities were far more flamboyant — and daring — in their quest for basic civil rights than their East Coast counterparts. The Mattachine Society’s Eastern leaders, for instance, required members to dress up (suits and ties for men; dresses and heels for women) for a 1965 protest in front of the White House. Compare that with José Sarria’s 1961 election bid for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A performer at the notorious Black Cat Bar who often campaigned in drag, Sarria’s slogan was "Gay Is Good." He garnered only 5613 votes (electability for at-large seats required from 70,000 to 100,000), but Sarria helped create the idea of a publicly gay political presence.

In 1962, a loose association of San Francisco’s gay-bar and -club owners formed the Tavern Guild of San Francisco (TGSF) to fight off police raids, in part by providing economic help for smaller gay-owned businesses. (Back on the East Coast, meanwhile, gay-club owners spent the 1950s and 1960s paying protection money to corrupt vice squads.) The TGSF raised money by organizing risqué events like the infamous Halloween Drag Ball and the Beaux Arts Ball. The group made progress by keeping one eye on the basic civil-rights struggle and the other on throwing a fabulous party.

Perhaps the contrast between East and West Coast gay activism played out most clearly in the politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In San Francisco, the movement was sparked with the 1970 publication of Carl Wittman’s "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto." While Wittman had a long history as a leftist political activist, his work in San Francisco was rooted in the counterculture, and it was this upon which he drew most strongly. Much of Wittman’s manifesto concerned sexual liberation and personal freedom, which in turn served to reinforce those aspects of the West Coast’s gay movement. In New York, the GLF was formed after the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 and drew its inspiration from organized progressive institutions such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the War Resisters League. So while East Coast gay activists tried to change the world by quoting Marx and Mao, San Francisco activists did it by transforming the everyday culture of the city.

By the ’70s, then, San Francisco more than any other US city offered up an ongoing spectacle of queerness. Although concentrated in the Castro and Tenderloin districts, lesbians, gay men, and transgender people were visible everywhere. As a result, Gay Pride marches were larger and more extravagant than elsewhere, as were serious political gatherings — the most famous of which were the candlelight vigils held after the assassinations of openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White in 1978.

Today, it’s hard to imagine any other American city giving us the moving spectacle of the Names Project Quilt, which commemorates the lives of people who have died of AIDS on individual squares lovingly created by each victim’s survivors. Or safe-sex educators like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — a drag troupe of women and men in habits with names like Sister Missionary Position and Sister Boom-Boom. Or, for that matter, the first issuances of marriage licenses for same-sex couples in the United States. While gay activists in most other cities rely on traditional lobbying and back-room dealmaking, San Francisco’s gay political culture has long known that bold, impertinent, brazen gestures are not only useful, but often necessary to bringing about radical social change.

NOT EVERYONE IS happy with Mayor Newsom’s decision. California senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have both voiced disapproval of what they see as an illegitimate method of testing the validity of state law. Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank told the Associated Press this week that he feared "San Francisco being in sort of a free-for-all will be used against us politically." And Arline Isaacson, who has tirelessly lobbied on Beacon Hill for gay rights for more than two decades, expressed fear of a backlash when she told the Boston Globe this week: "What happened in San Francisco has not helped us at all. And it arguably made things worse here."

This is what you would expect to hear from senators, representatives, and lobbyists. This is what they have to say (and may even believe). But such fears don’t in any way invalidate the staggering effect of what’s happening in San Francisco. It is clearly no accident that, within days of Newsom’s mayoral order, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley said he agreed with Newsom’s decision and would, if he had the authority, issue marriage licenses to lesbian and gay couples as well. On February 20, Victoria Dunlap, the clerk of Sandoval County, New Mexico, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the county attorney said state law defines marriage as an agreement between contracting parties but does not mention sex. Licenses were granted to 26 couples before New Mexico attorney general Patricia Madrid issued an opinion saying the licenses were ‘invalid under state law.’" And while the Netherlands and Belgium both allow same-sex marriage, who ever thought that Cambodia would be open to the idea? On February 19, Cambodia’s 81-year-old King Norodom Sihanouk announced — after seeing news footage of gay marriages in San Francisco — that he would support same-sex marriage in his country because he had "respect" for homosexuals and "God loves a wide variety of tastes."

The brilliance of Newsom’s move is that he removed the battle for same-sex-marriage rights from the legal realm and placed it squarely within the sphere of social opinion. While progress has been made in the legal fight for same-sex marriage — in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court declared it to be a constitutional right, as did the Supreme Courts of Hawaii and Vermont (although the implementation of those decisions was circumvented by a constitutional amendment forbidding it in the former case, and a civil-union bill that replaced it in the latter) — it has always been argued as an abstract right. Now, thanks to Newsom, this debate is rooted in the here and now.

The city of San Francisco has sued the state of California, arguing that the law prohibiting gay and lesbian couples from marrying violates the state constitution. If the Golden State’s highest court finds that these weddings have indeed violated the state constitution, it will have to order 3000-plus couples to divorce. (Massachusetts will face the same prospect if the legislature and public eventually pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages — which cannot happen until November 2006 at the earliest — after the first of these weddings takes place this May.) The method by which Newsom challenged the implicit discrimination in California’s state laws created a cultural context in which the world can see the alternative to what exists now. Gavin Newsom knew — of course, he must have known — that by permitting same-sex marriage, San Francisco would become a 24-hour wedding party/carnival/playground. The effect of his gambit is amazing. Not only does it generate great press, it also shows that the world doesn’t fall apart because there is same-sex marriage, that it actually looks like a better, more fun place in which to live. And indeed — as if on plan — most of the reporting about the anti-same-sex-marriage protesters usually casts them as disgruntled, wet-blanket party poopers.

Politics is often described as "the art of the possible," and San Francisco has shown the world that, well, gay marriage is possible. Gavin Newsom and his city have taken the national debate on same-sex marriage and turned it into a brilliant piece of political theater. Just as José Sarria used drag to bring gay politics into the light, the hippies and the flower children staged love-ins as a stunning alternative to the war against Vietnam, and the drag queens and leather folk used costumes to show that gender and sex didn’t have to be what you thought they were in high school, Newsom’s simple decision to allow same-sex marriage unleashed a fabulous vision of what the world could be like — a more moving and effective display of political power than any formal debate could ever achieve.

Michael Bronski’s most recent book is Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com