out of me.”
Despite his flawless Anglo diction, Juan was proud of his heritage and tried to educate me about Mexican culture. Diego Rivera and Pancho Villa! Salsa and serapes! Alas, I had no interest in anything that wasn’t new wave and preferably from London. Racist? Let’s just say ethnocentric. If my brattish indifference hurt Juan’s feelings, he kept it to himself. He did harbor some ethnic resentment, though. At the time, a lot of white people were terrified of so-called “cholos”: tough Mexican guys with crude tattoos, slicked-back hair, pleated pants, and pointy shoes who loitered about on street corners, presumably up to no good. Juan had no tattoos and his pleated pants made him look more like David Bowie as the Thin White Duke than a Barrio Baddie, but apparently he scared white people anyway. “When they see me and flinch I glare at them real mean and they skitter away,” he said in a chipper tone that couldn’t quite hide his hurt feelings. “It’s hilarious.”
Two or three times a week I’d join Juan at his small, tidy apartment in the Polk Gulch, the walls of which he’d decorated with picture sleeves from new wave 45s: The Suburban Lawns, Missing Persons, The Urban Verbs. We’d head out to meet Michael at The Stud or see bands, share a few beers, a few laughs, maybe dance a bit, then go back to his place and tumble into bed. A normal, healthy relationship. And yet, in Juan’s presence I always heard a faint echo of Peggy Lee singing, “Is that all there is?”
After a few months of dating I’d grown restless and told Juan (oh, cruel youth, by telephone!) that we were through. Two weeks later he turned up on my doorstep with pleading eyes. “Can we get back together?” Juan’s eyes naturally looked as if they’d been rimmed with kohl and his long lashes long reminded me of peacock’s tails. Who could say no to eyes like that? I took him back. A month later, out of nothing more than sheer boredom, I dumped him for good.
And now Juan was dead. “How’d it happen?” I asked. “Was it AIDS?”
My friend shook his head. “No, no. It was something else. I’m not sure what, but definitely not that.” It didn’t seem impossible to me Juan had died from one of those rare diseases with a hard-to-remember Latin name, but I couldn’t help wondering if my friend wasn’t covering up the truth. A lot of people who got sick—a word that with the tiniest emphasis suddenly meant dying of AIDS—were lying about it to avoid being shunned by society. Nobody knew how the disease spread and fears were running amok. A friend told me about her out of town relatives refusing to go with her to a bar in San Francisco for fear of catching AIDS from the glasses. Michael once got sent home from his job because a co-worker felt pretty sure the tiny cold sore on his lip meant he had you-know-what. And the newspapers were full of reports about sick people who’d been hounded from schoolrooms, fired from jobs, or disowned by friends and family.
Of course, not everyone believed AIDS was an infectious disease. A radical Gay Libber of my acquaintance insisted AIDS was obviously government-sponsored germ warfare designed to wipe out undesirables. A spiritual friend conjectured that AIDS resulted from the hateful prayers of Christian fundamentalists creating a disturbance in the psychic dimension so powerful it was manifesting on the physical plane. My holistic doctor theorized gay men were expiring from the excessive use of the antibiotics used to treat sexually transmitted disease. I didn’t know what to think, but for the first time in my life, a young person I’d known intimately was gone. Cue tiny alarm bells.
Perhaps because nobody invited me to Juan’s funeral, his death never seemed totally real to me. As a result, I didn’t so much mourn him as miss him the way you would a friend who’s moved abroad. Now and then something would remind me of our time together and I’d feel a twinge of sadness. Mostly, though, his death left me feeling creepy, hollow, and irked with the universe.
Chapter 7: Fashion, Turn to the Left
I WATCHED WITH INCREDULITY AS MICHAEL stood before the mirror putting on first a narrow tie with horizontal stripes, then another tie of solid blue, and finally a third: forest green and covered with yellow smiley faces. “Are you really going to work like that?” I asked. Michael had recently started a job at the front desk of The Nob Hill Cinema, a dirty movie theater in San Francisco.
Michael raised his eyebrows in a manner that suggested he was a helpless pawn of fate. “My boss insists I wear a tie.”
That evening I expected Michael to come home unemployed, or at least wearing a single tie. Nope!
“What did you boss say when he saw you?”
“He just laughed and shook his head.”
Plenty of subcultures have an identifying “look,” a fashion template full of coded significance announcing to the world here is a . . . hippie, punk, beatnik—fill in the blank. New wave was unique in that it didn’t prescribe a particular look, but rather a playful attitude toward fashion. Clothes associated with middle class propriety (tasseled loafers, anything beige) or status striving (gold chains, designer jeans) were deemed un-cool, but anything else was A-OK. You could mix ’n’ match handmade message tee shirts with ironic vintagewear, iconically rebellious black leather with deliberately vulgar day-glow, or pirate gear with Native American facepaint. Genders were bent, with girls in suits and boys in make-up. Futuristic jumpsuits, wraparound sunglasses, pink and green hair, leopard-print mini-skirts? Why not?! For new wavers, life was a giant dress-up party.
Michael and I believed all this dressing up was dissidence through dandyism. By abandoning one’s socially-prescribed identity in favor of expressive individualism, one opted out of the power structure. And because culture is contagious, one’s opting out would encourage others to opt out—thus depriving the exploitive corporate monoculture of the docile zombie consumer-workers it needed to survive. Whether the hordes of aesthetically-mutated ’80s youngsters actually contributed to the general tide of social rebellion or just diverted attention from more substantive forms of dissent (like unionizing workers or registering voters) is anyone’s guess.
Michael didn’t dress like a total lunatic everyday, but he frequently managed to look rather alarming. Inspired by the perversely bizarre costumes of Leigh Bowery, prominently featured in avant-garde fashion rags like i-D and The Face, Michael’s clubbing wardrobe often wandered past new wave hip into the realms of the surreal. Example: he once talcumpowdered his hair white like an 18th-century aristocrat before hitting The Brig, a South of Market S&M bar. Throughout the night he’d oh-so-casually run his fingers through his coif, releasing a cloud of white powder onto the Leather Men. I expected this to result in our being thrown out, but the DJ and bar staff found it hilarious and the black-clad Leather Men were so bewildered they didn’t know what to do.
There were plenty of straight guys into new wave, but a lot of jocks and jerks regarded dressing new wave as incontrovertible evidence of fagginess, at least for anyone not in a band. Everyone I knew got called “faggot!” so frequently it wasn’t even something we bothered complaining about (and we loved to complain). Mostly, the hateful remarks were followed only by more hateful remarks, but sometimes they were a prelude to physical attack. Once a pack of frat brats cornered Michael on his way to a club and threatened him with a severe thrashing. He only escaped by somehow convincing them he was Billy Idol’s drummer.
Now and then, Michael and I liked to dress in zany women’s clothes—op art mini-dresses, paisley pantsuits, what have you—bought for cheap at thrift stores. We did this in a spirit of androgyny rather than transvestitism, never bothering with fake bosoms or trying to look like real women. Most of our drag excursions were to gay house parties where we raised no eyebrows. Once, though, Michael decided we should wear ’50s prom dresses (his silver and white; mine, a dusty pink-rose) to see a bunch of hardcore bands. Hardcore was a subgenre of punk favored by guys dressed
