is ironic to find in these pages the city that has almost vanished under waves of Silicon Valley gentrifiers. I don’t know why so much of what happened in the late 80s and early 90s is not online, but it is gradually being written about and archived. It is not the same thing to go to Polk Street now. It is not the same thing to go to the Mission. The stories of those who lived here then and who fought and died for rights we’re in danger of losing again, the stories of the rights we still don’t have, returned to me as I read this, and I thought of the difference between stories written by those who lived through this and the stories written by those who can only imagine it.
There’s a strange love I have for these times that can be hard to explain. How can I love what I lived through from a time that was as “bad” as that? But as I read this, and those days came into view again, what I think of that love now is that there was a beauty to the beauty you found then that was made the more fierce by the horror of what was happening. If you could still find the worth of your life, still find sex, love, friendship, your own self-worth amid these attempts by the state at erasure and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, then it had the strength of something forged in fire. Queer punk is still with us, still alive, even assimilated by those who would never have dared to support it at the time. Which makes the stories here in Disasterama! the more vital. The stories here are not just a simple record but a record of how Alvin faced what he saw and still thrived. There’s lessons here if you want them.
So come to the source, as it were. Walk the vanished streets, learn about Go-Go, Harvey Milk, return to a time when neither national political party cared if we lived, much less if we could vote. Learn how making an outfit could be a revolution or at least a call to one. A dream of the future for one night that could become a gift to us all.
—Alexander Chee
JULY 2019
Preface
SOME PEOPLE ARE GOOD IN EMERGENCIES, others less so. My friends and I were Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks. You couldn’t count on us to pick up the right carton of milk at the store, let alone file our taxes or remember to take out the trash on Wednesday. We danced with the manic grace of plastic bags caught in the wind, but our bank accounts were empty. We wore clothes that stopped traffic, but few of us knew how to drive. We lived, laughed, and loved like there was no tomorrow, never guessing that for many of us there wasn’t. As denizens of what used to be called “The Underground” we were prepared for lives full of social exclusion and unrelenting bohemian squalor. We were not prepared for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
It began with newspaper articles full of rare, spooky diseases with unpronounceable names or mysterious acronyms. GRID. Pneumocystis. KS. My friends and I didn’t pay attention because, well . . . papers were always full of bad news, right? Then, the rumors started. A friend of a friend of a friend went into the hospital with a cough and never came out. A co-worker’s neighbor dropped in his tracks. That guy who was always sitting outside that café? Gone. Still we didn’t panic. We were barely into our twenties, so healthy and robust we felt immortal. Our delusions of immunity didn’t last long, though. First one friend took ill, then another, then another, then another and another and another. Before long we found ourselves in the midst of a pitiless and unstoppable viral scourge.
As if we didn’t have enough problems already, my friends and I!
In those benighted days of yore, wide swaths of the populace believed all homosexuals were degenerates. In our case they were basically right, but—oh!—they were so mean and judge-y about it. Everyone I knew was scarred, or at least neuroticized, from family rejection, queer-bashing, or just hearing the bigoted blathering of right-wing politicians and televangelists. Unwelcome in respectable society, we descended into the subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto. There, in dark clubs and dive bars, we frolicked and reveled, utterly determined to wring every last ounce of pleasure and fun from our wretched lives in what little time we had left.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned politicians and televangelists took an unspeakably irritating “told you so” attitude, loudly proclaiming we gays were getting our just rewards. “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals,” elucidated President Reagan’s good friend, Reverend Jerry Falwell. “It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” The resulting climate of paranoid intolerance, along with fear of a rapid and painful death, led many gays to abandon the hallowed traditions of camp humor, arched aestheticism, and sexual anarchy—as if a heapin’ helpin’ of normalcy might spur the virus and the bigots to leave us all alone. Not so, my friends and I. We doubled down on the queer and assaulted the public with agitprop street theater, drag cabaret, spoken word poetry, performance art, and worse. Our lives became one giant cri de coeur: We want to live! And yet, even during this riot of rococo rebellion, we kept dying.
Then, after a decade and a half of terror and trauma, it ended, or slowed down anyway, when the development of protease inhibitor “cocktails” sent the death toll plummeting. The general public (at least outside the Bible Belt) decided it didn’t hate gays after all and history marched on to meet its next appointment. The band of merry misfits who’d assembled for mutual support and collective hijinks during the crisis scattered to the winds. People wanted to get on with their lives, not sit around feeling shattered and tragic. A feigned amnesia prevailed across queerdom, albeit one interrupted by brief, sanctioned occasions for dignified mourning.
My dead friends, however, were anything but dignified or mournful. The ghosts of sleazy boys in black leather jackets and cackling queens in tacky frocks nagged me in my dreams. “Hey, Miss Girl! Get off your ass and write something fun about us. Nobody else is doing it.” Strangely, this appeared to be true. Sure, the heroic crusades of ACT UP and Queer Nation were well and justly remembered, but the swirling, whirling, daffy, and demented fringes of queer social life during the high AIDS era were all but forgotten.
When it comes to publicity, my dearly departed friends are not to be denied. So, to avoid their posthumous pestering, I wrote this book: the true story of how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a deadly serious disaster. You can read it as an elegy, apologia, cautionary tale, or social history, but it’s also my memoir, and as such it will have to begin with me.
—Alvin Orloff
FEBRUARY 2019
Chapter 1: Polk Street, 1977
A CLOUDLESS EVENING SKY WAS SHADING from deep blue to decadent purple as I stepped off San Francisco’s 38 Geary bus and started walking up Polk Street. On the next block I passed a small gaggle of boys—teenagers, like me—loitering outside a head shop with an air of mild insolence. The cutest, a pale, slender kid with a solemn face, took an oversized comb from the back pocket of tight, white jeans and began slowly running it through his shoulder-length dirty-blond hair. He did this with just enough swagger to suggest he might be preening for an audience. Sure enough, I soon spotted a nearby older man staring his way with needy eyes. A frisson of excitement ran up my spine. Once again I’d escaped the drearily heterosexual suburbs for a night in the glamorous gay ghetto, a place where it seemed possible, if only just, that someone would want me for . . . something.
On reaching the popular section of Polk Street, scores of guys were peacocking up and down the sidewalks, perching on cars, and spilling out of bars, all in a state of advanced merriment. A mini-skirted man wearing a ratty orange ladies’ wig jumped off the back of an idling motorcycle and ran into a liquor store. A balding, middle-aged Bible-thumper wearing a cheap, brown suit tried to give out tracts but was refused by everyone.
