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.