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There were by this time some ninety gay bars in the city, and perhaps a hundred and fifty gay organizations, including church groups, social service groups, and business associations.
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And most of them were young, white, and male. Many of the gay people-at least half of them-had moved into the city within the past eight years. If the oft-cited figure of a hundred thousand was more or less correct, that meant that in this city of fewer than seven hundred thousand people approximately one out of every five adults and perhaps one out of every three or four voters was gay. That summer-it was 1978-estimates of the gay population of San Francisco ranged from seventy-five thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand. Otherwise, the sidewalks and the streets leading off into the downtown were nearly deserted there were no spectators to watch this horde, in its outlandish costumes, march into the city. A block away, a woman in a baggy coat and a kerchief scuttled into a doorway just in time to avoid the sight of a transvestite copy of herself hulking down the avenue. Nearby, an elderly Chinese man with a dog walked along the sidewalk close to the buildings, his head bowed, his eyes averted from the marchers.
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The sun now looked like a klieg light it burnished the streets and set the windows of the skyscrapers on fire. Here we could suddenly see the whole first half of the parade-floats and lines of marchers filling the street in front of us-on its way to City Hall. The young women were leaning out of the windows cheering and waving a sign that read “L esbian T axi D rivers of S an F rancisco.” I recognized one of them, a slim young woman with long blond hair, as the taxi-driver who had brought me in from the airport a few weeks before.Įventually, our truck turned onto Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. At the next intersection, he looped around a yellow taxicab filled with young women in T-shirts. He glided through the Lutheran contingent and then swept through a group of clergymen carrying large placards depicting Jesus on the Cross. He had the torso of a dancer, and he moved with liquid, dreamlike movements, crossing and recrossing the street. The clown drifted off, and I turned to watch a man in a Batman cape and a sequinned jockstrap roller-skating by. I asked him about the rodeo, and he said matter-of-factly, “This is only our second year, so we don’t expect any bulldogging, but we’ve got a lot of calf ropers, some bronc riders, and some really wonderful Dale Evans imitations. A clown in whiteface with baggy overalls walked along beside our truck. In a few minutes, our part of the parade began to move forward a country-and-Western band struck up behind us, and a number of men dressed as cowboys or clowns took their places in and around the hay wagon. In the front seat were Ken Maley and a couple of other friends of Armistead’s.
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Our truck had no sign on it, but it carried, in addition to me and another journalist, two people well known to the gay community of the city: Maupin, San Francisco’s most prominent gay fiction writer, and Dave Kopay, the professional football player. Our truck nosed itself into the parade lineup behind a group of marchers with signs reading “L utherans C oncerned for G ay P eople” and a hay wagon advertising a gay rodeo in Reno. People in costumes milled about amid a crowd of young men and women in bluejeans. Bouquets of lavender, pink, and silver balloons clouded the sky, and bands were warming up. Rounding a corner, we came upon a line of stationary floats. The Gay Freedom Day Parade had not yet begun. “We’re on gay time, so the parade won’t have started yet.” He was right. At the bottom of the hill, skyscrapers wheeled across our horizon, and the truck careered through the deserted canyons of the financial district heading for the waterfront. On Russian Hill, Victorian houses with ice-cream-colored façades seemed to reflect this bewilderment of seasons. On Pacific Heights, the roses were blooming, the hollies were in berry, and enormous clumps of daisies billowed out from under palm trees. It was a Sunday morning, and the streets were almost empty, so our pickup truck sped uninterrupted up and down the hills, giving those of us in the back a Ferris- wheel view of the city.
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The sun shone out of a cerulean sky, lighting the streets to a shadowless intensity. It was one of those days in San Francisco when the weather is so close to perfect that there seems to be no weather.