City of High Spirits

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The city, of course, was no land's end colony of sybarites and free spirits. Wharves, canneries and dynamite factories were built. Immigrants arrived from China, Italy and Ireland, hoping to better their lot through hard work. After the 1906 earthquake, there was plenty of work to do. The city's two glorious bridges and half the buildings standing today were built during the 35 years between the quake and World War II. The names of immigrants who rebuilt San Francisco turn up everywhere in the city. There is a Molinari Delicatessen and a John Molinari who sits on the eleven-member board of supervisors. There is the Fisherman's Wharf fish market called F. Alioto Fish Co., and Lawyer Joseph Alioto, the former mayor. Alfred Nelder was once police chief; Wendy Nelder is now president of the board of supervisors. These fourth-generation families give San Francisco a solid core of culturally conservative citizens.

San Francisco has been ambivalent about its shifting myths, and seems to cringe each decade as the national press discovers the newest social kink cum movement. In 1957, Poet Allen Ginsberg and other shooting stars of his generation ("starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn," he wrote in Howl) were said to compose a San Francisco renaissance. The city was besieged by sophomores with a taste for espresso and random-access verse. When 1967 sparked and sputtered through town, the beatniks had given way to Haight-Ashbury hippies. They were less high-strung and, like, not into the whole verbal trip, O.K.? There was an influx of homosexuals during and after World War II, but it was nothing like the flamboyant wave that arrived in the 1970s. By 1977, when Gay Activist Harvey Milk won a seat on the board of supervisors, his Castro Street district was populated in great measure by similarly trim, tan men, and after Milk was assassinated in 1978, thousands of them rioted.

Other places have large homosexual populations, but nowhere are gays more conspicuous than in San Francisco, where they are said to make up 20% of the adult population. In the 1960s the police department went out of its way to raid gay bars, and recently a homosexual chorus was forbidden to sing in a Roman Catholic church. But the ill will has diminished a lot in the past few years. "We have fights going on in this town," says Supervisor Harry Britt, Milk's successor, "but we don't have fights between gays and straights."

The San Francisco homosexual community is more self-aware, more of a community, than any other on earth. Gays have their own savings and loan association, car-insurance agency and funeral parlor. There are gay newspapers, gay hotels and gay travel agencies. There is also, sad to say, a gay health crisis. About one in every thousand San Franciscans has AIDS. According to a sketchy study released last week, at least half the city's homosexuals may have been exposed to the disease.

Gay or straight, San Franciscans pursue the good life with vigor. Boutiques are endemic. Fine fresh food and exquisite wines are a local industry. A daily jog provides a runner's high. Cocaine was big. BMWs still are. In such a city, thick with gays and Yuppies, the similarity between those two demographic subsets is striking.