A Love Letter to Nightlife, and Plans for an Oral History

Posted on Spinning Platters, April 11, 2022:

Nightlife is a sacred pursuit, especially when the world is bleak. Lately, the clubs and the bars feel emptier, and it’s harder to find our people there. In the 80’s and early 90s, we had a similarly dark moment, but it felt like it was easier to be with other people. They matter, for so many reasons. A dark bar or club can be the heart of a community. I’m on a journey to collect and share stories of what happened in these venues.

Americans are lonely, but never was that sense of aloneness brought into sharper focus than during lockdown. One of the oldest, most comfortable rituals of urban life is pulling up a barstool at your local bar to settle in with your neighbors — and it was suddenly impossible. A simple, essential community pleasure had been put in the deep freeze. For 18 empty and joyless months, we didn’t get to gather. No chance encounters in familiar spaces that enriched our lives. I missed the feeling of joy I get when the DJ in the room lays down your favorite track and you hit the dance floor.

We require connection, and for many of us, nightlife venues are where we can most reliably find our people. The hibernation of bars and venues felt like muting a part of the self. Nightlife is where many communities are fostered and sustained, and in more difficult times, is critical for collective resilience and joy. Living for 18 months without it brings its meaning sharply into focus. Often dismissed by the respectable as unessential and adolescent in nature, it’s important to look at the ways that nightlife has been a vital positive force for many, particularly for those on the margins, especially if you grew up feeling isolated.

Like a lot of other queers my age, I grew up thinking there was nobody like me. The scene I found full of compatible, similar people when I moved to SF was life changing. I had, for the first time, a safe space where I could take risks and figure out my identity. I was surrounded by people who got it, whose views were compatible, and who wouldn’t let me get hurt while I did stupid shit in the name of finding out who I needed to be as an adult. Escaping the deep erasure that a lot of bi and pansexual people experience took work. Sometimes that work looked like a bender of a night. Parties and clubs with my people were essential to finding the affirmation I needed.

San Francisco is a small town, and it used to be the case that I’d run into my people all the time; when I first moved to my neighborhood there were about ten folks in my extended community who lived within six blocks of me. Now they’ve all left the City. I’m less likely to run into folks at the grocery store or the clubs. As a charming extravert, I’m a master at making new friends, but they, too, eventually leave. The economic unsteadiness causes an empty emotional landscape, and it’s fucking bleak.

I moved here for the counterculture and I’ve watched it disappear. In the 2010s friends would meet after work at Badlands, a gay bar which is now shuttered. The Stud, another longstanding queer bar, is in limbo after the space it occupied was closed, due to the pandemic, after 55 years. I used to meet up with a group of queer friends at a fun little queer friendly bar named Virgil’s. Now, Virgil’s closed and most of those people have left the Bay. Slim’s is gone, where I’ve seen a host of outstanding live shows, has been replaced with a dumb fucking club named YOLO. Across the Bay, American Steel was sold and the new owners are evicting all of the artists in favor of higher rent tenants. Revolution Cafe closed during COVID. The Lexington, San Francisco’s only lesbian bar, closed long ago, owners citing the departing community.

It’s fucking hard to be a person these days. I think it’s always harder for those of us who identify outside the norm. We don’t have places where we can be fully ourselves. Even in liberal contexts a lot of us feel alienated from family and religious spaces, and we need our people around us, but that’s getting harder to do. We’re used to seeing our favorite spots shuttered. We don’t know when we’ll have to move somewhere else. We’re tired of saying goodbye. It’s hard to have confidence in the earth beneath us when it keeps swallowing the anchors that keep us grounded. I keep missing places and people I knew, and I’m always waiting for the next one to close or leave. Cities are changing so fast it’s hard to emotionally keep up.

It is easier, today, to connect to people than it is to connect with people. It’s easy for us to rack up casual acquaintances and have brief and casual exchanges online. It’s given us the illusion of real community, but in a corporate-run social simulation with minimal vulnerability or risk. Online, we engage or disengage as we like, shift our attention when we get bored or annoyed, and delete content that we regret. We experience the ways online relationships make us feel more lonely, and there’s plenty of research that shows this. The inverse is also true – real life communities make us happier and healthier. A sense of belonging is essential for an embodied life. Relationships strengthen and deepen in beautifully uncomfortable and awkward moments, and we have less opportunity for that. None of us are really okay in the new COVID, Trumpian landscape, and, the bleak instability of social landscape makes everything so much fucking worse.

These days it feels like each of us is living on our own island in a sea of lava, and it’s super lonely. In fact, Surgeon General Vivek has declared loneliness to be a public health crisis. In his book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam demonstrates the extent to which our society has become more atomized. This increased atomization is especially dangerous right now; the harder things get – and things are very hard in today’s world – the more we need each other. This is especially true for people outside the mainstream.

Everyone needs a place to show up as their full selves. When your identity is outside the norm, you have to work harder to find your people. I’m an organizer of a particularly invisible group, and see first hand the impact that an intentional space has on people. In the LGBT community, bisexuals are notoriously erased from the narrative and left out of events. The psychological harm of this is well documented; our mental health suffers from the overwhelming lack of visibility and acceptance. I know from my work and personal experience how important it is to just be able to know that people around you understand who you are. I also know from my youth how painful it is to not have these spaces.

In high school when I came out, nobody was blatantly homophobic, but the AIDS epidemic was in full swing. Nobody threw slurs my way, but nobody really believed me either, because it was easier for them to dismiss my identity than to normalize LGBT people in their social world. I didn’t see anyone, anywhere, who embodied identities like mine until I moved to SF. Here, in the SF underground, I traversed clubs and house parties and bars, poetry readings, dungeons, and sex parties, and, of course, Burning Man. I was able to be among friends and sympathetic strangers who understood this aspect of myself. I got to recover from a lifetime of dissociation in a safe environment, and unpack my sublimated identity without going off a cliff because there were people to catch me. If you never had a safe place to be yourself, you need to rewrite our narrative and create a roadmap for ourselves from whole cloth. Nobody does that alone.

If you’re outside the social norm, you learn to create your own spaces. Since the 70s in San Francisco, gay men have been establishing their own subcultures to play and bolster one another. The 70s bar and club scene is particularly famous for its leather and disco scenes, and was the first gay circuit scene to establish itself here. In the 80s, even as the AIDS crisis ravaged the community, members attended epic parties to dance, drink, get high and fuck, and to make art and push back against the erasure and dread.

Gay men in the 80s experienced erasure and discrimination, but the community had begun to experience greater levels of acceptance prior to the AIDS epidemic. For the first time, there were out gay politicians on a national level, and representation of out gay characters on television shows like The Golden Girls. At the same time, the community was denied vital resources and funding and suffered from stigmatization due to misinformation about AIDS. Reagan himself refused to recognize the crisis, and his press secretary treated it as a joke. The community, still mourning the death of Harvey Milk at the onset of AIDS, had to show up for itself. This they did with fundraisers and blood drives and other community efforts, and, importantly, club nights and parties. Even at the height of the crisis, clubs like Febes, The Stud, Oasis, and The EndUp were lively with partiers and gay as fuck.

Simultaneously, the punk scene in San Francisco was thriving, drawing bands and poets and other artists making art for its own sake. Opting out of the white 80s upwardly mobile culture of greed and consumerism, the punk underground took place in a-zones and squats, and tiny venues, including Chinese and Filipino restaurants. It was in crowded apartments and dive bars. There was more than just a negative reaction to and rejection of the cruelty of the Reagan administration. It was an affirmation of a better possible world, where people opted to participate in creating a gentler and more joyful world built on humanism and inclusion. Punks were making a conscious choice to reject the consumerist trappings and make their own way.

Like today, the 1980s were a time of severe social crisis, increasing inequality, and geopolitical peril. As we are depleted by the pandemic, which our recent president declared a hoax, Reagan laughed off the AIDS epidemic and refused to provide support for suffering communities or invest in research for years. While today Russia conspires to undermine our democracy and attacks Ukraine, in the 1980s the Cold War was at its peak, with the risk of nuclear war against the Soviet Union at all-time highs. The economy was booming, but the social climate was oppressive. Poverty, inequality, overt racism, and moral panics over queer culture were ubiquitous, and leadership at the national level was violently silent.

One big difference, at least in major cities, was that by the 1980s suburban flight had depopulated them so much that city living was cheap. It was easy to find a place to stay in the city and connect with fellow punks. Today, as everyone knows, cities – and the whole West Coast – are so prohibitively expensive that many young people double up with their families well past adulthood, and a lot of culture develops on TikTok and Instagram, not in the nightclubs. A thing that hasn’t changed about counterculture though, is the racial segregation – today, as back then, a lot of punk and gay spaces are predominantly white, and this has to be discussed from an intersectional point of view.

I’m launching an oral history project about nightlife in the 80’s and early 90’s because I want to hear and share the stories from these days. The point of this effort is not to romanticize the past, but to open conversations about collective resilience. How did people create joy together when a lot of things about living just plain sucked? A lot has been written about every subcultural history, but I think now, the stories about the collective and relationships of this time matters. I think we tend to overlook the importance of nightlife culture in its power to affirm, connect, and attenuate the harsh aloneness that living through multiple crises can conjure.

I want to hear and share stories about the nights out and the days in between, and what glued people together and when communities fractured. I want to know about the drugs people did, and the sex they had, and the fallings out and how they showed up. I want to know about the clothes and the reasons for them, and the music and who was in bands and how they shared music before Spotify. I want to know about house parties and sex and orgies and making out on the couch, and the little friendship rituals that have been replaced by emoji exchanges. I want to know how the owners, bartenders, performers, participants built culture together and kept it going. What stories and circumstances brought and kept people together in a similarly challenging time of crisis?

There’s a lot of history wrapped up in these parties, and a lot of important cultural shifts rest on the ability of people to gather with one another in the dark. My plan is to talk to people who were part of these scenes and document their stories with interviews, photos, and more. The final product may be a podcast or a book or a blog. It’ll be hosted on Spinning Platters, with plans for a broader release at a later time.