Long before the Cockettes first donned drag and flirtatiously lifted their legs, people came to San Francisco to belong. So it was with Jose Cital. Young, handsome, and newly out, he came in search of peers.
"I was dragged out of the closet by my mother," Cital tells me. He was just 15. It caused a rift between him and his family, though they've since reconciled.
Ready for a new life, Cital fled Fresno at 18 for the city. His first stop: San Francisco's annual Pride celebration, where the teen could dance in glitter and togetherness. He especially looked forward to Pink Saturday, the annual party the night before the parade. Cital had heard this party was synonymous with Pride, with a capital P.
That wasn't what he found.
The dancing throngs stretched down Castro Street, but they and the thumping sound systems offered little to Cital. "I went with the new friends I made, most of them straight," he says. "I just wandered around aimlessly a bit, and halfheartedly danced to a few DJ's."
That's when the shot rang out. People stampeded, frightened, with Cital caught in the middle. The Bay Area Reporter ran a story on the homicide: A gunshot wound ended the life of young Stephen Powell, who was only a year older than Cital.
Welcome to Pink Saturday, 2010.
Flash-forward five years, and the annual party was canceled this month by its sponsors, the radical queer order of nuns known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The well-meaning Sisters couldn't assure the safety of their charges, they said, though heaven knows they tried. Ultimately, the party was not safe enough to go on.
How did it come to this? The local LGBTQ community is already pointing fingers.
"Some people say it's the straight people, but some people say it was the people from Oakland," Cital, now 23, tells Your Pissed-Off Narrator. He's now on Pride's board, and heard the word from many: The bridge and tunnel crowd (read: scary brown people) were ruining Pink Saturday.
But this singling out of others by the mostly (let's face it) well-off, white, male, gay San Francisco community helps no one, and catches many young suburban LGBTQ youth in the blame-game crossfire. It also runs counter to Pink Saturday's history of inclusivity.
Decades ago, Pink Saturday was what Jose Cital hoped it would be when he arrived in San Francisco — a place to belong.
At more than 6 feet tall with broad shoulders, auburn hair, and a handsome Midwestern face, Billy Blossom was the quintessential "really good looking guy," his friend Gerard Koskovich says.
One day, in the '90s, Koskovich and Blossom went to a symposium in the Presidio on the Spanish-colonial history of San Francisco. Under fluorescent lights in a grim makeshift classroom, they geeked out on local history.
Blossom was open about his status: HIV positive. When the strapping architect went on disability leave from work, Koskovich knew what was to come.
In this day of advanced drug treatment, it's easy to forget the toll AIDS can take on the untreated human body. According to various medical journals, kidney failure, heart failure, swelling, memory loss, physical weakness, spots around the mouth, and dementia are among the cavalcade of horrors awaiting those in late stages of the virus.
In the 1980s and '90s, the grim picture was a horribly regular occurrence.
As Blossom wilted, his blood family and chosen family both served as caretakers. One night a ferocious storm raged outside his Duboce home. The rain fell so loud, Koskovich couldn't hear Blossom breathe. In the darkness, he leaned in close. Soft breaths struggled against pattering rain drops.
"I'm an atheist, and not a spiritual person," Koskovich told me, "but I felt brought up in a huge force. It felt we were all connected. We were doing what we could."
Blossom died in 1995, but in 1990, San Francisco's LGBT community raged through the streets for all of the Blossoms of the world. Those protests birthed Pink Saturday.
Six days before the party started, June 20, 1990, the worldwide AIDS death toll clocked in at 300,000. Among them, exactly 5,692 San Franciscans died of the virus. In the San Francisco Examiner that week, a UCSF survey found that 63 percent of doctors "intended to avoid AIDS patients." The federal government imposed a no-fly ban on AIDS carriers. Funding for AIDS research was scarce.
Your Pissed Off Narrator cannot emphasize this point enough: Though some professionals were brave, many were not. Doctors and government left people to die. San Francisco exploded.
"Silence equals death," was the AIDS activists' slogan. So silent they were not.
Fires burned in the streets. Under the umbrella of the radical protest group ACT UP, thousands marched.
Many were met with SFPD batons, hundreds were arrested. By June 26, 1990, the near-constant protesting took its toll on the activists. The screams were spent, despair was omnipresent. What else were they to do? In the truest tradition of the community, LGBTQ protesters took to the Castro and threw a party.
"Living is what we're fighting for. We're going to show you we're still alive," Koskovich tells Your Pissed-Off Narrator, trying to capture the feeling of the new, impromptu celebration: This was the first Pink Saturday.
Because when you live through a plague, even fun is a political statement.
Laura Thomas, now co-president of the Harvey Milk Club, remembered the "spirt of celebration": She, Koskovich, and other ralliers strung toilet paper like party-streamers over Muni lines. It was the final day of the AIDS Conference, and ACT UP took over 18th and Castro in defiance of death.
The common cause united those across the LGBTQ spectrum. Images from the protests show black, brown, white, and Asian protesters. Women, men, and everyone raised their fists as one.
"It's a bit of a cliche way of putting it," Thomas says, "but it's human nature to find the life in the midst of grief, anger, and loss." And that sense of community held for years.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took the reins of Pink Saturday in 1995, and Sister Selma Soul said they positioned the party as a safe space for queer youth. It was long one of the few all-ages parties during a bar-fueled Pride Weekend.
Cristina Flores, a San Francisco native, was 12-years-old when she attended her first Pink Saturday, seeking a safe space. Her parents are traditional Catholics and struggled to understand her. At Pink Saturday, the protesters who started the party passed the baton to the younger kids.
"I got access and exposure to older generations who were on the political forefront of the gay rights movement," she said. "I felt like I could be myself."
Now 28, Flores says she began seeing seas of straight gawkers at the party, and decided to avoid it. She wasn't alone.
Modern-day Pink Saturday is a far cry from what it was when it began, many community members tell Your Pissed-Off Narrator. Even the Sisters had homophobic epithets thrown their way; just last year, one Sister and her boyfriend were beaten by a group of men. That was the final straw. The Sisters this month decided to shut down Pink Saturday.
People pin the violence to two groups: Straights and out-of-towners.
Koskovich, Thomas, and others say straights flocked to the party as LGBTQ acceptance rose. Being queer is cool now (thanks a lot, Rupaul's Drag Race), although not all of the straights attending Pink Saturday have been allies.
What's more, along with the straights, the "bridge and tunnel" "troublemakers" (our favorite code words for The Other) are being blamed for much of the violence. Many suburban queer youth are caught up in that line of thinking, Jose Cital and others say to us.
"Even now [The Castro] is such a boy's club, and also a white boy's club," Flores says. It makes sense that old divisions would rise.
Few now remember why Pink Saturday started in the first place, Sister Selma Soul tells Your Pissed-Off Narrator. Cital says that's instructive.
"Maybe," he says, "it's because we've lost our purpose."
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