Fairoaks Baths Time Warp

 

 

It’s a challenge, holding the past close enough to continue to inhabit. Eventually memories fade and people who were there, whatever patch of time we mean when we use that term, pass from our planet. This makes the past’s clutter and detritus, its family albums and vacation snapshots, its diaries and postcards, its event flyers and yes, its Polaroids especially and surprisingly precious. It’s why I can’t bear to throw anything away, because today will be The Past quicker than we can imagine; that’s why my self-bestowed moniker since I co-founded the Center for Sex & Culture, with its highly personal archives and its volumes and volumes from other people’s secret libraries, is “socially responsible hoarder.” Yesterday’s refrigerator-magneted bar cards and love notes are magic carpets that let us time-travel, gain perspective and detail that otherwise is lost to history. This is true of anyone’s stash of beloved personal refuse, but it’s especially true of those who aren’t given the credibility of in-group status: queers, people of color, poor and working-class folks, rank and file veterans, and so many more humans whose stories are largely lost to the churn and movement of time. 

 

We didn’t think we were making history when we got drunk with our friends in 1975 and, howling with laughter, used up a whole pack of Polaroid film, left a record that’s the only thing we have to remember those people and that long-ago year. We didn’t know our snapshots of a Pride march in 1979 would make it into a documentary 35 years later. And the gayboys who went to the lower Haight to visit the Fairoaks Baths and pose for night manager Frank Melleno’s camera—so many of them now dead and gone—would hardly have been able to wrap their minds around the idea that their party pics would gather the rarified dust of history, would be collected by CSC, the Tom of Finland Foundation, and UC Berkeley, would be exhibited in New York at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, would be valued, even venerated, as a window into a vanished and untouchable moment, as surprisingly near us in time as 1978 may seem. 

 

It seems that way to me, anyhow—I vividly remember those men, the butch, fey, sometimes both-at-once brothers with whom I protested, partied, and dished. I remember my pals from Gay People’s Alliance in Eugene, and how envious I was when the boys piled in someone’s old car four or six at a time for a road trip to San Francisco or Portland, a long weekend at the baths. I can only hope now, seeing the selection of photos Frank’s old friend Gary Freeman rescued from obscurity—pics taken as sexytime candids at the Fairoaks, or recording for posterity some especially fabulous party costume—that my friends made it there and partook of the camaraderie and family that shines out from these images.  In that decade an open call was heard all over the world to come to San Francisco: not just to wear flowers in their hair (though plenty did), not to sit on the dock of the Bay, but to make a new family with others who were too queer for their hometowns. Paging through the Fairoaks pictures makes me ache for the men I knew, forging new lives in the brightly-burning crucible of hope and social change. In the midst of that, for the lucky guys who made it to Oak and Steiner, Fairoaks was a friendly, sexy harbor with a laid-back and racially integrated ambiance. Frank documented life in the collectively-run bathhouse that featured yoga classes and parties, not just opportunities for sex and intimate connection; you could stay the night or make it your base as you explored the changing scene in the most famous gay men’s community in the country, maybe the world. 

Today, if we think back at all to the lives of gay and bisexual men in the 1970s, we often think in terms of community-building and sexual freedom—as the Fairoaks pics remind us, those things often went hand in hand (or intimately involved other body parts). We don’t always remember, though, in what painfully conservative times many of those men were born and raised. Then, a queer man who came out risked being cast out. That’s what made the gay rights movement so necessary and the bars and baths—especially the Fairoaks—such havens: not just because of sex and camaraderie, but because they represented safe space, but more than that, also a place where men—too often disrespected and at risk of violence outside its walls—could relax, connect and be joyful together. 

 

That sense of joy leaps out of the Fairoaks photographs. It’s the joy of love and lust; of friendship and partnership; it’s the sense of joy at finding a home where the shackles of gender norms and straight expectation fall away and the only pretense is theatrical, born of playful, exhibitionistic exploration: drag you put on before you cast it off to spend the rest of the evening joyfully naked. As CSC curator Dorian Katz says, “This collection of photos is unique because they capture an aspect of gay life rarely seen in snapshot photography—a bathhouse! —with sexual, candid encounters that are playful, spontaneous and affectionate. I don't know of any other group of candid pictures taken at a bathhouse. It's a diary and journalistic, not intended to be porn or erotica. And there is so much joy happening in the photos, people look so happy to me—it's very moving. Seeing the joy is super-important.” 

 

That these joyous men’s new San Francisco home, that hope, was so short-lived makes the Fairoaks images all the more moving and important. The gradual sweep of history sped up and then crashed to a stop for so many of the young men inhabiting this alternative space. To see candid shots of that world helps us understand who they were, what they lost… what we lost. As Lambda Literary [Review? Website only? Not sure which is correct] put it, “To… examine [these] images is to open a portal onto a secret place lost long ago.” 

 

Gary Freeman saw right through that portal when his longtime friend Frank Melleno showed him his old visual journal, the shoebox full of Fairoaks Polaroids; a gallery owner himself, Gary knew exactly how profoundly rare and important they were, and restored all the photos himself. We owe him such a debt of gratitude for preserving this secret chronicle.

 

I am not sure any of us back then ever expected to wear Posterity like a title or a fabulous piece of drag, but here we are, alive so far, having lived through history being made and, whether or not we knew it in the moment, making it ourselves. Now we need a scrying glass—or some Polaroids—to fully remember the youth we were. And here you are, my darling young one, not born yet when the Fairoaks men lived or died; in an historical moment when so much of your reality lives on the Internet, when you search the past by doing what you do to grasp the present, you find so little detail about the lives we lived, for those are barely digitized at all; mostly, we lived them voice to voice and flesh to flesh. Please look deeply into these pictures, into the eyes of these men seeking camaraderie and delight: These are messages to you from a world that underlies the one we occupy now. I don’t know about you, but when I walk the streets of the Western Addition, of SOMA, of the Castro and Polkstrasse, sometimes I see them standing there, looking back at us. 

 

—Carol Queen, PhD

San Francisco, January 2017