A Mothership Gay Dating member

You’re waiting at a prearranged rendezvous for a first meeting with a guy you’ve exchanged messages with briefly online, knowing very little about him, maybe not even  having  his face pic. First physical contact - it’s exciting and perhaps unnerving. How will you both react on seeing each other?  Whatever the outcome, it’s always the same - as thrilling as meeting an extraterrestrial,  imagining new adventures arising  from the other’s gay world.

Stephen Hawking’s recent warning that we should be wary of contacting alien civilisations as they may try to colonise us is a scientific projection not unlike that expressed in America’s Life magazine  on July 27th, 1964 which explored a gay societywhich was “getting bolder”. It quoted a Los Angeles pamphlet for law enforcement officers saying what homosexuals wanted was “a fruit world”. Like the communists it was believed that gay people “intend to bury us”. Cold War fears of communism and gay issues were blended in a common paranoia.

Even in gay circles in 1964 there were rigid distinctions between the leather scene crowd who liked to pose as manly and hard, and those who were seen as “swishy”, or effeminate. Thankfully, we’ve moved on, and ” fruits”  have not taken over the world but have created a garden of eden on earth open to all.

But back to our first contact with the guy who is gay like ourselves, and yet is a mysterious stranger who embodies so many possibilities. Read the rest of this entry »

The Golden Gate Bridge

Recently, two strong earthquakes shook Southern California - such reminders must give an edge to life for residents of San Francisco awaiting ‘the Big One’ (and this time even the basking Bay seals moved off). Imagine reducing your possessions to those you could grab in moments, fleeing as the house collapsed. However, some see more threatening cracks in the city’s fabric of gay liberation.

In 1963 the first gay bar opened in the area now famous as the Castro. It stood at 2438 Market, close to Castro Street itself, and was named The Missouri Mule. When it closed a decade later, thirty gay bars had come and gone, while others were arriving.  By then the area was attracting same sex couples from the brashness of New York to the peace and beauty of the West Coast in confluence with the hippy movement and the hipster Beats. Love-ins on Haight-Ashberry met the Castro Clone (Levi 501s, check shirts, and ‘taches) as gay men distinguished themselves by a proud hypermasculinity.

Behind the quiet facade of his camera shop future gay martyr Harvey Milk dabbled in porn movies, newly desirable low rent houses became cells of gay activism, and long-haired marchers hoisted rainbow flags ( designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker) to show the way. When Milk was assassinated in 1978, demand for the rainbow flag increased dramatically. Read the rest of this entry »