Arlene Francis and Me: Pandemic Diaries from Castro Street 2020

By Mark Abramson

Mark Abramson writes: "I suspect that we might not always recognize when we’re living in an historic time. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown provided ample opportunity to contemplate my surroundings and life in America in 2020. I have often kept a journal for many years, so when the coronavirus forced us to quarantine at home, I used the method I know best to try to make sense of the situation by starting a new diary."

Join Mark and his diary for Sex! Gossip! YouTube! Gay history! Pets! Laughs! Death! Neighbors! San Francisco! Television! Netflix! Jokes! Movies! Stories! Life! Google! Culture! Zoom! Celebrities! Ghosts! Sex! Love! Politics! Books! Death! Music! Scandal! Dreams! Ideas! Surprises!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Abramson
• Release date: Nov 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005097394

Mark Abramson

Mark Abramson is the author of the best-selling Beach Reading mystery series published by Lethe Press. He has also written the non-fiction books "For My Brothers," an AIDS Memoir, and "Sex, Drugs & Disco - San Francisco Diaries from the pre-AIDS Era" and its sequel, "MORE Sex, Drugs & Disco." His next book "Minnesota Boy" is a memoir about his coming out years while in college in Minneapolis.

Book preview

Praise for Arlene Francis and Me

You and I lived through the pandemic and its onslaught of medical and political media, but I’ll bet neither one of us wrote a dairy of the year 2020 as personal, plangent, thorough, and thoroughly entertaining as Mark Abramson’s Arlene Francis and Me: A Pandemic Diary of Castro Street in 2020. The same easy graceful and heartfelt writing that have made his stories and memoirs so popular are present with some throwbacks to his earlier history, both in SF and on the farm in Minnesota. You’ll end up saying I wish I had such a sane, thoughtful, intelligent, and sincere best friend like Mark.

—Felice Picano, one of the founding members of the legendary Violet Quill and author of more than thirty books

Mark Abramson is irresistibly charming in this diary of the plague years. He’s nailed the essence of the Covid pandemic – the deaths and shutdowns, the awful echo of AIDS, the honking and noise-making for frontline workers, the newfound fascination with neighbors, the wine and the weed, the Netflix and TV, the news and nonsense, cooking – and amidst it all, the story of the human heart. Mark Abramson is a treasure, the chronicler of the Castro, who has been there through it all, observant, wise, generous, kind and welcoming to everyone."

— Trebor Healy, author of A Horse Named Sorrow, Through It Came Bright Colors, and more

Reading Mark Abramson’s latest diary, Arlene Francis and Me, is like hanging out with an old friend. His comforting narrative makes this journal of the crazy year of 2020 almost therapeutic. Mark writes my favorite kind of gay history—intensely personal social stories filled with observations about the world. In Abramson’s case that world is the Castro in San Francisco, a place he has chronicled brilliantly in For My Brothers, Sex, Drugs & Disco, and More Sex, Drugs and Disco. Mark Abramson is a survivor, a born observer who knows how to narrate the world he lives in with spirit, insight, and abundant humor, even when sheltering in place.

—Owen Keehnen, historian and author of Voices in Isolation: 4 Queer Plays at a Social Distance, Starz and The Sand Bar.

There is an ancient Chinese curse that, roughly translated, boils down to something along the lines of May you live in interesting times…Abramson certainly has, steadfastly and unflinchingly, witnessing and documenting it all in the San Francisco of the 1970’s to today, in what has arguably been the epicenter of the Gay liberation movement. His body of work, as a whole, is now perfectly bookended, from the start of the AIDS epidemic to the rise of Covid, and, throughout it all, he doesn’t miss a beat…Abramson is a true war zone correspondent and, like his For My Brothers, this is a must read, to fully understand his life and times.

—James Dean Boldman, author of An American Feast

Mark Abramson has a gift for capturing historical moments with candor, complexity, and vivid detail. His first diary, Sex, Drugs, and Disco, stands out among the most evocative and vital records of daily life in pre-AIDS San Francisco. Now, in Arlene Francis and Me, Abramson applies his keen powers of observation to another pivotal moment in our cultural history: the Covid-19 pandemic during its first wave. Future generations will thank him for it.

—Alia Volz, author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco

Also by Mark Abramson

Beach Reading

a mystery series set in the Castro

Beach Reading

Cold Serial Murder

Russian River Rat

Snowman

Wedding Season

California Dreamers

Love Rules

Memoirs & Journals

For My Brothers

Sex, Drugs & Disco – San Francisco Diaries from the Pre-AIDS Era

MORE Sex, Drugs & Disco – San Francisco Diaries from the Pre-AIDS Era

Minnesota Boy

Farm Boy

River Days, River Nights: ...true gay adventures at the Russian River (1976-1984)

Acknowledgements

What would we do without friends? Many thanks to all the many pals both near and far who helped keep me and each other sane during the craziness of the past couple of years. From my social media contacts to my local Castro neighbors and drinking buddies (whenever it was possible to gather safely) I value all of you!

Special appreciation goes out to Gary Brownen for moral support and proofreading, not to mention laughing at even my lamest jokes. I have great gratitude and good fortune for having known Toby Johnson since the 1970s and for still being friends all these years later. He is a master at the craft of putting a book like this one together. Thank you!

I should also say that I am grateful for all those who have touched my life but left this human form in recent years, most notably Frank, Corrine, Lynn, and more recently George, Mattie, and let’s not forget Betty White!

Mark Abramson

February 2022

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Arlene Francis Herself

Foreword

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Ocean Beach from Point Lobos

I suspect that we might not always recognize when we’re living in an historic time. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown provided ample opportunity to contemplate my surroundings and life in America in 2020. I have often kept a journal for many years, so when the coronavirus forced us to quarantine at home, I used the method I know best to try to make sense of the situation by starting a new diary.

MARCH 2020

The Castro is Closed

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It all seemed to happen so fast! One day we heard the story of a cruise ship idling off the coast of San Francisco with 21 passengers aboard who were infected with the novel coronavirus. The president wanted them to stay there because he liked the numbers where they were.

The next thing we knew everybody was working from home, wearing masks, ordering hand sanitizer online by the gallon, hoarding toilet paper, and talking to grandma over Zoom!

Monday, March 16, 2020

I am sitting beside the north windmill in Golden Gate Park where thousands of tulips are blooming in Queen Wilhelmina’s Garden. I heard on the news that Mayor London Breed will shut down the city (whatever that means) by tonight, so I laced up my shoes, grabbed a jacket, and headed out to see the ocean one last time while the buses are still running.

Coronavirus or Covid-19 is killing people all over the world. Yesterday they closed the bar at 440 Castro right when we got there, so we spent the rest of Sunday afternoon at the Edge, where they stayed open a couple more hours but are closed today and from now on. All the bars in California are closed indefinitely. For weeks? Months? Who knows? What an interesting time to be alive!

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

I just got home from Safeway where many of the shelves were bare. People are hoarding paper towels and toilet paper! We’re not supposed to even go outside our homes except for necessities like medical appointments and food. Running low on coffee and oatmeal and strawberries and bananas, I mostly wanted to get out in the fresh air. We have to wear masks, wash our hands often, and stay six feet apart.

When I walked from my apartment down Castro Street to the MUNI station I saw CLOSED signs, some with handwritten apologies, in most of the store windows. The F-Line streetcars aren’t running, so I rode the underground from Castro to Church Street. I was never within six feet of anyone on the subway because it was nearly empty, except for a skinny guy and his obese girlfriend dressed in pink. The floor of the streetcar was littered with damp newspapers and trash from fast food joints.

Friday, March 27, 2020

It’s nearly 8pm and I’m home alone on Castro Street. I hardly ever write in my journal at home, but I guess I’d better get used to it. I miss taking the bus up to Buena Vista Park to write, but the buses don’t go there anymore.

Each day at 5:30pm a bunch of friends get on our iPhones so we can see and hear each other for a virtual Happy Hour. Since today was Friday, I made myself a dry gin martini. Today was also Kelly Shannon’s birthday so everyone was supposed to dress up. Kelly and his husband Craig wore tuxedos and top hats. When I took a shower this afternoon I actually thought about what to wear for the first time in ages.

My new book River Days, River Nights went up for sale on the Internet in paperback and I’ve been thinking of trying to work on an eighth book in the Beach Reading series. I won’t be able to do a book launch or any public readings like I usually do with a new book until this pandemic is under control. I can hardly wait until the book stores are open again – and the bars!

Mary Edna, my old friend and neighbor up the hill in the next block of Castro Street, brought me a stack of San Francisco Chronicles from last week. I let my subscription for home delivery lapse and I’m stunned at how expensive it is now, even though the paper gets thinner every year. It’s interesting to read last week’s news and see how much has changed in one week and to see which local news stories I’ve missed.

I always read Dear Abby, whose advice doesn’t need to be current anyway, the same way The Judge Judy Show on television is just as entertaining in reruns. I read the comics and do all the crossword puzzles and the Cryptoquip and sometimes even the Jumble.

I never used to look at the Sports section. Some gays have the sports gene. Some even play sports, thus the Gay Games (because they couldn’t use the term Gay Olympics) and lots of gays love to watch. Gay bars in San Francisco get packed to the rafters for games on television whenever the Giants or the Forty-Niners are on a winning streak, although not during a pandemic. I’m still not interested in sports, but I’ve discovered lately that the Sports section of the paper has some great photographs of hot athletes, especially basketball players.

Leah Garchik’s Overheard segment in the Chronicle is always fun, where people send in snippets of conversations they’ve heard out in public and she prints them. She’s used some of mine over the years, but I’ve hardly been out in public enough to overhear anything lately.

APRIL 2020

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The EDGE Boarded up

Nearly everyone started watching television during the shutdown, as if it were something new. When I couldn’t bear to hear any more news about the Trump administration, I escaped into series like Schitt’s Creek, Tiger King, Hollywood, and the Marvelous Mrs. Mazel. Whenever I grew tired of them, I turned to YouTube, where I came across old game shows from my childhood, especially What’s My Line? I reverted to the comfort of a time when I was a little boy watching TV with the only people I knew, my family. The most amazing thing I discovered was how clearly I remembered some episodes. We must have watched every Sunday night while I was still in the womb.

During the last plague I survived – AIDS – gay men learned to make adjustments to our behavior. Life went on, at least for the luckiest of us, until drugs came along that offered hope for some new normalcy. During Covid-19, even though I was older than when AIDS appeared, I remembered that my libido was still alive too.

One of my first trips outside the Castro was for acupuncture which, like any medical appointment, was considered an essential service. As a writer, I’ve grown used to enjoying time alone, but I was lucky to have a great roommate named Coby when the quarantine started. I think my dreams became more vivid during the pandemic lockdown. Maybe they were trying to make up for my lack of human contact. Some dreams were wonderful. Others, not so much…

Friday, April 3, 2020

It’s a whole different world out there! I can’t remember what day it is or how many weeks we are into this pandemic behavior adjustment, but today I got masked up and gloved and took an M-Oceanview bus over the hills to West Portal. Nothing goes through the tunnels anymore but rats. It was a beautiful ride on a sunny day. The front ends of the buses are blocked off to protect the drivers. Everyone enters and leaves through the rear door and nobody pays a fare. The drivers are masked too, so you can’t see their faces or sometimes even determine race or gender.

I got a mask from my roommate Coby. He had some left-over from Burning Man. They need them to breathe when the wind kicks up the desert dust on the playa.

I got an acupuncture treatment from Debi and then got on an inbound M-Oceanview bus, up past Laguna Honda and down Portola to Market, the city sparkling below in the sunshine, the air crystal clear and Mt. Diablo showing off in the East Bay. I rode past Castro to Church Street, intending to stop at Safeway, but the line outside was stretched across the front of the store and wrapped around the building as far as I could see. All those customers with shopping carts stood six feet apart with masks and scarves wrapped around their heads. They looked as if they were an orderly procession of the homeless waiting in line for a free meal like at Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin.

I decided there was nothing I needed that badly from Safeway and went back home.

Last night I caught an episode of What’s My Line? from June 3, 1953 with two mystery guests. First was architect Frank Lloyd Wright, deaf as a post and rather arrogant. But the funny thing was that I was only two years old when that show aired and I realized I remembered it! My first exposure to people who weren’t farmers were celebrities. I went from watching them as a child to watching Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares and later Charles Nelson Reilly. The butchest gay role model I saw on TV was Liberace. He was the second mystery guest and Arlene Francis guessed him right away, which gave them time to bring out his brother George, who talked just like him. Damn, those diamonds were butch!

Saturday, April 4, 2020

I had a good talk with Coby this morning. I asked him if he ever dreamed he might see a pandemic of this scale in his lifetime. He said, Oh, yes… I was kind of a science nerd. They’ve been predicting disasters for years, like global climate change and the destruction of the world’s coral reefs, floods, famine, diseases, and things like that. I expect to see all of them in my lifetime. I just didn’t know which one would happen first.

Coby is only 23 years old, so we talked about AIDS and how different those times were for my generation of gay men. I told him how we still went outside to go to work every day and most straight people ignored the virus because it didn’t affect them. We also talked about how there have been other plagues throughout human history, but this is the first time we get to experience one with the technology of today. Television and the internet mean we find out everything happening around the world almost instantly. Some days I think I’d rather not know.

Monday, April 6, 2020

I feel like we’re living in a Stephen King novel. It rains day and night. My whole neighborhood is boarded up and everything is wet. And it’s only Monday.

I heard that my sexy old friend Jeffrey Tumlin, who has such a fine body (we first met when he was sunbathing nude in the park) – now head of public transit – is closing many of the MUNI bus lines by Wednesday. The underground has stopped already.

I went to Cliff’s this morning to buy light bulbs for the bathroom. An employee was stationed at the front door. He asked me, What do you need today?

Light bulbs.

Okay, hold on…

He spoke into a microphone and someone came to escort me to the right department. I think I was the only customer in the store. Everyone was masked and very polite with remarks like Stay healthy and Take care of yourself. One of the employees even said Have a good day, Mark. I didn’t recognize him behind his mask, so I just said thanks and smiled. Once I got outside, I realized he couldn’t see me smile behind MY mask. Oh well…

At Safeway, I waited in line outside for 35 minutes to do 20 minutes of shopping and then waited another 25 minutes to check out because they only had one full-service lane open. Two express lanes had cashiers doing nothing. Unconscionable!

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Last night I dreamed that I met a guy and fell in love. One of his friends owned a private jet, so a group of six of us flew to a safe place, an island where the virus didn’t exist. He showed me pictures of the two of us from several years ago, but I had no memory of him. He said I’d brought him home one night and we’d had great sex but it was his last night in town. Our timing wasn’t right then, but now it was perfect, especially since we were so in love and safe from the virus.

When we landed on the island, I texted Coby and asked him to water the plants. I told him I’d be gone until the coronavirus is under control, but not to worry. I could pay the bills online. Everything would work out fine.

Thursday April 9, 2020

Last night I dreamed that I went to a funeral for a little boy, maybe ten years old. It was late at night and dozens of mourners were lined up across a big empty parking lot, waiting to get inside. I didn’t even know the kid, but I was freaked out by how young he was and that his death had been so violent.

When my turn came to enter the building, the open coffin was right inside the door. I was in a tiny anteroom where everyone had to pass by and see the body from up close. I wasn’t prepared for the sight, his soft brown hair framing a cherubic face with a trace of dried blood down his cheek. Then the weirdest thing happened! He started to move, tossing and turning like he was having a bad dream of his own.

I was so sad that this beautiful boy was about to be put underground for eternity when he still had so much energy, not to mention that marble skin, that almost perfect face. I said to the guy behind me in line, He’s still moving! How can they bury someone who’s still moving?

The stranger said, That happens sometimes when they’re so young and death was so sudden.

The boy twitched again and his hand moved to swipe a fly off his nose. His eyes never opened, but he turned his head toward me. His soft hair fell out of the way and exposed a gash on his right temple, dried blood and tears on his right cheek. The stranger beside me said, He’s dead, all right. He just doesn’t know it yet. He’ll settle down once he’s six feet under with no place to go.

A long line was still waiting to get inside, so we moved on to a much bigger room lit with crystal chandeliers. It was crowded and noisy with a band playing country and western music in the far corner. Ladies in fur coats sipped champagne from fluted glasses and men in bib overalls drank beer from the bottle. Some couples danced together. It was much too crowded, so I stepped out a side door and saw the long line still snaking across the parking lot, waiting to see the boy in the coffin. It started snowing hard and I woke up shivering.

Phyllis Lyon died overnight. The last time I saw her I was out on Castro Street with Officer Chris Kohrs (Hot Cop of the Castro, before his downfall) for the unveiling of the first brass plaques set into the sidewalks for the Rainbow Honor Walk. Phyllis was sitting in a lawn chair on 19th Street beside the plaque for her late wife, Del Martin. I stood back because she was surrounded by well-wishers, but when she looked up and saw me, she said, Mark… How are you? It’s been a long time!

I said, It sure has, Phyllis, it sure has. They were the first same-sex couple to be legally married in California (by then-mayor) Gavin Newsom at City Hall. I feel blessed to have known both Phyllis and Del in this lifetime.

Monday, April 13, 2020

I’m watching Rachel Maddow stoned. I mean me, not her, although she might be stoned too. I just smoked a bowl of primo buds out on the back deck. It’s become a nightly ritual after our virtual happy hour. That daily hour-long video connection with friends is a very good thing in my life right now! We share a lot of laughs and some love.

I try not to be one of those people who post too often on Facebook, but I love people who make me laugh. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is more connected now than ever, just because all of us have been separated by this killer virus.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

People are dying by the hundreds every day in a single city like New York. I’ve had hundreds of friends die from AIDS. They’re still with me, though, in my soul and in my sense of humor. They taught me how to be a happy and productive gay man, even in the midst of death all around me. I hope people who die from this coronavirus will go on to a great fantasy world of heaven or reincarnation, but I also hope they stay alive in the memories of everyone who loved them in this life.

Love is immortal. We just have to pass it on to the next generation.

Teach your children well…

Sunday, April 19, 2020

I am fortunate to have become used to enjoying my own company, but I miss people… hugs… SEX! I’m reading a great book by Ann Patchett called State of Wonder. I started watching a series on Netflix called Schitt’s Creek. I’ve always loved Catherine O’Hara. She reminds me of my dear old friend, the late comedienne Jane Dornacker.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

I’m home. It’s still morning and I don’t know the day of the week half the time. Some wit on social media invented a cocktail named the Quarantini. It’s just a regular martini but you drink it at home alone.

I dreamed last night that I was out for a walk in the neighborhood and discovered a gay bar that was open! It wasn’t one of the real Castro bars, but bigger, maybe the size of the Eagle. It was two stories high so I went to the upstairs bar and everyone was excited about being able to go to a bar again. I didn’t see anyone I knew besides Coco Butter who was not in drag and looked downright skinny. My drink cost eleven dollars for a tiny glass of vodka and soda, which I swallowed in one sip.

I went back downstairs and discovered several bars in different rooms like the big gay bars in Minneapolis, the Saloon and the Gay ’90s. The bartenders were all Russian women with pink hair and they all chain-smoked. They were nice enough, but obviously unaware this was a gay bar. They served the same tiny drinks downstairs for $11. I had three drinks and didn’t feel a thing. When I stepped outside my legs didn’t work, not because I was drunk but because I had a backache.

Friday, April 24, 2020

I needed groceries today, so I took MUNI to the Church Street Safeway. It was okay. I waited in line about twenty minutes and everyone had a mask on. There was a cute (well, I couldn’t see his face, but…) guy about two people ahead of me in short shorts and a soft white long-sleeved thin cotton shirt, sandals, and sunglasses with a headset over his long brown hair so he could listen to music and tune out the day’s noise. I fell insanely, totally, and madly in love with him, with his amazingly perfect feet and long lovely legs with veins slightly showing. When he did a set of stretches, lifting each leg up with both hands on each knee, one at a time, I nearly swooned! I never saw him again once we got inside the store. I’m sure he’ll be able to go on with his life without knowing about my desire for him, but he sure did remind me of how horny everybody is these days! It couldn’t be just me, could it?

If I ever have another lover, I’d want him to play the harpsichord every night after dinner.

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Every night at 8pm I go out on my back deck and join the cheering for the front line workers with neighbors from blocks around. The noise gets bigger every night and it feels good to be connected to so many strangers I might never recognize on the streets, even without their masks on. It’s weird to see everything boarded up. I’m afraid even when (if?) the pandemic ever ends, the Castro won’t be the same. Come to think of it, the Castro hasn’t been what it was since before AIDS.

Today at noon was a citywide sing-along of I Left My Heart in San Francisco. I walked down to Jane Warner Plaza, that blocked-off section in the middle of Castro, Market and 17th Streets where they’ve installed potted plants, tables and chairs. It’s named for the San Francisco Patrol Special Police Officer, Jane Warner, the much-loved Officer Jane, who kept the peace in the Castro, Noe Valley and Mission neighborhoods who died a couple of years ago. I ran into Joe Mac and Patrick Noonan. We didn’t hear any singing at noon, so Joe Mac led it off for about a dozen people who joined in, all masked and at least six feet apart except for a cute young gay couple holding hands in the doorway of the closed Twin Peaks bar.

Sunday April 26, 2020

I’ve been laughing about something I saw on Facebook about Betty White staying safe and healthy in her 90s during this pandemic. That got me to start thinking about life and death again in a way I hadn’t thought about that phrase in a long time, maybe since my friends stopped dying from AIDS every week.

I remember a few weeks ago, the first time I checked in at SF General when they asked, Have you traveled outside of the country lately? Have you been around anyone who has? Any fever lately? Have you had a cough? We weren’t even wearing masks yet, but I soon realized people asked the same questions each time, apologetically, sometimes adding, We have to ask, you know, because of the new virus.

I politely answered, No, no, no, no. It seemed as silly as checkers at Safeway asking my date of birth every time I bought wine. The other day they asked an old guy ahead of me and he said, I’m 94 years old. The checker still needed his birth date. I think I would have told the checker, You do the math!

I got to thinking how sheltering-in-place works in various situations. Extroverts must be going nuts, but how about prisoners? Their lives can’t have changed much except now they’re enclosed with a virus that could kill them before they get the electric chair or parole or whatever they were looking forward to before this started.

Three important people in my life checked out in 2019 before we’d ever heard of the corona virus – old friends Corrine and Frank and my sister Lynn. Maybe they wanted to live their lives (as finite as all of ours are) during a period of time on earth when there wasn’t a plague going on.

Maybe they knew the most fun times to be had here were before the pandemic, like people who lived in Berlin before the Nazis came to power, when Christopher Isherwood wrote the Berlin Stories that became the musical Cabaret.

My memory is terrible lately. I sit in front of the TV and hold the remote in my hand like it’s a microphone. I need to say Netflix so I can watch another episode of Schitt’s Creek, but I cannot for the life of me remember the word Netflix.

Monday, April 27

I just got off the phone with my dear buddy Nile. God, I miss that guy! He said he was nearby this afternoon and wanted to have a visit from the sidewalk, but he got so frustrated shopping at Mollie Stone’s on 18th Street, he went straight home afterward.

I’m okay, enjoying the back deck. Mayor Breed announced that the shelter-in-place will be extended at least through May. I expected as much. Pride is canceled this year, the 50th anniversary, plus the Folsom Street Fair, Dore Alley Fair, and Burning Man.

Joe Mac posted on Facebook today: I hope they open the bars pretty soon because I need to cut down on my drinking! I laughed, but my liver hurts. Or maybe it’s my appendix. I’ve been drinking one cocktail a day at 5:30 when we have our online virtual happy hour. Then I smoke grass on the deck with a glass of red wine. I’m lucky to be where I am. If this pandemic had hit when I was still a bartender, I would be shit-outta-luck right now!

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Cleve Jones called from Guerneville this afternoon and we talked for an hour. I love Cleve. He asked me about getting Toby Johnson’s help to publish a new edition of his book on creating the AIDS quilt: Stitching a Revolution. I always rave about how great Toby is. He was my editor for the Beach Reading series and he’s been keeping everything I’ve published in print. We go back decades.

Today was a gorgeous day and I am grateful to have this back deck filled with plants and flowers and old rugs and piecemeal furniture and Rufus, the upstairs neighbors’ cat at my feet, and a glass of cheap red wine, and plenty of good weed, although I might run out by summer at the rate I’m going through it. Oh well, the marijuana dispensaries are considered essential businesses during this shelter-in-place.

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Days have been sunny, but it’s cool on the deck this evening. I had to go inside and grab the afghan. I once told my buddy Nile that my Aunt Delilah crocheted the afghan for a church bazaar and my mother bought it for my birthday. Ever since then, Nile calls the afghan Aunt Delilah, as in, Aren’t you cold? Do you want me to bring Aunt Delilah from the couch?

I miss Nile a lot. He called last night from across the street, so I went up front where we could see each other through my bedroom window and talk on the phone at the same time. There’s not much to say these days, but it feels good to stay connected to old friends. I have so many lovely, loving men (and women) in my life and even though I can hardly ever see them in person without our faces covered, I do love and miss them every day.

Now I’m sitting at my desk in the bay window looking out at the fog pouring in and the wind whipping the trees on my block of Castro Street. There are no people walking by unless they’re masked, either walking dogs or delivering food. It seems a lot of people are tired of cooking by now, so they order out. At least that might help keep some of the restaurants alive and provide delivery jobs. I got my $1,200 stimulus check from the federal government deposited into my bank account – whoopee!

Life is surreal these days.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

DJ Warren Gluck died. Way too young. I didn’t know him, but our histories from those days of disco love and celebration crossed like paths through a forest, not lit by sunshine through tall trees, but by laser beams and flashing colored lights reflecting on spinning silver mirrored balls.

It feels like we’re getting gayer around here; maybe the whole building is going to be gay again for the first time in years. My new next door neighbor Marcus is assembling a weight bench on his deck next to ours while Coby is down in the back yard exercising with bars and resistance bands and hoola-hoops. Marcus is smoking hot and Coby is adorable, shirtless in his black shorts and sneakers and a backward baseball cap on his head. Life goes on and I’m glad to see a little more life around here these days.

Today I spent time on the phone with my credit card company’s fraud department. No, I did not spend $50.97 at Pizza Barn on Tuesday. I didn’t leave the house on Tuesday! I’m glad credit card companies are understanding. But now they’re going to change my number.

I was watching a very old episode of What’s My Line? on YouTube with a very young Jane Fonda as the mystery guest. After the big reveal, she said, I didn’t think they would know who I was, even without their blindfolds on. Such gracious humility!

MAY 2020

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Castro Theater

We’ll be Back Soon

Evening on my back deck on Castro Street was often the best time of day to write in my journal, whether pondering melancholy moments or making myself laugh out loud.

The murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police put a focus on civil rights with the Black Lives Matter movement and it also brought back a ton of memories, especially about my late lover Kelly, who died of AIDS and who was also black.

Even when there’s not a pandemic going on, people die every day. During the years when AIDS ravaged San Francisco and killed most of my friends, I sometimes thought I was almost getting accustomed to losing people. Almost…

Friday, May 1, 2020

I’ve been thinking about Bill Marchman. He was a favorite customer of mine when I was a bartender at Trax on Haight Street. He once told me about a cruise he and Byron Schiffman were on where they met a nice gay couple who invited them to their state room for a glass of wine. One of them was wearing the cheapest toupee they had ever seen. When they each had a glass of wine in hand, the toupee guy made a toast and said, Not too bad, for something that came out of a box, huh?

Byron said, No, not at all… I never would have guessed that wasn’t your real hair!

He snapped back, I was talking about the wine!

I must have thought of that old story because Safeway was out of cabernet today so I bought a box of merlot instead. Merlot is heavier than I like, but I’m drinking a glass right now while smoking my bong and watching Marcus lift weights. I offered him a toke, but he said pot makes him paranoid. He likes mushrooms instead. I said, So do I, but I don’t know where to get them these days.

I was thinking I should write about sex during the pandemic – or lack thereof! Last night Coby went to dinner with a 14-day locked-down healthy friend and spent the night. Jason texted me from the east bay to tell me he was dripping pre-cum thinking of me and then Nile texted me a picture of a cum-shot all over his belly.

Just now, after Marcus finished his work-out, we spent an hour talking on the back deck. When he saw me writing in my journal, he told me he writes poetry. He wanted to show me a poem he wrote, so he brought me his