Gay Bars “Turn Hustler”
Text by Joey Plaster. Copyright (©) by C. Joey Plaster, 2009. All rights reserved.
Part of the profit-driven process that “turned” heterosexual bars and restaurants gay in the early 1960s, Polk Street bars increasingly relied on sex work to generate revenue as gay male bar patronage sunk in the age of AIDS.
Ethnographer Toby Marotta, in a 1987 field note, wrote, “as little as 4 or 5 years ago, Polk Street was a bustling, entertainment district, filled with homosexuals and heterosexuals out for every form of sexy pursuit.” But in 1987, “the bars are half empty, the shops and restaurants and outdoor eateries seem barely attended….In its place, is a larger, more pathos filled, more starkly highlighted prostitution scene, bigger than that it’s even been in S.F. from what I can guess. This prostitution now dominates not only the entire lower end of Polk Street…but several of the bars that line it as well.”[1]
Like the Meat Rack of the 1960s, the “blighted” Lower Polk increasingly relied on the revenue the youth generated, seeing a flow of commerce from the street to the bars, but also the bookstores, residential hotels, and bathhouses. The street’s business association increasingly included businesses that benefited from the sex work economy; by the 1990s, the manager of the Q.T. served as president of the association.
“Most of us didn’t like the idea of these kids hanging out because it didn’t look good,” Steve Cornell recalled. “[But] if there are male prostitutes out there and there are businesses that thrive on that, and you have a certain clientele there, and they want the kids hanging out in front, they’re part of the business association too.” Because these businesses increasingly relied on this economy, “maybe things aren’t going to get done.”
Sex workers increasingly leveraged their economic dominance to claim space in the Polk Gulch. A sex worker named Ariel argued for his right to remain in a “dirty” bookstore after he was “harassed” by the manager in 1991. “It infuriates me that those fuckers would treat us like that when they know that’s what’s producing the fucking money,” he said. “Let’s be real. Who do you think brings in the revenue here?”[2]
David McCleve, part of a “street family” of hustlers and street youth who occupied an abandoned Polk Street building in 1994, part of a nationally-publicized campaign to showcase the lack of affordable housing, pointed to the hypocrisy of business owners who opposed their presence, including the manager of the Q.T. bar. “He will let any young hustler go in and sell his body,” he wrote. “That’s the only reason he still has his business standing. He lets [sic] all of the young hustlers bring in all the business for him.”[3]
By 1991, the transgender bar and prostitution economy moved to Polk Street, after the owner of a gay bar “turned” it transgendered, attracted the clientele from the Black Rose, a bar in the Tenderloin that was “having a tough time avoiding prostitution and drugs,” according to one article.[4]
Alexis Miranda, who arrived in San Francisco in 1986 and became a regular at the Black Rose, remembered that the owner of the Motherlode “originally wanted to open it up as a gay bar for Asian boys,” she recalled. But “he was making more money off the transgenders than he would be the gay boys, ‘cause in San Francisco it would just be another gay bar.”[5]
Transgender prostitutes had worked the Tenderloin area at least since the 1960s. “We never, never, never stepped on Polk Street in female attire, to prostitute, or even come down socially,” Tamara Ching recalled. “That was an unwritten rule, that transgendered people, or people that lived ‘that’ kind of lifestyle, we would not step on their turf.”[6]
The transgender prostitution district now moved to the Polk Gulch. “When the Black Rose moved up to the Motherlode, it turned into a huge meat rack,” Miranda said. “The girls were hanging out the window, they were stopping traffic. Many times there were accidents, just from people taking a double-take as to what was going on.”
Fundraising remained a staple of the community. Miranda was elected the 33rd Absolute Empress of San Francisco in 1999 while working at the Motherlode. “If in your community, somebody is homeless, we do fundraisers for organizations that would supply a home for them,” Miranda said. “If you have AIDS, it covers the AIDS Emergency Fund….If you’re hungry, Project Open Hand is there ….’Cause you never know when you’re going to fall and you’re going to need those services.”
Polk Street bars also cooperated to hold “Bar Wars,” in which patrons purchased drinks donated by bars and people, usually in one large group, went from bar to bar, drinking and raising money for AIDS and other charities. A bar-based baseball team called the “Hustlers,” some of the members hustlers themselves, played as part of a circuit to raise money for charities.
- ↑ Toby Marotta papers, GLBTHS, Field notes #1 Toby Oct. 30, 1987.
- ↑ Toby Marotta papers, GLBTHS, March 31, 1991.
- ↑ “Writings from Red Balloon House,” written by the tenants of 1211 Polk Street during the Homes Not Jails occupation June 14 through July 11, 1993.
- ↑ Jeff Stark “Moving Is a Drag,” SF Weekly, April 19, 1995.
- ↑ Interview with Alexis Miranda by Joey Plaster, 2008.
- ↑ Interview with Tamara Ching by Joey Plaster, 2008.
