Mona's San Francisco: 1940s lesbian club

'After 1920 women who occasionally wore men's clothing and those who passed as men began to socialize more openly in cafes and night clubs. In Chicago two night clubs, the Roselle Club, run by Eleanor Shelly, and the Twelve-thirty Club, run by Becky Blumfield, were closed by the police during the 1930s because "women in male attire were nightly patrons of the places". Many of the couples who frequented these clubs had been married to each other by a black minister on Chicago's South Side. In San Francisco, lesbians met at Mona's, where, it was said "Girls will be Boys"'.

Source: San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project 'She Even Chewed Tobacco: A pictorial narrative of passing women in America' in 'Hidden from history: reclaiming the gay and lesbian past' by Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey (Meridian Books, 1989).

This advert for Mona's Club 440 (440 Broadway, San Francisco) comes from San Francisco Life 1942:



This advert mentions Gladys Bentley, described as "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs" and "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Artist."

In his A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem, Eric Garber mentions Bentley's appearances in New York in the 1920s/30s:

'Perhaps the most famous gay-oriented club of the era was Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a narrow, smoky speakeasy on 133rd Street. The Clam House featured Gladys Bentley, a 250- pound, masculine, darkskinned lesbian, who performed all night long in a white tuxedo and top hat. Bentley, a talented pianist with a magnificent, growling voice, was celebrated for inventing obscene Iyrics to popular contemporary melodies. Langston Hughes called her "an amazing exhibition of musical energy." Eslanda Robeson, wife of actor Paul Robeson, gushed to a friend, "Gladys Bentley is grand. I've heard her three nights, and will never be the same!" Schoolteacher Harold Jackman wrote to his friend Countee Cullen, "When Gladys sings 'St. James Infirmary,' it makes you weep your heart out."

In the 1950s she appeared on Groucho Marx's TV show:

Don't get caught in a bad hotel

Love this story... a protest for better conditions for San Francisco hotel workers (including healthcare), featuring a flashmob in a hotel lobby performing a version of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance (retitled Bad Hotel) accompanied by the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

According to San Francisco Indymedia, on Saturday May 8th 2010, 'many LGBTQ folks held a picket and protest in San Francisco's Union Square, and the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, to show solidarity for the hotel workers who have been forced to work without a contract since August 2009. The protest, which featured music and dancing, also is calling for a boycott of the hotels that have failed to give their workers equal opportunity... San Francisco's annual Gay pride is approaching and many queers stay in hotels when they visit, so the local GLBTQ community is asking them to join the boycott, so workers can be treated fairly and equally in San Francisco. There are also a few GLBTQ folks who work for those hotels or corporations. So if, or when you come to San Francisco don't want to get caught in a bad hotel. The protest was sponsored and held by' "One Struggle One Fight" and SF Pride at Work/HAVOQ'.

Lenore Kandel (1932-2009)

San Francisco Chronicle reports the death of Lenore Kandel, belly dancer, beat poet, Digger and radical:

'Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat poets and was immortalized by Jack Kerouac, wrote a book of love poetry banned as obscene and seized by police, and believed in communal living, anarchic street theater, belly dancing, and all things beautiful...

"I met Lenore in 1965 at a citywide meeting of artists opposed to the war in Vietnam," said actor Peter Coyote. "Lenore was physically beautiful and physically commanding. She had this voluptuous plumpness about her and an absolute serenity." Coyote, Ms. Kandel and her then-boyfriend Bill Fritsch - a poet and Hell's Angel - became fast friends. "She was working as a belly dancer and would sew these beaded curtains to make money on the side," said Coyote, a founder of the Diggers, an anarchistic group supplying free food, housing and medical aid to the needy in San Francisco. "We would sit around and smoke dope and talk about philosophy and art. She was an enlightened person, a great being...

Her book of poetry "The Love Book," published in 1966, was deemed pornographic and the famed Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street where it was sold was raided by the police. Copies were confiscated on the grounds that their display and sale "excited lewd thoughts" and the store's owners were arrested'. (Read more)

One of her 1960s Digger episodes is recalled here (Marx Meadow is in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park):

'So one time, Lenore Kandel thought it would be the greatest idea in the world to hang 500 sets of glass, Chinese chimes in every bush around Marx Meadow -- that if we did that, people would discover them, take them home with them, play them and be entertained and felt elegant for the event. So, we went in and asked Tosh for 500 sets of Chinese chimes. He said, "Sure. Just take them."... And Lenore spent hours stringing them up in the trees'.

Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous

Revolution as dance? The following text is from a 1970 leaflet from the San Francisco area situationist-influenced group, Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous:

'The dance of revolution is a continuous project, floating free, perpetually changing, always focused. The music it moves to is pure energy, weaving three interdependent melodies: participation, founded on the passion of play; communication, founded on the passion of love; and realization, founded on the passion to create. Refusing the value of appearances, the dance makes itself invisible to those who see only appearances; the spectacle of the commodity cannot defend itself. The dance can never be a closed system, it never mystifies itself; rather, it realizes itself in its own supersession, in the sublime movement of subversion, where a pirouette returns to itself not as itself, not as it was born, but changed, reconceived in a limitless perspective. Subversion devalues each fragmented element in the hierarchy of appearances; each isolated commodity — whether it be inanimate objects or objectified human beings selling themselves in the marketplace — is projected into the significance of the WHOLE, all possible connections are made as we dance closer to the totality of our lives. Subversion is the only language, the only gesture, that bears within it its own critique. Its force is pleasure seeking itself. In the language of subversion we begin to sing, our whole lives begin to move in the rhythm of the song: thus we create the dance: thus the revolution becomes our daily life'.

Lola Montez and the Spider Dance

Lola Montez (1821-1861) lived a short but interesting life. Born Eliza Gilbert in Ireland, she reinvented herself as 'Lola the Spanish Dancer' on the London stage in 1843 before spending time in Paris, Munich, Switzerland, San Francisco, Australia and New York - attracting lovers and scandalous stories along the way. She became particularly known for her Spider Dance, which involved her shaking imaginary tarantulas out of her clothes and stamping on them. It was evidently loosely based on an Italian dance (perhaps linked to tarantism). This short description of her is taken from The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old West by Dee Brown (1958):

'No western stage performer ever equaled the glamorous Lola Montez in creating an aura of seductive mystery and exquisite scandal around her personality. Whether or not Lola was an actress is debatable - she was more in the class of modern burlesque queens - but the dubious legends of deli­cious sinfulness which she deliberately spread abroad and carefully nourished have spun down through the years until they are a part of the fabric of western history.

With her sensational spider dance, Lola burst upon San Francisco like a bombshell, making excellent copy for the newspapers with stories of her many marriages and her claim that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Offstage she dressed in the Byronic mode, wearing black jackets and wide rolling collars. Bronze-skinned, blue-eyed, she made a striking appearance strolling along the San Francisco streets, with two greyhounds on a leash and an enormous parrot upon her shoulder. She constantly smoked small cigars, forced her way into gambling saloons forbidden to women, and played tenpins with any male daring enough to take her on.

"A tigress," said one newspaper writer, "the very comet of her sex." Lola's celebrated spider dance shocked and titillated her audiences; the spiders were ingenious contraptions made of rubber, cork, and whalebone. She gave a spectacular bene­fit for an audience of San Francisco firemen, and they show­ered the stage with their fancy helmets and almost smothered her with enormous bouquets of flowers'.

Slim Gaillard, Jack Kerouac and Me

In Hanif Kureishi's latest novel, Something to Tell You, the narrator mentions being in a club in London in the late 1970s and meeting Slim Gaillard (1911-1991), prompting him to remark 'There can't have been many people alive with two pages devoted to them in On the Road... this was a man who'd known Little Richard and dated Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth'. It reminded me that I too once saw Slim Gaillard (1916-1991), in the late 1980s (1987?) playing in a room above the Alexandra pub opposite Clapham Common in South London, I believe at a Hi Note jazz club night. By this time he was an old man, singing songs and still doing his trademark stream of consciousness private 'o-reenee' dialect (apparently he was accompanied by Jason Rebello on piano).

Other than his age it wasn't vastly different from the scene described by Jack Kerouac in "On The Road" (written in 1951): '... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ..." He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C's, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing 'C-Jam Blues' and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages'.

Well in Clapham I don't recall bongos or people sitting on the floor, but I guess I was a 'young semi intellectual'! That was my only direct encounter with someone from the beat generation, other than once hearing Brion Gysin give a talk in Bedford library of all places (standing in for William Burroughs who didn't show- this was mid-80s).

More on the Alexandra and dancing in Brixton and beyond in late 1980s here

Classic party scenes (2): Basic Instinct

It's 1992 and cop Michael Douglas pursues suspect psycho Sharon Stone into a San Francisco club with sex, drugs and pumping sounds by Channel X (Rave the Rhythm) and LaTour (Blue). Jacques Peretti once characterised this as 'The Citizen Kane of club scenes... in which Michael Douglas, playing an Andrew Neil-lookalike in V-neck jumper and no shirt (a sweaty fashion detail signifying middle-aged man smelling out sex) watches Sharon Stone, who taunts his manhood by indulging in a faux-lesbian sex dance'.

Apparently this scene was not filmed in a real club but on a Hollywood film set inspired by the Limelight Club in New York.

San Francisco Bus Stop Rave

From Golden Gate Xpress, 22 September 2007:

People overflowed into the street and crowded around the westbound bus stop at Haight St. and Fillmore St on Friday night. They whooped and threw glow sticks in the air, dancing freely to music pumping out of the rigged bus stop and a nearby car, and green lights flashed from the tiny shelter where people usually just wait for the 6, 7, and 71 bus lines.

This impromptu rave, like the pillow fights, zombie days, and big wheel races that came before it, is an example of people in San Francisco deciding to create their own fun for free. These peaceful free-for-alls help people forget about all the stresses and serious concerns of the day and just cut loose for an exciting good time.

This rave was organized by Brent Lowteck, 25, a San Francisco native who has rigged bus stops at least five times before this. SF State alumni Leslie Carroll, 24, and Alex Oestreicher, 22, both heard about the rave on laughingsquid.com. “It shows the character of the city, that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, that we can get together and have fun at a bus stop in the Lower Haight on a Friday night,” said Oestreicher... Bus riders were also surprised at the crowd cheering for the bus as they pulled up to their stop, but none were annoyed by the ravers, one saying it’s a great thing to do on a Friday night.

The police came to the site three times before 11:00 p.m. The ravers would turn off the music, light up cigarettes, and stand around waiting for the authorities to leave. As soon as they did, the party was back on... By 11:00, the crowd was about half as large, but the remaining few kept the party going, having fun for free and clutching their brown-bagged beer bottles as they danced into the night.

There's a video of an earlier event here.