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Grubstake wins on appeal
Campos gets Milk nod
ARTS
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Bearrison Street Fair
Since 1971
The
www.ebar.com
Serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities since 1971
Vol. 51 • No. 42 • October 21-27, 2021
Eagle bar becomes San Francisco’s 1st leather-related city landmark by Matthew S. Bajko
B Joe Altman collection; California Historical Society
The Gay Latino Alliance marched in the June 1979 San Francisco Pride parade.
Snapshots showcase life in queer, 1970s San Francisco
by John Ferrannini
T
he California Historical Society is in the process of digitizing two collections of photographs and negatives from the wild and heady early days of LGBTQ liberation in San Francisco. The snapshots were discovered in boxes in the society’s archives, according to Al Bersch, a trans man who is a digital archivist with the society, which is based in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. “Over the years, people at CHS in different departments would collect things on their own and bring them to the vaults,” Bersch said. “For some of those older collections there wasn’t adequate staff to process them at the time, so there’s this backlog. These two collections have been identified more recently as high priority.” Bersch said that if the society has more donations it will be able to get the photos online more quickly. The society is currently focusing on digitizing a large project about the California Flower Market, also in San Francisco, in the early 20th century. “My ethics don’t say ‘we won’t process this without funding,’ but we are looking for support,” Bersch said, adding that the Flower Market project has to be done first.
Steven S. Norris collection
The society knows the origin of the first collection because it was discovered with a typewritten letter to then-historical society library director Bruce Johnson from Douglas Haller, curator of photographs, dated March 11, 1986. Haller wrote that he “squired a group of materials from a garage sale on Masonic [Street] in the Haight neighborhood which appear to have belonged to one Steven S. Norris.” Norris worked for Walter Jebe’s camera shop in the Excelsior neighborhood, according to the letter, before opening up his own store. “The materials range in date from Nov. 1978 to 1983 but they bulk in 1979,” the letter states. “They are mainly important for their documentation See page 9 >>
efitting for October being LGBTQ History Month San Francisco supervisors have granted city landmark status to the first local site related to leather history. At its meeting October 19, the Board of Supervisors finalized granting the designation to the gay-owned Eagle bar. It is the second leather bar in the U.S. of the same name to become a local landmark. The unanimous vote by the supervisors during their meeting had been expected, as they had granted preliminary approval for landmarking the South of Market establishment two weeks ago, as the Bay Area Reporter previously reported. Because city landmarks are granted via an ordinance, the supervisors needed to vote a second time to make the Eagle landmark official. It is now the city’s third gay bar location to be landmarked and the eighth property in San Francisco with ties to LGBTQ history to be designated a city landmark. Atlanta officials christened their Eagle bar, which opened in 1987, a city landmark in December 2020. San Francisco’s Eagle bar, under different ownership than that of its East Coast counterpart, first opened in
A bartender pours a drink during a beer bust at the Eagle bar in 2015.
February 1981 at 396-398 12th Street at Harrison in the SOMA neighborhood. The area had earned the nickname of the “Miracle Mile” due to the numerous businesses catering to the LGBTQ community on Folsom and Harrison streets in the 1970s and 1980s. While that part of western SOMA is now part of the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District, the Eagle is one of the few leather bars remaining and is the first LG-
Steven Underhill
BTQ landmark to be located in the district. The bar was shuttered for two years between April 2011 and March 2013 when Lex Montiel and his late business partner Mike Leon took over the ownership and management of the bar. Montiel supported landmarking the Eagle, which is best known for its Sunday beer bust fundraisers on its outdoor patio. See page 4 >>
SF AIDS grove memorializes Brown, 1st person cured of AIDS
by David-Elijah Nahmod
T
he National AIDS Memorial Grove has memorialized Timothy Ray Brown, who was the first person cured of AIDS, with a boulder at the contemplative space in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Brown, also known as the Berlin Patient, was remembered at a short gathering Saturday, October 16. He died September 29, 2020 after battling a recurrence of leukemia. Around 40 people showed up to honor Brown, who was the first person cured of AIDS through a stem cell transplantation. As the Bay Area Reporter previously reported, in 2006, Brown was living in Berlin and had well-controlled HIV when he was diagnosed with leukemia, which would ultimately require two bone marrow transplants. His German physician, Dr. Gero Huetter, had the idea to use stem cells from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that blocks HIV from entering cells. He underwent intensive chemotherapy and radiation – nearly dying in the process – and the donor stem cells rebuilt a new immune system that was resistant to the virus. He had never tested positive for HIV again. During the gathering, a memorial boulder was dedicated to Brown. The stone reads: “In loving memory of Timothy Ray Brown, the first person cured of HIV.” Attendees were invited to plant flowers in front of the boulder.
Christopher Robledo
Tim Ray Brown’s longtime partner Tim Hoeffgen, left, and Brown’s friend Raymond Bordeaux, center, placed his ashes on the memorial boulder dedicated to Brown at the National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park Saturday, October 16.
Additionally, Brown will be honored with a memorial bench and plaque in the Wellness Park adjacent to the Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, where he had lived at the time of his passing. Those who attended the ceremony spoke of its importance. “Anytime a community comes together to lift a member up it’s a good thing,” Vince Crisosto-
mo, 60, a gay man who has lived with HIV for 34 years, told the B.A.R. “Today we honor a person whose history should not be lost.” Attendees sat in the grove’s Circle of Friends for the informal gathering where anyone who wished to speak could do so. The first to make remarks was Tim Hoeffgen, Brown’s surviving partner. See page 9 >>
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