The Bay Area Reporter added a note about Chief Scott s family:
A Good Sportsperson Award should go to Walter and the new Mrs. Scott for goodnaturedly accepting the adulation of the overly enthusiastic crowd. He is one hunky and seemingly together guy.
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Through the years, the spectacle deepened. According to the book , Gay power in city politics had become not only undeniable, but celebrated by the middle of the 1970s, and what better way to show support than at a softball game? At the time, Dianne Feinstein, now a U.S. senator, was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and considering running for greater office.
Feinstein was running for mayor in 1975, and her loyalty to her gay constituency was undiminished. At the fourth annual Police vs. Gays softball game that summer, she had stood before a crowd of five thousand people and led one of the gay cheers against the police. Peaches, peaches, fuzz, fuzz, fuzz, she sang out, waving her hands. If you don t win, you re the team that wuz.
Willie Brown, too, attended games. In 1975, after five years of haggling and with the help of Moscone,Oakley Sunglasses Outlet, he finally got his bill passed by the State Assembly, effectively legalizing gay sex. In 1977, a New York Times Magazine feature story by Herbert Gold called A Walk on San Francisco s Gay Side noted that with one out of three voters estimated to be homosexual, Bay City politics and life style have changed sharply. The article discussed Milk, with his reputation as a hard-line, right-on gay candidate for both elective and appointive office.
Soon Milk and Moscone were both dead, in San Francisco s City Hall. People gathered at Twin Peaks Tavern to mourn, and later, when White s sentencing was light, they marched there to rage.
It was around that time, in 1979, that . Burke was one of thousands of gay men who wound up in the Castro in those years as the district s popularity spilled over from neighboring Haight-Ashbury. And he was one of countless gay athletes first dozens, then hundreds, and these days hundreds of thousands to find solace, exercise, community, and fun in the local gay softball league.
Mark Brown, who played softball in the Castro in the early 1970s, came to the city from the Midwest because I wanted to live, as he told me over the phone from the apartment he s lived in for more than 40 years. (He was watching a San Francisco Giants game while we spoke, he proudly noted.) Brown went on to help found the Gay World Series and the Gay Games, a multisport, Olympics-style international competition in which Burke competed in several events. He was just a fabulous athlete, recalls Brown, who will turn 80 soon and only recently gave up active managing duties of a team called the Hustlers. ( I m still kicking! he said.)
Vincent Fuqua, a 44-year-old who works for the city s Department of Public Health, was similarly lured to the Bay Area from his home in Southern California in the late 1980s. Like so many others, he wanted to come here to come out. I was a kid in a candy store, he said. Two communities were essential to him: a local gay youth group called Lyric, and the gay softball league in the Castro. He had always loved sports, but had always hated being picked last.
He s now commissioner of the San Francisco Gay Softball League, a wide-ranging organization of some 1,200 gay and lesbian athletes who play across all ranges of ability and seriousness. Many of them are getting set to head to Dallas for the annual Gay World Series. In 2008, Fuqua s first year as commissioner, he had his first fire drill when a San Francisco team accused of having too many straight members (two are allowed) was stripped of its second-place trophy at the Seattle World Series. (The team later protested and settled.)
Fuqua s role is a volunteer one; in addition to his day job and the commissioner position, he also is getting his doctorate in clinical psychology. It s a balancing act, he says, but one he couldn t do without. Just as it was to Glenn Burke, and to Mark Brown, and to so many of the other athletes who have participated in the league, softball is his rock.
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Twin Peaks continues to sit where it always has, on the corner of Castro and Market. It is adjacent to a bakery called Hot Cookie and a stationery store called Wild Card!, punctuation included. (Most of the business names in the vicinity are almost insultingly punny, as if the whole neighborhood is populated by hair salons and coffee shops.) Old-timey street cars rumble by outside the big windows. A thin slice of plaza plays host to a few Europeans lolling in red chairs in the sun. On a recent day, across the confusing, scenic intersection in front of the bar, a uniformly tanned naked man saddled with a cross-body bike messenger bag trudged wearily uphill on Castro Street.
We don t have Budweiser, the guy behind the bar informed an inquiring patron. We just have Bud Light. The age of the assembled customers appeared to be well above average. Pouring a spiked lemonade, he told me the place hadn t sponsored a softball team in a couple of years, and that he thought the squad was “over with Moby’s now.” Moby Dick, a bar around the corner that has been around since the 80s, has two teams: .
A guy in a black San Francisco Giants hat walked by the big windows, caught the bartender s eye, and ducked in for a quick, friendly hello. I just wanted to check on the Giants game! he said, craning his neck up at a big TV screen. CNN had been playing the day s grim footage of the Ukraine plane crash, and there were grateful murmurs as soon as the baseball game was switched on. (Everyone I spoke with for this article was a San Francisco Giants obsessive. Are you sure you re a gay man? Fuqua said his friends sometimes tease him while he s talking about games.)
According to the Planning Department s description of Twin Peaks placed before the Historic Preservation Commission, the place was originally designed by The Girls to be a genre of establishment known as a fern bar in their words, an American colloquialism for an upscale bar or tavern catering to singles, decorated with brass fittings, antiques, ferns and stained glass lamps.
Another bartender came over and squinted up at a set of those very stained-glass lamps, the big ones hanging over the bar. It was hard not to wonder how long they d been hanging there, and how much they d seen through that rainbow-colored glass. At any rate, none of the fixtures were needed yet it was still gorgeous and bright outside, the door flung open and the cool air sweeping in. By the look of things, they appeared to be in a state of mild disrepair. The bartender didn t seem too worried.
We re in for a very dark night, he said, shrugging, and turned back to work. It ll be soooo romantic.