by Jim Stewart $14.95; Palm Drive. Publishing; 213 pages
San Francisco in 1976 was a party. Gay expatriates were flooding the metropolis, defining and changing the face and texture of gay culture and identity forever. If the city at the time was Oz, then SoMa (South of Market) was Oz in a harness. It was a rough and uninhibited working-class area that tended to attract men into leather, bondage, uniforms, rough play and fetish galore. Jim Stewart was a carpenter who moved into the area and proceeded to rehab a dilapidated building at 766 Clementina Street.
Folsom Street Blues, a new memoir by Stewart, succeeds in celebrating that vibrant post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS era at its very epicenter with colorful anecdotes and a generous number of photos. The result is an evocative and visceral portrait, a precious first-hand account of a lost time and place in gay history, a valuable record of a world that needs to be remembered.
In addition to his work as a carpenter and handyman, which included constructing the interiors for some of the grittier bars of the era, Stewart was also a photographer. His rehabbed building became the home of Key Hole Studio. The photos he took celebrated the darker side of sexual liberation with a reverence and beauty that helped reclaim and redefine the raunchy world around him. His home became his studio, his playroom and even his work room when he created fetish-for-hire scenarios to accommodate the sexual hunger of the populace.
Stewart's photographic prowess is also evident in his prose. The narrative of Folsom Street Blues is best described as a series of evocative and erotic snapshots. Stewart was in the midst of it all, capturing moments with his camera and his mind's eye—the joyous sexual exploration, the cultural liberation, the emerging gay artist scene and more. It was drugs, bondage and decadence, but more than that. It was a grand brotherhood, a great generation of hedonists celebrating camaraderie with wild abandon.
An array of his Keyhole Studio photo work is interspersed with the text and reflects the bold unapologetic nature of this new sexual liberation with titles such as the Four Seasons of Ass series; Leatherneck Bartender Ron; Bound Feet and Bound Hands; Malefactors with Bound Crucifix; Johnny Gets His Hair Cut I and II; and Drugs, Sex, and Leather. Folsom Street Blues also includes several of Stewart's bar promotional photos and advertisements. It all serves to bring the era more fully to life. Even Stewart's sporadic poems provide an interesting cross-literary rendering of what was going on in his life at the time.
Woven into the narrative are anecdotes of the edgy notables of the day, like Robert Opel, who streaked behind David Niven and Elizabeth Taylor at the 1974 Oscars and who was slain in 1979 at his Fey Way Studio, a gallery at the very heart of the emerging homo-masculine art scene. Stewart's book includes stories of legends like Tom of Finland, porn director Wakefield Poole, Robert Mapplethorpe, gay leather poet Tom Gunn, author Jack Fritscher, artist Chuck Arnett, Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, Camille O'Grady, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Drummer magazine publisher John Embry, among others.
For the most part, the snapshot quality of the narrative and the somewhat disjoined and oftentimes non-chronological style helps to convey the frenzied pace and mosaic nature of life at that time. Reading Folsom Street Blues is like sifting through a box of fascinating photos or pulling up a barstool beside a guy with great stories to tell. Stewart captures an age when bouncers would pass bottles of poppers down the line of patrons waiting to get in the club so they didn't get bored, where joints were smoked openly in restaurants and where sex was rampant and often without boundaries.
Folsom Street Blues is a heartfelt love letter to a bygone time and place. It is a more than worthy addition to the much needed and precious first hand chronicling of an amazing time in gay history. Stewart was front row and center—right in the hotbed of it all—and history is richer because of his multi-disciplined ability to convey a bit of that era's magic.
