This week’s Bay Area Reporter has some fascinating excerpts from Mark Abramson’s new autobiography, Sex, Drugs & Disco: San Francisco Diaries from the Pre-AIDS Era.
Abramson, who is the author of the Beach Reading mysteries and the memoire For My Brothers, was one of thousands of gay men who came to San Francisco, the gay Mecca, in the 1970s.
In the BAR’s excerpt, Abramson name-drops dozens of gay bars and businesses – Star Pharmacy, Alfie’s (and the Mind Shaft), and All American Boy in the Castro; City/Cabaret, ’N-Touch, Buzzby’s, and Rendezvous in the Polk; the I Beam in the Haight; Ambush in SOMA; and bathhouses like Dave’s Baths and the Fair Oaks Baths.
From Monday, October 6, 1975:
We went to a bar called the Rendezvous the other night. It’s up a long flight of stairs, and has a bar in the front and a dance floor in back. They told me until recently a law was on the books against touching when you dance. When the cops showed up to raid the place, the doorman would flip a switch to turn off the mirrored disco ball and turn the lights up bright. John told me the switch is still there. We were stoned on Columbian pot, and I had a great time.
— Mark Ambramson, Sex, Drugs & Disco
The book is available in both paperback and Kindle editions.
Concerning drugs in gay San Francisco, weed and other hallucinogens (mainly acid, and sometimes Quaaludes) were the drugs of choice circa 1974-78; some time between the Milk-Moscone murders and the Dan White verdict, this shifted to crystal meth and cocaine, I seem to recall.