Photos capture crucial era of SoMa’s gay nightclubs
Exhibition documents crucial era of gay clubs
Photographer’s work from ’80s, early ’90s captured thriving scene amid adversity
You can imagine the music was loud, that people were probably a little bit tipsy — this was a party after all — and that Melissa Hawkins probably had to ask a couple of times.
Hey there. Do you mind if I take your photo?
Your photo! For the paper?
This was the mid-1980s, and nightlife photography wasn’t really a thing yet. But if people were at first put off by the request from the young woman with short, blond hair and her Minolta with its “huge Vivitar flash,” they weren’t for long. Soon they were asking her to take their photos. They wanted in. They wanted to be made all high-contrast and black-andwhite in the pages of the San Francisco Sentinel, the city’s weekly gay newspaper.
“I stepped into this world of people … who were not afraid to be who they really wanted to be,” Hawkins says. “And that’s what San Francisco has represented for so long.”
The images that Hawkins made working for the Sentinel, and later for other publications, from 1986 to 1994 manage to be both classic and current. The flash is always bright — sometimes people smile, sometimes they pose stone-faced. They almost always look very, very cool.
Now those photographs are the focus of an exhibition at the GLBT Historical Society Museum, “SoMa Nights: The Queer Nightclub Photography of Melissa Hawkins.” Nightlife historian Marke Bieschke curated the show alongside Hawkins, adding a selection of the society’s ephemera collection — party flyers, safe-sex kits, handbills from HIV/AIDS advocacy group ACT UP.
The collection captures a pivotal
community at a pivotal time. The South of Market area was not the Castro district. It was the counterculture to the counterculture. People played with gender in new ways, and the scene was becoming more diverse. Out was disco, and in was house, punk, industrial and hip-hop. “Women and people of color were making more of a claim on the nightlife culture,” Bieschke says. “That was groundbreaking back then.”
And then there was the AIDS crisis, a grief that’s bound to each of these images — and that continues today. Hawkins says that rediscovering and sorting through the photographs was bittersweet. “Seeing all these faces and thinking about these people and the memories — I can’t help but wonder who’s still alive,” she says. “And that’s hard.”
In some ways, though, this makes the evident joy in the photographs all the more miraculous, a reminder that sometimes the only medicine for grief is living.
“It was mopey, it was sad, it was all of that,” Bieschke says. “But it was also this fierce flash of creativity and living for today because you never knew how long you had.”
When Hawkins moved to San Francisco in 1986, she sent out applications to the free newspapers. All the of them rejected her, except for the Sentinel.
Soon Hawkins was bouncing around SoMa, going from club to club — 177 Townsend to 1015 Folsom to the Eagle to the End Up to the Rawhide to the Stud — with a guy who worked in the paper’s sales department and seemed to know everybody. “Of course we got to go to the front of the lines. We got drink tickets. … Work and fun mixed together.”
She was the only one photographing the nightlife scene at the time (aside, she says, from a woman who went by “Polly Polaroid” and would sell her photos for $5). Lucky for Hawkins, people were ready to be out. “We were that next generation,” she says, “carving out our own territory.”
In one photo, a go-go dancer, dressed in tight mesh, spreads her legs wide. In another, a man with a nose ring balances a cigar in his mouth and the camera’s flash bounces off his sunglasses. And in still another, a young woman with bleach-blond, shoulder-length hair leans toward the camera, her arm around a guy whose makeup looks more flawless than her own. There’s a photograph of porn director Chi Chi LaRue and one of artist Justin Vivian Bond. There’s a definite uniformity to them all. “If you didn’t have your leather jacket on, it had to be a jean jacket.”
Hawkins doesn’t know for sure how many photos she shot during that time. Try the math if you want: Eight or so years, at least a few nights a week, probably a roll or two of film a night. She just leaves it at “probably several thousand.”
As Bieschke and Hawkins stood looking at the photographs on the wall of the museum one recent evening, they attempted to gauge the value of the photos and the moments they represented, and tried to explain why thousands of pieces of “party photography” should be saved and shown.
Finally Bieschke settles on this: “I think of nightlife as almost the ‘opera of now.’ Everything comes together to make an art form.”
“Ohhh,” Hawkins says, taken by the description.
“You’ve got music. You’ve got fashion. You’ve definitely got the social aspect of going out and mixing with people you wouldn’t normally mix with. Definitely visuals. Theater for sure,” Bieschke continues. “And so I think this is really how our society expresses itself at its most potent, when it lets its guard down and lets art flood in.”