By Randy Alfred–
“Randy’s inviting us to have lunch with Quentin Crisp.”
The voice on the phone was David Israels, a fellow journalist friend, and himself the friend of fellow journalist Randy Shilts. Randy and I were colleagues, but sometimes rivals and not quite friends.
It was March 1979, four months after Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, but before White went on trial. A killer virus was silently spreading among gay men, but we wouldn’t hear the first scary reports for two more years.
Randy, David, and I were each 30, more or less, and each was freelancing. I was producing The Gay Life radio show for rock-and-roll station KSAN-FM and contributing to such diverse publications as the Berkeley Barb, The Book of Lists #2, and the Whole Earth Catalog. (The San Francisco Bay Times had started and stopped publishing the year before. It would begin again when co-founders Bill Hartman and Roland Schembari revived it later in 1979 as Coming Up! The name changed back to the San Francisco Bay Times in 1989.)
David was writing about the gay community, television, and videogames for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of America’s premier alt-weeklies. Randy was reporting for KQED-TV and KTVU-TV, as well as writing for Christopher Street and Blueboy.
I mainly knew Randy from when we were both at the same place and the same time covering the same stories of interest to the growing gay (still a multi-gender umbrella term in those pre-LGBTQ+ days) population of San Francisco. We overlapped, sometimes working on the same news outlets: The Advocate, New West, San Francisco Focus, and KSAN.
We even lived in the same neighborhood near 16th and Sharon streets for a while, but the only time I can recall either of us visiting the other’s house was a rollicking afternoon with David Israels. The three of us camped it up as Randy showed us some naughties, oddities, and queeriosities from his postcard collection. Like Randy, I too was a postcard collector.
The invitation to have lunch with Quentin Crisp was Randy’s because the event was at KQED, then headquartered at Eighth and Bryant.
It was not my first encounter with Crisp. I’d interviewed him for the Barb several months earlier. Crisp, you may recall, spent 50 years out of the closet as an “obvious” femme male homosexual in London of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Surviving that homophobic era was a miracle of sorts, doing it with panache and good humour (British, you know) an existential triumph.
This icon of English gayness was in town to tout the PBS rebroadcast of The Naked Civil Servant, starring John Hurt in the dramatization of Crisp’s autobiography.
Crisp was accompanied by his tour agent, likely as gay as the man himself. Also present in the conference room were KQED PR chief Jean Alexander and three journalists I hadn’t met before, all of them gay: Terrence O’Flaherty, longtime TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle; Michael Munzell, TV critic of The Peninsula Times Tribune; and Jack Armstrong, Northern California editor of TV Guide.
That was a lot of traditional media power sitting around the luncheon table. Remember: This was before social media, smartphones, flip phones, email, and the World Wide Web.
Randy, David, and I had agreed beforehand to follow the intended mood of the day by generally asking easy “softball” questions of the guest of honor, who was widely admired by straight as well as gay audiences. But as conscientious journalists, we would ask a single “hard” question.
So, after Crisp answered a short series of polite, soft queries (queeries?) dipping into his standard witty repertoire, we threw the verbal bomb: Why had Crisp presumed to write that all gay men at least secretly desire a heterosexual man as sex partner?
Crisp looked surprised by the sudden change of tone, but he gamely began: “It was facetious … “
Across the table from us, Jack Armstrong interrupted with a harumph: “That’s the trouble with you young gay liberationists, you have no sense of camp!”
Randy, David, and I exchanged glances. This was a generational challenge that could not be ignored.
In short order, more dish was flying over the table than there were dishes set upon it. Quentin Crisp and six verbally adept Bay Area gay journalists had at it.
Randy was all too happy to let the august assemblage know that he lived on Harlow Street: “Every gay man wants an address like that.”
There was lots of “girl” and “Oh, Mary,” of course, a little mock bitchiness—can I say that?—and at least a soupçon of just plain old nonsense.
Jean Alexander, the only woman (and only straight person, I think) in the room, was flummoxed. The poor PR pro was alternately wondering what was going on, and blushing at the sometimes-risqué remarks.
Finally, Crisp called a truce, holding up his hands palm down and lowering them with great ceremony.
The rapid exchange seemed brilliant at the time, but wine had been served, and I could hardly remember any waggish repartee by the next day. The campy froth had collapsed like a fallen soufflé or melted like yesterday’s whipped cream.
O’Flaherty’s Chronicle column a few days later characterized Crisp as “like an English gentlewoman presiding over the tea tray” with “mock solemnity and keen wit.”
The KQED luncheon began my warm—but platonic, if you must know—friendship with Terrence O’Flaherty. He retired from the Chronicle in 1986 and died in 2001, age 83.
Facing an early death from HIV, David Israels retired in the mid-1990s to his college town of Athens, Ohio, but was saved by protease inhibitors. He died at age 69 in 2022.
Michael Munzell went on to become Executive Production Editor at the old Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, where he hired me on for a big project in 1999. We also worked together on writing the first style guide for NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists. Michael is now retired and living in the East Bay.
Jack Armstrong returned to his home state of West Virginia. We recontacted with the help of email in the late 1990s, but eventually lost touch.
I asked KQED where Jean Alexander went after leaving the station, but it was a long time ago. No one knows.
I interviewed Quentin Crisp again later that year for The Gay Life on KSAN. You can listen to it on the GLBT Historical Society website: https://bit.ly/3ZJNzxJ
Crisp died in 1999 at nearly 91 years old.
Randy Shilts died of AIDS in 1994 at age 42.
How is it then that Randy and I—two early gay male journalists who came out of the closet around the same time, who migrated to San Francisco around the same time, who covered some of the same news stories, who worked for some of the same publications, who shared the hobby of postcard-collecting, and who ran into each other in the Castro many times—were not actually friends?
For the answer to that and many other questions, you can pick up a copy of Michael G. Lee’s new Shilts biography, When the Band Played On (yes, the title’s a riff on Randy’s own 1987 book about AIDS, And the Band Played On). Lee’s deft narrative shows how our careers crisscrossed and intertwined for two tumultuous decades of queer life in San Francisco.
The biography includes an even-handed account of Randy and me competing for the same post at the Chronicle (spoiler alert: he got it) and my controversial mixed review of Randy’s first book, The Mayor of Castro Street. So, on what terms did the Randy-and-Randy story end? You’ll get you no more spoilers from me here. Read the book.
But there is one thing I’ll tell you the two Randys always agreed on. We often ran into people who confused the work and byline of one of us with the face and person of the other. When disabused, these folks would invariably ask the same question, “Why are all the gay journalists called Randy?”
And Randy and I always gave the same answer: “That’s easy: truth in advertising.”
Journalist, producer, radio talk show host, and book author Randy Alfred, the founding news editor of the “San Francisco Bay Times,” in 2015 was inducted into the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association Hall of Fame. To learn more about his work and achievements, view the collection of his written and recorded materials at the California Digital Library: https://tinyurl.com/5h3425ju
Remembering Randy Shilts (1951 – 1994)
Published on October 4, 2024
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