Slouching Towards Euphoria: Pink Saturday

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence asked for a media blackout about Pink Saturday this year. It didn’t work out, KTVU did a report on the requested black out. I read about it in the Bay Area Reporter, a LGBT newspaper. The Sisters were trying to keep the party from turning into Halloween, in which people tend to get shot or stabbed. The control of the party opens up a hornet’s nest of racial, class and sexual issues—way too complicated to cover in a blog post, especially a Slouching Towards Euphoria post, which is dedicated to bars.

Pink Saturday is not a bar per se, but it is celebration of a kind that you find in bars and clubs. Quick lesson: The Pride Parade, which San Francisco and many other cities throw in remembrance of the Stonewall Inn riots, is usually celebrated on the last Sunday in June. The Saturday night beforehand, the streets of Castro are shut down and people dance and drink and carouse. It’s much wilder than the parade itself.

My roommate and I decided to throw a barbeque and then walk down and enjoy the festivities. The party started out as simple affair, but much like America’s waistline, it grew tremendously. The house was cleaned and washed and dusted, which took the attendees a few hours to reverse. Our place looked like it fell off the rainbow tree and hit every branch; we had rainbow flags, candles, towels, and garlands. I put out a party game of Name the Homo, in which you had to identify the pictures of famous homosexuals throughout history. On the box in which you put your answers in, I taped gay and lesbian porn pictures. That naughty little detail took me a surprisingly long time to put together.

The pièce de résistance was the ice sculpture my roommate had made especially for the party. Basically, it was a naked backside of a man. Running through the ice sculpture was a plastic tube attached to a funnel at the top of the sculpture. You would pour a shot of Jägermeister through the sculpture and the ice cooled the liquid as it ran through it, pouring out into a shot glass at the bottom. We dubbed it the Jägermeister glory hole.

Guests arrived slowly but surely. And as parties usually go, one moment there are a few guests then in an instant the place is packed. Beers are being opened; food is being devoured; the nose level creeps up. We had put together a dance mix on the computer, which we played at loud levels. Had my roommate’s subwoofer been working properly our guests would have felt it in their gut.

Around nine p.m., we decided to see what was happening out on the street. Two blocks of Castro street was closed to traffic. The Sisters were asking for donations to enter the area. The street was packed with people. D.J.s played on different street corners. The bars overflowed with patrons. Our group separated within the crowd. I had a bag of frozen Otter Pops and offered the pops to people walking by. Some folks took them, effusively thanking me. Other folks blanched, as if I was handing out right-wing literature.

On top of a truck people boogied to the beats. One guy stripped in the cold night air. The crowd was by and large people in their twenties. Although there were some straight couples, mostly, it was groups of young gay men and women. The crowd certainly held the rainbow: African-American, Asian, Latino, Caucasian. I assumed a lot of the crowd lived in the suburbs, and this was a chance to hang out with their sexual community. And with the drinking, people puked and pissed in the doorways. I thanked my Irish luck that my doorway was close enough to walk to the Castro but far enough away to avoid the drunkards expelling their toxins.

We danced for a while, then I went back to my place to start the party up again. A younger crowd took the next shift. The stereo was turned up even louder. The living room became a tiny dance club. Bottle and cups sat on every available open space. The ice sculpture crashed to the ground when one wayward youth put his head in the area where the shot glass catches the liquid. The Jägermeister was gone by then, so the loss was trivial. I hid in my room and played acoustic guitar with some new-found friends. Finally rosy Dawn spread her fingertips over the horizon. This meant one thing: get out.

The guest left. The house was in sticky shambles. I laid down and the cool mist of sleep came upon me.