California Reigns Tonight as Party King

Never mind the million or so expected to take in the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. Forget the crowded haunts of New Orleans. The real party capital tonight is here in California.

In fact, two West Coast towns lay claim to throwing the biggest, brashest adult Halloween party in America. San Francisco and West Hollywood say the holiday has reached its modern apex on their streets, growing from private party for gay men into mass celebration attracting hundreds of thousands of gays and straights to an all-night revel and exhibitionist extravaganza.

Tonight, each town is bracing to welcome more than 200,000 to its block party. And each is convinced that its event will be more spectacular than the other’s.

“Halloween is our major holiday,” said Uti Kaupp, owner of the Piedmont Boutique in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district. Calm in the frenzy of last-minute shoppers--gay and straight, male and female, young and old--who are crammed into her theatrical design boutique, Kaupp can’t imagine why anyone would rather be anywhere but San Francisco on Halloween.

“This is just a very playful city,” she said as people snatched up the silver pasties, sequined pumps with 6-inch heels and slinky gowns she custom-makes. “We just like to have fun. Up here, we have six major balls, private parties--it will go on all week.”

Robaire Boisvert begs to differ. Surrounded by women’s long-haired wigs, brocaded jackets and feather boas in every color of the rainbow at his West Hollywood theatrical costume store, Boisvert delivers a crushing assessment of rival San Francisco’s festivities.

“San Francisco is big--it really is big,” Boisvert conceded. “But here we are more glamorous. . . . Here they take it more seriously. Everything has to match, everything is so glamorous, so gorgeous. This is Hollywood!”

Popularity Seen as Mixed Blessing

In both towns, Halloween celebrants say the exploding popularity of their parties is a mixed blessing, a powerful symbol both of the growing acceptance of gay culture by mainstream Americans and of the loss some gays mourn of a subculture that--at least on the two coasts--is increasingly successful at assimilating.

In each city, Halloween has grown from the decadent, subversive celebration of largely gay communities to open civic events.

“One way to look at it is that the gay community has lost something, because there has been an evolution of what the event means for the community,” said Lester Olmstead-Rose, executive director of the gay, San Francisco nonprofit group Community United Against Violence. “But if we can find a way to maintain that core fantasy of what adult Halloween meant in the ‘80s--gays mocking society’s stereotypes of what we are--then we really are offering a gift to the world, a way to let your hair down,” he said.

“We have lost the initial innocence of the event, and the familiarity,” agreed San Francisco County Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a gay activist. “But the trade-off is a safe kind of community event providing a lot of people with entertainment and distraction.”

In West Hollywood, Mayor Steve Martin, who is also gay, says he understands why some gay men feel they have lost something by throwing open their town to the whole world on Halloween night. Many embraced the night as the one day of the year when they had license to openly cross-dress or wear outrageously revealing or creative costumes. Martin says some now say that the presence of families and straight couples--particularly those who don’t don costumes and come just to look--is inhibiting.

In both San Francisco and West Hollywood, many gay men approach the evening with deadly seriousness. Some spend thousands putting together multiple costumes, enter contests and attend parties--private and public--that begin the weekend before Halloween.

“Some of the best Xenas we see are men,” said Tony Taravelli, owner of the House of Magic, a costume shop that opened in San Francisco 40 years ago. “We sell about 300 wigs each Halloween,” Taravelli said. “Eighty percent of them are female wigs, and 80% of the female wigs are bought by men.”

Martin says his town is determined to retain the gay essence of the celebration, even as it welcomes the infusion of outsiders.

“The city of West Hollywood has tried to recognize that there are some components of the community that do not want to be restricted,” Martin said. “We want to celebrate the tradition of Halloween in the gay community and expand the nature of the celebration so that everybody on Halloween is able to share that gay experience.”

Anyone who comes, he warns, must be prepared to come face to face with partiers who sometimes wear little more than a custom-made G-string.

The city posted road signs last week, warning drivers that a mile of Santa Monica Boulevard, from La Cienega Boulevard to Doheny Drive, would be closed from 3 p.m. today until 7 a.m. Sunday morning. It has strung colorful banners from lampposts and is flying orange and black flags from the poles on Santa Monica Boulevard’s grassy median. Its advertising stresses that this is an adult event.

Public Safety Administrator David Petersen says he started planning security months ago.

“We had 250,000 last year and I suspect we will easily break 300,000 this year--more than we’ve ever had,” Petersen said. The city plans to field fewer than 80 sheriff’s deputies to control the crowd. Last year, Petersen said, only one arrest was made--of someone who was drunk in public.

“This is a well-behaved group that comes here to party and this is a community that is pro-public safety. The citizens of West Hollywood let people know that they won’t tolerate bad behavior,” Petersen said. In the past, there have been only rare acts of vandalism or complaints from residents about the partiers, he said.

Four-lane Santa Monica Boulevard can tolerate the huge crowds well enough that the town’s businesses generally stay open late into the night, Petersen said, “and they make a ton of money.”

West Hollywood has budgeted $180,000 for the event. The city charges no admission, hires the entertainment, names a grand marshal, sponsors costume contests, issues concession licenses for food and nonalcoholic beverages, provides security and takes care of cleanup.

“It is the city’s largest festival activity of the year,” said Beth Sazama, the city’s festival and events specialist.

If West Hollywood seems happy with its party’s ever-growing size, San Francisco is more ambivalent.

S.F. Celebration Moves Downtown

Three years ago, gay organizations and merchants in the Castro district decided that the party had become too huge for the tiny neighborhood and its narrow streets, and officially moved it downtown to the vast Civic Center plaza. Unofficially, the party is now split between the more controlled event in the Civic Center and the free-form party in the Castro.

“The merchants in the Castro said: We can’t handle an event this size here anymore,” said Patricia Aguayo, executive director of the Mission Economic Cultural Assn. “They said that it was not good for business and not good for the community.”

The association, a nonprofit events producer that also puts on the city’s annual Cinco de Mayo parade, is running the Civic Center party for the second year.

“We claim to throw the biggest in the United States, and it is certainly the best,” Aguayo said. “This was born as a gay event in the Castro, but that is changing, because it has to. We’re not taking it away from the gay community, but this has become an extremely diverse event--with gays, blacks, Latinos, Asians, whites and straights all dancing together.”

Aguayo says her budget is $160,000--raised from corporate sponsors and ticket sales. Last year, the group broke even, Aguayo said. It if makes any profits this year, they will be turned over to the Community United Against Violence, which for years sponsored the event in the Castro district.

This year, party-goers will find the Civic Center enclosed by chain-link fencing and will have to go through metal detectors and pay $5 to get into where disco diva Melba Moore is the headline act and Latin-flavored bands will play until the wee hours.

The Civic Center holds 100,000 people, according to Lt. Larry Barsetti of the city’s northern police district. He is expecting that many at the party this year, and maybe more, because it is on a weekend and the weather is expected to be good.

“We have canceled all days off and called in extra people,” Barsetti said. A total of 156 officers will be on duty all night at the Civic Center and another 100 at the Castro, where Mission district police are expecting another 100,000 people.

In the Castro, merchants and residents say they are relieved that the official party has moved out of the neighborhood, but frustrated that large crowds still gravitate to their streets.

“The intent was to try to create something that would draw people away from the Castro,” said Barry Hermanson, past president of the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro.

Still, Halloween’s roots run deep in the neighborhood, going back to the 1940s and a time when the Castro was largely working-class and Irish.

The public Halloween celebration began as a children’s costume contest, sponsored by a merchant everyone knew as Grandpa Ernie, owner of what was then called Cliff’s Hardware Store and is now Cliff’s Variety store on Castro Street.

The tradition was unchanged for decades, until the Castro began changing in the late 1960s. Families started moving out and young gay men started moving into the affordable, sometimes shabby Victorians. Gay bars opened on Castro Street.

Adults Overtake Children’s Event

For a few years, said Ernest Asten, who now runs his grandfather’s variety store, the Castro children’s party and the grown-up, gay Halloween co-existed, with the drag queens and other gays waiting until the children’s event was over before getting their own, sometimes raucous, street party underway. But by 1979, word was out that the Castro was the place for adults to indulge their fantasies on Halloween night.

That year, Asten’s grandfather abandoned the children’s party. “You just couldn’t justify it anymore as anything you would do for children,” Asten said.

Between 1979 and 1996, when the Castro decided its celebration had become more a curse than a blessing, crowds swelled to several hundred thousand.

San Francisco city officials say they suspect West Hollywood of inflating its Halloween party numbers to lay claim to the title San Francisco thinks it so richly deserves. Besides, said Kandace Bender, spokeswoman for Mayor Willie Brown, even if San Francisco draws fewer revelers this year than West Hollywood, “I would put our Halloween party up against anyone’s, anywhere.”

A guide to Halloween events throughout the Southland is on The Times’ CalendarLive! Web site is https://www.calendarlive.com/halloween

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