We Had Whistles

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My boyfriend bought me one that matched his: a shiny chrome-plated thing attached to a key ring. I remember sliding my apartment keys to it. I would carry it around for a couple of years. This was in the 1980s, San Francisco. Street assaults were routine; late night, technically morning, gay boys walking home from the clubs, cruising or not; in groups or not. An assault could end in beatings so severe a boy would be on life support. Maybe he’d die.

My first boyfriend was from Florida and called himself Sugar. He was six-two, six-three—you noticed Sugar in a cafe, on the bus, on Polk Street after 2 a.m., when the bars disgorged you to linger with the street trade. Sugar was a musician and a singer; he knew Sylvester. He had this big, wide-shouldered body. Life had made him tough, but he was still soft, still sweet, all sponge cake and steel. You knew he’d been through a lot of shit in his relatively short ride. His stepfather in Miami had regularly beat him up for being a sissy, and as a teen, a Greyhound runaway, he’d stepped off in San Francisco to feel safe, or safer, or anyway to escape the family beatings.

But San Francisco didn’t protect him. There was a gentleness to Sugar’s spirit. He had a flowery way of walking, of bouncing on the balls of his feet while keeping his arms up against his sides, and in a surveillance culture that punished deviations from a flexed, unbent masculinity, Sugar was a target.

I met him the night of my coming out, I suppose you’d call it: my first public act as a gay man, showing up for the Monday night walk-in social at an LGBT counseling center in Berkeley. Soon after I started sleeping at his place, letting him play records for me, since he (correctly) called my ignorance of essential music a tragedy. Sugar’s stories about growing up, of escaping, fighting off street attacks, related over Prince’s Dirty Mind on turntable repeat, helped inform my sense of what it was to be out. Of the risk, also the joy, the freedom, of being out in the city.

We were called faggot through rolled-down windows of cars rolling by with groups of men or high school boys—nothing unusual about that, you learned to not turn toward the aggressors, not engage, just keep walking, just keep looking ahead. You’d hear about altercations gone bad, gays who’d yelled back or flashed a middle finger only to see the car emptied, a baseball bat brandished.

By the time Sugar had dropped out of my life, by the time I was with my next boyfriend (the one who gave me the whistle), things had gotten bad. The cops had always harassed us, brutalized us, but there seemed to be a new aggressiveness in ’82 and ’83. Dan White, Harvey Milk’s killer, was protected as one of theirs, and even three years after his manslaughter conviction, the war against the police still burned.

Gay victims of bashings were usually treated like perps: that we’d provoked the violence by, what, being cute? By triggering “legitimate” gay panic in the basher? Flaunting our visibility on the street? You’d hear about cops taking victim statements from gays and crumpling up the report sheets; or referring to us as “it”; or twisting a nightstick into a bruise or abrasion and laughing when we screamed.

There was a community call to equip ourselves with whistles—to be our own police, become citizen eyes on the street: vigilante observers. I think about this a lot these days, opening Instagram and watching the chaos in Minnesota, soundtracked with shouts and cries and the thin whine of whistles, sometimes what sounds like dozens of them.

Just yesterday: a woman on a residential street in South Minneapolis, skittering video that starts on her front porch, then draws closer to the scene of an abduction (the familiar drama, a woman dragged from her car, forced face down in the snow). The neighbor shooting the video is calling to the ICE agents to let her go, she did nothing wrong, she’s been watching from her house. You hear what sounds like one, later two whistles singing in the otherwise empty, snowy street. Who are those whistles aiming to warn? Are they a call for others to leave their homes, trudge out to the street to document the capture? To serve as eyes in some kind of hope, I guess, that the ICE goons might be restrained from escalation? From murder?

What struck me was how lonely the scene was. How this woman’s capture happened without throngs of watchers; how it could easily have gone unrecorded, that it would be unremarked, as if it never happened. The whistles were voices, however faint, however weak they may have sounded in the video, that stitched the scene to a kind of reckoning, a dropped pin on a map. They gave it an aural reality that could not be denied. This abduction happened.

What’s audacious about a whistle is how it serves witness to breath. My long-ago whistle, my keychain, was never employed in the witness of a beating—I blew it at demonstrations, in Pride marches. As I recall, some guys would blow them on dance floors. At the time I made sense of it as drugged-out buoyancy, an unloading of pent-up energy. Now it seems to me even those whistles, sounded to the beat of “It’s Raining Men” or “Lucky Star,” were a way of saying we were there, we were watching.

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