Gypsies Tramps and Thieves: installment 9

[mitchtv]

“Double Gay Wedding in Golden Gate Park!”

As related by Tom Nevin

Read the headlines of the San Francisco that Monday morning. The Page Street Palace was consummating the all too brief marriages of four of its royal figures- couldn’t tell the kings from the queens. Three “clergy” officiated, a “priest”, a “minister” and a “nun”. Preston married Ange, and John married Jeffrina, beneath a canopy of white brocade held by four acolytes Forty- count’m forty bridesmaids, all Angels of Light or Cockettes dressed in prom gowns. Guests, flower boys and girls, incense heads, tourists from all corners of the mixed bag of freaks who were the guests, and stragglers and gagglers gathered along the procession from the house at Page and Shrader to the GG Park Conservatory, which swelled the crowd to hundreds by the time the “vows” were exchanged and finalized. Of course, Preston had alerted all the media (press, TV, and time/Life Magazine, xo the coverage was wide. The wedding was beautiful-flawless weather, flowers-human and botanical were everywhere.
After the ceremony hundreds of people paraded back to the house for the “reception”. Barrels of wine, beer; hands, arms, and mouths full of drugs, food and other pleasantries were dispensed. Dancing rollicked and rolled the building all afternoon and night. Several late night visits by the authorities, plus mere exhaustion brought that day’s festivities to a halt around 2or 3 AM in an orgy of decadent love.
The following morning, a Monday (9am) the doorbell rang. I awoke to find that about 40 of the guests had passed out on piles of chiffon, crepe, silk and satin covering every inch of floor space in the house. Hangovers abounded. The wails and moans of the pile of wilted celebrants greeted the doorbell ringer as he climbed the 3 flights of stairs to the top floor where the party was. It was the Electric Co., there to turn off the service, which someone had forgotten to pay for.
The ever-just Preston quickly seized a young black child from the arms of her white mother, who was passed out on the rug, and held the baby in the somewhat embarrassed electrician’s face. “You can’t turn off the electricity,” he said. “Look! There are children here; and sick people too,” he said pointing at the heaps of wilted drag queens lying everywhere. “ We need it to cook and care for these people”. Needless to say- one look at what he saw shocked the electrician as if he had grabbed a high voltage wire. He quickly apologized and turned tail and ran.
Of course it was only a matter of days before the couples ended up in divorce, and the wedding was but a memory of the sham it had been.