Winter Solstice at The Eagle

The Eagle bar at 12th and Harrison has been a gay leather bar with a large backyard since the 1970s.



Even when I was of an age where it was fun hanging out at bars looking for possible love, friendship and adventure, the Eagle was never my favorite though I always did love their outdoor fire pit which reminded me of the fire pit I grew up with at a Taco Bell in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara.



The Eagle always struck me as a bit too "leather" and mannered and brutal to be a place where I wanted to be a familiar face, but when I received an email out of the ether last week to join them for a "Winter Solstice" party on the evening of December 21st with a live band, I figured why not.



The band included one of the owners of the bar along with six or seven other young male musicians who were having a blast playing together with electronic pulsers, drums, and various electronic guitars. They were being listened to by a small crowd of old gay leather queens, old gay hippies, and young boyfriends and girlfriends of members of the band.



Outside in the patio, there were about 30 young gays accompanied by their fag hag friends, and then closer to the firepit was a whole other subscrulture who were quite amazing. They were extremely butch lesbians dressed in black leather vests with cropped haircuts who looked exactly like the guys who used to hang out in this bar's backyard in the 1970s. Plus, they were joined by a couple of female-to-male transgenders which really gave the mix a distinct flavor of confusion, plus a few slutty, fat females who were caressing these butch women/men in extremely suggestive fashion.



I walked back home to the Civic Center thanking the gods that I was not only living in such a cool, strange place as San Francisco, but that we were at a moment in time where the witches in different tribes were starting to feel comfortable with each other.