Marlena, The Absolute Empress XXV of the Imperial Court of San Francisco, hosted an al fresco birthday party early Sunday afternoon for their 80th year around the sun.
The informal, open-to-all celebration was held in the picnic area of Patricia's Green, and it could not have been sweeter.
Besides birthday cake...
...there were presents, flowers and booze.
Generations of Imperial Court royalty stopped by to offer well wishes, including Emperor XLVI Leandro Gonzales in the Georgetown sweatshirt.
In the early 1990s, Hayes Valley's doubledecker freeway that bisected the neighborhood was torn down after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Around that time, Marlena took over a scary crack whore neighborhood dive called the Underpass and turned it into a slightly more respectable dive called Marlena's that featured lipsynching drag shows on top of the pool table. It became the de facto community center for the slowly gentrifying neighborhood, and Marlena's smart, kind, no-nonsense stewardship of the saloon was admired by all: gay, straight, whatever, both young and old. The legendary place closed in 2013 (
click here for my account) and morphed into the more upscale Brass Tacks, but its influence continues to permeate through the neighborhood, and Marlena still lives in an apartment above the old bar.
Like Herb Caen, another iconic San Franciscan, Marlena is actually from the San Joaquin Valley. Caen came from Sacramento while Garry McClain (aka Marlena) is from Modesto, where he opened The Brave Bull, the conservative city's first gay bar. San Francisco has been improved immeasurably by Marlena's presence, and it's enormously cheering to see her survival into old age.
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