The lights were carefully dimmed to cast everyone’s face in seductive shadows with the added benefit of erasing sags and wrinkles, not that many were to be found among the predominantly thirty-something clientele. Discreet speakers mounted on the ceiling seemed to play a ceaseless loop of Bette Davis Eyes, Just the Two of Us, Endless Love, and Angel of the Morning, above the coiffed heads and cologned, gym-toned, and casually but expensively dressed bodies of the patrons. They posed like statues at and around the bar, but their eyes darted wildly back and forth across the room like goldfish swimming circles in a fishbowl. God, he was tired of the scene. Had he not spent the previous weekend at a bathhouse in San Jose on a coke and sex binge, he would have left and gone to the Club Baths. That, however, would have broken his own rule—only one Bad Bill binge a month—to which he grimly adhered.

His best bet was still the blond in the black Lacoste alligator shirt and pressed Levi’s who looked at him again with a half-smile before examining his tasseled loafers, worn, of course, without socks. Ugh, Bill thought, I don’t even like blonds. Still, a bed warmer was a bed warmer. But it was nearly midnight. He wasn’t going to wait until the guy had consumed enough liquid courage to make his move so Bill plastered a smile on his face and walked across the bar with his hand out. As soon as he approached, the blond turned his back. His smile curdling on his lips, Bill dropped his hand and headed for the exit, more rueful than angry, thinking, that’s what you get when you break The Rules.

It was a cold, clear night in March. A full moon shone above Castro Street. The shops were shuttered but the bars and a few food places remained open. The Castro Theater was letting out after a late showing of a Marilyn Monroe double feature—Niagara and The Misfits—and the sidewalks were crowded with men in flannel shirts, 501 Levi’s and leather bomber jackets, hair and moustaches clipped to perfection. The thump of disco music poured into the crisp air each time someone pushed open a bar door. On the corner of Castro and 18th, the small plaza, christened Hibernia Beach after the bank it fronted, was filled to capacity with gay men laughing, chatting, smoking and cruising.