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AIDS: Jerry Pritikin, history through the camera's lens
by Steven Chaitman
2011-10-05

This article shared 5819 times since Wed Oct 5, 2011
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Technically, Jerry Pritikin lives in a small high-rise apartment in River North for independent seniors. But anyone who's been inside and seen his living room walls ( or what little of them remains visible ) would likely call it nothing short of a one-bedroom museum.

Lining every vertical surface of Pritkin's apartment are various framed photographs, years of amassed signage and the stories that go with all of them. This "exhibit" brings to life the rise of San Francisco's Castro neighborhood as the Western capital of the LGBT rights movement in the 1970s, that vibrant, exciting and challenging time in the movement's young history.

As curator of this particular gallery, Pritkin spares no detail—with emphasis on the humorous asides. He also makes note of every slight factual liberty that screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ( who consulted Pritikin ) took with his Oscar-winning script for Milk, the biopic of San Francisco's famous openly gay politician Harvey Milk, whom Pritikin knew well.

On an evening in early June 1977, Pritkin snapped what would become famous pictures of Milk. That day, voters in Miami, following the lead of singer Anita Bryant, repealed a law that had banned employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. As the workday ended in San Francisco, frustrated LGBT citizens gathered at the Castro in protest. Pritikin instinctually grabbed his camera and took the iconic shots of Milk, bullhorn in hand, rallying the gay community out the bars and into the streets.

But these photographs do more than help to tell an important historical narrative; they help to tell Pritikin's own personal narrative as well. And despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary, that story starts with an important detail:

"I'm really not a photographer," Pritkin said. "I know nothing about photography and I can still say that today."

In fact, Pritikin, 74, isn't an anything—at least not professionally. And that's intentional. In 1964, Pritkin left his native Chicago and convinced his then-lover to move to San Francisco.

"I left Chicago so I could be myself," he said. "I didn't know San Francisco was necessarily gay, but I knew it wasn't Chicago."

Pritikin had lived in San Francisco for a few months in 1960 working for a jewelry store, but fled when the store gave him an ultimatum to relocate to Southern California. Returning four years later, he found a job at another jewelry store where after a year's work he took a vacation. When he returned, he found the store had changed ownership and no job waited for him.

"After that I decided to never work hard for anyone ever again," he said.

And he didn't. In the nearly 50 years since, Pritkin could loosely be considered any of the following: freelance photographer and sports editor for one of San Francisco's first LGBT newspapers, The Gazette ( for which he was never paid ) , marketer and promoter for local bars and the San Francisco production of Bleacher Bums, gay softball player, pithy t-shirt designer, Hall of Fame Chicago Cubs fan, and pot smoker—the lattermost of which Pritkin has since retired from ( too expensive ) but might have also been at least partly responsible for many if not all other "jobs" on the list.

"So much happened to me because I smoked dope," Pritikin said with a sly grin. "Ninety percent of my photographs were taken when I was stoned."

Drugs aside, photography would be the one constant throughout Pritikin's life. He has album upon album of photos and newspaper clippings, some that simply capture the budding flamboyance in San Francisco in the '60s and '70s and others that show off his politically charged humor; his most treasured is a picture of actress Jane Fonda wearing his "Anita Bryant's husband is a Homo Sapien!" t-shirt.

Most of all, Pritikin has a taste for the oxymoronic, namely the juxtaposition of words and images that have a humorous relationship to one another. He's less a photographer than a capturer of that happenstance, a camera always nearby should an oxymoron find him, such as a street sign that read "End Ford" during the Jimmy Carter vs. Gerald Ford election campaign of 1976. Naturally, that one inevitably led to another Pritikin t-shirt.

But Pritikin's photos, as much as they reveal about him and his story, obscure—intentionally or not—one chapter in particular, and perhaps one of the most influential chapters of all.

It takes a long time to find the photo that might spur Pritikin to tell that story. It hangs the wall outside his bedroom: a team photo of one of the gay softball teams he played for in the '70s.

The nation's first gay-sponsored softball league started in San Francisco, where the league grew so prominent and competitive that straight players wanted to join, and in 1978—the year he and Milk were murdered—Mayor George Moscone threw the first pitch at the opening game, a game Pritikin ( a pitcher ) started with more than 2,000 people in attendance.

A baseball fan since the age of eight, that game is one of the memories that Pritikin holds most dear, but this team photo reminds him of something else entirely. He points to a few different teammates; these young men would later die of AIDS.

Pritikin recalls in the very early '80s when The Gazette ran one of its first-ever obituaries. A young Jewish doctor had died of "hepatitis." Eventually more and more obituaries were printed and they all read the same.

"You never heard of anyone being written up in the gay newspaper dying," Pritikin said. "Robert Hillsborough was murdered ( brutally stabbed to death in 1977 because he was gay ) , he was a young gay guy, but it seemed like a lot of people were starting to get sick and die."

One day in town, Pritikin came across a sign made of poster board with a series of Polaroid pictures showing legions and purple dots attached to it. Next to these photos, written in hand, were the words, "If you have these markings go your doctor at once—you have gay cancer."

Pritikin said he regrets not having his camera on him that day.

"I thought, 'How ridiculous, how could there be gay cancer? Cancer's not exclusive,'" he said. "But in short period of time a lot of people started showing up with these markings."

Among them was a young man named Jay Platt, one of Pritikin's closest friends who would succumb to AIDS after contracting HIV around 1982. It turned out both were Jewish, grew up in Chicago and attended the same high school, though Platt was many years younger.

"Jay was the opposite of me. He was into leather and wild things and I guess I was a—well, a cute boy," Pritikin said.

Pritikin describes Platt in measurements alone: 6'4" and 300 pounds. But after a four- or five-year battle with AIDS, Pritikin said most frankly that, "it looked like he was coming out of Auschwitz."

The unlikely pair met through a friend on Thanksgiving 1973. Platt hosted the dinner. He was a gourmet cook who Pritikin said "had fingers in many different kinds of businesses," not the least of which was selling weed. Platt quickly became Pritikin's friend, dealer and sometimes-business partner. Pritikin would write captions for his catalogs and later help Platt's friend, bar owner Al Hanken, with promotions for both his bars: The Round Up and The End Up.

It was Hanken who put together and sponsored the softball team that Pritikin would join after much convincing from Platt. Pritikin was 38 years old and had never played organized sports. He would play four seasons with the team, which in 1978 won the right to represent San Francisco in the Gay Softball World Series in New York, but was disqualified by a mid-season rule capping the number of straight players.

Pritikin stayed in touch with teammates, but only a few years later that would mean visiting them in the hospital.

"I was in my 40s already and here I thought I was too old to play softball," Pritikin said. "The majority of these people who were dying were in their 20s or 30s."

Pritikin estimated 10-20 percent of those who played in the gay softball league with him developed AIDS. The Gazette obituary page eventually reached three pages.

In 1981, Pritikin had a medical mishap that he believes might have saved his life. The wound from a hernia operation became infected in the hospital and reopened during the course of the next year, coinciding almost exactly with the outbreak of HIV.

When he was in the hospital, Pritikin visited Platt and other ballplayers who were housed together in the same ward. Fortunately for Platt, his family was there to take care of him up until his death.

"I know that Jay's parents, when they came, and his sister, went so far out of their way to help Jay and whoever Jay associated with … they were open," Pritikin said.

Pritikin said that a photographer friend of his named of Guy Cory was less fortunate. Cory, Pritikin and several others had put on an "anti-Anita Bryant" show in 1978. When Cory died of AIDS, his parents were so ashamed that their son died of "gay cancer" that they burned all his negatives.

With friends and acquaintances getting sick and dying, Pritikin buried himself in a new business venture. While stoned and watching television in 1981, he came across a PBS recording of the play Bleacher Bums, which originated in Chicago in 1977 based on the aptly named fans of the Chicago Cubs. Days later he discovered an ad in the paper looking for actors for a San Francisco production of the play. He called the producer and was hired to do publicity for the show.

Also starting in June 1981 was the Major League Baseball strike. With local sports writers starved for material, Pritikin wrote to them about the play and they ran articles featuring it in the sports section. Performances soon sold out every night, enough to the point where the play moved to a 350-seat theater. Pritikin used his yearly summer trip back to Chicago to see his parents ( and the Cubs ) to gather signage and all he could to transform the theater's lobby into "Wrigleyville West."

Bleacher Bums was only supposed to run six weeks but went on for a year and a half. But more than a successful business endeavor, it was a successful distraction.

"For me ( the play ) was an escape, blinders from the fact that I was seeing so many people I know or people I didn't know but used to see ( die of AIDS ) ," he said. "But when people stopped showing up you asked 'did he die of AIDS?' Even if you moved with good health to another city, everyone would think that because you're not around anymore you must've gotten AIDS."

In 1984, baseball delivered again. The Cubs pennant hopes led Pritikin to spend a lot of time back in Chicago where he eventually dubbed himself the "Bleacher Preacher," giving sermons and displaying his 10 commandments. He also coined another of his iconic phrases: "How Do You Spell Belief? C-U-B-S." He spent the entire season in the bleachers in 1985 and in 1987. Harry Caray dubbed Pritikin the No. 1 Cubs Fan. That same year, he relocated back to Chicago permanently.

"Everyone who owed me IOUs in San Francisco was dead," he said.

To this day, Pritikin has passionately followed the course of AIDS and is still devastated to read about people dying from it.

"Here we are 30 years after the beginning and there's still people dying," he said. "That gets me madder than anything else."

More recently, Pritikin has played in the Chicago gay softball Senior Cup as a self-proclaimed "last hurrah" of sorts. He now lives mostly off Social Security and a settlement or two from when people misused his photos.

"I could sell these things," he said, looking around his living room, "but I don't."

An apartment with walls good for hanging photos appears to be more than enough.


This article shared 5819 times since Wed Oct 5, 2011
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