More History

In the late 70s, I worked at The Tenderloin Clinic in downtown San Francisco. We were a community mental health clinic of an agency called, I think, NorthEast Mental Health. Northeast M.H. had gotten the contract with the City to provide community mental health services in downtown S.F. in part because they had agreed to provide gay-oriented services for gay clients from all over the city and not just from their catchment district through the walk-in clinic in the old Downtown YMCA called The Tenderloin Clinic. (Northeast MH also ran a residential program for mental patients in the former hotel part of the Y.)

One of the reasons Northeast had included this plan in their proposal to the City was because of the lobbying of a gay man named Cliff Kraus.

A few years earlier, Cliff had sort of single-handedly established a telephone gay hotline called The San Francisco Gay Counseling Service. He ran it out of his little house on 17th at Hartford. He appealed for volunteers through a program called Gay Rap that met at the Alternative Futures private community center (on South Pine over in the lower western addition). Gay Rap was the premier gay liberation group at that time--1971-72. Many of the members of Gay Rap later moved on to be BAGL (Bay Area Gay Liberation)--from whence the Northern California Fairy Circle(s) developed.

I'd started going to Gay Rap and I volunteered to work Cliff's phone counseling line a few nights a week. Cliff and I got to be close friends and partners in the project. When Cliff's lease on the little house (that had a leaky roof and was rank with mold because in those days it was covered with vines) in the Castro expired, he moved, along with the counseling service, into my collective household over in the inner Richmond, on Arguello at Clement.

Cliff had been inspired by attending a Don Clark Weekend at Clark's little Victorian house in back of an apartment complex in Pacific Heights. I took the next Don Clark Weekend myself and was inspired to also think of myself as a gay-positive gay social service provider. Don was the unofficial "Clinical Supervisor" for the volunteers. He really was the theoretical leader for us. In the circle(s) around Don Clark and around the Counseling Service were Bill Horstman and Mark Freeman, a young psychologist who'd just published a book analyzing psychological studies of gay personality showing that gay people are not only not mentally ill but are potentially higher functioning than normal (Mark died of hepatitis within a year or two -- a wrinkle in his story was that he used to tell about having tricked with a man he was sure was Art Garfunkel.)

By this time, the counseling service had become the major project of Gay Rap. And leadership of Gay Rap and the leadership of the Counseling Service overlapped. Cliff (and I) had effectively taken over Gay Rap. Cliff was very charismatic. In addition to the big public gatherings of Gay Rap for consciousness-raising exercises and small group sharing at the meetings at Alternative Futures, we had weekly potluck dinner meetings at our house of the leaders. Peter Goldblum was a young social worker recently relocated to San Francisco who joined the project about that time.

The Counseling Service lived for two or three years. Cliff's major plan had always been to get the City to start providing these services and/or for us to get funding from the City to provide such gay-positive, peer-counseling services.

Cliff befriended a psychiatrist -- whose Italian-sounding name I don't remember--who was probably gay but closeted, who worked in community mental health. Cliff got him to be supportive of our project and when, for interpersonal and financial reasons in the collective household, the counseling service ceased functioning, to champion the idea of gay-affirmative and gay-identified services for gay clients. This Italian-named psychiatrist then became head of Northeast Community Mental Health Services and so he incorporated Cliff's vision into the proposal for services out of the old-Y building which Northeast purchased.

So by a very indirect route, the S.F. Gay Counseling Service evolved into The Tenderloin Clinic.

My own route had diverted through Napa. Peter Goldblum by this time had gotten a job teaching psychology to the Psychiatric Technician students in the Nursing Program at Napa College, the Junior College across the highway from Napa State Hospital. My boyfriend Guy Mannheimer (whom I'd met through the Don Clark connection) and I and a wonderful woman named Leslie Peterson (who now works for International Rescue Committee) followed Peter to Napa and became both his students AND his housemates.

I finished the Psych Tech training after a year and a half, moved back to S.F. and got a job as a psych tech at Westside Community Mental Health in the Crisis Clinic at Mt Zion Hospital, then went back to grad school at C.I.I.S. and got a PhD in Counseling Psychology. In a wonderfully circular way, I did my internship at The Tenderloin Clinic and then, after finishing the internship, was hired as a staff therapist.

All that is backstory to the importance of The Tenderloin Clinic. (The rest of the story is told at length on my website on the page about The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance.)

After a couple of years the gay & lesbian therapists at The Tenderloin Clinic began complaining that we had too many non-gay mental health clients from the catchment district to see to fulfill our mandate to serve gay clients from around the city with gay-positive counseling. The clinic staff organized as Dykes and Faggots Organized to Defeat Institutionalized Liberalism (which meant sounding gay-positive in theory, but in fact being dismissive of minority needs and disrespectful of the gay population).

We had a demonstration and march -- which was lead by a Lesbian Marching Band with loud brass instruments including a tuba -- from the clinic to City Hall then over to the Community Mental Health Services office on Larkin. The Director of Mental Health, Dr Bill Goldman, offered us $60,000 to expand the clinic AND set up a gay mental health task force to make recommendations for how the city could provide gay-positive, gay-affirmative services.

That task force met for six months to a year. I ended up co-chair/male spokesperson of the Task Force. We achieved two goals: a job in the Health Dept as head of g/l services for a black lesbian mother Pat Norman (who later ran for City Supervisor) and the acceptance of The Gay Client's Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights declared the right of gay clients to get gay-identified services and/or to at least be sure they didn't get an anti-gay therapist. It put into official policy the idea of gay therapist/gay doctors for gay clients/gay patients.

I think this indirectly had major consequences a few years later for AIDS services. It helped establish that AIDS patients should have gay doctors and helped make gay medicine respectable and allowed gay doctors to practice as openly gay.

More History of S.F.

& Gay Mental Health Services