Stu Bykofsky: He found his heart in San Francisco
TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA was gay before it was fashionable, before "Will & Grace" and Adam Lambert. The 57-year-old South Philadelphian-turned-San Franciscan was out there before most of us knew what out meant. If Tommi were any more gay, he'd burst into flames.
TOMMI AVICOLLI MECCA was gay before it was fashionable, before "Will & Grace" and Adam Lambert.
The 57-year-old South Philadelphian-turned-San Franciscan was out there before most of us knew what out meant. If Tommi were any more gay, he'd burst into flames.
Radicalized while at Temple, where he earned a creative-writing degree in 1974, Mecca now works for a tenants'-rights group in the City by the Bay. In this 40th anniversary year of the uprising at New York's Stonewall Inn, where gays fought back against harassing cops, Mecca has produced a 303-page book of personal remembrances of the early gay days - Smash the Church, Smash the State. The title comes from a popular battle cry at the time, used by gays (and others, Mecca concedes).
With maturity comes perspective. Philadelphian Hal Tarr shows a delicious awareness when he writes: "I must have been nuts to have written for my college newspaper that gay liberation meant that all men could love each other and that heterosexual relationships were sort of passe. But the atmosphere of the times, with the presence of Black Power, women's liberation, hippies, the peace movement, the drug culture and radical student actions, made anything seem possible."
As editor of the book, published by San Francisco's City Lights, that's what Mecca tried to capture by assembling three dozen writers - from Berkeley to Boston to New York to Philly - to offer revelations about the roots of what they call the "revolution," which looks to straight eyes more like slo-mo evolution.
I asked Tommi - who added his mother's maiden name, Mecca, to his own as a tribute after her death in 1990 - about this. "What we were saying was revolutionary, challenging the status quo," he says. "We changed people's thinking" about gay people, and that led to laws being changed, so that was evolutionary. "It depends upon your perspective."
For a straight man (even a friendly one), it's a little like reading others' memories of a weird summer camp you didn't get to attend. Mecca's reasons for moving to San Francisco in 1991 were complex. "I used to think it was because so many people had died [from AIDS] in the '80s," and he wanted to get away from all that death. He also didn't feel safe in Philly, having been beaten up a couple of times, maybe a result (although inexcusable) of the outrageous way he carried on. So he landed in San Francisco, "where I could feel safe and where not everyone was dying. Well, they were dying, but I didn't know them."
In San Fran, he says (using a word I wouldn't), "It's no issue if you're queer." He is comfortable, "being as I am and how I want to live," exercising his politics, which he calls anarchsocialist.
"Here, nobody blinks," he says. "Who cares what you call yourself? I don't think that would be the case if I lived in Philly."
In the key era covered by the book - the late '60s through the early '70s - there were dozens of gay groups, some that lasted as long as a fruit fly, others that lasted longer. One of the most effective - and often fun - was the Gay Raiders. They forced people to see gays in a new light by getting in their faces, such as when Mark Segal faked his way into CBS and chained himself to the set of the "CBS Evening News" during a broadcast with a stunned Walter Cronkite sitting a few feet away. "If we did that today, we'd be considered terrorists," Mecca says.
As a result of consciousness-raising publicity stunts, the networks sat down with the Gay Raiders and developed a policy that didn't discriminate against gay Americans. The "zap" of Cronkite's show led to a friendship between the anchor and Segal - the longtime publisher of the award-winning Philadelphia Gay News - that lasts to this day. (Disclosure: Segal is a friend of mine.)
There were deeper thinkers in the movement. There were better writers in the movement. But few were smarter in planning or braver in execution than Segal, a guy who barely moves the needle on gaydar.
Perhaps the best-written, and most poignant, chapter was written by Cei Bell, a Philadelphian who was born with male hardware but who is female otherwise. "I was abused and had to run away from home and drop out of school," she writes. "I was sexually assaulted and raped twice. I didn't think I had any future as a homely queen with Coke-bottle glasses."
She was wrong. Thanks to the courage and dedication of many of those in the book, Bell did have a future, and a gay life.
E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns: