Gay fashion through the years in New York exhibition - San Francisco Chronicle

Amid the haute couture of last year's "A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Runway" exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, there was an item of note with a San Francisco provenance: a leather motorcycle vest from the Castro Street scene of the 1970s.

This single piece of clothing might have been easy to overlook amid the dozens of other items in the show, but as an example of fetish wear that later went mainstream, the vest is a telling example of San Francisco's historical significance in the queer fashion scene.

San Francisco has long been considered a haven for people identifying as outsiders, including gender-bending performance artists who arrived more than 150 years ago, according to Brad Rosenstein, an independent Bay Area exhibition curator.

"As far back as the Gold Rush, this was the place on the fringes," he says. "San Francisco was where people went to find themselves and start over." Rosenstein, whose exhibitions include retrospectives on gay icons Noel Coward and Tony Kushner, cites the abundance of performers from the worlds of opera, ballet and theater who arrived in the 1800s as bringing a certain queer chic (independent of sexuality) to the citizenry: "Drag, both male and female, was an important part of theatrical tradition at the time, and it's significant in early San Francisco entertainment."

Among the performers famous in the era for "travesty" performances (female-to-male cross-dressing roles) was actress Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868), a bohemian beauty who frequently preferred menswear offstage as well as on.

"Adah very publicly wore masculine dress on the streets, and it did affect fashion at the time," Rosenstein says. He cites the independence this cross-dressing afforded Menken, both in terms of freedom from the constricting corsetry of the time and access to worlds off-limits to women. "She frequently explored the seedier, more dangerous haunts of Barbary North Beach, protected by her suit, in a sense."

For Tomboy Tailors' Zel Anders, 1920s bisexual artist Romaine Brooks and a later trendsetter, Tanya Neiman, were two keys influences in the development of Anders' own butch style, and her "men's tailoring for women" business in San Francisco.

"Tanya Neiman was my biggest style hero," Anders said of the longtime director of the Bar Association of San Francisco's pro bono program, who died in 2006. "She wore suits and bowties, day in and day out. I loved watching her walk down the streets entirely comfortable with herself. She quietly stood out in a crowd."

If the subversion and exaggeration of drag were the important queer motif of San Francisco starting in the 1960s, a more pansexual aesthetic began to emerge out of the Haight-Ashbury rock 'n' roll scene, aided by the first hints of gay men and women coming out of the closet at the dawn of the sexual revolution.

"A certain kind of androgyny began to be popular in those years for both sexes," Rosenstein says. "Rock stars coming out of San Francisco at the time are very influenced by the looks on the street in the Haight-Ashbury. As the clubs become more gay and straight integrated, the lines begin to blur and that androgyny makes its way into the mainstream. It makes sense given the cultural upheaval of the Stonewall Riots in New York," which also happened in the late 1960s.

When gay culture moved aboveground with the pride movement of the 1970s, and the Castro district became a gay mecca, fashions became more overtly sexual. As a "Castro clone" style for gay men began to emerge (a hyper-masculine look exemplified by work boots, fitted jeans and flannel shirts), another segment of the community responded with its own, more feminine, aesthetic.

"On the day of the first walk, it was a choice between cheerleading outfits or 'borrowed' habits that once belonged to deceased nuns from a convent in Des Moines," Joel Tan, a.k.a. Sister Baba Ganesh of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, says of the founding of the famous "order" of drag nuns. "When the first three sisters terrorized the Castro in 1979, the intent was to break from the gay conformity which was the clone scene in the '70s."

The gender-flexible nature of the Sisters' "habits" and signature face paint have not only given them a unique style but have also allowed them to be recognized across the world. Tan views Sisters fashion events such as the recent "Project Nunway" as the latest example of collaboration among San Francisco's diverse artists: Whether they identify as gay or not, Tan believes it's part of the Sisters' queer legacy.

"Sisters, Burners and tech geeks are all 'queerdos,' " Tan says. " 'Nunway' is a platform for these kinds of dreamers. These are the dreamers that make San Francisco what it is."

Tony Bravo is a San Francisco freelance writer. E-mail: style@sfchronicle.com

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