Surreal Halloween portraits from 1970s San Francisco

Exact­ly 48 years ago today, on Octo­ber 31, 1976, Ken Wern­er trav­elled to Polk Street in San Francisco’s Down­town area, cam­era in tow. He had moved to the city from New York’s Low­er East Side a few months before. His friend – aware of Werner’s eye for a pic­ture – had told him he’d find ​“some­thing he might like” Down­town, which at the time was San Francisco’s de-fac­to LGBTQ+ centre.

As he arrived, he found around 70,000 peo­ple par­ty­ing, danc­ing and dra­mat­i­cal­ly inter­act­ing with one anoth­er in the streets. Around half of the peo­ple present were dressed up in wild, fine­ly detailed cos­tumes, rang­ing from dou­ble-head­ed mon­sters to NSFW, kink embrac­ing setups. ​“I was amazed, I had nev­er seen any­thing like this before – the cre­ativ­i­ty, the art of what they were doing,” Wern­er recalls. ​“This was not a parade. This was street theatre.”

After spend­ing the rest of the evening tak­ing por­traits of its sur­re­al char­ac­ters and atmos­phere, Wern­er would return to Polk Street each Hal­loween, then to Cas­tro when the street par­ties migrat­ed there in 1979. In 1981, he self-pub­lished a lim­it­ed run of his pho­to­book Hal­loween: A Fan­ta­sy in Three Acts, lay­ing out some of his most arrest­ing black and white images from the past half decade’s fes­tiv­i­ties. Now, over four decades lat­er, the book is set to be repub­lished by Anthol­o­gy Edi­tions, drum scan­ning the orig­i­nal prints to bring a wild time in the city’s his­to­ry back to life.

In the mid-70s, San Fran­cis­co was a vast­ly dif­fer­ent city to the one that exists now. Long before the dot-com bub­ble and takeover from Sil­i­con Val­ley tech work­ers, it had cheap rents, a size­able LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty and an anti-estab­lish­ment edge borne out of the Sum­mer of Love. ​“The source of it all was the peo­ple of San Fran­cis­co, and in large mea­sure, but not entire­ly, the gay com­mu­ni­ty,” Wern­er says. ​“There was a say­ing at the time that the North Amer­i­can con­ti­nent was tilt­ed, and all the loose mar­bles had rolled into San Fran­cis­co. To a cer­tain extent, it was true – it was a place where peo­ple on the fringes could live, there were a lot of very cre­ative peo­ple and it all erupt­ed on Halloween.”

Unlike oth­er Hal­loween parade cel­e­bra­tions across the USA and beyond, the Polk Street and Cas­tro par­ties were nev­er cen­tral­ly co-ordi­nat­ed or planned by a spe­cif­ic group. ​“The amaz­ing thing was that it wasn’t real­ly organ­ised,” says Wern­er. ​“It was con­sid­ered a gay cel­e­bra­tion, but it wasn’t entire­ly that – San Fran­cis­co was very open and play­ful, but it wasn’t demar­cat­ed as you might think now – it was a com­mu­ni­ty thing focused in the gay areas.”

Werner’s pic­tures pro­vide a glimpse into the wild self-expres­sion on show. Cre­at­ing a sur­re­al­ist, dream­like visu­al nar­ra­tive across its spreads, the book is laid out into three sec­tions, loose­ly fit­ting the chronol­o­gy of a sin­gle imag­ined evening. ​“It was eight nights of pho­tog­ra­phy, which I struc­tured into a paper movie – a syn­the­sised night,” he explains. ​“It starts off at dusk, pro­ceeds to get erot­ic, then lat­er gets tired and even dan­ger­ous. I want­ed to evoke what it was like on a par­tic­u­lar night.”

Despite their anar­chic mag­ic, the Hal­loween street par­ties would often hold an edge, even if dan­gers were most like­ly to come from exter­nal forces. Vio­lent homo­pho­bic assaults were not uncom­mon, while in 1977 a gay man was mur­dered in his apart­ment. It led to lob­by­ing for the party’s clo­sure from sec­tions of the author­i­ties, and that loom­ing threat led to Wern­er pub­lish­ing the book in the first place.

“The per­son lead­ing the oppo­si­tion and who was real­ly dis­tort­ing the events of the night was named Dan White. You’re famil­iar with the type – very white, very con­ser­v­a­tive and out to score points,” Wern­er says. ​“He and the Board of Super­vi­sors were attempt­ing to shut it down. The thing about Dan White, is that a few years lat­er he walked into the Mayor’s office and killed him, and then walked into Har­vey Milk’s office and killed him.”

Ulti­mate­ly, despite per­sis­tent attempts to cur­tail them the street par­ties con­tin­ued until 2006 when a shoot­er opened fire into the crowd, and the city’s author­i­ties put an end to a Hal­loween cel­e­bra­tion like no oth­er in the world.

With his book and its repub­lish­ing, Werner’s pic­tures immor­talise a gold­en, freer era for the city’s nightlife and LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty. In 1981, months after Hal­loween: A Fan­ta­sy in Three Acts was ini­tial­ly print­ed, the very first men­tion of AIDS in Amer­i­can news­pa­pers was pub­lished. ​“There were amaz­ing things hap­pen­ing in the 80s and 90s and that’s tes­ta­ment to the com­mu­ni­ty, even though every­one was suf­fer­ing in rela­tion to AIDS,” he says. ​“They kept this as a sacred hol­i­day, where you did what you want­ed and you were play­ful, cre­ative and erotic.”

Hal­loween: A Fan­ta­sy in Three Acts by Ken Wern­er is pub­lished by Anthol­o­gy Editions

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