Season of the Witch Quotes

“The Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner—San Francisco homeboy, and a shrewd product of Bay Area Catholic schools—got it. “The difference between San Francisco and Berkeley was that Berkeley complained about a lot of things. Rather than complaining about things, we San Franciscans formed an alternative reality to live in. And for some reason, we got away with it. San Francisco became somewhere you did things rather than protesting about them. We knew we didn’t have to speechify about what we should and shouldn’t do. We just did.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“San Francisco’s battles are no longer with itself but with the outside world, as it exports the European-style social ideas that drive Republican leaders and Fox News commentators into a frenzy: gay marriage, medical marijuana, universal health care, immigrant sanctuary, “living” minimum wage, bicycle-friendly streets, stricter environmental and consumer regulations. Conservatives see these San Francisco values as examples of social engineering gone mad. But in San Francisco, they’re seen as the bedrock of a decent society, one that is based on a live-and-let-live tolerance, shared sense of humanity, and openness to change.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“I never could stand racism or indifference to poverty. That doesn’t make me a lefty ideologue. It makes me an ordinary American.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Moscone and Milk were the dynamic duo of San Francisco’s progressive revolution. They never forgot what they were elected to do: to fight for the burdened and afflicted, for those whose voices were never heard in the halls of power. They fought for the rights of workers, minorities, gays, and renters. And they made the same enemies: the chamber of commerce, developers, realtors, the SFPD.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war’s mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Frisco”—a violation of local custom that, as Herb Caen had impatiently explained for many years, was committed only by clueless rubes.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Sister Boom Boom—a half-Catholic, half-Jewish drag queen named Jack Fertig, who wore a whore’s makeup and a nun’s habit and vamped it up with the other political pranksters in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was an especially aggravating thorn in Feinstein’s side. Boom Boom ran a remarkably aggressive campaign against Feinstein during her 1983 reelection bid, under the slogan “Nun of the Above,” eventually winning twenty-three thousand votes.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“city’s anthem, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for “the city by the bay” after moving to Brooklyn Heights.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, don’t you want somebody to love.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“When Jones staged his grand escape, he did not simply destroy over nine hundred lives and plunge thousands more into bottomless grief. He poisoned a language of social justice. Everyone who had joined hands with his crusade, whether for opportunistic or idealistic reasons, was now contaminated by Jonestown. As the news images of bloated corpses sprawled in the dust were beamed back to San Francisco, the city shuddered. The same free air that had nurtured the beats, hippies, gays, and a growing garden of the imagination had given birth to a monster.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“You’d better find a way to laugh at life, because it will certainly make you cry.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“What I liked was that the game was not always on the goal line out there. It wasn’t always life and death. There were time-out signs. It was a nicer game.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“As the sun dipped below Twin Peaks, Jones wandered toward Castro and Market and saw the huge crowd starting to gather. “It was the most amazingly beautiful, heart-wrenchingly sad, magnificent example of what San Francisco is. It was gay people, straight people, white people, Filipinos, Chinese, African Americans, men and women of all ages, children, the poor and well dressed, people in fur coats next to people in rags. We estimated there were between thirty thousand and forty thousand people. We marched in almost total silence down Market Street to city hall and filled Civic Center Plaza, a sea of people holding candles. I remember standing there and thinking, ‘This isn’t the end of anything. This is the beginning.’ And I was right. “I think every city has a soul, every city is unique and special. But for San Franciscans, I don’t think there could ever be another place to call home. And a lot of it has to do with what I saw that night: with this ability to suffer horrible and dreadful events, earthquakes, civil turmoil, assassinations, and to not only endure but to create something beautiful from it.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“There was always a dark shadow around the San Francisco rainbow. From the very beginning, violence, desperation, and fear stalked the streets of the Haight, side by side with the euphoria. “When I hear about the Summer of Love, I say, ‘Where was that?’” remarked Lewis. “It was there, but always lurking below was this seething hatred and fear from Vietnam and the Cold War. There was always this feeling that we were going to die.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“The city was still known for its enchantments, but it would soon become notorious for its terrors.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“San Francisco beckoned to dreamers and losers everywhere. Many of them found the paradise they were seeking, free of the small voices that had hobbled them. Stewart Brand, Chet Helms, Janis Joplin, Jann Wenner, Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Crumb. More and more rebels arrived every day. They found one another, they formed bands, they started underground enterprises, they made history. San Francisco was Radio Free America, beaming its message of liberation around the world and summoning an endless army of outcasts. Crumb”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“The San Francisco police force was deeply implicated in the murders of Moscone and Milk. Dan White was not carrying out SFPD orders that morning in city hall, but he was carrying out the department’s will. He was no longer on the force, but he was one of them: their star ballplayer, their political representative, their brother. He knew all about the cops’ murderous feelings toward the city’s liberal leadership. He felt the same way. They had the will, he had the willpower.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Landlords—many of whom were absentee, and many were Chinese—hated my guts. They saw me coming and said, ‘There’s that Communist Ed Lee!’” The housing battles of the 1970s were the crucible for an entire generation of new activists in San Francisco. The city was a finite peninsula of competing dreams and ambitions. Was it to become a Manhattan of the West, whose office towers and high-rise apartment buildings overshadowed everything else, or remain an affordable, human-scale city of light nestled into the hills and hollows?”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Peace and love no longer held dominion in San Francisco, Gaskin decided. “The information we got in San Francisco was that folks were buying into violence in a wholesale lot,” he said in explaining his flock’s mass departure. His apocalyptic vision extended to American cities in general. They were falling into brutishness and depravity. And the only solution, according to Gaskin, was to withdraw from their destructive vortex and lead a simple, communal life in the country.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Sometimes it’s necessary to shame the city’s business class, the columnist later remarked, to remind them that a city like San Francisco is more than just a real estate opportunity—it’s “a precious, special, fragile place.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“HERB CAEN WAS born in Sacramento, California, a town that combined all the glamour of a farm fair with the dazzle of a state franchise board hearing.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“But as he lay dying in the bedroom of his Collingwood Street apartment, the beloved entertainer could hear the crowd chanting his name two blocks away: “Sylvester! Sylvester! Sylvester!”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“In the history of the AIDS epidemic, President Reagan’s legacy is one of silence,”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“My staff and budget at the AIDS clinic doubled every year,” recalled Volberding, “and Feinstein didn’t blink an eye. She was completely responsive to whatever I asked from her.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began working like real nuns, raising money for the sick at church bingos and organizing a charity dog show featuring Shirley MacLaine as emcee.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Gay nightclub diva Sharon McNight rolled her piano into the ward and belted out songs like “Stand By Your Man” as the patients sipped champagne and screamed encouragement.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“One day, Lisa Capaldini, a young intern in the AIDS ward, was saying good-bye to a patient named Gordon with whom she had grown close. Gordon was about to be discharged, but he was blind and dying, and Capaldini knew that she would never see him again. While she hovered over his bed, the intern began to cry. “And I thought, ‘That’s okay, he won’t know.’ Then I realized that my tears were dropping on his face. And I thought, ‘Busted.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Because if you left the straights to handle the party, it just wasn’t going to happen.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Bobbi Campbell—a boyishly handsome hospital nurse who led a second life as a drag queen nun (Sister Florence Nightmare) in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love