By Marke B.

WE QUEERS ARE always looking ahead. We eagerly latch onto newfangled gizmos like the Internet, digital film, fauxhawk haircuts, bias-cut jeans, and home-remixers in an effort to express our sexuality while advancing our politics. And for all the lip service about "honoring our past," we have a tendency to selectively edit out the more "unseemly" parts of it. Give us Phyl and Del for the front pages – but please keep the Crisco and poppers to yourself.

Our future, however, seems to be a mess. In one year's time, we've gone from holding worldwide pep rallies celebrating a fulfilled destiny of legalized sodomy and same-sex marriage to fighting a media barrage that's laid bare our apparent addictions to crystal meth, unsafe sex, and online hookups. In response, it seems that much of gay club culture is attempting to "sanitize" any overt queer sexual expression by burying it beneath a storm of heterosexual video imagery coupled with the same old remixes of Cher.

So what are we to make of the sudden emergence of a wildly popular DJ and promoter whose photocopied flyers feature a dancing, Baby Jane'd Bette Davis superimposed on a grainy Super-8 double-dicking? Whose sets mix early-'80s downtown NYC no-wave and disco obscurities with the synthetic Hi-NRG sounds of San Francisco's fabled cha-cha palace the Trocadero Transfer? Who worships at the keys of pre-Fairlight synthesizers but refuses to log on to the World Wide Web?

One smart sissy star, that's what. And his name is Bus Station John.

Harnessing the current electroclash vogue to channel gay historical dissonance into a dance-floor confrontation with the whole of our past, DJ Bus Station John pulls no punches with his disco politics. Aiming to re-create the slutty, sleazy, pre-AIDS bathhouse era with his music, his visuals, and his vibe at regular club nights the Tubesteak Connection (at Aunt Charlie's) and the Rod (Underground SF), he reanimates a lost, necessary part of our culture too often buried in shame and desperate yearning. Bus Station John dares to fete the heyday of truck-stop, bathhouse, and tearoom encounters, honoring it as the often fun-filled grassroots resistance movement it was, the only form of communal validation then available for many gay men.

But for those of us whose musical cerebellum often overshadows our pier-sized libidos, Bus Station John also reprazents. His mystical crate-digging layers homocore fetishism for the marginal over a roots ideal, with a generous nod to the same underground analog railroad that techno gods Derrick May and Carl Craig and early-Eurodisco enthusiasts Dimitri from Paris and Gilles Peterson have ridden to DJ superstardom. (Bus Station John would cringe at these contemporary comparisons, but, rather charmingly, his rage-filled lumping of all recent dance music permutations into a single "house music all night wrong" category is what fuels his creative lust for anachronistic vengeance.)

After years of suffering through that Great Erasure of queer dance quirks known as circuit music, we finally have a vinyl archaeologist of our own, one who nails the spirit of DIY activism in his stacks yet keeps the floors packed. The great gay ghost of Larry Levan may be double-parked in Paradise Garage, but down here in the queer underground, Bus Station John's still taking the free-love message to the streets. Revenge of the clones, meet the return of the queen.

Bay Guardian: You seem to be in direct rebellion against a gay community of methed-up, apathetic circuit queens on steroids looking for the latest anonymous Internet encounter. Is that safe to say?

Bus Station John: I don't see what I do as conscious rebellion, just my natural reaction to the steady decline of gay culture and nightlife over the last 20 years. I'm old enough, at 44, to have tasted the end of the golden age, the pre-AIDS era that I celebrate in the music I play – specifically the late '70s and early '80s, when some fantastic dance music was being produced. While Stonewall had definitely flung open the closet door, there was still that exciting sense of being a sexual outlaw, moving on a special plane apart from the mainstream.

Now we've gone from being a unique underground subculture to a marketing niche. Just check out how the archetypal gay male has changed over the last couple of decades. First we had the Castro Clone: the mustachioed, Levi-clad, free-loving, crotch-popping, hanky- and keyring-sporting icon of the old school. He was a stylistic expression of sexual freedom and identity. His current replacement? An overly preened and pumped label whore working the latest pinhead haircut smeared with "product," and undermining all those hours at the gym with a pair of hideous insect eyebrows better suited to Marlene Dietrich. Hmmm ... maybe I am rebelling after all!

BG: That certainly seems to be the gay man's current media image, but how does it relate to gay bar culture, which can be viewed historically as a reaction against the outside world?

BSJ: A visit to a gay bar today is less the sexual cruising odyssey of yesteryear than a visit to a well-lit aviary full of retail-bred magpies and their chirpy gal pals from the office. All eyes are fixed on relentlessly heterosexual video images of hoochies grinding their collective jugs and cameltoes into the camera lens, their meager talents propped up by an army of dancers as they frantically feign "havin' a par-tay." Why are we watching this in a gay bar, anyway? Suppose we pull the plug and look at each other. Now that would be revolutionary.

BG: Is that what inspired you to do your own thing?

BSJ: When you know how much better things have been, I think it's hard not to imagine how much better they can be. That's why I finally decided to create my own scene. I was tired of having no place to go after the dot-commoners and greedy landlords blanded out San Francisco – and even more tired of complaining about it.

My nights are audiovisual tributes to the old-school gay demimonde, when our culture was at its creative, aesthetic, and sexual peak. There was a short but amazing window of time when incredibly imaginative, engaging, and sometimes crazy electronic music was coming out of New York, San Francisco, Europe, and even Montreal, made principally by and for gay men.

These songs were the result of many hours of sweat over primitive, often homemade, synthesizers without the use of computer software or samplers. They transcended the disco clichés of the day by featuring one-of-a-kind hooks and arrangements, often paired with delightfully idiosyncratic vocals. As a DJ, my mission has been to rescue these gems from oblivion and re-create the special vibe of the gay bars, discotheques, and bathhouses of the day.

BG: So you're basically using electronic music not as a path to the unknown, technological future, but as a window onto a utopian, mostly forgotten fleshpot past. That's all well and good within the confines of your parties, but how can that translate to a wider shift within the community itself? In other words, how do you think your clubs can change the gay world?

BSJ: I'm not so sure about changing the world, but I think the parties I've created have definitely filled a void in SF's nightlife. The Tubesteak Connection in particular attracts fags, dykes, and trannies who are typically broke, creative, urban savvy, scruffy chic, and looking for love, sex, and kindred spirits. They're over the mediocrity of the status quo, they've been starving for something different for a long time, and I love turning them on to this great music they might not have otherwise known existed. It's part of their gay heritage.

I also want to get the word out to "men of a certain age" that you don't have to be young and hip to enjoy what I do – though it does get pretty loud!

In a sense I think I'm providing a musical bridge between two distinct queer generations, an emotionally important connection that was decimated both by AIDS and the lust to harness our "demographic" 's spending power to the popular market. By restoring this connection, I'm hoping to inform and empower us to make our sexuality our own again. I hope for a world where freaks can be freaks – and can proudly walk the streets of San Francisco again without feeling any pressure to fit into the latest fashionable "scene" shoved down our throats by whatever liquor or "lifestyle" ads are currently barraging our community.

BG: About AIDS: You must know that by bringing to the fore the bathhouse era, you're forcing a new generation to contemplate a segment of the gay past they may view as "dirty," in the sense that many young gay men erroneously see that particular historical period as the "cause" of AIDS. What's your take on some of the controversy you've stirred up because you champion the men and the music of that time?

BSJ: About 95 percent of what I spin is on used vinyl. Sometimes I look at my records and wonder about their previous owners. Many were gay men – DJs and disco-lovers whose music ended up in thrift stores and bargain bins, their collections broken up and scattered like ashes to the wind. Sometimes I find names stamped or handwritten on the labels. I think of these men and try to honor them. I believe part of them is resurrected every time I play their songs.

You know, those men who are no longer with us, the first to succumb to the epidemic – they didn't know what they were dealing with. We on the other side of the first wave of AIDS know better. Caring for yourself and your gay brothers enough to get rubbers and use them – that's hot. Rocket science it is not.

BG: Are you finding that people are glomming on to the message in the music of your clubs?

BSJ: Well, initially I envisioned my first club, the Tubesteak Connection, as a sleazy venue for alternaqueer men to cruise and pick each other up at – which of course it still is. But the comment I hear most from newcomers is "I had so much fun" or "I love your music," which is incredibly gratifying and lovely, so I adjusted my vision a bit to up the inclusivity factor. Now we're an internationally known nightspot for queers of all genders who get it. And I think they really are getting it.

My favorite evenings happen when every sort of San Franciscan is represented, from the electroclash kid to the disco granny, the trannyfag to the aging drag, the milquetoast accountant to the incognito TV personality. And I love that drugs aren't a big part of my parties. People get high enough on the music, the vibe, each other. When everyone's dancing enthusiastically to anachronistic rarities from a gay past they're rediscovering together, that's the icing on the cake.

Straight people aren't unwelcome, provided they have a clue. But if they're just out slumming 'cause they heard it was the trendy thing and they're looking to be entertained by the latest queer minstrel show, this isn't the place for them. The same goes for Queer as Folk Castro queens with their cell phones glued to their ears. I'd rather retire the club than see it co-opted into "the Bar on Turk Street."

BG: What do you do about the people who come but just don't "get it"?

BSJ: Oh, believe me, I have a stash of secret weapon music I can whip out that will ensure they flee back to from whence they came.

Marke B. is a big fag. He writes the biweekly Super Ego clubs column for the Bay Guardian and sleeps around a lot. Flame him at superego@sfbg.com.

Where to find Bus Station John

Frisco Disco vs. the Tubesteak Connection Sat/25, 10 p.m.-2 a.m., Arrow Bar, 10 Sixth St., SF. $5. (415) 255-7920.

Lips Stick Sun/26, noon-8 p.m., Soluna Cafe and Lounge, 272 McAllister, SF. $5. (415) 621-2200.

Mikes on Bikes (bicycle Pride Parade contingent) Sun/26, parade kickoff 10:30 a.m., Market Street, SF. (415) 905-8854 (24-hour info and preregistration hotline).

The Rod Second Saturdays, 10 p.m.-2 a.m., Underground SF, 424 Haight, SF. $5. (415) 864-7386.

The Tubesteak Connection Thursdays, 10 p.m.-2 a.m., Aunt Charlie's Lounge, 133 Turk, SF. $4. (415) 441-2922.