Petrelis Files

Chronicle: SF Gay Rent-Boy Bar Closes Tonight

The Chronicle's gossip maven Leah Garhick reports that today is the last day and night of operations of this disreputable Polk Street institution.

Guess this means when the bartenders at one of the last rent-boy bars in town tonight announce "last call for alcohol," it really will be the last call for booze, and boys, at Kimo's!

So long, Kimo's, and thanks for the all the drunken, raunchy people and the times they enjoyed at your dive.

Your demise tonight is the end of an era for the Polkstrasse neighborhood, but many of us will remember the good times had at the bar and in the bathroom of Kimo's.

The SF Chronicle reports:

Kimo's on Polk Street, which opened in 1978 and is one of the oldest gay bars in town, is closing today.

Owner Kimo Cochran bought a house by the river in Guerneville and just decided it was time to close. There will be food and Champagne "and probably a lot of tears on my part," Cochran says.

And "does anyone know if great bars go to heaven?" e-mails Jim Schock upon the closing of the Washington Square Bar & Grill. "If there are no bars up there, I'm going to have to rethink dying."

And even smarty-pants college professors went to Kimo's. It definitely attracted a diverse crowd of men, and wayward women. This is excerpted from a profile on San Francisco State University human sexuality professor John DeCecco, and his long career, that appeared in May 2007 in the Chronicle:

De Cecco (pronounced duh-CHECK-o), is 82 now, a bit physically diminished but vigorous in his curiosities. He edits the Journal of Homosexuality, an academic peer-review journal that comes out eight times per year; is a member and sponsor of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society; and still finds huge fascination in the subject of sex -- its practices, its permutations, in particular the windows it provides into the human psyche.

But sex is more than an abstraction -- it's also an active pursuit. De Cecco doesn't date, per se, but frequents Polk Street, where he cruises for male hustlers and goes to Kimo's, a bar that caters to older men and rent boys. Most of the men he hires are in their 20s or early 30s, often homeless or living in fleabag hotels. Many of them use crystal meth or heroin.

It's the pursuit, the mystery of the man as yet unattained, unconquered, that motivates him. "It's going out on the street and seeing who's there, who's available, and meeting someone about whom you know nothing. And just having this very intimate act with a stranger. ... It's partly the unpredictability of what's going to happen."