A Love Letter to San Francisco’s Freaks and Weirdos

The St. Stupid Day Parade in San Francisco in 2023.

This appeared in the literary magazine The Dreams I Dreamt: A Letter to San Francisco. You can download it for FREE right here.

By Carol Queen

[A note from unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. I am standing here with respect and only because of the stewardship of those who walked here before the colonizers came.]

I love a good fruit and nut mix. A great snack! And also a longtime right-wing slur for San Francisco’s human capital—the je ne sais quois of our town that puts movement and culture into the glorious setting and edgy future of this city at the margin of the continent. I was always a fan of the Golden Gate Bridge, but I came here for the people and the culture. Didn’t you?

If you didn’t, you might have come here for a job. (I came here to find my people and step into my future and my possibility, which is not always the same thing.) Jobs in SF looked a little different when I arrived: I met my wealthy neighbors by catering soirees in their beautifully-appointed homes and doing sex work. (You can learn a lot in both contexts, for those of you who have never partaken. Please tip your servers and anyone whose work facilitates your pleasure.)

This was back in the days when Silicone Valley was IN Silicone Valley, before it marched north and took over. I scowled as the ‘90s progressed and a new wave of tech dreamers began to infiltrate. Those enormous blank buses infested the town the way driverless cars do now, the ones that used to carry the workers down the peninsula each day as SF morphed into a Tech Bedroom Community. Such a very different kind of bedroom community than I belonged to! I always fantasized about getting lots of those brightly-colored kids’ letter and number fridge magnets to stick on the sides so we could run up to the bus at the stoplight and reconfigure the magnets into haiku and benign conscious-raising insults as those buses carried tech viruses up the 101 to a susceptible town. Meanwhile, other kinds of buses carried our first wave of departing artist friends out to Portland and Detroit.

These were the days when my favorite urban crimes were sawed-off parking meters and torched Xmas trees on the street, the latter a seasonal joy from December 26 til, I don’t know, sometime after Valentine’s Day. And despite the outrage on NextDoor, there were plenty of ongoing irritating crimes back then, constant car break-ins, and scary armed robberies just like there were during the pandemic. Cities, crime, this is not a new relationship, grasshoppers. 

During the next tech wave, as the tech bros began edging me out for tables at local restaurants, I developed a new hobby. This was most fun and effective at the high-end places we went to celebrate milestones, like book advances so small that dinner ate up at least half the funds. It emerged from an actual rant I organically launched into one night at Absinthe (where Robert and I used to be the youngest patrons and the only ones covered in cat hair, and now are invariably some of the oldest). Seeing myself surrounded, I very loudly demanded, “Have they never read any dystopian fiction?” I was thinking like a futurist (long a non-remunerative side hustle of mine), predicting that the proximity of a company that reportedly needed a motto like “Don’t Be Evil” might lead to problems eventually. 

I did say it loudly. Tech bro heads swiveled. Love a little hint of dopamine! 

But the joke was on me when Musk arrived, haha, because he was clear proof that they had—and found it as aspirational as that coldhearted shit Ayn Rand wrote. I just saw my first Tesla pick-up a fortnight ago and honey, that is a) not a pick-up, I am from the country; and b) one fucking fashy* vehicle. How to parse that we live in a time when people want to look like that driving down the road?

*I hope you know that is not short for “fashionable,” ahem.

Dystopian fiction bloomed in tent cities as the rents went up. It’s a real shame Fox News can’t connect the dots on that, but those aren’t the kind of dots they were built to connect in the right-wing lab they were spun up in.

I was thinking like a futurist (long a non-remunerative side hustle of mine), predicting that the proximity of a company that reportedly needed a motto like “Don’t Be Evil” might lead to problems eventually.

Speaking of waves, I came here because of past ones, and we must never forget that in this beautiful and complicated place, we are always in a wave. I didn’t know much yet about sex work’s early days here, though I would learn. I missed the Beats (though I made a beeline to Vesuvio when I arrived, trying to imbibe that history in glasses of red wine). I was way too young for the Summer of Love, though you can bet I took notes which began to make more sense years later. I only began visiting without my parents late in the 1970s (Mom left her heart here in 1952 or so): My first SF Pride was the summer before Harvey Milk was assassinated.

Oh, you people think things are rough here now? 

I was called to The City By The Bay by: Life Magazine photo-essays about Haight-Ashbury, Jack Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, readings from my student-taught Gay Studies class at the University of Oregon (my classmate Randy Shilts moved here first and made some waves), vintage movies and AM radio:

We built this city

San Francisco—you got me [This song mentions Folsom Street!] 

Old child, young child feel all right on a warm San Francisco night 

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

San Francisco, open your golden gates

This is the city that welcomes emigrants whether they come for gold, COYOTE or The Cockettes. This is the place where Scarlet Harlot held down the fort when Margo St. James moved to France. This is the town where Joani Blank looked around and decided that more women needed a place for vibrators. (And where subsequent generations busted that binary to bits.) San Francisco invented the Folsom Street Fair. Assless chaps!! I hope you appreciate where you are!

Sisters Risque of the Sissyteen Chapel, Sister Viva L’Amour, and Sister Rhoda Kill of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

This peerless environment gave the world The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and they made me and Robert saints… stick around and serve the community and perhaps they’ll make you one too.

Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart, you just gotta poke around. 

Wave after wave of people came here for San Francisco. If you came here for a job, you know in your heart you would have gone someplace else to get it. (Indeed, half your co-workers may have fled to Tahoe, Bali, or Austin the minute quarantine started.) And if that’s the case, you might not even be in the real San Francisco at all. (Beware venting your spleen on NextDoor when what you really feel is nostalgia for the place you escaped in order to come here to pan for gold in the Silicone Rush.) But it’s not too late! If you’re going to stay here, c’mon over to the deep end of the pool. Here, you can be yourself. Here, you can make your art. Here, you can find your people (even if they mainly connect at Burning Man. That’s a start). 

Oh and the least you can do is make this a bedroom community of your own. If you’re not having better sex here than you ever have (if you wish to have sex at all), I urge you to sink deeper into the space all the sex people (my generation, your generation, those who came before us) have made to facilitate it. Read some books, get some toys, explore your orgasm, find the right sex-positive therapist. Meditate on enthusiastic consent. Among so many other things, this city was made to help you untangle your shame. 

In this beautiful and complicated city, we are always in a wave, and there will be another one coming soon enough. The trick is to burrow in, hang on, contribute in any way you can, don’t forget the past, help shape the future. Welcome home.