San Francisco

Joe and I have been in San Francisco for a week. He lived here for many years; I visited maybe ten times. Life there has changed. Here are some examples:

We met with my friend Art and his wife Carol for breakfast near where we have been staying. Art's parents were friends with my parents before we were born, so we go way back. Carol suggested a new place. We were early, before work for Art and Carol, so there was not a full menu. The early menu featured five-dollar donuts and muffins, lavash bread with roasted vegetables and a possible egg, something with "fennellated butter." Not real food in my book. The people who came in were young, white and Asian people. groomed to look disheveled, but not really. Years ago, when Art asked me to go to a coffee shop in Haight-Ashbury with him, he asked me not to be shocked at the place. Everyone there was dressed for Halloween. It was July. In the past, when we stayed with Glenn, Joe's friend, we breakfasted at Java Beach, a funky place with bagels and oatmeal and pastries. The clientele were aging hippies, old lefties, young surfers and the tatooed and pierced denizens of the area. The beach in San Francisco is not the rich part of town; by reputation it is fogged in, cold and moldy.

We met with friends and relatives. The biggest complaints were about the cost of housing. My cousin Emily, who teaches at Stanford and her husband, an acupuncturist, are paying $2000 monthly for a one room guest house in Mountain View. Real estate is astronomical; The Bay Area Guardian and The San Francisco Chronicle note that renters in price-controlled apartments are being kicked out by unscrupulous landlords. The new people in town have been called "heartless, "overprivileged," "techies from Ohio with no idea what the values of the City are." Anyone who isn't filthy with money from their job at Google, Facebook, Twitter or some other hi-tech company is being pushed out of San Francisco. That's the narrative, anyway. I find it ironic that in West Virginia, any town would sell itself to attract young, educated hard-working people to the area. In San Francisco "techies" is a pejorative,  like "illegals" in Arizona, "Puerto Ricans" fifty years ago in New York, or for that matter "Jews" in the early twentieth- century. "Hordes" who are flooding our town, who dress funny, don't speak the language, and undermine our values. That's what I'm hearing.

We shared breakfast, lunch and dinner with friends. Two male couples gave us the same story. They are our age (late 50s into 60s) and are planning their retirement. Both couples are moving to Palm Springs in the next year or two. "We feel more comfortable there. There are gay people our age." All four are caring for elderly parents.

At Sha'ar Zahav (which means "Golden Gate" in Hebrew), San Francisco's venerable synagogue for LGBT people, we ran into a discussion of what the future will be. Their long-term rabbi is leaving, membership is declining, and there is a dispute about what to do. Some say there is no need for a special synagogue for LGBT people, with the mainstream Reform and Conservative synagogues much more accepting. One man told me "It's not fun like it used to be." That's probably true of a lot of gay life. Sha'ar Zahav started as a freewheeling group of social outcasts committed to Judaism. But the temple now has a professional staff, a building and a Sunday school. The free-wheeling people have grown up, or moved away, or had children, or died.

At one of our dinners, I suggested that Sha'ar Zahav declare itself "The Mission District Temple." A temple member was opposed, going on a rant about how gentrified the neighborhood was becoming, how "souless, cruel and uncaring" those people could be. She called them "bullies." But the temple needs money, and they have it. Maybe an outreach to liberal Jews, intermarried, gay or not, but living in the neighborhood, could save that temple. If it wants to be saved. If the members are open to change.

Some of our friends think change is good. The more conservative economically welcome the rebirth of neighborhoods. Those who know history just shrug when someone says, "Our neighborhood isn't what it used to be." Nothing is what it used to be.

I have only flashpoints of memories of San Francisco. I was there as a supervised teen, freezing in July in a T-shirt and shorts. In my twenties I indulged in some of the sexual excess of the times. In the mid-eighties, when I spent two weeks job training in San Francisco, I saw a handsome man on the Muni wearing gloves in warm weather. I could see he was not well, and I watched him struggle to walk up a hill after he got off the train. He filled me with sadness, and also fear. He might not have done anything I hadn't done.

Those of us who took the bait and married our boyfriends no longer hang out at the bars and baths. We feel left out of current culture, which would happen anywhere we went. We don't keep up like we used to, don't need to be in on the latest trend. Our generation, always young, died early. We are left mourning our friends who lost their life to AIDS. Joe's friends here are unwilling to move somewhere where they will have to fight for gay rights, as we do now in West Virginia. Palm Springs is warm, cheaper than San Francisco, and a gathering place for the remnants of our era.

Two stories. In one, we are on the N-Judah Muni train heading back to the coast where we are staying. Most people on the trains are young, not rich. There are people who work downtown, some oldsters and some down-and-out types. The train is late, overcrowded. One of the doors doesn't work. Many are standing in the aisles. With all the money in town, why isn't more spent on transit? Some of our friends blamed pensions and healthcare for the municipal budget problems, but what municipal worker on a pension can afford to live here? And yet, there was money to bring a yacht race to town.

We rented a car to drive to the Peninsula. We had to redo our plan and get a car earlier. A woman at Hertz downtown was helpful to us, but there was an issue about both of us driving. She needed my ID and credit card in addition to Joe's. But she stopped and asked "Are you two married?" "We are!" we said. "Then it's okay. I don't need any more documents."  We are not accepted as a couple in West Virginia, except among a close circle of friends. No one would help us because we are married. In that way, it does feel "at home" here in San Francisco.

It was great to reconnect with old friends, particularly for Joe, who met some of his San Francisco friends in college in the 1970s. But we don't really belong here any more, no matter how beautiful and how gay-friendly it is. It was fun to go to The Castro, the center of gay life in San Francisco, but there is nothing we need there. Time has passed us by. Joe's friends have moved on without us, and we are making our way in a different culture, somewhere else.