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Where Have All the Angry Gay Activists Gone?
by Tim Vollmer /08/07/08
Something strange happened in May. I began to see happy gay men and lesbians nearly every morning. The pace picked up in June, with more and more smiling gays everywhere. The reason of course was the historic California Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage--and the flurry of news reports that followed. Every morning the papers had front page stories and photos of beaming gay couples, and all day long television news shows were full of gay men and lesbians holding hands, hugging, and heading down the aisle with unrestrained glee.
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Four Wilde Years
by Alfonso Chinea /05/29/08
About four years ago, on a cool day in summer (just a hair’s breadth above freezing, as I recall) a flyer posted in a bookstore window caught my eye. I don’t remember the exact wording, something about “Wilde Chats” and a “men’s discussion group.” I remember the image of Oscar Wilde staring bemusedly out onto the world, the kind of shot that made Oscar look as if held a cigarette holder, even though he didn’t. My initial positive reaction quickly gave way to cynicism. A gay men’s group that was NOT about recovery, co-dependency, disease, sex, politics or various combinations of the five? Was this possible?
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Cohousing Creates Community
by Alan VanEss /04/17/08
This is my expression of thanks to the gay community of the San Francisco Bay area. It’s not a simple story to share, but here are some essentials of the tale. As a man shaped by Midwestern culture, I accepted the heterosexual imperative to fall in love with an amazing woman, to marry and to have children. In such a conservative society, I had seen these as my only viable choices in life and relationships. It was a satisfying life in many ways, with an incredible, lovely and soulful woman and with our two beautiful children.
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Twenty-Somethings Seek Something More
by
Alex Sarmiento
/04/03/08
The first time I set foot in the Castro was a cold, wet, and rainy Thursday afternoon in January 1996. I was fourteen years old. I had left James Denman Middle School and taken the M train. Normally, I would have gotten off at the stop next to my house. Not that day. I went past it, and twenty minutes later, I had arrived in the Castro.
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Helms, Hate and Me
by Jim Patterson /03/20/08
When U.S. Senator Jesse Helms attacked me in a Senate speech in 1994, I felt my world had come to an end. I was out to my family and friends, but I wasn’t ready for Helms’ vicious CSPAN performance. While working as a Foreign Service Officer in Washington, I was appointed to manage the Agriculture Department’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Employment Program.
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Hugs, Hi’s and Hello’s Build Community
by Michael Cooley /02/28/08
When I first heard about the San Francisco Gay Men’s Community Initiative’s “Say Hi to a Gay Guy” campaign, I thought it was too cute and too simple to really work. But actually, I’m the embodiment of it. I am one of those guys who love to say “hi” to folks on the street. I even know some of the regular homeless guys by name. I realized a long time ago that I had to be the one who puts myself out there, and my sense of personal community is enriched by these simple interactions.
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A Man on a Mission
by Wayne Schotten /02/14/08
Who hasn’t experienced the let down after obtaining a hard-won goal and asked, “What do I do now?” We are powerful creatures when we have a clearly defined mission, but become complacent and distracted when we have achieved some part of our objectives. That is not entirely bad, of course, since we do have a right to enjoy the benefits of our victories. Otherwise, why bother to fight battles in the first place?
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Let Them Make Their Own Revolution
by Greg Rowe /01/31/08
I'm a 46-year-old white, proud gay man and I live in the Castro. Thirty years ago, that would have been a bold thing to write. Today, it’s almost banal.
I work with a lot of young people in my volunteer time. There are occasions when I want to yell, "Don't you see what's happening politically!? For God's sake do something about it!"
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Walk Away or Stay Connected: It's Not Crystal Clear
by Buzz Bense /01/17/08
Having lived through the 80s in San Francisco, and been here during the most horrible years of the AIDS epidemic, I’ve witnessed some really tough challenges to our gay community, challenges that for the most part we have met, and which have changed our community and our city. In recent years, widespread crystal meth use and addiction have created a new challenge.
And whereas taking care of our friends with AIDS and confronting a complacent government brought our community together, the issues of crystal have created deep divisions.
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The Swish Beneath the Swagger : Liberating Our Queer Selves
by Brent Calderwood /01/03/08
Having grown up in the Bay Area, I’ve witnessed many of my gay brothers metamorphose over time. Now 32 and having been out and politically active in the gay community here for half of my life, I often run into the skinny, soft boys I knew from queer youth groups in Hayward, Berkeley and Oakland, newly transformed into hulking Adonises.
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Only Connect!
by Lewis Nightingale /09/20/07
I’ve belonged to many communities. And yet, the feelings that go along with community – connection, fellowship, support, belonging – have often been missing for me. So I wonder about the difference between being in community and the feeling of community.
Now, more than at any other time in my life, I feel a strong sense of connection. What’s different now from the way things were before?
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"Brokies" Find Community Online and In-Person
by PetenTannen /09/13/07
If I had been told two years ago that I would have many new friends locally, across the U.S., and around the world; spend many hours each night on an internet message board; and fly to five gatherings in one year – all because I saw a movie – I would have said, “You’re crazy. ”But it’s all true.
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Coming Home and Finding Community
by Les Wright /08/30/07
It has been two years since I moved back to San Francisco . Living here now, it is impossible for me not to notice the radical remaking of the city. Post-dotcom-bust San Francisco is a boomtown again, reminiscent of post-Wall Berlin . An entirely new 21st-century urban high-density city is rising.
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Our Community, At a Glance
by Brad Vanderbilt /08/16/07
There’s nothing sexier than a man who knows his own sexual power. If you’ve ever been to the Eagle Beer Bust you may know what I mean. I love that weekly event because it is so often filled with men who know their sexual power. As you squeeze through the testosterone-filled crowd, you see every size, shape and shade of sexy San Franciscan.
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Waking Up to Gay Adulthood
by Terry Rosson /07/26/07
I've been doing a lot of waking up lately. Three months after attending the “Gay Men and Midlife Awakening: Rites of Passage into the Second Half of Life” workshop in Oakland , the eye-opening journey I went on is still percolating. The major thrust of the weekend was a focus on “gay adulthood.” As gay men, most of us think of ourselves as either young or old
(at least that's my experience).
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Younger and Older: Out of Touch, Out of Sight
by Doug Sebesta /07/05/07
Most older gay men that I know and work with say that they don't see many younger gay men around and have no idea where they are, who they are and what they do. But many of these older men and I – I’m 51– feel a real desire and commitment for younger men to be part of our world and part of a larger multigenerational gay community.
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Seeing HIV in a New Light: Sharing Our Stories Builds Community
by Rodger Brooks /06/21/07
Many of us who survived the first wave of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and are now living meaningful, productive lives, indeed even thriving, can be role models for younger and more recently diagnosed persons.
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Do We Still Need a Gay Community?
by Tim Vollmer/06/14/07
Frank, a friend of mine from Berlin , has been visiting me in San Francisco nearly every year since the early 1990s. Last year he surprised me by declaring, “I’m sorry but gay San Francisco is boring.” When I pressed him further for details, this is what he said: “There is nothing to do. Where is everyone?
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Finding Community at Wilde Chats
by Alfonso Chinea /05/31/07
About three years ago, I was a year into mourning; my lover had died suddenly in our bed from a heart attack (his first). We had been together seven years, and I truly believed that I would be with this man for the rest of my life. My soul shattered.
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Divided or United: Can We Move Beyond Poz/Neg?
by Emil Friend /03/29/07
Communities have always been divided, factionalized, continually negotiating their interior as well as exterior boundaries. Humanity is organized formally by nation-state, by territory, and then by city, town, village, even by personal property. We are then divided subjectively by religion, by age, by gender, by lifestyle, and (politically correct or not) by pigmentation of our skin.
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Reclaiming a Lost Future: The Challenges of HIV at Midlife
by Paul Heidt /02/15/07
What can you expect to hear about life goals from middle-aged gay men living with HIV/AIDS? We’re not going to recapture the glory of our youth nor, for many, even the vigor or stamina we once imagined could be ours in our middle age. High blown notions of fame or fortune or lofty status we may have carried from childhood into our invincible twenties are largely irrelevant now.
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Three-way Or Not Three-way? That Is The Question
by Alfonso Chinea /01/11/07
With the question of gay marriage being debated ad infinitum throughout the country, an aspect vital to that issue has been mostly ignored. Think for a moment about all the marriages you have observed (gay or straight), and focus on the ones you consider positive; what do all these relationships have in common?
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A Positive / Negative Divide?
by Tom Moon /12/28/06
Is there a divide between HIV positive and HIV-negative gay men? Have we become two separate communities? Some men think so.
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Confessions of a Craigslist Addict
by H. Edward Taylor /12/14/06
I began running personal ads in the BAR and Bay Times in 1999, after I turned 50. My partner of seven years had died the year before and I had moved to Marin. There aren’t any gay bars in Marin and I didn’t care to drive into the City all the time to fi nd men. While I met a number of nice men and had a few short-term relationships, my hope was that some day my next long-term partner would come through the door.
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Through the Eyes of a Stranger
by Sascha Facius /12/01/06
I am a 26-year-old gay man, born in Berlin , Germany , and currently living in Cologne , where I am a university student working towards a degree in social education. During this final year of my education, I have just completed a 5-week internship with the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH), AIDS Office – HIV Prevention.
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The Father Shore How the “Gayby Boom” Is Changing Gay Culture
by Rick Loftus /11/02/06
KGO anchor Pete Wilson’s idiotic remark calling the birth of Supervisor Bevan Dufty and his friend Rebecca Goldfader’s baby Sidney a “travesty” resulted in a firestorm which brought the reality of gay parenting into sharp public focus. Once, parenthood might have seemed to gay men like an exotic tourist destination across the ocean—fun to visit for a brief time, like my recent “Dad for a Day” with my 5-year-old niece Emma Rose, but not home.
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Of Foley, Old Fags And Chicken
by Buzz Bense /10/20/06
The media feeding frenzy of the last weeks over the Mark Foley sex scandal has confi rmed what everybody knows—not about politicians, but about older gay men. Everyone knows that every gray-haired gay man is lusting— overtly or covertly—over boy flesh.
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Community, Intimacy & the Art of Conversation
by Rodger Brooks /09/28/06
Once upon a time, from the Village in the East to Lalaland in the West, magical kingdoms beckoned to a generation of fair young princes. Multitudes of these magnifi cent boymen harkened to a siren song, enticing each to abandon the confi nes of stifl ing hamlets for the freedom of shining cities and to escape the prisons of repressed psyches for the joy of liberation.
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Through the Looking Glass
by Donald Lovejoy /09/21/06
One of the first things I do when I get up in the morning is look in the mirror. Most days I like what I see well enough. However, what I see in the mirror and what people see when they look at me doesn’t tell the whole story.
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Queer in SF, Asian in SF Is Easy. Queer Asian? Not So Much.
by Efren Bose /09/07/06
For those of us who identify as queer Asian men, San Francisco should be a welcoming place. It’s the only city in the mainland United States where the largest ethnic group is Asian and where you’re able to see a lot of out, happy, queer Asians walking around, not just in the gay neighborhoods, but in many of our ethnic neighborhoods like the Mission, the Sunset, the Tenderloin, the Richmond and Chinatown.
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Protecting My Holy Land from Terrorists
by Barry Emanuel Zeve /08/24/06
The screen at the Castro Theater is my Wailing Wall. How many times have I sat before it and cried? That theater is my temple; it's the center of my spiritual life, where I meet my friends and pray in my own special way for understanding and acceptance in a world so hateful of gays. San Francisco is my Jerusalem , my "city of peace" as is the Hebrew meaning of the name.
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Invincible Forties?
by Joey Terranova /08/17/06
It’s been two years and three months since I was diagnosed HIV positive, one day before my forty-fourth birthday. Nothing could have prepared me for the roller coaster ride I was about to embark on. One thing I’d always taken pride in was my health; this would be the beginning of my surrender into the hands of the medical world, a truly foreign place for someone who hadn’t been to a doctor in almost two decades.
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The Rush of Judgment
by A. Chinea /08/03/06
I am judgmental about all sorts of things, from art to zoos, and about many of the people in our community. I’m fine with that. But I realize that many other gay men are not fine with that. Why not ask ourselves whether we’re hurting ourselves collectively by not judging?
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METH: SILENCE = DEATH
by Richard Broussard /07/27/06
Last night I went to the Castro expecting to bitch about my ex-boyfriend's ongoing struggles with that monster meth and how his mood swings, drug-induced psychosis and paranoia (not to mention the dreaded "crystal dick") deeply affected me and ultimately killed any hope of our having a relationship. Covertly I looked out the corner of my eye at faces in the Rec Center for signs of battle fatigue in the others who showed up for this ad hoc community meeting for friends, partners and buddies of tweakers.
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Is Romance Dead? Crystal Methamphetamine and the Social Interactions of Gay Men in San Francisco
by Aaron Cohen /07/13/06
There’s been a lot of talk about methamphetamine use among gay men in San Francisco over the past year. Many people have labeled crystal the “new gay epidemic.” Most men either strongly agree or strongly disagree with this belief, and it seems that there’s a real split between them by age.
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A Big Boy Finds Big Problems In SF Queer Community
by Blue Budha /06/22/06
Quite a few people believe, like I once did, that what binds so many of us together is being part of the LGBTIIQ community. Well, sometimes that is not enough. There are many incidents in my life that have taught me this and I would like to share three recent San Francisco memories with you.
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Being Different and Fitting In
by David Cameron /06/15/06
I can’t believe I’ll turn 60 next year. I’m amazed I’ve lived this long and survived my life as a queer person of sorts. It has never been an easy journey; in fact, it’s been very difficult, being different and trying to fit in, not only in the two-sex/two-gender binary system at large, but also in the ever-evolving gay culture.
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30somethings: The "Invisible Generation Looks for Community in Each Other
by Mark Vogel /06/01/06
Eighteenth and Castro (which a recent New Yorker article dubbed “perhaps the gayest address on earth” is, in all senses of the word, a climate – a feel, a look, a sense. This leads many of us to use “Castro” as an adjective: the “Castro scene” or a “Castro clone,” or we just say “That is so Castro.”
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Striving to Thrive in SF!
by Will Boemer /05/11/06
I am what has been called “a survivor” -- and a long-term one at that! Along with many other San Francisco gay men, I have survived living with AIDS for almost twenty years! But I'm not going to describe my years of treatment and issues with HIV/AIDS, since that has been “done to death.”
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SPARKS
by Doug Sebesta /04/13/06
Most of us think of ourselves as members of a “gay community.” Certainly, the rest of the world likes to lump us all together as “the gays,” as if we are all part of one organized group.
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