A Tale of Three Cities

[Aaron alerts us to a gayblogger writing contest that HomoMojo is throwing on the subject of What Home Means To Me. $50 will be awarded to the winner's favorite charity; my chosen dot-org is Equality California. The following may or may not be anyone's idea of a contest winner, but it's absolutely me.]

I didn't mean to sound like a matronly realtor featuring a blue blazer, a colorful scarf and an artfully tinted ash-blond hairdo, but I couldn't hold back. When I asked myself what home means to me, I couldn't help but answer "Location, location, location." I'm lucky to have spent just about my entire life in three of California's most beautiful places. Their size range - small, medium, and large - matches the life stages during which I've lived in each one.

I'd be remiss if I didn't start by telling you that I was born in yet a fourth California city, one also full of history, beauty, and tourists. But because Dad left the Navy within a year of my birth, and because we immediately left San Diego for points north, I don't have much to say about that city. My first hometown was and is Sonoma, that little historic square piece of quaint in the middle of the wine country. California got its start there with the Bear Flag Revolt, as did the state's commercial wine industry, introduced by that faux nobleman, "Count" Agoston Haraszthy.

I remember Sonoma as the hick town with a little something extra. If you've visited, you probably left with an impression of a place like Carmel, inescapably trapped in a state of Boutique. In my imagination, that's a relatively recent thing, and when I visit, I can't help but see the town that lives under the cutesy layers, the town that had a hundred-year-old hardware store on the Plaza where locals actually shopped. The town of pickup trucks and chewing tobacco. The town where I had to stretch my imagination to the limit to begin to construct an identity out of those now-cliche feelings of being "different."

I imagine that kids growing up in big cities, even in the '70s, had some exposure to "gayness," something to rebel against and maybe, secretly and tentatively, to emulate. Not so in the sticks: "gay" was an insult, a term vaguely meaning "lame" or "stupid" ("Man, that's so gay"), and my heart sank when it was first applied to me in about the second grade or so: there was no doubt in my mind that, whatever it actually meant, it was true.

I had one short, blazing, secret affair in high school, but until then, and from then until I went away to college, what I learned about being gay came from outside of Sonoma. Movies, newspapers and magazines, and one memorable trip with my parents to see Annie at San Francisco's Orpheum Theatre on a day that happened to coincide with an early Pride parade...these were my cues. Sonoma, as much as I loved it and drank in its stories about itself, was, as far as I could tell at the time, hermetically sealed off from these things. (Even after several Boy Scout camping trips there, I was completely clueless about the Russian River area as a gay getaway until I left Sonoma County!)

At 18 I left home and began attending the University of California, Santa Barbara. S.B. is quite possibly the most "California" of California cities. The palm trees and beaches, the white stucco buildings and red-tile roofs, the casually displayed wealth. The utterly beautiful boys and men! It was in this dreamlike idea of a place that I launched myself into adulthood (and adult queerdom). Whether I was jealously hoarding my "bisexuality" while living in the dorms, attending the young men's group on campus, or venturing into the town's few bars after turning 21, here was where I took those first steps.

Santa Barbara's insularity and image-consciousness offered a great stage on which to put on my early gay performances: to wallow in inadequacy next to the more gorgeous, wealthy, and wanted; to move on to popular ("I know everyone at the bar...") and then notorious ("...and I've slept with them all"), and finally to be bored with it all. I learned to have sex; to make most of the best friends I'll ever have; to get into and get out of unrequited love; to stride confidently onto a nude beach; to be an OK boyfriend; and to hold down a job.

Nine years down there was enough and too much, so in 1996, I moved where I always had a feeling I'd end up: San Francisco. I've loved this city since before sexuality was an issue. I'd crossed the Golden Gate Bridge so many times as a child that it really did just become the way to get to the airport or to my parents'. I'd almost chosen to attend S.F. State instead of UCSB (how different life would have been!), and by my last year in Santa Barbara, I was visiting the Bay Area at least once a month. It was inevitable, even if I hadn't fallen so totally under the spell cast by Tales of the City. (And Armistead Maupin has a lot to answer for.)

San Francisco is where it all got really complicated, really fast! I lived in a dingey apartment in the Mission, I got naughty in some unbelievable bars South of Market, I met and fell in love with my longest-term boyfriend to date. There was abject poverty and rare periods of money. There were intoxicants! There were fights and hilarity and silence and sex clubs and travel. I skated on the edge of the dot-com boom and I didn't even own a computer.

My old regime began to fall apart at about the same time the dot-coms started to fall apart. I got out of commercial property management and into a public-interest law school. I discovered I have HIV. John plunged into despair; I couldn't help him out of it, and instead of letting myself go down with him, I left. I spent a lot of time in despair anyway, and tried frantically to escape it in all the usual ways. San Francisco offers such a full menu of escape options that my imagination and my stamina were hard-pressed to try them all.

And finally, lately, I seem not be despairing quite so much. The thing about San Francisco is that you can do and be anything here. You can drown in your own undertow, and the city will help you do that, gladly. Or you can pull yourself up with tons of help from your friends, and thar she blows, spuming opportunity. I've just about decided to see what those opportunities might amount to. (Don't hold me to that...) I still find it difficult to find and hang on to hope, and there are still some monumental messes to clean up, but it can be done. Whether it will be done... But believing that it's possible is an improvement, don't you think?

Sonoma, Santa Barbara, San Francisco. Tall, grande, venti. Sabrina, Kelly, Jill. Baby, Mama, and Papa Bear. Threes, and multiples of three: I lived my first 18 years in Sonoma, then nine in S.B., and now nine in S.F. Each one, and all of them, have been where I've become and been myself, and that sounds to me like a good definition of home.

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