Gabby

Everyone in San Francisco is crazy. This is a city full of gorgeous beautiful women. This is a Freudian slip (I am writing, longing for a beautiful girl in St. Paul). I mean beautiful lunatics. There is a tangible sense of chaos and revolution; serpentine streets roll up and down like the back of some mythic ocean beast, the houses tilt crazily, are tattoos by the souls of residents living and dead; public transportation is a motley collection of colorful immigrants, trolleys from San Diego Boston and even Milan, all of which have only two speeds, a frantic, jolting breakneck pace through narrow streets and a shuddering stop that has, with its sense of relief, of release, of arrival, connotations of orgasm. This is a city swamped with hidden languages, one of which is sex, and they soak into the gaps in cement and in cracks souls until everything is a metaphor. If you are alarmed, dear Reader, it is only because San Francisco is a run-on sentence of a city that one can only describe with breathless, overflowing enthusiasm.
But in a city ruled by freaks, hierarchies remain, albeit in different flavors from Midwest brand of bigotry we know and love (or love to hate). There is queer power, yes, but the face of sexual liberation is queerly monolithic, monochrome, and even monotonous. Desire, in the people, the posters, the shops on every corner, is rooted in novelty, in the shock value of foot long dildos and plastic ball gags. The gleeful display of aggressive phallic energy seems, to a watchful observer, like a compensation for something; it feeds off of a sense of shame, since it is only by assuming these desires are shameful that flaunting them becomes so provocative. The sexuality seeps through the streets like the melting toxic plastic of cheap sex toys, and its name is capitalism, commodity, economy.
Isn’t sexual liberation supposed to be organic, isn’t queerness making room for real people and feelings, even (especially) when these are complicated? Why does it seem like they’ve taken one image, the token transgression of male homosexuality, and plastered it over everything along with the ubiquitous penis?
As much as I love the city, and the flamboyant, beautiful, passionate gay men that live here, I feel suffocated and terrified by this cannibalistic desire that blots out all other visions of queerness.



Gabby