Gay Pride is like Christmas–totally depressing. I want to hide from the world. I’m walking down Post Street on the Friday before Pride, like I’m going to the Mechanic’s Institute except I’m not going to the Mechanic’s Institute, I’m walking to the Ferry Building, but anyway I walk down this street all the time and I don’t usually feel particularly self-conscious, no more than usual, but today it feels like everyone’s looking at me differently, as if they think I’m a gay tourist here for Pride. They look at me knowingly, some with a smirk, some with disdain, some with desire. I scowl at all of them equally. I’m just a faggot who lives here, okay!? They think my purple belt is in celebration of Pride, as if.
I hate the Giants, have I told you that before? That’s why I should have known that the guy at Nob Hill Theatre wearing the Giants hat was total scum. I mean I knew, I knew, girl, but I did it anyway. That’s what the Nob Hill Theatre does to me, it puts me in confined spaces with hideous men who can only pretend to fuck me, it’s where I suck dicks that I have no interest in, it’s where I try to find the fun in the misery.
Thankfully, perhaps, my sister is visiting so I can avoid Pride for the most part, although I end up defending the need for such an event to her. I’m saying how I’m not into it, it’s so corporate, etc., and she’s like yeah I know, gay pride, it’s like be gay but do get up in everybody’s face with it. But I’m like well we needed to proclaim ourselves as gay in the streets because we were oppressed. I’m just not into it now because I don’t feel like a part of what it’s become. But I get oddly emotional standing there watching the all the gay cheer groups walking by Cheer LA, Cheer Dallas, Cheer Folsom, Cheer Sacramento, and then Chaz Bono and celebrity Grand Marshall Olympia Dukakis. Everyone screams for the gay marriage people. Just behind them are two people carrying signs supporting Bradley Manning. No one seems to notice, no one screams for Bradley.
I’m so glad it’s over for another year.
Tag: family
Pulsating
But there are still cruisy places to be discovered. There are still good times to be had. Paths untrodden, twisting trees of cover, and bushes, honey, bushes. And even some funny, fun people, too. This one likes standing behind trees playing it up like a real perv. He’s young and trendy, wearing some dark Prada glasses and a black shirt with a big number 6 on it. I walk by a couple a times, he says do you want to touch me. I say sure. Now he’s on the path with me out in the open. I’m grabbing his crotch and then I’m unbuttoning my pants. He likes this, being exposed. People are walking by, other cruisers, looking, but then looking away. He’s not getting hard, but I am and that’s enough. He’s talking a lot, joking, talking about my dick, stroking it, talking about this guy’s really short shorts. Yeah, I say, he’s showing off his legs, he’s been working out. Or maybe he’s just showing off his retro seventies shorts. It’s Pride week, you see these kinds of outfits. I spot one in Tenderloin at 9:15am. Suspenders, short shorts, little tiny backpack, combat boots, and they said it wouldn’t last. Number 6 starts getting too silly, saying he sure would like to hump me. Why are you teasing me I say, but I think I better go because I don’t think this is going anywhere. I want to know more about him like what’s your story what are you doing here where do you live how old are you do you like to read to you wanna watch the sunset, but I don’t think he going to open up, he’s working some persona which isn’t bad, it’s better than most I’ll tell you. I see Robert out of the corner of my eye on the main trail. We came here together but it’s not going well. I think our friendship is over, it’s been building, I keep thinking he’ll snap out his need to obsessively talk about himself but no it continues even when I tell him I can’t take it anymore. He doesn’t understand. At one point I say get away from me! We’re fighting in this most holy of holy spaces. Yes, we can cruise together but it’s not enough. I can’t look at him anymore, can’t listen to him go on and on about hours spent cruising online when yesterday he was celibate, about how he’s going to be a guitar hero, about how he loves men or how the world has fucked him over, about cock-blockers and being straight-identified and on and on. He asked me a few months ago why I was friends with him and I said it was because we were both outsiders which I thought was a pretty good answer and pretty truthful, I could have said two lonely outsiders, and that would have been true too. But now it doesn’t matter, I simply can’t listen anymore. He doesn’t even really know me or what I’m about because if his self-obsessesion. He’s not my kind of outsider.
partners
The streets feel deserted tonight. It‘s calm. I mean there’s no wind. Deserted streets are unsettling here, not what I’m searching for. Where is everyone? There’s no wind, now would be the time to hang out on the street. More people, less wind, but I think the police are in an arresting mood tonight. Yeah, there they are on the corner. The man in the uniform keeps asking where are you staying tonight as if he cares. I take a picture of some neon lights, pink up close and light green in the distance. I drop my camera and the film is exposed. I walk up Leavenworth to Geary, over one block to Hyde and back down the hill. It feels deserted but then there are these other people, the kind you’re not supposed to be scared of. The kind of people that the people who are scared of the Tenderloin are not scared of but I am scared of. All tough and standing just staring, grunts and fucks muttered and your like what the why are you standing there like you own the world and I’m offending it by walking down the street, go away, go away, go away. Maybe I’m over thinking it.
Rearranging my apartment endlessly, frantically. Something to accomplish, but it never ends. If I put some pink tape on that black box on top of the bookshelf I will feel better, or when I move the cactus from the window sill into the bathroom. I know, the windowsill seems like a better place for it, but it has shriveled to have its original size since it’s been there. I start fantasizing about moving to New Orleans, where does that come from? I’m imagining sun streaming into a long room with hardwood floors, the windows are open, of course it’s hot but it’s nice too. I’m relaxed and away from everything, but closer to my past which is really weird. I wonder if I should send my father that letter that I wrote Does that place even still exist with those people. That I could just go there, two planes and an hour long car ride and I would be there seems impossibly scary and utterly alluring, like spying on two people having sex. Lance is a sex addict whose given up park cruising for online cruising, but has no computer skills. How do you forward and email? How do you upload a picture to Adam4Adam? I don’t mind taking pictures of him nude and semi-nude, it’s fun even but why is always about him. He can’t get hard I’m tempted to pull out my dick, but I’m an artist right, I can’t break that wall. He would probably act all freaked out, but I’m sure he would get hard. He loves tell everyone about the one time we had sex. New Year’s Eve 2010. We’re in bed in Anthony’s house. I don’t expect anything to happen we’re just friends, actually I say maybe you should sleep on the couch because I won’t be able to sleep with you in the bed, but no he insists and then he’s restless. I say you can hold if you want. It is apparently the best line he’s ever heard in his life. But he’s been sexually unavailable since, and really I wouldn’t touch with a you know what, but then when he’s rubbing his dick in front of me, well you know. We talk on the phone after I get back from Palo Alto, I get sad like I want to cry, but I never cry. He’s talking about who he hooked up with last night. I tell him I’m just worrying about things, but really I think I’m feeling the sadness of meaningless connections when those are the main connections I’ve got. Sometimes, he feels like a partner, but then it always comes back to his self-obsession. I really don’t want to have sex with him, but then I do. It’s sounds horrible, but maybe that’s why I want it. Anyway, I’ve found my new demographic at the cruisy part of Golden Gate Park that I never knew about before. It could be anywhere, not San Francisco, no Castro crowd or anything that, I guess it’s the Ocean Beach crowd, and me riding my bike hungrily for miles to get here.
Queer moment
Giants mania everywhere. Orange and black and orange and black. Can I even wear black anymore, or will someone ask me if I’m a Giants fans? Well, I do like big dicks, maybe even orange and black ones. I guess I’m just pissed because I bought this hoodie in Hayes Valley (it was only eighteen dollars, okay?), and I thought it was red while I was in the store, but when I get home it’s obviously orange. So now I’ll dye it red because I cannot walk around town looking like a Giants fan.
The thing with being consumed by library school is, one, I do superior work, and, two, everything else that’s important to me gets pushed aside. Now I’m free, and the other things that are important to me are piled up and I’m frantic trying to do it all. Oh, there are not enough hours in the day, especially when you factor in my new xTube addiction. Like making that zine which keeps getting pushed to the end of the day and then not getting done at all. But I do go to the vintage zine store, yes there is one, they have a few “gay” ones, some porn ones, too, lots of music ones, some really tiny ones, political ones, “female” ones, and some other wacky ones. I look at two “gay” ones although they’re both about being queer. Holy Titclamps is one of them, I think it’s from 1994, but it seems so current. Larry-bob writes that he came here for queer culture while most of the gays came to dance. Or do people still come to San Francisco for queer culture? I came because I needed to get the fuck out of where I was, and to a city with tall buildings to walk between and public transportation to zoom around on and gays because then I could blend in, I don’t think I had thought of the concept of queer culture. When Gordon asked me if I identified with the term queer sitting at his kitchen table in his cute little Bernal Heights house in 1997, I said no smugly. I rejected the term “queer” back then because I thought it was rich white kids who had gone to good schools and who wanted to reject their families while looking all crusty and arty that were the ones who were queer. I guess queer seemed intellectualized and inaccessible, and I knew I didn’t want to be a part of that, or couldn’t be. I mean, yes, I rejected my family and I wanted something radically different, but queer just seemed like another clique. And I was bitter, and shy, and generally a special case, but getting to gay was a struggle, okay? And people who go to good schools are gross! But now I get queer. I mean I always felt like an outsider although I’ve only recently come to the point where this label is something to be proud of and to flaunt like crazy. But at the same time it’s becoming so ubiquitous, at least in San Francisco, that it’s a catch all term for all kinds of gay shit. Queer performance art is having its moment, or I guess it was having its moment in 1994, so maybe this is just one of many moments of queer art in San Francisco. Or maybe it’s just that I’m only paying attention to it now. What am I trying to say? I missed everything important, and now I don’t care. Maybe. Or, I am my own revolution. This queer moment in San Francisco is being supported by Giants mania that’s for sure.
staying up late
like a graduate student should, right? did i tell you i’m in grad school. oh, well, just in case you forgot.
I get offered “OCs” twice at the corner of Turk and Leavenworth. I ask Mattilda what that stands for, because she would know–Oxycotton.
I’m still looking for a small table and two chairs for my efficiency apartment. I want it right in front of the window for exceptional viewings, late-night chit-chats over endless cups of tea, and better-than-x-tube study-time distractions. Would that be chit-chats with myself? Probably, but don’t tell. No, really, I’m definitely having people over to visit. That is, if they can get over the fact that they have to sign in downstairs with their ID. No, it’s not an SRO, it’s not subsidized housing, it’s just a big-ass building in a “questionable” neighborhood. My Mom asks me if there’s some reason I wouldn’t want her to see my new place after I tell her that I don’t think it would be a good idea if she came to visit with my aunt and cousin. I just don’t think they would get it, the neighborhood, the tininess of my space. Is it wrong to not want to be a tour guide to three suburban, mainly conservative, possibly racist, people who I happen to be related to? I have to stop doing things I don’t want to do. I have to do my homework.
Sanfrancisco-ish 