Tolerance

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet)

Poeme sur la vie naturelle (1756)

In my humble opinion there is no legitimate argument against the validity of homosexual relationships. What is offered up as logic and rationale to invalidate homosexual relationships are really just excuses for bigotry, discrimination, sexism, and chauvinism. I don’t expect humans to be perfect. No doubt we are a flawed species but our flaws are not absolute. The greatness of leading a purposeful, prosperous, and generous life is recognizing, challenging, and overcoming our flaws. As social beings living in rigid, structured societies it has become easy to live behind the wall of mob mentality and groupthink. No experience necessary, just eat up the propaganda, digest it, and dump the load into the cesspool of intolerance. That’s the easiest and laziest way to deal with our ignorance. Just grab the lowest, rotting fruit on the tree.

For now let’s put that all aside. It’s not going anywhere. Its been with us since the beginning of time and we aren’t about to leave it at the doorstep. Instead let us look at personal responsibility, what we stand for as individuals and actual life experience. What we deem as our personal responsibility and what we construct as our individual system of morality is meaningless until it slams up against the reality that opposes and challenges it. It’s just petulant prose and pious theory, like words chiseled on stone tablets ready to be thrown into the fires of the condemned. Experience rarely validates the predisposed dispositions. Rather, experience liberates us from propaganda and intellectual bondage and illuminates the void of ignorance and superstition so that where we were once blind we are allowed to see.

When I moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles 18 years ago I was neutral when it came to the gay community and their mission of achieving the human rights of love, marriage, and community. Like many I was one who would give lip service to the cause but I wasn’t willing to stand on the front lines and fight the good fight. In a sense I was blind because what I believed was not based on any kind of reality or experience. My beliefs were challenged the day I splashed down on the shores of the City by the trifecta of home, work, and community. My first set of roommates were all former graduates of Cal Arts. It was a household of quintessential San Francisco equilibrium; two men and two women, two black and two white, four artistic individuals expressing themselves through distinctly different mediums. All we needed to be a true prototype San Francisco family was homosexuality which we lacked as we are all straight heteros, breeders by another name. We had a four bedroom flat with two bathrooms. The bathroom split was not based on gender as it is everywhere else on the planet. Ours was split by our ethnicity. I didn’t make the rules. I was just the new guy following along with the way things had been established. Truth be told there was no Jim Crowe angle it’s just how the math worked out. As a matter of fact if I had to choose a bathroom partner I would have chosen Pat anyway. Pat was a sista who over time became the spiritual big sister I never had. We kept a spartan, minimalist bathroom. Between the two of us we had no prescriptions and barely enough hygiene products to fill half a medicine cabinet. The other bathroom bonded to Sten the stoic Swede and Fraulein Alexis the cabaret singer was like a bohemian sanctuary adorned with half melted candles, fruit flavored incense, potpourri, varying sizes of orange plastic prescription containers with adult proof tops, multiplying bottles of hair and skin products, and enough knick knacks to have their own booth at the Haight Street Faire. When Pat or I had to use the bathroom we did our business without much fanfare, in and out. With Sten and Alexis a trip to the bathroom was more like an excursion. It was a combination of personal hygiene and communing with the gods.

Pat’s best friend Susan was a lesbian. She was the first gay/lesbian person I would get to know. Often on a Saturday or Sunday we’d go out to breakfast at the Pork Store, Ella’s, or Crescent City Café with Susan and her partner Mary. Susan was the feminine one and she was all blonde hair and smiles. Mary was the masculine half. She had short dark hair and she dressed in muscle t-shirts with Marlboro Reds rolled up the shoulder sleeve, 501 jeans, and black work boots. After getting to know Susan and Mary I realized that the roles of masculine and feminine were just a masquerade. When you got past the look what you had were two authentic and good hearted human beings. They talked about what everybody else talks about, their jobs, their friends, their relationships, their neighbors, politics, religion, shopping, and they also talked about starting a family. Why wouldn’t they? They are human beings. Why would they not have a strong desire to have a family? It would be like not having a strong desire to breathe, eat, or make love.

My first job in San Francisco was working for the Buchanan YMCA across the street from Japantown in the Western Addition. The YMCA of San Francisco was an association of branches spread throughout the City serving the various neighborhoods and districts. Each branch was a reflection of the district it represented. The Metropolitan branch was the administrative entity for all the branches and it was located in the Financial district. On the eight floor of a highrise the Metro staff wore urban professional clothing, dark suits, ties, and dresses in contrast to the branch folks who wore polo shirts emblazoned with the YMCA logo and branch name. Metro had quite a few gay and lesbian employees, mostly concentrated in the Personnel and Finance departments. As a Program Director these are the departments I usually dealt with when making my pilgrimages to the downtown offices. As a new employee I found the gay and lesbian staff to be the friendliest and most welcoming. If you were a branch person you could feel the air of superiority when entering the Metro offices which I guess was inevitable given they were the head of the association. It was all very formal. Suits and dresses zipping to and fro ready for the next meeting armed with manila folders, leather briefcases, and stern faces. The gay and lesbian staff stood out because they were the ones who would acknowledge your presence and treat you like a relevant human being. They’d chat you up and try to get to know you as a person while most of the straight staff exhibited the business-as-usual stone faced bureaucracy. Each branch of the YMCA is made up of its staff, its members, and its army of volunteers. The Western Addition due to its cheap rents, diverse neighborhoods, and proximity to the Castro district attracted a lot of gay and lesbian people and that was reflected in Buchanan’s membership and volunteer base. Each department of the Y had a volunteer committee that acted as advocate and a good number of citizens on the committees were gay and lesbian. As a director I worked directly with the committees and I found the gay and lesbian committee members to be the most reliable, dedicated, and hard working. They had a strong desire to contribute to the community they lived in.

After six years and three different roommate situations I found myself living on Grove Street a half a block west of Alamo Square and half a block east of Divisadero. I lived in a studio apartment in a nine unit building. Half the people in the building were gay or lesbian. My neighbor across the hall was a Jewish lesbian. On the first floor lived a gay couple, one black and the other white. They were two buffed out little guys who had a couple of teeny toy dogs. On more than one occasion after coming home from the bars past 2 am I’d run into one of them dressed only in bun hugger briefs and flip flops walking the toy dogs in the hallway with plastic bag in hand. Neither one had any issue being practically naked and letting their toy dogs drop loads on the hallway carpet. They’d see me and smile and ask me how my evening was. I didn’t trip because for San Francisco this was normal. In some other part of the country this scenario would play out much differently. It could be perceived as shocking or distasteful, even immoral. It would come down to perception because the reality is its just someone walking their dog and taking care of nature’s business. I could take issue with the dogs shatting on the carpet but they were tiny dogs who shat tiny, dry shats that were easy to pick up and didn’t soil the carpet. If it had been some huge bear of a dog with loose bowels well then I’d have to call 911 or something as that would be just disgusting by anyone’s standards. It’s something I find truly disturbing on the sidewalks which unfortunately in San Francisco is an everyday occurrence. It’s a dog loving city and there are some things you have to learn to tolerate. Living in an urban community one must learn to tolerate because all around one will find things that are slightly to very annoying but one learns to live with it because we all do at least one thing that is annoying to our neighbors. That is the nature of the urban beast. This is something a lot of just-from-the-suburb new homeowners don’t quite understand. They spend top dollar to purchase their dream shack and then get frustrated because the neighborhood won’t bend and adapt to their suburban sensibilities. This is the true cause of friction between home owners and renters. Homeowners want a dictatorship and renters want to live and let live. I know because I have been on both sides of the equation.

...to be continued