Accidental Careerist Part 2

...continued

When last we met I was unfolding most of my early childhood and adolescence trying to lay the groundwork on how I came to choose a career in my adulthood. Let’s get right to it shall we.

In my quest to show the world I had a brain I decided I wanted to go to college, not on a sports scholarship but on the strength of my academic record. I was recruited to play basketball by all the local junior colleges and a few small colleges. Interesting enough one of the schools that showed the most interest was Occidental College in Los Angeles. Had I gone there I would have just missed our current President Oback Barama by one semester. Had I gone to the school when he was there we would have surely become friends since there were very few blacks at Oxy and he was a basketball fanatic. According to the book From Promise to Power by David Mendell, when Oback was at Oxy he was in search of his black identity and made an extra effort to become friends with the entire black student body (not that there where a whole lot of them). Well that will be left to a life in an alternate universe. I almost ended up going to Lewis and Clark University in Portland. The small school approach was not one of selling me an NBA dream, it was about connections. I could attend one of these small, prestigious schools and meet lots of people who could be beneficial to my future in terms of business and career.

The truth of the matter is I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself after high school. Career counseling at St. Francis was a joke. It wasn’t all that important because most of the students career counseling came from their parents and it was all about following in the footsteps. When it came to college my parents really couldn’t help me. Having both grown up in the segregated south they never attended college. My father wanted me to play basketball at a local JC and get a scholarship to a major Division 1 school. I had an older brother who was in college but it he wasn’t in a position to help. College for him was an escape and that’s what he did. He started out local but eventually landed at LSU where he joined the Omega Phi Psi fraternity. He’s Omega branded and still bleeds purple and gold to this day. Despite going to a college prep school I was completely clueless about college. I applied to Arizona State, Marquette, USC, and UCLA. How I chose the schools is a mystery to me even to this day. I really only wanted to go to UCLA. A lot of my friends were applying there and the UC system had a good reputation and it seemed affordable compared to the private schools. USC was out of the question. The cost was something I could not relate to since I knew I would be paying my own way to go to college. I ended up being accepted at all the schools and of course I chose UCLA.

My freshman and only year at UCLA was a success in many ways but a disaster academically. I declared Art as my major having no idea what the Art Dept at UCLA was like. The campus and classes were massive. I had classes in auditoriums that had more people in them than the entire student body at St. Francis. I lived in an off campus apartment, this being my first time living away from home. One of my rooommates played the electric guitar as a hobby. He had a Fender Stratocaster and he taught me about Les Paul, guitars, and the great and soon to be great guitar players like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Michael Schenker, Yngwie Malmsteen, Angus Young, and Joe Satriani. Up to then I only knew Jimi Hendrix because everybody knows Jimi, Andy Summers because the Police was my favorite band and Eddie Van Halen because he was from Pasadena. I worked a part time job as an intramural referee and came to really dislike fraternities but I ended up becoming good friends with some frat guys from a fraternity called Acacia. They were outsiders in the fraternity system lacking greek letters and a frathouse. The fraternity was christian based and the guys were what was considered “geeks” and that’s what I liked about them. I never joined the frat but they treated my like one of their own.

Half way through my freshman year I started getting recruiting calls from Redlands University. Because of my sub par academic performance I knew I wasn’t going back to UCLA. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with myself so I agreed to attend the University of Redlands and reboot my basketball career. My father still wanted me to attend a JC and get a scholarship. One week before I was to begin classes at Redlands I gave in to my father’s wishes and enrolled at Pasadena City College to play basketball. I played basketball for PCC. We made it to the state finals and lost to Merced in triple overtime. We had a great year but my heart wasn’t in it so that summer in 1983 I quit the team and basically wandered the streets for the whole summer. It was the lowest point of my life. I lost touch with my friends and was struggling with thoughts of suicide. I just didn’t feel like my life had any meaning. Music saved my life. It was the heyday of KROQ and I would spend hours alone listening to music by U2, Talking Heads, English Beat, XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen, Style Council, OMD, New Order, The Specials, and many other mostly British bands. In America I couldn’t relate but I could to these bands from Thatcher’s England. What I was feeling was in their music. I knew I wasn’t alone out there. There were a lot of people across the pond feeling just like me.

My younger brother Kenny was working for the YMCA as a day camp counselor and he invited me to attend their end of the summer staff party. At first I was hesitant. My impression of the YMCA was the people who worked there were a bunch of square Christians who didn’t party. Kenny didn’t party much but he did seem to enjoy his job quite a bit. I wasn’t hanging out with my friends because I was depressing to be around so I decided to go out of sheer boredom. I was totally wrong about this YMCA staff. When I arrived at the party the music was blasting and people were having a great time dancing and playing drinking games. In the backroom there was a group of people smoking joints and taking bong hits. This is where I met my brother’s boss, a red haired woman with freckles named CJ. We hit it off right away. I ended up having a real good time at the party and ran into a guy name Craig Catimon who had played Pop Warner football with my older brother Keith. Craig and I later would become best friends and partners in crime. For the first time in a while I felt good hanging out with people. I liked this group of people. It wasn’t college and it wasn’t sports, it was just regular people. The next week I received a call from CJ. She asked me I was interested in being a group leader for the After School Program at the YMCA. She thought I had the right kind of personality to work with kids. I decided to take the job. I was enrolled in classes at Pasadena City College and thought it would be the perfect part time job to have while I was going to school.

My only experience working with kids had been babysitting which I had done extensively since the age of 12. I was a natural working with the kids at the YMCA. I absolutely loved it. It was challenging and fun and I threw everything I had into the job. I looked forward to coming to work everyday. It was just a part time job so I was just enjoying it for what it was. I wasn’t making plans on doing it for more than one school year but summer came around and I applied for a job as a day camp counselor. That was even more fun because we had the kids all day and we went on adventures to the local parks, to the beaches, and hiking in the local mountains. The following school year CJ asked me if I wanted to be a Site Director in charge of one of the school sites. There were others who had been there much longer than I had but she felt I would be good at running things and providing leadership for the staff. I was a successful Site Director which was almost a full time job. I ended up having all kinds of jobs within the YMCA which was one of the things I liked about it as an organization. I held a ridiculous number of jobs in my 11 years at the Y:

After School Counselor

After School Van Driver

After School Site Director

After School Program Director

Day Camp Counselor

Day Camp Site Director

Day Camp Director

Youth Sports Referee

Youth Soccer Coach

Youth Basketball Coach

Resident Camp Maintenance Engineer (janitor/trash burner)

Resident Camp Cabin Leader

Resident Camp Ropes Course Instructor

Resident Camp Assistant Director

Resident Camp Branch Director

Summer Youth Employment Coordinator

Youth Director

Program Director

Senior Program Director

By the time I reached Senior Program Director I had seen it all when it comes to the YMCA. I could probably write a book about my experience. The YMCA is really big on training. They have a national training program that covers everything from life guarding at pools to raising millions of dollars for capital campaigns. Because the trainings were national I got to meet people from all over, from Boise to St. Paul to Orlando to Denver to New York. The best part about the whole thing was meeting all the kids. I met and got to know thousands of kids from preschoolers to high schoolers. I saw kids grow from fresh faced five year olds to take-themselves-way-to-serious teenagers. I was fortunate as I had the privilege to teach these kids about life as an authority figure and a trusted friend, it is a unique position to have in the life of a child. I did so many outrageously fun things with kids sometimes it was hard to even call it a job.

Working with kids put me in direct contact with the people who are the real heart and soul of this country and that is working parents. When you work with parents a partnership is born. You get a certain amount of respect from people who know you value their child’s welfare just as much as they do. You get to see parents at their worst (right after a really bad day at work) and at their best (showing up with big smiles and the their child for Pot Lucks, Talent Shows, and Haunted Houses). It was a good balance for my own personal life which leaned more toward the hedonistic and bohemian.

For about the first 6 years I didn’t consider the YMCA a career but by the time I made Program Director I decided it was what I wanted to do. I went to management trainings and certification trainings to mold myself from clock-punching-jack-of-all-trades to salaried, pensioned, credentialed professional. I went from small suburban branch to large metropolitan association. By the time I reached Senior Director I was just one step away from Executive Branch Director, it was the next and perhaps final stop on this particular trajectory. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be an Executive Director. It was far removed from working directly with program staff and parents. It was a suit and tie job that required attending lots of Rotary Club type lunches and securing large donations and grants from local businesses and corporations. I was a guy who rode a bicycle and a sported a mohawk. I just wasn’t there yet. More than that I had plenty of years to watch all the politics involved at the management level. The Y is a large non-profit but its bureaucracy is just like any other. As an organization the YMCA became more and more focused on the health club business. All the new branches were primarily health clubs with state of the art equipment and facilities. The primary business was no longer serving the community, the business became selling memberships and selling memberships was driven by marketing. That’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to build facilities and start programs that would serve the community, primarily youth and their working parents. If that was your agenda you didn’t have much say and you were on the lower end of the pay scale. Executive Directors at branches with large health and fitness memberships made a pretty good salary and had tons of perks like housing and vehicle allowances while small community based Executives struggled to balance budgets and get funding for their programs putting in more hours for less pay.

I started to become disillusioned with my foreseeable future with the YMCA. It would have been a secure future. I had a good reputation and knew lots of directors around the country. I could work anywhere in the country, even abroad as the YMCA is an international organization. But I wasn’t feeling it. I was just 30 years old and still had young man’s view of the world. In my mind there was still some romantic adventure out there for me. I wasn’t ready for the life of a non profit administrator. I still had a touch of the wild in me. I felt I was still firmly planted in the field of anti-establishment. Becoming an Executive Director would have been like killing off a vital part of myself.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I could go from the YMCA. I had ideas about opening a school/camp using progressive methods like experiential learning. I was starting to warm up to that idea when my life took another unsuspected 90 degree turn. Out of the blue, or rather out of the low lights and hip hop beat of a San Francisco jazz club, I found a new career, or it found me, I’m still not sure how to call it. I’ll save that thought for the next blog, part three. Once again thanks for tuning in. Same bat time, same bat channel.

To be continued…

Drive By

Fortunately for me my brushes with the law have been few and far between. All my encounters with the police have been traffic related. Many times it was just a case of DWB but on a few occasions I have been stopped for legitimate purposes like expired registration tags, which in my younger days was the rule not the exception.


In my impoverished young adulthood vehicle insurance and registration were at times beyond my paltry budget so I took my chances and boy did I take chances. It wasn’t like I was driving some middle of the road, financed, upstanding citizen, blend into the void, kind of car… I drove a 1965 Rambler American. It was in good shape but it was a beater. It was a ska mobile that I bought off my most excellent friend Dan Parada who had decorated it with photos of the cast of the Big Chill on the inside passenger door, and with the words “Elvis died fat” printed on the dashboard under the radio. It was a four door that made for easy piling in and piling out of with the crew while wandering the streets of Los Angeles.


I must confess that I had many a reckless night in the City of Angels negotiating the freeways and mega boulevards for mile after mile from Pasadena to Hollywood, to Westwood, to Santa Monica, to Long Beach, Newport Beach, and back, even surviving the dreaded S-curve near the end of the Pasadena Frwy just before Ave. 64. The curve doesn’t have a name and people don’t speak of it but anyone who has driven that stretch knows the curve. Built in the 30’s and the oldest freeway in California the 110 Pasadena/Harbor Frwy had curves put in to make the drive “not boring” for the snail paced Ford Model T’s. making the drive from Pasadena to Los Angeles. Well “not boring” today is now “hair raising”. I was in the Rambler with my friend Dan P, on our way to Westwood to see “The Road Warrior” of all movies and we saw a VW go airborne and do multiple flips in the air right in front of us. The woman driving the Vee Dub didn’t hit anybody she just caught her wheel on the inside curb on the S-turn and up she went. I watched the car flip twice in the air, I thought it was going to land on us. She hit the ground, rolled once more and landed on her feet. We stopped about two feet short of her. Miraculously she was unhurt. Although physically she was ok, mentally she was scathed. She and the car were a wreck.


Thanks be to gods unknown I was never involved in an accident while driving a car… a bicycle yes, but never in a car. Part of my job working for the YMCA was transporting children in vans and busses which required me to have a Class B commercial driver’s license and certification from the California Highway Patrol so I had good driving skills. I may have been an irresponsible driver at times but I was always a safe driver. Before moving to San Francisco the only moving violations I had was a speeding ticket I acquired in law abiding South Pasadena for going 40 in a 35 mph zone. On the DWB stops I never had to ride in the paddy wagon because my name always came up clean on the computer search as well it should as I am a good citizen. That all changed when I moved to San Francisco.


My first month two months living in the Bay area were spent living in Oakland although I worked in San Francisco. My boss let me use the YMCA van to get to work and back until I relocated to the City. He didn’t like leaving the van in a the YMCA lot because it was a target for vandalism. I was so busy working the new job that for the first two months I didn’t go out and since I had no friends I hadn’t gone out to any bars in San Francisco or Oakland. My first night out at a bar in San Francisco would prove to be unforgettable.


My first night out at a bar was on Halloween night, 1991. Me and the youth staff at the YMCA had just finished doing the annual Haunted House fundraiser which was a smashing success. I was invited by one of the staff to go celebrate. We went to a bar called the Covered Wagon located on Folsom street in the South of Market area of SF. I was tired from a 16 hour day at work and I had not eaten but I was in a festive mood because I had just pulled off my first major event at my new job so a little celebrating was in order. Over the course of three hours I had 4 pints of ale. When I left the bar I didn’t feel drunk but I was feeling very tired. I hopped in the van to make the drive home not thinking twice about my condition. I made it across the Bay Bridge and was just about to get off the 580 freeway at MacArthur when I saw the red and blue flashing lights in the rearview. I wasn’t speeding or swerving so I was wondering what I was being pulled over for. The CHP officer said he pulled me over because I was straddling the line. He asked if I had been drinking. I said I had a few beers. They made me do the drunk tests, you know, stand on one leg, follow the finger, touch the nose, etc, etc. I thought I did well but the officers had other ideas because the next thing I know they tell me they’re taking me in for possible Driving Under the Influence. They were a couple of polite chaps so I went with them without argument, debate, or struggle.


Being handcuffed and put into a police car was a new experience for me. I had only been in a police car once in my life before this and that was in Rosarito Beach when me and my buddy Wes were pulled over one midnight in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. They told us we were speeding but we knew that was bogus, they just wanted to search us for bribe material. The Mexican cops put me in the back of the squad car without cuffing me. I knew the situation wasn’t that serious because they didn’t cuff me and in the backseat there was basket full of freshly done laundry. These guys weren't hardcore shakedown artists they were just bored and looking for a score. They searched the VW van and found a roach in a box of Marlboro reds. The maddening part about this was that neither Wes nor I smoked cigarettes and neither of us had brought any herbage for this trip because we couldn’t find any. The Marlboro reds had been left in the van by another friend weeks ago and the herb was homegrown which in LA is practically an insult. That roach ended up costing us $50 each. They wanted more but Wes beat them down on the price thanks to his well honed negotiation skills that he had developed haggling with Mexican vendors and store owners over the years. Here I was in the US of A where haggling for a DUI was out of the question. They drove me to the Oakland city jail where I was booked and put into the community cell. I never spent much time imagining what the inside of a jail looks like. We have all seen jails in movies and television shows but when does that ever measure up to reality? Courtrooms are always so beautiful and dramatically lit in the movies but every court room I have been in has been drab, rundown, and uniformly lit by harsh fluorescent lights which is the typical look for cvic offices and buildings that deal with the masses. The Oakland jail feels subterranean because there are no windows and everything is bland off discolored white brick, painted grey metal, and 1960’s green tiled floor. They gave me the Breathalyzer test and I came in at .09. Just my luck California had just lowered the drunk standard from 0.1 to .08. A year earlier I would have been legal but now I was considered legally drunk. I was photographed, fingerprinted, and put in a cell with about a dozen other men, all black and latino.


I surmised by the body language I was the only newcomer there. The cell was all hard surfaces with one metal bench, one dirty metal toilet, and one dirty pay phone. The phone was in constant use but nobody went near the toilet. Men were stretched out on the floor catching some z’s or or sitting against walls nodding off. I wouldn’t say that they were comfortable but they seemed used to the conditions. I was the only one standing up looking around checking everything and everybody out. Nobody in the cell was talking. All seemed quite content to pretend that the others didn’t exist. It was relatively quiet. I could hear the officers joking around with each other like people do on any job and I could hear them processing the perps. About every 10 minutes or so one of the inmates in another cell would start belting out the song “Somewhere” with a voice that eerily sounded like the lead singer from Blood, Sweat, and Tears. The Oakland jail was the last place I would expect to hear someone singing a song from West Side Story but since I’m a huge fan of that musical I found the singing rather comforting plus it's difficult to feel like you are in a hard place when some gravelly voice down the hallway starts belting out, "There's a place for us! Somewhere a place for us...!" The irony, which escaped cops and inmate alike, put everything into proper perspective for me. For this night the Oakland jail was my place of existence and a place for me to make up for past transgressions and pay my dues.


I chose to forgo making a phone call and trying to post bail because I was too embarrassed. I figured I messed up and needed to take my punishment like a man which meant staying the whole night in jail. After they let me out I would go retrieve the van and go to work and try to act like nothing happened. In my mind I was set to deal with whatever fallout that would come from my debacle. That actually put my mind at ease so I stood there in the cell just taking in the jail experience. More men were brought in over the course of the night. Sensing I was not a regular a few of the guys struck up conversations with me. I don’t know if I would call them conversations, they were more like confessions. It was like all of a sudden I was the cell priest or psychiatrist. Guys were telling me stories of remorse and how they ended up in jail…again. One guy I remember in particular because I really felt bad for him. He had been in jail for three or four years for armed robbery and all he wanted to do was get straight and see his kid who had just been born right before he went into the slammer. He was back in on parole violation. He said he had only been out a few days when he borrowed his brother’s car to go see some old friends. He was spotted and pulled over. He gave consent to check the car and the police found some crack cocaine underneath the driver’s seat. He said it wasn’t his but if you are a black man with a record there is no way the cops will give you the benefit of the doubt so here he was back in jail. I believed him. He had no reason to lie to me and he seemed really busted up about not being able to see his son. Most of the guys I talked to were back in for parole violations. The most common violation was hanging out with friends who were also known felons. These aren’t the smartest guys in the world to begin with but the way the system is utilized by law enforcement these guys will be in and out of jail most of their lives. I felt sympathy for them. I don’t know how they were on the street but in the cell they were polite and cordial. There was no fighting, dirty looks, or signifying. They were just quietly biding their time until release. Nobody was coming for them they just had to do their time.


I was released at about 7am. I retrieved my belongings and it felt good to be free once I hit the streets of downtown Oakland. I hailed a cab, picked up the van and drove home. I cleaned myself up and went to work. I told my boss what happened. I didn’t know what to expect. I felt bad because I let him down. He recruited me to come to work in San Francisco and I had impressed his superiors so this was definitely going to be a blow to my image. It seemed my worries were unfounded because he supported me 100%. I wasn’t proud of getting the DUI so I didn’t tell anybody, not even my parents. I just made a vow to do everything that would be required of me for the DUI, like paying the $1500 fine and attending the 6 weeks of DUI classes. For me it was a lesson learned. I wasn’t mad at the world or even myself. I made a mistake, plain and simple. The best thing for me to do was deal with the consequences without pity or apology.


About two weeks after the incident I finally received mail from the City of Oakland. I figured it was my court date notice. When I opened the envelop and read the letter I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The DUI charge had been dropped with no explanation. No further action on my part was needed. I didn’t have to go to court, I didn’t have to pay any fines, and I didn‘t have to attend any classes. Sometimes in life you get lucky and this was one of those times. Even though I was not a religious man I thanked the Lord for my fortune. I’d had plenty of misfortune in my life up to that point so I guess in the end it all balances out. In life sometimes you are up like a hang glider riding the thermal winds as free as a bird and other times you are down in the dumps with no way out. Sometimes it is by your own hand and sometimes it's just how the world turns.


Even though the charges were dropped my license was suspended for a year. I could only drive to and from and during the course of employment. That was not a problem for me since I only drove to and from work. I had been riding my bike as my main mode of transportation for five years so driving was something I only did for work. A few weeks later I moved to San Francisco where I have lived in various sections of the Western Addition for the last 18 years. San Francisco is the perfect place to live if you prefer to ride a bike over driving a car. It is the one thing that has kept me here for all these years. The City is so small geographically all you need is two feet and a pair of working legs. You don’t even need a bike. If you have too much to drink you can just walk home. It’s my preferred way to travel after leaving a bar or party. You never know what you will see or who you will meet and best of all I don’t have to worry about getting stopped by the cops for DUI or DWB. That’s something a brutha can live with.

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