A summer solstice in San Francisco

Perched atop the Presidio, one has a commanding view of San Francisco with its seven hills (there are actually 43 hills listed) that give this City by the Bay a distinctive character. A city famed for its parks and gardens, galleries and houses, fields and harbors, museums and arboretums, operas and plaza, studios and stations, public squares and theatres, libraries and centers—a Paris and a Venice, a Lisbon and a London, a Leningrad and an Islamabad, a Tokyo and a Timbuktu, a Hong Kong and a Rome—this city of diverse ethnicity portrays in its neighborhoods and its streets, its trips and cruises, a mosaic of global humanness and a curricula of worldwide humanities.

At dawn this day in June, the moon hung huge and low like an overblown balloon on the immediate horizon. San Francisco woke up to a “Spare the Air Day,” a regular workday when all public transportation are free for the riding, letting commuters leave their CO-belching machines home and take trains, ferries, buses, cable cars, motorbikes and bicycles to wherever they want to go. With the price of oil gone ballistic, this is a welcome relief to the consumers and the tourists, all told, to the tune of $1.8 million! The June day looked like a “Good Morning, America” day!

I was a young college student in the Summer of Love of 1966 when I lost my existential innocence and left my heart in San Francisco. Love in its most fundamental expression as visualized at the time by D. H. Lawrence and sentimentalized by Rod McKuen laced the events and happenings associated with the love-ins held around the city, in places now familiar to many—Haight-Asbury, Fillmore, Broadway, North Beach and the Golden Gate Park. Sex came out of the closet of Victorian America; it was handed a flower-in-your-hair, and faces beamed in psychedelic glow. Sex danced to many voices including that of the Beatles, and the strings of Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar. A paradigm shift in the acceptance and care of the body fantastic happened, and its effect reverberated across the bedrooms of the nation. The consequent sexual revolution engaged and impacted the rest of the world.

Presently, the antics of the single girl in Sex and the City are celebrated in countless cinemas across the world. In San Francisco this June, representatives of the 10 percent of the human race who are born with the inclination (some would say, biologically programmed propensity) to choose the affection of one of their own gender, have won a legal battle to recognize the union of two contracting adults.

Women, with their right to decide what may transpire in their bodies, have long ago guarded that prerogative enshrined in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. But forces to reverse that decision are once again in earnest play. The result of the next U.S. presidential election will determine the composition of the Justices who currently occupy the nation’s highest judicial bench.

Free photos were offered to couples going to City Hall Tuesday, first day of the reestablished legal solemnization of same sex marriages in California. Technically, it started after 5pm Monday and the gay community lost no time in queuing before the magistrate. Images of 80-ish elderly couples as well as recognized movie personalities vowing “I do” led the stories in print and broadcast news far and wide.

This day, Castro district in SF celebrated the triumph of civil rights. The judgment was timed perfectly for the annual GLBT film festival, a 10-day display of 230 films from 30 countries, focusing on the lives and loves of gay couples and the “queer” (inclusive and not a pejorative term at Castro) community in a world suddenly thrust to confront a reality in its midst that it has long decried and/or ignored.

At the start of school in my 6th grade class in San Vicente, I inform my students that they could tell the day by the color of the shirt I was wearing. Blue is Monday, and fresh green is Tuesday. Hot red marks Wednesday, and compassionate pink makes Thursday. “Mr. V is gay on Thursday” has become the accompanying declaration. Yellow, the school colors, is the corporate choice for Friday. Brave members of the lower grades would stop me in the hallway to ask if I was gay. I would respond: “Only on Thursday.”

The homophobia at my school, like everywhere else on island, is active. Young boys’ insult with the words “homo” and “faggot.” Less of an affront but still meant to demean is the word “lesbo” among the girls. Of course, the children are just behaving as the microcosm of their sustaining society. The nature of prejudice is that it is unexamined.

Those who understand and take biology seriously recognize that every human being is made up of chromosomes from both parents. We are in fact sexless in the first 8-12 weeks after conception before the testosterone kicks in, and that female and male traits are indelibly everyone’s inheritance. So, Mr. V being gay on Thursday is a symbolic as well as accurate affirmation of the female traits that are patently part of my being.

A massive paradigm shift is occurring and the foundations of many of our traditions are being shaken with shattering intensity. The guardians of social morality would prefer that experts and the elite be the ones to dictate the practices of care and expression of the human body. But the democratization of individual choice across the political landscape is so far gone that drastic measures in the body politic will have to transpire to derail the trend, let alone, reverse it.

Conversely, cities like San Francisco, and such heroic actions like Mayor Gavin Newsom’s issuance of same-sex marriage licenses four years ago, have declared war against those who would inhibit freedom, sexual and otherwise. It is as if they have unequivocally and defiantly declared to the self-appointed moral wannabes that reversal of situation will only occur “over our dead bodies.”

In the prolonged brightness of day that this summer solstice provides, San Francisco once again leads the way in humanizing residents of this planet. More than 40 years ago, I learned of Rock Hudson and the word “queer.” I was shocked, then. We’ve come a long way, baby. Lives long lived in the darkness of the closet are now freely and gaily displayed in the bright of day. The innocence lost then, is now integrity regained.

Is Mr. V gay? Only on Thursday, even in San Francisco! And, yes, the heart I left behind is still here.