Good Vibrations Magazine

At heart I’m just a small-town girl from Oregon — granted, a girl who got called queer even before my tormenters were old enough to know what the epithet was supposed to mean — and moving to San Francisco fifteen years ago was a big deal for me. It meant I had to learn the logic and skills of a modern urban person. Eugene, where I’d lived since high school, was a city of 100,000, not small compared to where I grew up, but not exactly a metropolis.

Moving to San Francisco was a big deal in another way, too. It meant I was coming home, joining the tribe in the only city in America I felt might hold a place for me. I moved to San Francisco because I was chasing a doomed relationship, but that was just my excuse for packing the truck. Really, I’d been slowly moving to San Francisco all my life, from the time I heard my mother croon the Tony Bennett ode: She’d left her heart here once, and I think that set me on an emigrant’s path even before I heard about the Summer of Love or Castro Street.

My first big Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender event was the San Francisco Pride parade I trekked down to see in 1978. I was just about to turn 21. Contingents passed down Market Street endlessly — who knew there were this many queers in the whole entire world? I was thrilled by the drag queens in their towering hair, the Dykes on Bikes, even the Gay Republicans.

A couple of years later my girlfriend Ellen and I visited again. We wound up on Castro Street after the march, looking for fun — the street was packed from sidewalk to sidewalk, mostly with shirtless gay men (the lesbians had obviously gone somewhere else and failed to invite us). Ellen and I had to clutch each other hard as we moved down the street in order to not be forcibly separated by the tide of guys. I marveled that I had never before been one of the only women in a crowd of men and felt so safe. I treasure that memory now because so many of those men are gone — the AIDS-overwhelmed ’80s changed the Castro, but I’m glad I got to see it in its heyday. Being among all those sexy queer men also pointed me in the direction of a kind of bisexuality I didn’t then know existed, because in the ’70s we thought it was kind of like a grafted tree: you’re gay with some straight attached, or straight with a gay part. My response to those men was erotic yet not out of the gay mindset in which I lived in those years: It told me attraction to men didn’t necessarily mean feeling, or being, straight.

In those days Gay Pride was one of the forces that moved me through the world. I was lesbian-identified (though was happy in those days to let “gay” stand for “gay/lesbian/bi/trans” — I used the term the way we later used “queer”) and was politically active in practically all the gay movements that touched Eugene. I had co-founded a gay youth group in 1975. I ran the University of Oregon’s Gay People’s Alliance. I helped teach Gay Studies. I worked for antidiscrimination laws on city and state levels. Gay Pride meant that gay was good, one of many alternatives for sex and loving — and also that we needed to stand up for ourselves, introduce ourselves to the world instead of staying hidden in the closet, and fight homophobia and intolerance.

None of that has changed since the ’70s, except now we often say “LGBT” or “queer” instead of “gay”; those terms acknowledge diversity a little better. And no one can deny there’s a lot of diversity in our communities: of gender (both kinds), sexual desires, and political philosophy as well as class, race and culture, relationship preference, and desire to create a family. Everything that distinguishes people in the big world outside is present within the queer communities. Back in the day we often wanted to downplay all this difference, or failed to understand it. We had challenges relating woman to man, gay to bi, color to caucasian, and many other culturally significant divides. While there may always be more room for improvement, we’re getting better at bridging and respecting our differences now — which, I am certain, is one underlying reason that I could be elected one of this year’s Grand Marshals of San Francisco Pride.

I’m not the first bisexual Grand Marshal, but it’s still a bit unusual for bi folk to be selected for this honor. I think I might be the first Grand Marshal so closely identified with sex toy sales, and so if you come to San Francisco for the 2001 Pride march (or even if you just catch it on TV), look for me on a float with my Good Vibes friends, celebrating sexual independence and erotic pride for everyone.

Maybe the biggest change in my conception of Pride is this: I used to think only people who had to fight for self-respect because they were queer (or different in some other way) needed it. Everybody else had it already, right? After all, the culture labels some people and groups acceptable, others not. But now I realize that most heterosexuals aren’t really encouraged to develop pride in their sexuality either — sure, they can say they’re better than somebody else, but they often don’t get adequate education or support any more than queers do.

We all need pride, the sense that we’re good and valuable people just the way we are, making a unique contribution to the diverse mix of humanity. Pride implies that we can love and value ourselves because we don’t hold others in greater or lesser esteem: it implies equality, or at least striving for it. Living in San Francisco has taught me that Pride works: We’re a diverse and remarkably tolerant city, still, after all these years, exporting notions of acceptance and sex-positivity to the whole world. I’m proud to be here, to be a part of a community that teaches those lessons to others. This year I’ve traveled to places that most people don’t think of as progressive or liberal — Tennessee, Salt Lake City, Columbus (Ohio) — and in all of those places I found people who look to San Francisco as a model. They’re queer, they’re sex-positive, they value diversity, they’re “straight but not narrow.” They have carved out their lives to feel pride — and in the doing, they teach their neighbors and families more about acceptance — and possibility.

While I’m riding the float down Market Street, no doubt brandishing a Magic Wand instead of a scepter, I’ll be thinking about those people, all the folks who visit San Francisco at this time of year to get a dose of pride strong enough to last. I’ll be looking for the folks who just moved here because they realized they needed more acceptance and possibility in their lives than they feel they can get back home, wherever that is. And I’ll think about the Pride celebrations in dozens or hundreds of towns that are smaller than San Francisco’s, but no less exhilarating and necessary. And I’m sure I’ll think, like Dorothy, “There’s no place like home.”

For more about San Francisco Pride, visit www.sfpride.org.