I love to move around. I got that from my dad. He loves to travel. My parents were academics who immigrated to the USA from India and I spent much of my younger days traveling back and forth between the US and Asia, which meant lots of stops all over Europe and Asia, and anywhere my dad’s heart literally drove us, such as all across the USA several times! (When I got older, my dad actually moved around even more as his work -as a mechanical engineer who rebuilds war torn countries- took him all around the world. But more on that in a future post.)
As an adult, I have moved around a lot, too. My first stop was San Francisco.
San Francisco in the 90s was a utopia for artists, academics, and sexual revolutionaries. Much of my upcoming book Cheers to Queers is about my early days in San Francsico, going to University of Lesbians and being heavily steeped in Gay Pride. But the later years I spent there were often quiet, dark, lonely, and eventually they became stagnant. After eight years of what often felt like swimming upstream in San Francisco, I left it all for the wide expansive streets of Los Angeles. I heard someone say once that energy gets stuck in San Francisco, because of all the hills and narrow streets. Versus Los Angeles where the energy flows much more smoothly because the streets are wide, the freeways grandiose, and the sun is constantly cleansing.
But. When I left San Francisco in 1998, I told myself I could always return.
For the first few years in LA, I missed SF so hard. LA was lacking in the kinky, queer, leather, sexual revolution department, that was the mainstay of San Francisco, and I missed the city life, you know trains, dark alley ways. But life in Los Angeles was easier. Being an urban sprawl, we had more space and parking, for one. Plus, things felt doable, jobs and money came easier, recognition was yours for the taking if you put yourself out there. So, I joined in the fun in the sun, the doing, the living. But I missed my fair utopian of a city.
I would return periodically to San Francisco to visit friends and my family too who live in a nearby suburb. And from afar I watched that city and its surrounding areas change so rapidly, from being a charming, progressive, diverse, kinky, with-a-livable-climate utopia to the Mecca of technology, business, capitalism, and overpriced dystopia.
Over the years, I still held on to the idea that SF would always be waiting for me, unchanged. I imagined walking into the queer bookstore on Valencia, which had in fact closed before I left, or Good Vibrations a woman-owned sex toy shop that now looks more like a fancy department store, everything the same as ever. Queers, steers, dykes on bikes, gays in leather, women owned exotic dance clubs and a new emerging rave scene in the rise. I would reunite with my city, which would be the waiting, frozen in time, frozen in the final years of what I realize were now the city’s golden years, the early 1990s. I would come back and resume the life I had been living.
San Franciscans also purport LA as being superficial and ambitious but lacking in intelligence and I had cold feet about leaving the safety of my dark, bookish, brooding city for perky, audacious Los Angeles.
But a friend said, “Go. You should go. San Francisco will always be here.”
I knew what she meant, that I could always return. But my heart hoped she meant something else, that life would stand still, and I could pick up where I left off. I even pictured it. I saw myself writing poetry in an old Victorian house while the clouds hung low. But I had outstayed my welcome in SF. When the time came, I had already lost a majority of my friend group, and then the ones I did still have eventually left too. Prices got too high, and life changed considerably. Many folks moved across the Bay to Oakland. Moving to Oakland was not an option for me as it was east of San Francisco, and closer to where I grew up. I didn’t want to move closer to home. I was barely 26. I wanted to keep going. Growing. Moving. Living. LA was waiting with open arms.
As the years passed, I started to realize I probably wouldn't go back to San Francisco and if I did it would be a much different place.
But, I still wanted trains, walkability, city life. I moved to NYC for a couple years where the winters last way to long. Lucky for me work and life brought me back to LA.
When I visited Portland in Summer of 2019, I really enjoyed it. We walked a lot and it even rained. We hit all the usual tourist spots. Pittock mansion, Japanese tea garden, we rode the tram and we hit some breweries and pubs in southeast. But it was when we sat down for a slice at Bella Pizza on Alberta St that it suddenly felt like the San Francisco I'd left behind. As we sat between the pride flags and the posters for local poetry readings and guitar lessons, while the tattooed barmaid in her doc Martins beamed a friendly smile at us, I turned to my partner and I said ,“I could live here.”
“You could?”
“Yes, it reminds me of San Francisco.”
When we moved to Portland four months later, I harbored no real notion of it being anything like SF because it's not. I mean sure there are similarities, but that was more of a fantasy than anything else, right? Besides it’s a different time now. I knew that. But the more I wandered around and got to know people, I couldn't help but constantly be reminded of San Francisco. In fact, many of my friends here lived in San Francisco at some point, prior to coming here. Portland is the new San Francisco, in many ways.
In the two years that I've been here, Portland has grow on me. It’s not really like the San Francisco I knew at all but in some ways it kind of is. If anything, the people here make it that way.
The moral is that I held onto this idea for so long that someday I'd move back up north, and then I did. The stories we tell ourselves do manifest. The things we envision do come true. Perhpas be mindful of what you envision because it may come true. And, of course, the flip side is also true, don’t give it too much meaning, because everything is temporary anyway! that’s the main thing that I learned. That time will keep going and that everything is temporary. And of course, I may already be planning my next move!
But, today as I sit in my house writing as the clouds hang low- though I’m in a California craftsman and not a Victorian-I realize that what I had been envisioning may have been Portland all along.
Great observation. I know you helped us fall in love with Portland. Thanks Mou.