OutLines

It has been two years since I moved back to San Francisco. Living here now it is impossible, at least for me, to escape noticing the radical remaking of the world going on all around me. Post-dotcom-bust San Francisco is a boomtown again, reminiscent of post-Wall Berlin. An entirely new 21st-century urban high-density city is rising. Dire, street-survival poverty jostles up against an unprecedented exuberance of über-conspicuous consumption here. As gay community scholar Gayle Rubin remarked at a recent GLBT Historical Society presentation, our painted lady is being transformed into a "command city for the 21st century." Like Hong Kong or Dubai, it is a "desirable" place for the new global corporate elite to build their personal homes. This, I sometimes think, is what expanding, Gilded Age Manhattan must have felt like.

We San Franciscans tend to forget this is a uniquely diverse, world-class metropolis. "Downtown," the nest of vast, impenetrable bureaucracies and corporations, has made but shallow incursions into our sense of living in a small town, a social space of perhaps two degrees of separation.

And as cities have become desirable again, deeper-pocket interests have been gentrifying the gays out of their urban enclaves all across the country. The Castro, our own homegrown "ethnically" gay neighborhood and symbolic (if less frequently visited) gay capital of the United States, suddenly looks like the last "traditional" gay neighborhood. As the Castro has been turning a bit seedy, local queer pride and, increasingly, the city planning and tourism boards see it as the Gay Capital of the World. Herein lies the ironic paradox today: as gay folk have been disappeared by AIDS or sucked into the queer diaspora, gays and straights alike see this newly "ethnic" community through gently softening lenses, engulfed in cloud-shrouded images of quaint, nostalgic, queer white picket fences.

My return nearly two years ago, portending no such evolution, began very painfully. In 2005 I returned to the emotional scene as I had left it in San Francisco 12 years before--by 1993 I was subsisting on SSI, waiting to die of AIDS, with no future, nor even the capacity to dream of a future. Indeed, I had explicitly organized my life around not surviving. But I did; I completed a long doctoral program at UC Berkeley, and was hired out of permanent disabled status into a tenure-track college teaching post in Boston.

I won tenure, settled down with a life partner, got a mortgage, and swiftly atrophied in this middle-class happily-ever-after. Then came a moment of clarity: the life I was living was not mine. It may have been someone else's, perhaps the dream of a much younger me. But the longer I willed myself to stay on this path, the more miserable, insane, isolated, and despairing I became. The last time I had seen my life, it was still in San Francisco, among the AIDS ghosts and other debris of living life messily.

Returning to San Francisco I found everything changed, and myself lost in a kind of time-and-space misalignment. My entire social reality had perished before I left in 1993, and now it was long forgotten. During my first six months back, I encountered the ghosts of my past at every turn. Old familiar places, sounds, smells would trigger them, reminding me of the future that never happened. As I had encountered while teaching about Holocaust survivorship in my Death and Dying humanities course, I too had come back from a world history had forgotten.

Since then, I have sought out numerous support groups and fellow survivors. Recently I participated in a gay men's community meeting on the "poz/neg divide" in gay San Francisco today. Profound healing has occurred through reconnecting with my fellow survivors. But, as the meeting facilitator commented to me privately, it is still far too painful for the queer community at large to hear about or acknowledge our generation. Did you know, he asked me rhetorically, that when Holocaust survivors immigrated to Israel, they were asked to shut up about their experiences and get on with building a future?

I first found re-engagement in the world by returning to the rooms of recovery. In this way I have been able to mourn and heal and move on. Like many gay men who unexpectedly survived the AIDS epidemic, I am now exploring my "middlessence"--how to be of service, to contribute meaningfully to the world, to earn a living again. Between the social services available to AIDS survivors returning to the workforce and the rich and diverse spiritual communities I participate in, I am reconnecting with my particular tribe.

Falteringly at first, struggling to overcome a by then paralyzing social anxiety, I found my way back. After recurrent respiratory illnesses landed me in the hospital in October 2005, I found my way to support services for long-term poz folks. The AIDS Health Project provided me with psychological support, the Positive Resource Center helped with career change and employment retraining support. The State of California has deemed my choice of work as a grant writer supportable. I relish digging into my new field of employment, as a development specialist in the culture and arts nonprofit world.

I've taken two semesters of intensive Spanish, have screened and penned reviews of a couple hundred films, and recently joined a writers' group (all HIV-ers). I work daily with recovering alcoholics. The Bear History Project is rising from old cyber ashes. The Billy Club, a rural collective of socially engaged and spiritually awakened gay, bi, and queer men, has welcomed me with open arms. As I trudge my spiritual path, as ordinary and unconventional as it comes, I find the world makes sense when I live in San Francisco. I know that I am of this place.

Les Wright is a newly minted grant writer, a published author, editor, and art curator, gay community activist and historian, and peace advocate. He continues to work in men's communities as a practitioner of spiritual healing arts and is a former support group facilitator at the Men's Resource Center for Change. Click here to read Part 1 of this column, which appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Voice Male.