The gay community in San Francisco itself has changed so much between the time I first started going up there right after Harvey died till now that I feel ANCIENT. Castro Camera is gone. Welcome Home is gone. The Patio Cafe is gone. Hibernia Beach is gone. They got a Gap and a Starbucks and a Walgreens.

Hell SOMA is even on it’s last legs for the most part being turned into condos.

It’s part of the reason I got out of there and moved my ass back across country. I handled the small changes but it was just getting too much and the community there is suffering. I think there might be What?… all of one lesbian bar left in San Francisco.

Maybe it is normal, maybe it is for the better but I find it disturbing.

When it came down to marching in the streets and putting oneself at risk, though, the women were definitely present, and I would have appreciated seeing a FEW more lesbians in those crowd scenes.

And now I’m done whining about such piffling details. It was a well produced movie that did justice to its subject matter and I was really happy to see it acknowledged by the Academy.

I remember when I was first going up to Castro I thought it was strange but boys went to boy bars and girls went to girl bars. They only ever really met at the grocery store or the disco or if one of the local bars had a girls night.

Harveys crew obviously was made up of the old school queens so girls were icky back then. I only saw that attitude about not mixing really change during the AIDS crisis.

But even now I have to admit I am careful about barging into a lesbian bar some of those places are hard core anti-men. I used to visit the Savoy when I first started coming out and they were like that. If you were a guy you had better know the bartender or some of those dykes were not happy you were there.

I had to wonder, though, as a person who campaigned tirelessly against prop 6, why so few women were portrayed in the movie? I was there and the proportion of women to men portrayed in the movie was not realistic AT ALL and underscores my fear that lesbians are second class even while fighting for gay rights.