The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

Capturing an ever-changing San Francisco, 25 acclaimed writers tell their stories of living in one of the most mesmerizing cities in the world.

Over the last few decades, San Francisco has experienced radical changes with the influence of Silicon Valley, tech companies, and more. Countless articles, blogs, and even movies have tried to capture the complex nature of what San Francisco has become, a place millions of people have loved to call home, and yet are compelled to consider leaving. In this beautifully written collection, writers take on this Bay Area-dweller's eternal conflict: Should I stay or should I go?

Including an introduction written by Gary Kamiya and essays from Margaret Cho, W. Kamau Bell, Michelle Tea, Beth Lisick, Daniel Handler, Bonnie Tsui, Stuart Schuffman, Alysia Abbott, Peter Coyote, Alia Volz, Duffy Jennings, John Law, and many more, The End of the Golden Gate is a penetrating journey that illuminates both what makes San Francisco so magnetizing and how it has changed vastly over time, shapeshifting to become something new for each generation of city dwellers.

With essays chronicling the impact of the tech-industry invasion and the evolution, gentrification, and radical cost of living that has transformed San Francisco's most beloved neighborhoods, these prescient essayists capture the lasting imprint of the 1960s counterculture movement, as well as the fight to preserve the art, music, and other creative movements that make this forever the city of love.

For anyone considering moving to San Francisco, wishing to relive the magic of the city, or anyone experiencing the sadness of leaving the bay—and ultimately, for anyone that needs a reminder of why we stay.

Bound to be a long-time staple of San Francisco literature, anyone who has lived in or is currently living in San Francisco will enjoy the rich history of the city within these pages and relive intimate memories of their own.

• GIVING BACK TO THE COMMUNITY: A percentage of the proceeds will be given to charities that help those in the bay experiencing homelessness. Every copy purchased offers a small way to help those in need.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781797210292

Gary Kamiya

Gary Kamiya is the co-founder of the groundbreaking website Salon.com, where he was the executive editor for 12 years. He is the former culture critic and book editor at Image, the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine. His first book, Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler, was critically acclaimed. He and his wife, Kate Moses, have two children together.

Book preview

Frost

Please Excuse My Chemtrail

Beth Lisick

Of course I miss the fog. I’m not a monster. 

In 1972 or ’73, one of the years we’re still driving my grandpa’s old Cadillac, guests come to visit my family in San Jose from who knows where. Oregon, maybe. The country. I sit in the back seat as we cruise up the 280, and when we turn the bend that reveals the colorful hillside houses near San Francisco, encased in glorious fog, my dad says, You know that song ‘Ticky-Tacky Houses’? That song was written about these houses right here. The guests gawk. Who lives in a square pink house right next to a square green house? Too close to your neighbors! The fog is so cold! The adults all agree these houses and this location are terrible. And then we sally forth to Pier 39 to eat chowder and watch a street mime. Get some culture. 

It’s not until I’m way, way older that I realize my young brain had wildly misinterpreted the song. The sentiment in the car that day emphasized the tacky, but the point is that the ticky-tacky houses are full of boring conformists. Like my parents. So if I wasn’t supposed to like a ticky-tacky house, was my destiny a split-level ranch in San Jose? Don’t be a doctor or a lawyer drinking your martinis dry, like the song says, but an industrial engineer with a box of supermarket Chablis in the fridge is all right. Were those my choices? Confusing. 

There’s not much of an original story to tell about how someone of my age and background who liked weird music and weird clothes bolted to San Francisco in 1991 with $300 and no job. That’s simply how you did it then. I mean, if you wanted to live in the most beautiful city in the United States with a bona fide freak scene. Yes, there was also New York, but New York was too expensive and the winters too harsh for a warm-blooded Californian like me. New York was New York back then.

So for the next twenty-two years, first bouncing around apartments in the Mission and then over to Oakland, then back to more Mission apartments and warehouses, and finally over to Berkeley, I remained within a forty-five-mile radius of my birthplace. I bought a house for 230K, thanks to a down payment from my boring, conformist, (generous, loving) engineer dad. I also Got Married and Had a Baby. It was abundantly clear that I was never, ever going to live anywhere else. Why would I leave? 

This was the place where I had fallen in love. Where my aging parents still lived. Where I seemed to have figured out, without a lot of hassle, who I was. I had written multiple San Francisco–centric books here. I cofounded and ran San Francisco’s first storytelling series. I’d represented San Francisco at the National Poetry Slam. I had been the pastry chef at the Fog City Diner. I had performed at shows with Neil Young and Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima and Tom Waits. I was part of nearly every single Sketchfest since the inaugural one in 2001. Every Litquake, too. I had worked at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I was one of the first seven employees at SFGate. I’d been in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s office at City Lights, Jim Mitchell’s office at the O’Farrell Theatre, and every green room in every single rock club. I drank champagne at the Gettys’ and performed naked at the Center for Sex & Culture. And now my son was enrolled in a public elementary school named after Malcolm X with a gardening program run by Alice Waters. I was a true Bay Area fruit and nut bag. Am I bragging? Absolutely. And what sheer relief, frankly, to be over fifty years old with my neck getting real saggy, so I can sit here in my elastic-waist soft pants and brag about being young. Because that’s part of this. All those things are part of why I had to leave.

Now when you hear the sentence My husband got a job offer in New York, certain things come to mind. A box of money, a big promotion, health insurance, having your relocation costs covered, making tender love on the hardwood floor of your new apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. But the reality included none of those things. The reality was that there was a guy with a raw space who wanted Eli to help him build a recording studio. Arguably a lateral move considering Eli had already built and owned a happening recording studio in Oakland. Plus, our son, Gus, in fourth grade at the time, was in this great school district, locked into a decent free education through high school. What was to be gained by leaving? 

Make no mistake. I was not, at age forty-four, participating in any kind of narrative about making a splash in the Big Apple. My professional ambition has always been pretty anemic, or at least on par with the slightly skewed, populist approach I have to art, writing, and performance. It had worked out just fine for me in the Bay Area. I was comfortable. I had stability. But even so, I knew it was necessary for me to give up my cool old Victorian house, my yard with its apple and plum trees, my car, my best friends, and whatever local clout I had in order to improve the quality of my life. In order to enjoy my life more fully. 

The embarrassing truth is I had become somewhat of a townie. I was frequently in a bad mood, disgruntled with the new expensive coffee places and the four-dollar donuts. I was scowling at fancy cars. Flipping off buildings shaped like glass pricks. Angry at air plants and hand-milled soap. Raging at salumi platters and hand-knotted rugs. I mistook a toddler in Gucci sunglasses for a robot and almost punched it. I even rolled my eyes at Burning Man and burlesque and Good Vibrations and marijuana, those mainstays of the freewheelin’ Barbary Coast, for the sheer reason that I couldn’t handle hearing them used as examples of how freaky and fun the Bay Area was by the new brand of interloping young people. I was pissed off at the rampant technology-fueled late-stage capitalism that had invaded my home turf. 

San Francisco was supposed to be for everyone and the more it became clear it was not, I rebelled. Me, a person who felt like she was always down for just about anything, forever on the lookout for vibrancy in my community, rebelled by closing my eyes. (Well, first I exhausted myself complaining how tech had ruined everything, and then I grew exhausted of other people complaining how tech had ruined everything, and then I closed my eyes.) I simply couldn’t look anymore. I was unable to see beauty.

Everywhere I turned seemed to have undergone a change of which I did not approve in the least. My friend, a San Francisco native, actually brought me to eat an icy chef salad at the restaurant at the golf course in Lake Merced just so we could experience something in the city that was old that felt new to us. The hypocrisy. I was a gentrifier through and through, but then I got mad at the gentrifiers who came after me, which I knew was ridiculous. So I got mad at myself for being ridiculous.

I think part of the reason this takeover happened, speaking for the gentrifying and predominantly white freaks and outsiders and bohemians, is that we don’t take up too much space in a capitalist system. The joke is that we pass the same twenty-dollar bill around for one another’s albums and books and drawings. We’re easy to elbow out because as long as we can keep being our weird selves without too much trouble, we’re good. We’ll just keep shuffling off to the next neighborhood or cheap apartment or, evict us enough times, and we’ll eventually move away.

If you’re a San Francisco artist, you don’t want to be at the center of what’s happening in mainstream culture. You know what people are expecting and then you don’t do it on purpose, even if the end result isn’t that great. Making art in San Francisco comes with a deep desire not to make things conventionally glamorous, but rather lead with your flaws up front. Be raw and have flaws. Show the seams and then tear them out and let it be a mess. Present something that might fall apart. The tragedy and comedy of mar­cescence. The flies on the rotting banana and the slipping on its peel. We don’t take up a lot of space that is perceptible to outsiders who aren’t looking. I’ve always thought San Francisco artists are kind of like farts in a jar. Subversive and self-contained. Occasionally one gets let out into the bigger world and people take notice. They might not necessarily appreciate it, but there’s no denying that it’s visceral and disarming. And forgive me please for comparing San Francisco artists to farts, but the beauty is that no one I know would take offense at that.

Almost all the people I know in San Francisco who are still making art are either people who were able to buy property decades ago or are, at this moment, knocking on wood hoping they don’t lose their rent-controlled housing. There is so much money amidst so much poverty and despair that your heart burns. Being comfortable when there is chaos and upheaval around you is never comfortable for long. It started to make me feel hopeless. It started to make me wonder who I would even be someplace else. And if that sounds too esoteric, I’m sure I also blew off San Francisco when I felt like it was about to blow me off entirely. The teenage feeling that sticks with you. So there I was, jilted and uncomfortable, and also shrinking, because defining yourself against something you resent will always make you small.

In 2012 we take off for New York and all I can do, a chemtrail of bitterness in my wake, is write a novel to cope with how bad I feel. A real low. To spend years of your life writing and rewriting something that you already know isn’t going to totally nail it because the feelings you have for your home are so complicated and you don’t know what to do with them. 

Of course I miss the fog. I’m not a monster. 

I let my narrator be as cranky and lost as I felt inside. I let her feel abandoned, like she had lost her grip. It was her fault for letting other people make her lose herself, and no one wanted to save her. And in the very end, it helped. That and all the walking I was doing. Have you ever wondered if that dippy montage scene in the movie where a middle-age woman smells a kumquat in Chinatown before smiling at a street artist painting a mural on her way to throw a dollar in a teenage dancer’s fedora on the subway was for real? That was totally me. Jazz at The Blue Note. Rush tickets at the Met Opera. Journaling on a marble bench at the Frick. Deep-throating a messy hot dog on a street corner as two cab drivers tell each other to fuck off. I was able to do everything in New York because I felt like I didn’t know everything. I had freed myself from my crampy old narrative.

My bones will always be San Francisco. No matter how much time passes since I’ve lived in New York, I always feel like Valencia Street walking down First Avenue. City Lights browsing at the Strand. The Latin American Club drinking at Sharlene’s. Goofy old BART riding the Q train. And most definitely a tacky house in the fog wondering why everyone wants to live in a brownstone.

Promises

Michelle Tea

When we cross the threshold of the Outer Sunset home, moving into the cozy foyer, turning through the french doors into the living room, I see the wood-burning stove in the corner, and I grip your arm. Buy me this house, I beg.

It’s an outrageous thing to ask you, but months ago, when I first told you I loved you, months before I pledged I would, as I am always, always the one who says it first and this time I was trying to do things differently, no sex until the third date, etc., and it was working, and I was not going to say it, but then I did, and you looked at me with your eyes burning and said, I’m gonna buy you a house, and lots of people have told me they loved me but never, ever had anyone ever made me a promise like that. And though you did go on to break so many promises, you kept that one.

A real estate agent is in the house. And I know her! This, too, is outrageous, an outrageous synchronicity, for I am not the sort of person who knows real estate agents. I know porn actors and therapists and writers and activists and academics and hairstylists and palm readers and dancers, but this was the only real estate agent I had ever known, befriended back in the day when she bartended at the lesbian bar, and here she is, and introductions are made and she picks a pear from the tree in the yard and says, Eat it, a magic command, because she is apparently a witch as well as a seller of homes, and I do it, I bite into the fruit, which is hard, and thin-tasting, and from now on whenever I want to live somewhere I will try to eat something from the premises.

Sure, the house would be purchased with tech money, like every other house purchase in the city, because you work at a tech company, but it certainly isn’t the worst one, not one of the top baddies whose buses were being pelted, whose campuses were being stormed by activists. You had gotten work there at the entry level, so broke, in debt to your then-girlfriend, and you worked so hard and came home each night exhausted, to fall asleep with your dog on your chest, a scruffy, white rescue who was a monster to everyone but you. You woke up every morning and did it all over again, and years later you were at the top, and the company went public, and now we can by a house. We.

You had grown up in a Central Californian family that owned homes, that renovated them by adding entire floors, with enough money on hand to rent an apartment while the house grew taller. Your mother owned a home in a cul-de-sac, deep red and made to look like a rustic barn. I had grown up in a family that rented homes, subject to the whim of landlords, kicked out when the owner’s daughter got knocked up and needed a home, kicked out when the place got sold, kicked out when a relationship soured. Years later my mother would buy her first home with the settlement from a worker’s comp case, and would lose it during the subprime mortgage apocalypse. Now she rented from a woman she worked with, always in fear the woman would stop by and see that she’d allowed the swimming pool to grow thick with algae, hopping with frogs.

I never expected to own a home. I was a writer. I ran a nonprofit for other writers, writers like me: queer, small-press-published, if published at all. Home ownership was a sport for you, a hobby. Cruising through Bernal Heights or the Mission on a weekend, you’d spot a sandwich board on a sidewalk and pull the car over. The places we walked through. That one on Dolores, on the corner, they’d divided it into condos and were selling what was once the attic. The views were insane, it was millions of dollars. Why even look at such a place, they just made me mad, but you loved it. The wide, wooden flat of a Victorian on Valencia, a dream. A walk-up on Cortland with all the 1920s details intact. Any of them would have been a blessing I could not yet comprehend, but you always could see what was wrong with them, why they would never work, even the million-dollar attic some sucker would inevitably purchase.

This house, our house, the one with the magic pear, it looks unlike all the others, the ticky-tacky boxes the Outer Sunset is famous for. It looks like a storm on Cape Cod had blown it across the country. It literally has a white picket fence around its tiny front yard. In the backyard is a heavy wooden studio with loft space, painted blue and white, which I call the mini-barn. A brick path leads to it, bright green moss fuzzy where the grout once was. The pear tree, yes, but an apple tree as well, and some other living things, a shrub of heather and some tall, swaying butterfly bushes, ivy that runs with rats, a spindly, elegant potato tree.

I write a letter to the sellers. I am a writer, it says. I’ve lived in San Francisco for decades. I am working on a book about mermaids. I will sit in this house so close to the ocean and conjure them. I have a baby in my belly as I write, a mermaid of sorts. Here is a picture of me and my spouse, look at us smiling, we love each other so much, I have never had a house that was mine. Oh please, goddess of pears and real estate, deity of homeowners and patron saints of renters, let this happen. And it did.

I tried to move to the Outer Sunset once before, many, many years ago, with another partner. A second-story flat on Judah. Nothing memorable, except a flat feeling of depression, as gray and wide as the sky. Forever I had lived in the Mission. I’d been offered drugs and the implements for using them daily as I walked to Katz’s for my morning salt bagel. I had watched the cops line up Latino youths in the days before cell phones, twitching on the sidewalk to bear witness, scared of the cops’ glare, unsure that the boys even wanted the audience. I was familiar with the street people—Swan, who doused himself in birdseed and let the pigeons climb over him as he sat, cross-legged, leaning against the façade of Adobe Books on Sixteenth. The Red Man, a totally red man, in a red fedora and red pants, red shoes, red shirt, his black mustache and black eyelashes striking against his crimson skin. The White Lady, with her kabuki face and ivory shroud. Sheila, so crack damaged, always introducing herself as she came toward you asking for money. UFOmer, with his David Lee Roth hair and David Lee Roth attire and even his David Lee Roth guitar, serenading passersby with hostility. My friends were in the Mission. My spots—Muddy Waters and Pancho Villa. Mission Creek Café. The Lex. Truly Mediterranean. Mission Grounds was still there, and Ti Couz and Café Macondo.

Looking up Judah to where the street terminated at the ocean, I saw nothing. A laundromat a few blocks away, and a natural food co-op. That was it. I felt a chill descend, and it was more than the obscured sun. It would be like being dead, living out here. I was grateful when the landlord refused our cat, despite our insistence that she would impact the space no more than a houseplant. I didn’t even visit that part of the city for another decade, at least.

---

Was that the best time of our life, in that house? I still believed in you, had no plans otherwise. You were true blue, hardworking, family oriented. We were devoted to one another and to the baby we’d hatched inside me. I had no reason to question you were anyone other than who you promised me you were. My friend painted a mural on the nursery wall, an animal tea party. After our baby was born we strapped him, so tiny, to our bodies and walked him down the street, where so many things now were, now that people like us—white, hipster-adjacent—had been pushed to the edge of town by the patterns of gentrification. The neighborhood had become cool. Even the sun was there, thanks to climate change. On one corner, the restaurant that made the dutch babies on weekends. Next to that, the overpriced boutique where you could kill time waiting for your name to be called from the list. They sold ceramic everything and thrifted dresses of white linen marked up to one hundred times the purchase price.

We became co-op members and I bought pint after pint of Brooklyn Blackout ice cream, even after my OB warned me I was eating too much. What point was there to being pregnant if not to eat and eat? Food would never taste so good ever again. The little coffee shop

Reviews for The End of the Golden Gate

[Lilia Martinez-Coburn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Every current, past and future resident of San Francisco needs to read this.