Dear friends and family,
My adventures continued!
While I was staying in Oakland for the work training, I had the evenings free to take the BART around the Bay area and explore. I spent most of it in San Francisco:
It’s fair to say that I am smitten with the City That Speaks for Itself (see previous blog posts). I just love the city’s vibe: the people, the places, the steeps and hills between. Every turn and every corner leads you somewhere interesting!
It’s just a coincidence that most of my turns in SF lead me to a gayborhood ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of my favorite bars in the Castro district is Twin Peaks. There’ve been many, many gay bars in San Francisco throughout the 20th century, but through the 1960s, most of them were being constantly harassed by the police. Cops would frequently raid gay bars and arrest patrons, or else extort the owners for “protection money” to prevent the raids (this “protection” racket was one of the issues which Harvey Milk later fought to end when he ran for San Francisco City Supervisor in 1977). In response, owners frequently hung up curtains in the windows of their bars to hide patrons and provide a modicum of plausible deniability to being a gay bar.
Twin Peaks, however, was the first bar to fight the bullshit. In the late 60s, they took the curtains down and let the light in. If you were going out, you wanted to be out, and this bar truly knocked down the walls to that. What a delight to take in so much history!
Which is not to say that the rest of the Bay Area doesn’t have a queer scene. The White Horse Inn in Oakland is the oldest still-operating queer bar in the country, and currently hosts an amazing drag king show!
In total, I had a grand old time. But there were other good times to be had:
The next weekend I had free, I drove up to Marin Headlands to see the fences full of lovers’ locks above the Golden Gate Bridge. I saw it for the first time in 2023, and was overwhelmed by the love on display:
Some new loves, some old ones. Most weathered and well-worn. I even liked that people who didn’t know to bring a padlock still tied up a sock here and there, just to tie their loves into the world with something. It was heartwarming to say the least.
I think this one is my favorite: seven lockets and a pair of rings all tied together with a cable lock. I was charmed by it in 2023, and I was charmed all the same when I managed to find it again in 2025. I don’t know what these people’s relationship was, but I am honored to bear witness to it.
But these are my favorite photos from that fence, and probably my favorite photos from all my time in The Bay:
Fences bending over from the weight of all the locks tied into them. Hundreds of lives and loves entrained together, through wear and weather and years, supplicating the world and its witness.
Isn’t it wonderful? A world heavy with love ❤️
That’s all for now,
Stay well everyone,
Evan 💙