SF: The West Coast NYC

San Francisco is really the sixth borough of New York, the only place, says my pal Alvin, which has the same inflated property values and inflated sense of self-importance. "[Residents of] San Francisco can look down on their surroundings," continues Alvin. "They think LA is for boobs, Seattle is bland, but they love New York. We share the same reverence for Halloween." Not only that, but bicoastal is the new bisexual, Andrea Lawlor tells me. She's a boy-dyke, but not an "FTM," an increasingly common phenomena in this Baghdad by the Bay. There's a grassroots Boy Dyke Lollapalooza here, a huge movement in which its members all help each other get jobs, apartments and connections?and one must refer to many of them as "he." They're pretty sharp with a great sense of humor, so the only people who suffer from this, points out Zak Szymanski from the Bay Area Guardian, are actual 14-year-old boys, who are now indistinguishable from young dykes.

"People talk constantly about rents falling here, but they don't come down a teeny bit?they just get deals. No credit check; you get to have a dog," Alvin prattles on. It's true that people thought that the rents would go down in SF after the big dot com bust, when many prospectors sold their book collections to Dog Eared, a great bookstore on 20th and Valencia, and left town. While it's possible to get a room for $600 and a studio for $900, if you really look and are connected, it's not probable. Try $1400 for a small apartment in the Sunset and a tight job market, similar to ours. The Mission District, which is still primarily Latino, consists of Mission Street, which is pretty seedy, and the avenue one block up, Valencia, which is full of hipsters and their businesses: retro furniture, sushi, coffee shops, like that. Malcolm from Fauntleroy, my tour guide, said he felt beaten and drained on Valencia, seeing all these people with headsets, dragging their poodles, so Alvin, Malcolm and I set out for the beer-battered glory of the Tenderloin, which San Franciscans have a deep attachment to. We started out at Mr. Lee-Ona's, a charming Tenderloin bar with a miniscule stage and a peachy silk backdrop. It was full of deliriously happy middle-aged gays in an upbeat mixed race environment, listening to tunes from a divacentric jukebox that inexplicably had Willie Nelson on it, joining Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Mariah Carey, Patsy Cline, Gloria Gaynor, et al.

Next we crawled over to Aunt Charlie's Lounge on Turk Street, which is always cheering with its irrational exuberance. A middle-aged drag with silicone cheeks and a Marilyn Monroe look lip-synched right into my face the minute we walked through the door, and I looked back happily. It's a tiny drag bar with mostly older queens, the oldest being the inspiring 70-year-old Vicky Marlene, who's been performing continuously since the 50s. Young Malcolm asked her if she had any message for my readers. "Live and live live, what else is there to say?" she responded promptly. There was a nice community feel to the place. You get a lot of eye contact from the performers and cheap drinks served by a waitress with a Jocelyn Wildenstein look, and I'd recommend the joint to anybody visiting the Bay Area as it has an endangered feel to it. Charmed twentysomethings sat enraptured by the show put on by the decidedly older queens, and silvery white balloons added a festive air to the proceedings. The more modern transgressive performance art version of all this, Trannyshack, is at the Stud every Tuesday night, but you won't see compassionate patrons offering up dollar bills in the ancient supportive ritual of classic drag artistry.

We stopped in at the Club 220, the old Campus Men's Theater where Alvin used to lap dance, and said hi to the young boy with the crazy colored hair who'd just hit town and had gotten a job as a sex club cashier. Some things, one hopes, will never change. Polk Street was a big gay hustler street back when I was young, but it too was dying out and becoming a straight street. The two hustlers crouched outside of the Rendez-vous, at Bush and Polk, looked a bit done in.

Memorabilia of the gay San Francisco of Polk Street past covered the walls, and there weren't too many patrons. I felt literally queasy as I gloomily reimagined the place as a crowded quasi-Irish sports bar, but was distracted by Malcolm's long-winded anecdote. He was standing outside of the bathroom, at a table providing free chili dogs, eating one, as his friend Ed stood on the nearby stage singing "Hello" by Lionel Richie. Suddenly Malcolm noticed that everybody was hunched near the door, and an Irish hustler-turned-stalker was hacking at the bar with an axe while the bartender jumped around shrieking. "Ed! Ed!" yelled Malcolm, but Ed could not stop singing the Lionel Richie song, which had become an extension of his fear. Finally the police came and hauled away the assailant, and Malcolm overheard the regulars murmuring to the arresting officers, "He just had an operation, if that helps."