I'm having... a moment.
Normally I would wait a day. Let it simmer. But I'm having a moment and I want to write about it. A moment of anger, frustration, rage, confusion... No, no, it's not confusion. It's that cognitive dissonance that keeps coming up again and again. This is the city I live in, the one that's 17 miles from where I grew up, the one that's the sanctuary city, filled with people of all class backgrounds, of people with differing citizenship statuses, sizes, ages, colors, abilities, and that city continuously seems at odds with the kind of gathering I find myself in this evening: Kinky Salon at Mission Control.
Having spent an afternoon in the company of a bunch of fabulous folk- sipping champagne, choking a little on that chocolate flavored and carbonated red wine, switching between Spanish and English, laughing, being amazed by Dick van Dick's Air Jordan shoe purse (DvD, btw, recently won a trophy in the Femme Queen Realness category at an SF ball) - I literally walked out of that house on South Van Ness into a totally different side of San Francisco, the side I keep trying to close my eyes, hold 'em real tight and hope is gone when I open them. And if not gone, transformed beyond recognition. But that side seems to get bigger and bigger, and the city seems to cater to its growth.
These are the specifically bohemian bourgeois burner variety of San Franciscan, the middle class thin white heterosexuals who congregate in homogeneous groups and think of themselves as liberals because they wear faux fur chaps and have 8 songs by James Brown on their iPod. Their progressive politics cluster around sexuality and recreational drug use, and they imagine themselves a reviled minority because they want to watch other middle class thin white heterosexuals fuck each other while high on coke.
Tonight I was reminded of what it feels like to be invisible, something I haven't felt in so long it actually felt strange and a bit absurd. Mind you: I was in a neon yellow dress, ghurl. It takes COMMITMENT to making a fat girl in a neon yellow dress feel invisible. I was unapologetically bumped into, passed up, ignored, and greeted with an indifference I'd nearly forgotten people were capable of feeling toward me. I was particularly outraged that the volunteers who held the party together tonight - making sure that hallways aren't stopped up by couples who feel the absolute, impossible-to-fight need to make out right in front of the bathroom door, keeping the toilet tidy, making sure that people aren't passed out or (in my case) having a fucking miserable time - all seemed to be fat girls, and there didn't seem to be much love, appreciation or respect for any fat girls in that place in my estimation.
There are these moments when I wish with all my heart that I didn't know that when in the company of this kind of people that my brownness and my fatness render my body as undesirable. And it's been a minute since I felt like my body was undesirable. I have intentionally avoided spaces that feel like Kinky Salon for a long time because there is no room for a person of color if you don't fall into a narrowly defined part of their fetish landscape. And there's definitely no room for fatties.
My friends - and even complete strangers - keep telling me that San Francisco is uniquely fucked. The dating scene is dead if you're a brown girl with a politic who fancies boys, they keep telling me. San Francisco is a bunch of Peter Pan complex having, Polo wearing misogynists. Forget it, they say. But goddammit, I live here. I like living here. And I'm not migrating in the name of some dick pilgrimage. So, will the real San Francisco please stand up?
And please, please, let it not be some dude named Tod from Noe Valley.
Normally I would wait a day. Let it simmer. But I'm having a moment and I want to write about it. A moment of anger, frustration, rage, confusion... No, no, it's not confusion. It's that cognitive dissonance that keeps coming up again and again. This is the city I live in, the one that's 17 miles from where I grew up, the one that's the sanctuary city, filled with people of all class backgrounds, of people with differing citizenship statuses, sizes, ages, colors, abilities, and that city continuously seems at odds with the kind of gathering I find myself in this evening: Kinky Salon at Mission Control.
Having spent an afternoon in the company of a bunch of fabulous folk- sipping champagne, choking a little on that chocolate flavored and carbonated red wine, switching between Spanish and English, laughing, being amazed by Dick van Dick's Air Jordan shoe purse (DvD, btw, recently won a trophy in the Femme Queen Realness category at an SF ball) - I literally walked out of that house on South Van Ness into a totally different side of San Francisco, the side I keep trying to close my eyes, hold 'em real tight and hope is gone when I open them. And if not gone, transformed beyond recognition. But that side seems to get bigger and bigger, and the city seems to cater to its growth.
These are the specifically bohemian bourgeois burner variety of San Franciscan, the middle class thin white heterosexuals who congregate in homogeneous groups and think of themselves as liberals because they wear faux fur chaps and have 8 songs by James Brown on their iPod. Their progressive politics cluster around sexuality and recreational drug use, and they imagine themselves a reviled minority because they want to watch other middle class thin white heterosexuals fuck each other while high on coke.
Tonight I was reminded of what it feels like to be invisible, something I haven't felt in so long it actually felt strange and a bit absurd. Mind you: I was in a neon yellow dress, ghurl. It takes COMMITMENT to making a fat girl in a neon yellow dress feel invisible. I was unapologetically bumped into, passed up, ignored, and greeted with an indifference I'd nearly forgotten people were capable of feeling toward me. I was particularly outraged that the volunteers who held the party together tonight - making sure that hallways aren't stopped up by couples who feel the absolute, impossible-to-fight need to make out right in front of the bathroom door, keeping the toilet tidy, making sure that people aren't passed out or (in my case) having a fucking miserable time - all seemed to be fat girls, and there didn't seem to be much love, appreciation or respect for any fat girls in that place in my estimation.
There are these moments when I wish with all my heart that I didn't know that when in the company of this kind of people that my brownness and my fatness render my body as undesirable. And it's been a minute since I felt like my body was undesirable. I have intentionally avoided spaces that feel like Kinky Salon for a long time because there is no room for a person of color if you don't fall into a narrowly defined part of their fetish landscape. And there's definitely no room for fatties.
My friends - and even complete strangers - keep telling me that San Francisco is uniquely fucked. The dating scene is dead if you're a brown girl with a politic who fancies boys, they keep telling me. San Francisco is a bunch of Peter Pan complex having, Polo wearing misogynists. Forget it, they say. But goddammit, I live here. I like living here. And I'm not migrating in the name of some dick pilgrimage. So, will the real San Francisco please stand up?
And please, please, let it not be some dude named Tod from Noe Valley.
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