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San
Francisco
...leather, lust and trams too!
California:
April, 1997
A bloke tried to pick me up at a bus stop in a very ordinary street in San Francisco! This despite the fact that I had a sunburnt nose and was wearing my floppy white sun hat — the one that Lenore hates. I was flattered, but not being bisexual at the moment I had to decline his advances.
San Francisco is certainly a place where sex is never very far away, or seemingly far from the minds of a great many of its inhabitants. And that isn't a bad thing. The sex shop we went into there was the highest quality and most relaxed I've ever visited. None of your pink nylon whispy nonsense here. No rows of cheap plastic elephantine dildos or kiss-me-quick underpants or imbecilic porno videos. This was serious sex!
It's a shop that Body Adornments supplies. Here you'll find not only the leather gear they produce, but also the swings and other sex devices that Tanya showed us. And on all sides the restraints and cuffs and straps and thongs and whips and cats'o-nine-tails and stuff I don't know the names for, hang from masked mannequins.
As Lenore tries on a couple of soft rubber bustiers (being vegan limits your choice of exotic clothing somewhat) I wander and wonder. Half the stuff I can imagine being a turn-on. The other half would turn me off. But I am sure many of the other customers would think exactly the opposite way around. Such is humanity.
Unlike the rather sheepish, eye-avoiding staff of less-classy establishments, the young lady who is serving us is relaxed and frank and, I should imagine, enjoys her job.
In the end, of course, nothing non-animal creates the look that Lenore wants, so we don't buy anything, and instead go for a ride on a hot and sweaty tram. I think it is wonderful that a city should reintroduce this form of transport, and not just for tourists. The San Francisco cable cars are fun, but the trams feel real — they take you from a to b in an efficient, if sweltering, manner.
Tourists
We attempt to see the Golden Gate Bridge, but it is swathed, as usual, in fog.
We stand and peer at the mist with a hundred merry Asians who are totally unconcerned. I sincerely love Asian tourists. My tourism is beset by bred-in-the-bone snobbery. I wish I could be as free and happy and energetic and unselfconscious as the Japanese and Chinese and Korean tourists we see everywhere, laughing and posing and chattering their way around the sights, dressed up to the nines, the women in high heels, the pretty girls in short skirts, the little children as cute as buttons, the elderly cackling and waving their walking sticks.
We do the cable cars of course, which are fun but over too soon to be anything other than a diversion. We lose Erica, then find her. We wander through the tourist quarter, peer at awful t-shirts and other tourists. We relax in a park, in surroundings that remind me of a Maupin story. But our time is limited, and we leave deciding to spend more a lot more time here in the future.
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