In the annals of queer memoirs, some conventions have become cliches: Being Misunderstood, Coming Out, the First Relationship, Running Away. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new memoir, The End of San Francisco, reworks all of these into a text where memory is inherently unstable, and where such experiences achieve a freshness while remaining uncompromisingly queer. It’s a text that both remembers and reminds but is also a record of a historical and cultural forgetting.
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At the heart of this complicated yet masterfully told tale is San Francisco, for decades the Emerald City of the queer imagination. The city has seen drastic changes in its landscape and perhaps its spirit. A new injunction against nudity caused much bemoaning of the loss of a core San Francisco value, the freedom to express oneself sexually and physically. More gravely, in recent years, city administrations have fought poverty not by increasing housing, for instance, but by actually sweeping the poor out of sight—with measures including stringent policing and surveillance tactics directed against poor and homeless people as well as severe antiloitering laws. Like many local queer and antipoverty activists, Sycamore has been part of the movement against San Francisco’s rabid washing out of the poor.
The point for Sycamore and her fellow activists, including those in the group Gay Shame, was never simply that fucking in public was a radical act unto itself. Rather, they sought to demonstrate the link between the privatization of a city’s resources—and their dwindling for its poorest—and the shutting down of activities deemed too “private” or unsavory for public consumption.
Class remains complicated throughout—Sycamore, for a period without family support, was, like the band of queers she traveled with, often on the edge of homelessness and drug use. But the stakes were different for everyone, with each person coming into their experiences with different sets of survival skills and cultural literacies that either helped them manage or proved insufficient.
By Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (City Lights Publishers) Reading Mon 10/7, 7:30 PM Women and Children First 5233 N. Clarkwomenandchildrenfirst.com free
