There is a topic that seems to be coming up in my conversations with my San Francisco friends a lot lately which relates to being social and being sexy in San Francisco. What I’ve learned recently is that a lot of my friends feel a little twinge of sadness that they just don’t really stand out in San Francisco like they have in the other cities where they lived. They love San Francisco. They’re glad that they’re accepted for who they are here. But there’s this little bit of confusion for them about just who they are because who they are was always someone “different” everywhere else and, let’s face it, it is really really hard to be different in San Francisco.

This is true for my friends in different ways. Goth friends and “alternative friends” and queer friends and artist friends alike all seem to find that they have lost a little bit of that feeling of being special that they had when they were part of a certain fringe group in another no-name city. I’ve gotten used to it now but I know the feeling that they’re talking about because I grappled with it for the first couple of years that I lived here.

For me, the issue was being just a straight girl living in San Francisco. Before moving to San Francisco, the things that I talked about and did in regards to my sexuality were edgy and they pushed the boundaries of what the people I was around were getting into at any given time. This goes waaaay back to being the first one of my group of friends to have sex.

And it continued on in many ways … I was reading about pomosexuality in high school (ah, who knew then that I’d be casually attending events hosted by author Carol Queen today?!) I bought myself a vibrator for my 18th birthday. I briefly dated a bisexual feminist man when I was too young to really understand that this guy was actually just gay. I was an advocate for open relationships. I was a promoter of sex-positive thinking. I worried my early boyfriends with gifts of handcuffs and silk restraints. I was the first person that a friend called when she finally had her first orgasm because she knew I was the one who would get it. I had adventurous outdoor sex in more than one location. I owned stripper heels and wore them out. When I was 16, I had a really hot poster on my bedroom wall of two gay men embracing that read “Fuck Rules. Wear Condoms.” Oh yeah, I was edgy.

What I discovered about my sexual self when I moved to San Francisco is that I’m really not all that edgy. Sure, I’ve dabbled in the basics of sexy life in San Francisco. I’ve flirted with the idea of having hot threesomes with polyamorous couples. I’ve danced all night at Bondage a Go Go and been inside the walls of Kinky Salon. I’ve stuck money into a dancer’s bra at Divas. But the fact of the matter is that my real sex life here is pretty damn vanilla when compared to the private lives of the people I’ve met here. For that matter, it’s pretty vanilla when compared to the things these people do in public.

I mean, it’s hard to push the edges of what people are doing sexually in San Francisco. If you’re not into pony play and you don’t like getting peed on and you can describe your sex life without using the word fetish … well, let’s face it, you’re just kind of plain and boring. And that’s what I had to come to terms with about living here as opposed to living somewhere else. Elsewhere, I could be defined by my making-people-uncomfortable sexuality. Here, I’m just on one end of the spectrum of things considered normal and there’s not much I do that’s going to make a San Francisco resident blush.

It’s a good thing, ultimately. It’s allowed me to learn to define myself in many different ways that aren’t just related to how cool and edgy and sexual I can be. I think that’s what San Francisco’s so-permissive attitude can do for people - it can let them be more than just a single definition of what makes them stand out from the crowd. You can be more than just gay here because so what, everyone is gay here. You can be more than just a graphic designer here because who doesn’t know a graphic designer here. You can simply be more. But it can definitely be disorienting when you first move here and you’re trying to figure out who you are in this midst of people that all seem to be creative and edgy.

Luckily, as soon as you take a trip back home to wherever the family lives or you talk to one of the people you knew when you were younger, you realize that the things about you that are just taken for granted as “normal” here are still edgy and weird and scandalous in the rest of the country. And you can feel great about who you are while feeling comfortable being in a city that doesn’t pigeonhole you as simply that thing.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 7:49 am and is filed under General Info and Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.