I can’t remember why we decided to move together, my lesbian roommate and I. I had been talking about moving to get off the couch and out of her way—and to stop the monkey dreams. The “monkeys” turned out to be real, but they were actually raccoons scurrying by my open window inches from my head as I slept nearly every night, and nearly every morning I would relay to my roommate the weird monkey dreams I was having. The dreams stopped when we moved to the penthouse near Dolores Park, but the raccoons didn’t. One night we watched in horror as a raccoon drowned three stories below in the neighbors’ hot tub as its raccoon family screamed in panic around it and no human would get close enough to do anything. They could very well have been the same little band of raccoons from Diamond Street. Did they follow us because I’d started feeding them?

Two things stand out most in my memory about the time at this place: one, it was a killer apartment and two, I was having a lot more sex. The apartment was the kind of place I had always fantasized San Francisco to be. It was funky and weird, had an amazing view and a lot of stairs. The façade on 20th Street is a non-descript but handsome 1920s four story apartment building. However, hiding behind it, and fused to it, a Victorian mansion that had clearly outlived its real estate potential, and like so many others been converted to apartments (the real San Francisco Story is after all real estate). Ironically that mansion, with its few remaining grand rooms now buried inside another building, would probably be in great demand again in today’s tech billionaire climate. It is a mere half block from the new home of Mark Zuckerberg. Anyone familiar with the neighborhood knows the particularly creepy style of the few big Victorians left here. There are only a few surviving, but they definitely stand out. There’s one between 20th and Liberty on Guerrero that could be a near match, at least from what you could still find intact after being imbedded in the backside of a much larger building. That one was even somehow in the news for having all of its stained glass removed when it became some kind of halfway house in the 90s (there’s a random tidbit). Anyway one of the intact Victorian parlor apartments in our building was occupied by another UO architecture grad which is how we came to rent the most special unit of all. Resting on top of the whole weird architectural pile on that very steep hillside known as Liberty Hill was our half-midcentury modern half-Victorian attic kooky mysterious and spooky penthouse. From our perch we watched the Oakland fire, and every other sunny evening took special joy in the orange-pink reflections off what is arguably the city’s ugliest building create the illusion that it too was on fire.

The elderly couple who managed the building (that used to be the norm in this town) weren’t shy at all about telling us the gay couple who lived in the penthouse for years had both died of AIDS. Clearly it was not their first time informing a new tenant of this all too common event of the times. It was my first time though encountering the left behind stuff of a lifetime, with no family left behind to clean up. It didn’t make us uncomfortable at all though—if anything it felt right. The bathroom window, one of those with a crank and louvers of glass that never quite close had been transformed into a perfect gay rainbow with custom cut strips of stained glass—that we kept in honor of their memory. I pierced my own ears in the church-like colored glow of that bathroom with lots of beer and a very big needle. It didn’t hurt but the crunching noise was disturbing.

Years later I helped my beloved gay boss move into an apartment just around the corner on Guerrero, again occupied by two AIDS ghosts. The apartment was the dramatic attic of a big craftsman house with high ceilings, a loft and balconies with amazing views over the Mission.  The previous residents had left a great deal of stuff behind, including some furniture covered in red Irish setter dog hair and a large box of photographs. Rather than help the movers, I sat in the corner of the back room, and carefully went through the whole box of photos that were generally arranged chronologically from top to bottom, which took a couple of hours. The photos chronicled the couples’ years together, the death of the Irish setter, and at the very bottom the death-bed photos of the first man to die. He had been a model, as evidenced by his professional head shots with name and contact info on the back. His gradual decline from beauty to ugliness was well documented, and finally the last few photos at the very bottom of the box were of his lifeless body draped in pure white sheets with a single red rose on his chest. I realized that the photos had been taken in the same room in which I now sat sobbing on the floor. I had never seen anything like this before. I demanded to take the box of photos away—I didn’t want the landlord to throw them out. I gave them to an artist friend who re-photographed them and created an album, including the story about where they came from. Of course I never knew these two guys, and the fact that the photos had been left behind was the only evidence of what became of the surviving partner. My friend didn’t mind knowing this history and we often referred to the couple and their dog by name as guardian ghosts, watching over the place, and him. In a bizarre coincidence I’ve known two subsequent owners of this house, but have never shared this story with them—both hetero couples—I deemed them, fairly or unfairly, to be unworthy.

Back to 20th Street and the sex part of this post. If you’re squeamish about gay sex you can stop reading here. I was single in those days and the only people I knew outside of work were ACTUP. It never felt right to me to use ACTUP as a way to meet socially, though many did so—including my roommate—and frankly I lost respect for them, there was real work to do in those days. I tried some pre-internet newspaper ads (which is actually how I met the first love of my life back in Portland in 1979) and started dating—some good some bad and one friend for life. That friend was very adventurous, had lived in New York and wasn’t afraid to try anything. He made it very easy to explore aspects of gay culture that frankly scared me a bit.

This was the very early 1990s and a sex-positive attitude was taking hold in SF again after years of death and the notorious health department shaming and closing of the baths in 1984. Queer Nation kiss-ins were way in, and new underground “safer sex” clubs were opening up, one was even incorporated as The Church of Phallic Worship, as well as private parties like the Radical Faeries’ solstice Golden Bowl Party. If you ever hear homos my age speak disparagingly about Dianne Feinstein, keep in mind that she was mayor in 1984—we don’t forget—including how she became mayor. Anyway the closure probably helped BART and Steamworks as Berkeley passed no such draconian laws. Neither did San Jose. This new breed of clubs later became licensed businesses, but started out completely underground, and were raided by the police—we’re talking the 1990s and gay sex was being policed—again. I won’t debate the public health argument with anyone BTW because it so missed the point then and now. The new debate over Truvada or not Truvada, as if taking a pill every day is more awkward than slipping on a condom in the heat of passion, and that big brother attitude that we can’t be trusted. Well to that I say: the cure, spending or progress toward one is where again? I don’t think a straight person can relate to the difference between a condom as birth control and a condom as a physical symbol and acknowledgment of disease that can’t be cured. But I digress and rant.

One of this new breed of community center/sex club was EROS, which is still there, though for how much longer remains to be seen as it is now next door to Whole Foods—awkward. My friend and I went to the opening night party at EROS 20+ years ago, billed as a unique sex club for all, women’s nights, bi nights and a whole host of other non-viable nods to community inclusiveness—doubtless actually intended to keep the authorities at bay. It didn’t take long for it though to revert to a pretty traditional tried, tested and proven gay men’s bath house—without locking doors (that is the legal difference FYI, not water). My roommate even attended some of the women’s nights, but reported that the girls just sat around talking—hmmm… talking—I’ll get back to that. The opening party was so super weird. Isadora Alman (“ask Isadora”) did readings in one room, various displays of awkward bondage and S&M (aren’t they always awkward and stagy?) were going on all over what looked like a converted dentist’s office. EROS was for its first few years the unsexiest sex space ever conceived. A group of Japanese women with cameras were the oddest attendees of the party—giggling is soooooo unsexy. After about an hour of boring whipping demos and no alcohol—of course—my adventurous friend decided to make good on the promise of an evening of sexual abandon. He and I stripped off, found a tall black man to join us and put on an actual show for the hundreds of fully dressed looky-loos—all captured on film by the Japanese tourists. Somewhere there’s a video.

Once EROS settled into a regular sex club it was OK—certainly handy, but the darker more seedy ones like Blowbuddies always had more appeal, their phone message that ended with “and if you’re wearing cologne stay home” said it all—which brings me back to talking. There’s an etiquette to baths and sex clubs that is complex and unspoken. It takes a while to learn, but the appeal of these places is that it is not dating. If one hookup isn’t working, move to the next, and the next. For me the absolute best thing about them is that it can all go down without a single word exchanged—I just think that is awesome. Strangely EROS is once again spinning itself as a different kind of club, all inclusive and community serving. I can’t help but think this a direct response to the changing Whole Foods condo-fied neighborhood (or maybe the hyper prudish young geeks who now occupy our city). This one event lead to 20 years of adventures—all around the world. The best bath was Chicago, the weirdest was Paris—maybe Rome and the most “normal” looking and easy to find was Sydney.

If a conversation with a straight friend ever turns toward sex, especially numbers of encounters, my answer is always the same: I will tell you, but make very sure you really want to know. And, what does any of this have to do with relationships? Nothing at all. I’ve had a litmus test for relationships since I was a teenager, and yes it’s a first date question: do you believe in monogamy or god, and if the answer to either is yes then this is just a hook up and there’s no need for a second date.

As our involvement with ACTUP wound down and we had less and less in common, I told my roommate I no longer wanted to live with her. I of course hoped she would move out and leave me the magical penthouse. It didn’t happen that way. She moved shortly after and for that I hated her. I still drive by and wonder who lives up there now, hidden from the street, sunbathing in the nude and sipping coffee on the deck watching the sunrise over Oakland.