At the end of the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting,” the title character breaks with two decades of unhealthy coping and defense mechanisms to drive 3,000 miles to San Francisco on a hand-crafted engine. The goal? In his own words, which he stole from Robin Williams’ character earlier in the movie: “To go see about a girl.” At the end of the movie, as the credits roll and the screen shifts to black, Will turns a bend in the road and disappears from view. His fate remains a mystery.
There is a clear dichotomy between San Francisco as place and as concept — San Francisco being representative of the West as a whole. The place is fixed in space. It is the emerald waters of the San Francisco Bay and the setting sun over the Golden Gate Bridge. Historic trolleys, sea lions sunbathing in the warm gaze of tourists and the intoxicating air over Castro Street on a Saturday night. Then, there is the concept. A titillating promise of freedom and new beginnings; armed not with the prospector’s pan but the technology and social attitudes of a new age. It is this San Francisco — the promise of it — that Will Hunting traveled to in pursuit of his ex-girlfriend, and it is the very same concept that I traveled to just a few weeks ago.
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The trip was, in some ways, an accident of financial necessity. As a high school graduation gift, my grandparents gifted me two $500 gift cards for Delta Airlines. Incidentally, the first was used for Her my freshman year, when She and I spent spring break together far from the blistering winds of Michigan. The second gift card remained forgotten in the dresser drawer back in my hometown until this past year. I resolved to use it for a weekend trip this summer to save the high costs of summer airfare. My problem? Hotel costs. Before we ever thought of revisiting the concept of Us, I booked a trip to visit Her — and take advantage of Her summer apartment. The optics are not lost on me that both of my gift cards were used to take a vacation with Her.
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The first thing I took note of on the descent into the city was the sheer Westness of everything. The trees I was used to on the East Coast gave way to the browns and reds of a subtle Mediterranean climate. From a distance, I could see the sloping hills and rising mountains of the city — a far cry from Virginia Beach, my hometown’s highest point of just 88 feet. For much of the weekend, I was reminded of my status as an almost-foreigner. Yes, I was still in the same country, but the difference felt as stark as an Irishman in Athens. My walk along the Embarcadero was peppered with succeeding street vendors selling Mexican style hot dogs and fruit cups. More than once on my first afternoon in the city, I saw driverless cars cruising down the road. I even saw one successfully execute a narrow three point turn on a neighborhood street. It wasn’t until the evening when I finally saw the person I had come to San Francisco for.
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A thought. San Francisco may be the last city with character left in a country besieged by the blight of dullness. Maybe it’s the idealism of a son of the Midatlantic, but the menagerie of colors and people spoke to a promise of the West Coast; could I imagine having this weekend with Her in Baltimore or Richmond? Unlikely. But maybe it is because She herself operates as a symbol of the Golden Coast. Being a nerd aside — the 21st century has attracted enough of them to San Francisco — the dizzying combination of Her outgoing personality and abundance of conversation is perfectly in line with the extroverted nature of that city. She is more at home in the colorful sunkissed houses of San Francisco than the sunless brick of the Midwest.
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I’m not the first person to engineer a trip to San Francisco on the unpromised assumption of love. After spending a Saturday joined at the hip, we had dinner by Castro Street, one of the world’s first gay neighborhoods — gayborhood, if you will. At a time when various Queer communities across the country have lost some of the geographic meccas of the last century — Hingetown, Cleveland’s former gayborhood, now hosts a new population of millennials and luxury condos — The Castro still has some life left in it. While it has become less gay, a small majority of residents still identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
The Queering of The Castro happened in the 1960s and 1970s. Driven by repressive households and the drudgery of middle America, young gay men and women flocked to San Francisco. Once in the city, the twin motivations of cheap housing and community saw the area around Castro Street quickly become host not only to gay residents, but also gay businessmen. Florists, bookshops and barbershops were all run by gay men. It’s easy to understand the appeal; San Francisco — California at large — has always been a destination for the outcasts of the educated, civilized East. It’s where the laborers went, the disobedient youth and, yes, the silent mass of Queer America.
This is Castro the concept. Where She and I — both Queer, regardless of whether our waiter thought our hand-holding was representative of some heterosexuality, and by the Castro too, what scandal! — felt comfortable expressing ourselves and hurrying to a Queer bookstore before it closed. It’s why She was so drawn to it this summer and why I am now also enamored with it as a place to live during a still-hypothetical internship. It’s where we saw dozens of Queer people, both young and old, eating dinner, entering and exiting the bars and hurrying home to prepare themselves for a Saturday night out.
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We spend a lot of time locking away the feelings we consider harmful to our present circumstances. To quote Michael Stuhlbarg’s monologue in “Call Me By Your Name:” “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!”
I will dedicate much of this piece to illustrating the sobering realities of San Francisco, Castro and the gayborhoods neighboring Mission District. But concepts can also be limiting. There’s a concept of what breaking up should be. What an ex should be. Life is the consequence of which path we choose; concept or reality? I chased the concept, and yet the reality remains a visceral feeling of companionship I find difficult to describe to you, the reader, even in the form of communication I’m most comfortable with. The reality? We immediately fell into comfortable domesticity over a brief weekend. Yet the concept would argue that I should have never spent a weekend with Her in the first place. Reality required that I took this journey, yet reality also demands indecision and difficult conversations not illustrated in the ending of “Good Will Hunting.” Still, I was happier sharing a dinner with Her near the nation’s gay mecca than facing that conversation; the feelings were reality, but we spent the weekend in the daze of content concept.
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Castro the place is perhaps less magical. It is well known, and She told me this as well, that the Castro is built for white gay men. No doubt it’s a symbol of Queer liberation, but I fit in easier than a non-white bisexual woman. This is perhaps symptomatic of its origins in the gay middle class. The Castro was never a place for all Queer people to freely migrate to; it was price-locked to the type of white gay man who could afford it. Andrea Shorter, a co-founder of And Castro for All, said during a panel hosted by San Francisco Pride that non-white people were never allowed to play a central role in the concept of the neighborhood.
“Discrimination is very real,” Shorter said. “It’s part of the history (of the neighborhood) and goes back to what people expect of the Castro. There was a time, and it’s not entirely gone, where the neighborhood was a ‘white man’s playground’ where everyone else is ‘background’ or has an ancillary role.”
San Francisco as a whole is currently facing an affordability crisis. An analysis by the Terner Center found that 55% of Californians would find it difficult to “get by” in San Francisco. Only 14% could afford to live in the city comfortably. This process has been accelerated over the decade by the rise of the tech industry, which has slowly pushed the poorer residents out in favor of a new gentry of programmers and software engineers.
The closest I could get to Her house via Bay Area Rapid Transit was the Mission District, a historically vibrant Latino neighborhood. During my pedestrian odyssey, I only heard Spanish. People opening their stores, uncles loitering on the sidewalk — although I would consider conversation a reasonable purpose — and all manner of other residents. However, my visit glossed over the fact that this experience is fading from view. In this neighborhood, landlords are attempting to evict rent-controlled tenants in favor of outsiders willing to pay two or three times as much. The same charm of colorful murals, locally owned Latino businesses and a hospitable community is bringing in tech workers who had no hand in building the neighborhood in the first place. A tourist site for San Francisco advertises the Mission as the city’s “most-of-the-moment neighborhoods” featuring “trend-setting boutiques, restaurants and more.” In their photos of the neighborhood’s attractions, nearly all happy visitors are white.
Today, The Castro is facing the same reality as the rest of San Francisco. Gentrification, consumerism and a rising cost of living are driving out the Queer community in the same way that they’re driving out the lower-income community. My initial impressions of San Francisco were, admittedly, ones of awe. My ride in a driverless car was exhilaratingly terrifying, a reminder of the new urban innovations in this Western oasis. The neon sign of the Castro Theater reminded me of the State Theater — and everything I love about that sign. But reality is bleaker. Why were there so many street vendors selling in rapid Spanish? Can they afford the $3,000 average rent in the city through their $4 hot dogs? How much wealth went into creating that driverless car, and which Uber or taxi driver did I deprive of a day’s pay by riding in it? The colorful murals of the Mission, inspired by Chicano culture, depict a wonderful concept of neighborhood diversity and character, but where can the residents who built that character afford to live?
We never see what happens to Will Hunting when he turns that bend in the road. His car — handbuilt by his friends — could have broken down halfway to the promised land, left behind to drown in the Red Sea. Or maybe he, like me, made it to San Francisco. Did he get his happy ending? It’s a cheerful concept, one I was glad to indulge in on my own brief getaway. But love is as volatile as San Francisco’s ongoing housing crisis. It requires words, not deeds. Apologies, discussions, compromises and the endless flaw of human indecision. I went to San Francisco, an unpromised-promised land of love and new beginnings, for just that. Yet I return with Her and myself in the same place as before I left. Concepts are wonderful things to be inspired by, but we must face the reality, in every field of our lives, that requires deeper action. San Francisco promises freedom and new beginnings, but only for a few. But what if it opened its wells to everyone. What if the Castro was a haven for Queer people of every creed, affordable to those on the lower fringe of the middle class. What if the endless technology was used to lower the cost of living and increase the comfortability of the lower class? What if San Francisco was one place, fixed in both space and mind?
Statement Correspondent Joshua Nicholson can be reached at joshuni@umich.edu.
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