It’s never been that I didn’t love San Francisco enough. It’s never been that I didn’t love my family, or my friends, or the opportunities enough. It’s never been that I didn’t see the beauty and the energy and the joy in the city where I lived for ten years.
It was that I was ready for change, pure and simple. I was ready to try on a new challenge, to leave familiar territory for something totally new. I’m still the same person as I was a year, two years, five years ago, only I have challenged myself to break out of my comfort zone in a way that has empowered me to consider new possibilities and opportunities in a way that staying in SF might never have.
It was more likely than not that I was going to seek a change like this at some point. Even before I moved to San Francisco, I knew it was only temporary, even though over time it started to feel more and more like it could be permanent.
See, there’s a part of the story to my first-ever visit to San Francisco that I have not yet shared here that is instrumental to understanding why change came as it did for me and why this next step in my journey feels like what was meant to be.
That first visit to San Francisco – when I saw the two affectionate men on the train and “no one blinked” – opened my eyes to tremendous possibility. And I wanted to absorb it and understand what it was like to live in a place where I was not faced with the daily pressure to be more than just a “gay man,” the label which I so often saw practically defining the lives of enterprising LGBT folks back in Michigan. Yet even though I wanted the possibility offered by SF, I also saw it as unreal – as an escape from reality. Yes, it was “real” in that it existed, but for millions of LGBT people everywhere, the reality was far different, and spending the rest of my life in San Francisco meant both (a) removing myself from the reality faced by so many people in light of some version of a “gay paradise” and (b) implicitly acknowledging that I was somehow challenged by the idea of being openly gay outside San Francisco.
I’m reminded of my first-ever visit to the Netherlands, where my sister and her family live. When I was just a lad of 17 years, my sister and her husband took me to “Pink Monday” at the nation’s annual festival in Tilburg, and there were tens of thousands of people, many of whom were LGBT, many of whom were not, all intermingling and having a merry time. And to be gay meant about as much as having blue eyes, or blonde hair... it meant practically nothing. If I’d accidentally asked a straight guy out, he’d most likely say “no thanks” and move on (or even be flattered), and he wouldn’t say “what?!? Do I look gay to you? Fuck off.” It all felt so easy that it was thrilling, but the challenge – the identity – were practically gone, which left me feeling a little empty, like part of my calling to advance equality for the disenfranchised had no place here.
It’s one thing to experience real equality. It’s another to hoard it.
Thus, before I ever moved to San Francisco (or even seriously considered it), I told myself, “I could live here for a part of my life.” The emphasis on “part of my life,” was a phrase that I did not take lightly, especially as I sought a place to really settle down after a childhood notable for its transience, with my family moving from state to state every couple years.
The Midwest guy in me couldn’t stay in a place that didn’t feel “real.” I knew that people everywhere are suffering – whether because they’re LGBT or because they don’t have essentials like food or water or because they live in a place where they are oppressed for whatever reason – and I felt utterly removed from that reality faced by so many others. Perhaps it was a case of “too good to be true,” or perhaps it was just that I wanted that grist, that challenge, which gave me something to overcome.
You may be thinking “the home of the entertainment industry isn’t exactly real,” but you’d be wrong there. Just today I was out talking to people in a community ravaged by poverty, and marred by the LAX airport flight path that made some conversations quite difficult, as we attempted to talk in-between the roar of planes as they passed just hundreds of feet overhead. LA is a place that, in many ways, reminds me of the places I grew up – and perhaps it is that familiarity that gives me the feeling that this is where I need to be at this point in my life.
Thanks to San Francisco, I have the courage to say, “you got a problem with that?!?” whenever anyone raises my sexual orientation as some potential issue. Thanks to San Francisco, I have an awareness around environmental and transportation possibilities that have my mind churning and considering things I’d like to do in Los Angeles in a way that I might not have before.
But I needed the change. I needed to come to a place where I felt like I could make choices that involved real choices, where I could create opportunities where they might otherwise simply not exist.
If it wasn’t Los Angeles, it might have been Chicago, or Seattle, or Boston, but it would have been something. It was time, and it just so happened that, particularly for the reason I expressed previously on this blog, LA was the right choice for me.
So… that’s it! You now know why I moved to LA. Don’t you just feel so much better now? Hahaha. So, yeah, enough comparing LA to SF. I didn’t call this blog “LA vs. SF” for a reason. This is about a Midwest guy in a West coast city. And rest assured that’s what it’s gonna be.
From now on it’s time to just revel in my new home. Seven-plus months in, I love it here, and am thrilled to call Los Angeles home!
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