When Lawrence founded City Lights, San Francisco wasn’t the swinging, bohemian town it would become. That came later. In 1953, San Francisco was a conservative, rather buttoned-up place. And as he tells it, there was a real need for a space like City Lights. A place where the poets and writers could congregate and feel welcomed. The bookshop was meant to be a place for people to find each other, along with the books.
City Lights is based in a utopian vision of how creativity can be harnessed to make the world a better place, and to make our individual lives better and richer too. It was never thought of as a “business,” per se, and in fact, it’s always been actively anti-capitalist. The place has always just kept itself going, investing in the people who work here and in the projects we’ve created and supported over the years. It’s about empowerment through knowledge and creativity and about a strong commitment to free inquiry and free expression.
Both the press and the bookstore have always been engaged with the times. So during the 1950s, we published some of the very first books by poets who became the “Beat Generation.” During the 1960s and early 1970s, it was resistance to the Vietnam War, the environmental movement, experimenting with spiritual traditions—what’s thought of as hippie culture and ideals. In the Reagan years, there were the wars in Central America, anti-nuke movements, and Lawrence was traveling the world, attending poetry festivals and conferences, finding authors and connecting those literary and political dots. It’s been more than sixty years now, and inhabiting the line between being a historic institution and being very much a living, breathing participant in contemporary society, that’s the dance we do here.
And it seems to resonate. City Lights is full of people, always. And there are people all over the world for whom it’s important that City Lights continues to exist. They dream of coming here someday. How many places are like that? It’s not like this is Angkor Wat or something. I mean, it’s a bookstore. It’s uncanny and beautiful, and it’s being created each day by the people who work here, and by the people who come to the store and who read the books we publish.
Human beings are looking for collaboration—or commiseration—and stories. Even though the experience of writing a book or reading a book can be a very personal and solitary project, a book is a repository of our communal experience. So a bookstore is like a storehouse for our souls.
The story of San Francisco is that it’s a boomtown. And boomtowns are never particularly good places to live. Those of us who came here for an alternative to that, we’re in the minority now.
San Francisco was always—at least rhetorically, and sometimes in action—a kind of community unto itself. Maybe it still is. But if San Francisco no longer represents an idea of humanism and freedom from the treadmill, then where do we fit in? What’s our role?
The thing is, we are still here. And by working to keep this place strong amid everything else that’s going on—we’re reminding people that there is still another way to be.
I’ve had a recurring nightmare—where I’ll come walking down the street and it’s like Tokyo or Times Square. All the buildings are tall, there’s neon and huge video advertising everywhere. And it’s a terrible feeling: Oh my God, what has happened?
And then, finally, there’s City Lights. It’s still there. Just this little sweet building surrounded by all of it. And once I see it, I can breathe again.
CAROL QUEEN
She moved to San Francisco after college and soon enrolled in the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. “There was a room with a screen in the front—a television the size of a Volkswagen—and a bunch of pillows, on the ground—the ’70s were into this—and all day long the representatives of varying sexualities ranged before me to explore, like a set of Star Wars figurines. It felt like San Francisco was convened to make a sexually diverse space.” She self-describes as a “cultural sexologist,” and writes, speaks, and organizes around sex-positivity as a political and social movement. She taught sex education in the 1980s, bringing her face-to-face with the AIDS epidemic. She witnessed firsthand how the queer community was both shattered and rebuilt through crisis, a story common to many communities in San Francisco.
It’s important to know more about each other. It’s important to be close to people who aren’t like you, to develop understandings about likeness and unlikeness that help you see why we go in different directions. Even if you never get to what makes us the way we are—are we born that way, all that stuff, even if you never go all that far—there’s still value to thinking about the way we are brought together or pulled apart.
When the AIDS crisis began, there had essentially been two separate communities—with not many points of intersection. Many, many gay men or queer men or bi men knew hardly any lesbians; plenty of lesbians I knew wouldn’t talk to guys at all, gay or not. That has almost entirely changed. And it was HIV that changed it.
The discourse initially within the women’s community was, “This is not our problem, except insofar as we can see all this homophobic writing on the wall will probably wash up at our feet.” And: “If those guys hadn’t gone to the baths and been all wild and crazy, this wouldn’t be happening to them either.” That was the stigma. And of course, attached was, “And now you bisexuals are going to give it to us.” So I picked an awesome time to come out as bi.
But I started to understand that I could function as a bridge character. I could take that knowledge and go into straight communities, talk about their exposure and at the same time do the work of unpacking their fears about AIDS victims, their homophobia . . .
There was something about this moment, something like: we are all in the soup because of sex. Here’s our little town on the edge of the cliff, in an earthquake zone, and HIV jacked up that feeling. You can’t have the kind of an impact that AIDS had on a city the size of San Francisco and not have it felt everywhere, everywhere.
There was a fundamental shift in how anybody who wasn’t living a heteronormative life understood their community space. There began to be trans people coming out and coming together, the kinky people versus the not-kinky people. Women that didn’t care that there were gay men in the same city found that they cared if the men were dropping like flies. Because HIV asked all non-heteronormative people to say, “We are in this together. There’s something meaningful for us collectively to get out of the work.”
It was a national happening—on the heels of this great politicization around sex and difference and identities, this crisis turned everybody into some kind of stakeholder. Even if they were just a homophobic, AIDS-phobic asshole, the more upset they were, the more of a stakeholder they were. San Francisco’s identity just gave everyone an excuse to talk about it more. Solidarity in the community was forged in crisis.
Had I not lived through this, and lived through it in this city—I would have wound up in some variant life, an alternate universe to this, but I would not have ended up in this one. I would not have written what I’ve written. I would not have spoken the way I’ve spoken. I would not have made the relational choices I’ve made. I could not have been the me that I am right now if I had not come to San Francisco during that time.
Today, people from other parts of the country—parts that have never been part of our story—are moving here and bringing their own communities’ cultures in, and we have to blend somehow. They are from more culturally conservative places, which is changing the understanding of what it means to live here. It’s getting more expensive. Even the wealthy people in the queer and sex community now are not the most radical politically. Which I think is conservatizing the whole city.
It is a new wave. It happened to the communities who lived here when we arrived. But this feels like the first generation that has not come here for San Francisco specifically. I’m sure a lot of them are excited to be here: I hope I get a job. Look at all the tech there is! But they aren’t here to discover what came before them. They would have gone to any city where the job opportunities and career
culture offered the same prospects.
I walk around Hayes Valley with the straight kids and the real expensive baby strollers, and I think to myself, They think it’s getting better. They think it’s getting better. And of course their older brothers and sisters are still living in their parents’ basement because they can’t pay off their student loans. So, sure, from that perspective it is. But they are kind of libertarian dicks.
I am here to remind people that there are other perspectives. You can’t tell me that a whole bunch of young people have just moved into San Francisco and they’re not interested in exploring sexuality, because that hasn’t happened in many, many, many decades—if ever. And I feel it is my job to keep the doors open, remind them that this city has a political legacy, and a rich, multifaceted sex history, and encourage them to yes, come play!
Today, queers are running to get married, and heterosexuals are trying to learn how to do polyamory properly. I mean, what does that tell you? People who never had a question whether or not they were going to live a straight life are trying pretty hard to make a place where they don’t have to live one.
DO D.A.T.
He was a founding member of the Attik, an Oakland hip-hop group. “Eclectic . . . eclectic treasures. We were trying to elevate the consciousness higher. The Bay Area was the attic of California, and L.A. was the basement.” When the group broke up, he stepped out as a solo artist and educator in the community. His latest album is titled Oakland in Blue.
East Oakland is kinda hot. It’s clicking in a different kinda way. The energy—you’re gonna wanna have your head on a swivel a little bit more and just kinda pay attention to what’s goin’ on around you. It’s polar: you’ve got the Panthers and the pimps, you have the protesters and the profiteers. The two pillars of the community, and everything kinda spreads out from there.
I didn’t grow up in the shit, but I grew up, like, up the street from the shit. So it wouldn’t take much for me to get down there and get into it. I could see, Oh, okay . . . Bro is selling drugs. Homeboy just got shot.
My parents told me that East Oakland looked a lot like San Leandro when they first moved up here: it was a nice area. Then all that shit went down. Their oldest kids were part of the generation that got hit hard by crack. My brother was familiar with that element, but thank God, he and my sister didn’t get caught up in it. But all of their friends, all the folks that graduated school in 1980, 1981, they almost got wiped out. Wiped out.
Paying attention, being young, I saw where we was living. There were seven or eight corner stores between Seventy-Third and Eighty-Second. Oakland ain’t that big. That’s a very concentrated area to have all that. Those stores represent . . . oppression. They represent convenience, which is a different type of oppression if you think about it. It can turn into oppression.
I feel like America is good at creating sociopaths. Greed is running this country. Greed and Fear. It’s like these two entities take turns, they’re a tag team. Maybe Fear is really the big boss, but Greed is the main manufacturer of individuals who can’t or won’t take in their environment, or realize how much space they’re taking up.
The city is changing. Uptown district, there wasn’t shit up there but one club in 2002, 2003—wasn’t nothing else going on. But they were very community-oriented.
You get a couple more bars. Jerry Brown puts in that school. All of a sudden it’s not so friendly to hip-hop. They don’t want us there. Whatever silly associations they have with hip-hop culture, or rappers, or whatever.
Second and MacArthur, that’s gonna look a lot different now, the soon-to-be Uber building and all that represents.* It’s just a sign of the times. A tombstone. Take, take, take. These are individuals that had an idea, and they hustled it, but there’s also that endless consumption, endless hunger. A very American kind of thing. Gotta get it for me! Ironic, but also very American.
What did Richard Wright say? Being of America but not being American. Like, being able to be in America but not being able to really participate. The same narrative retold, over and over again. This time it’s with the tech industry.
Oakland was a major jazz and blues hub. Anybody that was doing music came through to the Bay Area. They would do a big show in San Francisco, but they would come to Oakland to kick it.
Right across the street from the Seventh Street Post Office was Esther’s Orbit Room. It was known around the world. B. B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Miles Davis, all these other folks, they would come to this little hole-in-the-wall joint, and they would perform. I grew up around spots like that.
Oakland in Blue is encompassing that tradition—different producers, my peers, the best I knew, working on each track—different sounds, something jazzy, then a hood-open feel, then go to something like Bourbon Street, then a straight-up hip-hop sound. It was a metaphor, different artists reflecting different facets of Oakland.
It’s kinda cool driving through. If you take MacArthur from 106th all the way down to the lake, and you go down International, it’s interesting watching the city change. So you’re in Fruitvale, and that’s where a lot of Latinos are. Between Fairfax, that’s where all the black people are. Then you get closer down to the lake and that’s more where the Asian and Pacific Islanders are.
So the album was taking a specific color, green, and expanding it out to all the different kinds of green you can get. Or Blue. And painting with that. We much more than hyphy and Too Short. We Hieroglyphics. We Goapele. We Tony! Toni! Toné! We Sly and the Family Stone. We Duke and B. B. and Miles.
Oakland is the heartbeat. It resonates outward into the rest of the Bay Area. San Francisco is a city built to funnel all the resources from the area. But there wouldn’t be a San Francisco without an Oakland to take from. I mean . . . slaves built the White House.
EDWIN LINDO
He sits in a playground atop a hill in Bernal Heights, near his grandmother’s home where he grew up. He slept next to the washer-dryer in the basement. Years later, the house passed to a family member, who quickly filed for eviction against Edwin and his father. “There are people who say that this is a family issue. But this is the epitome of what we’re dealing with today. Because if it wasn’t for what that house is now worth—$1.4 million—they wouldn’t be evicting us. It just shows that it doesn’t even matter if you’re family, this is how ugly it is getting.” A twelve-year saga unfolded, hauling father and son into housing court over and over again, inspiring him to go to law school and turning him into an eviction expert. When the case settled, he chose to stay in the same neighborhood, just blocks from his family home. Sitting in the swings, he looks out over most of the Mission, Noe Valley, and up toward Potrero Hill.
I can see everything in my story from up on this hill.
My grandparents came here in 1962, before the civil war in Nicaragua. They were janitors at Wonder Bread, when Wonder Bread was still in this neighborhood, in this city. My grandfather retired from there, and my grandmother worked for maybe ten years more. But they saved up some money, bought a home for $17,000, in Bernal Heights.
My dad’s first job was shoe-shining on Mission Street, and he was so proud of it. Then he had a paper route and said he was the fastest paper-route deliverer: “I got a raise.” As a kid, he played with Carlos Santana and Carlos Santana’s brother in Dolores Park across the street from Mission High School. Hearing them jam out when they started their bands, malo coming out of their window.
My mom and dad met right down the street, there. They were dancing. He was much older than her, but that’s my dad.
I went to school over by Third Street. I would wake up, run down the block, catch the 24 down to the 9 to San Bruno, jumping on the back and not paying because I didn’t have enough money. We would go to those basketball courts and play pickup, or watch the big guys play sports at St. Mary’s or Portola, hoping one day we could be as good as them, never once thinking of going to college, because that wasn’t on my radar. After that going to the corner store, buying
Cheeto chips with food stamps that I pulled out of a coupon book and feeling awkward because they had to change the register for me—someone grouching that I was holding up the line. Running through all these streets, talking nonsense, hearing every language but English, getting home in the freezing cold with the fog rolling in.
I realize for many people, this is all they are, memories. Inherently there is no value to them. There’s no tangible currency that you can attach to them. It doesn’t make anyone money. It doesn’t buy you a house. It doesn’t do anything unless you open up and appreciate that there’s much more to value than the currency in your bank account.
In just the last three months, there have been 220 evictions in the city, 50 in the Mission. Over the past, I think, five years, there’s been a 220 percent increase in the eviction rate.
Many of these are “no fault” evictions: an opportunity for a landlord, under law, to exit the rental market, for no reason whatsoever except that they no longer want to be landlords. Which means they have the opportunity to convert into condos and sell them—because now you’re no longer a landlord, you’re an owner.
What does that mean for the people who are tenants in these neighborhoods? It means that though they pay rent on time—they’ve never violated the lease, they’ve done nothing wrong—they get a notice saying their tenancy is now terminated. They have to leave.
Statutorily they’re given an amount, a relocation amount—that, I think, today, is a $15,000 maximum per unit, not per person. But many of these homes have more than three people living in them. So you have less than $5,000 per person to survive an eviction. That doesn’t cover attorney costs.
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