Gay Pride is Here

It is a beautiful Sunday morning here in the Bay Area and the culmination of Gay Pride month activities. June is unofficially Gay Pride Month across the world. Certain cities and countries hold Gay Pride events in other months, but the vast majority of celebrations occur in June.

One of my coworkers last year asked me, "So what is the deal with Gay Pride anyway? Why do your people feel a need to celebrate in this manner?" I suppose the majority of people think of Gay Pride as a weekend when you see a lot of drunk drag queens on a float on television. This is part of Gay Pride, but certainly not the motivating factor.

In many parts of the world, people cannot openly or honestly express their sexuality. Heck, even in a city like San Francisco I know people who do not feel comfortable publicly expressing that they are gay. There is no doubt that members of the GLBT community have made unbelievable strides towards equality and acceptance in the last forty years in the United States and we continue to do so. However, we still have a long way to go. In many parts of the world, homosexuality is still a crime and people risk their lives by being who they are. In countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, sodomy between two men is a crime punishable by death. Iran executed two men late last year for what appears to have been a consensual sexual encounter. In April of last year, two American gay men were beaten with a tire iron by a group of six people outside a gay bar on the island of St. Maarten. In Tanzania, being gay can get you twenty five years in prison and/or a fine. Jamaica merely has a sentence of ten years hard labor in contrast. I recently saw an Israeli film The Bubble at the Gay and Lesbian film festival here in San Francisco. The film dealt with an Israeli man and a Palestinian man who fell in love on opposite sides of the fence and the impossibilities of their relationship. After the screening, the director of the film remarked on how his film would not be able to be shown at any film festival in the Arab world. "They are not able to look beyond the gay story to see the real meaning, struggle, and humanity in the film." he stated. How very sad.

I thank God and my ancestors that watch over me every day that I am able to live a happy and open life as a gay man. As a citizen of the United States, being granted the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not something I take lightly. Gay Pride is a day when we celebrate these rights and the continuing challenges that our community continues to tackle. It is also a time to look back on the people who have made it possible for us to stand here today. The gay men and women who died in Nazi Concentration camps in World War II, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Tennessee Williams, Harvey Milk, Billie Jean King, Dave Kopay, Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Bessie Smith, Alan Turing, Martina Navratilova, Susan B Anthony, Elton John, Alexander the Great, Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas, Katharine Lee Bates, Esera Tuaolo, Rosie O'Donnell, Tom Ford, Barney Frank, Ellen DeGeneres, Hadrian, Frida Kahlo, Annie Liebowitz, Tony Kushner, Ian McKellen, Wilson Cruz, Matthew Shepard, Randy Shilts, Stephen Sondheim, Tchaikovsky, Pedro Zamora, Oscar Wilde, and the list could go on forever. This is what we are celebrating. Those who have gone before us and those of us that are standing up and being counted each and every day.

I wish all of you a Happy Pride weekend. I also would like to light a candle for those people for whom Pride is an unattainable reality. My wish is that you will one be celebrating with us all.

Cuidate.

Slinging Food for Tips

There is a great website that is a few years old, but still a good read. My friend S introduced me to it. http://www.bitterwaitress.com/.

During my ten years with the airlines, I always had some kind of second job to make ends meet. This phase of my life thankfully ended about a year ago when I finally found a job that could pay the bills. I spent the better part of the past ten years working for CPK (California Pizza Kitchen) as a server and a bartender. Waiting tables is definitely a love hate relationship. It is a fast paced business that I was very good at. You have to be patient, efficient, and able to juggle several tasks at the same time. There is definitely a burn out factor and the majority of my friends and I all left between the eight and twelve year mark. The last year I had really lost my interest in the business, but restaurants were always a consistent source of extra cash for me and I was reluctant to leave before I could start working OT at my current job. In California, employers have to pay you minimum wage plus tips. In most other states, you only make two to three dollars per hour plus tips. Normally, you make decent money. On bad days though, sometimes the reverse is true. If a big party walks out on you without paying or something, you might be paying the restaurant rather than them paying you!

I am still close friends with a lot of my compadres from the biz. We all suffer from a form of post traumatic stress. Food serving is quite the lifestyle. Working in such close quarters, laughing and joking through constant hard work and rude customers who don't tip you well, learning Spanish the hard way (Que es la palabra para bacon?), the ongoing drama of what the managers want you to push that week or what 24 steps of service you have to hit that week in order to keep your job. Equipment that does not work, lazy servers who do not restock what you need, items you run out of EVERY Sunday night without fail, the kitchen crashing, and on and on. I got together with my girlfriends last week and we all were discussing our recurring restaurant nightmares. Mine is that I am standing in the side station of the restaurant in front of the computer where I would enter orders. I have three or four tables that have all been seated at the same time (in restaurant speak getting triple sat or more likely you will hear "The fucking host just slammed me!") I have taken their orders and tried to remember them all in my head, but for some reason I cannot remember any of them. I have a couple of servers behind me that are impatiently waiting to use the computers going, "Come on! Hurry up!" My manager then walks into the side station and starts yelling at me. "What is going on? All of your tables are just sitting there with nothing on the tables! No drinks, no bread." I am frozen in place and cannot move. I keep trying to make it back to my tables, but something prevents me from doing so and there is chaos all around me.

bitterwaitress.com is a cool website because most of the people who post on there are servers or restaurant staff and reading a few posts brings me right back to the trenches. They debate such important topics as Shouldn't there be a charge for water? to How much do you tip out? to Have you ever screwed someone else over on their sidework? One of the other major debates is fine dining versus non fine dining. Most of the servers who upgrade from Applebee's to Aqua are looked at with a certain amount of envy or fascination by their peers. "She made the jump..." is one phrase you will hear or the excited statement "Marvin is working in fine dining now!" is another. For me, I am not and will never be a fine dining kind of a guy. Though I put up a good front for the most part, my white trash roots always end up showing through. I do not care where the shrimp fork goes versus the salad fork and what truly comes first, soup or salad? I was always a big fan of the turn and burn mall restaurant type places. Quick service and easy in, easy out. You cannot keep up working at this pace forever though and that is likely why I burnt out. You can only argue with so many mothers about why their stroller cannot block the emergency exit door or why you cannot stand there for ten minutes while their child decides what they would like for lunch. bitterwaitress also has a forum on celebrities and what it is like to wait on them. Are they polite? Do they tip well? There is no way to verify the stories, but they are good reading nonetheless.

To all my brothers and sisters in the restaurant biz, I applaud you and encourage you to keep the faith. Coming home caked in ranch dressing and pizza sauce is a character building experience. So is waiting on a table of East Indians. "I would like water no ice. Can you tell me what is vegetarian on the menu?" Along with the pain, there is always laughter.

Cuidate a todo.

The Dawn of June

I have been working like a madman. June has arrived and with it, gorgeous weather. Living in the East Bay, the warm temperatures are warmer and the cooler temperatures are cooler. San Francisco stays consistently cool in the sixties most of the year with a couple spells of warmer weather. I was running last night at work, very little wind and it was a gorgeous clear night. The temperature and weather reminded me of when I used to live in Hawaii.

June is always a busy month. Most cities around the country celebrate Gay Pride and in San Francisco, it is a month long affair. Films are one of my passions and San Francisco hosts one of the biggest GLBT film festivals on the planet. The last weekend of the month is the big weekend with the parade and City Hall Plaza shut down with multiple music stages, acts, demonstrations, and more. Being gay in the Bay Area is a relatively easy experience compared with living elsewhere in the world. That being said, a lot of gay people here in the Bay Area shun Pride or have the been there, done that attitude. I love Gay Pride weekend. It is one of the few weekends that I just let go and party. Hundreds of thousands of people attend Pride and most of my straight friends join in as well. I run into such a wide cross section of people that I have known in many different capacities over my ten years of living here. The closest thing you can compare San Francisco Gay Pride to is Mardi Gras in Sydney. It is an all out mix of people having a good time together and the City goes all out. You cannot put a price on living in a city where diversity and differences are celebrated rather than berated.

I have been in a Bad Four state (as I like to call it) with my Netflix movies. Four movies in hand and no motivation to see any of them. You have two options when this occurs. Send a couple back or wait a month or so until one of them starts to sound interesting. I took the latter option and finally tackled a couple in the past few days. One of them, The Road to Guantanamo, is a docudrama about three British youths who are detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, interrogated, and then taken to Cuba. (The trio originally traveled to Pakistan, so one of them could be married. They made a fateful decision to take a tour to Afghanistan.) The film is brutal, shocking, and horrifying. My gut feeling and reaction that I take from the film is the Marie Antoinette story. We (American citizens) are the fat, spoiled queens sipping our Peets coffee, eating the finest meals, driving our SUVs, and ignoring the brutality and reality of U.S. policy that is keeping us the best fed hogs at the trough. There are over five hundred prisoners left at the detention facility in Cuba. They have been held without trial and without access to legal counsel for years and little hope on the horizon of them ever being given a chance to stand up and tell their stories. It is hard for me to proudly wave an American flag and sing patriotic songs about the freedoms afforded by the United States while we violate both the fourteenth amendment and due process of law so arrogantly and flagrantly. The values upon which we claim to hold dear and upon which our society was founded mean nothing if we do not abide by them. The conclusion of the book Animal Farm also springs to mind. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Is the argument of the Bush Administration truly that because these people are not American citizens, they are not entitled to a trial? Luckily for the subjects of this film, they were British citizens and the British government lobbied successfully for their release. I pray that there will be a swift end to the detention of these subjects and a return to their native countries. Some of these subjects have been in U.S. custody since 2001. The Al Queda that they might have been associated with has ceased to exist and an entirely new organization is in place. I would encourage you all to see this film and see for yourself what our tax dollars are paying for.

I am celebrating a milestone at work on the 6th. After nine months of training and a year of probation, I will finally be a real (aka it is really hard to fire you unless you majorly fuck up) dispatcher. Some people from work are headed to an A's game this week to celebrate the end of our shift. I have not been to a baseball game in years and I could care less about actually paying attention to the game. It will be fun to hang with people outside of work though.

Hope you are all doing well and enjoying the beginning of a beautiful summer. Cuidate.