The End of San Francisco by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (review)

The End of San Francisco is the first memoir by radical queer writer and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and a founding figure in Gay Shame. Sycamore weaves together stories of direct action, sex work, dancing, and survival that explore what it means to be queer and radical in an era when gay rights have gone mainstream. An unflinching and unforgettable examination of sex, politics, and urban life, The End of San Francisco bears comparison with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives. Like those works, Sycamore’s memoir documents queer urban subcultures that are in the process of being destroyed—only, the world Sycamore describes is threatened not only by gentrification and heteronormativity but also by the push for assimilation within lesbian and gay communities. It bears witness to an end of San Francisco that is material and symbolic. The physical transformation of the city by the influx of capital following the tech boom coincides with the end of a vision of radical connection and possibility that San Francisco once represented for queer culture.

When Sycamore arrived in San Francisco in 1992, she discovered a community of queers who had come to the city in search of refuge and self-determination. She finds both, for a while at least, in the city’s dance clubs and activist communities, where she spends her nights dancing to the pounding beat of house music and her days navigating the intricacies of consensus decision making in ACT UP meetings. Sycamore writes of a “whole generation of queers who came to San Francisco to try and cope,” who “were scarred and broken and brutalized but determined to create something else”; and the book’s most compelling passages capture some of the energy of these efforts to live the dream that another world is possible:

We paraded down the streets in bold and ragged clothes too big or too small, we shared thrift-store treasures and recipes and strategies for getting day-glo hair color to last. We exchanged books and zines and flyers and gossip, got in dramatic fights over politics, over the weather, over clothing, over who was sleeping with whom—we held each other, we painted each other’s nails and we broke down, honey we broke down.

(82)

Lyrical sentences like this create a vivid picture of life in queer activist communities in San Francisco as well as New York and Boston.

Yet the book’s treatment of queer activist communities is neither nostalgic nor glibly self-congratulatory. Sycamore subjects her life to the same ruthlessly critical gaze that previous works, such as That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation and Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform have cast on the gay marriage movement and other efforts to sanitize queer culture. At the heart of Sycamore’s memoir is a dreadful recognition: “We brought the trendy restaurants and boutiques that we stared at with anguish and disgust, the yuppies we scorned.... We were the beginning of the end and we didn’t know what to do because we had just found the beginning” (86). As mostly white artists and activists, Sycamore’s queer subculture also constituted the first stage of gentrification, making neighborhoods like the Mission safe for real estate and business investment. The “beginning” for queer refugees like Sycamore was the beginning of the end for neighborhoods like the Mission. For Sycamore, acknowledging complicity and contradiction is not simply a way to make these dreadful facts like this bearable; instead, a relentless demand for accountability animates the entire text.

Eschewing conventional autobiographical narrative, the book moves back and forth in time, and it is written in a fiercely self-reflective style. Sycamore’s sentences often suddenly change course, turning from memory to the scene of writing or to direct quotations from an...