Here, and then Not Here

Surprising no one who knows me, I’ve procrastinated writing this blog post until we are literally sitting in the airport, only a few hours before we board our plane.  Oh, well.

This trip is going to be a whole heap of firsts for me. It’s my first time flying and my first time going to Pride. So when I think about what I’m expecting from this trip, my mind keeps drawing a blank. I have no idea what to expect from living with thirteen other people for two weeks, or from living in such a historically and culturally significant queer area like the Castro, and I’m slowly realizing just how wonderful that feeling of uncertainty can be. I don’t have any expectations for this trip, and I don’t want to have any. I want to just experience it, and just be.  

That being said, I do hope that I develop a deeper, more complex relationship with my own queerness throughout the course of this trip. Being so immersed in an area and activities so enmeshed in queer culture and queer history and being surrounded by queer people of all different experiences and backgrounds are both things that I’ve never really experienced, so I’m excited to see how I grow and change during this trip.

In an odd way, I’m excited to be overwhelmed. I know that attending the Frameline Film Festival and seeing 25 films is going to leave me exhausted in the best way. To be honest, I feel like I’m going to be busy, busy, busy while we’re in San Francisco, but I’d rather be exhausted in California than calm in Wisconsin. I know that it’s naïve to feed into the idea of San Francisco and the west coast as some type of ultra-queer, liberal utopia with no bigotry or  homophobia whatsoever, but I still find myself excited to be in a place with such strong queer roots.

I can’t wait to see what it means to be queer in San Francisco and compare it to what I know of being queer in Eau Claire, I imagine that there are so many differences, but I’m also interested to see the similarities and explore what connects the two areas.

We’re boarding soon, so I guess I’ll sign off here. Now, on to San Francisco.