My family has lived in San Francisco for more than 150 years.
One line moved to the City shortly after the end of the Civil War. Another ancestor arrived here from Ireland sometime around 1867, meeting and marrying another Irish immigrant. Their eldest daughter, my 2x great grandmother, was born here in 1872. Another Irish line came here 1884 when my recently-widowed 3x great grandmother uprooted her family and moved here from County Galway with seven of her eight surviving children. (I think the eldest boy stayed in Ireland. A ninth child, a daughter, had died years earlier at 4 months of age.)
The Danish lined all moved to San Francisco in the 1890s; my Danish great grandfather, the youngest, was the only one of his siblings to be born in the United States. (They lived a block from where I now live.)
My French great grandparents separately moved to San Francisco in the 1890s as young adults from different parts of France, where they met and married here in San Francisco. (The City used to have a very large French immigrant population; the “French Campus” of Kaiser Hospital was once French Hospital, which my great aunt used to go to because she could speak in French with all of the doctors, even though she was born and raised in the City with English as her co-first language.)
I was born in San Francisco, but after my Dad completed his Master’s Degree, we moved to a tiny town in Sonoma County. More accurately: we lived outside of the town on 40 acres of undeveloped redwood forests, where we lived for eight years as back-to-the-landers with no electricity. We used propane gas to power our lights and oven. We siphoned water from a nearby spring, and my chore was to make a fire every evening to heat water for washing dishes and showering. But we were doing better than some neighbors: we had not one but two outhouses!
In addition to owning a dog and several cats, we raised chickens, rabbits, two ducks, and (co-raised) a goat.
After my parents got divorced, we moved to a much, much bigger city (population at the time: 87,000). When I graduated high school, I went to college much closer to San Francisco, where I came out. I moved across the bay back into San Francisco proper a few years after high school, where I’ve lived for the last several decades.
Career
Like many people these days, my career has taken unexpected turns over the decades. I’ve worked in politics and grass roots advocacy; search technology with early Web companies; digital media outlets; and content licensing consulting for publishing companies. None of the twists were precisely mapped out or planned, they just evolved organically and naturally.
- I worked for a decade as a grassroots public interest advocate working to restrict smoking in enclosed public places like airlines, public transit, workplaces, restaurants, and other enclosed public places;
- I (briefly) assisted with layout design for a print business magazine;
- I was an editor (and eventually an international Editorial Director) of a human-built online search directory;
- I was an editor and staff writer for the first publicly-traded LGBTQ media outlet in the U.S., building out their localized content for top gay markets in the country;
- I work for a company that helps broker deals for publishers to license use of their digital content (like news feeds, digital archives for libraries, textbook publishers, and more).
Interests
I have a variety of hobbies and eclectic interests. I wish I could remember the details I used in personal ad I wrote in the early 90s that tried to sum it up alliteratively (something like “pixies and politics, dragons and Democrats, something-something and Kids in the Hall…”).
Back in the early 1990s, I wrote interactive murder mystery party games for my friends. Our parties included drag Mother’s Day competitions, Mardi Gras parties, a “Spring Frolic” around Easter, and other parties. Later, my friends and I threw massive charity fundraising parties for local LGBTQ nonprofits.
I’ve always been politically active and involved, even working in politics for a decade. I’ve been active in the LGBTQ community, even working in LGBTQ media for half a decade. I have an avid interest in my family’s genealogy, gay history, local history, and local gay history. I’m a bit of a movie buff with a wide range of genre interests. I’ve done unpaid, amateur nightlife photography, and have designed and maintained strictly amateur websites to support my interests.
About the Cover
The cover is an illustration of the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the largest and most famous libraries of the ancient world. The library is believed to have been built during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285 to 246 BCE). It was estimated to hold between 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls, the equivalent of 100,000 books. Royal agents were dispatched around the world to purchase new works by any author in mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and other subjects. Any ships that docked at Alexandria were searched for books, which were then transcribed for the library. Though an exact layout is not known, “ancient sources describe the Library of Alexandria as comprising a collection of scrolls, Greek columns, a peripatos walk, a room for shared dining, a reading room, meeting rooms, gardens, and lecture halls, creating a model for the modern university campus” (Wikipedia). The library began to decline around 145 BCE. Whatever remained, if anything, was probably destroyed around 272 CE.
This illustration comes from Crystalinks.