It was an annoyingly bright October morning, too warm too early in the day, when I learned Bobby had died. I read it over breakfast on the Chronicle’s obituary page. I looked up and told myself I should have a drink, not to settle my nerves, but a final tip o’ the glass to one [...]
It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Holidays in the city quiet things down and even streets like Geary and Polk seem almost quaint and slow, kind of thoughtful.
So it wasn’t so depressing, spending most of a sunny and cold Christmas day inside the darkness of that bar, around the corner from the porn store [...]
“I have something for you,” she said as they lay together at the end of an afternoon.
“What?”
He was staring at Jihan Li’s gullet inches away. It fascinated him. They were naked, side by side, and from Penman’s view, nose to throat, it seemed her Adam’s apple was a small animal scurrying back and forth in [...]
In the part of San Francisco’s Tenderloin that drops below Market down Sixth Street, The San Francisco HIV Prevention Project (HPP) has an exchange center. HPP has been in operation since the late eighties when it was organized in association with the SF AIDS Foundation in response to the spread of HIV through needle-sharing. It [...]
The union hall sits near the corner of Fremont and Harrison Streets on the down slope of the hill running toward the Financial District. One of those neighborhoods on the fulcrum of urban development, teetering between the upscale and derelict. A walk inside the massive hall reveals a space the size of a [...]
I didn’t intend to fuck him; it just happened. Something between the coke and the floor to ceiling comic books in his room worked a spell on me so later when we were at the club in SOMA and I asked for a cigarette and he said No have your own; it’ll taste better [...]
FIRST DISPATCH
In January 2006, participants in Community Housing Partnership’s Training Institute started the Tenderloin Oral History Project. The group, mostly residents of Single Room Occupancy hotels, explored their community armed with simple tape recorders. This first dispatch provides small glimpses into lives lived in one of San Francisco’s most complex and dense neighborhoods. TOHP will [...]