By the 14th April, I was back from the American trip: (I didn’t take a diary for the same reason as before: the dratted customs).
Difficult to write about it now, there are so many thoughts/feeling I have about the time there. I suppose my main thoughts about it now though are:
The ‘SM ‘scene there, with Michael and the ‘pick up’ itself (I had met a guy called Micheal in a leather bar there)
The Stud Bar and the blocks around it. Wow!
The heat. So weird. 94F in April! (its highest in 80 years)
Castro Safeways.. massive and open at midnight!
The ‘Yield‘ signs on the freeways. ‘Yield ‘? Isn’t that the amount of milk you get from a herd of cows?
The view coming into SF over Golden Gate Bridge:oh so spectacular.
Fishermans Wharf on a perfectly perfect ‘blue sky day‘.
The workshop on ‘Sex, dating and intimacy‘. Wow!
The hardest thing was saying goodbye and leaving, on a jet plane.
It’s perhaps quite revealing that there wasn’t a huge amount I mentioned about the content of the conference itself. It was a valuable experience and yet strangely, I think we found that as a learning exercise there was not a huge amount there that we didn’t know already. There were no other large scale advertising campaigns ongoing (though the Australians and the Dutch were doing some interesting work, along with well established outreach projects in New York and San Francisco itself) but our work was greeted (surprisingly to us) positively.
We had thought that we would be seen as rather ‘behind the game’ but it turned out not to be case, in fact it seemed in many ways we were rather ahead of it. Perhaps we were being too hard on ourselves?
Sex, love and life (The Sacrifice): 3.09 London life at the end of the eighties
