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Memory of Mecca.
On a rainy April afternoon in 1979, while a thousand San Franciscans stood by, Mayor Dianne Feinstein exhumed a century-old time capsule from the base of a statue in Washington Square. Most of the items retrieved from the lead cube were ordinary: a string of buttons, newspapers, a fork. But mixed in with the mementos from the past was a clue to the city's future - a future that anyone living in 1879 would have found difficult to imagine. It was a slim pamphlet about the region's geysers penned by one Laura De Force Gordon. Scribbled on its flyleaf was the notation "the author was a lover of her own sex."
Novelist Armistead Maupin recalls this sweet discovery in his deft foreword to Gay by the Bay, the first book ever to chronicle the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history of the San Francisco Bay Area. Co-authors Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk wisely combine these diverse appellations into the more generic term "queer" throughout most of the text, while acknowledging that the community they're documenting consists of a "bewildering variety of intersecting subcultural scenes, separatist enclaves, political factions, ethnicities, genders and classes." Just to think about this hodgepodge of humanity is daunting enough, but Stryker and Van Buskirk chart a measured course through these...