One of my favorite, and more personal, columns is today’s Day Shift Strippers: Lazy Saturday in North Beach. Here, I describe what Hacker Boy and I got up to last weekend, snip:

This story, like all good San Francisco stories, begins at the tail end of a chilly-and-sunburned Gay Pride Sunday afternoon, and winds up on a heartbreaker of a Saturday night in North Beach under a writhing, tattooed stripper named “Johnny.” Everything was unpredictable, from meeting Hayes Valley ex-punks who run a high-end furniture store, to when the day-shift pole dancer at Hustler’s put her head through the ceiling tile. It could happen to anyone. This is how it happened to me.

By the end of the Pride Parade I’d had my fill of butt cheeks and bullhorns, sun and freezing Civic Center scented gale force winds, and split City Hall before the VIP party ran out of free booze. Never mind the ghosts of homophobic murderers and gay brides mingling under the dome, and the speech by Mikayla Connell I was about to (regretfully) miss; my feet were through with the festivities. Hacker Boy and I wandered off toward Hayes Valley in search of that mythical beast all San Franciscans think they can charm: no, not a unicorn — a taxi on Pride weekend.

Weary from the walk, we ducked into an open door: a modern furniture store had to have a Chicago chair that needed testing. It was in Inside, and at the exact moment we darkened the doorway, the black-clad proprietors popped open a bottle of champagne. After an hour with Inside’s old-school San Francisco ex-punk owners Emmett and Deanna, I’d discovered a fellow San Francisco native, been regaled with tales of Mabuhay Gardens, and bonded over what it’s like explaining to old friends that you never OD’d and are still alive (”I just moved to Canada! It wasn’t that bad!”), and more.

Link.

And if you want to read what happened after the end of the column, when you’re done click the post Johnny, are you queer?

Image via, via. Alt pole dancer photo here.