August 2, 2005
ON ROMANCE, DANGER AND PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
I wrote this essay in response to a query from Charlie Anders about whether San Francisco is still a romantic city. I knew she didn't need a whole essay, just a quote from a romance writer (me), but I got inspired. And when she wrote her piece for the SF Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay issue, she let me have the last word.
San Francisco has never felt like a romantic place to me. I'd already fallen in love by the time I'd moved here--Michael and I got together thirty-nine years ago during a sweaty New York summer. We slept, limbs all intertwined, in his single bed, and made out in the parks. Hot town, summer in the city: we read Story of O together, rode the Staten Island Ferry, walked and walked, talked and talked.
Perhaps it's because I wrote S/M before I wrote romance novels that I seem to need a certain discomfort in my romantic venues. Urban sweat and grit also make their way into my romance novels; the hero of The Bookseller's Daughter goes to the window of his cell in the Bastille to take a "deep draught of warm, stinking Paris air. It was foul. It was thrilling. It stirred something in him."
Sweat and grit, crowds and anonymity, moments of stray, fortuitous revelation and display. In San Francisco it comes in precious small glimmers. Night skies swathed in mauve cloud. Lonely alleys Hammett might have walked. Faces splashed with green and purple neon at the corner of Sixteenth and Valencia. Sometimes I hear it late at night south of Market, the click of high heels on pavement, grouplets of people on their way to--where? I don't know, somewhere dangerous, I hope.
(You do understand, don't you, that I'm not advocating danger as urban lifestyle? I live here, after all; I'm as concerned about our problems as anyone and I want us all to live comfortably and consensually, with mutual respect, progressive values, and excellent public transportation. I wept happily at the gay marriage pix on the front page of the Chronicle. I support safe sex. I love that a friend of mine belongs to an organization called "Masters and Slaves Together." Michael and I got our kid successfully through the San Francisco public schools and we wish the best to everybody fighting that hard good fight.)
But my personal romantic imagination is centered in some other, less socially responsible part of my brain--the Baudelaire Hemisphere, the Rimbaud Lobe. And by and large my romantic imagination finds San Francisco just too chipper, too enamored of its own prettiness and satisfied with its goodness. Too much pastel, and oh please, all those damn sunsets over bridge and bay. Too sparsely populated, its night streets too empty and chilly for long late introspective walks. Restaurants too full of people taking pictures with their cell phones and shrieking across the table, paroxysms of hip urban fun. Aspects of it remind me of those mass-market romance covers where the embracing couple somehow aren't touching each other. Like that sad Gavin and Kimberley photo on the Getty rug.
* * *
Stepping back a little, though.
In an email asking for my input, Charlie said, "Nowadays, it seems like we're more famous as a once and future destination for same-sex marriage than for actual romance. I'm interested in what makes SF still romantic and fun."
And since I know a bit about Charlie's sexual politics, I'm guessing that this article is going to make a case for a romantic polyamorism over state-sanctioned gay marriage. In some ways I share that urge toward alterity and rebellion (although when the email asks about "cool off-beat things to do in the city," it seems to want to slip in a little Bay Guardian consumer savvy as well). But as a straight, married, monogamous, middle-aged romance writer, I'm going to temper that urge with a positive vote for the city I live in.
Is San Francisco romantic yet (as that good San Franciscan Zippy the Pinhead might put it)? Yeah, it's probably as romantic as it ever was--and I think that it's finding new ways to be so. Because (here's the radical claim --or is it a conservative one?): I think that my sometimes-maligned city shares the belief system of the often-maligned contemporary romance novel--and that I do too.
The romance novel tries to reconcile freedom and rebelliousness with virtue and civility. Which is where San Francisco wins bigtime. There's a good reason why the fundies hate us--because we're trying, in our lives and in our loves, to make sense of problems that scare them to death. We're too small and self-conscious, too silly and self-regarding, but we're onto something here, and yes, I think that at best and at bottom we are a romantic city.
Just don't take anybody's advice about romantic venues or cool things to do. As that other good San Franciscan Scoop Nisker might have put it, go out and make some romance of your own.
posted by Pam Rosenthal
Pam Rosenthal writes sexy historical romances under her own
name and literate smut as Molly Weatherfield. Check her out online at
www.pamrosenthal.com.
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