Month: September 2026

🏳️‍🌈 San Francisco’s LGBTQ liberation history didn’t begin with Stonewall.

2026-09-16 / JOhn / 0 Comments

Long before the famous 1969 uprising in New York, LGBTQ people in San Francisco were organizing, challenging discrimination, building institutions, and fighting back.

• 1951 — Black Cat Café: The California Supreme Court rules that a bar cannot lose its liquor license simply because homosexual people gather there—an important early victory for the right to occupy public space.

• 1955 — Daughters of Bilitis: Founded in San Francisco by Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon and others, it becomes the first enduring lesbian-rights organization in the United States.

• 1956 — The Ladder: The Daughters of Bilitis begins publishing a pioneering lesbian magazine, connecting women across the country.

• 1960 — National lesbian organizing: The Daughters of Bilitis holds its first national convention in San Francisco.

• 1961 — José Sarria runs for office: The legendary Black Cat performer runs for San Francisco supervisor, becoming the first known openly gay candidate for public office in the United States.

• 1962 — Tavern Guild: San Francisco gay-bar owners and employees organize to resist police harassment and discriminatory enforcement—an early example of LGBTQ economic and political solidarity.

• 1964 — Society for Individual Rights (SIR): A major new gay organization forms in San Francisco, combining political activism, community services, social activities and publishing.

• 1964 — Council on Religion and the Homosexual: Gay activists and progressive clergy form an unprecedented alliance to challenge discrimination.

• January 1965 — California Hall: Police attempt to intimidate and disrupt a legal gay-rights fundraising ball. Clergy and lawyers witness the harassment, arrests follow, and the resulting backlash becomes a major turning point in San Francisco gay politics.

• 1965–66 — Vanguard: Queer and transgender street youth organize in the Tenderloin around police harassment, poverty, discrimination and survival—anticipating the more radical politics soon associated with gay liberation.

• 1966 — Vanguard Street Sweep: Queer youth publicly sweep Tenderloin streets in a provocative demonstration challenging the treatment of LGBTQ street people as the neighborhood’s “undesirables.”

• August 1966 — Compton’s Cafeteria: Transgender women, drag queens and queer street youth fight back against police harassment at a Tenderloin cafeteria—three years before Stonewall.

Then came Stonewall in June 1969.

Stonewall was enormously consequential, but it wasn’t the beginning of LGBTQ resistance. By 1969, San Francisco already had nearly two decades of legal challenges, lesbian and gay organizations, political campaigns, publications, business associations, demonstrations, alliances with clergy and lawyers, and resistance to police harassment.

Black Cat → Daughters of Bilitis → José Sarria → Tavern Guild → California Hall → Vanguard → Compton’s → Stonewall.

The history of LGBTQ liberation is bigger—and began earlier—than one night in New York.

Spanish Progress

2026-09-15 / JOhn / 0 Comments

I had my first full session with my Spanish tutor today. Again, it went… ok.

I find I can understand about half of what he says in Spanish, and understand a bit more of the written material he shares. Let’s call that “input.”

However, my “output” stinks. When he asks me basic conversational questions, I spend many cycles struggling to recall key phrases and vocabulary. I constantly botch conjugations, matching adjectives to nouns’ gender and number, and remembering which gender the nouns are in the first place. I get embarrassed when there’s something we talked about in the previous session that I know I should know but is just not coming to mind.

I’m grateful the tutor is so patient with me, and offers hints when I appear to have McConnelled. I’m informed that at this point in my language journey, what I’m experiencing is perfectly normal.

Nevertheless, my autistic brain is very agitated that I’m not amazingly fluent right away. Just like it does with any new hobby I pick up but am not immediately proficient at.

Anyway, I need to find ways to improve my “output” rapidly and to get more comfortable when I hit the boundaries of my current knowledge. For those who have learned a new language later in life, what tips and tricks did you use to overcome this hurdle?

Authenticity or Intentionality

2026-09-08 / JOhn / 0 Comments

There’s frequently a lot of talk in the neurodiversity community about letting go of masking (when safe and appropriate) and living openly as one’s “authentic self.” Maybe it’s my particular flavor of neurospiciness, but I’ve never quite understood that concept. The term implies that if we could identify and set aside everything society has imprinted on us, what remains would be our true, authentic core. But can we actually do that? Almost all of us have been immersed in social environments since before we developed cogent thought, so how do we discover what existed before we even had a sense of self? This concept may resonate with other neurodivergent folks, but to me it seems not just difficult but impossible.

So I’ve decided I’m not going to strive to live “authentically.” I’m going to live intentionally.

Rather than excavating some pre-social self, I’ve looked at the people around me and identified the values I most admire — the traits that, when I embody them, make me feel genuinely good about who I am. These have become the foundation of my sense of self-worth:

Kindness
Compassion
Dependability
Empathy
Trustworthiness
Rationality
Using my intelligence to help people, or at least entertain them — through TTRPGs, storytelling, and conversation

I often feel like I fall short of these values. But I’ve come to recognize something important: I tend to keep a running tally of my individual failures, while the people who know me are seeing the whole picture. My husband and close friends, when I’ve voiced these doubts, have disagreed with my self-assessment pretty firmly. Maybe the scorecard I’m keeping isn’t the most reliable one.

The neurodiversity advocacy message underneath “be your authentic self” is real and worth keeping — chronic masking, done under social pressure and fear, carries genuine costs. But I think the framing does us a disservice. It sets up a false binary between masking and some unmediated true self, when really the alternative to exhausting, involuntary performance isn’t the absence of all adaptation — it’s choice. Knowing which parts of yourself are worth protecting, which adaptations serve you and which ones only serve others at your expense, and building a life around values you’ve actually examined and endorsed.

That’s not authenticity. That’s something better: intentionality. And unlike authenticity, it doesn’t require you to find something that was never lost.

Moving to Spain: September 2026 Update

2026-09-02 / JOhn / 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I have talked about our move to Spain, so I thought it was a good time for an update and to share more about the details of what it takes to move there on a permanent basis.

TLDR: We missed the window to get an appointment with the consulate for this month, so the earliest we could actually submit our application won’t be until the end of November, and we probably won’t be able to move until mid-January at the earliest.

In order to move to Spain on a permanent basis on the non-lucrative visa — which is the visa we’re trying to get — one needs to apply at the most local consulate (through their contractor, BLS), which for us is San Francisco. Getting an appointment to submit that application is a significant challenge. The consulate releases only a handful of appointment slots each month (we hear it is 24 total slots per consulate), and they usually release them during the workday in Spain, which means early morning in California. Generally, the appointments are for 1½ to 2 months in the future. It really is a kind of lottery to get an appointment, and we need two of them in the same month. Quite the hurdle!

We were getting ready for our big trip at the end of July and early August, so while we did make an attempt, it wasn’t an earnest one. So we knew we would not have a September appointment. It would have been nice, because that would have allowed us to make the move on our original timeline.

We were more determined this month. We tried early in the day the last couple of days in August, but the slots had not opened up. My husband is the primary applicant, so he has to make the appointments, but he was dealing with sleep deprivation from a sleep study the previous evening and was not able to wake up as early today as he had hoped. Naturally, we learned today that the slots opened up at 1 AM our time and were gone by 7 AM. So we missed out again — no appointment in October.

So it’s looking like we won’t be moving this calendar year. We’re kind of bummed about that, but there’s nothing we can do. (Well, we can keep checking for appointments because sometimes people cancel and those slots open up. This is not something we are counting on, but we are hopeful.) We’ll try again at the end of September and early October, cross our fingers, and hopefully get an appointment for the end of November.

Of course, once we submit our application, it can take anywhere between two weeks and three months for the consulate to decide on it. They may also take longer if they decide our documents are deficient and we need to submit new ones. And since each bureaucrat working for Spain’s government is encouraged to use their own judgment in interpreting the official visa requirements, we won’t know what that particular consulate wants until they ask for it. All we can do is over-prepare and hope that we’ve thought of all the documents they are going to ask for.

As an idea of what we’re preparing for, I share this humorous (but I’m assured reasonably accurate) video:

And so, while we wait, we are continuing to gather the documents our visa preparation team thinks the San Francisco office will require:

✔ Copies of our passports
✔ Copies of our drivers licenses
✔ Our official marriage license apostilled by the California secretary of state
FBI records for each of us, also apostilled (records obtained; waiting on the State Department to apostille them)
Bank statements for the past couple of years proving that we have enough liquid assets to support ourselves in the first year living there
Various letters issued by the banks (who often look at us perplexed when we ask for them in the way Spain requires) stating average balances and that the funds in the accounts can be withdrawn within 48 hours
✔ Letters from our most recent employers with confirmation that we are no longer working there
Letters from ourselves affirming we will not seek employment while under the terms of the visa (we’ve written these letters and are just waiting for approval from our visa preparation team)
3 years of tax returns
Current Health certificate signed by our physicians
Proof of having purchased a visa-compliant Spanish medical plan
Letters of intent from each of us

Many of those documents will need to be officially translated as well, and we are looking to our visa preparation team to help us get that done.

We are also making progress on deciding what we will be purging from the house and what we will be keeping. We’re not making as much progress on this as I had hoped, but now we have an extra month, I suppose. If you’re local and interested in books, TTRPG books, board games, art supplies, or who knows what else, keep an eye on my personal Facebook page.

Month: September 2026

🏳️‍🌈 San Francisco’s LGBTQ liberation history didn’t begin with Stonewall.

Spanish Progress

Moving to Spain: September 2026 Update

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta