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Synopsis

Writing a memoir is time travel. When I set out to write "Folsom Street Blues: A Memoir of 1970s SoMa and Leatherfolk in Gay San Francisco" I wasn't quite sure how it would go. I had done considerable non-fiction academic writing using various research methods. Other writing consisted of short narrative poems and flash fiction. Then there was the murder mystery I had been working on for close to seven years. And my annual holiday letter. We all know about such holiday letters.

A creative writing course at the local community college taught me how to ruthlessly discard a third of the words in each of my poems and the very best lines of my fiction. I attended a seminar on "creative non-fiction," the new tag for the old fourth genre of literary non-fiction. I found my "voice." Memoir, I learned, is not the same as autobiography, although many confuse the two. I like to think of memoir as a chapter, whole and complete, lifted from the autobiography of one's life. In my introduction to "Folsom Street Blues" I state that "I've written how I recall myself as a gay man then, living my life as a fanatical moderate."

From my various writing experiences I culled skills for writing this memoir. Place description techniques I had employed in my unfinished mystery I used to describe my flat on Clementina Street as well as San Francisco of the 1970s. In fact my working title was "Clementina Tales." Dialog style I had developed in a feeble attempt at small town noir blossomed as part of my voice to express the felt truth of my experiences. My short story style morphed into non-linear tales of my multifaceted life at that time, in that place. Research skills as an academic and as a librarian helped me track down such details as a restaurant's street address, a theater's name, or the corner where a long closed leather bar had once stood. The discard and rewrite method from my poetry class helped me find the best word or phrase for my memoir. And of course I remembered the writer's mantra - "Show, don't tell."

I hadn't been working long on "Folsom Street Blues" before I realized the past really is a foreign country. The senses became my mode of travel to that once upon a time place, The-Past. The mere smell of star anis in a store triggered memories of five-spice cicken at a Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall off Polk Street, followed by a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge and sex in the fog on Stinson Beach. I needed only to glimpse someone's Harris tweed jacket to remember wearing my own to the opera and meeting Beverly Sills. And the smell and texture of new leather... You get the idea. A taste, a smell, or a glimpse of the most ordinary thing could bring me to the border of that foreign country. Putting it down on paper became the passport that allowed me to enter again that time and place of my youth. Writing a memoir, I discovered, is as much for the pleasure of the author as it is for that of the reader.