April 21, 2005 | If You're Smoking in San Francisco

Dennis Roddy, an old-fashioned reporter (that's a compliment folks), a gentleman intellectual and columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, turned in a little piece on San Francisco a couple of months ago, but it escaped my sight.

Many of you may have read Roddy's absurdly well-written profile of John Gilmore, (c'mon admit it, how many of you EFF-heads knew Gilmore worked as a Tilt-A-Wheel operator and was once shot).

Well, Roddy had a little something else to write on his trip to San Francisco.

Bill Scannell, a public relations consultant with whom I dined here last week, tells of the adventure of ordering a beer in a city in which sex and politics are indistinguishable and all-encompassing.

"I asked the bartender what beer he would recommend. He said, 'As a gay man and as a gay bartender, I think you should have...' " Scannell shrugged. "Sometimes you want to shake these people and tell them, 'I don't care what you are. What do you do?' "

It has been so many years that it is hard to recall that when my uncle first moved here after the war, San Francisco was a conservative town that occasionally held an earthquake. Forty years later, Jeanne Kirkpatrick stood before the Republican National Convention and dismissed "the San Francisco Democrats." Geography alone was enough to doom the 1984 Democratic slate.

After his wife died, my uncle brought her back to Johnstown, buried her in her family's plot at St. John's Cemetery, and returned to San Francisco. He came here because there was work as a university librarian, an established, even stodgy, community, and weather nice enough for him to golf in early spring and late autumn.

In 1976 one of my closest friends left Johnstown because he was gay. He ended up in famously gay-friendly San Francisco. He was a leftist as well, and San Francisco is so left it is a wonder the cars keep in the correct lanes. It is strange to think about, but as we play the red-state, blue-state game there is much reason to consider the implications of a nation in which someone would select a home not for the climate but its political comfort level.

In San Francisco, the feel-like temperature for the Democrats is a balmy 78. For George Bush, it is arctic. Those of us in the gelatinous middle are left to wonder at a town in which people walk with such moral certainty about everything from smoking (banned) to sex (encouraged) to driving (aggressive). It could be argued, I suspect, that this place is Dallas for lefties.

Finish reading the whole thing here.

Now for the record, I officially doubt Scannell's anecdote, but someday kids I'll tell a real story about a San Francisco bar.

It involves, as one could guess, drinking with Roddy in a San Francisco lesbian bar. A San Francisco lesbian bar that you can, though Roddy didn't, smoke in.

Until then, keep your eyes on his column and wonder to yourself what Pittsburgh has on your city to deserve such well-chosen words in its daily rag.

I'd trade almost all of the Chronicle lifestyle staff and all of its editorial board (hell, Pittsburgh I won't make you take Ken Garcia), for one Dennis Roddy.

Posted by Ryan Singel at April 21, 2005 04:01 PM

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