When Harry Dodge moved to San Francisco in 1985, he was what you might call a typical Midwestern transplant: Nineteen years old, footloose, gay, and ready for a change — a biological woman who would eventually take testosterone, grow a goatee, and characterize himself with “he” pronouns. He was, at that time, prone to fantasies about opening “an anarchist performance space with wrestling mats.”
“There was something in me that always identified with San Francisco,” Dodge says, decades later. “It had this sheen of being a gay mecca. That was sublimated for me, at that point, but clearly the things were intertwined.”
Dodge found a one-bedroom apartment at 21st and Valencia streets for $275 a month, a deal forged with a wizened landlord who hadn’t fixed anything in a long time. He began consorting with the bike messenger and punk crowds, dabbling in classes at San Francisco State University (where tuition was $286.50 a semester) and City College (where tuition was considerably lower, he says), and flitting through the city’s seven or eight lesbian bars, which all seemed to have female names with a possessive apostrophe (“Amelia’s,” “Clementina’s”).