Peet’s in San Francisco’s Castro closes today after more than three decades. It’s part of a corporate shuttering of about 30 shops in the Bay Area due to “long-term growth priorities and current market conditions.”

Translation: shareholder returns. Peet’s is joining the same conglomerate that owns Dr Pepper.

I’m a Castro resident and was among the first to report on the café’s demise via social media. A swift deluge of reactions followed, filled with grief, despair and anger.

“Very sad. We go there every morning,” “Oh nooooo!,” “So many first ‘dates’ there. RIP,” “Fu*king corporate accountants.”

Why so much emotion…for a chain coffee shop?

It might sound corny, but our Peet’s, on Market near 16th, was a community. Neighbors met each other there, became friends, and caught up on each other’s lives.

This is where we learned neighborhood news, from new business openings to petty crimes and passings. Our city supervisor regularly appeared with a coterie of adoring young fans, and our elders came to reminisce about the days of struggle those same young men will never know.

My husband and I went almost every morning for 24 years, often before dawn, for facetime to talk about our day ahead.

It didn’t matter that it was a chain (albeit one that originated in Berkeley). Cafes are the modern equivalent of town squares.

For us here in the Castro, the Peet’s closure is part of an unfortunate trend.

We’ve already lost most of our veteran café communities. The Starbucks on 18th near Castro Street was affectionately nicknamed “Bearbucks,” a mecca for large hirsute gay men. It abruptly shuttered in 2025 after about 30 years.

Café Flore at the corner of Noe and Market closed several years back after 47 years. Before that we lost longtime mainstays like Sweet Inspiration and Bagdad Café. The beloved Castro Coffee Company has faced possible eviction.

I have fond memories of all these places. The princess cake, the bearded cruising, and fries so spicy they scorched my lips, all served with a side of local gossip.

I’m not one of the residents who (loudly) try to block every change here and preserve the neighborhood in amber. I know that cities, and even famous neighborhoods, must evolve to thrive.

And, yes, there are smaller cafes in the Castro that survive. They just don’t have the large number of local regulars to form de facto communities, either because they’re too small or too new. Maybe someday they will collectively fill the gap.

In the meantime, we will mourn the loss of our Peet’s. Café culture has real value.

Just apparently not for stockholders.

The pain surged in Dmytro Melnyk’s arm before he heard the bullet’s shot.

He jumped behind a crumbling cinderblock wall. Stupid. He’d foolishly made himself an easy target.

It wasn’t like Dmytro to be so distracted. But this horror.

Moments earlier he’d emerged from the brush to find a cairn of human flesh, body upon body, a memorial to insanity. Here on the front lines in the Donbas, Russian soldiers, most of them boys, were cannon meat.

Moscow’s strategy was to overwhelm its enemy by sheer numbers, gambling a doomed horde would prevail. Fifteen hundred dead or permanently wounded per day, he’d heard. They even imported thousands of malnourished North Korean troops to be butchered.

It worked. The moskals advanced in deadly increments, pushing further into Ukraine.

But never in his nine months of fighting had Dmytro seen this much carnage. The soil was soaked red. He’d stared down into the face of one of the kids, not many years ago someone’s angelic boy. Now half his skull was gone.

All because a madman wanted to resew the remnants of the Soviet scourge.

It was when his eyes searched the pile for any sign of life that the bullet hit Dmytro’s arm.

Behind the safety of the wall, he gently spread open the tear in his sleeve to examine his wound. He exhaled. Barely a graze.

A new shot hit the brick. Then another.

Dmytro determined the direction of the shooter. He got down on his belly in the rancid muck. Whoever said soldiers get used to the smell of death was a fucking liar.

He sprung up and pointed his pistol at the sniper. Another child. The shocked young man tossed his rifle into the air.

“Please, I beg you, do not kill me.”

The boy shivered.

“You piece of shit. Why should I spare you? You tried to murder me.”

“I am sorry. Sorry! I was scared. I aimed at the wall. I never meant to hit anyone,” he said. “I did not know what to do. I hide here for two days. I had to shoot, or they would know. If I ran back… I had no choice!”

Dmytro looked into the boy’s terrified blue eyes, his blond hair matted in the grotesque battlefield mud. Skinny, pale and barely old enough to shave, the kid was the opposite of Dmytro’s imposing brute Baltic frame hardened by battle and a face overgrown by dark stubble. He had no doubt the youngster told the truth — the cruelty Russian fighters faced if they retreated was notorious.

“Please!” The soldier clasped his hands behind his head and bent down. He was already on his knees. Dmytro paused. This wasn’t war. This was execution.

He thought of his son Andriy back in Vinnytsia. He was only twelve but might be sent to fight one day. Dmytro would want compassion for his boy. Maybe he could take the conscript back to his unit as a prisoner.

Too risky. Russians were likely in the villages between here and his base. Dmytro could hide himself to sneak back, but with a prisoner that would be impossible.

Dmytro clicked the trigger on his MP-443 and pointed. There was no other way. The young man had to die.

“Wait!”

Dmytro hesitated.

“Spare my life! I…I…I know the 19!”

Dmytro had heard of the 19. It was surely a myth.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I do! I swear!”

A silence drifted between the two men for nearly a full minute.

“I swear!” the soldier begged. “Keep the gun pointed at my head if you must. If at any moment you think I am lying, then kill me. You have the right. I shot you. I…I…I deserve to die. But I am not lying. The 19. I know the 19!”

A vision of Dmytro’s wife Anichka came into his mind. Her chestnut hair that matched her eyes. Those thin red lips. The pink in her cheeks.

Steve Zwang adjusted his head in the cradle. He really needed this. He’d heard this guy had hands twice the size of normal humans and was especially brutal. But it was a good hurt, perhaps the best massage he’d ever had.

“Turn over.”

It was the moment Steve dreaded. He was gay, the masseur was gay, and Steve was naked, as was typical in San Francisco, especially here in the Castro. That also meant the expectation of complete fulfillment at the end.

Steve had no interest. He knew he was good-looking, a smooth fit body he attributed to his Taiwanese heritage and working out three times a week, plus thick black perfectly mussed hair, and only thirty, the gay prime. Men fooled around with each other constantly, he rationalized, as casually and as often as yawning. He didn’t see the masseur as a sex worker, just another guy who loved to play like everyone else. The masseur had brushed his intentions on Steve’s hand several times during the session to signal his interest.

Steve appreciated the gesture, but sex was not on his agenda. This was his escape from work that completely absorbed his mind — a break from reality to venture into a realm that did not include data, tests, bug hunts and moonshots. At his job he was expected to “change the world.” When he got a massage, he left the planet.

When he turned over his body signaled no arousal, flopped to the side like a blanket over the arm of a chair. Steve knew most guys would be at attention, eager to engage a masseur nicknamed The Grizzly Bear — beefy, hirsute and with an endowment larger than Stanford’s.

The Grizzly kneaded Steve’s chest and arms, then cracked his fingers. Nothing close to the groin. Steve was relieved he would make it to the end without an awkward unwanted moment.

Then a grasp. A turn in an unexpected direction. Steve was instantly transported from relaxed to fully engaged. He submitted to a series of pulls, strokes and what-the-hell-is-thats. When finished he was spent in a way he’d never felt before. From beginning to end it took less than two minutes.

“What was…?”

“What was what?” the masseur laughed, his voice an octave higher than expected. “Just a little fun. Did I do something wrong? I’m sorry if I overstepped.”

“But I’ve never…”

“Oh, I like to improvise. I get in a zone and shut my eyes. No two are the same.” The masseur inhaled deeply, shut his eyes and gently placed his hand on Steve’s stomach. “Namaste.”

Steve felt his consciousness depart and float above the table to look down and study. He’d had a photographic memory since childhood, which is why he’d been so successful in tech. He memorized each maneuver the masseur used. As Steve created a catalog in his mind, like a picture book, he realized that none of the steps could be done on oneself. They required another’s hand, plus intimate knowledge of exactly how male anatomy worked. Simple, yet audacious.

He added up all the steps. It took 19 moves.

Steve worked on moonshots at X, Google’s secretive think tank down the road from the tech giant’s megaplex headquarters in Mountain View. The mission was to come up with new ideas people didn’t yet know they needed. X’s successes were legendary: driverless cars, internet access for rural communities, and transformative advances in web search. Nearly every person on earth had their lives touched by the breakthroughs germinated at X.

Steve was young to be on the X team. Most had vast experiences that could ruminate in their minds to bring seemingly disparate ideas to unexpected conclusions. Batteries made from salt. Computer-enhanced clothing to help disabled people walk. Shanghai soup dumplings that solve climate change. No brainstorm was too outlandish. With Steve’s preternatural ability to memorize and compute an array of facts in his head he was a natural fit. Google recruited him from MIT and quickly realized they’d found their latest X man.

Now he couldn’t get the 19 out of his head.

He’d performed the 19 with several tricks from Grindr, and they would not stop pinging him. Each time was the same — two minutes, arched back, sheets ruined. They begged to be taught how to do it themselves. There was something else Steve noticed. He now had a connection to each man, a concept contrary to the dismissive and sometimes cruel San Francisco gay world. It was one thing to take a man to bed, but entirely unreasonable for him to ask to sleep over, or even take a shower. Now Steve remembered each man lovingly.

The mission at X was “inventing radical new technologies to solve humanity’s problems.” The 19 didn’t fit. It was not tech, as it was unquestionably manual. Yet it was metamorphic, and perhaps could be a solution, although Steve hadn’t determined the problem it would solve.

Obsession was the seed at X, but there was a process to how projects advanced, employing scientific methods of research and experimentation. If the 19 was truly transformative, then Steve had to test it in scenarios where it would surely fail.

His colleague Dave owed him a favor. Straighter than the Kinsey scale could measure, Dave constantly talked about women. Being a successful Google engineer had been the deal closer in bedding women out of his league. Dave was charming and affable, but his hair was already thinning in his late thirties, and he was shaped like a boiled egg. He’d not been in a gym since junior high school, and back then he’d persuaded a doctor to write a note excusing him from any activity that involved sweating. Steve could not be less attracted.

Despite his shortcomings in looks, or maybe because of them, Dave was remarkably open-minded. He’d tried ayahuasca for fun and once went to the nudist Harbin Hot Springs, knowing he’d likely be ridiculed for his body. He loved collecting experiences.

“I have an idea I need to put to the test,” Steve said over lunch. “It’s beyond unusual. Moonshot does not quite encapsulate it.”

Steve told Dave the story of the 19.

“Sure,” Dave said.

“I didn’t ask you anything.”

“It’s only logical that you need to test this in the wild. You need adverse conditions. I’ve never been with a dude, or even thought about being with a dude. Frankly, it simply has nothing to do with me. I’m not wired that way, so I’m not impacted by others who are. It’s antithetical for any truly straight person to think otherwise.”

The soundproof Amelia Earhart room on the far side of the building was designed for playing musical instruments, one of the ways X fostered creativity. After nine at night the room was never used. Steve brought a tarp he’d bought at a nearby paint store and spread it over the noise absorbing carpet.

“What do you need that for?”

Less than two minutes later Dave understood.

His ideas came almost as quickly. They could leave X and do their own start-up. Men would pay a fortune to learn this. No, he quickly contradicted himself. Once the secret got out there’d be no market — it was easy enough for men to teach each other.

Dave then turned to the bounces. Imagine how this could reduce STIs. Maybe women would be less harassed. A cure for incels.

He pivoted to rapid-fire thoughts on why it would fail. What would it take to get straight men to do this to each other? This was an age when bros used fist bumps to avoid being perceived as gay. Perhaps when men tried it, they’d be convinced. No, that would never happen. There had to be another way.

“You know, guys go to all sorts of extremes in pursuit of health and to make themselves more desirable. Obsessive gym bodies, hair plugs, expensive clothes…” As Dave’s voice lowered to a rambling whisper and his inner dialog took over, Steve could not help but notice that Dave’s list of men’s pursuits of perfection all involved things Dave was not.

“Give me some time,” he said. “This is one of those impossible problems that’s impossible to solve. But it can be solved. We just need to be smart enough.”

“I feel like all we’ve done in our lives has led to this moment,” Steve said.

Dave nodded and asked for one thing.

“Teach me.”

“You really know the 19?” Dmytro asked the young soldier.

“Yes!”

He said another conscript passed the knowledge on to him during basic training. Now it was well known among the Gen Z troops.

“You know what it does,” the soldier said. “It is all true. Everything you have heard.”

“You’re gay.”

“No! Of course not,” the boy said, indignant. “Gays are evil. This fact is already settled. In Russia we have laws against such things. The 19 is not gay. Nothing is healthier. It improves virility. No, not just improve. That is saying too little. It is an explosion. Not just in the moment, but an electricity that never stops. This is proven by scientists in America. Silicon Valley they say. I have had the best sex in my life with my girlfriend since I learned the 19. This is true!”

In his life, Dmytro scoffed. What did a boy know about such things? But Dmytro had heard rumors of the 19 and its life-changing power. He always thought of himself as virile — he was here on the frontlines of a war. He had killed. Nothing was more manly.

He thought again of his wife, Anichka. He craved her. He was fighting for her, really — their survival.

He’d heard of fellow soldiers who returned home from the front so wrecked by what they’d seen that they could no longer function as men for their wives. Killing had stolen more than lives. He could not fail like that.

“Let’s do it.”

In less than two minutes Dmytro’s mind blurred, stunned as surely as if he’d been near a grenade blast. The ground was covered in a million lost offspring. It was true. Not just virility. It was more than that.

As Dmytro emerged from his haze, he knew.

“I can’t kill you,” he said to the conscript as he uncocked his pistol. “I don’t hate you. I can’t describe it, except that we are bonded.”

“What about me shooting you?” the young man said, still petrified. “You said I tried to murder you.”

“It’s only a flesh wound. It will heal. And that was before.”

The young man tentatively grinned.

“I have one condition before I let you go,” Dmytro said.

“Anything.”

“Teach me the 19.”

The conscript undid his belt.

“It would be an honor.”

Commanders on each side were outraged and astonished. Not a bullet had been shot in two days. No missiles. No jets strafing convoys. Drones grounded. It was as if peace had abruptly spread like a pandemic. Without any permission or orders, the battle stopped.

A simultaneous mutiny on both sides made no sense to General Daniil Petrov, the weary grayed chief of the Russian General Staff Army. Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of war.

That wasn’t exactly true. When Petrov was a young Soviet stationed in East Berlin, he witnessed something like this. Peace overtook the city when soldiers refused to shoot those on the other side. They’d recognized each other as fellow human beings — as brethren — and brothers did not kill each other. The wall fell.

Petrov knew the Kremlin would order the fighting in Ukraine to continue. He could hear the brutal commands headed his way. “Hang the deserters.” All of them? That would leave no one left. And exactly who would do these executions when everyone refused to kill? From what the general could determine from intelligence reports, the ceasefire started in the Donbas, but with the speed of wind reached all the way to Lviv and then down to Crimea. No one would fight, and the soldiers had somehow concluded that no one would destroy them.

His chief of staff Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov walked into the general’s office.

Ivanov’s usual purse-lipped edge was missing, his normally perfect uniform slightly disheveled. Maybe he was ill, the general thought. The colonel typically strode with a modified goose step. Today he sauntered.

Ivanov stood at the general’s desk.

“What is it?” the general said, peering down at paperwork through his bifocals.

“General,” Ivanov said with hesitation. “Have you heard of the 19?”

Scott James is an Emmy winning veteran journalist and author of Trial by Fire, featured on the CBS News program “48 Hours” and recipient of the top prize for non-fiction by the New England Society Book Award. He’s also the author of two bestselling novels, The Sower and SoMa, finalist for Lambda Literal Award for debut fiction

Castro Street was a vibrant village, and then suddenly a plywood void.

I live and work here in one of America’s few remaining gayborhoods, a mecca for queer rights and a beacon of hope for people who live oppressed around the world. We know that what happens here matters.

When the pandemic came to town, and San Francisco was the first major U.S. city with a shelter-in-pace dictate, the composite wood flew up. With the shutdown indefinite and the future in question, owners wanted to protect their properties.

But to many, each nail pounding in those boards felt like defeat. In a neighborhood that has battled death, from the assassination of Harvey Milk to the genocide of AIDS, the plywood represented a terrible message.

I sat in a Zoom town hall meeting in March when Donna Sachet, the city’s drag doyenne, offered a solution.

“Any thoughts about painting those awful plywood boards? Maybe local artists without current work would be interested in painting flowers, murals, or something to make things more interesting?”

I want to say that the politician running the meeting immediately embraced the idea and the community rallied, like in a scene from some inspirational movie. No. Donna’s vision seemed to land with a thud. There were concerns raised about violating local graffiti ordinances, and the bizarre argument that an artist painting a mural outside would risk death from the virus.

Well, I’m not the first one to say this…

Donna Sachet was right.

It would take weeks because of those initial naysayers, but in time the plywood was conquered. And this being the Castro, there’s more than just pretty pictures.

Take a look…

As the President praises Putin, a photograph tells a different story

I was touring the streets of the ancient Marais in Paris with a friend recently when we saw a sign down an alley for a pop-up gallery exhibit of prize-winning news photography. As a lifelong journalist, I had to have a glimpse, if only for a few moments.

So many of the pictures featured the refugee crisis. Living here in the U.S., an ocean and thousands of miles away, our news tends to dwell on the politics. But in Europe the crisis is inescapably in the foreground, and one after another, the photos vividly captured the aching human drama.

Then on a far wall was a gigantic picture of a wheat field. As I got closer, I saw that some solitary object was sitting in the middle of the waves of grain, although I couldn’t quite register what it was.

I moved to within inches of the photo and continued to stare for several minutes. The object was oddly familiar, but my brain refused to compute, somehow not allowing me to understand exactly what I was seeing. Then, very slowly, bits came into clear focus.

A chair.

A blue chair.

A chair from an airplane.

Still strapped in the chair was a person.

A human being.

Parts of a human being.

The image was taken by Jerome Sessini at the site of the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down by rebels in Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Russia had armed the rebels with anti-aircraft missiles, and they shot down the passenger plane filled with innocent civilians.

As the horror hit me, I stepped back and noticed that I was surrounded by Sessini’s grim photos from that day. You can click on this link to see them for yourself. It would be wrong for me to simply show the picture of the chair here without giving you fair warning.

The image of that chair in the wheat field came back to me this week after hearing our President yet again praise Russian President Vladimir Putin. When confronted by Fox News about Putin being an unrepentant killer, Donald Trump dismissively said, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

The remark has received widespread condemnation, for all the predictable reasons. While America is not perfect, any comparison with Putin’s Russia is an outrageous false equivalency. Our leaders do not routinely assassinate their critics in the United States, and we don’t allow for the wholesale murder of innocent civilians. We’re not a strongman dictatorship, and should not aspire to be one.

Take a look at that photo of the wheat field if you need to understand why. That could be your loved one strapped into that chair. Or you.

The Wheat Field was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s 2016 and this just happened to me, yes, right here in the gayborhood of San Francisco.

In the Castro early Saturday morning I boarded the bus to downtown. As soon as I stepped on, a brawny African American man in a black bandana shouted at me. “Help me out with something to eat?”

“Sorry, man,” I said as I sat down several feet away behind a divider, hoping to stay out of the man’s sight. There were only two other passengers on the bus, both huddled up front next to the driver.

Not being able to make eye contact with me didn’t matter. After a few moments went by, and no one else got on the bus, the man began berating. “You’re not giving me anything because I’m black,” he yelled, and then added with a menacing tone, “Faggot!”

It was the beginning of a ride of terror. At times I felt in mortal danger, but no one on the bus intervened or attempted to help, including the driver.

It was also the first time I’ve been called a “faggot” or felt physically threatened for being gay.

We don’t expect to experience such harassment these days. After all, we live in a new age of enlightenment when it comes to gay people, with much discrimination against us now illegal. And it might seem especially strange here in San Francisco, in the Castro no less, the city’s gay center, often considered the LGBT mecca of the world.

But being in San Francisco, and specifically the Castro, is probably why this happened. If you don’t like gay people, or you think gay people are weak and therefore easily victimized, then this is the one place you can be sure to find them. I was a man alone getting on a bus in the Castro, so the odds were better than anywhere else that I was gay.

“Faggot!” the guy in the bandana yelled again. “You disgust me. I can’t imagine what two men would even do with each other. What’s it like sucking little boys’ dicks? Faggot.”

The slurs kept coming. I slumped down in my seat and took out my phone to pretend that I was reading and the verbal assault was not aimed at me. The anger in the man’s voice intensified and a feeling of dread swept over me that this was a dangerously unstable person and the situation could quickly escalate. Anticipating an assault, I activated the camera on my phone to try to record some evidence, but I only managed to nervously fumble with the buttons and take a photo of my own knee.

Then the man got up from his seat and came toward me. I kept my head down, hoping that if he didn’t see me rattled then he’d simply move on. He passed me, still hurling insults, and stood up front, right next to the bus driver. From there he continued to shout obscenities at me. The driver pulled up to the next stop and opened the door. Since the man had been causing such a disturbance, I thought the driver would surely ask the man to leave.

Instead, they exchanged pleasantries. The man explained that it wasn’t his stop, and then he thanked the driver for allowing him to ride for free.

When the door closed the shouting started again, this time with the demand that I take off my jacket. He described the maroon coat I wore and said it was really his and he wanted it back, “Right now!”

I just kept staring at my phone, my face showing no expression, continuing to act as if the man was not talking to me. This seemed to enrage him even more, and he segued back into his diatribe about “cocksuckers” and “faggots.” My chest tightened. Now he’s going to attack, I thought.

But when we pulled up to a stop in the Civic Center, the man got off and headed in the direction of the BART station. I finally got a good look at him, at least from behind. He was tall, muscular and neatly dressed in a clean tight white knit shirt with a designer backpack slung over one shoulder. In frustration, or perhaps just bravado, he punched into the air as he walked away, finally releasing the meaty fists that could have pounded my face.

I wanted to immediately run up to the driver and ask why he didn’t call the police or tell the man to vacate the bus. Aggressive panhandling and verbally assaulting passengers should both be reasons enough to kick someone off. But then I realized that the man stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the driver while I was being harassed, so the driver knew exactly what was happening. Was he scared too? Didn’t the driver have an obligation to do more than just ignore the situation?

I had played the turtle in its shell and avoided a beating, but others have not been so lucky in the Castro. Those who want to victimize us are making the neighborhood a destination for assaults and robberies, with new cases every week. Police have publicly admitted that criminals from outside the city specifically target gay men here, especially those leaving the bars at closing who have had too much to drink.

Or as someone put it on the website Hoodline this past week, “Come for the rainbows. Stay for the muggings.”

There are also the public taunts and anti-gay slurs, like the ones I experienced on the bus. There have been times when troublemakers have come into the Castro in order to stand on a street corner and yell “faggot” and “cocksucker” at all who pass. But when the local police captain was asked about this at a public meeting, he said there was nothing that could be done because it’s “free speech.”

I doubt the city or police would shrug it off so easily if someone showed up in a primarily black neighborhood and shouted racist slurs and taunts.

Until this past Saturday I had largely forgotten that I’m a member of a minority group, one that remains despised or victimized simply for existing. I escaped unharmed, but the harassment on the bus was an abrupt reminder that there are still some people who want to hate us or hurt us. Yes, even here in San Francisco.

The perch of the 1937 world’s fair Trocadero complex on the Seine offers a stunning unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower where thousands gather to stand in awe, snap photos, and face an onslaught of relentless souvenir hawkers. But when we went this past Friday night, the peddlers were still there, but not the tourists. I’d never seen the area so desolate.

We came to pay our respects. The tower is temporarily basked in red, blue and white lights, symbolizing the French flag, a moving statement of stoic patriotism in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13th. Normally the tower becomes a spectacle of glittering, festive lights each hour, a show that was put on hold after the murders of 130 people at the hands of ISIS gunmen.

The lack of crowds at the Trocadero shouldn’t have been so surprising. After all, we weren’t sure if we were even allowed to be there. France’s state of emergency following the terrorism prevents assemblies of large crowds. Would one of the city’s most popular tourist spots be included in the ban?

Perhaps an official ban is not needed at all. A week after the attacks, Paris is eerily quiet. Neighborhoods that would normally be teeming are empty, with shops, bars and restaurants closed when they would typically be packed. Tourism business is down by 40 percent or more, according to some reports. Understandably, few in Paris feel like carousing these days.

My husband Jerry and I arrived in Paris for a brief stop as part of a long-planned trip. When the terrorist attacks happened some of our friends and family urged us to cancel.

“It’s so violent over there,” more than one person said.

Paris? Dangerous? I refused to accept this. Yes, the horror of terrorism had struck the French capitol — twice in one year — but it made no sense to suddenly dismiss the entire city as unsafe. After all, American cities are consistently far more violent and deadly. Chicago is one of my favorites, and this year has had more than 2,000 shootings, resulting in more than 400 murders. And America is not immune to acts of terror that kill innocent strangers. My nephew once lived in Aurora, Colorado, just a short distance from the movie theater massacre where a dozen people were murdered watching a Batman film. He could have been there.

Statistically, America is one of the most dangerous nations on earth, even when taking into account the terrorist scourge in other nations. We’re fooling ourselves to believe otherwise.

So we kept our plans to visit Paris. At the very least, we could show our support by not cowing to the agenda of the terrorists who’d hoped their attack would also result in a blow to the French economy.

After the Eiffel Tower we went to the Arc de Triomphe, which is normally surrounded by visitors. I spotted only two people standing at the eternal flame memorial to fallen soldiers. We walked down the Champs-Élysées, the boulevard famous for its luxury stores. Retailers were illuminated for the holidays with entire buildings wrapped like Christmas presents, but few were around to be dazzled.

Heading toward the Place de la Concorde we wandered into the massive annual Christmas Village, fully staffed but without customers. And as we meandered through the stalls we noticed a complete absence of children, even in a play area filled with animatronic displays of animals and Santa’s helpers — a surreal scene that played out in my mind like something from a dystopian novel.

We then made our way to the Marais, a neighborhood packed with restaurants, bars and cafes. We passed Les Glaciers de Paris, considered the best ice cream in all of France, where a line of eager foodies normally stretches out the door. Not tonight. It was closed.

“It must be too cold for ice cream,” Jerry said.

But it wasn’t too cold. In fact, many places were shuttered that would usually be thriving on such a temperate fall night. The streets were void of crowds and we struggled to find a place open for dinner. Cafes that would normally serve until the wee hours were bringing their chairs inside, locking up, and conceding the truth: Paris was closed.

Later that night I met a Parisian friend for a drink at one of the few nearby spots that remained open. He talked about how the city remained on edge, and he’d felt it himself. A few days earlier he was at a Starbucks when reports of gunshots sent patrons there scrambling under tables and hiding for their lives until the police came and cleared the scene. It was a false alarm, but for several tense minutes people genuinely believed that they too might die. Some wept.

“I’m okay,” he said when I expressed concern. I didn’t believe him.

I looked at my watch. It was 1:07am and we were the only customers left at the bar. The staff were noisily cleaning up, a signal that they were eager to close and go home.

U.S. mainstream media have ignored Morocco’s gay crackdown, so pass the word. It’s time for a boycott.

In the bright noontime sun we entered the maze of Marrakech’s ancient Kasbah. A tall young Moroccan man in a red and white tracksuit immediately approached us. He called himself Mustafa and asked us where we were from. We said California, smiled and moved on. Minutes later he’d caught up with us again, this time to tell us we were headed down a dead end street.

“Are you two friends?” he asked, pointing at my husband.

I felt a rush of danger. “Friends” suddenly seemed a dangerous word. Was he really trying to determine if we were a gay couple?

“Of course we’re friends,” I said loudly, with as much incredulity as I could muster.

Another young man lurked nearby. As we tried to extricate ourselves, Mustafa pointed in the direction of a museum and then asked for money, since he’d “helped” us through the labyrinth. The other young man moved in close. I gave them the equivalent of a dollar and they scurried away.

Encounters like this are common when traveling in the developing world, with locals seeking the spare change of relatively affluent visitors. As a seasoned traveler, I’ve experienced dozens of these situations.

But I felt a tinge of terror when visiting earlier this year because Morocco is the midst of a witch-hunt, targeting and imprisoning foreign tourists suspected of being homosexual. A person does not need to actually engage in any type of gay sex or overtly gay activity to be picked up and thrown in jail.

It happened to Ray Cole, a 69-year-old retiree visiting Marrakech last October from England. He’d started an online relationship with a young Moroccan man and flew down to visit. As the two men stood at a bus stop the police pulled up and started berating them with homophobic slurs. Homosexuality is a crime in Morocco, and the young local man was apparently already on a list of suspected gays. So when the two men were spotted talking to each other, that was enough evidence for police. Both men were jailed, and Cole was sentenced to four months in prison after investigators found information on the senior’s locked cellphone that allegedly confirmed his orientation.

Cole described the prison as a “concentration camp” with filthy, deplorable, overcrowded conditions. He would have languished there, but when his family discovered his fate they started a campaign on social media that was eventually picked up by the mainstream news media in Europe. The British government objected, and the bad press reportedly led to a local drop in tourism inquiries to Morocco. After serving 20 days of his sentence, Cole was released. Then following additional pressure, the Moroccan man was also freed.

It’s not the only case. A 35-year-old Canadian man was arrested and jailed in April after having a consensual sexual encounter with a security guard at a five-star luxury resort in the seaside city of Agadir. In June two French women were arrested and deported after kissing in the capital of Rabat. And arrests aren’t the only concern: a gay couple this past May said their reservation at an upscale spa hotel in Marrakech was abruptly canceled after management discovered that they were a couple.

Mainstream American news organizations have ignored nearly all of these incidents, leaving travelers woefully uninformed about these new dangers until they arrive. The U.S. State Department has not issued an official warning, only noting that, “Consensual same-sex sexual relations are criminalized” in Morocco — a dramatic understatement that leaves LGBT travelers perilously unaware of the current crackdown.

Homosexuality has long been against the law in Morocco, as it is in much of Africa and throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, but there was a time when Morocco was much more tolerant. In the 1950s, Morocco was considered a gay destination as artists, writers and free thinkers of all sorts escaped from the repression of America’s McCarthyism and flocked to places like Tangier, where same-sex encounters could be pursued with willing Moroccans. The scene attracted the top gay literati of the era: Jean Genet, Andre Gide, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Joe Orton. William Burroughs reportedly wrote “Naked Lunch” in a Tangier hostel.

In more recent decades homosexuality was tolerated, as long as it remained hidden. That’s typical in many Muslim cultures, where views of men having sex with men can be more nuanced than they are in the west. No one speaks of it publicly, but sexual encounters are not uncommon between men, especially young men in countries where sex between Muslim men and women are illegal outside marriage, and subject to harsh penalties, including death. So some men secretly have sex with each other until they are married, and don’t consider it a big deal. Even those who clearly prefer sex with men still get married and have families. By our standards, these men are living a lie, but not to them — they co-exist in both worlds, and they don’t understand why people in the west seem to choose between gay and straight. In fact, some Muslim men completely reject those definitions of sexuality as simplistic.

I know this because these are the stories I’ve heard over and over again when traveling and talking to men from Muslim countries, including Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Emirates.

But when we arrived in Marrakech in May we discovered an atmosphere of fear and despair. When I chatted with locals via gay social media phone apps they said it was too dangerous to even chat in cafes. Others on the apps aggressively tried to get personal information from me, or wanted to determine exactly where I was in the city, leading me to think they might be Moroccan police lurking undercover in a sting to try to make more arrests.

After that, it’s no wonder we were so paranoid when Mustafa approached us in the Kasbah and asked about our relationship.

So what’s happened to Morocco? Some blame the Arab spring uprisings that have toppled dictatorships throughout northern Africa.

Morocco is a monarchy, and by many accounts is a benevolent dictatorship when compared to the old regimes of Libya and Egypt. In fact, there’s a strong argument that Morocco is immune to the type of revolution that threw those countries into chaos because King Mohammed VI is believed to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. Moroccans are proud of this lineage (a taxi driver, unsolicited, bragged to me about the divinity of his monarch), and any rebels might have a hard time claiming that Allah was on their side in any holy war.

That said, it’s difficult for the nation’s leaders to ignore the changes sweeping through the Muslim world. Some fear that the self-proclaimed caliphate of Isis portends a regional shift to extreme religious conservatism. So there’s a thought that if these conservatives are placated, there’s even less of a reason for any rebellious uprising in Morocco. And as history has taught us, there’s no easier way to appease religious conservatives than targeting gays. Such a crackdown might also help end rumors of gay people within Morocco’s royal family.

And this has made Morocco suddenly an unsafe place for gay people to visit. They should not go, and neither should anyone concerned about these issues. Morocco depends on tourism revenue, and perhaps the only way to put an end to the crackdown and decriminalize homosexuality is to vote with our dollars.

There’s no doubt that such a boycott would hurt ordinary Moroccans first, since most live in poverty and depend on that money, but many in the general public seem to support the crackdown, and local gays are suffering as a result. In June police arrested 20 Moroccans on suspicion of being homosexual and “incitement to corruption.” Then two local gay men were jailed in Rabat for standing too close to each other while posing for a photo in front of a historic site. Moroccan news media salaciously publicized the men’s names to enrage the public, and angry mobs set up hateful, bigoted protests in front of the men’s families’ homes.

And these are just the reported cases. How many more have been arrested and imprisoned in secret?

Morocco had been considered one of the more progressive Muslim countries. If people there truly want to veer in an ugly new direction, then I suppose that’s up to them. But we don’t have to fund such a move by visiting and spending our money. And we certainly shouldn’t become the next martyrs left to rot in jail cells because we weren’t warned about this nasty turn of events.

Now you know. Don’t go.

Reality Bytes: Bravo TV’s “Million Dollar Listing” Comes to San Francisco, Skewering the Tech Rich

When you first move to San Francisco you notice how different the initial conversations are here. On the east coast, locals quickly size you up by asking where you went to college or what you do for a living.

But out here, within minutes of encountering a complete stranger, you’ll be peppered with questions about where you live. What neighborhood? How long? House or apartment? Own or rent? Rent control? Oh, how much?

We’re obsessed with housing. And for good reason — it’s expensive and there’s not enough. San Francisco has the highest housing costs in the United States, whether you’re renting or trying to buy. The median home price in the city just hit $1.15 million, up 21.4% from a year ago.

Notice I said trying to buy. Part of the reason it’s so costly is because the number of homes for sale is relatively small and has actually dropped from a year ago, making the few places up for grabs all the more rare and coveted. Add to this the fact that San Francisco has always had limited housing stock (we’re surrounded by water on three sides), has been maddeningly slow to build new housing, and an influx of wealth from both China and the booming local tech sector has created a mob of buyers flush with cash.

Against this frenzied background comes the new television show “Million Dollar Listing San Francisco,” the latest edition to the Bravo cable network’s stable of reality TV shows (premiering July 8). Bravo might be best known for its “Real Housewives” franchise, but the channel practically invented bourgie TV porn, first with fashion porn (“Project Runway”), then food porn (“Top Chef”) and now real estate porn — the “Million Dollar Listing” series has featured Los Angeles and New York for years. See all the things you could never get to wear, eat or own. Drool, baby, drool!

Count me among the droolers. Just like everyone else, I too became obsessed with real estate after moving to San Francisco. More than once I’ve been a lookie-loo at a Sunday open house I could never afford. I would even tell out-of-town visitors to put an open house on their touring schedule, since they’re jaws would surely drop when they saw how much homes cost here. San Francisco’s version of the Wailing Wall is the vast window of listing posters at Coldwell Banker on Market near Castro where eyes well up when residents see the prices and curse themselves for not buying years ago.

I’ve eagerly watched both the New York and L.A. versions of “Million Dollar Listing.” The producers play up the colorful characters and personal conflicts, but I’m on the edge of my seat for the moments when they show the properties, getting light headed over plumbing fixtures and custom kitchens, and taking careful note of the size and then calculating the price per square foot. And after living in San Francisco for nearly 20 years, I’m probably among only a handful of viewers who see the Beverly Hills palaces and Manhattan penthouses and marvel at how inexpensive they are, uh, compared to San Francisco.

So I was excited when I heard the show was finally coming here, but also a little bewildered. After all, nearly everything is a million dollar listing in San Francisco. How interesting can a one-bedroom condo in SoMa be? A fixer in Bernal Heights? A rock doesn’t get you much more than an actual rock here.

I got to see an advance screening of the first episode, and similar to the other editions the cast consists of three preternaturally ambitious local real estate brokers, all telegenic men. Casting for this series seems to follow the fuck-marry-or-kill game, and the same goes for the San Francisco version. Andrew Greenwell is the machiavellian gay guy with the hot boyfriend, and Duboce Triangle native Justin Fichelson is the charming oddball. The casts of the other versions also include these archetypical characters.

But the San Francisco edition has something the other cities’ versions don’t, a character that seems to have some depth and substance. That’s Roh Habibi, an immigrant from the wars in Afghanistan who was once a Marina party boy and is now a practicing orthodox Muslim with a wife and newborn. Diminutive in stature, he reminded me of Ike Shehadeh, the beloved San Francisco sandwich shop king of Ike’s Place fame who was once homeless and overcame remarkable odds to succeed. There’s nothing like hardscrabble beginnings to help build character, and it will be interesting to see how far Bravo is willing to let the grit of Habibi’s life and story unfold. That will be a challenge, since this isn’t a documentary, and the franchise is inherently about selling fantasy and escape…and nothing kills a reality TV porn boner faster in than a dose of, well, a bummer reality.

That said, there are signs that “Million Dollar Listing San Francisco” will have a bit more profundity than its sister shows. While focused on techie buyers and the higher end of the spectrum, properties selling for $3 million and up, the premiere episode also alluded to the harsh reality of the city’s current housing crisis. Yes, it’s compelling in a rubbernecking-a-car-crash way to see how mind-boggling expensive it has become to find a home here, but the harsh truth is that working class and middle class folks are priced out of city these days. If not for the fact that a dwindling majority of the rental units are covered by rent control that restricts rent hikes on existing tenants, many of our friends and people we encounter every day could not afford to live here.

People concerned about this affordable housing crisis might be inclined to scorn “Million Dollar Listing San Francisco” because of its focus on the wealthy that are gobbling up every available square foot of shelter these days. But the producers seem to be making their own judgments: home sellers and buyers in the premiere are consistently portrayed as unattractive pustules of arrogance and avarice — the type of people no one in San Francisco would want to know. Their egos are dwarfed only by their idiocy: one man seems to want to purchase a place because the bed is comfortable (it’s part of the staging), and a woman appears to demand that a nearby tree be removed, unable to comprehend that it’s on a different property that belongs to someone else.

These might be editing tricks (read those release forms before you sign), because it’s hard to believe people are that inane. But skewering the rich and privileged has been a form of entertainment dating back thousands of years before Molière, and it has long been a favorite pastime here in this left leaning city. Perhaps San Francisco finally has a reality TV show that many people can enjoy, for many different reasons.

The new planter had just been installed, a much needed touch of green on a corner otherwise dominated by too much city concrete. But as I headed out early one morning there was something missing. Large empty holes had appeared overnight. Several beautiful succulent plants were gone.

A review of security camera footage showed a man at 3:30 that morning pushing a large wooden cart up to our building. Within a matter of minutes he took a trowel and carefully removed the plants and then rolled away with his bounty.

What type of person goes around stealing plants in the middle of the night?

I took the video and posted it on the website NextDoor, which features neighborhood news. I’d done this before with footage of a person stealing bicycles and it eventually led to that person’s arrest. I asked if anyone recognized the plant thief.

But instead of tips, I received a tidal wave of reactions and comments. Hundreds of homes and businesses in San Francisco’s neighborhoods have also had their plants stolen in recent months. It’s a veritable citywide plant heist.

“I, too, had 20 new succulents stolen.”

“Our planters on Church have been hit again and again. They aren’t taking cuttings but whole plants leaving holes in the soil.”

“Hoffman and 24th wiped out pots and all.”

“We were hit last night.”

People shared other security video and descriptions, and the suspects don’t match the man who robbed the planters at our building. This is the work of more than just one thief.

Most of the plants reported stolen were succulents, and that’s probably no coincidence. California’s drought has people switching their gardens to jades, aloes, agaves and other succulent plants (and cacti) because they require very little water. They’re also remarkably resilient and can survive being ripped out of gardens and replanted elsewhere.

They’re also expensive, creating a nice little market for stolen plants. There’s some speculation that gardeners are robbing the plants so they can resell them to other local homeowners who are making the switch to succulents because of the drought.

But don’t expect the San Francisco Police Department to be on the case anytime soon. That’s because most people apparently aren’t reporting the crime. Some feel it’s silly to waste police resources with something so small as plant theft, and others cynically believe that anything not secured is just bound to be stolen in the city — that residents who try to beautify their town somehow deserve to be victims.

“I guess it is all part of city living. Sigh,” said Brian on NextDoor.

The truth is that city resources are allocated based on complaints, so if a police report is filed (it can easily be done online) then investigators can spot trends and act. Neighborhoods that become known as easy pickings for thieves are inevitably targeted for more crime. Criminals tend to avoid areas where neighbors are known for being attentive and on alert.

“It’s never a waste of your time to file a police report,” said David Troup, president of the Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association, in a recent newsletter. “Even if your crime isn’t solved, your report may help prevent similar crimes in your area.”

And, frankly, it shouldn’t be too difficult for police to spot guys pushing carts and raiding gardens before dawn.

The Great San Francisco Plant Heist was originally published in Left Coast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

San Francisco has one of the highest car/pedestrian accident rates in the nation — nearly a thousand each year. I recently wrote a piece, called “San Francisco’s Walking Dead,” about the city’s misguided approach to this crisis. Until recently, policies have focused solely on blaming drivers — and I argued that distracted pedestrians (re: smartphones) are also responsible.

Don’t get me wrong — I pointed out that the city has plenty of terrible drivers, but some thought I let them off too easily.

Fair enough.

So I’ve compiled a list of what I’ve observed to be the city’s worst drivers. Is it scientific? Well, I’m closing in on nearly twenty years as a resident, and I can summarize my expertise in two words: I drive.

I walk and take public transit too, but I’ve always been comfortable driving — even in big cities — because as a lifelong journalist I’ve had to get to stories. In the news business, stories don’t exclusively happen next to bus stops. And news is often time sensitive. You need to get there quickly, and not 45 minutes later because the K-Ingleside got stuck again in the tunnel.

In recent years I’ve been driving an electric car, which has made me even more hypersensitive to the city’s worst drivers. Why? My car doesn’t make sounds, and others can’t hear me approaching, so I must drive defensively. Spotting bad drivers is an act of self-preservation.

To be clear, this list does not include the obvious suspects that exist everywhere: those who text and drive, use hand-held phones, wear headphones, eat while driving, speed too fast, or are otherwise distracted, reckless and selfish.

No, this is San Francisco. We’ve got our own special brands of bad drivers…

Stuffed Animals in the Back Window

When you see a car with only adult occupants and a back window cluttered with stuffed animals, bad driving is sure to follow. It’s not just that they can’t see out the window, or that the idea of adults collecting stuffed animals is a tad creepy. These drivers mistake their cars for something other than a mode of transportation — like it’s the set for “Hoarding: Vehicle Edition.”

At the very least, driving isn’t the only thing on the person’s mind in that car, and that’s a bad idea in one of America’s most congested cities.

The last time I was behind one of these drivers the person constantly stopped…at every green light.

Car Sharing Services

Practice makes perfect, and good driving on urban streets is an acquired skill. Car sharing services are hugely popular in a city that has a shortage of parking, and they might be great for the environment, but you can see what happens when someone only drives once every six months — they’ve forgotten the rules of the road.

Recently on Noe Street I saw a car share driver blow through three consecutive stop signs. Buddy, I realize it’s been a while since you were behind the wheel, but you’ve forgotten what stop signs are? Really?

It doesn’t help that San Francisco has it’s own set of rules that rarely appear anywhere else in the United States. 15th Street, as just one example, is two-way traffic, then one-way, then two-way. And that’s just in the course of a few blocks. Even experienced city drivers have been known to turn onto one-way streets going the wrong way.

Beware the share.

Big Hats

If you’re already inside, encased in metal and protected from the glare of the sun, why wear a big hat while driving? Perhaps it’s fashion, but there’s a direct correlation between bad driving and the size of a driver’s hat. If you see someone wearing a huge, floppy brim, chances are they can’t see you. They’ve blocked their own peripheral vision.

It’s style over substance — a venerable San Francisco tradition.

A friend recently moved to the trendy Mission neighborhood from the east coast and asked me, “Why is everyone here in costume?” Dress-up is fun, and it’s fabulous to have developed an elaborate personal flair, but when it comes to driving: millinery = mayhem.

Prius Drivers

I asked a cyclist friend who he thought the worst drivers in the city were, and before I could finish my question he blurted out: “Prius drivers!”

I wondered if that was because, like my electric vehicle, their cars don’t make much sound — something that would surely catch anyone on a bike by surprise. No, my friend said, he was sure it was a sense of entitlement — that they’re better than everyone else.

They think they’re saving the planet, he explained. So you’d better get out of their way.

Ouch.

“Free Tibet” Bumper Stickers

Along the same line of do-gooders, and something that seems counterintuitive, I’ve noticed that people who have “Free Tibet” bumper stickers on their cars are among the most aggressive drivers in the city. Perhaps they’ve channeled all their Zen lovingness into supporting the Dalai Lama, but it seems like whenever I get cut off in traffic the offending drivers have “Free Tibet” on their tails.

I’m not going to argue that this makes any sense. When I shared this observation with a friend, she said I was wrong — that the most aggressive drivers are those with “Coexist” bumper stickers, featuring a conglomeration of various religious symbols.

Oh no, said another friend, the worst drivers are those with the “God is My Co-Pilot” stickers. Apparently some believe that Jesus doesn’t have anything better to do than ride shotgun in a minivan.

Okay, so maybe it’s just those who mix religion with driving.

After all, every driver in San Francisco knows that prayer should be saved for those moments when you’re looking for street parking.

San Francisco’s Worst Drivers was originally published in Left Coast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.