“I’ve lived here since ’81. It was a good time to get out of Manhattan.”

“The way I feel about San Francisco... if it stops changing... then you need to worry. There are a lot of good people coming in and yes, a lot of assholes, but remember that a lot of people are gonna be changed by the city instead of them changing the city.”

“There’s a real attitude in the city that if you have money you have free reign to do whatever you want. When I was coming up it wasn’t about that, it was about 'what have you done.' On the other hand those people have a lot of money to spend and they are going out. They go see local music, they go to clubs. That’s just how it is. People fall into the trap of thinking things were so much better back when. Yeah they were better, you were younger! Personally I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth, I almost lost my studio last month, but I’m still digging it. I just try to get up every day and not be bitter because that's a waste of time."

“I haven’t had a perfect day yet.”

“Well you have to be in a good frame of mind to be relaxed, and I am relaxed so I’ve had good days. But I haven’t had gigantic, ostentatious, stupendous, lottery-winning kind of days.”

“It’s more bitter than it is sweet.”

“I’ve been watching a lot of kung fu movies so I decided to cut my goatee like this. I might even grow my hair out like those old kung fu masters.”

“Exactly, I was wondering what that would look like and then I realized it would be super fly.”

Right: “I’m 5 years older but she teaches me a lot about how to love people more, love God more, and love myself more. A lot of people can’t say that about their younger sister.”

Left: “She’s taught me a lot about how to be a strong woman. How to be determined and go after what you want. Really own who you are.”

“I left New York to move here in 1972. I was running away from a marriage and I just thought ‘No… it's not gonna work,’ so I came here.”

“You know, he was my high school sweetheart but he had to go to Vietnam. Since he was in college he could apply for the services and not be drafted so he applied for the Navy. He ended up going to Japan and when he came back he was such a different person, angry and weird. He started beating me. My friend said, ‘You’re not gonna marry him are you?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know’. She said, ‘Can’t you tell he’s crazy?’ It’s so weird when you’re in love with people you don’t see them like that."

“I asked her, ‘What are you gonna do?’ and she said ‘After college I’m gonna go to San Francisco to become a lesbian. You should come with me.' So she came here and I followed.

"I was the only one with money. They had gotten a little apartment on Oak. They got me a bed off the street. That was a time when people you didn’t know would knock on your door and say ‘Hi, I’m a friend of Mary’s, can I stay here?’ It was like that. So many people would move in that we would just have to move on to the next flat, and the next flat. Everyone lived in communes. The idea was to break down all of those boundaries we had grown up with that we didn’t understand. It was a time of civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, the Vietnam war. It was a very shocking time for all of us. We went to Maoist classes. We taught each other because we wanted a different way to live. It was like ‘let’s create another world away from our families, away from everything that was so fucked up'… so that’s what we did.”