San Francisco - Alison Bing [16]
Civil rights organizations, religious institutions and GLBT organizations increasingly popped the question: why couldn’t same-sex couples get married too? Early backing came from the Japanese American Citizens League, which in 1994 publicly endorsed marriage for same-sex couples as a civil right. A decade later and just 45 days into his term in office, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom took the unprecedented step of authorizing same-sex weddings in San Francisco, just in time for Valentine’s Day, 2004.
The first couple to be married were Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, a San Francisco couple who had spent 52 years together. California courts ultimately halted the weddings and voided theirs and 4036 other San Francisco same-sex marriage contracts, but Lyon and Martin weren’t dissuaded: they married again on June 18, 2008, with Mayor Newsom personally officiating. Del Martin passed away in August at age 83, her wife by her side. In November 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8, asserting that only marriages between a man and a woman would be legally recognized. Phyllis Lyon commented, ‘It may not be while I’m alive, but eventually it will work out that if two people want to get married, they can get married and it won’t matter to whom.’
Return to beginning of chapter
SAN FRANCISCO 3.0
Industry dwindled steadily in San Francisco after WWII, as Oakland’s port accommodated container ships and the Presidio’s military presence tapered off. But onetime military-industrial tech contractors found work in a stretch of scrappy tech firms south of San Francisco, in an area known today as Silicon Valley. When a company called Hewlett-Packard, started in a South Bay garage, introduced the 9100A ‘computing genie’ in 1968, a generation of unconventional thinkers and tinkerers took note.
Ads breathlessly gushed that Hewlett-Packard’s ‘light’ (40lb) machine could ‘take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic integrals and regression analysis’ – all for the low, low price of $4,900 (about $29,000 today). Consumers didn’t quite know what to do with such a computer, until its potential was explained in simple terms by Stewart Brand, an early LSD tester for the CIA with Ken Kesey and organizer of the first Trips Festival in 1966. In his 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, Brand reasoned that the technology governments used to run countries could empower ordinary people. That same year, UCLA professor Len Kleinrock proved Brand right, sending the first rudimentary email from a computer in Los Angeles to another at Stanford. The message he typed was ‘L,’ then ‘O,’ then ‘G’ – at which point the computer crashed.
The next wave of California techies was determined to create a personal computer that could compute and communicate without crashing. When 21-year-old Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple II at the first West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, techies were abuzz about the memory (4KB of RAM!) and the microprocessor speed (1 MHz!) – today’s gigabytes of RAM, gigahertz processor speeds and online downloads would have seemed unbelievable. The Mac II originally retailed for the equivalent today of $4300, or, if you wanted to get really fancy with 48KB of RAM, more than twice that amount. This was a staggering investment for what still seemed like a glorified calculator/typewriter – and even if these computers could talk to one another, pundits reasoned, what would they talk about?
Billions of web pages later, it turns out computers had plenty to say. By the mid-1990s an entire industry boomed in SoMa warehouses, as start-up ventures rushed to be the first to put news, dates, politics, fashion and, yes, sex online.