Mark Abramson has kept a journal, off and on, since age eighteen. He was a popular and civically-engaged bartender in San Francisco’s Castro District. He has lived through and written about interesting times in gay history. In San Francisco, AIDS had devastated a generation, but by the early 2000s, the disease was manageable. The first gay marriages were celebrated at City Hall, followed by Proposition 8, which voided them, but only for a time. On Castro Street, the filming of the movie MILK brought the welcome invasion of Hollywood. It was the middle of GW Bush’s war on Iraq. Beloved celebrities died. At the same time, Mark Abramson was recovering from open-heart surgery and a year of treatment for Hepatitis C, while he was working to publish his first novel Beach Reading. It’s all in these pages.

The names of some of the people in Mark’s life who might still be living are changed and the rawest sex self-censored, but all of these diaries are true. Here’s how gay men of a certain type and joie de vivre were living in San Francisco 2003-2008.