447 origin stories

Remember my friend the infectious disease doctor? The one who told me a while back about the "lab escape" theory? About the sick miners, and the virus sample brought back to the Wuhan Institute for Virology?

Well, all of those details wound up in this Vanity Fair article, several months after he told me.

And it went on, into details, of... Well, so far nobody has any concrete proof of a cover up. Just some classified intelligence saying three researchers got sick in October 2019. But no proof of it.

There is proof that the WIV changed the name of a virus they were experimenting with.

And there's proof that the US government funded some of the research. And some evidence that's why we didn't want to go digging too hard to find out if this really started in the farmer's market a few blocks away.

Then there are the statements from the lead scientist at the lab, which absolutely do not sound at all like her government censors wrote them. "Shut your dirty mouths," is how all scientists talk, not state oppressors. Duh. See, look, she said it right there, swearing by her own name this is the truth.

The truth! It had nothing to do with the lab. Sure, there are only three facilities in the world that do this kind of virus work, and sure the pandemic started in the same city as one of them, but that's just a coincidence. Really. She swears.

When I moved to San Francisco in 1995, there were still a fair number of vacant lots where buildings fell in the 1989 earthquake. It was relatively easy to find and apartment, and rents were relatively affordable. (I went from paying $750 for a two bedroom near Boston to paying $550 for a one bedroom here... Not bad at all.)

Well, there's another reality to that rental situation, one that is perhaps best summed up by this photo. We moved in on the coattails of an epidemic which had killed off a lot of potential renters. Fuck.

This visual makes me feel for the older gay men I know, who have lived through this absolute nightmare. 

For more recent arrivals, here's a reminder of what SF means to a lot of us.

At top, Fort Funston. On a Monday. Nose to the grindstone, people!

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