It's all about highlighting the city's housing crisis for one San Francisco Pride community grand marshal, and he's using the bully pulpit that comes with the honor to make sure the issue gets attention.
Longtime queer activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca has called the city home for many years. Prior to moving to San Francisco, Avicolli Mecca lived in Philadelphia, where he grew up in an Italian Catholic family.
As is typical for anyone who knows him, Avicolli Mecca looks at being a grand marshal as much more than the attention it brings him personally.
"I'm honored to be named a grand marshal, but I feel this is more about the work I do in the community rather than me as some kind of celebrity," Avicolli Mecca said. "I want my contingent to be open to anyone who wants to be in it, and certainly it will have housing is a queer right as the theme, as a reminder to all of us that housing is our issue, too."
Avicolli Mecca believes that there is a housing crisis in the LGBT community just as other groups in the city are also affected. But the number of LGBTs identifying as homeless are staggering.
Last June, the biennial San Francisco Homeless Point-In-Time Count and Survey was released and, for the first time, included statistics on LGBT people. The 2013 report found that out of a total of 7,350 homeless people, more than one in four (29 percent) identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or "other," for a total of 2,132.
Avicolli Mecca noted that about 3 percent of homeless identify as transgender, and that 40 percent of homeless youth identify as queer.
"Where is the affordable housing in the Castro?" Avicolli Mecca asked. "Where is the LGBT friendly affordable housing in the city? The LGBT community hasn't made housing a priority. It's time to do it, and to do it big-time."
Advocating for affordable housing for 17 years �" with an emphasis on the LGBT community �" Avicolli Mecca sees that more people are being displaced now than during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, when the city also saw a spike in evictions.
"We are losing our neighborhoods," Avicolli Mecca said. "Our neighborhoods are changing character. We didn't see that much of that in the 1990s. The Castro is becoming less gay, and I know the supervisor of this district disagrees with me on that, and other people do, too. But the reality is it is becoming less gay. In 10 years this will not be a predominately gay neighborhood."
San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents the Castro and is gay, said the neighborhood has always had LGBT and straight residents.
"For decades, the Castro has been a neighborhood for both LGBT and straight people," Wiener said. "As has been the case going back to the 1960s, we have a very large LGBT population in the Castro, and the community is strong. The LGBT community here has survived and thrived, including through the height of the HIV epidemic and through our current housing crisis."
Wiener added that the Castro continues to draw LGBT people, including young people
"All neighborhoods change �" and the Castro is no exception �" but even with the changes we've experienced, our LGBT community continues to be an integral part of this great neighborhood," he said
Avicolli Mecca worked in the Mission for 14 years, and he expressed great love for the neighborhood because it reminds him of where he grew up.
"What is happening now in the Mission is unbelievable," Avicolli Mecca said. "Rent is $8,000 to $10,000 a month in the Mission. The Mission was always the place for artists, and there was a strong working class lesbian community at one time along Valencia Street. That is where the tech people are now.
"The Mission was always welcoming to everybody," Avicolli Mecca added. "It was heavily Latino, but now a whole building of Latinos is being evicted and replaced by non-Latino people. So what we are seeing is ethnic cleansing, culture cleansing, and economic cleansing, and it is all happening at a rapid rate. That wasn't happening as quickly in the 1990s. Now people are forced out of their homes."
Growing up, coming out
When Avicolli Mecca was only 5 years old he fell in love with his next-door neighbor. That was his clue that he was gay.
After 12 years of Catholic school, Avicolli Mecca graduated in 1969 from Bishop Norman High School. He doesn't have fond memories of his early education.
"I wish all Catholic schools would shut down, because their education is the world's worst education," he said, smiling. "I decided to become a writer. So I went to Temple University, which was where the working class kids could afford to go to. I remember it was like $500, which was still very hard for my father, so I had to work to pay for most of my way, and my father would fill in the rest."
The first thing he did when he got to Temple was join the Students for a Democratic Society, which was a main anti-war group. He joined the Gay Liberation Front when he was 19. He left the Catholic Church behind, with its guilt and restriction, identified as a gay man, and helped organize the first Gay Pride in Philadelphia in 1972.
Standing in an aisle at a bookstore in Philly, Avicolli Mecca would often browse books and read as many Sartre books as he could.
"My brother gives me a book called No Exit ," Avicolli Mecca said. "I read it and understood it. I would be reading about the whole idea that we are condemned to be free. I love that phrase and I never forgot it because it is true. We are totally free. We choose to give in to all these rules that societies put on us and we put on each other."
Avicolli Mecca hammered out plays on an old Underwood typewriter that his mother had in her bedroom. As a teen, he published poems in the South Philly Review Chronicle.
At Temple University he won the Young Poets contest for a poem he wrote about a high school classmate he was in love with. Since those early days, Avicolli Mecca has continued to answer the call of his life's greatest passion: He spent 10 years working for the Philadelphia Gay News as a reporter, then local news editor, and finally managing editor.
One of Avicolli Mecca's close friends is Janice Winchester, 75, who used to work at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library as the executive assistant to the executive director of the library foundation. Until recently she lived in San Francisco. After she retired she could no longer afford to live in the city and she moved to Seattle.
Winchester met Avicolli Mecca 26 years ago when they were both living in Philadelphia.
"I first met him at one of his poetry readings and was struck by his work," Winchester said. "By chance, I ended up living in an apartment in a historic house on Rittenhouse Square that Tommi was managing for the owner."
In 1989, Winchester moved to San Francisco, and a few months later Avicolli Mecca decided to join her.
"I came home from work one night and he was sitting on my front porch playing his guitar," Winchester said. "I was so happy to see him and have him in my life again. We were roommates for a while until he found his own apartment."
Before Winchester retired and moved to Seattle, she and Avicolli Mecca used to meet early Saturday mornings and run around the Castro doing their errands, checking out sidewalk sales, "and ranting about everything," Winchester said. "One Saturday Richard Labonte, the former manager of A Different Light Bookstore, came upon us and he told us that we had become 'Castro characters.'"
Avicolli Mecca worked for a time at A Different Light, which sadly, closed years ago. He also wrote for a few years for the San Francisco Bay Times. In 1993, his book Between Little Rock and a Hard Place about President Bill Clinton upset many in the LGBT community because Avicolli Mecca heavily criticized Clinton, and most LGBTs saw the president as a supporter, even though he signed the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which prohibited gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.
DADT was repealed in 2011, while last year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of DOMA, allowing married same-sex couples access to the benefits straight married couples receive.
Avicolli Mecca has also contributed articles and short stories to about 50 anthologies since the early 1970s, and published poetry in a number of journals. Not many of these books are still available. He also used to be part of a group of editors who put together Avanti Popolo: Italian Writers Sail Beyond Columbus.
He also writes regularly for beyondchron.org and maintains a website with some of his writings at avicollimecca.com.
He has long considered himself a political activist as well as a writer, fighting for economic justice for all.
"That means affordable housing, living wage jobs, free public transportation, universal health care, and ownership of the means of production by the workers," Avicolli Mecca said.
He is also a songwriter and performer. One of his songs is "I am a San Francisco Liberal."
"I started writing songs after getting my first guitar as a graduation present from my oldest brother," Avicolli Mecca said. "I learned chords and scales and things from friends in the neighborhood who played guitar. We all dreamed of being famous like the Beatles."
Avicolli Mecca enjoys the single life, and he spends his free time performing with friends.
"Nothing I like better than an evening on stage playing my songs," he said. "A lot of people don't realize how much that means to me. I've performed a lot in my life. It's always been my way of coping with the tremendous stress of being an activist and working for causes rather than corporations or humdrum 9-5 jobs. Invite me to play, folks, you'll make me very happy and help me stay sane in this insane world."