The VICE Guide to San Francisco

Photo: Ian Cone

Greetings from never-never land. Want to stay young forever or act like you’re 21 for the duration of your pathetic existence? Are you an outsider inside your small town of 2,500 farmhands? Are you seeking exile from daily persecution due to your love of cock? Would you like to be part of an entire social movement to extinguish and gentrify a once cosmically diverse metropolis? Do you enjoy 50-degree weather in mid-July? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then we’re here to recruit you (thank you, Harvey Milk)! Come sit on the dock of the bay, leave your heart and your liver in San Francisco, and don’t forget a sweater, ’cause it’s cold out here!

The renting population in SF is around 65 percent. There are more dogs than children. Since the cost of living is so high, rent is out of control and most of us are living in hovels above Mexican gang dens and lowcost bordellos. But besides that, and despite the June gloom that always rears its foggy head, the quality of life is very high here.

Unlike a great many urban environs, in SF you don’t need or want a car. Sure it’s nice every once in a while, but parking is a bitch and superexpensive. (Meters are now active on Sundays and most holidays. Bullshit.) If you’re coming to visit, don’t rent a car because we have some of the most reliable public transit in the world. If you insist on renting anything, it should be a bike.

We’ve got culture out of our ass: art, live music, bars, and sourdough bread, to name a few. The food is second to none. There are more bars and restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. Trying to cover all the spots in SF would be like compiling all the glory holes in the Castro.

Lastly, and this is probably the biggest draw, you can be whoever you want out here. If you want to be a male-identifying dyke who runs his/her own butcher shop, go right ahead. If you want to make it as a lonely drifter with a cape, tattoos on your face, and a penchant for smelly, used hockey pads, go on with your bad self. If you want to be a buttoned-down, roofiedropping suit, well, you’re welcome, too! It’s the opposite of New York because anybody can make it here.