OMG did they have some fabulous friends, and still do!
Pacifist, LBGTQ, beatnik forerunners of hippies, even a few celebrity hippies.
As children me and my siblings didn't speak of it, especially at school.
Some neighborhood children were banned from visiting our home because their parents feared they might be exposed to a random uncovered breast or same-sex couples engaging in very mild public displays of affection. Girls kissing girls. Boys kissing boys. It's safe to do that in our family.
My dad's mom and her sister ran wild in Hollywood when they were young adults. They were born in San Francisco, my great aunt before the Great Earthquake, my grandma just after, but they considered San Francisco a stodgy and oppressive working class city compared to Hollywood. Which San Francisco may well have been in the 'twenties and 'thirties. Their dad, who may have been bored by the California dairy industry, foresaw a future where the movies, airplanes, and rockets would become hugely more important industries than cows. Sadly he only lived long enough to see glimpses of it, but his daughters lived his dreams.
My mom's dad was a buddy of Sally Rand. As a girl my mom got to hang out with Rand's nice ladies backstage because it wouldn't have been seemly for her to be in the audience with her dad.
My mom was very well trained in avoiding appearances of unseemliness. Her mom was a welder in the shipyards. Her mom must have been a very talented welder because they kept her on when World War II ended, doing the sorts of delicate work men were supposedly not good at. No job too small... or unimportant.
Personally I have many wonderful San Francisco stories and quite a few sordid ones.
Once upon a time in San Francisco my only true ex handcuffed her girlfriend's boyfriend to a urinal and was beating the crap out of him while I was standing outside guarding the door and deflecting very drunk guys who had to pee really really bad.
Drunk guys are morons. By the screaming they thought there was some kind of rough sex going on behind the door and by the drunk-guy-code-of-honor decided they'd just as well go out the back door to pee.
I have some very bitter stories about fake hippies who were just vile Libertarians or granola eating Evangelical Christians underneath their tie-dye t-shirts, but I do continue to exist in a lot of light and love.
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