Four years ago, I wrote I Have Seen the Future, and It’s San Francisco (the essay pasted below). Upon re-reading it, I find that it still conveys all the sentiments I feel today when the California Supreme Court struck down existing law forbidding gays to marry, essentially legalizing gay marriage.

San Francisco was just ahead of its time in this regard.

I wrote the essay when Gavin Newsom allowed Gay couples to get married at City Hall here in San Francisco. I thought I should re-run it here in celebration of the new dawn for gay rights. In it I said I’m proud to be a San Franciscan.

But now I’m also proud to be a Californian – so read on…

“Get used to it,” an eccentric aunt of mine warned us when we first came here in the mid-’70s, fresh from a war-torn Vietnam. I was 11 years old, speaking not a word of English.

My aunt, a San Franciscan since the late 1960s, drove me and my family to the Castro district our second week in the city, and parked. In our car, we watched as two men kissed passionately on the sidewalk.

“My god,” my mother gasped, covering her mouth. That was when my aunt said it: “Get used to it,” she whispered. “This is San Francisco.”

I didn’t know what to make of that kiss. I remember staring from the backseat of the car, however, until one of the men turned to me and winked.

Fast-forward three decades. As I watched two men on the steps of City Hall kissing last week, having just been declared spouses by the city authorities, I finally know how I feel: Proud.

I don’t use that word lightly. I’m not always proud to be American. I, along with a hundred thousand here, protested against the war in Iraq last year. I’m not always proud to be Vietnamese either, having seen members of my own clan at each other’s throat in a bloody civil war that proved pointless afterwards. But I have to say I am proud to be San Franciscan.

For to live in San Francisco these days is to live with a sense of what’s possible for the rest of America.

Others, including my own relatives, shake their heads and sigh. They think San Francisco has finally gone off the deep end, that the city is seceding from the rest of the country. But I think ours is a message that’s closer to the opposite: Tolerance is the only possible recourse for America, especially when, as an empire, it is forsaking all ideals for dubious gains, waging an ill-fought war in Iraq, and all but tarnishing its reputation overseas with a “might makes right” mentality.

Those men in tuxedos on their way to get married, those women who hugged and wept on their way out of City Hall with flowers in their hair, having been declared legally married by the city, seemed to speak of something far larger than gay rights.

In a way, San Francisco has always been a more American city than most of us who live here realize. Though small, it has always rejected simplification. Known for its flower power and hippie ‘60s, it has also become a city of non-white immigrants in my lifetime.

The gay Mecca of the West has become an Asian city. Whites make up 41 percent of its citizens; Asians are not far behind at 33 percent. There is no majority left in a city whose compass is pointing increasingly toward the Pacific.

On Chinese New Year the city schools shut down. The Chinese New Year parade precedes the Gay Pride Parade, which is followed by Carnival in the Mission. It’s a city where private passions have a tendency to spill out into the public domain.

After all, with no real suburb to speak of, its residents live in overlapping neighborhoods. It’s a city that takes my aunt’s message to heart. Get used to it. We’ve had to, because, unlike expansive Los Angeles, San Francisco has only 47 square miles. We’re constantly in each other’s face, like it or not.

Thus, we tolerate. We integrate. We learn to like our cosmopolitan lifestyle, our global sense of self. Thus, down the street from where I live, a gay couple walk hand in hand past the old Chinese lady doing her morning tai chi next to the homeless teenager reading a romance novel outside the coffee shop owned by Middle Easterners. Meanwhile, a twittering flock of Asian children wearing colorful backpacks rush up the hill on their way to school.

Indeed, growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in this open, cosmopolitan city was more or less a walk in the park. I never felt like an outsider here. If anything, it was the city that gave me dreams of possibilities beyond my own conservative, Confucian-bound upbringing. It was here that I fancied for myself a vocation that shocked my parents: writer. It is here that I see myself as a central character in the latest modern American novel.

San Francisco is in the limelight again, and I think for a good reason. The scene at City Hall may seem like the Boston Tea Party to outsiders. But we’re not seceding. We’re only sending back hopeful images of a tolerant America, from a nearby future.

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