Saturday night I was picking up some takeout at my favorite low-budget sushi place, Miyabi Sushi, when I encountered four young women standing outside trying to hail a cab. It was that time of the night before the parade when the drunks at the Castro street party start to outnumber everyone else, and many people decide to bail. This meant that every taxi cab in the city was occupied, so the women were still fruitlessly trying to wave down taxis ten minutes later when I came out of the restaurant with my dinner.

I had my big Volvo four-door, so I impulsively said, “You guys want a ride?” and a minute later I had a car full of dykes heading back to their hotel on Van Ness and Geary.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: You guys from out of town? Here for Pride?
Dyke 1: Yeah, we came up from Southern California.
Dyke 2: We went to the Dyke March but now we’re tired.
Dyke 3: Are you going to the parade?
Me: Eh, I think my parading days are over. But I used to… (There follows a boring old-fart story about being in Queer Nation 15 years ago.)

Pause.

Dyke 3: What’s Queer Nation?