In keeping with last week’s aviary theme: I just got back from a week in San Francisco for a (mostly) enjoyable respite from the Brooklyn grind. My son showed me a hilarious five-minute movie he did at his film school; I saw a number of old pals I hadn’t seen in years, including John Sheehy and Jane Palacek, who are launching a new magazine (remember those?), and Charlie Haas, whose novel The Enthusiast is out in stores now; and I finished a short story that I began (in my mind at least) decades ago. Funny how much you can get done when you don’t have a wireless connection!

I also spent a lot of time communing with the city’s best known birds, the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill. The flock is estimated to number about twenty now and they fly around squawking; I think it’s because they mate for life and are always ragging each other, though my brother Ethan said they are often the victims of the local hawks, who admire a parrot for breakfast now and then. 

While I was there, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition Eight, denying gay couples the right to marry, with one bizarre exception: The 18,000 or so couples who got married in between the time the courts allowed them to marry and the day the voters took that right away may continue to be wed, making them the rarest birds in the state. But don’t imagine that they will become extinct. One way or the other, the voters will change the law. Time is on the movement’s side. Polls indicate that young people just don’t care that much about the idea of Mr. and Mr. Jones, and the intolerance and fear that guide most of the proposition’s supporters will expire, finally. 

And it may not take decades, either. A few wags observed that had Milk won the Oscar before the election, the outcome might have been different. The canonization of Harvey, and the acceptance of gays across the board, is the sign of a sea change and the tide isn’t going to turn the other way. Let us pray that the vicious Christians (shouldn’t that be a contradiction in terms?) who fight gay rights and kill abortion doctors poison themselves and reap the whirlwind. May history deal them the dodo’s hand, or claw I guess that would be…