Categories: Local & Entertainment; Travel & Events

San Franciscans are weird: but you can learn our quirks in this guide, PART ONE

By Juliette
updated 2 months ago

If you live in San Francisco, that means a few things. In theory, being from SF means you're a liberal, you have some issues about eating meat, you spend hundreds of dollars a month on kombucha, you use Second Generation cleaning products instead of Lysol and BioBags instead of Hefty, your kitchen is equipped with biodegradable utensils, you shop at farmer's markets, you ride a fixed gear bicycle and carry a Chrome bag, you have a subscription to Mother Jones, you're in a pot growing club and a book club, you have a bunch of ironic tattoos, and your lifelong ambition is to move to Oakland Hills one day to start your own marijuana farm where you'll raise a family of multicultural adopted children. Right? WRONG.

It's easy to generalize a San Franciscan as a neo-hippie dreamer who still lives in the time of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. But no, seriously, it's not like that at all. We get that 1968 is over and that People's Park in Berkeley is no longer what it used to be. We know that the eco-friendly movement is in large part a capitalist scheme to suck money out of our impressionable faux-leather wallets. We know that San Francisco is not the center of the universe and even though it's always 70 and sunny in our fair city by the Bay there are other places in the world (though they pale in comparison). SF is a modern city, with modern vibrant and unique people. This is simply a guide to help condense the immense variety there is to SF, to make your San Franciscan a little less foreign to those not from the city. Use this guide as a highly generalized though still helpful way to understand some of the social categories of people who live in San Francisco - it's not gospel, but if you're planning on coming to the city, it sure is helpful.

This is the first part of a two part guide to San Franciscans. In this guide, we'll look at Mission Hipsters, Marina Prepsters, Castro Gays, Haight Hippies, and Tenderloin Crackheads.

Type One: The Mission Hipsters

The Mission is to San Francisco what the Lower East Side is to New York City. Think gritty, bohemian, super hipster, artsy, pretentious, and yet despite the hard-edged exterior, still an entirely gentrified neighborhood. The Mission is – in my opinion – the subculture capital of San Francisco, or in other words, home of the hipsters.

Mission hipsters are a unique entity among themselves. There are first and foremost, the hipsters who actually live in the Mission (as opposed to those who just visit on weekends). The legit Mission hipsters are generally the grungey boys and girls who wear unisex flannel and ripped skinny jeans, the ones who drink Mickey’s and Hamm’s and Royal Gate Vodka without flinching, who look like they haven’t bathed in at least two weeks, the ones who travel in ‘crews’ and generally on bicycles at that. Occasionally you’ll see a haute hipster – think Alexander Wang dress and Louboutin ankle boots paired with a thrift store fedora and tons of costume jewelry – but rarely. The stereotype does not frequently deviate from the norm of those too-cool-to-shower, but at least I never feel weird about making the walk of shame home to my apartment. No matter how smeared my makeup is and no matter how hungover I look, I totally blend in on a Saturday morning.

The hipsters who visit are another story altogether. They wear head-to-toe American Apparel with the price tag barely removed and come on the weekends to hang at Beauty Bar and Casanova. They like music six months out of date, like the ‘new’ Hot Chip album and MIA (especially after the Pineapple Express trailer). These kids are hard to miss. More emo than anything else, watch out for their asymmetrical haircuts and insecure sidelong glances at any other hipster who crosses their path (to see how they themselves compare). It’s amusing, but sad, so you should avoid these people.

Thrift Town

2101 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110

Buy all your clothes thrift if you want to be an authentic hipster. They see American Apparel is the evil corporate conglomerate stealing their precious identities. Except their identities aren’t that precious.

Type Three: The Castro Gays

I effing LOVE the gays. I think they’re the much needed adrenaline that gives this city a vibrant heart. I’m pretty unapologetically a fruit fly and there’s nothing much I can say about it than that I just prefer people (male or female) who share my affinity for bad pop music and excessive partying, and that tends to come in the form of gay men in my life so I’ve accepted it for what it is.

The Castro is one of my favorite places to go out at night simply because when I’m out, I am literally left alone to my own devices. As a woman, you won’t have to deal with unwanted attention and that leaves you free to dance your little heart out to Cher and Britney and whatever else they’re playing at Badlands. The Castro is also a great and fun place to hang out during the day, with tons of eating, shopping, and daytime debauchery.

Castro gays are a particular breed onto themselves. It’s not hard to pick one out – there is a distinct Castro fashion aesthetic. The stereotype goes that gay men are all extremely put together, Gentleman’s Quarterly style, but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, on AVERAGE, gay men dress 100X better than the AVERAGE straight guy, but there are some hot tranny messes in the Castro… and the best thing about them is that they know they’re hot tranny messes and they don’t care. That attitude is what gives distressed, boot-legged Antik jeans with that hideously embellished back pocket an element of gay fabulosity, while on a straight man it’d be terrible. Gay men in the Castro have a thing for bicep revealing muscle shirts, flashy accessories, butt hugging jeans, and the ability to borrow elements from many different styles (the news boy cap, the hipster bandana, skull Vans that were cool three years ago) and make them new again. Basically, Castro style is club style, and it’s all about sun sweat and fun.

Alembic the

1725 Haight St, San Francisco, CA 94117

This is actually a great bar, even though it’s in the Haight. It’s a whiskey bar with a phenomenal selection that you should go to, like, yesterday.

Type Five: The Tenderloin Crackheads

Why oh why is everyone in the Tenderloin a legitimate crackhead? Seriously, everyone in the TL has this crack problem where they are always leaning over, like lurking on the ground. They are people who stand up in the shape of an upside down “U” – it’s like they’re always looking on the ground, searching for that last tiny piece of crack or something! So bizarre. Anyway, I love the TL. Without it, SF would be so dull. What would we do without our happy healthy crackheads?

I don’t have to describe a drug addict. You know what they look like. They’re wearing rags and they talk to themselves and occasionally they scream things like “When life hands you lemons, I have a huge dick!” It’s such a friendly neighborhood. In the TL, there are three main types of drug addicts.

There are, first and foremost, the crackhead. I use crackhead as an umbrella term to mean, largely, all druggies, but it has a specific definition. That definition is that you are addicted to crack. To spot a crackhead, go to the Tenderloin and look around for an extremely dirty looking person who is twitching uncontrollably and acting paranoid. They’re sometimes extremely thin but not always. They also scream. Like they’ll just be twitching there, minding their own business, then all of a sudden they’ll shout “I AM THE HALF BLOODED PRINCE!” Stay away!

How about a meth head? They talk nonstop. Uncontrollable verbal diarrhea. Like crackheads, they’re super paranoid. But they’re also more violent. They probably lost half their hair and teeth too, their nails are ragged from biting them, and they have violent schizophrenic tendencies. Stay away!

The third type of druggie in the TL are heroin addicts, who are sad. They move slowly, look like they’re asleep, and just extremely sluggish people walking around during the day with dilated pupils like zombies. Really sad. Stay away!

Type Two: The Marina Prepsters

If the Mission is San Francisco’s LES, the Marina is our UES. That means the Marina is full of people who think that Sperry Topsiders are cool in a non-ironic way. Like the Mission, the Marina has two distinct types of prepsters.

First, there are the WASP-y East Coast type prepsters with the perfect I’ve-just-come-back-from-our-house-in-Tahoe tans, those tastefully boring button downs and khakis types who all went to Ivy League schools and now work in business development for a tech company. These people have names like Bradford and Archibald (whereas people in the Mission go by monikers like Lazerblade and Ladymeat). I went to college with people like this, and they bored me to death. Marina prepsters stick to their preppy lifestyles because they are to emotionally and mentally crippled to try anything else outside of their cloud of nostalgia. They look toward East Coasties like Bostonians and even New Yorkers as the ultimate paradigm of prep-ness and they cling to that lost heritage here, in San Francisco (arguably the least preppy city in the world). No wonder they are exiled in the Marina, at the very Northern tip of the city. Luckily, the population of prepsters in San Francisco seems to shrink every year as more people make the pilgrimage back to the East Coast as the tech industry isn’t what it used to be.

The second type of prepster is prepster trash. I don’t know what to call these people other than East Bay kids who come to the Marina on the weekends because they think it makes them appear rich, or something. You can’t miss them. Thomas Pink shirt guy with the frosted tips and man-scara on, or J Crew girl with the lucite heels under her madras mini and eyes bruised with blue eyeshadow.

Marina Lounge

2138 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94123

Ugh. Sports and video games. Women who pretend to like sports to pick up bros. Men who like sports because they’re too uninteresting to like anything else. Gross me out.

Type Four: The Haight Hippies

Do you smell that pungent sweet scent of burning marijuana, mixed with a hint of sage and patchouli and unwashed arm pits? If you replied yes to the above, look around you. You’re in the Upper Haight. Do you see that kid on the street, begging you for loose change with a vaporizer sticking out of his JanSport? Don’t give him money. He’s probably a trust fund baby doing the homeless hippie thing. Seriously.

The Haight is definitely a tourist center for San Francisco. People walk through the Haight and think, “Wow San Francisco is still stuck in the 60s.” In the Haight, this is true. But don’t take the Haight as representative of the rest of SF. I happen to pride myself on NOT living in the Haight. As should you.

I don’t know what to say about hippie style that hasn’t been said before. You know the type. Dreadlocks or some other form of unbrushed hair, hirsuite men and women in tattered clothing, with an affinity for wearing jewelry from places like Tibet and India. Birkenstocks, quilted backpacks, crystal magic, all of that still exists. I’ve never been anywhere in America quite like the Haight in terms of concentration of hippies to general population.

Though I might sound harsh, I actually have nothing against the Haight. I mean, haute hippie style is still very a la mode – look at Sienna Miller in her hippie phase, or the YSL hippie dresses of fashionistas like Kate Hudson. I’m glad the Haight exists and I’ll even go there from time to time. There’s a great whiskey bar there, and a fantastic hookah place. And there’s Amoeba Music. And it’s right by Golden Gate Park, which is phenomenal. I just wouldn’t live there. A little hippie in your life is fun from time to time, but if I had to see those unwashed potheads every day decrying that they should have been young in the 60s (actually what’s pathetic is that some of them actually WERE, as the Haight is also home to the aging hippie population of America) I’d probably go insane.