In 1985, I moved from Minneapolis to attend the University of San Francisco with a double major in humanities and communications. I was eventually admitted to USF's Honors College where I learned to fall in love with learning. Planting new roots in San Francisco enabled me to flourish as an independent person in a place very different from where I had come. It opened a universe of possibilities combined with the pride I found in discovering there was a city that embraced me as a queer person. On weekends, friends from the university joined me and we escaped our dorms, left the work on campus, and explored the richness of the city's nightlife. Hitting the bars in the Castro, dipping into the seediness of the Polk, going to the Alta Plaza Bar gay men's club in Pacific Heights, and eventually finding the hidden parties South of Market delivered new texture to the very act of living.