San Francisco has been my home longer than any other city. I moved here as a life-long outcast to finally fit in. I spent my formative years in red states, and those red states shaped who I am. San Francisco set me free but Indiana and Tennessee taught me more about myself and how I want the world to be than California ever could.

I don’t know if I would have sought out Gertrude Stein and mope rock and Diet For A Small Planet at age 15 if I had been blessed a Northern Californian at birth. Growing up in conservative places with conservative people never felt right, and I sought out things that made me feel more comfortable about myself.

Former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, commenting on her friends Cole Porter and Bill Blass, said “Indiana, Indiana… don’t tell me he is from Indiana. They all come from Indiana. It may be a horrible, snowy, deserty place — I don’t know, I’ve never been in the Middle West. But all of you who come from there - that I admire, that I love, and are good friends of mine all have this great sort of serenity of spirit.” Many of my good friends are midwesterners who I met in California. They are among the most interesting of my interesting friends. They know who they are, they know what they like, they know what they believe and they formed these ideas while swimming upstream, in the snow. It makes me mad to hear people demonizing the red states, because while there may be gay-marriage hating majorities there are plenty of people who are there right now, being open-minded despite their being the minority. It’s a tough way to live, unlike San Francisco where you can just be gay and married and have kids and no one tries to vote your life out of existence.

San Francisco is an island surrounded by a bubble shaded by a giant rainbow flag sheltered by the First Amendment. It is a wonderful place to be a liberal or a woman or an immigrant or just about anyone. Our problem is we can’t see outside the city, past that big gay pride flag and all the protective layers we wear to keep out the encroaching fog. This is the most liberal city in the country and the queerest city on earth. Celebrating being the most out-there place and then being let down with the rest of the country for not going our way makes no sense. Most of us are San Franciscans because of the compassion this city affords us. Not many people have that reasoning for living in other parts of the country.

I don’t think the sadness and doom that has enveloped San Francisco for the past week is as intense anywhere else in the country — even New York has a Republican for mayor. We are not used to a diversity of political ideas here. We celebrate diversity of everything else, but we need to work on accepting 51 percent of the country. We have preached about racism, sexism, free needles, the right to marry and no-kill animal shelters. We must respect people’s right to vote from their heart. San Francisco has a big heart, but it is not shared by everyone. That is our job: compassion. Pulling away from the heartland is the last thing we should be doing.

This is not the end of the world. It’s a beginning. I cannot get sucked into a depression and I will not await the armageddon of my rights. This is a renewed opportunity for me to show 51 percent of the country what freedom means. There are people just like me growing up in the red states who may someday leave for kinder pastures. Some of them may be braver than me and stay in their home states. Telling them that they suck is no way to bring the reds to the blue side.

I’ve seen sites like this one and I can’t help but think that people are angry and not thinking before they swing. Pot, kettle, you’re both black. Lumping everyone together is a narrow worldview — the very charge being leveled at the red states. This election was not won on facts and truths. Educating voters about the system is a great idea. We didn’t do a great job of that this time out. We were so focused on what we are not that we didn’t tell them who we are.

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My post was partly inspired by the following quote from Fat Mike, a punk rocker turned indie label owner turned voter registration guru. I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about our polarized nation, and how an us-against-them dialogue — even in something as slight as conversation among friends — only divides the country more and makes our goals further out of reach. I am in no way saying that Democrats should become more conservative or that people should give up hope. But I am definitely giving Fat Mike the finger. In the past year, he went from showing that not all punks are jerks, to being a mouthpiece for jerks. Message to Fat Mike: not everyone from the South is a fag-basher, just as not everyone in the record industry is a money-grubber, nor is every punk rock kid a waste of space. Maybe you regret saying what you did to the reporter. You blew it, man.

The piece originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle

Fat Mike is not a happy man. “When I see a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on a car, it’s time to slash their tires,” he says, calling from the offices of his Fat Wreck Chords label. “When I run into a tourist with a Southern accent, I tell them to get the f — out of San Francisco. We’re at a culture war. I’m angry at them.”

Leading up to the election, the member of Bay Area punk bands NOFX and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes did more to mobilize progressive and young voters than certain red-state evangelists did for their delegations. He released two “Rock Against Bush” compilation CDs, launched the Web site punkvoter.com, and took several bands on tour through swing states.

“We succeeded,” he says. “We got the word out. But obviously we’re not as organized as the churches.”

Even though his candidate of choice, John Kerry, urged reconciliation and unification the day after the election, Mike is not interested. “F — that,” he wrote in a statement posted on the Punk Voter site. “There’s no f — way I am going to come together with these homophobic, flag-waving, God-fearing, gun- toting, uneducated, isolationist, ethnocentric rednecks. We live in a country that’s in a shroud of ignorance. We do not compromise or come together with them. We fight them and everything they stand for.”.