Beautiful mezcla of pictures, OH WAIT technology interrupted. Read on.

So, this is what happened. I’m horrible with technology. I’ve had my post ready since Monday but I’ve embarrassingly spent the past four days trying to figure out how to upload the picture so it actually shows on the post instead of taking you to a link. However, I have epicly failed so here’s the link, I hope you can get to my collage because it’s a collection of some interesting pictures of art, architechture and fascinating characters from Hillcrest’s gay village in San Diego, California!

Blog Post #2- Hillcrest collage

My family and I randomly decided to jetset off to San Diego, California for the weekend and in doing so, I found some great material for one of my blog entries. Although it doesn’t have the equivalence of the large gay community in San Francisco, there IS a community that’s local to San Diego called Hilltop. It’s notorious for being one of the best hotspots for LGBT members to live in Southern California and is regarded as a sort of “gay village” since 50% of the residents identify themselves as belonging to the LGBT group. I consider Hilltop to be a place of the arts because of their vibrant culture within a culture: gay community in the West. When my sisters and I went shopping in the district, we were struck by how many gay couples we saw openly walking around holding hands and showing other signs of public affection. For us, this was a shock because certain members in our family are extremely homophobic and therefore have tried to shelter us from the real world where gay people actually exist (fancy notion, huh?)

In short, Hilltop has inspired me to create a collage of some pictures from their past gay pride parades, architecture and art exhibitions. Theirs is held in July as a two part parade extended over two days that includes floats, demonstrations, lectures, etc. to inform the public on homosexual issues as well as celebrate them. Talking to a shop owner about the parade and the months of extensive planning that goes into it, I am now inspired to attend my first gay pride parade. Hopefully, it will be back in Hilltop but I’d like to go to any location for one of these parades just for the experience. As someone who is heterosexual and doesn’t have any gay friends (although Professor Macharia says I probably have them, I just don’t know it yet) I would like to dip into the other world I don’t know about yet, just for the experience. The collage that I have put together hopefully reflects the effort and joy that goes into the Hillcrest’s events and my excitement to attend them.