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When Shannon Amitin moved to San Francisco in 2005, he was early in his transition. He identified as queer, and he’d never felt quite at ease in Los Angeles, where he lived before.

The first time he walked into Juanita More!’s Pride pool party, he understood why.

“There were drag queens in the pool in full makeup; there were boys dressed like sailors and girls dressed like boys,” he told me recently. “There was a sense of respect around being yourself, in whatever form that looks like.”

The stories of coming to San Francisco vary. Felicia Elizondo, a longtime trans activist, remembered being beaten and jailed when she got to the Tenderloin in 1967.

But their emotional contours are similar.

“We were young kids learning to belong somewhere that we were at least, what do you call it?” Ms. Elizondo recalled, searching for the word: “Accepted.”