Welcome to Strangers, fun KCW and radio-topia, Emily Etau.

And today's story takes many turns, and I hope it'll keep surprising you, as it did

me, through many emotions and places, starting in the heat ash-bring neighborhood of San

Francisco, which was of course an epicenter of the counterculture in the US in the 1970s.

There is Joshua Soffron.

I was born into a coven of lesbian witches in the hate ash-bring commune after the fall

of Saigon in 1975.

And Saigon was a big deal because my mother was an anti-vietnam war radical activist.

She came west in the summer of love to reclaim the goddess from the patriarchy and to basically

overthrow the US government.

My mother was part of a group of gay feminist secessionist women who wanted to essentially

to secede from America and have a land just of women.

Her one guilty problem with all of this is that she was actually physically attracted

to men.

So she was essentially a lesbian for political reasons.

Men were part of the oppressor class.

And that created somewhat of a problem because I was born a boy.

And I was sort of a potential oppressor born in there, midst.

So my mother sort of distanced herself a little bit from this community of witches in San

Francisco.

And then in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected.

And my mother was convinced that nuclear war was going to happen.

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