April did not so much arrive as accrete—my partner and I threading one of those San Francisco spring weekends that can feel like a civic sacrament, then a lateral move to Southern California for speed and steel, then—without much room to catch our breath—embarkation on Brilliant Lady for a Mexican Riviera run with six of our friends from the city (eight of us in all). The weather had been doing its usual April trick: sun, fog, wind, repeat. Getting out of town felt less like indulgence than like swapping a mercurial thermostat for a different set of problems entirely. What follows is the month in pictures, with the cruise kept deliberately thin here; the ports, sea days, meals, and the rest of the film roll are reserved for a longer piece still in draft.
✝️ Hunky Jesus — Part 1, Dolores Park
If you are not in town for April in San Francisco, Hunky Jesus registers as pure invention, a phrase you might misread on a flyer and never think of again. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—the queer order that has, for decades, braided AIDS-era activism with camp and serious fundraising—host Easter in the Park each Easter Sunday on the north bowl of Mission Dolores Park: a donation-supported fair and variety show that behaves, at scale, like a neighborhood block party with better lighting and worse boundaries. Among the long-running contests (Foxy Mary, Easter Bonnet, and this one), Hunky Jesus is exactly what it sounds like, which is also the joke: contestants arrive as satirical Jesuses, finalists vanish backstage for whatever adjudication the universe allows, and the hillside votes with laughter.
These frames are from Easter Sunday, April 5. The theme was "Love Thy Neighbor"; the Sisters’ posted schedule had Hunky Jesus on the main stage around 2:55 p.m., after the bonnets and the Marys had done their work. The city does not issue a turnstile count; in fundraising language the Sisters talk about underwriting something on the order of a ten-thousand-person gathering, and on a clear day the north lawn argues the number upward once you account for everyone who has spilled past the edge of the blankets. The crown went to Renewable Energy Jesus—complete with a windmill lashed to his back—which landed with the unsubtle aptness good satire sometimes earns: spring on a hill, a crowd in sunglasses, and a winner who had brought his own grid.
Blankets, DJs, picnic archaeology, and the low-grade thunder of a city that still knows how to throw a ritual. That was the afternoon.
✝️ Hunky Jesus — Part 2, Walking to The Mix
When Dolores had done what Dolores does, we drifted toward the Castro and The Mix—sidewalk theater giving way to patio sun, drinks sweating on metal tables, and someone with a bubble gun who turned the whole terrace into a soap-bubble weather system. Not snow; something sillier and warmer.
🎭 Gayme Show! at the Castro Theatre
A few nights later: Gayme Show! with Matt Rogers and Dave Mizzoni at the Castro Theatre, my first time through the doors since the renovation and reopening. The format is a live game-show entropy machine—audience members hauled up, teams sorted with cheerful cruelty, a crown at stake for the Queen of the Castro. The bit that still replays in my head: they located, with prosecutorial glee, the one straight man in the building (there with his girlfriend), flashed a slideshow of decoys, and demanded he answer a single question—“Is this a Chappel Roan?”—where “Chappel Roan” was whatever pun the writers could staple to the name: a cocktail, a church chapel, whatever else the projector coughed up. Loud, stupid in the best sense, and exactly the kind of night you want when the marquee has been dark long enough that its return feels like news.
✈️ Flying to LAX
Delta down to Los Angeles: first the west side of San Francisco in hard-edged clarity—Ocean Beach, the grid, the bridge a thin line on the horizon—then the long gold haze of approach, the basin opening below you like a map someone has half erased with an eraser made of smog and sunset.
🏎️ Grand Prix in Long Beach
My friend Mateo had a pair of spare tickets to the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach and brought my partner and me along—downtown streets temporarily reclassified as a circuit, exhibition halls full of carbon fiber and nostalgia, and a sound field you feel in your sternum before your brain catches up. I caught more of the race by ear than by eye; if you are sound-sensitive, pack earplugs and thank yourself later.
⚓ Exploring Battleship IOWA Museum
Before embarkation we had a few hours in San Pedro, enough to walk Battleship IOWA end to end—or as much of her as the museum route allows—which is less a ship in the romantic sense than a steel municipality moored to a pier. An hour or so of companionways, enlisted berthing that still smells faintly of paint and policy, the captain’s quarters with their odd domestic politeness, the navigating bridge forward, then the upper decks for the money shot: harbor, cranes, the ordinary world looking small from a platform built for another century’s arguments.
🚢 LAX to Mexican Riviera Cruise on Brilliant Lady
From Los Angeles we joined Brilliant Lady on Virgin Voyages’ Mexican Riviera itinerary—this time under an Atlantis Events charter, my first sailing with that crowd, though the ship herself was already familiar. I had been on Brilliant Lady not long before, over Thanksgiving 2025—a trip I never wrote up; April was the same hull, different house lights.
This section stays intentionally small: six friends from San Francisco, my partner and me, a few favorite frames, the shape of the trip without the ledger of every port and plate. While we were offshore, San Francisco shook—our phones did that modern ritual of lighting up all at once with alerts and group chats—and we pieced together the rest through the usual feeds, including SFGate’s story on the quake.
The longer account of this sailing—sea days, food, shore leave, the rest of the gallery—will live in its own post when the sentences have cooled.
🪴 Back Home — Plant Updates
By month’s end we were home in San Francisco, where the indoor garden resumed its quiet coup: herbs and flowers under the AeroGarden’s honest, slightly alien light, a salt lamp holding down one corner of the counter like a small sun that had given up on spectra and committed to orange.