December 3, 2015 Edition of the Bay Area Reporter by Bay Area Reporter

Trans case causes concern

ARTS

Barber of Seville

Ana Gasteyer

The

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Serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971

Vol. 45 • No. 49 • December 3-9, 2015

SF plan to end HIV shows progress

Confab highlights LGBT aging research by Matthew S. Bajko

by Liz Highleyman

s more and more LGBT seniors are living out of the closet, the issues they are confronting during their golden years are receiving increased attention from researchers who study aging. Thus, at this year’s SF State professor annual conference Brian de Vries held by the Gerontological Society of America, a record number of presentations and posters were presented that dealt with LGBT aging. Topics ranged from social isolation and mental distress faced by LGBT seniors to weight issues among lesbian and bisexual senior women and how gay men and their families access end-of-life services. While not always specific to LGBT seniors living with HIV, many panels also discussed various aspects of aging with HIV or AIDS. “It is really important to be raising LGBT issues in the professional community. It gives voice to those issues in the larger scheme of aging issues,” said conference attendee Mark Brennan-Ing, Ph.D., director for research and evaluation at Acria, which is based in New York. “It gives you a seat at the table to affect issues in aging.” Just as the number of older adults in America continues to climb, so too does the population of LGBT seniors. Yet because many health surveys do not include questions about sexual orientation or gender identity, the true size of America’s LGBT senior population remains unknown. The U.S. Administration on Aging has estimated the number of LGBT seniors age 60 and older to be anywhere between 1.75 million to 4 million. California is estimated to have 215,000 LGB people age 55 and older. (There is no statewide data for the transgender senior population.) As the Bay Area Reporter has previously noted, there are nearly 20,000 LGBT residents 60 years of age or older living in San Francisco. Nationwide, the population of LGBT seniors is projected to double by 2030. It is believed that the first LGBT-specific symposium at a GSA convention was held in 2002, a year prior to the formation of the LGBT-focused Rainbow Research Group. At this year’s confab there were three LGBT-specific symposiums and five others that included LGBT-centered research presentations. In addition, there were 19 LGBT-specific posters on research studies presented during the conference. See page 12 >>

O Christmas Tree! T

Rick Gerharter

he San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band receives hearty applause from the nearly hundred merry-makers who came out the evening of November 30 for the annual lighting of the Castro Holiday Tree, sponsored by the Castro Merchants business group.

an Francisco made good progress in HIV prevention and treatment during 2015, and its successes have brought the city national and worldwide attention. But more Liz Highleyman work is needed to “get SFDPH Bridge to zero,” especially in reaching currently un- HIV Director Dr. Susan Buchbinder derserved groups. “Like Silicon Valley in the tech world, San Francisco is where innovation happens in the HIV world,” Dr. Diane Havlir, chief of the HIV/AIDS division at San Francisco General Hospital, said at a December 1 forum commemorating World AIDS Day. Havlir and committee members from the See page 16 >>

SF schoolchildren mark World AIDS Day by Sari Staver

hen community activist George Kelly recently spoke to the fourth graders at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy about his 32-year struggle living with HIV, he noticed one student getting teary-eyed. Jada Tucker, 9, had lost her uncle to AIDS. After sharing a hug, Kelly suggested that the girl honor her uncle’s memory by writing out his name in chalk on a sidewalk in San Francisco’s gay Castro district during a special event held Tuesday, December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day. Tucker was one of the first students who agreed to be part of the Inscribe Project, in which students, volunteers, and community residents met on Castro Street to inscribe the names of hundreds of people who had been affected by AIDS. The collaboration between the Castro elementary school, named after the city’s first gay supervisor, and a group of long-term HIV survivors, called Honoring Our Experience, saw the names of more than 1,000 people written out along the sidewalks. Before the 75 students and teachers from the Milk school walked down to Castro Street with their pails of chalk, Jada’s mother, Barbara Banks, thanked the organizers for getting the kids involved in the project. “When my brother was first diagnosed” with HIV, there was so much stigma associated with the diagnosis that it took him 10 years “to even tell us he was HIV positive,” Banks said, noting

Jane Philomen Cleland

Cruz Anderson, left, and Val Cornejo, helped inscribe the names of people living with HIV, as well as those lost to the AIDS epidemic, on a Castro district sidewalk during a World AIDS Day event held in San Francisco December 1.

how “things have changed a lot since then and I think it’s wonderful that the subject is out in the open now” so children grow up knowing about the disease. When Kelly spoke to Jada’s class, said Banks, her daughter “was really hit very hard” because she had also known a school volunteer, Tom Ray, who died of AIDS in 2012. And, added

Banks, “George’s announcement to the class that he too was HIV-positive, really saddened my daughter.” Other Milk students filled the sidewalks with names they brought from lists given to them from friends and family. Wyatt Shaffer, 9, had See page 18 >>

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11/18/15 12:20 PM

Brief Brief Brief Summary Summary Summary of ofof Patient Patient Patient Information Information Information about about about GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA

What What What isisGENVOYA? is GENVOYA? GENVOYA?

GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA isisaaisprescription prescription a prescription medicine medicine medicine that thatthat isisused used is used without without without other other other HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines medicines medicines tototreat treat to treat HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 ininpeople people in people 12 12years 12 years years ofofage age of age and andand older: older: older: GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA (jen-VOY-uh) (jen-VOY-uh) (jen-VOY-uh) • •who who • who have have have not notreceived not received received HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines medicines medicines ininthe the in past the past past oror or (elvitegravir, (elvitegravir, (elvitegravir, cobicistat, cobicistat, cobicistat, emtricitabine, emtricitabine, emtricitabine, and and and tenofovir tenofovir tenofovir alafenamide) alafenamide) alafenamide) tablets tablets tablets • •toto •replace replace to replace their their their current current current HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines medicines medicines ininpeople people in people who who who have have have been been been ononthe on thesame the same same HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines medicines medicines for foratfor atleast least at least 66months, months, 6 months, have have have Important: Important: Important: Ask Ask Ask your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider ororpharmacist or pharmacist pharmacist about about about an an amount an amount amount of of HIV-1 HIV-1 of HIV-1 in in their their in their blood blood blood (“viral (“viral (“viral load”) load”) load”) that that that is is less less is less than than than medicines medicines medicines that that that should should should not notnot bebetaken be taken taken with with with GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. 5050copies/mL, 50 copies/mL, copies/mL, and andand have have have never never never failed failed failed past past past HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 treatment treatment treatment There There There may may may bebenew be new new information information information about about about GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. This This This information information information HIV-1 HIV-1 isisthe the is virus the virus virus that thatthat causes causes causes AIDS. AIDS. AIDS. isisonly only is only aasummary summary a summary and andand does does does not nottake not take take the theplace the place place ofoftalking talking of talking with with with your your your HIV-1 GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA contains contains contains the theprescription the prescription prescription medicines medicines medicines elvitegravir elvitegravir elvitegravir healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider about about about your your your medical medical medical condition condition condition orortreatment. or treatment. treatment. ® ® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® ),),cobicistat cobicistat ), cobicistat (TYBOST (TYBOST (TYBOST ),),emtricitabine emtricitabine ), emtricitabine (EMTRIVA (EMTRIVA (EMTRIVA ) )and and ) and (VITEKTA (VITEKTA (VITEKTA What What What isisthe is the the most most most important important important information information information tenofovir tenofovir tenofovir alafenamide. alafenamide. alafenamide. I Ishould should I should know know know about about about GENVOYA? GENVOYA? GENVOYA? ItItisisItnot not is known not known known ififGENVOYA GENVOYA if GENVOYA isissafe safe is safe and andand effective effective effective ininchildren children in children under under under 12 12 years 12 years years of of age. age. of age. GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA can cancan cause cause cause serious serious serious side side side effects, effects, effects, including: including: including: When When When used used used tototreat to treat treat HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 infection, infection, infection, GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA may: may: may: ••Build-up Build-up • Build-up ofoflactic of lactic lactic acid acid acid ininyour in your your blood blood blood (lactic (lactic (lactic acidosis). acidosis). acidosis). Lactic Lactic Lactic acidosis acidosis acidosis may may may happen happen happen ininsome some in some people people people who who who take take take GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. • •Reduce Reduce • Reduce the theamount the amount amount ofofHIV-1 HIV-1 of HIV-1 ininyour your in your blood. blood. blood. Lactic Lactic Lactic acidosis acidosis acidosis isisaaisserious serious a serious medical medical medical emergency emergency emergency that thatthat can cancan lead lead lead This This This isiscalled called is called “viral “viral “viral load”. load”. load”. totodeath. death. to death. Lactic Lactic Lactic acidosis acidosis acidosis can cancan bebehard be hard hard totoidentify identify to identify early, early, early, because because because • •Increase Increase • Increase the thenumber the number number ofofCD4+ CD4+ of CD4+ (T)(T)cells (T) cells cells ininyour your in your blood blood blood that thatthat help help help the thesymptoms the symptoms symptoms could could could seem seem seem like likelike symptoms symptoms symptoms ofofother other of other health health health fifight ght fight off offother off other other infections. infections. infections. problems. problems. problems. Call Call Call your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider right right right away away away ififyou you if you Reducing Reducing Reducing the theamount the amount amount ofofHIV-1 HIV-1 of HIV-1 and andand increasing increasing increasing the theCD4+ the CD4+ CD4+ (T)(T)cells (T) cells cells get getget any anyany ofofthe of thethe following following following symptoms, symptoms, symptoms, which which which could could could be besigns be signs signs ofof of ininyour your in your blood blood blood may may may help help help improve improve improve your your your immune immune immune system. system. system. This This This may may may lactic lactic lactic acidosis: acidosis: acidosis: reduce reduce reduce your your your risk riskrisk ofofdeath death of death ororgetting or getting getting infections infections infections that thatthat can cancan happen happen happen when when when your your your immune immune immune system system system is is weak weak is weak (opportunistic (opportunistic (opportunistic infections). infections). infections). • •feel feel • feel very very very weak weak weak orortired or tired tired GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA does does does not notnot cure cure cure HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 infection infection infection ororAIDS. or AIDS. AIDS. You YouYou must must must • •have have • have unusual unusual unusual (not (not(not normal) normal) normal) muscle muscle muscle pain pain pain stay stay stay ononcontinuous on continuous continuous HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 therapy therapy therapy totocontrol control to control HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 infection infection infection and andand • •have have • have trouble trouble trouble breathing breathing breathing decrease decrease decrease HIV-related HIV-related HIV-related illnesses. illnesses. illnesses. • •have have • have stomach stomach stomach pain pain pain with with with nausea nausea nausea ororvomiting or vomiting vomiting Avoid Avoid Avoid doing doing doing things things things that that that can cancan spread spread spread HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 infection infection infection totoothers: to others: others: • •feel feel • feel cold, cold, cold, especially especially especially ininyour your in your arms arms arms and andand legs legs legs • •Do Do • not Do notshare not share share ororre-use or re-use re-use needles needles needles ororother or other other injection injection injection equipment. equipment. equipment. • •feel feel • feel dizzy dizzy dizzy ororlightheaded or lightheaded lightheaded • •Do Do • not Do notshare not share share personal personal personal items items items that thatthat can cancan have have have blood blood blood ororbody or body body • •have have • have aafast fast a fast ororirregular or irregular irregular heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat flfluids uids fluids ononthem, on them, them, like likelike toothbrushes toothbrushes toothbrushes and andand razor razor razor blades. blades. blades. ••Severe Severe • Severe liver liver liver problems. problems. problems. Severe Severe Severe liver liver liver problems problems problems may may may happen happen happen inin in • •Do Do • not Do nothave not have have any anyany kind kind kind ofofsex sex of sex without without without protection. protection. protection. Always Always Always people people people who who who take take take GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. InInsome some In some cases, cases, cases, these these these liver liver liver problems problems problems practice practice practice safer safer safer sex sexsex bybyusing by using using aalatex latex a latex ororpolyurethane or polyurethane polyurethane condom condom condom can cancan lead lead lead totodeath. death. to death. Your Your Your liver liver liver may may may become become become large large large and andand you youyou may may may totolower lower to lower the thechance the chance chance ofofsexual sexual of sexual contact contact contact with with with semen, semen, semen, vaginal vaginal vaginal develop develop develop fat fatinfat inyour your in your liver. liver. liver. secretions, secretions, secretions, ororblood. or blood. blood. Ask AskAsk your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider ififyou you if you have have have any anyany questions questions questions about about about how how how Call Call Call your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider right right right away away away ififyou you if you get getget any anyany to to prevent prevent to prevent passing passing passing HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 to to other other to other people. people. people. ofofthe of thethe following following following symptoms symptoms symptoms ofofliver of liver liver problems: problems: problems: • •your your • your skin skin skin ororthe the or white the white white part partpart ofofyour your of your eyes eyes eyes turns turns turns yellow yellow yellow (jaundice) (jaundice) (jaundice) Who Who Who should should should not not not take take take GENVOYA? GENVOYA? GENVOYA? • •dark dark • dark “tea-colored” “tea-colored” “tea-colored” urine urine urine • •light-colored light-colored • light-colored bowel bowel bowel movements movements movements (stools) (stools) (stools) Do Donot Do notnot take take take GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA ififyou you if you also also also take take take aamedicine medicine a medicine that that that contains: contains: contains: ® ®® ® • •loss loss • loss ofofappetite appetite of appetite for forseveral for several several days days days ororlonger longer or longer )) ) • •alfuzosin alfuzosin • alfuzosin hydrochloride hydrochloride hydrochloride (Uroxatral (Uroxatral (Uroxatral ® ® ® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® • •nausea nausea • nausea , Epitol , Epitol , Epitol , Equetro , Equetro , Equetro , Tegretol , Tegretol , Tegretol ,, , • •carbamazepine carbamazepine • carbamazepine (Carbatrol (Carbatrol (Carbatrol ® ® ® ® ® ® ® ® • •stomach stomach • stomach pain pain pain Tegretol-XR Tegretol-XR Tegretol-XR , Teril , Teril , Teril )) ) ® ® ®® ® ®® ® , Propulsid , Propulsid , Propulsid Quicksolv Quicksolv Quicksolv )) ) • •cisapride cisapride • cisapride (Propulsid (Propulsid (Propulsid ••You You • You may may may bebemore be more more likely likely likely totoget to getget lactic lactic lactic acidosis acidosis acidosis ororsevere or severe severe liver liver liver • •ergot-containing ergot-containing • ergot-containing medicines, medicines, medicines, including: including: including: dihydroergotamine dihydroergotamine dihydroergotamine problems problems problems ififyou you if you are areare female, female, female, very very very overweight overweight overweight (obese), (obese), (obese), ororhave or have have ® ® ®® ® ®® ® , Migranal , Migranal , Migranal ),),ergotamine ergotamine ), ergotamine tartrate tartrate tartrate mesylate mesylate mesylate (D.H.E. (D.H.E. (D.H.E. 45 4545 been been been taking taking taking GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA for forafor along long a long time. time. time. ® ® ® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® (Cafergot (Cafergot (Cafergot , Migergot , Migergot , Migergot , Ergostat , Ergostat , Ergostat , Medihaler , Medihaler , Medihaler Ergotamine Ergotamine Ergotamine ,, , ® ® ®® ® ®® ® GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA isisnot not is for not foruse for useuse toto to ••Worsening Worsening • Worsening ofofHepatitis of Hepatitis Hepatitis BBinfection. infection. B infection. Wigraine Wigraine Wigraine , Wigrettes , Wigrettes , Wigrettes ),),and and ), and methylergonovine methylergonovine methylergonovine maleate maleate maleate ® ® ®® ® ®® ® treat treat treat chronic chronic chronic hepatitis hepatitis hepatitis BBvirus virus B virus (HBV). (HBV). (HBV). IfIfyou you If you have have have HBV HBV HBV infection infection infection (Ergotrate (Ergotrate (Ergotrate , Methergine , Methergine , Methergine )) ) and andand take take take GENVOYA, GENVOYA, GENVOYA, your your your HBV HBV HBV may may may get getworse get worse worse (fl(flare-up) are-up) (flare-up) ififyou you if you ® ® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® , Altoprev , Altoprev , Altoprev , Mevacor , Mevacor , Mevacor )) ) • •lovastatin lovastatin • lovastatin (Advicor (Advicor (Advicor stop stop stop taking taking taking GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. AA“fl“fl Aare-up” are-up” “flare-up” isiswhen when is when your your your HBV HBV HBV infection infection infection • •midazolam, midazolam, • midazolam, when when when taken taken taken bybymouth by mouth mouth suddenly suddenly suddenly returns returns returns ininaainworse worse a worse way way way than than than before. before. before. ® ®® ® )) ) phenobarbital • phenobarbital (Luminal (Luminal (Luminal • •Do Do • not Do notrun not runrun out outof out ofGENVOYA. GENVOYA. of GENVOYA. Refi RefiRefi ll llyour your ll your prescription prescription prescription orortalk or talktalk toto to • •phenobarbital ® ® ®® ® ®® ® , Phenytek , Phenytek , Phenytek )) ) • •phenytoin phenytoin • phenytoin (Dilantin (Dilantin (Dilantin your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider before before before your your your GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA isisallall isgone. all gone. gone. ® ®® ® )) ) • •pimozide pimozide • pimozide (Orap (Orap (Orap • •Do Do • not Do notstop not stop stop taking taking taking GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA without without without fifirst rstfitalking rst talking talking totoyour your to your ® ® ® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® ®® ® , Rifamate , Rifamate , Rifamate , Rifater , Rifater , Rifater , Rimactane , Rimactane , Rimactane )) ) • •rifampin rifampin • rifampin (Rifadin (Rifadin (Rifadin healthcare healthcare healthcare provider. provider. provider. ® ®® ® ),),when when ), when used used used for fortreating for treating treating lung lung lung problems problems problems • •sildenafi sildenafi • sildenafi l (Revatio l (Revatio l (Revatio • •IfIf•you you If you stop stop stop taking taking taking GENVOYA, GENVOYA, GENVOYA, your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider will willwill ® ® ® ® ® ® ® ® ® ® ® ® need need need totocheck check to check your your your health health health often often often and andand dodoblood do blood blood tests tests tests regularly regularly regularly • •simvastatin , Vytorin , Vytorin , Vytorin , Zocor , Zocor , Zocor )) ) simvastatin • simvastatin (Simcor (Simcor (Simcor ® ®® ® for forseveral for several several months months months totocheck check to check your your your HBV HBV HBV infection. infection. infection. Tell TellTell your your your )) ) • •triazolam triazolam • triazolam (Halcion (Halcion (Halcion healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider about about about any anyany new new new ororunusual or unusual unusual symptoms symptoms symptoms • •the the • herb the herb herb St. St.John’s St. John’s John’s wort wort wort ororaaor product product a product that thatthat contains contains contains St. St.John’s St. John’s John’s wort wort wort you youyou may may may have have have after after after you youyou stop stop stop taking taking taking GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA.

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What What What should should should I Itell tell I tell my my my healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider before before before taking taking taking GENVOYA? GENVOYA? GENVOYA?

What What What are are are the the the possible possible possible side side side effects effects effects of ofof GENVOYA? GENVOYA? GENVOYA?

Before Before Before taking taking taking GENVOYA, GENVOYA, GENVOYA, tell telltell your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider ififyou: you: if you: • •have have • have liver liver liver problems problems problems including including including hepatitis hepatitis hepatitis BBinfection infection B infection • •have have • have kidney kidney kidney ororbone or bone bone problems problems problems • •have have • have any anyany other other other medical medical medical conditions conditions conditions • •are are • are pregnant pregnant pregnant ororplan or plan plan totobecome become to become pregnant. pregnant. pregnant. ItItisisItnot not is known not known known ifif if GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA can cancan harm harm harm your your your unborn unborn unborn baby. baby. baby. Tell TellTell your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider ififyou you if you become become become pregnant pregnant pregnant while while while taking taking taking GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. there there there isisaaispregnancy pregnancy a pregnancy registry registry registry for forwomen for women women Pregnancy Pregnancy Pregnancy registry: registry: registry: who who who take take take HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines medicines medicines during during during pregnancy. pregnancy. pregnancy. The TheThe purpose purpose purpose ofof of this thisthis registry registry registry isistoto iscollect collect to collect information information information about about about the thehealth the health health ofofyou you of you and andand your your your baby. baby. baby. Talk Talk Talk with with with your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider about about about how how how you youyou can cancan take take take part part part ininthis this in this registry. registry. registry. • •are are • are breastfeeding breastfeeding breastfeeding ororplan or plan plan totobreastfeed. breastfeed. to breastfeed. Do Donot Do notbreastfeed not breastfeed breastfeed ififyou you if you take take take GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. ––You You – You should should should not notbreastfeed not breastfeed breastfeed ififyou you if you have have have HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 because because because ofof of the therisk the riskrisk ofofpassing passing of passing HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 totoyour your to your baby. baby. baby. ––AtAt –least At least least one oneone ofofthe the of medicines the medicines medicines ininGENVOYA GENVOYA in GENVOYA can cancan pass pass pass toto to your your your baby baby baby ininyour your in your breast breast breast milk. milk. milk. ItItisisItnot not is known not known known ififthe the if other the other other medicines medicines medicines ininGENVOYA GENVOYA in GENVOYA can cancan pass pass pass into intointo your your your breast breast breast milk. milk. milk. ––Talk Talk – Talk with with with your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider about about about the thebest the best best way way way toto to feed feed feed your your your baby. baby. baby. Tell TellTell your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider about about about all allthe all thethe medicines medicines medicines you youyou take, take, take, including including including prescription prescription prescription and andand over-the-counter over-the-counter over-the-counter medicines, medicines, medicines, vitamins, vitamins, vitamins, and andand herbal herbal herbal supplements. supplements. supplements. Other Other Other medicines medicines medicines may may may affect affect affect how how how GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA works. works. works. Some Some Some medicines medicines medicines may may may interact interact interact with with with GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA . .Keep Keep . Keep aalist list a list ofof of your your your medicines medicines medicines and and and show show show itittoto ityour to your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider and and and pharmacist pharmacist pharmacist when when when you youyou get getget aanew new a new medicine. medicine. medicine. • •You You • You can cancan ask askask your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider ororpharmacist or pharmacist pharmacist for forafor alist list a list ofofmedicines medicines of medicines that thatthat interact interact interact with with with GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. • •Do Do • not Do notstart not start start aanew new a new medicine medicine medicine without without without telling telling telling your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider. provider. provider. Your Your Your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider can cancan tell tellyou tell youyou ififititis ifisitsafe safe is safe toto to take take take GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA with with with other other other medicines. medicines. medicines.

GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA may may may cause cause cause serious serious serious side side side effects, effects, effects, including: including: including: • •See See • See “What “What “What isisthe the is the most most most important important important information information information I Ishould should I should know know know about about about GENVOYA?” GENVOYA?” GENVOYA?” • •Changes Changes • Changes ininbody in body body fat fatcan fat cancan happen happen happen ininpeople in people people who who who take take take HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicine. medicine. medicine. These These These changes changes changes may may may include include include increased increased increased amount amount amount ofof of fat fatinfat inthe the in upper the upper upper back back back and andand neck neck neck (“buffalo (“buffalo (“buffalo hump”), hump”), hump”), breast, breast, breast, and andand around around around the themiddle the middle middle ofofyour your of your body body body (trunk). (trunk). (trunk). Loss Loss Loss ofoffat fat of from fat from from the thethe legs, legs, legs, arms arms arms and andand face face face may may may also also also happen. happen. happen. The TheThe exact exact exact cause cause cause and andand long-term long-term long-term health health health effects effects effects ofofthese these of these conditions conditions conditions are areare not notknown. not known. known. • •Changes Changes • Changes ininyour in your your immune immune immune system system system (Immune (Immune (Immune Reconstitution Reconstitution Reconstitution Syndrome) Syndrome) Syndrome) can cancan happen happen happen when when when you youyou start start start taking taking taking HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicines. medicines. medicines. Your Your Your immune immune immune system system system may may may get getstronger get stronger stronger and andand begin begin begin totofifight toght fight infections infections infections that thatthat have have have been been been hidden hidden hidden ininyour your in your body body body for forafor a a long long long time. time. time. Tell TellTell your your your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider right right right away away away ififyou you if you start start start having having having any anyany new new new symptoms symptoms symptoms after after after starting starting starting your your your HIV-1 HIV-1 HIV-1 medicine. medicine. medicine. • •New New • New ororworse or worse worse kidney kidney kidney problems, problems, problems, including including including kidney kidney kidney failure. failure. failure. Your Your Your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider should should should dodoblood do blood blood and andand urine urine urine tests tests tests toto to check check check your your your kidneys kidneys kidneys before before before you youyou start start start and andand while while while you youyou are areare taking taking taking GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. Your Your Your healthcare healthcare healthcare provider provider provider may may may tell tellyou tell youyou totostop stop to stop taking taking taking GENVOYA GENVOYA GENVOYA ififyou you if you develop develop develop new new new ororworse or worse worse kidney kidney kidney problems. problems. problems. • •Bone Bone • Bone problems problems problems can cancan happen happen happen ininsome some in some people people people who who who take take take GENVOYA. GENVOYA. GENVOYA. 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11/18/15 11/18/15 11/18/15 12:21 12:21 PM 12:21 PM PM 11/18/15 12:21 PM

<< Open Forum

6 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Volume 45, Number 49 December 3-9, 2015 www.ebar.com PUBLISHER Michael M. Yamashita Thomas E. Horn, Publisher Emeritus (2013) Publisher (2003 – 2013) Bob Ross, Founder (1971 – 2003) NEWS EDITOR Cynthia Laird ARTS EDITOR Roberto Friedman BARTAB EDITOR & EVENTS LISTINGS EDITOR Jim Provenzano ASSISTANT EDITORS Matthew S. Bajko • Seth Hemmelgarn CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Ray Aguilera • Tavo Amador • Race Bannon Erin Blackwell • Roger Brigham Brian Bromberger • Victoria A. Brownworth Brent Calderwood • Philip Campbell Heather Cassell • Belo Cipriani Richard Dodds • Michael Flanagan Jim Gladstone • David Guarino Liz Highleyman • Brandon Judell • John F. Karr Lisa Keen • Matthew Kennedy • Joshua Klipp David Lamble • Max Leger Michael McDonagh • David-Elijah Nahmod Paul Parish • Sean Piverger • Lois Pearlman Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota • Bob Roehr Donna Sachet • Adam Sandel • Khaled Sayed Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro Gwendolyn Smith • Jim Stewart Sean Timberlake • Andre Torrez • Ronn Vigh Ed Walsh • Cornelius Washington Sura Wood ART DIRECTION Jay Cribas PRODUCTION/DESIGN Max Leger PHOTOGRAPHERS Jane Philomen Cleland • FBFE Rick Gerharter • Gareth Gooch Lydia Gonzales • Jose Guzman-Colon Rudy K. Lawidjaja • Georg Lester • Dan Lloyd Jo-Lynn Otto • Rich Stadtmiller Steven Underhil • Dallis Willard • Bill Wilson ILLUSTRATORS & CARTOONISTS Paul Berge • Christine Smith ADVERTISING/ADMINISTRATION Colleen Small VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING Scott Wazlowski – 415.829.8937 NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE Rivendell Media – 212.242.6863

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News Editor • news@ebar.com Arts Editor • arts@ebar.com Out & About listings • jim@ebar.com Advertising • scott@ebar.com Letters • letters@ebar.com Published weekly. Bay Area Reporter reserves the right to edit or reject any advertisement which the publisher believes is in poor taste or which advertises illegal items which might result in legal action against Bay Area Reporter. Ads will not be rejected solely on the basis of politics, philosophy, religion, race, age, or sexual orientation. Advertising rates available upon request. Our list of subscribers and advertisers is conﬁdential and is not sold. The sexual orientation of advertisers, photographers, and writers published herein is neither inferred nor implied. We are not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

Harvey Milk would be proud

wo events recently held in San Francisco’s Castro district surely had Harvey Milk smiling down on the city’s gay neighborhood. Milk, the city’s first openly gay elected leader, had his life tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet 37 years ago. Former Mayor George Moscone, another progressive leader, also was fatally shot that horrible morning by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White. On the anniversary of their deaths last week, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club held the annual vigil and march to honor Milk and Moscone and the political values they held dear. Former San Francisco Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, who served alongside the two men, told those gathered at this year’s event that their policies didn’t end with their deaths. As efforts are underway nationwide to preserve and remember the LGBT community’s history, we commend the Milk club leaders and those community members who participated in this year’s vigil and march for taking time during their Thanksgiving vacations to commemorate the lives of men many in the crowd did not personally know. It is one San Francisco tradition we hope will not fade with time, as Milk’s famous dictum “you have to give them hope” is still relevant. His exhortation was aimed at providing young people, particularly LGBT youth, “Hope for a better world. Hope for a better tomorrow.” Thusly, Milk would certainly have been pleased to see schoolchildren from the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, an elementary school in the heart of the Castro, using chalk to inscribe the names of those living with HIV and those lost to the AIDS epidemic on Castro Street sidewalks. The special event was one of many in the city commemorating World AIDS Day, held annually on December 1. Having the next generation pay homage to a lost generation of gay men was a poignant sight that brought tears to many of the adults who participated or happened upon the event.

The idea, by school volunteer George Kelly, a long-term survivor of HIV, was an inspired one, and the school community, from administrators and teachers to the parents and students, deserves credit for embracing it. Remembering our collective past is how society learns to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. As demonstrated by the students who wrote out the names of relatives and family friends, AIDS did not just devastate the gay community. It tore a hole in the heart of the entire city. Amidst that grief and loss, however, San Franciscans showed true resilience and compassion as they rallied to support those diagnosed with HIV. And the city continues to be a beacon of hope in the effort to end the transmission of HIV within the lifetime of those children whose hands were coated in chalk dust. Public health officials reported this week that the city’s Getting to Zero strategy aimed

at ending the transmission of HIV within San Francisco by 2030, along with HIV-related deaths and HIV stigma and discrimination, continues to show progress. Gay men are playing a large part in that success, with many HIV-negative sexually active men using preexposure prophylaxis, better known as PrEP, to ensure they do not become HIV-positive. And as we report, HIV-positive men deserve large credit for abiding health officials’ message to use antiretroviral treatment no matter their CD4 T-cell count and to stay in care. Challenges remain, particularly with the care retention component of the city’s three-pronged Getting to Zero strategy. As one local health official told us, “Retention is a monster that requires a huge amount of time and money.” The city has already set aside $1.2 million to fund the Getting to Zero plan, and we hope the financial support for the strategy continues to ensure its success. Achieving the goal of ending HIV transmission in San Francisco will truly be a proud day and Milk will be smiling down from above.t

A gay dad asks for understanding by Demetri Moshoyannis

commuting, and better schools. What has been most important to ince adopting our amazing little boy us is that we share our love, our carfrom the foster care system nearly ing, and our values with our son - a two years ago now, I have found myself child who might have faced considerincreasingly empathetic to the chalable challenges without our support. lenges of parenthood. We made the decision to become dads Parenting is difficult. Sometimes because we maintain a strong sense of you don’t sleep, you don’t eat, and you family and community that we want to do it all because your child comes first. share with him. We want a better life In the daily sacrifices we make as parfor our son. ents, I have come to appreciate all that So, if another gay person wants to my parents have done for me. give our life choices a disparaging, conMost of all, I have become more sendescending title such as “heteronorsitive to the judgments foisted upon mative,” so be it. We know the kind of others not like us, people who do not life we want to live and no one, gay or necessarily share our state of being in straight, can deny us that. What if some the world. Until you are or have been a of us merely want the same things in parent, it’s hard to comprehend. life? For example, I recently found myself Husbands Demetri Moshoyannis, left, and Joshua Sparks What amazed me in the aforemenin the position of defending the mother are raising their adopted son, Christopher Sparks, in the tioned online thread, however, is how of a little baby. As it was posted online, East Bay. quickly so many gay men jumped on the picture shared little information the proverbial bandwagon. Let’s make except that the woman was waiting in fun of the straight person because, we have been fighting for: not to be told who line with her stroller parked temporarwell, they deserve it, right? They’re the we are or who we can be? ily in the doorway of a tiny sandwich shop. source of our oppression and suffering. So, Apparently, childrearing among A thread of demeaning and judgmental why not at least be snippy and spitegays and lesbians tends to be more posts followed with a parade of gay men makful? This is our collective thick skin common in conservative, rural ing endless assumptions about the woman, her that has protected us well for quite states like Wyoming (28 percent socioeconomic status, her parenting choices, some time. of same-sex couples) and Kanand her motivations. When I came to her I understand that the institusas (26 percent). According to defense and asked for people to think outside tion of “family” is one that has Gary J. Gates, a demographer at of their own life circumstances, I was told to been denied to us repeatedly and LGBT think tank the Williams “lighten up” and to take it as light-hearted jokone from which we have been Institute at UCLA’s School of ing. But, I just couldn’t. actively excluded for countless Law who analyzed the census The reality is that there are increasing numyears. When I came out to mydata, “Same-sex couples who live bers of LGBT folks who are choosing to parself, I cried because I believed that in places with relatively high concentrations ent. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, it I wouldn’t be able to get married and have a of same-sex couples tend to be less likely than was reported that about 63,000 couples were family. other same-sex couples to be raising children.” raising children in 2000; but, just a few years Years later, our community proved me Of course, no one told my husband and ago, that figure had nearly doubled to more wrong. Times are changing; and, our own atme that fact as we set about to adopt a child, than 110,000. titudes need to keep pace. LGBT life is more living in the heart of the Castro district. HonAbove all, adoptive parenting is increasing openly diverse now than it was 20 or 30 years estly, it wouldn’t have made any difference if substantially as is gay male parenting. Is parago. Perhaps it’s time to give up the jokes and they had because we knew what we wanted for enting for everyone? No, of course not. What merely accept each other at face value.t our family and ourselves. We have since chois critical to appreciate is that our hard-won sen to move out to Castro Valley for a variety battles are opening up a greater range of lifeDemetri Moshoyannis is the longtime exof personal reasons, including cost of living, style options for us - and, well, isn’t that what ecutive director of Folsom Street Events.

Politics>>

t Race to oversee SF Democratic Party draws out candidates by Matthew S. Bajko

long with casting votes for their favored 2016 presidential candidate, Democratic voters in San Francisco will also be voting on the June 7 primary ballot for who they want to lead the local Democratic Party. Candidates from the city’s two state Assembly districts will be running for seats on what is known as the Democratic County Central Committee, referred to as the Dtriple-C for short. Not only do members of the body elect a party chair from amongst themselves, they also decide which candidates to endorse in local races as well as which municipal ballot measures the party supports. Thus, the winners in June will determine whom the local Democratic Party backs in the odd-numbered supervisor races next November. Their decision could be influential, as the party’s support continues to be seen as a key advantage for candidates as it opens the door to financial backing and placement on the party’s slate card sent to voters. With progressives holding a 6-5 majority on the Board of Supervisors due to Aaron Peskin’s election last month as District 3 supervisor, the fall election presents the city’s moderates a chance to tip the balance of power back to their camp. Both political factions are sure to run candidates for DCCC in order to impact the party’s endorsement process next summer. The race, now held during presidential election years, has traditionally drawn a long list of candidates, including of late a number of sitting supervisors. Apart from wielding influence in local politics, a DCCC seat can also be a launching pad for those interested in running for political office themselves one day. The DCCC race also attracts a sizeable contingent of LGBT community leaders. Three out candidates have already pulled papers, with the total set to increase as the March 11 filing deadline nears. Surveyed by the Political Notebook over the last week, a majority of the current 11 lesbian, gay, and bisexual DCCC members – there are no elected transgender members on the body – plan to seek re-election next year to another four-year term on the oversight body. In addition to the out incumbents planning to run, so far one gay candidate, Shaun Haines, has already pulled papers to seek one of the 17th Assembly District DCCC seats. A native San Franciscan who is African American, Haines in May was appointed to serve on the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and also sits on the LGBT advisory committee to the city’s Human Rights Commission. Haines told the Bay Area Reporter his interest in serving on the DCCC stems from his wanting to help diversify the Democratic Party and the city’s elected leadership. “It is something I have been trying to take a close look at,” said Haines, 37, an Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club member who serves on its board. “I want to use my personal experience to work on addressing that problem.” The lone out person on the DCCC representing the city’s western 19th Assembly District, which has 10 elected seats on the body, is already raising money for his campaign. Joel Engardio was tapped in July by party chair Mary Jung to serve out the term of gay longtime DCCC member Arlo Hale Smith,

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 7

Barry Schneider Attorney at Law

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DCCC candidate Shaun Haines

DCCC member Rebecca Prozan

who resigned due to health reasons. person in the city serving in an elected “Championing common sense role – Dorsey said he wants to ensure in San Francisco will be a two-step the HIV community continues to process in 2016: The DCCC election have a voice within the party. in June and the supervisor race in “I am proud of the work I did November,” wrote Engardio, a colas secretary to revamp the party’s umnist for the San Francisco Examwebsite,” said Dorsey, adding that iner who unsuccessfully ran for the he also “worked hard to rewrite the District 7 supervisor seat in 2012, bylaws to accommodate having” five in an email last month to readers of supervisors, at one time, serving on his column that also asked for donathe DCCC so that the committee did tions to his DCCC campaign. not violate the state’s open meetings Most of the 10 out DCCC memrules that govern politicians. bers from the 17th Assembly Dis“I think I have done a good job of trict, which covers the city’s eastern reaching out to people I disagree with neighborhoods, are planning to run to find common ground,” said Dorsey. again for one of the 14 Mayoral spokesman Francis seats on the DCCC asTsang, appointed to fill the seat vasigned to that district. cated by former supervisor David The only one to have Chiu after he won election last filed to date, however, is year to the state Assembly, told the Carole Migden, a lesbian B.A.R. he now plans to seek election and former state lawto a full term on the DCCC. maker. She also reported “As the only Asian incumbent having $4,588.69 in her in AD17 and among the few LGBT campaign account as of members on the DCCC, I’m going October 17, based on her to run a vigorous campaign to retain most recent filing with the city’s ethmy seat,” wrote Tsang in an emailed ics commission. reply. “Next year is an important Seven of the other incumbents year as we have an opportunity to told the B.A.R. they would be seekelect the first woman president of ing another term, including lesbian the United States. I want to conlibrary commissioner Zoe Dunning, tinue the work I am doing to keep the outgoing co-chair of the pothe community engaged and ensure litically moderate Alice club, and forthey have a voice on important ismer Alice co-chair Rebecca Prozan. sues that affect our city.” “I haven’t filed yet but absolutely Both gay District 9 Supervisor plan to run,” Prozan told the B.A.R., David Campos, who is termed off adding that her motivation for the board next year, and bisexual podoing so is to elect Hillary Clinton lice commissioner Petra DeJesus, an president “and work to keep our attorney, said they have yet to decide country a nation of immigrants!” if they will run again for a DCCC seat. Gay former District 8 Supervisor Gay man eyes SF D7 supe race Bevan Dufty, who recently resigned In addition to running for re-elecas Mayor Ed Lee’s homeless czar, tion to his DCCC seat, Joel Engardio and gay attorney Rafael Mandelis also eyeing another man, a onetime president campaign for the District of the more progressive 7 supervisor seat next fall. Harvey Milk LGBT DemThree years ago Engarocratic Club, both said dio, considered a modthey would be running erate, came up short in again for DCCC seats. his bid to represent the “I’m running to help district centered west of elect progressive DemoTwin Peaks. The winner, crats to state and national Norman Yee, has already offices and to continue Jane Philomen Cleveland pulled papers to seek repushing our local party election to a second, and in a more liberal, reform- Joel Engardio final, four-year term. oriented direction,” ManIn his fundraising appeal sent delman, who is traveling in Asia, out last month for his DCCC race, wrote in an emailed reply. Engardio wrote that he was seekGay District 8 Supervisor Scott ing donations through December Wiener, a former chair of the local 31 and added, “Then we can focus party, will also be seeking re-elecon fundraising for supervisor soon tion to the DCCC, on which he has after the start of the new year.” served since 2004. He will appear Asked if he was running for suon the June ballot twice, as he is also pervisor, Engardio told the B.A.R. running in the primary for the Senhe had yet to pull papers because ate District 11 seat, which includes he has not made a final decision on all of San Francisco and portions of if he would run against Yee, who is northern San Mateo County. part of the board’s more progressive “I’m committed to continuing bloc of supervisors. to build the party as we head into “While raising funds for my a Presidential election year - a year DCCC race, the number one queswhen we need to get Kamala Harris tion from donors was when could elected to the U.S. Senate,” Wiener they give for supervisor. My DCCC told the B.A.R. “I look forward to donors are motivated and some getting a terrific group of Demoeven said they wanted to wait until I crats elected to the DCCC so that was a supervisor candidate and give we can do that work.” then,” wrote Engardio via a FaceCity attorney spokesman Matt book message as he was in Taiwan Dorsey, a gay man who serves as the visiting his husband’s family during DCCC’s secretary, is also planning to Thanksgiving week. seek another term. As the only person He added, “I would like to run on the body living with HIV – and believed to be the only HIV-positive See page 18 >>

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<< Community News

8 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Annual Milk march commemorates slain gay rights leader by David-Elijah Nahmod

t has been a Thanksgiving week tradition for nearly four decades, drawing scores of people to the city’s gay Castro district to commemorate the lives of LGBT rights leader Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. This year’s vigil and march in honor of the slain progressive leaders saw approximately 100 people gather in the evening of Friday, November 27 on the 37th anniversary of the assassinations of Milk and Moscone, who were killed inside City Hall by disgruntled former Supervisor Dan White. Upon his election in November 1977, Milk made history as the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco and California. Over the years he has become an icon to the international LGBT community, celebrated in two Oscar-winning movies about his life and death. “Harvey is a hero to so many of us in the LGBT community,” said Peter Gallotta, co-president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, as he addressed the crowd. He then proceeded to list some of Milk’s accomplishments, which included defeating the Briggs Initiative, the 1978 ballot measure that would have banned gay men and

Jane Philomen Cleland

Gay former San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt addresses the crowd at the start of the 37th annual vigil and march commemorating the lives of gay Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, who were killed on the morning of November 27, 1978 inside City Hall.

lesbians from teaching in California public schools. “Over forty years later the Milk club carries on Harvey’s legacy,” Gallotta said. “It’s important now more than ever to remember him.” The Castro’s Harvey Milk Plaza was decorated with hundreds of flowers as a photo of the slain leader greeted attendees. The mood was a combination of joy for the recent victories the LGBT community

achieved, and sorrow for the fact that Milk didn’t live to see what his perseverance had started when he first began political organizing over forty years ago. Many in the crowd felt that Milk would be appalled by the city’s current eviction and housing crisis. “I’m a queer woman of color raised in the Mission,” said Kimberly Alvarenga. “As our communities are forced out, we need to work together

in the spirit of Harvey. We need to come together and build power.” Addressing the crowd at the start of this year’s vigil and march, organized by the Milk club, was former San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, a gay man who was appointed to serve out the remainder of Milk’s term. “If Harvey were here he would not have said ‘thanks for remembering,’” Britt said. “He’d say, ‘What have you done for tomorrow?’ We can’t go back to gay leaders who are happy that people like us more.” Britt likened the LGBT equality movement to the civil rights movement and emphasized the importance of giving a voice to all oppressed peoples. “We’re not going to suck up to straight liberals,” Britt added. Former San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a gay man who went on to serve in the state Assembly, from which he was termed out last year, also addressed the crowd. “It’s more than marriage, though I just got married and I’m so happy!” said Ammiano, as the crowd cheered. “We are not Stepford Wives. We need housing and health care. We need our anger; we need our revolution. We need to take the ass out of assimilation!” After Ammiano’s speech attendees marched down Castro Street to

Milk’s former camera store, located at 575 Castro Street. It is currently home to the Human Rights Campaign store and a call center for the Trevor Project, which helps queer youth. Out front plaques commemorating Milk can be found in the sidewalk. There, former San Francisco Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver recalled that she was one of White’s intended targets that deadly morning. Not being in her office that day, she recalled, saved her life. After a moment of silence, Silver intoned a short meditational prayer for Milk. “Wherever you may be, look down upon us tonight and know that we are here every November 27,” Silver said. “The bullets have not stopped your policies.” Gallotta then closed the march by asking people to remember the black, brown and transgender lives that have been lost at home, and the lives lost due to the Syrian war and the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Neighborhood resident Christine Saita, who said she was a Republican and a Christian, took Gallotta’s hand and expressed her support for equality and for Milk’s vision. The rally ended as everyone sang a heartfelt rendition of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” t

Trans teen receives rabbi’s blessing by David-Elijah Nahmod

ast Bay resident Tom Sosnick, 13, always knew he was born in the wrong body. “I didn’t know what the word transgender meant so I had no way to tie this to reality,” the teenager told the Bay Area Reporter. “I struggled a lot because I could not figure

Share-worthy Views o f t h e C i t y a n d B ay

out or explain how I felt. I felt at one point that it would be easier to live as a girl - I had the body for it.” Sosnick’s questions about his gender identity had begun fairly early. “I was open with my parents about how I was feeling,” he said. “In the fifth grade I had a ‘realization moment’. I had this moment in the shower when I looked down and realized that my

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whole life was a trick. I was never a girl. I didn’t feel like a girl.” In 2014, Leelah Alcorn, a 17-yearold transgender teenager, committed suicide in Ohio. Raised in a conservative Christian family who refused to accept her transition, Alcorn’s violent death - she walked into oncoming traffic on a freeway - attracted international attention.

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Alcorn had left behind a suicide note in which she asked that gender identity issues be discussed in schools. Alcorn’s tragic fate reached Sosnick, who was inspired to come out. “It really made me want to make the most of what I have and give a voice to those who have been silenced,” Sosnick said. “Though I can never speak to everyone, it was something I had to do.” Sosnick came out to his classmates at the Tehiyah Day School in El Cerrito. In a stirring speech that has gone viral on YouTube, he told his teachers and friends what they already knew. “For some of you this may come as a shock,” Sosnick said in the video. “For others, well, you knew or thought that I was transgender. I am no longer Mia. I never really was. And now I stand before you in my true and authentic gender identity as Tom. I stand before you as a 13-year-old boy.” Sosnick said that his family was supportive and loving, and that they remain proud of him. He also got support from Rabbi Tsipi Gabai, principal of Tehiya Day School. Speaking to the B.A.R. she declined to reveal her age, whether or not she was straight, or whether she identified with the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist sects of Judaism. “A person should be judged by their actions, not by their labels,” said Gabai, who father is also a rabbi. She did acknowledge that many Jews still do not accept women as rabbis. “My family had difficulties accepting me as a rabbi,” she recalled. “They had issues, but they didn’t cut me off.” She maintains a close and loving relationship with her family, who is aware of her support for Sosnick. “My brother said you stretched things a bit, but you didn’t cross the line,” Gabai said, adding that she wasn’t sure what crossing the line might entail. Like Sosnick’s parents, she’s very proud of the young man. “We embraced him so he feels comfortable with his gender identity,” Gabai said. “By doing religious rituals we show that we accept him this is the message we want to send. Acceptance of differences is a Jewish

Tom Sosnick found support from his rabbi in coming out as transgender.

Rabbi Tsipi Gabai presided over the naming ceremony for Tom Sosnick.

value. The Torah was given to all of us, men and women.” Gabai pointed out that many things, which are “forbidden” in Judaism, do not come from the Torah, but from man. She led Sosnick through a naming ceremony, establishing his new, male name as his Hebrew name. “It takes compassion and understanding,” she said. “We have to be gutsy and get out of our comfort zones.” Sosnick, who said that he’s interested in theater, playing guitar and also enjoys rock climbing, hopes to balance activism with his everyday life. That life includes school and hanging out with friends. “I’m torn,” he admitted. “It’s hard to add another responsibility. As proud as I am I don’t want this to define me - I want to be successful in the fields I’m trying to do. I think there is a responsibility to share knowledge.” As for those people who don’t accept others for who they are, “if they don’t accept you they’re irrelevant,” Sosnick said. “Keep the people who are supportive very close to you and let the others seep out of your life.”t

Community News>>

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 9

Kaiser letter suggests price increase by Seth Hemmelgarn

aiser Permanente, one of the country’s largest health care providers, recently sent letters to some people saying their drugs were being placed in a specialty tier, meaning the patients would have to pay more. At least one of the letters went to someone who’s living with HIV. Earlier this year, Kaiser was criticized after it came to light that it was charging people about 20 percent of the cost of their medications, rather than a flat copay. After coverage in the Bay Area Reporter, the company announced it would stop charging people more for HIV drugs and offer refunds. Yet in an October 19 letter to a San Francisco man who has a prescription for the HIV medication Atripla, the health care provider said, “Health care coverage that is offered to small businesses will now provide coverage for outpatient specialty drugs under a separate cost share level. … One or more of your prescriptions may soon be covered as a specialty drug.” The change was being made to more closely align with “standard plan designs in California,” the letter said. The change would go into effect when coverage renews in 2015, it said. Specialty drugs would be subject to a coinsurance payment, “a percentage of the total cost that you pay after you reach any applicable deductible,” Kaiser said in the letter. “This means that your out-of-pocket expenses for these specialty drugs may increase in 2015.” The Atripla prescription for one man who received the letter cost $7,338.75. With the change Kaiser explained in the letter, it would cost him 10 percent to 40 percent of that every 90 days, plus $100, meaning

the cost to him every three months would be $833.88 to $3,035.50. In response to emailed questions, Kaiser spokesman John Nelson said, “[W]e in no way have changed our decision to move HIV therapies off the specialty tier. This letter was sent to members who get their coverage through a small group, and who receive drugs that were moved to the specialty tier last year. It should not have been sent to anyone who is only prescribed HIV drugs, as those drugs are no longer (since February) on the specialty tier. This letter went to 30 people.” Nelson said the company was checking to see whether the letter was sent to anyone in error, and it would “reach out to them to make sure they have the right information from us.” He added, “If any member who is prescribed HIV drugs goes to our formulary, or inquires about their benefits, they will get confirmation that those drugs are not on the specialty tier.” The man who received Kaiser’s letter said the only other prescription he’s had in the past two years was for ibuprofen. In a phone interview, Nelson said it was possible that “someone may have received that letter in error, and they are only currently prescribed an HIV-related medication, and in that case, we will contact them and let them know they can disregard the error. … We haven’t found an example of that yet. But it is still possible.” The recipient of Kaiser’s letter said he hasn’t heard from the company since its October 19 message.

Drug pricing proposal

Drug prices are at the heart of a proposal backed by the Los Angelesbased AIDS Healthcare Foundation that would require state officials not to pay more for prescription drugs

Rick Gerharter

Kaiser Permanente is again facing questions on how it is pricing HIV drugs.

than the Department of Veterans Affairs. According to AHF, the department “generally pays 20 percent to 24 percent less than any government program.” In October, AHF announced advocates would submit almost 550,000 signatures to qualify the California Drug Price Relief Act, a statewide ballot initiative that would go before voters in November 2016. A similar effort is underway in Ohio. The proposed measure needs 365,880 valid signatures of registered voters to qualify for the ballot. In a news release, AHF President Michael Weinstein said the VA pricing is “the lowest pricing available to any government agency.” In a phone interview, Ann Donnelly, director of health care policy at Project Inform, said, “It’s actually a very different approach, and we are not ready to comment on this publicly yet.” Donnelly said, “It’s obvious we all want to see changes in drug pricing and deeper discounts in purchasing.” Her agency hadn’t yet ana-

lyzed the proposal, she said, but it would work with others “who have drug pricing and drug purchasing expertise.” “We do have some concerns about how it would be implemented, and we will be looking very closely at any impact it may have” on people who take part in Medi-Cal, the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, or other public purchasers, Donnelly said. In response to emailed questions, AHF spokesman Ged Kenslea wrote that if the measure becomes law, “The relevant departments would be charged [with] enforcing as indicated in the initiative.” Kenslea wrote, “California’s 31,000 ADAP clients and 2.7 million Medi-Cal Fee for Service patients would see drug costs reduced to VA pricing levels. The law would not apply to the 9.9 million Medi-Cal patients who are enrolled in managed care plans.” Asked whether his group had worked with any other organizations on the measure, he replied, “AHF sponsored the initial petition

drive. The campaign is now really just getting off the ground after the submission of signatures, and we are starting to build a statewide coalition of like-minded organizations and individuals. We have no other names or organizations to offer at the moment, but that is not a surprise seeing how we are just getting up and running.” Kenslea wouldn’t respond to a question about whether AHF has access to VA prices, which aren’t public information. Earlier this year, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law gay Assemblyman Rich Gordon’s (DMenlo Park) AB 339, which caps the amount people pay out-of-pocket for a 30-day prescription at $250. It also restricts insurance providers from placing all of the drugs for a specific disease in the highest, most expensive tier for prescriptions. The law applies to non-grandfathered contracts or policies “that are offered, renewed, or amended on or after January 1, 2017,” the state legislative counsel’s digest says.t

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<< Community News

10 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Misgendering in trans case criticized by Seth Hemmelgarn

dvocates for the transgender community are criticizing a San Francisco attorney’s misgendering of a trans woman who was allegedly assaulted in a recent hate crime. Deputy Public Defender Kwixuan Maloof, who’s representing Dewayne Kemp, one of the people accused of attacking Samantha Hulsey in November, repeatedly referred to Hulsey as a man and used male pronouns for her during the arraignment in the case. In an interview this week, Hulsey, 25, said the comments made her “really offended and a bit upset. I think that from a legal point of view, him saying that about me is completely pointless, because regardless of whether I am [transgender] or not,” Kemp “still committed a hate crime against me based on what he perceived to be my gender or sexuality.” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said of Maloof, who’s been with the public defender’s office for over a decade, “To me, it seemed like some amateur trying to make the victim look bad, to favor their client, and it was just odd.” After the Bay Area Reporter ran an editorial last week calling on Public Defender Jeff Adachi to provide sensitivity training to his attorneys, Adachi sent an apology to the paper. “It is my policy that everyone associated with my office treats transgender people with respect and dignity, whether they are clients, victims,” or others, Adachi wrote. “This includes referring to transgender individuals by the pronoun that reflects that person’s gender identity. Mr. Maloof has expressed it was not his intention to treat Ms. Hulsey in an insensitive manner, but the buck stops with me.” Adachi noted that his agency’s previously “undergone training around transgender issues.” He said he contacted Transgender Law Cen-

Courtesy ABC7

Samantha Hulsey was misgendered by defense attorneys.

ter to provide “additional sensitivity training and education.” Yet last week, as Maloof questioned Hulsey’s partner, Daira Hopwood, 40, who witnessed the incident, he asked several questions about her and Hulsey’s gender identities. The queries prompted Hopwood, who’s transgender, to call Maloof’s line of questioning “transphobic.” Kemp, 36, and his fiancé, Rebecca Westover, 42, both face charges including assault and hate crime allegations stemming from the November 15 incident in the South of Market neighborhood. The couple has pleaded not guilty and remains in custody. They have claimed the trouble started when Hulsey barged past them and called Kemp the N-word. Hulsey denies pushing past the couple and using the racial slur.

Advocates call for more training

Flor Bermudez, director of the Oakland-based Transgender Law Center’s Detention Project, confirmed Adachi has requested more training and said, “Usually,” such

sessions feature “a basic transgender 101 that includes myths and stereotypes about what being transgender means,” and review of state and federal laws. “In the particular case of public defenders,” Bermudez said, training also covers the ethical obligations attorneys have to advocate for their clients and to “respect the gender identity of whoever they’re referring to in the courtroom.” Having “leadership from the top down” and making trainings “not just a one-time thing” are important, she said. Bermudez, a lesbian ciswoman, declined to comment specifically on the Hulsey case, explaining that TLC isn’t involved and she doesn’t know enough about what happened. However, she said, her organization hears comments such as Maloof ’s “often, coming from all sides” nationally, including from prosecutors, judges, and officials at parole hearings. Misgendering “could trigger transphobic attitudes and allow for further stigmatizing or harassing behavior,” Bermudez said. Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, was also critical of Maloof ’s remarks. “The defense attorney’s deliberate misgendering of Ms. Hulsey is disrespectful, uninformed and insulting,” Kendell said in an emailed statement. “There is no justification for deploying transphobic comments and it is regrettable that the defense attorney did so in this case.” Rick Zbur, executive director of the LGBT advocacy group Equality California, said in emailed comments, “It’s appalling, though not surprising, that defense attorneys are relying on bias against transgender people as part of their defense strategy. That is why it is so important that we continue our See page 18 >>

Supes eye security needs at SF events by Seth Hemmelgarn

wo San Francisco supervisors this week introduced legislation that would establish a formal process for the city’s festival organizers to arrange for off-duty police officers through the 10B program. Local law allows security at events such as the San Francisco LGBT Pride celebration to be provided by 10B officers. An amendment being sought by Supervisors David Campos and Mark Farrell is meant to help organizers of a variety of festivals avoid “unforeseen costs,” according to Campos’ office. Among other provisions, the legislation, which was introduced Tuesday, December 1, would create an explicit timeline for the application process and for when police have to respond with the number of 10B officers that will be required. The proposal would also create a process for appealing decisions and establish a process for collecting data. At a news conference Tuesday in the Castro district, Campos, who’s gay and was once a city police commissioner, spoke of the need for “striking a balance” between a “thriving” entertainment and nightlife scene and strong public safety measures. Referring to the city’s “unique events,” Campos said, “It’s becoming a lot more expensive for these things to happen in San Francisco.” The District 9 supervisor pointed to the benefits many festivals bring to the city. He referred to a recent

Supervisor David Campos

report from the controller’s office that detailed the amount of money festivals generate for the city. In 2014, for example, total spending at LGBT festivals was $259 million when hotels, restaurants, and local transit were included. Police Chief Greg Suhr said, “Tourism is our number one industry in San Francisco, and a big, big, big piece of that is events.” However, Suhr said, the city is “all over” the place when it comes to arranging for 10B officers, and Campos’ proposal “clearly delineates what the planning process is.” He said the police department doesn’t pay for 10B officers. Instead, they’re “privately paid for.” The amount of security provided at the annual SF Pride celebration was at the heart of a lawsuit a man who was shot at the 2013 festival recently settled with organizers. Trevor Gardner, 25, of Los An-

geles, filed the case last year. Ryan Lapine, his attorney, has suggested that the hundreds of thousands of people who attend the annual party should have to go through metal detectors and have their bags checked. Before the case settled, the level of security that police had recommended to organizers had been expected to be an issue during the trial. After Tuesday’s news conference, SF Pride Executive Director George Ridgely said he didn’t know much about Campos’ proposal. However, Ridgely said, the 10B process is one his organization has been through “for many, many years.” Conversations around how many officers to have “are happening constantly” during planning, he said. “It’s too early for us to say” how security may be different at the 2016 festival, Ridgely said. In a subsequent email, he said, “Our total police costs in 2015 were $34,647.01. This includes both charges for services pursuant to our Temporary Street Closure Permit as well as any additional 10B officers.” Asked whether there’s been discussion of having bag checks and metal detectors at next year’s SF Pride, and whether he would support that, he said, “I would support whatever would make sense for the event and is sustainable for the event. … Things change annually based on the previous year’s experience,” among other factors, and “you need to be open to all ideas when you’re planning.”t

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<< Community News

12 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

LGBT aging

From page 1

The increasing inclusion of LGBT aging research points to the “immeasurable change” Brian de Vries, a gay man who is a professor of gerontology at San Francisco State University, has witnessed over the decades as a member of GSA. He recalled how during a meeting 10 years ago, when the GSA conference was held in San Francisco, someone asked him what LGBT meant. “I think there has been a radical shift. It’s in the lexicon now,” said

de Vries, who helped co-found the Rainbow Research Group. “We have gender-neutral bathrooms now. When I saw that I was really proud.” This year’s meeting, held in late November at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort, marked the first time the GSA confab designated bathrooms as being non-gender specific. Members of the Rainbow Research Group had petitioned GSA leaders to do so at the behest of Brennan-Ing, one of the group’s members. Another first at this year’s gathering was an LGBT poster session highlighted as such in the GSA con-

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ference schedule that grouped together nine research papers focused on aging issues within the LGBT community. It caught members of the Rainbow Research Group off guard, as they were unaware of it prior to the start of the confab. “We flipped out. We were so excited,” said Sara Keary, who earned her Ph.D. in social work at Boston College and is a research consultant at the Fenway Institute looking at the housing needs of LGBT older adults. “Before, such posters would be listed under health or social support, or if the poster was about depression it would be grouped with other posters on depression.” Keary, one of three co-conveners of the Rainbow Research Group, told the B.A.R. that the group now has 70 members, which includes both LGBT people and straight people interested in LGBT aging research. A straight ally herself, Keary said she feels that LGBT-focused research has been gaining greater acknowledgement at the GSA conferences. “Yeah, I think there is more,” said Keary, in terms of posters and sessions about LGBT aging issues. For Molly Ranahan, 28, a lesbian who is studying at the University of Buffalo, it was her second time attending a GSA conference. She is exploring how city planning policies can be used to positively impact the lives of aging LGBT adults. “Going to the Rainbow Research Group was why I came back. Meeting people from these other disciplines pushed me to expand the research I look at as I prepare for my dissertation,” said Ranahan. “It has been a fantastic experience and opened a lot of doors for me.”

Wide array of research topics

Surrogacy • Adoption • Prenuptial Agreements Divorce • Custody • Parentage Disputes

At the LGBT-specific symposium de Vries coordinated, the focus was on research he has helped conduct of gay older men in Canada and a smaller survey of Palm Springs residents. The cohort of men in the study is very similar to gay older men in San Francisco, he said, and in both countries end-of-life care is becoming of increased concern. In focus groups, when asked if they were prepared for the end of their life, most of the men said they had made out wills. But few had thought about who would take care of them just prior to death as their health failed, said de Vries. “People had a hard time getting into that question,” he said. For heterosexual seniors, the answer most likely would be their children or other relatives. Yet for gay men, who didn’t have kids and may have cut ties to their biological family, they far too often do not talk about end-of-life care with their friends.

Jayn Goldsen

Researcher Karen FredriksenGoldsen, Ph.D., is overseeing a national LGBT seniors study.

His research, said de Vries, aims to help gay men develop opportunities where they can talk to one another about their declining health. In most families, he noted, children will sit their parents down and have that discussion. “Gay men don’t have that. This is the limits of the chosen family,” said de Vries. Lesbian researcher Karen I. Fredriksen-Goldsen, Ph.D., a professor and director of the Hartford Center of Excellence at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington, led another of the LGBT-specific symposiums titled “The Cascading Effects of Marginalization and Resilience Over Time: Pathways to Health and Well-Being Among LGBT Older Adults.” Fredriksen-Goldsen is the principal investigator of the National Health, Aging and Sexuality Study: Caring and Aging with Pride over Time, the first national LGBT senior study that the National Institutes of Health first funded in 2009. “We did find that most LGBT people are doing very well. They are aging well and have good health,” Fredriksen-Goldsen told the nearly 40 people who attended the symposium. “We don’t want to stereotype LGBT people by just focusing on problems.” Nonetheless, Fredriksen-Goldsen said they are finding higher rates of disabilities and more mental distress among LGBT seniors, with lesbian and bisexual women more at risk for obesity and cardiovascular disease. The Caring and Aging with Pride project has received funding to conduct a longitudinal study of LGBT seniors and is working with 16 community-based organizations across the country, including San Franciscobased LGBT senior services provider Openhouse, to recruit participants. The study will not only allow the researchers to better track LGBT seniors’ health, well-being and identity issues as they age, noted FredriksenGoldsen, but also allow them a chance to design and test interventions. “It will include a large cohort of people from the Baby Boom Generation and the Silent Generation

Obituaries >> Christopher “Mitch” Mitchell October 1, 1981 - November 21, 2015

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Christopher “Mitch” Mitchell was born October 1, 1981 in Oxnard, California. He passed away on November 21, 2015 at the age of 34. Christopher spent most of his childhood in Oxnard, moving to Long Beach and then to San Francisco. An avid bowler, Mitch garnered a number of high profile championships. He loved music, dancing, cars, traveling and fitness. He had an interest in teaching others to improve their physical well-being, which began his career as a personal trainer. His incredible people skills naturally opened doors for managerial roles in the fitness industry. Mitch celebrated life with enthusiasm and humor. His frequent hugs, illuminating smile and infectious laughter were gifts to many. Christopher is survived by his loving mother, Angela Mitchell of Oxnard, California; his sister Jessica Mitchell; his maternal grandparents, Anglee and Ella Mitchell; paternal grandparents Otis and Nita Brantley; and several loving aunts, uncles and cousins who will be forever blessed by knowing him. The viewing will be held from 3 to 5

p.m. Friday, December 4 at the Neptune Society of Northern California, 1 Loraine Court in San Francisco. A Ventura County memorial service will be forthcoming. Condolences may be sent to 1302 West Hill Street, Oxnard, CA 93033 or by email via InMemoryofMitch@gmail.com.

Raymond Powers March 10, 1940 – November 21, 2015 Raymond “Ray” Powers died peacefully in his home on Castro Street in San Francisco November 21, 2015 of complications from diabetes. Born in the Bronx, New York on March 10, 1940, he loved his old neighborhood and kept in touch with several life-long friends. At age 17, he joined the Navy where he felt fortunate to “see the world.” When stationed at Alameda, California, he decided San Francisco was where he wanted to be, and had lived in his favorite city ever since. In 1977 Ray entered the “Castro Scene” as owner and manager of Welcome Home Restaurant until August of 2007 when he retired. Ray is survived by his life partner, Joe Brooks; his brothers, Jim and Jack, and their wives; and several nieces and nephews. In keeping with Ray’s wishes, there will be no service.

and the Greatest Generation,” said Fredriksen-Goldsen, who two years ago was hired to conduct a special study of LGBT seniors in San Francisco by a city panel tasked with reporting on how to better address their needs. “We will also stratify the sample by race and ethnicity.” Charles Hoy-Ellis, an assistant professor at the College of Social Work at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, presented research findings that counter-intuitively show the message of “come out of the closet” may not be the best approach for LGBT seniors to take in certain settings. “Concealing may sometimes be a socially protective strategy,” he said. “We have talked about being out as being helpful but that may not always be true.” In a brief interview with the B.A.R., Hoy-Ellis explained that being out in certain environments might lead LGBT seniors to feel more isolated. “If you live in an environment that is supportive, then being out in those circumstances may be protective. But in an environment that encourages conformity, being out may have detrimental effects,” he explained. “You might be shunned socially.” University of Washington School of Social Work research scientist Hyun-Jun Kim, director of the Caring and Aging with Pride project, discussed one study looking at how LGBT seniors’ social networks impact their health outcomes. “The more diverse network ties the better the health outcomes,” said Kim, noting that most LGBT seniors do not have family or children they can turn to for assistance as they age. “This may change as more gays and lesbians have children, but older LGBT adults are more likely to not have any children. They heavily rely on friends for support as they age.”

Dearth of LGBT senior data

Boston College student Jie Yang presented a poster on her research into social isolation among older LGBT adults. Based on her findings culled from needs assessments done with 256 residents of North Carolina age 45 and older, Yang reported that the more open seniors are about being LGBT the less social isolation they face, in contrast to Hoy-Ellis’s findings. Yang said the factors that did contribute to the respondents in her study feeling isolated included unemployment, poor mental health, and living alone. And though her findings may have been impacted by the study’s small sample size, Yang concluded that the eight transgender older adults in her study “had higher rates of perceived isolation” compared to their LGB counterparts, with bisexuals appearing “to be the least isolated group.” Yang’s study was one of the nine presentations grouped together under the LGBT-specific poster session. Compared to the nearly 1,500 total posters presented during the course of the five-day gathering, the LGBT poster session seemed rather miniscule, said Yang. “It really is not enough. Hopefully, there will be more going forward,” she said. One of the reasons for the dearth of posters about LGBT aging, Yang suggested, is the lack of data on LGBT seniors. Researchers looking at heterosexual seniors have a wealth of information they can draw on for their papers, noted Yang, while those focused on LGBT seniors have to collect their own data since most surveys do not ask about a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. “In the national data sets, they don’t identify LGBT people,” said Yang, a straight ally who is in her third year of seeking a Ph.D. in social work. “If they did, we could do a lot of analyzing of the data on LGBT seniors.” See page 16 >>

Community News>>

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 13

SF Pride and Facebook to co-host forum on site’s names policy compiled by Matthew S. Bajko

an Francisco Pride officials and Facebook executives are cohosting a community forum Tuesday, December 15 to discuss the company’s much-maligned names policy for its social media platform. The company requires people to use their real names for their profiles on Facebook. But as the Bay Area Reporter has reported, the rules for how people need to identify themselves in their profiles has been fiercely criticized by drag queens, performance artists, and advocates for domestic violence survivors. The company has made some concessions, allowing certain individuals to use their stage names or alternate personas. And last month, Facebook announced it was making it harder for people to flag profiles they believed to be using fake names. Despite those steps, Facebook continues to face criticism over its restrictions on how people can self identify on the site. To further address those concerns, Facebook and the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee are co-hosting an “Authentic Names” community forum. The event aims to bring LGBTQ leaders together with Facebook executives “to discuss updates to the authentic name verification experience and related issues and updates to the system,” according to an emailed invite to the forum. Community members who have been in talks with Facebook about the names policy will also address the recent changes the company has made due to their protests. The invite said the audience would be able to “participate in an open and civil discussion” with the Facebook employees, “particularly through the

Q and A portion of the forum.” A pizza dinner will be served between 6 and 6:45 p.m. The forum will run from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The meeting will be held in the Rainbow Room at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, located at 1800 Market Street. Registration is required and can be done online at https://www. eventbrite.com/e/authentic-namesfacebook-community-forum-tickets-19720812481.

Castro to host menorah lighting

In addition to the neighborhood’s annual Christmas celebrations, the gayborhood will play host to a menorah lighting this year in celebration of Hanukkah. It is the first time in recent memory that such a public event is being held in the Castro to mark the Jewish holiday, which begins Sunday, December 6 and ends the evening of Monday, December 14. The lead organizer of the ceremony is Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, the LGBT synagogue located at the corner of 16th and Dolores Streets. Co-hosted by the Castro/Upper Market Community Benefit District and the Castro Merchants, the neighborhood business association, the event will include greetings, songs of the season and the traditional menorah lighting. Attendees are invited to BYOM – bring their own menorah - to join in. The celebration will begin at 6 p.m. Wednesday, December 9 at Jane Warner Plaza, the public parklet located at 17th, Castro, and Market streets.

Oakland Dem club hosts cinema night

For its quarterly general membership meeting, the East Bay Stonewall Demo9.75 in. cratic Club is hosting an evening event centered on “wine, cheese and thought

Jane Philomen Cleland

Sister Roma of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, left, took part in a protest outside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in June to demand that the company revise its real names policy for users of the social media site.

provoking cinema.” The meeting will take place from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, December 9 at the Sports Basement located at 2727 Milvia Street in Berkeley. Attendees will receive 20 percent off on all purchases that night. The LGBT political club will first hold a reception and then conduct its membership business. The food and film portion of the evening, being presented by Spectrum Queer Media as part of its Film + Conversation Series, will kick off at 6:30 p.m. The films featured will be Blackberri Jams, directed by Monica Anderson and Kin Folkz; My Beautiful Resistance, directed by Penny Baldado; and Living With Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100, director by Yvonne Welbon. There will also be a conversation between Folkz and Blackberri, a longtime gay African American performer who lives in Oakland and uses only one name. To RSVP to the free event online,visit bit.ly/EBStonewallDemsDec2015. Find out more info about Spectrum Queer Media’s film screenings and conversation series at www. SpectrumQueerMedia.com.

Drag queens on ice returns

It has become another one of

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those only-in-San-Francisco Christmas traditions: drag queens taking over the ice rink in Union Square. The sixth annual Drag Queens On Ice, presented by Alaska Airlines, will take place from 8 to 9:30 p.m. Thursday, December 10. Bay Area Reporter society columnist Donna Sachet will serve as the mistress of ceremonies with special guests Queen Dilly Dally and Sister Roma with the drag nun group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. “Imagine being surrounded by the best retail stores in the city, busy holiday shoppers, and sparkling decorations all while gliding across the ice in Union Square in your best seasonal drag outfit,” stated Sachet. “I’m so pleased to return as the hostess and emcee for this popular evening, and remember, I’ll be the drag queen on the MIC, not on the ICE.” Other drag queens expected to show off their “fierce and fa-la-la-laabulous” ice skating moves include Mutha Chuka, Paju Munro, KyliePop, Kim Chi Chi, BeBe Sweetbriar, and Mahlae Balenciaga. The Safeway Holiday Ice Rink in Union Square is presented by Bank of the West. Watching the special drag ice show is free.

Those interested in showing off their own ice moves either before or after the special event can purchase tickets in advance at www. unionsquareicerink.com. The price for adults is $11 and $7 for children eight years old and under. Ice skate and hockey skate rentals are $5. Ice rink hours are from 10 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. daily. A portion of the ticket proceeds benefits the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco and the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department.

LGBT groups can apply for funding opportunity

Applications from smaller LGBT groups are being accepted for the third year of the Funding Queerly Giving Circle. Funded by a group of donors under 40 and launched at Resource Generation’s Making Money Make Change in 2012, the giving circle is partnering with the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice to mobilize financial resources in support of organizing work by and for marginalized LGBT, queer and intersex communities. Especially encouraged to apply are small community organizing groups led by and for communities of color, indigenous communities, low-income communities, and/or rural communities. Last year $180,000 in grants was awarded to 20 different groups from across the country, including the Bay Area-based Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project. The deadline to apply for the next round of funding is Friday, December 11. Those selected will be notified in March. To learn more about the grants and how to submit an application, visit http://www. astraeafoundation.org/whatwe-do/philanthropic-advocacy/ funding-queerly-giving-circle.t

<< International News

14 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Sites harness social media to battle AIDS globally by Heather Cassell

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wo gay social media sites, Hornet and Moovz, are raising awareness and joining the fight against HIV/AIDS globally. To coincide with World AIDS Day, held annually on December 1, Moovz launched its #KissOffHIV campaign, wrote Shae Savin, a publicist for the site, in an email announcing the public effort. On Tuesday, celebrities and supporters in the fight against HIV/ AIDS puckered up with red lipstick, blew a kiss, and took a selfie and posted it with the message “HIV is still an epidemic, help us #KissOffHIV and remember #WorldAIDSDay #Moovz” or “Get Tested, stay informed, #KissOffHIV on #WorldAIDSDay #Moovz.” “Social media is super important when it comes to raising awareness for things like World AIDS Day because you are able to reach such a large amount of people,” said Idan Matalon, the app’s vice president of marketing. “Moovz wanted to create a safe place for people who have questions or concerns about HIV.” Moovz’s app, added Matalon, “will act as a safe haven and information center for HIV positive people as well as a platform to educate the community about the latest developments on safe sex.” Hornet and the Global Forum on MSM and HIV joined forces in a public/private partnership to create the Blue Ribbon Boys campaign. The two organizations announced the launch of the program in a November 24 news release from MSMGF. The Blue Ribbon Boys campaign has a brand new sleek website that is also mobile-friendly and responsive in real-time, making changes based on user feedback. Men can also sign onto a global petition demanding sexual health and treatment services be made available and more accessible, wrote Dr. George Ayala, executive director of MSMGF, in an

email interview. Modernizing The Blue Ribbon Boys the battle against campaign is a longer term HIV/AIDS and more complex proThe response to HIV gram that is in line with the during the past 15 years goal of UNAIDS to fasthas been “extraordinary,” track HIV/AIDS awareaccording to an UNAIDS ness and treatment to end new release November 24. the disease by 2030. The As of June 2015, UNCourtesy of MSMGF program is aimed at reducAIDS estimated that ing HIV/AIDS, according Global Forum 15.8 million people were to the release, through the on MSM & HIV accessing antiretroviral popular global gay male Executive Director therapy, compared to 7.5 social media app and the George Ayala million people five years largest HIV/AIDS earlier and 2.2 million global advocacy network with a decade ago. New HIV infections the largest targeted, global fell by 35 percent since the peak HIV viral suppression camin 2000, estimated UNAIDS at the paign to date. end of 2014. Similarly, AIDS-relatMSMGF’s top three ed deaths have fallen by 42 percent goals for the program, since its peak in 2004. wrote Ayala, are to scaleHowever, gay and bisexual men livup the reach of young ing in low- and middle-income counmen who have sex with tries currently may not have access to men, demand technically basic services. However, smartphones competent and sensitive health serare prevalent and quickly adopted by vices that integrate HIV treatment people under 25 years old, the same and PrEP, and to serve as a model population that is disproportionately for public/private partnerships. affected by and at an increased risk “The partnership offers MSMGF for HIV. Young men under 25 years and Hornet an opportunity to of age comprise more than 40 percent scale-up a more modern message of new HIV infections worldwide, acabout sexual health,” wrote Ayala, cording to UNAIDS. who said that within days of the They are up to 19 times more campaign launch several thousand likely to be infected with HIV - in users had already been reached and spite of being only 4 percent of the blue ribbons had been added to male population - compared to the men’s Hornet profiles. “Blue Ribgeneral population, according to bon Boys frames the message in five the agency. While incidents of HIV questions related to men’s sexual are declining worldwide, new HIV health. It then encourages men to infections among gay and bisexual take action in demanding services men “remains unchanged and is and resources they need to care for increasing in some high-income themselves and their sex partners.” countries, like the United States,” Hornet Founder Sean Howell according to the release. agreed. It is hoped that the Blue Ribbon “Leveraging social technology on Boys campaign will reach more such a massive scale is one of the than 7 million men who have sex ways we will be able to make a big with men around the world directly difference in global health,” Howthrough their smartphones via the ell said in the release. “As a large Hornet app. Since the launch of the social media platform, we can be a campaign they’ve already reached megaphone to the good work that and handed out blue ribbons to MSMGF is doing.” several thousand users, wrote Ayala. Howell was unable to respond to “Mobile technologies represent requests for additional comment by See page 17 >> press time due to traveling.

Trans vacationer files complaint against Royal Caribbean by Heather Cassell

t was supposed to be fun on the high seas on the second annual Transgender Vacations’ Caribbean cruise aboard a Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. ship. That was until one guest alleged she was the recipient of a bartender’s homophobic epithets. Stephanie Land, founder of Transgender Vacations, based in Miami, Florida, on Monday filed a complaint with Royal Caribbean that included the guest’s accusations about the November 8 incident. The vacationer, Sherry Donegan, had also contacted the Transgender Law Center on November 21, they told the Bay Area Reporter. It was the most recent homophobic incident aboard Royal Caribbean. It follows on the heels of a gay man going overboard during one of the company’s cruises allegedly after his husband and he were the recipients of anti-gay epithets from crewmembers two days before Transgender Vacations set sail. Donegan, 44, a bisexual transgender woman from Fresno, was excited about her first-ever cruise and one where she was with other transgender and ally travelers. The group of 18 cruisers with Transgender Vacations set sail November 7 for a sixday cruise aboard Royal Caribbean’s

Brilliance of the Seas ship. However, it wasn’t the cruise of their dreams, especially for Donegan, who on the second night aboard the ship was told by a bartender, “We don’t serve fags here,” she recalled in an interview with the B.A.R. “I said, ‘Oh, you don’t serve fags huh?’” she responded. “I was very surprised, especially coming from a large company as Royal Caribbean.” She immediately left the bar and reported the incident to guest services aboard the ship and to Land. They were told that a guest services representative would look into the incident. Two days later a member of guest services appeared at Donegan’s cabin door and informed her that the employee had been escorted off the ship in Cozumel, Mexico, where the ship called port, the two women said. Land told the B.A.R. that a member of guest services had informed her that the employee had been fired. Donegan, however, wasn’t satisfied. She didn’t believe Royal Caribbean, which last month received a perfect 100 score on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2016 Corporate Equality Index for the second year in a row. “I don’t think that they did anything,” said Donegan, who believes that Royal Caribbean is attempting to cover up crewmembers’ alleged

homophobia, alluding to the November 6 incident involving the gay man who went overboard after being the recipient of alleged anti-gay slurs from cruise staff. “I don’t believe a word that Royal Caribbean is saying.” Royal Caribbean didn’t respond to requests by email and phone for a statement by press time. Two days before Transgender Vacations set sail aboard Royal Caribbean, Bernardo Albaz, also appearing in the media as Bernardo Elbaz, went overboard on a different ship operated by the company. The 35year old gay man was on vacation aboard the Oasis of the Seas ship with his husband, Eric Albaz, when they were the recipients of anti-gay epithets, according to media reports. The couple allegedly had a loud, drunken argument in their cabin following an alleged incident where crewmembers called them “lipstick” at a bar. Crewmembers were called to the couple’s cabin and then they chased an allegedly intoxicated Bernardo out onto the deck where he got onto the other side of the banister. Crewmembers reportedly attempted to rescue Bernardo after he fell over the seventh balcony before falling into the water about 92 miles from the Bahamas. Nearly a month later BerSee page 17 >>

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<< World AIDS Day

16 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

CDC says many more could benefit from PrEP by Liz Highleyman

quarter of gay and bisexual men in the U.S. and a fifth of people who inject drugs could benefit from Truvada pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last week ahead of World AIDS Day. Adding at-risk heterosexual men and women, 1.23 million people may be eligible for PrEP - far higher than the number currently using it. “PrEP isn’t reaching many people who could benefit from it, and many providers remain unaware of its promise,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden during a media briefing held November 24 to announce the findings. “With about 40,000 HIV infections newly diagnosed each year in the U.S., we need to use all available prevention strategies.” The Food and Drug Administration approved Gilead Sciences’ Truvada (tenofovir/emtricitabine) for PrEP in July 2012, and in May 2014 the CDC recommended that people at substantial risk for HIV infection should consider using it. Studies have shown that daily PrEP can reduce the risk of HIV infection by more than 90 percent among gay and bisexual men, and by about 70 percent among injection drug users who use it consistently. The new analysis by Dawn Smith

and colleagues from the CDC looked at data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to estimate the number of adults who are at substantial risk for HIV infection and eligible for Truvada. The study findings were published in the November 27 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. According to the 2014 U.S. Public Health Service’s PrEP clinical practice guideline, those at high risk include HIV-negative sexually active gay and bisexual men who have anal sex without condoms with an HIV-positive partner, a partner whose HIV status is unknown, or multiple sex partners. For people who inject drugs, PrEP is indicated for those who share needles or other drug injection equipment, have recently undergone drug addiction treatment, or are at risk for infection via sex. Heterosexuals at risk include those who do not always use condoms with an HIV-positive partner, a partner of unknown HIV status, partners who inject drugs, or men who have sex with both men and women. The researchers estimated that about one in four sexually active gay and bisexual men (24.7 percent) are at substantial risk for HIV, for a total of 492,000 people. In addition, nearly one in five people who inject drugs (18.5 percent) could benefit, or 115,000 more. A much smaller percentage of

heterosexuals are at high risk - just one in 200, or 0.4 percent - but due to their larger proportion of the population they account for a majority of people who could benefit from PrEP, at 624,000.

Doctors still unaware of PrEP

Although primary care providers are qualified to provide PrEP, an unpublished 2015 survey of U.S. health care providers found that 34 percent had not heard of it, according to the CDC report. While the survey suggests that two-thirds of providers are at least familiar with PrEP, that does not necessarily mean they are comfortable offering it, according to CDC principal deputy director Ann Schuchat. “The bottom line is doctors need more prep about PrEP,” she told reporters. California residents can take advantage of the newly re-launched PleasePrEPMe.org website, which offers an up-to-date directory of local providers who are willing to prescribe PrEP. “While there is increasing demand for PrEP with more and more people asking about it in the community, we need to do a better job to address the supply side of the equation,” HIVE director and PleasePrEPMe founder Shannon Weber told the Bay Area Reporter. “In addition to rapidly connecting PrEP users with welcoming providers, PrEP directories are one way of tracking our progress toward the goal of equitable and universal access to PrEP.”

Improving access to PrEP

It has been hard to get a handle on how many people have used PrEP to date, since no one centrally collects this information. A Gilead survey covering about 40 percent of U.S. pharmacies found that more than 8,500 individuals have been prescribed Truvada for PrEP. But

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SF plan

From page 1

city’s Getting to Zero Consortium gave a progress report on the initiative, which aims to make San Francisco the first U.S. jurisdiction to eliminate new HIV infections, HIVrelated deaths, and HIV stigma and discrimination. “Highlights of this year’s accomplishments include a substantial increase in PrEP uptake, launch of a citywide protocol to ensure immediate access to care and treatment for people newly diagnosed with HIV, and the beginning of a comprehensive program to increase retention in care for everyone living with HIV,” Dr. Susan Buchbinder, director of Bridge HIV at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, told the Bay Area Reporter. “In 2016, we’ll build upon these early successes, with a particular focus on populations in greatest need.” In an update to the SF Health Commission, Buchbinder reported that the number of newly diagnosed HIV infections in the city fell by more than 18 percent, from 371 in 2013 to 302 in 2014 - the lowest since the start of the epidemic. The number of new infections fell in all racial/ethnic groups and only

this does not include peoEugene McCray, direcple receiving PrEP through tor of the CDC’s Division clinical trials, demonstraof HIV/AIDS Prevention projects, public health tion, also highlighted clinics, Medicaid, or nonSan Francisco’s efforts to reporting providers such expand PrEP access. as Kaiser Permanente. “Today, by some estiAltogether, experts esmates, 15 percent of gay timate that the total nummen in San Francisco are Courtesy of the CDC ber of people using PrEP taking PrEP,” he said durin the U.S. may reach at National Center for ing the media briefing. least 25,000. Last week HIV/AIDS, Viral “While we can’t credit this France became the sec- Hepatitis, STD, to PrEP alone, last year ond country to approve and TB Prevention San Francisco reported PrEP. a record low of only 302 Director Jonathan Coordinated efforts Mermin new HIV diagnoses… could substantially inThis type of effort needs crease the number of people with to be replicated nationally, targeting access to PrEP, according to a sepathe people who stand to benefit from rate report. it the most.” Franklin Laufer and colleagues CDC officials stressed that while with the New York State DepartPrEP is a good tool for the right ment of Health looked at changes in people, all prevention strategies PrEP use after the state’s governor, must be used in order to have the Andrew Cuomo, adopted a plan greatest impact, including wideto end the AIDS epidemic in June spread HIV testing, antiretroviral 2014, including an effort to increase treatment that suppresses viral load, PrEP awareness, train providers, use of condoms, and sterile drug inand ensure Medicaid coverage. Apjection equipment. proximately 3,000 new HIV infec“PrEP has the potential to drations occur in New York State each matically reduce new HIV infecyear and about a quarter of state tions, but PrEP only works if paresidents are covered by Medicaid. tients know about it, have access to The researchers found that the it, and take it as prescribed,” Jonanumber of New York residents on than Mermin, director of the CDC’s Medicaid who filled prescriptions National Center for HIV/AIDS, for Truvada PrEP increased by more Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prethan 300 percent, rising from 259 vention, told reporters. “In a highly during July 2012-June 2013 to 1,330 complex HIV prevention landscape, during July 2014-June 2015. PrEP can help fill gaps, but no one While PrEP use “increased subintervention will end the HIV epistantially in the years following demic - we must use all the tools.” state-wide efforts to increase knowlSchuchat acknowledged that aledge of PrEP among potential prethough PrEP can be costly, “it is much scribers and candidates,” the numless expensive to prevent HIV than to ber of people on PrEP “remains low have a lifetime of health care costs.” relative to the number needed to “Science clearly calls out to us treat in order to achieve the goals of that PrEP works,” Mermin added. New York State’s Ending the AIDS “The lives of Americans are too Epidemic initiative,” the study auimportant for us not to get PrEP to thors concluded. people who need it.”t

LGBT aging

From page 12

There have been advances made toward including LGBT seniors in research efforts. This fall, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law legislation that requires several state agencies to begin collecting LGBT data by July 1, 2018. In New York a number of state agencies have already begun to collect such information. And in the federally focused Healthy People 2020 study, “all

Rick Gerharter

Jorge Vieto, along with his Boy Alexei Othenin-Girard holding a leather vest in honor of Daddy Philip, accepted the National AIDS Memorial Grove’s Thom Weyand Unsung Hero Award on behalf of the San Francisco Leather Community during a December 1 ceremony to mark this year’s World AIDS Day.

14 women were newly diagnosed last year. Deaths due to any cause among people with HIV fell by 15 percent during the same period, from 209 to 177.

City plan has three parts

to pre-exposure prophylaxis (better known as PrEP), rapid access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), and retention of HIV-positive people in care. PrEP - use of antiretroviral drugs to prevent HIV from taking hold in the body after exposure - saw the

Getting to Zero relies on a threepronged strategy of expanded access

See page 17 >>

LGBT people will be included,” noted Fredriksen-Goldsen. She told the B.A.R. that she believes the scarcity of data on LGBT seniors will soon be reversed as more federal surveys and statebased agencies move toward asking people about their sexual orientation and gender identity. “All states - and at the federal level – are looking at the importance of having LGBT demographic questions,” said Fredriksen-Goldsen, who advocated on behalf of the recently

signed California LGBT data inclusion bill, which was authored by Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco). “There is a lot of movement to have sexual orientation and gender identity included in state level and federal level data sets.”t This article was written with support from the Journalists in Aging Fellowships, a program of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America, sponsored by The Scan Foundation.

t <<

Community News>>

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 17

Royal Caribbean

her letter of complaint about Royal Caribbean to Transgender Vacations. “I just wish that people would stop discriminating against the LGBT community, especially trans,” said Donegan. “They need to be more educated and open about it.” In response to an email from the B.A.R., the Transgender Law Center

declined to comment citing its confidentiality policy. In the complaint Land filed November 30, obtained by the B.A.R., the travel agent tells Royal Caribbean about the damage the incident did to her young company, because she assures guests that travel partners are vetted for an experience

that is “safe and welcoming onboard,” she wrote. “This promise was not kept and TGV Holidays has been damaged, irreparably, by this incident,” Land concluded in the complaint. She requested a representative of the cruise line contact her to resolve the issue.

“I don’t want to see this happen to anyone else ever again,” said Land, who simply wants Royal Caribbean to make proactive changes regarding LGBT travelers, such as LGBT cultural sensitivity training for its staff. For the time being, Land said she won’t be using Royal Caribbean to host future Transgender Vacations trips. She’s working with Anteros Cruise, a new luxury LGBT cruise line, to charter small ships so guests won’t experience what Donegan and her other 17 guests saw during their trip. Her goal, she said, is to “make sure that everyone will feel comfortable traveling and enjoy life.” Fortunately for Donegan, the incident didn’t completely ruin her vacation. “It was just fun. It was my very first cruise and I loved going in the pool,” she said. “I loved going to the disco bar at night. I loved the shows going on at night. They had a lot of interesting demonstrations on the cruise so it was real fun,” said Donegan, adding that she would travel with Transgender Vacations again.t

Limited available data indicate that a majority of PrEP users are white gay and bisexual men in their mid-30s. Experts have estimated that between 10 and 15 percent of gay men in the city who are eligible for PrEP are currently taking it. In an effort to expand access and to reach out to other groups the consortium has started a “PrEP ambassador” program in which volunteers promote PrEP awareness in their communities. In addition, local agencies have used city funding to hire “navigators” to help people gain access to Truvada and determine how to pay for it. “Our work in San Francisco continues to be a model for how to scale up pre-exposure prophylaxis,” PrEP researcher Dr. Robert Grant from the UCSF Gladstone Institutes told the B.A.R.

way with its RAPID program, which aims to get people diagnosed with HIV on treatment as soon as possible, ideally the same day. Early data from a pilot program at SF General Hospital showed that 90 percent of eligible patients opted to start treatment on the day of their first visit. RAPID participants reached undetectable viral load in 56 days on average - less than half the time it took for those receiving standard care. The Getting to Zero RAPID committee has developed a protocol for accelerated treatment that has been adopted at SF City Clinic and Kaiser Permanente, with a goal of expansion to all public and private providers citywide. “RAPID is all about getting to zero delay in antiretroviral treatment,” RAPID researcher Dr. Christopher Pilcher from UCSF told the B.A.R. But people with HIV must remain in care to get the maximum benefit in terms of improved health and reduced transmission. Retention is the third pillar of the city’s Getting to Zero effort - and it may be the most difficult. Socioeconomic issues are the “Achilles heel of retention,” according to retention committee co-chair Andy Scheer. Many people with HIV who drop out of care are dealing with unstable housing or homelessness, mental health issues, and drug or alcohol use. “San Francisco’s crisis of housing affordability and shortage of mental health and substance use services severely jeopardizes patients attempting to remain in care and be virologically suppressed,” Scheer stressed. “Retention is a monster that requires a huge amount of time and money.”

ed $1.2 million in city funds to Getting to Zero efforts. This includes $300,000 in PrEP funding from the Board of Supervisors requested by gay District 9 Supervisor David Campos; that money is currently making its way through a Request for Proposals process and the DPH is negotiating with top-scoring applicants. In late October the city announced that it received a grant of $500,000 from the MAC AIDS Fund to support retention in care. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded San Francisco $1.9 million over three years for PrEP expansion and another $958,000 to develop ways to identify people who drop out of care and bring them back in. Following a model established in the early years of the epidemic, San Francisco relies on communitybased organizations that can reach the most heavily affected groups, including young gay and bisexual men, communities of color, transgender people, and sex workers. “We don’t believe in doing things top-down here,” said gay District 8 Supervisor Scott Wiener. “The reason San Francisco has had so much success is not because city government says ‘this is what we’re going to do,’ but because of an amazing coalition of community-based advocates.” A number of local agencies, including the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, GLIDE, St. James Infirmary, and API Wellness Center, have received funding to advance the goals of the Getting to Zero strategy. Much of that money will go towards navigators to assist HIVnegative people in accessing and paying for PrEP and to help HIVpositive people get linked to care and stay on treatment.

San Francisco’s position as potentially the first city to end the epidemic was highlighted in several major media stories this year. Mayor Ed Lee joined the Fast-Track Cities Initiative, collaborating with mayors and city governments from more than 50 cities with a high burden of HIV. UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibé visited San Francisco this summer to observe some of its pioneering programs. “Because the city has spent decades focused on meeting the human needs of marginalized communities, Getting to Zero’s focus on the rapid scale-up of proven biomedical interventions is working,” SFAF’s James Loduca said at a World AIDS Day event this week at the White House. “Innovation is fundamental, but innovation alone doesn’t get the job done. Progress also requires compassion, collaboration, and community action.” Even as San Francisco leads the way in HIV prevention and treatment, it is also on the cutting edge of research towards a cure. On November 30 amfAR announced that it had selected UCSF to host a new Institute for HIV Cure Research. The new initiative launched with an initial $20 million grant, which amfAR CEO Kevin Frost said was “a floor, not a ceiling.” “It’s a nice bookend with the Getting to Zero initiative in that San Francisco seeks to be in the lead in ending the epidemic by applying treatment as public health and by fundamental research,” Dr. Paul Volberding, director of UCSF AIDS Research Institute and the new cure institute told the B.A.R. “That’s more or less the story of our response to HIV/AIDS from the beginning - it’s amazing to think of where we were and how far we’ve come.”t

global campaigns, like Blue Ribbon Boys, with global HIV prevention and treatment targets,” wrote Ayala. The UNAIDS report “Focus on location and population: on the FastTrack to end AIDS by 2030” points to innovative community-based programs in more than 50 communities around the world that are reaching more people through innovative approaches to reducing infection rates and treating HIV/AIDS, according to a UNAIDS news release November 24. The global HIV/AIDS organization is using information resourced from its database to map where incidents of HIV/AIDS infections are occurring and where services are needed the most and pairing it with local civil service organizations and community groups. One of the success stories noted in the report was Colectivo Amigos contra el SIDA (CAS), an organization in Guatemala City, the capi-

tal of Guatemala, which provides comprehensive HIV services. The organization has successfully promoted HIV services on popular social media sites and gay dating apps and gone offline targeting outreach activities in popular meeting spaces for gay and bisexual men since 2014. The effort has dramatically increased HIV prevention services by 61 percent and HIV testing by 32 percent, according to the release. As an incentive to participate in the Blue Ribbon Boys campaign, Hornet is giving away a free premium account to new users who sign up throughout December using this link, http://hrnt.it/blueribbonboys. To learn more, visit http://blueribbonboys.org.t

From page 14

nardo’s body still hasn’t been found. The Broward Sheriff ’s Office determined the case was a suicide following a domestic disturbance, but Bernardo’s husband and family, along with their attorney Michael Winkleman, are vehemently denying that assessment. In Donegan’s case, it wasn’t just the incident at the bar that bothered her. She also noticed things like their group being seated at a table in the back of the dining room. “They put us at a table way, way in back of the room like we are little kids not being seen,” said Donegan. Land wasn’t pleased either and spoke with the maitre d’ who, she said, “apologized for the situation” and the situation was corrected. Now home, Donegan would like to see the company partially refund the cost of her cruise due to being discriminated against and humiliated. She contacted the Transgender Law Center about her experience on the cruise in addition to submitting

SF plan

From page 16

most dramatic and highly publicized advances over the past year. Data continued to accumulate confirming the effectiveness of PrEP both in clinical trials and in realworld use. Researchers reported this year that daily PrEP in the English PROUD study and intermittent or “on demand” PrEP in the French Ipergay study both reduced the risk of HIV infection by 86 percent. A trio of PrEP demonstration projects in San Francisco, Miami, and Washington, D.C. found that no one who took PrEP regularly became infected. And no new infections have been seen so far among more than 650 mostly gay and bisexual men who received PrEP at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco. The Food and Drug Administration approved Gilead Sciences Truvada (tenofovir/emtricitabine) for PrEP in 2012, but adoption was initially slow. While there has been an upsurge in the number of people taking PrEP over the last two years, experts agree that it is probably too soon for it to have been a major factor in the decline of new infections in 2014. The consortium’s PrEP committee reported that as of November 2015 a total of 3,854 people in San Francisco were known to be taking PrEP. This includes 1,366 people seen at SF General Hospital, UCSF, the SF Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Kaiser Permanente; 779 seen at SF City Clinic and the SF AIDS Foundation’s Magnet clinic; and 1,709 seen by private doctors and medical groups. But this is an underestimate, as it does not include other community health centers, some large hospitals, and many private providers.

Out in the World

From page 14

an important entry point to engage MSM with information and resources framed smartly, succinctly, and in a manner that engages,” wrote Ayala in an email interview with the Bay Area Reporter. “We encourage men to have the sex they want while being mindful of their options for maximizing their health and the health of their sex partners.” Once users are connected, the app will quiz them on their sexual health. Questions pertain to the individual’s HIV and sexually transmitted infections testing, antiretroviral treatment, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, viral load, disclosure, stigma, condom and lubricant use, and other prevention methods. The app will guide users through the quiz according to their responses. Individuals who are committed to

Courtesy of Transgender Vacations

Sherry Donegan, second from right in the foreground, filed a complaint with Royal Caribbean Cruises alleging that a crew member addressed her using a homophobic slur while on a cruise arranged by Stephanie Land, third from right in the foreground, founder of Transgender Vacations.

Getting and keeping people in care

One factor that likely has had an impact on the recent reduction in new HIV infections and deaths is early antiretroviral treatment. In 2010 San Francisco was the first city to recommend antiretroviral therapy for everyone diagnosed with HIV regardless of CD4 T-cell count. U.S. treatment guidelines adopted the same recommendation in 2012, and the World Health Organization did so this year. Findings from the large START trial reported this year showed that starting treatment soon after diagnosis significantly lowers the risk of illness and death for people with HIV. And final data from the HPTN 052 study confirmed that HIV-positive people on treatment with an undetectable viral load have very low likelihood of transmitting the virus. San Francisco continues to lead the their sexual health and well-being will receive a blue ribbon on their profile photo at the end of the quiz. Men who don’t qualify will be guided to recommendations and resources available in their region to improve and protect their sexual health. Individuals who successfully change their behavior will be able to earn their way to become a Blue Ribbon Boy. “Seldom are sexual health services for MSM technically competent and comprehensive. Nor are they delivered sensitively,” wrote Ayala. “These factors create barriers that must be taken down with the active participation of their intended consumers.” The campaign heads expect that the app will grow and evolve within the coming months, adding new treatment and prevention information as it becomes available locally in different regions.

Funding adds up

To date San Francisco has devot-

Innovation to end AIDS

The Blue Ribbon Boys campaign is exactly the type of program that UNAIDS is touting in its quest to end AIDS by 2030. MSMGF is a longstanding partner of UNAIDS and the campaign, wrote Ayala, is “strongly aligned with” the agency’s accelerated HIV prevention and treatment targets. “We see the campaign as an important opportunity to reach higher numbers of MSM with a sexual health message about the importance of treatment and comprehensive prevention in the global work against HIV,” Ayala wrote, adding that the campaign is only one piece of MSMGF’s work with UNAIDS and other United Nations agencies to “develop an advocacy platform focused on MSM, HIV, and human rights.” “The platform is intended to advise UN agencies on the sexual health needs of MSM worldwide. We will use the platform to align

Got international LGBT news tips? Call or send them to Heather Cassell at 00+1-415-2213541, Skype: heather.cassell, or oitwnews@gmail.com.

18 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

SF schoolchildren

From page 1

a list of 14 names to inscribe. At a family Thanksgiving celebration, Shaffer asked all the guests if they would like him to honor people with AIDS they knew. “I’m really glad I’m able to be part of something” honoring the people whose names he had been given, Shaffer said. Fourth grade teacher Tom Nishimura, on Castro Street supervising several dozen of his Milk students, said the project “dovetailed perfectly” with the AIDS curriculum taught at the school. Nishimura, who is gay, invited a group of people living with HIV to speak to his class. The students “were riveted” when they heard the guests’ stories, he said. At the same time, Nishimura also told the students that his first partner, James Stokely, had died of AIDS. “I told them that we were very young, in our twenties, and this was my first love,” he said. Even though his students are only nine or 10 years old, they “really stepped up” and were “very sympathetic” when they heard the story, recalled Nishimura. Kelly, a longtime volunteer at the Milk school, coordinated the Inscribe event and received assistance in staffing it from the members of Honoring Our Experience, part of the Shanti Project. “There are so many things I love about this event. One is that it’s being created by George, a longterm survivor, as his gift back to the community,” HOE founder Greg Cassin told the Bay Area Reporter.

Political Notebook

From page 7

for D7 supervisor again because D7 residents deserve better representation on issues the homeowner majority district cares about. I will focus on raising my DCCC funds now and then consider the D7 supervisor race in the new year.”

Gay PA congressional candidate visits SF

Local supporters of gay Pennsylvania Democratic state lawmaker Brian Sims are hosting fundraisers

Trans case

From page 10

work to educate the public to further understanding and acceptance of transgender people, so that juries and judges can better understand the bias and discrimination that underlie these types of strategies in the courtroom.” One state law addresses “circumstances where a transgender panic defense is used to reduce murder charges to manslaughter,” Zbur said, so it doesn’t apply in Hulsey’s situation. “However,” he said, “it appears that defense attorneys in this case are similarly using bias against transgender people to achieve a better outcome for their clients. Assembly Bill 1160, which allows a plaintiff or defendant to request that the jury not consider arguments based on gender identity bias and other factors, should give prosecutors some tools in terms of jury instruction.” Alex Bastian, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, was at the arraignment and later said of Maloof ’s comments, “I was shocked.” Attorney Murray Zisholz, who’s representing Westover and who’s also misgendered Hulsey, said outside the courtroom last week that he was “sorry” if his comments “offended anybody,” and that hadn’t been his intent. Zisholz said he didn’t know such remarks were offensive. “I thought I’d been referring

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

“It is poignant that we will concluded his best chance of honor our loved ones lost survival would be to move to the epidemic right in the to San Francisco. Unable to Castro, right in our beloved relocate to California without neighborhood…the neigha job, Kelly, who had been borhood and on the streets employed by Hilton Hotels that we walked together, celfor many years, recalled servebrated together, and where ing Conrad Hilton at a grand we have grieved and mourned opening event. He wrote to losses. the hotel magnate, asking if he “And now it is particularly could help him with a transfer poignant for long-term surto San Francisco. vivors to gather in this place “The phone rang and it was that holds so much meaning Conrad Hilton. The rest of for us,” added Cassin. “That the story is history,” said Kelly, we gather together and call who was prescribed various together the entire community different HIV cocktails and Jane Philomen Cleland - young and old - to honor today takes 18 pills a day. those we loved and lost, to Hero Freemom, left, and Emmajean Brown Over the last three decades honor those still in the fight, stop making sidewalk art in order to pin red Kelly has focused on “getting and also to honor the beauty AIDS awareness ribbons on each other’s shirts involved with the community.” of our community’s response.” during a World AIDS Day event held in San At first, he was informally Another HOE volunteer, Francisco Tuesday, December 1. helping friends who were ill, Patti Radigan, who has been but after a stint volunteerHIV positive for 23 years, was ing with facilitating patient vices were “plentiful,” he said, notimpressed with the openness of the groups, he landed a job with Kaiser ing that the Castro/Upper Market Milk school administration in supPermanente, where he continues to Community Benefit District made porting the Inscribe Project. work part-time. sure the sidewalks were cleaned. Radigan, who lived in Suffolk The Inscribe event had been Starbucks paid for lunch for the stuCounty, New York when her kids scheduled to end at noon but was dents and Cliff ’s Variety bought the were growing up, said she had “lots still going strong at 3 p.m. when Dr. chalk and pails. of difficulty” getting schools there Elizabeth Harrison, a psychiatrist The Inscribe Project comes 37 to offer AIDS education. “And I’m from Sacramento and founder of the years after Kelly first recognized that talking high schools. To have a AIDS support group Hand to Hand, he had symptoms that may have middle school be so enlightened, stumbled upon the event during a been HIV-related. His hunch was well, I guess that’s why I live in San visit to friends in the Castro. confirmed in 1984, when a UniverFrancisco now.” Grabbing some chalk from a pail sity of Texas school physician told The project was supported by on the sidewalk, Harrison inscribed him he had AIDS. dozens of individuals and businessthe names of two friends who died “He said, ‘Stay close to home, es in the Castro, said Kelly, who was several decades ago. you’re going to die,’” Kelly recalled. named the 2008-2009 volunteer of “It was wonderful to find an opInstead, he dropped out of colthe year by the San Francisco Uniportunity to remember my dear lege, packed his bags and moved to fied School District. friends,” she said. “I so appreciate Albuquerque, “so my family didn’t “This isn’t a fundraiser,” he noted, the Castro, the only neighborhood have to watch me decline,” he said. “but our way of giving back.” I can think of where something like After several years of failing health, Donations of materials and serthis would happen.”t Kelly researched HIV drug trials and this week for his congressional campaign. It is part of a West Coast fundraising swing for the up-and-coming politico. Sims is seeking his state’s 2nd congressional district seat centered in Philadelphia. Three years ago he became the first out person elected to his state’s Legislature when he won his House of Representatives seat based in the heart of the liberal city. Beloved within the gay bear community, the bearded Sims is no stranger to tapping into Californians’ wallets. In 2013 he held events in Los Angeles and San Francisco in

search of donations for his statehouse re-election campaign. He is once again looking for support in both cities, with several stops Thursday, December 3 in southern California and then events in San Francisco the following day. He will first be at a private fundraiser in Noe Valley followed by a more public event at 7:30 p.m. Friday hosted by Joe’s Barbershop, at 2150 Market Street. The suggested donation is at least $25 to attend. To purchase a ticket online, visit https://secure.actblue. com/contribute/page/joesbarbersh

op?refcode=facebook. For questions email Raven McShane, a campaign consultant for Sims, at Raven@SummitStrategy. com or call (206) 892-8298.t

to her all the time as Samantha Hulsey,” he said. However, Zisholz again misgendered Hulsey by saying, “He identifies himself as a woman, but he’s a man in a dress.”

wood responded it had been “a few years,” but said she’d have to ask Hulsey to find out exactly how long it had been. “Do you know if Samantha is taking medication to increase her estrogen?” Maloof asked. Hopwood didn’t want to answer, saying, “I believe that would violate Samantha’s medical privacy.” However, she eventually said that she knows Hulsey identifies as transgender, and she’s known that since they’d met at the city’s Trans March. Maloof asked Hopwood about knowing “this is not the first time Samantha has used the transgender community for her own political” status. Conroy sustained McGregor’s objection to the question, and Maloof moved on to other topics. Asked after the hearing about the questions he’d put to Hopwood, Maloof said he needed to establish whether Hulsey’s transgender. “If she’s not transgender, then there’s no hate crime,” Maloof said. He said he’d asked if Hulsey has a penis because Hopwood hadn’t responded to his questioning about whether Hulsey was born male. “On the record today,” Maloof said, there had been “nothing indicating Samantha was transgender until I asked those questions.” Maloof didn’t respond to a follow-up email about why he hadn’t asked specifically in the beginning of the hearing whether Hulsey and Hopwood identify as transgender. Hulsey, who didn’t attend the

arraignment or Wednesday’s session, referred to Maloof ’s line of questioning as “complete bullshit. They should know better than to ask those questions. This is San Francisco,” she said, and such queries wouldn’t result in any progress in Kemp or Westover’s defense. Hopwood was also dismayed. “I think the experience of court proceedings for transgender people is almost abusive in some ways,” she said. She was especially troubled by questions about Hulsey’s “private medical history.” “Their need to be systematic changes about how vulnerable groups have their rights protected in court,” Hopwood said. Keisling, of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said Maloof ’s questions were “just outrageous.” “That is trying to condemn somebody for being trans, and that is just not OK,” she said. “I just can’t imagine how that was relevant, unless he was hoping to prove that [Hulsey] was somehow just inherently fraudulent and defrauding the world because of her identity.” Bermudez said she didn’t know what Maloof was trying to accomplish, but “gender identity should be respected as the self assessment of someone who is saying they identity as such a gender,” and there doesn’t have to be extensive questioning about it. “If a person identifies as X or Y, that should be respected,” Bermudez said.t

Gender again focus at hearing

Maloof used feminine pronouns when referring to Hulsey at a conditional examination Wednesday, November 25, but he asked Hopwood several questions about her and Hulsey’s gender identities and their relationship. When Maloof asked whether Hopwood knew Hulsey was “born a male,” Hopwood said responding in full “would take us half an hour.” After he asked, “Do you know if Samantha was born with a penis?” Hopwood said, “I believe the line of questioning is transphobic,” and she preferred not to answer. As he did several times during the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Blair McGregor objected to Maloof ’s question. But Superior Court Judge Brendan Conroy allowed it, noting that the defendants were facing hate crime allegations “based on some of these very areas.” Hopwood eventually said that Hulsey “was assigned male at birth.” When Maloof asked whether Hopwood had been designated male at birth, as well, she said that she had. He then asked her if she knew how long Hulsey had been transitioning from male to female. Hop-

The Political Notes online column will return Monday, December 7. Keep abreast of the latest LGBT political news by following the Political Notebook on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/politicalnotes. Got a tip on LGBT politics? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 8298836 or e-mail m.bajko@ebar.com.

Legal Notices>> ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551629

In the matter of the application of: AUTUMN CATRICE KENDALL EVANS, 5400 FULTON ST #203, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner AUTUMN CATRICE KENDALL EVANS, is requesting that the name AUTUMN CATRICE KENDALL EVANS, be changed to AUTUMN CATRICE KENDALL WYLDER. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 31st of December 2015 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036762500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HEART OF SAN FRANCISCO AIKIDO; MAINTAINING MOBILITY; 365 VERMONT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ANNE F. SABLOVE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/01/04. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/04/15.

NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036766900

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NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036747400

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NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036765000

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NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551657

In the matter of the application of: BENJAMIN LEE LARD, 236 WEST PORTAL AVE #120, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94127, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner BENJAMIN LEE LARD, is requesting that the name BENJAMIN LEE LARD, be changed to BENJAMIN SERAPHI SIGMA. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 14th of January 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551676

In the matter of the application of: AMY MARSH MACIONIS, 900 FOLSOM ST #701, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner AMY MARSH MACIONIS, is requesting that the name AMY MARSH MACIONIS, be changed to AMY REVERE. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 14th of January 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551682

In the matter of the application of: JOERI NICOLAAS MARIA ELISABETH MICHIELSEN, 302 EUREKA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner JOERI NICOLAAS MARIA ELISABETH MICHIELSEN, is requesting that the name JOERI NICOLAAS MARIA ELISABETH MICHIELSEN, be changed to YURI MICHIELSEN. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514 on the 19th of January 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015

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Legal Notices>> FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036774800

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036765600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: XCEL STUDIOS; BOUTIQUE BON JOUR, 1995 CHESTNUT ST #308, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94123. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SUSAN SCOBIE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/30/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/05/15.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551628

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036774000

NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036775500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BRILLIANTLY STONED JEWELRY, 2229 15TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed DAVID L. HONE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/11/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/13/15.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036770200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: RAY’S SWEET CORN, 601 VAN NESS AVE E315, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed RUSHD ODTALLAH. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/10/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/10/15.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551513

In the matter of the application of: PING CHUNG YU, 1910 31ST AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner PING CHUNG YU, is requesting that the name PING CHUNG YU aka BING CHUNG YU aka JONATHAN PING YU, be changed to JONATHAN PING CHUNG YU. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514 on the 12th of January 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036752300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: METRO APPLIANCE REPAIR, 1920 TURK ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ALEX SLIVNYAK. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/29/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/29/15.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE PETSITTERS; THE PET SITTERS, 1624 YORK ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ELAINE S. PEREDNIA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/01/84. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/13/15.

In the matter of the application of: KIMBERLY ANN STINER-ZERCOE, 5400 FULTON ST #203, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner KIMBERLY ANN STINER-ZERCOE, is requesting that the name KIMBERLY ANN STINER-ZERCOE, be changed to KIMBERLY ANN WYLDER. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 31st of December 2015 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 19

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: POPSONS, 998 MARKET ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed B & M BURGER LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/12/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/12/15.

NOV 19, 26, DEC 03, 10, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036787300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TC CONSTRUCTION, 414 DETROIT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed JUAN CARRENO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/04/14. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/18/15.

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NOV 26, DEC 03, 10, 17, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036791200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: KL CAP; KL CAPITAL PARTNERS, 480 2ND ST #303, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed KL CAPITAL PARTNERS, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/02/09. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/19/15.

NOV 26, DEC 03, 10, 17, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036797300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LANE, 11 MAIDEN LN, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by a joint venture, and is signed RICHARD MA & URI ROGERS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/20/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/20/15.

NOV 26, DEC 03, 10, 17, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036800100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BUBBLE CUP, 1900 CLEMENT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed BUBBLE ENTERTAINMENT LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/23/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/23/15.

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NOV 26, DEC 03, 10, 17, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036788500

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Legal Notices>> ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551664

In the matter of the application of: YU YANG, 2600 18TH ST. #11, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner YU YANG, is requesting that the name YU YANG, be changed to SUSIE YANG. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 14th of January 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

NOV 12, 19, 26, DEC 03, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036799800

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retail land the changing neighborgay debate over y Francisco’s Hall Thursda scape in San land at City ion takes up hood will commiss s planning considered when the city’ ove three businesses appr whether to retailers. ing seek is ula Les Natali to be form bar owner y’s in the Castro gay burger Mar Castro open a Ham space at 531 approval to Patio Cafe n was launched in long vacant chai h of restaurant ugh the Sout Street. The 1972, altho in . cisco 2001 in tered San Fran property, tion was shut Market loca s down from Natali’s t Philz A few door to relocate his 18th Stree ro Cast ts front at 549 Phil Jaber wan into the store a shoe store, and been coffeehouse location had quarters for Street. The paign head tly, the cam Francisco). most recen David Chiu (D-San spin of n Assemblyman , the national chai its third And Soulcycle would like to open t, the Stree s centers, 400 Castro class fitnes Muni location at e the Castro San Francisco building abov s purveyor Diesel. former bank housed jean once that 10 >> station See page

ey recent surv lof LGBT equa muity among may already nicipalities ge in chan ring be spur Berkeley. an Rights The Hum Municipal Campaign x, which Equality Inde cities on a, rated 353 U.S. l laws Kriss gton icipa ged with Sant their mun awarded Worthin e Samaro, mug vities. Castro left, and Mik the festi amd policies, points to gayrs enjoyed dated with n for flock to the while othe been inun 95 out of 100 East Bay city, long know beish hope shoppers hoppers have Cyber Monday sales part merchants season as sales were slugg and le Berkeley. The politics, lost points in ay pletBlack Frid ing but peop ve ent lacks the now-com borhood this Thanksgiv atits progressi eley Police Departm year due to since before day, December 1 to ect. much of the cause the Berk n. the widening proj out Mon lighting in an Kriss took time ed sidewalk en Cleland an LGBT liaiso s to gay Councilm nance al holiday tree Jones, Jane Philom tend the annu people, like Fredrick This was new ored an ordi . e , who auth Castro. Som Worthington liaison position in 2001 City the the establishing surprised to hear that such ng very “I was as not havi gton was reported ted,” Worthin of Berkeley I’m disappoin a position. thai Chakko said. Manager Mat been w S. Bajko Assistant City the position has not cer by Matthe offi that last d the rme confi let in ral years” since popular park ’s gay filled “for seveed. The perSan Franciscoict is to hold it retir t, we don’t have one. there ther Castro distr part “At this poin be evaluating whe ko said. We’ll new look as tion,” Chak son retired. sporting a e imto fill the posi dite the r streetscap city wide a will be a need gton hopes to expe of Reproject the But Worthin ing from the Bay Area ted provement draf r learn in the area. process. Afte position was vacant, he undertook Jane Warner the issue. porter that The redo of ch of 17th address the the cil item to a stret was filled, on a tion a city coun Plaz ford posi the eley’s een Hart “At the time was evidence of Berk ped Street betw felt it this posistreets wrap community The city should fill ay, and Castro t of Wednesd inclusiveness. reads. up the nigh on the eve of address ember 26 tion,” the item ncil item would also ts in kNov en Cleland Day. Wor poin Jane Philom The City Cou Thanksgiving cost Berkeley de genwith that area tro. the in the Cas the other issue – the city doesn’t inclu rimiers repaved red asphalt ner Plaza x -disc inde non -colo Jane War ent the HRC chocolate gates renovated in its employm l workers. new metal ents in the lled s at the elem insta der identity n icipa and disow crosswalk of the mai northeastern y for mun employment alt is one ion of rainb streets. the plaza’s nation polic ic creat ibits asph on d the mim proh But lore to and law 18th tity. ned ies, olate-co California gender iden at Castro and ro Street largely boundary desig uee of the New choc based on intersection t. own nonmarq planalong Cast crimination this in their the historic Theater. on Castro Stree final piece of the $6 re The work r to Halloween, with city s reaffirm and Scrub ro was the can help ensu hers of when citie prio ing projnearby Cast policies, it the plaza The plaza work t sidewalk-widen wrapped up contractor, Ghilotti Brot in time Andrea discrimination “This gives finished look,” said ro Stree pted trafproject con. ners and the million Cast in February and disru ro/Upper e of a t to finish the Moore is that protectio much mor Although sevthen racing tor of the Cast “I love an Darr yl began ss to the hear n. in, sight. direc that acce ncilm seaso Mar n over ect utive Cou the Gay ay shopping correct fit District. be installed and pedestria Aiello, exec of the year. the item to for the holid elements have yet to who will munity Bene fic patterns ness district for most is going to e sponsoring n-elect Lori Droste, pedestriMarket Com I like it because it to coeral decorativ 7 >> t. r.” of the gay busi the increased space for t trees, See page Councilwoma 9, is expected to is a rich colo Castro the pavemen lesbian December In addition ting new stree time and it the be sworn in is the first out ncil. included plan the neighhold up over erac, president of had well. Droste ans, the work historical facts about sponsor as eley City Cou DeDaniel Berg ness association, also luminarof to the Berk ring LGBT installation busi the item hono ts on ues chan vote to be elected plaq Mer ncil will ne plaza. a Casborhood and The City Cou e for the redo tiful,” said Bergerac, prais the on beau y’s Tub NS } 353 cities cember 16. “I think it is co-owner of Mudpupp SECTIO a total of er 12, and THREE HRC rated sed Novemb tro resident h was relea 20 >> { FIRST OF See page survey, whic

Market to the San Francisco Bay Area’s S do debuts most desired demographic audience! er Plaza re n r a W e n a J A

LGBT consumers spend more than their non-LGBT peers online, as well as at brick-and-mortar establishments and more likely to spend money on music and entertainment.* LGBT consumers in the U.S. spent an average of $4,135 at retail establishments in 2014, 7% more omes H t e than non-LGBT consumers, due largely to thefact that they made e w S , omes 10% more visits to retail establishments overHthe course of the year.* The City’s

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Vol. 45 • No. 49 • December 3-9, 2015

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Charming stylist beguiles Seville by Philip Campbell

fter just two years, the San Francisco Opera has already revived Spanish director Emilio Sagi’s clever take on Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). It is a happy start to the holiday season and a second chance for anyone (myself included) who missed the fun before. A large bust of the composer is on prominent display when the audience enters the theatre, so we know from the start that the production means to honor both the composer and his beloved comic masterpiece. See page 23 >>

Lucas Meachem (Figaro) in San Francisco Opera’s The Barber of Seville. Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera

Movies of the mind by Erin Blackwell

guess what I resent most about Hollywood is that it fell from such heights. There is in Hollywood’s Past such grandeur, glamour, vision, incision, and in its Present such choked, bloated, blinkered conformism, not to say institutionalized misogyny and unrelenting publicity for arms manufacturers. When you go waaaaay back to its beginnings, when artists first got their hands on the equipment and experimented with possibilities of light and shadow, you see there are worlds inside the mind worth exploring. Today I’m giving thanks to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for reminding us in stylish ways what was lost but can still be savored. Five feature films at $16 a pop, which includes live and inspired musical accompaniment, await your discernment at the Castro Theatre on a single breakneck Saturday, Dec. 5, starting at 11 a.m. See page 31 >>

Montage of images from A Day of Silents. Courtesy San Francisco Silent Film Festival

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22 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015 2pub-BBB_BAR_111915.pdf

10/16/15

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<< Out There

t Artistic tourism in Washington by Roberto Friedman

week away, in Washington DC for familial holiday obligations, also meant a few happy afternoons spent amidst the bounty of our national art museums. An inveterate museumgoer, Out There can recommend the following exhibitions now on show: Louise Bourgeois: No Exit (through May 15, 2016), at the National Gallery of Art, showcases works exploring Bourgeois’ grounding in surrealism and ties to existentialism. American artist Bourgeois (1911-2010) would no doubt offer a caveat. Although her early work was certainly influenced by surrealism, the artistic movement that championed the creative potential of the subconscious mind, the artist bristled at being labeled. She wrote, “At the mention of surrealism, I cringe. I am not a surrealist.” Per the NGA press kit: “Bourgeois preferred instead to identify herself as an existentialist. She imbibed the writings of the philosophers JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, and often quoted Sartre. She even named one of her sculptures after his 1944 existentialist play No Exit, in which three strangers are forever trapped together in a room. To a great extent, her work addresses existentialist concerns born of a period of war, conflict, and distress: the struggle of choosing to live meaningfully and authentically in an uncertain, hostile, and indifferent universe. While Bourgeois’ illogical spaces, irrational juxtapositions, and distorted anthropomorphic forms might appear surrealist in nature, her subjects testify to her commitment to existential thought.” A small show, but highly recommended. Elaine de Kooning: Portraits (through Jan. 10, 2016) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner, Photographs 1859-1872 (through March 13, 2016) are both showing at the National Portrait Gallery. Gardner’s works are dramatic studies of Civil War battlefields and personnel. De Kooning made paintings and drawings of famous artists and others from her circle, including her husband Willem de Kooning and eternal gay poets Allen Ginsberg

CMY

T H E

F U R W E L L

National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY

M is for Mother (1998), pen and ink with colored pencil and graphite by Louise Bourgeois.

and Frank O’Hara, with his facial features wiped away. Said the artist: “When his face was wiped away, Frank was more there than before.” We’re happy to report that the NPG is on top of LGBT issues. Here’s an item from their press relations department: “Earlier this year, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery installed the portrait of Sylvia Rivera in the Struggle for Justice exhibition. Rivera is the first transgendered person in the museum’s collection. A forerunner in the fight against gender identity discrimination, Ray Rivera rechristened himself as Sylvia as a teenager. When cast out by her family, she worked the dicey Times Square district as a transvestite prostitute. She was there in 1969 at the turning point of the modern LGBT struggle for equal rights, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn violently rebuffed a police raid. Politicized by this experience, Rivera campaigned with the Gay Activist Alliance [GAA] in urging the city to enact a nondiscrimination ordinance. Facing racism and discrimination as a Latina transgender by the mainly white male GAA leadership, she began to work with homeless teenagers, co-founding the group and shelter STAR [Street

Transvestite Action Revolutionaries]. In the 1990s Rivera was embraced as one of the fundamental figures of the LGBT movement. “Puerto Rican photographer and Visual AIDS member Luis Carle took this photograph of Sylvia Rivera at the Saturday rally before New York’s Gay Pride in 2000. Rivera is pictured with her partner Julia Murray, on the right, and by fellow activist Christina Hayworth, on the left. The placard at their feet reads, ‘Respect Trans, People/Men!’ stating Rivera’s lifelong cause of fighting for transgender civil rights. While Rivera became an outcast from the gay rights movement in the late 70s and 80s, she was again embraced in the 1990s as a fundamental figure in the movement. She renewed her activism, speaking widely on the need for transgender people to unite at the forefront of the LGBT community. In 1994 she was a keynote speaker at Gay Pride in New York, and in 2000 she was invited to the Millennium March in Italy, where she was acclaimed as the ‘mother of all gay people.’” We also enjoyed Sotatsu: Making Waves, Japanese masterpieces by 17th-century Japanese artist Tawaraya Sōtatsu (through Jan. 31, 2016) at the Freer/Sackler, the Smithsonian’s See page 23 >>

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Luis Carle, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Sylvia Rivera with Christina Hayworth and Julia Murray, photograph by Luis Carle, gelatin silver print (2000).

Music>>

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 23

Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera

René Barbera (Count Almaviva) in San Francisco Opera’s The Barber of Seville.

Barber of Seville

From page 21

Dancers in flamenco dress enter (Nuria Castejon’s choreography features throughout the show) while others prepare the playing area. They pull the stylized set onto a steeply raked stage. Even before conductor Giuseppe Finzi has ended his sparkling account of the overture, we are primed and ready for a good time in old Seville. Big performances and super vocal pyrotechnics follow, along with some shameless clowning, crafty disguises and visual delights. Vivid pops of color and bright lighting by Gary Marder increasingly enliven Llorenç Corbella’s evocative scenery and Pepa Ojanguren’s attractive costumes. Before the final curtain, not all of the jokes will land, and some stage business will try a little too hard (some entrances and exits are rather strangely made from under the platform), but revival director Roy Rallo has trusted in Sagi’s imaginative concept, and the results are thoroughly entertaining. It doesn’t hurt that the story itself is virtually indestructible, or that several of the arias are immediately recognizable. Rossini knew well how to please all but the grumpiest of listeners, and his gift for melody and endearing silliness is legendary. Music-lovers have enjoyed his famous opera buffa with its tonguetwisting patter, elaborate ensembles and pretty arias for a couple of hundred years. Long enough to make us wonder whether one more Barber is really necessary. A production this fresh and amusing replaces any doubt with a satisfied smile. The SFO premiere of the Sagi staging (co-production with the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre) was double-cast; the brief current limited run has only one singer per role. Many of the 2013 performers are back, perhaps most importantly former SFO Resident Conductor Giuseppe Finzi. He has returned to maintain a wonderful rapport between the crew onstage and the peppy members of the SFO Orchestra. All of the casting is from strength. Right from the get-go a newcomer to the production, current Adler Fellow baritone Edward Nelson, makes an impressive role debut as Fiorello. Other, smaller parts are

Out There

From page 22

Museums of Asian Art; Marvelous Objects – Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York, works by artists including Dali, Arp, Duchamp, Giacometti and Noguchi (through Feb. 15, 2016) at the Hirshhorn; and Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty, photographs by Irving Penn, maker of iconic fashion, portrait and still life images that resonate well beyond the 20th century (through March 20,

essayed winningly by such familiar faces as mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook (treasured for her spot-on comic timing) as a cigarette-addicted Berta, and tenor Efrain Solis (a very busy current Adler Fellow), who makes his role debut as her ardent admirer Ambrogio. Tenor René Barbera as Count Almaviva also has a proven track record at SFO even if he is a new participant in this revival. His Rossinian skills earned him the inclusion of an often-cut aria, “Cessa di più resistere,” in the second act, and it is the ringing highpoint of his fine performance. Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack returns to sing Rosina, the salty senorita with a twinkle in her eye. She is physically alluring, and her clear-cut coloratura is weighted with a pleasantly dark tone. Bass Andrea Silvestrelli as Don Basilio is very funny, using his impressive stage presence and uniquely sonorous voice to great effect. His interaction with others in the ensemble is a constant delight. American baritone Lucas Meachem is Figaro, and his strong voice makes the wily barber a believably charming manipulator. His acting may be a little underwhelming, but he is more than equal to the task, and he proves an excellent foil to the other, more distinctive personalities around him. For outstanding characterization and remarkable vocal stamina one need look no further than Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli’s Doctor Bartolo. An old pro in the best sense, he makes “there’s no fool like an old fool” seem more like a compliment than a criticism. Cavorting with the best of them in the physical comedy, Corbelli still manages to really sing the role. Emilio Sagi (with obvious help from his design team) does pile on some anachronistic visual touches towards the end, but they are not excessive. When the right couple is finally united and they drive away in a vintage steel-blue Jaguar against a backdrop of bursting fireworks, it only underlines the timeless appeal of Rossini’s operatic valentine.t Il Barbiere di Siviglia continues at the War Memorial Opera House Sat., Dec. 5 & Wed., Dec. 9, both at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: go to sfopera. com.

2016) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Finally, the 156-year-old Renwick Gallery, the first American building built as an art museum, has been renovated and reopened. Now the Second Empire beauty by architect James Renwick, Jr. (who also built St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC) is home to Wonder, nine fabulous sitespecific installations by contemporary artists (through May 8 and July 10, 2016). Not to be missed on any upcoming visit to DC.t

ANA GASTEYER

SPENCER DAY

KIM NALLEY

December 4 - 5

December 9 - 10

December 20

For tickets:www.feinsteinsSF.com Feinstein’s | Hotel Nikko San Francisco 222 Mason Street 855-MF-NIKKO | 855-636-4556

<< Theatre

24 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Thespian relationships by Richard Dodds

rt imitates life, which imitates art, which imitates life, which… well, you get the picture. This is the rabbit hole that the prolific Sarah Ruhl descends in the latest of her plays to hit a Bay Area stage. Stage Kiss, seen in New York last year and now at San Francisco Playhouse, is a backstage comedy that has no hesitation in changing styles in the middle of scenes. It may be an out-of-the-blue fantasy rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening,” a lurch into Noises Off-style farce, or a deux ex machina of easy-bake resolution. But its main tone is vaguely realistic as well as somewhat surreal, and along with those tonal detours, it adds up to a generally amusing entertainment. The wobbles come mostly in the second act, which hits some dry patches that land somewhere between comedy and drama, and not terribly interesting as either. But even then, there are laughs and surprises that carry us through to the end.

Stage Kiss suggests a variation on Noel Coward’s Private Lives, particularly the ill-advised Broadway revival starring ex-spouses Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton playing ex-spouses who wind up in adjoining hotel rooms with their new spouses. In Ruhl’s play, former lovers identified only as He and She uneasily realize they have been cast together in a play as former lovers who are drawn together again. And in this case, life imitates art as the co-stars find their passions rekindled despite an acrimonious split years before. The play within a play that stars He and She is a musty tearjerker that flopped on Broadway in 1932, and for reasons never quite explained is considered ripe for revival. Ruhl gets considerable comic mileage out of an awkward audition by the overeager actress for a forlorn director, early rehearsals including an unlikely understudy’s misguided notions of lovemaking, and a scene from the fictional play’s woebegone

opening night, in which the injured leading man makes histrionic uses of his crutches. Both leading players have, in real life, domestic partners, further complicating the onstage-offstage rekindled love affair. She is married to a starchy banker, and they have a sharp-tongued teenage daughter. The actor is in a relationship, he says, “with a schoolteacher, and she’s nice so it probably won’t work out.” All the principals in this love quadrangle converge at the actor’s apartment, a shabby space that inspires the director of the flop revival of the flop play to write his own script for He and She, now officially recoupled, to star in. But the tale of a Brooklyn prostitute and an Irish revolutionary – with a subplot about ophthalmology – proves to be the lovers’ undoing. Carrie Paff is quite delightful as She, a role of many faces, and if Gabriel Marin as He isn’t as consistently vibrant as her co-star, he can hit some comic highs as well. Mark

Jessica Palopoli

Carrie Paff and Gabriel Marin play ex-lovers who find romance rekindled when cast together in a play in Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss at SF Playhouse.

Anderson Phillips knows how to find the laughs in the low-key director who really should be in another line of work. Perhaps the biggest laughs are provoked by Allen Darby, who plays the unlikeliest of pimps in the second play within a play and the out-of-his-comfort-zone understudy in the first play within a play. A solid Michael Gene Sullivan plays the cuckolded (real) husband, and Taylor Iman Jones makes her mark as the perpetually angry teenage daughter. Millie DeBenedet gets her showcase as the actor’s sweetly inane kindergarten-teacher girlfriend.

Stage Kiss is almost always operating on multiple levels that director Susi Damilano skillfully navigates. It seems to be more the case that Ruhl, the playwright, is the one not consistently handling the navigation. But for the most part, this alternating imitation of life and art is an intelligent comedy that is willing to slip on a proverbial banana peel for a laugh or two.t Stage Kiss will run through Jan. 9 at San Francisco Playhouse. Tickets are $20-$120. Call (415) 677-9596 or go to sfplayhouse.org.

Hummable humbug

David Allen

Ebenezer Scrooge (Jason Graae) and Tiny Tim (Michael Grasso) have become good buddies as the new musical Scrooge in Love! takes the title character on another series of Yuletide adventures.

by Richard Dodds

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erry Herman has nothing to do with the new musical Scrooge in Love! at the Eureka Theatre, but his words from three decades ago kept hopping onto the melodies that Broadway veteran Larry Grossman has created for this world premiere 42nd Street Moon production. In accepting the songwriting Tony Award for La Cage aux Folles in 1984, he said his “award forever shatters the myth about musical theater … that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway.” Many saw it as a dig at Stephen Sondheim, whose Sunday in the Park with George was the main competition, but it was also likely that the composer of Hello, Dolly! and Mame was surprised and relieved to be back in the winner’s circle after a string of flops. Yet the “simple, hummable show tune” was not really to replant its flag on Broadway, at least not in ways that were somehow doing so without a broad wink at traditional stylings. But Grossman’s score for Scrooge in Love! is quite happy pursuing the simple, hummable show tune. And while Kellen Blair’s lyrics occasionally acknowledge they are in show-tune land, for the most part the songs earnestly, and successfully,

maintain a largely lost tradition. 42nd Street Moon’s primary mission is to revive seldom-seen Broadway musicals, and that list has included Grossman’s Goodtime Charley and Minnie’s Boys. But occasionally the troupe offers new shows that fit the Moon aesthetic, and Scrooge in Love! slides comfortably into that groove. It’s a sequel to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, taking place one year after Ebenezer Scrooge spent his fateful night with the spirits of Christmases past, present, and future. Now he’s more annoyed than fearful when the ghost of his late partner Jacob Marley makes a return appearance, thinking that his sunny disposition of the past year should free him of any more ectoplasmic visitations. Duane Poole’s book moves merrily along as Scrooge gradually recognizes his deep loneliness beneath the cheery veneer, and three new spirits guide him to finally reunite with the girl who got away many years before. The musical’s creators may be traditionalists, but they also have a sense of contemporary whimsy. The Ghost of Christmas Past, deliciously played by Elise Youssef, is something of a bubblehead chorine who, with piercing emphasis, See page 25 >>

Fine Art>>

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 25

Women’s work A Chanticleer Christmas Welcome the season with Chanticleer's profound and joyful mix of holiday music, from the Renaissance to spirituals and carols

Reiko Fujii

“Knitting Together Community” (detail) by Nancy Arvold, part of A Place of Her Own at SOMArts.

December 12-23

by Sura Wood

o have a place of one’s own is to have a refuge, somewhere safe and secure, a space to create, think, dream, to be oneself and to be free. It can be an actual physical place, either yearned for or retrieved from memory, or a state of mind. It’s a compelling, often loosely construed concept that means different things to different people, and claiming one’s place or retreating to it, particularly for women, can be a radical act. Last year, some Iranian women incurred the wrath of the Islamic Republic by posting photographs of themselves without headscarves on Facebook. Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own” argued that women should have the freedom and enough financial independence to write about their own experiences, rather than being idealized by men in fiction, and “room” in the patriarchal literary tradition for their work. Historically, it has been women’s role to put the needs of others first. Even feminist avatar Gloria Steinem, speaking during a recent book tour, recalled that she didn’t have a home of her own until she was well past the age of 50 because she had long believed a home was something women made for others. A Place of Her Own, a new show at SOMArts’ spacious warehouse at 8th and Brannan Sts., ruminates on the idea in largely metaphoric artworks in a variety of mediums by 20 mostly Asian-American women artists, who range in age from their early 20s to their late 80s. Combining found objects and narrative in paintings, large-scale installations and miniatures, sound sculptures and poetry, the deeply personal works grew out of workshop programs where participants expressed their inner lives, gender and identity issues, family trauma and longings. Sigi Arnejo, a Filipino lesbian and graphic artist, examines her origins and feelings of imperfection, doubt and rejection in “as is,” a sound collage of African drums, and a poster on a fence flapping in the wind that also incorporates visual elements such as hand-written journals suspended on strings and individual pages containing her reflections on taking care of her late mother. For psychologist and teacher Nancy Arvold, who identifies as a single white lesbian, it wasn’t a physical space she was seeking but a spirit of community and belonging. Using scraps of yarn and wood, her piece “Knitting

Scrooge

From page 24

declares her Cupid’s philosophy in “I Love Love.” Will Springhorn Jr. merrily creates a campy Viking as the Ghost of Christmas Present, and an excellent Ryan Drummond plays a wearily wry Jacob Marley. The multi-talented Jason Graae, who guest starred at 42nd Street Moon several years ago in Little Me, returns to play Scrooge in a performance that drives but doesn’t overwhelm the production. Graae

Courtesy of the artist

“Studio Euphoria Under the Big Top” (mixed media) by Maggie Yee, part of A Place of Her Own at SOMArts.

Together Community” evokes a rustic communal landscape, almost primitive in nature, where animals and people toiling at various tasks live in harmony. Queer Filipino-Japanese-American artist Marlene Iyemura taps her Japanese ancestry and the shameful internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government in WWII for her mixed-media assemblage “To All Persons.” Simple but powerful, it consists of a cosmetics suitcase overflowing with small boxes wrapped in brightly colored papers. At first glance they look like birthday-party favors spilling out on a table, but plastered underneath and all around them are ominous notices warning Japanese Americans to report. Manon Bogerd Wada calls on her family history of alcoholism for her affecting, genuinely spooky installation “Thirty Ghosts,” in which a gray straight-backed chair with oddly shortened legs seems to be sinking under its own weight into the earth. It sits below a “chandelier” fashioned from recycled green-glass liquor bottles, dimly lit from within. The theatrical scene, shrouded in black cloth, is something one might stumble upon in a dilapidated, once-grand haunted house. On the more playful side, artist and biologist Irene Wibawa draws on her immigrant background in the creation of a series of teeny tiny worlds inserted into baby jars. In these miniature dioramas, toy figures play their parts in intriguing albeit diminutive scenarios. In one,

a man stands on top of a potato as triumphantly as if he’d just ascended Mt. Everest; in another, a figure seems to be dragging a cage behind it. Magnifying glasses are handy to aid in ferreting out the petite dramas. But the prize for the most whimsical yet concrete vision of a cherished place belongs to Maggie Yee, who constructed “Studio Euphoria Under the Big Top,” an ideal work/ live space that one can actually visit, at least the life-size version of it. The project evolved from the discovery of a discarded doll house she found on the street in Oakland one drizzly evening. It was left moldering in her garage for several years until she transformed it into her dream studio, where she’s free of responsibility, and organic “hassle free, no guilt” food of all kinds, from lobster and crab to cakes and fancy pastries, magically materialize with no preparation. “I can even throw out the cook pans,” she writes on the walls of the place. One enters the 10’ by 10’ installation through heavy purple curtains – it has the feel of a carnival booth – and at the very back of the space, one can peer into the windows of a two-story miniature studio with a fully stocked kitchen and microwave. Able to snack with abandon without the complications of hiring a private chef, the miniature artist, dressed in black, makes art at a work table. We all need a hideaway like this. Where do I sign up?t

is equally skilled at finding both humor and pathos, and his pleasing voice is showcased in two of the score’s best songs, “The Things You Should Have Done” and “A Kitchen Built for 20.” He also has several opportunities to dance lively across the stage in Staci Arriaga’s choreography. On Hector Zavala’s attractive set decorated with oversized replicas of clock gears, director Dyan McBride smoothly moves the production through its many scenes while pianist and musical director Dave

Dobrusky gets a full sound from the three-piece accompaniment. All the ingredients have come happily together, making Scrooge in Love! a genuine reason to smile when holiday cheer always seems just a little more mechanical than the year before. For two hours at least, you can find a bah-humbug-free zone at the Eureka Theatre.t

Through Dec. 11.

Scrooge in Love! will run through Dec. 13 at the Eureka Theatre. Tickets are $25-$75. Call (415) 2558207 or go to 42ndstmoon.org.

DATES & TICKETS:

www.chanticleer.org 415-392-4400

/lgbtsf

Recreated from an original Cliff House postcard c. early 1900s.

Holiday Parties at The Cliff House The Terrace Room Offering sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and historic ambiance, the Terrace Room is a truly unique private event venue for groups up to 120. Private Events Direct 415-666-4027 virginia@cliffhouse.com

The Lands End Room Located in Sutro’s, the Lands End Room is a semi-private space for smaller parties of 15 – 49 with California coastal cuisine and awesome views. Large Parties Direct 415-666-4005 lauraine@cliffhouse.com

Call to Book Your Event! 1090 Point Lobos • San Francisco • 415-386-3330 www.CliffHouse.com

<< Out&About

26 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

O&A

Thu 10

James Graham Dance @ ODC Theater

Out &About

Wintry D warmth by Jim Provenzano

espite the seasonal shift that’s inspired us to haul out the warm scarves and winter pelts, some outstanding dance events include some alluring bare skin, while fun musicals revel in costume buffoonery. Robbie Sweeney

New & Classic Films @ Castro Theatre

Thu 3 10 Percent @ Comcast David Perry’s online & cable interviews with notable local and visiting LGBT people, broadcast through the week. Check for times on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ pages/10-Percent/66629477326 www.ComcastHometown.com

California Honeydrops @ The New Parish, Freight & Salvage The charming New Orleans-style soul-funk band performs two East Bay shows. $20-$25. 9pm. 1743 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. www.thenewparish. com Dec. 4, at F&S, $20-$25. 8pm. 2020 Addison St. www.freightandsalvage.org www.cahoneydrops.com

The Golden Girls @ Victoria Theatre The Christmas Episodes are performed by Heklina, D’Arcy Drollinger and a drag queen/king cast of local talents. $25. Thu-Sat 8pm, Sun 7pm. Thru Dec. 20. 2961 16th St. goldengirlschristmas.eventbrite.com

Dec. 3, 4, & 6: The Sound of Music sing-along, with hosts Laurie Bushman and Sara Moore. ($11-$16). Dec. 5: SF Silent Film Festival 11am9:15pm. (www.silentfilm.org). Dec. 8: Sicario and The Border. Dec. 9: Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of San Francisco. Dec. 10: Nosferatu (Werner Herzog 1979 version) and The Keep. $11-$16. $10-$15. 429 Castro St. www.castrotheatre.com

Rhodessa Jones @ African American Art & Culture Complex The music-theatre-storyteller performs her solo show, Fully Awake, Facing Seventy: Heaven Betta Bea HonkyTonk! With a four-piece band. 8pm. 762 Fulton St. 292-1850. www.culturalodyssey.org

Wed 9

Holiday Concerts @ Davies Symphony Hall Dec. 3, 4, 5, 8pm: Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II. Dec. 5, 2pm: Music for Families. Dec. 6, 11am & 3pm: Deck the Hall with SF Boys Chorus, SF Ballet trainees, and more Christmas fun. Dec. 6, 8pm: Holiday Brass with the SF Symphony. Dec. 7, 8pm: Soperano Deborah Voigt with the SF Girls Chorus. Dec. 9 & 10, 7:30pm: A Classic Christmas with the Symphony. $15-$135. 864-6000. 201 Van Ness Ave. www.sfsymphony.org

Notes of a Native Song @ Curran Theatre Tony Award-winning writer/musician Stew’s homage to James Baldwin, with Heidi Rodewald. Part of the Curran: Under Construction series. $25-$50. Dec. 3-5 8pm, Dec 5 also 2pm. 445 Geary St. www.SFcurran.com

Raw Dance @ Joe Goode Annex The intensely physical dance company performs their acclaimed 2013 work, Mine. $25-$30. Dec 3-5, 8pm; Dec 6, 7pm, Also Dec. 9-13. 401 Alabama St. (800) 838-3006. www.rawdance.org

Fri 4

Fayette Hauser @ SF Public Library Park Branch

Student & Faculty Concerts @ SF Music Conservatory Almost nightly free concerts of piano, strings and vocal repertory. Usually night 7pm or 8pm. 50 Oak St. www.sfcm.edu

Lydia Daniller

Beach Blanket Babylon @ Club Fugazi The musical comedy revue celebrates its 40th year with an ever-changing lineup of political and pop culture icons, all in gigantic wigs. Reg: $25$160. Beer/wine served; cash only; 21+, except where noted. 678 Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd (Green St.). 4214222. beachblanketbabylon.com

Cavalia @ AT&T Park The sweeping horse and acrobatic show returns with the new Odysseo. $44.50$289. Tue-Fri 8pm. Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Jan 10. (866) 999-8111. Embarcadero at AT&T Park. www.cavalia.net

Christmas in Cuba @ Dance Mission Theatre Cuba Caribe and Dance Mission present a sizzling evening of Cuban cabaret, complete with dinner and a show, featuring Alayo Dance Company and guests. $45-$65. Fri & Sat 7:30pm. Sun 6:30pm (No Dec. 6 show). 3316 24th St. (800) 838-3006. www.dancemission.com

Bums, Broads and Broadway @ Z Below

Bay Area premiere of Amy Freed’s dark drama about post-modern megaarchitect Gregor Zubrowski, and design theft. $3-$50. Tue 7pm, Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm & 7pm. Extended thru Dec. 20. 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. (510) 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org

Word for Word theatre company’s Holiday High Jinx shows of dramatised stage readings of classic short stories, this time works by Damon Runyan, Joseph Mitchell and E.B. White. $20-$55. Thru Dec. 24. 470 Florida St. www.zspace.org

Pirates of Penzance @ Arts Passage

A Christmas Carol @ Geary Theatre

Gilbert & Sullivan’s bouyant musical operetta gets an energetic new staging. $25-$65. Tue-Thu-Sat 8pm; Wed & Sun 7pm; Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Dec. 20. Osher Studio, 2055 Center St., Berkeley. www.berkeleyrep.org

American Conservatory Theatre’s annual big-cast big-sets production of Carey Perloff and Paul Walsh’s popular stage adaptation of Dickens’ classic holiday story. Previews; opens Dec. 10. $25-$150. Thru Dec. 27. 415 Geary St. www.act-sf.org

Stage Kiss @ SF Playhouse Gabriel Marin and Carrie Paff star in Sarah Ruhl’s new romantic farce that blends on- and offstage romance between actors. $20-$45. Tue-Thu 7pm, Fri & Sat 8pm, Wed, Sat & Sun at 2pm & 3pm. Thru Jan. 9. 450 Post St. www.sfplayhouse.org

Double bill of queer-identified visually striking dances by EmSpace Dance presents Whether to Weather, a dance play for four men by Erin Mei-Ling Stuart and written by Brian Thorstenson; and Kat Cole and Eric Garcia’s Beckon, which examines the intersection of power, sex and race on the street and in the workplace for men and women. $15-$30. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sun 5pm. Thru Dec. 13. 2840 Mariposa St. www.detourdance.com www.emspacedance.org

If/Then @ Orpheum Theatre

Vernacular Vixens @ Robert Tat Gallery

Inappropriate in All the Right Ways @ The Marsh

Opening reception for Robert E. Jackson’s collection of found photos of women. 5pm-7:30pm. Thru Feb 6. 49 Geary St., Suite 410. www.roberttat.com

Fri 4 Absolutely Fabulous @ Oasis Christian Heppinstall as Patsy, Terry McLaughlin as Edina, plus Katya Smirnoff-Skky, Raya Light and a cast of queens perform scripts from the hit BBC comedy series. $25 ($200 champers front row VIP, sweetie!). 7pm. Also Dec. 5, 8, 9, 20. 298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

The comic actress-singer ( Saturday Night Live, Wicked ) performs music from her cool fun jazz CD, I’m Hip, plus a few holiday tunes. $50-$65. 8pm. Dec. 5 at 7pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.ticketweb.com www.anagasteyerinconcert.com [See feature in BARtab]

The annual juried exhibition of works by several Northern California artists in different media. Thru Dec. 19. 3030 20th St. 863-2141. www.soex.org

Make this holiday seas

Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer- Prize-winning drama about cultural assimilation, Islamic imagery, and a family’s unraveling. $17-$61. Tue, Thu-Sat 8pm. Wed & Sun 7pm. Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Dec. 20. Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison. (510) 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org

Sia Amma’s vibrant music-theatre show about food, with african drumming, singing, dancing and storytelling. $20. Thu-Sat 8pm. Thru Dec. 19. 156 Eddy St. (800) 838-3006. www.superfoodmusical.com

Superfood @ Exit Theatre

Crank @ Southern Exposure

Disgraced @ Berkeley Rep

Idina Menzel, Anthony Rapp and Lachanze star in the national touring company of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Tony-nominated hit Broadway musical about parallel lives, chance and possibilities in contemporary New York City. $40$212. Tue-Sat 8pm. Wed, Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Dec. 6. 1192 Market St. (888) 746-1799. www.shnsf.com ifthenthemusical.com

Ana Gasteyer @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko

Detour/Em Space Dance @ Noh Space

Those naughty puppets and their human pals are back yet again, in the company’s third revival of the Tony Award-winning musical comedy. $30$50. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Jan. 17. 25 Van Ness Ave., lower level. 861-8972. www.nctcsf.org

The Monster-Builder @ Aurora Theatre, Berkeley

Special guest stars

Anna Trebunskaya & Dmitry Chaplin

Detour/Em Space Dance @ Noh Space

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder @ Golden Gate Theatre The touring company of the Tony Award-winning musical comedy about the conniving heir to a family fortune. $45-$212. Tue-Sat 8pm. Wed, Sat, Sun 2pm. Thru Dec. 27. 1 Taylor St. at Market. 551-2050. www.shnsf.com

Avenue Q @ New Conservatory Theatre Center

▼

Ann Randolph’s serio-comic solo show about family loss and death. $20-$100. Saturdays, 5pm. Sun 2pm. Extended thru Dec. 13. 1062 Valencia St. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Jason Mecier @ Magnet The celebrated gay collage artist premieres Man Candy, his latest works: portraits of Magic Mike actors and other celebrities (Burt Reynolds’ nude Cosmo spread!), made of jelly beans and other media. Opening reception 8pm. Thru Dec. 4122 18th St. jasonmecier.com magnetsf.org

The Kid Thing @ New Conservatory Theatre Center The local theatre company presents Sarah Gubbins’ witty play about the problems two lesbian couples face with an impending pregnancy. $25$45. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Dec. 13. 25 Van Ness ave., lower level. www.nctcsf.org

San Francisco Bach Choir @ Calvary Presbyterian Church The candlelight concert includes Bach chorales, early motets and American hymns. $10-$35. 7:30pm. Dec. 6, 4pm. 2515 Fillmore St. sfbach.org

as seen on Dancing With The Stars

ANNA - #1 on list of "Top 10 Hottest Dancing With The Stars Female Pros - past and present" or "Top 10 Hottest DWTS Female Pros - past and present" DMITRY - Emmy nominated for Argentine Tango choreography on "So You Think You Can Dance" “A show that you will never want to end” —Marin Independent Journal "Gloriously varied, stunningly performed and beguilingly sexy: Forever Tango must be seen" —The London Times "The most magniﬁcent, romantic, exciting evening you can ever spend" —KGO Radio “An evening of Sheer Pleasure! Sensual, Elegant and Dazzling! —NY Daily News Take a SELFIE WITH THE STARS: VIP tickets include preferred seating, post show meet & greet and Forever Tango CD.

Dec 20–Jan 1

Special New Year’

415-392-4400 • cityboxoffic Scrooge in Love @ Eureka Theatre Jason Graae stars in 42nd Street Moon Theatre company’s restaging of the almost-forgotten musical comedy loosely based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. $25-$75. Wed & Thu 7pm. Fri 8pm, Sat 6pm. Sun 3pm. Thru Dec. 13. 215 Eureka St. 255-8207. www.42ndstmoon.org

Sat 5 Bright Half Life @ Rueff Room, Strand Theatre Tanya Barfield’s drama about two women whose lives together are interrupted, then brought together through time. $35-$75. Tue 7pm. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sat & Sun 2:30pm. Thru Dec. 6. 1127 Market St. 4418822. www.magictheatre.com

Date Night at Pet Emergency @ The Marsh Berkeley Lisa Rothman’s comic solo show about domestic hell, pet panic and trying to find a date night amid it all. $20$100. Saturdays, 5pm. Extended thru Jan. 23. 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. www.themarsh.org

Fiddler on the Roof @ Hillbarn Theatre, Foster City East Bay production of the Tony Award-winning classic musical about a Jewish family in Czarist Russia. $25-$48. Thru Dec. 20. 1285 Hillsdake Blvd., Foster City. (650) 349-6411. www.hillbarntheatre.org

Krampus Night @ Slim’s Jello Biafra & The Guantanamo School of Medicine headline a night of oldschool punk, with the Arnocorps, The Flshies, Death Hymn No, 9, and DJ Russell Clash. $20-$43 (with dinner). 8pm. 333 11th St. slimspresents.com

Out&About>>

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying @ Marines’ Memorial Theatre

Disney & Dali @ Walt Disney Family Museum

Frank Loesser’s lighthearted 1960s comic musical about climbing the corporate ladder gets restaged by Bay Area Musicals, the new local theatre company. $20-$60. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sat 2pm. Thru Dec. 19. 609 Sutter St. 3402207. www.bamsf.org

New exhibit documenting the unlikely collaborations between Salvador Dali, the Surrealist artist and Walt Disney, the cartoon icon; curated by Ted Nicolaou. Thru Jan. 3. Also, Tomorrowland and other exhibits. 104 Montgomery St, The Presidio. 3456800. www.waltdisney.org

Mipso @ Brick & Mortar The cute Americana string quartet performs. $15-$20. 9pm. 1710 Mission St. www.mipsomusic.com www.brickandmortarmusic.com

The Mousetrap @ Ashby Stage, Berkeley Shotgun Players’ production of Agatha Christie’s British mystery drama (the longest-running show in modern history). Previews; opens Dec. 11. $20-$40. Wed-Syb. Thru Jan. 24. 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. (510) 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org

Jewel City @ de Young Museum Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition; thru Jan. 10. Also, Portals of the Past: Photographs of Willard Worden (thru Feb. 14); Royal Hawaiian Featherwork (thru Feb. 28); Between Life and Death: Robert Motherwell’s Elegies (thru Mar. 6). Other exhibits of modern art as well. Free/$25. Thru Sept. 20 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive. www.famsf.org

son sizzle!

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 27

Garden Railway @ Conservatory of Flowers

Office Space @ YBCA A group exhibit of compelling visual art that visualizes 21st-century labor practices. Also, Won Ju Lim: Raycraft is Dead. Thru Feb. 14. Earth Machines : Exploring the environmental impact of our high-tech world; both thru Dec. 6. $5-$12. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. www.ybca.org

OutLook Video @ Channel 29 The weekly LGBT TV show, with updates on current events. 9:30pm. www.outlookvideo.org

Reverend Horton Heat @ DNA Lounge The king of “psychobilly” music performs with his band. The Bellrays and Lords of Altamont open. $20-$25 and up (VIP packages). 8pm. 375 11th St. www.dnalounge.com

Mon 7 Carl Linkhart @ Glama-Rama Salon The Vault of Broken Dreams, an exhibit of creative unusual paintings from the artist also known as Carl With Records, an early Angel of Light and Sister of Perpetual Indulgence. On view thru Jan. 3. 304 Valencia St. 8614526. www.glamarama.com

Thu 3

New exhibit of floral displays inspired by the centennial anniversary of the 1915 Pan-Pacific World’s Expo, with SF scenes in miniature train and architectural installations with hundreds of dwarf plants. Thru April 10. Also, permanent floral displays, plants for sale, and docent tours. Tue-Sun 10am4pm. $2-$8. Free for SF residents. 100 JFK Drive, Golden Gate Park, 831-2090. www.conservatoryofflowers.org A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder @ Golden Gate Theatre

Joan Marcus

Material of Survival @ Magnet

Reigning Queens @ GLBT History Museum

Artist Grahame Perry’s exhibit of works portraying the longterm struggle of HIV, shown in the new health space, including Every AIDS Obituary, a montage of 100’s of B.A.R. obits. Thru Nov. 470 Castro St. www.j.mp/hiv-survive www.magnetsf.org

New exhibit of 1970s San Francisco drag ball photos by Roz Joseph; with curator Joey Plaster, DJ Irwin Swirnoff. Thru Feb. 2016. Reg, hours Mon, WedSat 11am-6pm. Sun 12pm-5pm. 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

NEAT @ Contemporary Jewish Museum You Know I’m No Good, NEAT: New Experiments in Art and Technology, Chasing Justice (thru Feb 21) , and Hardly Strictly Warren Hellman. Lectures and gallery talks as well. Free (members)-$12. Fri-Tue 11am-5pm, Thu 11am-8pm (closed Wed). 736 Mission St. 655-7800. www.thecjm.org

Tom & Jerry’s Christmas Display @ Church & Sanchez The local gay couple’s annual festive decoration display includes a Santa in attendance. Free. Daily 6pm-10pm. Thru Jan. 1. 3560 21st St. at Church. http://tinyurl.com/mhh98vz

Color of Life @ California Academy of Sciences Exhibits and planetarium shows with various live, interactive and installed exhibits about animals, plants and the earth; new exhibit focuses on vibrantly colored species of octopus, snake fish and other live creatures. Special events each week, with adult nightlife parties many Thursday nights. $20-$35. Mon-Sat 9:30am5pm. Sun 11am-5pm. 55 Music Concourse Drive, Golden Gate Park. 379-8000. www.calacademy.org

Help is on the Way for the Holidays XIV @ Marines Memorial Theatre

10 • HERBST THEATRE

’s Eve Performance Added!

ce.com • forevertango.org SF Gay Men’s Chorus @ Walnut Creek, Santa Rosa East Bay holiday concerts at Dec. 5, 3pm & 7:30pm, Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. Dec. 6, 3pm at Wells Fargo Arts Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. SF concerts at the Nourse Theater Dec 11 & 12; Castro Theatre Dec. 24. $19-$50. www.sfgmc.org

Sun 6 Abrazo, Queer Tango @ Finnish Brotherhood Hall, Berkeley Enjoy weekly same-sex tango dancing and a potluck, with lessons early in the day. $7-$15. 3:30-6:30pm. 1970 Chestnut St., Berkeley. (510) 8455352. www.finnishhall.com

Ezra Furman & The Boyfriends @ Rickshaw Stop Fun electro-pop Illinois singer performs with his band. $12-$14. 8pm. 155 Fell St. ezrafurman.com www.rickshawstop.com

Looking East @ Asian Art Museum Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gosh, and Other Western Artists. Thru Feb. 7. Free (members, kids 12 and under)-$15. Tue-Sun 10am-5pm. 200 Larkin St. www.asianart.org

The 14th annual festive concert and benefit for the Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation includes performances by Martha Wash, Mary Wilson, Steve Grand, Sharon McNight, Jason Brock, Carly Ozard, Shawn Ryan, Jessica Coker, Russ Lorenson and others, plus cast members from the productions of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and The Phantom of the Opera. $50. 6pm silent auction, 7:30pm showtime. After-party with champagne and desserts, $120 and up. 609 Sutter Street. 273-1620. www.helpisontheway.org

Julissa Rodriguez @ Qulture Collective, Oakland Pigment : A Redefinition of Beauty, an exhibit of the artist’s works, at the new multi-use café, gallery, workspace and community center . Reg. hours Mon-Fri 8am-4pm. 1714 Franklin St., Oakland www.qulturecollective.com

Fri 4

Mother’s Milk: A Blues Riff in Three Acts, Wayne Harris’ new solo show set against his Southern Baptist upbringing amid the civil rights struggle. $20-$100. Sun 5pm. Thu 8pm. Thru Dec. 10. 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Wed 9 Alison Saar @ MOAD New exhibit, Bearing, the acclaimed artist’s sculptures of Black women as a centerpiece. Free-$10. Thru April 3. Museum of the African Diaspora, 635 Mission St. www.moadsf.org

Daily and Transcendent @ SF Public Library Dual exhibit of LGBT-themed photos by veteran photographers Jane Philomen Cleland and Rick Gerharter. Jewett Gallery, lower level. 100 Larkin St. Thru Jan. 3. www.sfpl.org

An original member of the The Cockettes discusses her illustrious past, with a film screening. 6:30pm. 1833 Page St. www.sfpl.org

Spencer Day @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko

Fri 4 Idina Menzel in If/Then @ Orpheum Theatre Joan Marcus

Tue 8 The Fall of the House of Usher @ War Memorial Opera House San Francisco Opera’s fascinating double bill of Gordon Getty’s Usher House and Claude Debussy’s La Chute de la Maison Usher, both inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling 1839 short story. $36-$255. Dec. 8-12 (7:30pm), Dec. 13 (2pm). 301 Van Ness Ave. 864-3330. www.sfopera.com

Figures and Interiors @ John Pence Gallery Group exhibit of gorgeous realist and modern impressionist paintings. MonFri 10am-6pm. Sat 10am-5pm. Thru Dec. 19. 750 Post St. 441-1138. www.johnpence.com

Panama Pacific @ Harvey Milk Photo Center

A Place of her Own @ SOMArts Cultural Center

Jason Mecier’s art @ Magnet

Frequent concerts in several forms (instrumental, vocal) by accomplished students and faculty. Free-$18. 50 Oak St. 503-6322. www.sfcm.edu

Fayette Hauser @ SF Public Library Park Branch

Centennial photography exhibit of historic images from the 1915 World Expo. Thru Dec. 23. 50 Scott St. 5549522. harveymilkphotocenter.org

Mother’s Milk @ The Marsh Berkeley

Student & Faculty Concerts @ SF Conservatory of Music

Group exhibit of 30 works and installations by 20 women artists visualizing the dreams and hopes of women. Closing reception Dec 10. Thru Dec. 11. 934 Brannan St. www.somarts.org

The local jazz vocalist-pianist performs songs from his albums Daybreak, and the new Angel City. $40-$55 ($20 food/drink min.). 7pm. Also Dec. 10, 8pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. (866)663-1063. www. spencerday.com www.ticketweb.com

Thu 10 Gay Skate Night @ Church on 8 Wheels LGBT night at the former Sacred Heart Church-turned disco roller skate party space, hosted by John D. Miles, the “Godfather of Skate.” $10. Kids 12 and under $5. Skate rentals $5. 554 Fillmore St at Fell. www. churchof8wheels.com

James Graham Dance Theatre @ ODC Theater The Izzie Award-winning choreogrpaher presents his eveninglength duet, Homeroom, a compelling dance-theatre piece concerned with male relationships, masculinity, and human connection, performed with Sebastian Grubb. $18-$35. Thu-Sat 8pm. Thur Dec. 12. 3153 17th St. www.odcdance.org www.jamesgrahamdancetheatre.com

The Naughty List @ Pianofight A Very Chardonnay Best of Show, a holiday-themed show performed by the all-women comedy sketch theatre group. $20-$30. Thu-Sat 8pm. 144 Taylor St. www.pianofight.com

Unusual Movies @ Oddball Films Weekly screenings of strange and obscure short films. $10. 8pm Also Fridays. 275 Capp St. 558-8117. www.oddballfilm.com

<< Music

28 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Holigay cheer with SFGMC by David-Elijah Nahmod

t’s that most wonderful time of the year, when the venerable San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus ushers in the holiday season. It’s going to be a particularly busy season for Dr. Tim Seelig, the chorus’ conductor and artistic director. Seelig and his singers are promoting the release of a new CD, rehearsing for a short tour of their annual Christmas show Holigays Are Here, and will perform

their annual Christmas Eve concert at the Castro Theatre. The Castro performance is a different program from Holigays Are Here. An upbeat and energetic Seelig chatted with the B.A.R. about his troupe’s various projects. He first spoke about Festive: Four Years of Favorites, a CD now available for sale at the Chorus’ website. “It has been my privilege and joy to conduct SFGMC in four holiday concerts,” Seelig said. “So we decided

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CAST OF “A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE & MURDER”

MARTHA WASH

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JAKE SIMPSON SHARON MCNIGHT SHAWN RYAN RUSS LORENSON CARLY OZARD JESSICA COKER LEA BOURGADE PHANTOM’S LEADING LADIES

CAST OF ‘HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING”

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to take the best of those four years and release them on a new recording. Many of the 19 pieces are easily recognizable as holiday favorites from a wide variety of experiences.” Some of the CD’s selections celebrate holidays other than Christmas. “Included is a beautiful set of variations on the Chanukah song ‘Nerli,’” Seelig said. “‘Auld Lang Syne’ and “New Year’s Carol” both describe post-holiday experiences. There’s also a beautiful mash-up of the secular song ‘The Rose’ with the traditional ‘Lo, How a Rose.’” Seelig added that ‘New Year’s Carol’ was an original work commissioned by the Chorus. “SFGMC does not have a venue to call home,” Seelig pointed out. “The four years represent concerts performed at the Masonic Center, War Memorial Opera House, Davies Symphony Hall and Nourse Theater. It’s not easy to find a concert home to fit 300 men.” Holigays Are Here will be performed at the Nourse Theater on Dec. 11 & 12. Seelig said that he was fond of the funky, atmospheric and historic old theater. “Nourse Theater is indeed a very special place in the hearts of the Chorus,” he said. “It literally opened, after being refurbished, to our world premiere of I Am Harvey Milk. On a personal note, my husband and I were the first same-sex couple to be married in Nourse Theater, so it holds a very special place for me.” Holigays will include original Christmas compositions by Broadway and cabaret composers Ernie Lijoi and Lawrence Rush, and a world premiere by composer Laurie Karpman, set to a text written by author Rebecca Walker. Karpman’s work is about the role that mothers play in our lives. Seelig also promises a fun collection of holiday favorites, and even a little choreography. “To say that Holigays covers a wide gamut of experiences would be an understatement,” Seelig said. “The

John Vajda

San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus artistic director Dr. Tim Seelig.

shopping list for props included 300 tiaras attached to reindeer antlers, 300 baking tins attached to headbands, 300 red top hats with white fur hatbands, three grandma nightgowns, a hazmat suit, and a recycle bin and dancing fruitcake costume. There might be a sugar plum fairy or two, and maybe even a Rockette.” In addition to three performances at the Nourse, Holigays are Here will also perform in Santa Rosa (Wells Fargo Center), Walnut Creek (Lesher Center) and Berkeley (Freight and Salvage). The Chorus will then return to the Castro Theatre for their annual Christmas Eve concert. Home for the Holidays has become an annual Castro tradition, one that began while the community was still reeling from the effects of the AIDS pandemic.

“This is the 25th anniversary of Home for the Holidays,” Seelig explained. “In 1990 the Chorus decided to give a gift to the community by singing on that special night in that special place for the hundreds of men who were too sick to go home, or because they had been thrown out of their own homes. The first performance was so overwhelming for the audience and the singers, it became an instant tradition.” Seelig added that it was always great to see the Castro Theatre packed with “family” on Christmas Eve.t Home for the Holidays offers three Dec. 24 performances at the Castro Theatre: 5, 7 & 9 p.m. ($25-$40). Holigays Are Here plays the Nourse Theater on Fri., Dec. 11, 8 p.m., and Sat., Dec. 12, 2:30 & 8 p.m. ($25$65). Ticket info: sfgmc.org/events.

Staged business by Richard Dodds

he name of a new theater company, Bay Area Musicals, officially gains an exclamation point when abbreviated: BAM! That shout of punctuation is certainly deserved for the ambitious vision of the company’s founder and artistic director, 25-year-old Matthew McCoy, whose passion for the American musical spans the decades in the debut BAM! season. Coming up are productions of Hair and La Cage aux Folles at the Victoria Theatre, but Marines’ Memorial Theatre is the site of the BAM! debut. It’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and if the company hasn’t quite earned an exclamation point for the production itself, there is some exclaiming to do for having got the musical up and running in reasonable fashion. How to Succeed, a Broadway hit in 1961, may seem like an overly familiar chestnut to catch the attention of theatrically savvy audiences, but while it has been twice revived on Broadway in the past 20 years, I have not caught a local production of it in that same amount of time. Yet it all seems comfortably familiar, and McCoy’s production seems content to remount it in generally conventional fashion. That might have been enough with a cast better able to playfully infuse the characters with the personalities that the script suggests. Or if the staging were sharper, the choreography less awkward, and the musical accompaniment more in tune. In 1961, How to Succeed was embraced for its brash but gentle satire of all the nervous businessmen in

Ben Krantz

Kyle Stoner stars as a mischievous corporate climber, and Nicole Frydman and Chloe Condon are his steno-pool cohorts, in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the first production of Bay Area Musicals.

their grey flannel suits trying not to make waves, and the female-only secretaries whose only dream is to someday marry their bosses. It’s like a sanitized version of Mad Men, a safe place where audiences could laugh at cartoon versions of themselves. With a few exceptions, this cast isn’t equipped to punch up the personalities into what librettists Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert intended for the characters, from the mailroom to the executive offices. At the story’s center is a window washer who, armed with a self-help book, sets his sights on the World Wide Wicket Company for his executive ascent. J. Pierpont Finch is a lying, cheating, backstabbing corporate climber, but he’s a lovable lying, cheating,

backstabbing corporate climber. The impish Robert Morse played Finch in the original production, and the subsequent Broadway revivals were vehicles for Matthew Broderick and Daniel Radcliffe. Kyle Stoner is properly cuddly in the role, but he is mild of manner and voice and can too easily blend into the surroundings. As the big boss, Kirk Johnson is competent in a role whose name, J.B. Biggley, indicates more harrumphing superciliousness than we get here. Bud Frump, the boss’ nephew and another character with a signaling name, is the musical’s most comic character, and a miscast Brendon North only hints at its possibilities. Chloe Condon is genial as See page 29 >>

TV>>

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 29

Counting on midseason by Victoria A. Brownworth

he season finales have largely wrapped, with only a few exceptions, and some cliffhangers really left us all “Whut?!” We finally found out who shot Annalise on How to Get Away with Murder, along with other stuff that surprised us. We were left wondering if Shonda Rhimes had left the door open for a trans storyline at the end of the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, or if we read that last scene wrong. And we hope that this isn’t really the end for Olivia and Fitz on Scandal. Some storylines really resonated with current events, especially Mellie’s filibuster over Planned Parenthood funding in Congress, and Jane getting water-boarded on Blindspot. And what about Empire? On the Nov. 25 episode Rosie O’Donnell guested (preview of a recurring role?) as Cookie’s (Taraji P. Henson) former cellmate, Pepper. We wonder if there will be some flashbacks to prison time in the near-future, since Cookie referred to her former cellmates as her “true sisters” (shade to Candace, played by Viveca A. Fox, her blood sister). There was a surprising and tender storyline on CBS’ Code Black involving a patient who comes in with heart failure due to end-stage AIDS. The entire episode was a reminder that AIDS is still happening and that many gay men are still alone with no one to hold their hand as they die. Code Black isn’t our favorite new show, but it’s often good, and this was an especially moving episode, as one of the doctors gets a needle-stick while drawing blood and panics, and the gay man with AIDS talks to him about the old gay days. The show was just picked up for five more episodes, so it’s resonating somewhere. Some TV we wish wasn’t being picked up. A spin-off of the canceled 19 Kids and Counting follows two of the family’s now-married daughters, Jill Dillard and Jessa Seewald. The three-part TLC special Jill and Jessa: Counting On debuts Dec. 13. The subsequent episodes will run Dec. 20 & 27. TLC cancelled 19 Kids and Counting after it was revealed Josh Duggar had molested underage girls, including the two sisters who will star in Jill and Jessa: Counting On. Yes, how creepy is that, really? The three-part series special will focus on their lives after the revelation of the sexual abuse. We’ll be hate-watching. We’ve now entered that amorphous space between the finales of the best shows and the start of the 2016 season. Till your faves return in February, there will be lots of holiday specials, some good, like NBC’s Dec. 3 re-boot of The Wiz starring Queen Latifah and Mary J. Blige, among others; and some notso-good, like Mariah Carey’s off-key Christmas at Rockefeller Center last year, which we hope she does not reprise this year. New shows with big stars the networks want you to focus on, like Telenovela with Eva Longoria (Dec. 7), Shades of Blue with Jennifer Lopez and Ray Liotta (Jan. 7), and the next installment of last spring’s new anthology series American Crime

How to Succeed

From page 28

Rosemary, Finch’s romantic interest, while Nicole Frydman does manage to bring some spark to Smitty, a fellow secretary and Rosemary’s main cohort. Mary Kalita knows how to deliver the vavavoom as Hedy LaRue, an abjectly inept secretary

(Jan. 6) with a boatload of awardwinning actors and an intense gay storyline, will also debut right after New Year’s. The re-boot of the cult classic The X-Files will return to Fox on Jan. 24. Then two of our fave gay shows, ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars and The Fosters, return on Jan. 25. These are all shows you want to watch. Don’t be put off by the mid-mid-season timing. American Crime was one of the best series of the spring 2015 season, earning 10 well-deserved Emmy nominations. Taking a page from the American Horror Story and True Detective playbooks, this anthology series utilizes the same actors, but in different roles and storylines. In season 2, the storyline focuses on issues of sexual identity and same-sex rape, as well as class and race issues. According to ABC promos for the award-winning show, “Issues of sexual orientation and socioeconomic disparity come to a boil when lurid photos of a high school boy, Taylor Blaine (Connor Jessup), are posted on social media following a school party. Circumstances become more complicated when Taylor accuses two players on an elite private high school’s championship basketball team, Kevin LaCroix (Trevor Jackson) and Eric Tanner (Joey Pollari), of drugging, assaulting and then posting the pictures of him online.” Also returning this season are Regina King, who won an Emmy for her role in the series last season, Felicity Huffman and Timothy Hutton (both of whom should also have won Emmys for their performances) and Liv Taylor. The show’s creator, Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave), has proven repeatedly that we need to be behind the camera to be in front of the camera. Ridley, who also executive-produces American Crime, told Variety, “We wanted to take incidents that sometimes in other shows tend to be week-to-week and episodic, and not just use them merely as plot points, but really see how they play out with family, how they have a cascade effect over time, and with the community as well.” Ridley had originally planned for the plot to be about a girl who was sexually assaulted, like the nowinfamous Steubenville rape case, which the plot still mirrors right down to the economic and racial differences between the victim and the perpetrators. Ridley said, “We really thought, if we were going to try to tell a story that is as provocative as it can be, are there other things that we can say? We started looking into cases where there was peer-to-peer sexual assault among men. As difficult as it is for society to deal with it among women, for men, every single issue is magnified.” Referencing the Cosby case, Ridley said it’s difficult for people to believe some men are guilty of rape. “I’ve been doing this a long time, I’ve been in lot of writers’ rooms. This is one of the most emotional rooms I’ve ever been in.” Ridley, who is black, added, “As much as last year really hit me very emotionally, this season hit me very hard. It’s been really tough to deal with.” Expect an who is Biggley’s secret paramour. Unfortunately, she’s at the center of choreographer AeJay Mitchell’s most raggedly performed dance number. Songwriter Frank Loesser, whose efforts are most celebrated among the musical’s creators, has not yet been mentioned. That’s because his songs appear, disappear, and only occasionally make much of a mark.

Courtesy TLC

Jill Duggar Dillard and Jessa Duggar Seewald return to reality TV in Jill and Jessa: Counting On.

emotional and psychological roller coaster that challenges you on many levels. Ridley is that good, and he engages his actors that deeply.

Shades of JLo

We’ve long had a soft spot for Jennifer Lopez. She supports our community (she exec-produces The Fosters) so what’s not to love? We’ll be watching the much-hyped Shades of Blue, in which she stars opposite award-winning veteran actor Ray Liotta. Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson (Rain Man), who also created the gritty Baltimore cop drama Homicide: Life on the Streets, directs Shades of Blue. The show is another baby of Lopez’ Nuyorican Productions and is executive-produced by Ryan Seacrest and Lopez. Lopez plays Harlee Santos, a police detective forced to work undercover for the FBI to probe corruption after she’s been caught in a crime herself. Lt. Matt Wosniak (Liotta) heads the group of tightly knit detectives Santos is forced to spy on. As with other such detectives in other police dramas from The Shield and The Wire to Law & Order: SVU, Wosniak has a tendency to go rogue with extrajudicial actions, leading his cops in the same direction. Santos, a single mother who has to put her kid first, is tasked with exposing her colleagues, working under an increasingly obsessive FBI handler, Agent Stahl (Warren Kole). Wosniak isn’t about to go down without a fight. He’s determined to find the informant and mete out some oldschool street justice. NBC’s new sitcom Telenovela is not meant to be more than a romp, and it achieves that goal. Eva Longoria plays an actress in a telenovela who does not speak Spanish. Hilarity ensues. The series will premiere as an hour-long preview on Dec. 7 following The Voice, then it will settle into its regular time slot on Jan. 4. We saw the preview of this show, and it is really funny. NBC, which owns Telemundo, the primary outlet for telenovelas, is taking a bit of a risk with this show with its all-Latino cast and mucho subtitles. Sad we have to say this, since Latinos are America’s largest minority group and 17% of the population, but white people rule TV. Longoria is very good as Ana Sofia Calderon, the American soap star. She’s fleshier than she was in Desperate Housewives, which adds to her natural sexiness, and she doesn’t have the edge Gabrielle had, which makes her more vulnerable

And certainly not an exclamation mark, which is the heady goal that BAM! has made for itself.t How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying will run through Dec. 19 at Marines’ Memorial Theatre. Tickets are $35-$60. Call 415-340-2207 or go to bamsf.org.

and more likable. Ana Sofia is trying to hit the re-set button on her life, but the fates cast her ex in the show with her, and bad things happen. The cast includes Diana Maria Riva and Jose Moreno Brooks as Sofia’s closeted yet flaming gay co-star. There are repetitive bits, but rather than annoying, these become an inside joke. The scenes with Riva will remind viewers of Lucy and Ethel, but with selfies. There’s lots of slapping, per the telenovela format, as well as huge fans to blow back long hair, and men are always ripping off their shirts to reveal mucho abs. We enjoyed the preview and laughed out loud. We aren’t sure exactly who the audience is for this show as it slaps the hell out of the genre, but it will definitely play to the gays. These mid-mid-season debuts can be dicey, but it would be a shame if this entertaining sitcom failed because of poor timing. There’s nothing but great timing when it comes to Adele. She’s already shattered a bazillion records for her new album 25, and has been doing the talk-show circuit. She was great on SNL on Nov. 21 with host Matthew McConaughey. And her Nov. 24 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon was terrific musically. Adele is a fab person who laughs a lot. On Dec. 14 the hourlong Adele Live in New York City will air on NBC in The Voice slot. The concert from Radio City Music Hall was taped on Nov. 17, an NBC production exec-produced by SNL’s Lorne Michaels. The next presidential debates are this month. The Republicans meet in Nevada on CNN Dec. 15, and the Democrats debate Dec. 19 in Manchester, NH on ABC. It’s also apparently mass-shooting season, although really, when is it not in America? According to FBI stats in The Washington Post

(Nov. 28), there have been 366 mass shootings thus far this year. Major news stories involving guns highlighted the problem. The release of a searing video of Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by police as he walked away from police shocked the nation on Nov. 24, as did the Black Friday terrorist attack on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. The way these two events were reported by every network was appalling. The McDonald shooting actually happened in October 2014, but the video wasn’t released until last week when Jason Van Dyke was formally charged with murder in McDonald’s death. The video is chilling, just the latest in a series of extrajudicial killings of mostly black men and women by police. Van Dyke has a long history of racial and violence complaints (more than 20), which should raise questions about why violent cops are kept on police forces. Another question is why news media feel compelled to have the “other side” on these stories. What’s the “other side” to a teenager being shot in the back 16 times? The attack on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs strikes even closer to home, since Planned Parenthood services impact women and gay men most. In many areas of the U.S., Planned Parenthood is the only place for HIV and other STI screening. The attack, which mainstream media couldn’t call terrorism but which PP did, killed three and wounded nine. One police officer was killed and four others wounded, yet none of the GOP presidential candidates spoke out against the terrorism. Yet all the GOP candidates attacked PP in their debates. The link between attacks on women and attacks on LGBT people can’t be stressed enough. On Nov. 25, two days before the PP attack, Marco Rubio made statements that could easily be viewed as provocation. In a TV interview with David Brody of the popular Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) show The Brody File, Rubio said that the Supreme Court’s rulings on marriage equality and abortion rights in the Obergefell and Roe decisions, respectively, are “not settled law.” Rubio told Brody that states should “do everything possible within the constraints placed upon us” to restrict all abortion rights. He said government officials should “ignore” Supreme Court rulings if they believe they conflict with “God’s rules,” like Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, or, perhaps, the Colorado Springs shooter. Rubio said, “We are clearly called, See page 31 >>

<< Film

30 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Raised as a man, ruled as a queen by David Lamble

Were there paintings of her? Yes, but every painting was different, she was changing all the time. Sometimes she was very ladylike and blonde, and sometimes she was very masculine and dark.

potent new history lesson about a queen who found female lovers from the ranks of her ladies-in-waiting may send many LGBT filmgoers heading for the big screen. The Girl King, a new film about a powerful, long-ago Swedish female monarch, shows how political lessons learned when the idea of the United States was little more than a pipe dream have come full circle. Finland-born director Mika Kaurismaki has fashioned a provocative historical drama about a young woman raised as a man after the battlefield death of her father. Kaurismaki attempts the Herculean task of updating a movie legend with his English-language depiction of the 17th-century Swedish queen who shakes her snowbound kingdom to its foundations before she’s deposed by a male cabal. Malin Buska is the headstrong Queen Kristina, with Sarah Gadon as her young lady-in-waiting and sometime bedmate the Countess Ebba Sparre. Michael Nyqvist is the bad guy Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, whose task it is to break up the women’s strictly taboo bond for reasons of state. The film is a powerful lesson in what it must have been like to be simultaneously the queen of your people and a sexual outlaw, at a time when neither the Pope nor his Protestant enemies regarded queers with any fondness. This well-produced history is no replacement for Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 early talkie classic Queen Christina, with Silver Screen icons Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. But the challenges facing the makers of this sublime historical drama came up in my conversations with the film’s lead, Malin Buska, and director Mika Kaurismaki. Malin Buska bears the middle name Kiristina. Her character is a woman who doesn’t show up in American history lessons, but was a figure who made important decisions for Sweden in the 1600s when

The way she lived and all her changes sound like LGBT people today, transsexuals, bisexuals. Today we’re living in identity boxes, because it’s easier. But if we could do what we wanted, maybe we’d dress differently, and love who we want to love. Director Mika Kaurismaki: I remember going to school in Finland and the teacher telling us about Kristina. In the 17th century, Sweden and Finland were one country, so she was also Finland’s queen.

Wolfe Releasing

Malin Buska and Sarah Gadon star in director Mika Kaurismaki’s The Girl King.

the country was still a major player on the European stage, competing for territory and influence with the Russians under the Czars. Malin Buska: My character was crowned when she was six years old. David Lamble: She ruled for 21 years, and then she abdicated? Until she was 28. She abdicated and converted to Catholicism. At a time when that was an extremely controversial thing to do. She was controversial in many ways. She did the opposite of what she was supposed to do. She was interested in being a free spirit, to love who she wanted to love, to read and educate herself, and experience life with a free will. Her father died in battle. She succeeded him as if she were a prince, heir to the throne of Sweden. And they raised her as a prince.

“Today we’re living in identity boxes, because it’s easier. But if we could do what we wanted, maybe we’d dress differently, and love who we want to love.” –Malin Buska When she was born, her voice was very deep and her body was covered in hair, so they thought she was a boy. She had both male and female lovers. Have you seen the Greta Garbo version? Yes, and I really admire her work. I believe she wanted to do a very

different kind of film. Where did you film it? In a small town called Tarku, in a castle from the 1600s. Queen Kristina lived there for a time. I lived in a wooden house in Finland during the shoot. It helped me think about how hard it must have been for her to be a free spirit. That’s hard even today.

Rise & fall of a white blues artist by David Lamble

arely does a documentary hit that sweet spot in American pop culture that transcends race, class, gender, and orientation, where it becomes must-viewing for anyone with the price of a first-run movie ticket. Such a doc is Amy Berg’s shockingly intimate Janis: Little Girl Blue, opening Friday at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater. It lets the Port Arthur, Texas-born white blues mama Janis Joplin play herself to the hilt. It appropriates fiction-film storytelling tricks to show in three acts how a “plain Jane”-appearing East Texas lass raised in the brownair environs of Port Arthur could seduce the bejesus out of blues fans, black and white, from Austin to San Francisco to Woodstock and beyond. Writer-director Berg (Oscarnominated for her searing portrait of a child-abusing Catholic priest, 2006’s Deliver Us from Evil), narrator Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) and Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy award-winning producer Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) combine forces to plot the insane highs and lows of Joplin’s shooting-star impact on the American pop, rock and blues worlds. She released only four albums during her lifetime, an output that has quadrupled in the more than four decades since Joplin was found dead from a drug overdose in a shabby Hollywood motel room on Oct. 4, 1970. The makers of Janis: Little Girl

Blue adroitly avoid the pitfalls, the larger than-life cliches that often attach themselves to any film biography about a genius-level artist who dies from an overdose. Thus the movie does not overstay its welcome or forget why we care about its subject, the way Clint Eastwood’s 160-minute Bird did so disastrously in its depiction of the rise and fall of legendary jazz great Charlie Parker. The same intuitive balance applies to the other big issues in Joplin’s saga: her freewheeling sexual hookups with men and women, her poor self-image due to high school bullying, and the virtual impossibility of assessing her huge contributions to the music business. What we do know is that demand for her records has never slackened over the years, producing a score of “live” performance discs to supplement the quartet she cut with her two all-male bands. As the movie makes clear, Joplin was blessed and cursed with a slew of attractive male and female musical and bed partners. How many of us could have held up under the pressure of way too much too soon, balanced by the well-documented knowledge that this littlegirl-blue only felt truly loved in her nightly hour or so onstage? The musical side of this 105-minute musical biography is so abundant that everyone’s going to have their special fave cuts. The soundtrack album should be essential in the libraries of every hip blues/rock aficionado. For me, Joplin’s ferocious vocal attack on “Cry

Getty Images, Jan Persson, contributor; courtesy Film Rise

Janis Joplin, smoking a cigarette in Denmark, from Janis: Little Girl Blue.

Baby” (written by Norman Meade and Bert Russell), backed by her Full Tilt Boogie Band, provides the essence of her appeal: “ballsy chick” bad complexion, full-body engagement, complete with kicks and hips swinging. The picture leaves the paradoxical impression of a strong woman all alone at the pinnacle of show-biz fame, but only as long as the spotlight caught her in its annihilating, withering heat. Janis Joplin was the comet

sensation of my generation. I caught her act at Woodstock and at Madison Square Garden. Everything she did contributed to our experience of how fast the good times could sour, turn deadly. Around the time of Joplin’s overdose I received the gift of a potent recreational drug from a fellow newscaster at Houston’s then-freewheeling album-oriented rock station. I remember the drug kicking in, leaving me in a scary, paralyzing trance for several hours

Did the Greta Garbo film play any part in your thinking? I had seen the Garbo film many times, but I tried to put it out of my thinking. Garbo wanted to do a different kind of movie, with a female love story, but Hollywood wasn’t ready for that in the early 1930s. Remember, when Kristina was born they thought she was a boy. The king was very happy because they were trying to have a boy but there were a number of miscarriages. Then they discovered she was a girl, but they said, “We’ll raise you as a boy.” The Pope is enjoying very good PR right now, but in the 17th century the Pope was an absolute monarch and harsh ruler. There was a revolt against Papal authority in the Lutheran countries. When she converted to Catholicism there was quite a revolt, because she was seen as a traitor. From my research you could make many different films, but we decided to focus on the 10-year period from when she was crowned until she abdicated. Among other things, she ended the 30 Years War. Many people today think this was the beginning of the European Union.t

until I finally came down. I celebrated my survival with a heaping plate of Texas-style fried chicken. Janis Joplin’s story is truly a generation’s cautionary tale. The chat continues about a fictionalized version. The Internet Movie Data Base currently has a poll of its users asking who should play Janis. Scanning the latest results, I suspect the result will point to a dual casting: a woman who looks like Joplin onscreen, with a performer who can bring it musically. Perhaps Pink? I hope the filmmakers will avoid the traps that ensnared the creators of The Rose, the 1979 Joplin bio-pic that marked the screen debut of the divine Bette Midler. The hoped-for Joplin fiction film will test the taste and pocketbooks of Hollywood’s best. Meanwhile Amy Berg’s Janis: Little Girl Blue whets your appetite for America’s greatest white blues artist, the subject of one of the LGBT community’s most perplexing unfinished stories. One of the most exasperating problems Joplin faced, which had such a hideous impact on her self-image, was the fact that her onstage charisma didn’t translate into a conventional offstage beauty. It’s the kind of dilemma that, in the so-called “golden age of radio” (roughly 1930-50), made stars of performers who were blessed with great voices but not comparable physical beauty. Looks can produce the rock-solid selfconfidence that Joplin so tragically lacked.t

t <<

Film>>

Silent films

From page 21

There is no love or tragedy like that between older woman and younger man. Whether it’s Christ crucified with Mary prostrate with grief, or further back, Phaedra selfincinerating with passion for her gay stepson, or further forward, worldly wise Léa spoiling her indolent Chéri. No, they need not be related but that adds spice, as in Oedipus and Jocasta, and serves as the basis for any culture worth having. It’s out of fashion now, but was the height of chic for Edwardians, and is preserved in one of the world’s most mind-blowing films, screening Saturday at 6:30 p.m. L’Inhumaine (1924), which just happens to be the year of my mother’s birth, is a French film, to put it mildly. That final “e” renders the substantive feminine. The Inhuman Feminine is how the title should be translated, since we’re dealing not with an individual but an abstraction, icon, or archetype as old as prehistory. The woman who says

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 31

“No” and means it, the Princess of Cléves, the woman who decides her own destiny doesn’t include you, Lady Macbeth having cut off the access and passage to remorse, Aileen Wuornos, even Marie-Antoinette letting them eat cake. I seem to be contradicting myself? Yes. The diva in love who says “No.” L’Inhumaine is narrative, but no, it’s not linear but kaleidoscopic, film hallucinating film as a psychic emanation of aesthetic-frenetic, psychotic-erotic, ecstatic-erratic poses and impostures, furs and feathers, distractions and distress acted out as nonstop trembling and hyperventilating on the razor’s edge

of sacrifice to the aesthetic gods. Above all, eyes as organs which emit light. L’Inhumaine is best enjoyed with a true champagne, if you can get it chilled into the Castro, or an equally valid Perrier, whose revivifying bubbles and dose of magnesium will bolster your nerves for a nonstop thrill-ride-cum-metaphysicalinitiation into the mysteries of love and death. L’Inhumaine is a hard act to follow, but at 9:15 p.m. you can fall off your ephemeral Parisian perch and plop into Piccadilly (1929), a downto-earth melodramatic masterpiece focusing on the eternal backstage triangle. An impeccably groomed

older man in a tux serves as pivot point to the rivalry of two dancehall sirens, one fading and one new. Anna May Wong was 24 and Gilda Gray 28 when the film opened, but Gray’s trademark shimmy fades when compared to Wong’s sinuous, suggestive wiggling in exotic-erotic garb, at least in the eyes that matter, those of the impresario, played by Jameson Thomas as a brooding Warner Baxter capable of Ronald Coleman’s restraint. Narrative is a place for director Ewald André Dupont to plant his cinematographer Werner Brandes, who films Wong with a lover’s attention to every flicker of emotion

on her facial landscape. Wong is one of those rarities who repay such scrutiny, like Louise Brooks or Marlene Dietrich, a purely cinematic phenomenon. Dupont follows the smitten showman into the sordid haunts of Limehouse, and Brandes transforms beer hall and boudoir into opium dreams. In The Shanghai Express (1932) Dietrich would meet Wong under Von Sternberg’s lens for the epiphany of this film school. Storywise, there is a fourth angle to the triangle, the Chinese boyfriend, enacted by King Hou Chang as passion’s plaything, and the whole thing ends in ennobling tragedy.t

Lavender Tube

From page 29

in the Bible, to adhere to our civil authorities, but that also conflicts with a requirement to adhere to God’s rules. When those two come in conflict, God’s rules always win. If we are ever ordered by a government authority to violate God’s law and sin, if we’re ordered to perform a same-sex marriage, we are called to ignore that. We cannot abide by that because government is compelling us to sin.” Rubio previously told Iowa TV station KCCI that Planned Parenthood “incentivizes” women to have abortions. Referencing the investigation into whether the agency sells fetal tissue to laboratories for profit (it does not), Rubio asserted, “Now what you’ve done is created an incentive for people to be pushed into abortions so that those tissues can be harvested and sold for a profit.” Well, no, but reporters and pundits are not challenging these candidates on their outright lies, whether it’s Trump saying he personally witnessed thousands of Muslims in New Jersey having tailgate parties on 9/11, to Carson saying the pyramids were grain silos, to Fiorina’s assertion that she saw a beating heart of a living baby cut out to be used for fetaltissue research in a video. All these things are false. You know, lies. Now we have another mass shooting that may have been fueled by this inflammatory rhetoric. Certainly Planned Parenthood thinks so. On NBC’s Today the morning after the attack, Planned Parenthood executive VP Dawn Lageuns was succinct. The issue wasn’t PP and the 2.7 million women and men for whom the agency provided medical services in 2015, but gun violence in America. Lageuns asked the question so many of us have been asking for a very long time: Why are men allowed to go to movie theaters, schools, pretty much anywhere with guns? Lageuns also said the “violent rhetoric” about Planned Parenthood in specific and abortion in general had created “a poisonous environment that fuels domestic terrorism.” The inflammatory rhetoric of the right, especially from some GOP candidates, has created a volatile atmosphere for violence against women, against LGBT people, against Muslims. When CNN and the other networks parrot the incendiary comments by these candidates without taking them to task, they give them permission to continue that rhetorical flourish. Now there are three people dead. So for the middle of the middle, the soaring voices of holidays past and present, and the latest on America’s devolution into chaos, you know you really must stay tuned.t

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December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 35

Holiday Harmonies

From page 33

Which songs are the performers’ favorites? To find out, with help of event publicist Lawrence Helman, my messages to several of this year’s gifted performers came back like a stocking full of quotes and quips. Legendary talents Mary Wilson (The Supremes) and Sharon McNight join new stars like Steve Grand, Jason Brock and more than a dozen others in a concert of uplifting and winsome holiday-themed songs on December 7 at the Marines Memorial Theatre. Virtuoso violinist Lea Bourgade will also perform. Along with a bevy of solo singers, cast members from the touring productions of A Gentlema’s Guide to Love & Murder and the local staging of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying will perform, along with a trio of Broadway’s “Christines” from The Phantom of the Opera. And as usual, while concert and silent auction tickets are a mere $50, a $120 ticket gets you into the tasty after-party with champagne, desserts and a chance to meet the performers. Mary Wilson’s favorite holiday song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Before she became a member of the iconic Supremes, Wilson first performed Christmas songs at an elementary school concert. Like anyone else, although she did mention some less than happy years, Wilson said the holidays are more often joyful. “I have always loved the Holiday season and look forward to them.” Wilson said she hopes to enjoy some of our local seafood while she’s in town. She also has something else to celebrate. Her rereleased EP, Time to Move On, has found a fandom. “It’s now #37 on the Billboard dance charts. It’s my first chart in over 20 years.” Steve Grand has been busy performing since his last appearance at San Francisco Pride’s mainstage earlier this year. The out gay music sensation cited his favorite song as “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” “The history of the song is heartwrenching,” said Grand of “the fact that it’s from the perspective of a World War II soldier deployed overseas. The Christmas imagery is beautiful and warm, and is in a stark contrast to what we think about when we think of WWII.” Grand’s childhood favorite tune is “O Christmas Tree,” “mostly because of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special,” he said of his childhood, where he sang and performed music since grade school. “I’ve been lucky enough to have a strong family that always comes together for the holidays, so I am very grateful for that,” Grand said of the season. He’ll be visiting with friends while in San Francisco, “and maybe go out, since alcohol seems to be the only cheap(ish) thing in the city!” From award-winning local cabaret star to New York City singer, Carly Ozard can knock us down with her vocal chops. Among her holiday traditions are watching the original film Miracle on 34th Street. “Since we just lost Maureen O’Hara, this year watching it will be extra celebratory,” said Ozard. While back in town, Ozard said she’ll be attending Russ Lorenson’s Christmas Show on December 11, and singing in two concerts with Ann Assarsson on December 16 and 19. “I also look forward to attending awesome annual Christmas parties that always get crazy, and seeing my family.” Ozard mentioned John Lennon’s classic “And So This is Christmas” as a favorite, along with the more traditional “O Holy Night,” which, she said, “I got to sing once as a duet on Christmas Eve at Most Holy Re-

Mary Wilson

Steve Grand

Carly Ozard

Sharon McNight

Steven Underhill

Jason Brock at the 2013 holiday concert for REAF.

deemer in the Castro for 800 congregants including B.D. Wong who was in the front pew!” Ozard’s favorite ‘bittersweet’ holiday song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” saying, “It’s bittersweet, hopeful, with a lot of sad.” Ozard owned up to a few lonely holidays. “I identify as non-binary with a straight orientation. Try finding a man who understands that sentence. At least I have parents, friends, my dogs, my show husband Russ Lorenson, and our gigs.” At Lorenson’s recent Feinstein’s concert, Ozard sang a new favorite, “All I Want For Christmas (is a OneNight Stand)” from Nunsense. “It’s still one of my go-to’s for all things Christmas.” Ozard’s colleague Russ Lorenson performs his holiday concert at Feinstein’s, and also has a Christmas CD from 2005 for your listening pleasure. Like Grand, Lorenson cited “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” as his preferred ‘sad’ holiday song. The performer mentioned some local concerts as part of his holiday traditions. “I’ll be seeing The Golden Girls Live!, Katya’s Christmas Spectacular, The Gay Men’s Chorus at the Castro Theatre on Christmas Eve.”

I mentioned “Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer” as an unofficial ‘gay anthem’ for the holidays, to which the happily gay Lorenson agreed. “Years ago, I used to do a little monologue in my holiday show about how Rudolph [the Rankin/ Bass animated TV special] was the gayest thing on television! I mean, Hermie? That little flip of hair gave him away for sure! “My other ‘gay’ go-to song would have to be ‘Santa Claus Got Stuck In My Chimney.’ It’s not well-known, but Ella Fitzgerald’s version is the best.” Known for his festive Christmas tree costume at prior REAF concerts, singer, actor and film producer Shawn Ryan agreed on the gay Rudolph angle. “It’s definitely a metaphor for being the stand out,” he said. “You had Rudolph and that little dentist with the perfect blonde highlights. It’s kind of all one big metaphor for being yourself and celebrating your inner joy and light.” Ryan’s first holiday performance was as a five-year-old, “in my little Catholic town of Mesa, Arizona. I played the dreidel in the Christmas Pageant.”

Russ Lorenson

Growing up, he enjoyed the John Denver and Muppets Christmas album. “Miss Piggy singing ‘If you haven’t got a penny, a hay penny will do...’ still cracks me up.” Ryan cited another show biz classic. “Auntie Mame singing ‘We Need a Little Christmas’ is kind of a gay boy’s wet dream come true; an eccentric aunt pulling out the tree a month early? It’s kind of heaven on earth!” With his husband and a supportive family, Ryan said the holidays are a great time of year. “We always enjoy our time together and just celebrate each other.” Still, he does like a little bittersweet sentiment. “’Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ (the Judy version is obviously the best) makes me cry each time. ‘Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow.’ You’re killing me!” For Jason Brock, “Silver Bells” and “Winter Wonderland” are among his favorites, and, like Ryan, he mentioned Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as a winsome fave. The powerhouse vocalist recalled his first local holiday-themed con-

cert at Martuni’s lounge. Since then, while traveling for shows, he calls San Francisco home. The beloved Sharon McNight has performed at more benefits than anyone can count, and who still conjures Sophie Tucker as well as singing in her own indominable style. Her first remembered holiday performance? “Angels We Have Heard on High” in first grade. As for a sad song, “Stay with Me ‘Till After the Holidays” is her choice. “My Father was a mailman for 38 years,” said McNight, “so Christmas was never a happy time, because he worked so hard and long delivering Xmas cards. That was in the day where everyone sent out cards.” Her favorite holiday song? “Santa Lost a Ho.”t ‘Help is on the Way for the Holidays,’ the annual concert and benefit for the Richmond/ Ermet Aid Foundation, takes place Monday, December 7 at the Marines Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter Street. 6pm silent auction, 7:30pm showtime. $50. After-party with champagne and desserts, $120 and up. 273-1620. www. helpisontheway.org

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

36 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Eight Crazy Nights Chanukah with a Queer Twist

Gareth Gooch

Gents at the gentile-friendly Mazel Top at Oasis.

by David-Elijah Nahmod

hanukah, the Festival of Lights, commences on December 6. As always, there will be eight days and nights of candle lighting, gift giving and celebrating. This being the Bay Area, some of the events might have a queer twist or two.

Glimmering

LGBT Alliance of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Glimmer’s dinner commences at 6PM, followed by the program. Mazel Top, a monthly party for gay Jews and friends. Your ticket to Glimmer gets you into Mazel Top. Come as you are, Keshet asks. Dress in your evening wear, your party attire, or your feathers and boas. Tickets vary in price from $150-5000. Hey, its a fundraiser! Keshet is the host of a new social group dubbed Nice Jewish Boys. Described as a community group for young gay, bi, trans or otherwise Queer Jewish men, Nice Jewish Boys will throw Lights, Latkes and Liquor, its own Chanukah party, on Thursday, December 10 at a private home in Alamo Square. The party is free, but RSVPs are required, and

space is limited to 30 attendees. “We’re exited to be creating spaces where our boys can bring their Queer side and their Jewish side to the same event, and meet others who share these overlapping identities”, said Keshet’s Gene GoldsteinPlesser. RSVP for Lights, Latkes and Liquor here: www.keshetonline.org/ event/lights-latkes-and-liquor-nicejewish-boys-hanukkah-party/ Updates on future Nice Jewish Boys events can be found at the group’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ groups/1616787835251886/ Tickets for Glimmer are available at the Oasis: www.sfoasis.com

Keshet, an organization which seeks to include LGBT Jews into all aspects of Jewish life, will offer Glimmer, its annual Chanukah party, on Thursday, December 3. This year’s party takes place at Oasis, currently the City’s hottest queer club; no doubt a drag queen or two will be in attendance. There will also Super-Hebrews be a few dignitaries at Keshet who Also on December 10, from will be honored for their work in the 6:30-9PM, the Contemporary JewJewish community. ish Museum offers Night at Rabbi Tsipora Gabai, the Jewseum, its own annual head of Judaic Studies at Tehiya Day School in El Cerrito, recently garnered national attention when one of her students, 13-yearold Tom Sosnick, came out as transgender. Rabbi Gabai not only supported Tom’s transition, she led the young man in a Hebrew name-changing ceremony. Also scheduled to receive accolades are Ruth Messinger. Formerly the Borough President of Manhattan, Messinger currently serves as President of American Jewish World Services. She has a long history of sup- Kung Pao Kosher Comedy host Lisa Geduldig An early Kung Pao Kosher porting the LGBT com- (right) at a recent event with veteran comic Comedy flyer. munity. The final honoree Henny Youngman. is Al Baum, Founder of the

Ana Gasteyer

From page 34

ferent from when I left SNL to when I started in Wicked. I mostly have fans from one or the other.” With her select tour of cabaret shows focusing on I’m Hip, Gasteyer said she hopes to “fuse these two ridiculously different but not necessarily separate paths. That’s why I like old-fashioned music and novelty songs. They’re from an era where entertainers were expected to be well-rounded.” Devoted Wicked fans can expect Gasteyer to perform her touching softer version of Stephen Schwartz’ “Defying Gravity.” “Part of the reason I do that quieter version relates to what I think is so cool about cabaret,” said Gasteyer. “It’s this opportunity to almost have someone perform in your living room. It’s intimate. I cut my teeth as

an audience member on people like Bette Midler. The first time I saw her was at Radio City Music Hall, in the nose-bleed section, but I left feeling like we were best friends. That, to me, is the whole goal of performing; personal. There is no fourth wall, like there is in everything else I do.” With songs like “Mint Julip,” a domestic ‘cautionary tale,’ the sardonic music video includes some familiar comic collegues. And Gasteyer has more recordings scheduled. “We’re working on a Christmas album, which is why I was happy to tackle some of these new arrangements,” said Gasteyer. “It’s so joyful and ridiculous, and it seems like the right kind of attitude. I don’t often perform a lot of holiday songs. This is kind of new for me, as much as I love the idea.” Gasteyer mentioned a recent performance with the Seattle Men’s and Women’s Chorus. “I’ve mostly per-

Night at the Jewseum.

holiday party. MIxing partying with politics, this year’s event is tied in with Chasing Justice, one of the museum’s current exhibitions. “We are exited to continue the tradition of celebrating Chanukah with the artistic and contemporary spin that is the mark of all programming at CJM,” said Gravity Goldberg, the museum’s Associate Director or Public Programs. “This year we want to connect the themes of Chasing Justice with the apocryphal story of Chanukah: The Maccabees fighting for freedom and regaining the temple. And so we started thinking about how they were the superheroes of the time, and since superheroes are pretty Jewish anyway, we are going with it as a theme. We encourage people to come in costume.” A Night at the Jewseum will include a latke bar, storytelling, and the lighting of Chanukah candles. Admission is free with museum admission, $5 after 5PM. Must be over age 21. Ticket info: www.thecjm. org

Lox of Laughs

And finally, comedian and hostess with the mostess Lisa Geduldig returns for another laugh-filled edition of Kung Pao Kosher Comedy: Jewish Comedy on Christmas in a Chinese Restaurant. (Where else?) As always, Geduldig and her comics will be serving standup comedy with Chinese food at New Asia Restaurant, 722 Pacific Avenue. You can choose

between a 5PM dinner show or an 8:30PM cocktail show from Thursday December 24 through Saturday December 26. Proceeds to benefit the Institute on Aging Friendship’s Line and Legal Assistance for the Elderly. This year’s line-up includes Wendy Liebman, Dana Eagle, Mike Fine, and Geduldig herself. “I used to make sure that the Kung Pao line-up was half gay and half straight, but I ran out of gay Jewish comics,” Geduldig said. “I was waiting for some to come out or convert, and hadn’t had any others on the line-up for awhile. This year marks the return of a half and half line up with out lesbian comedian Dana Eagle –and me– on the bill.” Kung Pao is a comedy show like no other. “People walk into a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown” Geduldig explained. “There are Chanukah and Bar Mitzvah decorations adorning the walls and inflatable dreidels and matzoh balls, and a dreidel pinata, on the stage.” Geduldig said that she usually gets a mixed crowd of Jews and Goyim (non-Jews), gays, straights, older and younger. “One of my proudest accomplishments through a Kung Pao donation was the creation a dozen years ago of Comedy Clinic at the Jewish Home in San Francisco,” Geduldig added, noting that the bimonthly class continues to this day. Ticket info for the 23rd annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy: www.koshercomedy.com Happy Chanukah!t

formed songs with jollity and ridiculousness, not so much wistful. The trick, of course, is finding holiday music that is a good song, not just familiar, and having fun with those arrangements.” The fun jazz style of her new repertoire should please fans as we gear up for the holidays. “It’s my goal to make excellent holiday party music.” Gasteyer last performed in San Francisco in 2010 for the opening of another venue, Bay Area Cabaret at the Fairmount Hotel’s Venetian Room. She sang “Defying Gravity” in a concert honoring composer Stephen Schwartz. “I love it there,” she said of our town. “I’m really looking forward to visiting. It’s my people and my audience.” Gasteyer will bring her musical directors, and perform with a small band of local musicians. “Basically, I like to make music that people can get drunk to at a party.” So whether or not you imbibe, Ana Gasteyer’s beautiful singing will please with a perfect combination of the sincere and the silly.t Ana Gasteyer performs at Feinstein’s at the Nikko, December 4 (8pm) and 5 (7pm). $50-$65. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.ticketweb.com www.anagasteyerinconcert.com

A few of Ana Gasteyer’s best-known SNL characters: Bobbie MohanCulp, the singing school teacher (with Will Ferrell); NPR host Margaret Jo McCullen (with Molly Shannon and “Shweddy Balls” guest Alec Baldwin); Celine Dion; and Martha Stewart.

Read more online at www.ebar.com

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 37

Pajama games, pies and parties by Donna Sachet

hat happens when you put Brian Kent, Suzan Revah, and BeBe Sweetbriar together at Lookout with a packed crowd, most of whom are wearing onesies? You have the second annual Winter Onesie Party, benefiting the National AIDS Memorial Grove. DJ Asheton Lemay kept the public happy and frisky as masculine longjohns mixed with playful cartoon pajamas in a crazy salute to the onesie. We arrived in time to witness the midnight “Best Onesie Contest,” startled, but not surprised by the creativity, theatricality, and originality of every contestant and especially the winner who gave his best Paris is Burning dance routine. Among the assembled were Andy Lax, Fabio Fabiano, Sean Huck, Jeff Zacuto, Andy Tonken, Brian Abascal, Heath Allen, Robbie Hehnerey, Jake Merves, Simon Tam, Graig Cooper, and Benjamin Joseph. All in all, a fun way to come in out of the cold and leave smiling! Saturday, November 21, saw the birthday celebrations of two notable individuals. First, we popped into Twin Peaks for the ongoing party for Marlena, much beloved Empress of the City, formerly of Marlena’s bar in Hayes Valley, and continuing supporter of so many causes in the City. Fellow Empresses Misty Blue, China Silk, Alexis Miranda, Patty McGroin, and Tiger Lily led the festivities. The line of well-wishers frequently snaked out the door! Marlena took it all in graciously. Later that night, we wandered to Beatbox, where the man behind the bar, Brian Kent, celebrated with a slew of friends as DJ Philip Grasso and Moto Blanco tempted guests to the dance floor. The graphic invitation to this event no doubt drew a big portion of the crowd, including Reigning Emperor Kevin Lisle, CoCo Butter, Xavier Caylor, Jeff Doney, Locoya Hill, and some of the sexiest and most cooperative dancers we’ve seen in ages. This party went well into the night. The day before Thanksgiving may seem an unlikely time for a fundraiser, but not for our Reigning

Georg Lester Georg Lester

A couple of hot Wookies at the Onesie party at The Lookout.

Empress Khmera Rouge. Teaming up with Mr. Golden Gate Leandro Gonzales and Miss Golden Gate Rad Ronda and a handful of her sister Empresses (most in their boy personas for the day), she hosted a Gayme Night and Holigay Bake Sale at Lookout, raising over $1000 on an unlikely date. Recipes were swapped, baked goods bought and consumed, and fun was had by all. We hope all our readers enjoyed a peaceful Thanksgiving weekend and returned ready take advantage of the many holiday events and fundraisers right around the corner. Allow us to mention a few! The Golden Girls Christmas Episodes, starring Heklina, Mathew Martin, D’Arcy Drolllinger, and Holotta Tymes, opens at the Victoria Theatre tonight, Thursday, December 3. If you pay very close attention, you’ll see this tireless columnist making a couple of cameo appearances on Opening Night, with other local guest performers, including Sister Roma. The show runs on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through December 20. It’s campy, it’s hilarious, and it’s just what you need. On Saturday, Dec. 5, starting at 9PM, The Edge hosts one of the first leather contests of the season. The winner of the Mr. Edge Leather contest will compete for Mr. San Francis-

Gareth Gooch

Royalty honors Marlena’s birthday at Twin Peaks.

Leandro Gonzales

Mr. Golden Gate Leandro Gonzales and Reigning Empress Khmera Rouge at their Holigay Bake Sale at The Lookout.

Suzan Reva, Julian Marshburn and Donna Sachet at the annual Onesie party at The Lookout.

Georg Lester

Pajama game at The Lookout’s Onesie party.

co Leather and potentially represent the City in Chicago at the International Mr. Leather competition. Erick Lopez is the producer and if his successful Code parties are any indication, this contest will be done right and will attract a lot of attention. Yes, there is leather in the Castro! Sunday, Dec. 6, hundreds of people will gather for one of the most elegant, but fun parties of the season: Toys for Tots at the St. Regis Hotel from 4-7PM. The tradition of gathering unwrapped, new toys for children goes backs decades, and this party makes it fun and painless. The host committee is a veritable who’s who of San Francisco’s movers and shakers. DJ Christopher B will keep your mood uplifted. And on Monday, Dec. 7, don’t miss Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation’s Help is on the Way for the Holidays XIV, a rousing holiday concert at the Marines’ Memorial Theater, 7PM, with a stellar cast, including Martha Wash, Mary Wilson, Steve Grand, Sharon McNight, Jake Simpson, Shawn Ryan, Jason Brock, Lea Bourgade, and the Barbary Coast Cloggers. There will be plenty to bid on in the silent auction and plenty to drink and eat at the reception following the show at the Clift Hotel. There is no better way to get into the holiday mood! A little farther in the future, make your way to Union Square for Drag Queens on Ice on Thursday, Dec. 10, 8-9:30PM, when some of the City’s finest will brave the slippery ice rink, all for the amusement and delight of the downtown shoppers. As hostess of this event, we’ll be the drag queen on the mic, not the ice! Then make your choices wisely, as the Gay Men’s Chorus presents Holigays Are Here at Nourse Theatre, Fri., Dec. 11, 8PM, and Sat., Dec. 12, 2:30PM and 8PM, and the Lesbian/

Gay Freedom Band presents Dance Along Nutcracker: The Nutcracker of Oz at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sat., Dec. 12, 3PM and 7PM, and Sun., Dec. 13, 11AM and 3PM. What a weekend! These are both proven crowd-pleasers and sell out

quickly, so get your tickets soon. As the holiday season gains momentum, take the time to make your own choices, creating the season you most enjoy with those you love. We’ll see you out there on the town!t

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38 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

On the Tab Dec. 3-9, 2015

Nap’s Karaoke @ Virgil’s Sea Room

Tubesteak Connection @ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge

Sing out loud at the weekly least judgmental karaoke in town, hosted by the former owner of the bar. No cover. 9pm. 3152 Mission St. 8292233. www.virgilssf.com

Disco guru DJ Bus Station John spins grooves at the intimate retro music night. $4. 10pm-2am. 133 Turk St. at Taylor. www.auntcharlieslounge.com

Queer Karaoke @ Club OMG

Frisco Robbie and Persia’s dance and pop music night gets the weekend started, with gogo guys and gals, plus drink specials and guest DJs. No cover. 9pm-2am. 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

Dana hosts the amateur singing night, 8pm. 43 6th St. www.clubOMGsf.com

Throwback Thursdays @ Qbar Enjoy retro 80s soul, dance and pop classics with DJ Jorge Terez. No cover. 9pm-2am. 456 Castro St. www.QbarSF.com

Thursday Night Live @ SF Eagle

reak out the scarves and winter wear for your pre-holiday stroll to nightclubs where all sorts of sounds await, from retro punk to classic disco, genderfluid electro to House-Burner grooves.

Thu 3 The Golden Girls @ Victoria Theatre mr Pam

Thu 3 Absolutely Fabulous @ Oasis Christian Heppinstall as Patsy, Terry McLaughlin as Edina, plus Katya Smirnoff-Skky, Raya Light and a cast of queens perform scripts from the hit BBC comedy series. $25 ($200 champers front row VIP, sweetie!). 7pm. Also Dec. 4, 5, 8, 9, 20. 298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. sfoasis.com

After Dark @ Exploratorium Glow, a night-light festival of fun at the hands-on museum’s monthly adult party, with Light Orchestra by Benjamin James and Ka-Ping Yee; cocktails, dancing and a scenic outdoor veranda. $10-$15. 6pm10pm. Pier 15, Embarcadero at Green St. www.exploratorium.edu

Bulge @ Powerhouse Grace Towers hosts the weekly gogotastic night of sexy dudes shakin’ their bulges and getting wet in their undies for $100 prize (contest at midnight), and dance beats spun by DJ DAMnation. 10pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Dining Out for Life @ Sonoma Restuarants 80-plus restaurants in scenic Sonoma participate in the fundraiser where a percentage of your bill goes to local HIV/AIDS charities, including Food for Thought, Sonoma’s food bank. List online at: www.FFTfoodbank.org

Funny Fun @ Club 21, Oakland LGBT comedy night hosted by Dan Mires. $10. 8pm. 2111 Franklin St. Oakland. (510) 268-9425. www.club21oakland.com

Glimmer @ Oasis Keshet, the LGBT Jewish nonprofit, celebrates the holidays, with a dinner, awards honoring Al Baum, Rabbi Tsipora Gabai and Ruth Messinger ($150 and up; 6pm), with Mazel Top, the dance party, afterwards (9pm). 298 11th St. at Folsom. www.sfoasis.com

The Golden Girls @ Victoria Theatre The Christmas Episodes (two of them) are performed with over-the-top camp by Heklina, D’Arcy Drollinger and a drag queen/king cast of local talents. $25. Thu-Sat 8pm, Sun 7pm. Thru Dec. 20. 2961 16th St. www. goldengirlschristmas.eventbrite.com

Gym Class @ Hi Tops Enjoy cheap/free whiskey shots from jock-strapped hotties and sexy sports videos at the popular sports bar. 10pm-2am. 2247 Market St. 551-2500. www.HiTopsSF.com

Karaoke Night @ The Stud “Sing Til It Hurts” the new weekly night with hostess Sister Flora (Floozy) Goodthyme. 8pm; happy hour drinks til 10pm. 10pm-2am. 399 9th St. www.studsf.com

Mary Go Round @ Lookout Mercedez Munro and Holotta Tymes’ weekly drag show. $5. 10:30pm show. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

Mazel Top @ Oasis Celebrate Hanukkah at the gay Jewish men and friends/admirers party, with host Yuri Kagan, DJs Mo Tech and Goy Toy. $5. 9pm. 298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

The Monster Show @ The Edge The weekly drag show with themed nights, gogo guys and hilarious fun. $5. 9pm-2am. 4149 18th St. at Collingwood. www.edgesf.com

Xcess Thursdays @ The Café

Fri 4 Boy Bar @ The Cafe

Music night with local and touring bands. $8. 9:30pm. 398 12th St. at Harrison. www.sf-eagle.com

Gus Presents’ weekly dance night, with DJ Kid Sysko, cute gogos and $2 beer (before 10pm). 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

We are the future of th LGBT community. We’re gay.

This is our first holiday as a married couple an from two different religions. We’ll celebrate our

We’re also hoping that 2016 brings new excitin to have the same rights we do. We want peace fearing for the future. We want an end to AIDS

We are the future of the LGBT community. And probably read about that future on our smart w 2016. Because that’s what we bought each other this year.

My So-Called Night @ Beaux Carnie Asada hosts a new weekly ‘90s-themed video, dancin’, drinkin’ night, with VJs Jorge Terez. Get down with your funky bunch, and enjoy 90cent drinks. ‘90s-themed attire and costume contest. No cover. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

Nightlife @ California Academy of Sciences Themed event nights at the fascinating nature museum, with DJed dancing, cocktails, fish, frogs, food and fun. Dec. 3, Feel the Force, with Star Wars-themed science demos, a live performance by Humans, with DJ sets by Johnny Hwin. Dec. 10, Hard french DJs, with an arts and crafts bazaar for holiday shopping. $10-$12. 6pm-10pm, 55 Music Concourse Drive, Golden Gate Park. 379-8000. www.calacademy.org

The people depicted here are models. Their image is being used f

Thu 3 Polyglamorous @ Oasis

Fri 4

Giorgio Moroder @ 1015 Shot in the City

On the Tab>>

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 39

Sat 5

Ana Gasteyer @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko The comic actress-singer ( Saturday Night Live, Wicked ) performs music from her cool fun jazz CD, I’m Hip, plus a few holiday tunes. $50-$65. 8pm. Dec. 5 at 7pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.ticketweb.com www.anagasteyerinconcert.com

Comedy Noir @ Balancoire Valerie Branch’s weekly comedy night, where she embodies her faux queen character Pia Messing for some offbeat wit, along with guest performers. $5. 8pm-10pm. 2565 Mission St. www.balancoiresf.com

Giorgio Moroder @ 1015

Jello Biafra headlines Krampus Night @ Slim’s

The iconic disco music master plays a retro-new disco set; with DJs David Harness, Dan, Anthony Mansfield, Steve Fabus and more. $25-$35. 9:30pm-3am. 1015 Folsom St. www.1015.com

Sat 5

Happy Friday @ Midnight Sun The popular video bar ends each work week with gogo guys (starting at 9pm) and drink specials. 4067 18th St. 861-4186. www.midnightsunsf.com

Hard Fridays @ Qbar DH Haute Toddy’s weekly electro-pop night with hotty gogos. $3. 9pm-2am (happy hour 4pm-9pm). 456 Castro St. www.QbarSF.com

Ladies of San Francisco @ Club OMG Galilea hosts the new weekly “old school drag show” with guest performers and DJ Jack Rojo. $4. 43 6th St. www.clubOMGsf.com

nd we’re creating new traditions despite being r family, our friends, and our new life together.

Latin Explosion @ Club 21, Oakland

ng changes. We want our transgender friends e in our time. We want the world to stop S.

Lulu, Jacki, and Vicki cohost the festive gogo-filled dance club that features Latin pop dance hits with DJs Speedy Douglas Romero and Fabricio. $6-$12. 9pm-4am. 2111 Franklin St., Oakland. (510) 268-9425. www.club21oakland.com

d we’ll watches in

Manimal @ Beaux Gogo-tastic dance night starts off your weekend. $5. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

Midnight Show @ Divas Weekly drag shows at the last transgender-friendly bar in the Polk; with hosts Victoria Secret, Alexis Miranda and several performers. Also Saturdays. $10. 11pm. 1081 Polk St. www.divassf.com

El Mundo @ Empire Ballroom The new weekly Latin night at the Civic Center renovated nightclub features drag shows, gogo guys and gals, and DJed grooves. 9pm-3am. 555 Golden Gate. www.theempireroomsf.com

Go Bang! @ The Stud Shot in the City

La Bota Loca Halloween @ Club 21, Oakland Latin, hip hop and Electro music night. $5-$25. 9pm-4am. 2111 Franklin St., Oakland. www.club21oakland.com

Club Rimshot @ Club BNB, Oakland

Mother @ Oasis Heklina’s weekly drag show night with different themes, always outrageously hilarious. $10-$25. 10pm-2am. 298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

Saturgay @ Qbar

Get groovin’ at the weekly hip hop and R&B night at their new location. 8-$15. 9pm to 4am. 2120 Broadway. (510) 759-7340. www.club-bnb.com

Stanley Frank spins house dance remixes at the intimate Castro dance bar. $3. 9pm-2am (weekly beer bust 2pm-9pm). 456 Castro St. QbarSF.com

Dirty Queers @ SF Eagle

Sex, Drags & Rock ‘n’ Roll @ Midnight Sun

Beer bust benefit for Groundswell, the bucolic queer campground and retreat center in Northern California. $10. 4pm-7pm. 398 12th St. at Harrison. www.sf-eagle.com

Go Bang! @ The Stud 7th anniversary of the popular disco dance night, with resident DJs Sergio Fedasz, Prince Wolf and Steve Fabus; giest DJs Robin Simmons and Stanley Frank. $10. 9pm-3am. 399 9th St. www.studsf.com

Mipso @ Brick & Mortar The cute Americana string quartet performs. $15-$20. 9pm. 1710 Mission St. www.mipsomusic.com www.brickandmortarmusic.com

Mutha Chucka’s wild drag show celebrates two years, with Dulce De Leche, BeBe Sweetbriar, Sugah Betes, U-Phoria, Pristine Condition, Cruzin D’Loo, Mama’s Boyz and more. 10pm1am. 4067 18th st. www.MuthaChucka.com www.midnightsunsf.com

Soul Delicious @ Lookout Brunch, booze, sass and grooves, with the Mom DJs, Motown sounds, and soul food. 11am-4pm. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

Soul Party @ Elbo Room DJs Lucky, Paul, and Phengren Osward spin 60s soul 45s. $5-$10 ($5 off in semi-formal attire). 10pm-2am. 647 Valencia St. 552-7788. www.elbo.com

Sugar @ The Cafe Dance, drink, cruise at the Castro club. 9pm-2am. 2369 Market St. cafesf.com

See page 41 >>

Sun 6

Party Nights @ Club BnB, Oakland Different events each week. 10pm2am. 2120 Broadway. (510) 759-7340. www.club-bnb.com

for illustrative purposes only.

Polyglamorous @ Oasis Gay Marvine (aka Chuck Hampton) guest-DJs at the Burner-style groovy gay dance night. $10. 9pm-3am. 398 11th St. www.oasissf.com

Sat 5

Ezra Furman & The Boyfriends @ Rickshaw Stop

Red Hots Burlesque @ Beatbox

Black Xxxmas @ 1015 Folsom

The saucy women’s burlesque revue’s weekend show; different musical guests each week. Also Wednesday nights. $10-$20. 7:30pm. 314 11th St. www.redhotsburlesque.com www.beatboxsf.com

Sat 5

Some Thing @ The Stud Mica Sigourney and pals’ weekly offbeat drag performance night. 10pm-2am. 399 9th St. studsf.com

Sat 5 Black Xxxmas @ 1015 Folsom Industry and Gus Presents’ 10th annual holiday circuit dance party, with DJ Abel. Wear your Santa hats (and not much else). $75. 10pm-6am. 1015 Folsom St. guspresents.com Marques Daniels

Mipso @ Brick & Mortar

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

40 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

Pier to peer The historic cruise spot on film and in a photo book by John F. Karr

y some counts, as many as 99 piers once lined New York City’s west side, serving transatlantic luxury liners, and cargo freighters. Abandoned by those businesses in the 1960s, the piers began crumbling into decay. Ignored by everyone else, they became a playground of gay promiscuity. And they became legendary. Ah, The Piers. The rotted ruins were a distinct danger to the guys

who cruised there. Slivers of shadowy sunlight filtered eerily through dust motes by day, and at night a deep and scary gloom was only partially illuminated by street lamps across the West Side Highway, and perhaps a partial moon. Rooms strewn with broken glass, refuse, a semen and sweat-stained mattress. Creaking walls, and cold floors with holes big enough to swallow you, drop you into the inky death of the river waters below. The piers were a place you hardly dared to enter. And

yet, you did, because you were hard, and you knew the debauch you’d find inside the pier’s dark danger. In the days when bars routinely blacked out their windows, the piers became a community center of an unusual sort, hosting covertly and protected from public view a democracy of sexual adventurers that cut through society, including Wall Street brokers, doctors, sailors, the homeless, prostitutes, artists, and the infrequent straight guy who knew where he could get his dick sucked. The piers were finally demolished in 1989. But there are two ways you can revisit them. One is The Piers (TF Editores; hardbound; $65), a recently published, fantastic and somber collection of black and white photographs taken during the piers’ heyday by Alvin Baltrop. The other is Pier Groups, the potent movie Arch Brown filmed on the piers in 1979 (available streaming and on a tolerably faded DVD ($14.95) at TLA. Alvin Baltrop was an AfricanAmerican gay man. He was born in the Bronx in 1948, and from 1969 to 1972 served the US Navy in Vietnam, where he began photographing his sailor buddies. He studied at the School of the Visual Arts in New York between 1973 and 1975, and settled into an artist’s life on Manhattan’s West Side. His photographs focused on young African-Americans, youth marginalization, male prostitution, and the piers. His work has been little known and under-published, mainly due to its unflinching and often explicit subject matter. Yet it should be recognized as on a par with Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He died, largely unheralded, in 2004 of AIDS and diabetes. Baltrop didn’t mix with his subjects, and the men he photographed on the piers weren’t models. He kept his distance, allowing the men he caught sunbathing and sodomizing their privacy and spontaneity. On occasion he did get near the guys, and the book has close-up blowjobs, jack offs, SM play. The photos are definitely not hobbyist’s or tourist’s snapshots, and not crime scene photos à la Weegee. They are beautifully composed works of an accomplished artist. They have grit, they have repose, and their always political nature carries, in hindsight, a threnody, a requiem. The photos come to life in Arch Brown’s Pier Groups, in which some well-known professional performers stand in for the anonymous civilians of Baltrop’s work. The movie

Alvin Baltrop

A seeker amidst the shards of the piers.

In a Pier Groups screengrab, Viktor Houston and Keith Anthony get acquainted.

is notable for the flannel and mustaches worn by its guys, which was standard uniform for the day, and for its scant one-hour length, which was standard for porn at the time. Also fitting a standard, unfortunately, are the soppy, folkish James Taylor-type songs that accompany and supposedly illuminate the sex acts. There are also stretches of reflective, quasiclassical harpsichord and flute-noodling. I always found these musical standards of the day rather sub-standard. I could understand the filmmaker’s striving to enrich his craft, but these soundtracks were no aid to the sex. At any rate, we find big star Keith Anthony in his apartment, happily preparing for a day of cruising the piers. Also waking up is Anthony’s neighbor, Joe, a survey engineer played by Johnny Kovacs, who is going to the piers to inspect for a demolition company. He blithely goes about his thing at the piers, at first not even noticing the couplings going on around him, and not understanding the invitations telegraphed his way (he’s a very attractive daddy). But he’s not stupid, and slowly but surely seems to get interested, although (spoiler alert) he never succumbs. Parallel to the surveyor’s story is that of the prodigiously longdicked Anthony’s day on the hunt. He has innumerable orgasms, more in the one day than I could attempt in a week. He’s either getting it on with a guy, or voyeuring other guys together, like short, handsome, furry chested and so heavily hung star Victor Houston. The action escalates throughout the movie, from simpler sex acts with a pastoral feel, to major set pieces that are ominous and excessive. One features Anthony, demonstrating his

Director Arch Brown nicely framed a couple of smoochers silhouetted against a passing sailboat, in a screengrab from Pier Groups.

Pier Group’s director Arch Brown.

famed ability at autofellatio while in the midst of some aggressive facefucking and 69-ing with a ruggedly hirsute fellow. A standard of the day that we approve of brings us condom-free fucking, and lots of creamy facials and oral cumshots. Oh, succoring semen—we gobbled tons of cream in those days. Blasting yet another load, and receiving another mouthful of cum, Anthony is strung up by a group of guys, sexed up by each in turn, and finally bukkakied by all. To the accompaniment at long last of some actually sexy music. Surveyor Joe watches intently, blithe no more (but still able to pretend not to recognize Anthony when they pass in their apartment hallway). Though the final scene is freewheeling and wild of impact, it still has the stamp of swell composition that Brown exhibits throughout. Remember, as Arch Brown would tell you, he made films, not porn. Because of its location, Pier Groups turns a neat trick, being both historical and hot. I have Pier Groups on a two-disc set titled 5 New York Classics, issued some years ago by The French Connection. You may wish to search it, as it includes four other movies of the era which feature New York City, with stars Daniel Holt, George Payne, Jack Wrangler, and especially Scorpio in All Tied Up.t

t <<

Read more online at www.ebar.com

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 41

On the Tab

Wed 9

From page 39

Under the Golden Gate @ The Cinch Maria Konner, Ferosha Titties and DJ Dank host a holiday drag show and benefit. Bring a clean warm coat (sweaters, socks, scarves, gloves, too) and/or canned food for the SF LGBT Center’s Youth Programs. Enjoy wacky holiday grooves and elve-shly cute gogos, and sit on Santa’s lap. 5pm10pm. 1723 Polk St. www.underthegoldengate.com

Mr. Marcus

Sun 6 Beer Bust @ SF Eagle The classic leather bar’s most popular Sunday daytime event in town draws the menfolk. Beer bust donations benefit local nonprofits (Check the website for a list of recipients). 3pm6pm. Now also on Saturdays. 398 12th St. at Harrison. www.sf-eagle.com

Big Top @ Beaux The fun Castro nightclub, with hot local DJs and sexy gogo guys and gals. $5. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.Beauxsf.com

Domingo De Escandal @ Club OMG Weekly Latin night with drag shows hosted by Vicky Jimenez and DJ Luis. 7pm-2am. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

Ezra Furman & The Boyfriends @ Rickshaw Stop Fun electro-pop Illinois singer performs with his band. $12-$14. 8pm. 155 Fell St. www.ezrafurman. com www.rickshawstop.com

GlamaZone @ The Cafe Pollo del Mar’s weekly drag show takes on different themes with a comic edge. 8:30-11:30pm. 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

Jock @ The Lookout Enjoy the weekly jock-ular fun, with DJed dance music at sports team fundraisers. 12pm-1am. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

Femme, Xtravaganza @ Balancoire Weekly live music shows with various acts, along with brunch, mimosas, champagne and more, at the stylish nightclub and restaurant; shows at 12:30pm, 1:30pm and 2:45pm. After that, T-Dance drag shows at 7pm, 10pm and 11pm. 2565 Mission St. at 21st. 920-0577. www.balancoiresf.com

Sunday’s a Drag @ Starlight Room Donna Sachet hosts the weekly fabulous brunch and drag show, now celebrating its tenth anniversary. $45. 11am, show at noon; 1:30pm, show at 2:30pm. 450 Powell St. in Union Square. 395-8595. www.starlightroomsf.com

Mon 7

Man Francisco @ Oasis

Epic Karaoke @ White Horse, Oakland Mondays and Tuesdays popular weekly sing-along night. No cover. 8:30pm-1am. 6551 Telegraph Ave, (510) 652-3820. www.whitehorsebar.com

Help is on the Way for the Holidays XIV @ Marines Memorial Theatre The 14th annual festive concert and benefit for the Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation includes performances by Martha Wash, Mary Wilson, Steve Grand, Sharon McNight, Jason Brock, Carly Ozard, Shawn Ryan, Jessica Coker, Russ Lorenson and others, plus cast members from the productions of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and The Phantom of the Opera. $50. 6pm silent auction, 7:30pm showtime. After-party with champagne and desserts, $120 and up. 609 Sutter Street. 273-1620. helpisontheway.org

Holiday Ice Rink @ Union Square Enjoy skating, hot drinks and fun in the downtown center of holiday shopping. $7-$11. Skate rental $6. Thru Jan. 14. Various times, 10am-11pm. 333 Post St. www.unionsquareicerink.com

Hysteria @ Martuni’s Irene Tu and Jessica Sele cohost the comedy open mic night for women and queers. No cover. 6pm-8:30pm. 4 Valencia St.

Piano Bar 101 @ Martuni’s Sing-along night with talented locals, and charming accompanist Joe Wicht (aka Trauma Flintstone). 9pm. 4 Valencia St. at Market. www.dragatmartunis.com

Underwear Night @ 440 Strip down to your skivvies at the popular men’s night. 9pm-2am. 440 Castro St. 621-8732. www.the440.com

Tue 8 13 Licks @ Qbar The “lezzie queer dance party” brings out the femmes and butches. 9pm2am. 456 Castro St. 864-2877. www.qbarsf.com

Block Party @ Midnight Sun Weekly screenings of music videos, concert footage, interviews and more, of popular pop stars. 9pm-2am. 4067 18th St. 861-4186. midnightsunsf.com

Cock Shot @ Beaux Shot specials and adult Bingo games, with DJs Chad Bays and Riley Patrick, at the new weekly night. No cover. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

Funny Tuesdays @ Harvey’s Ronn Vigh hosts the weekly LGBT and gay-friendly comedy night. One-drink or menu item minimum. 9pm. 500 Castro St. at 18th. 431-HARV. www.harveyssf.com

See page 42 >>

Mahogany Mondays @ Midnight Sun

Wed 9

Honey Mahogany’s weekly drag and musical talent show starts around 10pm. 4067 18th St. 861-4186. www.midnightsunsf.com

Monday Musicals @ The Edge Sing along at the popular musical theatre night; also Wednesdays. 7pm2am. 2 for 1 cocktail, 5pm-closing. 4149 18th St. at Collingwood. edgesf.com

No No Bingo @ Virgil’s Sea Room Mica Sigourney and Tom Temprano cohost the wacky weekly game night at the cool Mission bar. 8pm. 3152 Mission St. www.virgilssf.com

Opulence @ Beaux Weekly dance night, with Jocques, DJs Tori, Twistmix and Andre. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

Red Hots Burlesque @ Beatbox

Wed 9

Drag Mondays @ The Cafe Mahlae Balenciaga and DJ Kidd Sysko’s weekly drag and dance night, 2014’s last of the year. 9pm-1am. 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

Gaymer Meetup @ Brewcade The weekly LGBT video game enthusiast night include big-screen games and signature beers, with a new remodeled layout, including an outdoor patio. No cover. 7pm-11pm. 2200 Market St. www.brewcadesf.com

REMEMBERING

Sun 6 Reverend Horton Heat @ DNA Lounge

Spencer Day @ Feinstein’s

January 9, 2016 • 7pm • $10 SF Armory, 4th Fl, 1800 Mission St., SF 94103 21+ Adults Only Imperial Court & Leather Community Retrospective Slideshow of Marcus’ Life Entertainment • Refreshments • Cash Bar For more info email msqcougar@comcast.net Tel (510) 996-2235

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

42 • BAY AREA REPORTER • December 3-9, 2015

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On the Tab

From page 41

Gaymer Night @ Eagle Gay gaming fun on the bar’s big screen TVs. Have a nerdgasm and a beer with your pals. 8pm. 398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

(415) 430-1199 Oakland:

(510) 343-1122 (408) 514-1111 www.megamates.com 18+

Tue 8 Block Party @ Midnight Sun

Red Hots Burlesque @ Beatbox

Ladies night at the Castro dance club. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. beauxsf.com

Bobby Barnaby hosts a special “Bandand-burly-oke” burlesque night with women and men dancing; the Phishnets, Dottie Lux, Liza Punami. Wear holiday costumes for prizes. $10-$20. 314 11th St. www.redhotsburlesque.com www.beatboxsf.com

The weekly themed variety cabaret showcases new and unusual talents; MC Ferosha Titties. $3-$7. Show at 11pm. 9pm-2am. 399 9th St. at Harrison. www.studsf.com

Spencer Day @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko

Naked Night @ Nob Hill Theatre Strip down as the strippers take it all off. $20. 9pm. 729 Bush St. at Powell. 397-6758. thenobhilltheatre.com

Wed 9

Dream Queens Revue @ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge

Retro Night @ 440 Castro

Bedlam @ Beaux

The classic drag show (2nd & 4th Wed.) features Joie de Vivre, Sophilya Leggs and other talents at the intimate bar. No cover. 9:30pm. 133 Turk St. dreamqueensrevue.com

Switch @ Q Bar Weekly women’s night at the stylish intimate bar. 9pm-2am. 456 Castro St. www.QbarSF.com

Trivia Night @ Hi Tops Play the trivia game at the popular new sports bar. 9pm. 2247 Market St. 551-2500. www.HiTopsSF.com

Una Noche @ Club BnB, Oakland Vicky Jimenez’ drag show and contest; Latin music all night. 9pm-2am. 2120 Broadway. (510) 759-7340. www.club-bnb.com

Underwear Night @ Club OMG Weekly underwear night includes free clothes check, and drink specials. $4. 10pm-2am. Preceded by Open Mic Comedy, 7pm, no cover. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

New weekly event with DJs Haute Toddy, Guy Ruben, Mercedez Munro and Abominatrix. Wet T-shirt/jock contest at 11pm. $5-$10. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

Bone @ Powerhouse New weekly punk-alternative music night hosted by Uel Renteria and Johnny Rockitt. 10pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Bottoms Up Bingo @ Hi Tops Play board games and win offbeat prizes at the popular sports bar. 9pm. 2247 Market St. 551-2500. HiTopsSF.com

B.P.M. @ Club BnB, Oakland Olga T and Shugga Shay’s weekly queer women and men’s R&B hip hop and soul night, at the club’s new location. No cover. 8pm-2am. 2120 Broadway, Oakland. www.bench-and-bar.com

Dirty Filthy Show @ SF Eagle Nasty Ass Bitch (aka Charlie Ballard) and Kollin Holtz cohost a night of tasteless yet delicious comedy. Free hot dogs and Trumer Pils beer served while supplies last. No cover. 6pm8pm. 398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

Latin Drag Night @ Club OMG Weekly Latin night with drag shows hosted by Vicky Jimenez. 9pm-2am. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

Miss Kitty’s Trivia Night @ Wild Side West The weekly fun night at the Bernal Heights bar includes prizes, hosted by Kitty Tapata. No cover. 7pm-10pm. 424 Cortland St. 647-3099. wildsidewest.com

Man Francisco @ Oasis The weekly all-male striptease revue with a storyline of San Francisco’s history, from the Gold Rush to the tech boom, performed by sexy local hunks, and MC mr Pam. $20 (plus optional $30 lap dances!). 9:30pm. Extended thru December. 298 11th St. at Folsom. www.sfoasis.com

Open Mic/Comedy @ SF Eagle Kollin Holts hosts the weekly comedy and open mic talent night. 6pm-8pm. 398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

ebar.com personals

Pussy Party @ Beaux

Meow Mix @ The Stud

Jim Hopkins plays classic pop oldies, with vintage music videos. 9pm-2am. 44 Castro St. www.the440.com

San Jose:

So You Think You Can Gogo? @ Toad Hall The weekly dancing competition for gogo wannabes. 9pm. cash prizes, $2 well drinks (2 for 1 happy hour til 9pm). Show at 9pm. 4146 18th St. www.toadhallbar.com

Way Back @ Midnight Sun Weekly screenings of vintage music videos and retro drink prices. Check out the new expanded front window lounge. 9pm-2am. 4067 18th St. 8614186. www.midnightsunsf.com

Wooden Nickel Wednesday @ 440 Buy a drink and get a wooden nickle good for another. 12pm-2am. 440 Castro St. 621-8732. the440.com

Thu 10 Funny Fun @ Club 21, Oakland Weekly LGBT and straight comedy night hosted by Dan Mires. $10. 8pm. 2111 Franklin St. Oakland. (510) 2689425. www.club21oakland.com

Gay Skate Night @ Church on 8 Wheels LGBT night at the former Sacred Heart Church-turned disco roller skate party space, hosted by John D. Miles, the “Godfather of Skate.” Also Wed, Thu, 7pm-10pm. Sat afternoon sessions 1pm-2:30pm and 3pm-5:30pm. $10. Kids 12 and under $5. Skate rentals $5. 554 Fillmore St at Fell. www.churchof8wheels.com

Gym Class @ Hi Tops Enjoy whiskey shots from jockstrapped hotties and sexy sports videos at the popular new sports bar. 10pm-2am. 2247 Market St. 551-2500. www.HiTopsSF.com

Mary Go Round @ Lookout Mercedez Munro and Holotta Tymes’ weekly drag show. $5. 10:30pm show. DJ Philip Grasso. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

Queer Karaoke @ Club OMG Dana hosts the weekly singing night; unleash your inner American Idol. 8pm. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

Thirsty Thursdays @ The Cafe Drink specials, Top 40, gogo studs and no cover, 2 for 1 cocktails until 10:30pm. 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

Thump @ White Horse, Oakland Weekly electro music night with DJ Matthew Baker and guests. 9pm-2am. 6551 Telegraph Ave, (510) 652-3820. www.whitehorsebar.com Want your nightlife event listed? Email events@ebar.com, at least two weeks before your event. Event photos welcome.

Read more online at www.ebar.com

ooting Stars

December 3-9, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 43

photos by

Steven Underhill

Union Square Tree-Lighting T

he annual tree-lighting ceremony in Union Square, sponsored by Macy’s, included festive holiday cheer amid dropping temperatures last Friday, Nov. 27. Snoopy even made an appearance, and songs were beautifully sung by Jordin Sparks, winner of American Idol Season 6. Choral music included Vocal Rush from the Oakland School of the Arts, the Transcendence Theatre Company and the Contra Costa Children’s Chorus.

More event photo albums are on BARtab’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/lgbtsf.nightlife. See more of Steven Underhill’s photos at www.StevenUnderhill.com.

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For headshots, portraits or to arrange your wedding photos

call (415) 370-7152 or visit www.StevenUnderhill.com or email stevenunderhillphotos@gmail.com

WE FOCUS ON HIV TO HELP YOU FOCUS ON

TODAY

Ask your doctor if a medicine made by Gilead is right for you.

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3/27/15 3:33 PM