February 4, 2016 Edition of the Bay Area Reporter

SF park reopens at last

ARTS

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Oscar nominees

Jinkxed

The

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

Lesbian to head SF General

by Seth Hemmelgarn

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n out lesbian has been selected to lead the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

Dr. Susan P. Ehrlich, a longtime physician whose appointment Dr. Susan P. Ehrlich follows a nationwide search, will start her new post as chief executive officer April 25.

The county-run hospital is known for providing care to poor people who otherwise may not be able to get treatment, including many people who are living with HIV and AIDS. Ehrlich, who declined to share her age and what her salary will be, will lead a staff of 5,400 and manage a $1.1 billion budget.

In response to emailed questions, she said, “The biggest challenge for any health care provider today, large or small, public or private, is to provide the highest quality care at the lowest cost and with the best experience for patients and staff.”

To achieve this goal, the hospital uses what’s known as Lean, “a philosophy and set of tools” that comes “from Japanese management practice,” Ehrlich said. She said she’d join staff “in continuing this improvement journey.”

Ehrlich comes to the hospital from the San Mateo Medical Center, where she’s been the CEO since 2009. There, she’s overseen a staff of about 1,500 and a budget of $270 million.

In her 14 years at the center, she’s also served as chief medical officer, vice president, and medical director.

Ehrlich, who continues to work as a physician, has also been budget and planning director for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

“We are very proud to welcome Susan to Zuckerberg San Francisco General, a critical component of the San Francisco Health Network,” Health Director Barbara Garcia, also a lesbian, said in a January 28 news release announcing Ehrlich’s hiring.

“Dr. Ehrlich joins us at a moment of unprecedented activity and excitement, as the entire environment of health care is changing, as the needs of our community continue to grow, and as we prepare to move into our new state-of-the-art acute care and trauma center in spring of this year,” Garcia said. “We know our hospital will be in great hands.”

Ehrlich said staff and patients would be moving into the new center by June.

“My first priority will be to support the staff and providers in moving our patients safely and effectively into the building,” she said. EhSee page 14 >>

Vol. 46 • No. 5 • February 4-10, 2016

SF Pride names GM nominees T

by Sari Staver

en local community leaders have been nominated for grand marshals for the 46th annual San Francisco Pride parade, and public voting started this week.

The nominees, a diverse group of queer and straight people, were “selected for their contributions to the LGBTQ communities,” according to officials with the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee Inc. SF Pride officials said that there were 50 people nominated, which the board whittled down to 10. The board also announced nominees for organizational grand marshal and for the pink brick, given to a person or group that has caused significant harm to the LGBT community.

This year’s individual grand marshal nominees are Race Bannon, Queen Cougar, Pamela H. David, Deana Dawn, Bevan Dufty, Janetta Johnson, Joanie Juster, Mercedez Munro, Mia Satya, and Larry Yang.

Organizational grand marshal nominees are AGUILAS, Black Lives Matter, St. James Infirmary, Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, and UNITE HERE Local 2.

Individuals

Bannon, a gay man, has been an organizer, writer, educator, speaker and activist in the LGBT, leather/kink, polyamory and HIV/STI

Race Bannon

Queen Cougar

Pamela H. David

Deana Dawn

Bevan Dufty

Janetta Johnson

Joanie Juster

Mercedez Munro

Mia Satya

Larry Yang Courtesy SF Pride

prevention realms since the early 1970s. An author of two books and currently the leather columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, Bannon has been credited with creating the world’s largest kink-friendly psychotherapist and medical referral service.

In an email to the B.A.R., Bannon said he’s especially proud of the work he did “to begin changing the perceptions of kinky people in the world of psychotherapy.”

Bannon, 61, said he led the first project of its kind that helped change the diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which he calls the “bible of

psychotherapy.” The result, Bannon said, is that therapists “no longer assume that people into BDSM and other related sexualities were mentally ill.”

“I have always worked hard to ensure that people from all walks of life could feel secure and informed in their sexual identity, erotic practices, and relationship choices,” he added.

Cougar, also known as Colleen Small, co-chaired the Leather SM Roundup, a nowdefunct clean and sober group for people in the SM community, in 1991 and has traveled See page 13 >>

Latest Castro housing projects cause concern

by Matthew S. Bajko

Several have been well received while Spiers’ Linea has been one of wo mixed-use developthe most derided for its geometric ments in the Castro’s upper design and, according to some Market Street corridor will critics, unappealing retail spaces. be taken up this month by the The latest batch of proposed decity’s planning commission amid velopments is drawing unusually concerns about their designs and strong concern from the Duboce complaints they include too few Triangle Neighborhood Assounits of affordable housing. ciation. It has voiced objections to On Thursday (February 4), the the designs of not only the projArquitectonica-designed 62-unit ects for the Home and Sullivan’s building at 2100 Market Street is up sites but another in-fill project at for a vote before the oversight body.

2201 Market Street (at Sanchez) The redevelopment of the corner where 14 units of housing is being restaurant space, last operated as proposed to replace an existing Home, and attached parking lot is commercial building currently ocfrom local developer Brian Spiers, Courtesy Brian Spiers Development cupied by a real estate firm. who owns nearby bar Lucky 13 and A rendering of the apartment building at 2100 Market Street, the DTNA has labeled all three of built the cube-like Linea develop- site of a former restaurant, shows a flatiron-inspired look. the designs as “generic and uninment, designed by the same architeresting” and blames the plantects, a block north on Market. ning department’s design review Market Street to go before the planning comThe following week, at its Febprocess for rejecting the architects’ bolder plans mission in nearly two years. ruary 11 meeting, the planning commission is for each site.

Another five more redevelopment proposals slated to vote on the Prado Group’s revamp of In addition to pushing to see more cuttingslated for Market Street between Duboce AvSullivan’s Funeral Home at 2254 Market Street edge architecture, DTNA has joined with a enue and Castro Street are in the pipeline, with number of other neighborhood groups to deand its adjacent parking lot. The developer has proposed incorporating the existing structure several expected to also seek approval from city mand that the new projects set aside 20 percent officials this year. into a new building containing 45 apartments of their units as affordable. And it is pressing to Over the last three years a number of new see that any ground floor retail spaces be limand a townhouse with two units constructed on housing developments with retail spaces at the property’s 15th Street side. ited in size so the leases are not so astronomical street level have been built along the main thorBoth projects include ground floor retail in price that only chain stores can afford them. oughfare in the city’s gay district. All have been spaces and plan to set aside the required 12 perIts concerns are so great about the coming situated at prominent corner sites and feature cent of below-market-rate units on site. They See page 7 >> modernist designs. are the first new housing proposals for upper

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<< Community News

2 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

Castro GLBT History Museum marks 5 years

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by Sari Staver

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ver 300 people braved the rain and packed the small GLBT History Museum in the Castro for its fifth anniversary party and raised more than $1,500 for the nonprofit.

The museum, located at 4127 18th Street, is the first full-scale stand alone museum of its kind in the country. It is part of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, which has one of the largest collections of LGBT historical archives.

Since its opening in 2011, about 75,000 people have visited the museum, which sees about 15,000 people a year, historical society spokesman Marke Bieschke said.

The nonprofit’s new executive director, Terry Beswick, who started on a half-time basis February 2, urged attendees to become members of the historical society, noting that the organization would like to find a space where it could combine the archives and the museum.

In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Beswick said the diverse stories of oppression, struggle, and triumph that comprise the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender expe-

Steven Underhill

New GLBT Historical Society Executive Director Terry Beswick, left, talks with Strut’s Steve Gibson at the fifth anniversary party for the GLBT History Museum.

riences are integral to human history and culture.

“My ambitious goal is to take the historical society to the next level, to build on our existing programs to establish a world-class cultural museum and archives to preserve and present our stories in ways that

are accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences” Beswick said in an email. “We have earned it, and my hope is that the community will be inspired by this vision and will help make it a reality.”

Hosts for the evening were celebrated drag performer Juanita More and Alex U. Inn, founder and member of the drag king group, Momma’s Boyz.

A number of special guests spoke about their favorite objects in the museum.

Tina Takemoto, an artist and associate professor of visual studies at California College of the Arts, discussed the display on Jiro Onuma, a gay Japanese immigrant who arrived in California in 1923. The exhibit, which was curated by Takemoto, contains photographs of Onuma with his friends and lovers around San Francisco and a small selection of homoerotic kitsch, including his postcard of a matador with a bronze erect penis, which could be detached and used as a necktie pin (then placed back on the matador at the end of the day), she said.

“The item I find most striking and mysterious,” she said after the event, “is an image that is one of the few known photographs showing adult gay men in the American concentration camps during World War II.” “As a fourth-generation Japanese American,” said Takemoto, “I grew up hearing family stories about the camps, but no one ever mentioned the LGBTQ experience of imprisonment. Historical accounts of same-sex intimacy in camp are rare partly because of the atypical structure of the prisons, which organized inmates by family units, and partly due to the conventional ways we think about JapaneseAmerican wartime history, which often focus on intergenerational narratives highlighting themes of loyalty, hardship, innocence, and civility.”

Ms. Bob Davis, a professor of music at City College of San Francisco and a former board member of the GLBT Historical Society, discussed “Artists United in Drag,” a chalk pastel drawing on construction paper by Doris Fish. The drawing depicts five drag queens on a float they created for a gay pride parade in the 1970s. Three of the people in the drawing were members of Sluts a Go Go, a 1970s drag group.

In a phone interview with the B.A.R., Ms. Davis, as she prefers to be known, said the drawing is special to her because it is a reminder of “how far drag has come” in the LGBT community. In the 1970s and 1980s, she said, “the gay community didn’t care about drag. It was the era of the Castro clone,” she said.t

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Community News>>

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 3

Mixed reaction as rehabbed Dolores Park reopens

Visit The Castro District’s Super-Store

Rick Gerharter

A robot dance party drew fans of all ages as it helped to celebrate the opening of the southern section of Mission Dolores Park.

by David-Elijah Nahmod

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housands partied as Mission Dolores Park was fully reopened last week after a year and a half of renovations. Though touted as a grand re-opening, there was no official opening ceremony.

With the final phase of the Dolores Park renovations now completed, the “gay beach,” a popular LGBT hangout on the hill alongside Church and 20th street near Muni’s J Church line, was reclaimed by the community.

The renovations include newly planted grass and trees, new benches and lighting for the park, and newly constructed restrooms, as well as a children’s playground complete with swings, slides, and climbing bars.

The $20.5 million renovation was funded through the 2008 Clean and Safe Neighborhood Parks Bond, San Francisco Recreation and Park Department said.

Thousands took advantage of the break in the rains and the mild temperatures. Revelers included a group of hula-hoopers and a diverse array of families who were there to enjoy a simple picnic. A number of people danced to the musical stylings of a local mariachi band – dancers included an attention-grabbing robot.

Gay District 8 Supervisor Scott Wiener told the Bay Area Reporter that he couldn’t be happier with the new Dolores Park.

“Dolores Park is a community treasure, and it’s now even better,” Wiener said. “We increased the park’s restroom capacity seven-fold, installed new irrigation and drainage systems, renewed the athletic facilities, and generally spruced things up. The project team did a fantastic job, as did the many community members who helped with the design process.”

Parkgoers were also pleased.

“It looks awesome,” said Lee Jewell, 55, as he sat on a hilltop bench that afforded him a view of the en-

tire park. “They did an amazing job – come back to Dolores Park.”

According to a news release from Joey Kahn of rec and park, the newly constructed restrooms brings the number of toilets in the park to 27 – the park previously offered only four toilets for public use. Additionally, near the gay beach is a pissoir, an outdoor, open-air urinal that now stands next to the outbound JChurch stop. The pissoir is modeled after similar urinals that are found in a variety of European cities.

One thing that did stick out was that the pissoir does not resemble a rendering that the B.A.R. published in December. In that illustration provided by rec and park, the sides of the pissoir look to be at least seven feet tall.

But the pissoir walls actually come up to a man’s chin, and using the urinal does not afford much privacy.

Kahn said this week that the pissoir had indeed changed.

“The design was changed due to community and operational concerns about vandalism and visibility, as well as to ensure ADA access,” Kahn said in an email, referring to the Americans with Disabilities Act. He added that plants on the exterior of the pissoir “will grow similarly to ivy over the next several months to provide for additional privacy.”

Kahn said the pissoir was conceived to “address concerns of neighbors and park users who had seen people illegally relieving themselves on the Muni tracks and in bushes near homes.”

One of the people who helped construct the pissoir also talked about it at the park last week.

“We want to give people a communal location to go to the bathroom,” Peter Dickinson told the B.A.R. “We need it because people would rather not take the time to go down to a facility that might be locked after dark.”

Dickinson said that he laid out the

location for the pissoir’s drain and coordinated its connection with the sewer system. He said that the pissoir is on an auto-timer that flushes water through it a number of times per day.

“If this works out, they’ll consider using this system in other parks,” Dickinson said.

The pissoir got high marks from gay artist Jokie X Wilson. “I love it,” Wilson told the B.A.R. as he used the facility. “It brings back warm memories of Amsterdam – it’s one of those things that makes life easier.”

“I could have pissed all night, like a horse,” added Wilson’s friend, Roger Schachtel, 66. Schachtel was also quite pleased with the new Dolores Park as a whole.

“From where I stood, I beheld glittering crowds, the downtown vista and the tapestry of the heavens,” he said. “I inhaled champagne air. I never wanted to go home.”

Several neighborhood residents took a different view of the park’s reopening. Lisa Geduldig, a popular comedian and LGBT activist, took issue with the personal habits of park attendees.

“I used to enjoy Dolores Park and was thrilled to have it around the corner from me,” Geduldig said, who has lived in the neighborhood for 27 years. “But it has become a playground for the nouveau riche or hip• sters or whoever the F they are who apparently never learned to clean up after themselves. Who goes to a park and leaves their shit behind?”

Geduldig was referring in part to photos of a trash-littered Dolores Park that were posted on Facebook the day after the reopening.

“Over the past few years or so, the place has suddenly become wall-towall and a pigsty,” she added. “With that said, I haven’t been there since it reopened. After eons of construction being an eyesore and parts of the park closed in different intervals, I’m glad the whole thing is open.

But I must admit that I almost never go there anymore since the overly paid entitled set moved in. Get off my lawn.”

Patrick Henry, a gay man who lives about a block from the park, took issue with the money the city spent on its redesign.

“If my impression remains that it seems odd to me that the city, which is currently routing homeless people out of their personal shelters, their tents, yet failing to provide adequate shelters or services to them – that the city had all this of this money to redo a pleasure-park,” Henry said.

“Of course, with all of the tax revenues from our dot-com businesses and high-priced property sales we should be able to afford all of it, right?”t

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Artist Jokie X Wilson demonstrates how to use the new pissoir at Dolores Park, which is close to the J-Church Muni line.

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<< Open Forum

4 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

Volume 46, Number 5 February 4-10, 2016 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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Three-way anti-gay GOP race

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onday’s Iowa caucus results have scrambled the Republican presidential contest into a three-way race among candidates known for anti-gay views – Texas Senator Ted Cruz, businessman Donald Trump, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

Cruz, the winner of the caucuses, is the harshest. A tea party darling, Cruz has built his political life on demonizing people, including the LGBT community. In currying support from Christian evangelicals, Cruz derided last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide and criticized President Barack Obama’s executive orders that, among other things, prevents discrimination against LGBT people in employment by federal contractors and expands hospital visitation policies.

Rubio, whose surprisingly strong thirdplace finish boosted his momentum heading into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, is perhaps the GOP’s brightest prospect. He’s Cuban-American, young, and is the possible face of the next generation. But his homophobic beliefs are no way to expand the party. He, too, has pledged to repeal Obama’s executive orders, and is against same-sex couples’ ability to adopt because children shouldn’t “be part of a social experiment,” according to a position paper from the Human Rights Campaign.

As for Trump, he’ll say anything, even contradicting himself to win over voters. As the New York Times reported this week, “There is something in his message for almost everyone.” Let’s just say for LGBTs, there’s nothing positive in Trump’s statements. He disagrees with the

Supreme Court’s marriage decision and has said he would appoint high court justices committed to overturning the ruling.

These three candidates will likely be battling it out in primaries and caucuses for months to come. Now that the field is shrinking, and possibly even more after next week, it’s time for debate moderators to start asking tougher questions regarding domestic issues, including LGBT rights. It’s not enough to ask just about marriage equality. We need to understand where this animus toward us comes from. Surely there are employment issues for the LGBT people working in Trump’s casinos. Florida has a large and active LGBT community and gay enclaves, such as Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Key West, yet it lacks state protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. As for Texas, well, we know there are pockets of forward-leaning people, but state laws do not

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protect LGBT employees anywhere. Houston voters reinforced that last fall when they rejected an inclusive anti-discrimination ordinance.

Abetting these candidates and the party’s homophobia is Log Cabin Republicans, who this week let loose on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, saying she was late to issues like supporting same-sex marriage. Well, yes she was, as were a lot of other people. The point is that she supports marriage equality now. But really, how can Log Cabin criticize Clinton when all of the GOP candidates are against marriage equality? Marriage is a conservative social construct, and since the Supreme Court decision, more and more moderate Republicans have come to support their LGBT families, neighbors, and co-workers. Yet the party’s presidential candidates want us go back to the days of gay raids and firings.

Log Cabin’s work in state and local GOP parties is important, but it has lost credibility at the national level because it doesn’t call out the presidential candidates on their anti-gay platforms. It should be working with these campaigns, but that’s a tall order when the candidate are running to the far right to get the support – and votes – of conservative Christians.

Much progress has been achieved on LGBT rights over the past 20 years, yet community members along with Muslims and immigrants continue to be singled out and bullied from the Republican presidential candidates. And most of those who show up for these rallies actively play along, or shout back more insults. The GOP playbook hasn’t changed in decades – stoke hatred of minorities in order to divide rather that unite the party as a valid strategy for victory.t

Tips for reinventing your golden years

by Scott Page

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hen it comes to retirement concerns, it is tempting to suggest that the gay community behaves in the same manner as the rest of America, but such a suggestion would be incorrect. A Sage and Harris poll found that 51 percent of older LGBT people are concerned about having enough money to live on as they age, compared with 36 percent of non-LGBT people. In addition, LGBT seniors are more concerned about personal finances, physical decline and attractiveness, remaining independent, loneliness in older age, and support systems. The LGBT community is not only more concerned about retirement, but these concerns go deeper than finances and into the emotional aspects of aging into one’s golden years.

I have studied retirement and longevity issues for many years, reviewing studies like the one mentioned above, speaking with clients who are dealing with such things firsthand and even seeking the counsel of my friend and the original Golden Girl, Betty White. What I have learned is that large swaths of Americans are ill-prepared for retirement; yet seniors and boomers (gay or straight) who make smart assessments and work on their emotional and financial plans can learn that it is never too late to have a fulfilling retirement.

Start with a reality check

As I learned with my own parents, a key starting point for re-energizing a retirement plan is to make an honest assessment of the situation and to realize that significant changes can make a difference. While traditional financial planners will tell you that the only options are to either save more or cut costs, other options exist. However, before that can start, you have to take a realistic look at your life and determine reasonable long-term goals.

For some, this can be a major reality check. If you continue on with your current behavior of spending nearly as much as comes in, failing to save, or living in a home that’s more than you need, then retirement may remain a pipedream. However, if you look at your life and make an appropriate and realistic financial plan, then you will be able make changes that will lead to a more secure financial future.

Life expectancy is a key building block

Before you can plan, you need to get a better understanding of how long you need to

Scott Page, right, with his friend, actress Betty White

plan for. This requires addressing the alwaysuncomfortable topic of life expectancy. Again, from personal experience, I know that most people don’t like to consider their mortality, but if you don’t have an understanding of how long you will live, then it is impossible to prepare for the future. Because it has always bothered me that the financial planning profession just glosses over life expectancy, I created a special calculator to help assist seniors and boomers who need to pin down the length of time needed for their plans.

Right-size your life

While cutting costs enough to live an appropriate retirement may seem difficult, some big changes can be made which mainly involve downsizing. Many seniors and boomers continue to live in large homes (sometimes by themselves), have more than one car, live in an expensive part of the country, or even pay for the expenses of a vacation home. If you right size your life, you can definitely improve your retirement.

First, if your home has more than two bedrooms, then you probably have more space than you need, and it may be best to downsize and move to a less expensive part of town or even a new state. Taking full advantage of your living space is a tremendous cost saver. Why heat, cool, and clean extra rooms if you don’t have to?

Next, if you are living alone, look for options whereby you can co-habitat with others. This not only saves money, but the social aspect of having other people around can do wonders for your happiness. There’s a reason that the television show The Golden Girls was such a big success. Spending time with your

friends and family is more fun and productive than living alone with a remote control and the Internet.

Lastly, when thinking about your future, it’s also time to get rid of extra vehicles and other possessions – that riding mower that hasn’t cranked in years and any other large assets that are just using up space. Sorry, but this means taking a hard look at everything you have accumulated over the years. Do you need all of that jewelry? Would that value be better off in your money market account? Are you holding on to a stamp collection or those gold coins you accumulated decades ago? Now’s the time to reassess the value of your possessions.

Consider your encore career

If you are already retired or closing in on the date, it may be time to look at a new career that is a better match for your age, your needs, and your wants. Encore careers, such as working in a local shop, consulting, or turning a hobby into a small income source, can be incredibly rewarding and can help you make the transition from full-time worker to part-time retiree. And such encore careers are typically less stressful and more rewarding than the 21st century grind that is wearing down so many of us. You can make some money and perhaps earn some benefits, but mainly, you will be giving your life additional purpose while increasing your social network.

Tools of the trade for the new retirement

For help with planning for the future, including worksheets that can help you organize your thoughts and figure out how to right size your life, visit http://scottpage.com/freeretirement-tools/. A meaningful retirement is possible for everyone within both the gay and straight communities – we just have to rework our plans and make significant adjustments to our lives.t Scott Page is president and CEO of the Lifeline Program, a life insurance settlement provider in Atlanta. He is a recognized expert on retirement and financial issues facing seniors and baby boomers. He is the author of It’s Never Too Late, Getting Older, Wiser, and Worry Free in Our Golden Years.

Politics>>

t Party signals support for out Dems in CA legislative races

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 5

by Matthew S. Bajko

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number of out Democratic non-incumbents seeking state legislative seats have secured preendorsements ahead of the California Democratic Party’s convention to be held later this month in San Jose.

Due to receiving at least 70 percent of support from their district’s delegates at pre-convention endorsement caucuses held last weekend, their being endorsed by the party will now be placed on the consent calendar for simple ratification at the convention.

Intraparty opponents, however, can still maneuver at the party’s statewide gathering to try to pull the endorsement off the consent calendar and stop it from being approved. However, with new rules in place this year, party insiders say blocking the endorsements will not be easy.

For months gay San Francisco District 8 Supervisor Scott Wiener, who is seeking the Senate District 11 seat, had worked behind the scenes to secure enough support to land early backing for his party’s endorsement. The strategy paid off, as Wiener received 80 percent of the Region 6 vote; his opponent, District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim, earned less than 20 percent as several people opted for a no endorsement in the race.

“As a lifelong Democrat and former chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, I couldn’t be more proud to earn the support of these grassroots activists,” stated Wiener. “They work tirelessly to elect leaders who will fight to protect our environment, expand affordable housing, ensure access to quality, affordable health care, fight to improve our schools, and protect a woman’s right to choose.”

Sabrina Cervantes, a lesbian who is seeking to oust Assemblyman Eric Linder (R-Corona) from his 60th Assembly District seat centered in northwestern Riverside County, walked away with 95 percent of the votes cast at the Democratic Party’s pre-convention caucus for its Region 13.

“I am humbled by the outpouring of support from grassroots Democratic Party activists,” she stated. “The 60th Assembly District is likely to be one of the most competitive races in the state, and I am excited to be one step closer to earning the official endorsement of the California Democratic Party.”

In Region 19, Palm Springs resident Greg Rodriguez, a gay married father who is HIV-positive, secured a 93 percent vote at the pre-endorsement meeting. He is seeking to oust from office freshman Assemblyman Chad Mayes (R-Yucca Valley) from his 42nd Assembly District seat, which covers most of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

With state Senator Marty Block (D-San Diego) announcing last week that he was dropping his re-election bid, outgoing lesbian Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) walked away with 94 percent of the pre-endorsement vote of her bid for Block’s Senate District 39 seat. The Region 20 caucus meeting also saw gay San Diego City Councilman Todd Gloria, who is running for Atkins’ Assembly seat, earn a 100 percent pre-endorsement vote.

Unlike Wiener, the other four out candidates who secured pre-

Barry Schneider Attorney at Law State Senate candidate Toni Atkins

Assembly candidate Sabrina Cervantes

endorsements do not face an intraparty primary challenge. Thus, the caucus results are hardly a surprise.

Three other out non-incumbent legislative candidates, all of whom are running against fellow Democrats, failed to secure pre-endorsement backing over the weekend.

Bryan Urias, a gay man seeking the 48th Assembly District seat located in the San Gabriel Valley, fell 2 percentage points below the required threshold needed at the Region 15 caucus. He is running to succeed Assemblyman Roger Hernandez (D-West Covina), who is termed out of office next year, and is in a tough race against teacher Blanca E. Rubio.

His campaign noted in a statement that his 68 percent is more than the 60 percent threshold of eligible delegates required to win the party’s endorsement at the convention.

“This vote today was very humbling for me” stated Urias. “These delegates are people I respect and work side by side with to ensure we advance Democratic candidates and Democratic policies at all levels of government. I am so proud to have received this level of support.”

Lesbian Pasadena resident Katherine Aguilar Perez-Estolano, who is seeking the open 25th Senate District seat, also came up short.

Instead, former Assemblyman Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge) landed 70 percent to secure the Region 11 caucus’s pre-endorsement.

Meanwhile, Joel Fajardo, a gay man and current mayor of San Fernando who is running for the 39th Assembly District seat held by Assemblywoman Patty Lopez (D-San Fernando), was not listed as eligible for the party pre-endorsement vote.

In that contest, former Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra, who lost to Lopez two years ago, scored 95 percent at the Region 12 caucus.

The party’s state convention will be held in San Jose February 26-28.

ful leadership post, had the biggest, by far, campaign cash total of the out non-incumbent legislative candidates. She raised more than $1.7 million last year, though the bulk of it came from her former campaign accounts, and reported having more than $1.6 million to spend on her campaign.

Gloria raised close to $362,000 for his bid to succeed Atkins and had more than $242,000 in his campaign account at the start of 2016.

Urias raised $277,329 last year and had $195,906 left over. His opponent, Rubio, reported $182,710 in donations, with $132,604 in cash on hand.

Perez-Estolano took in $109,605 with $82,718 left in the bank. It paled in comparison to the $512,593 her opponent, Portantino, raised last year, bringing his financial resources to $994,069 for the June primary race, where the top two vote-getters advance to the November election.

Another candidate in the Senate race, Phlunte Riddle, netted $177,729 from donors last year. The retired Pasadena police lieutenant reported having $106,157 left over to spend. Republican Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich raised $248,902 last year toward his bid for the Senate with $224,325 left on hand.

(Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, in December withdrew from the Senate race and is now eyeing a run for lieutenant governor in 2018. He reported having more than $2 million in his campaign account for that race; Leno is also considering a bid for the statewide office and reported having $37,371 for a potential campaign.)

For her Assembly bid, Cervantes netted $99,453 last year and had nearly $72,000 remaining. Her opponent, Linder, raised $360,160 and had more than $252,000 to spend.

Rodriguez reported $80,523 in contributions last year for his Assembly race with $51,579 unspent. His opponent, Mayes, raised $431,518 with $260,425 in cash on hand.

Raising the least amount of money in 2015 was Fajardo, who reported a total haul of $10,475. He started the new year with $7,384 to spend on his Assembly bid.

The incumbent, Lopez, reported raising $29,108 last year and had spent all but $1,582 by December 31. Bocanegra, on the other hand, was sitting on a campaign war chest of $456,807, having raised $377,330 last year.

Candidates report 2015 fundraising hauls

State legislative candidates also reported their 2015 fundraising hauls this week, with Wiener having raised more than $852,000 since entering the race last July.

In a news release, his campaign said that more than 75 percent of Wiener’s donors live in the district and most gave $250 or less. As of January 1, Wiener had $662,324 remaining in his campaign account.

Kim, who officially entered the race in October, raised a little more than $300,000 and reported having spent hardly any of it as of December 31.

Atkins, due to holding her power-

Gay ex-congressman stumps for Honda

Just days after appearing at a fundraiser for Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), gay former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank will be stumping for See page 14 >>

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<< Commentary

6 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

Can you see the real me?

by Gwendolyn Ann Smith

E

very so often I like to take a step back from the issues of the day and spend a moment or two on what is known as “transgender 101.” I know that not everyone who might casually wander across this column is transgender, or even may have the slightest glimmer of what it’s all about. That said, I hope that everyone might get a little something out of this.

One of the most important things to understand about transgender people, beyond anything else, is this: when we live in our preferred gender identity, or opt to express gender in any manner of our choosing, we are being authentic to ourselves. You are seeing the person we really see ourselves as.

What you see then are our authentic selves, presenting in a gender identity that feels right to us. We’re not trying to deceive. Indeed, it’s quite the opposite; we’ve dropped the pretense of fitting into a gender identity that doesn’t fit us.

There are those out there, especially in the fights against public accommodations for trans people, who will tell you that it is a simple matter to identify as trans, and that allowing transgender people to use the restroom of their appropriate gender will open the floodgates for

others to claim to be transgender in a bid to harm others.

To date, there are no truly credible examples of this happening in the fashion our foes would claim.

We have usually spent a significant portion of our lives coming to this conclusion. It is rare that we might come to such a decision without a fair amount of soul searching and introspection. Many of us will try anything else we can before we opt to transition. It’s just not a simple decision.

To the average non-transgender person, the notion of changing their gender is a non-issue. They’re perfectly happy to remain what they were assigned at birth – usually due to the configuration of their genitalia – and have not felt any significant displeasure with their gender identity. To such folks, they have always been a man or a woman, and expect to be such for the rest of their lives.

The issue of their gender is moot.

Indeed, even if they opt to appear as the opposite gender for, say, a film role such as Eddie Redmayne’s portrayal of Einar Wegener in The Danish Girl, they understand that this is simply a role they are portraying. They remain male or female, and – unlike the mangled story that is The Danish Girl – appearing as a gender opposite the one they identify with does not change their core gender identity.

Unfortunately, many might take their own sense of gender and opt to apply it to trans people, assuming that transfolks have this same innate gender identity that corresponds with their primary sexual characteristics, and that they have somehow “gone astray” at best – or are attempting to deceive at worst.

In 2003, a largely discredited psychologist, J. Michael Bailey, released his equally discredited book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. In the book, Bailey discussed the theory of autogynephilia developed by sexologist Ray Blanchard.

In Blanchard and Bailey’s world, transsexuality as we know it does not exist. Instead there are people

Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener.

“It is my great honor to recognize author Armistead Maupin with the 2016 Mayor’s Art Award,” Lee said in a news release. “His groundbreaking series Tales of the City helped introduce LGBTQ culture to the mainstream and contributed to

San Francisco’s image as a compassionate city that celebrates diversity and where all are welcome. He is truly a San Francisco icon, and we are immensely grateful for his innumerable contributions to the city’s cultural history.”

Maupin, 71, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1944 and grew up in

Christine Smith

who are “homosexual transsexuals” who seek genital reconstruction to attract straight men into (presumably) gay relationships, and “autogynephiliac transsexuals” who are sexually aroused at the idea of having a female body. This is what you see presented in the aforementioned The Danish Girl, by the way.

I should add that, yes there is such a term as “autoandrophilia,” although Blanchard doesn’t seem to think that exists. In a 2013 Vice interview, Blanchard stated, “I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism.”

In this notion of autogynephilia, trans lives are stripped of legitimacy.

Even though Blanchard has generally supported genital reconstruction surgeries for transsexuals, this notion of trans identity being little more than a fetish over having a female body – or, of course wanting surgery to “fool straight guys” – says that the lived experiences of a lot of transgender people is to be discounted.

“An autogynephile does not necessarily become sexually aroused every time he pictures himself as female or engages in feminine behavior, any more than a heterosexual man automatically gets an erection whenever he sees an attractive woman,” said Blanchard in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy in 1991. “Thus, the concept of autogy-

Maupin receives Mayor’s Art Award compiled by Cynthia Laird

B

estselling author Armistead Maupin has been named by Mayor Ed Lee as the recipient of the 2016 Mayor’s Art Award.

Maupin, a gay man, rose to fame with his nine-volume Tales of the City series, as well as the novels

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Raleigh, North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he served as a naval officer in the Mediterranean and with the River Patrol Force in Vietnam. He worked for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, before being assigned to the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. In 1976 he launched his groundbreaking Tales of the City serial in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Maupin lives in San Francisco with his husband, Christopher Turner. Over the years, Maupin has been involved with advocating for gay rights and has actively supported a number of organizations that work to advance the lives of LGBTQ youth and adults.

“Armistead Maupin is a hero to many in the LGBTQ community,” said Tom DeCaigny, a gay man who is director of cultural affairs for the city. “Throughout his life, he has given back to his adopted city and community whether it be championing gay rights through his art or supporting LGBTQ youth.

He is most deserving of the Mayor’s Art Award.”

Maupin adds this award to other accolades including Lambda’s Pioneer Award (2012); Litquake Barbary Coast Award (2007); and an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Maupin will receive the Mayor’s Art Award on Tuesday, March 29 at a fundraising reception hosted by ArtCare: Friends of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

This is the fifth Mayor’s Art Award to be bestowed on a San Francisco artist. Previous awardees are Ruth Asawa (visual art); Alonzo King (dance); Carlos Santana (music); and Rhodessa Jones (theater). Maupin is the first writer being honored.

Booker to speak in SF

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Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) will be sharing his personal experiences and how they informed his civic vision during an appearance at an Inforum event Friday, February 19 at the Castro Theatre,

t

nephilia-like that of heterosexuality, homosexuality, or pedophilia-refers to a potential for sexual excitation.”

In short, it doesn’t matter if you actually got sexually excited, but you might have.

These same standards are not applied to non-transgender people, mind you. When a somewhat limited test for autogynephilia in non-transgender women was administered in 2009, it put forth that autogynephilia is simply too broad to be taken seriously, and only exists to negatively portray transgender people as fetishists.

One more thing: I mentioned that whole bit above about wanting medical transitions in order to “fool men.”

What Blanchard and many others are saying here is, again, that we’re here to deceive you, rather than showing you who we truly are. I’d be remiss to mention that this assumption of transgender deception is the exact same thing that crops up in a majority of anti-transgender murders.

Yet when we tell you we are male or female, we are being honest: this is who we are, the real us. Understand that, and you’ve taken a step into deeper understanding of what it means to be trans.t Gwen Smith is the real deal: accept no substitutions. You’ll find her at www.gwensmith.com and on Twitter at @gwenners.

Rick Gerharter

Author Armistead Maupin

429 Castro Street in San Francisco.

Inforum is a division of the Commonwealth Club and attendees meet thought leaders in entertainment, tech, pop culture, and politics.

Booker, an ally of the LGBT community, will talk about social, economic, and environmental justice during his talk, which is timed to the release of his new book, United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good.

Booker became New Jersey’s first AfricanAmerican senator in October 2013 when he won a special election to fill the term of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg.

Prior to that, he was mayor of Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, for seven years.

As senator, Booker is best known as a passionate proponent of criminal justice reform, and has garnered bipartisan support for the issue. He has sponsored bills on the issues of health, transportation and public works, taxation, and civil rights.

Booker is no stranger to the Bay Area as he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University. He later attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. He earned his law degree from Yale Law School.

Tickets for the event are $25 for non-members (or $45 with the book), or $15 for members ($35 with the book). Premium seating in the first rows is $75 for non-members or $60 for members. To purchase tickets, call (415) 597-6705 or visit http://www.commonwealthclub.org.

See page 13 >>

t <<

From the Cover>>

Castro housing

From page 1

projects that DTNA has asked the planning department to put a pause on approving any new housing along upper Market Street until its concerns can be addressed.

“This is an unusual step for DTNA, an organization that has welcomed neighborhood-serving, transit-friendly, dense development,” DTNA noted in its February newsletter. It added that, “The Upper Market/Castro is without question taking its ‘fair share’ of growth and development, but DTNA is insistent that these projects be done right and respond to current issues for the community.”

Planning Director John Rahaim met with the group’s land use committee Monday night to address its concerns. In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter Rahaim said he generally does not support halting construction anywhere in the city.

Doing so, he said, will only exacerbate the growing demand for both market-rate and affordable housing.

“I believe if we don’t do more market rate housing in the city, new residents will push out long time residents of the city,” said Rahaim, a gay man who has led the city’s planning department for eight years.

“My personal belief is stopping market-rate housing is not going to solve this problem.”

In addition to the planning department refusing to put a hold on the upper Market Street projects, gay Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents the Castro, told the B.A.R. this week that he does not agree with DTNA that a pause is needed.

“I do not support a moratorium in housing on upper Market, period,” said Wiener, who was a vocal critic of last fall’s unsuccessful ballot measure to impose a building moratorium in the Mission. “These projects are all in the planning process and the developers have been engaging with the community.

They are all headed to the planning commission, which will make a decision.”

Planning Commission Vice President Dennis Richards, a gay man who formerly led DTNA, has spoken to the group about its concerns.

He told the B.A.R. he believes there are ways to address the issues DTNA has raised other than through a moratorium.

“My question on that would have to be what would a pause accomplish?” asked Richards.

However, Richards said he does understand the neighborhood concerns about wanting to see more units be made available for low- and middle-income people in the new developments proposed for upper Market Street.

“They feel this is the last gasp chance to create more affordability,” he said.

City Hall officials are in talks to boost the percentage of affordable housing developers would be required to set aside to as much as 25 percent. But Wiener said he believes the threshold should be based on the size of the development so that ones with 40 units or less would face a set-aside greater than 12 percent but less than 25 percent.

He is waiting to see the results of an economic feasibility study before committing to an exact number.

“I support increasing the inclusionary percentage but I want to make sure we are differentiating between projects based on size,” said Wiener.

Planning backs Home site proposal

The planning department has recommended that the planning commissioners approve Spiers’ plans to redevelop the former Home site when they meet Thursday. Seven of the rental units would be set aside

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 7

as affordable, and a new resthat accepted the bodies of taurant would be sought to AIDS victims at the beginning operate out of a corner 2,600 of the epidemic “appears to be square foot commercial space. a significant overstatement.”

“We think it is a great space In an interview for the refor a restaurant, nightlife port conducted last April, Jim spot,” said Spiers, who already Sullivan, who started working has been fielding calls from for his father at Sullivan’s in interested restaurateurs.

1970, couldn’t recall any of The building, which would the city’s funeral homes rerange from four to seven fusing to serve AIDS victims. stories on the sloping parcel, He is quoted as saying he “did would have six studio units, not think Sullivan’s was one 31 one-bedroom units, and 25 of the first funeral homes in two-bedroom units. Residents San Francisco to accept AIDS Courtesy Prado Group would have access to a 4,960 victims.”

The proposed development at the site of the former Sullivan’s Funeral Home would square foot roof top deck.

Based on its own research In his report on the proj- keep the existing building, front, with its distinctive terra cotta roofline. of obituaries published at ect, planner Jeff Horn noted the time, the Architectural it complies with the city’s Resources Group concluded units will be apartment rentals or ing would be torn down. They Upper Market Development Design that Sullivan’s “was one member of condos for sale. contended the funeral home was Guidelines and “is desirable for, and a broad array of funeral homes and Unlike with Spiers’ project, Prado one of the few in the early days of compatible with the surrounding religious institutions – both within has proposed a below-grade parkthe AIDS epidemic of the 1980s to neighborhood.” the Castro district and across the ing garage with 24 spaces. There accept the bodies of those who had Addressing the Castro Merchants, city – that held services for AIDS will also be 66 bicycle parking spots died. which voted to support his project victims in San Francisco in the for residents, most accessed via the A post from January 2015 on the in December, Spiers noted the prop1980s and 1990s.”

Market Street building’s lobby.

Preserving LGBT Historic Sites in erty has been vacant since 2011 and The group concluded in its The initial design by BAR ArchiCalifornia Facebook page pointed that he is eager to revive the promievaluation that the Sullivan’s buildtects played off the red colors of the to a June 2006 AIDS timeline in the nent corner where Market, Church, ing does not warrant listing on terra cotta tiles on the funeral home San Jose Mercury News that said, and 14th streets intersect.

California’s Register of Historical building. That was changed, how“Sullivan’s was a notable exception: The building would mirror a flatResources. But it did agree with an ever, in the current proposal.

Owner Jim Sullivan ‘lost a brother iron design with the corner featurearlier finding by another firm that “The new design has more muted to AIDS, and his funeral home ing glassed living rooms with dark the building does contribute to the colors so the new building will take was one of the few in the city that gray metal guardrails. Both sides of Upper Market Street Commercial a back seat to the existing building,” would handle the funerals of AIDS the building would feature pop-out Historic District. explained Prado Group senior projvictims.’” bay windows.

It is expected that planning staff ect manager Jon Yolles during the The Citywide Historic Context The initial design for the project will also recommend the planning December meeting of the Castro Statement for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexu“was not well received for being too commission approve Prado’s plans Merchants, which voted to endorse al, Transgender and Queer History modern,” said Spiers, “so we decided for the site next Thursday. And with the project. in San Francisco, adopted last fall, to go in a different direction.” its past record of supporting the There will be 3,000 square feet cited Sullivan’s, along with the NepThe property owner approached various in-fill projects along upper of retail space in the new building tune Society, as “reportedly a few him in 2013 about redeveloping the Market Street, the commission is not with 15-foot-high ceilings that can of the first to offer services to those triangular lot after the city rejected likely to vote down either Prado’s or be divided into three smaller spaces, felled by AIDS” but did not include Mexican fast-food chain Chipotle’s Spier’s proposed developments. said Yolles. There will also be comthe Market Street building in a list request to open an outlet there.

The commissioners, however, mercial spaces created in the existof properties it suggested deserve “The owner knew me so he called could require both projects to ing building. some form of landmark status. me and we came to an agreement,” increase the number of below“We made the decision to incorPrado hired Architectural Resaid Spiers. “I signed a 99-year market-rate units they are offering, porate the existing building because sources Group, headed by Charles ground lease that is allowing me to as increasing affordable housing we think it has a lot of charm,” he Chase, a past president of the San do the apartment building there. throughout the city has become a said. “Quite frankly, you can’t reFrancisco Historic Preservation There will be no condo units here.” chief concern. place these buildings.”

Commission, to do a historic reThere would also be no parking The planning commission meetWhen the project was first ansource evaluation of the site. It confor cars. Instead, Spiers plans to proings begin at noon Thursdays in nounced, LGBT historic preservacluded that the Arthur J. Sullivan vide 62 bicycle spaces indoors and Room 400 at City Hall.t tions had feared the existing buildFuneral Home being among a few another five outside on the Market Street sidewalk. Six new street trees would be planted along 14th Street, where the sidewalk would be widened from 9 to 12 feet where feasible.

“This is the first to take that route.

We were highly encouraged by planning to do it,” said Spiers, who was able to add two more residential units in place of a car garage.

magnet

Developer will save Sullivan’s building

At its project a block south from the Home site, the Prado Group has committed to setting aside its required five affordable units on-site. The development fronting Market Street will be a mix of 12 junior bedrooms, 10 one-bedrooms, 20 two-bedrooms, and three three-bedrooms.

The new construction would be set back behind the existing building, which is deemed a historical resource and will be maintained, “to allow the distinctive terra cotta roofline of the funeral home to be seen at an oblique view much the way it is today,” according to the developer.

The two units in the new townhouse fronting 15th Street will be accessed by a raised stoop above the sidewalk and feature “a contemporary interpretation of the bay windows that are a cornerstone of San Francisco residential architecture,” according to the developer.

The project also includes the retention of an existing three-unit rent-controlled apartment building at 15th Street. Prado plans to make exterior improvements to it, including new windows, trim, and siding.

Prado built the nearby 38 Dolores (at Market Street) apartment building that includes a Whole Foods grocery. It will not decide until halfway through construction of the Sullivan’s site project whether those

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<< Community News

8 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

State bill calls for all-gender bathrooms

t

Jane Philomen Cleland

Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), left, announces legislation creating all-gender public restrooms at a January 29 news conference with Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) Equality California’s Rick Zbur, California NOW’s Summer Lowen, and Samantha Higgins from the Golden Gate Restaurant Association.

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bill to designate all single-user restrooms in California businesses, government buildings, and public spaces as “all gender” is being proposed by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco).

The bill is about “convenience, fairness, and frankly, safety,” Ting said at a news conference Friday, January 29, the day after he introduced Assembly Bill 1732.

The issue has become mainstream in recent months as people have expressed concern about transgender people facing harassment when they use public bathrooms that don’t match their perceived gender. The obsession over bathrooms helped doom a non-discrimination ordinance in Houston last November when opponents focused the debate on trans people using restrooms.

There’s a need to ensure “every community feels it has access,” Ting, a straight ally, said, adding, “Nobody should need to use the bathroom

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and not feel safe.”

He said he’s “proud to be part of a state that wants to take leadership and show the way rather than follow.”

Gay San Francisco Supervisor David Campos recently introduced a similar proposal locally, and such laws are also appearing in Oakland and other cities.

Assemblyman David Chiu (DSan Francisco), AB 1732’s principal co-author, said anti-LGBT policies, including those aimed at restricting which restrooms transgender and gender non-conforming people may use, “stem from a core of fear, hate, and ignorance.”

Chiu, a straight ally, referred to the state legislation as “common sense policy” that’s “overdue.”

The statewide LGBT advocacy group Equality California is one of the organizations backing the proposal.

EQCA Executive Director Rick Zbur said trans and gender-nonconforming people have been “intimidated, harassed, and threatened” when trying to use multi-stall restrooms, and the bill addresses “a civil rights issue that affects their ability to fully participate in our communities.”

Kris Hayashi is the executive director of the Transgender Law Center, which is also backing AB 1732.

In Ting’s news release, Hayashi said, “All Californians should have the same freedom to participate in public life, go about their day, and use the bathroom when they need it. By making single-user restrooms accessible to all genders, this law will make life easier for everyone and reduce the harassment regularly experienced by transgender people and others who don’t match people’s stereotypes of what it looks like to be a man or a woman.”

At the news conference, Zbur said the bill would also be helpful to opposite-sex caretakers and others.

Ting said “bathrooms are something we use every day,” and as the father of two daughters, he’s been faced with the dilemma of trying to figure out which bathroom to use when he’s out with them.

“My favorite bathrooms are the ones that say ‘family bathroom,’” he said.

Other supporters of the legislation also spoke Friday.

Summer Lowen, of the National Organization for Women’s San Francisco chapter, said among other problems, women’s rooms are often farther away than men’s rooms.

“Segregated facilities are not meeting our needs,” Lowen said.

Samantha Higgins, policy and community manager of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, said Ting’s proposal also addresses hospitality concerns.

AB 1732 “honestly just makes

sense,” Higgins said.

“Single-occupancy restroom access should not be an issue for anyone” who’s visiting a restaurant, bar, or other establishment.

Ting said he and other supporters are “very optimistic” about his bill becoming law, noting that it simply requires bathroom signage to be changed.

He said backers “debated on having penalties” for people who don’t comply with the law, but it’s “so frankly simplistic we didn’t feel the need to add penalties to the legislation at this point.”

Anti-LGBT activists recently tried to get a measure on the November 2016 state ballot that would have required people “to use restrooms based on their biological sex,” Ting’s office noted.

Under the proposal, which failed to gain enough signatures to make it to the ballot, transgender people could have been sued for $4,000 if they used a restroom that didn’t match their gender assigned at birth.

The failed initiative wouldn’t have applied to single-user restrooms.

Brad Dacus is president of the Pacific Justice Institute, which submitted that proposal.

Asked in an interview whether his group would do anything to oppose Ting’s legislation, Dacus said, “I don’t know why we would.”

The bill “makes a lot of sense,” he said, noting that it’s not “forcing multi-person male or female restrooms to become unisex.”

Ting’s proposal is “sensitive to many transgendered people who would otherwise potentially feel uncomfortable or awkward in terms of the restroom they choose to use,” Dacus said.

His stance might be surprising coming from someone who was involved with such a vehemently antitransgender proposal as the one his group failed to gain support for, but he said there’s “nothing wrong with laws accommodating and being sensitive to the different needs of individuals” as long as others’ privacy rights are respected.

However, an email one man recently sent to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors regarding Campos’ legislation shows there are still people who have trouble with such ideas.

“You continue to cater to those with money, deviant sexual appetites, and the mentally ill,” Joe Tobie Jr. said in a January 19 note to supervisors.

“San Francisco is no longer a place for decent people. ... I will not support lifestyle, policies, or practices that I know are simply wrong.”

Tobie didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

Campos’ legislation is expected to go before the supervisors’ budget committee soon.t

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Community News>>

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 9

DOJ launches SF police probe amid turmoil

by Seth Hemmelgarn

T

he U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation of the San Francisco Police Department following the fatal shooting of Mario Woods. The news, announced this week, comes after sniping between District Attorney George Gascón and Police Chief Greg Suhr, and just as the SFPD promotes its anti-bias Not on My Watch campaign.

In a news release Monday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that, in the coming months, the DOJ would examine the SFPD’s “current operational policies, training practices, and accountability systems, and help identify key areas for improvement going forward.”

Suhr and Mayor Ed Lee were among those who requested the review, which comes about two months after police fatally shot Woods in the city’s Bayview neighborhood. Woods had allegedly stabbed someone and was holding a knife when police shot him.

Following the review, the DOJ will release a report with its findings and recommendations.

Just days before the investigation was announced, Gascón wrote a blistering letter to Lee, criticizing what he says is a lack of cooperation with the Blue Ribbon Panel on Transparency, Accountability and Fairness in Law Enforcement he launched last year. The task force

was formed after local scandals emerged, including police officers allegedly exchanging racist and homophobic text messages several years ago.

In his January 28 letter, which was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Gascón told Lee, “In order to conduct this review, I requested funds to hire staff to be able to analyze the approximately 4,000 police reports written by the officers in question. You refused to fund the work and characterized my undertaking of this review as ‘lawyering up’ ... .” The DA cited a KQED story.

Gascón also said that both his office and the panel have tried to get Suhr “to cooperate with our investigation, yet he has never committed the department to cooperation.”

The DA also complained that the panel hasn’t been allowed to have direct access to officers, among other concerns.

He told Lee that if the promises he’d made in his inauguration speech and in a letter he wrote to Lynch “to repair the ‘dissolution of trust between communities of color and law enforcement’ are genuine, and if it will remain should the impassioned pleas from the community for reform fade in the months ahead, then I would ask that you demonstrate an actual commitment to these issues by taking steps now to support the existing investigation. These problems are far too se-

HPPC, CARE merger moves forward

by Seth Hemmelgarn

accomplishments of both councils, and developed he merging of two a set of shared values and panels tasked with depriorities that have allevitermining San Francisco’s ated much of the concern priorities for fighting HIV initially expressed.” and AIDS is almost final.

In 2013, Tracey Packer, The deal, which has who at the time co-chaired Jane Philomen Cleland been in the works for years, the HPPC and is currently combines two groups that Tracey Packer the director of Commuinclude city officials, nonnity Health Equity and profit staff, people living with HIV/ Prevention at the San Francisco AIDS, and others.

Department of Public Health, said The HIV Prevention Planning the idea for the merger stemmed Council sets priorities for HIV prefrom concerns around federal cuts vention. The HIV Health Services to HIV health services and prevenPlanning Council, also known as tion funding. the CARE Council, prioritizes and Mayor Ed Lee and Health Direcallocates federal Ryan White HIV/ tor Barbara Garcia “suggested it was AIDS Treatment Modernization important for the two councils to Act funding for the San Francisco work together,” said Packer, with the Eligible Metropolitan Area, which question being, “How can the two consists of Marin, San Francisco, councils plan together to ensure a and San Mateo counties. continuum of services for people A work group established in 2012 with HIV and people affected by had recommended full collaboraHIV to maximize the resources we tion between the two groups within have in San Francisco?” the next two years, but some had At a joint meeting of the two balked at the idea, and a deal is just councils in October 2013, Packer now being finalized. and other HPPC members voted In a response to emailed quesunanimously to approve a merger tions, Ali Cohen, the CARE Counplan. The vote of the CARE Council cil’s program manager, recently said, was 14-10 in favor of the plan, with “Both councils have approved the two abstentions. However, to pass merge. The next step is to approve the council, the recommendation the bylaws of a merged council, required the support of a two-thirds which is slated for a vote in May. majority. Abstentions counted as no The new merged body plans to meet votes. as early as June.”

Charles Siron, who’s living with Cohen explained the reluctance AIDS, said he voted against the of some members by saying, “The merger because there were “a lot” concerns of some CARE Counof unknowns as the Affordable Care cil members essentially centered Act takes effect, including how it around maintaining a communitywould impact Ryan White funding. driven council and preserving HIVIn a November 2014 interview, positive consumer representation.”

Packer said that the Centers for But she said, “The Joint LeaderDisease Control and Prevention ship Work Group, a joint venture of and the federal Health Resources the CARE and prevention councils, and Services Administration had endeavored to address all concerns told officials they should have a from both sides and create a plan combined plan for both councils by for integration. Over the course of 2016.t the last year, this group has really forged a new level of understandMatthew S. Bajko contributed to ing of the histories, cultures, and this report

T

Jane Philomen Cleland

Attorney General Loretta Lynch

rious and far too systemic to simply pay them lip service.”

Lee’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the police department provided the Bay Area Reporter with a November 6 letter from Suhr to Gascón.

“I know there is much work to be done to address racial and ethnic disparities and implicit bias issues not only within my department but within the entire criminal justice system,” the police chief said. However, he added, “the information regarding the goals and status of your taskforce and/or panel has not been made clear to me. Thus, I have only been able to discern what is available in the media. For instance, the only communication I had with you relating to your office’s investigation in the text messaging incidents occurred earlier this year following your press release announcing the formation of a task force.”

Suhr said he would “continue to cooperate” with the DA’s office and provide information to him, but he couldn’t “compel department members to be interviewed.”

“As you know,” Suhr wrote, “there is a very well-crafted and proven procedure in place to request witnesses in any legal or administrative proceeding. ... In this instance, I lack the authority to compel or even request members of my staff to participate in the interviews the panel has requested, especially without further information as to their creation, authority, and power.”

He asked that “no outside entity contact individual members of my staff for interviews,” but said he’d send the list of names and further interview requests “to the San Francisco Police Officers Association for sworn members and other applicable associations for non-sworn members.”

“Again I must stress that it is my intent to fully cooperate with any review of my department, including alleged misconduct of members,” Suhr told Gascón. “However, there must be a clear and concise procedure in place in order for us to productively participate in the process.”

On November 12, Gascón wrote to the police chief saying, “I greatly appreciate your expressed commitment to work with us and to cooperate with our work on the critically important issues of potential bias in law enforcement” in the city. He went on to explain the make-up and purposes of the panel.

In a December 8 letter to Suhr, Anand Subramanian, the panel’s executive director, told Suhr that the panel appreciated “the independent and proactive efforts” the SFPD was taking “to address racial bias, procedural justice, and transparency concerns.” Subramanian also thanked Suhr for producing some of the documents the panel had requested.

He added, “With respect to interviews, the panel will approach officers directly to request their voluntary participation.”

Not on My Watch

Last week, Suhr launched a campaign called “Not on My Watch,” which department spokespeople said is “aimed at rooting out potential bigotry and intolerance among San Francisco police officers by promoting diversity in recruitment, bias training, community involvement and a first-of-its-kind pledge that department officers have been making.”

Among other things, officers who take the pledge vow, “I will not tolerate hate or bigotry in our community or from my fellow officers. I will confront intolerance and report any such conduct without question or pause.”

The department said in a January See page 14 >>

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<< Community News

10 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

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Gay men preserve film treasures for posterity

by Matthew S. Bajko

B

ill Longen has had a love affair with the movies since childhood. His family was in the theater business in Philadelphia back in the 1950s, leading him to pursue a career in film and collect various reels of celluloid over the decades.

“I have been a film archivist and collector since I was a kid,” said Longen, 68, a gay man who used to work at the Castro Theatre as its technical director and community liaison. “I loved movies and just started collecting.”

The Castro resident, who now is a co-owner of the Ironwood Stadium Cinema 8 multiplex in Minden, Nevada, has amassed various collections of archival film footage over the decades. When the boxes of film reels begin to overwhelm his storage capacity, Longen will donate the material to various institutions equipped to preserve it.

In 2001, due to his moving to Palm Springs for a brief time, Longen donated several boxes full of tapes with gay content from local news station KTVU, where he worked as an editor for 20 years, to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

“Once I get rid of a collection I start all over again ... I love the idea of saving this stuff,” said Longen. “Once a collection gets so big, you need a team of people to care for it. Film has to be treated tenderly and needs proper storage. It gets very expensive to rent climate-controlled storage.”

His latest trove to be donated is a collection of old movie trailers that he saved over the years from a variety of sources. Some came from his time working at the Castro Theatre, others he acquired from theaters that were closing, and some he bought or traded from other film buffs.

About 20 percent came from dumpster diving, admitted Longen,

Courtesy Metro Theatre Center Foundation Rick Gerharter

Ron Merk stands in the scanning facility of the Metro Theatre Center Foundation, while Adam Dziesinski, in back, uses the new scanner.

who would search through the trash thrown out by film exchanges, shuttered theaters, or film production offices.

“If you were lucky enough to know what they were throwing away, you would go and dumpster dive,” he said. “I have on occasion. I have to admit I went out in old dirty clothes and dumpster dived.”

His preservation tastes favored “oddities” as well as more mainstream fare, such as previews Alfred Hitchcock made specifically for his movies.

“I would go for off-the-wall cartoons or trailers of coming attractions. It was a preview of coming attractions; now everyone uses the term trailers,” said Longen, who has a special fondness for old trailers that did not include any footage from the actual movie. “There are a lot of those trailers that were made when Hollywood had a little more imagination than it does now.”

Today’s trailers pale in compari-

A screen shot from an old film of soldiers bathing was purchased from an antique dealer and is being preserved by the Metro Theatre Center Foundation.

son, contends Longen.

“Trailers nowadays are pretty much cut from a cookie-cutter mold. If you watch movie trailers, they all look the same,” he said.

“There is nobody taking a chance on doing something like that that is unusual.”

Wanting to ensure his trailer collection would be preserved, Longen last October donated it to the Metro Theatre Center Foundation for Motion Pictures and the Performing Arts in San Francisco co-founded

by Ron Merk. The material was not just trailers, but also included old newsreels, cartoons, and “shorts on short subjects long forgotten about,” said Longen.

“I just decided, now that I am getting older, I thought Ron would be a good person to give the collection to. Then it goes, I believe, to the Library of Congress after that when he does the digital transfers,” said Longen. “It is a good place for it.”

Merk, a gay man and San Francisco-based film producer, has for years been promoting the need to preserve old film footage, whether

it be related to Hollywood pictures or home movies shot by private citizens.

His foundation last year acquired several film scanners so that it is able to scan and digitize 8mm, super 8 and 16mm films. The copies are in high-definition and the process takes several hours for each box of film.

There are more than 1,500 movie trailers in the collection donated

by Longen. It equals about 3,000 pounds of film, said Merk.

“It is one of the largest movie trailer collections in the world,” said Merk, as he demonstrated the scanning process at his office in the Ninth Street Independent Film Center. “They are all probably going to the Library of Congress for preservation.”

Another project Merk’s foundation is currently working on is in joint partnership with the Center for AsianAmerican Media, which is also housed in the 9th Street building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. The Memories to Light Project aims to preserve old home movies shot by Asian-Americans.

The scanning process “is easy and pretty quick. It doesn’t damage the film,” said Adam Dziesinski, a former intern at the Metro Theatre Center who is assisting with the project.

As the B.A.R. noted four years ago in a story about Merk’s foundation, he has advocated for the safekeeping of home movies through an initiative called the Preservation Project Partnerships. Over the years Merk has acquired more than 2,000 collections of home movies whose footage either features historical figures, from politicians to movie stars, or captures private moments that contain cultural clues to generations long gone.

Some show the private lives of LGBT individuals during decades when many were not out of the closet.

The original film reels are to be donated to the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles maintained by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“There is such an amazing amount of surprises. You never know what you are going to find,” said Merk, the foundations’ director of film and cultural programs.

In order to help pay for the preservation efforts, Merk has been working to turn some of the footage into a 13-part television series about home movies. The first episode would likely focus on Hollywood, said Merk, with others devoted to the periods of World War II, the post-war years of the 1950s, the Cold War era, and the Vietnam War. “We are going to focus on the home front rather than the war,” said Merk.

“The idea is to show the extraordinary things you can find if you look in someone’s attic or garage. These films capture a time and place without guile. It is just shots of people when they tend to be themselves.”

To learn more about the film preservation projects, visit http://www. metrocenterfoundation.org/.t

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Election 2016>>

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 11

Cruz beats Trump; Clinton eeks out Iowa win

Courtesy NBC News

Texas Senator Ted Cruz addressed supporters after his win in the Iowa caucuses.

by Lisa Keen

T

here were some interesting LGBT moments in the days leading up to Monday’s Iowa caucuses – caucuses in which Human Rights Campaign-endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton appears to have essentially split the vote with Senator Bernie Sanders and an early favorite among some Log Cabin Republicans, Senator Marco Rubio, finished surprisingly strong.

Clinton, a former secretary of state, had won 49.9 percent of the Democratic delegates in Iowa Monday night, according to unofficial returns. Sanders, a Vermont independent who’s running as a Democrat, appeared to have won 49.6 percent, results show.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas won the Iowa caucuses by securing 29 percent of the votes for the Republican nomination. Real estate mogul Donald Trump came in second with 24 percent, followed by Rubio, of

Florida, with 23 percent.

Cruz had anti-gay Iowa activists Bob Vander Plaats and Representative Steve King on stage with him as he made his victory speech Monday night. On that stage, Cruz praised the 48,000-plus Iowans who voted for him at the caucuses. He said the campaign was about getting back to Judeo-Christian values.

Rubio’s strong third place showing in Iowa may have been due in part to his being endorsed by the state’s largest newspaper, the Des Moines Register. But it was certainly one of the more stunning LGBT moments when the endorsement from the Register chided Rubio for wanting to fight “the battles of the past” against same-sex marriage. Following the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling that required equal treatment for same-sex couples several years ago, the Register all but called for a movement to recall the court’s justices.

Other LGBT moments in the later days of the Iowa campaign included Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, who supported Cruz, railing against marriage between samesex partners as “wicked” and “evil,” and Trump reiterating his already stated disagreement with the U.S. Supreme Court striking down state bans on such marriages.

Cruz didn’t explicitly mention the Supreme Court ruling against state bans on marriage for same-sex couples, but he told CNN Sunday that, as president, he would on “Day One” reverse all of President Barack Obama’s “illegal” executive orders.

Rubio repeatedly promised the same.

Although the executive orders have not been deemed illegal, Obama has signed them to prevent discrimination against LGBT people in employment by federal contractors and in hospital visitation policies.

Clinton and Sanders have repeatedly voiced their support for equal rights and dignity for LGBT people.

A third candidate, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, got less than 1 percent of the vote Monday and has suspended his campaign.

On the Republican side, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses eight years ago, also suspended his campaign after a dismal showing.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum dropped out of the race Wednesday morning.

During her speech to supporters late Monday night, Clinton said she knows her administration can “protect our rights – women’s rights, gay rights, voting rights, immigrants’

rights, workers rights.”

Sanders’ speech Monday night focused on income inequality, tuitionfree college, and climate change.

Donna Red Wing, a longtime LGBT activist nationally and now executive director of the statewide LGBT group One Iowa, said both Clinton and Sanders had strong support in the LGBT community there.

“I certainly cannot gauge where the LGBT community is around the top Democratic candidates,” said Red Wing last November. “Sanders has an amazing ground game and people in the community love him for his longtime and unwavering See page 14 >>

LIFE DOESN’T END AFTER

Courtesy BBC

Hillary Clinton spoke to supporters after claiming victory in the Iowa caucuses.

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New LGBT asylum project launches in SF

by Heather Cassell

I

mmigration attorney Okan Sengun is on a mission, one that is personal and one that started with his first LGBT asylum case helping a gay Russian man in 2013.

Since then, Sengun, 31, a gay Turkish man and an immigrant himself, has been helping asylum seekers on a pro bono and paid basis. However, during the past three years he’s realized the demand for assistance with LGBT asylum cases, particularly from Russia and Turkey, has dramatically increased.

“I receive 10 to 15 calls a day asking about the asylum process,” Sengun told the Bay Area Reporter during a “friend-raiser” beer bust for the new Center for Immigrant Protection’s LGBT Asylum Project in the Castro January 31.

Homosexuality is criminalized in more than 80 countries around the world and in 10 of those countries same-sex love is punishable by death. Discrimination and prejudice are rampant against LGBT people in many of these countries, making life challenging for queer people.

Because of his personal story and experience LGBT clients feel free to open up to him about their experiences of discrimination, sexual abuse, and other horrors of their lives in their native country, he said.

“I can easily put myself in their shoes and understand the conditions that they come from because of my personal experiences,” said Sengun, “and how being in the United States has changed my life.

That’s what I want to do for other LGBT people as well.”

Rick Gerharter

The board of the new Center for Immigrant Protection’s LGBT Asylum Project, including co-founders Okan Sengun, center, and Brooke Westling, right, held a fundraiser at Q Bar last weekend.

Sengun and Brooke Westling, who co-founded CIP, are currently working on four pro bono asylum cases: a gay man and a lesbian from Nigeria; and a transgender man and a gay man from Mexico.

Right now it’s just the two of them working on cases out of Sengun’s downtown San Francisco law office, but they plan to eventually have an office in the Castro, hire some immigration attorneys, and work with volunteers and other legal organizations as their agency grows, said Sengun.

Sengun serves as president of CIP and Westling is vice president.

They are currently working with their board on a projected budget that wasn’t available by press time.

Westling, a 32-year-old straight ally, interned for Sengun while earning her master’s of law at Golden Gate University, where she focused on human rights and gender and

sexuality law, she said. She’s since graduated and has assisted Sengun with a number of asylum cases. She received her law degree from Capital University Law School in Ohio and passed the California Bar. “[I] just really loved the work that he was doing and wanted to stick around and keep doing the cases,” continued Westling, who wanted to “find a way that we could keep offering these services without having to put the financial burden on the clients, who typically just don’t have that kind of money.

“It’s been really powerful for me to see the changes that it makes in their lives,” said Westling, talking about the joy she receives when she hands someone a card telling them that they are allowed to stay in the U.S. “Relief just washes over.”

The state of asylum

Sengun and Westling plan to target several communities to provide direct pro bono legal assistance and See page 12 >>

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<< Sports

12 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

SF is lost amid the hype of Super Bowl City

by Roger Brigham

B

e patient, my friends. In just a few days – Sunday, February 7 to be exact – all of the football fetish fantasy that has ensnarled San Francisco the past two weeks will be over and we can go back to looking forward to the start of baseball’s spring training and enjoying the Golden State Warriors historically great season.

Big sports events such as the

Super Bowl inevitably trigger social protest, corporate excess, and questionable economic benefit to wherever they are plunked down. This year’s Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara is no exception.

While corporate sponsors have had San Francisco’s Embarcadero district cordoned off to create what is dubbed Super Bowl City, news crews have been following city cleanup crews around and interviewing homeless residents to get a

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feel for the city’s campaign to hide its homeless problem so as not to inconvenience big-buck tourists in town to consume beer, buy T-shirts, and brag that they were in the general vicinity of the Super Bowl on or about the time it was actually played.

Perhaps no sport feeds on the fantasies of unswervingly loyal fans as football does. Fans may be inundated with stories about their favorite players committing domestic abuse, taking performance enhancing drugs, playing with guns, or suffering mentally and physically crippling injuries, but by golly they will be glued to their TV sets and their sofas every Sunday or Monday or Thursday or any other day of the week the National Football League decides to stage its contests. They will consult the Vegas lines printed in newspapers or discussed on radio talk shows before plunking down their best guesses on FanDuel or DraftKings or, god forbid, flying to Las Vegas to make their wagers in the future home of the Oakland nee Los Angeles nee Oakland Raiders.

My significant other and I took advantage of a break in the El Niño onslaught to visit Super Bowl City last weekend. If you haven’t been able to go, then goody for you. The San Francisco Bay Area Super Bowl 50 Host Committee has managed to take over one of the most wonderful places for tourists to enjoy in San Francisco, the Embarcadero, with its shops and street vendors and choice restaurants and great views – and make it boring. Really, except for performances put on by the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band last Sunday, there was not much entertaining about the venue at all.

<<

Out in the World

From page 11

network with organizations to provide other direct assistance to new asylum seekers in the U.S., they said.

Currently, asylum seekers have one year to claim asylum once they arrive in the U.S., said Sengun.

From that moment forward it can take two years for an asylum seeker to gain asylum in the U.S. Those two years include six months where they can’t legally work. They must also search for housing, employment, and other services and need to get acquainted with an entirely new culture and language. Add on top of that the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an important destination for LGBT asylum seekers, and attorney fees that can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000, said Sengun. The process can be expensive and overwhelming, he pointed out.

Unlike other types of cases, asylum seekers don’t automatically receive legal representation. This often leaves them on long waitlists or they defend themselves, Andrea Ruth Bird, an attorney who served as pro bono counsel on a landmark 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision involving a Mexican transgender woman, told the B.A.R. last year.

Sengun agreed, pointing out that statistics show that only 13 percent of self-representing asylum seekers’ cases are successful, compared to a

In Memoriam Gale Chester Whittington 6th Feb. 1948 - 12th Aug. 2013

Co-founder with Leo Laurence of the International Gay Liberation movement (Committee for Homosexual Freedom).

In 1969, picketed with a dozen plus other founders in San Francisco’s financial district on California Street for three months before Stonewall.

t

Khaled Sayed

Sourdough Sam, the 49ers mascot, waves to fans at Super Bowl City.

You enter by waiting in a long line only to find yourself surrounded by booths whose biggest features are more long lines. And damned little of it actually has to do with football and much, much more to do with the products offered by the corporate sponsors hosting the booths. As families dressed in NFL jerseys wander aimlessly from one line to the next, they occasionally stop to take selfies against the many backdrops presented to remind us that this is in fact all about the Super Bowl.

In short, Super Bowl City is just like San Francisco LGBT Pride – except without the small vendors, the parade, the nudity, the social messaging, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, or the sense of community. It gives tourists who wish to be associated with the Super Bowl a sense that they have actually visited San Francisco (rather than a sanitized and soulless version of San Francisco) and that the Super Bowl

is actually being played here and that they were a part of it.

The saddest sight, of course, were all the folks wandering about in jerseys bearing the names of 49ers greats from years past. Talk about being lost in the San Francisco fog and losing sight of reality!

In any event, it is almost all over now. We have our bowls of chips and guacamole ready, we’ve put on our foam fingers, and we have the nozzle from the keg feeding directly into our mouths. We are good and ready for the big game. We really do not care whether this is the coming out party for the Carolina Panthers’ Cam Newton or the last rodeo for the Denver Broncos’ Peyton Manning – we are just glad we do not have to watch Tom Brady and his under-inflated balls.

And don’t forget: Giants spring training begins February 18. And this is 2016 – an even number year.

We all know what that means.

Super what?t

success rate of 75 percent for cases where asylum seekers have legal representation. Sengun and Westling currently have a 100 percent success rate for their asylum clients, according to a fact sheet provided about CIP. Even so, the demand for asylum cases in general is overwhelming for the organizations and programs that currently exist, Sengun said.

“There’s a huge need for all of the asylum cases, but our experience is with LGBT people,” said Sengun.

Sengun and Westling want to alleviate the dearth of services for asylum seekers throughout the U.S., starting first in the Bay Area and with LGBT asylum seekers. The Organization of Refuge and Asylum and Migration, which re-opened its San Francisco office last year, focuses most of its energy on refugees. Immigration Equality, which is located in New York, doesn’t have a San Francisco office, said Sengun, who formerly worked at ORAM and is inspired by Immigration Equality’s work.

are creating around the asylum issue.

“I think that if you believe in the message of what they are doing you can’t help but support something like this,” said Chong, who works for a data analyst startup. “It’s exactly what you’ve got to put your energy behind.”

Sengun and Westling said they have pulled together experts from business, finance, immigration, law, and LGBT advocacy to serve on CIP’s board of directors. The sevenmember body includes: Ozkan Boyar, Jason Hall, Timothy McQuillan, Dodi Gomez Paloma, Adam Sandel, Nienke Schouten, and Kelly Walsh. (Sandel is a freelance arts writer for the B.A.R.) The LGBT Asylum Project is only the beginning. Sengun and Westling have an eye on expanding the organization to aid other vulnerable asylum populations, such as women who are victims of abuse and human trafficking, they said.

“I would like to expand out to other people who have the same types of issues but a different demographic,” said Westling, whose passion is helping women.

For the moment Sengun and Westling are working on their current cases and getting the word out about their new organization through fundraising and speaking engagements, networking, social media, and other avenues, they said.

“We are already off to a better start than we allowed ourselves to hope for,” said Westling.

They are currently searching for donors and volunteers to assist the young organization.

Another fundraiser is being planned for the spring. For more information, contact info@cipsf. org.t

Friends of asylum seekers come out in support

Last Sunday’s party drew a couple hundred people throughout the evening to Q Bar, including an angel investor who matched the donations that evening, raising a total of $2,500 for the soft launch of the CIP’s LGBT Asylum Project.

“The rest of the world isn’t where we are and I think that’s why creating an LGBT Asylum Project – it’s not only critically important – but its life changing and lifesaving,” said Kate Maeder, 28, who is the president and co-founder of Women Get It Done, a woman’s organization.

Maeder declined to disclose her sexual orientation.

Anthony Chong, a 27-year-old straight man whose family immigrated to the U.S., said that he appreciated the sense of community and groundswell Sengun and Westling

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

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Community News>>

News Briefs

From page 6

SF marks National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day

National Black/HIV AIDS Awareness Day is Sunday, February 7 and marks the 16th year for the day, which is a national HIV testing and treatment community mobilization initiative targeted at blacks in the United States and the Diaspora.

Locally, San Francisco will observe the awareness day Friday, February 5 with its annual community event. The theme this year is “Our Voices – Bearing Witness” and the focus will be on PrEP, treatment as prevention, and mental health. The event will take place from 6 to 9 p.m. at 25 Van Ness Avenue, Conference Room 610 (6th floor).

For more information, contact Vincent Fuqua at vincent.fuqua@ sfdph.org or (415) 437-6208.

Openhouse moves programs to Castro storefront

Due to its lease expiring this month at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, which is set to begin a renovation project in March, Openhouse has leased a Castro Street

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SF Pride

From page 1

the U.S. and Canada as a contest judge, emcee, BDSM workshop presenter, producer, entertainer, and fundraiser. She holds numerous community service awards and ,in 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors proclaimed March 1 “Queen Cougar Day.” She holds the titles of Ms. Headquarters and Ms. SF Leather 1993.

Her day job is doing administrative and advertising work at the B.A.R. In a telephone interview, Cougar, 60, who identifies as a leather dyke, told the B.A.R. that she was especially proud to have twice emceed International Mr. Leather, the huge annual leather contest in Chicago.

“As a woman of color to have been chosen twice is a high feat in our community,” Cougar, an African-American, said.

When asked why people should vote for her, Cougar said, “The humble side of me says they don’t have to because I’ve been picked” for honors so many times before. “But I am very proud that my name would be considered” for grand marshal.

David, 63, a progressive LGBTQ activist for four decades, helped organize the Lesbian Rights Alliance and Lesbians Against Police Violence. She was national outreach coordinator for the 1987 March on Washington.

David was also the first out lesbian appointed to a mayor’s staff and in that capacity, helped to launch the San Francisco LGBT Community Center.

In a phone interview with the B.A.R., David said she has been a “player behind the scenes ... making things happen for our community.” For example, she said she was the first person to tell the founders of the LGBT senior housing program Openhouse that they “weren’t crazy.” Subsequently, she helped them “get their first dollars” to launch the program, she said.

The grand marshal nomination “was a total surprise to me,” she said, “because I’m so used to being behind the scenes.”

“I hope my nomination means the community is taking note of all the people” who they may not see on the front lines but who are organizing in less visible roles. “I have devoted 40 years to that,” she said.

Dawn, a queer ally, is a performer, community leader, philanthropist, and cancer survivor. For decades Dawn, 44, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local HIV and housing charities and has mentored young people. She has held titles in the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association, Imperial Council of San Francisco, and sainthood with

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 13

acrobatic dance collective in Oakland. She’s also the artistic director of Topsy Turvy Queer Circus, which has been featured at the National Queer Arts Festival in recent years.

Bay Area multidisciplinary artist India Davis will present a monthlong exhibition, From a Place With No Space or Time in downtown Oakland February 5-29.

The multilayered exhibition includes two multimedia gallery installations, Adrift, and What the World Knows of Infinity at Qulture Collective, 714 Franklin Street, beginning February 5 with an opening reception February 12. On February 20, Davis debuts An Angel’s Manifesto, a sitespecific pole and dance performance

that will begin at the Flight Deck, 1540 Broadway, and include a procession to a nearby downtown location.

In From a Place With No Space or Time Davis embodies traditional and imagined spiritual and cultural archetypes as a means for creating new narratives that reflect queer black femme experience and power.

In the visual exhibit, the culmination of nearly fours years of collaboration with New Orleans-based photographer Lauren Hind, Davis performs archetypal personas in site-specific locations that evoke possible alternative realities.

Multimedia installation Adrift, shot in New Mexico, follows an afro-surreal water spirit as they navigate a vast rolling gypsum sand dune desert.

In the second installation, What the World Knows of Infinity, Davis channels the World card from Tarot, carrying elements for creation through sites in New Orleans.

Davis is a trained acrobat, aerialist, and pole dancer who combines physical feats with multidisciplinary art forms to illustrate the breadth of her inspirations. She is a founding member, dancer, and choreographer of Body Waves, a queer black

has faced adversity and this has formed her community work as well as her deep investment in the liberation of all black trans and gender non-conforming people.

At press time, the B.A.R. was unable to reach her for a comment on her nomination.

Juster, 62, has been volunteering since the AIDS epidemic struck in the 1980s. Her work has involved fundraising, event production, and grassroots community organizing for programs fighting AIDS, breast cancer, poverty, and social injustice. She is best known for her work with the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, AIDS Emergency Fund, AIDS Walk, Shanti Project, Breast Cancer Emergency Fund, and Marriage Equality USA. In an email to the B.A.R., Juster said that of all the work she has done in the fight against AIDS, she is most proud of “providing help and solace to those who were dying, and those who were grieving.” The work, she said, also “transformed” her life.

Juster, who is straight and has been “happily married” for 35 years, said that “volunteer” is the best job title she has ever had.

“Life is challenging: we need to stand by each other, and work together with joy and understanding to make the world a better place for all,” she said.

Munro, the first gay national titleholder from California, is a former Miss Gay San Francisco, Miss Gay California, and Miss Gay United States.

Munro, also known as Lonnie Haley, considers himself an “old school” female impersonator and an entertainer, community leader, housemother, and businessperson.

In an email to the B.A.R., Munro, 44, said he is “most proud of being the first drag queen, in the history of national pageantry, to win a national title in the entire state of California.”

“I exemplify the California dream,” Munro said, “and I’m proof positive that the California dream does exist.”

When he moved to the state, “I foresaw a new life for myself ... a life of prosperity, personal expression, and happiness.”

Munro said that through his production company, Beatfish Productions, he’s been able to send numerous drag performers to national competitions “so that their dreams can be realized as well.”

Satya, 25, who prefers to be known as Mia Tu Mutch, has been empowered by her own experiences with homelessness, discrimination, joblessness, and violence. She served on the San Francisco Youth Commission and has worked to provide

direct services, including health care and employment, to underserved communities, including homeless LGBTQ youth. She helped secure free Muni for 40,000 low-income youth, and co-created landmark LGBTQ diversity training for over 9,000 city employees.

As director of Transitional Age Youth San Francisco, she facilitates opportunities for underrepresented youth to give feedback to city leaders. Tu Mutch is also the first transsexual to be selected for Emerge California, the premiere political training program for women.

In an email to the B.A.R., Tu Mutch said that she is especially proud of “being one of the key leaders responsible for securing the renewal of the Children’s Fund.”

She said she worked on the campaign for two years to increase funding and strengthen the oversight body for the city fund. The legislation “guarantees over $100 million in funds each year for childcare, after school programs, and summer jobs that will benefit thousands of San Franciscan youth for the next 25 years,” she said.

As far as her nomination for grand marshal, Tu Mutch said, “There are many LGBTQ activists, organizers, and leaders who equally deserve recognition and I trust the community to make the best decision to represent the full diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I only want this honor because getting the opportunity to wave from a fancy car will also provide me a vehicle to raise awareness on pressing issues in our city including income inequality, the housing crisis, the California drought, and the ongoing violence faced by trans people and people of color,” Tu Mutch said.

Yang, 60, teaches mindfulness and meditation locally and nationally, and is committed to serving diverse multicultural, queer, and activist communities. An AsianAmerican queer man, Yang helped to start a variety of long-running LGBTQI meditation groups in the Bay Area, including at the SF LGBT Community Center and the annual LGBTQI meditation retreat in Garrison, New York.

Yang’s current focus is training spiritual leadership within communities of color and LGBTQ communities. He is on the Teachers’ Council of Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

In an email to the B.A.R., Yang pointed out that, “any accomplishment, especially around social justice and change, is never done in isolation. I am continually inspired by being part of efforts to create truly inclusive multicultural spiritual communities in all the directions

of our lives—something that the world so dearly needs right now.”

If someone voted for him to be grand marshal, “they would not be voting for me as an individual.

People would be voting for the communities that I am connected to, and our vision of how spiritual communities can still create deep inclusivity, trust and respect, care and compassion, and equity and justice for all of us.”

storefront on a temporary basis to house a number of its programs.

Beginning the third week of February, the LGBT senior services agency will be setting up shop at 541 Castro Street, a vacant retail space adjacent to the former Patio Cafe eatery. Property owner Les Natali, who owns both buildings, has previously leased out the storefront on a temporary basis, most recently to a real estate firm whose offices were being renovated.

The retail space was also once home to the now-defunct Under One Roof, a store that had donated a portion of sales to local HIV nonprofits. It ceased operations in 2014.

Openhouse will be moving into new offices this September being built in a ground floor space at the 55 Laguna LGBT senior housing development. As the Bay Area Reporter disclosed last month, the agency’s new location will be named the Bob Ross LGBT Senior Center in honor of the B.A.R.’s founding publisher due to a $1 million donation from the Bob Ross Foundation.

Programs that will be housed in the Castro Street space over the next seven months include a four-week healthy aging workshop, which begins Thursday, February 18, and

Openhouse’s monthly fourth Fridays health and wellness series starting on February 26.

Its monthly drop-in group for people caring for someone with dementia is also moving to the Castro Street location, as are its gay writers group, poetry salon and, beginning on February 20, the weekly Saturday games gatherings.

To download Openhouse’s monthly calendar listing the programs at the new location, visit http://openhouse-sf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/February2015-Newsletter-RS.pdf.

the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

In an email to the B.A.R., Dawn said she is most proud of her work mentoring young people to become “ethical leaders.”

“I thrive when our youth excel in roles like board member or elected official. Helping someone reach their full potential is my greatest pride,” she said.

Dufty, a political and LGBT community leader for two decades, has been a leader with Castro Youth Supportive Housing, the GLBT History Museum, transgender employment programs of the LGBT community center, the city’s crystal meth task force and the city’s first LGBT shelter.

A gay man, Dufty, 60, is a former city supervisor and retired last year as director of Mayor Ed Lee’s Housing, Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement program, where he worked on homeless issues.

Dufty was previously named a grand marshal by SF Pride in 2013 but then declined the honor. In an email to the B.A.R., Dufty explained that he turned down the recognition because he was “troubled” by the SF Pride board’s decision to rescind grand marshal honors from Chelsea Manning, “with uncertain authority.” (Manning, a trans woman, was named a grand marshal but the board at the time took it away. She was convicted of violations of the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison.)

“Being nominated as a candidate for 2016 community grand marshal brings it full circle,” Dufty wrote. “If I’m chosen it certainly will be meaningful to have it come through election by our community and allies.”

Dufty said he is proudest of his “accomplishments for LGBTQ youth, establishing Castro Youth Housing and a $750,000 budget increase for Larkin Youth Services; LYRIC, the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center; and Dimensions Health Clinic that has continued in future budgets.

“I hope people see me as someone who has served this community with energy, purpose, compassion, and an open mind,” he added. “I care deeply about homelessness and championed LGBTQ services as we are disproportionately represented among those living on our streets.”

Johnson, an Afro-American trans woman, is executive director at the Transgender Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project. Since 2006, she has been organizing around the intersections of violence faced by herself and the broader gender non-conforming and transgender communities of color. As a formerly incarcerated trans person, Johnson

New exhibit at Qulture Collective

‘Revival’ dance party for long-term survivors

A dance party to celebrate longterm survivors (HIV-positive and HIV-negative) will be held Saturday, February 13 from 6 to 10 p.m. at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist, 1661 15th Street (at Julian) in San Francisco.

Organized by Gregg Cassin and the Shanti Project, the event, called “Revival,” is free and will feature DJ Bill Strach playing some of the era’s greatest hits. Light refreshments will be served early in the evening.

In an email, Cassin said that Revival honors the long-term survivor community, its resilience, hope, and commitment to one another.

Everyone is welcome. Volunteers are needed. For more information, visit the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ events/939380192817641/.t Matthew S. Bajko contributed to this report.

Organizational grand marshals

AGUILAS, short for Assembly of United Gays Impacting Latinos toward Self-Empowerment, is the oldest Latino LGBT organization in all of the Americas, according to the SF Pride news release. The agency is dedicated to creating a supportive, culturally sensitive environment for gay and bisexual Latinos.

Black Lives Matter is an international network of more than 30 chapters working for the validity of black life. It has taken a leading role in the national conversation around police brutality and officer-involved shootings involving unarmed black men and others.

St. James Infirmary is the only occupational health and safety clinic run by and for sex workers in the country. It offers free services such as medical care, mental health care, HIV services, transgender health care, education, and outreach.

The aforementioned Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project is an organization of transgender, gender variant and intersex people – inside and outside of prisons, jails, and detention centers – creating a united family in the struggle for survival and freedom.

UNITE HERE Local 2 represents over 12,000 workers in the hospitality industries in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.

Pink brick

This year’s pink brick nominees include the Liberty Council, an organization specializing in evangelical Christian litigation, advocating for anti-LGBT discrimination under the guise of religious liberty; One Million Moms, a parallel project created by the American Family Association (last year’s pink brick recipient); and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who opposes same-sex marriage.

Public voting started this week online and runs through February 29. For ballots and more information, go to http://www.sfpride.org/ vote. People can also vote at the SF Pride offices, 30 Pearl Street, Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.t

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

14 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

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Political Notebook

From page 5

embattled South Bay Congressman Mike Honda (D-San Jose).

Frank, who left office in 2013, will be in San Francisco Friday, February 12 to help raise money for Honda, who is fighting an ethics investigation into his fundraising practices as well as a strong challenge from venture capitalist Ro Khanna in a rematch of their 2014 race.

The morning of Monday, February 8 Frank is slated to be the featured guest at a breakfast event for Lee hosted by the East Bay Stonewall Democratic Club.

Invites to Frank’s Honda fundraiser note that Honda is the founder and chair of the newly formed U.S. Congressional Transgender Equality Task Force. Among the co-hosts is gay Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell).

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SF General

From page 1

rlich called the move “a great opportunity for me to get to know every area of the new and existing hospital buildings from top to bottom, as well as the entire team providing patient care and support services.”

In 1983, San Francisco General Hospital became the first hospital in the country to start a program for people living with HIV/AIDS when Ward 86, the outpatient clinic, opened. The hospital continues to

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SF police

From page 9

25 news release that all police academy recruits “are now required to participate in implicit-bias training, and all officers will receive implicitbias training and procedural justice training by the end of the year.” The SFPD is also “conducting a comprehensive review of its use-of-force policies in addition to the reforms now underway.”

In an interview last week, Officer Grace Gatpandan, a police spokeswoman, said there are already academy classes and department bulletins that address treatment of LGBT people. She didn’t know whether the Not on My Watch campaign includes any new training components in that area.

However, Gatpandan said, “All officers are mandated to take the pledge.”

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Iowa

From page 11

support of LGBT equality. Clinton, on the other hand, also has a great many supporters in the community and an exceptional campaign, one that is gaining traction.”

By January 19, Clinton picked up a key endorsement.

The Human Rights Campaign board endorsed Clinton, saying she had “unveiled the most robust and ambitious LGBT plan any candidate for president has ever laid out” and has a “long record as a champion for LGBT rights both in the U.S. and, notably, around the globe.”

Later that week, HRC President Chad Griffin joined Clinton at a campaign event in West Des Moines and introduced her to a rally and, according to the Register, said, “All of the progress we’ve made and all that we’re still fighting for – all of it – is on the ballot this year.”

The Register said Clinton told the crowd of about 900 supporters, “We have to end the travesty that under our Constitution, you can get married on Saturday and because of it, fired on Monday.”

Meanwhile, Log Cabin Republicans stepped up its campaign against Clinton, posting a video of her comments in 2002 and 2004, saying she did not support marriage for same-sex couples.

It will take place from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the home of Matt Herrick, a leader of the San Francisco Young Democrats chapter, at 2121 3rd Street. Tickets begin at $200 for members of the public; $100 for members of a Democratic club.

To RSVP email Nicole Nahulsi at Nicole@mikehonda.com or call (949) 371-3094.t Web Extra: For more queer political news, be sure to check http:// www.ebar.com Monday mornings at noon for Political Notes, the notebook’s online companion.

This week’s column reported on a forum about the lack of female politicians.

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.

care for thousands of people living with the disease.

Ehrlich said she’s “proud to help support the work of many experts who have been pioneering care to those with HIV/AIDS for decades, and are still cited as models of providing care. ... I look forward to learning from the experts how I can best support them.”

Zuckerberg San Francisco General gets its new name thanks to a $75 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Pricilla Chan.t The campaign “wasn’t something that was put together within the last three weeks,” she said. It’s been “an ongoing project since early last year.”

San Francisco police Sergeant Yulanda Williams, president of Officers for Justice, told the B.A.R. that she was inspired to create the Not on My Watch campaign following the texting scandal, and the idea came to her after she attended a Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club meeting in April. Williams said she’s not LGBT. Gatpandan said that police would be “fully cooperating with the DOJ.” “The bottom line is we can always do better, and we’re going to do what it takes to always do better,” said Gatpandan, who said police were “definitely caught off guard”

by Gascón’s letter, since they’re “continuing to cooperate with the blue ribbon panel.”t “Democrats and members of the LGBT community have given Hillary Clinton a pass on past transgressions and even allowed her to rewrite the history of the gay rights movement; Log Cabin Republicans will not,” said Log Cabin national President Gregory Angelo. “It’s time for the people of Iowa – and the country – to know that when it mattered, Hillary Clinton was wrong on gay rights.”

Up next, New Hampshire

Now the smaller fields move to New Hampshire, where the first 2016 presidential primary takes place Tuesday, February 9. Clinton has an “LGBT Granite Staters for Hillary” organization in place there that includes the state’s first openly gay state senator, David Pierce. But according to polls, Sanders has held a strong lead in the state, which neighbors Vermont.

On the Republican side, Trump has led in recent polls, but several candidates who didn’t compete in Iowa – Ohio Governor John Kasich, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush – are hoping to add life to their campaigns with a strong showing in New Hampshire.

Rubio, who many pundits said came out of Iowa a clear winner even with his third place finish, could also see momentum going into the Granite State.t

t

Legal Notices>> ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-16-551794

In the matter of the application of: VERONIKA Z. CASTELLO BRANCO & LEONARDO CASTELLO BRANCO, 442 VALLEJO ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner VERONIKA Z. CASTELLO BRANCO & LEONARDO CASTELLO BRANCO, is requesting that the name ANALUZ Z. CASTELLO BRANCO be changed to ANNALUZ Z. CASTELLO BRANCO and PALOMA CASTELLO BRANCO be changed to PALOMA Z. CASTELLO BRANCO. 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 3rd of March 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036874600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HEART OF THE MISSION COUNSELING, 2261 MARKET ST #478, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed EMILY THOMPSON. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/11/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036877900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE MINDFUL CLEANER, 2261 MARKET ST #411, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed JOE ZAMORA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/12/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/12/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036877700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LILIA’S DAYCARE, 4009 IRVING ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ZHIQIONG YUAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/16.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/12/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036875000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: VALLE’S TAX SERVICE, 1690A VALENCIA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed OSCAR E. VALLE ORTIZ. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/11/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036869000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HEART OF SAN FRANCISCO AIKIDO; MAINTAINING MOBILITY, 79 MIRABEL AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. 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 01/07/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036869500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HARRY CLAY INTERIORS, 945 LARKIN ST #41, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed DANIEL S. CLAY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/07/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/07/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036867500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: WINSTON TSAI TRUCKING, 108 CAMPBELL AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed WINSTON TSAI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/06/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/06/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036859800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: DANCING MOUNTAIN, 1490 16TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed GAYLE SUE ZAHLER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/31/15.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036858100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: RASLAYA, 1 BRADFORD ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed LAAVANYA LUXURY AYURVEDA INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/30/15.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-034478300

ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-16-551807

In the matter of the application of: PETER SHIH, 463 NEVADA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner PETER SHIH, is requesting that the name PETER SHIH, be changed to PETER HUNTER PAINE. 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 10th of MARCH 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551760

In the matter of the application of: BRANDON ERICKSON, 1570 QUESADA AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124, , for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner BRANDON CHRISTOPHER ERICKSON, is requesting that the name BRANDON CHRISTOPHER ERICKSON, be changed to AVERY BRAVERY ERICKSON. 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 25th of February 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036883200

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036885000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NANKING ROAD BISTRO, 1360 9TH AVE #100, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by a corporation and is signed BJJ GROUP INC. (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/14/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036875300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ROCKET FIZZ SODA POP AND CANDY STORE, 245 JEFFERSON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a limited liability company and is signed ROCKET FIZZ SODA POP AND CANDY STORE, 245 JEFFERSON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/11/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036856000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: REGINALD LYN WISE, 2965 HARRISON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed REGINALD LYN WISE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/24/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/29/15.

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036906100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: AMPERSAND VIDEO, 221 DOLORES ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed TAYLOR SOPPE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/10/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/13/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NIDO AGUILA SAN FRANCISCO, 1189 GENEVA AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SULMA GARCIA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/27/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036878600

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036894800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SJC TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING, 933 CASTRO ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SCOTT CILIBERTI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/12/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BAKER DESIGNS, 850 6TH AVE #A, OAKLAND, CA 94606. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ALYSSA BAKER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/18/16.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/20/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036878900

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036856600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HUANGSHAOXIANG WORKSHOP, 202 LAKE MERCED HILLS N., SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94132. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed KEQIAN BI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/12/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/12/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: OLIVE CATERING, 1668 BUSH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed NOUREDINE HADDADENE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/29/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/29/15.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036891700

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036896400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LOPEZ HEATING HANDYMAN, 585 GATES ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed MOISES LOPEZ. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/19/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: KTIM LOVE, 164 KERWIN AVE, OAKLAND, CA 94603. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CHAO QIANG LIN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/21/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036888500

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036891400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LOU’S ROADSIDE SERVICES, 2186 QUESADA AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed LEWIS HEREDIA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/15/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/15/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LUCID SGR, 260 BUCKINGHAM WAY #303, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94132. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SEBASTIAN GUSTAVO REYES. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/05/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/19/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036889300

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036897300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: JIKA RAMEN & GOLD CURRY SUSHI HOUSE, 3925 IRVING ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CIMEI LUO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/15/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/15/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036883600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: KRISPY KRUNCHY CHICKEN, 4517 3RD ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed MUSLEH ALOUDI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/21/16.

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036896300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PARCEL EXPRESS, 1163 GENEVA AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed JEFFREY LI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/13/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/13/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: GOLDEN HEALER HONEY ALLA’S APIARY, 68 MEADOWBROOK DR, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94132.

This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ALLA GRANKINA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/21/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/21/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036887200

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036872400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: UNION SQUARE DENTAL PRACTICE, 450 SUTTER #1326, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed NAZANIN HAKIM D.D.S/MAHSA HAKIM D.D.S, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/15/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PETE’S PLUMBING SERVICE, 1238D NORTHPOINT DR, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94130. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CHARLES PAUL SKINNER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/08/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/08/16.

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036881900

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036885400

The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: SCHOGGI, 87 YERBA BUENA LANE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103.

This business was conducted by a limited liability company and signed by SCHOGGI LLC, (CA). The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/25/12.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: DR. COWAN’S GARDEN, 661 CHENERY ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed VEGETABLE PRODUCTS FROM DR. COWAN’S GARDEN, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/13/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BLAZING SADDLES BIKE RENTAL, 721 BEACH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER AND CYCLE RENTAL INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/14/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/14/16.

JAN 14, 21, 28, FEB 04, 2016

JAN 21, 28, FEB 04, 11, 2016

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016

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Legal Notices>> FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036886200

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036903900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NORTH BEACH PIZZA, 4787 MISSION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed PROKOPOS LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/26/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/26/16.

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036885500

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036899600

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036875500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SURISAN, 505 BEACH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed JKC FINE DINING INC. (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/16.

JAN 28, FEB 04, 11, 18, 2016 NOTICE OF PETITION TO ADMINSTER ESTATE OF ANDREW EMILE VUCKOVICH IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO: FILE PES-16-299469

To all heirs, beneficiaries, creditors, contingent creditors, and persons who may otherwise be interested in the will or estate, or both, of Andrew Emile Vuckovich aka Andrew Vuckovich. A Petition for Probate has been filed by Larry Milutin Vuckovich in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. The Petition for Probate requests that Larry Milutin Vuckovich be appointed as personal representative to administer the estate of the decedent.

The petition requests the decedent’s will and codicils, if any, be admitted to probate. The will and any codicils are available for examination in the file kept by the court.

The petition requests authority to administer the estate under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. (This authority will allow the personal representative to take many actions without obtaining court approval.

Before taking certain very important actions, however, the personal representative will be required to give notice to interested persons unless they have waived notice or consented to the proposed action.) The independent administration authority will be granted unless an interested person files an objection to the petition and shows good cause why the court should not grant the authority. A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows: February 24, 2016, 9:00 am, Rm. 204, Superior Court of California, 400 McAllister St., San Francisco, CA 94102. If you object to the granting of the petition, you should appear at the hearing and state your objections or file written objections with the court before the hearing. Your appearance may be in person or by your attorney. If you are a creditor or contingent creditor of the decedent, you must file your claim with the court and mail a copy to the personal representative appointed by the court within the later of either (1) four months from the date of first issuance of letters to a general personal representative, as defined by section 58(b) of the California Probate Code, or (2) 60 days from the date of mailing or personal delivery to you of a notice under section 9052 of the California Probate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may want to consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court.

If you are a person interested in the estate, you may file with the court a Request for Special Notice (form DE-154) of the filing of an inventory and appraisal of estate assets or of any petition or account as provided in Probate Code section 1250. A Request for Special Notice form is available from the court clerk. Attorney for petitioner: Larry Milutin Vuckovich, 913 Champagne South, Calistoga, CA, 94515; Ph. (707) 942-9007.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 2016 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-16-551846

In the matter of the application of: MARLEEN SCHRODER HERSCHEND, 37 CLIPPER ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner MARLEEN SCHRODER HERSCHEND, is requesting that the name MARLEEN SCHRODER HERSCHEND aka MARLEEN ROSE SCHRODER aka MARLEEN SCHRODER, be changed to MARLEEN ROSE SCHRODER. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514 on the 7th of April 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036903200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: COMPOSITION DESIGN, 1900 EDDY ST #18, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SCOTT MICHAEL UPPER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/25/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/26/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036868400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BAYSIDE BARK, 2041 26TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed HANNAH ST MARTIN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/16.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/06/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036909100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PICSTAR, 50 GOLDEN GATE AVE #524, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CAREY LEO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/29/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016

Classifieds The

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BLAZING SADDLES BIKE RENTAL AND TOURS, 721 BEACH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER AND CYCLE RENTAL (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/14/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/14/16.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BLAZING SADDLES BIKE RENTAL AND TOURS, 721 BEACH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER AND CYCLE RENTAL INC (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/14/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/14/16.

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 15

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as: VERVE WELLNESS STUDIO, 1231 CORTLAND AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed KINSELLA WELLNESS CHIROPRACTIC INC, (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/26/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/22/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036907400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BIKE AND ROLL BIKE RENTALS AND TOURS, 2800 LEAVENWORTH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER & CYCLE RENTAL (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/26/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036907500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BIKE AND ROLL BIKE RENTALS AND TOURS, PIER 43.5, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER & CYCLE RENTALS (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/26/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036907700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BIKE AND ROLL BIKE RENTALS AND TOURS, 520 BEACH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER AND CYCLE RENTAL (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/26/16.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036907800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BIKE AND ROLL BIKE RENTALS AND TOURS, 5 EMBARCADERO CTR, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111.

This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER & CYCLE RENTALS (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/26/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036907900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BIKE AND ROLL BIKE RENTALS AND TOURS, 899 COLUMBUS AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed AMERICAN SCOOTER & CYCLE RENTALS (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/26/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036915100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CABLE CAR CAKES AND CHOCOLATES, 39 TAYLOR ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed CABLE CAR CAKES AND CHOCOLATES, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/01/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 02/01/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036904500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: GOLDEN BAY MOVERS; GOLDEN BAY MOVING COMPANY, 1160 MISSION ST #1914, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed GOLDEN BAY RELOCATION LLC (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/16. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/26/16.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-030723200 The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: SCARLETT’S JANITORIAL SERVICES, 1515 BRODERICK ST #341, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115. This business was conducted by an individual and signed by SCARLETT TOLEDO. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/13/07.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-034178300 The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: GOLDEN BAY RELOCATION, 1160 MISSION ST #1914, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business was conducted by an individual and signed by FERNANDO BEGLIOMINI. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 03/05/12.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-036749600 The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: JOHANNA’S HOUSE CLEANING, 162 EDINBURGH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business was conducted by a general partnership and signed by HAROLD MARTINEZ & ADDONIS MARTINEZ. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/28/15.

FEBRUARY 04, 11, 18, 25, 2016

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Legal Notices>> SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT DISTRICT NOTICE TO PROPOSERS GENERAL INFORMATION The SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT DISTRICT, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, California, is advertising for proposals for Supplier Services for the Rental of Digital Monochrome Copy Machines at Various District Offices/Facilities, Request for Proposals (RFP) No. 6M4493, on or about January 30, 2016, with proposals due by 2:00 P.M. local time, Tuesday, March 15, 2016.

DESCRIPTION OF WORK TO BE PERFORMED The District is soliciting the services of a Supplier to provide for the rental of eighty-three (83) digital monochrome copy machines, provide all supplies except copier paper, and provide associated maintenance services at various District offices/facilities for a base term of three (3) years, with options to renew for two (2) additional oneyear periods, exercisable by the District at its sole discretion. The District may also exercise its option to order fifteen (15) additional copy machines within 240 calendar days from the Notice to Proceed.

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WHERE TO OBTAIN OR HEPA Vac. Richard 415-255-0389 SEE RFP DOCUMENTS Prospective Proposers who are not currently registered on the BART Procurement Portal QUALITY to do business with BART are required to register on the BART Procurement Portal HOUSECLEANER – on line at https://suppliers.bart.gov in Kitchen & Bath, order to obtain Solicitation Documents, updates, and any Addenda issued on-line Polish, Wash & Iron. and be added to the On-Line Planholders List for this solicitation. If a Prospective Call Jose 415-571-5747 Proposer is a partnership or joint venture, such entity must register on the BART Procurement Portal with the entity’s Tax Identification Number (TIN) and download the Solicitation Documents so as to be listed as an On-Line Planholder under the entity’s 415.861.5019 FAX 861-8144 PHONE FAX 861-8144 name, inPHONE order for the entity to be eligible415.861.5019 for award of this Agreement.

RITES OF PRIAPUS – PROPOSERS WHO HAVE NOT REGISTERED ON BART Gay writer seeks information PROCUREMENT PORTAL PRIOR about a Temple or Church of TO SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL, AND DID NOT DOWNLOAD THE Priapus which existed in SF in the SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS FOR THIS SOLICITATION ON LINE 1970s. Call 415-613-3181 SO AS TO BE LISTED AS AN ONLINE PLANHOLDER FOR THIS SOLICITATION, WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR AWARD OF THIS AGREEMENT. A Pre-Proposal Conference and Networking Session will be held on Thursday, February 18, 2016. The meeting will convene promptly at 10 a.m. at the District’s Offices, in Conference Rooms No. 1500 and 1502, 15th Floor, at 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, * home or office California. At the Pre-Proposal Meeting the District’s Non-Discrimination Program for * 24 years exp Subcontracting and Small Business Program * sfmacman.com will be explained. All questions regarding MBE/WBE participation should be directed to Ms. Muriel Owens, Office of Civil Rights at (510) 874-7326. Prospective Proposers are requested to make every effort to attend this only scheduled Pre-Proposal Meeting.

Proposals must be received by 2:00 P.M., local time, Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at the address listed in the RFP. Submission Ralph Doore of a proposal shall constitute a firm offer to 415-867-4657 the District for One Hundred and Eighty (180) calendar days from date of proposal Professional submission.

BAYB AAY AR REPORTERFax to:Fax to: REA EPORTER REA 395 Ninth CAS.F. CA 395Street NinthS.F. Street

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Out &About

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Vol. 46 • No. 5 • February 4-10, 2016

www.ebar.com/arts

Local filmmakers earn Oscar nomination

by Sari Staver

W

hen San Francisco filmmakers Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman were nominated for an Oscar for their film Last Day of Freedom, friends started asking one question: “What are you wearing?” to the Academy Awards gala.

“That was the last thing on our minds,” said Hibbert-Jones, 53, an associate professor of art at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

See page 26 >>

Last Day of Freedom filmmakers Nomi Talisman and Dee Hibbert-Jones.

Kelly Sullivan

Museum’s T stellar return in Berkeley

Sibilia Savage

he Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [BAMPFA], which was forced to relocate after their concrete, cave-like Mario Ciampi-designed building on Bancroft Street was deemed seismically unsafe, made a stellar return last week in a renovated, red, white and stainless steel Art Deco facility in downtown Berkeley. Though, at 83,000 square

by Sura Wood

See page 18 >>

Architecture of Life, on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Installation view of “The World Garden” by Qiu Zhijie.

Hot choreography at the ballet

by Paul Parish San Francisco Ballet in Liam Scarlett’s Fearful Symmetries.

Erik Tomasson

S

an Francisco Ballet opened its winter season last week with two programs of mixed bills, each of which featured a world premiere by a hot choreographer. The new works got pride of place and closed each program; both were wildly successful, unrelentingly intense, and looked completely different from each other.

See page 27 >>

{ SECOND OF THREE SECTIONS }

SATCHMO WALDORF AT THE

MU

“DAZZLING!” New York Times

ST C LOS E

“RIVETING!”

FEB

New Yorker

ACT-SF.ORG | 415.749.2228

7!

<< Out There

18 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

Healdsburg hejira

by Roberto Friedman

E

veryone has their favorite local getaway for escaping the city, and for Out There, it’s Healdsburg, CA. In bygone years a sleepy little Sonoma hamlet set around a charming town square, it’s now a resort destination chock-full of gourmet eateries, intriguing bars, winery tasting rooms, art galleries and luxe hotels. We’ve been going up there for years, so when we were invited to return for an overnight stay to sample some recent additions to the town’s attractions,

we jumped at the chance.

Our first stop was at the new Taste of Tea just off the square, a unique establishment that offers quality teas from Japan, China and Taiwan, food, retail and spa treatments. Cups of strong Kyoto Bancha green tea and an “oldfashioned” made with chrysanthemum, goji berries, tea and mint sugar got us up and ready for our day.

Next we were part of a tour and tasting at the new Sonoma Cider, housed in an old autoparts warehouse, where we sampled many delicious hard ciders. These

libations are barrel-aged varietals, so they’re really more like wine than beer. Sonoma Cider specialties include Golden Delicious, Winter Banana, Gravenstein and Gode (like the German beer), sarsaparilla vanilla (roots from Mexico) that tastes like root beer, and an absinthe-flavored brew. Cidermaker Robert Cordtz’s “Jacks” cider took the honors: dry cider, apple juice, honey, toasted buckwheat and cinnamon produced a drink that tasted just like Apple Jacks breakfast cereal, but with a kick.

Martinis and a cocktail demonstration at the newly refreshed Ralph’s Martini House on the town square hit the proverbial spot, and then our group of pressies, including writers for Vogue and Conde Nast Traveler, found our dinner waiting for us at the excellent Valette restaurant on the square. The elegant dinery is the heart project of chef Dustin Valette, formerly of Dry Creek Kitchen, and his brother Aaron Garzini. Our repast included house-made charcuterie & cheese, olive oil-poached ahi sushi, red wine risotto, day boat scallops en croute, smoked + sous vide lamb bacon, and a dessert of huckleberry jam, toasted brioche and salted brown-butter ice cream. All of this was presented with

<< BESTIES 20 15

THE LGBT BEST OF THE BAY

WINNER - Best Wedding Photographer

Steven Underhill

PHOTOGRAPHY

415 370 7152

WEDDINGS, HEADSHOTS, PORTRAITS

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Special Guest TV and Broadway’s

MICHAEL URIE Don’t miss the latest symphonic celebration of world music with Emmy Award-winning composer/performer Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ and Broadway and Hollywood star Michael Urie (Ugly Betty, Modern Family...)

Notes From Vietnam Friday, February 12, at 8 pm Paramount Theatre, Oakland

World Premiere by Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ plus music by Britten and Dvorák Come early and make an evening of it with no-host drinks and free lobby entertainment beginning at 7 pm. Tickets start at just $20.

OaklandSymphony.org · 510-444-0802 Thanks to our sponsors Wells Fargo, Bell Investment Advisors, The Grubb Co., California Waste Solutions, EBX

▼

Courtesy Hotel Les Mars

Hotel Les Mars in downtown Healdsburg offers accommodations in the style of a French manor.

style and panache. Double and triple yums all around.

We had overnight accommodations at the elegant Hotel Les Mars, a luxurious French maison-style inn filled with 17th- and 18th-century antiques in the rooms and public spaces. The hotel exudes old-world

charm, and offered European-style service and an in-room continental breakfast – including an espresso machine – that got us on our way next morning. All this, a stone gas fireplace in every room, and hydrotherapy tubs for salt baths as well.

When can we go back?▼

BAMPFA

From page 17

feet, the amount of space remains roughly equivalent to that of the previous site, the new, tri-level venue, across from the entrance to the UC Campus, boasts whitewalled, flexible galleries with plenty of room to move and linger, ranging from a 10,000 sq. ft. space that can be divided with temporary walls to a 750 sq. ft. jewel-box gallery; picture windows with views to the street; and a pair of state-of-the-art movie theaters – one seating 232, the other 33 – with excellent sight-lines and high-end acoustics for the Pacific Film Archive, plus a large outdoor LED monitor that allows for free public screenings of digital media projects. A prime attraction of the location is its close proximity to BART, a relief for anyone who has ever had to contend with parking on the upper campus.

BAMPFA’s new home is a 1939 UC Berkeley printing plant “repurposed” by Diller Scofidio + Renfro Architects, who’ve integrated a curvilinear machine aesthetic and given the streamlined moderne, late Deco style a 21st-century panache. Initial plans to hire the adventurous Japanese architecture firm Toyo Ito and Associates were scrapped mostly due to financial concerns after the 2008 crash and subsequent recession; the budget for that project was in the neighborhood of $200 million, but the current building cost substantially less. While one can only speculate on what might have been, the end-product is an elegant, well-designed if not wholly inspiring building with clean lines and a relatively modest exterior whose greatest asset is the light-filled main-floor galleries. They certainly provide a luxuriously spacious backdrop for over 250 artworks displayed in the inaugural exhibition, Architecture of Life, which occupies almost the entire museum.

Curated by BAMPFA director Lawrence Rinder, the show explores architecture as metaphor, an ambitious if overly broad concept that encompasses almost anything and everything of aesthetic beauty. The eclectic mix of objects, intended to reflect the encyclopedic nature of the museum’s holdings and curatorial interests (only 15% of the pieces are from the permanent collections), dates from the second century and the Renaissance to the

Iwan Baan, Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, EHDD, BAMPFA

UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2016) by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. View of the Center Street façade, with main entrance and cantilvered café above.

present, drawing from the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe.

But the show is at its best when it hews to the role of architecture and design in society, a theme reflected in works such as Achilles (A.G.) Rizzoli’s whimsical mid1930s architectural ink drawings of imaginary buildings designed to represent neighbors, friends or family members; “Home-for-All” in Rikuzentakata, a selection of fascinating, meticulously constructed scale models created by Toyo Ito and three other Japanese architects following the devastation wreaked by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami on a coastal community; Rosie Lee Tompkins’ grid-structured, midnight-blue quilt; and Chris Johanson’s “Cityscape with House & Gray Energy” (2003), where a larger primary-colored canvas of a dense, hilly urban landscape is connected by a narrow wooden strip to a smaller depiction of the artist’s San Jose childhood home on one adjoining wall and an abstract gray square of a psychological interior on the other. Together they mimic the network of a neighborhood and hint at the co-existence of internal and exterior lives.

“The World Garden,” a commissioned “art wall” mural that hijacks your attention as soon as you enter the museum, represents the cacophony of contemporary global life and its woes. Done in an ink-brush technique by Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie, the 60’ wide by 30’ high satiric epic, which merges classical Chinese landscape and Italian Renaissance gardens with Northern Song Dynasty panoramic scroll painting, signals a sardonic view

of the modern age, with handwritten names of destination such as “Peak of Impermanence,” “Chill,” “Mt. Sensory Management,” and “Holiday in Distance.”

A notable advantage of the new space is its enclosed galleries that are more conducive to sound and video installations than the open-floor plan of the old building. Among the half-dozen videos is Ben Rivers’ “Origin of the Species.” Projected inside a wood shed with aluminum siding, the junky “mini-theater” recalls the abandoned Southern California wasteland installations of artist Michael C. McMillen. “Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then,” a video from artist-animator-filmmaker Brent Green, chronicles the odd life-story of Leonard Wood, a Louisville man who, upon learning that his wife has terminal cancer, embarks on a decades-long task of building a fanciful architectural sculpture he’s sure will heal her; the project continued years after her death. The film, which used stopmotion animation and five fullscale replicas of Wood’s home that Green erected on his Pennsylvania See page 23 >>

On the web This week, find a review of the new book Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections): The Battles That Define America from Jefferson’s Heresies to Gay Marriage by Stephen Prothero, online at ebar.com.

T

BESTIES The 2016 LGBT Best of the Bay

BALLOT

Enter Your Information to Start the Survey and to Qualify for the Prize Drawings

hank you for taking time to complete this survey by the Bay Area Reporter. Your opinion and answers are important to us.

For this sixth annual readers’ poll, we now include nominees for each category, along with a write-in designation if you think another business or individual should be nominated. This year’s nominees are a mix of previous winners and new entries.

The survey should only take 10-15 minutes of your time. Your identity and answers are completely confidential and will be used only to

contact winners of a random drawing for several valuable prizes. You must complete at least 75 percent of the survey to qualify for the prize drawings. One survey per person/email allowed and must be submitted by midnight (Pacific Time) March 2, 2016. Mail to Besties, 44 Gough St. #204, San Francisco, CA 941034 or email to besties@ ebar.com. Survey results will be published in the April 7, 2016 issue of the B.A.R. If you have any questions about the survey, please contact our office at (415) 861-5019.

PRIZES! ONE OF SEVERAL VALUABLE PRIZES JUST FOR VOTING FOR YOUR FAVORITE PLACES, PEOPLE AND THINGS TO DO IN SAN FRANCISCO AND THE BAY AREA.

GRAND: Maui Getaway: Includes three nights accommodations at the Maui Sunseeker Resort with roundtrip airfare for two via Alaska Airlines.

SECOND: Two VIP tickets to see the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ Tales Of Our City: Our Lives, Our Heroes, with featured guest Armistead Maupin and the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony.

THIRD: Two VIP tickets to see the SF GIANTS!

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Prize winners and results of The Besties will be published in our 45th Anniversary issue on April 7, 2016

Best Mixed Drink £ Blackbird £ Club OMG £ Driftwood £ Martuni’s £ Twin Peaks ✎

ARTS & CULTURE Best Art Museum

£ Asian Art Museum £ Contemporary Jewish Museum £ de Young Museum £ GLBT History Museum £ Legion of Honor £ Museum of Craft and Design £ Museum of the African Diaspora £ Oakland Museum of California £ San Jose Museum of Art £ SFMOMA (closed through May 2016) £ Walt Disney Family Museum ✎

Best Ballet Dance Company £ Alonzo King Lines Ballet £ Ballet San Jose £ Diablo Ballet £ Oakland Ballet £ Post:ballet £ San Francisco Ballet £ Smuin Ballet ✎

Best Classical Venue

£ Davies Symphony Hall £ Herbst Theatre, Veteran’s Building £ War Memorial Opera House £ Old First Church £ SF Conservatory of Music ✎

Best Live Music Venue £ The Chapel £ The Fillmore £ Great American Music Hall £ Masonic Hall £ Regency Center £ The Warfield ✎

Best Modern Dance Company £ AXIS Dance Co. £ Jess Curtis/Gravity £ Joe Goode Performance Group £ Katie Faulkner/little seismic £ Keith Hennessy/Circo Zero £ ODC Dance £ Sean Dorsey Dance ✎

Best Nature or Science Museum

£ California Academy of Sciences £ Exploratorium £ SF Botanical Gardens £ SF Conservatory of Flowers ✎

Best Small Music Venue £ Martuni’s £ The New Parish £ Thee Parkside £ Rickshaw Stop £ El Rio £ SF Eagle £ Soundbox ✎

Best Theatre Company

£ American Conservatory Theater £ Aurora Theatre £ Berkeley Repertory Theatre £ New Conservatory Theatre Center £ Ray of Light Theatre £ Theatre Rhinoceros ✎

COMMUNITY Best LGBTQ Activist

£ Mia Tu Mutch (Community organizer) £ Subhi Nahas (ORAM) £ Sister Roma (My Name Is Coalition) ✎

Best LGBTQ Activist (Under 25)

£ Austin Padilla (youth leader for Getting to Zero) £ Ruby Spies (youth leader for Bay Area Youth Summit) ✎

Best LGBT Event

£ Castro Street Fair £ Folsom Street Fair £ Oakland Pride £ San Francisco Pride £ Silicon Valley Pride ✎

Best LGBT Fundraiser

£ Academy Awards Gala (Academy of Friends) £ AIDS/LifeCycle (SFAF) £ Anniversary Celebration (NCLR) £ Help Is On the Way (REAF) £ Soiree (LGBT Community Center) £ Spark (Transgender Law Center) £ Spring Fling (Openhouse) ✎

Best Health-Related Nonprofit

£ Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center £ Breast Cancer Emergency Fund £ Lyon-Martin Health Services £ Project Open Hand £ Shanti ✎

Best HIV/AIDS Nonprofit

£ AIDS Emergency Fund £ AIDS Healthcare Foundation £ AIDS Housing Alliance/SF £ AIDS Legal Referral Panel £ Project Inform £ San Francisco AIDS Foundation ✎

Best LGBT Nonprofit

£ Billy DeFrank LGBT Center (San Jose) £ Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC) £ National Center for Lesbian Rights £ Openhouse £ Our Family Coalition £ Pacific Center (Berkeley) ✎

Best LGBT Sports League £ Golden Gate Wrestling Club £ SF Fog Rugby Club £ SF FrontRunners £ SF Gay Basketball Association £ SF Gay Softball League £ SF Pool Association £ SF Tsunami Swim Club ✎

Nightlife BARS Best Bar/Nightclub to Meet Men £ The Café £ 440 Castro £ Hole in the Wall £ Lone Star Saloon £ SF Eagle £ Powerhouse ✎

Best Bar/Nightclub to Meet Transgender People £ Asia SF £ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge £ Divas £ Oasis ✎

Best Bar/Nightclub to Meet Women £ Qbar £ Rickshaw Stop £ Virgil’s Sea Room £ Wild Side West £ Club BnB, Oakland £ The Uptown, Oakland ✎

Best Beer Selection £ 440 Castro £ Pilsner Inn £ Toronado £ SF Eagle ✎

Best Cabaret Venue £ Martuni’s £ Feinstein’s at the Nikko £ Hotel Rex £ Oasis £ The Starlight Room ✎

Best Castro Bar/Nightclub £ 440 Castro £ Badlands £ Beaux £ The Cafe £ The Edge £ Last Call £ Lookout £ Midnight Sun £ Qbar £ Toad Hall ✎

Best Dance Floor £ 1015 Folsom £ Beatbox £ The Cafe £ City Nights £ DNA Lounge £ EndUp £ Oasis ✎

Best East Bay Bar £ Club BnB £ Club 21 £ Turf Club £ White Horse Bar ✎

Best Neighborhood Bar £ El Rio £ Cinch £ Twin Peaks £ Pilsner Inn £ Virgil’s Sea Room £ Wild Side West ✎

Best Sports Bar £ 440 Castro £ The Edge £ Lookout £ Hi Tops £ Pilsner Inn ✎

Best SoMa Bar/Nightclub £ Beatbox £ Club OMG £ Hole in the Wall £ Lone Star Saloon £ Oasis £ Powerhouse £ SF Eagle £ The Stud ✎

Best Stray (Straight/Gay) Bar £ Blackbird £ EndUp £ The Uptown, Oakland £ Wild Side West ✎

Best Wine Bar £ Blush £ City Club £ Press Club £ Swirl ✎

NIGHTLIFE EVENTS Best Drag Show

£ Dream Queens Revue at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge £ Glamazone at The Café £ Mahogany Mondays at Midnight Sun £ Meow Mix at The Stud £ The Monster Show at The Edge £ Mother at Oasis £ Sex, Drags & Rock n Roll at Midnight Sun £ Some Thing at The Stud £ Sunday’s a Drag at The Starlight Room ✎

Best Comedy Night

£ Comedy Night at the SF Eagle £ Comedy Returns at El Rio £ Funny Fun at Club 21, Oakland £ Funny Tuesdays at Harvey’s £ Hella Gay Comedy at various venues £ Shit Talk at Oasis ✎

Best (non-contest) Leather Event at a Bar £ BLUF at SF Eagle £ Code at The Edge £ Daddy at The Powerhouse £ Lick It at the Powerhouse ✎

Best Monthly Nightlife Event

£ Beatpig at The Powerhouse £ Boy Division at Codeword £ Comedy Returns at El Rio £ Gameboi at Rickshaw Stop £ Go Bang! at The Stud £ Hardbox at The Powerhouse £ Polyglamorous at Oasis ✎

Best Nightlife Event (non-weekly/non-monthly) £ Bearracuda (various venues) £ Cockblock at Rickshaw Stop £ Comfort & Joy (various venues) £ Gameboi at Rickshaw Stop £ Hard French at El Rio £ ShangriLa at The EndUp ✎

Best Stage Show in a Bar/ Nightclub £ Absolutely Fabulous at Oasis £ Baloney at Oasis £ Man Francisco at Oasis £ Matthew Martin at Oasis £ Red Hots Burlesque at Beatbox £ Star Trek Live at Oasis ✎

Best Theme Night

£ Cubcake at The Lone Star Saloon £ Gym Class at Hi Tops £ Hardbox at Powerhouse £ Mazel Top at Oasis £ Onesie Parties at Lookout £ Pound Puppy at the SF Eagle ✎

Best Unusual Nightlife Event

£ After Dark at The Exporatorium £ Kink.com parties £ Nightlife at the California Academy of Sciences £ Nightlife at the de Young £ Opening parties at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ✎

Best Weekly Nightlife Event £ Bulge at Powerhouse £ The Monster Show at The Edge £ Mother at Oasis £ Musical Mondays at The Edge £ Sundance Saloon at Space 550 £ Underwear Night at Club OMG ✎

Best Women’s Event

£ Cockblock at Rickshaw Stop £ Mango at El Rio £ Pussy Party at Beaux £ Ships in the Night at New Parish, Oakland £ Switch at Qbar ✎

Best Game Night

£ Bottoms Up Bingo at Hi Tops £ Gaymers at Brewcade £ Gaymer Night at SF Eagle £ Trivia Night at Harvey’s £ Miss Kitty’s Trivia Night at Wild Side West ✎

See next page >>

PEOPLE Best Bartender

£ Andy Anderson, 440 Castro £ Michael Breshears, Lookout £ Erick Lopez, The Edge £ Michael Tempesta, Midnight Sun £ Steve Dalton, SF Eagle £ Matt Wruble, The Gangway ✎

Best Cabaret Performer (Female) £ Leanne Borghesi £ Connie Champagne £ Sony Holland £ Paula West £ Wesla Whitfield ✎

Best Cabaret Performer (Male) £ Jason Brock £ Brian Kent £ Barry Lloyd £ Russ Lorenson £ Joe Wicht ✎

Best Cabaret Performer (Trans or Drag) £ Vanessa Bousay £ Veronica Klaus £ Honey Mahogany £ Katya Smirnoff-Skyy £ Shawna Virago ✎

Best Comic (Female or Trans) £ Marga Gomez £ Lisa Geduldig £ Natasha Muse £ Marilyn Pittman £ Karen Ripley £ Irene Tu £ Gina Yashere ✎

Best Comic (Male) £ Yuri Kagan £ Justin Lucas £ Nick Leonard £ Ronn Vigh £ Sampson McCormick £ Jesus U. Betta Work ✎

Best Drag Queen

£ D’Arcy Drollinger £ Glamamore £ Diego F*cking Gomez £ Heklina £ Honey Mahogany £ Joie de Vivre £ Landa Lakes £ Mutha Chucka £ Peaches Christ £ Matthew Simmons/ Peggy L’Eggs £ L Ron Hubby £ Juanita More £ Donna Persona £ Rahni NothingMore £ Sister Roma £ Phatima Rude £ Donna Sachet £ Bebe Sweetbriar £ Grace Towers £ Uphoria ✎

Best Gogo Gal

£ Lucy Dorado £ Jella Gogo £ Chloe Rainwater ✎

Best Host/MC

£ Peaches Christ £ Heklina £ Lance Holman £ Maria Konner £ Gina LaDivinia £ Honey Mahogany £ Pollo del Mar £ Juanita More! £ Mark Paladini £ Donna Sachet £ Sister Roma £ Grace Towers £ Tweaka Turner ✎

Best Band/Musician £ Double Duchess £ Veronica Klaus £ Maria Konner £ Pepperspray £ Tom Shaw £ Xavier Toscano £ Shawna Virago £ Whoa Nellies £ Joe Wicht ✎

Best DJ (Male)

£ Gehno Sanchez Aviance £ Marke Bieschke £ DAMnation £ Hawthorne £ Jason Kendig £ MC2 £ Guy Ruben £ Bus Station John £ David Harness £ Justime £ Mark O’Brien ✎

Best DJ (Female or Trans) £ Balthazar £ Lady Ryan £ G Star £ Najee Renee £ Page Hodel £ Olga T £ Ms. Jackson £ Siobhan Aluvalot ✎

Best DJ Duo/Group £ Adrian & Mysterious D £ BAAAHS £ Hard French £ Honey Soundsystem £ Go Bang! ✎

Best Drag King

£ Clammy Faye £ Arty Fishal £ Fudgie Frottage £ Leigh Crow £ Alex U. Inn £ Mason Dixon Jars £ Kegel Kater £ Kit Tapata £ Chester Vanderbox ✎

Best Faux Queen

£ Alotta Boutté £ Fauxnique £ Linty £ KaiKai Bee Michaels £ Migitte Nielsen £ Miss Shugana £ Vespa Synd £ Ferosha Titties

✎

Best Gogo Guy

£ Claudio Boser £ Jim Collins £ Josh Colwell £ Connor Hochleutner £ Eric Osborn £ Simon Palczynski £ Andrew Slade £ Michael Tempesta £ Ilie Valeri £ Ty Vincent ✎

Best Coffee Shop £ Blue Bottle £ La Boulange £ Coffee Bar £ Dolores Park Café £ Four Barrel £ Philz £ Peet’s £ Spike’s ✎

Best Late Night Restaurant £ DNA Pizza £ Flour + Water £ Grubstake £ It’s Tops £ Lori’s Diner £ Orphan Andy’s £ Sparky’s £ The View ✎

Best Happy Hour Bites £ Alchemist £ Azucar Lounge £ Bar Crudo £ Dosa £ Farralon £ Hi Tops £ Nopa £ Picaro Tapas ✎

Best Bar Menu £ Bar Tartine £ Bender’s £ Harvey’s £ Hi Tops £ Lookout £ Tempest £ Trick Dog ✎

Best Food Delivery App £ Caviar £ Munchery £ Eat24 £ GrubHub ✎

DRINKS Best Beer

£ Anchor Steam £ Bud Light £ Miller £ Stella Artois £ Sierra Nevada £ Trumer Pils ✎

Best Vodka

DINING Best Breakfast £ Crepevine £ Moulin Rouge £ Orphan Andy’s £ Plow £ Stacks ✎

Best Brunch

£ Breakfast at Tiffany’s £ Dottie’s £ Hazel’s Kitchen £ Kate’s Kitchen £ Squat & Gobble ✎

Best Lunch

£ Basil £ Café Flore £ Farm: Table £ Harvey’s £ Super Duper £ Toast ✎

Best Dinner

£ Cala £ Canela £ Chow £ Delfina £ Firewood Café £ Little Gem £ Marlowe £ Saison ✎

Best Dessert

£ Absolut £ Skyy £ Smirnoff £ Stoli ✎

Best Gin

£ Bombay Sapphire £ Gordon’s £ Tanqueray £ Hendrick’s ✎

Best Whiskey £ Bulleit £ Fireball £ Jim Beam £ Johnny Walker £ Seagram’s ✎

Services & Shopping Best Automaker £ Fiat £ Honda £ Lexus £ Tesla £ Toyota ✎

£ Cream £ La Luna £ Sift £ Sweet Inspirations £ Tartine Bakery £ Tout Sweet ✎

Best Bank

Best Outdoor Patio

Best Barbershop

£ Bar Agricole £ Café Flore £ Catch £ Fable £ Foreign Cinema £ Magic Flute £ Starbelly £ Stable £ Sycamore £ Zazie £ Zeitgeist ✎

£ Bank of America £ SF Federal Credit Union £ Sterling Bank and Trust £ Technology Credit Union £ Wells Fargo ✎ £ Daddy’s Barbershop £ Glama-Rama £ Joe’s Barbershop £ Louie’s Barbershop £ Male Image ✎

Best Bicycle Shop

£ Box Dog Bikes £ Freewheel Bike Shop £ Market Street Bikes £ Mission Bicycle Company £ Valencia Cyclery ✎

Best Bookstore £ Aardvark £ Alley Cat Books £ Books Inc. £ Booksmith £ Dog Eared Books £ Green Apple ✎

Best Dentist

£ Financial District Dental Care £ Opera Plaza Dentistry £ Michael Perona, DDS £ Aaron Rose, DDS ✎

Best Dog Park

£ Bernal Heights Dog Park £ Corona Heights Dog Park £ Duboce Park £ Ocean Beach small dog run (weekly) £ Point Isabel (Richmond) ✎

Best Grocery Store (Chain) £ Molly Stone’s Markets £ Safeway £ Trader Joe’s £ Whole Foods ✎

Best Veterinarian

£ Mission Pet Hospital £ San Francisco Veterinary House Calls £ Seven Hills Veterinary Hospital £ VCA San Francisco Vet Specialists £ VetPronto ✎

Best Vintage Clothing/ Consignment Shop £ Buffalo Exchange £ Crossroads Trading Co. £ Sui Generis £ Wasteland ✎

Best Wireless Carrier £ AT&T £ Sprint £ T-Mobile £ Verizon ✎

Best Place to Worship

£ Congregation Sha’ar Zahav £ Grace Cathedral £ Metropolitan Community Church - SF £ Most Holy Redeemer ✎

Best Grocery Store (Independent)

£ Brown & Toland £ CPMC/Sutter Health £ Kaiser £ UCSF ✎

Best Medical Marijuana Dispensary £ Apothecarium £ Bernal Heights Collective £ Green Cross £ Green Door £ Shambhala MCC £ Sparc ✎

Best Place to Pamper Your Pets

£ Best in Show £ Bernal Beast £ Doggie Day Spaw £ George £ Noe Valley Pet Company £ Mudpuppy’s Tub and Scrub £ VIP Pet Grooming ✎

Best Pet Hotel

£ High Tail £ Pet Camp £ Mission: Cats £ Wag (Oakland) £ Wag (San Francisco) ✎

Best Realtor

£ Mario Banuelos (Vanguard Properties) £ Travis Bernard (Coldwell Banker) £ Katharine Holland (Coldwell Banker) £ Kevin Koerner (Zephyr Real Estate) £ Kevin Melander (Zephyr Real Estate) £ Patrick Patricelli (Vanguard Properties) £ Terry Murphy (Bennion Deville Homes, Palm Springs) ✎

Best Real Estate Firm

£ Hill & Company £ Paragon Real Estate Group £ Vanguard Properties £ Zephyr Real Estate ✎

Best Retirement Community

£ Fountaingrove Lodge £ San Francisco Towers £ The Sequoias – San Francisco ✎

Best Ride-Hailing Service £ Homobiles £ Lyft £ Uber ✎

Best Thrift Store

£ Community Thrift £ Goodwill £ Out of the Closet (AIDS Healthcare Foundation) ✎

Best Beach

£ Black Sands £ Ocean Beach £ Marshall’s Beach £ Muir Beach £ Stinson Beach ✎

Best Caterer

£ J Jardine £ Molto Benne Catering £ Taste Catering ✎

Best Domestic Getaway

£ Las Vegas £ New York City £ Palm Springs £ Seattle £ Washington, D.C. ✎

Best Formalwear for Men

£ Bi-Rite Market £ Golden Produce/ Golden Natural Foods £ Good Life Grocery £ Rainbow Grocery ✎

Best Health Care Provider

Weddings & Destinations

£ Macy’s £ Men’s Wearhouse £ Sui Generis ✎

SEX Best Local Gay Male Porn Actor £ Jesse Colter £ Race Cooper £ Leo Forte £ Dominic Pacifico £ Adam Ramzi £ Jon Shield £ Damien Stone £ Dylan Strokes ✎

Best Dating App £ Dandy £ Grindr £ Growlr £ Hornet £ Jack’d £ Manhunt £ Scruff ✎

Best Sex Venue

£ 442 Natoma £ Blow Buddies £ Eros £ Nob Hill Theatre £ Steamworks, Berkeley £ Watergarden, San Jose ✎

Best Place to Buy Sex Toys

£ Folsom Gulch £ Good Vibrations £ Rock Hard £ Mr S Leather £ Does Your Mother Know ✎

Best Place to Meet an Online Date/Hookup £ Blow Buddies £ SF Eagle £ Beck’s Motor Lodge ✎

Best Formalwear for Women £ Kipper Clothiers £ Macy’s £ Saint Harridan ✎

Best Local Getaway £ Carmel-Monterey £ Healdsburg £ Napa £ Santa Cruz £ Sonoma £ Reno-Tahoe £ Russian River ✎

Best Honeymoon Destination £ Hawaii £ Key West £ Provincetown £ Puerto Vallarta ✎

Best Place to Buy Rings £ D&H Sustainable Jewelers £ Gallery of Jewels £ Love & Luxe £ Shane Co. £ Tiffany & Co. ✎

Best Wedding Photographer

£ Jane Philomen Cleland £ Rick Gerharter £ Gareth Gooch £ Georg Lester £ Steven Underhill ✎

Best Wedding Reception Venue

£ Bently Reserve £ City Club of San Francisco £ Terra Gallery £ W Hotel ✎

Best Wedding Venue £ Cal Academy of Sciences £ de Young Museum £ Julia Morgan Ballroom £ Legion of Honor £ SF City Hall ✎

▼

Theatre>>

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 21

Into the gender-ambiguous woods

by Richard Dodds

A

Lois Tema

SK Kerastas, right, plays a character at a personal crossroads who finds support from a young forester played by Matthew Hannon in Sagittarius Ponderosa at New Conservatory Theatre Center.

nything can happen in the forest, and it’s been happening for millennia in literature. Sondheim and even Shakespeare can be considered among the more recent examples, with known recorded tales dating back to 2100 BC, when Gilgamesh entered the Cedar Forest to fight the monsters. The forest where the new play Sagittarius Ponderosa takes place may or may not be enchanted, but it can still be a powerful presence. “In the middle of our walk of life,” Dante wrote in The Divine Comedy, “I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

The straightforward pathway has certainly been lost to the main character in MJ Kaufman’s promising but not completely satisfying work having its world premiere at New Conservatory Theatre Center.

Archer has unhappily moved back into the family home amid the ponderosa pines in Oregon, leaving behind a muddled life only sketchily suggested to reenter a place where he is still known as Angela despite a countenance that suggests a genderambiguous name may be a better fit.

It is outside the house, in the forest, where Archer begins to thrive.

The drama in Kaufman’s play is mostly low-key and spaced out through occasional wordless

Criminal temptations in virtual reality

interludes set to mystical music. But many of the specific scenes are of the kitchen-sink variety, involving grocery shopping, taking out the trash, and ordinary bickering. Archer is mostly surly, but not ready to press his new name and identity on his parents. The larger household drama is his father’s deteriorating health, and escape from the familial confinement is discovered beneath one of the oldest trees in the forest.

It is there that he meets Owen, a young forestry intern, and introduces himself with a choice of names, Angela or Archer, and the first spark of a quickly igniting romance happens when Owen spontaneously chooses Archer. Trying to cast the relationship in hetero or homosexual constructs doesn’t work, nor do these two characters address the issue at all.

While the dialogue is largely realistic, Kaufman has tossed in a few curveballs. Archer’s somewhat addled grandmother gets a love potion recipe from an unlikely radio show, hoping to spur her grandchild into a traditional marriage. And Grandma has a suitor at the old folks home, and he happens to be played by a puppet designed by Dave HaazBoroque and operated by Archer’s father for reasons that have a sense within the context of the story.

The play is made up of many short scenes jumping around several locations, and director Ben Randle’s

ingenious staging eliminates any lags between scenes. NCTC’s Walker Theatre has been reconfigured so that audiences sit on opposite sides of the stage area, and James Ard’s set design manages to bring all the locales into one place. (Ard is also responsible for the ethereal background score.)

The cast is an able one, with SK Kerastas, as Angela/Archer, capturing the nuances of this character who arrives home not yet quite knowing how to navigate a queergender life. Andy Collins amiably does double duty as Archer’s father and the voice and manipulator of the puppet who becomes a part of the family. Janis DeLucia has a grim intensity as Archer’s mother, contending with a family changing in sad and confusing ways. As the grandmother, Michaela Greeley goes for a kind of stock-issue doddering old lady, while Matthew Hannon provides genuine warmth as the easygoing student forester.

Sagittarius Ponderosa is not a play with swooping dramatic arcs, overt sexual politics, or climactic resolutions. This is a moody play that lulls rather than challenges you into entering its rearranged world.▼ Sagittarius Ponderosa will run at New Conservatory Theatre Center through Feb. 28. Tickets are $24$45. Call (415) 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org.

/lgbtsf

by Richard Dodds

W

hen the Muppet-like Trekkie Monster sings “The Internet Is for Porn” in Avenue Q, people laugh. A recent audience at San Francisco Playhouse also laughed when a virtual-reality entrepreneur asks, “Don’t you know that porn drives technology?” But it can only be a mordant laugh, considering the context in which it arises in Jennifer Haley’s eerily disturbing play The Nether.

True to the human nature laid out by that Avenue Q character, as soon as someone invents the ultimate in immersive virtual reality, the big bucks are to be made in sexual fantasies that are unspeakable – not to mention illegal in the real world. Is there a point when imagined roleplaying becomes so realistic that it crosses some amorphous line? That is the question at the center of The Nether.

Haley’s play takes place in a nottoo-distant future where Earth is environmentally blighted, but the Internet has graduated to a new technology known at the Nether, which provides some relief from a grey world. The opening scene takes place in an interrogation room as a detective from an unnamed agency and the creator of a Nether program known as the Hideaway spar not over whether he is guilty, but over whether there is anything to be guilty of. This may be the future, but the argument has been around for decades: Does pornography encourage acts of sexual predation, or give release to those who might otherwise commit it?

The difference, in this case, seems to be the reality of the particular fantasy, a point explicitly made as Nina Ball’s wonderful set transforms from the cinderblock enclosure of the interrogation room to a storybook Victorian home. First we are in the parlor of what is essentially a VR pedophile bordello, when an undercover detective arrives in period attire before the set

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Josh Schell, left, as a new visitor to a deviant virtual-reality fantasyland, is greeted by the proprietor played by Warren David Keith in The Nether at San Francisco Playhouse.

changes again to a young girl’s frilly bedroom. Iris looks to be about 8 years old, and she is soon encouraging her undercover client to touch her in increasingly inappropriate ways. He is horrified by his temptations, though we gather that he is less squeamish on return visits. An axe is always available to the visitor if he wants to take his fantasies a step further.

Haley has constructed her play in a series of terse, tense scenes quickly moving among the locales in which the accused, known as Sims in the terrestrial world and as Papa in the conjured Hideaway, is the only constant character. Or so it seems until late twists turn the play into much more than it first seems.

Director Bill English’s production is a tightly packed, sharply paced 80 minutes of increasing intrigue. As Sims/Papa, Warren David Keith is excellent as a sinisterly nonchalant character whose claims to be an emotionally detached businessman are increasingly undercut.

Louis Parnell, as a hapless user of Sims’ services, creates a strikingly sad character scooped up in the investigation. Josh Schell brings a kind of Mr. Darcy stateliness as the increasingly tempted visitor to Iris’ bedroom, and Carmen Steele as Iris (who alternates with Matilda Holtz) projects an innocence that is coupled with a knowing determination. Ruibo Qian, as the detective, isn’t at quite the same level as her fellow performers, and is prone to rushing her lines.

The Nether is by no means graphic, and any abuse that takes place at the Hideaway is only implied. But a queasiness does hover over the proceedings, no doubt by design, and that may require audiences to do some redefining of the notion of entertainment.▼ The Nether will run at San Francisco Playhouse through March 5. Tickets are $20-$120. Call (415) 677-9596 or go to sfplayhouse. org.

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<< Out&About

22 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

O&A

Natural selections

by Jim Provenzano

S

ometimes, an event so clearly compels attendance or interest, it’s a natural selection sure to be added to your agenda. ‘My friend’s hosting a reading!’ ‘Eggers has an exhibit!’ ‘I heard that play is amaze-balls!’ Here are some of the more clearly evolved events this week, with plenty more online at www.ebar.com

Thu 4 The Unfortunates @ Strand Theatre

Thu 4 Black Virgins are Not for Hipsters @ The Marsh Echo Brown’s hit solo show about desire and doubt returns. $20-$100.

Thu 8pm Sat 8:30pm. Thru March 5.

1062 Valencia St. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Club Inferno @ Hypnodrome The glam rock musical, based on Dante’s Inferno, with songs by Peter Fogel and book by Kelly Kittell, returns, with the original 2015 cast. $30-$35. Thu-Sat 8pm. Thru March 5. 575 10th St. at Bryant. 377-4202. www.hypnodrome.org

A Concert of Champions @ Davies Symphony Hall

Jenny Graham

New & Classic Films @ Castro Theatre

Feb. 4: Lady Sings the Blues (6:30) and Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling (9:10). Feb. 5-10: Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along (2:30-7pm) hosted

by Sara Moore and Laurie Bushman; $11-$16. Feb. 11: 7th annual Taste Awards (www.TheTasteAwards.com). $11. 429 Castro St. www.castrotheatre.com

Punk Rock @ Strand Theatre American Conservatory Theatre students perform Simon Stephen’s edgy acclaimed play about overachieving British private school students. $20. Feb 2, 5, 6 at 7pm. Feb. 6 & 7 at 1:30pm. 1127 Market St. 7492228. www.act-sf.org

August Wilson’s first in his ten-part African American historical play series, set in 1900s Pittsburgh, gets a local production. $20-$47. Tue-Sun 7:30pm. Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Feb. 14.

397 Miller Ave., San Rafael. 388-5200. www.marintheatre.org

Kronos Festival @ SF Jazz The Kronos Quartet’s Explorer Series includes multiple performances with different guest artists, including the Homayun Sakhi Trio. $15-$65.

Opening night, 7:30pm. Thru Feb 7. 201 Franklin St. (866) 920-5299. www.sfjazz.org

Leah Crocetto @ Curran Theatre

Tony Taccone directs Julia Cho’s acclaimed drama about an estranged Asian family. $48-$89. Tue, Thu-Sat 8pm. Wed & Sun 7pm. Sun 2pm.

Thru March 20. 2025 Addison St. (510) 647–2949. berkeleyrep.org

Brittsense @ Betti Ono Gallery, Oakland Forgotten Cities: The Power of Melanin, an exhibit of powerful photo portraits of Black Americans. Opening reception Feb 5, 6pm-9pm. Artist talk 7pm. Thru April 16. 1427 Broadway, Oakland. www.bettiono.com

D.I.R.T. @ Dance Mission Theater Dance In Revolutionary Times presents 18 choreographers in a weekend of three programs of new dance and performance works. $15$50. Sat & Sun, pm. Thru Feb. 7. 3316 24th St. at Mission. (855) 787-5237. www.dancemission.com

David Allen

Satchmo at the Waldorf @ Geary Theatre American Conservatory Theatre presents Terry Treachout’s acclaimed solo show, starring John Douglas Thompson, about the famed jazz trumpet player’s private struggles. $20-$135. Tue-Sat 8pm. Some Tue. 7pm. Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Feb. 7. 415 Geary St. www.act-sf.org

The Unfortunates @ Strand Theatre

Jennifer Haley’s unusual plays turns a fantasy world into a dark scifi thriller. $15-$45. Tue-Thu 7pm. Fri & Sat 8pm.

Sat 3pm, Sun 2pm. Thru Mar. 5. 450 Post St. 677-9596. sfplayhouse.org

Obscura @ Victoria Theatre

Cutting Ball Theater’s world premiere of Katherine Sherman’s haunting take on the Little Mermaid, Pelleas and Mellisande myths in a transformational love story. $10-$50.

Previews; gala opening Feb 12. Thu 7pm, Fri & Sat 8pm. Sun pm. Thru Mar. 6. 277 Taylor St. 525-1205. www.cuttingball.com

Sagittarius Ponderosa @ New Conservatory Theatre Center World premiere of MJ Kaufman’s whimsical play about a transgender man who returns to visit his Oregon family. $25-$45. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Feb. 28. 25 Van Ness Ave., lower level. 861-8972. www.nctcsf.org

Scott Welsh @ Strut SF

The darkly comic blues-gospel musical tells of Big Joe, a tough-talking soldier cursed with giant hands, set in a funky bar, and the underworld. $35$95. Tue-Sat 7:30pm. Wed, Sat Sun 2pm. Thru April 10. 1127 Market St. 749-2228. www.act-sf.org

Opening reception for You Pink Too Much, the local gay artist’s portraits and nudes. 8pm-10pm. Thru Feb. 470 Castro St. www.strutsf.org

The Groundbreakers series returns with Editor Kevin Sessums interviewing the opera soprano, who also performs a few jazz selections. $25. 7pm. 445 Geary St. www.sfcurran.com

SF Hiking Club @ Mt. Tam, Pleasanton Ridge.

Feb 6, join GLBT hikers on an 8-mile hike along Matt Davis Trail; bring lunch. Carpool meets 9am at Safeway sign, Market St. at Dolores. Feb. 7, a 10-mile hike at Pleasanton Ridge; meet 9:15am at Rockridge BART. (510) 342-2623. www.sfhiking.com

Bob Siedle-Khan performs his new solo performance work about the people he’s met through his work at the CAPS HIV prevention program.

12pm. McKusick Conference Room 3700, 550 16th St. www.caps.ucsf.edu

Perfectly Queer @ Books Inc. The new monthly LGBTQ reading series, presents Queer is Black, featuring authors Ajuan Mance ( Gender Studies), Brontex Purnell (Johnny Would You Still Love Me If...) and Arisa White ( Hurrah’s Nest). 7pm.

2275 Market St. www.booksinc.net

Thu 11 Dave Eggers: Idaho @ Jules Maeght Gallery

Sun 7 Architecture of Life @ Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive Inaugural opening of the new art and film museum, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with more than 200 new and ancient works dating back 2,000 years. Free-$12. Thru May 29.

2625 Durant Ave., Berkeley. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered @ Contemporary Jewish Museum New exhibit of photos from the prolific documenter of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Thru May 29. Other exhibits about Jewish culture. Free (members)-$12. Fri-Tue 11am-5pm, Thu 11am-8pm (closed Wed). 736 Mission St. 655-7800. thecjm.org

Mon 8 Mexicanos al Grito de Guerra @ Mission Cultural Center We Didn’t Cross the Border, The Border Crossed Us, a new visual exhibition featuring 40 artists and collectives from California and Mexico focusing on social movments, immigration and injustice. Thru Feb 13. $5. Tue-Sat 10am-5pm. 2868 Mission St. missionculturalcenter.org

Reigning Queens @ GLBT History Museum

Thu 11 Vanishing Ice @ David Brower Center

Wed 10 Ghosts/Ships @ MOAD Cheryl Patrice Derricote’s new exhibit of works visualizing the global slave trade. Also, Alison Saar’s 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. moadsf.org

Paula West @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko The acclaimed jazz vocalist returns for another extended residency at the upscale intimate cabaret. $40-$60 ($20 food/drink min.) 8pm. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sun 3pm (also Feb 14, 7pm; no show Feb 28). Thru March 6. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. (866) 663-1063. www.ticketweb.com

Pussy Riot @ The Warfield Maria “Masha” Alyokhina and Ksenia Zhivago of the Russian activist trio discuss their work, and screen clips, in conversation with Zarina Zabrinsky of The Arts Resistance. $25-$45. 8pm.

982 Market St. (888) 929-7849. www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

Thu 11 Dave Eggers: Idaho @ Jules Maeght Gallery Solo exhibit of commissioned acrylic-on-wood art by the awardwinning, bestselling local author (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). Opening reception 6pm9pm. 149 Gough St. 549-7046. www.julesmaeghtgallery.com

Exhibit of 1970s San Francisco drag ball photos by Roz Joseph; curated

by Joey Plaster. Thru Feb. Reg, hours Mon, Wed-Sat 11am-6pm.

Sun 12pm-5pm. 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

IndieFest @ Various Cinemas

Tue 9

MLR Press Authors @ Books Inc.

Bring It Home @ SFAC Gallery

Little Erik @ Aurora Theatre, Berkeley World premiere of Mark Jackson’s drama (an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ) about a tech guru, her writer brother, and a family tragedy that turns their world upside down. $32-$50. Tue & Sun 7pm. WedSat 8pm. Also Sun 2pm. Thru Feb. 28.

2081 Addison St., Berkeley. (510) 8434822. www.auroratheatre.org

The author of Square Zair Pair (illustrated

by Christine Knopp) reads from his children’s book about embracing differences between zoo animals, at the monthly kid-friendly reading. This innocuous book is under threat of protest by the abhorrent Westboro Baptist Church, so prepare to show up and defend the bookstore against these bigots. 11am.

2275 Market St. www.booksinc.net

Dumpster Diving for Love @ UCSF Mission Hall

The Nether @ SF Playhouse

Ondine @ Exit on Taylor

Little Erik @ Aurora Theatre, Berkeley

Jace Peeples @ Books Inc.

The Tony-winning hit Broadway jukebox musical about the lives of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons returns. $55-$212. Tue-Sat 8pm. Wed & Sat 2pm. Sun 1pm & 6:30pm. Thru Feb. 14. 1192 Market St. shnsf.com

Get a behind-the-scenes look at Brenda Way’s new dance work Walk Back the Cat. $25. 6:30pm food & drinks, 7pm performance. Studio B, 351 Shotwell St. www.ODCdance.org

Thu 4

Sat 6

Jersey Boys @ Orpheum Theatre

ODC Dance Unplugged @ ODC Dance Commons

Dogeaters @ Magic Theatre

Gem of the Ocean @ Marin Theatre Company

Aubergine @ Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Bay Area Musicals presents Christian Cagigal, who performs (two shows in one night of) his acclaimed beguiling fable-magic show of intrigue and sleight of hand. $20-$25. 7pm & 9pm. 2961 16th St. .www.bamsf.org

Select NFL films with live orchestral accompaniment, Joshua Gerson conducting, and NFL running back Marcus Allen as host. $50-195 concert. $50-$195 (formal dinner and gala cocktail reception (Feb 3, $1000 and up). 8pm. 201 Van Ness Ave. www.sfsymphony.org Bay Area premiere of Jessica Hagedorn’s 1998 play set in Manila’s mythical Studio 54 – with drag queens, beauty queens and movie stars alongside statesmen, activists and rebels. In early 1980s Philippines as the country unravels at the end of the Marcos regime. $25-$75. Wed-Sat 8pm. Tue 7pm. Sun 2:30pm. Thru Feb. 28. Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina Boulevard, Building D, 3rd Floor. 4418822. www.magictheatre.com

Fri 5

▼

Bring It Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy Through the Body, a large group exhibit of works; thru May 7.

Also, Susan O’Malley’s Do More of What You Love, thru May 7; Also, Enter: 126: Coalescence by Annette Jannotta and Olivia Ting; thru Dec. 17.

Free. Tue-Fri 11am-6pm. War Memorial Veterns Building, 401 Van Ness Ave. www.sfartscommission.org/gallery

The 18th annual SF Independent Film Festival screens dozens of innovative new films at the Roxie, Brava and Alamo Drafthouse theatres. Thru Feb. 25. www.sfindie.com

Authors published by the gay erotic/ romance publisher –James Buchanan, Atom Yang, Alex Ironrod and Rob Rosen– read from their new works. 7pm. 2275 Market St. mlrbooks.com booksinc.net

Vanishing Ice @ David Brower Center Opening reception for Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art 1775-2012, a historic group exhibit of old and contemporary images. 6:308:30pm. Curator lecture 7pm. Mon-Fri 9am-5pm. Thru May 11. 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley. www.browercenter.org

▼

Theatre>>

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 23

Everything’s coming up Blackhurst

by Richard Dodds

K

lea Blackhurst doesn’t remember saying it, but she told an audience a few years back that “I’m one of the most accomplished people who has never been on Broadway.” A throwaway line, perhaps, but when recently reminded of it, she said, “I’ll stand by that.”

With a resume packed with 30 years of credits in concert halls, nightclubs, regional theaters, CDs, and off-Broadway, she’s still got her eyes on the Great White Way. “My heart’s been broken in show business so many times,” she said recently by phone, “but I have such high hopes for this one, and this time I’m not a placeholder for a star.

Everyone really feels that, oh my God, I was born to play this.”

The Broadway prospect in question is Hazel, a new musical based on the comic strip and 1960s sitcom starring Shirley Booth as a lovably meddlesome maid working for an archetypical middle-class family of the era. Blackhurst heads to Chicago in a few weeks to begin rehearsals at the Drury Lane Theatre, where the musical opens on April 6.

But first Blackhurst is returning to San Francisco, where she has frequently performed, to benefit a theater for which she has a particularly warm affection. She is the headliner for 42nd Street Moon’s annual fundraising dinner gala, set for Bimbo’s 365 Club on Feb. 10.

Dubbed Falling in Love with Love, the evening is dedicated to the theater’s outgoing co-founder and artistic director Greg MacKellan.

Jack Vertoogian

Courtesy 42nd Street Moon

Versatile and prolific performer Klea Blackhurst is a fan of 42nd Street Moon, and she will headline its annual gala on Feb. 10.

Klea Blackhurst starred in the role that Ethel Merman created when 42nd Street Moon staged Call Me Madam in 2009.

Blackhurst has twice starred in Moon productions, Call Me Madam and Red, Hot, and Blue, and has also performed at other Moon functions where she has gotten to know MacKellan and his mission for finding new life for oftenneglected musicals. Her repertoire, she said, will be aimed at “reflecting the love Greg has for what he does.”

You can be sure Ethel Merman will be represented, since Blackhurst has become so closely associated with Broadway’s brassy dame. Both her Moon musicals starred her in roles Merman created, and she has also widely performed her Merman tribute show Everything the Traffic Will Allow. On top of all that, she has been involved in a new book musical

Blackhurst has a big and inviting voice, but she wasn’t easy to cast when she was the age to be playing ingenue roles. She figures her age and her type are coming into alignment, but she wasn’t just sitting around before. “I have never really gotten to the point of taking ‘no’ as an answer,” she said. “The Merman show started because I was not going to wait for permission for someone to let me have a relationship with this material.”

A native of Salt Lake City, and part of a big Mormon family, she recently moved up to Harlem with an actress she has been dating for a couple of years. Blackhurst said her sexual identity “is probably the main reason I’m not a Mormon anymore.”

Being coupled with someone who is 17 years younger has been an eye-opening experience for Blackhurst. “It’s interesting to be with

with an original score, playing Merman who takes a nervous child performer under her wing, and a studio recording of Merman’s Apprentice has recently been released.

If she sings a song from Merman’s Apprentice, she said it will be “Taking the Veil.” In it Merman sings of a kind of religious devotion that pulls certain people into the theater.

And she’ll likely sing a song from Hazel, a romantic ballad titled “He Just Happened to Me” when the title character finds a new love interest.

“The reason I’m a little looseygoosey with the song list is because my musical director of 20 years, Michael Rice, is coming with me,” Blackhurst said. “We have a big trunk of songs, so that means almost the sky’s the limit because I can shift gears, like, 10 minutes before a show and have him right in sync with me.”

Changing the course of culture

by John F. Karr

BAMPFA

From page 18

farm, is part of a three-hour loop featuring works by Kenneth Anger, Bruce Bailey, and Yuri Ankarani. It plays twice a day in the PFA’s smaller theater.

The PFA is expanding its programming from 40 to 52 weeks a year and offering limited engagements of favorites like Luchino

Visconti’s fatalistic family drama Rocco and His Brothers; Our Man in Havana, a dry espionage satire written by Graham Greene, starring Alec Guinness; and Gilda, a cynical WWII-era noir showcasing the splendid Rita Hayworth, who was at the peak of her voluptuous, redheaded powers in Charles Vidor’s sexually ambiguous 1946 film.

Four major-director retrospectives are also on tap, beginning with

For ticket information on the 42nd Street Moon gala featuring Klea Blackhurst on Feb. 10, go to 42ndstmoon.org.

recently gobbled up S. C. Gwynne’s dashing history of the Comanche tribe, Empire of the Summer Moon. It had been rapturously reviewed, was a bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Only after lauding it to friends did I find the essays by specialists questioning its veracity, and, most damagingly, one by queer critic Susan Stryker pointing out how incredibly racist it was. Carried away by the book’s novelistic sweep of history, how was little me, or the many unknowing reviewers who lauded the book, to know?

So you’ll have to accept my taking at face value the 27 brief biographies of the prominent movers and shakers that George Cotkin provides in Feast of Excess – A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, $35). I’m not familiar with Cotkin’s previous books, but in Bookforum he was called “the great cultural and intellectual historian.”

So I’m recommending the book as an enlightening and accessible way to glean not just the pertinent facts of these artists’ lives, but the meaning and impact of their work, and how they changed the tone and course of American culture.

These are the transgressive artists who during the last half of the 20th century defined an artistic

phenomenon known as the “New Sensibility.” The phrase was coined

by Susan Sontag and Thomas Wolfe to cover the movement of artists in many fields away from the staid prevailing culture. They pushed the limit on personal liberation, sexuality, selfexpression. Cotkin shows how this disparate group made permissible new avenues of behavior and expression, influenced our cultural history, and the effect they’re still having on us today. The range Cotkin covers is great: John Cage, Diane Arbus, Hunter S. Thompson, Lenny Bruce, Marlon Brando, Judith Malina, even John Coltrane and Jerry Lee Lewis.

I honed in at first pass on the bios of the not surprisingly large number of gay and lesbian artists that Cotkin profiles. After Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, we find Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Sontag, and Gore Vidal.

Greatly to his credit, Cotkin frequently and understandingly correlates an artist’s sexuality with its effect on their worldview and work.

Brando could challenge traditional ideas of heterosexual masculinity because he had nothing to hide (although it seems he’d actually been around the block at least once, with a photo as proof). But while the work of many of the gay creators was artistically explosive, homophobia

and self-repression rendered it politically impotent, as in the silence of Cage’s music, the erasure of self in Rauschenberg’s painting. As gay men, Cotkin notes, they were “exiled to a sort of expressive closet.” Following these men, Highsmith’s novels were seditious, and Ginsburg’s poems were a blow-out.

Because irony and camp, still an underground phenomenon in the 1950s, were taken during the Cold War years as signs of political weakness and homosexuality, they bloomed only with the 60s second wave of the New Sensibility, as embodied by Sontag and Warhol.

It’s not lost on Cotkin that the gay liberation movement was gathering strength simultaneously with the questioning of the New Sensibility, voicing itself in the 1950s and exploding in the 60s.

Finally, here’s how Feast of Excess represents the newest New Sensibility: it discusses gay and lesbian sexuality as easily and knowledgeably as it does heterosexuality. No hiding, no coding. Feast of Excess is a useful book, as it leads the bourgeoisie to better understand, and perhaps partake of, the cognoscenti. For its encompassing overview, inclusion of queer sensibilities, and apprehensible writing, I think you may find Feast of Excess rewarding.▼

a weekend (Feb. 12-14) of Guy Maddin, the mad Canadian known for his wildly imaginative – some might say insane – evocations of stylized melodrama, German Expressionism, silent cinema and deep dives into his own twisted psyche. Maddin will be on hand to present films that shaped his warped sensibility and several of his own creations, including his latest, The Forbidden Room, which begins in a doomed

submarine, and cobbles together imaginary digital recreations of lost rarities specially treated to look like degenerated celluloid. “It’s a cascade of stories within stories, jumping from a Middle European forest to a tropical fantasy about amnesiac chanteuses and Filipino jungle vampires, by way of doppelgangers, revenant fathers and tormented buttock obsessives,” observed Jonathan Romney in The Guardian. Maddin

has said that he wants audiences “to feel washed up, panting, on some far shore, after barely surviving a drowning in narrative.” Who could resist a pitch like that?▼

I

<<

someone for whom that is not an issue generationally,” she said. “When I moved to New York, you could be living or sleeping with whoever you wanted, but you didn’t say it in a work setting. I may have been more cowardly than some people, but I don’t think I was completely delusional in not wanting to be open about that. It’s been a tough one for me over the years to finally realize no one cares.”

Blackhurst vividly remembers when her own closet doors opened widely for her. “An interviewer said, ‘Are you in-out or out-out?’ and I was shocked by that, but by the end of the conversation, I said, ‘I’m outout.’” ▼

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, now at 2155 Center St., Berkeley, opened Jan. 31.

Architecture of Life runs through May 29. Info: (510) 642-0808, bampfa.org.

<< Music

24 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

Pardon my French

by Tim Pfaff

I

had a French boyfriend, twice, who refused to teach me French.

“I can’t stand the sound of someone murdering my language,” he said, abruptly declining my eager offer to learn. “That’s why I learned English.” As anyone who’s ever attended an intermission knows, if there’s a piece being sung in French, the first issue to be settled is how good the French was, and it’s a safe bet that if the singer isn’t Francophone (a word I can’t imagine the French approving) it won’t be good, or good enough. You hardly ever hear that a singer’s Italian is iffy unless the singer is German, and vice versa.

Fussing about the French is likely to remain a hot-button, pet-peevish thing of mine forever. But every now and then along comes a performance or CD that argues the case for the opposition so compellingly, I just press replay. Take, for example, Alpha Classics’ Neere, the latest release of melodies (French for songs, if you hadn’t already guessed) by Veronique Gens. The French Police will already have spotted lapses in my use of French diacritical markings, but let’s be friends in these dying days of civilization.

Gens’ new CD is preposterously

beautiful, not a little sad and as addicting as absinthe (I’m told). Nearly half the songs are by Reynaldo Hahn.

Depending on how you count your tiers, he’s a second- or third-tier composer remembered today more for having been the lover of Marcel Proust than for composing striking, highly individual songs that still too often appear on programs as relatives invited because of their connections.

When Gens sings them, you discover how good they are.

Here is a singer who knows the uses of enchantment. Gens begins with the disc’s title song, by Hahn, the first of five numbers she extracts from his Etudes latines. She traces the song’s line, as long-limbed as a ballerina’s, as if on a single breath, the dynamics so organic they seem (if sometimes deceptively) at one with the rise and fall of the notes on the staff. The colors, too, are shaded such that the filling in of all the gradients between L and M tells you everything about the implied A-K and M-Z. Similarly, the song’s moods are rendered subtly, bewitchingly.

The CD notes refer to the three composers represented on the disc, rightly enough if leaning into cliche, as “the melancholic Henri Duparc, the elegiac Ernest Chausson, the charmer Reynaldo Hahn.” As if to

confirm, Gens follows “Neere” with Hahn’s initially sparkling “Tres jours de vendange,” which, over three brief verses, goes from giddy love at first sight to mournful regard of the lover’s coffin. The song feels almost Schubertian in its economy and deft modulations. In two songs, to say nothing of the beautifully designed program that follows, Gens refutes the tired old notions about this repertoire: that it is light, and that it is, perilously for both performers and listeners, unvaried.

Chausson and Duparc need less advocacy, and Gens digs deep. Some fraying of the tone at the summit of “Le temps de lilas,” an excerpt from the Poeme de l’amour a de la mer, usually heard in its orchestral version, is so expressive it sounds intended. Her searching accounts of Duparc’s “Au pays ou se fait la guerre” and “L’Invitation au voyage,” which come up against stiff competition, not only hold their own but also have a potent particularity.

Gens’ regular recital partner, pianist Susan Manoff, is of one mind with this wonderful, entrancing singer, who just gets better and better.

I can’t remember the last time a new voice has made me as happy as Sabine Devieilhe’s does. The French

lyric coloratura soprano makes a recital debut with Mozart: The Weber Sisters (Erato). It’s a bright, slightly acidulous voice with a distinctive timbre that imprints itself on you immediately, astonishing in agility but not the least instrumental, never departing from the quintessentially feminine. It’s bursting with personality tempered only by a keen intelligence – one sharp enough anyway to have devised this brilliant program.

It’s clearly a collaborative effort with Raphael Pichon, director of the instrumental ensemble Pygmalion and as scintillating a program annotator as he is a director. The music chosen is associated with the three Weber sisters, Aloysia, Josepha and Costanza, who were so central to Mozart’s life, musically and personally. There’s a warm, affectional core to this whole enterprise that brings deep smiles and sudden tears.

▼

The French bits have a particular charm, the “Ah, vous dirais-je maman,” for Aloysia, aching in simplicity. But the Italian and German numbers are as savory. Devieilhe feasts on consonants as avidly as on vowels, and her music-making, however serious or solemn the content, seems intent on putting over a song. The concert aria “Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio,” written for insertion into another composer’s opera, all but floats away on a filament of truly heavenly sound, indulging a rare range and depth of feeling on the way.

It would be remarkable enough that Devieilhe has the very high top notes so securely, but it’s there that her sound blooms. She can, and does, work and play with those notes, frisking around the infamously difficult, stratospheric notes See page 27 >>

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Books>>

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 25

His lucky star

by Jim Piechota

Starf*cker by Matthew Rettenmund; Lethe Press, $25 wenty years ago, writer and BoyCulture.com blogger Matthew Rettenmund published both a well-received work of erotically charged fiction, Boy Culture, and a must-have Madonna fan-bible, Encyclopedia Madonnica, recently updated for its double-decade anniversary. Each book satisfied a niche market: gay readers wanting sexy smut about insatiable young 20somethings, and Madonna wannabes rabidly devoured every minute detail of her pantiless climb up the ladder to stardom.

It’s apparent the author hasn’t changed much since the 1990s, since his memoir Starf*cker, subtitled the eye-rollingly silly A Meme-oir, dives right into the heart of Rettenmund’s obsession with celebrity, beautiful men, Madonna (“yes, still – always”) and his allegiance to popculture fanaticism. His foreword defines “starfuckery,” which forms the foundation for the memoir, as “rooted in an appreciation of nostalgia, which along with wisdom, gray pubic hair and a lack of respect

T

for boundaries, is something that comes with age.”

Excessively chatty and giddy yet charming and distinctive for all of his loony celebrity name-dropping and dishy asides, Rettenmund waxes nostalgic for his “tubby” Lutheran childhood begun in Flint, Michigan, then on to Flushing, Queens, as a plucky child with an “eerie intelligence.” His stroll down Memory Lane includes adventures with Dungeons and Dragons, Atari, random straight male jocks he’d obsessed over, a quest for high school supremacy that mirrors Mean Girls, and coming out to his best straight buddy, who, he sadly assumed post-admittance, “felt really stupid for having been so close to me without realizing the truth.”

As a young adult, an addiction to gay porn and celebrity soon blossomed into stints at a book publisher, a media news outlet, and a stab at becoming a porn star himself. His love for Divine soon gave way to everything Madonna, high-energy dance music, and boyfriends, cheating on boyfriends, and sure, even a relationship or two.

Perhaps the best part about Rettenmund’s memoir is the writing. The author is a seasoned, flashy

wordsmith, and his fancy footwork on the page is something to behold.

He’s a cross between your bitchy, lip-glossed best friend holding court at the brunch table and the National Enquirer, if written by Jackie Collins.

He has definite opinions on relationships and dating in Manhattan, particularly if one navigates these murky waters using hook-up apps and winds up throwing caution to the wind, not exchanging photos, and coming faceto-face with a man “much older than I’d expected, hunched, and looked like a greater being had chewed him like bubblegum and spit him out.”

Then there’s the modernday curse of meeting a man he really likes who already happens to be in an open relationship: “Curse these great-looking, successful guys,” he writes, “who find each other, take each other off the market, and continue to play the field.” On

the subject of seducing straight men, Rettenmund believes this to be “as easy an itch to scratch as it is to type Craigslist into your browser and hit return. Whatever challenge it once

held is gone, girl.”

Rettenmund’s addictively fun blog, created “out of a desire to say something mean about a pushy journalist encountered at a Blondie concert,” is filled with memes and hunky-man clips on repeat (“wrestler GIFs are my gifts to you”) and has emerged as a gay Internet impulse mouse-click since its inception in 2005. That’s not to say that his name will be instantly recognizable among bookstore browsers; Rettenmund does serve a niche market. Far from obscurity but not exactly knocking knees with the Kardashians, his memoir is an amusing indulgence, much the same way TMZ has become a procrastinator’s dream date.

Never dense nor particularly incisive, this memoir is worth reading only to discover that there are gay men out there who still cherish pop stardom to its very core, and who see “how lucky it is for someone to become a star in the first place.”▼

High-stakes Checkers in Thailand

by David Lamble

I loved the image of the kid riding the motorcycle.

Josh Kim: Well, a lot of times he’s not really driving it, it’s on a rig. Even during the night scenes, you can only really see from the back. We hired a stuntman who was quite small. There was only one shot where’s he’s actually driving it, where his brother’s teaching him to drive for the first time.

Chris Lee: Learning to ride the motorcycle is the film’s rite-ofpassage moment.

A

s anyone who’s tried knows all too well, making a movie, even a poor one, is a Herculean task that requires inspiration, perspiration and a mysterious element that even for devout nonbelievers might be dubbed the blessing of the gods. In the new movie How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) (Wolfe DVD), young KoreanAmerican director Josh Kim mashes together two short stories that illustrate the fickle finger of fate involving two Thai brothers.

The Kingdom of Thailand requires young men to participate in an annual highstakes lottery. Drawing a red ball means a young man must serve in his country’s armed forces, a not-insignificant fate given that a military junta has more or less ruled the Kingdom off and on for several decades. As the film opens, 21-yearold Oat (Toni Rakkaen) awaits his own draft day. Praying that he draws a black ball, the young man recalls a decade before, when at 11 he tried desperately to prevent his older brother Ek (Thira Chutikul) from being drafted. The laws of unintended consequence seem to dictate his brother’s fate.

When How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) was a showcase film at the 2015 Frameline Festival in June, I had a sit-down chat with the film’s young director Josh Kim. Kim was born in Orange, Texas, to a mother raised in North Korea. His ChineseIndonesian producer Chris Lee joined us seven minutes into our conversation.

Josh Kim began by noting that his screenplay for the film was adapted from a short-story collection, Sightseeing, by Thai author Rattawut Lapcharoensap. “There’s nothing about checkers in the book, but I felt the freedom to enter my own stories into this. One of the things I remembered about my own brother was that he taught me how to play chess, and that once you start to learn to play games with your older brother or parents, you really try to beat them. Eventually there comes the time that you beat your older brother or parent, and then

you don’t know what to do next.

You start to see flaws. Before, you thought they were perfect; you learn they’re just like yourself.”

David Lamble: How easy was it to blend the two stories? I think you did a wonderful job.

Josh Kim: Originally I was going to have three acts, it would have three different points of view: the kid, the boyfriend, and the older brother. About a year-and-a-half ago I realized it wasn’t working, so I decided to do it all from the kid’s point of view. We went through some writing labs, when you go around the table and everyone tells you there’s something wrong with your script.

How did you find your terrific actors?

We had a great casting director, and we auditioned her candidates for two weeks.

The kid who play Oat is terrific.

I know it’s hard to find a kid who can anchor a story.

Right, and I really wanted a kid who could hit the emotional beats.

He was really good. He had one problem; when he was acting with somebody, he could cry. But when he was counting the cash that he stole, that was really difficult because he didn’t have [another actor] to bounce off of.

(Producer Chris Lee joins our conversation, filling in all the hard work his young director had done to get this feature made.)

Chris Lee: Josh first heard about the short stories from an interview on National Public Radio. He bought an option on the stories, wrote a script, moved to Thailand, studied Thai, and learned about the draft lottery. The rights were about to expire, and this really kicked our butts. So I moved to Thailand to join Josh. We started shooting in 2014 for 21 days, then went on a crash post-production period so we were finished for our world premiere in Berlin.

Josh, you had more problems after political upheaval in Thailand.

Josh Kim: There was a military coup, then a curfew. This was really hard because when you’re shooting night scenes, you do them from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Even showing this film in Thailand was a bit controversial, because the Army is still in power, and one of themes of the film is military corruption, so we had to cut some scenes due to military censorship.

Chris Lee: It is a very sensitive subject, the Royal Family and the military are almost taboo topics in Thailand, definitely not for public discourse. Even among friends it’s very sensitive to talk about those issues. A funny story: In Berlin, we invited the Thai embassy to come to the opening, we were really nervous.

Josh Kim: They said that they liked it. I don’t know.

Chris Lee: The film just passed the censors, so we’ll be able to release it in Thailand.

It joins The Motorcycle Diaries, where Gael Garcia-Bernal plays the Cuban revolutionary figure Che Guevara riding a motorcycle across South America.

Chris Lee: That motorcycle was important for us, that and the kid surviving the story, transcending the tragic fates of his older brother and father.

Canadian Monogamist

Portrait of a Serial Monogamist Canadian directors Christine Zeidler & John Mitchell explore Toronto’s lesbian scene from the perspective of a high-voltage TV producer who enters each affairette with a pre-written breakup speech.

Your enjoyment of this North of

the Border comedy that plays like a cable TV show will hinge on your appetite for smile-inducing banter.

Our heroine and the film’s strongest asset is Elsie (sassy Diane Flacks), whose character flaw is smartly introduced in a scene where she defends her breakup with longtime girlfriend Robin to a clique of female friends.

“I did not dump Robin, we broke up.”

“I can’t go through this again!”

“This is not again. This is this time!”

“You’re a serial monogamist!”

“I was single for a while.”

“Elsie, it was three months, and you had mono. I have just one question. Who is she? The next one you have lined up to be your next girlfriend?”

“They’ll be no next one!”

As Neil Sedaka once crooned, “Breaking up is hard to do!” This Canadian sex comedy is amusing but doesn’t go for the jugular. The right frame of mind to watch it is stated by one of Elsie’s slightly bitter friends. “I got dumped, so I get to have a rebound.” But Portrait comes up short compared to this Oscar season’s higher-voltage lesbian period-comedy-romance Carol, whose leading lady would mop the floor with these refined Canadian ones.▼

<< Film

26 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

<<

▼

Last Day of Freedom

From page 17

“I thought matching socks might be appropriate,” said Talisman, 49, a freelance editor and animator.

The women, who are married, have been collaborating on art for over a decade, although this is the first film for each. The 32-minute animated documentary, produced over a five-year period on a $120,000 budget, is the story of Manny Babbitt, a homeless Vietnam War vet suffering but untreated for PTSD, who commits a murder. Manny’s brother Bill, the film’s narrator, reports the crime, eventually leading to his brother’s execution.

The film has already won prestigious awards, including best documentary short at the International Documentary Association and Full Frame film festival. New York Times film critic Stephen Holden, in a January 28 article on the Oscar nominees, wrote that Last Day of Freedom was the “most moving documentary” of the nominees, and predicted that the film “will break your heart.”

In addition to being available on Netflix, the film can be seen on the big screen beginning on Feb. 6 at the Roxie Theater, with question-andanswer sessions with the women following the film. See the endnote for details.

In an interview with the B.A.R.

Courtesy of Living Condition

Scene from Last Day of Freedom, an Oscar-nominated documentary short by filmmakers Nomi Talisman and Dee Hibbert-Jones.

in their Mission District flat, the filmmakers discussed their hectic lives. The most recent chapter began at 5 a.m. on Jan. 14, when they sat in bed with their six-year-old son Max watching the live telecast of the nominations. Just as the announcements for documentary shorts were about to begin, the local station cut to a traffic announcement. Before they had a chance to go online, their mobile phone lit up with texts and calls from friends around the world.

“It’s been absolutely crazy” since then, said Hibbert-Jones. “When

we’re not sleeping or building Legos with our son, we are working” on the film. In addition to scheduling the interviews and screening requests that have flooded in, the filmmakers are also dealing with the nitty-gritty of fundraising and distribution.

Fundraising has been a part of their life for the past five years, when they first began the film. “We basically financed it from grant to grant,” said Talisman. It was produced for $120,000, she said. Fundraising efforts continue, with details about needs as well as a link to make

a contribution, on the film’s website, lastdayoffreedom.net.

The idea for the film came up while Talisman was working as a media specialist for the Community Resource Initiative, a local nonprofit that collects narratives to build cases against capital punishment.

“I came home every night and told Dee that I was hearing stories that we need to tell,” she said. They explored telling the stories of a number of other families, but when they met Bill Babbitt, “we knew this was our story,” said Talisman.

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Both are experienced at drawing, and decided to use animation because it allowed them the “intimacy” of telling a story that was “difficult to hear” because it was so sad and painful. During the film’s five years of production, “we would often come home crying after hearing some of the details about what this family went through,” said Hibbert-Jones.

The Babbitt family saga took place in Sacramento, when Manny returned from two tours of duty in Vietnam suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, as well as earlier mental health problems, also untreated, after several falls.

Narrator Bill Babbitt describes his painful struggle after learning that his brother has probably committed a murder. After law enforcement assured him that they would not seek the death penalty, Bill turned his brother in. But the case was grossly mishandled by the defense team, and Manny was executed at San Quentin Prison in 1999, soon after being awarded a Purple Heart behind bars.

The film, said Talisman, “is a portrait of a man at the nexus of the most pressing social issues of our day: veterans’ care, homelessness, race, class, mental health access and criminal justice.” By using Bill as the film’s narrator, they wanted to “give voice to a perspective that is rarely broadcast,” she added.

Although this is their first film, the women have had earlier collaborations. They were part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ artists-in-residence program, where they created Living Conditions, an interactive project that focused on the lives of families with relatives on death row. Last Day of Freedom is a stand-alone film that is part of that project.

Hibbert-Jones, originally from the United Kingdom, and Talisman, from Israel, both attended Mills College, where each received a master’s degree in fine arts. They started dating shortly after graduation, and married in 2014. They are already planning future projects, but in the meantime are trying to cope with the attention from the Oscar nomination.

“We are so honored!” said Hibbert-Jones. “I remember we were dancing around the kitchen when we heard we were accepted” into our first major festival. “To have come so far with our first film, it’s all beyond our wildest dreams.”

Amidst the excitement, they haven’t forgotten the question their friends all want answered: their wardrobe on the evening of Feb. 28.

“Someone in Los Angeles is dressing me,” said Hibbert-Jones, “and Nomi is working with several suit companies locally” to find just the right outfit.▼ Last Day of Freedom will screen at the Roxie Feb. 6-9, with filmmakers’ Q&A following the 2:30 p.m. screening on Sat. & Sun. Info: roxie.com.

▼ <<

Dance>>

SFB 1&2

From page 17

The whole orchestra floor stood up and cheered at the end of Fearful Symmetries, Liam Scarlett’s new ballet, to the eponymous score by John Adams. Though it’s not a great ballet, it is very easy to like: the movement is sumptuous, the look is glamorously noir, and the mood is “I want to be bad.” The costumes are black hot pants that look like something a teenager could barely afford – I’m sure they’re not pleather, but they look like it – with a variety of black lurex tops. And the whole thing takes place in the dark, as if at a rave, with a few fluorescent lights glaring in our eyes, so the dancers are lit from above and behind, and we can almost never tell who we’re looking at. It’s like abandoned club dancing, nonstop, sexy, with virtuoso passages rising out of nowhere pretty much the way they do when you’re out clubbing and a song comes on you can really groove to.

Adams’ music is almost a parody of Philip Glass. The phrases pulsate with mind-numbing symmetry, yet the accents are shrewdly placed – sometimes the tubas blat like a Bronx cheer, sometimes they sparkle or squeak, and sometimes a wave of sound builds to an astonishing power – which Scarlett exploits with lifts and tosses that catch the emphasis and give the music a visible white-cap, or even a breaking curl.

It was halfway into the piece before I realized the women were not wearing pointe shoes. Their feet in jumps and lifts were thrillingly pointed, but that’s no problem when the foot is not weight-bearing – but the characteristic posture is to have the knee of the standing leg en fondu – which is ballet for melted, and in this case it was as scrumptious as any fondue I’ve eaten. The ability to bend your knees easily and deeply is proverbially the province of the young and athletic – and the prevailing use of fondu in the piece probably contributes more than anything else to creating an ethos of young people throwing their collective fate to the wind.

The silhouette of the ballet is low, and the heroic principal dancer Carlos Quenedit spent a great deal of time on his knees (his costume sported black kneepads, which seemed as cool as the black markings on football players’ cheekbones), hoisting a woman I could never identify but who seemed to be extending herself in ecstasies.

After much aerobic expense of energy, the music rose into a calmer, more sparkling realm,, and a more refined pas de deux, almost an apotheosis, costumed in silver, closed the dance in a mood of luxe et volupté, all passion spent. Outstanding among the dancers were Joseph Walsh, Lonnie Weeks, Kimberly Braylock Olivier, Isabella De Vivo,

<<

French music on CD

From page 24

of the Queen of the Night’s “Der Hoelle Rache” (introduced by an astonishing dissonance from the orchestra), making them blaze with an incandescent rage. Pichon balances the fare with apposite instrumental music, to clear the palate for the next course, folding protein into the lightness of this souffle.

The buzz about the disc has been about its unlisted final track after the C-minor Mass “Et incarnates est,” “Leck mich im Arsch,” a jolly, juicy little number in which Mozart extols his vaunted predilection for “ass-licking.” With contrapuntal chorus accompaniment, Devieilhe gives it her all, singing with a vocally girlish pucker that Scarlett Johansson might envy. It’s the last but really the least of the reasons this intoxicating CD will blow you away.▼

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 27

and the final couple, Davit Karapetyan and Yuan Yuan Tan. Fearful Symmetries was nightpeople, dark and low-down. William Forsythe’s Pas/Parts 2016, a near-total remaking of a ballet he’d created on the Paris Opera Ballet decades ago, was brilliantly lit, tense, sharp, pulled-up, and so thoroughly based in classical ballet technique it could be called hyper-classical. PP2016 is a formidable piece, astringent where FS is juicy, shocking in its clarity and in the exactness of execution it requires, and it flashes past us so fast we don’t know what hit us. The dancers meet themselves coming and going. They’ll make a half-turn, take a step, and about-face again to a three-quarters view, always measuring precisely how much, and staying focused no matter how arbitrary the requirements seem. It’s astonishing how interesting Forsythe can make these patterns, and equally hard to believe people can move so fast without colliding – much less a whole group of people. The pattern of it all resembles a painting by Jackson Pollock.

Like Scarlett, Forsythe created an ethnos – a world of creatures, like a school of fish or a flock of birds, who have a group mind and a way of moving all their own. Forsythe’s folk flash like fish – when they turn they disappear, and when they’re back they’re clearly the same but different.

Erik Tomasson

Yuan Yuan Tan and Davit Karapetyan in Yuri Possokhov’s Magrittomania, part of San Francisco Ballet’s Program 1.

Forsythe always creates a whole look – costumes, set, lighting, and movement are all his. This piece looks like Agon, but with some color – the women’s leotards are black in front, but tan (or blue, and I think I saw red) from the back, which makes them flash as they turn, and flattens out their images almost like playing cards. The men wore dark tights and looser tops; James Sofranko and Wei Wang, who often

did the same steps in mirror image, wore loose long-sleeved green Tshirts, which created a kaleidoscopic effect when they flashed about in synch on opposite sides of the stage.

First among equals here was the brilliant Sofiane Sylve, a sphinxlike ballerina who can always make cryptic movement seem to have a thrilling subtext. Equally dazzling were Carlo di Lanno, Frances Chung, Dores André, Yuan Yuan

Tan, Diego Cruz, Joseph Walsh, and Wei Wang.

The whole of Program 1 was wonderful; Helgi Tomasson’s best work, Seven for Eight, was immaculately danced to Bach’s keyboard music (excellent work by pianist Mungunchimeg Buriad). Yuri Possokhov’s striking Magrittomania was extremely well-danced.

I’m told that opening night of Program 2 was better danced than the performance I saw, when Rubies didn’t sparkle all the way, though Vanessa Zahorian brought wit and Broadway chutzpah to her role, which is steeped in Broadway style and needs it.

Mark Morris’ Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes is an ideal work, more beautiful than it can be danced. It’s a piano ballet, a suite of dances set to some of Virgil Thomson’s perverse and wonderful etudes.

The pianist Friday night did not understand that the melody for the last dance (“Tenor lead”) lies in an inner voice. “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” was once a well-known tune, like “Greensleeves,” and it should sing out; but she buried the melody under the soprano line, an astonishing mistake. The dancers did more or less well enough; the men saved it, especially Pascal Molat (though he made it too “French”), Max Cauthorn and Myles Thatcher, and Wei Wang, who could not have been surpassed.▼

A fully–staged opera that tells the real–life story of Emile Griffith, a world champion boxer who killed rival Benny Paret in their 1962 welterweight title match after Paret mocked him as a closeted homosexual.

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PERSONALS Vol. 46 • No. 5 • February 4-10, 2016

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Jinkxed

LEATHER

by David-Elijah Nahmod

J

erick Hoffer graduated Summa Cum Laude from Cornish College in Seattle. But Hoffer didn’t want to be smart; he wanted to be famous. And so Jinkx Monsoon, whom he calls his “overbearing and impudent persona” was born. And while it’s okay to call Jerick Hoffer a “he,” you better change those pronouns when addressing Jinkx.

See page 30 >>

‘Drag Race’ winner brings ‘The Vaudevillians’ to Oasis Jinkx Monsoon (right) and Major Scales.

Santiago Felipe

On the Tab Feb. 4–11 O

ur sixth annual Be sties Awards are op en for your voting, online and in print. Vote for your favorite bars, performers and night life events with a pr at www.ebar.com/b int ballot or online esties2016.

We’ve adjusted a few categories and adde names and categor d and moved a few ies. Yes, in the attem pt to be more inclus miscategorized a few ive, we folks. Apologies! No minations have been justed. And remem ber, write-ins are als ado welcome.

But remember, un like the Super Bowl , it’s not about winn unless you think it ing, is. Either way, wheth er you’re avoiding sporting thing or div the big ing into the huddle, you can have fun.

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Polyglamorous @ Oasis Gareth Gooch

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SECOND: Two VIP tickets to see the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ Tales Of Our City: Our Lives, Our Heroes, with featured guest Armistead Maupin and the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony.

THIRD: Two VIP tickets to See the SF GIANTS!

vote NOW at www.ebar.com/besties2016.com

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

30 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

<<

Santiago Felipe

Jinkx Monsoon and Major Scales.

Jinkxed

From page 29

“She would slap you if she heard you calling her he,” said Monsoon, who might just be the first openly Jewish drag queen.

“I’m half Jewish but raised Catholic,” she said. “When I learned about my Jewish heritage, it seemed to make sense to make Jinkx Jewish.”

Monsoon admits to having been Bat-Mitzvahed. “But I couldn’t fast on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement),” she said. “I couldn’t give up alcohol consumption!”

At her official website, Monsoon offers a little back story into how her now iconic character was created.

“From the movie Death Becomes Her, I was inspired by the crazy extent vain women will go for eternal youth, beauty, and power,” she explains. “Through Lucille Ball I saw how a woman can bring you to tears with laughter with nothing more than a look. Through the Disney villains I was raised with, I saw how powerful a woman can be, and yet so deliciously evil. And through my mom, I saw not only the trials and tribulations a single mother faces every day, but also the strength and determination a woman can possess when she is trying to provide a bright future for her children.”

The result is the very distinctive character that Monsoon has become. “She is definitely a zany,

Santiago Felipe

Jinkx Monsoon (right) and Major Scales.

off the wall, irreverent, gorgeous anachronism,” Monsoon adds. “She simply refuses to let her audience sit idle; she is a powerhouse of song and comedy, igniting her audiences in a frenzy of laughter and sexual tension.”

The nice Jewish girl, who was the grand prize winner on Season 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, is now an acclaimed and popular performer on stages and screens from coast to coast. She’ll be making a return engagement to San Francisco, scene of past triumphs, when she takes to the stage at Oasis from February 9-13.

The diva is bringing her acclaimed

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GRAND: Maui Getaway: Includes three nights accommodations at the Maui Sunseeker Resort with roundtrip airfare for two via Alaska Airlines.

SECOND: Two VIP tickets to see the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ Tales Of Our City: Our Lives, Our Heroes, with featured guest Armistead Maupin and the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony.

THIRD: Two VIP tickets to see the SF GIANTS!

VOTE ONLINE AT EBAR.COM/BESTIES2016

Off-Broadway show The Vaudevillians: Bringing Up Baby to the city.

“The Vaudevillians is a show and concept I have been working on with my music partner for over six years,” Monsoon explained. “One day we had the thought that it would be funny to play two characters who were frozen alive in the 1920s, only to thaw out and discover that all their songs had been ripped off by pop stars over the last 90 years. The result is one of the stupidest, funniest shows I have ever worked on.”

The Vaudevillians garnered quite a bit of attention during its sold out New York run. Celebrities took notice, with many notable names joining in the applause after taking in the show. Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson, talk show queen Sally Jesse Raphael, Neil Patrick Harris, Perez Hilton, and John Cameron Mitchell were among the luminaries who were delighted by The Vaudevillians, and by Monsoon herself.

“We performed for a four-month extended run in New York City at The Laurie Beechman Theater, and we were lucky enough to have some amazing stars in our audience,” Monsoon said. “We were frequently visited by Fred Schneider of the B-52s and other celebs, all of whom met us after the show and were extremely nice and enthusiastic to meet us.”

RuPaul, who helped launch Monsoon onto a national stage, also took in the show. Monsoon recalls working with RuPaul on Drag Race as an educational experience.

“She constantly told me that she started out as a punk rock, edgy, messy queen,” Monsoon said, “When she found her Glamazon self, that is when things really took off. She said I could learn from her life experiences, and I definitely have.”

And while onscreen bitchiness has become a hallmark of Drag Race, Monsoon assures us that it’s all an act.

“All the fighting happens onscreen,” she said. “Honestly, offscreen we were just a bunch of clowns having fun doing drag.”

Monsoon is looking forward to seeing some of her drag sisters at Oasis when the curtain rises on The Vaudevillians. She’s worked with many local drag stars, and invites them to take in the new show.

“I hope to see some of my drag sisters in the audience like Micah Sigourney, Glammamore, Peaches Christ, Honey Mahogany,” she said.

“Can you tell I am a huge fan of San Francisco drag?”

Always a busy girl, Monsoon tells us that she and Major Scales, her Vaudevillians co-star and music partner, are now working on an album together.

“I am very excited for this project as I will be bringing more original music by Major Scales,” she said.

“We will be bringing a more rock edge to this new album and we are truly ecstatic to work on it.”▼ The Vaudevillians @ Oasis. $30-$40.

Feb 9 at 7pm & 9pm. Also Feb. 10-13 at 7pm. Feb 11 also 9pm. 298 11th St. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

▼

Read more online at www.ebar.com

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 31

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Fri 5

Boy Bar @ The Café Steven Underhill

Thu 4 After Dark @ Exploratorium Enjoy cocktails, interactive exhibits and special demos on animal sexuality and fertility. $10-$15. 6pm-10pm. Pier 15 at Embarcadero. www.exploratorium.edu

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; now with new characters lile Bernie Sanders and Sia. $25-$160.

Beer/wine served; cash only; 21+, except where noted. 678 Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd (Green St.). 421-4222. www.beachblanketbabylon.com

Bulge @ Powerhouse Grace Towers hosts the fun sexy night. $100 cash prize for best bulge. $5-$10 benefits Groundswell Institute, the queer retreat camp. 10pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Mazel Top @ Oasis The gay Jewish men's (and their admirers) social party. $5. 9pm-12am.

298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

Nightlife @ California Academy of Sciences Themed event nights at the fascinating nature museum, with DJed dancing, cocktails, fish, frogs, food and fun. $10-$12. 6pm-10pm, 55 Music Concourse Drive, Golden Gate Park. 379-8000. www.calacademy.org

Rock Fag @ Hole in the Wall Enjoy hard rock and punk music from DJ Don Baird at the wonderfully divey SoMa bar. 7pm-2am. 1369 Folsom St. 431-4695. www.hitws.com

Tubesteak Connection @ Aunt Charlie's Lounge Disco guru DJ Bus Station John spins grooves at the intimate retro music night. 10pm-2am. 133 Turk St. at Taylor. www.auntcharlieslounge.com

Fri 5 Boy Bar @ The Cafe Gus Presents' weekly dance night, with DJ Kid Sysko, cute gogos and $2 beer (before 10pm). 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

See page 32 >>

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February 12-14, 2016

Michael Sam @ Hi Tops

Fri: 5-10pm, Sat: 3-10pm, Sun: 12-5pm

Coco Peru @ Oasis

26 Artists

The wacky drag queen performs her new live show, A Gentle Reminder. $25-$35. 7:30pm. Also Feb. 5 & 6.

298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

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Jesse Cook @ Palace of Fine Arts

Adm: $15 - Free Sunday

The popular nuevo flamenco guitarist performs. $35-$45. 8pm. 3301 Lyon St. www.palaceoffinearts.org

SOMArts Cultural Center 934 Brannan St. San Francisco, CA

Kingdom of Sodom @ Nob Hill Theatre The sexy, sexual night returns, with clothes check and live sex shows. Get it on. $20. 9pm-1am. 729 Bush St. at Powell. 397-6758. www.thenobhilltheatre.com

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<< On the Tab

32 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

<<

▼

On the Tab

From page 31

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

Curtain Call @ Hotel Rex Society Cabaret presents Bill Cooper's cabaret open mic night, with pianistaccompanist Joe Wicht. $15-$25.

7pm-10pm. Cocktails and small plates available. 857-1896. 562 Sutter St. www.societycabaret.com

Friday Nights @ Oakland Museum The family-friendly night events returns, with exhibit tours, dancing, food, drinks, and live music. $7-$15.

5pm-9pm. 1000 Oak St. www.museumca.org

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

Sun 7

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 weekly "old school drag show" with guest performers and DJ Jack Rojo, and a special Christmas night show. $4. 9pm-2am.

43 6th St. www.clubOMGsf.com

Bryan Hawn shakes it at Big Top @ Beaux

BARtab

Latin Explosion @ Club 21, Oakland Lulu Ramirez hosts the drag show and dance night, with Mitzy Lee and Jacqueline Aguilar La Gata; gogo guys, drink special. $6 before 10:30pm. Til 3am. 2111 Franklin St., Oakland. www.club21oakland.com

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

Michael Sam @ Hi Tops Meet the hunky gay former football player at a pre-Super Bowl happy hour. 6pm-8pm. 2247 Market St. www.hitopssf.com

Pepperspray @ Bootie SF

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t was a fond farewell for the local drag cover band Pepperspray, whose cult followers gathered January 30 at Bootie SF at the DNA Lounge. The Drag Queens vs. Furries night also brought a fun array of costumed creatures, and Adrian Roberts and his DJ crew kept the animals and humans dancing.

But the alleged swan song of the rocking band may not be their last. “Hey, we once opened for Cher, so who knows?” quipped a unicorndressed Michael Soldier. See their closing number David Bowie’s “Rock n Roll Suicide” at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0j1SZmAE53A.▼

Keep up at www. pepperspraytheband.com. www.bootiemashup.com/sf/ www.dnalounge.com More event photo albums are on BARtab’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/lgbtsf. nightlife.

▼

On the Tab>>

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 33

Midnight Show @ Divas

Seal @ Fox Oakland

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

The soulful pop singer performs with his band. $60-$100. 8pm. 1807 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. www.thefoxoakland.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

Point Break Live @ DNA Lounge Dude! The hilarious stage show version of the cult surfer/bank robbers film returns. Get ready to get splashed. $20 and up. 7:30pm. 375 11th St. www.dnalounge.com

Polyglamorous @ Oasis Celebrate the one-year anniversary of the groovy-sexy dance night, with resident Mark O'Brien and M*J*R (BAAAHS), plus guests Nark and Sailor Saturn and Kenneth Kemp in the Fez Room, midnight show by Suppositori Spelling, and glowing décor by Brian Busta (Comfort & Joy). $7-$10. 9pm-3am. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Red Hots Burlesque @ Beatbox The saucy women's burlesque show hosted by Dottie Lux. $10. 7pm-10pm.

314 11th St. www.beatboxsf.com

Some Thing @ The Stud Mica Sigourney and pals' weekly offbeat drag performance night. Feb 5: Nina Simone tribute night. $7.

10pm-3am. 399 9th St. studsf.com

Sat 6 La Bota Loca @ Club 21, Oakland Latin, hip hop and Electro music night. $5-$25. 9pm-4am. 2111 Franklin St., Oakland. www.club21oakland.com

Sat 6

Club Leisure Bowie Edition @ Cat Club Celebrate Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke at a special music tribute night of the monthly Brit pop event, with DJ Omar. $10. 10pm-3am. 1190 Folsom St. at 8th. www.sfcatclub.com

Club Rimshot @ Club BNB, Oakland Sampson McCormick hosts a special pre-Super Bowl night, with TSD, Blatino Oasis studs and more, at the weekly hip hop and R&B night. 8-$15.

9pm to 4am. 2120 Broadway. (510) 759-7340. www.club-bnb.com

Go Bang! @ The Stud The dazzling disco dance party, with residents Steve Fabus, Prince Wolf and Sergio Fedasz, welcomes guest DJs Derek Pavone and Andy Trice. $10.

9pm-3am. 399 9th St. studsf.com

Juanita More!’s Powerblouse @ The Powerhouse FBFE

Jesse Cortez, Tim Wagner @ Hotel Rex Two young cabaret performers debut at the intimate hotel lounge. $15-$25.

8pm. Cocktails and small plates available. 857-1896. 562 Sutter St. www.societycabaret.com

Sun 7

Femme @ Balancoire

Kafana Balkan @ Rickshaw Stop Enjoy Balkan live music as Gadje Balkan Brass celebrates its ninth anniversary, with guest musicians and bellydancers; also ethnic beats by DJ Zeljko. $18-$20. 9pm-2am. 155 Fell St. www.rickshawstop.com

Mother @ Oasis Heklina's weekly drag show night with different themes, always outrageously hilarious. Feb. 6: a Taylor swift tribute. $10-$25. 10pm-2am. 298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

Powerblouse @ Powerhouse Juanita More! hosts a glam drag benefit for AIDS Housing Alliance, where one lucky guy gets a drag makeover: this month, bar manager Scott Peterson. $5 and up. 10pm-2am.

1347 Folsom St. powerhousebar.com

Saturgay @ Qbar

Gareth Gooch

Sun 7 Sue Casa hosts Sue Per Bowl Sunday @ Oasis

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

Sex, Drags & Rock n Roll @ Midnight Sun

Thu 11

Paula West @ Feinstein’s

Mutha Chucka's hilarious monthly drag show, with Dulce De Leche and the crew from the Broni Mitchell Show (Laundra Tyme, Scarlett Letters Guido Candito) celebrating the Age of Aquarius. 10:30pm. 4067 18th St. www.midnightsunsf.com

See page 34 >>

Sun 7

Watch the game or the gogos at The Edge

/lgbtsf BARtab

<< On the Tab

34 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

I Want to Believe @ Oasis Watch new X-Files episodes, enjoy X-Files-themed drag acts and trivia, hosted by Linty and Mannequin. $3.

298 11th St. at Folsom. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.com

Karaoke Night @ SF Eagle Sing along, with guest host Nick Radford. 8pm-12am. 398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

Mahogany Mondays @ Midnight Sun 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

Sun 7

Football fans at Hi Tops

<<

Georg Lester

On the Tab

From page 33

Big Gay Scavengar Hunt @ Beaux, Castro District

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

Fundraiser for the AIDS Life/Cycle, with raffles, prizes and team fun, plus a bit of Super Bowl-viewing. $10-$15 entry. $10 beer bust. 2pm-5pm. 2344 Market St. www.eventbrite.com www.beauxsf.com

Soul Party @ Elbo Room

Big Top @ Beaux

Soul Delicious @ Lookout

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

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

Sugar @ The Cafe

Domingo De Escandal @ Club OMG

Dance, drink, cruise at the Castro club.

9pm-2am. 2369 Market St. www. cafesf.com

Sun 7 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

Weekly Latin night with drag shows hosted by Vicky Jimenez and DJ Luis.

7pm-2am. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.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. balancoiresf.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

Shade @ Powerhouse DJs Justime and Gehno spin grooves.

9pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Sue Per Bowl Sunday @ Oasis Enjoy the sporty spectacle of men in tights with irreverent queens, hostess Sue Casa and members of the SF Gay Flag Football League. $12 beer bust (3pm-6pm) and all the dip your chip can scoop. No cover. 2pm. 298 11th St. 795-3180. www.sfoasis.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

▼

Tue 9 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. www.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

I am the future o LGBT commun I’m gay.

I’m 55. I’ve been out to my family for twenty years. I married a wonderful woman six year ago, and we adopted a baby girl from Vietna My family is everything to me.

That’s why I’m an avid follower of LGBT righ Not just marriage, either. I want to make sure I can travel safely, enjoy my retirement and h my child benefit from my life’s work.

I’m the future of the LGBT community. And I read about that future every morning on my laptop. Because that’s where I want it to be.

Super Sunday @ Beatbox Super Bowl viewing party, with a 10'x12' screen, hostesses BeBe Sweetbriar and Pollo Del Mar, $3 shots, $8 draft beer pitchers, $1 hot dogs, bottomless chips and salsa.

12pm-6pm. 314 11th St. www.beatboxsf.com

The person depicted here is a model. Their image is being used for illustrative pu

Mon 8 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

Epic Karaoke @ White Horse, Oakland Mondays and Tuesdays popular weekly sing-along night. No cover.

8:30pm-1am. 6551 Telegraph Ave, (510) 652-3820. whitehorsebar.com

Gaymer Meetup @ Brewcade The weekly LGBT video game enthusiast night includes 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

Fri 5

Seal @ Fox Oakland

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.

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

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

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

Meow Mix @ The Stud 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

▼

On the Tab>>

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

Retro Night @ 440 Castro Jim Hopkins plays classic pop oldies, with vintage music videos. 9pm-2am.

44 Castro St. www.the440.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

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 35

Wed 10 Bedlam @ Beaux 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

Wed 10 Sheena Rose at Dream Queens Revue @ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge

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

of the nity.

Georg Lester

Latin Drag Night @ Club OMG

Sun 7

Weekly Latin night with drag shows hosted by Vicky Jimenez. 9pm-2am.

43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

DJ Gehno at Shade @ Powerhouse

Man Francisco @ Oasis The sexy, funny weekly male burlesque show returns; choreographed by Christopher James Dunn, with Colin, Darius, Thomas and Jon. Mr Pam MCs. $20. 2-drink min.

9:30pm. 298 11th St. at Folsom. 7953180. www.sfoasis.com

Miss Kitty's Trivia Night @ Wild Side West

y rs am.

The weekly fun night at the Bernal Heights bar includes prizes, hosted by Kitty Tapata. No cover. 7pm-10pm.

424 Cortland St. 647-3099. www.wildsidewest.com

Open Mic/Comedy @ SF Eagle

hts. e that have

Kollin Holts hosts the weekly comedy and open mic talent night. 6pm-8pm.

398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

Paula West @ Feinstein's at the Nikko The acclaimed jazz vocalist returns for another extended residency at the upscale intimate cabaret. $40-$60 ($20 food/drink min.) 8pm. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sun 3pm (also Feb 14, 7pm; no show Feb 28). Thru March 6. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. (866) 663-1063. www.ticketweb.com

I work .

Pussy Party @ Beaux Ladies night at the Castro dance club.

9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

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

urposes only.

Way Back @ Midnight Sun 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

The Vaudevillians @ Oasis Jinkx Monsoon ( RuPaul's Drag Race winner) and costar-composer Major Scales perform Bringing Up Baby, their musical satire show of a pair of hilariously bitter entertainers. $ Feb 9 & 11 at 7pm & 9pm. Feb. 10, 12, 13 at 7pm. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Bottoms Up Bingo @ Hi Tops Play board games and win offbeat prizes at the popular sports bar. 9pm.

2247 Market St. 551-2500. www.HiTopsSF.com

Dream Queens Revue @ Aunt Charlie's Lounge Classic twice-monthly drag show at the intimate Tenderloin bar, with Collette LeGrande, Ruby Slippers, Sophilya Leggz, Bobby Ashton, Sheena Rose, Kipper, and Joie de Vivre.. No cover. 9:30pm show. 133 Turk St. www.dreamqueensrevue.com

Falling in Love With Love @ Bimbo's 365 Club 42nd Street Moon's annual gala fundraiser includes dinner, cocktails, a live auction, and performance by Klea Blackhurst and other members of the revival musical theatre company. $375 and up. 6pm. 1025 Columbus Ave. 255-8207. www.42ndstmoon.org

Weekly screenings of vintage music videos, and retro drink prices. 9pm2am. 4067 18th St. 861-4186. 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. www.the440.com

Thu 11 Bulge @ Powerhouse Grace Towers hosts the racy night with a $100 wet undies buldge contest at midnight. 10pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

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

Gym Class @ Hi Tops Enjoy whiskey shots from jockstrapped hotties and sexy sports videos at the popular 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

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

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

Nap's Karaoke @ Virgil's Sea Room 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

Picante @ The Cafe Lulu and DJ Marco's Latin night with sexy gogo guys. 9pm-2am. 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

Queer Karaoke @ Club OMG Dana hosts the weekly singing night; unleash your inner American Idol.

8pm. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

Skate Night @ Church on 8 Wheels Groove on wheels 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 3pm5:30pm. $10. Kids 12 and under $5.

Skate rentals $5. 554 Fillmore St at Fell. churchof8wheels.com

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

Throwback Thursdays @ Qbar Enjoy retro 80s soul, dance and pop classics with DJ Jorge Terez. No cover.

9pm-2am. 456 Castro St. QbarSF.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

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

Tubesteak Connection @ Aunt Charlie's Lounge

Disco guru DJ Bus Station John spins grooves at the intimate retro music night; 10pm-2am. 133 Turk St. at Taylor. www.auntcharlieslounge.com Want your nightlife event listed?

Email events@ebar.com, at least two weeks before your event.

Event photos welcome.

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

36 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

Should we march?

▼

Rich Stadtmiller

The Leather contingent in 2015’s LGBT Pride Parade.

by Race Bannon “I’m still passionately interested in what my fellow humans are up to.

For me, a day spent monitoring the passing parade is a day well-spent.”

– Garry Trudeau

T

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he San Francisco Pride parade is one of the largest events of its kind in the world. Locals and visitors flock to the parade each year to watch various dignitaries, nonprofits, political action groups, clubs and others march down Market Street in a statement of pride. Leather people and groups have had a presence in the parade since 1972 and as a unified leather contingent since 1999 when Robert Davolt organized the first one.

This past week the San Francisco Leathermen’s Discussion Group (LDG) hosted a town hall discussion titled “SF Pride: Should Leather March – A Community Discussion,” and it was well attended. It was clear from a quick scan of who was there and from the discussion and comments that transpired that this is a hot topic for many in the local leather and kink scene.

Origins of the LDG event are rooted in complaints some in the leather community have made regarding the leather contingent’s late placement in the parade lineup. Many feel that the contingent has been placed late in the parade far too often and that it’s unfair to the leather community to relegate them to back of the bus status that reduces their public exposure significantly. So, LDG figured it was a good time to give the community a platform from which to air their grievances, suggestions and perspectives.

Erik Will, Chairman of LDG, of-

fered opening comments that set the proper tone for the evening.

Bob Goldfarb, Program Director for LDG, was masterful at managing the discussion. With rare exception, the entire discussion was thoughtful, respectful and civil, which is a significant accomplishment when hot button issues like this one are discussed in such a large and public forum.

Panelists Jason Husted, the current Chairman of the SF Leather Pr ide Contingent, and Dahn van Laarz, President of the San Francisco Bay Area Leather Alliance, offered their own perspectives and inside information and answered questions from the audience. There was also a lot of productive crosstalk among the audience members. Over the course of the two hours, hands were consistently raised to talk and still it was impossible to find the time for everyone to speak. People care about this topic, many of them quite vehemently.

Two members of the San Francisco Pride Board of Directors were present and I give them lots of credit for attending, since the discussion had the potential to get contentious. Gary Virginia, a former Mr. SF Leather and an incredibly active community activist and organizer, was one of the Pride Board members in attendance and he offered a lot of detailed information about the management of the parade. He represented the SF Pride Board well.

So, what were some of the sentiments expressed by the audience?

It’s difficult to summarize the entire discussion into a consensus because I don’t think any sort of consensus formed. So here I will simply list what I consider an amalgam of the comments I heard over the course of

Erik Will

A well-attended town hall discussion on whether the leather community should continue marching in the SF Pride parade.

the night. I leave it to you the reader to formulate your own opinion. In no particular order, here are what I heard as some of the audience’s and panelists’ primary sentiments.

A few mentioned the option of not marching at all, but I heard more people wanting to continue to have a leather presence in the parade while working to improve our placement. Those wanting to keep marching had various reasons for that stance as did those who didn’t want to march any longer.

Corporate influence over the Pride parade’s funding and decisionmaking was discussed a lot. The reality of supporting a $2.1 million cost for producing the Pride festival and parade was countered with charges that the parade was no longer as representative of the LGBT activist and community roots as it should be. The claim of the corporatization of Pride and the parade was brought up many times by those in attendance who felt corporations had more influence than mainstream LGBT people and organizations and that’s a sticking point in their mind.

The length of time it takes for the parade to complete was mentioned many times and it was pointed out that the 2015 parade was particularly problematic due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and that such problems are not likely to be repeated. Still, ways to shorten the parade’s timeframe so that everyone marching could be seen by the maximum number of onlookers was a priority for many.

How the parade lineup is determined was discussed quite a bit. The Pride’s Board representative explained the complexities of producing the parade and determining the parade order. There are factors such as people with disabilities, people with pets, following government protocol for political figures, high donor sponsorship placement, and others that go into the parade order decision.

Because the SF Bay Area Leather Alliance requires many volunteers to staff its Leather Alley space on the Pride festival grounds, having the leather contingent so far back in the parade impacts the ability of volunteers who want to march and also volunteer at Leather Alley.

There were a few other points brought up, but I think I’ve encapsulated the array of comments into the basic themes of the night. I am sure this community discussion will continue. The Pride Board’s representatives mentioned that they definitely heard the community input expressed during the discussion and See page 38 >>

▼

Read more online at www.ebar.com

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 37

Str8 slayers

by John F. Karr

W

hile reviewing a book about gay painter Francis Bacon in his ‘Out There’ column a couple weeks ago, peripatetic wit Roberto Friedman wondered if the heterosexual author could adequately portray the inner life of the artist, who was a kinky and tormented homosexual. “Does a critic have to be queer to appreciate a queer?” Friedman queried, before concluding, “Jury still out.”

Shortly after that, Chronicle reviewer Steve Winn found monologue portions of Taylor Mac’s show at the Curran, “boring.” Yet noted queer theatre director F. Allen Sawyer countered to me that those were the portions he liked the most, as they discovered hitherto unexplored gay ways within American history.

Does a reviewer have to be queer to perceive queer history? Jury still out.

And then there’s me, always sure porn fans are being emotionally shortchanged by Gay for Pay (G4P) performers. Does a performer have to be gay to appreciate his gay sex partner? This juryman is still out on the question. Begging the verdict toward their side are two undeniably str8 dudes who put goose bumps on top of my hard nipples. Gentlemen, I introduce you to Adam Bryant and Solomon Aspen. They’ve both been knocking around gay porn for some time, but only recently came knocking on my door.

I discovered Adam Bryant while researching short performers. Bryant’s a delicious 5’6”, but, like many a shorter man, he isn’t at all short on pow! bang! and wallop! He’s mighty meaty, with rolling mounds of muscle, and his fucks are leveraged by massive thighs. He’s a tough-looking dude, a hot little stud-hustler.

Talk about trade. With his scruffy goatee, insolent expression, and str8 boy tats, he’s real barrio.

It’s a look that perhaps too easily matches up to his actual arrests for burglary, fraud, resisting an officer, and contempt of court. And though it’s not quite contempt he shows his sex partners, there’s a hard edge to his performances. You can find him pumping his plush pecs and bulging biceps at ParagonMen, in stray scenes at sites like MasqueradeMen. com, and CollegeDudes.com (four scenes, one hot one with Patrick Rouge).

But the best of his work, over 20 scenes that are frequently bareback, is at Men.com. An estimable array of partners bottom for him, including Alex Mecum, Vadim Black, Jimmy Fanz, Mike Demarco, and Luke Adams. He fucks his way through group scenes, lays his cum on Brendan Phillip’s tongue (it was supposed to be mine!), and, no doubt at the company’s non-stop urging, finally agreed to bottom, for Diego Sans.

Hot House

Adam Bryant flaunts his beef.

“I decided to bottom at least this once just to see if I could,” he said.

“The money helped, too.”

Afterward, he drolly admitted he didn’t know the score.

“I probably should’ve gotten used to the experience first.”

Sans isn’t too hard on him, but it’s painfully obvious that Bryant is not enjoying himself. When asked if he’d bottom again, he gave a classic G4P response.

“Sure, if I get paid enough.

Hate to sound like I’m only about the money, but that’s what it comes down to.”

So, when a str8 guy’s just going for the money, I think I’ll recall the jury, with the instruction to just forget the joy of gay sex.

That scene will be collected on a DVD, Top to Bottom 3, due out mid-March. But, as I’ve pointed out before, with a site membership, you can own every scene he’s made (and a lot more than that) for the same price.

Bryant recently graduated to mainstream porn, and I’m glad he settled within the RagingHotFalcon family, where his plump cock will be well-serviced. His first flick for the titillating triumvirate comes from Hot House. It’s called, Erector. He still doesn’t rim or suck, but for me that simply underscores his status as trade.

Men.com

Solomon Aspen shows off his enticements.

Men.com

Adam Bryant (left) is smiling, but he wasn’t too happy when topped

by Diego Sans. photo:

All four of the movie’s scenes take place in front of a flaring corona of steel fretwork that could be a backdrop for The Emperor Ming of Mong’s throne. I think Jimmy Durano conceived of it. Like Christian Owen’s direction, it is solidly masculine. Owen skips dialogue, is tightly focused on the action, and provides kit of butch looking high top boots and cock-framing latex jockstraps. Damn, but Bryant’s sexy in his.

Johnny Ryder furiously works Bryant’s tense cock, slobbering it all saliva shiny, choking and gagging to get it all down. Then Ryder’s on all fours, and Bryant works a long dildo up Ryder’s ass, although he shows no skill in its application. Ryder has to guide it in. Once there, they get some rockin’ good action going.

Bryant’s brusque, but Ryder can take it. With his cock replacing the dildo, Bryant’s no different, delivering rapid, hard thrusts while Ryder moans. Then, breathless and covered in sweat, they jack off together, and Bryant whispers, “God damn.”

Elsewhere in Erector, jockstrapped and très handsome Marko Carbo, making an auspicious porn debut, shares with Donnie Dean a double-ended dildo and a juicy 69 as preface to a swell fuck. In another scene, a shaved head makes Juan Lopez look stern, and it’s a stern fuck he throws porn pro Derek Atlas.

Other sides of Aspen

And what about Solomon Aspen aka, simply Aspen? He, too, is undeniably str8. In recent months, Aspen’s divorce was finalized, but not before his wife had their baby.

And yet…

Aspen does everything, with relish. He devours kisses, and he devours cum. He eats an ass before plugging it, and he eats ass before getting plugged, which happens in the majority of his films. But most of all, he’s a happy boy, radiant and smiling, who always seems to be enjoying his partners. Not just using them as tools for his enjoyment, but as duo players in escapades of lust and, if not romance, then how about calling it comradeship. All this has made me reclassify Aspen from str8Boy to GameBoy. Because, boy, anythings goes with Aspen.

He shows off his well-padded and handsomely hirsute body at Paragon Men, fucks various blond bottoms at PrideStudios.com, and at what was once his home base, bottoms quite a lot, bareback, and even fucks himself, at ChaosMen. com, where, since 2011, he’s made 24 videos.

I enjoyed his round-robin cocksucking, so savory and unrushed, with Darius and Eli, which follows a whole lotta fucking as well as a double-ended dildo (in an outtake, Eli tells the camera, “Pretty impressive for a straight boy.”)

With Haigan, there’s the kink of bondage, with Aspen locked to a metal play table, plus C&B restraint, a blindfold and a butt plug, a paddle and some hot wax. Aspen’s wife may be able to lock him down and paddle him, but she can’t shoot a hot load of man-seed in his maw, like Haigan does.

Meanwhile, at Men, his partners are the caliber of Dirk Caber, big Colby Jansen, and hearty Kurt Wild.

And, oh yes, another happy man with whom he’s quite combustible, Alex Mecum.

As a footnote, Aspen shares with Adam Bryant more than heterosexuality. His disarming personality may tell you otherwise, but he’s got a police record that includes charges of Larceny, DWI, Simple Battery, and Carrying a Concealed Weapon.▼

Look for a new Karrnal in the first B.A.R. issue of every month.

Men.com

Solomon Aspen, here pounding Johnny Rapid, is an infrequent but undeniably proficient top.

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

38 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 4-10, 2016

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From page 36

they’d take back what they heard to the entire Pride Board.

One way that local leather and kink folk can help ensure that the leather contingent is well planned this year is to attend the San Francisco Leather Pride Contingent general planning meetings for the 2016 SF Pride Parade. Meetings are held at the SF Eagle, 398 12th Street, every second Tuesday at 2pm from now until June. The next meeting is February 13. I encourage those interested in creating the best leather contingent possible to attend the meetings.

Another way to help is to become a member of SF Pride. Members can attend regular meetings and offer input on the Pride festival and parade planning.

Folsom Street Events’ New Digs I enjoyed seeing the new Folsom Street Events offices on 8th Street in South of Market when they had an open house event this past week. As is happening all over San Francisco, their previous location’s rent was

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skyrocketing and they needed to find a new place from which to operate. They found great new offices.

Folsom Street Events is currently in the midst of a fundraising effort to raise the money needed to equip the offices properly. They do such great work for the entire leather and kink community that I feel they are a worthy beneficiary of any donations readers of this column might be able to contribute.

You can find their fundraising page by visiting the IndieGoGo site at www.indiegogo.com and entering “FOLSOM” in the search box. Their “Help Folsom Street Events Fight Gentrification” page will appear and you can donate from there.

Folsom Street Events, of course, produces Folsom Street Fair, but they also produce seven additional events, all of which generate monies that they then distribute to a wide cross-section of community nonprofit organizations. They are such a vital element of the local leather and kink scene.▼ Race Bannon is a local author, blogger and activist. You can reach him through the contact page on his website, www.bannon.com.

Leather Events, February 5-19, 2016 >>

T

here’s always a lot going on in the San Francisco Bay Area for leather and other kinksters.

Fri 5 Sober Kink Together @ Castro Country Club Officially a CMA meeting, but open to all Anonymous 12-step Fellowship members, 4058 18th St., 9:30pm. www.castrocountryclub.org

Gear Party @ 442 Natoma Gear play party (leather, rubber, harnesses, etc.) for gay men.

442 Natoma St., $15 (requires $5 membership), 10pm. www.442parties.com

Mon 8 Ride Mondays @ Eros A motorcycle rider and leathermen night at Eros, bring your helmet, AMA card, MC club card or club colors and get $3 off entry or massage. 2051 Market St. www.erossf.com

Rope Bondage Basics with Ropemaster John @ Eros SF Ring offers a discussion, demonstration and hands-on practice session covering the basic concepts and techniques of rope bondage for erotic male-male play. 2051 Market St., 7:30-9:30pm. www.sfring.org

Race Bannon

(Left to right) Demetri Moshoyannis, Executive Director, Patrick Finger, Development and Projects Manager, and Edwin Morales, Jr., the newly elected President of the Board of Directors, for Folsom Street Events, at the recent open house party for the new Folsom Street Events offices.

Wed 10 Golden Shower Buddies @ Blow Buddies A men’s water sports night, Golden Shower Buddies, $15 with membership, 933 Harrison St., 8pm. www.blowbuddies.com

Thu 11

Mon 15

Red Hanky Nite @ Powerhouse

Ride Mondays @ Eros

Bar night for men into fisting. 1347 Folsom St., 7-9pm. http://hellholesf.com/

Fri 12 Sober Kink Together @ Castro Country Club Officially a CMA meeting, but open to all Anonymous 12-step Fellowship members, 4058 18th St., 9:30pm. www.castrocountryclub.org

Gear Party @ 442 Natoma Gear play party (leather, rubber, harnesses, etc.) for gay men.

442 Natoma St., $15 (requires $5 membership), 10pm. www.442parties.com

Puppy Luv Auction at Lick It @ Powerhouse Pedal Pups are the beneficiaries for this Lick It at Powerhouse Valentine’s Weekend. 1347 Folsom St., $5, 10pm1am. www.powerhousebar.com

Cigar Play Party @ Blow Buddies Cigar enthusiasts take over the (heated) back patio to smoke and play. 933 Harrison St., 10pm-1am. www.blowbuddies.com

Sat 13 Brüt @ Beatbox Join like-minded kinky men who appreciate mind-blowing dance music, have a confident sexual verve, and a little bit of sleaze. 314 11th St., 10pm. www.brutparty.com

A motorcycle rider and leathermen night at Eros, bring your helmet, AMA card, MC club card or club colors and get $3 off entry or massage. 2051 Market St. www.erossf.com

Tue 16 Kinky Entrepreneurs Munch @ Wicked Grounds Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner in the kink community? Would you like to swap notes with other kinky businessfolk, build community and network? 289 8th St., 11am-1pm. www.wickedgrounds.com

Fri 19 Sober Kink Together @ Castro Country Club Officially a CMA meeting, but open to all Anonymous 12-step Fellowship members, 4058 18th St., 9:30pm. www.castrocountryclub.org

Gear Party @ 442 Natoma Gear play party (leather, rubber, harnesses, etc.) for gay men.

442 Natoma St., $15 (requires $5 membership), 10pm. www.442parties.com

▼

Read more online at www.ebar.com

February 4-10, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 39

Shooting Stars

photos by Steven Underhill

5th Anniversary @ GLBT History Museum photos by Steven Underhill

F

ans, patrons, local celebs and active members of the GLBT Historical Society attended “I Love History,” the fifth anniversary of the popular Castro district musuem, which has showcased diverse exhibits of queer lives and events from our past since it opened.

Held Friday, January 29, the party included DJed music by Marke Bieschke and a live

set by Momma’s Boyz. New Executive Director Terry Beswick greeted guests and spoke, as did guest-hosts Juanita More! and Alex U. Inn. Beverages were donated by nearby popular bars Beaux and Midnight Sun. www.glbthistory.org 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