February 3, 2011 edition of the Bay Area Reporter

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BAYAREAREPORTER

Vol. 41

. No. 5 . 3 February 2011

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by Matthew S. Bajko

Bayard Rustin

Sylvester James

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George Choy

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Rick Gerharter

Castro history project selects first 20 honorees

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by Matthew S. Bajko ourteen men and six women have been chosen to be the first group of 20 LGBT luminaries to be honored with plaques along the sidewalks of the Castro, San Francisco’s gay neighborhood, the Bay Area Reporter has learned.

The list includes the famous, such as the poet Allen Ginsberg and pop artist Keith Haring, to unsung heroes few people may know, such as Jane Addams, the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and Japanese playwright Yukio Mishima.

Known as the Rainbow Honor Walk, the pro-

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ject is aimed at showcasing the extraordinary achievements LGBT people have made toward human society despite the hatred and lack of rights they faced due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

A dozen people on the project’s steering committee spent the last three months whittling down a list of nearly 150 nominees sent in by the public over the course of the last year to come up with the first group of inductees. The committee decided to select only from among the deceased who, when they were alive, were open about their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The steering committee strived to select a rep-

resentative sample of the LGBT community’s gender and racial diversity. The honorees also represent a wide variety of backgrounds, from artists and activists to musicians and scientists.

The list includes three black men: civil rights activist Bayard Rustin; disco drag star Sylvester James; and the author James Baldwin. The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca also made the cut.

George Choy, a San Franciscan who was an early member of the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance, was picked in part for his AIDS activism and work to support LGBT youth.

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an Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim has refrained from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since high school, citing the lack of rights granted to San Francisco LGBT Americans Supervisor Jane Kim as part of the reason behind her decision.

When she served on the city’s school board, Kim did not join in recitation of the pledge at the start of meet-

Del Martin

Rick Gerharter

Mick Hicks

Kim cites LGBT rights for pledge silence

Jane Philomen Cleland

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

Older people LGBTs mark Black History Month account for majority of F SF AIDS cases

by Matthew S. Bajko or the first time since AIDS was discovered 30 years ago, people 50 years of age or older account for the majority of people living with an AIDS diagnosis in San Francisco, the Bay Area Reporter Susan Scheer has learned.

In 2010 the city crossed the 50 percent threshold of AIDS cases being among older adults.

Overall, 53 percent of AIDS cases last year were among people 50 and older.

“I think it is a continuing trend. It reflects improved treatment so that is the good news,” said Susan Scheer, Ph.D., MPH, the director of the Department of Public Health’s HIV Epidemiology Section. “People who were diagnosed a longer time ago and have been able to get good care and treatment are surviving longer.”

The milestone in the city’s epidemic, say health officials, is another example of the extraordinary progress that has been made in turning HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from being a death sentence into a manageable disease that people can live

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Rick Gerharter

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ebruary is Black History Month, and LGBTs in the Bay Area are among those reflecting on what’s happened and where things are going in the broader community.

An upcoming event at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center will mark the month and celebrate the lives of figures who have paved the way.

Generations: Black LGBT Experiences will run from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, February 18 in the center’s ceremonial room. The center is located at 1800 Market Street.

Anthony Philip, the center’s health and wellness director who identifies as black and gay, said, “I think it’ll be a great event” and something that will impact the community, “particularly for the black LGBT community,” to see “who got us where we are today and how far we still need to go.”

People such as the late writers Audrey Lorde and James Baldwin will be among those recognized.

At the Metropolitan Community Church-San Francisco, the congregation has recently been seeing the first African American to serve as their pastor.

The Reverend Dr. William H. Knight, who’s gay and is serving on a provisional basis, returned to San Francisco recently after previously living in the city from 1968 to 1970.

“San Francisco was the epitome of where everyone who was gay or bisexual or whatever came in order to be able to live an open and free and non-discriminated-against life,” said Knight, 67. “There was such a sense of joy and a sense of freedom” for black LGBTs, he said.

However, “That all started to become impacted when the virus became as deadly as it did,” said Knight, referring to AIDS. “Now, I think there’s a whole new generation that didn’t grow up having their ranks decimated by the virus, who didn’t grow up having to fight daily just for the right to be, and it’s interesting that their issues are very different,” said Knight. “Their issues are issues of being able to be self-confident and self-reliant, and that’s a very different reality.”

He said that before, “We were in a position where the wrong move could very easily result in either great injury or, in fact, loss of life.”

However, Knight said he’s encouraged by the new generation’s “enthusiasm for life and by their

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Jane Philomen Cleland

by Seth Hemmelgarn

The Reverend Dr. William H. Knight speaks to his congregation at Metropolitan Community Church-San Francisco during last Sunday’s evening service.

willingness to just embrace life without labels.”

Stewart Shaw, the manager of the African American Center at the San Francisco Public Library, has done several LGBT programs there.

“I think there’s always been an interest” in black LGBT programming “on some level,” said Shaw.

He said the programs have been well attended.

Shaw, who’s 47 and identifies as same-gender loving, was born and raised in Berkeley and has lived in Oakland for more than 20 years.

Shaw said a big issue now is that “the larger gay community doesn’t always see communities of color as their allies, or vise versa.” In addition, he said, “Internal homophobia is still pretty large in the black gay community.”

Still, “I think the black LGBT community is speaking out more,” than they had been, said Shaw. “... We’re not afraid to be seen. We’re out there doing things.”

Karen Roye Hiles, a 50-year-old out lesbian who is African American, is director of San Fran-

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cisco’s Department of Child Support Services.

She’s lived in the city since 1990.

She said that her job includes working with couples who are same-sex, African American, white, and others, “who are struggling with the same issues that everybody else struggles with.”

Besides her city work, Roye Hiles is also the recording secretary for the San Francisco branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

She said when it comes to race and orientation, what’s changing is that “more and more people are seeing that they’re not separated” and they have “equal weight.”

“It becomes more apparent as we begin to talk about civil rights in new ways, when you talk about hiring practices, for instance. The law says you can’t discriminate against sexual orientation, gender, or race,” said Roye Hiles. “These are three significant conversations that are in the same sentence,” she said, adding, “And that’s my life.”▼

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

COMMUNITY

NEWS

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Lyon-Martin remains open, but future is uncertain

by Seth Hemmelgarn yon-Martin Health Services, the San Francisco-based clinic that provides health care to women and transgender people regardless of their ability to pay, will stay open for now.

As of Tuesday morning, February 1, about $200,000 had been raised in donations and pledges since last week, when the board abruptly announced it was going to close the clinic in days due to it being more than $500,000 in debt. Clinic officials said that they could stay open if $250,000 was raised in the next month.

However, the board’s future appears to be in doubt, and it’s still unclear where the clinic’s approximately 2,500 patients would go if it closes. It is not accepting new patients.

The clinic is named after pioneering lesbians Phyllis Lyon and her wife, the late Del Martin.

Dr. Dawn Harbatkin, Lyon-Martin’s medical director and interim executive director, couldn’t say Tuesday how much longer the clinic could stay open.

“That’s the answer everybody wants,” she said. She said consultants are helping to “sort out the answers.”

At the finance and planning committee meeting of the city’s Health Commission on Tuesday, committee members appeared concerned about current board members continuing in their roles.

The board’s financial oversight skills are being questioned, and they had announced the clinic’s closure without having made any plans for what would happen to patients.

Committee Chair Steven Tierney

Rick Gerharter

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Sylvia Mwihaki reaches for money to support Lyon-Martin Health Services during an effort January 29 to solicit donations from people on the street.

She was approached by Cherry Popkins, Alex Lannon, and Sister Tuna Noodle Cocktail in the Castro.

current structure, does not have the trust of the city, and I don’t think it has the trust of the public. That board has to be restructured.”

As for the possibility of the city providing money, Campos said, “I think the city can provide some assistance, but we’re also talking about the city being in a situation where the city doesn’t have any money.”

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi has called for a hearing with the supervisors’ budget and finance committee. That hearing will be held Wednesday, February 16.

Mirkarimi said he’s asked to see “all the financial data in some genesis that explains a little bit better how [the clinic] accrued such a substantial debt” with almost no notice to others.

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asked Harbatkin if she was okay with the board remaining.

Harbatkin expressed support for the board, saying, “We’re continuing with our current board for now.” She said the board’s “been working very hard for many years.”

But some on the city’s Board of Supervisors are less supportive. Supervisor David Campos held a meeting in his office Thursday, January 27 with Harbatkin, Supervisor Scott Wiener, Department of Public Health Director Barbara Garcia, and Lyon-Martin board President Lauren Winter.

Asked in an interview if he thinks the clinic’s board should resign, Campos said, “I think the board has to figure that out for itself, but what I can tell you is this board, under its

page 9

New owners reopen Edge bar

by Seth Hemmelgarn he popular Edge bar in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood has reopened, thanks to the owners of another area nightspot stepping in.

The Edge, located at 4149 18th Street, had shut down in mid-January after owner Don McMartin failed to negotiate a new lease with the building’s landlords.

But owners of the nearby QBar, located at 456 Castro Street, announced last week that they have bought the Edge.

McMartin reopened the bar Friday, January 28, almost two weeks after he’d shut it down, according to one of the new owners.

In a statement last week announcing their move, new owners Rob Giljum, Tim Eicher, and Rob Cotterman cited the bar’s “long reputation for providing a fun place for neighbors and tourists to meet, order a drink from a friendly bartender, listen to great music, and maybe meet a new friend or two.” They also pointed to the bar’s “long history of supporting and giving back to the community.”

Giljum told the Bay Area Reporter that they’ll take over operation of the bar February 14, on a temporary liquor license. They’ll continue to operate the bar under a temporary license until the full transfer of the liquor license is complete. They’ve been told by the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control that that could take about 160 days, according to Giljum.

As of Tuesday, February 1, McMartin is operating the Edge under the new owners’ lease until they take over February 14, Giljum said in an e-mail.

“We saw an opportunity to buy the Edge and give it new life while also continuing the tradition of

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Rick Gerharter

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Reclaiming their regular stools at the Edge bar, the “Window Queens” continue where they left off after a brief interruption after the bar closed briefly last month. Gary Rahlf, Doug Schaffer, Joe Bourassa, bartenders Mike McHale and Gavin Thompson, and Mark Abramson are some of about 25 regular customers who have been meeting every afternoon for 20 years to gossip and socialize at the Castro bar.

being part of and being supporting of the community,” he said in a phone interview. “We couldn’t turn it down. We had to do it.”

The new owners will be remodeling the bar, but they’ll keep it open during the renovations. They hope to be finished in time for the bar’s 20th anniversary in May. Giljum said the space had fallen “into a little state of disrepair” and patronage at the bar has been “down from where it should be.” He said he and his partners would reinvest in the space and bring more events in to try to build the business back up.

He said he’d spoken with McMartin before the bar closed, and McMartin had told him that out mayoral candidate Bevan Dufty was talking to one of the bar’s landlords. Dufty represented the Castro and other neighborhoods on the Board of Supervi-

sors until being termed out last year.

Giljum said after Dufty connected him with the landlord, he spoke to him about how people “in the community would be disheartened if [the Edge] went away.”

Dufty called the outcome a “win, win, win” for Giljum and his partners, McMartin, and the building’s landlords.

Giljum didn’t want to share the amount they paid McMartin for the bar and declined to disclose how much they’ll pay to lease the space from the landlords.

McMartin previously told the B.A.R. that he was paying $9.15 per square foot for the space. He didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.

Landlord John Tran wouldn’t say this week how much the new owners would be paying. ▼

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3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

ELECTION

2011

Rees kicks off mayoral speaker series in SF

by Matt Baume ill Hemenger, an out former District 8 candidate for the Board of Supervisors, has launched a speaker series featuring candidates for San Francisco’s next mayor.

Hosted at Hemenger’s Diamond Heights home, last week’s inaugural speaker was Joanna Rees, the founder and managing director of VSP Capital. Rees announced last fall that she would campaign for mayor with a focus on job creation, education, and government transparency.

She has never held elected office.

Too much of San Francisco’s workforce commutes to jobs outside of the city, Rees, 49, told a group of approximately 30 people gathered in Hemenger’s living room Monday, January 24. The city’s high cost of doing business has led many employers to avoid San Francisco, she said.

“Twenty-five percent of our working population commutes out of the city,” she said. “That was 5 percent 15 years ago.”

Rees suggested that the city institute new tax incentives, modeled after the existing biotech payroll tax exemption, to attract new industries.

In addition, she said, the city needs to maintain a strong workforce by increasing the rate of high school graduation and college matriculation.

“If we don’t dramatically improve public education, we will not have a viable city going forward,” she said.

Throughout the evening, Rees maintained a heavy emphasis on job creation.

When asked how she would push the city toward achieving its goal of 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020, she responded, “more people are going to ride bikes if they have jobs in the city to ride bikes to.”

When asked for comment on the potential closure of Lyon-Martin Health Services, Rees said, “It distresses me ... It’s so important that we bring in more revenue into the city so we have more dollars available.”

Rees advocated building new bridges between the business and nonprofit communities, bringing leaders together to share best-practices. As mayor, she would help LyonMartin with restructuring, she said.

Although this is her first bid for public office, in recent years Rees has received training in public leadership through programs at the World Economic Forum and Aspen Institute, where she was mentored by the late former Texas Governor Ann Richards.

Attendees at last week’s event appreciated Rees’s focus on jobs. “I think she’s on the right track,” said Judith Litvich. “I’m glad to get this introduction.”

Ludovico Mazzola, a senior sales associate with Climb Real Estate Group, wanted more specifics about Rees’s plan to attract businesses to San Francisco.

For his part, Hemenger was grateful to Rees for appearing, and is looking forward to hosting future

Web content Online content this week includes articles about an adult industry health clinic in southern California shut down by the state and an update on the Pentagon’s implementation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal. www.ebar.com

www.ebar.com

Matt Baume

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San Francisco mayoral candidate Joanna Rees, right, talks with people who attended a meet and greet for the candidate.

gatherings with Bevan Dufty and Dennis Herrera. Both mayoral candidates have agreed to appear, but have not yet scheduled a date.

“I think [Rees] already has a very political, polished message,” said Hemenger. “I think her business background will bring up some good points about job creation and

getting businesses stimulated again. ... On the social side, we didn’t get into that. I want to get her thoughts on LGBT issues and the trans community, and how we’re going to deal with discrimination.”

Anyone is welcome to attend future events, he said. “We would love more people. The more the merrier.”▼

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

OPEN

BAYAREAREPORTER Volume 41, Number 5 3 February 2011 eBAR.com PUBLISHER Thomas E. Horn Bob Ross (Founder, 1971 – 2003) N E W S E D I TO R Cynthia Laird A R T S E D I TO R Roberto Friedman ASSISTANT EDITORS Matthew S. Bajko Seth Hemmelgarn Jim Provenzano CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Dan Aiello • Tavo Amador • Matt Baume • Erin Blackwell Roger Brigham • Scott Brogan • Victoria A. Brownworth Philip Campbell • Chuck Colbert • Richard Dodds Raymond Flournoy • Brian Gougherty David Guarino • Liz Highleyman • Brandon Judell Robert Julian • John F. Karr • Lisa Keen Matthew Kennedy • David Lamble • Michael McDonagh Paul Parish • Lois Pearlman • Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota Bob Roehr • Donna Sachet • Adam Sandel Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro • Gwendolyn Smith Robert Sokol • Ed Walsh • Sura Wood

A R T D I R E C TO R Kurt Thomas DESIGNER Scott King P H OTO G R A P H E R S Jane Philomen Cleland Marc Geller Rick Gerharter Lydia Gonzales Rudy K. Lawidjaja Steven Underhill Bill Wilson I L L U S T R ATO R S & C A R TO O N I S T S Paul Berge Christine Smith G E N E R A L M A N AG E R Michael M. Yamashita D I S P L AY A DV E R T I S I N G Colleen Small Scott Wazlowski

FORUM

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Uganda must condemn murder homophobia in that country. e mourn the loss of Ugandan gay acThat was brought home with the evangelitivist David Kato, who was brutally cals’ 2009 visit. One of the participants, Don beaten to death last week in his home.

Schmierer, told the Times last week that he foWhile police were quick to announce that robbery was the motive, many LGBTs and allies are cused on “parenting skills” at the conference, in not so sure. Anti-gay sentiment has been running an effort to distance himself from the rampant high in Uganda for a couple of years now, homophobia in Uganda. The theme of the ever since a group of U.S. evangelicals event was “the gay agenda,” the Times and visited the African nation in 2009. other media outlets reported last year. It Since then, the country has been dewas a three-day confab that, participants bating a repressive anti-homosexualisaid, was attended by thousands of ty bill. That bill would imprison for life Ugandans – police officers, teachers, and anyone convicted of “the offense of hopolitical leaders. We’re sure they heard mosexuality;” punish “aggravated homosexuabout “parenting skills” from Schmierer, ality” (repeat offenses, or having gay sex while probably along the lines of how it’s being HIV-positive) with the death bad for a child to be raised by penalty; forbid “promotion of homosame-sex parents. He issued a stateE DITORIAL ment after he appeared on The sexuality” and incarcerate gay-rights defenders; and jail individuals in posiRachel Maddow Show, where he extions of authority for up to three years if they fail plained that he did go to Uganda to promote his to report within 24 hours the existence of all new book, An Ounce of Prevention: Preventing LGBT people or sympathizers known to them. the Homosexual Condition in Today’s Youth. He More recently, the Ugandan newspaper Rolling tried to explain how he disagrees with Caleb Lee Brundidge and Scott Lively, two other evangelStone (no relation to the U.S. publication of the icals who spoke at the Uganda conference, on same name) splashed photos of 100 gays and lessome gay-related issues. His statement also said bians in its pages a few months ago, and published Kato’s picture on the front, under a banner reading “Hang Them.” He knew, friends told the New York Times, that he was a marked man.

The Ugandan government must condemn Kato’s murder. It should go further and begin a national dialogue condeming anti-gay violence that has been pervasive in that country. It’s deplorable that a newspaper is able to call for the death of people because they are gay.

Here, in this country, the evangelical leaders who visited Uganda a couple years ago also bear responsibility for what has become a witch-hunt. And it’s telling that, in the years since their visit, these men have attempted to distance themselves from the anti-gay conference in which they participated.

The U.S. evangelicals’ 2009 visit to Uganda was designed to stoke fear and hatred of gay people. While some of the ministers have backpedaled, there’s no doubt in our mind that they went to the country to rile up people. And their plan worked. Rolling Stone said that gays were raiding schools and recruiting children.

Both are widespread beliefs in Uganda, even though they are wrong, and both help drive the

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he was opposed to the anti-homosexuality bill.

Despite his words to minimize his hatred and homophobia, Schmierer is on the board of Exodus International, a group that claims it can “cure” same-sex attractions, but which relies on junk science, with a heavy dose of conservative Christianity thrown in.

For his part, Lively, according to a Times article last year, acknowledged meeting with lawmakers in Uganda to discuss the anti-homosexuality bill. After being confronted, however, he backed away and said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.

Now, Uganda’s leading gay advocate has been brutally murdered. And the evangelicals don’t think they’re part of the problem. They are indeed pushing this effort to demonize gay people and export homophobic violence. And in Uganda, they found a willing audience, eager to buy into their lies and falsehoods to the point that people are being murdered with impunity.▼ Grassroots activists are organizing a memorial for David Kato Sunday, February 6 at 5:30 p.m. on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.

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Black History Month: Important for everyone

by Susan Belinda Christian n 1975, the United States was gearing up to celebrate its Bicentennial. Despite the fact that African Americans were integral to the country’s creation, growth and success, and although black history had been celebrated annually since 1926, the lives and achievements of African Americans remained essentially absent from mainstream celebrations of American culture. President Gerald Ford issued the first presidential message urging Americans to “recognize the important contribution made to our nation’s life and culture by black citizens.” In 1976, the year of the United States’ Bicentennial, what had been Black History Week was expanded to African American History Month.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that, “the foremost purpose of Black Barbara Jordan was the first black Southern History Month is to make all Americans aware woman to be elected to the House of of this struggle for freedom and equal opporRepresentatives in 1972; she served in tunity” and designated it a time “to celebrate Congress until 1979. the many achievements of African Americans in every field from science and the arts to politics and religion.” enables us to appreciate the extraordinary difEach year since, presidents have proclaimed ficulty of our ancestors’ lives. Day in and day the month of February to be the time to celeout, people like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachbrate the history and contributions of African mann, and Glenn Beck demonstrate how Americans. deeply ignorant many people are about AmerBringing the true history of African ican history. So, by all means, let the celebraAmericans into the consciousness of tions begin, and let’s all enjoy them. But the mainstream is important – doing is it enough to make people aware of so renders visible (for at least 28 or 29 the past “struggle for freedom and of the shortest days of each year) the equal opportunity?” Is it all that we lives and achievements of African should do?

Americans. The celebrations A singular focus on commemenable everyone interested in G UEST O PINION orating watershed civil rights victhis country’s origins and cultories and celebrating the centralture to better appreciate it by ity and richness of black Ameriunderstanding the rich history, strength, and cans’ contributions to this country leaves ungenius of black people in this country. examined the de facto, structural inequalities More than a decade into the 21st century that have never abated and which continue to and several years after electing the first African be endured by the overwhelming majority of American president, this recognition and celAfrican Americans. It has not been legal since ebration continue to be necessary and impor1954 to provide black children inferior educatant. The beauty of African American history tions through segregation on the basis of race. nourishes us; contemplation of the brutality Yet, in California, approximately 40 percent of faced by black Africans and black Americans

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African American students fail to graduate high school. Federal and state laws have for decades prohibited racial discrimination in housing and employment, but the percentage of African American people who are chronically unemployed or underemployed remains wildly disproportionate. The number of African Americans incarcerated each year in proportion to our numbers is staggering. And the disparities continue to grow. The need for each person to take responsibility for her own actions is, without question, paramount and constant – but it is dishonest to ignore the fact that success in our society has always correlated, and continues to correlate, to economic class, the quality of education gained by an individual (and their parents). And by race. As the concept of “race” becomes less valid, economic class and education continue to act as proxies for it. The actual opportunities for significant numbers of African Americans to become successful, productive members of mainstream American culture remain illusory.

That structural inequality of opportunity, resources and access to wealth exists cannot be denied.

During the 2008 campaign, presidential candidate Barack Obama often said, to great cheers, “There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There is a United States of America.”

This year, we should all take part in celebrating the contributions of African Americans to our country’s success – because it is our history. But we can also honor our ancestors by carrying their work forward. If the Proposition 8 battle of 2008 taught the LGBT community nothing else, it taught us that people who are not LGBT will not step forward to defend our equality if we, as a community, do not visibly work for theirs.▼ Susan Belinda Christian lives in San Francisco and is a recent co-chair of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club and a member of the Bayard Rustin Coalition, a political forum for discussion, debate, and action on a range of issues concerning LGBT persons of African descent.

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3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

LETTERS

Lyon-Martin is vital to community

offer salaries to attract qualified people who can be effective managers and fundraisers, but the facts of the matter are that Lyon-Martin Health Services clinic plays a vital role in there are people in the labor pool who are and can be effecthe delivery of essential health services to our community tive managers and fundraisers who will work for less than [“Lyon-Martin on life support,” January 27]. It must not only seven or six figures and can also focus on the mission of the be saved from closure but it also deserves to become a symorganization. A good case in point is the new executive dibol of how we can turn things around and establish new rector of Maitri Hospice. standards for community-based services.

I entirely agree with Mr. Basinger that in the past these Equally important is that we understand how the demise highly paid executives of nonprofits do eventually become of New Leaf: Services for Our Community and the possible “disconnected from the realities, values and priorities of closure of Lyon-Martin clinic reflect the absence those they are supposed to be serving.” I also of a comprehensive strategy that addresses the agree that there should be a cap on executive mental and physical health care needs of the compensation so that more money can be dedLGBT community. The decline in communityicated to providing direct client services. This is based treatment options means that signifiespecially the case during these difficult ecocant problems are going untreated. While donomic times when organizational budgets are mestic abuse and alcoholism are two of the being slashed and agencies are being asked to most severe health concerns facing our comprovide the same level of services to an ever inmunity, treatment is virtually non-existent.

M AILSTROM creasing number of clients.

Without accessible treatment people often It is time to level the playing field with refind themselves in crisis and that can result in gards to nonprofit executive compensation by placing a cap emergency room visits or doing jail time, which in turn on compensation, requiring that managers live in the comtranslates into higher costs for the city – and still no treatmunities that they serve, and give more time and energy to ment for those in need. It’s time to develop a comprehensive focusing on an organization’s mission. approach for the delivery of physical and mental health services that is specific to the needs and well being of the LGBT Howard McDonough community and makes more efficient use of city clinics and Berkeley, California community resources.

Ultimately, preserving and improving Lyon-Martin There goes the community center Health Services is not just about saving a clinic. It’s in honor I have watched one executive director after another try to of the late Del Martin and her surviving spouse, Phyllis Lyon, find a purpose for this multi-million dollar building [“LGBT that we need to mobilize our resources, time, effort, and skill, center seeks commercial tenants,” January 20]. I applaud the in the service of our community’s well being. I can’t imagine work they have done. In my opinion the transgender emour community without Phyllis and Del’s activism, their ployment program is a great idea, but I think such a procommitment to each other and to us, their passion for jusgram could exist with or without this expensive piece of real tice and equality. And I can’t imagine our community withestate. out Lyon-Martin Health Services.

Far back in the planning process there seemed to be only two reasons to build the LGBT Community Center. One was Raymond Buscemi, Psy.D. that other cities had a center. The other was to save the VicSan Francisco torian on the corner. When I asked how they were going to Supports compensation overhaul finance the operations, that did not seem important.

When the building opened our Gay and Lesbian Atheists I am writing in support of Brian Basinger’s Guest Opinand Humanists group moved our meeting there in order to ion concerning the need for a new model of nonprofit execbe part of the “community.” We paid almost twice the rent utive director compensation [“New model needed for nonwe had paid for a very spacious and pleasant meeting place profit executive director compensation,” January 27]. When I for a very small room in the Victorian. was executive director of Damien Ministries, a small nonNow the Center (a nonprofit) can’t find enough support profit organization in Washington, D.C. that served the in the “community” and is looking for commercial tenants. “poorest of the poor” with AIDS, my salary was a stipend of $200 per month. As a person living with HIV/AIDS I was Dick Hewetson living not only on the stipend but also federal disability, some San Francisco of which I contributed to the organization to “help make ends meet.” From 1991 to 1996 I either lived in a ground level New IRS tax rules apartment in one of our group homes or with my colleagues I find it strange and confusing that a government that in a community house in one of the poorest sections of the does not acknowledge same-sex marriage is going ahead city near our group homes. My financial situation and living and creating tax laws that set rules concerning same-sex arrangements were in stark contrast to the salary and living couples [“IRS tax change for DPs causes headaches,” Januarrangements of the executive director of the once-famous ary 20]. Given the disparity in income of some couples it Whitman-Walker Clinic who made a seven-figure salary and can create a bigger tax burden where that would not exist lived in one of the more trendy neighborhoods of Washingin separate filing. ton, D.C. Whitman-Walker Clinic would often refer clients I think this is an issue where the government is crossing to us that they could not serve. Most of these clients were a line by taking financial advantage of domestic same-sex drug/alcohol addicts, transvestites, and ex-prisoners. In fact, partners while not granting them the equality that should at that time Damien Ministries was the only nonprofit orcome with the taxation. ganization in Washington, D.C. that had an outreach proAll organizations working for same-sex marriage should gram in the D.C. Department of Corrections. use this as an example of discrimination and exploitation as Having said this, I have always felt that the compensation leverage in the fight for marriage equality. for executive directors of nonprofits who serve low-income persons or the poor, including persons living with Peter Caban HIV/AIDS, was excessive and scandalous given the populaPalm Springs, California tion they served. I can somewhat understand the need to

Voting now open in B.A.R. readers poll he Bay Area Reporter turns 40 this year and to help celebrate the milestone, the paper is unveiling its “Best of the Gays” readers’ choice awards. Voting begins today (Thursday, February 3) and continues through March 2. A ballot is published in this paper, in the Arts section, and people can also vote online throughout the month at www.ebar.com/bestofthegays-2011.

The readers’ poll includes several categories such as food and drink, arts and nightlife, outdoors and sports, shopping, sex and romance, and city living. One ballot per person is allowed.

“The B.A.R. is thrilled to launch this new annual poll, the Best of the Gays,” publisher Thomas E. Horn said. “Please vote, and tell us what you think.”

There are several prizes available to readers just for voting for their favorite places, people, and things to do in the Bay Area. The grand prize

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is a trip for two to Boston in June for community-based organizations that city’s Pride weekend provided will observe National Black HIV

by Southwest Airlines and Kimpton Awareness Day Monday, February 7 Hotels. Other prizes include a Reno with a press conference at 5 p.m. on casino getaway, San Francisco Giants the steps of City Hall, followed by a tickets, and gift certificates. candlelight march to the Western The B.A.R.’s 40th Addition neighborhood.

The public is invited to anniversary comes participate in the march. after the paper Health officials noted that launched its popular HIV/AIDS still has a loomBARtab monthly ing presence in the African nightlife guide last spring.

American community, The paper, founded both in San Francisco by the late Bob Ross N EWS B RIEFS and across the nation. and Paul Bentley in The purpose of the April 1971, is the namarch is to raise awareness of the tion’s oldest, continuously published continued impact of the disease in LGBT newspaper in the country.

African American communities and Bentley left the paper several years to underscore the importance of the after it started and Ross died in 2003. work that still needs to be done in Horn then became the publisher. the fight against HIV/AIDS. The paper is owned by the Bob Ross A community discussion at the Foundation.

African American Art and Culture Candlelight march complex, 762 Fulton Street, will folplanned for black low the march. There, Bishop Yvette HIV/AIDS awareness Flunder, who founded City of Refuge United Church of Christ, will The San Francisco Department of Public Health’s AIDS Office and page 12

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compiled by Cynthia Laird

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

INTERNATIONAL www.ebar.com

NEWS

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Prominent Ugandan gay activist killed

by Rex Wockner rominent Ugandan gay activist David Kato was killed in his home January 26, just 23 days after winning a lawsuit against a tabloid newspaper that published his picture and pictures of other gays along with the headline “Hang Them.”

Police said a robber entered Kato’s home near Kampala early in the afternoon, struck him in the head with a hammer, and left in a vehicle. Police later arrested Kato’s driver and are looking for his handyman, who they said is an ex-con. Kato died en route to a hospital, according to Human Rights Watch.

“David Kato’s death is a tragic loss to the human rights community,” said HRW’s senior Africa researcher, Maria Burnett. “David had faced the

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increased threats to Ugandan LGBT people bravely and will be sorely missed.”

Kato, believed to be 42 years old, was the advocacy officer for the organization Sexual Minorities Uganda, or SMUG. He had been a leading voice in the fight against the anti-homosexuality bill, which has been before Uganda’s parliament since October 2009.

The legislation would imprison for life anyone convicted of “the offense of homosexuality,” punish “aggravated homosexuality” (repeat offenses, or having gay sex while being HIV-positive) with the death penalty, forbid “promotion of homosexuality” and incarcerate gay-rights defenders, and jail individuals in positions of authorUgandan gay activist David Kato ity for up to three years if they fail to was brutally murdered in his home report within 24 hours the existence of last week. all LGBT people or sympathizers known to them.

Kato was one of three plaintiffs in tivists have blamed the U.S. visitors for the recent successful lawsuit against inspiring the anti-homosexuality bill Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper, during their visits to the country. which published photos, names and “David was a true hero, a man who addresses of numerous gay people, ingave his energy, and, finally his life for cluding Kato, along with a headline others’ freedoms,” said Scott Long, that said, “Hang Them.” Kato’s photo who headed HRW’s LGBT Rights Diwas on the cover. vision for several years. “The foreign The Kampala High Court ruled Christian leaders who have supported that the plaintiffs suffered violations of the spread of murderous homophobia their constitutional rights to life and to in Uganda ... should search their conprivacy of the person and the home, sciences today and beg forgiveness.” and ordered the newspaper, which has According to Political Research Asno relation to the U.S. Rolling Stone, to sociates: “The targeting of Kato and pay each plaintiff $643 plus court other LGBT Ugandans follows an incosts. tense demonization cam“[P]ublishing the identities of paign fostered by rightthe applicants and exposing wing Christian activists their homes coupled with from the United States. the explicit call to hang A March 2009 conferthem because ‘they are ence in Kampala ... feaafter our kids,’ the respontured notorious Amerdents extracted the appliican anti-gay camcants from the other paigners, who promoted members of the community who are regarded as W OCKNER’ S the idea of a sinister global homosexual conworthy, in equal measure, W ORLD spiracy to corrupt Uganof human dignity and da. Conference speakers who ought to be treated as advocated parliamentary action to worthy of dignity and respect,” the thwart this ‘international gay agenda’ court said. “Clearly the call to hang (and) met with Ugandan lawmakers gays in dozens tends to tremendously and government officials, some of threaten their right to human dignity. whom drafted Parliament’s infamous ... [T]he exposure, of the identities of Anti-Homosexuality Bill.” the persons and homes of the appliIn a statement, SMUG Executive cants for the purposes of fighting gayDirector Frank Mugisha vowed to ism and the activities of gays, as can carry on Kato’s activism. easily be seen from the general outlook “No form of intimidation will stop of the impugned publication, threatour cause,” he said. “The death of en the rights of the applicants to priDavid will only be honored when the vacy of the person and their homes.” struggle for justice and equality is won.

The newspaper article said, in part: David is gone and many of us will fol“The mighty Rolling Stone is glad to low, but the struggle will be won. reveal some of the most horrible seDavid wanted to see a Uganda where crets in gay community, which is bent all people will be treated equally deon recruiting at least one million spite their sexual orientation.” members by 2012. Dishearteningly, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clingays are after young kids, who are easton issued a statement that said, in ily brainwashed toward bisexual oripart: “David Kato tirelessly devoted entation. ... The leaked pictures of himself to improving the lives of othUganda’s top homosexuals and lesers. As an advocate for the group Sexbians have renewed calls for the ual Minorities Uganda, he worked to strengthening of the war against the defend the rights of lesbian, gay, birampage that threatens the future of sexual and transgender individuals. our generation by hanging gays. ‘UnHis efforts resulted in groundbreakless government takes a bold step by ing recognition for Uganda’s LGBT hanging dozens of homosexuals, the community, including the Uganda vice will continue eating up the moral Human Rights Commission’s Octofibre and culture of our great nation,’ ber 2010 statement on the unconsti... said a radical church leader who tutionality of Uganda’s draft ‘anti-hopreferred anonymity.” mosexuality bill‘ and the Ugandan In a statement, SMUG said that High Court’s January 3 ruling safeKato “has been receiving death threats guarding all Ugandans’ right to privasince his face was put on the front page cy and the preservation of human of Rolling Stone magazine, which dignity. His tragic death underscores called for his death and the death of all how critical it is that both the governhomosexuals.” ment and the people of Uganda, along Val Kalenda, board chair of Freewith the international community, dom and Roam Uganda, blamed speak out against the discrimination, Kato’s killing on “the hatred planted in harassment and intimidation of Uganda by (visiting) U.S. evangelicals Uganda’s LGBT community, and in 2009.” work together to ensure that all indi“The Ugandan government and viduals are accorded the same rights the so-called U.S. evangelicals must and dignity to which each and every take responsibility for David’s blood!” person is entitled.” she said.

Some U.S. news reports and gay acpage 7

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3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

POLITIC S

Queer youth revive 1960s magazine an Francisco in the 1960s was a beacon for LGBT youth from across the country. Yet it was far from being a safe haven for those young adults who were runaways and landed on the streets of the city’s Polk and Tenderloin neighborhoods.

Back then that area of town was the Castro of its day, with numerous gay bars and residents. It was also a magnet for the queer youth moving to the city.

Once there, some turned to prostitution as a way to earn money, while others became addicted to drugs. Homosexuality was still considered a criminal act, and a sense of community was lacking for many of the youth.

The increasing numbers of queer kids on the streets soon caught the attention of both community organizers and local religious leaders.

They formed some of the first gay liberation organizations as a way to provide support and services to the youth.

One such group that emerged in 1964 was the Council for Religion and the Homosexual. A collaboration between the early homophile organizations and urban ministers, its leaders secured federal War on Poverty funding that was used to start several programs for Tenderloin youth.

One of the P OLITICAL first projects was Vanguard, the nation’s first GLBT youth organization, which debuted in 1966. The following year saw the launch of Conversion Our Goal, an early transgender group, and the social services nonprofit Hospitality House, which remains in operation today.

“Vanguard was a street gang that was established. When I came the church adopted Vanguard as its youth group,” recalled former Glide church pastor Larry Mamiya, who was 24 years old at the time. “We hosted dances and socials Friday and Saturday nights in the church basement. It was a mixture of straight, gay, lesbian. There were also transvestites and some transsexuals.”

Looking for an outlet to express their feelings of isolation, abandonment and rage at the society at large, the Vanguard youth published their own magazine. The zine-like publication was a mixture of artwork, essays, and news reports. It sold for 25 cents.

It covered everything from opposition to the Vietnam War and the emergent hippie culture to the struggles and challenges the youth faced.

Many, using pseudonyms, wrote first person accounts of their lives.

“I think Vanguard was one of the groups in the forefront of the gay movement that helped to push society to re-examine its views of gay people,” said Mamiya, who is straight.

Copies of Vanguard from 1966 through 1969 remain in the archives

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President Barack Obama also issued a statement on Kato’s death.

“I am deeply saddened to learn of the murder of David Kato,” Obama stated. “In Uganda, David showed tremendous courage in speaking out against hate. He was a powerful advocate for fairness and freedom. The United States mourns his murder, and we recommit ourselves to David’s work. At home and around the world, LGBT persons continue to be subjected to unconscionable bullying, discrimination and hate. In the weeks preceding David Kato’s murder in

Rick Gerharter

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Sergio Sandoval, Megan Rohrer, and Joey Plaster look through original copies of Vanguard magazine, housed in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society.

of the GLBT Historical Society. They had been mostly overlooked, until now.

A new project has unearthed this important period of LGBT history, and a group of youth has revived Vanguard. They produced a new version of the publication called Vanguard Revisited that mixes vintage artwork and writings from the 1960s editions with their own contemporary pieces.

It will be officially released at a launch party tonight (Thursday, February 3). The 1,000 copies of the new 60-page edition will then be handed out to young adults from across the city for free.

“These aren’t N OTEBOOK scripts from movies. It is real life. This is how some of these young adults are feeling about this,” said Sergio Sandoval, 21, who moved to San Francisco five months ago from Atlanta.

While Sandoval, who is gay, doesn’t have housing, he said he is “sheltered,” meaning he relies on “nice friends” who offer him a place to stay.

He is also an artist, and created several artworks for Vanguard Revisited, including the cover art. He also interviewed a fellow youth and penned an “Open Letter to the Fags” using the alias Gotti.

The project was a way for him to express both his frustrations with the larger LGBT community and his hopefulness for the future.

“The whole project it has been super emotional,” he said. “Being the transformer that I am, I just think people really need to realize that everything is not just how it seems.

They really need to open their minds. People are so shallow; I need them to be a little deeper.”

The genesis for the Vanguard Revisited project grew out of the Polk Street Oral History project spearheaded by Joey Plaster, 32, a consultant to the LGBT historical society and the volunteer director of its oral history program. His research led him to the archived Vanguards.

“I was immediately struck by their beauty and bluntness, and by the ways they combine themes of poverty, sex, and religion. I was also

Uganda, five members of the LGBT community in Honduras were also murdered. It is essential that the governments of Uganda and Honduras investigate these killings and hold the perpetrators accountable. LGBT rights are not special rights; they are human rights. My administration will continue to strongly support human rights and assistance work on behalf of LGBT persons abroad. We do this because we recognize the threat faced by leaders like David Kato, and we share their commitment to advancing freedom, fairness and equality for all.”▼ Bill Kelley contributed to this report.

More world news is online at ebar.com.

struck by how familiar the people were: I could imagine a modern-day Polk Street equivalent of each 1960s Tenderloin figure I read about in the archive,” wrote Plaster in an e-

mailed response to questions.

Plaster approached Megan Rohrer, 30, a transgender dyke and pastor in the Lutheran Church, about exploring the Tenderloin’s queer history. They then decided to revive the Vanguard magazine and worked with Larkin Street Youth Services to find young adults interested in being part of the project.

The youth, assisted by Rohrer and Plaster, spent three months to “create a magazine that spoke to their expressed desire to enlighten youth, celebrate the queer history of the Tenderloin, and create a voice for the unheard,” explained Rohrer.

They raised $23,500 from various foundations and LGBT agencies to fund their work. And the LGBT Community Center, through its youth program, signed on and provided space for the youth to meet each week.

The center and the Faithful Fools Street Ministry will continue to

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by Matthew S. Bajko

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NATIONAL

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CDC offers PrEP guidance he federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new interim guidance last week for the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, better known as PrEP, to prevent HIV infection among highrisk gay and bisexual men. The recommendations specify appropriate candidates and outline important cautions.

“It’s good that the CDC issued the interim recommendations, as some physicians and other health care practitioners have not known what to say to patients about going on PrEP since the iPrEx findings were released,” said Judith Auerbach, Ph.D., of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

As announced last November, the iPrEx study showed that daily oral tenofovir plus emtricitabine – the two drugs in the Truvada pill – can lower the risk of HIV acquisition when used in conjunction with other riskreduction measures.

The Phase 3 trial included nearly 2,500 sexually active, HIV-negative men who have sex with men and a

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SFAF’s Judith Auerbach

small number of transgender women in South America, South Africa, Thailand, and San Francisco and Boston in the U.S. Participants, who had an average of 18 sex partners in the three months before enrollment and were judged to be at high risk for infection, were randomly assigned to take Truvada or an

inactive placebo pill once daily. They also received free condoms, monthly HIV testing, and regular counseling about risk reduction and medication adherence.

During an average follow-up period of about one year, 36 people using Truvada PrEP were newly infected, compared with 64 people taking placebo – a risk reduction of 44 percent. Participants who took their drugs as directed most of the time lowered their risk by 73 percent.

What’s more, men in both groups reported more condom use and fewer sex partners.

The iPrEx trial results were greeted with enthusiasm, but they also raised numerous questions about who could potentially benefit, longterm drug side effects, and cost and access issues.

The Food and Drug Administration has not approved Truvada for HIV prevention, but some gay men are eager to start using it as PrEP right away. The recent CDC guidance is intended to offer temporary recommendations until public health agencies develop more definitive

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COMMUNITY

History project ▼

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Other local LGBT leaders chosen are Harry Hay, who founded one of the first gay rights groups in the U.S. called the Mattachine Society; pioneering lesbian rights leader Del Martin; San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts, one of the first out reporters to cover a gay beat; and Gay Games founder Tom Waddell.

Four other famous authors were also selected: Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and Virginia Woolf. Rounding out the group are Christine Jorgensen, who in 1952 became the first person to receive widespread media coverage of her sexual reassignment surgery, and Alan Turing, who cracked the German’s coded messages in World War II but was later prosecuted for being homosexual and opted to be chemically castrated to avoid a prison sentence.

In a stark reminder that suicide within the LGBT community is not a new phenomenon, three on the list – Mishima, Turing and Woolf – took their own lives. And five were lost to AIDS – Choy, Haring, James, Shilts, and Waddell.

“Overall, I think the selections are pretty diverse. We definitely took that into consideration, being that San Francisco is diverse, and to be inclusive of every group was very important,” said Benjamin Leong, 30, who co-chairs GAPA and served on the honor walk’s selection committee.

“Each person or nominee deserved it.

It was really hard to just pick 20.”

Bill Lipsky, 64, a historian who serves on the board of the GLBT Historical Society, also helped select the first group of names. He said the inaugural honorees all led exceptional lives despite the hardships and challenges each faced.

“I am excited that all of these stories are going to be told in this way.

We are really talking about a group of people who were very dangerous people. They were out and honest at a time when that was not a really safe thing to be,” said Lipsky, who wrote the 2006 book Gay and Lesbian San Francisco. “They could have lost their jobs, their families, a place to live if renting a place to live, everything we consider to be social support. Yet they

Lyon-Martin ▼

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Mirkarimi said he didn’t know whether the clinic’s board should resign but he said the situation “definitely speaks to a level of ineptitude or dysfunction that has to be corrected ASAP.” In response to a question about whether Lyon-Martin would ask the city for more money, Harbatkin said, “I understand that clearly there is no free money. The city has budget troubles of its own, but we are looking at ways we can work together.”

At Tuesday’s health committee meeting, John Gressman, president and CEO of the San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium, indicated that federal officials would require a new board and finance director for the clinic if it were to continue receiving federal funding.

Lyon-Martin is a consortium partner and receives federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act funding. In addition, the clinic is a federally qualified health care provider for homeless patients.

The clinic is also a subcontractor on a contract the consortium has with the city’s health department.

Garcia told the commitee that the clinic’s board did not understand financial management, but she also said that the clinic’s previous executive director Teri McGinnis hadn’t fully disclosed financial information to the board.

McGinnis, whose November resignation hasn’t been fully explained publicly, didn’t respond to an interview request.

NEWS

showed that openly GLBT people could succeed.”

Having grown up in the late 1950s and 1960s when there was no such thing as LGBT visibility, Lipsky said the Rainbow Honor Walk is a sign of how far the community has come and that its history will no longer be forgotten.

“It is really vital for people to understand what it is to have been a member of GLBT communities in an earlier time; that helps to explain very much why it is like it is now,” said Lipsky. “Having been around in the earlier time, we certainly don’t want to go back to it.”

The initial proponents of the LGBT history project, Castro business owner Isak Lindenauer and resident David Perry, told the B.A.R. they are confident the community will embrace the inaugural list of people chosen. They also stressed that it is only the first of what they hope will be successive groups of inductees to be honored in coming years along the gayborhood’s streets.

“It is an illustrious group,” said Lindenauer. “I think it is diverse and rich with people who contributed in all fields.”

Perry, who owns his own public relations firm, added, “We are everyone. We are everywhere. We do everything. That is what this list represents.”

They have raised roughly $1,100 to date to help cover the costs of designing, creating and installing each of the plaques. A Facebook page will launch today (Thursday, February 3) to help raise more money and educate the public the world over about the project.

The next step is for the committee to determine the look and size of the plaques. Once that is done, the city’s arts commission will need to approve the design. The Board of Supervisors, which gave initial approval to the project last year, must sign off on it one last time before the first plaques are installed.

While there is no timeline for when that might happen, Perry said, “It may be possible to lay the first plaque by gay Pride in June.”

Anyone interested in making a donation or finding out more information about the project should e-mail rainbowhonorwalk@gmail.com.▼

The public health director said Harbatkin has done “an incredible job.”

Debbie Pappas, who has been Lyon-Martin’s finance director since April 2010, declined an interview request, as did board member Kimberly Gillette.

Board Chair Winter and board treasurer Peter Balon didn’t respond to interview requests. Other board members couldn’t be reached for comment.

Lyon-Martin officials have said that their audits had been “clean,” but they have not provided copies of those audits.

Patients’ futures unclear At Tuesday’s meeting, Garcia said that about 1,000 of Lyon-Martin’s patients are part of Healthy San Francisco, the city’s health insurance program for uninsured residents.

Tangerine Brigham, the program’s director, said health officials would be reaching out to others to “see if they’re interested and able to take on other patients.”

The city appears determined to find spots for patients if that needs to happen. Garcia said that Brigham is “looking at if we do have to close, how do we do that in an appropriate manner?”

According to Harbatkin, under Healthy San Francisco, transgender patients can get primary, mental health, and emergency care – anything other than surgery.

Harbatkin’s been working on a transition plan in case the clinic does close to ensure that all patients have somewhere to go, but the process is “complex.” Lyon-Martin’s patients

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

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Out of the locker room closet

by Roger Brigham he wrestlers warm up on the mat with a series of acrobatic stunts. As they jog, tumble, cartwheel, and somersault in structured routines, a team captain quietly barks directions and answers questions confidently and precisely – sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, occasionally in Chinese. His natural family is 3,000 miles away in his native Panama, but in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, on the mat with his high school wrestling team, Jaime Loo is the picture of happiness.

That was not the picture Jaime presented a little more than three years ago, when he first arrived in San Francisco from Panama at the age of 14. He was by all accounts something of an insecure, out-of-shape nerd trying to learn his third language and wondering where, in the grand scheme of things, he belonged. He knew he was gay but knew of nobody to address the multiple fears and questions bubbling up inside him.

Tragically, for many LGBT teens in similar seeming isolation, their stories are never told and are very short.

Leading hidden lives, untold numbers drift into suicide or addiction: rudderless lives soon dashed upon the rocks of despair and hopelessness. Death turns their brief lives into statistics.

But, as they say, it does get better for those who stand and fight.

“Before I came out, I feared that I would be J OCK hated for who I am – all friendships would be gone, family would no longer love me, and all the stereotypes would come true,” Jaime said. “I basically played along with my friends, pretending that I was straight.”

As he became acclimated to Mis-

Courtesy Jaime Loo

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Wrestler Jaime Loo said the sport has played a big role in his life.

sion High School, he began to think about coming out and slowly talked it through with a few teachers and coaches.

“Some teachers put posters on their doors that say this is a safe space,” he said. “But I talked to others. Listening to mentors who have dealt with it before made my insecurities go away.

Stories such as yours and others were very inspiring.”

I got to know Jaime when I started volunteering as an assistant coach at Mission High as part of my work in San Francisco Alliance Wrestling, an initiative by Golden Gate Wrestling Club to provide coaching for high students in San TALK school Francisco. The wrestlers know I am gay, but I never talked about orientation with any of them. Instead we talk wrestling, good citizenship, wrestling, service to others, wrestling, and working to take control of our lives.

Hudson Taylor, a heterosexual wrestling coach at Columbia University who founded Athlete Ally, said creating a safe environment for teen athletes to talk is important to their survival. Silence is as inhibiting as spoken slurs.

“The most common e-mail I get from young LGBT athletes is that they don’t know whom they can talk to,” said Taylor. “They may not feel comfortable talking to their coaches. I usually recommend that they talk to their school guidance counselor. The guidance counselor is there to listen and to help. This can oftentimes help young LGBT athletes find the answers to their questions without the fear that accompanies such a personal discussion. Also, the Internet makes so many wonderful resources available. If an athlete doesn’t feel comfortable telling someone face to face, I suggest doing some Googling. There are thousands of e-mail addresses and phone numbers out there that are waiting to listen and respond.”

And when an athlete does open up to a coach?

“As a coach, it is important to first let your athletes know that they can come talk to you about anything,” he said. “Oftentimes this isn’t explicitly said, so athletes may not feel comfortable going out of their way to do so. If they do come to you, it is important to listen and support. The affirmation of a coach can make a world of difference. If your athlete has questions that you don’t feel qualified or comfortable answering, you should offer to put them in contact with someone else.”

His first few weeks of wrestling, Jaime was weathering storms of whethers: whether to come out; whether to stay or return to Panama and a seemingly inevitable secretive existence; and whether to stick with the grueling grind of wrestling or just chuck it all.

“I joined wrestling because I wanted to lose weight for baseball,” Jaime said. A coach suggested I do wrestling because it would definitely help me reach my goals.”

Then, with his parents in town for

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a visit and waiting in the stands to take him back to Panama, Jaime was losing a match in a meet in which every Mission wrestler to that point had been beaten. Unaware of the pressures surrounding him, I watched from the bench as he tried and failed at move after move, giving up points, getting into bad predicaments repeatedly, only to find some inner resolve to battle back and try again.

And he tried until he succeeded, turning and pinning his opponent for the upset victory. As soon as the meet was done, he walked upstairs and told his folks he was staying: he was having success at building a life and he could not leave it now.

“It made me very furious that some coaches, including other teammates, assumed that I would not last long on the team because I was a fat kid,” he said. “But I stayed because as time passed, I changed other coaches’ minds. I was not there to play, I was there for a purpose. I stayed because by the time I wanted to go back to baseball, a coach already invested lots of effort and hours on me, and I felt like I needed to pay back by simply taking it seriously and stay for the season.”

As his confidence grew, Jaime started coming out to teammates and coaches one by one. I was the last one he told.

Three years later, Jaime is still here and now I am his head coach. A wonderful support program at Mission High has made is possible for him to visit college campuses and attend sports and leadership camps. He’s a solid A student in his final year as a team co-captain and is the most gregarious and vocal team leader. Having already earned two bronze medals in the past two city tournaments, he is gunning for his first state tournament berth. And he has been coming out to people outside his team.

“There are many reasons,” he said when I asked him why he was telling me his story. “One is because I had a little bit of a taste of what coming out means to me. There’s a sense of freedom with it, and not letting society tell me what I should expect to be. People believe that it’s hard, but it would help other kids to know it’s better than they think it will be.

“There were mentors helping me.

One asked me why it was so hard for me to come out. I said I lived in San Francisco but there are lots of people there who are discriminated against.

He said, ‘Just be yourself. Ultimately it’s your decision.”

Jaime said a Mission teacher was “understanding. He let me feel better about the situation.”

Jaime said he is happy with his decision to come out.

“I was pretty nervous when I started talking about it,” he said. “I get very many different reactions. Some say, ‘You? Really? I didn’t know.’ It usually starts with a question. I haven’t faced any discrimination yet. No bad things have happened yet, nothing harsh.

“I don’t have to pretend to be another person. I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to follow what others say and do.

I can just express how I truly feel. It’s a

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3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

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OBITUARIES

Civil rights attorney Patricia Roberts dies

by Cynthia Laird atricia (Patti) Rose Roberts, a longtime Bay Area resident and civil rights and labor attorney who worked tirelessly on behalf of the poor, died unexpectedly while on vacation in Yelapa, Mexico on January 7.

She was 64.

Ms. Roberts, an out lesbian, was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, on November 13, 1946, to Jewish working class New Yorkers Florence and Bernard Roberts.

Ms. Roberts first honed her skills in debate at the dinner table and beyond with her sister, Wynne, and her father.

Always smart and ever funny, Ms. Roberts attended New York City public schools and went on to Brooklyn College. In 1967, a seminal year in radical left history, Ms. Roberts made her way to California with only a backpack and admission to UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. While in law school, as the events of the late 1960s and 1970s unfolded, she engaged intensely in the anti-war, free speech, and feminist and gay movements. She graduated from Boalt Hall in 1970 with a J.D. degree and a desire to use her legal skills to help those traditionally without representation.

Initially, Ms. Roberts involved herself with the burning issues of the times, working on behalf of prisoners with Fay Stender and the National Lawyers Guild. In addition to her involvement with the Prison Law Project of the National Lawyers Guild, she spoke out on feminist and gay rights issues.

“She had a tremendous zest for life,” said Alameda County Superior Court Judge David Krashna. “She was a robust person with a wonderful laugh and a great smile.”

Krashna knew Ms. Roberts through their work with the National Lawyers Guild. Ms. Roberts also became involved with Krashna’s judicial campaign in 2000.

“She was a surrogate speaker for me and a very reliable person,” he added. “With Patti, you could listen to her and rely on what she said. There

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Jock Talk ▼

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great feeling I have after I express my thoughts.”

Confidence that students gain through sports can give them the courage to lead open lives.

“We pretty much accept that, for the general public, sports is an integral part of the school experience,” said Pat Griffin, a longtime LGBT sports activist who is heading up the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s Sports Project, one of the newest initiatives to counter homophobia in youth sports. “Sports help people feel good about who they are.

When students don’t feel that they can participate in sports and have the fear of what would happen if people find out about them, they are shortchanged. They should be able to have a sports experience where they can improve their self-esteem and become healthier. Part of playing on a team is having a group of friends who are like a second family. That’s particularly important for students who might feel isolated.”

“Sports-wise, I think I will continue to wrestle,” Jaime said of his postgraduation plans. “There are way too many lessons and skills that I have yet to discover in the wrestling world – many of them that I can apply in real life situations. But if I do not end up playing the sport, then I would most likely coach it.

“Wrestling has played a big role in my life,” he added. “It gave me selfconfidence. It made me more responsible for myself and for my body. The confidence level on how possible everything is has changed me.”▼

Attorney Patricia (Patti) Rose Roberts

wasn’t much fluff in her statements, but her statements always got your attention.”

In 1970, Ms. Roberts formed a collective Oakland household, which included Doron Weinberg, Steven Bingham, Susan Matross and Barbara Rhine, among others. While others moved out she stayed in that home for the next 41 years.

While continuing to do political work with the guild, Ms. Roberts took a position as the head of the Women’s Litigation Unit at San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Aid, representing

poor women on a wide range of legal issues. Following her time at Legal Aid, Ms. Roberts founded and co-directed the Comparable Worth Project in Oakland, which pioneered much of the earliest legal work on the issue of pay inequity rooted in gender and race bias.

After departing the Comparable Worth Project, Ms. Roberts took a position as a union lawyer for the California School Employees Association in Alameda County. During her long legal career, she remained active in the National Lawyers Guild, serving as president of the Bay Area chapter and on the local NLG board as well as being an active member of the civil rights committee of the guild and a mentor to law students and new lawyers through the guild’s mentoring program.

Ms. Roberts was a founding board member of the Lesbian Rights Project, which later became the National Center for Lesbian Rights, where she later served as interim director. She began private practice as an employment discrimination attorney in 1990 and also started teaching labor studies and GLBT studies at City College, and employment law, legal research, and current legal issues at San Francisco State University Extension.

Retired San Francisco Superior

Court Judge Donna Hitchens recalled Ms. Roberts’s involvement with the Lesbian Rights Project.

“She was on the first advisory board, and that was in 1977,” Hitchens said, adding that she first met Ms. Roberts in 1974.

“Her whole career was advocating on behalf of people who were underrepresented in the justice system,” Hitchens added. “She was an excellent attorney.”

Ms. Roberts was a co-author of White-washing Race – The Myth of a Colorblind Society.

She is survived by nieces Cathryn and Margit Galanter and their partners, Jim Rosenfeld and Beth

Ahlstrand; her grand-nephews Ben and Jed Rosenfeld; her brother-in-law Marc Galanter; her two closest friends Susan Matross and Karen Rachels; her beloved dog Picnic; and the many friends with whom she shared her life for decades.

A memorial Service is scheduled for Sunday, February 27, at Freight and Salvage, 2020 Addison Street in Berkeley. Doors open at noon, service begins at 1 p.m.

Condolence cards may be sent to: Law Offices of Patti Roberts, 1901 Harrison Street, Suite 1550, Oakland, CA 94612. To leave a message online, visit memorialwebsites.legacy .com/pattiroberts.▼

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COMMUNITY

Kim ▼

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ings. Now that she is representing District 6 on the Board of Supervisors, the freshman member has maintained her policy of refusing to join with her colleagues at the beginning of board meetings in saying the pledge.

Her silence made headlines locally last week when the San Francisco Examiner brought attention to the fact that Kim is alone among the 11 supervisors not to say the pledge. Kim told the newspaper that she doesn’t because the words “with liberty and justice for all” are not yet reality in America.

In an interview this past weekend with the Bay Area Reporter, Kim went further in explaining why she doesn’t join with her colleagues and the public in saying the loyalty oath to the American flag. While the board’s Rules of Order require the board president to lead the recitation of the pledge, it does not require individual supervisors to say it.

“It was a personal decision I made in high school. Every time I stand, I get a chance to reflect on how the work is so important,” said Kim, the first Korean American to serve on the board.

Kim said her stance is similar to the one taken by Will Phillips, an Arkansas boy who garnered national news attention in 2009 when he refused to recite the pledge with his then fifth grade class because of laws banning LGBT people from marrying or adopting children.

“There are many examples in our country where we are still trying to move forward to that ideal we espouse. A great example is marriage equality,” said Kim, 33, a civil rights lawyer and community activist.

“There are so many civil rights issues we are still working on in this country. It is not just LGBT rights but also communities of color, immigrants, and women. That is why I am so committed to public service. I do want to be a part of helping our nation achieve those ideals.”

She also wants to disprove a refrain she heard from many non-Asian District 6 residents during last year’s campaign, that she would only focus on the Asian American community while in office.

“When I was campaigning, people would say, ‘Oh, you are Asian. You are

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not going to care about our issues.’ I heard that a lot actually,” said Kim. With Ed Lee now the city’s first Asian American mayor, Supervisor David Chiu serving a second term as board president, and the board having four Asian American members for the first time, Kim believes the quintet of city leaders will break down such stereotypes.

With the city’s Asian American community coming into such political power, Kim said she sees it as “an opportunity for Asian Americans to show leadership on a number of issues, whether they affect the African American community, the LGBT community, or the Latino community. It is something I want to demonstrate.”

The city and board is well positioned to transcend “identity politics,” added Kim, where “if you are LGBT you only care about LGBT issues or if you are Asian you only care about Asian issues. We can move beyond that and build coalitions; that is my hope.”

She is working with several of the people who ran against her for the supervisor seat to bring forward their concerns. Kim and Debra Walker, an out lesbian on the city’s Building Inspections Commission, are looking at how to address bed bug infestations in the city’s affordable and SRO housing stock.

She has also met with Glendon Hyde, whose drag persona is Anna Conda, to discuss his proposal to locate a safe injection site for intravenous drug users somewhere in District 6 as well as host an elder street fair.

“Harm reduction is so important.

Research has shown it is one of the most effective ways to address addiction,” said Kim, who also would like to appoint Hyde to a city commission.

Kim is also backing the nomination of lesbian former Supervisor Leslie Katz to the city’s Port Commission. Concerns about former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appointments of both Katz and businessman Michael Kim late last year to the oversight body have caused their nominations to languish.

As chair of the board’s Rules Committee, Kim controls when to bring those nominations forward.

She told the B.A.R. this week that she intends to calendar Katz, who would be the first out Port Commissioner, for Thursday, February 17.

“As a former supervisor she understands public service and representation within the entire city. She will do an amazing job outreaching to

News Briefs

NEWS

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neighborhood groups on port issues,” said Kim. “I am looking forward to having someone on the commission I can work closely with, particularly with the America’s Cup coming to District 6 and District 3.”

Kim has yet to meet with officials of the city’s Pride Parade and festival and was unaware of the fiscal problems and staff turnover organizers of the West Coast’s largest LGBT event have been facing over the last six months. But she pledged to offer whatever assistance she could to the nonprofit committee.

“I will definitely reach out to the Pride Committee. It would be tragic if we didn’t have one of the biggest events happen in San Francisco this year,” said Kim. But she stopped short of endorsing suggestions that the city agencies still owed money for services rendered at the 2010 event forgive those debts. Some have pointed to the city’s financially assisting the LGBT Community Center in restructuring its debt last year as setting a precedent for other nonprofits in need of economic assistance.

Kim said she would prefer seeing the city first establish clear guidelines for how to deal with such situations before taking any action.

“If we are going to move forward, we have to develop consistent practices and standards when we do these bailouts or forgiveness of expenses.

We still have a very large deficit we are facing this year,” said Kim. “I am very open to proposals around this. But we need standards to decide when we do this so we treat all groups the same.”

As for how to solve the city’s own budget deficit this year, Kim plans to host hearings throughout her district to gather public input. She is also planning a town hall with the mayor to elicit feedback.

The hope this year, said Kim, is for the board and mayor to work together on solving the budget problems without having to go through the add-back process, where community groups facing cuts have to send their staff and clients to City Hall and ask the supervisors to “add back” their funding.

“The mayor is ready to listen to community concerns. He is hoping we won’t have to go through the addback process because we will have a much better community process for input. That would be great; we will see if we can do that,” said Kim. “I want to, as much as possible, have what we cut come from the community to prioritize.”▼

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SF Pride seeks main stage talent

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deliver a keynote address.

For more information about the activities and events on National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, contact Vincent Fuqua at the AIDS Office at (415) 554-9073 or Vincent.fuqua@sfdph.org.

Black History Month open mic Radical Women invites the public to participate in a feminist tribute to the courage and tenacity of the African American struggle for justice by reading favorite prose, speeches, or poetry at an open mic event Thursday, February 10 at 7 p.m. at New Valencia Hall, 625 Larkin Street in San Francisco. There will be a buffet featuring Southern dishes beforehand at 6:15 p.m. for a $7.50 donation. For more information or child care, contact (415) 864-1278 or baradicalwomen@earthlink.net.

The San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee is now accepting submissions for main stage performers for this year’s June 25-26 event. Those who are interested should submit a package to the Pride Committee that includes the following: contact information; a one-or two-line statement about why the applicant would like to perform at Pride; a CD or DVD of the performer’s work (no vinyl, cassette or e-mailed links to mp3 files for download); discography (if any); recent press; and photo(s). People should include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if they want the materials returned.

The deadline is March 17. Materials must be received by 5 p.m. and should be sent to San Francisco Pride, Attn: Main Stage, 1841 Market Street, Fourth Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103-1112.▼

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3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

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CDC

AIDS cases ▼

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with for decades. It also has numerous implications for policymakers and those who care for HIV and AIDS patients, say officials.

“One of my initial reactions is that that actually represents a success for HIV therapy. I am presuming what that means is many of the people who have been living with HIV successfully for a long period of time, they are getting mature and have well controlled HIV infections,” said Dr. Kathleen Squires, chair of the HIV Medicine Association, a national network for HIV and AIDS care providers. “It used to be that a sizable portion of patients already had, by the time they were diagnosed having HIV infections, had already developed AIDS. Now, younger people are not being diagnosed with full blown AIDS.” The trend has yet to show up nationally in the figures compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the CDC’s latest data from 2008, there were 37,151 AIDS diagnoses. Of that 8,190 were among those 50 years of age and older.

Scott Bryan, a spokesman for the Office of Planning and Policy Coordination at the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, declined to speculate on if or when the national figures would mirror what San Francisco is finding in its AIDS cases.

In an e-mail, Bryan wrote, “While CDC can provide surveillance data regarding the number of AIDS diagnoses, we cannot predict future diagnoses data and we don’t want to speculate about future surveillance data.”

New research does suggest that the country’s AIDS population is aging. A study released last week conducted by researchers at UCLA’s AIDS Institute, along with colleagues at several other universities, found that people infected with HIV who are over the age of 50 progress to AIDS more rapidly than adults in their 20s or 30s.

The study, published January 31 in the online PLoS ONE journal, also found that HIV infection in older adults can have “detrimental immunological effects that are not completely reversed” by retroviral therapies.

“It is known that older people who contract HIV tend to progress more rapidly to AIDS. They have less ability to fight off the virus,” said Tammy M. Rickabaugh, the lead author of the study, titled “The Dual Impact of HIV1 Infection and Aging on Naïve CD4 T-Cells: Additive and Distinct Patterns of Impairment.” “People who contract it at a younger age and who live longer due to drug treatments are still going

Prospective users must be tested for HIV before starting PrEP and every two to three months thereafter, since using Truvada without other antiretroviral drugs if HIV is present can lead to drug resistance. They should also be tested for hepatitis B and other sexually transmitted diseases.

People with flu-like symptoms that could indicate acute or very early HIV infection need special testing because they may not yet have enough antibodies to show up on a standard screening test.

In addition, kidney function should be checked before starting PrEP and monitored regularly, since tenofovir can cause kidney problems in susceptible people.

“PrEP should be done by an HIV or infectious disease specialist care team,” said Horberg. “This is a complex protocol and follow-up that is best done by people who have a lot of experience.”

Just one tool The CDC guidance also emphasizes that PrEP recipients should receive regular risk-reduction counseling and condoms, as well as support around medication adherence, as was done in the iPrEx trial. “[PrEP] was not an either/or, it was a both/and,” Horberg stressed.

to have those T-cells age faster than someone who has never gotten HIV.” The flip side is that while younger people who have HIV are no longer progressing as fast to full-blown AIDS, they are showing signs of other illnesses more closely associated with older adults, said Rickabaugh.

“They are getting these diseases younger, such as some cardiovascular diseases, some types of cancers normally seen in older individuals,” she said.

Funding needed for older PWAs According to data from the city’s HIV Epidemiology Section, of the total 9,734 AIDS cases in the city and county of San Francisco last year, 5,153 were people 50 or older. A person is considered to have AIDS when their CD4 T-cell count drops below 200.

The next highest group among AIDS cases is people in their 40s, who account for 36 percent, or 3,516 cases.

Men make up 92 percent of all AIDS cases in San Francisco.

In 2009, the number of AIDS cases in people 50 years of age or older accounted for 49 percent of all cases. Of the 9,489 total cases that year, the city recorded 4,649 in older adults.

Whites and blacks account for a

“This [study] was an affirmation of more traditional prevention – it did in fact show that even control patients who did not get the medication had more protected sex and lower risk.”

“This is one tool along with a number of other different tools to help men who have sex with men remain HIV-negative,” concurred Dr. Brad Hare, medical director of the Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital. “The same guidance remains regarding condom use, learning your HIV status, and practicing safer sex. These things are still relevant in the era of PrEP.” Hare noted that many local health departments have been “struggling” with how to implement PrEP in the wake of the iPrEx findings. “Here in San Francisco, our health department has been on the front of the wave and has already begun figuring out how this is relevant,” he said. “The guidance will help refine what to do.”

“It’s very important to be prepared for a likely PrEP roll-out in communities like San Francisco, given the strength of the iPrEx data,” added Auerbach. “This is why a number of us are advocating for a demonstration project that will assess the desirability and feasibility of PrEP as a component of the city’s HIV prevention strategy.”▼

larger percentage of the city’s older AIDS cases than their racial counterparts. Caucasians make up 58 percent, or 3,569 cases, while African Americans account for 55 percent, or 742 cases. Latinos make up 39 percent, or 616 cases; Asians are 38 percent, or 186 cases, and Native Americans are 32 percent, or 18 cases.

“I think the obvious reason is Latinos and Asians and Native Americans are much more likely to be diagnosed younger. It just takes them longer to reach the over 50 group,” said Scheer.

“There is fewer in those populations too.”

As for the city’s HIV-positive population, the bulk of those cases remain lodged in men ages 30 to 39.

According to the last HIV/AIDS Quarterly Surveillance Report, released in December, the total number of HIV Non-AIDS cases was 5,856, with men in their 30s accounting for 43 percent, or 2,292 cases.

At the same time, the city’s number of new HIV infections continues to drop. Scheer said health officials now estimate there are 621 new HIV cases per year, down from earlier estimates of 1,000 new cases.

“It is unfortunate we have over 9,000 people living with AIDS in the city. This does reflect improved sur-

STD rates in SF continue to climb

by Matthew S. Bajko he rates of sexually transmitted diseases in San Francisco continued to rise in 2010, prolonging a five-year trend in spiking rates of venereal diseases.

According to preliminary data the Department of Public Health released last week, the number of cases of Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and early syphilis all increased last year compared to the number of cases reported in 2009.

Overall reported Chlamydia increased from 4,171 to 4,591 cases (a rise of 10 percent) while male rectal Chlamydia increased in 2010 from 740 to 913 cases for a 23.4 percent annual increase. Reported gonorrhea cases increased 9.8 percent from 1,787 in 2009 to 1,963 in 2010.

Additionally, rectal gonorrhea among men also increased from 448 cases to 476 cases, a 6.3 percent year-to-year increase. After recent declines in early syphilis seen in 2008, early syphilis cases sharply increased by 27.4 percent in 2010,

T

from 519 cases to 661. The total number of all syphilis cases last year was 764 compared to 632 in 2009.

The final tallies for STD rates will not be known until later this year with the publication of the 2010 Annual Summary.

As the Bay Area Reporter reported last November, health officials are at a loss to explain what is driving the spikes in STDs. The city’s STD chief, Dr. Susan Philip, noted at the time that STD rates historically have fluctuated and the current incidents could be due to more people getting tested.

At the same time Philip has seen her budget slashed due to the city and country’s ongoing fiscal crisis.

With less staffing, she has turned to using social media to supplement the work her section is doing.

Health officials recommend all sexually active gay and bisexual men be tested for STDs every three to six months. Additionally, all women 25 years old and younger should be screened for Chlamydia at least annually. ▼

Lyon-Martin page 9

include people living with HIV, Spanish speakers, and many others, so “there’s not a single strategy” for all of them, she said.

Plans for debt Lyon-Martin’s debt includes money that had not been billed to Medi-Cal and Medicare for mental health services for two years, according to Harbatkin.

She said typically, “at most you can backbill one year.”

However, state Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) is working with the state’s Health and Human Services Agency to try to get a waiver for Lyon-Martin with reimbursements.

Harbatkin said the clinic is a federally qualified health care provider and “there were a lot of things around billing that we didn’t fully understand.” She said that consultants are helping to look at that situation.

In addition to Lyon-Martin’s other debt, the clinic took out a $600,000 loan in 2009. Balon said last week that they’ve been paying that off, but a large amount remains.▼

vival and improved treatment and the fact people are living longer,” she said. “I would say, overall, I would look at this as a positive sign given we have this many people infected with HIV in the city.”

Funding for programs targeting older people living with AIDS, however, has not kept up with the graying of the city’s AIDS population. A city report issued last June aimed at addressing the service needs of older PWAs in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin counties found them to be overlooked.

According to the report, “an inventory conducted of publicly funded programs targeting this group for services and prevention resulted in no programs and no dollars allocated for targeted programs.” While the report found “a few support groups” for older PWAs, it concluded that, “the number is inadequate and lim-

Politics ▼

guidelines and other trials – including ongoing studies of different populations – provide additional data.

The guidance, published in the January 28 issue of “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” and summarized on the CDC’s website (www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/P rEPMSMGuidanceGraphic.html), specifies that the iPrEx findings only support PrEP for gay and bisexual men with “substantial, ongoing, high risk” for acquiring HIV. “This was a very select population, only men having sex with men, only ones with multiple sex partners engaging in continued high risk behavior,” said Dr. Michael Horberg, director of HIV/AIDS at Kaiser Permanente and vice chair of the HIV Medicine Association. “We have to be careful thinking this applies to any other people than that specific population – we just don’t have the data.”

“At this time, the findings cannot be applied to monogamous serodiscordant [gay male] couples,” he added. “It does not apply to people who just want to take a pill on Saturday night, nor to [serodiscordant] heterosexual couples where the woman wants to get pregnant.”

NEWS

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work with the youth Monday nights through June to determine how to move forward. One possibility is creating a second issue of Vanguard Revisited.

“If San Francisco’s LGBT community knew what it was really like to be homeless queer youth, they would get motivated to fund organizations and to protest unjust laws and to give voices to those who are the most vulnerable in our community,” said Rohrer, who with Plaster will bring a traveling exhibit about the Vanguard project to other cities this summer. “We were able to do that during the AIDS crisis. There are still problems happening in our community and we can do something positive about it.”

Tonight’s magazine release party will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. at St. Francis Lutheran Church, 152 Church Street across from Safeway.

It is free and open to the public.

For more information about the Vanguard project, including PDF versions of the original publications and the 2011 edition as well as recorded interviews with the youth involved, visit www.glbthistory.org/Vanguard.▼

ited in that these groups primarily targeted older gay men. No services from any funding stream targeting other demographics were identified.”

The report also concluded that by 2012, older people living in San Francisco “could account for more than 50 percent of all HIV and AIDS cases.”

Due to the findings in the report, conducted by the HIV Health Services Planning Council and the Mayor’s Long Term Care Coordinating Council, the issue is gaining more notice, said Scheer.

“I think there is a focus now on trying to make sure services are available for people who are older. It is the fastest growing population of people with AIDS,” Scheer said. “There does need to be a focus on making sure this population has the health services and prevention services that they need.”▼

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CLASSIFIEDS

BAYAREAREPORTER

CLASSIFIEDS To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are: EMPORIO RULLI AT CHESTNUT STREET INC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street,Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at: 2300 Chestnut St., San Francisco, CA 94123-2610. Type of license applied for:

47 ON-SALE GENERAL EATING PLACE FEB 3,2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION TO SELL ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are: EDGE OF CASTRO INC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street,Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at:4149 18th St., San Francisco, CA 94114. Type of license applied for:

48 ON-SALE GENERAL PUBLIC PREMISES FEB 3,2011 STATE OF CALIFORNIA IN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE# CNC-11547411 In the matter of the application of PATRICK JOSEPH SHANAHAN for change of name. The application of PATRICK JOSEPH SHANAHAN for change of name having been filed in Court, and it appearing from said application that PATRICK JOSEPH SHANAHAN filed an application proposing that his/her name be changed to FAUSTINO MENDONÇA. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Room 218 on the 8th of March, 2011 at 9:00 am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

STATEMENT FILE A-033243800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as ELECTRIFY, 3080 Alemany Blvd., San Francisco, CA 94112. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Catherine Wright. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/24/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/05/11.

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033253400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as THE GARDEN OF IAN, 219 Brannan Street, Unit 14H, San Francisco, CA 94107. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Charles P. Ellington, lll. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/07/11.

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033262100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as GOLDEN GATE FLOORING, 1630 39th Ave., San Francisco, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Tony Phui. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/11/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/11.

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033211700

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011

The following person(s) is/are doing business as KOMATER ELECTRIC,214 Divisadero Street, San Francisco, CA 94117-3207. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Mark Komater The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/03/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/17/10.

STATEMENT FILE A-033235300

NOTICE OF APPLICATION TO SELL ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES

The following person(s) is/are doing business as 1.BIKE AND ROLL SAN FRANCISCO, 2.ADVENTURE BICYCLE COMPANY, 899 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Darryll White. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/01/05. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/31/10.

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033243200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as 5 STAR CARPET CLEANING, 7707 Geary Blvd.,Apt. 2, San Francisco, CA 94121. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Inadze Irakli. 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 01/04/11.

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033242100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as SUN VALLEY PRODUCE COMPANY, 2000 McKinnon Ave.,Bldg. #417, San Francisco, CA 94124. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Kenny Eng. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/04/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/04/11.

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033240800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as UNCOVER, 98 Martha Ave., San Francisco, CA 94131. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Samantha Bergeron. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/15/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/04/11.

JAN 13,20,27,FEB 3,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033230700 The following person(s) is/are doing business as BAY CITY SMOG, 4850 Geary Blvd., San Francisco, CA 94118. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Paul Li. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/21/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/29/10.

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To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are: XINH BISTRO LOUNGE LLC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street,Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at: 680 8th St., Suite 170,San Francisco, CA 94103-4942. Type of license applied for:

41 ON-SALE BEER AND WINE EATING PLACE JAN 27,FEB 3,10,2011 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTICIOUS BUSINESS NAME: #A-033103100 The following persons have abandoned the use of the ficticious business name known as BASIN, 310 Berry St., San Francisco, CA 94158. This business was conducted by a limited liability company, signed Man Mohan Sahi. The ficticious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/25/10.

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47 ON-SALE GENERAL EATING PLACE FEB 3,10,17,2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033263800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as STANDARD STUDIO LLC.,366 Clementina St. San Francisco, CA 94103.

This business is conducted by a limited liability company, signed Michael Dolan.

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/12/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/12/11.

JAN 27,FEB 3,10,17, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033288100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as RENE BUSINESS MACHINES, 2940 16th St. Suite 322, San Francisco, CA 94103. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Rene F. Salinas. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/20/85. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/21/11.

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JAN 27,FEB 3,10,17, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033286100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as EXTERNAL PROCESSES, 153 Bartlett St., San Francisco, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, signed William Sherman. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/20/04. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/20/11.

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JAN 27,FEB 3,10,17, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033289200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as COURTHOUSE CHRISTY,1097 Howard St.,Suite 209, San Francisco, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Christy Bergman. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 1/21/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/24/11.

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as PRESTIGE TRANSPORTATION SOLUTIONS, 600 Persia Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112.This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Raul Lumbi. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/22/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/22/10.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as J.SABATINI & CO.,239 Bright St., San Francisco, CA 94132. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Erica Giacchetti. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/27/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/27/11.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as GLOBAL REAL ESTATE CONSULTANTS,306 28th Ave. San Francisco, CA 94121. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Erich Struzyk. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 1/01/11.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/21/11.

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LEGAL NOTICES STATEMENT FILE A-033308200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as GEORGE SLACK CABINETMAKERS, 757 Pennsylvania Ave., San Francisco, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed George Slack. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/01/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/31/11.

FEB 3,10,17,24, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033305200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as MOLLIE STONE’S CASTRO MARKET, 4201 18th St., San Francisco, CA 94114. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed David M. Bennett. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/28/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/28/11.

FEB 3,10,17,24, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033252400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as DENTAL CONCEPTS,244 9th St., San Francisco, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Baljit Johal. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/27/06. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/24/11.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as NOE VALLEY SMILES AND BRACES. DENTAL PRACTICE OF SHAHRAM NABIPOUR DDS, MSD, INC., 3932 24th St., San Francisco, CA 94114.

This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Shahram Nabipour.

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 01/07/11.

FEB 3,10,17,24, 2011

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JAN 27,FEB 3,10,17, 2011

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as FAMOOLY PRODUCTIONS,845 Treat Ave., San Francisco, CA 94110.

This business is conducted by an individual, signed Jose Leon. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/18/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/18/11.

JAN 20,27,FEB 3,10, 2011

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Trial runs & ‘visual soul food’

Life after ‘Cabaret’

Race relations 2011

‘Eva Hesse: Studiowork’ in Berkeley, colorful jazz quilts in MoAD’s ‘Textural Rhythms.’

Christopher Isherwood’s ‘The Sixties: Diaries 1960-1969.’

Bruce Norris’ ‘Clybourne Park’ opens up the dialogue at ACT.

page 26

page 32

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ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT

BAYAREAREPORTER

Vol. 41 . No. 5 . 3 February 2011

▼

Still beautiful atthe

San Francisco Ballet opens its new season

by Paul Parish

ballet Erik Tomasson

Sarah Van Patten and Tiit Helimets in Val Caniparoli’s Double Stop.

B

with professional dance entertainment in the Opera House for a couple of hours – the audience as much on show as the dancers, the parade of costumes onstage almost out-flashed by the feathers and sequins in the house.

Galas are variety shows, descendants of imperial command performances, and suited to the royal attention span. SFB’s galas are more serious than most. This one included three new duets that merit another look: a postmodern study in close-in partnering for Tiit Helimets and Sarah van Patten, a sexy duet for Lorena Feijoo and Vitor Luiz to a bolero from the score for Almodovar’s Talk to Her, and a dreamy moon-child piece for Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith to the ravishing adagio from Ravel’s fa-

mous piano concerto (choreographed by Val Caniparoli, Yuri Possokhov, and Edwaard Liang, respectively). The last piece resembles Ashton’s Monotones enough to make you remember Ashton made his ballet for an occasion like this.

It was a chance to see new dancers for the first time. The standouts were Vito Mazzeo, for astounding aplomb in the heroic Black Swan pas de deux, and the new corps dancer Nicole Ciapponi, who’s got speed, attack, moxie, and a hilarious wit; I can’t wait to see her again, in anything.

It was also heartening to see the great dancing of the gorgeous students from the SFB School out on the disco floor at the bash

▼

ig-time dance kicked back in last week as the gala opening of San Francisco Ballet’s season showed 10 brilliant dances in quick succession to festive effect, and then the real season began with the tragedy of Giselle. The company is now rightly regarded as one of the best in the world – not in the top rank with the great Russian, French, British, and New York companies, but right behind them.

So far this year is slightly underwhelming, as if the dancers have not quite got their stage-presence back. There’s been much technique, strength, accuracy, brilliance on display, but the luster has been spotty. It won’t be long til they’re back in top form.

The gala last Wednesday was really a party that lasted til 3 a.m.,

page 32

Gregg Araki meets WernerErhard poiled as we have become by our embarrassment of cinema riches, with festivals tumbling out after and over other festivals, Maestro Jeff Ross’ “Sundance at the Roxie,” the 2011 SF Independent Film Festival, is two weeks of old-fashioned fun. Headquartered at the Roxie Theater (Feb. 3-17) and running concurrently with the SF Winter Music Fest Battle of the Bands (Cellspace), there’s a lot to take in. Plus great parties: the 8th annual Big Labowski, Super Bowl XLV: Men in Tights, Roller Disco, Love Bites and Fight Like a Girl.

Thomas Dekker in Gregg Araki’s Kaboom.

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S

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•••SECOND

OF

TWO

SECTIONS•••

SF IndieFest

The gang’s all here in the 13th SF Independent Film Festival • by David Lamble

22

BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

OUT

Keeping it punchy when it seems like Lady Luck is blowing on some other guy’s dice.”

Ian: “But those who’ve seen it all/ hotographer Stephen Underlive out their lives in sad cafés and hill wintertime model Jaime music halls./ They always have a story.” reminds us to keep a boxer’s Klaus and her instrument were made stance and take an upper-right cut at for the cabaret stage; she will return to life. Let that be our February motto the Rrazz Room with a new show on as Out There punches out a few April 25 & 26, featuring the music of items of various cultural import. the immortal Peggy Lee. Tickets are at We’ll try to keep the items fightwww.therrazzroom.com. ing trim.

Meantime, Bay Area Cabaret, founded by Cabaret beat Marilyn Levinson, San Francisco chanteuse continues its landmark Veronica Klaus played a season at the historic sold-out house last week at Venetian Room with the Rrazz Room with the Vintage Rose, the West Tammy Hall Trio – Hall Coast solo concert debut (piano), Ruth Davies (bass) of Tony Award winner and Kent Bryson (drums).

A.C.T. alumna Vibrant highlights were the O UT T HERE and Anika Noni Rose. DiTurtles’ “Happy Together,” rect from Lincoln the Amy Winehouse torcher Center, where she’s appearing as a part “Love is a Losing Game,” and Joni of its acclaimed American Songbook Mitchell’s “For Free” leading into Janis series, Rose will offer songs made faIan’s “Stars.” Games of chance gave mous by Blossom Dearie, Lena Klaus her theme – she sang “Taking a Horne, and other legendary artists. It’s Chance on Love” and “Lucky So and one night only, Sun., Feb. 20, 7 p.m. at So,” and offered her performance as the Venetian Room of the Fairmont compensation “for all those times

THERE

▼

San Francisco in wintertime with model Jaime.

by Roberto Friedman

Kent Taylor

P

San Francisco song stylist Veronica Klaus: chasing Lady Luck.

(950 Mason St., SF). Find tickets at www.bayareacabaret.org.

From the sublime to the shallow, a pair of queer film-production news flashes from last Sunday’s Outfest Queer Brunch at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Well-known indie filmmaker Ellen Spiro (Greetings from Out Here, Body of War) is embarking on a documentary history of ACT-UP to be executive produced by filmie Gus Van Sant. Plus, producer Michael Shoel announced the start of simultaneous pre-production on installments 4 and 5 of the successful Eating Out franchise of gay films, to be helmed and co-written by fab filmie Q. Allan Brocka (Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World).

In response to our tribute to the late actress Susannah York in last week’s Out There, a gossip pal sent a related item of interest. In 1972, York played Michael Caine’s mistress in the movie X, Y, and Zee, while Elizabeth Taylor, in full bitch mode, played his wife. In her determination to break up his affair, Taylor seduced York. Thus, York went down in film history as the only woman who can claim to have had sex (on screen, at least) with Beryl Reid, Coral Browne, and Elizabeth Taylor. Top that.

One of the small morsels of gratification in the mixed bag of the recently announced Oscar nominations was the inclusion of director Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist in the list of contenders for Best Animated Feature. A script for The Illusionist was originally written by French comedy genius and cinema legend Jacques Tati, as a love letter from a father to his daughter, but it never was produced. Chomet adapted the script and brought it to life in his hand-drawn animated style, and

Steven Underhill

Film clips

the result is a poignant tale that has whole scenes that feel like parts from a classic Tati film. Worth catching during its current run in art cinemas.

Theatre magic Out There was in the house last weekend when Custom Made Theatre presented the Bay Area premiere of Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell at the Gough Street Playhouse. In it, a five-person cast performs pieces by the late lamented monologist, who took his life in 2004 after a tragic car accident.

Gray’s collaborator and widow Kathleen Russo had the concept of five actors of mixed age and gender taking on parts of Gray’s psyche: love, family, career, adventure and journal. Russo arranged sections of his works, along with private writings, into a 90-minute narration, here offered by Leah S. Abrams, Patrick Barresi, AJ Davenport, Gabriel A. Ross and Richard Wenzel, and directed by Brian Katz and Daunielle Rasmussen. The resulting collage suggests Grey’s appeal and genius, and hints at the ways he pioneered monologue theatre. The show runs through Feb. 19; more info is at www.custommade.org.

Custom Made’s production

comes along with the release of Steven Soderbergh’s documentary on Gray, And Everything is Going Fine, which we’ve heard will get a SF run. This sent us back to our copy of Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, the monologue inspired by his time in Southeast Asia, there for a small part in The Killing Fields, the Oscar-winning film about the Cambodian genocide. Gray recounts a visit to the red-light district in Bangkok. “For the last act, out comes a Thai couple to do a live sex show. They do all the kama sutra poses – and the Thais are the most beautiful race of people I’ve ever seen. When you see them coming toward you on a Bangkok street you don’t know whether they’re men or women, there is such androgyny afoot. And when they get closer to you it doesn’t matter.”

On one last subject, if you’ll humor us, did you read that Barbra Streisand, at 69, is in serious discussions with Steven Sondheim and Arthur Laurents about a remake of Gypsy? If it happens, we hope she doesn’t try to make Mama Rose warm and fuzzy underneath the brassy exterior. Tom Hanks was mentioned for Herbie. Perhaps Natalie Portman will essay the role of the adult Gypsy Rose Lee!▼

3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

23

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

THEATRE

Domestic unraveling

by Richard Dodds ormal is good when it comes to body temperature, precipitation, and a town in Illinois.

In everyday life, however, normalcy is an impossible concept, and even becomes a pejorative when linked to conformity and doctrinaire standards of behavior. I honestly don’t know any normal people, and I run with a pretty tame crowd.

But Next to Normal invites us into a world where normal looks like a Sisyphean paradise. As the title succinctly indicates, just arriving in the vicinity of prevailing behavior is a goal in itself, even if the exact reasons it prevails are unclear to the seeker. The Pulitzer Prize-winning musical is one of Broadway’s more unusual success stories, and its excellent touring counterpart is now at the Curran Theatre.

There is only one holdover from the original Broadway company, but it’s a doozy. Alice Ripley, a well-regarded stage veteran, scored a breakthrough triumph with the role of the mentally distressed Diana Goodman, whose unraveling causes the same within her family. Ripley won the Tony Award for her portrayal of this woman on the verge, and seeing her reprise it at the Curran is an exhilarating theatrical experience.

Next to Normal is a nearly completely sung musical with a rock-centered score by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey that can take on the cloak of different genres that the situations suggest. The basic sound is fairly generic, but its driving rhythms provide the right transport for a story of accelerating deterioration. The only false note comes at the end, when a here’s-to-life anthem, even in its tempered tones, too neatly puts a bow on the damaged packages that the characters must continue to carry.

For reasons best left to the theatergoer to discover, Diana’s ability to

Craig Schwartz

N

Alice Ripley and Curt Hansen share a mother-and-son moment in Next to Normal, the unusual Broadway musical now at the Curran Theatre.

function in the day-to-day life of a wife and mother is in serious decline as the curtain rises. She has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, manic-depression, and the story serpentines through domestic situations, both comic and fraught, and into the characters’ minds as they try to cope with an untenable situation.

There are also adventures in pharmacology, with a kaleidoscope of toss-of-the-dice medications. “Valium is my favorite color,” Diana says sardonically.

Michael Greif, who directed Rent, has sharply staged the musical on Mark Wendland’s multi-tiered set based in pop-art sensibilities. While Ripley and her character are the pro-

duction’s driving forces, there is estimable work from Asa Somers as Diana’s stalwart husband, Emma Hunton as their prickly teen daughter, Curt Hansen as their invasive son, and Jeremy Kushnier as a succession of doctors with no cures but endless remedies.

Next to Normal is hardly a feelgood musical, but that doesn’t mean it’s a feel-bad experience. Human drama, compellingly told and expertly played, brings pleasure even when it comes at an emotional price.▼ Next to Normal will run at the Curran Theatre through Feb. 20. Tickets are $30-$99. Call (888) SHN-1799.

Hetero clubhouse

by Richard Dodds he abandoned local library in the post-apocalyptic world of Treefall is well-stocked with Shakespeare, Superman comics, and anatomy books. But anything to do with gay history either failed to make it into the stacks or didn’t survive the bio-eco calamity that has devastated the planet. At least, that’s one explanation of why the self-taught band of young survivors is so at sea when it comes to same-sex attraction in this New Conservatory Theatre Center production.

The results of this ignorance are disastrous to the characters who harbor such feelings, but before playwright Henry Murray takes this final turn, he uses the conceit to portray an ad hoc recreation of civilization from bits of memories and pieces of literature. “Alack, I am undone,” declaims the youngest member of a trio of survivors, paraphrasing Romeo and Juliet to register his disgust with another dinner of stewed tomatoes.

Despite the seeming sophistication of his language, he mostly infantilizes his role in the all-male makeshift family. He is playing the baby, while his older compatriots adopt remnants of clothing and props to play the mommy and daddy.

The playwright offers an original

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Web content This week, find Victoria A. Brownworth’s Lavender Tube column, “The whole world is watching,” on www.ebar.com. www.ebar.com

Lois Tema

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Corinne Robkin and Josh Schell don makeshift protection to venture into the deadly sunlight in the post-apocalyptic world of Treefall at New Conservatory Theatre Center.

take on gender, suggesting there is something primal in the need to assign roles even in the absence of the traditional duality of the sexes. But it’s not an entirely happy family, as August (a compelling Josh Schell) reluctantly dons a wig, dress, and high heels at the insistence of daddy-figure Flynn (the authoritative Evan Johnson). Flynn has tried to consummate the “marriage,” to August’s disgust, while the baby-like Craig (a manically energetic Sal Mattos) is eager to get into daddy’s pants.

The first and last thing this group needs is a girl, who arrives in the form of a tough, diminutive survivor who has been making it on her own among the marauding mobs of the cities and the poisonous world of daylight. This tomboy, who goes by the name Bug (played with edgy in-

tensity by Corrine Robkin), disrupts the trio’s tenuous unity, as August gets his first taste of heterosexual arousal, Flynn tries to play both angles, and Craig goes into a tailspin of sexual identity.

Director Ben Randle has effectively directed this unconventional play, and the production is enhanced

by Kuo-Hao Lo’s creative suggestions of a ruined planet. It’s an imaginative world that has necessarily been woven largely of whole cloth, even if the heterosexuals-only happiness is an unexpectedly grim final message from a gay-centric theater.▼ Treefall will run at New Conservatory Theatre Center through Feb. 27. Tickets are $24$40. Call 861-8972 or go to www.nctcsf.org.

▼

3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

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MUSIC

Promising repertoire impregnated Bathsheba by seeing to it that her husband Uriah was left to die fter 14 years of stimulatundefended in battle, ing guest appearances Uriah, as told by Dorman, with the San Francisco is related in a brisk and Symphony, current Music Dieventful 15 minutes. rector of the St. Louis SymphoThat is not a complaint, ny and noted champion of conjust the facts. That the comtemporary music David poser can be concise, espeRobertson returned to Davies cially in this age of short atHall last week with a typically tention spans, is probably promising program. His reperfor the best. The only probtoire featured a world premiere, lem is that the story seems an extraordinary modern violin less momentous. Dorman concerto and a couple of suresays Uriah makes note of fire orchestral audience leaders who let their solpleasers. So why was this one of diers die for inappropriate his less satisfactory concerts? personal gain, and in the It all looked good on paper. political climate of today, The opening The Sorcerer’s Apthat’s a big point to make. prentice by Paul Dukas was Unfortunately, while structhere to lay the groundwork for turally and musically confithe likewise storytelling nature dent, the piece comes off as of the premiere piece later on, slightly generic. This is and brilliant violin virtuoso where more would have Leonidas Kavakos was there to Conductor David Robertson, champion of new music. been more. play a technically difficult but Writing at the level of essentially listener-friendly good film music, the comconcerto, guaranteed to keep piece that really should go unbridled. poser, at 35, already has a fine body of the audience alert. The second half Violinist Kavakos also seemed to work to show, and he has the backing would bring on the new tone poem, have a mind of his own while playing of many big names in the profession. and feature a visit by the composer the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 Uriah has Dorman’s rhythmic flair himself. The closer, a popular and in G minor. The orchestral framework and glittering orchestration. It tells the endearing modern symphony, seemed rather soft-focused against his tale in a straightforward and accessiwould provide a proper reward and tighter and more intense interpretable way. There is just not enough meat thank you to the listeners. So the intion. It was not an uninteresting peron its bones. tentions were mostly smart, and the formance, and we know from previOrchestra and conductor gave it all program was indeed well-balanced. It ous experience that the conductor has they had, and Dorman’s brief appearis just that the proof was, as they say, the full measure of this essentially lyriance was pleasant if less than comin the pudding, and the execution just cal score. Technical difficulties did not pelling. If you want more of this narrowly missed, making for some faze the soloist, but this was hardly a promising young writer and a better lumpy results. definitive reading, and I even noticed understanding of why he is generatIf the individual ingredients didn’t some audience members dozing off at ing so much buzz, go to his website, blend well, there were many entertimes. During Prokofiev?! Oh, no they www.dormanavner.com, and sample taining moments and admirable perdidn’t. Well, yes they did. some of his more substantial pieces. formances to savor. Robertson gave Israeli-born, classically educated The night ended with some more The Sorcerer’s Apprentice a fine showand Juilliard-trained, current AngeProkofiev, the composer’s utterly ing or, more accurately, the players leno Avner Dorman was commisadorable Symphony No. 1 in D did. All the shimmering and detailed sioned by the SFS to write a piece for Major, Classical. No stretch for orchestration was suitably gooseorchestra, and his resulting score from David Robertson, but a delightful bump-inducing, but the conductor’s 2010 is Uriah: The Man the King way to say goodnight, and this part pacing seemed a bit perfunctory and Wanted Dead. Based on the unsavory of the soufflé was done to absolute ill-paced. It was almost as if he were Biblical story of how King David perfection.▼ trying to keep the reins too tight, on a managed to bed and wed his illicitly

by Philip Campbell

A

Safe from harm

by Jim Piechota Hidden by Tomas Mournian; Kensington Books, $15

17 succinct chapters demarcate Tomas Mournian’s sensitive, impressive debut Hidden, a youngadult novel about a gay youth who becomes entwined in the homeless teenager community in San Francisco.

The Los Angeles author is a freelance journalist and based his tale on an investigative article (“Hiding Out”) he penned for the San Francisco Bay Guardian about teens who escaped from abusive residential treatment centers and “boot camps” to join others within an underground network of safe houses. Mournian parlays this research into an engrossing fiction that traces the life of 15-year-old Ahmed, who, after coming out to his parents, is forced to attend Serenity Ridge, a treatment center in the Nevada desert bent on ridding him of his homosexuality.

Eleven months later, Ahmed, fed up with the center’s heavy-handed techniques, flees the facility and heads to San Francisco to become ensconced in a network of ramshackle

1

safe-houses for runaway teenagers.

Within this network, he meets a ragtag group of seven kids who relate their own traumatic stories of desperate life on the unforgiving city streets. Renaming himself “Ben,” the narrator falls into step with these teens, but finds that the social (and sexual) boundaries between each of them are easily trespassed upon.

While most of the novel treads somewhere between desperate angst and cheerless confusion, there are glimmers of light and humor that shine through.

Consider Ben’s frustrating, awkwardly aggressive sex with beautiful blond teen Hammer, a boy so attractive Ben imagines he has “never dealt with romantic doubt or sexual hesitation” in his life. In another, particularly resonant scene on Halloween night, Ben and fellow squatter/future boyfriend J.D. follow a muscular, near-naked Hammer, dressed in a white G-string on the street. Both drooling over him, Ben notes that Hammer’s perfectly globular ass “serves as our personal lighthouse.

So long as I can see it, I know we’re heading somewhere.”

Assorted drama ensues with fellow squatters with names like Kidd, Marci, Peanuts, and Blue-Eyed Bob,

but Ben holds the reader’s attention most with his struggle to suppress the memories of his time at Serenity Ridge, while attempting to mold something – anything – from his life hiding in the underground network with the downtrodden and forgotten.

Not the most uplifting of gaythemed YA novels available these days, but the success of Mournian’s first effort should pave the way for more intriguing works of both fiction and nonfiction alike. ▼

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

FINE

ART

Minor epiphanies Eva Hesse at BAM, ‘Textural Rhythms’ at MoAD

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www.ebar.com

Courtesy BAM/PFA

va Hesse, whose life and career were prematurely cut short at age 34, in 1970, by a fatal brain tumor, left behind an intensely haunting body of work. She started as a painter but, in 1965, turned to sculpture, working with papier-mache, latex and fiberglass constructions. Some have speculated that Hesse’s work was informed by the terminal illness which took her life within months of diagnosis – she reportedly created right up until the end, formulating ideas from her hospital bed – her escape from Nazi Germany as a child, and her struggles for recognition in the New York art world. Whatever their origin or meaning, the spell cast by her seemingly unimposing temporal sculptures – the sum product of a mere decade – is inescapable.

Although the curators of Eva Hesse: Studiowork, a new exhibition on view at the Berkeley Art Museum, would prefer visitors not conflate Hesse’s tragic and compelling biography with the work itself, the fleeting nature of time hangs over this collection of minor epiphanies, 54 experimental test pieces (“samples,” as Hesse liked to call them), like a heavy perfume. Add to the artist’s history that most of her work was made with perishable, mutable materials that change and eventually disintegrate over time. They recall those Egyptian mummies that, once unwrapped, appeared intact for an instant before vanishing into dust. It’s possible to view the entire show as an assembly of endangered species.

Most of Hesse’s sculptures are too fragile to travel, so the glimpse we get here of her process is a rare one. A white table in the first gallery features approximately a dozen shards of paper sculptures, some girded by strips of stitched-together muslin, layers of tissue or string, and molded around curved surfaces that fight against the intrinsically flat, square properties of paper. (Their inner strength comes from rigging concealed beneath the surface.) Tiny open hemispheres, envelopes, folded napkins collapsed in on themselves, kelp-like cords, miniature boxes stuffed with string, and sacks made of latex which seem to trap the light, are protected inside glass vitrines.

“Eva Hesse: Studiowork” (1968), fiberglass, polyester resin, and plastic (clear) tubing.

These trial runs and near-misses were conducted in Hesse’s New York studio, where she pushed the limits of her materials. On display, they have the resonance of unearthed, fractured relics mined for information and pieced together for clues to a deceased artist’s cast of mind, and a vision of future promise never fulfilled.

SFMOMA’s Hesse retrospective in 2002 was a transformative experience; the exhibition’s fragile polyester and resin structures in creamy or rust-colored tones, either hanging on the wall or sitting waif-like on the floor like abandoned sea urchins, exerted a mysterious power that lingers in the memory. It’s debatable, though, how much meaning this small grouping of fragments and tantalizing hints of the artist’s sensibility will have for those unfamiliar with her work. Through April 10. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Jazz quilts Across the Bay and a world away, Textural Rhythms: Quilting the Jazz Tradition at the Museum of the African Diaspora is as exuberant and colorful as the Hesse show is muted and restrained. The exhibition curator, Carolyn Mazloomi, has called quilts “visual soul food,” a description that certainly applies to the 50 fine examples on display here, which take their cue and ebullient vitality from jazz music. While it’s true that quilting is a multi-generational art form in which cultural history along with requisite skills are passed from mothers to daughters (and sometimes to sons), these are not your grandmother’s quilts, unless you happen to have an extraordinarily hip grandmother.

Flights of fantasy, they’re decorated and collaged with sequins, beads and metallic threads, shimmering appliqué and gold accents. Above all, they communicate their narratives in

“Jazz Montage II (Back)” (2006)

by Viola Burley Leak, appliqué, silk, cotton, lurax, machine-quilted.

a panoply of living color. Contributing to the richness of the exhibition, wall labels adjacent to the quilts contain the artists’ lyrical descriptions of how and why they were inspired by the joy and wild improvisational invention of jazz and/or particular musicians, and their approaches to articulating the essence of jazz. The latter is not an easy task, but it’s one that’s accomplished with gusto in a show that will make you want to dance, an impulse aided by the cool vibes playing on the soundtrack in the galleries.

Some quilts are impressionistic, riffing on the quilter’s favorite musical composition or instrument (the saxophone is a popular choice) or the role of jazz in African-American cultural identity, while others are unabashed tributes to beloved musicians like the founding father of jazz, Satchmo (a.k.a. “Asthma”), who gets an almost cubist homage from Bisa Butler.

Flashing his familiar toothsome grin, Satchmo grips a golden trumpet and is decked out in a natty patterned shirt that includes a score of musical notes.

A universal portrait of the meaning of down-and-out, Dr. Edward M. Bostick’s black, white and red meditation on Lady Day’s “Strange Fruit” is a study in pain that depicts the chanteuse with sensual ruby lips, her eyes closed, and elegant long fingers framing her face. Alice M. Beasley’s imagery of Miles Davis is how she remembers the legendary composer/trumpeter who epitomized cool and was always in the vanguard of the next marvelous thing: hunched over, clutching a red trumpet, wearing the ever-present black shades that shielded him from the audience, and “dressed in some eclectic fantasy, blowing cold fusion or funk, electric rock or sweet jazz, atonal and abstract or warm and melodic. But always Miles ahead of his time.” Through April 24. www.moadsf.org▼

Courtesy MoAD

by Sura Wood

▼

3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

Erik Tomasson

THEATRE

Omoze Idehenre and Gregory Wallace play a housekeeper and her husband who quietly watch as a neighborhood representative tries to convince the homeowners not to sell to a black couple in Clybourne Park at ACT.

Neighborhood watch

by Richard Dodds es, people are tired of talking about race. Exhausted, really.

And no one wants to talk about it in Clybourne Park, either. But when black folks and white folks intersect, whatever the year, decade, or century, a dialogue is taking place even if it’s unspoken. That’s the main message of Bruce Norris’ smart, provoking, often funny, and occasionally exasperating play at ACT. Seen earlier this year in New York, and in London last year, Clybourne Park offers a back-story to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 A Raisin in the Sun in the first act, and then leaps ahead 50 years in the second act to offer an ironic coda to what the initial characters have wrought. In simplest terms, that would be the integration of a white neighborhood (first act) and the gentrification of a black neighborhood (second act). They are, in fact, the same neighborhoods, with the very same house as the fulcrum.

Hansberry’s play dealt with the moving-on-up ambitions of the Younger family, and especially its matriarch, to leave Chicago’s South Side for the more open spaces of a heretofore entirely white neighborhood. We never see the Youngers in Norris’ play, but one of Hansberry’s characters does show up in the newer work: the representative of a home owners’ association who, in Raisin, tries to convince the Youngers that their presence in Clybourne Park would be inappropriate, and delivers a similar message to the husband and wife who have made the bold decision to sell their home to a black family.

Bold, but not exactly courageous.

It turns out that the fluttery wife is shocked when she learns of her clenched husband’s decision, and when his reasons are revealed, they are more of an up-yours to his neighbors than of any budding liberalism.

There is also a contrived twist vaguely introduced in the first act that is fully revealed at the end of the second to conclude the play with an utterly wrong emphasis.

In cringe-worthy fashion, much of the racial conversation, as ostensibly polite as it is, is played out in front of the stoic black housekeeper and her husband who are eager to flee the situation. Dragged into the discussion, as the HOA rep argues for non-judgmental examples of differing racial

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interests, they have to concur that, no, there aren’t many Negro skiers.

The second act flips the situation, not exactly in mirror fashion, but with enough parallels to spur deeper reflections on the evolution of race relations over the past half-century. While in 1959, segregation and racial bias were both legal and de facto standards, by 2009, laws and social propriety have practically made taboo even the acknowledgement in polite society that people come in different colors, let alone any suggestion that the color implies any cultural differences.

During the intermission, set designer Ralph Funicello’s Ozzie-andHarriet house at 406 Clybourne St. has been stripped down to a graffitispewed, abandoned shell. Gathered on folding chairs in the bare living room are the white couple who want to raze the house in a neighborhood that is finding renewed appeal among the gentry, and a black couple who don’t want to see the proposed McMansion changing the historic character of their tidy neighborhood.

With chairs set in a semi-circle on stage, also occupied by lawyer-types representing both sides, the play moves away from drama to group discussion. How we talk about race, or largely avoid talking about it, becomes the theme that eventually envelops the characters as self-censoring mechanisms begin to falter. It becomes an aggravating conversation for the participants, and that aggravation begins to spill over into the audience, which might not be as intentional.

As written by Norris, and maintained by director Jonathan Moscone, the characters can cross over into the kind of caricatures that TV sitcoms have established over the decades. It roots the play in a familiarity that becomes more unsettling when comfort zones are breached.

All cast members take on considerably differing roles as the play changes decades between the acts, and among the more notable performances in the accomplished cast are Rene Augesen as the repressed wife/cynical agent, Omoze Idehenre as the obedient housekeeper/feisty homeowner, and Gregory Wallace as the housekeeper’s meek husband/reserved homeowner.

Every city and each of its neighborhoods are evolving entities, the

www.bartabsf.com

playwright and his characters agree, but change is invariably accompanied by loss even in the guise of progress. The biggest laugh on the opening night came when, in the second act, the black veterans of the neighborhood were remembering the Jewish man who ran the grocery and was the only white person in their midst. To help the new couple place the old market, this helpful reference point is offered: You know, it’s where Whole Foods is now.▼ Clybourne Park will run at ACT through Feb. 20. Tickets are $22-$88.

Call 479-2228 or go to www.act-sf.org.

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

OUT &ABOUT Fri

Eonnagata

4 >>

Billygoat @ The Independent Uniquely innovative musical duo who play ambient soundtracks to their own magically beautiful animated films perform live, opening for Little Dragon. $20-$30. 9pm. Also Feb. 5.

628 Divisadero St. www.billygoatplanet.com www.theindependentsf.com

Costume drama Erick Labbe

by Jim Provenzano

Classic TV Commercial Orgy @ Oddball Film Hilarious screening of ads and PSAs from the 1960s to the 1980s. $10. 8:30pm. also, Feb 5, films about Tibet, Buddha and Buddhism.

8pm. 275 Capp St. 558-8117. www.oddballfilm.com

Clybourne Park @ American Conservatory Theatre Bruce Norris’ sardonic comedy takes on two generations of gentrification and racial tensions in a Chicago suburban house. $10-$80.

Tue-Sat 8pm. Wed, Sat, Sun 2pm. Thru Feb. 20. 415 Geary St. 749-2228. www.act-sf.org

ften, a well-dressed publicity photo of a performer in a wild and colorful outfit may catch your eye. But how many acts can truly follow through with their skirted tease?

Here are some guaranteed performers whose talents fill the bill, from crowns and wigs to hoop skirts and doublets.

Unusual costumes, from fireproof hooded gear to near-nudity, pervade the world premiere of Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies, Jess Curtis/Gravity’s visually witty and unusual performance-dance work exploring societal ideas of bodies, beauty and its misperceptions. $20-$25.

Pulp Fashion: The Art of Isabelle 8pm. Thru Feb. 4-6. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. 978-2787. www.ybca.org de Borchgrave Costumes alone can compel, especially when they’re delicate art. Opening Feb 5, Pulp Fashion: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave, is shown at the Legion of Honor. The exhibit of amazing paper costumes by the acclaimed Belgian artist includes recreations of classic historical royal garb, including Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette. Free-$10.

Tue-Sun 9:30am-5:15pm. Thru June 5. 100 34th Ave. at Clement St. 7503600. www.legionofhonor.famsf.org If, like me, you’re one of those artsy gays who also like sports, Super Bowl XLV: Men in Tights at Cellspace should split the bill. Watch the Super Bowl with beer, mimosas or Bloody Marys and perhaps a bit of homemade chili. Laugh at/with the IndieFest SportSweater commentators as they explain how football works. Don’t care? Wear your own uniform and play around. It’s part of IndieFest. Sunday, Feb 6. Free/donations. 21+. 2:30pm. 2050 Bryant St. at 18th. www.sfindie.com The late gay fashion star Alexander McQueen designed the costumes for Eonnagata, and that’s only part of this dazzling show. Cal Performances presents Ex Machi- Busby Berkeley na (director Robert LePage and choreographer Russell films at the Maliphant)’s dance-theatre work about the life of Charles de Castro Theatre Beaumont, Chevalier d’Éon, an 18th-century French diplomat, soldier and spy, whose career exploits included fluid gender identity; he lived half of his life as a man and half as a woman. $36-$86 ($10-$20 rush tix for students/community). 8pm. Feb. 9 & 10. Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Bancroft Way at Telegraph Ave., UC Berkeley campus. (510) 6429988. www.calperformances.org For classy splashy operetta fun, Lamplighters reprises their production of The Yeomen of the Guard at the Novellus Theater. Gilbert & Sullivan’s musical comic tale tells of an unjustly jailed political prisoner and the plot to free him. $14-$47. 8pm. Thru Feb. 6. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. at 3rd. 978-ARTS. www.lamplighters.org And finally, in glorious black and white, Busby Berkeley Films at the Castro Theatre should give you fever dreams of dizzyingly delicious dance numbers. Imagine the hundreds of studio costume workers slaving away to make 300 chiffon mini-skirts! Enjoy two nights of double feature films featuring the master of classic cinema choreography. Jeffrey Spivak, author of the biography Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley, will give a talk and sign books each day. Feb 10, 42nd Street (3:15, 7pm); Gold Diggers of 1933 (1:25, 4:55, 8:55). Feb 11, Footlight Parade (3:10, 7pm) and Dame (1:25, 5pm 9:10pm). $7.50-$10. 429 Castro St. 621-6120. www.castrotheatre.com▼

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Collapse @ Aurora Theatre, Berkeley Aurora Theatre Compan y’s production of Allisn Moore’s family comedy, set in Minneapolis and inspired by the 2007 Mississippi River Bridge collapse. $10-$55. Tue 7pm. WedSat 8pm. Sun 2pm & 7pm. Thru Mar. 6.

2081 Addison St. (510) 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org

Courage Group @ ODC Theater Three new dance works by Todd Courage, including The Dance of Listening, with a cimmissioned score by Ryan Anderson. $25.

8pm. 3153 17th St. Thru Feb. 6. www.couragegroup.org

Felix d’Eon @ Magnet Opening reception for the creator of beautiful homoerotic paintings inspired by Greek, Roman, Aztec and Mexican mythological characters. 8pm-10pm. Exhibit thru Feb. 4122 18th St. Castro. www.felixdeon.com www.magnetsf.org

Heartbreak House @ Live Oak Theatre, Berkeley Actors Ensemble of Berkeley’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s fancifully comic play set just before World War I. $12-$15. Fri & Sat 8pm. Thru Feb. 19. 1301 Shattuck Ave. (510) 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org

Holly Hughes @ The Marsh Ascerbic solo performer (and famous lesbian) performs her new show Dog and Pony, a blend of autobiography, animal behavior and pure lies. $15-$50. Thu 8pm, Sat 8:30pm, Sun 7pm. thru Feb. 27. 1062 Valencia St. (800) 838-3006. www.themarsh.org

Kodo @ Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley Outstanding Japanese drumming, dance and music ensemble, celebrating its 30th anniversary, rumbles its way back to Berkeley. A must-see. $22-$52. 8pm. Also Feb 4. Bancroft Way at Telegraph, UC Berkeley campus. www.calperformances.org

Lars Theurkauff @ Cain Schulte Contemporary Art U.S. debut of the gay German painter’s contemporary take on male nudes, Impressionism, privacy and voyeurism. 251 Post St. 2nd floor. 543-1550. www.CainSchulte.com

Loveland @ The Marsh Ann Randolph returns with her solo show about a sexually frustrated woman who flies home and faces the greatest love of her life.

Also, special guest Laraine Newman (Saturday Night Live) costars Feb. 4 & 5 only in two special benefit shows for The Marsh $5$100. Fri 8pm. Sat 5pm. $20-$50. Thru Feb. 26. 1062 Valencia St. at 21st. (800) 838-3006. www.themarsh.org

Tangled Yarn @ Lycée Francais Multi-media performance by Anais Alexandra Tekerian, with artist Kevork Mourad and vocal trio Zula, about Ismene, the sister of Greek heroine Antigone. $10-$20. 8pm. Also Feb 5. 1201 Ortega St. www.brownpapertickets.com/event/138830 www.lelycee.org

Treefall @ New Conservatory Theatre San Francisco premiere of Henry Murray’s post-apocalyptic drama set in the Pacific Northwest. Four characters form a makeshift family, and gender and desire shifts in a desperate and strange setting. $15-$36. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Feb. 27. 25 Van Ness Ave, lower level. 861-8972. www.nctcsf.org

Unmentionables @ City Art Opening reception for a group exhibit of work themed around undergarments. 7pm. WedSun, 12pm-9pm. Thru Feb. 27. 828 Valencia St. 970-9900. www.cityartgallery.org

Sat 5 >>

Peaches Christ welcomes Cloris Leachman at the Castro Theatre, Saturday; then is honored at the exhibit Popcorn, Blood and Glitter, Sunday

Screening of How Gay do You Want to Be Today?, the first hour-long webisode by and about proudly effeminate gay men. $7. 3pm. post-screening Q&A with director Randall Jenson. 1310 Mission St. www.counterpulse.org

Parker Nolan @ Martuni’s

50 Faggots @ CounterPulse

African American GIs and Germany @ African American Arts Complex Exhibit about the role of African American soldiers in World War II by researchers Maria Hohn and Martin Klimke. Thru April 22. 762 Fulton St. at Webster. www.aacvr-germany.org

Beach Blanket Babylon @ Club Fugazi Musical comedy revue, now in its 35th year, with an ever-changing lineup of political and pop culture icons, all in gigantic wigs. $25$130. Wed, Thu, Fri at 8pm. Sat 6:30, 9:30pm. Sun 2pm, 5pm. (Beer/wine served; cash only). 678 Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd (Green St.). 421-4222. www.beachblanketbabylon.com

Cheryl Kilodavis @ Books Inc Author of My Princess Boy, who has appeared on Oprah and other major TV shows, discusses her book and struggle to understand her happily “princessy” son. 3pm. 2275 Market St. at Noe. 864-6777. www.booksinc.net

Cloris Leachman @ Castro Theatre Peaches Christ hosts a tribute to veteran TV and film actress (Young Frankenstein, Mary Tyler-Moore, Phyllis, Raising Hope), a screening of the Mel Brooks comedy High Anxiety, and a fun Q&A with the actress. $25. 8:30pm-11pm. 429 Castro St. www.sfsketchfest.com

Erasure-esque @ Red Devil Lounge Erasure cover band performs; Also, 80s band Fast Times and Sing Blue Silver (Duran Duran cover band). $8-$10. 8pm. 1695 Polk St. 447-4730. www.reddevillounge.com

Mike Daisey @ Berkeley Rep Master storyteller tells tall tales The Last Cargo Cult (natives who worship shipments from overseas) and The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (computer guru’s precarious trip to China). Thu-Sat 8pm. Wed & Sun 7pm. Thu, Sat, Sun 2pm. $15-$73. Thru Feb. 27. 2025 Addison St. (510) 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org

Nude Aid @ Center for Sex & Culture Peruse 25 live nude male and female tableaux models as 25 artists make sexy art for patrons; Annie Sprinkle and Dr. Carol Queen MC. $20. 3pm-8pm. 1519 Mission St. www.sexandculture.org

San Francisco Ballet @ War Memorial Opera House Giselle, Coppelia and mixed programs of new and classic works; thru April. $48-$194.

8pm. Special LGBT “Nite Out” with afterparties in the Dress Circle Bar Feb. 4, Mar. 4 and April 8 (21+). 301 Van Ness Ave. 8652000. www.sfballet.org

Kersti Malvre

SF Sketchfest @ Various Venues Lamplighters’ The Yeomen of the Guard

Month-long comedy shows with dozens of famous and upcoming comics, at clubs and theatres. $15-$30. www.sfsketchfest.com

Love on Wheels at Public Works, Wednesday

Classy crooner is joined by the Tom Shaw Trio for The Odds are Good but the Goods are Odd, a comedic musical story-song show about dating. 6:30pm. 4 Valencia St. at Market. www.tomshawtrio.com

Paula West @ The Rrazz Room Popular local singer performs with The George Mesterhazy quartet on various nights for eight weeks thru Mar. 13. $35-$45. Mostly at 8pm.

Check online schedule. 2-drink minimum.

Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. at Ellis. (800) 380-3095. www.therrazzroom.com

Pearls Over Shanghai @ The Hypnodrome Thrillpeddlers’ revival of the comic mock operetta by Link Martin and Scrumbly Koldewyn, performed by the gender-bending Cockettes decades ago, and loosely based on the 1926 play The Shanghai Gesture; with an allstar local cast. $30-$35. 18 and over only!

Sat 8pm, Sun 7pm. Extended again thru April 9. 575 10th St. at Division. (800) 8383006. www.thrillpeddlers.com

Pulp Fashion: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave @ Legion of Honor Exhibit of amazing paper costumes by the acclaimed Belgian artist based on classic historical royal garb including Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette. Frtee-$10. Tue-Sun 9:30am-5:15pm. Thru June 5. 100 34th Ave. at Clement St. 750-3600. www.legionofhonor.famsf.org

SF Hiking Club @ Sweeney Ridge Trail Join GLBT hikers for a 7-mile hike with views of the San Francisco Bay. At the ridge there are panoramic views all around. Bring water, lunch, layers, hat, sunscreen, good walking shoes. Carpool meets 9:00 at Safeway sign, Market & Dolores. (650)6150151. www.sfhiking.com

Suzie Wong’s Chinese New Year Party @ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge Enjoy food and drinks at this annual festive occasion at the beloved dive bar. Donated proceeds benefit API Wellness Center. 4pm-7pm.

133 Turk St. www.auntcharlieslounge.com

Textural Rhythms @ Museum of the African Diaspora Constructing the Jazz Tradition, Contemporary African American Quilts, a new exhibit of quilts by the Women of Color Quilters Network that visualize jazz artists. $5-$10.

Wed-Sat 11am-6pm. Sun 12pm-5pm. 685 Mission St. at 3rd. 358-7200. www.moadsf.org

3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

twin acrobats Ming and Rui, Vertical Tango rope dance, plus magic, comedy, a fivecourse dinner, and a lot of fun. $117-$145. Saturday 11:30am “Breve” show $63—$78. Wed-Sat 6pm (Sun 5pm). Pier 29 at Embarcadero Ave. 438-2668. www.teatrozinzanni.com

Various Exhibits @ Oakland Museum of California Bay Area figurative art, Dorothea Lange archive, Early landscape paintings, Gold Rush Era works, California ceramics. Gallery of California Natural Sciences focuses on California’s unique status as a region of extreme biological and geological diversity. $6-$12. 1000 Oak St. Oakland. (510) 238-2200. www.museumca.org

Various Exhibits @ YBCA Felix d’Eon at Magnet, Friday

True Stories, David Byrne @ Castro Theatre Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the innovative quirky music film by Talking Heads’ David Byrne (onstage interview with Paul Myers). $25. 5pm. 429 Castro St. www.sfsketchfest.com

Sun 6 >>

Cabaret Showcase Showdown @ Martuni’s Best Male Crooner is the chosen genre for round 2 of the second annual talent show, with hosts Katya Ludmilla Smirnoff-Skyy and Joe Wicht. Guest performer Mark Johnson (2010 Best Male Crooner). 4 Valencia St. at Market. www.dragatmartunis.com

Design & Wine 1976 to Now @ SF MOMA Exhibit of the rich culture of wine, with historical artifacts, art, installations designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro. Special contests with prizes, including hotel stays in Napa, SF and Sonoma. 151 3rd St. www.sfmoma.org

Our Vast Queer Past @ GLBT History Museum New exhibit from the GLBT Historical Society, with a wide array of rare historic items on display. Free for members-$5. Wed-Sat 11am-7pm. Sun 12pm-5pm. 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

Outlook Video @ Channel 29 LGBT monthly news show; segments on 2010 in review, gay marriage and activist-photographer Jerry Wang. 5pm. Also online streaming. www.outlookvideo.org

Popcorn, Blood and Glitter @ Glama-Rama Salon Opening reception for a group exhibit of art celebrating the mad world of Peaches Christ and Midnight Mass, with works by Christopher Hattfield, Jim Winters, Tennessee Loveless, Jim Jeske, Adam Ansell, Cheyanne Payne, Danyol, Louis Hansell, Nathan Rapport, Flynn De Marco; special All About Evil photo gallery featuring the work of Jose Guzman Colon and Steven B. Wheeler. 6pm-10pm. 304 Valencia St. 861-4526. Reg hours, Tue-sun 10am-7pm. www.peacheschrist.com www.glamarama.com

Sunday’s a Drag @ Starlight Room Donna Sachet and Harry Denton host the fabulous weekly brunch and drag show. $45.

11am, show at noon; 1:30pm, show at 2:30pm. 450 Powell St. in Union Square.

395-8595. www.harrydenton.com

Teatro Zinzanni @ Pier 29 License to Kiss II is the show at the theatretent-dinner extravaganza with Kevin Kent,

Howl animation artist Eric Drooker at CounterPulse, Wednesday

Nina Bier: Agents of Change (thru Jan. 23) and Lauren DiCioccio: Remember the Times (thru Mar. 27), ongoing Middle East videos and more. $5$7. Thu-Sat 12pm-8pm. Sun 12pm-6pm. Free first Thursdays. 701 Mission St. at 3rd. www.ybca.org

Funny Tuesdays @ Harvey’s Ronn Vigh hosts the weekly LGBT and gayfriendly comedy night. One drink or menu item minimum. 9pm. 500 Castro St. at 18th.

431-HARV. www.harveyssf.com

Maria Volonte @ The Rrazz Room Argentine singer-songwriter performs the works of great Latin American composers. $28.50. 2-drink minimum. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. at Ellis. (800) 380-3095. www.therrazzroom.com

Meditation Classes @ Kadampa Buddhist Temple Tessa Logan teaches drop-in meditation classes. $10. 7-8:45pm. 3324 17th St. 503-1187. www.meditationinnortherncalifornia.org

Martin Freeman @ Visual Aid Exhibit of works by the local creator of funky collage sculptures. Thru Feb. Tue-Fri, 2pm6pm. 57 Post St. #905. www.visualaid.org

Particular Voices @ Jewish Community Center Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Writers, selected portraits from Robert Giard’s twodecade-long projects photographing over 600 gay and lesbian writers. Thru Feb. 27. 3200 California St. 292-1200. www.jccsf.org

2008 Pinot Pinnot Noir:

Yoga Classes @ The Sun Room Heated, healing weekly yoga classes in a new location. Suggested donation $10-20. 12pm1pm. Tue & Thu. 2390 Mission St, 3rd floor.

794-4619. www.billmohleryoga.com

889 PPoints oints Wine Wine Enthusiast Magazine M

Mon 7 >> Wed 9 >> Erich Bergen @ The Rrazz Room

Stage and TV actor (Jersey Boys, Gossip Girl) performs his irreverent cabaret music act. $20-$40. 2-drink minimum. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. at Ellis. (800) 3803095. www.therrazzroom.com

Marga’s Funny Mondays @ The Marsh, Berkeley Marga Gomez, “the lesbian Lenny Bruce” (Robin Williams), brings her comic talents, and special guests, to a weekly cabaret show. $10.

8pm. 2120 Allston Way. (800) 838-3006. www.margagomez.com www.themarsh.org

Q Comedy @ Martuni’s Casey Ley, Tony Koester, Cassandra Gorges, Michael Capozzola and more performers join drag comic Cookie Dough in the monthly laugh night. First Mondays. $5-$16. 8pm. 4 Valencia St. at Market, www.Qcomedy.com

Ten Percent @ Comcast 104 David Perry’s new talk show about LGBT local issues. Mon-Fri 11:30am & 10:30pm, Sat & Sun 10:30pm. www.davidperry.com

Exhibit documenting the award-winning Tony Kushner drama, with an array of original costumes, props, manuscripts, video clips, photos, designs and audio interviews. Wed-Sat 12pm-5pm. Thru Mar. 26. 401 Van Ness Ave. 255-4800. www.mpdsf.org

Dynamic Dating Profiles @ SF Public Library Blogger and single mom Carol Renee leads a workshop in writing compelling and confident oneline dating profiles. 6:15-7:45pm. Lower level. 100 Larkin St. at Grove. www.sfpl.org

Blue Room Comedy @ Club 93 Weekly adults-only jokes at the divey small bar; David Hawkins hosts. 10pm. 93 9th St. at Mission.

Curious George Saves he Day @ Contemporary Jewish Museum Fascinating exhibit of 80 drawings by Margret and H.A. Rey, cocreators of the impish monkey books, and how their daring escape from the Nazis in Europe was aided by their drawings. Also, Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker and Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations (both thru March).

Thu-Tue 11am-5pm. Thu 1pm-8pm. 736 Mission St. at 3rd. 655-7800. Thru March 13. www.thecjm.org

Dinner With the Divas @ Bisou Intimate and delicious dinner fundraiser for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus Scholarship Fund, with a special menu by Chef Nick, and drinks by Barefoot Wines & Bubbly. $70. 6pm-9pm. 2367 Market St. www.dinnerwiththedivas .eventbrite.com

Onnly 25 cases Only p produced!

Love on Wheels @ Public Works San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s annual fun games show (a la The Dating Game) with cyclist puns and prizes for gay, lesbian and straight contestants. Enjoy discounts on swag when you become a SFBC member. $5$10. 21+. 7pm. Free valet bike parking. 161 Erie St. www.sfbike.org/?love

Reprise @ Robert Tat Gallery

Tue 8 >>

“...Still dry and crisp “...Still in ac cids and jammy acids jammy,, with ith raspberry b andd che erries, but with cherries, extra depth a length.” and

Angels in America at 20 @ Museum of Performance & Design

The finest Pi Pinot not Noir and Char Chardonnay donna ay wines w fr from om the Sonoma Coas Coast st a appellation. ppellation.

Our wines ar are e ar artisan, tisan, hand-crafted,, sma small-lot all-lot pr production. oduction.

Favorite photographs on display at the fine art gallery of historic prints. Thru Feb. 26.

Tue-Sat 11am-5:30pm. 49 Geary St. #410.

781-1122. www.roberttat.com

What We’re Up Against @ Magic Theatre World premiere of author, playwright and TV writer Therea Rebeck’s comedy about sex and sexism in the workplace, confused mall architects, and ducts. 8pm. Tue 7pm; Wed-Sat 8pm. Also Sat & Sun at 2:30pm. Thru Mar. 6.

Fort Mason Center, Bldg. D. Marina Blvd at Buchanan. 441-8822. www.magictheatre.org

Thu 10 >>

Eric Drooker @ CounterPulse Acclaimed visual artist (New Yorker covers, popular graphic arts) who created the fascinating animated sequences in the film Howl discusses his technique and process. Free. 7:30pm. www.drooker.com www.counterpulse.org

Group Exhibit @ Michael Rosenthal Gallery Greer McGettrick’s “Faulkner by Hand” (The Sound and the Fury hand-written on wall-sized panels) and works by Narangkar Glover, Meghan Gordon and James Benjamin Franklin. Thu-Sat 11am-6pm. 365 Valencia St. 55201010. www.rosenthalgallery.com

Nightlife @ California Academy of Sciences Weekly parties with different themes at the new museum of life sciences. Enjoy the exhibits while drinking and schmoozing; Life: A Cosmic Story, narrated by Jodie Foster in the Planetarium. $12. (Reg, admission $20$30). 21+. 6pm-10pm. Golden Gate Park. www.calacademy.org/nightlife

To submit event listings, email jim@ebar.com.

Deadline is each Thursday, a week before publication.

For more bar and nightlife events, go to www.bartabsf.com

Al waayys fr ree gr ro ound shipping!

Always free ground To bu uy our wine To buy wine,, please visit: www.b bar tzallenwiner y.com www.bartzallenwinery.com

22008 Chardonnay: Char rdonnay: 922 PPoints oints Wine Enthusiast Magazine Maagazine “Superr Superripe ipe and oaky in pineappple, white peach pineapple, pureé pear peear tart, tart buttered pureé, toast and vanillainfused creme ´ bruleé, this Char rdonnay is saved Chardonnay from m ere richness by mere crisp coa astal acidity and coastal a fine sp pine of minerals. spine Exotic an nd delicious, itit’s’s and at itss best now now.”.”

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

SOCIETY

All tomorrow’s parties

by Donna Sachet he new group called Reason to Party is committed to parties with a purpose, in other words having a good time with like-minded professionals while benefiting worthwhile local charities. Our first chance to see them in action was a recent Saturday cocktail party and dance benefiting EqualityCalifornia at the St. Regis Hotel ballroom, featuring a live musical performance by Grammy nominated Sam Sparro. If there was ever a room full of husband material, this was it! Among the happy crowd were Bevan Dufty, Julian Marshburn, Shaun Saunders, Mark Calvano, Joel Goodrich, Adam Sandel, and Don Spradlin. Watch for upcoming events, always in upscale locations with premium liquors and gorgeous attendees.

The Imperial Court of San Francisco paid beautiful tribute to Absolute Empress VIII Maxine last Sunday at her memorial at Most Holy Redeemer in the Castro. In a ceremony replete with symbolism and ceremony, this beloved Empress was remembered for her grace, beauty, and charm. The attendees included Empresses Velveeta Mozzarella and Pushy Phyllis visiting from Palm Springs and Empress Anita Martini from Dallas, as well as many local and out of town members of the several communities touched by Maxine’s life. The formality was followed by a raucous celebration of life at Marlena’s with food, drink, and camaraderie, where conversations ranged from exciting rumors about the upcoming election of the new Emperor and Empress on Sat., Feb. 19, to the recently elected Mayor and SuO N T HE pervisors of the city and surprising revelations about the fall Mayoral election. When Wayne Friday talks about his lunch with Jack

Steven Underhill

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January birthdays party, last month at Fresh @ Ruby Skye.

Davis, we listen!

When Absolute Empress XXXI Cockatielia asked us to co-emcee her 50th birthday celebration with the dynamic Kitty Glamour, the incorrigible Sister Roma, and the irrepressible Heklina, we knew this was going to be a party of historic proportions! This Sunday night, Triple Crown on Market Street was packed to the rafters, starting with a buffet and T OWN cocktails, then a slick video montage of the guest of honor’s life, climaxing with her entrance from across the street and into the club in a

C

sparkling silver gown. The audience included family and friends from across the country, treated to a rollicking show with a cast of local talent and a very special surprise appearance by bawdy and bodacious Wendy Ho! Once you’ve heard her lyrics and seen her delivery, you’ll know why she is in demand all over the country! We send hearty birthday wishes out to Cockatielia and wish her many more years of sharing her amazing talents with the city.

The social pace really picks up in the coming month, starting with EqualityCalifornia’s Gala and Awards in the Rotunda of City Hall on Sat., Feb. 12, honoring State At-

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Coming up in leather & kink >> Thu., Feb. 3: 2012 Bare Chest Calendar Semi-Final #3 at The Powerhouse (1347 Folsom). 9:30 p.m. Go to: www.barechest.org or www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Thu., Feb. 3: Edges Wet Munch at Renegades Bar (501 W. Taylor St., San Jose). 7 p.m. Happy hour for the sexpositive and alternative communities, 4-7 p.m. Go to: www.edges.biz or www.renegadesbar.com.

Thu., Feb. 3: EduKink, Your First Scenes Class with Angela and Iain at the SF Citadel (1277 Mission). 7:30 p.m. $15-$25 sliding scale. Go to: www.EduKink.org or www.sfcitadel.org.

Thu., Feb. 3: Locker Room at Chaps Bar (1225 Folsom). 9 p.m.-close. Wear your jockstraps, sports gear, anything that goes in the locker room, for drink specials. Go to: www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com.

Fri., Feb. 4: Truck Wash at Truck (1900 Folsom). 10 p.m.-close. Enjoy the live shower boys and drink specials. Go to: www.trucksf.com.

Fri., Feb. 4: Shirts Off at Chaps Bar (1225 Folsom). Gogo studs at 10:30 p.m. Featuring DJ Sam. Take your shirt off for drink specials. 9 p.m.-close. Go to: www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com.

Fri., Feb. 4: Bent: Close Encounters, a play party for kinky youth hosted by Stefanos and Cheryl at the SF Citadel. 9 p.m.-2 a.m. $20. “Youth” is 18, 19, 20s, 30s. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Sat., Feb. 5: Monthly Leather, Boots & Uniform Event sponsored by BLUF and Hot Boots at the SF Eagle (398 12th St.). In conjunction with the weekly formal dinner.

No cover. 9 p.m.-2 a.m. Go to: www.hotboots.com.

Sat., Feb. 5: Back Bar Action at The Eagle Tavern (398 12th St.), back patio and bar open to all gear/fetish/leather.

10 p.m.-close. Go to: www.sfeagle.com.

Sat., Feb. 5: Bearracuda Underwear Night at Club 8 (1151 Folsom) featuring DJ John LePage. 9 p.m.-3 a.m. $8 cover, $6 before 10 p.m., 2 for 1 drinks before 10 p.m.

Go to: www.bearracuda.com.

www.ebar.com

Sat., Feb. 5: Puppy Pile (A Lovers’ Ball) at The Powerhouse. 10 p.m.-close. The animalistic boys of Chickenbear join forces for this new event. Bachelor auction benefiting P.A.W.S. (www.pawssf.org) plus Cuddle Space, Bromantic Go-Gos, Jell-O shots, and more. DJs Taco

Tuesday & Dirty Knees. $5.

Sat., Feb. 5: Open Play Party at the SF Citadel (1277 Mission). 8 p.m.-1 a.m. $25. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Sat., Feb. 5: Boot Lickin’ at The Powerhouse, 10 p.m.

Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Sun., Feb. 6: Castrobear presents Sunday Furry Sunday at 440 Castro. 4-10 p.m. Go to: www.castrobear.com.

Sun., Feb. 6: PoHo Sundays at The Powerhouse. DJ Keith, Dollar Drafts all day. Go to: www.powerhousesf.com.

Mon., Feb. 7: Cheap Ass Happy Hour at Chaps Bar. Mon.-Thu., 6-9 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 4-9 p.m. Drink specials.

Go to: www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com.

Mon., Feb. 7: Trivia Night with host Casey Ley at Truck. 8-10 p.m. Amazing prizes and ridiculous questions. Go to: www.trucksf.com.

Tue., Feb. 8: 12-Step Kink Recovery Group at the SF Citadel. 6:30-8 p.m. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Tue., Feb. 8: Making the Switch, presented by Keri at the SF Citadel. 8-10 p.m. $20. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Tue., Feb. 8: Busted at Truck. 9 p.m.-close. $5 beer bust from 9-11 p.m. Great music, and the notorious Truck boys. Go to: www.trucksf.com.

Tue., Feb. 8: Ink & Metal followed by Nasty at The Powerhouse. 9 p.m. Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Tue., Feb. 8: Skins n Punks at Chaps Bar. Drink specials. Go to: www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com.

Wed., Feb. 9: Golden Shower Buddies at Blow Buddies (933 Harrison). Yellow is the color of the night! Doors open 8 p.m.-12 a.m. Play til late. Go to: www.blowbuddies .com.

Wed., Feb. 9: Nipple Play at the Powerhouse, 10 p.m.

Go to www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Wed., Feb. 9: Busted! at Chaps Bar. Spanking hosted

by Daddy Tony. Bring your paddles! Starts at 9 p.m. Go to: www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com.

Wed., Feb. 9: SoMa Men’s Club. Every Wed., the SoMa Clubs (Chaps, Powerhouse, Truck, Lone Star, Hole in the Wall, Eagle) have specials for those who wear the Men’s Club dogtags.

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3 February 2011 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER

KARRNAL

Str8 boy follies

by John F. Karr ’ve been hot for RandyBlue star Reese Rideout for a long time. I’ve liked his sassy attitude, and the showoff way he’s always reveled in his sexiness. But the recent interview he gave British magazine Marie Claire has me confused. True, most of the interview seems made up, although Reese has yet to fully disavow it. It just doesn’t ring true (Google the star, and you’ll quickly find the article).

He says that since making str8 porn made him feel guilty about cheating on his girlfriend Becki, he switched to gay porn. That way, he says, “I can have sex without thinking of the other person, because I’m genuinely straight. But gay sex is tough if you’re straight. The first time I shot a scene with another man, it was oral sex, and I couldn’t keep it up because I wasn’t turned on. Now I watch footage of women or think about Becki while I’m filming.”

Well, gay sex has never seemed tough for Reese. He’s wildly bi. I don’t believe he needs the crutch of het porn to have gay sex. But if he does, do you want to know that?

Does his choosing to be thoughtless Reese Rideout and Becki pose for Marie Claire. about his partner turn you on? Let’s muse on these interesting questions for a bit. Another RandyB movie, n’t matter to me. He’s hot, and he their homophobia. Pure and simple, Cum Into My Room 2, includes a makes out with guys as intensely, in it’s our revenge. Call it guerilla gaytelling Behind the Scenes bonus (cuhis own way, as, say, Adam Killian. ness – we take ’em down by witnessriously, it’s behind the scenes of anBut I wonder what’s up with Reese. ing them having the sex they’ve disother movie altogether). In it, we First the Marie Claire interview, and dained. meet four guys, most kinda nervous.

We know all about str8 guys rathen the fizzle of his scene in Never Three of them tell us it’s their first tionalizing their homo-urge. One Been Fucked 2. shoot with guys (does that str8 guy had his perforIt’s not that Reese doesn’t make a mean they’ve made a sexo mance with Conner valiant attempt. Much blame lies with girls?). They’ve jacked filmed by his girlfriend. with the scene’s director. Stupid setoff together. A ripped Also on hand was the up, constipated dialogue. A rush past cutie named Dax admits, guy’s buddy and his foreplay, even through cocksucking, “It’s not so bad touching girlfriend, providing a for a continuity-shredding, abrupt another guy’s penis. It’s jocular, frat-boy party jump into fucking. Co-star Richard’s just a penis. If you’re atmosphere. Conner comnot much of a cocksucker, anyway. gonna touch yours, ments that for this guy to Makes you believe he’s str8, the way you might as well permit himself to have he never works more than the first touch someone else’s. gay sex, he needed a inch of Reese’s cock. And Richard K ARRNAL And get paid for it.” salary, a camera, the never gets hard. And the shopworn K NOWLEDGE presence of two girls, fantasy that it’s his first time getting You know, this turns me way off. Just and camaraderie. “Taken fucked? Brings us right back to the what is it that makes as a whole,” Conner observes, “that’s question, why do we want to see a gay men want to see this sort of a very complex sex act.” str8 guy deflowered? porn? Where does our response Another rationale is, “I’m only Reese is professional; Richard’s come from? We fool ourselves if we doing it for the money.” Is it, as Gore compliant. Several positions they asthink it’s merely a response to bodies Vidal has suggested, that sex is just sume are revealing. But of what? In or genitals. Gay sexo performer Conabout money now? Money is so the absence of any true excitement, ner Habib writes a blog you should eroticized that it carries str8 men we’re seeing only the mechanics of check out (www.ConnerHabib.com), through the act? Sex is no longer sex. Not sex. The director is giving us because he’s a pretty fascinating homo- or hetero-sexual. It’s monewhat we want – after all, we keep paywriter (before his porn career, he was tary-sexual. ing for these movies. Is this what we a professor at a couple New England Whether it’s making money or want? To be continued next week.▼ colleges). Habib connects our desire disguising a homo-urge, the impetus to see str8 men having gay sex with driving Reese to make gay porn didwww.RandyBlue.com

I

On the Town torney General Kamala Harris and Alameda County Superior Judge Victoria Kolakowski. Rumor has it that this event is nearly sold out, so find out which friends still have room at their tables for you!

A Victor/Victoria Valentine is presented by Marc Huestis on Mon., Feb. 14, featuring an 8 p.m. screening at the historic Castro Theatre of the motion picture, introduced by local film critic and television personality Jan Wahl, a tribute to Academy Award nominee Lesley Ann Warren, live and in person, and a drag performance by local Matthew Martin, all hosted by popular entertainer Coco Peru. Relive this hilarious film, full of gender confusion and insane laughter, in the company of your own gay community. Arrive early at 6 p.m. for a private VIP reception with all the celebrity guests.

Then we dive into Imperial Coronation activities, beginning with Voting Day for the new Emperor and Empress on Sat., Feb. 19, followed by a weekend of shows, parties, and fundraisers, culminating in Imperial Coronation at the Galleria

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Actor Zach Braff (Scrubs) was the moderator for a tribute to comedian Gary Shandling, last month during Sketchfest at the Castro Theatre.

Design Center at 101 Henry Adams St. This lavish five-hour extravaganza, titled All Aboard Flight 45 – San Francisco to New York – Broadway Bound, begins promptly at 6 p.m. and includes spectacular musical

production numbers, elaborate costumes, stunning jewelry and regal pageantry, all with an element of camp thrown in. Come celebrate with Reigning Emperor Steven Dorsey & Empress Renita Valdez. ▼

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BAY AREA REPORTER . eBAR.com . 3 February 2011

BOOKS

He was a camera R

SF Ballet ▼

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in City Hall after the show. We’ll be seeing plenty of them filling out the corps de ballet in the season ahead, starting with Giselle and in the huge cast of Symphony in C, the glorious ballet by Balanchine which is the finale of Program 2 (Feb. 3-13), to be reviewed next week.

Giselle got off to a slightly rocky start on opening night; both stars wobbled on the final turns of their first-act solos, and the ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan sometimes failed to point her feet when she jumped. But the big moments, especially in the second act,

SF IndieFest ▼

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Kaboom He’s back! Having caught this one only once, I can’t yet decide if Gregg Araki has lost his mind, reverted to his pre-Mysterious Skin faux despair, or truly mined a feisty new combo of sex-crazed characters from every possible gender/fetish. It’s a silly romp that collapses the distinctions between comedy and horror, and a spoof of social networking. (Opening night, 2/3, 7 p.m.)

Heartbeats If you missed Quebec queer-boy auteur Xavier Dolan’s first feature I Killed My Mother, don’t pass on his Cannes-heralded follow-up.

The 21-year-old sensation, deliciously bratty in his debut feature’s bitch slap to the coming-out story, produces a combustible ménage that may finally land him a US distribution deal. (2/6, 7 p.m.)

The Drummond Will This is the one I enjoyed the most strictly from a laughs-per-minute ratio. The plot is as flimsy as a British “caravan” (UK slang for a beat-up aluminum motorhome), but it’s pure joy to discover an actor who can do those old John Cleese “Minister of Silly Walks, Dead Parrot” rants that leave you down on the floor choking on your chips with Bush and the dog.

Alan Butterworth’s British comedy finds two brothers – one uptight and self-righteous, the other long-haired and feckless – up against some wacky old codgers (“Malcolm the Bastard,” “Dave the Hobo”). By the third act, this tiny town is minus several citizens (including a barmaid armed like she were heading for the Crusades), but the survivors are much the wiser: a brother who dons a dress to mop up blood from a crime scene, and a vicar who’s summoned the courage to

Isherwood has the kind of self-consciousness he does, you always know what he is talking about. On the surface, much of it is as seemingly unimportant as Auden’s preoccupations, but Isherwood brings you into the very midst of his life with focus to spare.

It’s of the I Am a Camera type, a mode he so strongly advocated in his endorsement of the play and movie of that title, both drawn from his Goodbye to Berlin.

At the newsreel level, it’s fascinating to live or relive the events of this signal decade, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Summer of Love, at the armchair of such a savvy observer. What’s remarkable is that there’s nothing on Stonewall, despite the riots having happened a half-year before the last entries in this volume (but just at the time his treatment for Cabaret was being declined) and Isherwood’s having had countless well-placed gay friends in New York. Maybe Volume III. What never ceases to amaze is the cavalcade of celebrities who pass through his daily (and nightly) life.

Even though a sense of too-manyparties, too-many-pals pervades much of this record, the culture’s major players keep showing up in person (and in Isherwood’s depictions, decidedly warts and all) and never cease to amaze.

But these memoirs go far beyond name-dropping. Sometimes you realize, with a start, that you’re reading Isherwood on Gore Vidal on JFK – all in off-the-record, personal observations you simply wouldn’t find

were extremely beautiful. The corps de ballet danced heroically throughout, and the supporting stars were superb: Pascal Molat as the boy she does not love, and Gennadi Nedviguin in the first act divertissement, and especially Elana Altman, who danced the Queen of the Wilis with majesty in the second; she was fantastically beautiful when she took the air. The production will doubtless polish itself during the two-week run.

Giselle is one of the great classic ballets, historically important as the culmination of the Romantic ballet.

It’s one of the first to use dancing on pointe, and the best to exploit the fantastic atmospheres that gaslight could create onstage. But it’s bigger than

that: as Balanchine said, Giselle is to ballet as Hamlet is to poetic drama.

The material is so juicy, so suited to its own art form, that every great-hearted performer wants a chance to probe it, and audiences can’t tire of seeing how the new generation makes it its own.

Like Hamlet, it is a ghost story, with a heroine who goes mad and a delicate prince who is not ready to take on the burden of being in charge of the state; and as with Hamlet, there are many questions as to what’s real and what’s illusion; what’s the brave, noble thing to do; and finally, how easy it is to get it all wrong.

Giselle has two scenes: Giselle’s farmyard, and the graveyard where

she’s buried. She is a peasant girl, and a nobleman disguised as a peasant wins her heart, which breaks when she discovers that he’s already engaged to the noblewoman whom chance brings in a hunting party to her house. Giselle loves him because he, too, loves to dance. In the second act, her ghost saves his life.

Our production’s haunted forest is one of the greatest stage-settings I’ve ever seen; it rivals something from The Lord of the Rings as the kind of place in which impossible things could happen – such as, in this case, that the ghosts of jilted maidens (the Wilis) may rise from the dead and make unwary men dance til they fall down dead.

anywhere else. Only one among many manifestations of Katherine Bucknell’s superb editing of these diaries is her 100-plus-page Glossary, a complete guide to the flora and fauna of this vast, captivating celebrity jungle.

What you get instead of an account of Stonewall, of which there are ample others, is a deep, personal, unsparing look at pre-Stonewall gay life as lived in Europe and America, and the view is so unobstructed you forget there ever was a closet.

The central ring of this dazzling circus – and never out of view long – is Isherwood’s long-term relationship with Don Bachardy, here in its darkest passage. If the film Chris and Don is that story from Bachardy’s point of view, tinged with the inevitable post-mortem sentimentality, this is Isherwood’s side of the story. The stories aren’t contradictory, but this day-by-day account of the vicissitudes of intimacy is vastly, sometimes crushingly, grittier.

Part of what makes this volume of the diaries so compelling is that that story – of painstakingly learning how to be with someone and to be free – has never felt more contemporary.▼

The Wilis’ power is laid out most explicitly in the implacable forward advance they make, like planes taking off from the decks of aircraft carriers in war movies, where the dancers lift one leg behind them, lay out flat, and chug forward in interlacing lines. This is interrupted by the flying advance of their queen, launched like a javelin.

There will be five ballerinas playing the role over the course of the run; Maria Kochetkova has an unparalleled lightness and elevation (she gets aloft like a kid on a skateboard); Sarah van Patten is likeliest to go mad in a way that breaks your heart; Vanessa Zahorian has greatness in her. Watch this space for reviews of more performances.▼

Nathaniel Chapman’s The Evangelist.

Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats.

SF IndieFest

eading Christopher Isherwood’s The Sixties: Diaries 1960-1969 (Harper), you seldom lose sight of the fact that these journals were meant to be read, years on, by someone just like you. But far from spoiling things, Isherwood’s keen, instinctive feel for audience pulls you in and quickly – and, perhaps more important, steadily over the course of 600 pages – holds you in his thrall. It’s a different kind of spell than the ones he casts in his novels and memoirs, but it’s as compelling and, against all odds, you never tire of a single man’s take on the events of a decade, at the macrocosmic and microcosmic level.

There are any number of writers of Isherwood’s league who would be satisfied at having written as much in a decade as we find in these journals – which makes it the more remarkable every time you encounter yet another entry about stalled work and wasted days, as you do often. But this painstaking, richly detailed walk through Isherwood’s creative process reminds you that this was the decade of his greatest achievements, peaking

with A Single Man. It was also the decade in which Isherwood reached the greatest international fame of his lifetime, as the man behind Cabaret, first as a Broadway play and then as a film.

But precisely because he himself was not able to turn his Berlin Stories into that script – despite having worked on it with W.H. Auden and his partner Chester Kallman, the librettists for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and, as we witness in these pages, Hans Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers – he forfeits his place at the Broadway opening (to his longtime partner, Don Bachardy), and we learn far more about his work on other Berlin-related projects.

In the entry on June 7, 1961 – about a fairly normal lunch, albeit at the home of Stephen Spender – he writers of Auden, one of his best friends and an enormous presence in these diaries: “Wyston always brings you into the very midst of his life – so near, indeed, that it is out of focus, so to speak. He mutters about everything that’s on his mind; feuds, unpaid bills, alterations to be made in proofs. Most of the time, you barely know what he’s talking about.”

By contrast, and precisely because

SF IndieFest

by Tim Pfaff

scream out that he’s gay. (2/4, 2/6) The Evangelist How can a queer indie set in Provincetown, where a gay, atheist theatre director adopts then battles a 12-year-old religious fanatic, prove dull, even a bit pompous? Director Nathaniel Chapman wants us to feel Danny’s pain when his good deed, adopting the tantrum-prone Gideon (Leif Garrett look-alike Lucas Fox Philips), lands him in the intensive-care unit. But Chapman has the indie auteur’s curse of being unable to decide whether his baby is a spoof, a moral fable, or a shaggy-dog tale with laughs in the right places. You can drive a truckload of Fred Phelps fanatics through the beats in Chapman’s implausible, mirthless sitcom. Lead Theodore Bouloukos is overly coy and not credible as a queer adult who would put up with Gideon’s misdeeds, even before they turn felonious. (2/6, 2/9) Food Stamped Co-directors Shira and Yoav Potash went on food stamps to research this activist doc. Limiting themselves to the program’s dollar-ameal allowance, they discovered just how tough it is to fight over half a banana. This program, co-sponsored by

the SF Food Bank, includes the short Inhuman Eating Machine. (2/13, 4:45 p.m.; 2/15, 7 p.m.)

Fuerteventura This Canary Islands resort becomes a jumping-off point for self-reflection for a Swedish man recovering from personal tragedy.

Mattias Sandstrom’s film takes a surreal, sex-fueled path to the subject of a turbulent past life. (2/12, 2/15, both 9:15 p.m.)

Gabi on the Roof in July Lawrence Michael Levine seeks hip family comedy and insight in this battle of the artists between a confident, aspiring painter and his bratty, feminist artleaning sis. Gabi and Sammy love each other to death, except when they’re seeking to implode each other’s love lives. This thoroughly hetero zone profits from insights into how 20something New Yorkers lie, cheat and pay the rent. The art-gallery game can seem like a deadlier version of Monopoly, and in the end there’s a body count and the nutty sight of brother and sister concocting a gas chamber for a squashed pet rodent.

(2/5, 2/10, both 9:15 p.m.)

A Little Help Dental hygienist Laura’s world is on life support when

her hunk of a hubby dies (while she’s giving him a BJ), her junior high son fibs that his dad was a 9/11 hero fireman, her pushy sister gets her to sue the doc, and her absent-minded dad remembers when he decided that Cassius Clay should call himself “the greatest.” Michael J. Weithorn’s post9/11 Long Island family drama is fueled by a Jakob Dylan soundtrack.

(2/5, 4:45 p.m.; 2/8, 9:15 p.m.)

Transformation Remember The Advocate Experience? Back in the mid-70s, lots of no-longer-young activists were feeling the void left by the end of the anti-war movement and the beginning of the job-destroying stagflation. Even gay men and women felt the need to check the gap between their feelings and pre-Reagan reality.

Here in San Francisco, Est founder Werner Erhard enrolled hundreds of thousands in his personal-transformation seminars, until a bad-news vibe, a whiff of personal scandal, killed the buzz. Robyn Symon’s doc plays with short Only One Boss. (2/3, 9:15 p.m.; 2/5, 7 p.m.; 2/8, 9:15 p.m.)

The Aristocrat A retiring traveling salesman encounters his replacement, a young grifter who presents a dis-

turbing glimpse of the future, in Greg Croteau’s drama set in 1989. There’s a touch of David Mamet circa Glengarry Glen Ross in the creepy intimacy that envelops road-weary semi-conductor pitchman Marc Ward and his smarmy little buddy Eddie Kent. Souldeadening road trips, with cheap motels, bad diner food, and rivers of booze to lure clients into going for the next big order, have pushed Marc over the brink. He just wants to cash out and find another way of life. Jeff Gill is deadpan as the aging cynic who keeps his fingernails clean, his tie straight and patter smooth. As for Eddie, a nuanced turn from Adam Soule, whose creepy cool demeanor suggests any number of pathologies, behind the chipmunk grin and Mad Men-issue garb, there’s a wolverine looking for a fresh kill.

In a surreal bend, we get to do the whole trip again, this time through Eddie’s eyes. Suffice it to say, one man stands to lose a whole lot more than he can really afford. Top-notch latterday noir, this one should get a theatre slot. (2/5, 4:45 p.m.; 2/8, 7 p.m.)▼ www.sfindie.com

▼

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Ben Barnes is Dorian Gray in the remake based on the Oscar Wilde novel.

Mostly British

by David Lamble he Mostly British Film Festival, with works from the UK, Australia and New Zealand, is headquartered for the next week at San Francisco’s Vogue Theatre.

Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde’s impossibly handsome blonde bachelor (with a cosmetic adjustment for the darkly handsome Ben Barnes) returns to the screen under the aegis of Wilde movie vet Oliver Parker, and a screenplay by Toby Finlay.

First introduced to the British public in a magazine version in 1890, then expanded (while becoming somewhat less gay) in book form (The Picture of Dorian Gray) in 1891, Dorian Gray has presented his various movie suitors with questions of style and substance. The beautiful young man makes a pact with an unseen devil to keep his smashing good looks while a portrait of him ages badly in the attic of his London townhouse, He begs to be blatantly homosexual, decadent, and most importantly, more or less Wilde.

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings are the cultivated. For these there is hope.”

Hope fades by the special effectsloaded third act. Barnes is a visual treat without being subtle enough a performer for us to fully savor his Dorian before the fall. Colin Firth is a good Wilde interpreter as Lord Henry Wotton, leading our boy to his doom.

Critics have suspected that Wilde drew considerable inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This film’s over-thetop finale is quite a bit more Stevenson than Wilde. (2/8, 9:30 p.m.)

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls Leanne Pooley examines the only-in-New Zealand phenomenon of twin yodeling, country-singing lesbian sisters Jools and Lynda Topp.

Raised along with their gay brother in rugged cattle country, the Topp gals started busking in the early 80s, leading to a career that has no clear American counterpart. The film switches from chronicling their near-icon status to serious episodes of anti-nuclear and pro-queer demos. (Vogue, 2/5, 4:30 p.m.; San Rafael, 2/7, 7 p.m.)

T

Gallipoli As long as boys are encouraged to become men while pursuing the art of war, this story of young men becoming mates while marching off to their doom will remain the apex of Peter Weir’s Australian work.

Weir takes his time showing why a potential Aussie track star (Mark Lee) would risk his life trekking across an unforgiving outback desert to join His Majesty’s forces’ hopeless assault against the Turks on the Gallipoli peninsula. Lee is paired with a young, still believably idealistic Mel Gibson, as a cheeky drifter who holds out against the patriotic poppycock until seduced by manly adventure. It has been said that all antiwar propaganda turns into its opposite in the eyes and loins of its target audience. Still, a haunting freezeframe of a soldier at the moment of his death should give the wiser among the young pause. (2/7, 4:30 p.m.)

The Time That Remains (Opens Friday at the San Francisco Film Society’s screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.) Time seems to freeze on the screen as Elia Suleiman strings together a series of absurdist vignettes depicting her Palestinian family under six decades of Israeli occupation.

Suleiman returns to 1948, when the birth of the Jewish state brought Palestinians an unending series of Kafkaesque moments. She comically balances the futility of accepting the new arrangements against the soulkilling consequences of playing along with your enemy.

Some of the skits are understated gems of absurdist humor: young Palestinians ignore calls for a curfew while at a West Bank disco, the soldier’s bullhorn entreaties getting in sync with the dance beats; a young Palestinian boy is lectured by an Israeli school principal about not believing anti-American propaganda, while Arab collaborators harass his family. Sometimes Suleiman is a little too eager to linger over her setpieces, but we are haunted by images of ordinary people driven slowly insane under extraordinary pressures.

P.S. Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstances, a portrait of a young lesbian growing up in a modern-day Iranian family, has won the audience award for American films at the Sundance Film Festival.▼

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