January 17, 2019 Edition of the Bay Area Reporter

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Vol. 49 • No. 3 • January 17-23, 2019

Board honors Britt Courtesy Build Inc./Place Lab

Rick Gerharter

A rendering of Eagle Plaza shows a food truck and walkways.

Openhouse’s complex at 55 Laguna Street, with 95 Laguna under construction in the background, offers several programs for LGBT seniors.

SF mayor seeks permit for leather plaza

SF offers LGBT seniors end-oflife services

by Matthew S. Bajko

S

an Francisco Mayor London Breed has stepped in to expedite the permit process for the construction of a leather-themed parklet in the city’s South of Market neighborhood.

Eagle Plaza, named after the gay-owned bar it will front on a portion of 12th Street, is seen as a focal point for the LGBTQ cultural heritage district city officials created in western SOMA to celebrate its being the home of the city’s leather community.

On Tuesday Breed’s office introduced an ordinance to the Board of Supervisors to grant a major encroachment permit for the project so that it can See page 10 >>

Roxie names new ED

by Sari Staver

by Matthew S. Bajko

Bill Wilson

T

he San Francisco Board of Supervisors joined Tuesday, January 15, to honor former supervisor Harry Britt, seated, on the 40th anniversary of his appointment to the legislative body. In 1979, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein named Britt to succeed Harvey Milk following his

assassination in November 1978. Paying tribute, from left, are Supervisors Ahsha Safai, Aaron Peskin, Catherine Stefani, Matt Haney, Hillary Ronen, board President Norman Yee, Vallie Brown, Rafael Mandelman, Sandra Lee Fewer, Shamann Walton, and Gordon Mar.

A

s a growing number of LGBT seniors call San Francisco home, the city and local nonprofits are aiming to help them confront myriad end-of-life concerns.

The issues run the gamut from preparing wills and health care directives to being able to age in place in their homes.

Aging experts estimate there are at least 25,000 LGBT people over the age of 60 living in the city. And based on national estimates in the

Series of pedestrian collisions alarm Berkeley officials

See page 11 >>

by Alex Madison

T

he Roxie Theater, San Francisco’s longtime independent cinema, has hired its lesbian general manager as its next executive director.

Lex Sloan was formally appointed Sari Staver to the position Tuesday, January 15, at an Lex Sloan event at the Roxie.

Located in the heart of the Mission district at 3117 Valencia Street, the Roxie is one of the nation’s oldest continually operating movie theaters. It specializes in independent films, frequently offering post-screening discussions with filmmakers.

Sloan, 36, replaces Elizabeth O’Malley, who has taken a job as managing director of SFFILM, the presenter of the San Francisco Film Festival. O’Malley will remain on the Roxie’s board of directors.

Sloan, a filmmaker with a master of fine arts degree in cinema from San Francisco State See page 11 >>

S

ince the beginning of the year, there have been nine pedestrian-vehicle collisions in Berkeley that have left 11 pedestrians injured, according to Officer Bryon White, Berkeley Police Department’s public information officer.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin said the city has been slow to prioritize pedestrian safety, but that it is his number one priority for 2019.

The most serious pedestrian collision so far involved Judy Appel, president of the Berkeley school board, and her wife, attorney Alison Bernstein, ages 53 and 54. The couple were hit by an 81-year-old Berkeley man shortly after midnight January 5 as they were crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way near Stuart Street.

Appel and Bernstein remain in critical but stable condition at Highland Hospital in Oakland, according to its spokesman. An online community group set up by friends and family of the couple at http://www.lotsahelpinghands.com, stated as of January 11, they are making “subtle signs of healing and recovery,” and neither of them has had any concerning setbacks. The post was shared on Our Family Coalition’s Facebook page. Appel is the former executive director of the LGBT family nonprofit.

No other information was available and no

Jane Philomen Cleland

The intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Stuart Street was the site of a vehicle-pedestrian collision January 5 that left the Berkeley school board president and her wife critically injured.

arrests have been made in the incident, which is under investigation.

The collision involving Appel and Bernstein has brought renewed attention to an issue one Berkeley resident has called a “public health crisis” that has not been given proper priority or funding.

Berkeley has one of the highest pedestrian collision

rates in the state and has the second highest walking commute rate in the state among cities and towns with populations of 5,000 or greater, according to the latest census data. Last year, the city averaged nine to 10 pedestrian-involved collisions a month.

City officials say they are in the process of See page 5 >>

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<< Community News

2 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Redstone tenants rally to save SF building

by Tony Taylor

A

fter over a century as a hub of community activism, the 55,000 square foot red brick building at the corner of 16th and Capp streets has fallen prey to wealthy real estate developers.

Now, a local organization’s bid to save the site is one of the last hopes for this Mission district landmark.

Redstone Labor Temple’s longtime landlord, David Lucchesi, has until the end of February to accept the final offer of $18 million from the Mission Economic Development Agency. The nonprofit housing developer offered the bid in December.

During a news conference and rally January 12 in the Lab, an experimental art space inside Redstone, about 20 people gathered to show their support. Local musicians sang songs denouncing gentrification and displacement.

Ironically, representatives from the San Francisco Labor Council were no-shows, despite the building’s rich labor history.

Gary Gregerson, a tenant and president of the Redstone Labor Temple Association, has rented his music studio in the building since 1995, and for nearly 25 years he has seen new tenants arrive from shuttered San Francisco community spaces.

“It’s a nationwide struggle,”

Gregerson said during the rally at 2940 16th Street. “It’s one of the last places [like it] in the city, definitely in the Mission. That’s what we’re fighting for. That’s why we need to keep this building here.

We have a wide range of artists, nonprofits, and small businesses here. We’re gonna need the whole city to make this happen.”

Even if MEDA buys the building, additional funding will be necessary. With an appraised value of $17 million, the fourstory building was put up for sale last year for nearly $25 million, Mission Local reported.

In a statement, MEDA said it is still negotiating the purchase price for the Redstone building.

“We are in need of the support of the city, foundations, and the community to make this deal a reality,” MEDA spokesman Christopher Gil wrote in an email.

“Our community-based organization is steadfastly working on solutions for cultural placekeeping in the Mission and throughout San Francisco. In addition to keeping cultural institutions in their current homes, MEDA will have nonprofit/art spaces in its three new constructions in the Mission: 681 Florida Street; 1990 Folsom Street; and 2205 Mission Street.”

Photographer Rick Gerharter, who called Redstone a “godsend” after he was evicted from a Bernal

Heights live-work building 15 years ago, hopes MEDA and the landlord make a deal.

“I hope they can come to an agreement to upgrade the building and below-market rate [rents] can continue,” said Gerharter, a gay man and longtime freelance photographer for the Bay Area Reporter. “I hope that it becomes a safe, modern, functioning, nonprofit home for the people. We’re really a community center.”

Twenty years ago, the Redstone Labor Temple Association was formed by tenants to defend against the threat of predatory developers seeking to profit by clearing the building of its lowbudget advocacy organizations and artists, read a statement from the association.

Since September 2018, a GoFundMe page titled “Save Redstone Labor Temple” has raised $6,525 of its $9,500 goal. Additionally, a Change.org petition seeking the support of Mayor London Breed has garnered nearly 600 signatures of its 1,000 goal.

“We need the word out to people and put pressure on city officials,” Gregerson said.

Isabella Torres is a member of El/La Para TransLatinas, a transgender support group whose office is in the Redstone. Torres, a Colombian native, along with about 30 others belong to the group, many of whom are seeking

t

Rick Gerharter

Isabella Torres, right, speaks of the importance of El/La Para TransLatinas for Spanish-speaking transgender people during a musical/social event informing the community about the status of the Redstone Labor Temple Building, where the organization has its meeting rooms.

refuge from their transphobic hometowns.

“We’re not just protecting bricks and a building, we’re defending people,” Torres said during the rally. “It’s the place where we can get something to eat. It’s a place to stay when it’s cold. We can get our medications when we need them. It’s become a home and safe space.”

Local LGBT organizations who used to call the Redstone home include the GLBT Historical Society; the Sisters of

Perpetual Indulgence, who had a storage space there; and Theatre Rhinoceros.

Scott Peterson has his Archive Productions there. He has recorded thousands of LGBT events over the years.

Built in 1914 by the San Francisco Labor Council, The Redstone building was the epicenter of organizing for the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. According its website, after 50 years See page 9 >>

Sparse turnout for info on Castro film shoot

by David-Elijah Nahmod

C

BS Films will shoot scenes of a new movie, “The Phone,” in the Castro next week, but residents

didn’t seem too concerned about the project as only a half-dozen showed up at a recent informational meeting.

The movie will film at the intersection of Sanchez and 16th streets

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Representatives from the movie’s locations department joined city officials January 9 at the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial branch library for the meeting. They discussed how filming would impact normal neighborhood activities such as parking, how residents could get to and from their homes, as well as how the filming would affect students at Sanchez Elementary School, which is located at 325 Sanchez Street.

Speaking at the meeting were Manijeh Fata of the San Francisco Film Commission, along with Sharlene Duale, the film’s co-locations manager, and Felix Gehm, the film’s second unit location manager.

“Our office is working with the CBS Films production of ‘The Phone,’ and they’re shooting for approximately 30 days in San Francisco,” Fata said. “It’s kind of a big deal that they’re shooting entirely in the city – the rewards out of it are hiring a lot of locals.”

Duale spoke about how happy she was to have the production in the Bay Area because a number of locals were working on the film’s crew. She described the movie as “a comedy about what can happen when you love your phone more than anything else in your life.”

Gehm told people what they could expect in the Castro.

“During the actual filming of the scenes the actors may walk across the street, and we may have the camera in the middle of the street, so we’re going to have a street closure on Sanchez, but if neighbors want to get into their driveways or garages, we’re going to be able to facilitate that,” said Gehm. “We’re going to have local traffic only, and that’ll be at 16th and Sanchez going toward Market Street.”

Neighborhood resident Tom Wineland asked when the main shooting would be.

“The rough schedule is partly in the day and partly in the night,” said Gehm. “We’ll be permitting from 10 a.m. until midnight at the latest.”

Rick Gerharter

Felix Gehm, left, and Sharlene Duale, location managers for CBS Films’ “The Phone,” spoke during a January 9 community meeting about the filming arrangements in the Castro.

Wineland, who said that he lives directly across from Sanchez Elementary School, pointed out that there’s a great deal of traffic congestion at the school every day.

“Unfortunately, a little girl got hit by a car trying to run to her mom’s vehicle,” he said. “This happened about a week ago, and the reason I bring that up is because the school needs to be notified.”

“We’re not going to be blocking traffic on 16th Street,” Gehm said.

“We’re not over by the Sanchez school so we’re not going to be interrupting traffic. There will be some officers there, who will keep the intersection of 16th and Sanchez flowing.”

Duale added that the school would be notified about the shoot.

“If there are any residents here concerned about the parking, we’ve asked the production to provide parking to residents that are displaced,” said Fata. “I don’t think anything has been solidified as to where that would be, but it would be another lot where you could park if you were displaced by the filming.”

“And you can email us at sflocations2019@gmail.com. That will be on the notification letter,” said Duale.

“Filming can be a little disruptive

in a neighborhood while it’s going on,” pointed out Richard Magary of Castro Merchants, a business group.

“These folks live this and know how to deal with it and, almost without exception, I have found that they really take care of business. They get their shots, they get what they came for, but they also respect the neighborhood. They do thoughtful placement of where their trucks and equipment are. The police know how to let residents in, so make sure you show your ID.” “The team that works here locally wants to make friends in the neighborhood,” said Duale. “We want to continue to work here, we want to return, so we want to work with any of your concerns.”

Fata suggested that if any concerns come up during the filming, location managers were the people to speak to.

“I thought the meeting was great,” Wineland, a gay man, told the Bay Area Reporter. “I think they answered everyone’s questions. They were very professional.”

Daniel Harley, who is also gay, was pleased with the meeting.

“It went really well,” he said. “I’m more interested in small businesses and how they will benefit from the filming.”t

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<< Open Forum

t Berkeley needs to improve ped safety

4 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Volume 49, Number 3 January 17-23, 2019 www.ebar.com PUBLISHER Michael M. Yamashita Thomas E. Horn, Publisher Emeritus (2013) Publisher (2003 – 2013) Bob Ross, Founder (1971 – 2003) NEWS EDITOR Cynthia Laird ARTS EDITOR Roberto Friedman BARTAB EDITOR & EVENTS LISTINGS EDITOR Jim Provenzano ASSISTANT EDITORS Matthew S. Bajko • Alex Madison CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Ray Aguilera • Tavo Amador • Race Bannon Erin Blackwell • Roger Brigham Brian Bromberger • Victoria A. Brownworth Brent Calderwood • Philip Campbell Heather Cassell • Belo Cipriani • Dan Renzi Christina DiEdoardo • Richard Dodds Michael Flanagan • Jim Gladstone David Guarino • Liz Highleyman Brandon Judell • John F. Karr • Lisa Keen Matthew Kennedy • Joshua Klipp David Lamble • Max Leger Michael McDonagh • Juanita MORE! David-Elijah Nahmod • Paul Parish Sean Piverger • Lois Pearlman Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota • Bob Roehr Adam Sandel • Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro Gwendolyn Smith • Tony Taylor • Sari Staver Jim Stewart • Sean Timberlake • Andre Torrez Ronn Vigh • Charlie Wagner • Ed Walsh Cornelius Washington • Sura Wood ART DIRECTION Max Leger PRODUCTION/DESIGN Ernesto Sopprani PHOTOGRAPHERS Jane Philomen Cleland • FBFE Rick Gerharter • Gareth Gooch Jose Guzman-Colon • Rudy K. Lawidjaja Georg Lester • Dan Lloyd • Jo-Lynn Otto Rich Stadtmiller • Kelly Sullivan • Fred Rowe Steven Underhil • Dallis Willard • Bill Wilson ILLUSTRATORS & CARTOONISTS Paul Berge • Christine Smith ADVERTISING/ADMINISTRATION Colleen Small Bogitini VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING Scott Wazlowski – 415.829.8937 NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE Rivendell Media – 212.242.6863

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B

erkeley must stop procrastinating and start implementing its Vision Zero program to reduce traffic deaths and injuries.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been nine pedestrian-auto collisions in the city, resulting in 11 injured pedestrians, according to the Berkeley Police Department.

The most seriously injured were Berkeley school board president Judy Appel and her wife, attorney Alison Bernstein. A car struck them as they walked across Martin Luther King Jr. Way just after midnight January 5.

Nearly two weeks later, both women remain in critical but stable condition at Highland Hospital in Oakland.

Many community members are concerned about the women’s condition, and yet Berkeley police seem to be blaming pedestrians for their own injuries. In a January 9 report on KTVU Fox News, Officer Byron White, public information officer for the police department, said, “Regardless of whose fault or who you want to point the finger at for the blame, the responsibility for your safety is on each one of us.”

This is unacceptable, as Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin told us. For his part, White clarified to us that his intent “was not to place blame on anyone when I made those comments.”

The city adopted its Vision Zero plan last year, but has been slow to implement it. With a spate of pedestrian injuries just three weeks into the new year, it’s urgent that the city get the plan started, and we’re glad Arreguin and lesbian City

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin

Councilwoman Lori Droste have made it a 2019 priority. The core principles of Vision Zero are: no loss of life is acceptable; prevent fatalities and serious, lifealtering injuries; humans make mistakes; and foster a culture of traffic safety. While we don’t know the details of the AppelBernstein collision, we do know the driver was an 81-year-old Berkeley man who is reportedly cooperating with authorities.

Vision Zero calls for city engineers to determine whether streets should be redesigned or include new safety features, such as traffic calming, reduced speed limits, or better nighttime lighting. The plan’s report noted that the city has converted existing

streetlights to LED, but more streetlights could help reduce traffic collisions, especially those involving pedestrians and cyclists.

According to the Vision Zero report, two pedestrians were killed and 33 people were seriously injured in 2016. In 2015, two people died and 39 people were seriously injured. Going back to 2012, the report indicates that the city had between 25 and 33 serious injuries a year. The city has budgeted $1 million in its 2018-2019 spending plan for traffic calming projects.

Education is an important component of Vision Zero. To that end, public campaigns to obey the posted speed limit and, as the report stated, “yielding and anti-speed campaigns – emphasize responsibility of those imposing more risk on vulnerable roadway users.” This means a campaign aimed at drivers, rather than inartfully seeming to blame pedestrians.

This week, gay state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced legislation that would prioritize the creation of “complete streets.” They include safer and better designed sidewalks, bikeways, and crosswalks on state highways that run through cities, towns, and neighborhoods. In San Francisco, that would apply to Van Ness Avenue and 19th Avenue. While Senate Bill 127 would not affect MLK Way in Berkeley, Wiener and Vision Zero share the same goals.

Berkeley, San Francisco, and every other city and town must make safer streets a priority, especially since drivers must share the roads with in increasing amount of pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, and other modes of transportation. t

Support needed for LGBT refugees

by Junior Mayema

F

leeing persecution from homophobic countries can be the most life-risking experience and the wisest decision at the same time. You might not find acceptance after you reach a country and a city where you were supposed to integrate and secure a supportive community.

In this essay I will focus on inclusion, integration, community support, the international LGBT community, homonationalism, and xenophobia.

I am originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I fled the Congo in 2010 to South Africa after receiving several homophobic death threats including by family members. How can one live in a place where people want you killed? It was a tough decision to makem, but I had to leave for the sake of my own life and security. Being in South Africa didn’t end my persecution. There was homophobia, xenophobia, and racism there.

That is where I experienced racism for the first time. There was not inclusion or integration whatsoever; there was the same language that is heard nowadays in America: “Go back to your own country, go makwerekwere [foreigner or alien].” So Passop, an organization that helps refugee and asylum seekers in South Africa, started its LGBT refugees and asylum seekers project. It’s where, as a volunteer, I tried to create community support and networking among LGBT refugees and asylum seekers.

Integration is the hardest thing for any immigrant, including LGBTs. Nationalism is thriving in the western world and anybody who doesn’t look or speak like the rest is considered an alien, a foreigner, and you’re told to go back to wherever you came from. It doesn’t matter whether the person is gay or not and that is when homonationalism comes in.

Integration is a key element, for in a society without integration it is very hard to make friends, create community support, learn the language properly, and, in the end, become a citizen too.

Community support is what is offered by, and in, the community to persons who need it most. In the context of my essay, I will focus on unaccompanied, or solo, LGBT refugees and asylum seekers. Most LGBT people fleeing persecution often reach the country of asylum alone without family because in some cases, or even in many cases, their family is part of the problem, which means they are homophobic or transphobic. So these LGBT refugees and

Courtesy Facebook

Junior Mayema

asylum seekers need support with material resources, such as housing facilities; employment services; health care; and education.

Many of us come here without knowing where to start, in some instances with no employment background, health issues, and language barriers. So we need support for the LGBT community.

The LGBT community is international because LGBT people live in every country so there is no founded reason to nationalize being gay. Restricting LGBT rights only on a national level completely destroys our advocacy work at the United Nations and among global LGBT rights organizations. We LGBT people have an international obligation to stick together, work together, and advance LGBT rights all around the world. That is the only way we can achieve equality. We are all citizens of the world, according to the universal principle of human rights.

Homonationalism and xenophobia are the biggest threats to the global LGBT fight. I will start by defining what homonationalism means and then I will define what xenophobia means and talk about my own personal experience in the San Francisco Bay Area as a gay gender-nonconforming person from Africa.

Homonationalism, according to Jasbir Puar in “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times,” is an understanding and enactment of homosexual acts, identities, and relationships that incorporates them as not only

compatible with but even exemplary democratic ethics and citizenships. As gay people have become “normalized” in the American consciousness through recent historical milestones like the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2010 and legalization of same-sex marriage in June 2015 in my first year in America, these victories have created space for the homonationalist American, which involves conceptually realigning the ideas invested within the realm of LGBT activism to fit the goals and ideologies of neoliberalism and far-right. This reframing is used primarily to justify and rationalize racist and xenophobic perspectives.

The word xenophobia means having or showing a dislike or prejudice against people from other countries.

Since Donald Trump became president, I have never seen as much hate being meted out against immigrants, let alone LGBT refugees and asylum seekers.

I have been forced out of work simply because I am a gay immigrant. I have been forced out of housing, harassed at school, and treated like a social outcast everywhere I go. I have a case pending with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. I have been a target of police surveillance for months.

It has been like a living hell in a sanctuary city. Most of my harassers happen to be gay men or transgender women. I think it is because my gender transcends the male and female gender binary. Homonationalism is real and I see it everyday. The last time that I went to socialize in a gay-friendly environment I was verbally assaulted simply because I was talking to a handsome gay American. I tried to defend myself and then those gay men threatened to call the police on me and escorted me outside.

The reason why I am writing this is because we, as LGBT people, shouldn’t be fighting each other or hating each other because that is what our homophobic enemies want from us. They want to divide us in order to conquer. Let’s stop bringing each other down. Let’s focus on the real enemies. We cannot claim to be human rights advocates while being racists at the same time.

Let us be the change we want to see in the world. t Junior Mayema lives in San Francisco.

t

Politics>>

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 5

GOP CA legislators do well on LGBT scorecard

by Matthew S. Bajko

A

n overwhelming majority of Republican legislators in California earned scores of 50 percent or more on the 2018 Legislative Scorecard compiled by Equality California, the statewide LGBT advocacy group.

Most members of the GOP caucus in the Legislature received scores of 60 percent or higher; none received a zero score. It was a significant turnaround from 2017.

That year nearly all the Republican lawmakers scored 50 percent or below, with the majority receiving scores of 30 percent or less. Two had zero scores.

But in 2018, a total of 30 Republicans garnered scores of 50 percent or higher. Of those, five earned scores in the 70 percent threshold, four in the 80s, and one in the 90s. Former Assemblywoman Catharine Baker (RDublin) for a second time earned a 100 percent score, the lone GOPer to do so.

“We saw improvements for the Republicans. We had four members of the Assembly score over 80, which is a really marked improvement,” said EQCA Executive Director Rick Zbur, who shared the scorecard with the Bay Area Reporter ahead of its official release Thursday.

He noted that, when he joined EQCA four years ago, “having Republicans who got up to 40 or 50 percent was pretty rare. We have hopes that the Republicans will continue to improve.”

Log Cabin Republicans California Chairman Matthew Craffey, while “definitely excited” to see the improved scores by GOP lawmakers, told the B.A.R. that it reflects what he has personally experienced in recent years not only within Republican politics but also among his socially conservative family and friends.

“Some needed time to come to terms with what being a truly good Christian looked like when it came to how they viewed the LGBT community,” said Craffey. “Others, who perhaps haven’t always voted in defense of LGBT equality have often been supportive of the people in their lives who are LGBT, but until recently, felt their constituencies wouldn’t allow them to vote that way without serious repercussions.”

While EQCA endorsed her re-election bid last year, Baker fell short and was ousted from office by Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (DOrinda). Baker had been the lone GOP state lawmaker from the Bay Area, and her defeat could negatively impact seeing Republicans support LGBT legislation going forward, said Zbur.

“Losing Catharine Baker in a pretty purple district in the state, probably the most purple district, was a loss from the perspective of the fact her leadership did cause other Republicans to follow her more than not in supporting our bills,” said Zbur. “It is a bit of a loss in improving the scores of GOP members. She had put pressure on other Republicans to vote on our bills.”

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Pedestrian collisions

From page 1

creating an action plan to accelerate projects focused on pedestrian safety including street engineering improvements, traffic law enforcement, and education.

Longtime Berkeley resident Mark Chekal-Bain’s teenage son was severely injured last year after being hit by an Uber driver while crossing the street in

Barry Schneider Attorney at Law Courtesy Maienschein for Assembly

Republican Assemblyman Brian Maienschein scored 93 percent on Equality California’s 2018 Legislative Scorecard.

Assemblyman Brian Maienschein (R-San Diego), who earned a 100 percent on the 2017 Legislative Scorecard, fell to a score of 93 percent last year. He lost points for voting absent on Assembly Bill 2119, which ensured that transgender youth in the state’s foster care system have access to appropriate health care. EQCA scores an absent vote similar to if the lawmaker had voted no.

“It would be hard for anyone to believe it wasn’t a priority bill for us,” noted Zbur. “We were heavily lobbying for that legislation.”

EQCA’s political action committee rescinded its endorsement of Maienschein due to his not supporting the bill. Despite a strong challenge for his seat by lesbian real estate agent Sunday Gover, who had initially shared EQCA’s endorsement in the race, Maienschein was re-elected in November.

Another GOP lawmaker who has consistently scored well on EQCA’s scorecard is Assemblyman Chad Mayes (R-Yucca Valley), who for the second year in a row scored 80 percent. During his freshman year in the Legislature in 2015, Mayes earned a score of 60 percent, but then dropped to 40 percent in 2016.

“Chad Mayes’ score has been improving over time and, I think, he views himself as a supporter of LGBTQ civil rights and social justice,” said Zbur.

The southern California Republicans are ones to watch this year to see if they earn 100 percent scores from EQCA. Its legislative package this year will feature bills requiring LGBTQ cultural competency for teachers and amending the state’s statutory rape laws so that they treat young same-sex couples the same as opposite-sex couples.

As EQCA’s mission becomes “more intersectional,” Zbur noted that it presents a challenge for Republicans earning perfect scores because some of their principles may be “inconsistent” with the legislative priorities of the state’s LGBT community.

The Democrats

On the Democratic side of the aisle, all eight Legislative LGBT Caucus

front of his house. Chekal-Bain, a gay man, watched a KTVU Fox 2 report following the news of Appel and Bernstein that discussed the many pedestrians hit in January. In the newscast, White was quoted as saying, “Regardless of whose fault or who you want to point the finger at for the blame, the responsibility for your safety is on each one of us.”

Chekal-Bain felt White was blaming pedestrians for the collisions.

Courtesy AP

Democratic Assemblyman Jim Cooper

members earned perfect scores last year while four Assembly members and two Senators fell short. Of the quartet in the lower chamber, the only one to be endorsed last year was Assemblyman Jim Cooper (D-Elk Grove). (The two senators were not up for re-election.)

He earned a score of 93 percent for voting absent on a resolution apologizing to the state’s LGBT community for past discriminatory laws. Because it wasn’t an EQCA-sponsored bill, it didn’t impact his being endorsed, explained Zbur.

Former Democratic Governor Jerry Brown received a score of 85 percent in his last year of his fourth term in office after vetoing two of EQCA’s bills. As the B.A.R. had noted last fall, it was the first time in five years that he had done so.

EQCA’s scoring for the 2018 Legislative Scorecard differed for senators and Assembly members due to the Senate taking up more bills last year than the lower chamber. To download a copy online, visit https://www.eqca. org/category/publications/.

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Lesbian appointed to SF library panel

San Francisco Mayor London Breed has appointed lesbian arts professional Connie Wolf to the city’s Library Commission. She will serve through January 15, 2022, the remainder of the four-year term of former commissioner Lee Munson, who died in the summer of 2017.

Wolf is a longtime former head of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in the city and left that job in 2012 to serve as the John and Jill Freidenrich director of Stanford University’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts. She now works as a consulting program director for the arts program at Stanford Hospital and serves on the board of the federal Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture along San Francisco’s northern waterfront.

She will serve alongside lesbian library Commissioner Zoe Dunning, a longtime LGBT rights advocate and retired U.S. Navy officer. Dunning’s term expires on the same day as that of Wolf’s term. t

Political Notes, the notebook’s online companion, will return Monday, January 28.

“The PIO is blaming individual pedestrians. He’s the spokesman for the City of Berkeley. To blame the pedestrians instead of looking inward to make the streets safer, it was appalling,” said Chekal-Bain, 51, adding that residents in his neighborhood have been advocating for funding for traffic calming resources for his street that he said sees more than 3,000 cars a day.

There has been an increase in traffic See page 6 >>

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<< Communitty News

6 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

t

Visually impaired artist pays tribute to Muni operators

by Belo Cipriani

S

ome people prefer to communicate with words, while others find images more telling. For gay San Francisco resident Kurt Schwartzmann, drawing has always been a way to share his thoughts with the world.

“I’ve always loved to draw,” said Schwartzmann. “My parents – retired educators – encouraged my artistic abilities.”

Schwartzmann, 54, used his creative talents to launch a 20-year career as a professional pastry chef and baker. While things were good for some time, it all changed in 2006 when CMV retinitis, a complication of AIDS, attacked his left eye. The virus severed the optic nerve, and slowly and painlessly, he began to lose his vision.

“One day the doorbell rang. I went to answer and realized that I could not see anything through the peephole with my left eye,” he said.

Life became even more complicated when, in 2008, he lost his housing and found himself living on the streets.

“A Muni operator showed me a great kindness,” Schwartzmann said.

“She allowed me to board her bus and sleep when I had nowhere else to turn, even though I had no money to pay the fare.”

The display of compassion the Muni driver showed touched Schwartzmann and the memory stayed with him.

A few years later, Schwartzmann was back on his feet. With his troubles behind him, he finally had the opportunity to reconnect with his art. Though, it was his mate, Bruce Schwartzmann, who gave him the big nudge.

“My partner suggested that I take a printmaking class,” he said.

“When I inquired ‘Why?’ he replied, ‘So you can make our wedding invitations.’”

“So,” Schwartzmann continued, “I added printmaking to my artistic repertoire. We got married in 2013.”

As Schwartzmann reconnected with his craft, he also realized he

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Pedestrian collisions

From page 5

in residential areas, Chekal-Bain said, and it’s due, in large part, to ridehailing companies like Uber and Lyft whose drivers use Google Maps and Waze driving apps that often lead drivers to less-congested neighborhood streets.

“The city has not been doing

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Art: Courtesy Kurt Schwartzmann

A panel from Kurt Schwartzmann’s “Yellow Line” exhibit.

needed to talk to someone about his visual impairment and turned to the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco.

“I was looking for a therapist that I could relate to, one that could help me with situations and language associated with loss of vision,” he said.

Although Schwartzmann does not use a white cane, or any other mobility aid for the blind, he found it necessary to cover his blind eye.

“I choose to wear a black eye patch,” he explained, “to communicate to the world that I can’t see on my left side.”

Schwartzmann clarified that by covering his eye, if he happened to enough to enforce traffic speed laws, distracted driving laws, enforcement for stopping at stop signs, and appropriate traffic engineering,” he said.

When White spoke with the Bay Area Reproter, he clarified his statement saying, “My intent was not to place blame on anyone when I made those comments. In that same interview I talked about how drivers can improve the situation. The responsibility lies with each one of us, not on any particular group. There is certainly blame passed around to drivers, bicyclist, and pedestrians.”

White added that some factors contributing to the pedestrian-auto collisions this month are inclement weather and less daylight. In general, he said, tourism and the high number of pedestrians and student commuters from UC Berkeley are also a part of the problem. He said that last January, there were 15 collisions involving pedestrians and a total of 122 in 2018.

“There are a lot of different contributing factors to this,” White said. “It’s something each one of us can take a look at ourselves and say what can we be doing better to improve traffic safety.”

Arreguin, in an interview with the B.A.R., disagreed with this statement.

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bump someone with the left side of his body, the individual would automatically know the reason for the abrupt collision. However, some reactions to the patch have given him much to talk about.

“Sometimes,” he said, “insensitive people call me a pirate. This used to bother me, but now I just answer: ‘I am not a pirate, I am an artist.’

“As for my patch,” he continued, “a friend of mine and I designed it to fit my face. We created it out of plastic mesh and fabric. The ones they sell at drug stores are too big and uncomfortable.”

But while his lack of sight with one eye has presented him with some unpleasant social interactions, when it comes to his drawing, Schwartzmann states that it has helped with

Courtesy Facebook

Alison Bernstein, left, and her wife, Judy Appel, were seriously injured when a vehicle hit them while they were crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley January 5.

The mayor said, “We, as a city, are responsible for the safety of our pedestrians. We can’t create environments that are dangerous for people to cross the street.”

When asked if he felt the city was slow in prioritizing initiatives aimed at pedestrian safety, Arreguin replied,“I think so. The recent incidents have highlighted the importance of prioritizing this and moving quickly. We don’t want anyone to be seriously injured or killed.”

Improvements coming

Some immediate improvements the mayor is working on are installing a traffic control device known as a HAWK beacon at the intersection of Virginia and Sacramento streets and plans to install a street light there. On January 3, a 60-year-old Berkeley resident was taken to a hospital for treatment of serious injuries after being hit by a car while crossing the street.

Berkeley’s 2018-2019 fiscal budget includes $1 million in traffic calming projects. Arreguin said he is working with lesbian Berkeley City Councilwoman Lori Droste, a close friend of Appel’s, on Vision Zero, an initiative introduced by Droste that set a goal of zero road fatalities and serious injuries by 2028. It was unanimously approved by the City Council in 2018.

Droste told the B.A.R. that the City Council ranked implementation of that policy as its top priority to staff for 2019. It is a national initiative that

his technique.

“Having 2D vision,” he said, “flattens my perspective of the world and makes it easier to transfer it to a flat piece of paper.”

“To me,” he continued, “drawing is like dismantling a composition into its components and reproducing them on my sketchpad to recreate the whole.”

On January 10, the Lighthouse opened an exhibit of Schwartzmann’s collection of drawings: “Yellow Line: A Tribute to SF Muni Operators.”

The well-attended event showcased 64 drawings that pay homage to the Muni drivers that he came in contact with while drawing the series over a three-month period.

The “Yellow Line” collection is simple, yet also complex. It possesses impressionist elements, but with a playful and primitive twist. Schwartzmann’s work is available for purchase on his online store at www.yellowlineart.ecwid.com. To reach him, you can visit his artist website at www.YellowLineArt.com. The “Yellow Line” exhibit will be at the Lighthouse, 1155 Market Street, 10th floor, until May, according to his website. t Belo Cipriani is an award-winning author and prize-winning journalist. His new book, “Firsts: Coming of Age Stories by People with Disabilities,” is now available. Learn more at www.olebbooks.com.

has been adopted in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

“Jesse and I were talking about an action plan to move forward Vision Zero right before the news of Judy and Alison,” Droste said. “There is always a sense of urgency, but now there is even more of a greater sense of urgency on pedestrian safety.”

Vision Zero focuses on preventing fatalities and serious injury by designing streets that result in people driving more slowly, and it factors in human error. The key elements of the policy are engineering, enforcement, and education.

“We need to do a better job of not just designing streets to make them safer for pedestrians, but to increase enforcement so that drivers are following traffic laws,” Arreguin said.

Beth Thomas, principal planner in Berkeley’s Transportation Division, said the division is “taking this very seriously” and has already completed some street improvements with others in the pipeline.

The department has been working on an update to the “Pedestrian Master Plan,” which was adopted in June 2010. It identifies the city’s intersections and streets that have had the most fatal and serious injury pedestrian collisions. It revealed that 14 percent of Berkeley’s streets account for 93 percent of the pedestrian fatalities and severe injuries.

“We are developing a list of prioritized projects for these areas,” said Thomas. “We are also working with a consulting company to develop a Vision Zero action plan that will be established by a city task force with representatives from key departments.”

The task force will get underway this month and the update of the Pedestrian Master Plan is expected to be adopted this summer.

Thomas mentioned that construction to narrow Ellsworth Street where it approaches Bancroft Way to help visibility of the bikeway on Bancroft Way was completed a couple of weeks ago.

Additionally, as part of the Safe Routes to School program at Sylvia Mendez Elementary, sidewalk extensions have been installed at key crossings on Shattuck Avenue. The division is also nearing the end of its designs on the Ninth Street pathway project, which provides an off-street pathway See page 7 >>

t

Community News>>

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 7

SF bridge club has success, offers lessons

by Sari Staver

W

hen a handful of gay men got together to play bridge regularly in 1978, they had no idea the group would be setting attendance records four decades later.

That’s the success story of Quick Tricks, a Castro-based bridge club that typically attracts over 150 players and students to its Monday night game in the basement of Most Holy Redeemer Church.

“I didn’t think the game would survive the AIDS epidemic,” said Jim Leuker, 72, one of the club’s founders, who left a successful career in technology to teach bridge.

Leuker, who has seen the world on six-star cruise ships as a bridge teacher, attributed the club’s success to its teaching program.

“No question that’s why we are doing so well,” he said.

For the past 10 years, two longtime players, David Fielder, 69, and John Corey, 59, have taught Quick Trick’s annual series of bridge lessons, known as Easy Bridge. Fielder, a retired theater manager, and Corey, a staff attorney with the California Supreme Court, met at Quick Tricks two decades ago, when they became bridge partners and, later, a couple, marrying in 2013.

Fielder said the class is based on a nationally recognized teaching method that allows people to feel comfortable and enjoy the game.

Under their tutelage, the classes have attracted a growing number of students, often recent retirees who learned the game at college and now have time to return, and neophytes looking for a new hobby.

This year’s series of 15 weekly lessons, held on consecutive Monday nights, begins Monday, January 28, at 6:30 p.m. While one doesn’t need to attend with a partner, it is necessary to sign up in advance to reserve a slot.

Learning bridge is often more than what new students have bargained for, said Fielder in a recent interview.

Many students seem to think, “Oh, it’s a card game, I can learn this in a week,” he said, laughing.

Easy Bridge allows the students to

<<

Sari Staver

Bridge teachers and students are ready for Quick Tricks’ Easy Bridge lessons, and include, in back row, from left, David Fielder (teacher), Jim Leuker (former teacher and founder, Quick Tricks), Mark Sawchuck, Rob Saken, Eric Bishop, and Marc Lorenzen.

In middle, from left, are John Corey (teacher), Bill Lynch, Wayne Goodman, and David Sweet. In front, from left, are Janis Greenberg and Megan Sanguinetti.

start playing from the very first lesson, said Fielder. People “don’t want to sit in a boring lecture,” he said. “They are there to play, and we get that started immediately.”

Although most clubs are filled with retirees, there are always a few techies at club games.

Zack Karlsson, 41, a gay man who is founder and chief executive officer of start-up EdTech, has played at Quick Tricks and is now going back for lessons with his partner, Derek Shockey, 35, a software engineer.

Karlsson, a veteran of the gaming industry, said he believes bridge

would appeal to “anyone who enjoys strategic thinking in games.”

“It’s one of the more complex games I’ve played, but the ramp-up is not intimidating,” he said. “It’s got a very high top-end of the learning curve such that you can spend a nearly infinite amount of time learning to master it in new and interesting ways.”

Easy Bridge instructor Corey said those who are “logical and analytical” can succeed at bridge.

“It involves making a plan and accomplishing it,” he said. “If you can do that, you can play bridge.”

Corey touted the game as more than just a place to compete, but to meet people one might not meet elsewhere.

Nationally, the game of bridge is often described as “dying” as a result of its original stalwarts, middle-class women, entering the workforce.

But in the Bay Area, the game seems to be “doing quite well,” said Kim Fanady, a straight ally who manages Quick Tricks. Fanady, an attorney in private practice, attributed the club’s success in part to the quality of the teachers.

“Quick Tricks is a huge success story,” she said, pointing to statistics that indicate that the number of people coming to the club has doubled in

the past 10 years.

Dianne Barton-Paine, whose family owned bridge clubs beginning in the 1930s, made a name for herself nationally, when at age 18, she became the youngest person ever to be named a “life master,” a title that indicates a player has achieved a certain level of expertise. She appeared on the 1960s game show, “What’s My Line?”, shortly after she received that honor.

Barton-Paine, a 75-year-old lesbian who directed games at Quick Tricks for two decades before starting her own bridge club 10 years ago, has also seen record attendance at her club, known as PIPS (https://concordiabridgeclub. com/), which meets on Thursday afternoons at St. Mary’s Cathedral.

Barton-Paine, who also works full time directing bridge tournaments nationwide, is “just too busy” to play much, she said.

“I get in maybe one or two games a year,” she said. “When I retire, maybe I’ll have time to play.” t For more information on Quick Tricks or the Easy Bridge lessons, visit http://www.quicktricks.org.

Games cost $6 per person. If you don’t have a partner but would like to play, contact the club’s partnership coordinator, Bruce Osterwei, at Bruceo.bridge@gmail.com.

RHODA GOLDMAN PL AZA

Pedestrian collisions

From page 6

to connect pedestrians and cyclists to the Emeryville Greenway.

Future projects include an installation of sidewalk bulb outs at the intersection along Sacramento Street in the vicinity of the North Berkeley BART station. As well, a pedestrian hybrid beacon will be installed at Virginia and Sacramento streets, with plans to start construction in 2020.

When asked if the Transportation Division is given sufficient funding to be able to meet its goals, Thomas did not directly answer the question, but said, “I think it’s a statewide problem.

California’s Active Transportation Program, used to fund pedestrian and bike safety projects, is really over subscribed. Applications for the program ask for far more money than it has available.”

Thomas added that she feels the city has been “proactive” in mitigating this issue.

At the state level, gay state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced Senate Bill 127, or the Complete Streets Bill, Monday, January 14. The bill requires Caltrans to make state highways that run through cities and towns safer for people walking, biking, or using transit.

It is meant to enforce a complete streets policy that was adopted by Caltrans in 2008. Wiener said Caltrans has not followed through with its goal of complete streets.

See page 10 >>

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<< Community News

8 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

ICA

Alice Griffith Apartments 6 one-bedroom and 5 two-bedroom Affordable Rental Units available at 2800 Arelious Walker Drive, San Francisco, CA 94124.

Bare Chest Calendar raises $200K for PRC

Rents range from $1,351-$1,504 per month.

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Application information found on SF Housing Portal DAHLIA at housing.sfgov.org Applications due by 5pm on January 29, 2019. Please contact Alice Griffith Apartments for building information at (844) 276-1989 or alicegriffithapts.com Units available through the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure and are subject to monitoring and other restrictions.

Visit www.sfmohcd.org for program information.

t

by David-Elijah Nahmod

B

are Chest Calendar’s class of 2019 joined executives from beneficiary organization PRC to celebrate the calendar’s publication and to commemorate the $201,261 raised by the calendar’s models.

It was the first time in the long history of the calendar that it broke the $200,000 fundraising mark, officials said.

The party took place Saturday, January 12, at the Lookout.

“One of the best things about the calendar is not just the community involvement, but the brotherhood that gets created in each class,” said Demetri Moshoyannis, PRC’s managing director of strategic partnerships.

Moshoyannis told the Bay Area Reporter that there are 14 people in the current calendar class.

“There are two Mr. Mays plus one lucky 13,” he said.

Some of the calendar men spoke about what the project means to them.

Rick Gerharter

The 2019 Bare Chest Calendar men celebrated their record-breaking fundraising total of $201, 261 during a reception at the Lookout January 12.

“I love that this is an organization that you can be a part of whether you are 25 or 99, as long as you are about helping the community,” gay

27-year-old Andrew Hirst, who is the youngest calendar man, told the B.A.R. “When I started with the calendar, my See page 10 >>

Panel to discuss being queer, API

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Queer yoga starts Thursday

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he Gay Asian Pacific Alliance and Team Q of the United Democratic Club will hold a panel discussion on the queer, Asian-American and immigrant experience Monday, January 28, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, Room 204, 1800 Market Street.

The event is free and open to the public.

Organizers said that Michelle Meow, a lesbian and host of the “Michelle Meow Show,” will moderate an all-queer and all-API panel about the experience of being queer, API, and from an immigrant family. The convergence of these identities was rarely discussed in public, until the controversy during last year’s school board race. While organizers didn’t mention her name, candidate Josephine Zhao was initially criticized for her antitrans comments six years ago about transgender students using school bathrooms of their choice. Last August, she disavowed those remarks and said she was “wrong” on the issue.

But by September, Zhao was found to be telling Chinese voters on a social messaging app that she continued to stand by her prior position. She dropped out of the race.

Scheduled panelists include Cecilia Chung, an immigrant from Hong Kong who is director of strategic projects at the Transgender Law Center and sits on the city’s health commission. Also speaking will be Phil Kim, who ran unsuccessfully for the San Francisco school board last year; Mandy Lee, the former board president of Equality California and daughter of Chinese immigrants; and Cynthia Wang, a business owner and daughter of Chinese immigrants.

All of the speakers have had difficulties in coming out to their families over the years, according to their bios.

Lee was the subject of protest by members of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club after she wrote an opinion piece last fall in the Bay City Beacon defending Zhao, saying she had helped her come out as “a gay Chinese woman” to her first generation immigrant family. The club wanted Lee to resign as EQCA board president, but she did not. Her stint leading the board ended December 31 but she remains on the body as an at-large member.

Kim said that his brothers and

Danny Offer

Mandy Lee

cousins were accepting of his being gay, but his mother, an immigrant from South Korea, was not. Kim continues to work on his relationship with his parents and extended family.

He serves on the board of the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center.

Chung is a nationally recognized civil rights leader. Her bio states that she became estranged from her family due to their lack of understanding about her being a transgender woman. After Chung was stabbed during a sexual assault attempt, her mother came to the hospital and the two reconciled. Her story was part of the four main storylines in the 2017 ABC miniseries “When We Rise.”

Wang was born and raised in the Sunset district and came out to her parents when she was 23, while introducing them to the woman she planned to marry. They spent a few months crying but eventually came around, embracing their daughter’s wedding. Unfortunately, the women are now divorcing and her parents are asking if she might marry a man next.

To RSVP, visit https://www.facebook.com/events/348919759261372/.

MLK Day march

The San Francisco Interfaith Council has announced the annual march for Martin Luther King Jr. Day will take place Monday, January 21, at 11 a.m. in San Francisco.

People should gather at the Caltrain Depot at Fourth and Townsend streets, and march to Yerba Buena Gardens, 750 Howard Street, where there will be an interfaith commemoration ceremony.

For more information, visit http:// www.sfinterfaithcouncil.org/.

Gay yogi Tim Rubel will start his queer yoga class Thursday, January 17, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at Pentacle Coffee and Art Gallery, 64 Sixth Street in San Francisco.

There is a suggested $15 donation (cash preferred) for the Thursday classes, which are open to all levels and identities. Students should bring their own mat.

Rubel received his master’s degree in fine arts from UC Riverside and is currently completing a 500-hour yoga teaching program at the Yoga Room in Berkeley. His yoga Asana practice is informed by the lineage of B.K.S. Iyengar, and from the wisdom of the many teachers he has studied with.

He has been on the dance faculties of several institutions including San Francisco State University, Mt. San Jacinto College, and the Beijing Dance Festival in China.

For more information, visit www. humanshakes.com.

Ma to hold listening tour on housing

Newly sworn in state Treasurer Fiona Ma will embark on a listening tour this week to gather ideas and feedback from the public about how her office can help increase the supply of affordable housing.

Ma will be in San Francisco Friday, January 18, at 3 p.m. at Recology Golden Gate, 900 Seventh Street.

In a news release, Ma noted that the treasurer’s office has two programs that offer assistance to those in need of affordable housing. Both programs promote private investment in affordable rental housing for low-income Californians.

The California Debt Limit Allocation Committee manages the state’s tax-exempt bond allocations for affordable housing projects and the Single-Family First-Time Homebuyer Program. In 2017, the program helped to finance more than 12,000 units of housing, including more than 10,000 affordable units.

Another program offered by the treasurer’s office is the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee, which administers federal and state lowincome housing tax credit programs.

According to Ma, the listening tour will help her understand how to best organize and deploy these and other resources that her office has to offer. It will also allow her to assist Governor Gavin Newsom, who has called for 3.5 million new housing units by 2025.

To RSVP for the event, visit https:// bit.ly/2Rqmkqk. t

t

Sports >>

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 9

SF Fog rugby competes on the pitch

by Roger Brigham

T

he season for rugby, that most aggressively affable of team sports, is upon us. Forget the transient wind, chill, and rain: this is the season for the Fog. As in the San Francisco Fog, an iconic LGBT-centric rugby team that plays in the Division 3 club of the Northern California Rugby Football Union. The Fog started its 2019 season last weekend with a 37-26 home victory over the Aptos Beach Dogs. The season continues this Saturday with a home match against Bay Area Baracus at Minnie and Lovie Ward Recreation Park, 650 Capitol Avenue in San Francisco.

“Fog Rugby was established in 2000 with the mission to be the preeminent rugby club in the world that actively pursues the participation of people of color, gay men, and other groups traditionally underrepresented in rugby,” said Tony Folenta, who is the club’s marketing officer and plays the forward positions of prop and hooker. “Over the years our mission has evolved, but we still hold the original mission in high regard. When the Fog was founded, we were the second gay rugby club in the U.S. after the Washington, D.C. Renegades. Now, there are nearly 30 gay and inclusive rugby clubs across the country, and many more around the world.”

The Fog runs an annual five-week introductory program called “Pathway to Rugby” to acclimate wouldbe players to the sport.

“I joined the Fog in the fall of 2016 through the Pathway to Rugby program,” treasurer Joey Van Matre, who plays the lock position, said.

“I had never played a team sport, and since rugby isn’t as popular of a sport, I figured that I wouldn’t be the only complete novice on the field. Rugby is great because it is equal parts teamwork, skill,

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Redstone tenants

From page 2

as a labor temple, the building became a community center in 1969.

“MEDA stepped in at a good time,” Gregerson told the B.A.R. “There was a cash bid for $21 million from WeWork. I’m really glad that MEDA stepped in and is trying to broker something. If an entity like that came in we would be in trouble.”

Gerharter believes a space like

Tony Folenta

The SF Fog won its season opener last weekend against the Aptos Beach Dogs.

and aggression. If you don’t know the sport, all you see is the aggression and the tackles – but there is so much more happening on the pitch.”

Van Matre said the Fog made his entry into the sport easy.

“The Fog is a really welcoming environment for gay players,” he said. “I would have never felt confident enough, as a total rookie and an out gay man, to join a team that didn’t put inclusion at the forefront.

We have players and coaches from all over the LGBTQ spectrum, as well as many straight allies. Seeing gay players that were in the starting lineup and leaders on the team and gay players who were missing every pass like me on my first day really

gave me confidence that I could be part of the team and grow.”

Folenta, 29, is in his fourth season with the Fog. “A few years ago, I found myself looking for a new social outlet, something healthier than the gay bar scene,” he said. “I had a number of friends on the rugby team, including one of the club directors at the time. I decided to come out to one of the team’s Rugby 101 clinics – a Saturday event where the club would host a rookie clinic with some basic drills before one of the regular matches. Prospective players would warm up with the team, then watch the match, and then join the team at the bar for the post-match social.”

Folenta instantly connected with the sport’s gregarious culture.

Redstone is needed now more than ever.

“There’s a rich history here, certainly for the queer community, for the city, for people’s movements, for working-class people,” Gerharter said. “But given the recent history of displacement in the Mission, I think the support of the building from the city will be there.

“It’s too valuable,” Gerharter added. “There’s fewer and fewer of these spaces left. I do think it will not become a market-rate

office space. I think they may try it, but if you want to do a startup, do it somewhere else. Don’t come to 16th and Mission.”

Gregerson said the association is planning a meeting with District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen soon.t

Observatory, GLBT Historical Society, or the Transgender Law Center in Kanani’s honor. Her memorial will be held on Sunday, January 20, at 4 p.m. at the Women’s Building, 3543 18th Street, in San Francisco.

He was affiliated with Metropolitan Community Church-San Francisco and sang in the choir.

In the Castro, he was well known at both Starbucks and the Cove on Castro.

Bruce was a dear, smart, and caring man who will be missed by his friends and family.

A memorial will be held Saturday, January 26, at 2 p.m. at MCC-SF, 1300 Polk Street.

To sign the petition, visit https://bit.ly/2FqrmfW. To donate, visit https://uk.gofundme. com/save-redstone-labor-temple.

“I fell in love with the camaraderie of the group – everyone felt like family, and was incredibly welcoming to the rookies,” he said. “Prior to the Fog, I’d had zero experience with organized sports, but within a few weeks of coming out to practice, I was thrown into a match.”

Trial by fire, one scrum at a time.

“Rugby is a thrilling sport,” Folenta said. “The pace is quick, the plays are exciting. The team is made up of a diverse group of body types and skills – small, fast guys and big, hard-hitting ones. For someone like me, with a few extra pounds and a stocky frame, rugby let me prove to myself that I could do something I didn’t think I was able to do, and do it with a team at my side, supporting me. Rugby’s an outstanding outlet for releasing stress and building athletic skill. The Fog, in particular, has become my family here in San Francisco.”

Currently the Fog draws about 25 to 30 people to its practices, representing a wide diversity of ages, body types, and skill levels.

“We don’t have a dedicated women’s side, but we do have a few women who regularly practice with the Fog and who play for the Fog in friendly matches,” Folenta said. “While we have women who are part of the team and the Fog family, we haven’t been able to pull together an entire women’s side in many years. The Bay Area has several women’s teams, notably the SF Golden Gate women’s team, and the Berkeley All Blues. We work with our sister teams to ensure that our women players have the opportunity to play, and we also organize friendly matches with men’s teams in our division so that our women ruggers get to play for the Fog. We also have a number of transgender men in the Fog family, and we actively advocate for inclusion of transgender men in men’s rugby.”

The Fog is coached by team veteran Dany Samreth. Fellow Fog veterans Tina Watts coaches the forwards and Paolo Diaz the backs coach.

The most famous Fog veteran, of course, was rugby national champion Mark Bingham, one of the heroes who died during 9/11, crashing a plane into a Pennsylvania field rather than allowing terrorist hijackers crash the plane into an intended target in Washington, D.C. His life has been the subject of documentaries – including “Legacy: The Mark Bingham Story,” released earlier this month and available on YouTube – and the International Gay Rugby biennial world championship, the Bingham Cup, was named after him. Compete magazine gives out an annual Mark Bingham Athlete of the Year Award.

Fog practices are on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. For more information on the Fog and upcoming events, visit http://www.fogrugby. com. t

THIS IS THE

san francisco

Columbariu M Funeral Home and

formerly the Neptune Society

Obituaries >> Kanani Leigh Kauka June 16, 1966 – November 10, 2018 Kanani Kauka was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. She went to Dartmouth College, where she was one of the few out LGBT students and was active in the campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa.

She loved living in California. She and her partner, Laura Thomas, were together for 18 years and married four times. One of Kanani’s great passions was birding, including volunteering with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory for 15 years. She was published in “A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories,” among other collections.

She worked for Lambda Rising bookstore and the Lambda Book Report. For the last 12 years she worked for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer in June and died with Laura holding her hand, surrounded by cats and friends. She is mourned by her partner, Laura; their cats Roswell and Yorvit; many friends and colleagues; and everyone at KFF. Laura has asked people to make donations to the Golden Gate Raptor

Bruce A. “Skip” Purdy July 11, 1954 – January 9, 2019 Bruce A. “Skip” Purdy died January 9, 2019 in San Francisco.

A gay man, he moved to the city in 1978, where he worked at D.C. Typography before retiring.

Bruce was born and raised in the small Ohio town of Hollansburg. He attended Wright State University, majoring in music, from 1972 through 1975.

Not surprisingly, considering his college major, Bruce as an avid music lover, singing in several gay choruses. He was also one of the early members of the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, playing the French horn.

Later in his life, he attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He was a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and did music arrangements.

Anson John Royer Jr. November 1, 1944 – December 4, 2018 It is with great sadness that I announce that my twin brother, Anson John Royer Jr., ended his life on December 4, 2018 at the age of 74. John Royer, as he was known, was in the late stages of emphysema. He was a lifelong smoker.

Every breath was a struggle and painful for him. He also suffered from atrial fibrillation and depression. He is survived by his son, Jeff, and former wife, Joanne. He was a former resident of San Francisco and spent his last years in Costa Mesa, California. He is greatly missed by his twin brother, Jerry Royer, of San Francisco.

We’ve expanded our services and kept the spirit and tradition.

Call (415) 771-0717 One Loraine Court between Stanyan & Arguello

FD 1306

COA 660

<< Community News

10 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Gay chorus plans fire relief benefit concert

by David-Elijah Nahmod

T

he San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus will hold a benefit concert later this month to help those ravaged by the wildfires in northern California.

Proceeds from the Sunday, January 27, event will be split between the North Valley Community Foundation and the music department of Paradise High School. The town of Paradise, in Butte County, was devastated by the Camp Fire last fall.

Shawn Howell, a music teacher at Paradise High School, will appear at the concert.

“The students and teachers are doing as well as can be expected,” Howell told the Bay Area Reporter.

“They are a very resilient group. Ninety percent of our students have lost their homes and have been scattered all over northern California. Many teachers lost their homes as well, and the tremendous sense of loss has been felt throughout the community. Our district’s focus has been to get students back with their teachers, and we have worked diligently to create temporary schools to achieve their goals.”

Paradise High is now based out of Chico, Howell noted.

“We’re running buses to four different towns and cities to get our students to school,” he said. “The ability to have class and feel some sense of normalcy has been very therapeutic

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Leather plaza

From page 1

take over the block of 12th Street between Harrison and Bernice streets.

The supervisors’ land use committee is expected to approve the permit in early February, with the full board following suit shortly thereafter so that work can begin the following month.

“Eagle Plaza is a celebration of our city’s LGBTQ heritage and our leather community, and it will create a vibrant public space in the heart of the Western SOMA neighborhood,” said Breed in a statement to the Bay Area Reporter. “We will be moving this ordinance forward quickly so that we can get this important project moving.”

Local development firm Build Inc. will construct the plaza as part of a $1.5 million in-kind agreement with the city for approval of its mixed-use development across the street from

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Bare Chest Calendar

From page 8

age was 26, which was the same age backward as the oldest member of the 2019 calendar, Joe [Pessa], who was 62.”

The men chosen for the 2019 calendar participated in a variety of fundraising activities last year such as bar crawls and events like Big Muscle Party-Dore Edition.

“All year long these guys are doing fundraising events, and it adds up,” said Moshoyannis. “This is the 35th year of the calendar.”

The final selections for the calendar were made in 2018 at a pageant at DNA Lounge, with 20 candidates vying for 12-14 positions. There were six judges: Hunter Fox, Ed Mathews, Jawn Marques, Will Swagger, Ranj Singh, and John Tomlins, all of whom

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Pedestrian collisions

From page 7

“State-owned highways that run through local communities should be designed for safe use by everyone, not just cars,” said Wiener in a news release. “For too long, Caltrans has talked about complete streets as a policy, but hasn’t actually delivered these improvements

Courtesy SFGMC

Singer-songwriter Bobby Jo Valentine

t

Paradise High School.”

Gay singer-songwriter Bobby Jo Valentine will perform at the benefit.

“When I was putting concerts together to benefit the fires, we [Valentine and Seelig] came up with the idea almost simultaneously,” Valentine told the B.A.R. “We have already raised over $40,000 with the other concerts, and I’m hoping this one brings it up to $50,000 with the audience’s help.

SFGMC has always been on the front lines of unity, peace, and restoration, and we’re definitely on the same team.

The time has come for us to celebrate that together, for a great cause, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.”

In a news release, Seelig said the chorus had been looking for a way to help out.

“When the opportunity came along to present Bobby Jo Valentine, we were thrilled,” Seelig said. “No one will go away untouched by his singing. We are also incredibly happy to be able to assist the music programs of Paradise High School.”

Valentine said that he knows all too well of how much harm the fires can do.

“I was affected by the California fires that swept through Napa and Santa Rosa in 2017,” he recalled. “I lost the home I lived in and everything in it. But the support that came afterward, from friends and family and benefits like this, was absolutely priceless for getting me back on my feet, and believing and hoping again.

So, when the chance came up for me to do a little bit of the same, I jumped at the opportunity.”

He spoke of what he’ll be doing at the benefit.

“I’ll be performing a thoughtful selection of songs about hope and homecoming, to remind us that we find home in ourselves and in the people we love who are still with us, more than what has been lost” he said. “My goal is that it will be soulful, hopeful, upbeat, and heartfelt. And the SFGMC ensembles are performing as well, bringing their amazing talent and bright spirits for us to enjoy.

I’m so excited.”

The chorus’ HomoPhonics and Lollipop Guild ensembles will perform, the chorus said.

Valentine said that he was grateful for advance coverage of the concert.

“It’s up to us, those reading this, to keep this alive,” he said. “If you’re reading this message, I hope you’ll get online immediately and buy tickets for yourself and your friends. Let’s show these people, who have so much left to rebuild, that there are hundreds of people who love them and want them to recover.” t

project and a member of the Friends of Eagle Plaza group. “But we understand this is a process for the city.”

The Eagle bar’s flagpole sporting the leather flag will be moved into one of the plaza’s planting areas in front of it. Sidewalks at both entrances into the plaza will sport the colors of the leather flag, which features a red heart and blue, black, and white stripes.

The parklet’s estimated cost is $1.85 million. In addition to Build’s contribution, the city awarded $200,000 in grant money to the plaza. The Friends of Eagle Plaza is aiming to raise $150,000 by this spring. Donors giving between $1,000 and $2,499 can have a name listed on the flagpole plaque, while those giving $2,500 up to $4,999 can have a name featured on a stainless steel stud inlaid in the plaza.

To learn about other naming opportunities and to donate to the project online, visit http://www.eagleplaza.org/. t

for everyone.”

Howell added that he would be speaking at the benefit to share the school’s story and to express his gratitude to the chorus for organizing the benefit.

“We were so excited and honored to be contacted by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and hear that they wanted to do a benefit concert for us,” he said. “After the fire, I felt very helpless and at a loss as to what to do, so I reached out to a social media choral group page that is followed by thousands of directors from all over the world. I immediately received hundreds of messages of encouragement

and support and the kind words were all very overwhelming.”

It was through this post that Tim Seelig, a gay man who’s artistic director for the chorus, contacted Howell to see if there was any kind of help he and the SFGMC could provide.

“It was quite surreal to think that someone I had never met before wanted to reach out and help my students and my music program,” said Howell. “The funds raised will go a long way to rebuilding our music library, getting new risers, and a new keyboard. This will help ensure that music, a vital part of a student’s education, can continue in the future at

the Eagle bar on what was a surface parking lot. Construction began last summer at 1532 Harrison Street on three seven-story buildings consisting of 136 rental homes.

“The root of Build’s work is to help create great urban places, and we love that this project will add both homes and public space to San Francisco,” stated Lou Vasquez, a principal at the firm.

Place Lab, started by Build and now part of the nonprofit San Francisco Parks Alliance, is overseeing the design of, and permits for, Eagle Plaza.

The goal is to dedicate the parklet ahead of this year’s Folsom Street Fair in late September.

Place Lab Director Brooke Ray Rivera said having Breed’s office move forward with the permit “is fantastic.

We are so grateful and thrilled because this is such an important cultural project and open space project in a neighborhood that needs it so badly.”

Gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman and District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents SOMA at City Hall, are co-sponsoring the permit request. It had been expected that Haney would take the lead on introducing the ordinance.

But Breed spokesman Jeff Cretan told the B.A.R. that, due to the complicated nature of the project, which has been caught in a bureaucratic morass due to numerous city departments needing to sign off on it, the mayor’s office decided to be the main sponsor in order to ensure it was approved.

“This is an incredibly complicated interdepartmental issue, so the mayor has stepped in to move this project forward, which she knows is incredibly important for the community,” said Cretan.

As the B.A.R. reported last fall, the

scope of the project has been significantly scaled back due to access issues voiced by fire officials. Its greenspace has been reduced in order to accommodate fire trucks and other safety vehicles.

Rather than close down that stretch of 12th Street, it will remain open to traffic in both directions via a curving, 28-foot-wide two-lane roadway through the plaza. Bollards will be used to close off the street at both ends for special events.

The border for a gathering space in front of the Eagle bar dubbed the Eagle Porch has been designed to allow for fire trucks to back into the area and turn around inside the plaza. San Francisco Public Works also required that the plaza’s chairs and tables be removable rather than permanent.

“It is unfortunate we lost some of the design characteristics we were originally proposing,” said Eagle co-owner Lex Montiel, an early supporter of the

are past calendar men.

PRC CEO Brett Andrews was delighted by the amount of money that was raised for this year’s edition.

“This unprecedented and extraordinary year is only made more meaningful against the backdrop of the current U.S. administration,” he said. “In so many ways this unmatched Bare Chest Calendar fundraising achievement is a positive resistance to what so many are experiencing. While extraordinary, this is not surprising for San Francisco.”

Andrews also explained how the money would be spent.

“As in years past these crucial funds support our HIV services that cover legal representation, workforce development, and emergency financial assistance,” he said. “With our new merger with Baker Places Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services we can now do residential treatment.”

Gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman presented a proclamation, signed by the entire Board of Supervisors, to Andrews in commemoration of the calendar.

“I am here because you are all amazingly hot, so how could I say no to showing up for a celebration of the Bare Chest Calendar,” Mandelman told the crowd. “For years, for decades even, folks in San Francisco have been talking about the need for nonprofits to be smarter, to bring folks together and to have different organizations consider mergers, and you guys did it.

“As I think of the work that needs to be done to get homeless folks, mentally ill folks, and substance using folks off the streets and into care – if we’re going to do that work effectively, it’s because we’re going to dramatically expand the work that PRC and other organizations do,” he added. “So I want to thank you

Bare Chest Calendar men and thank you PRC for the tremendous work you do for San Francisco.”

Gay former state Senator Mark Leno quipped that he stood before the crowd “naked, without proclamation.”

“I have nothing to present, other than to add my thanks to PRC,” Leno said. “Going back 35 years, for those of us who were around in 1984 when we had to literally save our own lives because we had a president who couldn’t even say the word AIDS, so over 20,000 young, mostly gay men died of a virus – we had to step forward and put together what is now known as the San Francisco model, and so much of it is community-based organizations like PRC and its predecessors, now successfully merged, to provide the services needed because government couldn’t do it on its own, especially with the vacuum of leadership that we had at

that time. So now, 35 years later, it’s quite a record accomplishment.”

PRC merged with AIDS Emergency Fund and Baker Places in 2016.

Pessa, now 63, said he had concerns he might not fit the profile for a calendar man because of his age.

“But I ran anyway and discovered that the calendar is for everyone,” he told the B.A.R. “When the calendar men were announced, Andrew was Mr. November, at 26, and I was the oldest, at 62. As we got to know each other we discovered that we had more things in common than the things that separate us.”

This year’s Bare Chest Calendar is now available. To purchase one, visit http://barechest.org/. Potential calendar men for the 2020 edition can also find out about this year’s competition, which begins with preliminaries February 8 at the Powerhouse. t

in its projects. Streets designed for all residents create safer, healthier, and more inclusive communities.

Ensuring everyone has access to safe streets also encourages alternate modes of transportation, which can help reduce vehicle miles traveled, and help us fight climate change.”

According to the news release, Caltrans owns and maintains

50,000 lane-miles of state roads through the State Highway Operation and Protection Program, which invests at least $4.2 billion annually in repairs and updates.

For Chekal-Bain and other Berkeley residents directly affected by the pedestrian-auto collisions, this topic hits close to home.

Chekal-Bain’s son, who identifies as gay, was in a wheelchair for

seven weeks after he was struck by a car last year. A community group in his neighborhood took matters into its own hands after mounting frustration over city officials not following through with improvements to their streets. The group got “Slow, Children At Play” signs and put a skeleton in a wheelchair on the side of the road to bring awareness to what has happened.

“In Berkeley we pay some of the highest property tax rates in California,” Chekal-Bain said. “We deserve more. The city needs to protect its citizens.”t

Project scaled back

The January 27 concert takes place from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at 170 Valencia Street in San Francisco.

A minimum $25 donation is requested. For tickets, visit https:// bit.ly/2RWqllP.

Friends of Appel and Bernstein have set up a GoFundMe page to help with medical costs. To donate, visit https://bit.ly/2FmK5Ie.

t <<

From the Cover >>

LGBT seniors

To help it design those services, Openhouse teamed last year with another nonprofit provider of senior services in the city, On Lok. It is aiming to launch the program this summer a few months after the residents at 95 Laguna move into their apartments.

“LGBTQ seniors are four to 10 times less likely to access senior services. With Openhouse, we now

have an opportunity to develop a new program that, by involving LGBTQ seniors early on in the design process, will hopefully help address the issues this community faces accessing vital services,” stated Grace Li, On Lok’s chief executive officer, last September in announcing the agencies’ partnership.

It will be one of many Openhouse offerings at its new community center at 75 Laguna Street, next door to its main offices at 65 Laguna Street, known as the Bob Ross LGBT Senior Center and named after the founding publisher of the Bay Area Reporter.

“We will staff case management services for both buildings,” explained Skultety. “We hope to get them enrolled in the program with On Lok shortly after the new building opens in August or September.”

Talking about the end of one’s life can be exceedingly difficult for LGBT seniors, as the B.A.R. noted in a story in December, because of their lack of trust in their health care providers or not having close familial or social connections, leaving them without a family member or friend they can turn to and discuss how they want to be cared for as they age.

“It’s a really touchy subject,” acknowledged Roberta “Bertie” Brouhard, 72, a former Openhouse board member who has talked about end-oflife issues at drop-in groups the agency offered. “Two-thirds of my friends don’t want to go there.

These are gay males with no partners, no offspring, between the age of 55 to 80.”

Her friends are now in that demographic, however, “where they should start worrying about that,” she said. “Are you going to leave a real mess for somebody?”

Brouhard, a transgender woman who transitioned late in life following her retirement at 55, has drawn up her will and has what is known as a Vial of Life form hanging by her refrigerator. It has her important medical information listed out so

that, in the case of a health emergency where she is incapacitated, responding medical personnel can quickly find the document. It also includes her advance health directives so doctors know under what circumstances to resuscitate her, as well as how to contact her attorney and next of kin.

Because she lives alone in the city’s Western Addition, Brouhard also gave one of her neighbors a key to her condo so they can let themselves or emergency responders into her home should the need arise.

“I have two to three friends I talk to every week who might know where I am. They would have an idea if I am out of town,” said Brouhard. “If they don’t hear from me, they know I am either in the hospital or I am dead.”

The city and several local nonprofits have been helping to foster discussion among LGBT seniors about end-of-life issues. In the fall Openhouse hosted facilitated conversations where people could consider their own death and dying.

As an invite explained, the dropin program was not meant to be “a grief support group” but “an open-hearted discussion where we can share thoughts and feelings about our own eventual death in a meaningful, dynamic space free from judgment.”

Openhouse also partnered with Sagebrook Senior Living at San Francisco to present a talk in November about estate planning and end-of-life care options. The city’s aging department last year awarded a grant of $75,000 to Legal Assistance for the Elderly to offer local seniors end-of-life planning assistance.

The AIDS Legal Referral Panel is receiving a portion of the funds, which helps pay for the salary of one of its attorneys. The agency aims to work with upward of 40 clients a year on preparing their estate planning documents.

The two-year grant runs through

April 2020. ALRP will be holding several events this year where LGBT seniors and older adults with disabilities can meet one-on-one with an attorney to draw up various documents and have them signed that day by a notary public.

“Nobody likes to think about their mortality. These can be difficult conversations to have with folks,” said ALRP Executive Director Bill Hirsh.

The process can be particularly challenging for LGBT seniors, noted Hirsh, if they are estranged from their biological family or have seen their chosen family of friends either die or move away in recent years.

“One is folks have to identify somebody who is going to either have their power of attorney or be their executor of their estate,” said Hirsh, who is gay. “People might not have those individuals identified before the outreach event.”

They also likely have not considered the cost involved with dying, he added.

“Sometimes one of the challenges people face is just covering some of the costs that are going to flow from their passing,” said Hirsh. “So somebody who has a very low income might not be able to cover their burial costs. It forces people to think about some of these issues in advance.”

Retired from a successful mechanical engineering career, Brouhard has a nest egg she can rely on in her golden years. She also remains close to her sister and the two sons she had with her ex-wife – they both now have two children of their own – and therefore can rely on family should she need to as she ages.

“I don’t fear death at all. I feel I have won the race,” Brouhard said.

“I am one of the winners. I have come through the looking glass with a few friends, good health, and some money.” t

move forward, we are committed to this tradition.”

As the Roxie’s general manager, Sloan created its new year-round LGBT monthly programming series, OUTlook. The next installation will be the 30th anniversary screening of Marlon T. Riggs’ film, “Tongues Untied,” February 20, followed by a panel discussion.

Sloan’s appointment comes on the heels of the Roxie’s successful yearlong $60,000 fundraising drive to upgrade its smaller auditorium, the Little Roxie, with state-of-the-art cinema improvements, which were

unveiled at a January 15 reception for supporters. The project included installation of a digital projector, 5.1 Dolby surround sound, and audio description headsets and captioning devices for ADA accessibility.

The board praised Sloan’s selection.

“We are thrilled to have Lex Sloan’s steadfast commitment to the Roxie leading us toward continued success in the years to come,” said board President Diana Fuller. “Her passion for creating programs that serve our diverse community of local filmmakers and film audiences is essential to

the Bay Area.”

As executive director, Sloan will oversee the day-to-day operations of the Roxie and lead a strategy for organizational growth. She will be responsible for expanding the Roxie’s community reach, deepening the Roxie’s programming impact, and implementing programs that support local filmmakers, according to Fuller.

After years of revolving management and ownership, the Roxie received 501(c)3 nonprofit status 10 years ago. The independent cinema house “has doubled down on its iron-willed dedication to showcase

the coolest/weirdest/most thoughtprovoking films of the past, present, and future,” according to its website. The Roxie has a tax-deductible membership program, offering free or discounted prices for movies.

The Roxie has a budget of $1.4 million, according to Sloan, who declined to give her salary. The theater’s 2016 Form 990 listed thenexecutive director Dave Cowen’s salary at $23,743, with total revenue at $1.1 million. Total assets that year were listed on the Foundation Center’s site at $333,647.t

From page 1

growth of the country’s older adult population, the number of LGBT seniors is likely to double by 2030.

But a recent report from San Francisco’s Department of Aging and Adult Services found that LGBT seniors underutilize the city services that are available to them compared to heterosexual seniors. Their doing so can negatively impact their experience of aging in the city, say gerontology experts.

“If you are engaged in our programs and have a chosen family and friends, it is a great place to age. The problem is we have a number of seniors who are LGBTQ who are not connected to those programs and services,” said Shireen McSpadden, who is bisexual and executive director of the city’s aging department.

One consequence for LGBT seniors living alone in the city and not connected to services is they are more prone to becoming isolated. And that can lead to issues with loneliness, depression, and an inability to remain living in their homes when they experience a health care crisis due to their lacking social and familial support.

“We know LGBTQ seniors are not seeking services in San Francisco designed to keep them out of nursing homes,” said Karyn Skultety, Ph.D., executive director of Openhouse, a nonprofit provider of LGBT senior services. “One of the main concerns we hear from people is dying alone or becoming too frail to live independently and they have to move into a long-term-care facility that doesn’t feel safe because of who they are.”

Skultety, who is bisexual, said it is an issue that her agency is just beginning to grapple with as it provides services to the seniors living at the city’s affordable housing complex on Laguna Street aimed primarily for LGBT older adults. There are 119 units of housing at the site split between two buildings, with residents expected to move into the 79 units now under-construction at 95 Laguna in April.

A lottery to select occupants for

<<

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 11

Roxie ED

From page 1

University, came to the Roxie three and a half years ago after stints with Frameline, the LGBT film festival, and the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

“The Roxie has a long history of supporting the LGBT community with a wide rage of programming, as well as hosting both the Frameline Film Festival and the Transgender Film Festival from their inception,” Sloan said in an interview at the Roxie earlier this month. “As we

Rick Gerharter

Roberta “Bertie” Brouhard

57 of the apartments in the building was held Tuesday morning.

Residents of the 40-unit Openhouse Community at 55 Laguna, a remodeled former college building at the corner of Laguna and Hermann streets, moved into their apartments in late 2016.

Over the last two years Openhouse has realized that, if it wants to ensure the residents of the Laguna buildings can age in place, it needs to offer services for people who develop dementia or Alzheimer’s or need in-home care. Otherwise, those residents will need to relocate into nursing homes or hospice.

“If we don’t ensure we have the services in place to allow them to age in place and for how they will have support, we have failed them,” said Skultety. “It should be a small number of folks who need to move into hospice or a nursing home.”

While it has yet to be an issue for a resident at 55 Laguna, “it is only a matter of time,” predicted Skultety.

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12 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Legal Notices>> FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038444600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CARDINAL INTERIORS, 1700 CALIFORNIA ST #330, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed PATRICIA A. PROSES. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/89. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on12/21/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038440800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CD PROPERTIES, 550 27TH ST #203, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CHRIS DITTENHAFER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/01/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/19/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038429200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BUSY BEE CO, 5432 GEARY BLVD #245, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BRIAN LEE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/23/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/10/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038440400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: COAST SF, 742 14TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed KEMPER AND ASSOCIATES OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/14/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/19/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038415600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PARAGON BUILDING MAINTENANCE, 412 15TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed MERCHANT REAL ESTATE INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/28/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/28/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038413600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NAPO SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, 530 DIVISADERO ST #158, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZERS-SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/15/88. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/28/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038442000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: WATERLOO BEVERAGES, PIER 50, TERRY FRANCOIS ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94158. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed SAN FRANCISCO BEVERAGES DISTRIBUTION INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/20/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/20/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038444900 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CMO LABS, 100 PINE ST #325, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed DAVID BURK IDEAS LLC (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/17/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/21/18.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-036054700

The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: MUSIC FOR SF, 52 OVIEDO CT. PACIFICA, CA 94044. This business was conducted by an individual and signed by LAURA WARNER. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/22/14.

DEC 27, JAN 03, 10, 17, 2019 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-18-554496

In the matter of the application of: SARA ANGELICA MATUTE, 850 RUTLAND ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner SARA ANGELICA MATUTE, is requesting that the names DIEGO SANCHEZ be changed to DIEGO SANCHEZ MATUTE and ESTEFANIA SANCHEZ be changed to ESTEFANIA SANCHEZ MATUTE. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 7th of February 2019 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 03, 10, 17, 24, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038444400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ALL AROUND BUILDER, 600 17TH AVE #2, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed GRAHAM RIDDELL. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/19/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/21/18.

JAN 03, 10, 17, 24, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038425100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CAFE DE OLLA.SF, 2301 MISSION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110.

This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed EDUARDO ANTONIO LOPEZ & JOSE FRANCISCO GARCIA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/05/18.

JAN 03, 10, 17, 24, 2019

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038446700 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PILLAR CAPITAL GROUP, 1725 CLAY ST #102, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed PILLAR CAPITAL GROUP (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 08/27/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/26/18.

JAN 03, 10, 17, 24, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038446600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PILLAR CAPITAL REAL ESTATE, 1725 CLAY ST #102, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed PILLAR CAPITAL REAL ESTATE (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 08/27/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/26/18.

JAN 03, 10, 17, 24, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038428800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: RANDALL WHITEHEAD LIGHTING, 1212 18TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed RANDALL WHITEHEAD LIGHTING INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/15/01. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/10/18.

JAN 03, 10, 17, 24, 2019 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-038074700

The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: SAN FRANCISCO PET HOSPITAL, 1371 FULTON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117. This business was conducted by a corporation and signed by MORRIS-MICHAELIS ASSOCIATES, INC (CA).

The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 03/30/18.

JAN 03, 10, 17, 24, 2019 NOTICE OF PETITION TO ADMINISTER ESTATE OF DARLENE OAKLEY IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO: FILE PES-18-302440

To all heirs, beneficiaries, creditors, contingent creditors, and persons who may otherwise be interested in the will or estate, or both, of DARLENE OAKLEY. A Petition for Probate has been filed by JANICE OAKLEY, in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. The Petition for Probate requests that JANICE OAKLEY be appointed as personal representative to administer the estate of the decedent. The petition requests the decedent’s will and codicils, if any, be admitted to probate. The will and any codicils are available for examination in the file kept by the court. The petition requests authority to administer the estate under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. (This authority will allow the personal representative to take many actions without obtaining court approval. Before taking certain very important actions, however, the personal representative will be required to give notice to interested persons unless they have waived notice or consented to the proposed action.) The independent administration authority will be granted unless an interested person files an objection to the petition and shows good cause why the court should not grant the authority. A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows: Feb 04, 2019, 9:00 am, Dept.

204, Superior Court of California, 400 McAllister St., San Francisco, CA 94102. If you object to the granting of the petition, you should appear at the hearing and state your objections or file written objections with the court before the hearing. Your appearance may be in person or by your attorney. If you are a creditor or contingent creditor of the decedent, you must file your claim with the court and mail a copy to the personal representative appointed by the court within the latter of either (1) four months from the date of first issuance of letters to a general personal representative, as defined by section 58(b) of the California Probate Code, or (2) 60 days from the date of mailing or personal delivery to you of a notice under section 9052 of the California Probate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may want to consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court. If you are a person interested in the estate, you may file with the court a Request for Special Notice (form DE-154) of the filing of an inventory and appraisal of estate assets or of any petition or account as provided in Probate Code section 1250. A Request for Special Notice form is available from the court clerk. Attorneys for petitioner: Stephanie Barber Hess (SBA 204321) & Christopher M. Haws (SBA 29924), 420 Aviation Blvd, Suite 201, Santa Rosa, CA 95403; Ph. (707) 543-4900.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 2019 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-19-554524

In the matter of the application of: MARIA MAY-LEE CHAI, 1890 CLAY ST #604, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner MARIA MAY-LEE CHAI, is requesting that the name MARIA MAY-LEE CHAI AKA MAY-LEE CHAI AKA MAYLEE CHAI, be changed to MAY-LEE CHAI. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 26th of February 2019 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038460600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HAVEN REAL ESTATE PARTNERS, 2369 UNION ST #3, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94123. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SUSAN DOOLITTLE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/07/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/07/19.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038460000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: AKT TRUCKING, 229 CUMBERLAND ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ARTHUR HARRIMAN. 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 01/07/19.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038453000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: IOBJX, 1587 11TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed JOHN B. GRAHAM. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/02/19.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038459900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PETES LAUNDERETTE, 600 OCTAVIA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed YAOGUANG TAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/04/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/07/19.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038453500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PUFFIN, 828 TAYLOR ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BRIAN HICKEY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/02/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/02/19.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038441200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: STUDIO B CUBED ARCHITECTURE, 1788 19TH AVE, 2ND FL, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BRANDON QUAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/19/18.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038446800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ASAHIRU, 1325 9TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122.

This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ALEX TAO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/26/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/26/18.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038441700 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TSIMSHASUI BEAUTY CENTER, 310 8TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SAO IENG FONG. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/12/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/20/18.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038449000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ALLEY HOUSE, 3751 GEARY BLVD, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134.

This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed GS RIVERSIDE GRILL (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/28/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/28/18.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038445000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CANNABIS INFUSED BEAUTY, 1049 MARKET ST #403, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed DVSH HOLDINGS (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/21/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/21/18.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038458100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ROTI INDIAN BISTRO, 53 WEST PORTAL AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94127. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed ROTI INDIAN BISTRO LLC (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/04/19.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-037618700

The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: PETES LAUNDERETTE, 600 OCTAVIA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business was conducted by a general partnership and signed by YAOGUANG TAN & WUT KHUN KYI. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/31/17.

JAN 10, 17, 24, 31, 2019 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-19-554538

In the matter of the application of: RICHARD PETER SOMDAHL, 1550 MASONIC ST., SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner RICHARD PETER SOMDAHL, is requesting that the name RICHARD PETER SOMDAHL, be changed to RICARDO XAVIER SOMDAHL. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 5th of March 2019 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-19-554522 In the matter of the application of: THOMAS GIONET SCHMIDT C/O CHRISTINA H. LEE, (SB #230883), BECKER & LEE LLP, 1322 WEBSTER ST #300, OAKLAND, CA 94612, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner THOMAS GIONET SCHMIDT, is requesting that the name THOMAS GIONET SCHMIDT, be changed to THOMAS GIONET PETROVIC-SCHMIDT. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 12th of March 2019 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019

ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-19-554523 In the matter of the application of: VLADIMIR PETROVIC C/O CHRISTINA H. LEE, (SB #230883), BECKER & LEE LLP, 1322 WEBSTER ST #300, OAKLAND, CA 94612, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner VLADIMIR PETROVIC, is requesting that the name VLADIMIR PETROVIC, be changed to VLADIMIR PETROVIC-SCHMIDT. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 12th of March 2019 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-19-554530 In the matter of the application of: KATHY SHU KHIN KYI, 336 8TH AVE #2, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner KATHY SHU KHIN KYI, is requesting that the name KATHY SHU KHIN KYI AKA SHU KHIN KATHY KYI AKA SHU KHIN KYI AKA KATHY S KYI, be changed to KATHY SHUKHIN KYI. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 28th of February 2019 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038470700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: 415 EYEWEAR, 3251 20TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94132.

This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed MD RASHIDULL ALAM. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/10/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/10/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038447700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ROGUE SUPPLIES, 1882 33RD AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122.

This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CARMEN IBARRA LLANOS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/25/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/27/18.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038472300 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SAN FRANCISCO MOBILE CHIROPRACTOR, 110 GOUGH ST #201A, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed KIM MAKOI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/11/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038440600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MASTERPIECE TATTOO, 614 WASHINGTON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BRAHIAN MARTINEZ. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/19/18.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038471800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HART HABITATS, 1367 8TH AVE #4, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed KRISTINA HAWLEY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/09/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038461000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LUCKY SPOT, 1917 IRVING ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed LIYU KUANG. 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 01/07/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038465100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: DAVID ROSE HAIR, 1538 PACIFIC AVE #104, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed DAVID GARY YEPREMIAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/08/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/08/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038460800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BRO’S CAFE, 1184 1/2 GENEVA AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed FELICIANO H. YAMAT II. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/07/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/07/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038465900 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: FAR WEST SKINCARE, 1756 FILLMORE ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SARAH CHERNESKY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/07/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/08/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038472200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MASHALLAH HALAL FOOD TRUCK INDIAN AND PAKISTANI, 1804 LIBERTY ST, EL CERRITO, CA 94530.

This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed RABIA WAQAR & MOHAMMAD WAQAR. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/11/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019

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FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038471700 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: 07 STUDIOS; ZEROSEVEN STUDIOS, 1305 INDIANA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed SHELLEY FARRELL & DAVID BRENT HATCHER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/01/14. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038470400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TO BE DISCLOSED, 718 CLEMENTINA ST #B, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed DEREK BARROS JR. & DAVIN WENTWORTH-THRASHER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/10/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038444500 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: KAJI; SUSHI HUNTER, 1701 POWELL ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed H & K INVESTMENT GROUP (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 12/01/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/21/18.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038465200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: REVIVAL FILM, 608 ELIZABETH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114.

This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed PENABRAND INC. (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/08/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038473600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: COLOR ME BEAUTY SPA, 1507 GRANT AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed NGUYEN CHAU & KIM NGUYEN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/11/19. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/11/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038467500 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE GATEWAY, 460 DAVIS COURT, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by a limited partnership, and is signed GOLDEN GATEWAY CENTER (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/05/13. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/09/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038444100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: YIELD, 2490 3RD ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed MORENA WINE LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/21/18.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038444200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PAUSE, 1666 MARKET ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed MORENA WINE LLC (CA). 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 12/21/18.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038467300 The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE GATEWAY, 460 DAVIS COURT, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed GOLDEN GATEWAY CENTER SPE, LLC (DE). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/05/13. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/09/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-038452800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SUNSET SUDS, 1100 IRVING ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed SFR415 LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/13/18. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 01/02/19.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-038078800

The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: NAILS CARE FOR YOU, 1507 GRANT AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133.

This business was conducted by an individual and signed

by LAN THANH TRAN. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/03/18.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-037381900

The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: BRIAN TATTOOS, 614 WASHINGTON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business was conducted by an individual and signed by BRAHIAN MARTINEZ. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 12/12/16.

JAN 17, 24, 31, FEB 07, 2019

/lgbtsf

14

16

Saint Jerome

17

16

Epic layover

Culture mix

Conjuring Cavafy

Vol. 49 • No. 3 • January 17-23, 2019

www.ebar.com/arts

Sachyn Mital

Old friends reunite onstage

by David-Elijah Nahmod

B

roadway superstar Audra McDonald and Sirius XM radio host Seth Rudetsky will appear together at the Herbst Theatre on Jan. 20 for a lively evening of conversation and song. Proceeds from the evening will benefit San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Project Open Hand and Sandy Hook Promise.

See page 18 >>

Sirius XM radio host Seth Rudetsky and Broadway superstar Audra McDonald will appear in “Broadway @ The Herbst.”

Hans van der Woerd

Courtesy FAM/SF

New York Philharmonic music director Jaap van Zweden.

Steve Kahn, “Portrait 7” (1974). Gelatin silver print.

More Sartre than S&M

Taking the 5th

by Philip Campbell

by Sura Wood

T

A

he last time Anton Bruckner’s mighty Symphony No. 5 blasted the roof off Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony’s Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt was making one of his annual return visits. Internationally recognized for his mastery of the composer’s monumental works, he dedicated an entire evening to the towering Fifth in 2012.

fter rebelling against the constraints and realism of street photography in 1974, Steve Kahn commenced what became known as “The Hollywood Suites.” The series began in rooms he rented in the Villa Constance Apartments, a seedy Melrose Ave. no-tell hotel in LA, where he shot pictures of professional bondage models.

See page 14 >>

See page 13 >>

{ SECOND OF THREE SECTIONS }

<< Out There

14 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Jerome Caja lives on in his artworks

by Roberto Friedman

I

n every community there is an artist who best captures the zeitgeist of that place, that time, and what it was like to live there then.

For AIDS activist-era San Francisco, that artist was Jerome Caja. When he wasn’t creating his idiosyncratic and highly original queer art, Jerome could be found acting out atop the bar at Club Uranus, a vision in limbs akimbo, broken heels and torn fishnet stockings.

From “The Jerome Project” blog, written

by Anthony Cianciolo and devoted to Caja’s artistic legacy: “Jerome Caja (1958-95), Painter, Prankster, Performer, was born in Cleveland into a Catholic family of 11 boys. He majored in studio art at Cleveland State and earned a master’s degree in ceramics at the San Francisco Art Institute. This humble, self-possessed artist painted exquisite miniatures with everything that you would find in a drag queen’s handbag: nail

dime-store-reproduction of significant provenance paintings of harlequins in that will include artists plastic frames transformed like Jerome Caja, Tom of

by Caja into significant queer Finland, Quaintance phoart. The late art critic David tographs, Orejudos and a Bonetti gave the paintings to few other known queer artthe Historical Society’s Seists at the GLBT Historical nior Public History Advisor Society Archives.”

Gerard Koskovich about a Thank you, Dr. Silvestre year before Bonetti’s death, and the GLBTHS. The Caja and Koskovich donated renaissance has begun! them to the Society in his Now seems like a good memory last fall. time to mention the pubBoth are “Untitled,” 5 lication of a new book in. x 9 in., date of creation published by Visual AIDS, unknown. Out There had “Duets: Nayland Blake some questions about the & Justin Vivian Bond in Courtesy GLBT Historical Society works that were graciously Conversation on Jerome answered by the GLBT His- These untitled Jerome Caja artworks were a gift to Caja,” and share its dethe GLBT Historical Society by Gerard Koskovich torical Society’s Collections scription: “Blake and Bond from the collection of David Bonetti. + Exhibitions Registrar Dr. introduce us to the art and Ramon Silvestre, via email. life of the extraordinary Jerome Caja, an artist and continued preservation. provocateur who transgressed the “Clearly there remains a lack Roberto Friedman: Are there any supposed boundaries of gender, of information regarding the vast extenuating circumstances as to performance, and art in the nightmajority of non-art materials in the conservation of these works? club scene in San Francisco during modern or contemporary art, in Because Jerome used non-art the late 1980s and early 90s. Caja’s terms of understanding how they materials such as nail polish and outsize personality was matched by behave (either alone or in combiWite-Out, are there dangers of his powerful visual art, made with nation with other materials), and these pieces deteriorating? What nontraditional materials like nail how they may alter with age, in if any steps are in place to prevent polish and human ashes, which destorage or with treatment and or that? tails with humor, pathos, and deep in transit.

There is a clear need for Dr. Ramon Silvestre: “Our insight the struggles of living with more research to understand these consulting conservator on board, AIDS, finding love, and surviving. specific issues, and conservators are Elisabeth Cornu (emeritus objects With additional contributions by definitely working on these.” conservator, formerly from the de Anthony Cianciolo, Craig CorYoung Museum in San Francisco), pora, Anna van der Meulen, Amy says that with proper handling Are there any plans for exhibition Scholder, and Chris E. Vargas.” and storage, these works of art or publication?

We were among the first reportshould have the longevity expected Dr. Ramon Silvestre: “After we ers to write about Caja’s art in the from this type of work. The GLBT complete the Art and Artifact Projpress, along with Steve Abbott, Historical Society’s new location ect currently underway, we have disGlen Helfand, and of course, David continues to provide these pieces of cussed future possible exhibition of Bonetti.

This column is dedicated to art the appropriate conditions for specific art and photography pieces his memory.t

polish, glitter, make-up, lipstick, and eyeliner. His canvases included pistachio shells, lockets, discarded bottle caps, and small scraps of paper.

Jerome’s iconography pays homage to a wide cast of saints and sinners: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucy, Satan, imps, priests, cherubs, demented clowns, cannibalistic birds, pigs, and gay icons.

“Jerome died at the height of the AIDSArt-Activism era in San Francisco from complications related to HIV. His papers are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and his work is collected in major museums around the country.”

Both SFMOMA and the GLBT Historical Society have recently received donations of significant Jerome Caja works. “The Shroud of Buddha” (1992) is the first addition to the SFMOMA collection of Caja’s artworks since the artist’s death in 1995. The GLBTHS’ acquisitions are a matched pair of inexpensive 1960s

<<

SF Symphony

From page 13

More recently, the New York Philharmonic’s new music director Jaap van Zweden made his second appearance at DSH with his own strong-minded interpretation of Bruckner’s uniquely structured score. Unlike Blomstedt, he included another piece. Mozart’s exquisite Concerto for Clarinet gave SFS principal Carey Bell a chance to show his dazzling musical mastery on the first half. His deeply emotive performance was well-framed by the orchestra, with the conductor paying brisk attention to detail. After intermission,

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the audience was refreshed and ready for the Bruckner challenge.

The Fifth is the only Bruckner symphony to begin with a slow introduction. So slow and hushed, many early listeners and critics were somewhat baffled. Bewilderment turns to awe when the right conductor, using the right critical edition (in this case by Robert Haas), unpacks the contrasting foundational ideas of the opening movement to assemble them in the creation of a majestic edifice of sound. The composer himself liked to call the Fifth “Fantastic.” His purposefully mysterious elements seem disjointed at first, but his eye is always on the prize.

Blomstedt underlined Bruckner’s abrupt silences and contrasting sonorities in 2012, but he also took time to explore the dreamlike byways. Drama was uppermost to van Zweden. Self-control hinted at subdued passion with Blomstedt; Van Zweden controlled his players instead, yielding less subtlety. The older maestro brought spiritual exaltation to the glorious closing chorale. New York’s new leader raised goosebumps differently, by the sheer force of his players’ response.

Personal taste would determine the most satisfying rendition, but both work on their own terms. Van Zweden’s willpower certainly seems suited to contemporary listeners.

For those of us feeling nostalgia for Herbert Blomstedt’s enduring traditional approach, he is returning to DSH Jan. 31-Feb. 2 to conduct Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, “Scottish.” This is Blomstedt repertoire to the nth degree, and surprisingly enough, both works are infrequently scheduled.

SFS Music Director Designate Esa-Pekka Salonen takes the podium this week for the first time since his exciting appointment. The concerts feature the West Coast premiere of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos,” which received its world premiere in 2018 with Salonen conducting.

Stefan Cohen

Resident Conductor of the SFS Christian Reif.

Depicting the struggle between the “chaos and beauty” of the celestial abyss, “Metacosmos” should match well with R. Strauss’ famous tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra,” and “Four Legends from the Kalevala” by Sibelius.

Salonen replaces Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who had to postpone her SFS debut due to the birth of her first child. He also returns in the 2019-20 season to conduct at least two weeks of concerts before going full-time in 2020.

Currently in his final season as Resident Conductor of the SFS and Music Director of the SFS Youth Orchestra, Christian Reif follows Jan. 24-26. He will lead performances of Prokofiev’s electrifying Symphony No. 5. The irresistible masterwork, filled with the composer’s trademark harmonies, surging drama and sweeping melodies, will be paired with another famous piece by R. Strauss, “Don Juan.” It’s a highenergy bill for a young high-energy conductor.

After Herbert Blomstedt’s welcome return, Michael Tilson Thomas is back home Feb. 7-9 for the world premiere of Steven Mackey’s “Portals, Scenes and Celebrations,” commissioned by the SFS and composed in honor of MTT. Gil Shaham is also on hand to present more Prokofiev with the bold and moody First Violin Concerto. The program includes Tchaikovsky’s immortal Fourth Symphony, something of an MTT specialty.t

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Books>>

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 15

Olivia de Havilland, a star still shining

by Tavo Amador

O

livia de Havilland (b.

1916), the last living star from the 1930s, published “Every Frenchman Has One” (1961) about her life in France following her marriage to Paris “Match” editor Pierre Galante, but has yet to write her memoirs.

Ellis Amburn’s “Olivia de Havilland and the Golden Age of Hollywood” (Lyons Press, $27.95) attempts to remedy that.

She made her debut as Hermia in William Dieterle’s/Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” She had played the part at the Hollywood Bowl in the legendary Reinhardt production, having left Mills College to join his company.

Warner Bros. signed her to a seven-year contract. She was rushed into many films, notably opposite Errol Flynn (1909-59) in hits like “Captain Blood” (1935), and as a beautiful, spirited Maid Marion in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938). They made seven smash pictures together.

Major stardom followed her exquisite performance as Melanie in 1939’s “Gone With the Wind.” The 1940s were her peak years, although she continued appearing in movies and television until the late 1980s.

Olivia Mary de Havilland was born in Tokyo to English ex-pats.

Her sister, future star Joan Fontaine (nee Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, 1917-2013), was 15 months younger. When the girls were little, their parents divorced. Their mother relocated them to Saratoga, CA, near San Francisco. They competed

intensely for their mother’s affection, which may have carried over into their professional lives. They’re the only sisters to have won the Best Actress Academy Award. (Fontaine changed her name to avoid trading on her sister’s reputation.)

Amburn claims that de Havilland lost the role of the second Mrs. De Winter in 1940’s “Rebecca” to Fontaine, which made her famous.

(Surviving screen tests for that very sought-after part include those by Vivien Leigh, Loretta Young, Anne Baxter, and Fontaine.) He quotes de Havilland admitting her disappointment yet saying that Fontaine was a better choice. Fontaine’s Oscar came for 1941’s “Suspicion.”

De Havilland was among that year’s losing nominees.

Amburn doesn’t shed much light on the reasons for their often-

Lambert Bridge 2012 Crane Creek Cuvée

strained relationship, with flare-ups discussed in the press. Yet in the late 1960s, when de Havilland needed money, Fontaine leant her a substantial sum, then suggested she go on the lucrative lecture circuit, which she did, and soon repaid the debt. According to Fontaine’s 1978 memoir “No Bed of Roses,” the (presumed) final break occurred during their mother’s last illness and in the planning of her memorial service. De Havilland generally remained silent until after her sister’s death.

Amburn, a sympathetic biographer, knew de Havilland years ago, but didn’t interview her for this book.

He relies primarily on secondary sources, often gossip columns and interviews.

He’s good when assessing her complex relationship with the charismatic, handsome Flynn, who loved her deeply, but only revealed it late in life. She reciprocated his feelings, but also kept them to herself. During their years as a screen couple, he was married, making him off-limits to her. He was a womanizer and a drinker, not ideal husband material. She, on the other hand, was a dedicated, disciplined performer who didn’t rush into marriage, despite serious romances with James Stewart and John Huston.

Amburn is effective discussing the de Havilland Decision, resulting from her 1942 suit against Warners over the expiration of her contract. The studio contended that the periods when she had been on suspension should be added to it, thereby extending the end date.

She objected, sued, and won, but

was off the screen for several years.

That landmark decision still benefits performers.

She returned to films in 1946’s “To Each His Own,” as an unwed mother who gives her son up for adoption, for which she won her first Best Actress Oscar, and “The Dark Mirror,” playing identical twins, one good, one evil – a virtuoso performance, although Amburn dismisses it. Her graphic yet restrained portrayal of a mentally ill woman in “The Snake Pit” (1948) earned a losing Oscar nod but garnered the New York Film Critics Best Actress Award. She collected both prizes for her superb Catherine Sloper in William Wyler’s “The Heiress” (1949), based on Henry James’ “Washington Square.”

In 1946, she married writer Marcus Goodrich, who pushed her to star in Broadway revivals of “Romeo & Juliet” and “Candida,” both poorly reviewed, although the latter was a box-office hit in a pre-New York tour. Amburn plausibly explains why she rejected Blanche in the 1951 movie of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

She was back on screen as “My Cousin Rachel” (1952), from Daphne Du Maurier’s novel – an appropriately ambiguous performance.

Among her more interesting later films are 1962’s “A Light in the Piazza,” playing a mother of a mentally limited daughter, and 1964’s “Hush,

T

Hush Sweet Charlotte,” in which she replaced Joan Crawford to co-star with old friend Bette Davis.

She and Goodrich had a son, Benjamin, but his abusive behavior resulted in a 1953 divorce. She had a daughter, Giselle, by Galante. They separated in 1962 but lived together for their daughter’s sake. They divorced amicably in 1979. She cared for him in her Paris home during his final illness. Amburn offers few details about why the marriage ended.

In the 1960s, she was a frequent presenter on Oscar telecasts, and she received a lengthy standing ovation when she appeared on the 2003 show. In 1991, her beloved son Benjamin died, aged 41, from overradiation for treatment of lymphoma, leaving her brokenhearted.

In 2017, Catherine Zeta-Jones played her in the Netflix miniseries “Feud,” about the rivalry between Crawford and Davis. De Havilland sued, claiming comments attributed to her about Fontaine were false.

Additionally, she hadn’t given anyone permission to portray her. A final decision hasn’t been rendered.

She’s active in Paris’ American Church, occasionally grants interviews, battles macular degeneration and hearing loss, is understandably proud of her achievements, yet is fully engaged in the present. Admirers hope she’s also writing her autobiography.t

On the web

his week, find Victoria A. Brownworth’s Lavender Tube column, “Seeing in the new year with Jazz Jennings,” and David Lamble’s summary of the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, “More Sundance kids,” online at www.ebar.com.

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<< Theatre

16 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Grounded in human kindness

by Jim Gladstone

U

plifting. Optimistic. Inspiring.

You’ve likely heard these characterizations of “Come From Away,” the hit Broadway musical now making its San Francisco debut at the Golden Gate Theatre. But the show deserves accolades of a different stripe as well: Audacious. Shrewd.

Daring.

It took tremendous nerve for writer-composers Irene Sankoff and David Hein to imagine that a positive, humor-filled musical could be raised from the ashes of 9/11. And for commercial producers to invest in the project. It also takes exquisitely calibrated direction – which earned Christopher Ashley a Tony – and performances to keep this material from turning mawkish or disrespectful, too reverent, too light or too dark.

Like the diversion of 38 planes and thousands of passengers to Gander, Newfoundland, in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the U.S., “Come From Away” overcomes enormous risks. The raw material for Sankoff and Hein’s book and lyrics was a series of interviews they conducted with residents of Gander and travelers who were stranded there on 9/11. Their subjects’ voices remain vivid and varied, countering the blatant artifice of musical the-

Matthew Murphy

Nick Duckart, Kevin Carolan, Andrew Samonsky and Company in the first North American Tour of “Come From Away.”

ater with the much-needed ballast of authenticity.

The characters, many of whom share the names of their real-life counterparts, are sketched quickly but distinctively with tics, neuroses and perspectives. Among the travelers are a bickering gay couple, a Muslim chef who draws suspicious stares, the agitated mother of a first responder in New York. Their contrapuntal chatter adds topography to the show’s warm blanket of a surface

and keeps “Come From Away” a safe distance from “We Are the World” homogeneity.

While cast members playing multiple roles is commonplace in musicals, “Come From Away” ingeniously turns this practical consideration into an artistic statement.

Rather than relying on offstage costume changes, actors transform back and forth between “plane people” and Newfoundlanders. It’s a literal visualization of the show’s

overarching message: As different as people may be, they share a common humanity; ultimately, we’re all made of the same stuff.

Even for audience members who miss this subtext, it’s thrilling to see the code-switching prowess of the show’s crackerjack ensemble. Every one of them turns on a dime with million-dollar expertise. Postures shift, facial expressions snap, and accents suddenly switch from British, Arabic and idiomatic American (Southern, Noo Yawk, Midwestern) to goofy Newfie. It’s a bit ironic that while Sankoff and Hein are Canadian, their Newfoundlanders are rendered more generically than their non-Canuck characters.

Particularly impressive is Becky Gulsvig, whose “Me and the Sky” is the show’s most compelling solo number. As Beverley, the first-ever female pilot for American Airlines, who captained one of the Gander landings, Gulsvig is a riveting presence, commanding the audience’s undivided attention. Yet between appearances as Beverley, Gulsvig slips stealthily into the Canadian crowd, never pulling our focus from whoever else has stepped to the foreground.

Julie Johnson also stands out in her role as Beulah, the most distinctly drawn Gander local, a good-humored, no-nonsense town matriarch.

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Ashley’s direction and Kelly Devine’s musical staging keep their dozen-member cast in constant, crowded motion. Doubling as stagehands, the actors pass props and furniture back and forth. A terrific eight-piece band, on stage for much of the show, enlivens the action with busy, Celtic-influenced accompaniment, full of whistle, fiddles, mandolin and flute. This choreographed commotion evokes the ad hoc activity demanded when 7,000 unexpected guests arrive in a town with a similar population.

Performed in one intermissionless act, “Come From Away” is able to convey the compelling flurry of an emergency through its staging despite the lack of any strong dramatic arc in the script. (They land.

They leave. True story.) But it’s the lack of over-amped drama that keeps the show feeling sincere and unexploitative.

The travelers who landed in Gander on 9/11 experienced simple human kindnesses as part of an unexpected detour. “Come From Away” suggests that they belong on our everyday itinerary. You could write that off as treacle. Or take it as a dare.t Come From Away, through Feb. 3 at the Golden Gate Theatre.

Tickets (from $56): (888) 7461799, www.shnsf.com

Too many cooks spoil the melting pot

by Jim Gladstone

D

uring the mid-19th century, the Manhattan neighborhood of Five Points offered an optimistic glimpse of our country’s melting pot potential. Free blacks and Irish immigrants lived and worked together there, building families and community. But their tight-knit social fabric began to fray when the Union Army’s Civil War draft was instated. Irishmen who had applied for U.S. citizenship were called to put their lives on the line in the battle against slavery, while their neighbors of African descent were deemed unfit for the fight.

That’s the fascinating, complex and little-known episode of American history at the heart of “Paradise Square,” the ambitious, long-aborning musical now in its latest stage of gestation at Berkeley Rep. But a heartbeat is often difficult to hear through the buzzy, crosshatched brainwaves of a creative team that shows signs of internal discord.

The book, credited to three writers – Marcus Gardley, Craig Lucas and Larry Kirwan – feels less like a genuine collaboration than an oft-passed baton, covered with everyone’s stilldistinct fingerprints.

Kirwan is also credited as the show’s “Conceiver.” His original

concept was to explore the life and music of Stephen Foster through the time the iconic American composer (“Camptown Races,” “Oh, Susanna,” “Beautiful Dreamer”) spent living in Five Points, alcoholic, broke and estranged from his family. At some point during the show’s more than six years of iterative development, Foster may have been a central character.

But now his story has become a barnacle, clinging to the much more compelling fictional narratives of black and Irish business partners Nelly Freeman (Christina Sajous) and Annie O’Brien (Madeline Trumble), whose Paradise Square saloon is the community’s social hub and a station stop on the underground railroad. A wan, anemic Foster (Jacob Fishel, in a thankless role) rents lodgings above the bar and wafts in and out of the action.

His only substantive scenes make up a wildly tangential plotline, a sharp-witted but utterly superfluous peek at minstrelsy and the sheet-music business. It seems to be lingering from a long-gone Fostercentric “Paradise Square.” In its current form, the show feels more committed to intellectual showboating than satisfying storytelling. (“Showboat,” as it happens, along with “Porgy and Bess” and “Les Mis-

proceedings, and much of erables,” is in the league of the show feels like it’s taking populous, tableaux-heavy place in a museum vitrine history musicals that rather than on a stage.

“Paradise Square” seems Under Moisés Kaufman’s determined to join.) ultra-finessed direction, While taking pains to every actor’s every moveweave in clever references ment feels programmed to contemporary socioporather than lived. Disney’s litical debates – the role of Hall of Presidents comes to the 1% in fomenting racial mind. discord among less wealthy Producer Garth Drabinpopulations, the commersky, whose biggest Broadcial appropriation of ethway success was another nic folkways, the shifting American history musical, legacy of celebrated figures “Ragtime,” has clearly infrom the past in light of vested heavily in this procurrent mores – “Paradise duction. Toni-Leslie James’ Square” runs out of time to period costumes and Allen resolve its own plot, endMoyer’s enormous rotating ing didactically rather than tenement sets are visually dramatically. stunning. But while it treats After nearly two-and-athe eyes and piques the half hours, in the midst of Kevin Berne/Berkeley Repertory Theatre intellect, for the moment an onstage riot, the show (Front:) Daren A. Herbert (Rev. Samuel E. Cornish) “Paradise Square,” billed starts to wrap up with and Sidney Dupont (William Henry Lane) in as a “World Premiere,” remembers of the cast stepthe world premiere of “Paradise Square: A New mains a work-in-progress, ping forward, not quite in Musical” at Berkeley Rep. in need of more soul and character, and prosaically fewer concepts. “Paradise” describing the fate of the may not be lost, but it’s still Five Points community Foster’s music by Kirwan and Jason finding itself.t over months and years to come.

Howland provide occasional oases While some goosebump-inducof real theatrical rapture, “Paradise ing dance numbers, choreographed Paradise Square, through Feb. Square” generally doesn’t give its

by Bill T. Jones, Garrett Coleman 24 at Berkeley Rep. Tickets characters or audience much room (from $28): (510) 647-2949, www. and Jason Oremus, and sumptuto breathe. berkeleyrep.org ously layered interpolations of There’s an airless quality to the

Polish yoke

by David Lamble

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est-known in America for the 2004 Yorkshire teen girls romance “My Summer of Love,” Cannes award-winning director Pawel Pawlikowski recalls the European Communist-era relationship of his composer dad and singer mom in “Cold War.” It’s a fractured fairy tale filmed in chilly-to-thebone B&W and the old-fashioned square-screen aspect ratio.

Each chapter opens with a dateand-place stamp traversing a tumultuous slice of history from 1945-59.

“Cold War” focuses on a hetero love affair between an ambitious

blonde singer and her emotional punching-bag of a composer lover, set against the backdrop of postwar Poland, suffering under the cruel, freedom-crushing style of Stalinist bureaucrats.

We meet our tortured hero Victor (Tomasz Kot) in 1949 during a harsh Polish winter. His job is to wander through the bleak frozen tundra of Communist Poland with fellow musicologist Irena (Agata Kulesza), recording rural folk music where and whenever they find it.

Victor and Irena stumble upon a special academy established to harvest teenage talent to reboot the traditional folk music of rural Poland,

run by ruthless party bureaucrat Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc). Victor’s eye falls on a young blonde student singer, Zula (Joann Kulig).

Persistent rumors have it that she murdered her father. “He mistook me for my mother, and I used a knife to show him the difference.”

Victor is smitten, and despite the likelihood that Zula might be betraying him to the secret police, a passionate affair begins. Later,

feeling flummoxed by her demands and behavior, Viktor bitterly challenges her to “find another normal guy who can support you.” Zula retorts, “Such man is not born yet.”

It’s easy to forget that “Cold War” is that odd hybrid, the “musical drama,” a throwback to prewar days when Hollywood was giddy with song and dance. The film’s musical numbers resonate with socialist re-

alist themes, demonstrating the determination of the era’s communist rulers to bend every human element in their sprawling empire to a deadly dull propaganda purpose. It’s to the film’s credit that, as the sinisterly charming but scary Kaczmarek, Borys Szyc offers an Oscar-worthy turn as an ideology-driven devil.

At a moment when America’s long-treasured history of welcoming immigrants under Liberty’s torch is under siege, it’s useful to recall the daily terror of societies where, as “Casablanca” screenwriters wrote in 1942, “the Devil has the people by the throat.” (Opens Friday.)t

t

Books>>

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 17

Poet’s Parisian sojourn

by Tim Pfaff

I

know I’m leading with a tautology here, but I’ve never before read a book anything like “What’s Left of the Night” (New Vessel Press).

Writing about what happened during a brief interval in a historical personage’s life about which there is no competing official record has often proved a rich vein for novelists to mine. Ersi Sotiropoulos’ “account” of what happened during Constantine Cavafy’s three-day sojourn in Paris in 1897 gives primacy to the events that took place in Cavafy’s mind.

The tissue between dream and waking reality is ever-porous. Earth time is melted as it is in Salvador Dali’s clock. The few distinct events in three days appear with the same shock value as the nightmares.

The genius of Sotiropoulos’ fiction is that the only way they could accurately and fully be recounted is in her very words (brilliantly translated by Karen Emmerich).

I’ve never had a harder time starting a book without even considering stopping. It opens, hypnotically, with a long sentence that begins, “The earth still seemed flat then, and night fell at once until the end of the world,” which has the cadence of

Genesis as if, like this novel, Genesis had been written in Greek. Often, particularly early on as my body was adjusting to the fluctuations of the prose’s water temperature, I had to put the book down after a page or two, to breathe heavily and prepare to sally forth.

The last book that seemed to me as simultaneously concrete and hallucinatory in its opening was “Under the Volcano.” With this

novel my pauses between return engagements were in moments (to wipe my eyes, mostly) rather than the years before I was finally able to scale “Volcano.”

Until I got my footing in its rhythms (again, pages, not chapters), my eyes kept sliding off the page after her pregnant words had negotiated a “carriage return,” so I kept slipping off the unfettered imagination of her writing. This is not a book to miss, but neither is it one to take to bed, at least literally.

I’ll condense what I think Sotiropoulos says happened to Cavafy and his brother John during their fateful Paris sojourn. The weather was bad (on the hot end of the scale), the entertainments worse (on the coarse end of the scale). Cavafy found the people he knew largely insufferable, so took to elaborate Joycean fantasies about strangers he saw briefly but didn’t know.

Principal among them were a strappingly handsome apprentice Cavafy saw slaving over a machine that threw sparks on his exposed, hairy body, and a curly-haired dancer from the visiting St. Petersburg Ballet. There, in the reader’s imagination, now as heated as Cavafy’s, one imagines the Ballets Russes, the

Improper Bostonian

by Jim Piechota Sketchtasy by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore; Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95

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ambda Award-winning author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore draws from her time spent living in Boston in 1995 to inform “Sketchtasy,” a coming-of-age novel combining drugs, gay culture, adventure, spirit, and a group of ragtag friends who buoy each other through thick and thin.

Manning the helm of the melodramatic rocket ship is Alexa, an outspoken, color-coiffed 21-yearold queen who narrates the novel with breakneck-speed stream-ofconsciousness that migrates from annoyance to hunger to coke mirrors to gay Boston in all its 1990s sequined glam and faded glory.

The bars and clubs Alexa and her pals party in ring true. Their “little youth corner” hangout in the Eagle, Sundays at the Avalon nightclub, screeching Green Line trains, Luxor, Jacques, Glad Day Bookshop (where

she met BFF Polly, “the fag behind the counter”), the Combat Zone, “scary South End gays,” cruising the muddy paths of the Fens, hustling at Park Square – readers who were there are in for a surreal treat.

Alexa laments while walking across Boston, “I’m trying to figure out who’s worse, the gay people who look at me like I’m trash, the straight couples who look at me like I’m going to steal their unborn child, or the straight guys who look at me like they want me dead.”

The artificial energy of Ecstasy, speedballs, and cocaine rules the day, as does some clever banter courtesy of Alexa and friends. Alexa unravels before our eyes, hustling tricks, demanding steep prices (“a hundred is my starting point”), and visiting her therapist in an effort to process her father’s sexual abuse when she was a child. She also mourns acquaintances in other cities who disappear into the great AIDS vortex. “Everywhere in San Francisco, really, you went to a club one week, and the next week the DJ was dead.” The book reminds that 1990s gay life was rife with drugs, ACT UP meetings, buzzing pagers, and waves of evaporated friends.

Readers will feel the sting of pills hitting the back of their throats, the sogginess of a packed nightclub and its throbbing heartbeat, and the whirlwind of perceptions in Alexa’s drug-addled mind as she navigates pain, desire, hurt, and hope. Sycamore’s third novel is a kaleidoscopic carnival ride through life, love, sex, yearning, and the synergy of best friends, but it doesn’t shy away from the torment of being queer.t

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reads from “Sketchtasy” on Wed., Jan. 23, 7 p.m. at City Lights in SF. She will appear with Rebecca Brown at the SF Public Library main branch

dancer Nijinsky himself.

At the 11th hour, Constantine (John, lying sick in bed at the hotel) is driven by carriage with a sexually ambiguous “comte” to a forbidden club on the outskirts of Paris even beyond its demimonde. Something like a sex club is teased, but here the writing is at its most hallucinatory, inviting the reader to read in at will.

The central conflict is in the budding poet’s mind and is best expressed, plotlessly, near the end of the novel: “How could someone who lived a conventional, conservative, mediocre life [as the real Cavafy would] write important poetry?”

What we’ve been given a window on is nothing less than Cavafy we have come to know (some of us to revere) in utero, as both person and poet.

The point of view is spectral, allseeing if less than omniscient third person. Sotiropoulos’ sleight of hand – her sentences, even the page-long ones, are diagrammable, with the occasional sentence fragment clear as a cut diamond in context – is an act that could get an enchanted reader to follow a traveling circus around the Great Plains in winter. Sotiropoulos can find the hum in ennui, the charge in what masquerades as the everyday, the eternity in weather.

Particular scenes burn in the memory long after they have been read, and the author brings some of them back just when you need snapping out of reality. The stun-

on Thurs., Jan. 24, 6 p.m.; Alley Cat Books in SF on Sun., Jan. 27, 6 p.m. with Diana Cage; and in Oakland at East Bay Booksellers, 7 p.m. on Tues., Jan. 29.

ner is her account of the drunken Constantine crouched on his boots outside the door of the hotel room in which he imagines the dancer with a woman he is fucking, then sleeping – listening through a keyhole for what could be hours, until pain and the specter of shame drive him back to his own room. A pubic hair he imagines having come from the dancer’s balls becomes a relic for contemplation, even adoration.

If you’ve already found Rumi but not yet Cavafy, this novel should fix that.t

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<< Theatre

18 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Autumn de Wilde

Broadway star Audra McDonald: “Musical theatre is my first language.”

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Audra McDonald

From page 13

McDonald has been wowing Broadway audiences for 25 years with her performances in shows such as “Carousel,” “Master Class,” “Ragtime,” and as jazz great Billie Holiday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill.” She has won a record six Tony Awards for her work, and remains an in-demand concert performer and recording artist. She has also appeared extensively on television, including four seasons on the hit series “Private Practice.”

Rudetsky is the afternoon host on Sirius XM Satellite radio’s “On Broadway.” He is a published author, and recently co-wrote and co-starred in “Disaster!” on Broadway. An out gay man, Rudetsky and his husband, James Wesley,

<<

Steve Kahn

From page 13

He had previously met some of his subjects, all of whom were sex workers, during a brief stint in S&M publishing that produced a single issue of the pornographic magazine “Photo-Bondage.” But the LA-born Kahn, who settled in Berkeley in 2012 and died last year, soon trained his eye on their dingy, dilapidated workplace environments, the suites of the series title being a euphemistic term. More Sartre than S&M, the experimental project morphed into something existential in nature: a metaphoric, conceptual examination of the dimensions of psychological bondage, confinement, mental claustrophobia and the internal ties that bind. Fifty-eight of his staged, minimalist black & white photographs, along with contact sheets, Polaroids and multi-part images with a potent air of unreality, are now on view in a small but disconcerting show at the de Young Museum.

Kahn gives us the seamy underside of the Hollywood dream factory. This is not the LA of endless Pacific Ocean expanse, balmy sea breezes, Rodeo Drive glamour or sun-kissed movie stars, but of the harsh glare of Southern California light, torn, ill-fitting window curtains, scuffed doors, peeling paint barely concealed by kitschy art, and the imprint of long-gone mirrors on the walls of airless rooms devoid of life.

The first part of the show features portraits of models, nude and in various states of undress. “Nude 29” (1975), of a woman facing up against a wall, her spaghetti-strap cocktail dress unzipped to the waist exposing her naked back, is erotically charged, while another,

co-produced a recording of “What the World Needs Now” featuring Broadway luminaries Idina Menzel, Lin-Manuel Miranda and McDonald. The song went to #1 on iTunes and raised $100,000 to benefit the shooting victims at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando where 49 people died in a 2016 mass shooting. On Inauguration Day 2017, he launched “Concerts for America,” a monthly series around the country that raises critical funds for five nonprofits being hurt by the current administration.

McDonald and Rudetsky are old friends. Both spoke to the B.A.R. about that friendship.

“We met almost 30 years ago,” said McDonald. “We each got married around the same time, have kids the same age, and experienced a lot in the business together. Seth is

one of my favorite people, and he’s so, so talented.”

Rudetsky recalled more about the history of their friendship. “I met Audra at an audition in the 90s,” he said. “Right after I got out of Oberlin, and while she was still at Julliard.

I volunteered every week at a hospital that housed prisoners with AIDS. I would put on shows through an organization called Hearts and Voices. I asked her to sing at one, she asked me to coach her and play auditions for her, and soon I was playing the Broadway section of her Julliard senior recital – that raised a few uptight classical eyebrows.”

The two have worked together quite a bit since then. “Doing things like the Dreamgirls concert I put together for the Actors Fund,” said Rudetsky. “Or the recording of ‘What the World Needs Now’ that my

husband and I produced after the Orlando shooting. We both have a daughter the same age and got married within weeks of each other. I guess we’re friends because we have a lot in common, except she has six more Tony Awards than I do.”

“All I can say is that I am the one who’s honored,” McDonald said of her Tony wins. “I’m very grateful that people have enjoyed my work, and I’m so lucky to do what I do every day.”

McDonald recalled what it was that first drew her to the theatre. “I was a very hyperactive child, and my parents struggled to find an outlet where I could channel all of my energy,” she said. “One night, they attended a dinner theatre where a kids troop did the pre-dinner show.

They immediately inquired about how I could audition and join, and I absolutely loved it. After that, the theatre became my second home!”

She added that she greatly enjoys all the mediums that she performs in, including concerts and television. “I don’t really have a favorite,” she said. “They all challenge me and are fulfilling in different ways. The only thing I’ll say is that musical theatre is my first language. That’s the first thing I started with, so it feels very natural to me.”

McDonald, who is African American, said that she has been greatly influenced by many women of color who proceeded her, such as Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll and Ella Fitzgerald. She is still preparing for the Herbst show and isn’t yet sure what she’ll be doing when she takes to the stage.

“When it comes to concerts with Seth, I don’t really know what to expect,” she said. “We’ve been friends for such a long time, and he knows every song I know. Our concerts weave in and out of conversation and song, but we spontaneously stumble upon our favorite musical theatre or Great American Songbook works along the way.”

Rudetsky promises “a ton of

t

amazing singing and a ton of laughs.”

“People don’t realize that Audra is really, really funny,” he said. “She has so many stories about getting busted that I will make her tell, including the one that happened at Oprah’s house. Plus, she can sing anything.

We’ll be doing her amazing high soprano stuff like ‘Summertime’ from ‘Porgy and Bess,’ but also her Broadway belt stuff like a Barbra song from ‘Funny Girl.’ I always throw in something to surprise her as well. At our last concert in NYC, I brought out the entire score from ‘Evita’ and made her sing the title role!”

The evening will be completely improvised, he notes.

“Every concert I do involves interviews because I can’t stand scripted patter,” he said. “An audience knows it isn’t special because they’re hearing the same ‘It’s great to be here’ that the audience heard the night before. So, these concerts that I’ve been doing in San Francisco and across the country are different every single time. There are always new songs added, and there are always new stories between the songs. I love getting inside Broadway dish, and I think it’s fun for the audience to feel like they’re in my living room. With Audra, it’s especially fun because she has all those Broadway shows to talk about, plus her fabulous TV career, and yes, I’ll be asking about the time her wig fell off during ‘Ragtime.’”

McDonald said she was pleased to be appearing in support of the evening’s beneficiary organizations.

“It means a lot that this series is also focused on giving back,” she said.

“I think it’s our job as performers to always shed light on others who need our help. These organizations provide such wonderful services to the community, so we’re honored to do our part.”t Broadway @ The Herbst, Jan. 20, 5 p.m., Herbst Theatre, SF. Tickets: www.cityboxoffice.

of a nude woman whose upper body and face are covered in clear plastic, is just plain disturbing. The pictures are discomfiting to a 2019 sensibility, and Kahn was aware of the ire this body of work elicited from feminists at the time. He made statements that implied they failed to recognize that he and they were on the same page when it came to issues of bondage.

Kahn was at his most playful in “Acting Out” (1976), one of several multiple-image mural photographs included in a group of large-scale diptychs and triptychs.

Comprised of a dozen Polaroids he later re-photographed with 35mm film and enlarged, its offkilter angles and degraded surfaces hint something has gone awry. The piece captures a spectral, grainy figure, reminiscent of a Chinese shadow puppet, striking a number of poses as it moves across Courtesy FAM/SF a room, slipping halfway out the door at the tail Steve Kahn, “Nude 11” (1974). Gelatin silver print, part of an exhibit at the de Young Museum. end, its presence presumably invisible to all but a process by stretching the rope trapment. He was known to equate freighted, in literature, horror privileged few. across the passageway, pinning it to window dressings with female apmovies and ghost stories, with suIt’s fair to say that Kahn was the wall on either side, then photoparel or lack thereof, calling winperstition, fear and anxiety. Those obsessed with doors and windows, graphed the result. Like the scene dows without curtains “de-frocked.” apprehensions found expression in which can be perceived as barriof a crime, these shabby psychic One wonders what Dr. Freud would the artist’s practice of binding doors ers or portals depending on one’s landscapes compel our voyeuristic have had to say about this. with rope, eliminating any means of point of view. He once went so far attention even as we stifle the urge In what he dubbed his “No-Exit escape. For “Bound Door 6” (1976), as to create 17 variations of the to flee. You can check in, but you Scenarios” we are party to a private for example, he took 23 Polaroids of same window, each shot with a can’t check out.t monologue emanating from his a doorway obscured with dark fabdifferent exposure time. Masked or interior world, a one-way conversaric, and etched the chemical emulexposing downscale urban streets, tion apparent in a grouping devoted sion with marks mimicking strands Through March 31. for him windows were yet another to thresholds, which are commonly of twine. He capped the elaborate deyoung.famsf.org manifestation of alienation and en-

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Leather

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Susan Werner

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Shining Stars Vol. 49 • No. 3 • January 17-23, 2019

Nightlife Events

January 17-24

Follow a popular New Year’s resolution into 2019; sweat off a bit of winter weight on the dance floor, or stack it on at a food truck outside the club. No judgment.

Fri 18 Georg Lester

Winter Onesie Party @ Lookout

Listings on page 20 >

Arts Events January 17-24

Winter wonderlands of art, theatre and music offer warming thoughts, sounds, images and ideas.

Tue 22 Puddles Pity Party @ Palace of Fine Arts

Listings on page 23 > { THIRD OF THREE SECTIONS }

@LGBTSF

@eBARnews

<< Nightlife Events

Thu 17 After Dark @ Exploratorium

Gooch

20 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

Sun 20

Disco Daddy @ SF Eagle

Enjoy cocktails and science demo sat the hands-on museum. $15-$20. 6pm10pm. Jan 17: Curious Contraptions; Jan. 24: Atoms are ‘Radioactive.’ .

Pier 15 (Embarcadero at Green St). www.exploratorium.edu

Link Link Circus @ The Chapel Isabella Rossellini’s animal costume performance art fun lecture about the cross between human and animal behavoprs, with puppeteer Schuyler Beeman. $45-$60. 9pm. Also Jan 19 & 20. 777 Valencia St. thechapelsf.com

The Monster Show @ The Edge The weekly drag show with host Sue Casa, DJ MC2, themed nights and hilarious fun. $5. 9pm-2am. 4149 18th St. at Collingwood. www.edgesf.com

Ms. Pak-Man @ Oasis The wacky comic show about a hasbeen video game character returns; Scott Shoemaker as the loveable trainwreck Ms. Pak-Man, featuring Erin Stewart and Amalia Larson as the Ghostettes. $27-$50. 8pm. Also Jan 18 & 19 at 7pm. 10pm-2am. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Nightlife @ California Academy of Sciences Parties at the fascinating spacious nature and science exhibits. Jan 17: New Wave City, SF Sketchfest comedy acts. $12-$15. 6pm-10pm. 55 Music Concourse Drive, Golden Gate Park. www.calacademy.org

Prince’s former band (Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, Bobby Z, BrownMark and Dr. Fink), reunited. $26-$52. 8pm. 2036 University Ave., Berkeley. www.theuctheatre.org Also Jan 20 at The Fillmore, $50. 8pm.

1805 Geary St. at Fillmore. www.thefillmore.com

Sun 20

Andrea McArdle & Donna McKechnie @ Feinstein's at The Nikko The two Broadway and TV stars celebrate composers Sondheim and Hamlisch in a duo cabaret concert. $65-95 ($20 food/drink min.). 8pm. Also Jan 19, 8pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. feinsteinsatthenikko.com

The Revolution @ UC Theatre, Berkeley/ Fillmore, SF

Blessed @ Port Bar, Oakland

Fri 18 Comedy Returns @ El Rio The monthly giggle fest this time includes Bernadette Luckett, Joe Klocek, Chey Bell, Arjun Banerjee, and host Lisa Geduldig. $7-$20. 7pm. 3158 Mission St. www.elriosf.com

Elton John @ Oracle Arena, Oakland The rock legend stops through on his ‘Farewell Yellow Brick Road’ tour. $230 and up. 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakland. Also Jan 19 at SAP SCenter, San Jose. www.eltonjohn.com/tours

Makeout Party @ SF Eagle Smoochfest with cool kids photo booth, DJ Robin Simmons, Elaine Denham. $8. 8pm-2am. 398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

You Betta Work Comedy Fiesta @ San Mateo County Pride Center Jesus U. Bettawork’s monthly queer gigglefest. $5. 7:30pm-9pm. 1021 South El Camino Real, San Mateo. https://sanmateopride.org/

Sat 19 Beatpig @ Powerhouse Eclectic rockin’ fun with Juanita MORE! and crew, plus DJ Stanley Frank. $5. 10pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

D.A.D. @ Driftwood Dudes And Disco presents DJs Chrisssie, Kelly Naughton and Jumper at the popular intimate SoMa monthly event; get there early! $5. 9pm-2am.

1225 Folsom St. driftwoodbarsf.com

Howlin Rain @ Independent

The popular roving women’s dance party returns at the new nightclub, now weekly. 10pm-2am. 2700 16th St. at Harrison. http://jolenessf.com/

The rockin’ Oakland band plays original swampy-bluesy tunes; Scott Law and Ross James’ Cosmic Twang and Garcia Peoples open. $16-$21.

9pm. 628 Divisadero St. www.howlinrain.com

Winter Onesie Party @ Lookout

Jonathan Butler @ Yoshi’s Oakland

Uhaul @ Jolene’s

Annual fun PJ party for guys and gals, with DJ Matt Effect, performance by Juhnay Arabesque, free coat check. $5 and up donations support Global Girls Alliance. 9pm-2am. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

The genre-blending singer-songwriterguitarist performs four concerts at the stylish restaurant-nightclub. $35. 7:30pm & 9:30pm. Jan 20 at 7pm & 9pm. 510 Embarcadero West, Oakland. www.yoshis.com

Lewis Black @ The Masonic The brutally funny comic and social critic returns with rants, raves and revelations. $39-$80. 8pm. 1111 California St. www.sfmasonic.com

Macho Macho @ SF Eagle Monthly Latino leather & kink night, with Pinche Pobrecito & DJ Sucia, performances by Frankie Doom and Lady Forbidden. $8. 9pm-2am. 398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

Mother @ Oasis

Carnie Asada's fun drag night with Carnie's Angels Mahlae Balenciaga and Au Jus, plus DJ Ion. 2023 Broadway. www.portbaroakland.com

D’Arcy’s 5-Ohhh! @ Oasis Co-owner and performer D’Arcy Drollinger celebrates 50 years with a party and a show; fabulous/black & white attire requested. No cover.

7pm. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Disco Daddy @ SF Eagle DJ Bus Station John’s post-beer bust tea-dance and 58th birthday bash will groove your socks off. $5-$7. 7pm2am. 398 12th St. www.sf-eagle.com

Palace of Trash, Lip Service @ The Stud

Hysteria Comedy @ Martuni's Laugh out loud comics at the open mic night, with host Wonder Dave.

6pm-8pm. 4 Valencia St.

Race Chaser @ Castro Theatre RuPaul’s Drag Race stars Alaska and William do their podcast onstage, with performer Big Dipper, guests and contests. $25-$100 (VIP cocktail reception, priority seating). 7pm. 429 Castro St. www.castrotheatre.com

Truck Tuesdays @ Atlas The weekly super-cruisy night, with clothes check. $5. 415 10th St.

The Whining @ Gateway Theatre Peaches Christ and Varla Jean Merman’s satirical drag show very loosely based on The Shining ; part of SF Sketchfest. $30. 8pm. Also Jan 23. 215 Jackson St. www.SFsketchfest.com

Wed 23 NSA @ Club OMG Weekly underwear party at the intimate mid-Market nightclub. $1 well drinks for anyone in underwear from 9pm-10pm. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

New Drag @ Port Bar, Oakland Competition for drag acts, with host Echo. 2023 Broadway. www.portbaroakland.com

The sassy drag collective performs to Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill. 7pm-9pm; then ABBA drag lipsynch show, 9pm. $5. 399 9th St. www.studsf.com

Nudie Nubies @ Monarch

Renegade @ Atlas

Drag divas, gogo studs, DJed Latin grooves and drinks. 9pm-2am (free before 10:30pm). 2344 Market St. www.clubpapi.com

The popular new weekly super-cruisy party; BYO, clothes check and DJed grooves. $10. 5pm-8pm. 415 10th St. https://www.facebook.com/ groups/2094886877491354/

Mon 21 Drag Queen Bingo @ The Willows Board game fun with Ginger Snap and friends. 7pm-9pm. 1582 Folsom St. http://www.thewillowssf.com

Munro’s at Midnight @ Midnight Sun Drag night with Mercedez Munro. No cover. 10pm. 4067 18th St. 861-4186. www.midnightsunsf.com

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

Heklina's popular drag show, with special guests and great music themes, celebrates its fourth anniversary, with performances Gia Taco Zamora, Tito KaiKai Bee, Michaels Rock M. Sakura, Florida Man, Sugah Betes, Elsa Touche, Profundity, Madd Dogg, Nicki Jizz, Mason Dixon Jarrs. $15-$20.

10pm-3am (11:30pm show). 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Tue 22

Ozomatli @ The Fillmore

Weekly fun night of games (video, board and other) and cocktails. 8pm12am. 4067 18th St. www.midnightsunsf.com

The L.A. hip-hop Latin band performs; Bang Data shares the bill. $27. 9pm.

1805 Geary St. at Fillmore. http://thefillmore.com

Burlesque show with gals and drags. $10-$15. 8:30pm-11:30pm. 101 Sixth St. www.monarchsf.com

Pan Dulce @ Beaux

Queeraoke @ El Rio Midweek drag rave and vocal open mic, with assorted guest hosts. 10pm.

3158 Mission St. www.elriosf.com

SoMa Comedy Showcase @ Oasis Variety show of new local talents. $10. 7pm. 298 11th St. sfoasis.com

Thu 24 Junk @ Powerhouse MrPam and Dulce de Leche cohost the weekly underwear strip night and contest.. $5. 10pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Kick It @ DNA Lounge Kandi Love, Northcore Collective and Plus Alliance's weekly EDM, flow arts dance night, with DJs; glow drag encouraged. $5-$10. 9pm-2am. 375 11th St. www.dnalounge.com

Dina Martina @ Oasis

Queer Karaoke @ Club OMG

The drag comic will make you bust a gut with her show Crème de la Dregs. $25. 7pm & 9pm. Also Jan 23. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

KJ Dana hosts the weekly singing night; unleash your inner American Idol; first Thursdays are Costume Karaoke; 3rd is Kinky Karaoke 8pm.

43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

Gaymer Night @ Midnight Sun

Showstoppers @ Oasis An Evening with Garland and Minnelli, Logan Walker’s lipsynch drag show. $20-$30. 8pm. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Porchlight @ Swedish American Hall Special storytelling night with SF Sketchfest, featuring Guy Branum (podcaster, comedian and writer) Jon Glaser (writer and actor Parks and Recreation and Girls) , Ken Jennings (writer and 74-time Jeopardy champ), Lucy Davis ( The Office, Shaun of the Dead, Wonder Woman, Better Things) and comic Maria Wojciechowski. $25-$32. 7:30pm. 2174 Market St. https://www.sfsketchfest.com/

Reddroxx @ Lone Star Saloon DJ BRD spins tunes at the famous bear bar. $5. 9pm-2am. 1354 Harrison St. www.lonestarsf.com

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Mon 21

Munro’s at Midnight @ Midnight Sun

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Leather>>

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 21

Positioning our sex

Deconstructing top, bottom and various codes

leather and kink and the power dynamics sometimes employed during play and within relationships, the diminution of those who play as subs unfolds as a natural expression of the specific fantasies involved.

That’s fair and even useful, in small doses. But when such an attitude carries over into the larger communal and social realm, that’s where things can become problematic.

View from a top, and a bottom

Who’s the top? Can you read the hanky codes?

by Race Bannon

I

n 1968 an iconic novel by author William Carney was published titled The Real Thing. The story is set in New York amid a cast of an early generation of gay leathermen. Many consider it one of the first modern gay leather and BDSM novels. It’s a classic.

The following sentence that jumped out at me when I first read it, and that resonates even more today in our current sexual culture environment.

“Is it any wonder that the top men are so temperamental, so vulnerable, seeing that so much is expected of them and that almost the entire success of an arrangement depends upon them?”

Some will take exception to that quotation. Arguments that ‘It takes two to tango’ can rightly be made. Without those who bottom someone who tops can’t exactly do much.

However, although this is a work of fiction, the quotation aptly expresses the sentiment that often in the sexual partnering contract there’s an assumption that the top or dom will be the sole conductor of the experience with the bottom or sub simply going along for the ride.

Far too frequently, the leather communities tend to honor and revere tops and doms in a way they do not always bottoms and subs.

I’ve increasingly seen this play out in the non-kinky gay men’s world as well. Not only do some tend to elevate those who play as tops. They tend to assume that such tops are the gatekeepers of the great erotic experiences to be had. I’m not sure that’s entirely useful.

I don’t believe that anyone ‘should’ be any one thing sexually: top, bottom, versatile, dom, sub, switch, or whatever. Self-determination reigns as king with me and everyone gets to decide how their own sexuality manifests.

Certain assumptions and expectations we sometimes have regarding sex positions and erotic roles can be as constraining as they are liberating.

The quotation from the novel was written in 1968, and such position and role pressures certainly existed then. Yet the inordinate amount of

The Real Thing by William Carney is a well-known novel with early gay leathermen characters.

pressure we place on the top side of the equation has escalated, not just for BDSM and kink players, but also in the general gay men’s communities too.

One significant source of the current hyperfocus on positions and roles is the result of the ‘databasing’ of our sexuality. Before online hookup profiles, everyone had to have discussions to establish those sorts of parameters. Now we just look at a few fields in a profile and assume we know all we need to know about the person.

We don’t.

Perhaps due to the nature of

One of the advantages of being older, especially having come out into gay and sexual culture quite young, is that you get to see the long arc of change for many things.

We increasingly emphasize sexual positions and roles as self-defining and sorting mechanisms to, the point that we too often exclude perfectly good sexual and relationship partners because they don’t fit such self-imposed identity boxes.

Don’t get me wrong. I know we like what we like. If your bread is only buttered on the top, bottom, dom or sub side of the equation, do whatever floats your boat. One thing I consistently say is that sexuality is not a democratic endeavor and you should listen to your internal erotic directional signal and follow it. You can’t and shouldn’t force your sexual interests to conform to someone else’s perspective.

My fear is that all of this can generate a potential disconnect and dissatisfaction with sex because of top/bottom dyadic thinking rather than something more collaborative. Viewing tops as being responsible for the success of encounters also engenders an inequality and fosters the idiotic notion of top is better than bottom. For example, how often in the gay men’s communities do you hear snide swipes or jokes about someone being a bottom as if that’s somehow “less than” being a top.

There are other disadvantages to this mindset as well. In riskier scenarios it can lead to technical mistakes because it’s assumed tops know it all and the bottoms don’t need to participate with any in-depth understanding of what’s transpiring.

Bad idea; anyone who plays on the bottom or sub end of the spectrum should have a working knowledge of how good encounters happen, be they of the vanilla or kinky variety.

Just as worrisome, the mindset disallows the versatility that we all know the vast majority enjoy at least to some extent, either ongoing or across the span of their erotic lives. It can also force tops to unwisely adopt the ‘I know it all’ attitude while the bottom assumes they can ‘just lie there and react.’

For me, and I think many others, that’s not the best or most engaged of ways to enjoy sex.

Placing so much pressure on tops and doms to always produce a stellar encounter can result in tops feeling highly vulnerable and insecure. No top can be sure they’ll always perform to a bottom’s often unrealistic expectations.

One can crush the ego of a top rather easily. I’ve seen a top’s ego crushed with a few harsh words from a mean-spirited or clueless bottom: ‘The last guy didn’t flog me that way.’ ‘You better stay hard.’ ‘You say you’re versatile, but does that mean you’re going to go bottom instead of topping me?’ ‘I’m a ‘real’ slave and you better be a real Master.’

The list of tone-deaf comments like this could fill volumes. We hear

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them all the time.

So, let’s try to keep the positions and roles we enjoy within the confines of actual sex and relationships and not let them trickle out into the general sexual culture ether.

Whether you’re a leather or kinkidentified person, or you’re of the more vanilla variety, let’s make sex of all stripes true partnerships and keep the rigid position and role constructs inside our bedrooms and playrooms.t

For Leather Events, visit www.ebar.com/events Race Bannon is a local author, blogger and activist. www.bannon.com

<< Arts Events

22 • Bay Area Reporter • January 17-23, 2019

his creative design process with CJM Executive Director Lori Starr. $8-$20, 3pm-4:30pm. Also, Lew the Jew and His Circle: Origins of American Tattoo, an exhibit of the prolific tattoo artist’s work, tools and life; thru June 9. 736 Mission St. https://thecjm.org/

Impeaching the President @ Grace Cathedral Author Alan Hirsch discusses themes in his book, Impeaching the President: Past, Present and Future.

9:30am. 1100 California St. www.gracecathedral.org

Sun 20 Terrie Odabi at In the Name of Love @ Scottish Rite Center, Oakland

For full listings, visit www.ebar.com/events \

Thu 17 Classic and New Films @ Castro Theatre Jan 17: SF Sketchfest’s Stuff You Should Know with Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant (8pm). $11-$16 (SF Sketchbook tix at https:// sfsketchfest2019.sched.com). Jan 22: Race Chaser Live with Alaska and Willam. Jan 23: The Shining (7pm) and The Dead Zone (5pm, 9:35). Jan 24: Office Space 8pm. $20-$90. 7pm. 429 Castro St. http://www.castrotheatre.com/

Patti Smith: Wing @ SF Art Institute Exclusive five-day exhibit of 30 of the rock icon’s personal photos and portraits. Thru Jan. 19. 800 Chestnut St. www.sfai.edu/patti-smith

SF Sketchfest @ Multiple Venues The annual comedy, film & TV festival includes live appearances by dozens of comics, funny actors and celebrities; thru Jan 27. https:// www.sfsketchfest.com/

Fri 18 Border People @ The Marsh Dan Hoyle’s new solo show embodies multiple characters based around the U.S./Mexico border wall controversies; thru Feb 23. $25$100. Thu & Fri 8pm, Sat 5pm. 1062 Valencia St. www.themarsh.org

Fresh Festival @ Joe Goode Annex New dance, music and performance works-in-progress, weekly Fridays thru January. $20-$125 (fiull festival pass). 8pm. 401 Alabama St. www.joegoode.org

Eve of the Women’s March @ Grace Cathedral Kitka, the acclaimed women’s folk ensemble performs hauntingly beautiful works in Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, with Vajra Voices, and musicians Shira Kammen and Theresa Wong. $10$45. 7:30pm. 1100 California St. https://www.gracecathedral.org/

Late Company @ NCTC Jordan Tannahill’s gripping family drama about antigay bullies, redemption and anger, gets its West Coast-premiere in the gay theatre company’s new production. $20-$50. Wed-Sat 8pm Sun 2pm.

Thru Feb 24. 25 Van Ness Ave, lower level. www.nctcsf.org

Mental Health Comedy Hour @ All Out Comedy Theatre, Berkeley Standup comics tell truthful witty insights into their own dealings with Depression, Anxiety, ADHD, or Bipolar disorder, hosted by Wonder Dave and Kristee Ono. $11. 10pm.

2525 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. www.alloutcomedytheater.com

Poetry Night @ Alley Cat Books Kevin Killian hosts, with poets Claudia La Rocco, Allison Cobb, and Michael Brownstein. 7pm.

3036 24th St. http://www. alleycatbookshop.com/

You Betta Work Comedy Fiesta @ San Mateo County Pride Center Jesus U. Bettawork’s monhtly queer gigglefest. $5. 7:30pm-9pm. 1021 South El Camino Real, San Mateo. https://sanmateopride.org/

Sat 19 Jan Steckel @ FrankBetter Center for the Arts, Alameda The author reads from her new poetry collection, Flesh Covers Bone ; Jeanne Lupton hosts an open mic, with snacks and drinks. 7pm.

1601 Paru St., Alameda. https:// www.frankbettecenter.org/

Reorienting the Imaginaries @ SOMArts Cultural Center Exhibit of multidisciplinary works that bring together more than a dozen artists of color who are connected by complex histories, identity and power; thru Jan 24. 934 Brannan St. reorientingtheimaginaries.com www.somarts.org

Sara Cahill @ Dance Palace The acclaimed local pianist performs works by women around the globe, with a post-concert discussion with the audience. $10. 7pm. 503 B St., Point Reyes Station www.dancepalace.org

SF Hiking Club @ Uvas Canyon Park Join GLBT hikers of the SF Hiking Club for a 10-mile hike in Uvas Canyon County Park on the eastside of the Santa Cruz Mountains. meets 8:30 at Safeway sign, Market & Dolores.

(408) 797-7088. sfhiking.com

In the Name of Love @ Scottish Rite Center, Oakland 17th annual musical tribute honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with Jeanie Tracy, Kev Choice, Ms. Faye Carol, Terrie Odabi and Alvon Johnson, Scott Thompson, Daria Johnson, Alvon Johnson, and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, Terrance Kelly, Director. $25-$65.

7pm. 1547 Lakeside Drive, Oakland. www.livingjazz.org

Sprightly @ SF Public Library

Seascape @ Geary Theatre

Weekly hangout for LGBTQ youth, with crafts, snacks and activities.

Dec 16: Jessie Sisannah Karnatz, aka money Witch, leads a financial workshop. 12:30pm-2:30pm. James C. Hormel Center, 3rd floor, 100 Larkin St. www.sfpl.org

Edward Albee’s prize-winning satirical comedy about a retired couple’s beachside encounter with a pair of talking lizards. $15-$110.

Thru Feb 17. 415 Geary St. www.act-sf.org

Thunderbulge @ PianoFight LA’s hilarious male burlesque review feature comedy, strippers and singing; part of SF Sketchfest. $15.

10pm. 144 Taylor St. www.sfsketchfest.com

Mon 21 A Picture is a Word: The Posters of Rex Ray @ GLBT History Museum Exhibit of works by the late gay artist; thru Feb 3. The Briggs Initiative: A Scary Propostiion, thru Jan 20. $5.

4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

Patty From HR Would Like a Word @ Playground

Tue 22

Michael Phillis’ new solo show portrays a deranged Human Resources coworker. $20. 8pm.

Also Feb 2 & 8. 1695 18th St. www.playground-sf.org

The drag comic will make you bust a gut with her show Crème de la Dregs. $25. 7pm & 9pm. Also Jan 23. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Schitt’s Creek: Up Close and Personal @ The Masonic The cast of the hit comedy series (Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Dan Levy, Annie Murphy, Emily Hampshire and Noah Reid) in an onstage conversation; part of SF Sketchfest. $48-$103. 8pm. 1111 California St. www.sfmasonic.com

San Francisco Flamenco Dance Company @ Brava Theater The vibrant dance and music ensemble performs Volver, their new concert work. $28. 7pm. 2781 24th St. www.sanfranciscoflamenco.com

Dina Martina @ Oasis

Puddles Pity Party @ Palace of Fine Arts The surprisingly talented vocalistclown’s concert of comedy and creative covers; part of SF Sketchfest. $35-$125. 8pm. 3301 Lyon St. www.puddlespityparty.com

Wed 23 Black Refractions @ MOAD Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, a new traveling exhibition showcasing a century of artworks. Thru April 14. Free/$10.

Museum of the african Diaspora, 685 Mission St. www.moadsf.org

TO PLACE YOUR PERSONALS AD, CALL 415-861-5019 FOR MORE INFO & RATES

Various Events @ Oakland LGBTQ Center Social events and meetings at the new LGBTQ center include film screenings and workshops, including Bruthas Rising, trans men of color meetings, 4th Tuesdays, 6:30pm. Film screenings, 4th Saturdays, 7:30pm. Game nights, Fridays 7:30pm-11pm. Vogue sessions, first Saturdays. 3207 Lakeshore Ave. Oakland. https:// www.oaklandlgbtqcenter.org/

Thu 24 Metamorphosis @ Berkeley Rep Mary Zimmerman’s award-winning modern adaptation of Ovid’s iconic mythological story collection returns in a new co-production with The Guthrie Theatre. $28-$115. Thru Mar 10. 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. www.berkeleyrep.org

Stop AIDS Now or Else @ GLBT History Museum Protest as Community Catalyst, a panel discussion of the 1989 SF AIDS activist protests. $5. 7pm9pm. 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

SEXY ASIAN $60 Jim 415-269-5707 SUPERBOWL MASSAGE 415-350-0968

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Sun 20 Choreographies of Disclosure @ Pro Arts Oakland

The famed architect discusses

Incarceration of Japanese Americans During WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties, a touring multimedia exhibit documenting the terrifying period in U.S. history when the government scapegoated and imprisoned thousands of people of Japanese ancestry. Free. Wed-Sun 10am-6pm. 100 Montgomery St. https://thentheycame.org/

Massage>>

Portal: Group Show of Speculative Fiction, thru Feb; Shaped: Sharing HIV/AIDS Photos Essentially Deaf, thru Feb 1; Art/Work: Art Created by the Staff at SFPL, thru Mar. 8; SF Wildlife: Photography by Jouko van der Kruijssen, thru Mar. 28. 100 Larkin St. www.sfpl.org

Daniel Libeskind @ Contemporary Jewish Museum

Then They Came For Me @ Futures Without Violence

Personals

Various Exhibits @ SF Public Library

Choreographies of Disclosure: What the Mind Forgets, an LGBTartist group exhibit about sexual violence, thru Feb 15. 150 Frank H Ogowa Plaza, Oakland. https:// proartsgallery.org

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People>> “The first 80 years are the hardest.”

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Cabaret>>

January 17-23, 2019 • Bay Area Reporter • 23

Somewhere under the radar

Susan Werner

by Jim Gladstone

S

usan Werner is waxing lyrical about Carmen Cusack, the Tony-nominated singer-actress (Bright Star) with whom she’ll share a sublime Bay Area Cabaret double-bill at the Venetian Room this Sunday afternoon.

“You’ll feel lucky to be in the room with her. She’s so skillful it’s thrilling. She can snap your heart in two like a sugar wafer.”

But Werner might as well be talking about herself.

Check out that phrasing, that instinctive assonance, the sudden summoning of a perfect metaphor.

Over the course of twelve studio albums, the classically trained Werner –who has a fervent live fan base east of the Mississippi– has brought her keen ear and sharp wit to a dazzling range of subjects and musical styles, many of which seem tailormade for Bay Area audiences.

Hayseed, her suite of tributes to family farms like the one she grew up on in Iowa, finds Werner getting aggro on agri-business, cracking wise about the price of organic produce, and crafting a wistful paean to winter in the era of global warming.

The Gospel Truth, Werner’s rousing collection of “spiritual songs for agnostics” has lyrics that could serve as a hymnal at Glide Memorial. Chronicling her conflicted history with organized religion, she questions narrow-minded clergy: “If God is great and God is good/ Why is your heaven so small?”

In one of her earliest and most beloved songs, “Uncle John,” Werner, a lesbian with several gay siblings, reflects on the recognition and respect of a sensitive niece.

And her two most recent albums find Werner passionately delving into musical genres with huge Bay Area followings, Latin and New Orleans jazz.

Among the hundredplus original songs in Werner’s repertoire, is an ode to North Bay bliss, “Petaluma Afternoon,” and what should surely be an anthem of Peninsula nerds, “Recumbent Bike.”

So why isn’t Susan Werner the toast of San Francisco?

“I blame Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada,” she half-jokes, acknowledging that the broad swath of highly conservative turf that serves as a bit of a barrier. Based in Chicago and Philadelphia, Werner has had a successful career as a touring performer for over two decades; carefully planned, economically optimized itineraries are essential.

While Werner has occasionally played the Bay Area, primarily at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage, she’s a constant presence in the mid-west and on the east coast, where adoring reviews and word of mouth about her shows at venues including Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, Chicago’s City Winery and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival have built devoted ticket-buying regional followings.

“I’ve always made my living playing live,” Werner says, noting that between the technological shift to streaming and her genre-fluid musical tastes, “To be a ‘recording artist’? That’d just be a very expensive hobby.”

But it’s another slowly growing branch of Werner’s musical career that has brought her the opportu-

Icon-in-waiting Susan Werner plays the Venetian Room

nity for her high profile gig in San Francisco this weekend. Years back, a group of Broadway producers attended one of her Joe’s Pub performances.

“They recognized that many of my songs end at a very different place than they start; there’s a change of heart, or a change of viewpoint. They reached out to me and pointed out that this is the hallmark of theater songs, they move characters forward.”

“I’d started out writing pop-type songs and had just naturally moving into this more narrative style. I love the great American songbook and did one album in that sort of cabaret mood [I Can’t Be New]; I joked about being Cole Porter’s smart-mouthed little sister, Colette.”

“But honestly,” Werner recalls, “It hadn’t occurred to me that I could write for theater. It just dropped in

Susan Werner

my lap; so weird, like finding out you’ve got the skills to be a javelin thrower. Who knew? I didn’t have a javelin in the house!”

Ultimately, Werner was hired on to collaborate with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Ron Shelton on a Broadway-aimed adaptation of his hit film Bull Durham. In 2014, the show made a prominent regional debut at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater, an incubator for past film-to-stage hits, including Sister Act and The Color Purple.

While that production starred Melissa Errico in the role made famous by Susan Sarandon, subsequent development (“Broadway is a hurry up and wait game,” notes Werner) has found none other than Carmen Cusack playing the part.

When Bay Area Cabaret producer Marilyn Levinson, the astute identifier of sophisticated talent who first presented Cusack in concert locally decided to bring her back for an encore, she saw the Cusack-Werner Bull Durham connection as an opportunity to introduce local music lovers to yet another compelling new female talent.

“I’m so happy” says Levinson, “that San Francisco has become passionate about Carmen Cusack over the past few years and that Bay Area Cabaret has been a part of that. And now I can’t wait to see the city discover Susan Werner. Her humor, her spontaneity and her versatility are going to win our audiences over.”t Susan Werner and Carmen Cusack, Sunday, Jan. 20, 5pm at The Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel, 950 Mason St. $65. www.bayareacabaret.org

Shining Stars Steven Underhill Photos by

Paradise Square @ Berkeley Rep O

pening Night of Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s new musical Paradise Square was followed by a festive cast party, where patrons, directors, producers and numerous local arts luminaries celebrated. The show runs through Feb. 24. www.berkeleyrep.org See plenty more photos on BARtab’s Facebook page, facebook.com/lgbtsf.nightlife. See more of Steven Underhill’s photos at StevenUnderhill.com.

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