May 20, 2021 edition of the Bay Area Reporter, America's highest circulation LGBTQ newspaper

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LGBTQ leaders visit Milk naval ship

’60s vibe imbues Milk SFO terminal atrium art

by Matthew S. Bajko

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GBTQ leaders are getting a sneak peek this week of the naval ship named after the late gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. Work on the USNS Harvey Milk, the first Navy vessel to be named after a member of the LGBTQ community, is set to wrap up later this year on schedule.

The Navy had announced in 2016 that a fleet replenishment oiler, T-AO 206, would be named in honor of Milk, the first gay person elected to public office in San Francisco and California with his 1977 victory of a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors. Milk would only serve 11 months in office, as he was assassinated along with then-mayor George Moscone the morning of November 27, 1978 by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White.

See page 8 >>

Vol. 51 • No. 20 • May 20-26, 2021

Art by Craig Calderwood that will adorn the atrium of Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport shows colorful pots.

by Matthew S. Bajko

A

splash of psychedelic imagery infused with a 1960s vibe straight out of the Haight Ashbury is set to enliven a yet-to-be-built atrium space in Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport. Inspired by the city’s first gay supervisor, who represented the famous neighborhood at City Hall in 1978, the artwork features playful

canines, colorful pots of plants, and flowery figures in a panoply of bright colors.

San Francisco-based artist Craig Calderwood earlier this year won the $200,000 commission to design and fabricate the artwork for the three-story atrium. Located in the terminal’s pre-security arrivals level, the space will surround escalators that take passengers to the baggage claim area and ground transportation.

It is the first large public art project

for Calderwood, 34, who is transgender and queer. They grew up in Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley and, after attending Fresno City College, moved to San Francisco a decade ago.

“An opportunity to create work that has a kind of queerness to it, that is highly visible, feels exciting to me. Also, it is just such an interesting space,” Calderwood told the See page 15 >> Courtesy SFO

Kevin Zhou

GAPA Chair Michael Trung Nguyen spoke at one of the recent rallies in the Castro against Asian American and Pacific Islander hate.

SF to mark nation’s first LGBTQ API week

by Matthew S. Bajko

S

an Francisco will mark the country’s first Queer and Transgender Asian and Pacific Islanders Week this month with a series of events between May 22 and 29. Organizers are already planning for more cities, especially in the Bay Area, to follow suit next year.

The seven days of rallies, panel discussions, and a drag show will also see the launch of a new project aimed at ending transphobia within the LGBTQ+ Asian and Pacific Islander community. The QTAPI Week comes amid an uptick in violent attacks and harassment of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during the COVID pandemic.

See page 14 >>

Lawsuit alleges coercive sex at Larkin youth agency

by John Ferrannini

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arkin Street Youth Services, which receives millions of dollars in public funding, is San Francisco’s largest nonprofit provider for homeless youth, including LGBTQs. It is also the defendant in three recent civil complaints – including in a lawsuit that alleges an employee coerced three women who worked there into having sex.

The other two suits allege unpaid wages and breach of contract.

The three employees’ lawsuit was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court April 22. It alleges that a man, who was an employee of Larkin at all the times referred to in the suit, coerced the three women into having sex with him, threatening “negative consequences if they did not submit to his advances,” the complaint states.

(The Bay Area Reporter is not naming the women in the suit because they are victims of alleged sexual assaults. The paper is not naming the man because he is not a named defendant in the lawsuit and has not been criminally charged.)

Due to Larkin Street not returning multiple requests for comment, the B.A.R. was not able to ascertain the job title of the male employee and whether he still works there.

Google Street View Photo

Larkin Street Youth Services is the defendant in three lawsuits, one alleging sexual coercion, one for breach of contract, and one for unpaid wages.

The complaint alleges that in November 2020, the man touched the breast of one woman.

“When she told him to stop he advised that if she wanted more hours she should have oral sex with him, otherwise the hours would go to someone else,” the complaint states. “[The woman] did not submit to [the man] on that occasion, but was afraid to lose her job and had witnessed

how two other female employees had been terminated after incidents involving [the man].”

However, the complaint states that the man did not let up. The complaint states that one week later, he called the woman into his office and gave her an ultimatum – sex with him, or be fired. “[The woman] resisted at first, telling [the man] she had a boyfriend, but fearing for her job after [the man] would not relent submitted to sex with [the man], without a condom at his insistence,” the complaint states. The plaintiff also alleges in the lawsuit that she suffered health consequences as a result of the coerced sex.

The complaint states that the next month, a second woman was called into the man’s office.

When she took off her mask she was wearing due to COVID protocols, the man attempted to kiss her, the complaint states. “[The woman] pushed [the man] away and asked why he was acting that way. [The man], who appeared inebriated, responded that [the woman] was beautiful, he wanted her to be his girlfriend, and that he was the reason [the woman] had not received more severe discipline during a previous incident,” the complaint states.

See page 11 >>

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4 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

Volume 51, Number 20 May 20-26, 2021 www.ebar.com

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<< Open Forum

t Newsom must lead on LGBTQ issues T

he recent news that California with over 25 organizations to create has a $76 billion budget surplus the California Transgender, Gender was a pleasant surprise, especially after Non-conforming, Intersex Policy Althe COVID pandemic enforced beltliance. That group held a virtual news tightening last year. Governor Gavin conference April 21 to announce its inNewsom, who is facing a recall later tention to seek funding for the Transthis year, has been traveling around the gender Wellness and Equity Fund. The state touting various plans for spending alliance asked for $15 million over two the windfall. Lawmakers, who must years, starting in 2022, Bamby Salcedo, reach agreement with Newsom on any a trans woman who is president and Courtesy AP spending plan, are salivating. Nonethe- Governor Gavin CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition, less, the governor has unveiled sweep- Newsom told the B.A.R. But with the news of ing proposals like handing out $600 the budget surplus, we think the state stimulus checks to two-thirds of the can fund the entire $15 million now, alstate’s residents, providing rental relief, and elimilowing the program to kick off with the money it nating debt owed for traffic fees and fines by lowneeds. The wraparound services called for in the income Californians. All are worthy expenditures legislation would help trans and gender-nonconthat will help those who need it most. forming people as they recover from the pandemBut as long as Newsom is garnering headlines ic. That means housing and health care – two areas for his proposals, we’d like to offer some imporof critical importance to this community. tant ones that in comparison would cost a sliver As Santiago said during the recent news conof the surplus. We urge the governor to budget ference, now is the time for California to take a for these items. stand for trans equity.

“We had horrifying attacks from outside Trans health fund groups that said heinous things,” Santiago said Newsom, already a trailblazer on LGBTQ isabout the struggle to get AB 2218 passed. “But sues, can further bolster his standing among the the Legislature made it very clear that we need community by allocating $15 million to the transto provide the wraparound support services and gender health fund that he approved last we needed to start a Trans Wellness and Equity year. That’s right, as we reported at the Fund, and we are here today, having time, Newsom signed Assembly Bill passed a policy piece, going to the 2218 into law and that established budget request.” the Transgender Wellness and Equity The good news is that we’ve heard Fund. The problem was that the bill that the $15 million request is includwas stripped of funding in its final vered in the state Senate’s budget items for sion in order for the governor to sign it. the surplus; now it needs to get into That was disappointing, but not surthe governor’s budget. prising given the economic devastaImproving access to health care tion from COVID at the time. In fact, for trans and gender-nonconforming many bills that didn’t deal with the people will save money in the long pandemic were postponed altogether, run. It will reduce emergency room making AB 2218’s passage noteworthy. Advocates, visits, which are a drain on public coffers, and alincluding Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los low patients to get the medications and care that Angeles), a straight ally who authored the legisthey need from clinics and medical providers. lation, fought hard to get the bill passed. He was

LGBTQ archives joined by the TransLatina@ Coalition and other Another item that would benefit the LGBTQ groups, who held news conferences and lobbied community is a request for $750,000 for the lawmakers through last year’s session. preservation and accessibility of queer archives The law is intended to assist organizations servacross the state. In a February letter to Legislative ing people that identify as transgender, genderLGBTQ Caucus Chair Assemblyman Evan Low nonconforming, or intersex, and help create or (D-Campbell), the leaders of the GLBT Historifund TGI-specific housing programs and partnercal Society and the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA ships with hospitals, health care clinics and other Center in San Francisco; the ONE Archives at medical providers to provide TGI-focused health USC Libraries and OUTWORDS in Los Angecare. Earlier this year, before the state surplus was les; the Lambda Archives in San Diego; the June announced, the TransLatin@ Coalition joined

L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood; the Archives and Special Collections at UCSF; and the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, requested this small amount of state funding. The groups received $500,000 in state funds last fiscal year (allocated to the California State Library). In their letter, the officials pointed out that as these institutions begin to emerge from the pandemic, much work remains in digitizing collections and for new acquisitions. This is a miniscule amount of money in the state’s budget, and Newsom should fund it.

HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, STIs

So far there is no new funding in the state’s budget to fund HIV, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, or overdose programs.

The End the Epidemics coalition is urging lawmakers and Newsom to include funding for these critical services. It’s ridiculous that in a state like California, there isn’t a robust plan that is funded to address health issues that still affect millions of residents.

As the B.A.R. has been reporting, STI rates are expected to rise post-COVID. The potential confluence between untreated STIs, antibiotic resistant STIs, and the expected resurgence of socializing this year and beyond worries experts such as Dr. Stephanie Cohen, a straight ally who is the medical director of the Department of Public Health’s City Clinic in the South of Market neighborhood.

The state should seek to address this sooner, rather than later.

Bright spot

There is one bit of good news in Newsom’s “California Roars Back” $100 billion comeback plan – Equality California announced the governor’s revised budget includes $3 million for the state Department of Education to develop LGBTQ+ teacher training. As a spate of unprecedented attacks on trans students are occurring in states across the country, this funding is sorely needed.

Like the aforementioned trans health fund, a bill was passed and signed – in this case by then-governor Jerry Brown – but was stripped of funding.

Overall, Newsom must make LGBTQ issues a part of his budget and the surplus. Trans health, history preservation, HIV/AIDS, and teacher training are crucial and benefit more than just LGBTQ people. If the governor really wants the state to roar back after the pandemic, it’s initiatives like these programs that will benefit communities up and down the Golden State. t

GAPA takes inclusive stance with new name

by Michael Trung Nguyen

power of creating spaces where our folks didn’t feel traditionally inAPA was founded in 1988 by a cluded in the gay community. GAPA group of gay and bi Asian and members have organized protests in Pacific Islander men who had been the Castro against a double ID remeeting as a rap group at the Pacific quirement at gay clubs, which had Center for Human Growth in Berkea disproportionate impact on the ley. At the time, the founders saw a API community. GAPA created its need to build community with other own parties and gatherings to create queer APIs, shape a positive sense of spaces where our community felt safe.

Kevin Zhou queer API identity, and mobilize the GAPA board chair GAPA’s Runway event started at one community to increase our political Michael Trung of these small parties and has grown power in a time darkened by the AIDS Nguyen spoke at into the largest and longest-running epidemic. pageant for queer and trans Asian and one of the rallies Now, over 33 years later, GAPA in the Castro to Pacific Islanders. meets a national moment of racial stand against API Fast forward to 2021 where, after reckoning, at an unprecedented time hate. surviving a pandemic in which the of awareness of the violence perpepast administration scapegoated and trated against Asian Americans, by changing our endangered Asians, we are seeing a huge spike in name to GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance. This violence against Asian lives, weekly. Let’s be new name more fully reflects who we hold ourclear: Asian lives are and have always selves accountable to: the entire GLBTQ+ Asian been under attack since arriving in and Pacific Islander community. the 1800s. Trans lives continue to be During the past five years of service as chair of under attack. Our friends and partthe board of directors of GAPA, I have embarked ners at API Equality of Northern on a personal journey of reflection and rebirth, California launched the first-ever discovering what GAPA stands for as a commuTGNC API needs assessment in nity-based organization in San Francisco. Our the Bay Area over two years, Up vision is a powerful queer and trans Asian and to Us , resulting in findings that Pacific Islander community that is seen, heard, half of the TGNC API community and celebrated. believe TGNC APIs cannot influTo quote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San ence government decisions, that well-resourced Francisco), who attended a GAPA banquet back spaces where TGNC APIs are seen and accepted when she first ran for Congress, “No one’s goare not luxury items but rather essential needs ing to give you power. You have to seize it.” We for survival, and that TGNC APIs remains in exintend to seize that power by mobilizing our treme danger, mentally, physically, and economiQTAPI community through relational organizcally. ing. That all starts by taking an inclusive stance to We desperately need more queer and trans say clearly and loudly who belongs in GAPA. We Asian and Pacific Islander people to join, orgawelcome our families and allies to unite through nize, mobilize, and inspire our community into inclusion, advocacy, and love. action. We, at GAPA, empower our commuGAPA has been harnessing and seizing the nity through unity and visibility, through a lens

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of abundance, and with words of integrity. We implore all those in our community to join our family in building a home within GAPA. Please consider making your voice heard by joining us as a member at https://www.gapa.org/.

We created an advisory board (https://www. gapa.org/advisory-board) in 2020 to help us find ways to bring in more non-cis gay male-identifying folks into the organization. At the first meeting of the advisory board, members suggested changing the name of GAPA from Gay Asian Pacific Alliance to something more inclusive. After many conversations, GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance was unanimously approved as our new name by the board and the general membership.

It is our hope that with this new name comes even more visibility and community building.

GAPA, along with the recently formed Bay Area QTAPI Coalition, is pushing to have May 22-29 declared the first-ever QTAPI Week in San Francisco, through a resolution by gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s office. It passed, as expected, May 18, meaning this will be the first time QTAPIs will be recognized for the contributions we have made to San Francisco. At the intersection of May, Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month, and June, LGBTQ Pride Month, the closing celebration of QTAPI Week is set for Saturday, May 29, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Castro off 18th street behind Walgreens. We encourage all QTAPIs to join us and commit to making a difference in our society. Only then will we be able to #StopAsianHate. Let’s show the world the power of QTAPI pride, joy, and celebration in the face of violence and darkness.

We’re all in this together.t Michael Trung Nguyen is the board chair of GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance.

Politics >>

t In B.A.R. columns Milk had unabashedly strong opinions

by Matthew S. Bajko

O

ver his four-year run as a political columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, Harvey Milk unabashedly took on local, state, and national politicians and San Francisco special interest groups. He also wasn’t shy about lambasting his gay readers for their lack of involvement in politics or failure to vote on Election Day. In all, he filed 102 Milk Forum columns under his byline between October 2, 1974 and November 22, 1978. Five days later Milk would be gunned down in his City Hall office by disgruntled former supervisor Dan White mere minutes after White killed then-mayor George Moscone.

An all-white jury would convict White of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder, buying into his defense that his bingeing on junk food led White to mentally snap at Moscone and Milk. It became known as the “Twinkie defense.”

The two progressive leaders had objected to White’s demand that he be reappointed to his supervisor seat after he had abruptly resigned from the board less than a year in office.

The mayor had been expected to announce his pick for the board vacancy that Monday, November 27, 1978 when White sneaked into City Hall through a window so as to avoid the metal detectors at the entrance and assassinated his former colleagues.

Over the years Milk has become a global icon to the LGBTQ community and a figure now studied in California public schools. To honor Milk and his breaking through a pink political ceiling by being the first gay person elected to public office in both San Francisco and California with his 1977 supervisorial race win, state lawmakers declared May 22, Milk’s birthday, as a day of special significance in the Golden State.

First celebrated 11 years ago, Harvey Milk Day will take place this Saturday on what would have been Milk’s 91st birthday. A daylong celebration will be held in the Castro, the LGBTQ neighborhood where Milk lived and worked and which he represented at City Hall. (See the News Briefs on page 10 for details.)

As the B.A.R. celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the Political Notes column decided to return to some of Milk’s columns he wrote. He became an official political columnist for the B.A.R. in its October 2, 1974 issue, though Milk had written several articles by then for the paper.

He used his print platform for his own supervisor races in 1975 and 1977, and a failed attempt for state Assembly in 1976. (Milk’s first bid for supervisor came in 1973.)

Among the issues Milk highlighted in his columns was a boycott against beer maker Coors in solidarity with unions trying to organize delivery drivers and labor leader Cesar Chavez’s silence on gay rights, as was first highlighted by the Political Notes column in the May 22, 2008 issue of the B.A.R. on the occasion of the unveiling that day of the bronze sculpture of Milk situated at the top of the grand staircase in City Hall.

In the July 22, 1976 issue of the B.A.R, a famous photo of Milk shaking the hand of Jimmy Carter shortly after he had clinched the Democratic nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in New York ran with Milk’s column. Yet his encounter with Carter went unmentioned by Milk.

Rather, he zeroed in on the lack of support for gay rights by the Democratic Party, criticizing it for not adopting a gay rights plank in that

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Harvey Milk’s column from the July 22, 1976 issue of the Bay Area Reporter included a photo of him shaking hands with then-Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter.

year’s party platform. He contrasted that decision with the widespread support by the convention delegates for issues championed by Black members of the party.

Hitting on an issue he would repeatedly turn to in his column, Milk beseeched his readers to mirror the groundwork laid by Black Democratic leaders and become more vocal in politics and, in particular, in the Democratic Party. He argued that the “gay vote” should be as coveted by party officials as that of the Black vote.

“Yet the Gay community has failed in coming anywhere near what the Black community has achieved. Can you picture a Gay keynote speaker? Gay people placing in nomination candidates for the office of president?” asked Milk.

“Well, it will never happen as long as the Gay community does not use Gay voting power the way the Black community learned to use their voting power.

With probably the same potential power, the Gay community has very little, if anything, to show for itself.”

Milk wrote that gay people “must get involved. We must demand. We must not sell out, as so many have, for personal gains. The time has long since come when we must not be satisfied with a ride in the back of the bus.”

Instead, gay voters (as back then the LGBTQ acronym was not in use) should be prepared to get off the bus, argued Milk, and walk their path alone.

“If we are ever to see the end of repression and discrimination, we have to start to use our votes for the rights of Gay people and not for the personal gains of a few individuals and their organizations,” wrote Milk. “We must stop selling out our votes for crumbs when the pie does belong to all people and not just the non-gay community.

We must learn from the Black movement.”

His willingness to publicly criticize entrenched interests is clear in Milk’s last column that ran in the B.A.R. It came after the defeat of the statewide anti-gay Briggs initiative, which would have banned gay and lesbians,

and their straight allies, from being public school teachers in California.

Milk was the public face of the effort to defeat Proposition 6 along with lesbian former San Francisco State University professor Sally Gearhart.

The two would famously debate the initiative’s author, then-state senator John Briggs.

Under the headline “The Chamber of Commerce,” Milk ripped into the leadership of the San Francisco business association for not taking a public stand against Prop 6. In a blistering critique of the chamber’s staying on the sidelines, Milk likened the group to those that remained silent about the nazi’s reign of terror in Germany during the 1940s or Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch-hunt in the U.S. during the 1950s.

“Maybe the Chamber of Commerce was trying to tell us to go back into our closets or we would be punished. Maybe they were saying we were not wanted,” wrote Milk. “Maybe they were saying that Briggs was right.

Maybe they were saying that it’s all right to discriminate against Gays.”

It would take several decades, but business groups eventually came around to the fact that LGBTQ people were an important part of their customer base and began to speak out publicly on various LGBTQ rights issues. Milk signaled 43 years ago that LGBTQ consumers would demand nothing less.

“Well, in case the Chamber has not noticed ... we are not going away, or back into out closets,” he wrote.

“In fact, we are going to take an even stronger part in our government and its decisions. In fact, we will become an even stronger political and economic force in the city, the state, and the nation.”

Since 2018 all of Milk’s columns have been accessible online due to a digitization project overseen by the GLBT Historical Society and funded by the Bob Ross Foundation, named after the B.A.R.’s founding publisher who died in 2003. The two online repositories of the old B.A.R. issues can be accessed via https:// www.ebar.com/index.php?ch=19712005&screenID=18206.t

AIDS

40

@

The Bay Area Reporter will provide special coverage in our June 3 issue, commemorating the 40th anniversary of HIV/AIDS. It was June 5, 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report five cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) among previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles.

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<< Community News

6 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

t

SF’s Rohrer to become 1st openly trans bishop in US

by John Ferrannini

T

he Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer, a San Francisco Lutheran pastor, is set to become the first openly transgender person ever to become a bishop in a major United States Christian denomination.

Rohrer, who has served as pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in the Outer Sunset since 2014 and as community chaplain coordinator for the San Francisco Police Department since 2018, was elected to a six-year term leading the Sierra Pacific Synod May 8 by a vote of 209207, edging out the Reverend Jeff R. Johnson, who’s pastor of University Lutheran Chapel of Berkeley.

Rohrer, 41, told the Bay Area Reporter that the election was a sign of how much the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (the largest Lutheran community in the U.S. and the seventh-largest Christian denomination) has changed – Johnson is a gay man, and both were ordained “extraordinarily” at a time when gays and lesbians were not allowed to be appointed.

“When I began my ministry, gay and lesbian pastors couldn’t serve openly, so I had to be ordained through an extraordinary process,” Rohrer said. “Most people who become bishops follow as many rules as possible and move up, but at the time, in 2006, the official rules of the Lutheran Church said gay and lesbian people were supposed to be celibate.”

Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.

After the ELCA changed its position in 2009, Rohrer joined six others in participating in a rite “to become part of the ordinary pastor list in the church.”

Courtesy Facebook

The Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer is the bishop-elect of the Lutheran Church’s Sierra Pacific Synod.

“It’s a great reminder of how much change is possible and how much progress there has been in the world for sure,” Rohrer said.

Rohrer said that LGBTQ people bring special gifts to the clergy.

“Gay pastors have the best vestments,” they said. “Lesbian pastors can save churches that are falling down, and trans pastors can have conversations between things that people mistakenly believe are in binary opposition to each other.”

Ted Kuster, a straight man who said he is a “friend, relative, and involved person” to LGBTQs, told the B.A.R. that the Lutheran church’s “inability to assimilate LGBTQ folks and others who don’t match the traditional concept of ‘Lutheran’” kept him away for most of his adult life.

That is, until he heard about Rohrer four years ago.

“I’d heard it had changed its position on LGBT clergy and, since this was happening at a church right across from me, it made me curious, so I showed up to see what it was all about,” Kuster said.

“I was very impressed with Megan as a preacher, and their ability to make connections across lines.”

Kuster said it is very important to be able to do both of the main functions of a pastor, which are shepherding the people and preaching to them.

“Megan is good at merging those in a very satisfying way,” said Kuster, who is now president of the church’s council.

Rohrer will be staying with Grace Lutheran through June, when the Reverend Mark W. Holmerud – who has been bishop of the Sierra Pacific Synod since 2008 – retires. Rohrer’s installation is scheduled for September 11 at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Walnut Creek.

The Sierra Pacific Synod is one of 65 synods (which, like dioceses in the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian churches, cover the congregations within a particular geographic area) in the ELCA. It covers Central and Northern California and Northern Nevada and includes about 200 congregations.

It is in this role that Rohrer hopes to be “pastor to the other pastors” and “cheerleader for congregations.” They will be in charge of the approval of new ELCA pastors.

“I’m thinking about ways congregations can work together for justice projects and care for the world and our creation,” Rohrer said.

Michael Pappas, a gay man who is the executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council, called Rohrer’s appointment “historic.”

“I’ve known Megan for the better part of 15 years,” Pappas said.

“There’s a saying in the Letter of James – ‘show me your works and I’ll show you your faith.’ Megan really has walked the walk. I marvel at her response to homelessness, her chaplaincy, and they’re really on the front line of courage.”

Rohrer’s chaplaincy with the police department will have to end when they officially become a bishop later this year.

“I will complete the paid portion of my work with them, but as a bishop I will continue serving as I can as a volunteer blessing badges, first responders, and maybe praying at graduations,” Rohrer said.

San Francisco Police Chief William Scott congratulated Rohrer on their appointment in a statement to the B.A.R. “We’re incredibly proud of our SFPD colleague, Bishop-elect Megan Rohrer, for making history as the first openly transgender person ever elevated to the role of bishop by a major U.S. Christian denomination,” Scott stated. “At the same time, it’s somewhat bittersweet for us because Reverend Megan is so universally well regarded as our department’s community chaplain coordinator, and their ministry has been so mean-

ingful to crime victims, their families and our members.”

Scott thanked Rohrer for their service.

“Although we’re saddened Reverend Megan will need to step down from that role, we’re thankful that Bishop Rohrer will remain one of our sworn police chaplains and a cherished member of our SFPD family,” Scott stated. “I’m grateful that our members will continue to benefit from their spiritual guidance and inclusive ministry.”

Rohrer sees their new role as following in others’ footsteps.

“I see my election as bishop as one of many types of jobs where LGBTQ people have had to work through fear and prejudice to do the things they’re good at – like those in the military, police officers, and teachers – who did that work when it seemed it wouldn’t be possible,” Rohrer said.

Rohrer said that they hope their election sends a positive message to everyone. While some Christians don’t accept LGBTQ people, “just because some voices are loudest doesn’t make them the most faithful,” they noted.

“There are a lot of faithful people who adore LGBTQ folk, and we are in the pews, in the pulpits and out in the streets trying to make a better world,” Rohrer said.

“If there are more ways to bring the fabulous back to church, if LGBTQ people need to be around faithful people so we can apologize for trauma we’ve caused, if people need hope and light in this world, I hope we can celebrate with each other more.

“I want to not just welcome everyone, but welcome everyone in their full fabulous,” Rohrer added. t

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<< Harvey Milk Day

8 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

<<

t

Milk naval ship

From page 1

An LGBTQ San Diego advisory group had launched a campaign in 2012 to have a naval ship named for Milk, a Navy veteran who was on active duty during the Korean War. A naming ceremony for the vessel was held on Treasure Island in San Francisco in August 2016 with Ray Mabus, at the time secretary of the Navy, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), then the House minority leader.

A first cut ceremony for the ship took place December 13, 2019 at the General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company’s San Diego shipyard. It marked the start of construction, with the cutting of the first piece of steel being used.

Tuesday, May 18, several gay veterans and LGBTQ San Diego leaders, along with Milk’s gay nephew Stuart Milk and gay former San Francisco supervisor Bevan Dufty, were among the first LGBTQ community members to step foot on the USNS Harvey Milk. Helping to organize the visit was gay San Diego resident Nicole Murray Ramirez, a lead proponent of naming a naval ship for Milk.

“I started crying. It is gorgeous,” said Murray Ramirez, who as the Queen Mother I of the Americas and Nicole the Great is the titular head of the Imperial Court System, the philanthropic drag organization that began in San Francisco in 1965.

Dufty told the Bay Area Reporter that he was surprised by how “massive” the ship is. It is one of four that will posthumously honor civil rights leaders, with the first congressman John Lewis and the others for U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy and U.S. Supreme Court chief justice and California governor Earl Warren.

“It looks like a skyscraper has

Courtesy International Imperial Court

The USNS Harvey Milk sits in the General Dynamics San Diego shipyard as it’s being built.

been turned on its side and it floats,” said Dufty, who served in the Castro-centered supervisor seat that Milk had represented the Castro at City Hall and currently resides in the neighborhood. “It is just of that scale. You marvel at it.”

Friday at 10 a.m. a host of LGBTQ leaders and San Diego local officials are set to receive a VIP tour of the under-construction ship. It comes a day prior to Harvey Milk Day, a day of special significance in California observed on May 22, Milk’s birthday.

Gay San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, lesbian State Senate Pro Tempore Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), gay Assemblyman Chris Ward (DSan Diego) and Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (D-San Diego), a

straight ally, are among those expected to attend. Representing San Francisco will be John Carrillo, a gay man who is president of both the San Francisco Imperial Court Council and the International Imperial Courts Council.

“For me, it is truly an honor to be asked to be a part of it,” said Carrillo, crowned as the 28th Emperor after Norton of the imperial local court in 2000.

Having attended the first cut ceremony, Carrillo told the B.A.R. he is excited to now get to tour the nearly completed ship and can’t wait to see it make its maiden voyage.

“I just think the awareness of Harvey and all his efforts for the LGBT community is now going to be broadened just for this ship

pulling into port. Everybody is going to know who he is now who didn’t know before,” said Carrillo.

Milk enlisted in the Navy in 1951 and attended Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. By 1954 he was a lieutenant (junior grade) stationed at what was then called the Naval Air Missile Test Center in Ventura County in Southern California. He was serving as a diving instructor.

As the B.A.R. reported in February 2020, Milk was given an “other than honorable” discharge from the U.S. Navy and forced to resign on February 7, 1955 rather than face a court-martial because of his homosexuality, according to a trove of naval records obtained by the paper. It contradicted an

archival document housed in the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center that authors of several recent biographies of Milk had used to claim that Milk was honorably discharged from the Navy.

NASSCO officials have told Murray Ramirez that the USNS Harvey Milk will be ready to launch this November. He is working with Gloria’s mayoral administration, the Harvey Milk Foundation and the Imperial Court system to plan several “big celebrations and events for the first Navy ship in the world being named after a gay man and a soldier who was forced to resign because he was gay,” Murray Ramirez told the B.A.R. t

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t Obituaries>>

May 20-26, 2021 • Bay Area Reporter • 9

Trans activist and AIDS survivor Felicia Elizondo dies

by Cynthia Laird

F

elicia “Flames” Elizondo, a transgender woman and longtime AIDS survivor, died Saturday, May 15.

She was 74.

According to friends and social media posts, Ms. Elizondo was in hospice care in San Francisco at the Veterans Administration Hospital.

Ms. Elizondo was a fixture in the San Francisco LGBTQ community for many years.

“What I remember about Felicia are her performances and how giving she was of her time and energy,” Luis Gutierrez-Mock, a queer trans man, told the Bay Area Reporter in a phone interview. “She was always down to raise money for friends, HIV prevention, and the trans community.”

Gutierrez-Mock said that he and Ms. Elizondo organized the San Francisco Trans March for many years.

Gutierrez-Mock said that Ms. Elizondo performed at various events and was a staple at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge on Turk Street.

“She’d always say, ‘I’m a diva, I’m a bitch, I’m an icon, I’m a legend, and I’m your history,’” Gutierrez-Mock recalled.

Khaled Sayed

Felicia Elizondo

B.A.R. in a phone interview.

“I got to San Francisco in 1987 and she and Teresita, La Campesina, I met pretty quickly, Aguirre said, referring to their queer mother’s sister. “Later, I connected with Elena with the Names Project Foundation - she worked on many AIDS quilt panels.”

Ms. Elizondo frequented Compton’s Cafeteria, which was part of a chain of eateries owned by Gene Compton, located at 101 Taylor at Turk Street in San Francisco, from the Part of queer history 1940s to the 1970s.

Ms. Elizondo was “part of the In 1966, there was a riot at Compmovement, and beginning of the ton’s, when the LGBTQ community movement, ” said Tina Valentin Agucame together to defy discrimination. irre, a genderqueer person who knew The riots took place three years before Ms. Elizondo under her former name more famous Stonewall riot in of Elena Montez.

Aguirre said that ISO 12647-7 Digital Controlthe Strip 2009 100 60 100 70 City. 30 100 60 date100 100 70 30 100 60 A New York The exact of the 70 Ms. Elizondo was a former sex worker riots is unknown. in the Polk and Tenderloin.

“It was a hangout for the trans“I acknowledge Felicia was part gender community,” Ms. Elizondo of the generation before me and did told the Bay Area Reporter in a 2015 what she needed to do to survive 100 100 60 100 100 70 70 30 30 100 100 60 100 100 70 70 100 60 100 100 interview when30 30she100 was recognized70 70 and cultivate love and build other as a lifetime achievement grand marfamily connections,” Aguirre, who is shal by the San Francisco LGBT Pride the manager of the Castro LGBTQ Celebration Committee. “At that time Cultural District and board chair of transgender people were not welcome the GLBT Historical Society, told the in most gay bars. Police used to arrest B

and harass transgender people at that time because cross-dressing wasn’t legal.”

Even though Compton’s was open 24 hours, it decided to start closing at midnight to stop transgender people from socializing there. Ms. Elizondo noted that this policy change led to a demonstration, and the San Francisco police were called because some of the transgender demonstrators allegedly were making disturbing and loud noise.

After the police arrived they started arresting transgender people. But one of the transgender women threw her coffee in the face of one of the officers.

That is when the situation escalated and the violence spilled out into the street, Ms. Elizondo said at the time.

Windows were smashed, chairs and dishes were flying, and many people were arrested that night.

Most of the people involved in the riot were members of Vanguard, a gay youth organization in the United States, according to the Safe Schools Project, which provides resources for queer youth and educators in Santa Cruz County.

“What makes this incident unusual is that the news at the time never reported on the riot,” Ms. Elizondo said.

“Compton’s Cafeteria was fixed up and back to normal business the next day as if nothing had happened.”

The next night more transgender people and other members of the LGBTQ community came together to picket Compton’s Cafeteria, de40 100 40 100 30 100 40 40 70 40 manding that transgender people be allowed back into the establishment.

The newly replaced windows were smashed again, and the protests went on.30 30 100 40 100 40 40 100 10 40 40 “I continue to hold the torch for all who fought in the 1966 Gene Compton’s Cafeteria riots, making sure they are not forgotten,” said Ms. EliT:9.75" in “Screaming zondo, who is featured 3%

Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria,” a 2005 documentary on the protest that was co-directed by Susan Stryker, a trans woman and historian who now teaches at Mills College in Oakland.

Over the years, Ms. Elizondo at times claimed she was present at the Compton’s riot, and that was reported in the 2015 B.A.R. article. However, Stryker and her co-director, Victor Silverman, noted that in their film, Ms. Elizondo said that she was serving in the military in Vietnam between 1965-1967.

“I want to honor Felicia as a foremother, a community elder, a person who lived a hard life and lived it well,” Stryker wrote in an email. “I have compassion for her desire to have the significance of her actual lived history honored and remembered. I think she was understandably hungry for recognition of her strength, resilience, survival, and fierceness. And when ‘Screaming Queens’ became a bigger ‘hit’ than any of us connected with making it dared imagine, and the Compton’s Cafeteria riot became part of queer collective memory as a result, I think she was smitten at being in the spotlight in a perhaps unexpected way.

“The way the film was edited, it allowed viewers to imagine that Felicia was there even though she never says so explicitly on screen, which in turn allowed Felicia to make the claims she sometimes made, and sometimes recanted, on and off over the past 15 70 40 40 40 70 40 40 70 40 70 40 40 3 10 years,” Stryker added. “I don’t begrudge her in the least that yearning for presence, the need to feel seen.”

In an email, Silverman confirmed Stryker’s account. “It is a 3.1 sad2.2day for 20 70 70 70 70 40 70 40 40 0000 2.2 10.2 7.4 7.4 the community,” he wrote after Ms. Elizondo’s passing. “She played an important role not only in the period portrayed in the film but in the years after on the streets and in the bars of

the Tenderloin. Despite a tough life, her spirit was irrepressible. Her powerful energy led to her own liberation and to the community’s survival. She fought for herself and for all of us. In that sense, she was true to the bigger meaning of the Comptons’ riot.”

Ms. Elizondo is also featured in the new FX series “Pride,” which premiered May 14. Gutierrez-Mock said that Ms. Elizondo was also in “Tenderloin: Forgotten History,” a 2011 documentary short, according to IMDb. Another project that Ms. Elizondo was involved with was renaming a portion of Turk Street after the late Vicki Marlane, a longtime transgender performer who died in 2011. It was the first time a San Francisco street had been named after a trans person. Then-supervisor Jane Kim, who represented the Tenderloin at the time, was the main sponsor in 2014.

“Working with Felicia to name the stretch of Turk between Taylor and Jones as Vicki Mar Lane was magnificent,” Sue Englander, a longtime friend of Ms. Elizondo’s wrote in a Facebook message. “She persisted to make this happen and to stand as a tribute to all trans drag queens. What a woman!”

LGBTQ seniors

More recently, Ms. Elizondo was featured in a piece on LGBTQ seniors forming families of choice.

The article, a collaboration between the B.A.R. and Next Avenue, a digi25 50 75 tal publication covering90 aging100issues from Twin Cities PBS, discussed how queer seniors were coping with staying home last year during the COVID pandemic.

25 19 19 50 40 40 75 66 66 100 100 100 80 70 70 100 Ms. Elizondo had long lived by herself in a former motel turned apartment building in San Francisco’s LowSee page 15 >>

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<< Harvey Milk Day

t Events in California will mark Harvey Milk Day 10 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

compiled by Cynthia Laird

A

fter holding a virtual event last year due to the COVID pandemic, San Francisco LGBTQ leaders are once again hosting an inperson celebration to mark Harvey Milk Day this year. But with a nod to ending the health crisis, they will be offering a limited supply of vaccinations for the virus Saturday in addition to the usual lineup of entertainment and speeches from elected officials and community members.

The day of special significance in California marks the late gay icon’s 91st birthday this year. Milk was the first openly gay person elected to office in San Francisco and California in 1977 when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He and then-mayor George Moscone were assassinated in November 1978 by disgruntled ex-supervisor Dan White.

Dubbed the Harvey Milk Day Community Recovery Celebration, this year’s Milk Day event will take place May 22 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at various locations in the city’s LGBTQ Castro neighborhood.

A stage for the speakers, DJs, and

1985

Dan Nicoletta

Harvey Milk holds a bouquet of flowers and is surrounded by supporters on election night 1977 when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

performers will be set up in Jane Warner Plaza at the intersection of 17th, Castro and Market streets.

On Noe Street between Market and Beaver streets will be where health providers will be offering Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine to the first 200 people who request it. The

single-shot doses will be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis.

And along 18th Street between Collingwood and Hartford streets, which has been closed on weekends to vehicle traffic since last fall to allow restaurants and bars to safely serve patrons outside, organizers of the Harvey Milk Day celebration have invited local nonprofits and neighborhood groups to set up informational booths.

“So much about this is about helping promote the resources and needs being accessed by our community members. It is kind of a preview of what we hope to have with our future community hub,” said Stephen Torres, secretary of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District, which has taken a lead role in organizing this year’s Milk Day event.

The district is looking to find space somewhere in the Castro where it can offer various programs and services, such as a food pantry, or informational hours for people seeking assistance or want to be connected to community groups. It is modeled after the food hub that the city’s Latino Task Force set up on a block of Alabama Street in the Mission district.

Partnering with the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District on the Milk Day event is the Castro Merchants association, the Castro/Upper Market Community Benefit District, the GLBT Historical Society, the Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic clubs, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, LYRIC, Openhouse, the city’s Office of Transgender Initiatives, the Department of Public Health, and gay bar the Lookout. QR codes will be posted around the Castro Saturday that people can use to pull up a map and guide to the days’ festivities.

Organizers will be asking attendees to adhere to the latest COVID protocols. For people fully vaccinated, they no longer need to wear masks outdoors though may want to put one on in a large crowd.

“We want to welcome them back to have some semblance of normalcy,” said Torres. “This will be the first time for a lot of people being outside. We want to make it friendly and engaging.”

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CA Dem LGBTQ Caucus Milk Day event

The LGBTQ Caucus of the California Democratic Party will hold a virtual Harvey Milk Day event May 22 from 11 a.m. to noon that also serves to kick off Pride Month.

Participants will join LGBTQ Democratic Party activists and community leaders from across the state for a conversation about building the bench of queer leadership in elected offices and a celebration of those serving now.

Speakers will also remember the legacy of Milk and touch on how the implementation of LGBTQIA+ inclusive school curricula is a crucial site for cultural change, according to an email from organizers.

The Zoom event is free. To register, go to https://bit.ly/2Quaj3M.

Trans archive set to reopen

The Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive in Vallejo is set to reopen Friday, May 28, on the anniversary of Lawrence’s 109th birthday.

The archive had only been open for 18 months when the COVID pandemic hit, leading to the statewide lockdown. During the closure, several trans leaders, including Bay Area Reporter Transmissions columnist and Transgender Day of Remembrance founder Gwendolyn Ann Smith, Ardel Haefele-Thomas, and archive director Ms. Bob Davis, presented virtual talks.

The archive, as the B.A.R. previously reported (https://www.ebar. com/news///247066), honors Lawrence, a Northern California transgender pioneer who began living full-time as a woman in 1942, first in Berkeley, and then San Francisco.

She, along with Virginia Prince and others, published the first incarnation of Transvestia in 1952. Lawrence’s address book was the initial subscription list and she was instrumental in developing the trans community’s connection to pioneering sex researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Harry Benjamin, according to Davis, a trans woman who has preserved Lawrence’s collection.

The archive will reopen by appointment only and all guests must be fully vaccinated. To make an appointment, email lltransarchive@ gmail.com.

For more information, visit the website at https://lltransarchive.org/.

Writing competition for SF high schoolers

The San Francisco Historical Society’s third annual Fracchia Prize, open to any student attending a high school in San Francisco, has extended its deadline to July 15. The top three entrants will receive cash prizes of $2,500, $1,500, and $1,000 and publication of the essays in The Argonaut or Panorama.

The Fracchia Prize offers students the opportunity to explore the issue of how civic monuments reflect today’s values and how to deal with monuments that may be controversial. Interested candidates are required to submit an original and properly cited essay consisting of between 1,2001,600 words, based on one of two prompts: “Civic Monuments – How Should We View Them” or “Civic Monuments – Who’s Been Left Out?” Instructions, an entry form, and a list of existing San Francisco monuments and a map showing their locations can be found at https://www.sfhistory.org/education/fracchia-prize/.

For more information, go to the above link or call (415) 537-1105, ext. 2. t Matthew S. Bajko contributed reporting.

t Pride 2021 >>

May 20-26, 2021 • Bay Area Reporter • 11

Pride season set to begin in California compiled by Cynthia Laird

T

he 2021 Pride season is about to get underway in cities around California.

In the North Bay, Sonoma County Pride will have a drive-thru parade Saturday, June 5, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. This year’s theme is “Beyond the Rainbow.”

According to a news release, officials are moving to the new model due to COVID safety and social distancing guidelines.

Organizations and contingents will occupy defined spaces for their floats and celebrants, allowing attendees to drive through to experience the excitement and community of Pride in this unique, safe manner. A streaming soundtrack will be available to guide and entertain parade-goers as they make their way through the space.

The event will take place in the

<<

parking lot at Graton Resort and Casino, South Drive East (off Business Park Road) in Rohnert Park. The resort, overseen by gay Graton Rancheria Tribal Chairman Greg Sarris, is the title sponsor of the Pride celebration.

The focus for Sonoma County Pride 2021 is on the mental, physical, and emotional health and wellness of community members. On its website, Vice President Grace Villafuerte, Pride vice president, stated, “While some of us are reviving and thriving, some of us are still focused on surviving.

Wherever we are on our journey, we hope Sonoma County Pride 2021 will offer each of us a feeling of community, pride, and peace. We strive to not only reach our unique rainbows – our dreams and inner strengths, but we look to go Beyond the Rainbow!”

For more information, go to www. sonomacountypride.org/.

Lawsuit

From page 1

The woman was subsequently threatened with termination, too, the complaint states, saying the man was “the only thing protecting her from being fired.”

“She gave in but asked that he wear a condom,” the complaint states. “He refused and had sex with [the womISO 12647-7 Digital Control Strip 2009 an] in to60 100the 100 70 30 100 60 60 office 100 while 70she cried 30 due100 100 70 A pain and embarrassment.”

Rick Gerharter Also that fall, a third woman Sherilyn Adams is the longtime was called into the man’s office, the executive director of Larkin complaint states. She had been hired Street Youth30Services.

100 100 60 100 100 70 70 30 30 100 100 60 100 100 70 70 30 100 100 60 100 100 70 70 two months prior by the man and another supervisor, citing her hisstated “she was on probation and did tory of substance abuse and mental not need a reason to let her go.” health issues arising from childhood Subsequently, “[The man] called sexual abuse as a reason why she [the woman] into his office and had wanted to work at Larkin Street. his penis out and demanded that she The man harassed her, the comperform oral sex. [The woman] indiplaint states, until she relented after he cated she was not interested but due B

San Mateo Pride week

On the Peninsula, the San Mateo County Pride Center will have a week of virtual activities June 6-12.

According to its website, events will include performances, workshops, trainings, and more. This year’s theme is “Diverse As the Universe.”

At press time, more detailed information was not available, but check out the events calendar at https://sanmateopride.org/.

See Adam Lambert in LA

Dale Godfrey

For those who want to get away, OUTLOUD: Raising Voices will present Adam Lambert live in concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Sunday, June 6.

Other performers who will ap-

Thousands of people attended the 2019 Sonoma County Pride parade; this year’s is switching to a drive-thru format because of the COVID pandemic.

to [the man’s] position of authority and [the woman’s] previous abuse, she did as he asked and went back to work, humiliated and traumatized.”

It did not end there, according to the complaint. “[The man] coerced [the woman] to meet him at a hotel to have sex at which time he also smoked crack in front of her, causing [the woman] further trauma due to her recovery from substance use,” complaint 40 the 40 100 40 100 states.

30 100 40 70 40 The woman went on leave, and was threatened by the man that “she should not tell anyone or face termination,” the complaint states. When she returned to 30 100 40 100 40 called 40 100her10 40 the30office, “[The man] to40his office and then forced her to have anal sex, which was painful, degrading and traumatizing to [the woman].” This plaintiff also alleges in the lawsuit that she suffered health consequences as a result of the coerced sex.

In February T:9.75" 2021, the man, an3%

other supervisor, and the woman had a meeting to “discuss rumors that [the man] had been acting inappropriately with female employees,” the complaint states. The woman did not reveal the truth at that meeting because she was intimidated, the complaint states; however all three of the women quickly learned of each other’s circumstances and complained to human resources.

However, according to the complaint, 70 40 40 40 70human 40 70 40 40 told 3the man 10 40 40 70 resources (or allowed the man to be told) of the complaints against him, and he continued his campaign of intimidation.

Two of the women shortly thereaf20 70 70 70 70Larkin 40 70 40Street.

40 0000 3.1 2.2 2.2 10.2 7.4 7.4 ter left The two causes of action are that Larkin Street violated the Fair Employment and Housing Act through the “hostile work environment” the man created, and that Larkin Street retaliated against two of the women, leading to their constructive termination, by

pear that day include Angel Bonilla, Chely Wright, Kim Petras, Sam Sparro, Vincint featuring Parson James, Qveen Herby and Ty Sunderland, and Zhavia Ward.

The concert is part of a threeday June 4-6 LGBTQ+ PRIDE artist series. Headlining June 4 will be Sofi Tukker, while the main act June 5 will be Hayley Kiyoko.

According to the Los Angeles Blade, OUTLOUD: Raising Voices was created by the award-winning team of Jeff Consoletti and Artie Kenney and is billed as the Pride concert of the summer. Options include in-stadium seating, pod seating, and field cabanas. Tickets range from $30 to $250. For more information, go to http://weareoutloud.com/.t

disclosing complaints to the man.

When reached for comment after the initial online publication of this story, Jay Jambeck – an attorney with San Francisco firm Leigh Law Group P.C., which is representing the women – stated that he has no comment except to confirm one of them still works for Larkin Street Youth Services. Jambeck said he would have to check with each plaintiff if they’d be comfortable with 25 50 75 their90names100being disclosed in a news article.

Sherilyn Adams, a lesbian and the longtime executive director of Larkin Street, did not return phone and 25email 19 19 50messages 40 40 75 66 66 100 100 100comment.

80 70 70 100 seeking Alex Tourk, principal at Ground Floor Public Affairs, a local government and community outreach firm, wrote in an email that his firm represents Larkin Street. He stated the agency is unable to comment on active litigation.

See page 14 >>

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<< Community News

t Trans advocate Cooper announces SF D6 supe bid 12 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

by Matthew S. Bajko

W

ell-known transgender advocate Ms. Billie Cooper is mounting a bid to be elected in 2022 to San Francisco’s District 6 supervisor seat. The longtime Tenderloin resident would be the city’s first transgender supervisor and first Black LGBTQ supervisor on the board should she be elected.

Cooper, a Navy veteran who has lived with HIV for more than four decades, would be the first HIVpositive person elected to the Board of Supervisors and only second longterm HIV survivor to serve on it. The first was gay former District 8 supervisor Jeff Sheehy, who was appointed to fill a vacancy in 2017 but lost his election bid the following year.

“I am a resident, I am a stakeholder of the Tenderloin. Put me in office and it will be a new beginning and a new face of District 6 supervisor,” Cooper, 62, told the Bay Area Reporter. “District 6 has never had an unapologetically Black person as supervisor the whole time I have been here. I would be the first Black transgender woman having a seat at the table.”

But Cooper, as a first-time candidate for public office, faces long odds in winning the race, especially if the incumbent, Supervisor Matt Haney, runs for reelection on the ballot next November. Haney has yet to officially mount a reelection campaign or pull papers to seek a second four-year term with the city’s elections department.

There is a chance he could seek the city’s 17th Assembly District seat in a special election later this year should Mayor London Breed appoint the incumbent, Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) as city attorney.

Later this summer it is expected that City Attorney Dennis Herrera will

Courtesy Ms. Billie Cooper

Ms. Billie Cooper raises her hand after filling out paperwork at the elections department to run for District 6 supervisor.

become general manager of the city’s public utilities commission.

Breed will appoint a new city attorney once Herrera departs his City

Hall office to move into the PUC’s building nearby. It is widely expected that Breed will pick Chiu, prompting a special election to be held to serve out the remainder of his term through December 2022.

Haney is said to be contemplating jumping into the contest, though when contacted this week by the B.A.R. he said he has not made any decisions yet on his next political race. His focus for the time being, he said, is on chairing the supervisor’s budget committee as the board works to approve a spending plan for the 2021-2022 fiscal year. Breed is expected to release her budget proposal June 1.

“Right now I am focused on getting through this budget process. I’ve got probably one of the most intense and important months of my elect-

ed service coming up,” said Haney.

“This is a hugely important budget process, so I am focused on that.”

When pressed about seeking the Assembly seat, Haney told the B.A.R., “I have not made any decisions on that nor do I know if there is even going to be an open Assembly seat.”

If there is and Haney were to win the seat then Breed would get to appoint his replacement on the board.

His chief legislative aide, Honey Mahogany, has already said she plans to run for the District 6 supervisor seat once Haney departs. Should Breed pick Mahogany to fill a vacancy, it would be a historic choice as Mahogany is a Black queer, nonbinary transgender native-born San Franciscan.

Haney told the B.A.R. he expects to make a decision on his political plans in the coming weeks.

“I expect I would run for reelection. I love my job, I am getting things done, and I work hard,” said Haney, 39, who first moved into the Tenderloin in 2007 and has continuously lived in the neighborhood in various places the past seven years.

“There’s a lot more to do.”

Pointing to his receiving a higher share of the vote in the Tenderloin than anywhere else in the district when he first ran in 2018, Haney said he is proud to represent the historic trans and queer neighborhood. Noting he doesn’t own a car and walks everywhere in the district, Haney said he is visible and accessible everyday to his neighbors and constituents in the Tenderloin, just as he is for the residents of the rest of the district.

See page 16 >>

portionately sentenced to life without parole. Nationally, Black youth are sentenced at a rate 10 times greater than white youth, and are 22.5 times more likely to receive a life without parole in California.

Biology and social justice demand that California prohibit life without parole for youths under 18, especially when there is a better solution available.

Huckleberry’s Community Assessment and Resource Center is a San Francisco program for youth, ages 11-17, who are arrested for misdemeanors or certain felonies. CARC provides positive youth development and access to mental health services. It helps youth avoid detention and a future life of crime. Thirty percent of all arrested youth in San Francisco are served by CARC

and 72% of those young people are not rearrested within one year of the program. Seventy percent of CARC’s clients are youth of color, 67% are boys.

California is in the process of closing its juvenile detention centers and preparing counties to take on young people convicted of crimes in a way that protects the community while preparing youth for life outside of prison. Huckleberry’s CARC is a model for other jurisdictions to follow, and a superior alternative to the costs of life in prison without parole.

Editorial, May 13]. In my experience, Hollendoner was incredibly engaged with the community and advanced the work of SFAF in many critical ways, including increased HIV prevention services, harm reduction services, HIV & aging services, and in essential public policy work, often behind the scenes but absolutely essential. Too often I fear that we tear down leaders in the LGBT and HIV community. Like many, I was saddened to learn of the layoffs at SFAF and I am sure that Hollendoner would have preferred to leave SFAF on a brighter note, but we should focus on his solid leadership and his many accomplishments. San Francisco is better for Hollendoner’s service here.

Letters >> Saddened at high court ruling

We at Huckleberry Youth Programs are saddened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision to reject limits on life terms for youth. This decision marks the first time in almost two decades the high court has deviated from rules establishing more leniency for juvenile offenders, even those convicted of murder. The U.S. is the only nation that sentences people to life without parole for crimes committed before turning 18.

Research shows a child’s brain does not fully develop until age 25. Adolescence is a difficult time for youth, particularly low-income youth of color, who face systemic barriers making these years more challenging.

Also, youth of color are dispro-

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Douglas Styles, PsyD., Executive Director Rose Bentley, Board President Huckleberry Youth Programs San Francisco

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I wanted to respond to the recent editorial on outgoing San Francisco AIDS Foundation CEO Joe Hollendoner [“So long, Joe Hollendoner,”

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WITH OUR GRATITUDE OPENHOUSE HONORS

DR. KARYN SKULTETY After four phenomenal years of leadership, Dr. Karyn Skultety is leaving her post as Executive Director at Openhouse. Karyn’s work has transformed the landscape of aging in San Francisco in myriad ways, including spearheading the completion of our Laguna Street campus.

The Openhouse Community — our board of directors, staff, donors, volunteers and thousands of LGBTQ+ seniors in San Francisco — is grateful beyond measure for Karyn’s tireless work on behalf of LGBTQ+ seniors. Karyn has been an unforgettable champion, cheerleader, coach and colleague.

SF Pride parades will never be the same without her.

Openhouse proudly invites the public to a virtual tribute and dedication of the balcony of our new Community Center in Karyn’s honor on

Wednesday, May 26, 2021, at 3 p.m.

To attend go to www.openhousesf.org on the day of the event or join via the Openhouse Facebook page. housing, services, and

community for LGBTQ seniors

To make a donation in support of LGBTQ+ seniors in honor of Karyn’s leadership, please scan the QR code.

<< Community News

14 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

<<

Lawsuit

From page 11

Breach of contract case

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In a case filed November 13, 2020 in San Francisco Superior Court, Crusader Management Services LLC is claiming that Larkin Street violated a janitorial service agreement. Crusader Management Services is seeking $35,032.55 in damages, plus interest.

The complaint states that Crusader Management Services provided services to Larkin Street from January through July 2020. The contract was supposed to last the whole year, but Crusader Management Services stopped providing services and Larkin Street did not pay its full balance at that time, according to the complaint.

“Despite further written demands from plaintiff to remit the remaining balance due, defendant neither paid any further sums nor responded to plaintiff,” the complaint states.

Nathan D. Borris, a Hayward-based attorney representing Crusader Management Services, told the B.A.R. May 11 that the case has been scheduled for trial in February.

<<

LGBTQ API week

From page 1

As the Bay Area Reporter’s Political Notebook was first to report last week, leaders of the GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance, which recently held several rallies in the city’s LGBTQ Castro district to protest the rise in AAPI hate, and the Bay Area QTAPI Coalition came together to propose the inaugural QTAPI Week.

GAPA Chair Michael Trung Nguyen told the B.A.R. the dates were purposefully chosen so the week fell within Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and ahead of Pride Month in June.

He also wanted it to start on May 22, as it coincides with the annual observances of Harvey Milk Day, a day of special recognition in California timed to the birthday of the late gay San Francisco supervisor. QTAPI Week kicks off at 11 a.m. Saturday at Jane Warner Plaza on 17th Street at Market and Castro streets in the Castro, where Milk lived and represented at City Hall. Speeches and entertainment will also be held throughout the day at the public parklet in celebration of Milk Day.

t

The third case, Femi Jordan v. Larkin Street Youth Services, was filed February 23 in San Francisco Superior Court. It alleges that the nonprofit hired Jordan and “failed to compensate them for all hours worked, missed meal periods or rest breaks,” the complaint states.

Jordan is alleging failure to pay overtime, failure to provide meal periods, failure to provide rest periods, failure to pay minimum wages, failure to timely pay wages upon termination, failure to pay wages during employment, failure to provide complete and accurate wage statements, failure

to keep complete and accurate payroll records, and failure to reimburse necessary business-related expenses and costs.

Jordan is seeking, “individually, and on behalf of other aggrieved employees,” an amount above $25,000.

Edwin Aiwazian, a Glendale-based attorney representing Jordan, did not return a request for comment by press time.

Larkin Street Youth Services did not return a request for comment about these two cases by press time.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit received $17,693,510 in government contract revenue in the 2019-2020 Fiscal Year, according to an audit. It received $12,312,702 in grants and contributions during the same period. Its total revenue that year was $31,066,032.

As the B.A.R. previously reported, Larkin Street Youth Services was awarded a city contract to handle case management for Our Trans Home SF. It was awarded $660,000 annually when Our Trans Home SF was launched in 2019. St. James Infirmary, which handles the subsidies, was awarded $490,000 annually. t

“I felt it was important for this kind of visibility for queer Asians and Pacific Islanders to be within API Heritage Month. When I was looking at the dates and saw Harvey Milk Day, I said we should pick it as a start because he was a great gay elected official,” said Nguyen. “All marginalized communities have lots to learn from each other and do knowledge transfer. For folks who lie at the intersection of two different identities – Asian and Pacific Islander and queer or transgender – we see both sides and come on multiple paths here.”

Anjali Rimi, president of Parivar and co-founder of the Bay Area QTAPI Coalition, noted that, “As a South Asian woman of trans experience, I have often had to navigate out of my cultural identity to ascertain my gender identity. I am grateful for the visibility for QTAPI folx in the city of San Francisco and to be able to bring my whole self to this world.”

At the request of gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who now represents the Castro neighborhood, the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday, May 18, to adopt a resolution officially declaring May

22-29 as QTAPI Week in the City and County of San Francisco. He noted it was fitting for the city to be the one to establish such a week due to its being home to a number of LGBTQ trailblazing groups and individuals.

Among those Mandelman pointed to were Margaret Chung, the first American surgeon of Chinese descent who wore “mannish attire” and was romantically linked to several women, and Crystal Jang, the first openly gay Asian lesbian teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District who conducted the first LGBTQ issues trainings for the city’s public schools in the 1970s.

“This resolution will make ours the first city in the country to honor the queer and trans API community with a designated week of celebration and recognition. Amid a spate of heinous anti-AAPI attacks in San Francisco and around the United States, and with state legislatures across the country targeting the LGBTQ+ community – and trans community in particular – this will send a strong message of support and solidarity to QTAPI people everywhere,” said Mandelman.

See page 15 >>

“It’s still really early in the discovery phase,” Borris said. “Other than the complaint on file, that’s all we’ve got so far. Like any complaint, they’re allegations at this stage.”

Borris called it a “pretty simple case for services rendered and not fully paid.”

“I don’t have comment or knowledge of Larkin Street’s business practices or anything like that,” he said, adding that he learned earlier that day about the other two cases.

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50 years in 50 weeks: 1977 Milk win

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n honor of Harvey Milk Day on May 22, this week’s look at the Bay Area Reporter’s archive is from the November 10, 1977 issue, which reports when Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay person to win elective office in the city and in California. Milk, who wrote a political column for the paper, had tried two other times to win a seat, and was victorious on his third attempt. According to the article, Milk received 30% of

the vote, well ahead of the 16 other candidates for what was then the District 5 seat in the Castro, Noe Valley and the Haight. (The LGBTQ-focused seat is now District 8 and includes Noe Valley, Diamond Heights and Glen Park.) Milk took office in January 1978, but only served 11 months before he and then-mayor George Moscone were assassinated by disgruntled ex-supervisor Dan White. To view the issue, go to https://archive. org/details/BAR_19771110/page/n3/mode/2up.

t <<

Harvey Milk Day >>

SFO terminal

From page 1

Bay Area Reporter during a recent interview conducted via Zoom.

They had to imagine the dimensions of the atrium and how people would move through the space since that area of the Milk terminal has yet to be constructed. Slated as part of the final phase of the $2.4 billion remodel of the Milk terminal, the project’s construction timeline has been delayed due to the COVID pandemic.

“Originally slated for completion in 2023, we’re now expecting completion in 2024, although a revised installation schedule may have yet to be established,” airport spokesman Doug Yakel told the B.A.R. It means that installation of artist Andrea Bowers’ $1.1 million commission for the Milk terminal’s outdoor underpass lighting art project will also be delayed. As the B.A.R. reported last May, Bowers will turn the sidewalk entrance of the terminal into a dance floor with a series of disco balls and an elaborate neon artwork lighting up inspirational quotes from Milk, the first LGBT icon to have an airport terminal named in their honor.

Her work is inspired by the facade of the Castro Theatre, situated in the LGBTQ Castro district that Milk also represented due to his winning a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November 1977. Tragically, he was assassinated 11 months into his first term the morning of November 27, 1978 along with thenmayor George Moscone.

In 2018, city officials agreed to name Terminal 1 at SFO after Milk.

The decision came five years after gay former Supervisor David Campos had initially floated a proposal to name the entire airport after the gay icon and then settled on one of the airport’s four terminals.

Amid the protracted bureaucratic wrangling over the airport naming details, focus at one point turned to the public artwork planned for the terminal. District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a legislative aide to Campos who succeeded him in office, had pressed to see that at least some of the art was inspired by Milk.

<<

LGBTQ API week

From page 14

In conjunction with QTAPI Week the Dragon Fruit Network of API Equality-Northern California is launching the Queer Asian and Pacific Islanders Cis Allies Project May 23. The project, whose acronym QAPICAP is pronounced “Kappy-Cap,” is an intergenerational project to help cisgender LGBTQ+ API people unlearn and end transphobia within their community. A Zoom discussion will take place from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday.

<<

May 20-26, 2021 • Bay Area Reporter • 15

Elizondo

From page 9

er Haight neighborhood. Other than going out early in the morning to run errands on occasion or taking her dogs for walks, she was largely housebound last year. Local nonprofits delivered food for both her and her dogs, limiting Ms. Elizondo’s need to go to stores.

Being HIV-positive, Ms. Elizondo took greater precautions to limit her risk of contracting COVID-19.

“I have always been very active and involved in my community,” she said at the time. “It just is not the same anymore. I miss the freedom that we had, but I am dealing with it. I am OK.” Prior to the pandemic, Ms. Elizondo performed with her musical drag group, the Tenderloin Queen’s Revue.

During LGBTQ Pride Month in June

Rick Gerharter

Artist Craig Calderwood is excited about their SFO atrium project.

the LGBTQ community, either as a term or color used to refer to queer people or a pattern that images the imprisonment of being in a closet or discriminated against for who you are as an LGBTQ person.

Living in San Francisco Calderwood grew very interested in queer politics.

“I feel like I grew up in a fairly insulated space and in a very conservative and Christian environment. I didn’t really get access to any kind of queer political information or gay political information,” recalled Calderwood. “I moved here kind of on a whim with a friend to not be in the Valley and to try and pursue art. I am self taught; I found myself hitting a lot of roadblocks in Fresno in the arts scene there.”

Their atrium artwork also plays on travel, as Calderwood designed it so people first see land-based imagery and as they ascend the escalator they encounter scenes of blue sky.

“To me, it helps create a travelling narrative from the bottom to the top of the piece,” said Calderwood.

As for Milk himself, he is not depicted in any of the scenes. But his spirit imbues it, as Calderwood based some of the imagery on photos they saw of Milk.

“When I make my art and I am pulling a lot of different information to make the piece, I like to put little nods in there. I saw a photo of him holding a bouquet of daisies, so I put a daisy bush in one of the planters,” said Calderwood. “I did things like that. I didn’t want it to be literal necessarily; my art is never really literal.”

Their artwork is likely to bring a smile to airport passengers, and perhaps a bit of hope as Milk so famously called on people to provide.

“I was looking at Harvey Milk’s legacy and his wanting life for others to be nice and easy. Not just queer people, but labor unions and all kinds of marginalized people who deserved to have a nice life and an easy life,” said Calderwood. “I wanted to create a piece that thought about that more than necessarily a representation of him.”t

Another massive photographic exhibit detailing Milk’s life and political career that had been inside the terminal is being repurposed and reinstalled in the Milk terminal’s customs corridor, which is a passenger walkway connecting Harvey Milk Terminal 1 to the International Terminal Board-

ing Area A. As the B.A.R. reported last month, it should debut this September and remain on display for an indefinite period of time.

A portion of the exhibit, titled “Harvey Milk: Messenger of Hope,” will adorn for the next two years a wall inside the Milk terminal just beyond the security gates where new retail spaces are being built. It opens to the public Tuesday, May 25, several days after Harvey Milk Day is observed this Saturday, May 22, which would have been Milk’s 91st birthday.

As occurred with Bowers’ commission, a selection panel that included Milk’s gay nephew Stuart Milk, who heads the foundation he and his family created to promote the legacy of his famous uncle, recommended Calderwood be picked to create the atrium space art. They have yet to even step foot into the Milk terminal, partly due to the health crisis resulting in orders people sequester at home and also because Calderwood hasn’t had a reason to fly.

They are known for their graphic, line-heavy style that is oftentimes cartoonish. Calderwood draws inspiration from comics and video games. For the Milk-inspired artwork, they were inspired not only by Milk’s progressive political views but also his coming of

age during the 1960s.

“I think it fits well with some of Harvey’s interests. A lot of hippie, free love movements were happening in the ‘60s,” said Calderwood.

“Some of the color palettes and figures feel very ‘60s. I use a lot of floral motifs and pattern motifs in my work.”

The dog play area scene harkens to Milk’s sponsoring a local law to encourage dog owners to pick up their pooches’ poop. He famously planted a pile of dog excrement for him to step on following a news conference Milk held about the law.

“They are all made up dogs,” said Calderwood, who in their youth had dogs. “Dogs feel very San Francisco to me. A lot of people are trying to make a dog happen in their life in the city.”

It also allowed Calderwood to have some fun with gender-based tropes by, for instance, choosing to depict a Rottweiler with pink fur and hearts on it.

“I want to look at these opportunities of how even animals get masculinized and feminized with all these things we put on them,” said Calderwood. “It was a fun scene to draw.”

Their vernacular for the artwork showcases pansies, lavender, and stripe motifs as they all relate to

Nguyen, an attorney, will be in conversation with fellow lawyer Alexander Chen, a trans man who is the founding director of the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 26, in a Zoom event presented by the Asian American Bar Association.

The two first met in the Bay Area when Chen was an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

The closing event for QTAPI Week will take place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, May 29, in

the 18th and Collingwood parking lot in the Castro behind the Walgreens. It will include a live DJ, performances, and more celebrating API Pride.

Having grown up in Texas within the Vietnamese American community, Nguyen told the B.A.R. that he often felt alone and isolated growing up gay. No one like himself was in the media, and he felt pressure to conform to societal norms while being told being gay was wrong. With QTAPI Week, Nguyen is looking to upend that messaging and foster connections

among LGBTQ API people.

“I would hope that folks take away a sense of belonging and that there is a community out there for them,” he said. “I feel a lot of queer and trans Asians and Pacific Islanders have feelings of isolation and feelings of loneliness.”

As became Milk’s mantra that people need to be given hope, Nguyen sees QTAPI Week as offering a sense of hope. He would like cities across the country to replicate the event in 2022 and plans to push for Bay Area cities like Oak-

land and San Jose to do so.

For young API LGBTQ people in particular, Nguyen said he hopes the week carries the message that, “You can get through high school and can get through college and live a life of dignity and your true self.”

For more information about the QTAPI Week events and how to join the virtual programs, including a gamers’ night and drag show, visit its Facebook page at https://fb.me/e/XoaqM0wo.t

and throughout the holiday season, the group traditionally performed drag shows at venues accessible to older LGBTQ people, like SteppingStone Adult Day Health Care. The shows were meant to reach especially those unable to attend Pride events on their own or for those without family visiting them at Thanksgiving or the December holidays.

One of those who participated in the shows with Ms. Elizondo was Bobby Ashton, who described himself as a performance artist and a male performer at Aunt Charlie’s.

“We hung out quite a bit for a long time,” Ashton told the B.A.R. in a phone interview. “She contacted me six or seven years ago to get involved with the senior center shows.”

Ashton said that he admired his friend. “She wanted the world to

know about the transgender family,” he said.

Ms. Elizondo also helped her friends, as noted in the story. Jasmine Gee, another trans senior living in San Francisco, didn’t have a TV so Ms. Elizondo spearheaded a crowdfunding effort to buy her a television and an antenna to access a host of local stations and channels for free.

Gee had also met Ms. Elizondo at Aunt Charlie’s, she stated in an email, explaining that friends Michelle Alcedo and Sue Englander introduced them in about 2009. The two were later teamed up in 2013 through the Friendly Visitor program at Openhouse, a San Francisco-based agency that provides services to older LGBTQ people. Ms. Elizondo briefly served on the San Francisco Department of Aging and Adult Services Commission

after being appointed to the advisory body in 2019 by Mayor London Breed and also had a short stint on the San Francisco LGBT Aging Policy Task Force in 2012.

Breed was among those who were able to visit Ms. Elizondo in hospice before she passed away, her spokesman confirmed.

Born in San Angelo, Texas, on July 23, 1946, Ms. Elizondo first visited San Francisco in the mid-1960s but she decided to come back to the city to live in the early 1990s, she told the B.A.R. in the 2015 interview.

Knowing she was different didn’t comfort her when she was young, Ms. Elizondo said. “I was in the 12th grade and I left because I was being bullied,” she said.

Ms. Elizondo had a long resume of previous jobs.

“I have been a clerk, a nurse’s aid, a receptionist, a long-distance operator,” she said in 2015. She also worked as a customer service representative for Goodwill, and had stints at Los Gatos Community Hospital, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, and Catholic Charities.

She also was a Vietnam veteran, having served in the Navy.

Over the years Ms. Elizondo, by her calculation, made 80 panels for the AIDS Memorial Quilt, she said in 2015, and has helped raise funds for various LGBTQ-centered nonprofits, including Project Open Hand, Shanti Project, and the San Francisco LGBT Community Center.

Friends are planning a celebration of Ms. Elizondo’s live though more details are not yet available. t

She recently told the B.A.R. she is “elated” with the artwork and several photographic exhibits that will greet passengers of the Milk terminal.

“It took a lot of screaming, cajoling, and hearings to get here and we got here,” said Ronen. “I like that it is an eclectic collection and it fully spans a lot of the terminal. One of the biggest fights started with the corner nook and now we have the exhibit in the long customs corridor, the artwork for the atrium, and the lights outside the terminal.”

In addition to the two artists’ works, there is a photographic exhibit created by the SFO Museum that traces Milk’s life from his childhood in New York to his days as a pioneering political operative in San Francisco during the 1970s.

It is in an area dubbed the Central Inglenook near the American Airlines check-in counters.

Repurposed exhibit

<< Community News

16 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

<<

SF D6 supe bid

From page 12

“I ran because this district has challenges and problems. I am not going to deny there are challenges here,” said Haney. “I wake up and fight every day to make progress. I put forward solutions, not just criticism. I think I have been effective.”

Nonetheless, Haney is the third consecutive heterosexual person to represent District 6 since the supervisors reverted to being elected by district in 2000. Due to the district encompassing not only the Transgender District but also the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District in the South of Market area, Cooper told the B.A.R. that she started thinking about running to be its representa-

Military service

tive at City Hall several years ago.

“I am here for the residents of the Tenderloin. I have always been a voice for the voiceless, the underserved, and marginalized,” said Cooper. “I love San Francisco, California.

It is home now; I’ve been here so long. I have always been a leader and grown into being the person I am.”

Friend Terri Lynn Haggins, a cisgender straight ally who is also living with HIV, first met Cooper more than three years ago through the group Women Organized to Respond to Life-Threatening Diseases, which is an AIDS Healthcare Foundation affiliate. They had talked about Cooper running for supervisor several years ago.

“She was really, she was concerned about the issues going on in the Tender-

loin where she lived,” recalled Haggins.

“She would mention that and eventually she said, ‘Maybe I should run for office.’ We all looked at her as if to say, ‘Yeah, sure, OK Ms. Billie.’ She really took the time and thought about it.”

Cooper considers Haggins to be part of her campaign kitchen cabinet, people she is turning to for advice. Haggins told the B.A.R. she has advised Cooper to do her research and listen to residents of the district.

“She needs to make sure she is aware of who she’s going to be going against and learning about politics.

Politics is a strange world,” said Haggins. “My second advice was to pay close attention and listen carefully to the community, because that is where your strength is going to come from. And to listen more than talk.”

name or names on 03/22/21. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/16/21.

by a corporation, and is signed D AND D RETAIL ENTERPRISES INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/24/96. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/14/21.

conducted by an individual, and is signed HARRY H. ANDREWS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/29/81. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/03/21.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021

MAY 13, 20, 27, JUNE 03, 2021

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039323500

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039329800

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021

MAY 13, 20, 27, JUNE 03, 2021

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039323600

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039331900

Cooper, a Philadelphia native, joined the Navy in 1976 and was sent to boot camp in Florida then to bases in San Diego and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Joking she enlisted in order to find a husband, Cooper said she faced more issues due to her race than anything else.

“Back then in the 1970s it wasn’t like when Bill Clinton signed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ into law.

It was don’t even tell us, we don’t care,” recalled Cooper. “It was right after Vietnam and they really needed people and really needed bodies. I was an able bodied, effeminate body.”

Honorably discharged in May 1982, Cooper eventually relocated to San Francisco. She worked as

t

a security guard then as a “glorified ticket taker” at the now-closed PussyCat Theater on Market Street.

After 15 years employed as a janitor, Cooper went out on disability after getting hurt on the job.

Over the years she has been a sex worker and battled addictions to cocaine then crack. Diagnosed in 2002 with cancer, she lost her left eye to the disease on Thanksgiving in 2009. It is her wealth of life experiences, said Cooper, that gives her the confidence to now seek public office.

“I am standing up and going to not only show San Francisco but the world I am ready,” said Cooper. “Even though you haven’t given me the invitation to come to the table, I am ready to take a seat at the table.” t

Legals>> SUMMONS (FAMILY LAW) SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO NOTICE TO RESPONDENT: CARMEL VALENZUELA SANCHEZ, YOU ARE BEING SUED. PETITIONER’S NAME IS MICHAEL JAMES SANCHEZ CASE NO. FDI-15-784009

You have 30 CALENDAR DAYS after this Summons and Petition are served on you to file a Response (form FL-120 or FL-123) at the court and have a copy served on the petitioner. A letter, phone call, or court appearance will not protect you. If you do not file your Response on time, the court may make orders affecting your marriage or domestic partnerships, your property, and custody of your children. You may be ordered to pay support and attorney fees and costs. For legal advice, contact a lawyer immediately. Get help finding a lawyer at the California Courts Online Self-Help Center (www. courts.ca.gov/selfhelp), at the California Legal Services website (www.lawhelpca.org), or by contacting your local county bar association.

NOTICE: The restraining orders following are effective against both spouses or domestic partners until the petition is dismissed, a judgment is entered, or the court makes further orders. They are enforceable anywhere in California by any law enforcement officer who has received or seen a copy of them.

FEE WAIVER: If you cannot pay the filing fee, ask the clerk for a fee waiver form. The court may order you to pay back all r part of the fees and costs that the court waived for you or the other party.

SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO, 400 MCALLISTER ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102; the name, address, and telephone number of petitioner’s attorney, or the petitioner without an attorney, is: MICHAEL JAMES SANCHEZ, 750 O’FARRELL ST #107, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107.

July 05,2015 Clerk of the Superior Court by MELISSA ORTIZ, Deputy.

WARNING: California law provides that, for the purposes of division of property upon dissolution of a marriage or domestic partnership or upon legal separation, property acquired by the parties during marriage or domestic partnership in joint form is presumed to be community property. If either party to this action should die before the jointly held community property is divided, the language in the deed that characterizes how title is held (i.e., joint tenancy, tenants in common, or community property) will be controlling, and not the community property presumption. You should consult your attorney if you want the community property presumption to be written into the recorded title to the property.

STANDARD FAMILY LAW RESTRAINING ORDERS: Starting immediately, you and your spouse or domestic partner are restrained from: 1. Removing the minor child or children of the parties, if any, from the state without the prior written consent of the other party or an order of the court; 2. Cashing borrowing against, canceling, transferring, disposing of, or changing the beneficiaries of any insurance or other coverage, including life, health, automobile, and disability, held for the benefit of the parties and their minor child or children; 3. Transferring, encumbering, hypothecating, concealing, or in any way disposing of any property, real or personal, whether community, quasi-community, or separate, without the written consent of the other party or an order of the court, except in the usual course of business or for the necessities of life; and 4. Creating a nonprobate transfer or modifying a nonprobate transfer in the manner that affects the disposition of property subject to the transfer, without the written consent of the other party or an order of the court. Before revocation of a nonprobate transfer can take effect or a right of survivorship to property can be eliminated, notice of the change must be filed and served on the other party.

You must notify each other of any proposed extraordinary expenditures at least five business days prior to incurring these extraordinary expenditures and account to the court for all extraordinary expenditures made after these restraining orders are effective. However, you may use community property, quasi-community property, or your own separate property to pay an attorney to help you or to pay court costs.

APR 29, MAY 06, 13, 20, 2021 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556177

In the matter of the application of LIA CRUZ, 1265 INGALLS ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner LIA CRUZ is requesting that the name LIA CRUZ AKA LESLIE ANN LOREN CUSHMAN AKA ANALEIGH LISETTE CUSHMAN AKA LESLIE ANN LOREN CUSHMAN-MELVILLE be changed to ALESSIA THALIA ALTA. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103N, Rm. 103N on the 3rd of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

APR 29, MAY 06, 13, 20, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039320600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as DEXISION CONSULTING, 1101 PACIFIC AVE #501, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ANGELO FRANCHINI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business

APR 29, MAY 06, 13, 20, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039309300 The following person(s) is/are doing business as URBAN VERSES, 255 KING ST #308, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ALEXIS L. SPENCERBYERS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/04/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/02/21.

APR 29, MAY 06, 13, 20, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039320700 The following person(s) is/are doing business as FULLFILLED FOODS; MASAK MASAK, 1661 TENNESSEE ST #2K, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107.

This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed FULLFILLED LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/08/21. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/16/21.

APR 29, MAY 06, 13, 20, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039321400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as KALEIDOSCOPE; KALEIDOSCOPE FOODS, 1661 TENNESSEE ST #2K, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107.

This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed REGENERATION FOODS LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/21. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/19/21.

APR 29, MAY 06, 13, 20, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039314400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as MAXWELL’S PET BAR, 1734 CHURCH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed THE DOG BAR LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on N/A. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/7/21.

APR 29, MAY 06, 13, 20, 2021 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556300

In the matter of the application of ANTHONY DEAVEREAUX BLANCHARD, TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner ANTHONY DEAVEREAUX BLANCHARD is requesting that the name ANTHONY DEAVEREAUX BLANCHARD be changed to ANTONIO FRANCISCO DEAVEREAUX. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103, on the 15th of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as BEST IN CLASS EDUCATION CENTER, 780 BROADWAY, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed A&K EDUCATION LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/16/11.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/04/21.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021

MAY 13, 20, 27, JUNE 03, 2021

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039331500

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039329900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as EQ-1 LOAN, 1160 BATTERY ST #100, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed EQ-1 LOAN, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/03/21.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/04/21.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039325800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as THE TAILOR’S SON, 2049 FILLMORE ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94123. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed 2049 FILLMORE STREET, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/01/21. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/29/21.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556284

In the matter of the application of MICHELLE DUBONNET, 4320 PACHECO ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner MICHELLE DUBONNET is requesting that the name MALINA ANUHEA AHUMADA be changed to MALINA ANUHEA DUBONNET. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103N, Rm. 103N on the 8th of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021

MAY 13, 20, 27, JUNE 03, 2021 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556322

The following person(s) is/are doing business as AAA CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION AND PLUMBING CO, 3450 SACRAMENTO ST #124, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ROBERT KORMAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 08/01/19.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/12/21.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039316100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as THE GARDEN HOME, 4095 MISSION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ADAM CHANG. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/01/20. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/12/21.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039323900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as FIVE STAR ELECTRIC, 17 REDONDO ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CARLOS H. AGUILAR. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/18/21. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/26/21.

MAY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2021

In the matter of the application of EGHOSASERE STEPHEN IGBINOSA, 750 HARRISON #601, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107 for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner EGHOSASERE STEPHEN IGBINOSA is requesting that the name EGHOSASERE STEPHEN IGBINOSA be changed to STEPHEN EGHOSA IGBINOSA. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103N, Rm. 103N on the 22ND of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

MAY 13, 20, 27, JUNE 03, 2021 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556315

In the matter of the application of MEENAL BEN SINGH, 62 ARGONAUT AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner MEENAL BEN SINGH is requesting that the name MEENAL BEN SINGH be changed to MEENAL BEN PATEL. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103N, Rm. 103N on the 22ND of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

MAY 13, 20, 27, JUNE 03, 2021

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039319300 The following person(s) is/are doing business as THE CABLE CAR STORE, PIER 39 SPACE P-3, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted

The following person(s) is/are doing business as SUAREZ-KUEHNE ARCHITECTURE, 2410 14TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed JOHN STEVEN SUAREZ & SCOTT CARL KUEHNE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/14/97. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/30/21.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as SUPER SAM, 691 MCALLISTER ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed G&S LIQUOR AND CONVENIENCE STORE INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/29/18.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/26/21.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039316600

KEEP UP! EMAIL STRIP.indd 1

The following person(s) is/are doing business as PARK PRESIDIO LIQUORS, 4400 CALIFORNIA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed GOLDEN PARK VENTURES INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/15/21. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/26/21.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039330600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as FINO RESTAURANT; THE ANDREWS HOTEL, 624 POST ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is

The following person(s) is/are doing business as STRIKE KERR & JOHNS, 556 COMMERCIAL ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed BARRY STRIKE, TOM KERR & MELANI JOHNS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/01/20. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/30/21.

MAY 13, 20, 27, JUNE 03, 2021 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556303

In the matter of the application of BRETT ELERY CURTIS, 2175 MARKET ST #514, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner BRETT ELERY CURTIS is requesting that the name BRETT ELERY CURTIS be changed to BRETT ELERY. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103 on the 15th of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556334

In the matter of the application of DAVID HOWARD FOSTON, 295 FARALLONES ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner DAVID HOWARD FOSTON is requesting that the name DAVID HOWARD FOSTON be changed to RHOYALBALB’E DAVID HOWARD FOSTON. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103 on the 29th of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021

ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-21-556324

In the matter of the application of JOEL ALAN BRENNEMAN, 510 STEINER ST #2, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner JOEL ALAN BRENNEMAN is requesting that the name JOEL ALAN BRENNEMAN be changed to JOEL TAYLOR BRENNEMAN. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 103 on the 24th of JUNE 2021 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039330800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as SAN MARCOS RESTAURANTE, 98 LELAND AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed TEOFILO PEREZ. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/01/21. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/03/21.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039332700 The following person(s) is/are doing business as ALCHEMY 3, 265 FELL ST #102, 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 N/A. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/07/21.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039332600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as BENFIELD WORKS, 899 FULTON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed MARIO ANTONIO BENFIELD. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/19/02. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/07/21.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039333700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as CITISHIELD, 4224 MISSION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed CITISHIELD INCORPORATED (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/08/16.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/12/21.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021 STATEMENT FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-039332500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as TRULY FOOD & MORE, 483 MADRID ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed SKARLET AMAYA AVILES LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/05/21.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/05/21.

MAY 20, 27, JUNE 03, 10, 2021

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Sign up today at ebar.com/SUBSCRIBE 6/19/19 11:30 AM

Ric Weiland with Bill Gates

by Brian Bromberger

“R

ic was one of the pivotal people of our generation both in the information age and in the gay rights movement. He was right at the center; he was one of the architects. We wouldn’t live in the world that we live in today without the contribution that Ric made.”

While this quote from Michael Failla, a friend of Ric Weiland, sounds like affectionate hyperbole, it comes fairly close to truth, as we hear in the new documentary Yes I Am: The Ric Weiland Story, premiering at the Provincetown Film Festival (June 16-25).

Who is Ric Weiland, you may ask? He warrants much greater name recognition in the LGBTQ community, though he’s been dead for 15 years, a corrective convincingly argued in the film.

Produced by the gay team Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato of World of Wonder and narrated by out actor Zachary Quinto, the film is an apologia and witness to an individual, who despite almost overwhelming personal challenges, used his wealth and good fortune to make the world a better more just place, especially for LGBTQ people.

Technology is not a field usually associated with queer folk, though with their appearance in the upper echelons of big tech companies, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, and now Ric Weiland, as one of the founders of Microsoft, their impact

Gay tech guru

‘Yes I Am: The Ric Weiland Story’ is undeniable and worth celebrating.

Weiland attended Lakeside, a prep school in Seattle, where he met and befriended fellow tech geeks Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Allen and Gates hired Weiland in 1975 as lead programmer for Microsoft, which they had just created. A complex but logical thinker, Weiland’s brilliance developed the Basic and Cobol computer languages.

After a stint at Harvard Business School, he rejoined Microsoft in 1982 and became the Project Leader for Microsoft Works, though he turned down becoming a partner.

Still because he was a software pioneer at the forefront of the 1980s home computer revolution, he became enormously wealthy.

He let Allan and Gates know from the start

Lesbian parties in the 1950s

he was gay, which to their credit fazed neither of them. Reserved at work, he let off steam in his social life, dressing in drag (“Our Lady of the Wayward Girls”) literally becoming the life of the party and quite sexually active. Proudly gay, his license plate read, Yes I Am, which provides the title of the movie. He later tested positive for HIV. What was unexpected was his emergence as perhaps the first great gay philanthropist, giving $20 million to AIDS research, especially at a time when there were virtually no federal government funds. His seed money for amfAR and Project Inform, among others, helped subsidize medical advancements in HIV/AIDS research and treatments.

Weiland, after careful investigation, also contributed significant money to GLAAD, Lambda Legal, PFLAG, Planet Out amidst other organizations, when they were in their infancy, permitting them to survive and become viable.

In a stunning revelation, even after his retire-

Bayard Rustin

ment at age 35, he would return intermittently to write code for Microsoft, so he could make more money to give it away. He was instrumental in forcing General Electric to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation, a policy already established at Microsoft that became the template for other major big tech companies.

Weiland also made landmark contributions to his alma mater, Stanford University, endowed a medical school professorship in his mother’s name, but also included the Weiland Health Initiative to promote the mental health of LGBTQ students, a cause close to his own heart.

Weiland suffered from depression most of his life. There are quotes from his personal journals throughout the documentary, which reveal his struggles with loneliness, shame/ stigma related to AIDS and despite having several partners (interviewed in the film) didn’t believe he deserved love, poor at expressing his feelings in general.

See page 22 >>

Flawless Sabrina

Proud, empowered, parting

The Lavender Tube on FX’s ‘Pride,’ AAPI representation, & Ellen’s finale

by Victoria A. Brownworth

W

atch one of the queerer cooking shows, devise a tapas-y menu and mocktails, invite six vaccinated friends over and sit down to watch FX’s fabulous new documentary series, Pride.

Innovative, emotional, exuberant, gutting, enraging and wildly uneven, Pride takes viewers through the 1950s to the present in six documentary installments directed by seven different directors. The films are 1950s: People Had Parties,

by Tom Kalin; 1960s: Riots & Revolutions, by Andrew Ahn; 1970s: The Vanguard of Struggle

by Cheryl Dunye; 1980s: Underground by Anthony Caronna and Alex Smith; 1990s: The Culture Wars by Yance Ford; and 2000s: Y2Gay by Ro Haber.

There is history we are all-too-familiar with here as well as entré nous insidery history, like how Christine Jorgensen’s blonde good looks allowed her to become a trans poster girl while other trans people, notably trans people of color, were silenced.

These are not the standard corporate-driven made-for-straight/cisgender-TV takes. Much

of what is here will feel new even to LGBTQ viewers, and there is a layer of anger in some of these works that is usually edited out by straight studios.

Pride is also not just another white gay male rendering of our collective history. While there is only one female director, which is definitely a failing here, there are four directors of color: Dunye, Ford, Ahn and Haber, which is refreshing and makes for a very different perspective on LGBTQ history which has been largely told through a white lens. Additionally, Ford is a trans man (and was the first openly transgender man to be nominated for any Academy Award, in documentary, in 2018). Haber is non-binary.

Kalin’s piece is a powerful rendering of preStonewall activism and activists. This film features archival footage as well as re-enactments to tell extraordinary history, like the Lavender Scare (don’t let anyone tell you that Eisenhower was a “good” Republican).

Among these re-enactments is out bisexual actress Alia Shawkat as Madeleine Tress, fired from a government job for being gay, under Eisenhower’s egregious executive order.

There is also Raymond J. Barry as Sen. Lester Hunt (D-WY). Hunt took on Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and McCarthy targeted See page 22 >>

<< Books

18 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

‘Lies With Man’ brings back the mystery

by Jim Piechota

A

ttorney and prolific author Michael Nava’s impressive, engrossing ninth mystery novel in his Henry Rios detective series flashes back to the 1980s where big hair ruled, neon lit up the night, and the dark storm clouds of the AIDS epidemic began collectively chewing their way through gay communities on a global scale.

For readers unfamiliar with the series, Henry Rios is a gay Mexican American attorney in Los Angeles who, in the past, has primarily battled against homophobic murderers. In this new entry, he is charged with defending a man accused of the murder of an evangelical pastor –a heinous crime he may or may not have committed.

Nava’s narrative will be particularly nostalgic for a certain demographic of readers who came of age in the 1980s, a time when politicians believed it better to lock away those with AIDS and sequester them from public view. This was most evidenced in the creation of a Draconian California state voting proposition, whose legal language opens the novel, and was a very real measure appearing on the November, 1986

Author Michael Nava

ballot and authored by notorious homophobe Lyndon LaRouche.

In Nava’s novel, this initiative has been unsurprisingly lauded and fully supported by an evangelical church called Ekklesia. While the church’s hierarchy and congregants remain staunch proponents, it is the institution’s pastor, Daniel Herron, son-in-law of Ekklesia’s founder, who curiously seems to show some

leniency.

When the church is bombed, Daniel is killed and local gay activist Theo Phillips is arrested and charged, probably due to his involvement in the outspoken radical group, Queers United to End Erasure and Repression. Desperate to plead his innocence, Henry Rios rushes in to defend him and doubles down on the case without hesitancy.

Though Phillips claims he was collaborating with his conniving boyfriend Freddy at the time of the bombing, the plot further unravels to reveal the true perpetrator as the story gets even murkier to involve a nefarious homophobic plot devised by the church and local police.

Adding even more intrigue is the subplot of detective Rios falling deeply for Josh, a local waiter and Theo’s roommate, as well as a man who happens to be HIVpositive.

Nava nails many details of the 1980s era with exacting details and a flare for the tone and demeanor that suffused so many in the gay community fighting for both their right to co-exist as equals in society and literally battling for their lives against a disease whose malevolence knows no bounds.

Running alongside the main plot are other intricate narrative strands that are just as intriguing. Rios’s love

t

for Josh brushes up against the HIV sero-status-mixing conundrum which was a very serious romantic consideration in the 1980s when AIDS was infecting wide swaths of the gay community and no one held a clear-cut idea of how to avoid becoming yet another victim. Also, Pastor Herron has deeply-held secrets as well, including harboring a gay teenaged son whom he strives to protect from harm.

Nava is a Lambda Literary Awardwinning author who captures the true positive spirit of 1980s California, both through the boundless resiliency of the gay community in the face of police bullying and religious bigotry, as well as in the unsinkable pride the community embodied despite such seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Readers familiar with the Henry Rios volumes will find much to savor here in this gritty, vigorous page-turner, and those new to Nava’s literary brilliance may want to start with the series opener and beyond to truly relive Rios in all his gay crime-busting glory.t Lies With Man by Michael Nava, Amble Press, $17.95 paperback michaelnavawriter.com

Flower of Iowa Playwright Lance Ringel imagines male intimacy during WWI

by Mark William Norby

I

t was Tuesday November 3, 1992, the 52nd quadrennial presidential election but with a twist: it’s a gorgeous San Francisco evening in the Castro, bars were full, everyone stands with drinks in hands, necks bent and heads up, eyes glued to television screens waiting the results in George H.W. Bush vs William Jefferson Clinton.

At the same time in 1992, playwright Lance Ringel found himself stuck in bed recovering from a near-fatal case of hepatitis. In bed he watched the CBS series The Guns of August and studied Bill Clinton’s campaign promise to repeal the U.S. military’s ban on gay soldiers that eventually resulted in the Clinton Administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” a policy, where new and existing soldiers were required by law to keep their sexual orientation private while the military was prevented from gathering that information.

Simultaneously, Ringel states,

“An idea came to me: What would life have been like for two soldiers of the First World War who found themselves falling in love… with each other?”

“In 1992,” Ringel told the Bay Area Reporter, “when Bill Clinton said he would do away with the ban on gay and lesbian soldiers, it was the first time in my experience that our rights in any context had been mentioned out loud by a candidate with a serious chance of becoming President.”

Once Ringel was fully recovered, he began his research on what, 17 years later, became his novel Flower of Iowa. The book’s new hardcover edition has been named a 2021 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Romance category.

Flower of Iowa (Distant Mirror Press) centers on native 18-year old Tommy Flowers who was raised in rural Iowa and sent to France by the U.S. Military in June 1918, the final months of World War I. In the trenches and on the battlefields with fellow soldier, the Englishman David Pearson, the pair develop an un-

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expected intimacy that not only baffles them in a time when homosexuality was banned in the military, but tests their ability to explore those feelings together. A relationship develops and continues.

A sweeping tale of battle and romance during the First World War over four years that tore Europe in half, Tommy and David commit to spending as much time together as possible and learn the raw power of love in the harshest realities of war.

David is wounded and sent home to England to Author Lance Ringel convalesce but still they maintain their relationings from two additional authors of gel’s life partner. The performance ship. The book showcases historical fiction, Anne Shade, Alan will feature actors Ben Salus and a broad cast of memorable characE. Rose with writer discussions to Bradley Johnson, who reprise their ters, featuring Ringel’s meticulous follow.t roles of Tommy and David from historical research. Combined with the original stage production. exhilarating storytelling that expertwww.tososnyc.org. ly captures a war that changed the www.facebook.com/perfectlyJune 16 at 7pm PT, San Franciscoqueerreadings world, the book underscores how far www.distantmirrorpress.com based Perfectly Queer reading series the LGBTQ community have come www.lanceringel.com will feature Ringel and present readand where we stand today.

The book also honors the bravery and sacrifice of WWI military heroes and visits the many sites of the French battlefields. The Independent Book Publishers Association recently gave out its Benjamin Franklin Award to Ringel where Flower of Iowa won the Gold in the Fiction: Romance, and the Silver in LGBTQ literature. Ringel’s book comes to the world with focus on San Francisco and New York in upcoming virtual stage performances.

May 24 at 4pm PT, the nation’s oldest professional LGBTQ theatre The Other Side of Silence will present a Zoom video adaptation of the theatrical version of Flower of Iowa, followed by a conversation with Ringel and the production’s director Ben Salus and Bradley Johnson in the original stage production of Flower of Iowa.

Chuck Muckle, Rin-

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Books>>

May 20-26, 2021 • Bay Area Reporter • 19

Thoroughly Modern Actor, comedian & poet Catherine Cohen “Poem I wrote after I asked you if cereal can expire” was published in Alice Quinn’s 2020 anthology Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. What did it mean to you to have your work included in that collection?

I was so honored. So many poets I admire are in the collection. I also felt special to get to write something about the current moment and have it out in the world so quickly.

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading a great book called We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper. It’s part memoir and part investigative study of a murder that happened at Harvard in the ‘60s.

It’s just fascinating and I’m really enjoying that. I just finished Stephanie Danler’s memoir Stray, which I could not put down. I thought that was so fabulous.

Catherine Cohen

by Gregg Shapiro

O

ver the years, poetry collections have come from some unexpected writers. Actors Ally Sheedy, James Franco, Amber Tamblyn, Viggo Mortensen and even Jimmy Stewart, as well as musicians Alicia Keys, Billy Corgan, Jill Scott, and Jewel, are just a few who have shared their words with us. Houston native and New York transplant Catherine Cohen is the latest.

An actress (High Maintenance and The Lovebirds), comedian and podcaster (Seek Treatment), Cohen’s debut poetry collection God I Feel Modern Tonight: Poems from a Gal About Town (Knopf, 2021) has just been released. Striking a careful balance between the poetic (“I love sex and I love before it—/the double vodka soda leg touch”) and the play-

ful (“going swimming is an amazing way/to stop being on your phone”), Cohen never ceases to entertain. I spoke with Catherine shortly after the book was published.

Gregg Shapiro: Your book God I Feel Modern Tonight is subtitled Poems from a Gal About Town. Were you a gal about town in (your native) Houston or did that come later?

Catherine Cohen: [Laughs] No, I was definitely not a gal about town. I was just at my parents’ house studying and singing musical theater alone in the shower.

aware you are of your fans in the LGBTQ+ community and what they mean to you.

It’s been my everything! The community at Club Cumming has given me a sense of belonging. I just feel so at peace when I’m there. I used to do the show every Wednesday, so every week I’d be stressed out and exhausted. But I’d always leave the show energized and remembering why I do what I do. It’s because of the people that work there and come to the show and Alan himself who are really kind and generous and supportive of up-and-coming acts.

Do you have another book project in the works, or are there film or television projects you’d like to plug?

Have you performed the poems in God I Feel Modern Tonight in your acts at Joe’s Pub or Alan Cumming’s Club Cumming?

Yes. I read the poems on stage a lot.

I’ve been doing that for a few years. It’s always a great way to try out new stuff.

It’s a fun interlude to add some poems to the mix of songs and jokes. Yeah, I love reading them out loud.

You do the Seek Treatment podcast with gay comic Pat Regan and perform regularly at the previously mentioned Club Cumming, which made me wonder how

rancisco F n Sa

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Yes, lots of stuff in the works.

I would love to do a collection of essays next. I’m developing a few other things that are still in the early stages. For now, I’m just working on the podcast and auditioning and thinking of all the things I want to do next. I would love to do some kind of outdoor event if the COVID situation permits. That would be fun. It’s been really nice doing these virtual events. I’ve been really surprised at actually how fun and interactive they’ve been. But it would be really nice to celebrate in real life. So, we’ll see.t www.catherine-cohen.com

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<< Music

22 • Bay Area Reporter • May 20-26, 2021

Excitable boy

by Gregg Shapiro

than ever. I’m gonna keep grinding harder than ever and the hard work doesn’t stop. It also means that we have more people in my corner and we’re expanding the family. There’s going to be more hands on deck getting the music to more ears around the world. For that, I’m very, very excited.

J

ordy, the latest in the long tradition of mono-monikered performers in the music world – from Cher to Madonna to Beyoncé – gets up close and personal with listeners on his viral TikTok hit single “Long Distance.” The song, about the challenges of falling for a guy who lives far away, is the runaway song of the season.

Jordy, who has made the most of various means of viral video exposure throughout his career, is poised for stardom. A proud Pisces and out singer-songwriter, Jordy’s infectious enthusiasm and expres- Jordy sive vocals are a winning combination. The young performer was kind enough to take time out of an incredibly busy week in April to answer a few questions.

Gregg Shapiro: I’d like to begin by congratulating you on signing

<<

Ric Weiland

From page 17

There are dispiriting passages about fighting to make himself more “social and human,” despite being a well-versed conversationalist on a host of topics ranging from political philosophy to history.

Shy, he was more comfortable working behind the scenes, using his wealth to effect the change he wanted to see happen, even if he didn’t live to witness it. For all his desire to be generous to others, he wasn’t able to be generous to himself, which tragically led to his sui-

<<

Lavender Tube

From page 17

Hunt, blackmailing him over his gay son. On June 19, 1954, Hunt entered the Russell Building, a concealed .22 Winchester rifle under his coat, and shot himself in his office. The tragic suicide led to the end of McCarthy.

Dunye’s film is particularly entrancing, and a personal favorite, focusing as it does on our longtime friend, lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, and our mentor over a decade, poet, essayist and activist Audre Lorde. Some might feel Dunye gives short-shrift to other issues of the era, like Anita Bryant, but the story Dunye is telling –especially as the sole lesbian director here– is an untold tale of lesbianism and lesbian culture and society at that time.

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your first record deal with 300 Entertainment. What does such an accomplishment mean to you?

Jordy: Oh, my gosh! Thank you so much, I really appreciate the kind words. To me, it means that we’re just going to keep working harder cide by gunshot at age 53 in 2006.

Since his death, Weiland’s Pride foundation has given more than $170 million to 20 beneficiaries, many, though not all, LGBTQ. The documentary is meant as a tribute to Weiland. Despite a somewhat stilted low-budget production lacking the slick look of other World of Wonder programs ,and at just an hour running time, it largely succeeds in that endeavor.

What makes the film so poignantly effective are the remembrances of colleagues (including Bill Gates) and friends (activist Urvashi Vaid), many of whom remain Prominent trans activists, historians and authors interviewees include Susan Stryker, Justin Vivian Bond, Kate Bornstein and the late Felicia Flames, who died on May 15.

The 1980s film utilizes extraordinary footage –from more a thousand hours– including some shot by New York gay scene videographer Nelson Sullivan from 1982 until his sudden death from a heart attack on July 4, 1989, at 41. Sullivan filmed his crossdressing drag queen friends as well as his friends in the Warhol scene and gay New York celebs.

Pride is an amazing and at times breathtaking series, even where it misses the mark. It is both inspirational and aspirational. We revisit histories that have been long ignored via narrators who have often been silenced. The links between the activism of other eras and our own are clearly drawn. And Haber’s film reminds us we are still fighting for our very lives. On FX and Hulu, it’s a must-watch.

AAPI Heritage Month

There are not enough Asian queer people on TV. There’s the fabulously funny Bowen Yang on SNL, there’s BD Wong on...everything. There’s the iconic George Takei and the hilarious Awkwafina.

been doing it from the start. I was lucky enough to come out at an early age and have a super- supportive and loving family. I grew up in the Chicagoland area and felt really at home and welcome. I want to use that voice for those who feel that they don’t have the power to speak out yet.

In addition to your record deal, you also performed on the Today Show. What was that experience like for you?

Completely surreal. I grew up with the Today Show. [It was] one of those moments where my mother is like crying herself crazy. Very exciting for me and my family. It’s really cool to be able to see this little song I wrote on national TV. It’s pretty cool.

I’m really glad you mentioned your family and their support.

While you were still a student at Glenbrook North High School, you and your mother did an interview about coming out that ran on the Your Teen Magazine website.

Oh my God! I haven’t thought about that in a really long time, actually. My mom is the best! She is a huge reason why I am where I am.

I think we had this opportunity to write this article from each of our perspectives. It’s special to have such a close relationship with her. Her validation and support is definitely the reason why I’m so comfortable being who I am. I’m very lucky. She is the absolute best.

How important is it to you as a gay artist to maintain your identity in your work?

It’s literally essential. There is no alternate option. That’s how I’ve

“Long Distance” already has an irresistible dance beat. Are there remixes in the works?

Yes, there actually is. There’s a remix out right now by one of my

haunted and bereft by his death and unjustified public anonymity.

The movie is a stinging reminder that no amount of money and fame can shield one from the deleterious impact of discrimination and mental illness.

Weiland deserves to be included in the pantheon of LGBTQ heroes, as indirectly much of the equality we enjoy today is a result of his supportive vision for a brighter future during a time of prejudice and mass communal suffering.t www.ricweiland.com www.facebook.com/YesIAm2021

Mr. X and I

Vincent Rodriguez is gay, Filipino-American and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is queer AF. Sherry Cola, an out bisexual Asian-American actress, plays a lesbian on The Fosters’s spinoff, Good Trouble.

Shadow and Bone is a fantasy series on Netflix starring an Asian main shero Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li), who faces racism and misogyny. Jesper Fahey (Kit Young) is a queer character. The layered diversity of this series is compelling, and a welcome addition to the fantasy genre with an Asian woman lead.

Meanwhile, here are some other Asian LGBTQ shows you can watch on YouTube. The men in these series are uniformly gorgeous and mostly young, so not altogether different from American and U.K. queer series.

Mr. X and I is a gay reality-based web series from China about the lives of gay men. My Bromance is a rom-com series from Thailand about unrequited love and past love. It also covers the complex issue of ho-

t

favorite DJs, Luca Schreiner. It is on Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to music. It’s very fun and perfect for the dance floor.

When things return to normal and Pride festivities resume, would you perform at a Pride festival if you were invited to do so?

One million percent! I was supposed to last summer and then COVID happened. We’re very excited for Pride events.

You recently announced 15 fall tour dates, including one in your Chicago hometown. What are you looking forward to most about performing in concert?

I’m so excited. I did my first hometown show at Schuba’s last January and we sold out. We will be back on November 27th at Lincoln Hall. We’re growing and we’re very excited. Hometown shows are always the most special so we’re looking forward to getting back out.t

Read the full interview, with music videos on www.ebar.com www.instagram.com/jordymusic

Ric Weiland in snapshots shown in the film Yes I Am: The Ric Weiland Story

mophobia among Asian parents and the influence they have over their children and maintaining the closet.

Make It Right: The Series is a sweet Thai boys-in-love rom-com series. Advance Bravely is a Chinese series with a Cyrano de Bergerac plotline.

Also, Andrew Ahn, who covers the 1960s in Pride FX, raised funds via Kickstarter for his feature film, Spa Night, about a closeted gay Korean-American teenager who follows his desires and finds more than he bargains for at the Korean spa in LA’s Koreatown.

Watch on Amazon Prime, You Tube, Apple and iTunes.

The Half of It, a YA take on Cyrano de Bergerac written and directed by Alice Wu, is top rated on Netflix. Wu, a native of San Jose, is openly lesbian and came out in a feminist studies class while at Stanford. In The Half of It, Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), a smart, introverted Chinese-American teen,

Ellen DeGeneres

helps Paul (Daniel Diemer), a sweet but not so smart jock, woo Aster (Alexxis Lemire), the beautiful girl of both their dreams.

Bye, Ellen

When Oprah Winfrey left her role as doyenne of daytime TV after two decades, she left on a high, moving on to start her network, OWN, to begin a whole new chapter.

Ellen DeGeneres should have followed Oprah’s lead. When she announced this week that this season will be her last, it came as both an anti-climax and a relief, not sadness.

A year of scandal, upheaval, tales of a toxic work environment, racism, general nastiness and more has dogged the talk show veteran. And regardless of major changes in the show’s hierarchy, as well as a clunky mea culpa from the star herself, ratings crashed and the love affair with the lovable lesbian seemed over way before Ellen herself noticed.

It’s not how anyone wanted to see the most visible lesbian in America go off the air. Oprah ceded the central daytime talk slot to Ellen when she left and Ellen built a new queer brand with dancing and emotional stories and generalized fun as well as seriousness.

Ellen informed her staff May 11 and sat down with Oprah Winfrey on Ellen’s May 13 show to try and make it seem more a new chapter than a bad ending.

“When you’re a creative person, you constantly need to be challenged, and as great as this show is, and as fun as it is, it’s just not a challenge anymore,” Ellen told The Hollywood Reporter.

Nice spin, but that’s not how it looks from here. As her character Dory said in Finding Dory, Just keep swimming.t

t

Theatre & 50 in 50>>

May 20-26, 2021 • Bay Area Reporter • 23

Cabaret, comedy and a class act

by Jim Gladstone

I

t’s time to change channels.

After more than a year of kneecapped theater watched from couches and desktops, Bay Area stages are coming back to life. There will be limited, socially distanced seating for a while longer, but there will also –finally– be the buzz and breath of audiences and performers sharing a room, the feedback loop of laughter and gasps, that damn guy snoring in the row behind you. Ah, the huPeter Budinger (upside down) and DC manity!

It’s strangely fitting that one of Scarpelli in Don’t Touch That Dial! the last major virtual productions to emerge in the San FrancisCovid-era is a cheeky salute to at-home entertainment. Don’t Touch That Dial!, which will stream every weekend in June, is a lighthearted, slickly produced musical revue celebrating that earwormiest of genres, the television theme song.

Created and hosted by local stage stalwarts DC Scarpelli and Peter Budinger, the 70-minute program features more than two dozen performers setting aside the likes of Sondheim for less-esteemed musiDoris Bumpus as Billie Holiday cal oeuvres created under the ausin Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar pices of Norman Lear (All in the and Grill Family, The Jeffersons, Maude), Garry Marshall (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley) and other primeOf course, such unawareness of time producers. Sung in full and in the source material can lead to inmedleys, there are a whopping 22 teresting interpretations, like what theme songs in Don’t Touch That Budinger describes as “a kind of Dial stretching from The Patty Duke punk version of the theme from The Show to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Greatest American Hero.”

“We’d been playing with the idea While their TV tribute is the of doing a show like this for a long capstone of 16 months offstage, time,” said Budinger in a recent inBudinger and Scarpelli –like so terview with the Bay Area Reporter, many artists and audience mem“When the pandemic hit and probers– are looking forward to finally ductions we were scheduled to getting back to live performance latperform in were cancelled or poster this year. They’ve both been cast poned, we decided to go for it.” in the 42nd Street Moon producIn casting their show, Budinger tion of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll and Scarpelli, both in their late Along. As Sonny Curtis once sang to 40s, quickly realized that their perfootage of downtown Minneapolis: sonal Golden Age of television was “We’re gonna make it after all.” ancient history to many of the cast members still in their 20s and 30s.

She’s a Lady “There’s not much that makes Before Don’t Touch That Dial you feel your age,” admits Scarpelli, premieres next month, there’s still “like someone who has never heard time to catch 42nd Street Moon’s The Brady Bunch theme.” accomplished video production of

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill featuring an impressive musical performance by Doris Bumpus as Billie Holiday. If this year’s Oscar-nominated The United States vs. Billie Holiday was among the films you streamed over the course of the pandemic, Lady Day will provide a compelling alternate perspective on Holiday’s story.

e t a r o c de h t i w f l e yours pride

Life is a Cabaret

The final streaming production this column will cover in 2021 is one of the most valuable.

The New Conservatory Theatre Company’s latest offering, The TransNational Cabaret, which runs through June 10, was conceived by NCTC artistic director Ed Decker to provide a spotlight for transgender performing artists.

It’s a highly polished collection of six short presentations including dance, animated film, spoken word, comedy and music, all of which focus on what co-curator Chris Steele calls “trans joy.”

Steele, a drag performer who serves as emcee, says “Honestly, this is a piece by and for a trans audience. Other people are welcome to share and enjoy, but it’s not about explaining ourselves, it’s about celebrating ourselves.”

The Bay Area, says Steele, is one of the few places in the world that is a real stronghold for trans people.

It’s also home base to half of the show’s performers. But the very fact that such a program might not be mounted in most other cities is part of what makes online streaming a good match for TransNational.

“People are tuning in from all over the world,” says Steele, “Working in the digital medium really opens up the accessibility of art to audiences who couldn’t otherwise see it.”t Lady Day at the Emerson Bar Grill (through May 30) Don’t Touch That Dial (June 5-27) Streaming: Fridays at 8pm; Saturdays at 6pm; Sundays at 3pm Tickets: $25 www.42ndstmoon.org TransNational Cabaret, streaming on demand. Tickets from $5 www.nctcsf.org

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50 years in 50 weeks: 1977 - Drawn to It

1977

had plenty of news and arts coverage when the Bay Area Reporter was still biweekly with 26 issues a year.

But the illustrated cover, an ad for The Balcony bar, took a macho cartoonish focus with art by Chuck Arnett, who was known more famously for his mural on the wall of the Tool Box bar, which had been photographed for the groundbreaking 1963 Life magazine feature, “Homosexuality in America.” Intended as a warning, it served as a magnet for many gay men.

At 48 pages, this edition of the B.A.R. had expanded advance coverage of the upcoming Gay Freedom Day March and Fair (Grace Jones on a float! Sylvester performing at the after-party!), plus arts and porn coverage (The Runaways, Peter Frampton, a local production of A Chorus Line, and Big Roger at the Nob Hill Theatre).

As local businesses realized the strength of the B.A.R.s’ readership, they supported it, and helped themselves by placing more ads.t

Peruse all the retro-camp fun at https://archive.org/details/BAR_19770623

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