May 18, 2023 edition of the Bay Area Reporter

Drollinger is first-ever SF drag laureate

SF still reeling from Brown killing

by John Ferrannini

The Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club held an emotional meeting Tuesday night, just hours after San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin introduced a resolution asking the California and federal justice departments to investigate the killing of Banko Brown, the 24-year-old unarmed Black trans man gunned down by a security guard at a Market Street Walgreens.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ decision not to file charges against the security guard, Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony, 33, has been a political lightning rod in the city. Jenkins released the store video and other materials related to the killing Monday, leading to fresh calls that she mismanaged the case.

“This is not who we are,” Peskin said at the supervisors’ meeting. “In the 23 years since I was first elected, I haven’t experienced anything like this. This is … what we see on TV in states like Georgia, not in cities like San Francisco.”

The resolution was co-sponsored by District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen and District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton. It will be voted on by the board May 23.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and United States Attorney for the Northern District of California Ismail J. “Izzy” Ramsey have not publicly commented on the Brown case. The federal justice department can get involved if there’s evidence of a hate crime or civil rights violation. The state justice department investigates all police shootings of unarmed civilians. In this case, Brown’s killer is not a sworn law enforcement officer.

The attorney general can get involved in cases involving a conflict of interest, but Bonta did not do so last year when Jenkins asked that two cases – one involving the mayor’s brother, and another involving the alleged killers of a cousin of Jenkins’ husband – be transferred.

The attorney general’s office referred questions to the DA’s office. The federal justice department declined comment.

The Milk club meeting, held at the Milk cafe in the Mission neighborhood, was to feature Brown’s father Terry, but he canceled at the last minute, according to club President Jeffery Kwong.

However, a friend of Brown’s who worked with him at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, Juju Pikes-Prince, did show up. When asked what would bring justice, Pikes-Prince began to sob.

See page 2 >>

by Matthew S. Bajko

Oasis nightclub owner D’Arcy Drollinger will serve as San Francisco’s inaugural drag laureate. Her tenure in the first-in-the-world position coincides with her working to open a film production studio in the city where she plans to shoot her new feature motion picture.

Mayor London Breed will officially intro-

duce Drollinger as the city’s first drag laureate Thursday afternoon at the LGBT Community Center. As an ambassador for the drag community and LGBTQ nightlife, Drollinger will serve for the next 18 months.

“It is pretty awesome. I am super proud and excited to, sort of, help define what this role is and does,” Drollinger told the Bay Area Reporter during a May 15 phone interview to talk about being selected. “It just makes me want to

be that much more fabulous and sparkle that much more harder.”

Two weeks ago, prior to her leaving for a trip to Israel, Breed called Drollinger to inform her of her decision.

“I know, getting a call coming from the cellphone of the mayor is pretty cool,” said Drollinger, 54, who was born in San Francisco and, at age 3, first dressed up in drag as the beloved nanny character Mary Poppins.

See page 2 >>

New ‘Queer Threads’ exhibit opens at San Jose museum

by Heather Cassell

The highly anticipated “Queer Threads” exhibit has made its Northern California debut at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles.

The exhibit features the works of 37 San Francisco Bay Area emerging and established queer artists and opens with a free public reception that evening, where attendees will be able to meet John Chaich, the creator of “Queer Threads,” and some of the artists.

The show, which opened last week, runs through August 20.

Programming around the exhibit is still being developed, said Chaich and Christine “Chris” Salinas, the museum’s development director.

According to the museum’s April 17 news release, the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles celebrates and preserves the art of quilts and textiles. More than 100,000 visitors have viewed its collections and exhibits during its 46-year history.

“‘Queer Threads’ affirms our museum’s commitment to sharing the power of quilts and textiles in engaging communities and connecting their histories,” Andrea Temkin, interim museum director, stated.

“We have always said that our museum is for everyone,” Salinas told the Bay Area Reporter. The museum operates on an annual budget of $750,000.

Pointing to the current anti-LGBTQ climate in the country, Salinas said that the exhibit is timely

by “making sure that we highlight the work of artists from various communities,” especially from the queer and transgender communities.

The B.A.R. spoke with Chaich, a gay New Yorkbased independent curator, and five of the artists, including John Cunningham, the chief executive officer of the National AIDS Memorial Grove, which loaned the block memorializing gay Black singer Sylvester James to the museum for the exhibit ahead

of the “Queer Threads” opening. Sylvester, known for his disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” died from AIDS complications in 1988.

The artists spoke about their works and being a part of “Queer Threads.” Chaich spoke about the inspiration behind “Queer Threads,” what’s different about San Jose’s iteration of the exhibit, and what he hopes audiences will get out of viewing the show.

See page 7 >>

Harvey Milk & Disneyland

Katya Smirnoff-Skyy Project Nunway

John Chaich, gay New York-based independent curator and founder of “Queer Threads,” stands in front of “Secrets of Greenmont West, 2019” created by San Francisco Bay Area artist collaborative RoCoCo.

Heather Cassell

Banko Brown lies on the sidewalk after he was shot by a Walgreens security guard April 27.

D’Arcy Drollinger has been named San Francisco’s inaugural drag laureate.

Gooch

Having “to play dumb” ever since with her family and friends who have asked her for updates on who had been picked has “been very difficult,” noted Drollinger. She was forbidden from talking about it publicly until the mayor’s office officially announced the news May 18.

“I swear, it is more locked down than who are the new contestants on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’” joked Drollinger, referring to the globally popular televised drag contest with competitions now in numerous countries.

Being drag laureate comes with a $55,000 honorarium to help cover the costs of Drollinger performing her duties. It is modeled after the city poet laureate role.

Breed had secured the funding last year, and the city library is administering it since it also oversees the poet laureate program. The mayor’s office did not make Breed available for an interview with the B.A.R. about her selecting Drollinger.

In a statement, Breed said, “While drag culture is under attack in other parts of the country, in San Francisco we embrace and elevate the amazing drag performers who through their art and advocacy have contributed to our city’s history around civil rights and equality. I am proud to invest in programs that create a platform for individuals who, like D’Arcy, are sending a message to the nation and the world that our great city is a beacon for acceptance and opportunities for all.”

Drollinger was one of five applicants for the post who were recommended to the mayor by a selection committee tasked with reviewing all 16 people who had applied. They had to be full-time San Francisco residents at least 21 years old.

“I think it is an amazing choice. D’Arcy is a leader in our drag community,” said selection committee member Michael Nguyen, a gay attorney who performs under his drag persona of Juicy Liu. “I am very excited to see what happens next with this new drag laureate.”

San Francisco was the second city in California to initiate having an official drag ambassador. In 2020, West Hollywood was the first known city anywhere in the world to approve the creation of a drag laureate.

But its selection process was delayed as city officials retooled their position and sought more funding for it. It now comes with an annual honorarium of $15,000 for appearances and a yearly

event the drag laureate will be expected to host during their two-year tenure.

The city’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission is set to recommend a person for the position at its May 25 meeting. The West Hollywood City Council is then expected to finalize the selection at its June 26 meeting, with its inaugural drag laureate serving from July 1 through June 30, 2025.

“We are still planning for an in-person installation event for the Inaugural Drag Laureate on July 16, International Drag Day,” West Hollywood Arts Manager Rebecca Ehemann told the B.A.R. this week.

Asked about collaborating with her Southern California counterpart, Drollinger told the B.A.R. it would be “a lot of fun” to do so.

“I would love to invite us to maybe create something for California, if not the nation,” said Drollinger. “But we could definitely look at creating some sort of bigger events that reach out past our cities.”

Cultural heritage

As the B.A.R. has previously reported, having an ambassador for the local drag community was proposed in San Francisco’s groundbreaking LGBTQ+ Cultural Heritage Strategy first released in 2018. Due to the COVID pandemic, it is now seen as a way to boost local nightlife venues and drag performers whose revenues were impacted by the global health crisis over the last three years.

Working to ensure her club survived the forced closures imposed on nightlife venues, as well as her employees and the drag performers who graced Oasis’ stage, motivated Drollinger to apply to be the drag laureate. In 2020, she and her

DISPLAY OBITUARIES & IN MEMORIAMS

team quickly began posting recorded shows online, which included ways for people to make donations.

It led to their launching the OasisTV subscription service as a way to secure financial support. Drollinger also launched the meal delivery service “Meals on Heels” that employed drag performers who would lip synch a song at people’s doorsteps.

“It really felt like my life has grown a lot in the last three years, working through the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, and working so hard with my community and the San Francisco community at-large, that it felt like it made sense for me to take something like this on,” said Drollinger. “You know, when reading the description of what they were looking for and the qualifications, it felt a lot like, in many ways, it was speaking to me. I might not have said that pre-pandemic.”

Ambassador for nightlife

As San Francisco’s drag laureate, Drollinger will be expected to participate in and host community events while serving as an ambassador for the city’s LGBTQ, arts, nightlife, and entertainment communities. One of her first public events in the role will be presiding as a co-emcee of the public memorial May 23 for Heklina, her close friend and initial co-owner of Oasis when it opened in 2015.

The drag persona of Stefan Grygelko, Heklina died unexpectedly last month while on tour performing in England with her friend Peaches Christ (Joshua Grannell). Along with Sister Roma of the drag philanthropic group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Peaches Christ and Drollinger will introduce the speakers and performers taking the stage during the evening event at the Castro Theatre.

Drollinger told the B.A.R. that she hadn’t spoken to Heklina about applying to be drag laureate. They focused more on the projects each was working on when they talked, as Heklina had moved to Palm Springs and sold her shares in Oasis.

“I am sure she would be very jealous,” Drollinger quipped about Heklina learning she had been tapped for the post. “You know, obviously, the last six weeks have been really overwhelming in both losing Heklina and what that has done to the community. And it’s also been intense, as I am simultaneously moving into this gorgeous space that I got the grant for and I am getting the drag laureate position. It is all fabulous

From page 1

but bittersweet, in a sense, and also a really, really, really important reminder to pay attention to the people you love and live everyday to the fullest and tell those around you that you love them.”

As for the grant, Drollinger was referring to roughly $300,000 that has been donated to the nonprofit arts organization she launched last year, Oasis Arts, to support local LGBTQ artists, drag performers, filmmakers, and others. Most of the funding has come from the San Francisco Film Commission and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

The bulk of the money has gone into renovating a large commercial space in the South of Market neighborhood on Fourth Street at Bryant. It will have a 5,000 square foot soundstage that local queer filmmakers will be able to use.

It is where Drollinger plans to shoot the sequel to her 2020 film “Shit & Champagne” starring her stripper character Champagne Horowitz Jones Dickerson White. Construction on the space should be completed in July.

“We are creating a fully functional film production studio,” said Drollinger. “Because of these amazing two organizations believing in what we are trying to create, we have been able to make it all possible and to move this quickly to create something at this profound of a level.”

Coming home to SF

It will be another lasting legacy for Drollinger in the city she called home until the age of 7, when her family moved to Stockton, California. They then relocated to Apia, the capital city of Samoa, due to her mother, who was an anthropologist, being hired for a job in the Polynesian island country.

In 1980, at age 17, Drollinger moved again to Nevada City, California, where her parents taught at a Quaker boarding school. By the early 1990s, she was living back in San Francisco, working at the nightclub 1015 Folsom.

It was there, when RuPaul came to perform her dance hit “Super Model,” that Drollinger first dressed up as a drag queen in honor of the special guest. While her look was more that of a club kid, recalled Drollinger, she had “such a good time” she kept dressing up in drag.

She wrote and produced her own four musicals in San Francisco. Wanting to have a career on Broadway, Drollinger moved to New York City in 1998.

She landed a job with the production company behind “Hairspray” and worked on the out-of-town tryouts in Seattle. After it opened on Broadway, Drollinger landed a job assisting the

production team behind the musical “The Producers.”

Through mutual friends RuPaul hired Drollinger to choreograph her Diva’s 2000 concert at Madison Square Garden. Drollinger’s last Broadway job was working for costume designer William Ivey Long.

“That was my stint on Broadway. It was exciting and very eye-opening,” recalled Drollinger, who moved back to San Francisco in 2011.

Her drag name is the name she was given by her parents. Since D’Arcy works as a gender-neutral name, she decided to use it both personally and professionally, though she acknowledged, “it gets a little bit confusing.”

“I am closer to someone like Charles Busch, who is also a writer and a performer,” said Drollinger, referring to the acclaimed drag queen and playwright whose “The Confession of Lily Dare” is having its regional premiere this month at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center.

On June 2, Drollinger will join Breed on the Mayor’s Balcony at City Hall for the annual raising of the Pride flag to mark Pride Month. She is also likely to take part in the 13th SF Nightlife and Entertainment Summit taking place Monday, June 5, and is already preparing a whole host of parties and performances at Oasis throughout the month.

“I will be very busy this Pride,” said Drollinger, joking, “I am going to live my life in drag 24/7.”

Her serving as drag laureate comes as Republican lawmakers in states across the country are banning drag events from being held at public venues and criticizing parents for taking their children to drag brunches or drag story hours at bookstores and public libraries. Businesses that host drag shows have also come under fire, threatened with losing their liquor licenses.

Drollinger told the B.A.R. that she finds it “pretty profound” to know San Francisco officials didn’t decide to create the position in reaction to the legislative assaults on drag performers. Rather, they have long seen the drag community as a vital part of the city’s culture worth fighting to protect and support.

“This isn’t a response to that but really shows how much San Francisco appreciates and cares about the drag community,” said Drollinger, whose motto is “drag saves the day.”

As for why she wanted to take on the extra responsibility of serving as drag laureate, Drollinger joked, “Cuz I am insane and a glutton for punishment.” t

The Bay Area Reporter can help members of the community reach more than 120,000 LGBT area residents each week with their display of Obituary* & In Memoriam messages.

RATES: $21.20 per column inch (black & white)

$29.15 per column inch (full color)

DEADLINES: Friday 12noon for space reservations

Monday 12noon for copy & images

TO PLACE: Call 415-829-8937 or email advertising@ebar.com

* Non-display Obituaries of 200-words or less are FREE to place. Please email obituary@ebar.com for more information.

“Housing for my people,” PikesPrince said. “Holding this man accountable, people in office that look like us supporting us. It just hurts. It is all of this. That’s all I want for my community.” Meanwhile, Mayor London Breed defended Jenkins’ decision. At a news conference near Union Square, announcing a new $6 million investment in the area which has seen high-profile store departures pick up in recent weeks, Breed said, according to KGO-TV, “It’s a real tragedy but, at the end of the day, I think that the district attorney did everything she could to look at the evidence and make a decision based on what the evidence demonstrated.”

Gay state Senator Scott Wiener (DSan Francisco), a former deputy city attorney who backed Jenkins in last November’s election, disagreed.

“I’ve repeatedly watched the video and reviewed the other released evidence, and I honestly cannot see a justification for this shooting,” Wiener stated Tuesday. “While shoplifting is a problem in San Francisco that needs to be addressed, shooting someone for shoplifting is truly horrific and must never be tolerated. I respect the criminal process in San Francisco, and I respect the district attorney and the difficult choices she has to make every day. But a lack of any criminal responsibility for this shooting makes no sense to me.

SF ‘doesn’t seem to care’

The Milk club’s panel also featured Honey Mahogany, a queer trans person who’s the chair of the city’s Democratic Party and a legislative aide to Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco); Geoffrea Morris, a straight ally who’s an organizer and Black community leader; Socorro Cori Moreland, a Black trans man who’s the founder and CEO of Brotherhood510; Xavier Davenport, a Black trans man who’s one of the founders of the Oakland Trans March; and Peter Calloway, a straight man who’s a deputy public defender.

Kwong put the killing in the context of the increasingly restrictive environment for LGBTQ youth in other states. As the B.A.R. has also reported youth organization in Maine said last week that her organization is providing microgrants

to families fleeing states like Texas and Florida as they pass laws restricting youth transitioning and discussion of homosexuality in schools. (See page 4.)

“Kids are running away from violence and transphobic laws,” Kwong, who is gay, told the B.A.R. “They’re seeking refuge in San Francisco like so many LGBTQ folks in the past – looking for home and shelter – and yet they’re met with violence and intolerance. It’s not OK to say we march against anti-trans laws when a Black trans teenager named Banko Brown gets shot in cold blood.”

Mahogany echoed a similar sentiment.

“People continue to come to San Francisco thinking it’s a safe space for LGBTQ people, and it’s not,” Mahogany said. “Sure, we celebrate gay holidays, but

D’Arcy Drollinger performs at Oasis in 2015.

Steven Underhill

Honey Mahogany, second from left, speaks at a May 16 forum hosted by the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club about the death of Banko Brown, a Black trans man killed by a Walgreens security guard. She was joined by Oakland Trans March co-founder Xavier Davenport, left, activist Geoffrea Morris, and deputy public defender Peter Calloway.

John Ferrannini

At Gilead, we understand that it’s going to take a combination of both science and social change to help end the HIV epidemic for everyone, everywhere. It’s only by collaborating with advocates and organizations across the country that we can reach this collective goal. Together, we’re working tirelessly to improve health equity and bring awareness to the HIV epidemic.

Oakland LGBTQ Community Center & Gilead

Families in TX, FL seek help amid anti-LGBTQ laws

by John Ferrannini

Families fleeing states passing antiLGBTQ legislation can get microgrants from one nonprofit, whose leader said people are “leaving everything they know and almost in a dark-of-night situation.”

Susan Maasch, who said she is part of the LGBT community and is cisgender, is on the board of directors of the Mainebased Trans Youth Equality Foundation.

Taking part in an Ethnic Media Services webinar May 12, Maasch said, “It’s very different hearing about it on the news, knowing what’s right and wrong, and hearing the stories out of the mouths of the families that are fleeing.”

The states Maasch’s organization has helped people leave the most are Florida and Texas. The maximum amount it provides is $3,000.

“Recently we decided we’d announce we’re offering microgrants to any families that were fleeing red states and put the word out there,” Maasch said. “We have heard from hundreds of people, so of course we are overwhelmed by requests, and of course it’s heartbreaking.”

Speaking with the Bay Area Reporter after Friday’s event, “A War on Transgender People,” Maasch said that applications closed May 10.

“We will decide next week our final list of grantees and we will then have the number of people we can help,” Maasch stated. “Families are getting anywhere up to $3,000, so much less for some.”

In response to questions of how many people are being helped and whether the B.A.R. could speak to one or more of the grantees, Maasch stated, “We will not be allowing info on them to be shared. We will, however, share their stories ourselves with no identifying info so as to raise awareness. Maybe some will share their stories later.”

During the webinar, Maasch had stated, “Families are so scared, and the

rhetoric, and the discrimination, and the emboldening of hate toward them and toward their children is increasing so much that there’s a fear and there’s an urgency that a lot of families feel, so what it really looks like is hundreds of people packing their cars, fleeing their houses, selling them, quickly dumping them.”

One example Maasch mentioned was of a single mother who moved to Minnesota. She did not mention the person’s name or where she came from.

“In this family, for instance, the mother of three children, she doesn’t know anyone in Minnesota, she doesn’t know where to go in Minnesota,” Maasch said.

“She has to go to the lowest income area.”

The webinar went on for a little over an hour Friday morning and featured Nadine Smith, a queer woman who is the executive director of Equality Florida; Texas state Representative Gene Wu (DHouston), a straight ally; and Sailor Jones, a trans person who is associate director of Common Cause North Carolina.

Smith did not speak about the travel advisory that her organization sent out April 12, as the B.A.R. reported last

month, which warned, “Florida may not be a safe place to visit or take up residence.” (A written question the B.A.R. directed to Smith about this was not asked during the webinar.)

That said, Equality Florida press secretary Brandon Wolf returned a request for comment from the B.A.R. on Monday, May 15, in which he referred to the “DeSantis regime” and said that the travel advisory was all about helping people think through the current situation. “We determined that it was necessary to provide an honest look at how the current political landscape and impending policies may impact people so that they can make the best, informed decisions for themselves and their families,” Wolf stated. “Each individual situation is different,” he stated. “Some have assessed the risks and determined that Florida is not the right destination for them at this time. Others see an opportunity to be on the ground and make an impact. But across the board, the response has been overwhelming: people want to be in the fight for freedom in Florida. Conference planners and businesses have asked for

resources to help their attendees have a positive impact on the community. Those who have pulled out of Florida are making it a statement of their values. Whether you come to Florida or do not, we ask that you consider how you can more deeply engage in the fight.”

During the webinar, Smith did talk about many of the same issues that led to the travel advisory – such as actions spearheaded by the state’s GOP and the administration of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, that have “pulled every single far-right MAGA issue to the forefront,” as she noted.

These included the recent expansion of the so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which had banned classroom discussion or teaching of sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade but now extends prohibitions on such conversations through the 12th grade, administrative actions against drag shows, and a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth.

“When [Florida’s legislature] passed it, they swore [Don’t Say Gay] was about keeping inappropriate material away from kindergarteners, first, second, and third graders, but it was written so broadly it takes books wholesale out of libraries,” Smith said, including “any book with a trans person” in some instances.

“School districts out of a fear of complying with language that is very vague have gone to the extreme in some cases, saying to a gay teacher they can’t have their partner’s picture, a picture of your family,” she added.

Smith also discussed a “bathroom bill” in Florida that headed to DeSantis’ desk earlier this month. House Bill 1521 makes it a misdemeanor crime to use a bathroom that doesn’t align with a person’s sex as assigned at birth. The bill applies to facilities in state and local government buildings, schools, colleges, and detention centers. That’s a change

from the original bill, which lawmakers significantly scaled back so it no longer applies to bathrooms in restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses as it did previously, as Politico reported.

“As a Black Southerner, when we talk about access to restrooms and public spaces, I know it is not truly about bathrooms,” Smith said. “It’s about limiting the ability of trans people to be in public space.”

Smith framed the fight in intersectional terms, with societal change leading to “existential panic” in older, whiter voters, she said.

“The headline is it is an attack on the trans community, it is an attack on the LGBT community, it is an attack to whitewash American history so we don’t talk about rank, it is not to make America great again, it is to roll back the progress of decades,” she said.

She concluded, “The objective is a kind of Apartheid state,” referring to the system of racial segregation in South Africa when it was governed by the white minority population there.

Texas

Wu said that his colleagues in the Lone Star State’s legislature have not given up on a bathroom bill there.

“We’ve managed to send this bill back twice back to the committee in finding procedural errors in it, and they’re bringing it out for a third time,” Wu said. “Normally when a bill gets sent back that many times, leadership decides, ‘No more, we’re done. It’s taking up too much time and attention, attention we can use to do other things, anything else.’ It says a lot that they’re devoting this much effort to go after a small, minority population that has really done nothing to any of them.”

Wu tied this to prior legislative crusades against gays and lesbians, and a current bill that would’ve disallowed Chinese nationals from buying homes in Texas (the language was softened to agricultur-

Leaders of LGBTQ organizations said on a webinar that families are fleeing states like Florida and Texas because of anti-LGBTQ laws that have been passed.

The trans body Commentary>>

by Gwendolyn Ann Smith

As overplayed a term as it is, we are living in what amounts to a modern day witch-hunt, with transgender people replacing women in pointy hats. Hundreds of bills have been introduced to ban us from sports, from bathrooms, from our body autonomy – and rip us away from our families and our health care providers.

Behind all of this are the lies, piled so thick as to create an impenetrable web of falsehoods. Trans women are painted as fetishistic predators, preying on women and girls in restrooms while conspiring to somehow abscond with all the prizes and fame available in women’s sports.

Trans men, meanwhile, are misguided waifs, preyed upon by the machinations of the medical establishment, forced into dangerous medications and surgeries.

Meantime, the actual accounts of transgender people are wholly discounted, replaced with fact-free anecdotes and long-discounted papers such as the “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” study, (https://www.brown.edu/news/201903-19/gender) which claimed that trans-ness was a “social contagion” caused by too much internet.

Nevertheless, our existence – however inconvenient this may be for those who seek to mandate transgender people out of this reality – continues.

if you don’t have the money to play, San Francisco doesn’t seem to care.”

The panelists and club members decried the influence of money and political corruption in the city, and questioned why more people haven’t shown up in protest.

“San Francisco is fighting for its humanity,” Morris said, adding that Jenkins will be up for election in November 2024. “You don’t like Chesa?” she asked, referring to the DA ousted before Jenkins’ appointment, “We don’t like Brooke.”

Panelist calls out trans district

Moreland said during the panel discussion, “I need the San Francisco Transgender District to do things.” When asked afterward, he and Davenport said that the district – which covers six blocks of the Tenderloin and two south of Market Street – “used trans masculine people for access to funding, and then centered trans femme folks,” as Moreland put it.

“We actually started out working with the Transgender District, me and Xavier,” Moreland told the B.A.R. “It became a solely trans femme organization, which left trans masculine folks without access to resources.”

The two said that they stopped their involvement with the district after cuts put trans men “at a disadvantage” to getting housing during the COVID-19 pandemic, Moreland said, adding that the district needs to do a better job treating trans masculine people equally.

Aria Sa’id, a trans woman who is the Transgender District’s outgoing president and chief strategist, told the B.A.R. in response, “I don’t recall that. We haven’t defunded any programs.”

Sa’id added that the district worked with Moreland and Davenport in 2020 “to help amplify Black trans masculine voices” but “after months with no outcomes and deliverables not being met, we dissolved our partnership with them.

“All of our programs are designed and created to benefit trans people – all trans and nonbinary people. A quick peek at our impact reports, social media and programs will reflect that trans folks of all expressions have been an integral part of our framework,” she continued. “Our energy should be devoted to solving [the] complex problems that have been a result of the rich making this city their playground, exacerbating the social issues we know and see every day to a place where it almost feels unfixable.” t

As I write this, it is a warm spring evening. A light breeze swirls through the room, gliding across my back and arms as I sit at the keyboard in jeans and a cotton camisole. Music – in this case, Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song” – is playing through my AirPods. I am in my mid50s, and at this point, have lived more than half of my life post-transition.

I know that my experience is not the same as every transgender person, and I will make no claim as such. Just like they say in the auto commercials, one’s mileage may vary.

That said, I know my experiences as a transgender woman share some commonalities with a great many others –and these similarities fly in the face of every lie put forth.

Many of us were sure there was something wrong from an early age. Some are able to express it, persisting in an identity from their youngest years. Others of us may search for years for why we simply do not fit. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

Myself, I knew from about age 3 that something wasn’t right, but I did not really have the words for it until I was 8 or so. Even then, at that early age, I already understood there was a social stigma, and learned to keep quiet.

For many transgender people, puberty is a dark time. It feels as if our whole

body is betraying us. We may have thought, up to that point, that we would somehow become that which we know we are, only to have our bodies twist another way.

Yes, if you have read this far, and are not trans yourself, imagine just how many layers of body horror we trans folks may be wading through when this happens: your very flesh is turning you into something that feels painfully, horribly wrong. At the same time, unlike what some would like you to believe, we don’t get to just decide with little consideration that we’re an attack helicopter today, and go out and start sipping aviation fuel, to put a twist on an anti-transphobic trope used by many on the right to belittle pronoun

preferences. For many of us, our paths are long, spent seeking answers, and sometimes denying our trans nature as long as we can. Even once we do come out, we still need to find our paths, locate care, and begin a sometimes-rigorous path of integrating into society as ourselves.

For many of us, that path is a lifetime –and we may transition, and detransition, and retransition – as we try to find what makes sense for ourselves. While it has absolutely been the correct path for me, I would not recommend it for just anyone. This isn’t a path of impulse, per se, but one of necessity, and we don’t go through all this to change our bodies, so much as to put or bodies – no, our very being – right.

Those who stand against transgender people will tell you that we’re only doing this for some illicit gain, or because we were somehow hoodwinked into believing this was right for us, or even because we have a mental issue.

That speaks far more to them than it does to any transgender person. This is what it would take for them to transition, no doubt, but it has nothing to do with trans lives. They only see things in a limited fashion, and cannot imagine

what it is like to live in a trans body. Some will discuss how they were a tomboy as a child, or may have played with dolls or some such – and if this were them today, they surely would have been forced into a transition.

Respectfully, no, they would not have. No one is out there forcing anyone into transgender care. Frankly, most of us have to fight to get care as it is – no one is handing out trans care like candy. This is as much of a myth as, oh, the satanic panic of the 1980s, the 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast, or – to bring us back to the top – the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s.

A moral panic, by its very nature, is not logical, and urban legends are, nonetheless, legends. I can only ask that when you hear such tall tales of transgender lives that you might step back for the briefest moment, and consider that maybe, possibly, there is more to the story.

Trans people exist – and we’re simply going to know a lot more about the bodies we inhabit. t

Gwen Smith doesn’t even own a pointy hat. You’ll find her at www. gwensmith.com

Christine Smith

Supervisors postpone Castro Theatre vote

by John Ferrannini

The showdown at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors over the Castro Theatre was postponed to June 6 because one member couldn’t be at Tuesday’s meeting, according to gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman.

The board was expected to vote May 16 on an interior landmarking proposal for the historic movie palace that includes an amendment to retain the fixed orchestra seating.

The supervisors’ land use committee advanced the amendment on a 2-1 vote May 8, as the Bay Area Reporter reported.  Another Planet Entertainment, which manages the classic movie house, wants to remove the orchestra seating and replace it with a motorized device that would allow for theater-style seating or standing for concerts.

But the full board’s vote won’t happen until next month, Mandelman confirmed to the B.A.R. He is seeking to have the supervisors reject the fixed seating amendment to the ordinance, as Hoodline first reported Monday.

When the item came up at the board meeting, Mandelman moved to continue it to next month. District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí a straight ally who recently announced he’s running for mayor next year, seconded. There was no discussion.

Six votes would be necessary to overturn the amendment to the landmarking that complicates matters for APE. District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, a straight ally, won’t be present at Tuesday’s meeting because she is in Merced to be with her ill father, who has Lewy body dementia.

“Hoping for some healing thoughts and prayers and peace for my Dad,” the supervisor, who represents the Marina neighborhood, posted to Facebook late Monday from a Merced hospital.

Furthermore, Mandelman told the B.A.R. it’s “very likely” that the May 18 joint meeting of the Historic Preservation and Planning commissions on the appropriateness of APE’s plans will also be pushed back. Later May 16, the May 18 meeting was canceled and reset for June 8. The oversight bodies had already pushed back their hearing due to the delayed vote by the supervisors.

The imbroglio over the theater began in January 2022, when APE – which runs the Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park, the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium near San Francisco’s Civic Center, and the Fox Theatre in Oakland

– was announced as the new operators of the 101-year-old Castro Theatre.

Some Castro neighborhood, LGBTQ, and film groups – such as the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District and the Castro Theatre Conservancy – formed the Friends of the Castro Theatre Coalition in opposition to the proposed changes, which would allow the theater to sometimes operate as a concert venue.

It is unclear what would happen if the full board approves the landmarking amendment, Mandelman has said, but it could be the death knell for the project.

Stephen Torres, one of the executive co-chairs of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District, on behalf of the Friends of the Castro Theatre coalition, stated, “Friends of the Castro Theatre wish to send our heartfelt thoughts of healing and recovery to Supervisor Stefani’s father and

look forward to when the amendment goes before the board at a better time.”

APE and the Castro Merchants declined to comment. The conservancy and the Castro Community Benefit District did not return requests for comment.

New group backs APE’s plans

Meanwhile, a new community group has coalesced, arguing it speaks on behalf of the neighborhood in support of APE’s plans.

Joe Sangirardi, a 32-year-old Castro resident who said he is “as gay as they come,” and Mike Murray, 35, and also a gay man who lives in the LGBTQ neighborhood, are the co-chairs of Neighbors for a Restored Castro Theatre, the formation of which was announced May 11.

When asked about the delay May 16, Murray stated to the B.A.R. that “there’s been a groundswell of LGBTQ+ and Castro community members speaking in support of this project over the last couple months, and we’re confident that support will continue to grow between now and the June 6 and June 8 votes.”

Sangirardi and Murray did not think their late formation of the new group was an issue.

“It’s never too late,” Sangirardi said May 11.

“There have been hundreds and hundreds of people organizing and working to organize support for APE’s plans, but no central organization doing that,” Sangirardi told the B.A.R. “We realized our voices will be much more powerful if we speak together with one voice. A lot of organizations say they speak on behalf of the community but don’t speak for the vast majority of residents.”

When asked which organizations they were referring to, they specified the cultural district and the conservancy – two groups that are opposed to APE’s plans.

The raison d’être for the neighbors group is nothing less than saving the Castro, Sangirardi said.

“Though they [the conservancy] care a lot about film, we’re the ones who actually live here and want to preserve not just one aspect of the history of our community but the whole breadth of that history,” he said. “A lot of folks have been trying to turn the neighborhood around and now we have a chance, too.”

Changes at the theater provide “a real template for what the community needs to survive in the 21st Century to continue being a center of queer culture for the future,” Sangirardi said.

The two have not received any financial contribution from APE, they said. Gay APE spokesperson David Perry confirmed APE is not paying the two activists.

“Absolutely not – Another Planet Entertainment has paid none of the groups that’ve come forward to support our efforts,” Perry said in a phone interview last week. “None have been paid or urged to voice their support; this was entirely an organic neighborhood, citizen and resident-fueled effort that came to Another Planet because they were disturbed by how this situation was being represented by people who said they represent the community, and we are very grateful for the support.”

Sangirardi said the new group is an extension of work APE supporters have already been doing.

See page 12 >>

Task force announces Wall of Honor inductees

compiled by Cynthia Laird

Gay actor Leslie Jordan and Black

lesbian Achebe Betty Powell are among this year’s posthumous inductees for the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the historic Stonewall Inn in New York City. The National LGBTQ Task Force and the International Imperial Court System formally announced the inductees May 15.

The honor wall recognizes deceased LGBTQ luminaries. This year’s installation will take place Thursday, June 22, at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, according to a news release.

The Bay Area Reporter previously reported two of this year’s inductees, drag icons Heklina and Darcelle XV, would be among the class of 2023. Nicole Murray Ramirez, a Latino drag queen and San Diego community leader who helps oversee the memorial project as a member of the Imperial Court System, revealed that news

to the paper in April, shortly after attending the “Drag Up! Fight Back!” march and rally in San Francisco to protest anti-LGBTQ legislation in many states.

Heklina, the drag persona of Stefan Grygelko, died April 3 in London at the age of 55. She was a former San Francisco resident who had relocated to the Palm Springs area. Darcelle XV, the drag persona of Walter Cole, was a well-known fixture in Portland, Oregon and reported to be the world’s oldest living drag queen until her death March 23 at age 92. As for the other inductees, Jordan was an Emmy Award-winning actor best known for his role as Beverley Leslie on “Will & Grace.” He died last October at the age of 67.

Powell was the first Black lesbian to serve on the task force’s board of directors and attended the historic meeting of gay and lesbian leaders at the Carter White House in 1977. She died in February at the age of 82.

Gay playwright Terrence McNally will also be inducted. His career spanned six decades and he was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He died in 2020 and was 81.

Pioneering gay art patron J. Frederic “Fritz” Lohman will also be inducted. With his partner, Charles Leslie, Lohman launched the first gay art space in New York City in 1969, exhibiting homoerotic art that most galleries deemed too controversial at the time. Lohman died in 2010 and was 87.

Finally, Gloria Allen, an American transgender activist, will be inducted. She ran a charm school for trans youth in Chicago’s Center on Halsted. The school only lasted a few years, but it inspired a hit play, “Charm,” by Philip Dawkins, and her experiences are chronicled in the documentary film, “Mama Gloria.”

Murray Ramirez stated that it’s important for LGBTQ people to know their history.

“I founded the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor because I believe that

a community, indeed a civil rights movement, that doesn’t know where it came from and whose shoulders it stands on really doesn’t know where it’s going,” Murray Ramirez stated.

The event also coincides with the task force’s 50th anniversary year.

“As we reflect on 50 years of hard-

Obituaries >>

Michael Anthony “Tony”

Alvarez

April 2,1966 – November 24, 2022

Michael Anthony “Tony” Alvarez was born on April 2, 1966, in San Jose, California, and passed in his home of 25 years in San Francisco on November 24, 2022. After his high school years, he lived in Southern California and Arizona before moving to San Francisco in 1998.

Tony worked for years at the nowclosed, legendary Tenderloin bar The Gangway, where he was loved and appreciated by its many patrons. He also tended bar at the popular Cinch Saloon on Polk Street.

Courtesy National LGBTQ Task Force

won progress we hold tight to the fact that we not only fight for rights, we fight for people,” stated Kierra Johnson, a bi Black woman who’s executive director of the LGBTQ civil rights organization.

See page 12 >>

Tony loved reading and music, specifically rock, with favorite performers Blondie, Pat Benatar, Debbie Harry and Suzi Quatro, and The Runaways. He also enjoyed opera and classical music, fundraising, baking, and pets. His wry sense of humor and generous heart will be missed.

He is survived by siblings Bill and Terri, and will be missed dearly by close friends Chris Rogers, Marco Middlesex, Darryl Pelletier, and many friends in the Bay Area.

A community celebration of life will take place Saturday, May 20, from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Midnight Sun, 4067 18th Street, San Francisco. For more information, email MRSFL96@aol.com

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ expected vote on the Castro Theatre has been postponed to June 6 after a member could not be at Tuesday’s meeting.

Scott Wazlowski

Activist Achebe Betty Powell, left, and actor Leslie Jordan are among several LGBTQs who will be posthumously inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor.

Stitching queer stories

“Queer Threads” first exhibited nearly a decade ago at the LeslieLohman Museum of Art, New York City’s LGBTQ art gallery. Since its debut in 2014, Chaich said the show has traveled around the U.S., appearing at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2015/2016, and at Arcana Books as a mini exhibit in Los Angeles. During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, “Queer Threads” pivoted, collaborating with American University to exhibit installations in two storefront windows in Washington, D.C. with a series of virtual discussions.

The San Jose exhibit was delayed twice due to COVID.

“Queer Threads” also became a coffee table book featuring works from the original exhibit along with additional artists’ works.

Chaich, 50, who has worked with queer artists for most of his other exhibits, pinpointed three areas of inspiration for “Queer Threads.” First, his interest in craft and quilting stretches back to his mother and grandmother’s crochet, embroidery, knitting, and quilt works.

“I always was surrounded by all these fibers and textiles and so admired the work and care they put into it,” he said. “That matrilineal level of just the creativity, beauty, and kind of meditative process that it was for them just was always surrounding me.”

Second, coming out as a gay man in the early 1990s and seeing the AIDS quilt laid out on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. “was profoundly moving to me,” he said.

Cunningham called the AIDS Memorial Quilt “one of the most powerful activist tools ever created.” From the moment it was unrolled “on the front lawn of America” at the National Mall at the LGBTQ March on Washington in 1987 the AIDS crisis could no longer be ignored, he told the B.A.R.

“The quilt will continue to remind society of how corrosive stigma and discrimination is and how powerful the antidote of love, compassion, and art are,” he said.

The quilt’s impact on Chaich wasn’t just because of the HIV/AIDS crisis, but also “this tremendous piece of textile art.” The “message was very influential for me and understanding the power of what fiber and textile can uniquely do in that public space around a social cause intrinsically connected to my gay identity at the time,” he said.

The AIDS quilt was co-founded by gay activists Cleve Jones and Mike Smith and straight ally Gert McMullin.

Chaich said his final point was the third wave feminist movement’s taking back craft with feminist magazine Bust publisher and editor Debbie Stoller’s “Stitch and Bitch” series, “reclaiming the domestic and being empowered through that and that intersection of queerness and feminism.”

“In some ways, that kind of third wave

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU

UCSF is deeply committed to providing care for LGBTQ+ people and their families that isn’t just equitable as crucial as equity is.

We’re committed to giving you care that’s warm, welcoming, and knowledgeable, too.

That’s why we’re a longtime Equality Leader in HRC’s Healthcare Equality Index and why we offer a uniquely wide range of support for our LGBTQ+ patients and employees.

We look forward to warmly welcoming you and offering the great, supportive care that you and your family deserve.

ucsfhealth.org/lgbtq-care

feminist taking back of the craft tied me back to my matrilineal influence,” he said.

Taking his curator eye to fiber and textiles, Chaich found himself continually asking, “Why are so many queer artists drawn to this medium? What’s so queer about threads for artists and their practice?”

“I don’t think I have the answer yet, but it’s one of the core curiosities that drives my own attachment in exploration of the project,” he said.

He’s found through “Queer Threads” that audiences respond to the materials being used and how the artists are using those items to craft their artwork.

“I think the way that queer artists are working with fiber and textile to ask questions about our identity, politics, interactions, and relationships, and the spaces we make and try to change, strikes a real chord with audiences,” he said. That “particularly through the medium that seems really intimate, inspiring, and connecting, but still somehow critical, and eye opening for many audiences.”

One example is Lola Corona’s “Lacing, 2007.” The knit boxing gloves play with femininity and masculinity, taking a tool used in a violent sport inspired by her youth and turning it into something feminine and warm.

“They didn’t want to necessarily punch somebody with it,” Corona, a 37-year-old bisexual transgender Latina, said of a pair of red and black gloves created for guests to interact with at a previous exhibit. “They wanted to rub their face against it.”

The black and red gloves, which are a part of the series, aren’t a part of this exhibit. The cream and brown gloves will be on display, said the San Franciscobased artist, speaking with the B.A.R. in a video call from London where she was on a trip doing research for an embroidery program she started in January.

The exhibit

Chaich is excited about this iteration of “Queer Threads” and working with Bay Area artists – many of whom work at California College of the Arts –whom he’s admired for years from afar

in New York, he told the B.A.R.

“This is the first time these works are being shown together this way,” he said, and the themes that are emerging are forming “a real kind of healing arc in this version of the exhibition.”

Chaich said the works explore violence against transgender women, the Pulse nightclub massacre, the impact of HIV/AIDS on Black and Brown men, as well as pop culture and the community’s campiness, joy, and playfulness.

The exhibit also shows “how we heal through that and still can envision a sense of a queer future,” he said.

It was important for Chaich to connect the exhibit with the Bay Area’s rich culture and history of social justice and honor the AIDS quilt’s birthplace in San Francisco.

“It was important to me to ... keeping that regional reference alive as a reminder of the role of how much activism [and] cultural production was born here and how it’s inspired global movements,” he said.

New artists, works

The exhibit is filled with many new works and new artists who haven’t participated with “Queer Threads” before, and there are also some artists who have been with the exhibit from the beginning, but are showing new works, Chaich said.

One of the new works in the exhibit is “Secrets of Greenmont West, 2019” by collaborative RoCoCo, comprised of San Jose native gay Latinx artist Modesto Covarrubias and Oakland-based ally artist KC Rosenberg. The textile painting is the only one that explores San Jose history and queer identity.

Covarrubias, 56, was born and raised in East San Jose, but now lives in Berkeley. His family moved to the Greenmont West housing development in the 1970s, which became the subject of RoCoCo’s piece in the exhibit. The artwork was created during the team’s 2017 residency at the museum.

The work explores heteronormativity in the planned community built for nuclear families, yet an unspoken queerness in his Mexican American family was all around Covarrubias with

LGBTQ aunts, uncles, and cousins who simply existed but their queer existence was not spoken or named, he said.

Covarrubias said he moved away from San Jose when he was 17 years old, finding LGBTQ community in Berkeley and San Francisco. It was only through accidental discovery and returning home through creating the artwork decades later that he rediscovered how queer his family is, and always was, in the middle of a straight Latino world.

“None of it is at the forefront. It all kind of reveals itself through the making, but it isn’t made because of all of that,” he said. “I had to rediscover it and then also rediscover it within my own family, not realizing the cues of certain things within my family.

“You can leave home and never come home again. You get to rediscover it in a way and learn so much and realize that you had all this support without realizing it,” said Covarrubias about returning with new eyes and understanding.

The piece also addresses natural resources. The community was built above natural aquifers on former Indigenous land. It was also an agricultural hub, as Silicon Valley was once known as the “fruit basket” of the country before it became the heart of innovation.

San Jose, the Bay Area’s largest city, is also the more conservative neighbor to San Francisco and Oakland, which are more progressive, Covarrubias noted. Having the local museum host “Queer Threads” is a sign of San Jose’s changing social landscape.

“San Jose has always been super conservative compared to those two other cities as far as social structures,” Covarrubias said, stating it is important that the exhibit opens in the South Bay. “I think we’ve seen that change too.”

California Humanities is supporting the exhibit. Outgoing Executive Director Julie Fry said they liked that the exhibit had locally based artists participating, particularly Covarrubias, and also was “expanding the voice” of the LGBTQ community.

See page 13 >>

San Francisco-based transgender bisexual Latina artist Lola Corona’s “Lacing, 2007,” wool, recycled lingerie, silk, and poly-fil, 14 x 10 x 5 inches

Courtesy of “Queer Threads”

Volume 53, Number 20 May 18-24, 2023

www.ebar.com

PUBLISHER

Michael M. Yamashita

Thomas E. Horn, Publisher Emeritus (2013)

Publisher (2003 – 2013)

Bob Ross, Founder (1971 – 2003)

NEWS EDITOR Cynthia Laird

ARTS & NIGHTLIFE EDITOR

Jim Provenzano

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Matthew S. Bajko • John Ferrannini

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Christopher J. Beale • Robert Brokl

Brian Bromberger • Victoria A. Brownworth

Philip Campbell • Heather Cassell

Michael Flanagan •Jim Gladstone

Liz Highleyman • Brandon Judell • Lisa Keen

Philip Mayard • Laura Moreno

David-Elijah Nahmod • Paul Parish • Tim Pfaff

Jim Piechota • Adam Sandel

Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro

Gwendolyn Smith • Charlie Wagner

Ed Walsh • Cornelius Washington • Sura Wood

ART DIRECTION

Max Leger

PRODUCTION/DESIGN

Ernesto Sopprani

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Jane Philomen Cleland

Rick Gerharter • Gooch

Jose A. Guzman-Colon • Rudy K. Lawidjaja

Georg Lester • Rich Stadtmiller

Christopher Robledo • Fred Rowe

Shot in the City • Steven Underhill • Bill Wilson

ILLUSTRATORS & CARTOONISTS

Christine Smith

VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING

Scott Wazlowski – 415.829.8937

NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE

Rivendell Media – 212.242.6863

LEGAL COUNSEL

Paul H. Melbostad, Esq.

Release of Brown video raises questions

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins did release the Walgreens video of the shooting death of unarmed Black trans man Banko Brown this week, but it has led to more questions about why she has declined to file charges against the store security guard who shot him. As John Burris, the attorney representing Brown’s family, told us, what is viewed on the video could at least be a manslaughter charge. That’s what happened in New York City, where white Marine veteran Daniel Penny put Jordan Neely, a Black homeless and mentally ill man, in a fatal chokehold on a subway train after Neely began acting erratically. The Manhattan district attorney charged Penny with manslaughter in the incident. While the two cases are different, it’s worth noting that DAs have many tools at their disposal. If Jenkins didn’t believe the evidence supported a homicide charge, why didn’t she opt for manslaughter instead of declining to prosecute the case? A jury should have decided the self-defense issue.

The nearly six-minute video of Brown’s confrontation and ultimate shooting by security guard Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony is disturbing. But it shows, in our opinion, that Brown never presented a reasonable threat to Anthony. The video shows Anthony tackling Brown on the floor inside the store and, seemingly, in control of the situation. It then shows Brown grabbing his bag and heading out of the store, walking backwards as he faces Anthony and briefly points. (Witness accounts say that Brown spat at Anthony; there is no audio on the store video. Anthony tells police officers that Brown threatened to stab him, but no weapon was found and other witness accounts do not mention that threat.) Then Anthony shoots him. The whole episode lasts less than two minutes.

District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton also has issues with the incident and the report that Jenkins released. “I have watched the video several times, Banko Brown was clearly walking backwards, after being thrown to the ground, punched, and abused by the security guard for several seconds,” Walton, who represents District 10, stated, adding that according to the police transcript of officers’ interview with Anthony, he was prepared to let Brown go.

“Where is the perceived threat?” Walton asked.

That’s what we’re having trouble understanding – at least according to the store video, Brown doesn’t appear to be threatening Anthony. Yet, Anthony shot him.

We think Jenkins has botched this case so badly that any criminal charge against Anthony at this

point likely would be difficult to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. By quickly stating that Anthony acted in self-defense, as she initially did, Jenkins has basically done the defense’s job.

Of course, one of the issues that has come to light in this case is the fact that some stores have armed security guards. District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston last week announced legislation to limit the use of guns by security guards. The legislation will amend the Police Code to clarify that guards are not to unholster their weapons unless there is an actual and specific threat to a person, according to a statement from Preston.

“San Francisco law currently states that private security guards can unholster their weapons – which is considered a serious escalation for any interaction – to protect property,” stated Preston. “Property should never be placed above human life and our laws should be crystal clear on that.”

Preston’s press release explained that although California state law allows security guards to carry guns, San Francisco has its own regulatory scheme for private security guards under Article 25 of the Police Code. Section 1750.20 of the San Francisco Police Code currently states that a guard may “draw or exhibit other than in a holster any handgun ... in response to an actual and specific threat to person and/or property.” The supervisor noted that this has drawn sharp criticism from advocates and community members.

We expect this legislation to move ahead in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, it won’t bring Brown back but could help avoid future similar outcomes. This case has highlighted the reality that many trans people are living in poverty – as are plenty of other residents – and it’s a shame that in a city of wealth like San Francisco, they have to resort to alleged shoplifting just to survive. t

Requiem for a drag queen

by Michael Yamashita

The New York Times obituary for Barry Humphries extolled the life and career of a beloved actor of stage, screen, and television. You could be forgiven if you didn’t recognize his name, but surely not if you did not recognize his alter ego. Humphries made a seven-decades long career in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Australia by dispensing ad-lib sarcasm, wit, and humor with interview guests and audiences while under lilac-colored bouffant wigs, behind oversized rhinestone glasses, in sensible pumps, and donning garish, flamboyant gowns as the character Dame Edna Everage. Nowhere in this obituary – and those published in most media around the world – was the word “drag” mentioned.

Bay area reporter

44 Gough Street, Suite 302 San Francisco, CA 94103 415.861.5019 • www.ebar.com

A division of BAR Media, Inc. © 2023

President: Michael M. Yamashita

Director: Scott Wazlowski

News Editor • news@ebar.com

Arts Editor • arts@ebar.com

Out & About listings • jim@ebar.com

Advertising • scott@ebar.com

Letters • letters@ebar.com

Published weekly. Bay Area Reporter reserves the right to edit or reject any advertisement which the publisher believes is in poor taste or which advertises illegal items which might result in legal action against Bay Area Reporter. Ads will not be rejected solely on the basis of politics, philosophy, religion, race, age, or sexual

A performer adored by straight audiences – and a straight man himself – he was never fully embraced by gay audiences, who nonetheless regarded Dame Edna as an insinuation and a soft acceptance of drag in mainstream popular culture. Humphries had not explicitly referred to himself as a drag queen but insisted that as an actor, his portrayal of Dame Edna was a performance. He treated Dame Edna as an alternate, separate character and, while in character, spoke of himself, Barry Humphries, in the third person.

Never calling it drag but performance was a neat semantic trick that eased the discomfort of, and removed the stigma of, seeing a tall man in outlandish women’s attire who could get away with saying things usually left unsaid. Perhaps when a straight man dresses as a woman, even a ludicrous caricature that borders on misogyny, the audience can suspend belief just enough to experience a safe, nonthreatening flirtation with the subversive and the taboo in pursuit of humor. What began as a satire of a middle-class Australian housewife was soon elevated to the honorable, chivalrous title of dame, all the while retaining the same (although sometimes veiled and at times explicit) intolerant, right-adjacent tendencies. Periodic controversies would erupt following racist, anti-trans, or other offensive comments she made over her career. The amazing thing about Dame Edna was that she was never considered as a man in drag, she was simply Dame Edna.

Humphries’ craft as performance derived from the vaudeville, burlesque, and English pantomime traditions of transvestism combined with the adlibbing standup comic. He insisted he was neither a female impersonator nor a cross-dresser; but LGBTQ people were not fooled. It was obvious that Dame Edna was a clear appropriation of the gay drag queen aesthetic repackaged as a singular original creation for entertaining mainstream audiences. But, despite the qualifications, Dame Edna was a drag queen – although one without the genealogy, the history, or queendom of real drag

queens, like two who also recently passed away and deserved far more recognition for their true and steadfast call to duty.

Real drag queens are performers who, like Humphries did, create a character, but, un like him, they are corporeal and rule over realms that extend beyond the stage and encompass real people and their communities. There is no fourth wall that provides a false safety barrier between contrived performance and “normal” people, between the conventions of the stage and “perceived” experience, between suspended reality and the hard truth. Real drag queens are rulers who rally their subjects using their creative talents and personas to cultivate community in order to transform their people and domains.

Darcelle XV

Darcelle XV was a real drag queen. By the time he died at 92 in March, Walter Cole was the cherished icon of Portland, Oregon’s LGBTQ community and had been certified as the world’s oldest living drag queen performer by Guinness World Records in 2016. Teased as a “sissy boy” growing up, Cole was drafted into the Army in 1952 and a few years later returned to Portland married with two children. In 1967 he purchased the derelict Demas Tavern in the rundown Old Town neighborhood and, soon after, came out to his wife (they remained legally married) and met his life and business partner Roxy Leroy Neuhardt, a dancer who helped to develop the club’s drag cabaret show. Neuhardt christened Cole’s drag persona Darcelle, whom

Cole described as “sequins on eyelids, lots of feathers, big hair, big jewels, and lots of wisecracks.” The club’s unofficial motto was “That’s No Lady, That’s Darcelle.”

Many shows and wigs later, in 1973 Darcelle was crowned the 15th empress of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court of Oregon, an LGBTQ charitable organization of the Imperial Court System. The tavern was renamed Darcelle XV Showplace –home to the longest running drag show west of the Mississippi. The showplace grew into a Portland institution drawing straight and LGBTQ audiences, and is credited with forming relationships between the city’s LGBTQ and business and political communities. In 2011, Darcelle XV served as grand marshal of the Portland Rose Festival’s Starlight Parade and received the city’s Spirit of Portland Award. Darcelle XV was an advocate for LGBTQ youth and a tireless fundraiser for innumerable causes. The showplace also functioned as a de facto community center and would host Christmas Eve meals for the homeless. In 2017, a monument to Oregonians who died of AIDS was installed in a Portland cemetery and dedicated as the Darcelle XV AIDS Memorial in honor of her lifetime’s work for the cause. Over the course of her career, Darcelle XV created over 1,500 costumes for shows that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decades. Darcelle XV Showplace was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2020 for its contribution to LGBTQ history.

Heklina, left, and Darcelle XV were two larger-than-life drag queens.

Darcelle XV, from Instagram

An image from the Walgreens security video shows Banko Brown being tackled by security guard Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony moments before Anthony shot him.

SF DA’s Office

At Disneyland, Harvey Milk saw inspiration for urban design

by Matthew S. Bajko

Ayouth of the 1930s and 1940s, Harvey Milk grew up with the Walt Disney Company being a dominant player in the pop culture offerings of his day. The entertainment behemoth would use its television show “Walt Disney’s Disneyland” that began airing in 1954 to help promote the under-construction Disneyland in Anaheim ahead of its opening the following year.

At the time, Milk was serving as a diving instructor in the Navy. The lieutenant (junior grade) was stationed at what was then called the Naval Air Missile Test Center in Ventura County in Southern California not too far from the theme park.

Two decades later, while living in San Francisco, Milk would visit Disneyland in 1976, according to his gay nephew Stuart Milk. The park’s Main Street, inspired by small-town America and other design elements, apparently left quite an impression on the already prominent gay rights leader in the city.

Two years later, having been elected the first gay supervisor in San Francisco’s history, Harvey Milk would point to both Disneyland and its counterpart theme park Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida, as examples for how city planners could better integrate residential and business centers into combined neighborhoods.

“One of the foremost designers of ‘cities’ are the people who built Disneyland. They originally created a miniature city for little people – children – that was a fantastic success,” wrote Milk in a speech he would give to different groups. “With the techniques they developed and the information gained, they went on to design Disney World-with hotels and a monorail system for adults as well as kids. City planners now come from all over the globe to study Disney World.”

Reached in Paris, where he is serving as the jury president for the sixth Paris International Prize for LGBTQI+ Rights Award, Stuart Milk told the Bay Area Reporter he wasn’t sure if his uncle had ever been to the company’s East Coast park.

“Not positive about Disney World however he was in Florida before my grandfather died,” Stuart Milk wrote in a texted reply.

According to Jason Edward Black and Charles E. Morris III in their 2013 collection of Harvey Milk’s various speeches and media interviews “Harvey Milk: An Archive Of Hope,” Milk would give the stump speech known as his “I Have High Hopes Address” throughout the city during the summer of 1978. They only included the first two pages of the speech in their book, however, and omitted the third page that included the Disney reference.

The full three-page speech can be read online via the San Francisco Public Library’s Digi Center. It is part of the li-

Prop 12 and animal welfare

brary’s online Hormel LGBTQIA Center Collection consisting of digitized materials from the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center housed at the city’s Main Library in the Civic Center district.

It is strikingly relevant to various issues city leaders are confronting today, from how to care for the needs of a growing senior population to reimagining downtown office buildings hollowed out by work-at-home policies brought on by the COVID pandemic.

Milk, who frequently championed seniors and their concerns, argued in his speech that too often they are “ignored” and “discarded” like empty beer cans instead of seen as “the most valuable resource” cities can deploy in myriad ways.

“Senior citizens don’t suddenly lose their expertise, their knowledge of what makes things work, and how, at the magic age of 65,” said Milk. “Instead of scrapping them, why not use them?”

He also questioned having “huge high-rise office buildings that stand empty twothirds of the day.” Instead of siloing workers into an area that “dies every evening at five when the workers go home,” Milk asked people to “picture a city where the rush hour has been eliminated – because the factory and home are integrated into the same neighborhood and people walk to work!”

Of the speech, which also discussed how seniors could help people who commit minor crimes, Stuart Milk told the B.A.R., “Love Uncle Harvey’s possible matching making of two vulnerable communities and imaginative thinking.”

Tom Radulovich, a gay man who in January stepped down as executive director of the urban planning focused nonprofit Livable City, told the B.A.R. he was struck by how Milk’s speech continues to echo today as San Francisco’s elected leaders struggle with how to reinvent its downtown district and

infuse it with new vitality, possibly by converting vacant office space into new housing.

“These were front and center issues in the 1970s, and we continue to talk about them,” said Radulovich, who is now solely focused on policy and planning for the nonprofit. “It seems frustrating that we have not made a lot of progress on them in the past 50 years.”

Radulovich noted the irony in Milk extolling the design virtues of Disney planners when today the term “Disneyfication” is used as an epithet within planning circles. In reality, Radulovich said many people love going to the parks because of how they are designed, offering car-free environments easily walkable and filled with various public transit options.

“Disneyland, if you talk to modernists, is a derogatory term. ‘We don’t want it to be Disneyland; Disneyland is bad.’ Yet most people love Disneyland. One reason why is Americans will pay money to go some place where they can walk and take public transit all day. We should let these people design cities; they have figured it out,” said Radulovich, a former elected member of the board that oversees the BART regional transit agency.

Michael T. Nguyen, a gay lawyer who is vice president of Livable City’s board, told the B.A.R. after reading the speech that “Milk’s words seem prescient.” Current city leaders should take inspiration from Milk, he said, and look at arts, culture, and entertainment offerings for both young people and senior citizens for reviving downtown, along with his idea to use empty storefronts for childcare centers.

“The idea of having high rise buildings sitting empty for two-thirds of the day was as silly then as it is now,” noted Nguyen. “The idea of mixeduse city centers is still very inspiring today. We are at an inflection point in the development of San Francisco, and Downtown, especially Chinatown, SOMA, and FiDi, needs some imagination and heart.”

This Monday, May 22, on what would have been Milk’s 93rd birthday, California will again observe Harvey Milk Day. Various groups in San Francisco are co-hosting a celebration Saturday in the Castro in honor of the state’s annual day of special significance.

It will take place from 2 to 5 p.m. May 20 at Jane Warner Plaza on 17th Street near Castro and Market streets. The event will include speakers, a Drag Story Hour at 3 p.m., live music by DJ Nico and performances, including from the Queer Chorus of San Francisco.

As Milk said of his adopted home of San Francisco in his speech, “Granted its present problems, I have high hopes that the city of the future – our City of the future – will be one that will enrich the lives of all the people who live in it.”t

It’s good that the U.S. Supreme Court has (barely) upheld California’s Proposition 12 regarding pig welfare. Here in the U.S. we annually consume some 10 billion animals (not counting fish), most of which never touch foot to earth or see the light of day, a true crime against nature.

Relatedly, our State Department of Fish and Wildlife continues to issue annual import permits for some two million American bullfrogs, and 300,000 freshwater turtles for human consumption. None are native to California, and all are diseased and/or parasitized, though it is illegal to import and/or sell such products (California Code of Regulations, Title 14, Section 236).

The issues are three-fold: environmental protection, public health, and horrendous animal cruelty. Worse, the major-

ity of the bullfrogs test positive for a lethal chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), responsible for the extinctions of some 200 amphibian species worldwide in recent years.

CDFW Director Chuck Bonham wrote in a 5/19/20 letter to PawPAC: “I share your concern for the danger illegal wildlife trafficking and live animal importation poses to public health and the biodiversity of wildlife resources in California.” There’s an easy fix: Stop the permits!

Contact Director Bonham, c/o CDFW, Resources Building, 1416 Ninth Street, Sacramento, CA 95814; email director@wildlife.ca.gov.

Eric Mills, Coordinator Action for Animals Oakland, California

Planning Ahead is Simple

Planning Ahead is Simple

The benefits are immense.

Planning Ahead is Simple

The benefits are immense.

When you plan your life celebration and lasting remembrance in advance, you can design every detail of your own unique memorial and provide your loved ones with true peace of mind. Planning ahead protects your loved ones from unnecessary stress and financial burden, allowing them to focus on what will matter most at that time—you.

The benefits are immense.

When you plan your life celebration and lasting remembrance in advance, you can design every detail of your own unique memorial and provide your loved ones with true peace of mind. Planning ahead protects your loved ones from unnecessary stress and financial burden, allowing them to focus on what will matter most at that time—you.

When you plan your life celebration and lasting remembrance in advance, you can design every detail of your own unique memorial and provide your loved ones with true peace of mind. Planning ahead protects your loved ones from unnecessary stress and financial burden, allowing them to focus on what will matter most at that time—you.

The late supervisor Harvey Milk

Dan Nicoletta

IMPORTANT FACTS FOR BIKTARVY®

This is only a brief summary of important information about BIKTARVY® and does not replace talking to your healthcare provider about your condition and your treatment.

MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT BIKTARVY

BIKTARVY may cause serious side e ects, including:

 Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. Your healthcare provider will test you for HBV. If you have both HIV-1 and HBV, your HBV may suddenly get worse if you stop taking BIKTARVY. Do not stop taking BIKTARVY without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to check your health regularly for several months, and may give you HBV medicine.

ABOUT BIKTARVY

BIKTARVY is a complete, 1-pill, once-a-day prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults and children who weigh at least 55 pounds. It can either be used in people who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before, or people who are replacing their current HIV-1 medicines and whose healthcare provider determines they meet certain requirements.

BIKTARVY does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. HIV-1 is the virus that causes AIDS.

Do NOT take BIKTARVY if you also take a medicine that contains:

 dofetilide

 rifampin

 any other medicines to treat HIV-1

BEFORE TAKING BIKTARVY

Tell your healthcare provider if you:

 Have or have had any kidney or liver problems, including hepatitis infection.

 Have any other health problems.

 Are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if BIKTARVY can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking BIKTARVY.

 Are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed. HIV-1 can be passed to the baby in breast milk.

Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take:

 Keep a list that includes all prescription and over-thecounter medicines, antacids, laxatives, vitamins, and herbal supplements, and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist.

 BIKTARVY and other medicines may a ect each other. Ask your healthcare provider and pharmacist about medicines that interact with BIKTARVY, and ask if it is safe to take BIKTARVY with all your other medicines.

POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF BIKTARVY

BIKTARVY may cause serious side e ects, including:

 Those in the “Most Important Information About BIKTARVY” section.

 Changes in your immune system. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that may have been hidden in your body. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any new symptoms after you start taking BIKTARVY.

 Kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys. If you develop new or worse kidney problems, they may tell you to stop taking BIKTARVY.

 Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious but rare medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat.

 Severe liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, lightcolored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain.

 The most common side e ects of BIKTARVY in clinical studies were diarrhea (6%), nausea (6%), and headache (5%).

These are not all the possible side e ects of BIKTARVY. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any new symptoms while taking BIKTARVY.

You are encouraged to report negative side e ects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.FDA.gov/ medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Your healthcare provider will need to do tests to monitor your health before and during treatment with BIKTARVY.

HOW TO TAKE BIKTARVY

Take BIKTARVY 1 time each day with or without food.

GET MORE INFORMATION

 This is only a brief summary of important information about BIKTARVY. Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist to learn more.

 Go to BIKTARVY.com or call 1-800-GILEAD-5.

 If you need help paying for your medicine, visit BIKTARVY.com for program information.

(bik-TAR-vee)

BIKTARVY, the BIKTARVY Logo, GILEAD, the GILEAD Logo, and KEEP BEING YOU are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. © 2023 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved.

New mpox cluster in Chicago prompts concern

by Liz Highleyman

Health officials in Chicago have reported a new cluster of 13 mpox cases among gay men, raising concern about a possible resurgence this summer, which unofficially kicks off during the upcoming International Mr. Leather contest over Memorial Day weekend.

A majority of the men were fully vaccinated, which suggests waning protection. Nonetheless, local and national health authorities are urging people at risk to start or complete vaccination ahead of next month’s Pride events.

“We want to make sure that everyone can enjoy a happy and healthy Pride,” San Francisco health officer Dr. Susan Philip said in a Department of Public Health statement. “If you received your first dose of the mpox vaccine, even if it was in the fall, it is not too late – now is a great time to get your second dose.”

It takes about two weeks after the second dose of the Jynneos vaccine to develop maximum immunity. People who get their first dose now will be eligible for a second dose four weeks later

<< Families

From page 4

al, oil, gas, timber, and mining land, and the bill has not as yet been signed, though it has been passed by the Texas Senate).

“The basic [modus operandi] for the Legislature – any legislature, especially the Texas Legislature – is that the people in charge look for communities, look for

<< Castro Theatre

From page 6

“We’ve organized hundreds of letters to be written to the Board of Supervisors and the Planning Commission and the Historic Preservation Commission,” he said. “We have been organizing and we have hundreds of supporters. This is a point we need to be able to speak collectively, which is why we have formalized these organizing efforts.”

Part of that has been a letter to the conservancy critiquing its plans for the theater, announced two weeks ago and rejected by both APE and the theater’s owners, the Nasser family, as the B.A.R. reported. The conservancy wants to buy

<< News Briefs

From page 6

SF City Hall gearing up for Pride weddings

San Francisco City Administrator Carmen Chu and the Office of the County Clerk once again invite couples to celebrate their love and tie the knot

<< Guest Opinion

From page 8

Heklina

In early April, shocking news appeared on social media that iconic San Francisco drag queen Heklina had unexpectedly died in her London hotel room. It was reported by her friend Peaches Christ (Joshua Grannell), who was in London for a joint performance of “Mommie Queerest.” Heklina was the creation of Stefan Grygelko, named after the active Hekla volcano in her native Iceland. London officials do not suspect foul play in her death.

Since the early 1990s, Heklina had been the premier drag artist in Bay Area queer nightlife that featured irreverent shows and annual contests at various clubs. She got her start in 1996 as a founder of Trannyshack, a weekly drag show at the Stud bar (now closed) that operated through 2008 (the show name was later changed to Mother).

Each week featured an over-the-top, noholds-barred riff on the political, social, racial, and gender controversies of the

and should be fully protected by late June, the DPH noted.

This week, San Mateo County Health officials also urged at-risk individuals to protect themselves against the mpox virus as Pride Month approaches. After more than six months without a case, San Mateo County health officials reported one case this month, according to a news release.

Clusters in Chicago and France

Mpox cases have declined dramatically since the outbreak peaked late last summer, likely due to a combination of behavior change, vaccination, and natural immunity after infection. In late April, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw the first week with zero new case reports.

To date, the CDC has identified 30,361 mpox cases in the United States and more than 87,000 cases worldwide, mostly among men who have sex with men and their sexual partners.

But the reprieve may not last. As of May 9, Howard Brown Health in Chi-

groups that are convenient targets, people don’t necessarily understand, don’t necessarily have sympathy for, and there’s an ‘ick’ factor that they use,” Wu said.

Wu, who’s been a state representative since 2013, said, “If I lose my seat doing what is right: good. Good.”

“What is going to actually stop this –the real thing that will stop this line of attacks, not just against the transgender community or the LGBT community

the theater outright or have the Nassers sign a 60-year lease if APE is no longer able or willing to make the changes.

The new neighbors’ group’s letter stated: “We hope that you will respect our voices as LGBTQ+ community members and those most impacted by your actions. End your call to ‘Save the Seats,’ and instead think about how you can constructively contribute to saving the Theatre, the neighborhood, and the Castro’s place at the center of LGBTQ+ culture.”

Rob Byrne, a straight ally who is the president of the Castro Theatre Conservancy, stated to the B.A.R., “Since our founding, our mission has remained the same: to maintain the Castro Theatre as

at a special LGBTQ+ Pride celebration at City Hall. The county clerk has made available extra marriage ceremony appointments on Friday, June 23, the start of Pride weekend in San Francisco.

According to a news release, couples will wed in a festive atmosphere celebrating the city’s LGBTQ+ history and culture and receive special Pride souvenir marriage licenses. Wedding parties will be in-

day. Heklina threw out the rule book for drag performers: she welcomed female performers (known as faux queens) and drag kings to her stage. As recalled in the Bay Area Reporter by Adriana Roberts, a trans woman and early Trannyshack performer, “Coming from a punk rock ethos, she created a space that welcomed performers from across the gender spectrum, at a time when drag was VERY codified into TIRED (her words) tropes of men in sequined gowns doing diva lip-syncs. None of us realized it at the time, but she helped revolutionize the concept of what drag could be, breaking its mold years before the rest of the world caught on.”

In 2015 Heklina opened Oasis, a nightclub in the South of Market neighborhood, with fellow drag artist D’Arcy Drollinger and investors. It was one of the few performance spaces that featured drag shows, dance nights, musicals, concerts, and fundraisers. In her own statement emailed to supporters of Oasis on April 4, Drollinger called Heklina’s passing “a devastating blow to the community” that was personally

in the Centre-Val de Loire region south of Paris, mostly diagnosed after March 1. But only two new cases were reported in France in April, suggesting that this may not be the start of an ongoing outbreak. While the overall number of mpox cases worldwide continues to decline, there are other trouble spots, according to the World Health Organization. WHO recently reported that of the 111 newly confirmed cases in Africa during the last two weeks of April, 106 were in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Japan and South Korea have also seen recent outbreaks.

In particular, he urged unvaccinated people who plan to attend International Mr. Leather weekend at the end of May to get their first dose as soon as possible.

SF DPH strongly recommends two doses of the Jynneos vaccine for all people living with HIV, anyone taking or eligible to take PrEP, and “all men, trans people, and nonbinary people who have sex with men, trans people, or nonbinary people.” Anyone outside those groups who wants protection against mpox may also request the vaccine.

cago, which serves the LGBTQ community, had diagnosed eight new mpox cases since mid-April, after diagnosing only one case during the preceding three months. Chicago health officials have identified a total of 12 confirmed cases and one probable case – the largest cluster seen in the United States this year. All were gay or bisexual men, according to the local health department.

Similarly, French health officials recently reported a cluster of 17 new mpox cases

… is for good people, average Americans, average Texans, to stand up and say ‘No. No more. Enough … When you focus on these kind of issues, we will punish you. We will vote against you,’” Wu added.

Wu said that’s what makes visibility important, since people knowing a gay or lesbian person was instrumental in their fights for equality, such as same-sex marriage.

an iconic LGBTQ+ resource and mixedperformance venue. We continue to work towards unifying the community with that mission in mind.”

“APE insists that they must remove the orchestra floor seating to operate the Castro, but we know the theater can accommodate diverse and varied programming – and real community benefits – without demolishing its interior,” he added. “It’s unfortunate that APE threatens to shutter the theater when the conservancy has a fully-funded plan to begin operating it immediately, keeping it open 365 days a year.

“We know the Castro Theatre can thrive as a nonprofit, multi-use venue with film, comedy shows, concerts,

vited to take pictures in a photo booth set up in the North Light Court of City Hall. The county clerk’s office has played a role in the actions city government has taken toward equality for people of all genders and orientations, the release stated. In 2004, of course, the clerk’s office issued the first same-sex marriage license to now-deceased lesbian pioneers Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. While

heartbreaking. “I have known Heklina for 34 years. Opening the Oasis was a crowning achievement we shared, after performing for so many years in other people’s venues, to create our own space was a dream neither of us believed we could do and yet we did it together. She’s been my Carrie Bradshaw, my Janet Wood, my Darlene Conner, my Phoebe Buffay, and my Dorothy Zbornak. Heklina could push all my buttons and at times make me crazy and I still love her.”

In 2019, Heklina had sold her shares in Oasis and moved to Palm Springs, although you never would have known it because she continued to perform everywhere.

Castro Street will be closed to accommodate the overflow crowd expected for Heklina’s sold-out memorial service scheduled for May 23 at the legendary Castro Theatre. The statement from Grygelko’s estate added that Heklina’s “accomplishments as a performer, producer, and transgressive LGBTQ+ rights advocate have left an indelible mark on drag, the entertainment industry, San Francisco, and the queer communities

Officials urge vaccination

Even if vaccine protection is incomplete for individuals, health officials stress that increasing vaccination is key to keeping mpox under control at the community level.

“The more people who get vaccinated, the better protected the LGBTQ+ community will be from another outbreak of monkeypox this year,” Howard Brown Health chief medical director Dr. Patrick Gibbons stated in a news release.

North Carolina Jones, of Common Cause North Carolina, said that Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (R) is on a campaign of hate in the state.

“Robinson is currently making the rounds at the Black churches in the places that I grew up in the hopes of using his fear campaign,” Jones said.

Robinson has said that the trans movement is “of the Antichrist,” and that

drag shows, and other events. Our plan includes $20M in renovations and our first priority is to serve the community,” Byrne stated. “There is only one Castro Theatre. Ripping out the seats puts the Castro on an irreversible path to losing this irreplaceable treasure.”

According to the conservancy’s proposal, people in the performing arts and fundraising communities would draft a three-year plan that would lead to a $20$40 million capital campaign for the renovations and improvements.

Torres, representing the Castro Theatre Coalition, stated, “We’re not aiming our advocacy against other community members.”

“We reject APE’s divisive tactics. We

those “Winter of Love” marriages were eventually voided by the state, in 2013, after same-sex marriage in California became legal thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court upholding lower court opinions that Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, was unconstitutional, the clerks’ office stayed open throughout the weekend so that couples could wed.

Reservations for the upcoming mar-

worldwide.”

On June 22, as first reported in the Bay Area Reporter, Darcelle XV and Heklina will be inducted in the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City, a memorial to deceased LGBTQ luminaries started in 2019 as part of the Stonewall 50 anniversary. The news was announced April 11 after learning of the two drag artists’ passing by Nicole Murray Ramirez, Queen Mother I of the Americas and Nicole the Great, the titular head of the Imperial Court System, the charitable drag organization that began in San Francisco in 1965. “I knew both of them,” Murray Ramirez, a Latino veteran and San Diego community leader, said during a phone interview with the B.A.R. “They inspired and entertained a lot of people. ... Darcelle was a role model for me. ... Heklina as a performer made you laugh. That’s a gift.”

So what makes a drag queen a real queen of all her subjects and all she surveys? It is much more than acting or performance. It means bearing the weight of the crown to justify your right to rule,

To facilitate uptake, DPH has scheduled a vaccination event in the South of Market neighborhood in partnership with Folsom Street Events and the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District. The next one will take place Saturday, June 10, from noon to 5 p.m. on 12th Street between Folsom and Harrison streets.

Vaccines are also available through health systems, community clinics such as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Strut clinic, and SF DPH-affiliated sites, including City Clinic. For more information, go to sf.gov/information/mpoxvaccine. t

“a church that flies that rainbow flag … is a direct spit in the face to God Almighty.”

“As a trans person myself, who has lived through the anti-LGBT Amendment 1, this is the first fight we’ve considered – me and my wife – have considered leaving my home state,” Jones said, referring to a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage to the state constitution.  t

have a plan backed by real funding that seeks to unite the community,” he stated. “We’re sticking to the issues: The Castro Theatre should be activated everyday, and APE is leaving it mostly dark. There is no reason for APE to demolish the theater’s historic interior, limiting community and disability access. And we don’t trust APE to do even the most basic repairs given their $4 million breach of contract at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.”

As the B.A.R. reported last month, the city’s real estate division maintains APE still owes $4 million in improvements to Polk Hall, a smaller venue inside the Bill Graham auditorium. Perry stated that APE has secured permits and started the work. t

riage ceremonies can be made at https:// bit.ly/3MDac09. New appointments for Friday, June 23, will become available on Friday, May 26. Appointments are expected to fill up quickly, the release stated. The fee for a marriage ceremony is $98. For more information, including complete requirements for marriage ceremonies, click on the link above or call 311.t

to rally your community, and create and leave a better world for the most vulnerable. The great drag queens inspire us to see our lives from an unexpected perspective by upending conventions of gender and, ultimately, they foster an impulse to see a universe with new possibilities and the courage to present our authentic selves to the world. Darcelle XV and Heklina were sui generis and certainly achieved as much in this life – and they will not be the last of their line bestowing fabulousness and inspiration for generations of LGBTQ people. As supermodel drag queen RuPaul said, “We are all born naked and the rest is drag.”

Rest in power. t

Michael Yamashita, a gay man, is the publisher of the Bay Area Reporter and a founding member of News Is Out, a pioneering national collaborative of queer media outlets where this essay first appeared. The collaborative includes six of the leading local and queer-owned LGBTQ+ publications across the nation.

Health officials in Chicago are warning of a cluster of mpox cases among men who have sex with men.

Cynthia Laird

by Christopher J. Beale

“Igenerally don’t lip sync unless I absolutely have to,” bragged actor and singer J. Conrad Frank. “I am a theater person, so I approach anything I do character first.”

In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Frank explained that the character Katya Smirnoff-Skyy was custom-made for a specific reason: to host cabaret and sing live. This week Katya celebrates 18 years hosting Katya Presents at Martuni’s piano bar, a passion project that became an institution.

When Frank conceptualized Katya almost 20 years ago, the idea was to create a character he could embody and then take off to do other work that wasn’t in Katya’s wheelhouse. Today, not only is Katya more popular than ever, she is also just as serious a part of Frank’s artistic career as anything else.

J. Conrad Frank is about as native a Bay Area resident as you’ll find. Born and raised in San Mateo, Frank went to Lick-Wilmerding High School. His grandfather ran the makeup and luggage concessions at the Joseph Magnin Company, a department store in San Francisco. The store closed in the mid-1980s, but the family’s company is still going strong, and Frank’s “day job” is with the family business.

Frank was an artistic child and sang with the Ragazzi Boys Chorus, but by college he tried to pivot to something else. He studied architecture in college before the music bug bit again, and he switched to opera.

“I was a countertenor,” said Frank, “and I found that opera singers took themselves so seriously!”

Throughout college Frank performed and continued to hone his vocal and performance style. He eventually returned to San Francisco after graduating and got right to work acting.

Celebrating 18 years at Martuni’s

“I’ve been sort of a staple of Bay Area theater for the last 20 years,” said Frank with a smirk of modesty, “and performed in every bar with a microphone in this town.”

The fact is Frank has been practically every-

where from Feinstein’s at the Nikko, to places like Mr. Tipples Jazz Club, the Castro Street Fair, Boxcar Theatre, and Trannyshack, to name a few.

In 2005, right at the beginning of his drag jour-

Project Nunway

by Jim Provenzano

Holy haute couture! The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s popular Project Nunway fashion show fundraiser returns

May 26, and this time, the eleventh edition will be held in a former church, St. Joseph’s Art Society.

This year’s fashion extravaganza will showcase the theme “Sanctuary,” inviting designers to explore the concept of safety, refuge, and healing through their runway looks. Each designer gets

paired up with a Sister, who will walk the runway wearing their fabulous creations.

Project Nunway will also include drinks, DJed music and auction items. The winner of a Bay Area Reporter Bestie award, the glamorous event combines the worlds of fashion and philanthro-

ney, Frank was given an opportunity to join forces with his friend, pianist Joe Wicht, to produce and host a cabaret night at Martuni’s.

py, featuring unique runway looks created from recycled and repurposed materials.

“Sanctuary is a powerful theme that speaks to the heart of our community,” said event producer Sister Hera Sees Candy in a press statement. “We want to use the art of fashion to create a space where everyone can feel safe, celebrated, and empowered.”

Previous Project Nunway events have been held at SOMArts Cultural Center, YBCA’s Forum, and various nightclubs. St. Joseph’s Art Society will this year provide a beautiful visual metaphor paired with the Sanctuary theme.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns who believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty. All proceeds from the event benefit The Sisters organization, which gives grants to underfunded organizations and provides vital resources and support to marginalized communities.

“Project Nunway is hands down one of my favorite Sisters events,” says Sister Roma. “I am always amazed by the creativity of these designer/ Sister teams, and I just know this is going to be our best year yet.”

This year’s event promises to be a night to remember, with a diverse lineup of designers, entertainers, celebrity judges, and fierce models. Guests can also participate in silent auctions, enjoy VIP experiences, and party the night away with everyone’s favorite drag nuns.t

Project Nunway 11: Sanctuary, $50-$150. May 26, 7pm-11pm. St. Joseph’s Art Society, 1401 Howard Street. www.eventbrite.com www.saintjosephsartssociety.com www.thesisters.org

Gooch

The Sisters’ sartorial celebration reurns

Spotlight on Pride at Lyon & Swan

by Jim Gladstone

Since opening early this year, the Lyon & Swan supper club, in the basement of Eco Terreno winery’s North Beach tasting room has hosted an eclectic variety of musical performers.

To celebrate Pride month, the queer-owned venue’s entertainment director Boris Goldmund has booked a remarkable slate of four local gay artists, all worthy of broad attention, to play the intimate room, from an eclectic electric violinist to a singer just setting foot on his own path to pride. The Bay Area Reporter recently chatted with each of them.

“My career was at a peak,” recalled Marks. But almost immediately after returning to San Francisco last March, “I had liver failure.”

“I got so sick so fast and was hospitalized. I couldn’t do any of the work I’d booked, like ten weddings and performing at Pride.”

Since moving to the Bay Area from Southern California in 2005, Marks had deeply involved himself in queer community and charitable organizations including the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Grand Ducal Council, the Rafiki Coalition and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Black Brothers Esteem group. Colleagues from those organizations and others rallied to his aid, fundraising to support Marks’ medical care and to keep him afloat financially.

Last June 15, Marks received a liver transplant at UCSF.

Over his months-long course of recovery, Marks parted ways with his manager, having come to understand that they didn’t share the same values; to Marks, community engagement had proven more valuable than international bookings, regardless of their financial benefits.

While regaining his strength, Marks also composed his tenth album, “Yesterday’s Tomorrow,” which he’ll be featuring along with older originals and covers in his Pride month performances at Lyon & Swan.

Kippy Marks

Shortly after pandemic restrictions began to subside in 2021, the unlikely career path of Kippy Marks took some even unlikelier turns.

The El Paso-born violinist and composer, whose beaming smile, bejeweled face and beguiling music (a trippy blend of classical, jazz and EDM) have captured the attention of tens of thousands of visitors to Ghirardelli Square, Balboa Park and other public gathering places in San Francisco and San Diego, had supported himself largely through busking and selling self-produced CDs for more than two decades.

And then, he recalled, “I was approached by a manager who wanted to help me become an international star.”

Such serendipity was not unfamiliar to Marks. When he was a fourth-grader with no musical experience other than singing along with the choir in the church where his father preached, he was invited to examine a violin by a musician visiting his classroom.

Taking instrument and bow in his hands, Marks mimicked what he’d watched the violinist do just moments prior and sawed out an astonishingly credible rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

“From that moment,” said Marks, “I knew that music was my calling.”

Last winter, 45 years later, he set off on a whirlwind three-month tour booked by his new fairy god-manager, playing high society events in Rome, Venice, Amsterdam and Dubai.

“A year ago, I had to watch all of the Pride festivities on TV from my bed,” Marks said. “I’m so grateful to be able to get out to connect with my communities and share the gift of music again.”

Marks plays Saturday evenings through June, 5pm- 8pm.

www.kippymarks.com

He collaborated on songs with Kelly Clarkson and Noah Cyrus, gigged at major L.A. nightspots, and was featured on the premiere of NBC Television’s “Songland” songwriting competition, on which he worked with super-producer Ryan Tedder (Beyoncé, Adele, Taylor Swift).

But for all the industry cred it may have earned him, Embers recalls the experience as frequently feeling hollow.

“The scene in L.A. is really pay-toplay. If you get a gig and don’t bring in 100 people, you have to pay the club. It starts to be more about what attention you can generate on social media than about working to make art.

“I found myself leaning into what I thought I needed to do to be successful. I was writing and pitching very straightforward pop rather than authentically expressing myself.”

Embers had worked long and hard to find his authenticity and resisted losing his grip on it.

Growing up as Max Brandenburg in Herne, a small city in western Germany, Embers started taking piano lessons when he was five years old.

“I was trained exclusively in classical music,” Embers said. “I also loved to sing, but for some reason it felt really vulnerable, so I didn’t allow myself to explore it openly. I would actually only sing in secret.”

That began to change during Embers’ junior year in high school, when he was an exchange student in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

“The lady in charge of music at my host family’s church gave me a key to the building. I was able to spend time alone in this space with great acoustics and a grand piano, which is where I really found myself as a songwriter and started to feel like that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”

Two years later, Embers returned to the U.S., matriculating at Boston’s Berklee College of Music to study songwriting and, as it turned out, sing a song of himself.

“I didn’t come out until I was in college,” he said. “I just pushed the idea of being gay away in my early teens. I thought I would never acknowledge it.”

The confluence of coming out and refining his ability to express himself through writing made Embers’ college years especially fulfilling. But the seemingly obligatory post-graduate move to L.A. turned out to be soul-curdling.

“The whole scene started to feel really wrong for me,” Embers recalls, “And as the pandemic set in, I reexamined my thoughts about my career.”

In short order, Embers packed his belongings into an RV and became a nomad, traveling cross-country and writing songs while exploring national parks, visiting old friends and playing music at house parties.

As he drove around the country, Embers read up on the world’s ecological challenges, becoming fascinated with regenerative farming as “a great way to address global warming issues and build community at the same time.”

He began reaching out to farmers, offering to visit and perform, eventually gravitating toward the Bay Area, where he settled two years ago.

“It really caught my heart,” he said, praising the region’s abundance of ecological organizations and regenerative farms.

“I think my music has become more organic, folky and oriented around storytelling,” said Embers, who last year released his debut album, “Nomad,” which he’ll showcase at Lyon & Swan.

As his career has morphed, Embers has also co-founded the nonprofit MORF (Music on Regenerative Farms), partnering with his old Berklee friend, and now roommate, Michael Martinez.

Embers plays Saturday nights through June 17, 8pm – 11pm.

www.instagram.com/maxembersmusic/ www.morf-initiative.org

“I have self-branded the genre I write in as Honest Pop,” Martinez joked. “I feel like being open and candid about my insecurities actually helps me connect with people. At Lyon & Swan, I’m thinking of every night as a sort of choose-my-ownadventure. It’s a sort of loose musical autobiography; I’ll mix my originals with covers and tell some stories about what the songs mean to me.”

During his first show in the room, earlier this month, Martinez took requests as well, effortlessly taking on both Coldplay’s “Yellow” and a Michael Bublé-styled rendition of “Fever.”

As at the dozens of carefully curated SoFar Sounds concerts that he’s participated in Martinez says that patrons at Lyon & Swan are “active listeners” as opposed to the loud bar patrons he encountered during a longtime gig playing piano and singing for the Mastro’s Steakhouse chain.

“I was playing along to tracks there, so you have to stick to the song very closely. You don’t get to add anything. Here, I get to show some of my own artistry, even when I’m doing a cover.”

In addition to his gigs as a musician, Martinez, who studied musical theater in high school and at A.C.T.’s Young Conservatory, has recently returned to Bay Area stages, appearing in the sex-positive Z Space musical “Coming Soon” and the John Hughes musical tribute “Brat Pack” at Feinstein’s at the Nikko.

“I played the jock,” he admits sheepishly. “Running around half naked.” Martinez plays every Thursday through June, 8pm–11pm.

www.michaelcandothat.com

“I lost my joy in L.A.,” said singersongwriter Max Embers, who has made a new home for himself in the Inner Sunset following four eventful if ultimately unsatisfying years in Southern California.

After graduating from Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2016, Embers relatively quickly ticked several boxes on what many young performers might consider a checklist of success.

He rented a trailer in the woods of Idyllwild in the San Jacinto Mountains for three weeks to see if he could get back to writing on his own, without the collaborative, consensus-driven approach that dominated in Los Angeles.

“Something magical happened for me there. My passion for music really got reignited from being alone out in nature. I’d always loved nature when I was growing up and I realized that for me, nature and art are inseparable, I want my art to celebrate nature.”

With a languorous, sexy sound that hits a surprising, sweet spot between acid jazz and Jason Mraz, San Francisco native Martinez is a perfect fit for Lyon & Swan’s casually swank setting.

And his first single, “Freedom Within,” deserves a place on your Pride month playlist. Released last year, it’s a tender introspective anthem that Martinez wrote about coming out to his father, who was perhaps more accepting of his son’s sexuality than Martinez himself was at the time.

Its follow up, the rhythm-driven “Chill Out” reveals a jauntier side to Martinez, while nonetheless acknowledging his self-professed (and utterly endearing) anxieties.

“I don’t want to get my hopes up,” he sings, “I wish I didn’t care so much. But I just got ghosted for the third time this month.”

“I remember when I was a kid hearing Engelbert Humperdinck at my grandfather’s house,” recalled singer Jeovani Abenoja. “I know the name is so silly, but I loved the music.”

And so it was that Abenoja, a Pittsburg native, discovered his aural gateway drug, an intoxicating romantic sound that ultimately led him to the melodies of the Great American Songbook and the big band sound of the early 20th Century.

See page 18 >>

Max Embers

Michael Martinez

Jeovani Abenoja

Left to Right: Kippy Marks, Max Embers, Michael Martinez and Jeovani Abenoja

EVERYTHING YOU LOVE ABOUT THE ACADEMY. AND TONS MORE.

Sauropods were Mesozoic marvels, measuring up to 60 feet tall and weighing up to 80 tons. Discover the world’s largest dinosaurs at the world’s only aquarium + planetarium + rainforest + natural history museum. With life-size models, fossil replicas, and more.

Now open | Get tickets at calacademy.org

Every visit supports our mission to regenerate the natural world.

Shows Weds–Suns | Drinks & Small Bites Available

In the heart of North Beach, a historic jewel box theatre hosts high-flying acrobats creating a thrilling and moving love letter to the City by the Bay. Enjoy drinks and cicchetti (small bites). Come with a date or friends, celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, book a corporate event. The perfect place for a party!

Katya Smirnoff-Skyy

From page 15

Enter Katya

“I am the only drag queen who gets younger when I take off my makeup,“ joked Frank, whose drag persona is considerably older than he is. Frank said that was a strategic move. “When you start playing a 60 or 70-something-year-old, it means you are set for a long time.” Katya is based on a recognizable archetype to anyone in the theater and classical music communities; the aging diva.

“She’s a woman of a certain age who was a big star somewhere in the eastern bloc, and now is probably like a Chanel counter lady,” joked Frank. “And she has grand stories about this time when she was quite famous and did all these things.”

Add in self-indulgent music choices like dramatic arias, “and operatic versions of Alanis Morissette songs,” said Frank, and you get Katya SmirnoffSkyy.

“My pronouns are she/her/auntie,” he added, noting that Katya is designed to be a little bit delusional. It’s part of her charm.

The atmosphere at Katya Presents is classy and casual, light-hearted and deep. There is always a pianist, a guest, and the host, but the actual content of the show evolves. In the Martuni’s shows, Frank and company set out to create a (rare) space for cabaret artists to perform, and they are still going strong. Keeping cabaret alive

“It’s always a fun group of people and it’s a fun, festive atmosphere where you’re gonna hear all kinds of music. Hopefully I’ll sing something that might be touching at least once,” said Frank. “Whenever I’m putting together a show, it’s 90 percent for the audience and 10 percent for myself. So I make sure I do something that I wanna do, too.

“Over the last 20 years, the cabaret venues have really disappeared in San Francisco,” Frank opined. “We used

From page 16

Growing up, Abenoja, now 38, kept both his musical and sexual proclivities secret from his conservative Polish mother and Filipino father, whose own listening habits tended toward the Carpenters and, later, Phil Collins.

“I hated school,” said Abenoja, who was quiet and aloof as a youngster. “I took a lot of bozo classes. Senior year in high school, they put me in choir. I didn’t want to do it. Maybe it’s because I was in the closet. A lot of people in the choir were much more whimsical than me. But it was a good experience in a way.”

While he learned a bit about reading music in his time with the choir, Abenoja said that today, he learns music and sings “one-hundred percent by ear” and has a photographic memory for lyrics.

At 18, after graduating, Abenoja went to work as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service.

“For fifteen years!” he recalled. “I hated that job. But my dad was a Vietnam vet. He would have reamed my ass if I quit. To get through my days, I would sing while I was delivering the mail.”

to have the Octavia Lounge directly across from Martuni’s. And there were various other places where cabaret singers could go.”

Today, there are far fewer cabaret venues in San Francisco, which Frank said makes places like Martuni’s that much more important.

“We’ve tried to make Martuni’s sort of the hub for cabaret and encourage artists to do their own stuff and produce their own shows,” he said. “We’re singing songs, telling stories, and serving strong drinks,” said Frank, and that’s really what Katya Presents is all about.

With the 18th anniversary celebration of Katya Presents on May 21, it’s worth noting that Katya & Co kept the show running even when the COVID-19 pandemic shut Martuni’s down. From in-person, to online, and now back in person again, the show never lost its heart, or its character.

Dare-ing theater

“Performing is a lot of work, a lot of energy that you can’t give to other things in your life,” said Frank wistfully, “but the gain can be great.”

Over the last two decades Katya Smirnoff-Skyy has become a big name in the San Francisco drag scene, and J. Conrad Frank has been a success in his own right. Never one to slow

down, Frank will spend the next few weeks in a starring role at New Conservatory Theatre Center in the San Francisco premiere of Charles Busch’s camp play, “The Confession of Lily Dare,” which follows one woman’s path to ruin, paved with good intentions and humor.

“The play takes place here in San Francisco from 1906 to 1933 where

I get to be everything from a schoolgirl, to a cabaret singer on the Barbary Coast, to a madam of a string of whorehouses up and down the El Camino Real, to a washed up old broad in a gin joint on Larkin Street to dying in prison,” Frank quipped without taking a breath. “Yet it’s hilarious!”

“The Confession of Lily Dare” runs select dates through June 11 at New Conservatory Theatre Center. And Frank is working on new material for Katya too, including an update to the Great American Songbook, which will begin to work its way into Katya Presents soon.

Catch Katya Smirnoff-Skyy in action at Martuni’s, 4 Valencia St. at Market, on the third Sunday night of each month. Shows start at 7pm. Tickets are not available in advance, so arrive early.t www.russianoperadiva.com www.nctcsf.org

After overhearing Abenoja as he went about his daily rounds, a postal customer encouraged him to meet with a friend who led the Big Band of Rossmoor. After his first audition in 2012, Abenoja was invited to join the band. He fondly remembers his parents attending his first performance.

But singing remained primarily an avocation until Abenoja’s parents both passed away within a six-month period, shortly after which he left the postal service.

After an extended period of grieving, Abenoja began to focus more seriously on music and, through generous band mates’ networks and word of mouth, he began to get well-paying gigs, far more lucrative than his former career.

“I’ll get flown to L.A. to do a wedding or an anniversary. There are corporate events, charity gigs. Once I was hired to go to Cache Creek Casino to do a single song. I also do lots of events that don’t pay. But I enjoy playing in community centers and nursing facilities for people who are really grateful to hear my repertoire. This kind of music is very precious. I love to bring a smile to people’s faces.”

Abenoja says that being a part of Lyon & Swan’s Pride month program represents a bit of a stretch for him. “I’m gay, but I’ve always been a very private person. But I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m just saying, ‘Fuck it.’ I have, like, 10,000 followers on social media, and I think that 90 percent of them are from the gay community,” said Abenoja, a bit awkwardly and more than a bit knowingly. “I don’t think half of them know my music. Maybe it’s because of my face.”

Whether they turn out for the mug or the music, attendees of Abenoja’s Pride weekend kickoff performance may be witnessing the beginning of a new chapter for the reluctant heartthrob.

“Another thing that’s important about this,” said Abenoja. “Is that the room where Lyon & Swan is used to be a famous club called The Purple Onion. Johnny Mathis became famous playing there. And he was gay, too.” Abenoja plays Fri. June 23. 8pm–11pm.

https://www.instagram.com/ jeovaniabenoja/t

Lyon & Swan. 140 Columbus Ave. (415) 429-5200. lyonandswan.com

Katya Smirnoff-Skyy with accompanist Joe Wicht at a Martuni’s show in February 2022

J. Conrad Frank and LaMont Ridgell in ‘The Confession of Lily Dare’

Lois Tema

Chita Rivera

by Brian Bromberger

In her heyday, Chita Rivera possessed the fastest feet on Broadway. How she shared that agile talent as a dancer and musical star for 70 years is at the heart of her captivating memoir. 90-year-old Rivera comments in the introduction that unlike the Stephen Sondheim song, “I’m Still Here,” she wasn’t inclined to look back nostalgically at her past, that as a dancer she always focused on the next gig or challenge. However, the pandemic gave her time to reflect on her landmark career and perhaps to bequeath the lessons she learned to future troupers.

Rivera recognizes she had the privilege of being tutored by the best mentors during the Golden Age of Broadway. “They are responsible for me being who I am,” she states.

She covers her professional debut as a dancer in the national tour of “Call Me Madam” (1952) to her final Broadway appearance in “The Visit” (2015). Rivera lives for the stage. Her infectious enthusiasm and ambition prodded her to appear in one show after another, cultivating her innate gifts. Every fast-reading page is animated with her upbeat, outspoken spin on a spunky, fearless life where she blazed her own trail.

Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero to Puerto Rican parents in 1933 and raised in Washington, D.C., her musician father died when she was seven. Her single mother worked for the Defense Department to support five kids.

A tomboy with rambunctious energy who would jump on the furniture, Rivera was enrolled by her mother in ballet lessons with a lesbian AfricanAmerican teacher Doris Jones. She moved to New York City to study at

Memoir shares the Broadway legend’s life and career

George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet at age 16.

Recognizing she lacked the temperament and hard-core skills needed for ballet, she caught the musical theater bug, inspired by seeing her idol Carol Channing star in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

Go ‘West’

She originated the role of Anita in “West Side Story”(1957), which ignited her career. Her next role as Rosie in “Bye Bye Birdie” with Dick Van Dyke earned her first Tony nomination. However, she didn’t get to play any characters she created on stage in film.

Rita Moreno (for Anita) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (for Velma in “Chicago”) even won Supporting Actress Oscars. While she isn’t bitter, she feels she still owns these roles, that the other actresses can have their awards, because she’s been allowed to “keep my vamp.”

She married fellow “West Side Story” dancer Tony Mordente and begot a daughter Lisa with him, before their divorce in 1966. She never remarried, but had relationships with actor/

singer Sammy Davis, Jr., and restaurateur Joe Allen among others, as well as her fondness for hot Italian men.

The book is co-written with gay journalist Patrick Pacheco. She cleverly adopts a fiery, dark, renegade, snarky alter ego Dolores, the unfiltered, notalways-nice, unapologetic, sassy brutally honest Chita, who doesn’t take crap from anyone, or as her daughter notes, “Mom goes Puerto Rican.”

In addition to being a diva and gay icon, Rivera acknowledges in the book how much of her success, aside from her own talent and hard work, is due to gay men, who enriched her world professionally and personally. The gay alliance Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, gave Rivera her start in “West Side Story,” and the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb provided her with signature parts in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Chicago,” among others. She credits them with lending her artistry verve and sensuality. Her brother and manager Hoolie is gay. She writes, “Without Jews and gays, there would be no theater.”

There are loads of dramatic anecdotes, such as telling off a nasty Paul Lynde and a cruel comment John Lennon shouted at Judy Garland; the strain of dealing with pre-rehab alcoholic drug addict co-star Liza Minnelli playing her daughter in “The Rink;” working with the brilliant but often depressed, mean director-choreographer Bob Fosse (“a flash of lightning in a dark sky”); the importance of Catholicism in her life (including meeting Pope Francis); playing Marilyn Monroe in the 1955 “Shoestring Revue;” watching her gay co-star Roger Rees in “The Visit,” battle heroically against terminal brain cancer; and willingness to acknowledge and discuss the flops in her career.

Breaking a leg

Perhaps the most stirring chapter centers on her 1986 accident when her car collided with a taxi (yes it was her fault), resulting in breaking her leg in twelve places, which could have ended her dancing. However, with grit and perseverance, she sustained grueling physical therapy and was able to resume

Catherine Lacey’s ‘Biography of X’

by Tim Pfaff

C atherine Lacey’s new (and fourth) novel, “Biography of X” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) tries to be all things – and succeeds. This being 2023, it’s being praised for its genrebending when it would be closer to the truth to see it as a keenly intelligent woman’s riding the range with the skill and flair of a circus performer with a foot on each of two horses. Somehow entertainment seems too small a word.

The conceit is this: a writer (of course), horrified by an unauthor-

ized (also lousy) biography of her late wife, makes it her personal quest less to find facts to correct the record than to find out who her partner really was. Along the way she finds out that her wife/lover, a performance artist onstage as well as in life, was even more of an act than she previously thought. Discovering at least a baker’s dozen of names under which her spouse lived and worked, the widow settles on X.

Lacey’s skill at keeping multiple plates, heaped high with tempting edibles, spinning in the air – yet another circus act – makes her cap-

tivating novel equal parts wildly entertaining, thought-provoking, and emotionally sobering.

Our narrator, C.M.Lucca, is a journalist, a fraught calling in our perilous times, to be sure. She works in the last decade of last-century America, the fractured land now wrestling with Reunification after the 1945 secession of states that carved the nation into The Southern Territory (ST), the Northern Territory, and the Western Territory. Any resemblance to today’s USA, or yesterday’s or tomorrow’s, is strictly intended. I found the hints of a possible re-secession of the ST lip-smacking.

A year after X’s death, and in the immediate wake of Theodore Smith’s acclaimed biography of X, “The Woman with a History,” Lucca strikes out, ostensibly to correct the historical record, but, increasingly, on a quest not unlike Orpheus following Euridice into the underworld, to learn who her mysterious spouse really was.

Lucca’s quest takes her through a rogue’s gallery of the people who knew, worked with, and otherwise survived X, each of whom gets a named chapter. It’s as old a narrative frame as literature has to offer, and Lacey ups the ante on the shortcoming of even the most conscientious historiography by footnoting, preposterously, her sources, all those citations at odds with the reallife referents Lacey catalogs at the end of the “Biography.”

Cast of characters

The cast of characters makes Chaucer’s tale-tellers on their way to Canterbury seem like a company of dullards. For the most part, it’s X’s colleagues from the world of the rebellious arts who stand large in her history, but the reader is unlikely to fob off the accounts of X’s fortifying art as a sex worker in Times Square’s Fun City.

What creeps up on the reader as stealthily as it does on Lucca is that

her stage cavorting. She won two Tony awards out of ten nominations, plus a lifetime achievement Tony. She received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2002 and was presented with a Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2009.

She did experience racism and ethnic taunts throughout her life, but unlike rival Rita Moreno (to Rivera’s consternation, fans would often confuse the two actresses because their names were similar-sounding) who expressed anger, she fought back with her talent, not endangering her chances to be considered for a wider range of roles.

“If I was going to lose some parts because directors or agents thought my name sounded too south of the border, that was their problem,” she writes.

Rivera worked her hips off to make sure everyone knew and respected her name, superseding any discrimination. She also believed there was less stereotyping in the theater than in Hollywood.

Early in her career she followed the advice given by one of her idols, Gwen Verdon: “You don’t need to understudy anybody. Be more confident. Go out and create your own roles. Forge your own path.”

Her memoir is proof Rivera fulfilled that mandate. She says she wrote the book for the next generation of kids, telling them to go on and live their own lives and not be afraid of what life might have in store for them.

Rivera has embodied her own wisdom and readers get to experience not only a consummate legend, but a terrific human being. Chita, take your well-deserved bow!t

‘Chita: A Memoir’ by Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco. HarperOne/ Collins $29.99 (in English, Spanish and audiobook) www.harpercollins.com

one of the most artistic things about X was her willingness to feed on others and then, as Joan Didion declared the artist’s true calling, to sell them out.

There’s not a hastily drawn character in the lot, many of whom the readers might even find themselves thinking about when they’re away from the novel. Some even steal the spotlight, however briefly, from X.

But, taking into account why we’re gathered together here, let’s appreciate the principal gay male character. Like Professor Higgins, Oleg Hall, with his “exuberant homosexuality,” is rich and is as much in the market for a sensational protégé as X is for a patron. Besides setting X up in palatial digs of her own, Oleg introduces her to New York society with predictably outrageous results.

Lacey’s humor is the kind that hits you in the ass on the way to the next sentence. Against the odds, her chronicle is devoid of both cliché and groaners. There are few other writers you’d take this outrageous a display from, yet it interests and sustains beyond reason or explanation.

Such as it’s derivative at all, it’s in its tireless name-dropping and resort to visual means to amplify the prose.

Grainy photographs of droopy subjects are right out of the fiction of W.G. Sebald and placed with a narrative precision more characteristic of the traditional novel than the sleight of hand of a graphic novel.

The sheer level of invention is hard to keep up with at times, but it operates like an engine over a ceaselessly compelling 400 pages. At its most ribald, it bleeds the stuff of human comedy. The humor, deeply compassionate in the end, has the same kind of undertow you feel in an opera love duet; no amount of flash can conceal the hazards of desire, the workings of fate, and the tragedy to come.

It would be an insult to the ingenuity of Lacey’s novel to say that it has a moral. Still, many a participant in a romantic relationship will recognize the deep bafflement entailed in trying to know another human being at all.t

Read the full review on www.ebar.com.

‘Biography of X,’ by Catherine Lacey. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 390 pages $28

Let’s talk cannabis.

Catherine Lacey

Chita Rivera Chita Rivera in ‘West Side Story’

Fabulous & fractious

The Lavender Tube on drag queens & death cleans

by Victoria A. Brownworth

W ith the GOP passing antiLGBTQ laws every week and taking a stronger stand against queer and trans people existing than against sedition, watching drag feels like a revolutionary act. So watch we shall!

Drag Me to Dinner

Hulu’s “Drag Me to Dinner” is hosted by Neil Patrick Harris and husband David Burtka. It’s a drag show, cooking show, home improvement show, Real Housewives-ish show and generally entertaining as it promises “Culinary Costumed Chaos.”

“Drag Me to Dinner” also includes the last filmed appearance by the late, great San Francisco legend Heklina,

who passed suddenly in London last month.

Another local queen, Peaches Christ, makes an appearance. Judges include Bianca Del Rio, David Burtka, Neil Patrick Harris and Haneefah Wood. The presenter is New York City comedian and drag king entertainer Murray Hill. The show debuts on Hulu May 31.

RuPaul’s Drag Race

All Stars (Season 8)

Season 8 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race

All Stars” promises lots and lots of queenly drama. The series continues with RuPaul as host and judge, with Michelle Visage, Carson Kressley, Ross Mathews, and Ts Madison returning on the judging panel. Other fun drop-ins include JoJo Siwa,

Personals Massage>>

MEN TO MEN MASSAGE

I'm a Tall Latin Man. If you're looking, I'm the right guy for you. My rates are $90/hr & $130/90 min. My work hours: 10am-10pm everyday. 415- 5150594 Patrick, call or text. See pics on ebar.com

Zooey Deschanel, Idina Menzel and “Saturday Night Live” alums Ego Nwodim and Bowen Yang.

According to Paramount+, the season will feature a new twist to the show’s format. In addition to competing for a spot in the Drag Race Hall of Fame, a parallel competition for the title of Queen of the Fame Games will take place. Over the course of the season, viewers of the show will vote on unused runway looks from the eliminated contestants and the queen with the fan-favorite outfit will win a $50,000 prize. Look forward to catfights on the catwalk!

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

“The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is that show you didn’t know you needed. Based on Margareta Magnusson’s bestselling book, this transformation series (yes, that’s a thing now; we all need transformation) is narrated by Amy Poehler. People are given a chance to organize their homes, lives and relationships before it’s too late. “Listen up: everyone is going to die!” Poehler tells us. Now what?

An organizer, Ella, a designer, Johan, and a psychologist, Katrina –known as the Death Cleaners – head to America from Sweden to help eight people in Kansas City face their mor-

tality, speak honestly about death and confront all that has been collecting dust for years. It’s sort of like Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” meets Ikea. The concept is that transforming one’s home will lead to transforming one’s inner self.

It’s powerful stuff, but with an air of lightness. As one of the lucky declutter-ees says, “I knew you were going to declutter my house, I didn’t think you were going to declutter my soul.”

In one episode, The Death Cleaners aid Sue, an artist who helped build a lesbiansafe section of Kansas City in the 1980s, who hasn’t been able to clean her “organized heaps” of art since the love of her life died of COVID-19. In another, The Death Cleaners help Suzi, a sassy 75-year-old woman surrounded by phallic souvenirs from her travels and a lifetime of photos from her years as a singing waitress, let go of the past. In another episode there’s a drag show and there’s quite a lot of queerness throughout.

Speaking as someone recently bereaved by the death of a spouse, I think everyone can benefit from the lessons of this show.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton

Everybody loves a period piece and

everyone loves a thriller. BritBox’s “The Confessions of Frannie Langton” is both. A servant and former slave are accused of murdering a plantation owner and his wife. Moving from Jamaican sugar fields to the fetid streets of Georgian London, exploring one woman’s haunted fight to tell her story, BAFTAwinning director Andrea Harkin takes us on a deep and haunting journey in this four-part British series.

Based on the novel by Sara Collins and adapted by Collins, the series stars Karla-Simone Spence as Frannie Langton, Sophie Cookson as Madame Marguerite Benham and Stephen Campbell Moore as George Benham. Frannie’s relationship with Marguerite Benham begins over their shared enjoyment of books and reading and then becomes deeply, irrevocably emotional and sexual., and complicated by their respective roles.

The sets are lush and very “Bridgerton.” The acting is superb, the direction deft, Collins script crisp and emotive and believable. It’s absolutely stellar and must-watch TV; on Britbox Apple TV Channel , BritBox, BritBox Amazon Channel.

So for the fun, the fabulous and the fractiously fetid, you really must stay tuned.t

Read the full column on www.ebar.com.

Family entanglements

by Gregg Shapiro

Anyone with aging parents knows the fear of answering the kind of dreaded phone call that novelist Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) receives at the beginning of queer filmmaker François Ozon’s “Everything Went Fine” (Cohen Media Group). Emmanuèle’s sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) calls to tell her that their almost 85-year-old art dealer father André (André Dussollier) has had a stroke and is in the emergency room of a Paris hospital.

After a series of tests, it’s determined that André has multiple serious health issues, and the “risk of relapse is high.” An extremely impatient man, André struggles with his condition, thinking nothing of taking his frustrations out on his dedicated daughters. His estranged sculptor wife Claude (Charlotte Rampling), who is dealing with her own declining health (Parkinson’s and depression), has already written him off. In brief flashbacks, we see what a terrible, verbally abusive father he was to Emmanuèle. Yet she remains dutiful, even when he tells her that he wants her aid in putting an end to his suffering.

Emmanuèle and Pascale are then faced with making the difficult decision about André’s future, which is complicated by the good days/bad days of his convalescence. After doing research online, Emmanuèle determines that assisted suicide is illegal in France, but is a possibility in nearby Switzerland. She reaches out to

a nameless woman (Hanna Schygulla) affiliated with a death-with-dignity organization in Bern, and arrangements are made.

There are many obstacles along the way, some humorous, some serious. Simone (Judith Magre), a pushy cousin living in New York, tries to talk André out of it. The presence of André’s insistent male ex-lover Gerard (Grégory Gadebois), whom Pascale refers to as her father’s “gigolo,” only muddles matters. Even André himself adds a delay when he asks to change the selected date so that he can attend his grandson’s clarinet recital.

Once the plan is set in motion, a phone call from the police to the clinic where André has been recuperating threatens to put a halt to everything they worked so hard to carefully plan. The sisters are interrogated by the police

and then allowed to leave, just as André is on his way to Bern by ambulance.

Based on Emmanuèle Bernheim’s autobiographical novel, “Everything Went Fine” takes place over the course of seven months. Bernheim, who has collaborated on screenplays for Ozon’s “Swimming Pool,” Under the Sand,” and “Ricky,” is given a respectable treatment with Ozon’s adaptation. While it lags in places, “Everything Is Fine” is saved by the first-rate performances by Marceau, Pailhas, Dussollier, Schygulla, and Rampling (who makes the most of her limited screen time, particularly in the scene in which Emmanuèle asks Claude why she stayed married to an unfaithful, gay husband).t

In French with English subtitles.

Rating: B

Géraldine Pailhas and Sophie Marceau in “Everything Went Fine”

Left: Neil Patrick Harris, Bianca Del Rio and David Burtka in ‘Drag Me to Dinner’

Middle Left: The late Heklina in ‘Drag Me to Dinner’

Middle Right: Sue, a lesbian artist, in ‘The Art of Swedish Death Cleaning’ Right: Sophie Cookson, Karla Simone-Spence and Jodhi May in ‘The Confessions of Frannie Langton’

Itvx/Drama Republic

Arts notes

by Jim Provenzano

Anew series of panel discussions at the California Academy of Sciences reclaims scholarly research to underserved voices, and Frameline announced new youth filmmaker grant recipients.

The California Academy of Sciences will launch an all-new, threepart NightLife sub-series: Says Who?

Taking place over three evenings throughout May and June, the series examines the power and privilege of the storyteller in the world of science and beyond, and aims to uplift voices that have been systematically excluded from shaping the truths and narratives we often hold as fact.

“NightLife can be fun and flashy,

Cal. Academy talks; Frameline’s youth grants

and it can be real and raw,” says NightLife event program manager Lin Kung. “There are so many voices and stories out there far beyond what the dominant or collective narrative might be. There are communities and perspectives to listen and learn from, reflect on, and respect.”

The series will take place across three individual events: Volume 1: Culture (May 18), Volume 2: Experience (June 1), and Volume 3: Gender (June 29), with each event featuring a thoughtfully selected cadre of community partners who will lend their perspectives and stories. Featured talks at all events will be held in both English and ASL, and one talk will additionally feature Spanish language speakers.

The Nightlife events include access to the Academy’s exhibits and other nightlife events. $21.50. www.calacademy.org

Colin Higgins Youth Filmmaker Grant

Frameline, the arts nonprofit that hosts San Francisco’s International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, announced a new partnership with the Colin Higgins Foundation entitled the Colin Higgins Youth Filmmaker Grant, a new initiative centered on providing young LGBTQ+ filmmakers with financial support to continue their work.

Three young American filmmakers, Daisy Friedman, Karina Dandashi and Emilio Subia, have been selected as the recipients of the Colin Higgins Youth

Filmmaker Grant, and will each receive $15,000 to support their future film projects, for a total of $45,000 awarded to these filmmakers. In addition, the winners’ short films will be showcased at the Frameline: San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival June 14-24, 2023. Each filmmaker will be in attendance for their screening.

The grant is named after the late Colin Higgins, an acclaimed screenwriter and director responsible for such classic films as “Harold and Maude,” “9 to 5,” and “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas.”

“We are thrilled to engage and empower the incoming generation of LGBTQ+ young filmmakers,“ said James Woolley, Executive Director of Frameline. “Colin Higgins is an icon,

and it is a dream for our organization to provide life-changing financial support to filmmakers in Colin’s name. These young artists are telling the deeply authentic stories of the LGBTQ+ community, and we couldn’t be more excited.”

Frameline will also co-present a tribute to Higgins at a double-feature screening of “9 to 5” and “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas” at The Castro Theatre on May 27 at 6:00pm, presented by Movies for Maniacs and Another Planet Entertainment, with host Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.t

www.frameline.org

www.colinhiggins.org

Left: California Academy of Sciences ‘Says Who?’ panelists Right: Colin Higgins (seated) with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton in a publicity still for ‘9 to 5.’

SPECIAL KIDS PRICING

JUN 1–25 A.C.T.’S