Russian River readies for summer
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King of Clubs
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Serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971
Vol. 45 • No. 20 • May 14-20, 2015
Castro retail strategy nears completion Rick Gerharter
Lil Miss Hot Mess, shown speaking at a news conference last fall.
Drag queens want Facebook booted from Pride
Brooklyn Witteman, right, tidies up merchandise at Local Take, a Castro shop that features Bay Areamade creations.
by David-Elijah Nahmod
by Matthew S. Bajko
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he battle between Facebook and the drag and transgender communities continues amid calls for the social media giant to be barred from participating in next month’s San Francisco Pride parade. At issue is the company’s policy of using legal names instead of stage names or other names on Facebook pages. Last fall, a group of drag and trans community members, along with gay San Francisco Supervisor David Campos, met with Facebook officials but a formal agreement was not reached. The social media company did restore some drag queens’ pages that it had removed. Since then, however, drag queens and transgender people report being locked out of their Facebook pages for not using their legal or birth names. Facebook did announce 56 gender identity options last year, but anyone can still report alleged “fake” names with the click of a button. “As it stands, everyone on the site is vulnerable to the fake name reporting option and having their accounts suspended with one click,” said Sister Roma with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who had been helping people restore their suspended accounts and has been in regular contact with Facebook. “Everyone can lose contacts to their friends and families. People will lose contact with their social network, which for many people is a virtual lifeline to their well being.” Now, nearly nine months later, local drag queens have announced a June 1 protest at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. Organizers are also asking the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee board and the board of Heritage of Pride in New York City to bar Facebook from participating in Pride parades in both cities. Facebook has participated in San Francisco Pride in recent years. In 2013, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg was photographed as he rode on the company’s float. See page 9 >>
s San Francisco prepares to celebrate the annual Small Business Week, community leaders in the Castro are finalizing a retail strategy to assist with filling vacant storefronts throughout the city’s gay district. The Castro/Upper Market Community
Benefit District last summer launched the effort to create the strategy and has been working with the Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association, the Castro/Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association, and the Castro Merchants group to develop it. Last fall 1,200 patron surveys were gathered, both online and at various street locations in the Castro and along upper Market
Street, to provide a better insight into who is shopping in the district and what stores people felt were missing. The final report is set to be unveiled in early June, but some preliminary results have already been shared with Castro merchants and community leaders. Of the survey respondents, 77 percent lived in San Francisco, See page 9 >>
Pink Party, Dyke March shift to earlier start Rick Gerharter
by Seth Hemmelgarn
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ext month’s Pink Party in the Castro will run from 3 to 8 p.m. and Dyke March organizers are working to move up the time of their event, which typically ends in the gay neighborhood. People involved with the Saturday, June 27 street party, formerly known as Pink Saturday, are hoping to avoid the violence that’s marred recent years by starting and ending the festival much earlier. Last year’s event went from 5 to 10:30 p.m. The shift in times at Pink Party will also impact the Dyke March, the annual trek from Dolores Park to the Castro that had served as the beginning of the Pink Saturday event. Dyke March’s Elizabeth Lanyon said in an email exchange that the march would also begin and end earlier this year, although exact times have yet to be worked out. Pink Party organizers last week shared some of their other plans, including street closures, at a meeting with neighborhood merchants that sometimes grew testy. Rebecca Rolfe, executive director of the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, told the Castro Merchants business group at their monthly meeting Thursday, May 7 that she and other planners are trying to make the party “safe and fun for all involved” while also making it a “stronger
LGBT community event.” Many feel that the festival has devolved from a celebration of LGBT rights into an excuse for people with little concern for gay history to get drunk and cause trouble. There’s a general belief that the crowd gets rowdier as the evening progresses. Stephen Powell, 19, was shot to death around the time the festival ended in 2010, and there have been numerous assaults and other incidents connected with the event since then. Citing concerns about violence, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which owns the Pink Saturday name and had coordinated the event for decades, announced in February that they wouldn’t produce this year’s festival. In April, the Sisters announced they had voted not to allow the community center and its production team to use the Pink Saturday name. The center recently announced the Pink Party moniker. Rolfe said there’s “been a feeling” that Pink Saturday had become “more of a street party and less of an LGBT community event,” and she and others are “trying to shift that back.” Courtesy SF LGBT Community Center There will be a “dispersal plan” in A preliminary map of this year’s Pink Party shows place so that people actually leave the area at 8, Rolfe said. Few details have three entrance gates, four stage areas, and food trucks been determined, but Ruth McFarlane, parked on Market Street. See page 9 >>
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