October 8, 2015 Edition of the Bay Area Reporter by Bay Area Reporter

New Pride board prez elected

ARTS

Russian ballet

Margaret Cho

The

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

Biden, Clinton wow LGBT audiences

Vol. 45 • No. 41 • October 8-14, 2015

Bringing sexy to Castro fair

by Lisa Keen

Rick Gerharter

ust 10 days before the first televised debate among the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden Courtesy Human elicited enthusiastic Rights Campaign cheers Saturday as Vice President they addressed two Joe Biden separate Human Rights Campaign events in Washington, D.C. It was an important opportunity for both to lay out their credentials and proposals to the national LGBT community, and the speeches illustrated some important contrasts between them. Biden has not yet announced whether he intends to enter the race for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, and his October 3 speech to the HRC National Dinner gave no indication he’s revving up for such a run. The address consisted mostly of anecdotes that he’s shared at many previous HRC events and – except for a clear endorsement of the recently introduced Equality Act – was more a look back at accomplishments than forward to future intentions. Clinton focused on specific things she would do for LGBT Americans “as president,” making a number of important promises and carefully couching others. She also eschewed her usual quick departure following her speech and waded into the friendly fray, shaking hands, and posing for photos with the large crowd gathered from various HRC boards and major HRC donors. When a lone audience member at HRC’s cavernous black tie sit-down banquet yelled out “Run, Joe, Run” as Biden was about to explain what “a number of you have said to me over the last three to four years,” Biden quickly replied, “No, didn’t say that,” then looked down at the podium and grinned as the crowd sat mostly quiet. “Oh, anyway ... what was I saying?” Then, the audience erupted into applause. Clinton’s appearance, at 10 a.m. Saturday morning, drew more of a rousing campaign-like response from an already standing assembly of HRC organizational stalwarts, chanting “Hill-a-ry, Hill-a-ry.”. Out of the jam-packed room, Clinton found and pointed to Supreme Court plaintiffs Jim Obergefell and Edie Windsor. And, in subtle ways, she addressed what are likely to be her weaknesses in soliciting LGBT support for her campaign if she finds herself in a tough See page 9 >>

Mike Evans, right, and his lawyer, John Campion, hurriedly leave the courtroom Tuesday after Evans entered a not guilty plea to grand theft.

Gay ex-SF cop denies embezzlement by Seth Hemmelgarn

Rick Gerharter

gay former San Francisco police officer pleaded not guilty this week to felony charges of grand theft and embezzlement. Mike Evans, 34, allegedly stole more than $16,000 from the LGBT police officers Pride

T From Stonewall to the White House, and activist to author he annual Castro Street Fair took place Sunday, October 4 and, after a day of perusing booths and checking out performances, crowds in front of the QBar got a treat when a go-go dancer

jumped into the front of the bar to entertain passersby. This year’s fair was dedicated to Cookie Dough, the drag queen persona of Eddie Bell, who died in February. For more photos, see the BARtab section.

by Jen Colletta

“

’m standing across the street from Stonewall in Sheridan Square. Here I was, an 18-year-old kid living at the YMCA in a $6-a-night room with no job, no prospects for the future, no real place to live and no money in my pocket. I’m thinking, what am I going to do? And it came to me: This is exactly what I want to do. I’m going to be a gay activist.” More than 45 years after that fateful night outside the Stonewall Inn, Mark Segal still considers himself, first and foremost, an activist. “That’s what’s inside me and what always will be,” he said. “Everything else is secondary.” Adding to his list of “secondary” titles is a new one: author. Segal, 64, the founder and publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, has just released his memoirs, And Then I Danced. The 320-page book takes readers from Segal’s meager beginnings in a Philadelphia housing project to his pinnacle of dancing with his husband in the White House. That was a journey that, Segal said, many have prompted him to write about over the years. But, it wasn’t until a 2007 reunion of Gay Youth – which he founded in New York City in 1969 – that he started to gain an appreciation for his own role in the LGBT community’s development. “We had the reunion in the New York Gay

Courtesy PGN

President Barack Obama greets Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal at a White House event.

Community Center and there were about 100 of us who created this big circle. Each of us talked and, as they went around, people were saying that the organization saved their lives, that they were going to commit suicide until they found Gay Youth or that we saved them from bullying or harassment,” Segal said. “It wasn’t until I was halfway home on the train that it all of a sudden hit me what had just happened. Literally in the

{ FIRST OF THREE SECTIONS }

See page 6 >>

train car, I just started howling, just crying out loud. It really affected me.” A few years later, another incident again brought Segal full circle: Comcast Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer David L. Cohen invited him to join the media conglomerate’s Joint Diversity Council. “I thought it was going to be just a rubberstamp position and I said I didn’t have time for it. And David said, ‘Mark, there are only 40 people nationwide being asked to join this advisory board. Don’t you understand your history? There you were 40 years ago disrupting media, and now we’re asking you to advise media.’” Cohen was referring to Segal’s infamous “zaps,” in which he targeted media personnel on air to raise awareness about LGBT issues. That such encounters caught him by surprise, Segal said, are in part attributable to his tendency to stay forward-focused. “I usually just go project to project to project and don’t look back,” he said. “So I really didn’t look back at all the things I had done or what the full impact of them was.” But, as the significance of his decades of activism began to evince itself to him, Segal started seriously considering recounting that work in book form, especially at the prompting of his now-husband, Jason Villemez. See page 8 >>

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<< Community News

2 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

SF police seek driver who hit gay cyclist

Courtesy Maxwell Wallace

Cyclist Maxwell Wallace

by Seth Hemmelgarn

an Francisco police are looking for the driver of a red Cadillac who allegedly struck a gay bicyclist and accelerated toward the man, with the cyclist taking a “scary” ride on the car’s hood. Maxwell Wallace, 24, of San Francisco, said the Monday, September 28 incident started at about 11 a.m. as he was riding his bike east on Fulton on his way to his health care job downtown. Wallace, who was in the bike lane, said that he had entered the inter-

section at Divisadero Street when “the car swiped me on the left side.” The driver stopped. Wallace said he put down his bike and “walked to the front of his car to take a photo of the license plate.” As Wallace stood there, the driver “pressed on the gas and tried to hit me. ... I jumped and hit the hood of his car and hit the windshield.” Wallace said the driver accelerated for 100 feet as he held on to the windshield. When the car finally stopped, Wallace got off. The driver “pulled over and waited for a few minutes,” but “they left the scene before police showed up,” he said. “It was incredibly scary,” Wallace said. “I was confused why the driver would try to deliberately run me over.” A photograph circulated on the Internet shows Wallace on the hood of the car. He said he didn’t know the photographer’s name. Wallace said he’s experienced “bruises and soreness” from the incident and was “shaken up, but I didn’t break anything.” Paramedics assessed him at the scene and he went to urgent care for treatment. He said the driver was “an older man” who was accompanied by a female passenger. Wallace, who’s been bicycling

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in the city since he was 8 and has “never been hit by a car” before, said, “I have full faith the SFPD will do a thorough investigation and that the DA’s office will prosecute him.” He said, “I would like to live in a city where it’s safe for me to bike, and I don’t have to be the victim of aggressive drivers.” Wallace would like to see the

driver charged with hit and run and assault with a deadly weapon. He’d also like to see the driver “cited for not giving me enough space.” Officer Albie Esparza, a San Francisco Police Department spokesman, said Friday that no suspects have been identified. He said the driver was a black male wearing “a light blue denim shirt, dark sunglasses, and a hat.”

Esparza said the driver’s height, weight, and approximate age were unknown. He also couldn’t provide the car’s license plate number. Anyone with information in the case may contact the police anonymous tip line at (415)575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411. Type SFPD in the subject line. The incident number is 150849922.t

Oakland police release photo in muralist’s slaying by Seth Hemmelgarn

akland police have released a photo of a “person of interest” in connection with last week’s fatal shooting of Antonio Ramos, 27, who was working on a mural in the city. The photo, taken from surveillance footage and released Monday, October 5, shows a black male in his 20s, who’s about 6 feet tall and has a “thin build and dark complexion,” according to a description provided by police spokeswoman Officer Johnna Watson. In the photo, the man is wearing what appears to be a blue Adidas jacket with white stripes on the arms and a black ball cap with a white logo. Ramos was taking photos of the Superheroes mural on West Street near 35th, underneath Interstate 580, when he was shot Tuesday,

Courtesy OPD

Oakland police have released a photo of this “person of interest” in the shooting of muralist Antonio Ramos.

September 29, mural designer Javier Rocabado, 56, of Richmond, said. Rocabado was working near Ramos when the shooting occurred.

He said Ramos had questioned what the man was doing around nearby art supplies. According to Watson, the incident occurred at about 10:28 a.m. “Medical personnel responded to the scene and transported Ramos to a local hospital, where he was pronounced deceased,” she said. Rocabado, who’s gay, described Ramos as “very generous” and “a sweetheart.” After the shooting, many people placed candles at the site and a vigil was held soon after. There’s been no indication that Ramos, of Emeryville, was LGBT. Anyone with information in the case may contact the Oakland Police Department Homicide Section at (510) 238-3821 or call Crime Stoppers of Oakland at (510) 777-8572. Crime Stoppers of Oakland has offered a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest.t

Gay man’s death deemed ‘suspicious’ by Seth Hemmelgarn

an Francisco officials are investigating the death of a gay Duboce Triangle man whose passing the medical examiner’s office has deemed “suspicious.” Peter Huerta, 51, was found dead at 25 Sanchez Street, Apartment 322. Officer Albie Esparza, a police spokesman, said the medical examiner’s office ruled Huerta’s death is suspicious because his T-shirt was torn and he was lying face down in his bed when a friend found him at 2:25 p.m. September 23. “I don’t think there were any obvious signs of trauma, like stabbing or shooting,” he said. Huerta’s partner, who didn’t live

Seth Hemmelgarn

Authorities have sealed the door to Peter Huerta’s apartment.

with him, had someone go to check on Huerta since he hadn’t heard from him since September 19. “It doesn’t seem there was any forced entry,” Esparza said. The door had been “locked from the

inside,” and a master key was used to get in. “We don’t know if it’s a homicide case yet,” he said, but the homicide unit “investigates all suspicious death cases until proven otherwise.” The medical examiner’s office would only offer Huerta’s name, age, and city of residence. It will likely be months before the agency determines whether Huerta’s death was a homicide and how exactly he died. There are security cameras throughout Huerta’s building, which is operated by the San Francisco Housing Authority and intended for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. See page 8 >>

ALRP to honor attorneys at benefit compiled by Cynthia Laird

he AIDS Legal Referral Panel will hold its From the Heart 32nd annual reception and auction benefit Wednesday, October 14 from 6 to 9 p.m. in the Julia Morgan Ballroom at the Merchants Exchange Building, 465 California Street (near Montgomery Street). The event will recognize attorneys and law firms that have made a lasting difference in the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and ALRP’s more than three decades of service to PWAs. Gay District 9 Supervisor David Campos will present this year’s Clint

Hockenberry Award to attorney Andrew Westley; the ALRP 2015 Attorney of the Year Award to Shawn Matloob; and the ALRP 2015 Firm of the Year Award to Perkins Coie LLP. Tickets start at $100 and can be purchased by contacting Jim McBride at (415) 701-1200, ext. 301 or jim@alrp.org or simply pay at the door.

Mapping LGBTQ histories in the East Bay

California Pride, an online, crowdsourced archives of memories, stories, and images related to sites throughout the Golden State associated with LGBTQ history, will have an event to discuss sites of his-

torical significance in the East Bay Thursday, October 15 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the White Horse Inn, 6551 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The White Horse is considered the nation’s longest-running queer bar. Tickets are $15 general admission, or $10 for members of the Oakland Heritage Alliance, GLBT Historical Society, California Preservation Foundation, or the California Historical Society. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information, see the group’s Facebook page, “Preserving LGBT Historic Sites in California.”

Alamo Square home tour

The Victorian Alliance of San Francisco will hold its Alamo See page 10 >>

CITY COLLEGE TRUSTEE ALEX RANDOLPH ▼

DISTRICT 3 SUPERVISOR JULIE CHRISTENSEN

SHERIFF VICKI HENNESSY

MAYOR ED LEE

ALICE B. TOKLAS DEMOCRATIC CLUB VOTE BY MAIL OR IN PERSON

Getting Our City Back on Track

AliceBToklas.org oklas.org

TREASURER JOSÉ CISNEROS ▼

CITY ATTORNEY A DENNIS HERRERA

DISTRICT ATTORNEY A GEORGE GASCÓN

Y V O TVE3 RB D NO

“

San Francisco faces many challenges including addressing our housing affordability crisis, improving our transportation infrastructure, and creating a more livable city. Alice’s slate, including two female first-time candidates that have already proved their leadership, will help the city move forward in 2016.

” ELECTION ENDORSEMENTS – Supervisor Scott Wiener

ELECTED OFFICIALS

LOCAL BALLOT MEASURES

ED LEE, Mayor

YES PROP A: Building More Affordable Housing

NO PROP F: Short-term Rental Restrictions

GEORGE GASCÓN, District Attorney

YES PROP B: Improving SF’s Parental Leave Policy

NO PROP G: Impractical Energy Restrictions

YES PROP C: Broader Lobbyist Disclosure

YES PROP H: Clean Energy Right to Know

YES PROP D: New Housing, Parks and Shops

NO PROP I: Mission Housing Moratorium

JOSÉ CISNEROS,▼ Treasurer DENNIS HERRERA, City Attorney VICKI HENNESSY, Sheriff JULIE CHRISTENSEN, District 3 Supervisor ALEX RANDOLPH,▼ City College Trustee

▼indicates that the candidate is LGBT

in Mission Bay NO POSITION

NO PROP E: Unworkable Requirements

PROP J: Historic Business Preservation Fund – no position

for City Meetings YES PROP K: Surplus City Property Regulations

Paid for by the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club PAC, FPPC #842018.

<< Open Forum

4 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

Volume 45, Number 41 October 8-14, 2015 www.ebar.com PUBLISHER Michael M. Yamashita Thomas E. Horn, Publisher Emeritus (2013) Publisher (2003 – 2013) Bob Ross, Founder (1971 – 2003) NEWS EDITOR Cynthia Laird ARTS EDITOR Roberto Friedman BARTAB EDITOR & EVENTS LISTINGS EDITOR Jim Provenzano ASSISTANT EDITORS Matthew S. Bajko • Seth Hemmelgarn CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Ray Aguilera • Tavo Amador • Race Bannon Erin Blackwell • Roger Brigham Brian Bromberger • Victoria A. Brownworth Brent Calderwood • Philip Campbell Heather Cassell • Belo Cipriani Richard Dodds • Michael Flanagan Jim Gladstone • David Guarino Liz Highleyman • Brandon Judell • John F. Karr Lisa Keen • Matthew Kennedy • Joshua Klipp David Lamble • Max Leger Michael McDonagh • David-Elijah Nahmod Paul Parish • Sean Piverger • Lois Pearlman Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota • Bob Roehr Donna Sachet • Adam Sandel • Khaled Sayed Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro Gwendolyn Smith • Jim Stewart Sean Timberlake • Andre Torrez • Ronn Vigh Ed Walsh • Cornelius Washington Sura Wood ART DIRECTION Jay Cribas PRODUCTION/DESIGN Max Leger PHOTOGRAPHERS Jane Philomen Cleland • FBFE Rick Gerharter • Gareth Gooch Lydia Gonzales • Jose Guzman-Colon Rudy K. Lawidjaja • Georg Lester • Dan Lloyd Jo-Lynn Otto • Rich Stadtmiller Steven Underhil • Dallis Willard • Bill Wilson ILLUSTRATORS & CARTOONISTS Paul Berge • Christine Smith ADVERTISING/ADMINISTRATION Colleen Small VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING Scott Wazlowski – 415.829.8937 NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE Rivendell Media – 212.242.6863

LEGAL COUNSEL Paul H. Melbostad, Esq.

BAY AREA REPORTER 44 Gough Street, Suite 204 San Francisco, CA 94103 415.861.5019 • www.ebar.com A division of BAR Media, Inc. © 2015 President: Michael M. Yamashita Chairman: Thomas E. Horn VP and CFO: Patrick G. Brown Secretary: Todd A. Vogt

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 orientation. Advertising rates available upon request. Our list of subscribers and advertisers is confidential and is not sold. The sexual orientation of advertisers, photographers, and writers published herein is neither inferred nor implied. We are not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

Lee, Christensen deserve your vote

an Francisco is riding the highs and lows of an unprecedented boom period. Unemployment is down to a measly 3.5 percent, the tech sector is hot, and new housing projects are under construction and are being planned. Unfortunately, economic success has increased the cost of living for residents and, significantly, decreased the supply of affordable housing – even for middle class wage earners like teachers. Two candidates, for mayor and District 3 supervisor, have viable solutions for the housing crunch. Mayor Ed Lee, running for re-election against several minor candidates, should easily win his race. Julie Christensen, the supervisor whom Lee appointed earlier this year to replace David Chiu, who won an Assembly seat, is our choice for District 3, which includes Nob Hill, Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, North Beach, and the Financial district.

Mayor’s race

The mayoral race is not in serious contention this year, after several top tier politicians passed on the opportunity to take on Lee. But the mayor is running a real campaign and making the rounds to talk about his accomplishments and his vision for the next four years. Meeting recently with the Bay Area Reporter’s editorial board, Lee noted that when he came into office four and a half years ago, unemployment was near 10 percent and the city faced a $385 million budget deficit. There was a “runaway train on pensions,” the mayor noted. The mayor got to work, meeting with labor, business, and others, and crafted a pension reform measure. The mayor was also instrumental in keeping tech firms in the city with the so-called Twitter tax break, which was designed to spark improvement along the mid-Market corridor (although he noted that it was never just for one company). However, now that the economy is humming, more and more longtime residents are being priced out of the city. If they are evicted, particularly from a rent-controlled building, they are unlikely to find or afford comparable accommodation. Families trying to make ends meet are also falling behind. “I hate every story of long-term residents being evicted and signaling that ‘this place isn’t for me anymore,’” the mayor said. He noted, though, that the crisis has been “decades in the making.” To address it, he has proposed allowing developers to exceed current height restrictions in

units in their projects may not be enough for those who disagree with it, but it’s an improvement from past efforts and has jump-started what will likely be a continued focus on securing land for housing and increasing housing stock. Lee has done a great job as mayor and deserves another term.

Christensen for D3 supervisor Rick Gerharter Rick Gerharter

Mayor Ed Lee

Supervisor Julie Christensen

exchange for including more affordable units across the west side of the city. He also has a plan to build or rehab 30,000 new units by 2020. About half of those would be at market-rate prices, another 7,000 will come from rehabilitating public housing. The balance would be the creation of new affordable housing. Another new program the mayor has implemented is the creation of a navigation center for homeless residents. The one location now, in the Mission, is a 24/7 facility where, in one case, an entire former homeless encampment was invited in, and people were allowed to bring their property and their animals. It is a new model that the mayor, the interfaith council, and policy makers, such as homeless director Bevan Dufty, developed after looking at shelter rules and deciding that innovation was necessary. In the five months that it’s been in operation, 200 people have come through the center. Of those, 83 percent secured permanent housing, and 16 percent wanted to return home, with the city providing transportation costs once family members have agreed to receive them. On LGBT issues, Lee has been a steadfast supporter. He’s consistently replaced AIDS funding cut by the federal government and has been supportive of cultural districts like one South of Market that includes the proposed Eagle Plaza. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its marriage decision in June, Lee was front and center outside City Hall, praising advocates who brought the court case and praising San Francisco values. In fact, it’s those values that Lee seeks to embody in city policy. When he talks to people, he told us, the two words he frequently includes are “invest” and “leverage.” His approach on projects such as rehabbing public housing and negotiating with developers for more affordable housing

In order for the mayor to continue the programs he has started, he needs a majority on the Board of Supervisors. In the nine months since she was appointed to the board, Julie Christensen has come a long way. In our recent meeting with her, Christensen was informed about her district, focused on the issues, and eager to continue her work. Her main opponent in the race, former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, has mellowed some since leaving the board, but his vow to be a check against the mayor would shift the board majority, potentially resulting in stalemates that the city doesn’t need. District 3 is among the city’s densest and housing, not surprisingly, is a major issue. Christensen wants to see fair and effective controls on landlords and companies for shortterm rentals and opposes Proposition F because it is too focused on Airbnb without addressing the problem of owners taking individual units off the rental market. “The sharing economy is zooming by like we’re trying to catch up,” she said. She noted the city’s new enforcement office for short-term rentals has already issued some big fines to violators. “It’s a start,” she said. “The next step is trying to preserve a split cap,” meaning different maximum days that whole units versus what she calls partial spaces, like a room in a house, can be legally rented. She’d like to see the current city law on short-term rentals be given a chance to work and if necessary, the law can be tweaked by the board. If passed, Prop F can only be fixed by returning to the ballot and not the Board of Supervisors. One of the strangest things she said she sees at City Hall is ordinances or resolutions that “respond to things – that are not effective.” “It’s not right to pass ill-advised resolutions,” she said. “I want to offer something real.” Christensen has been a solid vote on the board for LGBT issues such as programs for LGBT seniors and youth. She works well with many of her colleagues and city leaders. We were impressed with the difference in Christensen compared to our first meeting with her in March, a couple months after her appointment. She has grown into the job and has a solid track record for a full term. She has our endorsement.t

Vote no on Prop F

he arrival of the technology revolution and the sharing economy has had significant impacts, some good and some bad, on the lives of ordinary residents as well as visitors to San Francisco. Nowhere is this more evident than in the practice of renting out rooms in residential units or even entire units to visitors. Much anecdotal evidence indicates that this has been a boon for residents and visitors alike: residents can make a little extra money to make ends meet in a city where rents and other costs are constantly increasing; and visitors get the opportunity to experience San Francisco neighborhoods and also spend money with neighborhood businesses. But the impact turns negative when short-term rentals have the effect of removing housing supply from existing stock; when landlords abuse the concept to turn whole buildings into de facto hotels. So the mayor and the Board of Supervisors in consultation with all stakeholders (housing rights activists; hosting platforms such as Airbnb, VRBO and HomeAway; and those who host or don’t like hosting) set out to establish regulations that would preserve the advantages of short-term home sharing without incurring the negative effect of removing permanent housing. This resulted in San Francisco’s Short Term Rental Law, adopted in 2014, which requires that only permanent residents may offer a residential unit for short-term rental. Before offering a unit for short-term rental, the permanent resident must register the unit with the city’s Office of Short Term Residential Rental Administration and Enforcement. The permanent resident may not rent the unit for more than 90 days a year if the resident is not living there during the rental period. If the permanent resident is physically liv-

ing in the unit, there is no cap on the number of days that s/he may host a guest. San Francisco’s 14 percent hotel tax must be collected and paid to the city, which is estimated by the controller to amount to between $10 and $15 million annually. Violation of the law is a misdemeanor. Certain interested parties (residents of the building containing the short term rental unit or who live within 100 feet as well as certain housing nonprofits) may sue violators. The city may sue the hosting platforms. In 2015, reform legislation was enacted strengthening the enforcement mechanism and creating a “one stop shop” to enforce the law. Proposition F would junk the carefully thought out compromise legislation adopted through the normal legislative process after thorough public hearings and consultation with all interested parties. We think this proposition is a bad idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the existing law has not been given a chance to work. In fact, the city has already sued a number of landlords for several hundred thousand dollars for abuse of the law. A careful review of Prop F reveals numerous defects. It would limit shortterm rentals of a unit to 75 days per year even when the host is physically living in the unit. We can find no valid public policy for such an arbitrary limitation. There has been a great deal of public testimony from permanent residents who have lost their jobs, have a sick partner, or just can’t keep up with the cost of living that this limitation would create severe hardship by decreasing their supplemental income. Further, if a permanent resident rents a room for even one night, s/ he is faced with onerous public reporting and notice requirements that would violate that person’s privacy and discourage many people from trying

Rick Gerharter

Home sharing is on the ballot in the form of Proposition F.

short-term rentals at all (and we suspect this is the sponsor’s intention). But there are two flaws in the proposition that we consider fatal. First, once it is adopted by the voters, it can only be modified by going back to the voters. The whole sharing economy is evolving with breakneck speed and any regulations need to have flexibility. Usually, if an existing law shows to be inadequate in any way, it can be modified by the Board of Supervisors and the mayor. Not so with Prop F. The process would be delayed by signature gathering and the election cycle. Additionally, it gives a broad private right to sue both the violator and the hosting platform to any person who thinks s/he spots a violation with a right to collect special damages even when none are proven, as well as attorney fees. This opens up the door to frivolous litigation from neighborhood busybodies and lawyers for no valid public purpose. The sharing economy is here to stay. Home sharing is part of that new economy. Government must be vigilant to see that the law is enforced and that unforeseen problems are addressed quickly. Prop F is not the solution. Give the current law a chance to work. Vote no on F.t

Letters >>

Parking and parties

October 8-14, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 5

In his letter [Mailstrom, October 1], Castro merchant Patrick Batt seems to want to blame everyone from the city to limited street parking to (especially) Supervisor Scott Wiener because his business was off 80 percent – the day of the Pink Party – compared to last year. I admit to not knowing all the facts but something just doesn’t seem right with his letter. He doesn’t mention how his business fared the day/week/month before or after the Pink Party but does say that he and others are “weathering the increasing lack of shoppers in an aging and rapidly changing neighborhood.” So it’s not just that one Saturday. I also find it hard to believe that parking spaces not being available were responsible for his business being off. Does he really believe that if those parking spaces were available that everyone would be shopping at his business? What about the fact that 60,000 people attended the Pink Party? Parking didn’t seem to stop them from coming to the Castro. Would Mr. Batt have preferred the other alternative of canceling the event altogether? Also, what does the “cost” of putting on the Pink Party have to do with the local merchants? It’s not coming out of his or others’ business expenses.

All that aside, the whole point of changing producers of the event and making changes to security, starting and ending times, etc. was to prevent the violence that has happened in the past. Mr. Batt needs to ask which is more important: the fact that no one got shot, killed, or beat up or that he couldn’t find a way to squeeze another dollar out of the visitors and locals in the Castro that day. It’s a rhetorical question Mr. Batt, and like you, I also won’t be “holding my breath” for your answer. Joe Mac San Francisco

‘Rent boys’ existed long before Rentboy

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Regarding the Rentboy issue, men my age (61) will confirm that “renting” boys for sex existed long, long before there was an Internet. In the old days, men would sit in Polk Street bars that had windows in front and just watch as the meat parade went by and then give the “come in” finger to their desired target. Times have changed but physical needs and desires haven’t. Ken Hensley Alameda, California

SF D3 supervisor race draws citywide attention by Matthew S. Bajko

ith the control of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in the balance, the race for the District 3 seat this November has drawn citywide attention. District 3 Supervisor Julie Christensen, appointed in January to fill a vacancy by Mayor Ed Lee, is in a close contest against former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who served in the seat from 2001 to 2009. Also running to represent Chinatown, North Beach, and Fisherman’s Wharf at City Hall is Wilma Pang, a perennial candidate for the seat. The 11-member board is currently split 6-5 along political lines, with moderates holding the majority. Should Peskin succeed in ousting Christensen from office, it would swing control of the board to the progressive members, with Peskin likely to once again seek the board presidency. Thus, the race has drawn an inordinate amount of attention and campaign contributions, with more than $1 million already spent by the candidates and their backers. “This is the most exciting race in the city, haven’t you heard,” Christensen told the Bay Area Reporter during a recent editorial board meeting. Her opponents have painted Christensen as being in the pocket of the mayor and his allies within the tech community. It is a line of attack, she said, Peskin has often used against his opponents. “This is the shtick. What passes for progressive politics in this city is you attack those in office and say they are under the thumb ... to rile up the base,” she said. “Aaron in 2002 said he would bring down Willie Brown. He voted against Care Not Cash because it was Gavin Newsom’s idea. Now Ed Lee is the problem.” The city’s housing affordability issues, she argued, can be traced back to the policies Peskin supported when he served on the board. “Some of what we are reaping now is the fault of people like Aaron and those on the board with him,” she said. “Aaron downzoned a lot while he was in office. He down zoned the waterfront.” Meeting separately with the B.A.R. editorial board, Peskin countered that during his time on the board the supervisors passed numerous zoning proposals benefiting much of the city’s eastern neighborhoods as well as the redevelopment of Treasure Island and the Hunter’s Point shipyard. “To say the Board of Supervisors of the 2000s created the housing crisis is nonsensical,” he said. “I served

Barry Schneider Attorney at Law

Rick Gerharter

Courtesy Peskin for Supervisor campaign

Supervisor Julie Christensen

Former Supervisor Aaron Peskin

on a board that anticipated growth and rezoned 20 percent of the city.” Seeing so many residents of the city be evicted and unable to afford to stay in San Francisco, said Peskin, is what led him to run again for his board seat. “I figured I would go back to what I am good at and have an impact,” said Peskin, adding that the current board too often serves as a “rubber stamp” for Lee’s policies. “It’s about putting checks and balances back in the government ... I am not running for office to fight the mayor. No, it’s not about gridlock.” Until recently, argued Peskin, no one at City Hall was addressing the affordability issue in the city. It wasn’t until the passage of a ballot measure in 2013 that blocked the luxury development known as 8 Washington and last year’s Proposition B requiring any development along the city’s waterfront that exceeds current height limits to seek voter approval, said Peskin, that City Hall took notice. “That turned out to be the affordable housing act of 2014,” he said, noting how several developers upped the number of below-market-rate housing in their proposals to be 30 or 40 percent of the total units. “The Board of Supervisors could be mandating much higher percentages of affordable housing in large housing developments and they are failing to do that.”

vember 3, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. For more information about the November 3 election, visit http://www. sfelections.org or contact the Department of Elections at (415) 554-4375.

Voting in SF begins

Early voting for the fall races is now underway at the City Hall Voting Center, outside the Department of Elections office on the ground floor. It is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays but will be closed this Monday, October 12 due to the Columbus Day holiday. Weekend voting will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. the two weekends before the election, October 24-25 and October 31-November 1. For weekend access to City Hall, the public must enter on Grove Street. The voting center will also be open on Election Day, Tuesday, No-

LGBT center hosts election forum

As part of its LGBTQ Economic Justice Month program, the LGBT Community Center in San Francisco is hosting an election forum next week focused on how the city’s housing crisis is impacting the LGBTQ community. The panel, titled “Making the LGBT Vote Count: LGBTQ Voters Forum,” will include Transgender Law Center Executive Director Kris Hayashi, Our Families Coalition Executive Director Judy Appel, and Shannon Way, the director of programs at HomeownershipSF. The discussion will take place from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Thursday, October 15 in the center’s second floor Rainbow Room.

Pot measure includes AIDS funding

Over the weekend ReformCA, a coalition of groups working to legalize use of marijuana in California, announced it had filed its measure with the state attorney general as it attempts to place it on the November 2016 ballot. And in response to a request from a San Francisco-based HIV nonprofit, it includes funding for AIDS services and other health needs. As the Political Notebook reported last month, half a dozen groups have either filed paperwork with state elections officials or indicated they plan to do so in coming weeks to put a measure before voters next fall that would allow for the personal use of marijuana in California. Medical use of cannabis in the Golden State was legalized with the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996. ReformCA is seen as one of the most likely of the campaigns to succeed in gathering the required signaSee page 9 >>

ebar.com

<< Community News

6 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

Meow elected new Pride board prez by David-Elijah Nahmod

he board that oversees San Francisco Pride elected new leaders this week. Michelle Meow, who has deep experience with SF Pride due to her board work and co-hosting the television broadcast of the parade, was chosen by her fellow directors to be the next president. Also at the October 6 meeting of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee board, new directors Melanie Nathan, Joey “Cupcake” Stevenson, and John Weber were formally seated, as were re-elected board members Jesse Oliver Sanford and Justin Taylor. In other officer elections, Joey Cain and Gary Virginia both accepted the nomination for vice president. Virginia had served the last two years as board president. “In the last two years I established new relationships for Pride,” Virginia said right before the vote. “We have a good relationship with City Hall.” He also said he wanted to pass those relationships along to Meow. Cain said he wanted to see the board achieve economic success. He also recalled divisive Pride boards in the past. “I want to see us getting back to working in consensus,” he said. “I feel I can reach out to people out-

David-Elijah Nahmod

New SF Pride board President Michelle Meow

side my own community.” The board, voting by secret ballot, chose Cain for vice president. Nathan and Larry Crickenberger were the sole nominees for secretary and treasurer, respectively, and therefore took those positions after the ballots were cast. “I enjoy serving,” Nathan said. “I have a very strong legal background and writing experience.” “Thank you for your trust in me,” said Crickenberger. “This board has tremendous potential.” Crickenberger added that he hopes to open discussions on how to fund the organization. Meow, also known as Michelle Sinhbandith, acknowledged former

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board member Marsha Levine as her mentor. She also expressed her commitment to a woman’s right to choose and to stopping the violence against transgender women. “We can come together and love one another,” Meow said. Levine and departing board member John Caldera were thanked for their service and given certificates of appreciation. A bottle of champagne was also given to each. Virginia was given a gavel as a parting gift for his two terms as president, which he accepted amid much laughter. Virginia remains a member of the Pride board, while Levine will continue in her contracted position as Pride parade manager. “I’d like to thank the outgoing officers,” said Nathan, as she took her seat on the board for the first time. “They’re a tough act to follow. Pride means an awful lot to me.” Other new board members were also pleased to take their seats. “I’m really excited to be here,” said Stevenson. “Thank you for trusting me on this board.” Nathan and Stevenson were the top vote getters at the Pride board elections last month, taking in 104 and 86 votes, respectively. Weber stressed the importance of civil discourse as he was seated. “Even though we may not agree on everything, we should attack the issue and not the person,” he said, also adding his commitment to give a platform to minority voices. The board then voted to move its monthly meetings from the first Tuesday to the first Wednesday, beginning in November. Two remaining open board seats will be appointed at a future meeting.t

Gay ex-SF cop

From page 1

Alliance when he was the group’s treasurer. Just before his superior court hearing Tuesday, October 6 before Judge Harry Dorfman, Evans said, “I’m not making any comments. You can talk to my attorney,” John Campion. After Tuesday’s brief hearing, Campion said he’d just received evidence in the case, so he couldn’t say how much money Evans had allegedly taken. The alliance’s secretary has said that Evans has paid back the money. Asked about how much money had been paid back, Max Szabo, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, said, “I can’t get into any information that may or may not be in the warrant,” which is still sealed. Information from the Pride Alliance indicates the allegations came up at an October 2014 board meeting. Police Chief Greg Suhr has said Evans resigned from the department “late last year.” Evans was booked into custody Thursday, October 1 and released on $15,000 bail shortly thereafter. Campion declined to comment on whether Evans, who was extradited from Texas, would be staying in San Francisco. Retired gay police Lieutenant Chuck Limbert allegedly tried to block complaints about Evans when Limbert was the alliance’s president. There’s no word yet on whether Limbert, who denied the allegations, will also face charges. In a text message to the Bay Area Reporter last week, Limbert declined to comment on whether he’s being investigated. Officer Albie Esparza, a police spokesman, said last week that Suhr has “made it very clear” that “no one is above the law. ... If officers break the law, it’s no different than anyone else, and the department takes that seriously.” Evans’ next court date is December 3 for a pre-hearing conference. Assistant District Attorney Mike Sullivan is the prosecutor who appeared on the case Tuesday.t

Business News>>

t Gay-led SF center promotes the art of bookmaking by Matthew S. Bajko

ne of the oldest pieces of equipment found behind the doors of the former warehouse space dates to the late 1880s. Made by the F.P. Rosback Company of Chicago (now called the Rosback Company and located in Michigan), it allows users to perforate paper. Another machine is referred to as the guillotine and is used to slice through thick stacks of paper. There are also machines for gluing, titling, and sewing wood spines of books. A collection of lithograph stones assists with paring leather to prepare it to be formed into leather binding for books. In the building’s main room is a collection of different printing presses that anyone, once certified to use them, can rent by the hour to create paper products ranging from wedding invitations to posters. Gutenberg would be in awe. The 7,000 square foot space at the foot of the city’s Potrero Hill neighborhood is home to the San Francisco Center for the Book. For nearly two decades it has been promoting and preserving the art of bookmaking. “When the center was founded, it was founded to promote the book as a contemporary art form,” said Jeff Thomas, its executive director. “The paper, ink, printing, binding, covering, and structure itself is meant to be representative of what the artist is trying to create.” Thomas, who is gay, has led the book center since June 2014 and is preparing to celebrate the nonprofit’s 20th anniversary in 2016. Co-founded by Mary Austin and Kathleen Burch, it opened its doors to the public on July 30, 1996. “I was really interested in getting involved in craft,” said Thomas, who knits in his free time and was hired in 2012 as the book center’s development director. “I love what is done here, although I am an amateur.” Duff Axsom, 70, a gay board member emeritus and longtime volunteer with the center, became involved in its fourth year. He first turned to the book center in search of a social outlet at a time when the city’s gay community was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic. “The reason, frankly, I got more and more involved here was after I came through the 1980s AIDS crisis my community had fallen apart,” recalled Axsom, a poet who has used the book center to produce broadsides of his works. “I was looking for other community and this was a natural fit. It’s always been open to the gay community.” Leigh McLellan, 65, who identifies as lesbian, designs books and has worked as an instructor at the book center since 2002. “I think queer people always have been involved in letterpress. There was never a time we had to break in,” said McLellan. Today, the nonprofit center offers between 300 to 400 classes a year, reaching 1,000 students ranging in age from 18 on up. Fridays it hosts a letterpress class from the California College of the Arts. The technological advances wrought to the graphic arts by the digital age have benefited the book center, said Axsom. Printing plates once arranged by hand using metal or wood type can now be done on computers. Meanwhile, designers and artists craving a more tactile experience can turn to the book center. “People want to get ink on their hands after sitting at Adobe all day,” Axsom said.

October 8-14, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 7

And the hi-tech sector has provided the book center, which operates on an $800,000 annual budget, a new revenue source. “Our earned revenue has been growing. We offer corporate teambuilding workshops where Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies will bring their graphic designers in,” noted Thomas. The public is invited to visit the gallery space at the book center, located at 375 Rhode Island Street. Admission is free daily between 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. The exhibits rotate throughout the year, with the newest a popup six-day showcase celebrating 50 years of Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater. “We’ve never done a queer focused exhibition,” said Thomas. “It is on the dock to do one.” The book center also holds an annual holiday book arts and craft fair that features handmade gifts, hand bound journals, book arts, prints, letterpress printed cards, calendars, wrapping paper, and other items for sale by individual vendors. This year’s fair will take place

Rick Gerharter

San Francisco Center for the Book studio manager Chad Johnson demonstrates the process of letterpress printing as board member Duff Axsom, left, instructor Leigh McLellan, and Executive Director Jeff Thomas look on.

from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, November 21. For more information about the holiday sale, gallery shows, and classes offered by the book center, visit its website at http://www.sfcb. org.

Port bar readies to set sail

With an anticipated opening in early 2016, the Port bar in down-

“ What happens

”

town Oakland this month announced it was looking to hire a part-time project assistant with the possibility of the contract position turning into a full-time bar staff or management role. In early 2013 Sean Sullivan and his partner, Richard Fuentes, announced they had signed a lease for 2021 Broadway, the former Ragsmatazz shoe store next door to the

Paramount Theatre. Vacant for over a decade, the building required seismic work before the bar interior could be installed. The property owner has also been working to restore the 1930s facade. “I would say late January or early February in that general timeframe,” Sullivan recently told the B.A.R. when asked about the expected opening. “I would say we are very optimistic but I am aware of everything that would delay the project, of course.” The Port bar would be the second gay-owned bar on that stretch of Broadway. Across the street a block away, at 2120 Broadway, is the building that houses Club BnB, formerly known as the Bench and Bar. Both are near the 19th Street BART station in downtown Oakland and a few blocks from the city’s Lake Merritt area. Interest in the Port bar’s opening has remained high since it was announced, said Sullivan. Close to 650 people have liked its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ OneGayDrink. “I can’t even go out without being bombarded with questions about See page 10 >>

Current Regulation

If Prop F passes:

Registration

All short-term rentals are required to be registered with The City

Short-term rental hosts will be required to report to The City when they sleep at home or are away

Restrictions

Short-term rentals of whole units are limited to 90 days a year

Bans short-term rental of all in-law units

Hotel taxes are paid on every stay

City will lose $500,000 a month in hotel taxes generated by short-term rentals1

In July, The City opened a new office to enforce and administer the law

Allows neighbors to sue each other over perceived violations regardless of The City’s findings

if Prop F passes

Taxes Enforcement

Airbnb Analysis – Prop. F, 7/11/15

JOIN US IN OPPOSING PROP F

Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom

Mayor Ed Lee

Supervisor Scott Wiener

San Francisco Democratic Party

Paid for by SF For Everyone, No on Proposition F, Sponsored and Major Funding by Airbnb. Financial disclosures available at sfethics.org. FPPC #1378051

<< LGBT History Month

8 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

Book tells trans prison stories

‘The Women of San Quentin’ comes amid historic changes by Seth Hemmelgarn

new book chronicling the lives of nine transgender women across the country who have been incarcerated comes amid historic progress for such prisoners. The Women of San Quentin: Soul Murder of Transgender Women in Male Prisons, by Kristin Schreier Lyseggen, was released in September. Schreier Lyseggen, who lives in Berkeley, traveled around the United States to speak with incarcerated trans women about their experiences with problems including rape, assault, and trying to get access to hormones. On one front, at least, there has been some good news as California prison officials recently announced they would provide gender-affirming surgery for a transgender inmate. Additionally, a transgender woman in Georgia was recently released, apparently due to pressure from a lawsuit. But Schreier Lyseggen, who didn’t give her age, indicated despite progress, problems are likely to persist for many people. “In order to find solutions, we have to see how did these people end up in prison in the first place?” Schreier Lyseggen said. “It is a race issue. Transgender women of color are suffering the most. ... They are down at the bottom of the caste system we have,” frequently struggling with a lack of employment, health care, and other problems.

Stonewall

From page 1

“Jason would say to me every night, ‘Do the book, do the book. Sit at your computer and start writing,’” Segal said, noting that at the time he was wrapping up work on one of the nation’s first LGBT-friendly affordable senior living facilities, and Villemez knew the memoir-writing would be a good way to keep that momentum going. “He was conscious that the minute that ribbon was cut, I’d go from being 2,000 feet into the air to crashing to the ground if I didn’t have a project to work on,” Segal laughed.

Beginning the project

Hiring an agent and publisher was easy work, Segal said. But, deciding what information to include and what to leave out was not. Segal had been amassing vignettes of his recollections in the past few years, which he thought could serve as the memoir’s foundation. “I thought I would just take what I had started writing and put it into book form. It didn’t quite happen like that; once I signed the contract, we basically threw out everything I had and went back to scratch,” he laughed. He set to work creating an outline of his life, checking dates and facts and researching his own storied history. That history began in 1951. Segal’s hardworking yet poverty-stricken parents, Shirley and Martin, raised him and his brother in a South Philadelphia housing project, after

‘Suspicious’ death

From page 2

Neighbors described Huerta as “nice” but indicated he may have had problems involving the company he kept. Greg Baysek, who’s in his 40s, said Huerta was “easy-going” and “trustworthy.” “If we were doing our laundry together, I could ask him to watch my laundry,” Baysek said. He last saw Huerta “almost a month ago,” looking thin and “out of it.” Huerta acknowledged using

Asked about solutions, told police in 1980 “that Schreier Lyseggen said, the gun used to murder “First, we have to make someone was hers, even them safe. We can’t just though it wasn’t. She was sit and watch them being serving a life sentence raped.” without the possibility of She added, “People like parole for a murder she me who are white, privisaid she did not commit.” leged, and straight” need In its news release, Flor Herb Schreier to “start getting involved Bermudez, TLC’s detenand not treat these people Author Kristin tion project director, said, as second and third-class Schreier Lyseggen “Ms. Quine will be the first citizens.” transgender inmate in the One of the people feacountry to receive gendertured in The Women of San Quentin affirming surgery while incarcerated, is Shiloh Quine. to our knowledge.” In August, the California DepartTLC Executive Director Kris ment of Corrections and RehaHayashi said, “This historic settlebilitation reached a groundbreaking ment is a tremendous victory, not just settlement with Quine, 56, to profor Shiloh and transgender people in vide surgery and other medical care. prison, but for all transgender people “After so many years of almost who have ever been denied medical giving up on myself, I will finally care or basic recognition of our hube liberated from the prison within manity just because of who we are.” a prison I felt trapped in, and feel In an email, CDCR spokesman whole, both as a woman and as a Jeffrey Callison said officials treat human being,” Quine said in a news situations like Quine’s on a “caserelease from the Oakland-based by-case basis.” Transgender Law Center, which has Callison said his agency “evalubeen helping to represent her. ates every case individually and in Quine has been serving a term of the Quine case, every medical doclife without the possibility of parole tor and mental health clinician who since 1981 after being convicted in Los has reviewed this case, including Angeles County for first-degree murtwo independent mental health exder, kidnapping, and robbery. She’s perts, determined that this surgery being held in Mule Creek State Prison, is medically necessary for Quine,” a men’s facility in Ione, California. who’s also known as Rodney James. According to the book, Quine In a phone interview in September, wrote to Schreier Lyseggen that she’d CDCR spokeswoman Terry Thorn-

Courtesy SFINX Publishing/ The Women of San Quentin

Shiloh Quine, a transgender prisoner, recently reached a groundbreaking settlement with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

ton noted another part of the settlement is that the agency’s policy will allow transgender people access to all the items listed in prison catalogs. “If a transgender inmate wants female items, and she’s in a male institution, she’ll have access to those items as well now,” Thornton said. Another woman Schreier Lyseggen profiled has also been in the news recently. Ashley Diamond, 37, is suing the Georgia Department of Corrections for denying her hormone treatments, which she had received before being incarcerated, and a safe environment, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. She was released in August from Augusta State Medical Prison after serving almost three years of an 11-year sentence for “a nonviolent offense,” according to SPLC, which filed a lawsuit

the city took over Martin’s bodega by eminent domain. As a member of the only Jewish family in the project, Segal’s feelings of being an outsider germinated from a young age, compounded by his worn clothes and lack of material possessions. But what Segal didn’t lack as a child was conviction; in elementary school, he refused to sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” his first act of civil disobedience, which was supported by his mother. His grandmother, Fannie Weinstein, also played a pivotal role in his upbringing; she brought Segal, at age 13, to a civil rights demonstration at Philadelphia City Hall, his first public demonstration – of many to come. Exploring the struggles of his childhood in that first chapter, Segal said, was among the most challenging aspects of writing And Then I Danced – as the self-doubt he experienced in his youth resurfaced. “The first chapter was extremely difficult to write because there are a lot of things in there that people don’t know about me. I struggled to continue with it because I really didn’t believe in myself,” he said. “I had Jason read the first chapter and at the end he was sitting on the sofa crying, and I said, ‘Wow, you really didn’t like it that much?’ And he said, ‘No, there were things here even I didn’t know.’ He really liked it and his support got me to continue.” Working with editor Michael Dennehy, Segal crafted and re-crafted 15 chapters for a final product that takes readers through the national LGBT community’s evolution, seen alongside Segal’s own development.

From his burgeoning coming out – beginning with a childhood pull to the Sears Roebuck male models – Segal’s story is as much a commentary on the times as it is on his own experience. “There was no name for it, at least none that I knew, but somehow it seemed wrong that I was looking at the men in the catalog,” he wrote. Eventually, Segal learned the name for “it” and came out to his family, who, despite the wholly unaccepting societal nature of the time, embraced his identity. Segal’s own self-acceptance was intrinsically tied to New York City; he wrote that he realized at a young age that the city was a haven for gay people, so he moved to the Big Apple the moment he graduated high school. He quickly became immersed in a growing and changing LGBT scene. The premiere LGBT activist group, Mattachine Society, was gradually becoming outdated, being ushered

aside by a new wave of social revolution across the country. And, a month after he moved to New York City, Segal found himself at Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969. And Then I Danced takes readers through Segal’s first-hand account of the seminal riot and ensuing LGBT mobilization. From those four reactionary nights came Gay Liberation Front, an organization that Segal said hasn’t gotten the credit it’s due. “From the ashes of Stonewall came GLF, and GLF created the foundation of everything that today is the gay community,” Segal said. “We created the first trans organization in America in 1969. We created the first gay youth organization that dealt with gay issues in 1969. We created the first medical alerts for the gay community and the first gay community center. And at the end of that first year, we created the first gay Pride march. And all of it had to

methamphetamine, Baysek said, “but he didn’t want to get into a whole conversation about it.” Huerta would have visitors in “waves,” usually men in their late 20s or 30s, Baysek said. He once warned Huerta about one of the men, who’d stand by Huerta’s door when he wasn’t there. He last saw the man six to nine months ago, when “he asked if I could get crystal meth,” Baysek said. “Peter sometimes would have guests over that would not come through the front door,” he said. Instead, the visitors would enter

through a door that would be left propped open. Baysek said people would often come at 3 or 4 a.m. (There’s a small front desk just inside the building’s locked front door, but nobody was stationed there when the Bay Area Reporter visited last weekend.) Hazel Nielson, 75, a neighbor and friend of Huerta’s, described him as “a very good gentleman” she liked to exchange gossip with. Nielson said she last saw him “a few days” before his body was found. He’d been walking his dogs, a Chihuahua named Joey and a

mutt called Chloe. “I was just floored” to learn of his death, she said. “He seemed just fine.” She didn’t have any idea what may have happened to him. “I don’t know anything that happens behind closed doors,” Nielson said. She also didn’t know if Huerta had any trouble with drugs, but she offered some information similar to Baysek’s. “I knew he had company,” she said of Huerta, describing his visitors as young men who were homeless and “dirty.” Sometimes, they’d

Courtesy PGN

Mark Segal carried a “Gay Power” banner at a 1972 demonstration.

on Diamond’s behalf in February. The organization said in a news release that Diamond had been housed with male prisoners and was “sexually assaulted eight times.” Diamond was going to be up for parole this fall, but SPLC attributed her release to the lawsuit. “I’m overjoyed to be with my family again and out of harm’s way,” Diamond said in the nonprofit’s statement. “Although the systematic abuse and assaults I faced for more than three years have left me emotionally and physically scarred, I’ll continue to fight for justice and to shine a light on the gross mistreatment of transgender inmates in Georgia and nationwide.” Facing scrutiny, GDC has “revised its gender dysphoria policy and adopted new guidelines to provide constitutionally appropriate treatment,” SPLC said, and the state agency agreed to give Diamond access to hormones. However, the dosage was “inadequate for months,” the group said. GDC spokeswomen didn’t respond to the Bay Area Reporter’s requests for comment. In response to an emailed question about why she used San Quentin in her book’s title, Schreier Lyseggen said, among other reasons the northern California institution “has been a symbol of prison life in America,” and two of the women she wrote about have been incarcerated there.t do with ending invisibility and creating community.” It was with those missions in mind that, upon his return to Philadelphia in the 1970s, Segal undertook a campaign to target television coverage of LGBT issues, an undertaking that secured a wealth of television firsts – and forged his unlikely friendship with the late Walter Cronkite. From the airwaves, Segal turned his attention to political circles, using his burgeoning notoriety to stage uniquely crafted demonstrations, such as chaining himself to a Christmas tree in Philadelphia City Hall and throwing a faux reception in the office of then-District Attorney Arlen Specter to thank him for his support for gay rights legislation – which he had not yet offered. Segal said it’s those kinds of actions that are needed to enliven the LGBT community’s modern political activism. “We need that spark of creativity and fun again. Gay liberation can be fun,” he said. “We have to get away from the Internet and the online petitions and start doing things to get people’s attention. Our leaders are stuck in this quagmire because they’re used to being in suits and ties in offices in New York and Washington, D.C., and not out among people. We need to think outside the box. Be nonviolent, but think outside the box.” Creativity needs to be paired with tenacity, Segal noted; another message he hopes readers, especially of See page 10 >> sleep outside Huerta’s door when he wouldn’t let them in, she said. Whatever happened, Baysek said, “He’ll be missed, and I hope he’s in a better place.” Esparza wasn’t able to share whether any drugs or drug paraphernalia were found in Huerta’s apartment. Rose Marie Dennis, a housing authority spokeswoman, said Huerta’s building is “very secure.” “Our condolences go out to Mr. Huerta and his family and friends. ... We feel, certainly, very sad for the situation,” Dennis said.t

t <<

Community News>>

Biden, Clinton

From page 1

contest with Biden or with the popular progressive candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “You’ve helped change a lot of minds, including mine,” said Clinton, “and I’m personally very grateful for that.” It was a reference to the oft-cited criticism that Clinton did not support marriage equality until after a majority of the American public was already polling its support for it. Biden said he believes the remaining work for the LGBT movement “will come much more quickly and more surely.” And while he said he “strongly supports” the Equality Act, he did not promise he would push for it but said rather that “it will pass.” Acknowledging that there are still young LGBT people “terrified of being rejected by the world” around them, Clinton said she knows “we still have work to do.” “Our work isn’t finished until every single person is treated with equal rights and dignity they deserve,” said Clinton. “... I want you to know that I get it. I see the injustices and the dangers that you and your families still face. And I’m running for president to end them once and for all.” The HRC gathering responded with prolonged and thunderous applause to that line and one that quickly followed: “I’m running for president to stand up for the fundamental rights of LGBT Americans and all Americans. That’s a promise, from one HRC to another.”

Political Notebook

From page 5

tures it needs to place its measure on the ballot. Several other legalization proponents have been waiting to see the final draft of its initiative to determine if they would sign on or move forward with competing proposals. The ReformCA initiative would designate 2 to 20 percent of the ex-

October 8-14, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 9

“Congress must pass the federal Equality Act,” said Clinton, later. “As president, I will fight for it and I hope many of you will be with me when I sign it into law.” Regarding the service of transgender people in the military, Biden stated that “transgender people are able to serve,” thanks to a directive from Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. Clinton more accurately noted that transgender people “are still banned from serving” unless they remain closeted, and she stated her support for “the policy review” Carter directed, adding that she “hopes” transgender people will be allowed to serve openly.

Similarities

Courtesy Human Rights Campaign

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin, waves to the crowd at last Saturday’s breakfast.

There were similarities in both speeches. Both emphasized the role of all individual LGBT Americans in reaching today’s greater acceptance of marriage equality and nondiscrimination. Both acknowledged that, even though the law now enables same-sex couples to be married in any state, it is still legal in most states to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Both urged that LGBT Americans stand up for the rights of LGBT people around the world. And both took swipes at the current field of Republican presidential hopefuls. Biden got one of the biggest applause lines of the day when he said, “There are homophobes still left – most of them are running for president.” Referring to the “ridicu-

lousness” of the GOP candidates, Clinton noted that Ben Carson said marriage equality “was the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire.” “If any one of them, heaven forbid, were ever to be elected president, they will do their best to enact policies that will threaten you and your families,” said Clinton. “Every single Republican candidate for president is against marriage equality – every one of them. Many of them are against anti-discrimination laws. Many are against samesex couples adopting. ... If you are ever in a forum with them, see if you can get them to even say the word ‘transgender.’” Most recent national polls show Clinton has a clear advantage over other Democrats to win the nomination. The latest poll, conducted by

cess tax revenues generated from the sale of marijuana toward “disease care and prevention, such as programs for screening, care, prevention, and treatment for HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis.” Project Inform Executive Director Dana Van Gorder, who initiated the ask from the legalization efforts for HIV funding, told the B.A.R. this week that he was pleased with Re-

formCA’s proposal. He added that he is confident that any competing ballot measures filed would also include a set aside for HIV services. “It appears as though we will be in good shape,” he said. “People recognize the role of the HIV community and the issue as a whole. And they seem to be very comfortable with directing the funding to the issue.”t

USA Today, found 41 percent of 430 “likely” Democratic primary and caucus voters said they would vote for Clinton, 23 percent for Sanders, 20 percent for Biden. A similar poll by the Pew Research Center found Clinton with even stronger support from “potential Democratic primary voters nationwide.” (Clinton 45, Sanders 24, Biden 8.) But the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal polls testing individual Democratic-Republican matchups, show only Biden would, at this point, beat all four Republican frontrunners (Donald Trump, Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Jeb Bush). Clinton and Sanders would beat only Trump. Biden is not likely to jump into the October 13 Democratic presidential debate unprepared, and he still has until November to meet deadlines to participate in the key first caucuses and primaries. While Democratic debate participants may, like their Republican counterparts, be asked one or two LGBT-related questions, Clinton’s speech was an especially important opportunity for her to state her positions on a wide range of issues of specific concern to LGBT voters. For the most part, Clinton seemed unabashed about putting herself on record, even ahead of the nationally televised debate, in support of LGBT Americans on most issues. But she did seem to be choosing her words very carefully with regard to allowing gays to adopt.

Calling discrimination against LGBT people in adoption “one of the cruelest vestiges of anti-gay bigotry,” Clinton said that, “as president, I would push to cut off federal funding for any public child welfare agency that discriminates against LGBT people.” Most discrimination against allowing LGBT people to adopt is being conducted, not by “public agencies” but by Catholic Charities and other private, religious-based organizations. On another matter where religious-based discrimination has played out, however, Clinton has made clear that she believes Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis has a legal duty to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even though Davis claims an “authority from God” prevents her from doing so. And Clinton promised in her speech Saturday that she would not be the sort of politician who is “courting your support at election time, and then disappearing as if your lives and your rights are just a political bargaining chip.” “Those who know me know that’s not me,” said Clinton. “I’ve been fighting alongside you and others for equal rights and I’m just getting warmed up.” “Your families matter to me and you matter to me,” said Clinton, closing her 25-minute speech. “I’m going to keep, as I have throughout my life, fighting for you, your rights, your children, your futures. ... And I am proud to be fighting right alongside you.”t

In Memoriam Marcus Hernandez

March 22, 1932 – October 8, 2009

City and County of San Francisco

Department of Elections

Election Day Tuesday

November 3, 2015 Vote at City Hall

Vote at Your Polling Place

Vote by Mail

October 5 – November 3 requests by October 27

on Election Day by October 19

sfelections.org (415) 554-4375

/sfelections

@sfelections

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

10 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

News Briefs

From page 2

Square House Tour Sunday, October 18 from 1 to 5 p.m. This year’s 43rd annual event will include tours of the interiors of eight exceptional Victorian homes and a historic church, including the Westerfield House, a San Francisco landmark and National Registerlisted home. Prices for the tour range from $40 to $55. Discounts are available for Victorian Alliance members, groups of 10 or more, and for purchases made before October 10. For tour information and online ticket sales, please visit http://www.victorianalliance.org or call (415) 824-2666.t

Stonewall

From page 8

the younger generation, take away from his book. “I wanted to show young gay people how our community got the rights that we have today. It wasn’t writing letters or visiting Congresspeople. Many of us got arrested, received death threats, were targets of physical violence. It was a rough ride getting to where we are today. It wasn’t, ‘One, two three. We’re there.’ Any social justice movement takes a lot of work and a lot of time.” For Segal, much of that work in the past four decades was focused on getting Philadelphia Gay News off the ground. And Then I Danced traces the history of the publication, which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year, from its meager beginnings in a building with no plumbing and a leaky roof, where staffers would use quarters from the newspaper boxes for lunches to a 2014 awards dinner where it received a national award for its investigative series on the murder of a local transgender woman. Exploring such transitions through the writing process, Segal said, was eye opening. “I encourage anybody, whether you publish it or not, to write your own memoir. You learn so much about yourself,” he said. “It sounds strange, but I don’t think I had an appreciation for what I’ve accomplished until I read the finished book. This made me look back. I didn’t realize all the issues I was involved in, and how much change they had made over the years. I’m just beginning to get in touch with my own history. And I’m finding out I’m a different person than I thought I was.”t

Business Briefs

From page 7

when the bar will open,” he said. “Every single day, whether I am out getting coffee or running around the lake, people will try to stop me and ask about the project.”

Honor Roll

San Francisco’s worker-owned and operated community food store Rainbow Grocery Cooperative is celebrating its 40th anniversary this month. With 240 workers and more than $50 million in yearly sales, it is one of the largest such grocery businesses in the United States. To mark its milestone year, the store at 1745 Folsom Street is holding a series of special events Monday, October 26 through Sunday, November 1. The weeklong celebration includes samplings from local food producers, product demonstrations by worker-owned food producers, pop ups and product giveaways. For more information, visit http://www.rainbow.coop/.t Got a tip on LGBT business news? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 829-8836 or e-mail m.bajko@ ebar.com.

Legal Notices>> ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-15-551513

In the matter of the application of: PING CHUNG YU, 1910 31ST AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner PING CHUNG YU is requesting that the name PING CHUNG YU aka BING CHUNG YU aka JONATHAN PING YU be changed to JONATHAN PING CHUNG YU. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514 on the 12th of January 2016 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

OCTOBER 08, 15, 22, 29, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036673900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LATER DAZE, 631 O’FARRELL ST #1214, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed DANA A. CHRISTY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/11/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/11/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036679900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SAN FRANCISCO IN FLOOR HEATING AND HYDRO SOLAR SYSTEMS, 518 24TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed RICHARD D. SEAMAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/15/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/15/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036671700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: VISION GRAPHICS, 1207 PLYMOUTH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94112. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed MANUEL AMILCAR SAAVEDRA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/10/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/10/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036672100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BARRISTER LAW GROUP; MONARCH MEDICAL GROUP; MONARCH REALTY GROUP; METRO MEDIA MARKETING; ENG DESIGN; ENG ENTERPRISES; SPYGLASS PROPERTIES. 2261 MARKET ST #198, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed JOHN J. ENG. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/11/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/11/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036670400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NINA RAABE, 1530 CALIFORNIA ST #2, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed KIM EHLER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/01/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/09/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036645000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ASIAN AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDERS LEADERS FORUM, 500 WASHINGTON ST #325, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed 21ST CENTURY ISSUES FORUM (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 08/25/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036649700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HA-RA CLUB, 875 GEARY ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed BROOKLYN ROSE, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 08/15/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 08/28/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036673300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SILKROLL, 833 MARKET ST #312, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed MAKANA LLC, (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/01/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/11/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036673500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SAN FRANCISCO LUGGAGE COMPANY, 865 MARKET ST #327, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed SHAPIRO TRAVELWARE LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/11/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/11/15.

SEPTEMBER 17, 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036676700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE CONSUMER HEART BUREAU, 286 LEXINGTON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed FRANCISCO JAVIER GUZMAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/15/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/15/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036682000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE MIDWIFE AND THE BAKER, 248 CHURCH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed THOMAS GIBSON MCCONNELL. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/16/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/16/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036684200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CONNIE Y. CHAN ATTORNEY AT LAW; LAW OFFICES OF CONNIE Y. CHAN; AFFLUENT HOMES; 405 SANSOME ST. 2ND FLR, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed CONNIE Y. CHAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/25/05. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/17/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036676800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TYTY HANDYMAN, 443 GOETTINGEN ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed LONG CAM TIEN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/15/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/15/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036681500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BOW JOY SERVICES, 835 CLAY ST #200, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed YIYI LIU. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/16/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/16/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036690200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LET BLU, 56 A PATTON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed PATTI FAHEY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/21/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/21/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036690100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SPIRO CAFE, 826 VAN NESS AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed MUSTAFA BAHADURI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/21/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/21/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036650800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HIGH STATE, 2151 24TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed ALEX PRESLER & PETR OLSKIY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 08/28/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 08/28/15.

SEPTEMBER 24, OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036663100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NATIVE SF TOURS; GREATERPURPOSE.ME, 787 UNION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed STEPHEN BACCARI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/03/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/03/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036661100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BEST OF GLASS, 645 SILVER AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed REMZI SHATARA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/02/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/02/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036702500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: METRO APPLIANCE REPAIR, 1920 TURK ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ANATOLI DIDENCO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/09/12. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/28/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036687800

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036690000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: WILD GROWTH, 524 30TH AVE #202, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed EUGENE BURAGA & DAVID YAKUBYAK. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/21/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036696900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: GOURMET NOODLE HOUSE, 3751 GEARY BLVD, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed GS RIVERSIDE GRILL (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/23/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/23/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036700800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BENNI AMADI INTERIORS, 331 LIBERTY ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BENEDETTA AMADI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/15/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/18/15.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MATHILDE FRENCH BISTRO, 315 5TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed LE CHARM INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/25/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/25/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036699000

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036699200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HEALING INTIMACY, 14 PRECITA AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed EMIKO YOSHIKAMI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/01/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/24/15.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: COMMON SAGE, 1552 POLK ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed ENA NORTH BEACH, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/24/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/24/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036689000

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LIPSHTICK PICTURES, 3870 SACRAMENTO ST #3, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SERENA SHULMAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/08/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/21/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT DISTRICT NOTICE TO PROPOSERS GENERAL INFORMATION The SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT DISTRICT (“District”), 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, California, is advertising for proposals for Detailed Station Cleaning Services, RFP No. 6M8098A, on or about September 30, 2015, with proposals due by 2:00 PM local time, Tuesday, October 27, 2015.

DESCRIPTION OF SERVICES TO BE PROVIDED

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (hereinafter referred to as “BART” or “District”) intends to engage the services of one or more firms (“CONTRACTOR”) to provide detailed station cleaning services as described herein. The District presently intends to enter into up to three (3) separate Agreements with up to three (3) CONTRACTORs selected. Each Agreement will be for a base three (3) year term.

WHERE TO OBTAIN OR SEE RFP DOCUMENTS

Prospective Proposers who are not currently registered on the BART Procurement Portal to do business with BART are required to register on the BART Procurement Portal on line at https:// suppliers.bart.gov in order to obtain Solicitation Documents, updates, and any Addenda issued online and be added to the On-Line Planholders List for this solicitation. If a Prospective Proposer is a partnership or joint venture, such entity must register on the BART Procurement Portal with the entity’s Tax Identification Number (TIN) and download the Solicitation Documents so as to be listed as an On-Line Planholder under the entity’s name, in order for the entity to be eligible for award of this Agreement. PROPOSERS WHO HAVE NOT REGISTERED ON BART PROCUREMENT PORTAL PRIOR TO SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL, AND DID NOT DOWNLOAD THE SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS FOR THIS SOLICITATION ON LINE SO AS TO BE LISTED AS AN ON-LINE PLANHOLDER FOR THIS SOLICITATION, WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR AWARD OF THIS AGREEMENT. Proposer should note that this Agreement is subject to the District’s Small Business Program that includes a preference of 5% of the lowest responsible Proposer’s price, up to a maximum of $250,000, for a certified Small Business Prime Contractor submitting a Proposal on this Agreement. Proposer’s attention is directed to Sections I.F and I.G of the RFP which set forth the District’s Small Business Program requirements. Inquiries regarding the District’s Small Business Program shall be directed to the District’s Office of Civil Rights, 300 Lakeside Drive, 16th Floor, Oakland, CA 94612, Telephone at (510) 464-6209, or to BART’s Website at: www. bart.gov/ocr . A Pre-Proposal Conference will be held on Monday, October 12, 2015. The meeting will convene promptly at 10 a.m. at the District’s Offices, at Conference Room 1600, 16th Floor at 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, California. At the Pre-Proposal Meeting the District’s NonDiscrimination Program for Subcontracting/ Small Business Program Policy will be explained. All questions regarding these programs should be directed to Hayden Lee, Office of Civil Rights at (510) 464-6209. Prospective Proposers are requested to make every effort to attend this only scheduled Pre-Proposal Meeting.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT DISTRICT NOTICE TO PROPOSERS – GENERAL INFORMATION

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (herein “District” or “BART”) 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, California, is advertising for proposals for Consultant Services to provide Districtwide Pre-Bid Small Business Supportive Services, RFP No. 6M5098, on or about October 1, 2015, with proposals due by 2:00 P.M. local time, Tuesday, November 10, 2015.

DESCRIPTION OF SERVICES TO BE PERFORMED

The District will seek a consulting firm (“CONSULTANT”) to provide these services. The Consultant selected to perform pre-bid supportive services will be responsible to provide training workshops on topics such as bidding, estimating, takeoffs, understanding BART contract requirements, bid evaluation and preparation and stop notices. Outreach and matchmaking support on large capital projects will also be a part of the scope of services under Districtwide Pre-bid Small Business Supportive Services.

WHERE TO OBTAIN RFP DOCUMENTS

PROSPECTIVE PROPOSERS WHO ARE NOT CURRENTLY REGISTERED ON BART’S PROCUREMENT PORTAL TO DO BUSINESS WITH BART, ARE REQUIRED TO REGISTER ON THE BART PROCUREMENT PORTAL ON-LINE AT HTTPS://SUPLIERS. BART.GOV/ IN ORDER TO OBTAIN THE SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS, UPDATES, AND ANY ADDENDA ISSUED ON LINE AND BE ADDED TO THE ONLINE PLANHOLDERS LIST FOR THIS SOLICITATION. PROPOSERS WHO HAVE NOT REGISTERED ON THE BART PROCUREMENT PORTAL PRIOR TO SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL, AND DID NOT DOWNLOAD THE SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS FOR THIS SOLICITATION ON LINE SO AS TO BE LISTED AS AN ON LINE PLANHOLDER FOR THIS SOLICITATION, WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR AWARD OF THIS AGREEMENT. MICRO SMALL BUSINESS ENTITY (MSBE) SET-ASIDE AGREEMENTS. PROPOSERS ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED THAT PROPOSALS MAY ONLY BE SUBMITTED BY FIRMS CERTIFIED AS A MICRO SMALL BUSINESS ENTITY (MSBE) UNDER THE DISTRICT’S DISADVANTAGED BUSINESS ENTERPRISE PROGRAM SMALL BUSINESS ELEMENTS (SB ELEMENTS). AN MSBE IS A SMALL BUSINESS ENTITY (SBE) CERTIFIED BY BART WHOSE AVERAGE ANNUAL GROSS RECEIPTS (INCLUDING THOSE OF ITS AFFILIATES) FOR THE PREVIOUS THREE FISCAL YEARS DOES NOT EXCEED $6 MILLION. IN ADDITION, THE FIRM SHALL MEET THE SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION (SBA) SIZE STANDARD FOR THE SPECIFIC NORTH AMERICAN INDUSTRY CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM (NAICS) CODE FOR WHICH THE FIRM HAS REQUESTED CERTIFICATION. ANY FIRM SEEKING TO BE CERTIFIED AS AN SBE SHALL COMPLY WITH BART’S SBE CERTIFICATION PROCESS DETAILED IN BART’S WEBSITE WWW.BART.GOV/OCR . A pre-proposal meeting will be held on Friday, October 16, 2015 at 10:00 A.M. in the BART Offices located at 300 Lakeside Drive, 15th Floor Conference Room No. 1500, Oakland, CA 94612. At the pre-proposal meeting, the District’s MSBE Program will be explained. All questions regarding the District’s MSBE Program should be directed to Alma Basurto of the Office of Civil Rights at (510) 464-6388. Prospective Proposers are urged to make every effort to attend this only scheduled pre-proposal meeting. Dated at Oakland, California this 1st day of October, 2015. /s/ Kenneth A. Duron Kenneth A. Duron, District Secretary San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District 10/8/15 CNS-2801639# BAY AREA REPORTER

Dated at Oakland, California this1st day of October, 2015. /s/ Patricia K. Williams Kenneth A. Duron, District Secretary San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District 10/8/15 CNS-2801620# BAY AREA REPORTER

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Legal Notices>> FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036680500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: JOHN COLINS, 138 MINNA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94105. This business is conducted by a limited partnership, and is signed JOHN GIUFFRE & COLIN O’MALLEY. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/15/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/15/15.

OCTOBER 01, 08, 15, 22, 2015 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036659900

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-036712300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TMJ & SLEEP THERAPY CENTRE OF SAN FRANCISCO, 450 SUTTER ST #1708, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed ALKHOURY DENTAL GROUP, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 08/27/15. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/01/15.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NEW UPPER TERRACE MARKET, 4499 17TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed BATSHONE EA, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 09/29/15.

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Vol. 45 • No. 41 • October 8-14, 2015

www.ebar.com/arts

The Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra presented Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella in Zellerbach Hall.

by Paul Parish

ime was, if big-time dance came to town from New York or Europe, they’d play San Francisco’s Opera House: the Royal Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem. Most-anticipated were the great Russian companies, the Bolshoi and the Kirov, which began to appear frequently ca. 1990, after the Iron Curtain came down. For these hot tickets, fans would camp out overnight on the steps of the Opera House to be first to get tickets. See page 18 >>

Vladimir Baranovsky

Eddie Redmayne in a scene from director Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl. Courtesy MVFF

by David Lamble

he 2015 Mill Valley Film Festival, running Oct. 8-18 at Mill Valley’s Sequoia Cinemas, Throckmorton Center, Lark

{ SECOND OF THREE SECTIONS }

Cinema and Rafael Film Center, has an unusually rich lineup of queer films, plus a sizzling selection of American independent cinema and some likely award-season candidates. See page 14 >>

<< Out There

14 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

Sweeney meditations by Roberto Friedman

ut There was in the house for the final performance of San Francisco Opera’s Sweeney Todd last week, surely one of the highlights of the young fall arts season (see “Glorious gore” review, Arts & Culture, 9/24). We’ve told this story before, but we’ll subject you to it again: OT was in the audience of the last preview

performance before opening night of the world premiere of Sweeney Todd at the Uris Theater on Broadway in 1979. It was our seniorclass trip to NYC that spring, and our drama teacher had noticed that OT read the Arts section of The New York Times religiously every day. This was unusual only because we went to high school nowhere near NY, but in a weird semi-rural suburb outside

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Baltimore. But our curiosity about culture was large even then. Upshot was, we got to choose the show for the senior-class Broadway outing. We’d noticed ads in the Times for this new musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, starring Broadway legends Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury as Sweeney & Mrs. Lovett. At our enthusiastic recommendation, the class got upper balcony seats in the cavernous Uris. The show itself was so big the distance from the giant stage didn’t matter. The set, a massive iron foundry, extended into the nosebleed section, with a pipe whistle then went off at each throat-slashing and made us jump in our seats. It was a great theatrical experience for Randallstown High. The next night the show opened, and Broadway history was made. What does Sweeney Todd look like from the vantage point of what we now know as the barbarous 21st century? After all, its hero is a sociopathic mass murderer who first sets out to wreak revenge on specific enemies, then expands his victim pool to all of humanity, or at least those in close proximity to his razors. Not so different from terrorists with perhaps legitimate grievances who victimize innocents, or deranged schizophrenics with access to weapons who perpetrate mass shootings. Todd sings a paean to his murder weapons, his blades (“My Friends”). In “No Place Like London,” he declares, “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit,/and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit,/ and the vermin of the world inhabit it,/and its morals aren’t worth what a pig could spit,/and it goes by the name of London.” Pretty dark stuff all around. Even the comic relief of Mrs. Lovett, Todd’s partner in crime, comes wrapped in the psychopathy

Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Tenor Matthew Grills as Tobias and tenor David Curry as Pirelli in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, from the fall San Francisco Opera season.

of homicide and cannibalism. In “The Worst Pies in London,” she sings cheerfully about her competitor, “Have to hand it to her, what I call enterprise,/ popping pussies into pies,/wouldn’t do in my shop./ Just the thought of it’s enough to make you sick,/and I’m telling you, them pussycats is quick!” What were Sondheim and Wheeler telling us in 1979? It was a dark time in America, the country had just gone through Vietnam and Watergate, and we had yet to be subjected to the “sunny optimism”/ union-busting of the Reagan era. We think the key to Sweeney is

Mill Valley

From page 13

The Danish Girl Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper guides Oscarwinning actor Eddie Redmayne in the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to get gender reassignment surgery. (Century-Larkspur, 10/8) An Act of Love Director Scott Sheppard’s documentary tells the heartbreaking tale of a heterosexual Pennsylvania Methodist minister under fire from church leaders for officiating at his son’s same-sex wedding. It’s the latest chapter in the United Methodist Church’s long-running civil war over samesex ordination and equality. (Rafael, 10/9; Throckmorton, 10/12) 45 Years British gay director Andrew Haigh brings us uncomfortably close to an aging British couple (Tom Courtney & Charlotte Rampling) as they start in on each other when their 45th anniversary looms. (Sequoia, 10/9; Rafael, 10/12) Code: Debugging the Gender Gap There’s gold in the valley,

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in its Brechtian undertones. The chorus stands at the very lip of the stage and confronts the audience with our complicity. Some of their lyrics could have been morals from Brecht’s own fables. Sweeney croons to Mrs. Lovett, “The history of the world, my love,/Is those below serving those up above.” In the final analysis, this masterpiece for the ages is about life’s ultimate conundrum, irony, and operating-system error: death. It isn’t any accident that its protagonist’s surname comes so close to the German word for mortal demise. Halloween approaches!t Silicon Valley. Robin Hauser Reynolds explores how the California tech industry’s notorious sexism can be overcome with an economic dividend in the form of skilled women filling over a million engineering jobs that lack qualified applicants. (Sequoia, 10/9; Rafael, 10/14; Throckmorton, 10/17) The Girl King Finnish director Mika Kaurifmghi attempts an English-language revision of the story of a 17th-century Swedish girl monarch who shakes her snowbound kingdom to its foundations before she’s deposed by a male cabal. Malin Buska is the headstrong Kristina, with Sarah Gadon as her young lady-in-waiting and sometime bedmate the Countess Ebba Sparre. Michael Nyqvist is the bad guy Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, whose task it is to break up the women’s taboo bond for reasons of state. The film is a powerful lesson in what it must have been like to be the queen of your people and a See page 21 >>

For tickets:www.feinsteinsSF.com Feinstein’s | Hotel Nikko San Francisco 222 Mason Street 855-MF-NIKKO | 855-636-4556

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Scene from director Scott Sheppard’s An Act of Love.

Theatre>>

October 8-14, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 15

Filipino dreaming by Richard Dodds

heckers Rosario could be described as a director of B movies in the Philippines, except that that grade level is too generous. His monster movie Squid Children of Cebu had a single midnight screening before a quick fade-out, and the studio boss is pulling the plug on Checkers’ new movie about dinosaur-women. The movies are vehicles for his wife, Reva, except that she’s all but unrecognizable beneath the costuming as an avenging squid mother or the bat-winged pygmy queen. When a fast-talking producer from the United States offers them a chance to fly to California, they jump at the chance. “Hello, Hollywood,” Checkers exclaims as their plane touches down. “Not exactly,” says sun-streaked producer Gaz Gazman. “Do you know Dionne Warwick?” As in, do you know the way to San Jose? That’s the kind of sharp, merrily off-kilter humor that characterizes much of Presenting … The Monstress!, one entry in a double bill of plays adapted from Lysley Tenorio’s 2012 collection of short stories Monstress and being staged by ACT at its Strand Theater. An insert indicates that the order of the plays has been reversed since

the program went to press, which was a smart move. Remember the IHotel, now the opener, is a poignant tale set around San Francisco’s doomed residential International Hotel. Poignant, but ineffably sad for reasons far beyond the urbanrenewal demolition of the hotel. If you have a choice, better not to send audiences out into the streets in a state of gloom. ACT commissioned local playwrights Sean San Jose and Philip Kan Gotanda to adapt two of Tenorio’s stories that ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff herself is directing. Tenorio, born in the Philippines and raised in California, looks at the various effects of cultural displacement often through a popculture lens, with the added outlier perspective of a gay man. The Green Lantern, the Beatles, and wayward Hollywood dreams figure into the stories of his Monstress collection, which also includes heartbreaking tales of unrequited gay love and the funeral of a transsexual woman as her brother and their mother diverge on which gender-state the corpse should be laid to rest. It is unrequited gay love that is at the heart of Remember the I-Hotel, Gotanda’s rendering of Tenorio’s “Save the I-Hotel.” From 1907 to 1977, the International Hotel was a

residential hotel that became one of the last vestiges of San Francisco’s Manilatown. The play shuttles between the 1930s and the 1977 eviction day, following two friends with a tortured history whose adult lives have been lived at the hotel. Gotanda deftly establishes the characters of the savvy Vicente and Fortunado, an awkward new arrival from the Philippines, whom Vicente befriends. Vincente helps Fortunado land a job as a bellhop at a Nob Hill hotel, and also tries to hook a reluctant Fortunado up with women. But Fortunado secretly loves Vincente, and a brief reciprocated kiss leads Fortunado to naive expectations that turn from vile retribution to a lifetime of caretaking for the man he helped disable. Ogie Zulueta and Jomar Tagatac are in lovely harmony with their roles as the once-brash Vincente and the gentler (but guiltridden) Fortunado. Gotanda provides something of a Greek chorus that occasionally pokes in its head to provide narration, but it’s distracting and unnecessary. A variation on the technique works better in playwright San Jose’s Presenting … The Monstress!, which needs a way to supplant the first-person narration of the original story. Two movie queens (Zulueta and Tagatac returning in

Kevin Berne

Nick Gabriel, left, plays a slick Hollywood type who entices a secondtier Filipino filmmaker played by Sean San Jose to fly to California in Monstress at ACT’s Strand Theater.

much different roles) along with a gal-buddy (Rinabeth Apostol) conjure the tale of husband-and-wife Hollywood wannabes Checkers and Reva as they chase an impossible dream. But much of the tale is upbeat, at least for the audience, with San Jose capturing the delusional passion of film director Checkers, and Melody Butiu finding a touching ambivalence as the more realistically ambitious actress Reva, who longs to be, in an ill-omened malapropism, a “femme fatality.” Nick Gabriel is a constant comic delight as pseudoHollywood player Gaz Gazman,

whose “soundstage” is in his grandmother’s basement in Colma. Perloff has comfortably directed both plays, highlighting the very different tone of each, on Nina Ball’s multi-purpose set. This is the second production at ACT’s Strand Theater, a venue smaller than its home base at the Geary, and Monstress is a good fit for this edgier alternative to the grand gaudiness of the Geary.t Monstress will run at the Strand Theater through Nov. 22. Tickets are $20-$100. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.

Enterprising dragsters by Richard Dodds

f you were born the year when the original Star Trek debuted on television in 1966, you’d be pushing 50 right now. And you’d likely be over 60 if you actually remember watching the series during its original run. In a brief trivia quiz during a break in Mudd’s Women, a first-season episode being given the Oasis treatment, a contestant was stumped when asked what eventually replaced the lithium crystals that powered the Starship Enterprise. But the audience, median age certainly less than 50, shouted out practically en masse, “Dilithium!” That helps explain why codirector D’Arcy Drollinger felt the need to explain that, because of the series’ diehard fans, fewer liberties were taken with the original than in other drag-centric parodies of TV shows. “Think of it more as a restoration piece,” Drollinger said of the proceedings. But Stephen Kandel and Gene Roddenberry’s

original teleplay doesn’t need much goosing to make it fertile for reverse-gender parody. It’s already a goofball episode that cries out for semi-affectionate mocking of its hardly futuristic gender roles. In the episode, three centerfoldready women are beamed aboard the Enterprise, accompanied by their booking agent, and the mostly male crew gets all hot and bothered. The ladies are actually 23rd-century versions of mail-order brides, destined for a hellhole asteroid and marriage to some grizzled lithium crystal miners who live in shacks straight out of the Old West. Small twist: The lovelies must regularly take the Venus pill or turn into haggard crones. This is the actual TV plot, and not much needs to be changed to turn it into a high-camp comedy. In their shimmering beautypageant gowns, Eve, Ruth, and Magda provide delectable opportunities for drag characterizations that have hefty doses of attitude on

As Harry Mudd, procurer of the Oasis stage. And the men space brides, co-director Laurie at the helm of the Enterprise, Bushman plays the role with most notably Capt. James sleazy panache. T. Kirk, are ripe for dragBushman and Drollinger king impersonations. As have only occasionally Kirk, Leigh Crow steers this punched up the dialogue with ship with her canny comic a risque retort here and a instincts, riffing on William double entendre there, letting Shatner’s strutting manner the performances and original and pompous delivery. material do much of the heavy The lady Eve is another humor-lifting. But the decidchoice role, and Jef Valentine edly low-tech production ofprovides a wonderful combifers up its own opportunities nation of sultry, snarky, and Gareth Gooch for comedy, from the tinseled snide as the most outspoken transporter effect to the auof the marital cargo. Persia Amber Sommerfield, Leigh Crow, and Honey tomatic sliding doors moodand Jordan L’Moore play Mahogany play officers aboard the Starship ily mimed by the performers. her hot-for-consummation Enterprise in a cross-dressing parody of Star The original Star Trek barely cohorts with glamor infused Trek at Oasis. eked out three seasons, and with the elegance of bored that was decades ago, but its strippers. The other male-toseems to have absorbed some of the iconography merrily continues at female drag performance is Honey missing Chekhov) getting big laughs warp speed.t Mahogany’s Lt. Uhura, a glorified thanks to Emily McGowan’s impensecretary on the TV show and happy etrable brogue and hangdog manner. about it, who now realizes her status Amber Sommerfeld, Zelda Koznofski, Star Trek Live!: Mudd’s Women and gets plenty of mileage out of that. will run through Oct. 31 at Oasis. and Ammo Eisu are fine as Spock, Tickets are $25-$35. Tickets at Back to the crew on the bridge, McCoy, and Sulu, but there is not as sfoasis.com. with chief engineer Scotty (who much humor mined from these roles.

Looking back from 60 by Jason Victor Serinus

o honor Anne Sofie von Otter on her 60th birthday, Deutsche Grammophon has issued a 10CD box of this wonderful artist’s favorite recordings. Hand-picked by the mezzo from her sizeable DG discography, the anthology spans a 13-year period that begins with her 1990 survey of Brahms lieder that received the 1991 Grand Prix International du Disque, and ends with Watercolors, her 2003 collection of Swedish art-songs that won a Diapason d’Or. If the succession from one album of art songs to another suggests that the Swedish mezzo has kept to a traditional pathway, several other titles in the box, including 2001’s For the Stars: Von Otter Meets Elvis Costello and 1994’s Speak Low: Songs by Kurt Weill & The Seven Deadly Sins, remind us of the breadth of von Otter’s interests. Nor is the survey in any way complete. Understandably omitted, for example, is her first

recording for the Naive label, 2010’s Love Songs collaboration with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau. Even before her string of debuts at Basel Opera (1983), London’s Royal Opera House Covent Garden (1985), Milan’s La Scala (1987), and New York’s Metropolitan Opera House (1988), von Otter had begun performing with her favored accompanist, Bengt Forsberg. While the anthology lacks her Grieg Song collaboration with Forsberg (Gramophone magazine’s Solo Vocal, Record of the Year Awards, 1993), it contains a number of their other collaborations. The box’s wide-ranging content underscores that von Otter has had equal triumphs in florid early music, German lieder, and the lighter French music of Chaminade and Offenbach. Thus the inclusion of Marian Cantatas & Arias with Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antiqua Köln, which won the 1995

CD Compact Award in Barcelona; excerpts from her complete recording of Handel’s Ariodante with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre (1999 Cannes Classical, Classic CD Awards); Chaminade: Mots d’Amour with Forsberg (Gramophone’s 2002 Vocal Award); and Anne Sofie von Otter

sings Offenbach, again with Minkowski. Because the box lacks texts and translations, I listened to recordings for which I either had complete liner notes (the Brahms), and others that I simply couldn’t resist (the Weill). The wealth of nuance von Otter brings to Brahms benefits from her depth of imagination and informed way with language. She may lack the weight of tone that deeper-voiced mezzos have brought to the two Op. 91 songs for voice and viola, as well as spiritual depth, but she more than compensates in other ways. Von Otter’s attention to detail and rare ability to change the color and sound of her voice, as well as the intensity of vibrato for expressive purposes, make for a moving musical experience. Von Otter’s Weill is both beautifully sung and deliciously voiced. Her attempts at swinging jazz-like and

sounding like a belter go only so far, but she does so much with her voice that the performances are a great delight. Notable, too, are her idiomatic English pronunciation and knowing way with meaning. The sound of the voice itself is irresistible. As an artist, von Otter resides in the same exalted pantheon as Janet Baker, Kathleen Ferrier, Christa Ludwig, Cecilia Bartoli, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Brigitte Fassbaender, and other mezzos of the last 50 years who have equally excelled in opera, oratorio, and art song. As long as you either understand Italian, German, French, and Swedish (for starters); can access translations in print or on the web; or are content to ignore the meaning of words and instead listen to an extremely expressive artist sing beautifully and with feeling – nothing wrong with that, especially since von Otter’s powers of communication are so universal in scope – this 60th birthday tribute comes highly recommended.t

16 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

Papal dispenseries by Victoria A. Brownworth

here to begin with this week on TV? Viola Davis having a lesbian sex scene with Famke Janssen? Killing of a trans teen on Law & Order: SVU? Lesbian teen suicide on Grey’s Anatomy? RavenSymone finding her lesbian voice and ripping Rick Santorum a new one? House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) admitting on Fox News the Benghazi hearings were specifically to undercut Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid? Another mass shooting in Oregon? Let’s start with Kim Davis lying to ABC News’ Paula Faris about having a “private meeting” with Pope Francis when he was in Washington, DC. We have to say up front that we are Catholic, a fan of Pope Francis, and we saw him when he was in Philadelphia on the last leg of his American tour. We found the experience quite moving. So we were pretty bummed to think both that the Pope had met with the homophobic Davis, and that this meant he had lied to ABC senior foreign correspondent Terry Moran on the plane back to Rome when he said he was unfamiliar with Davis and her case. On Oct. 2 the Vatican issued a statement refuting Davis’ claims of a private audience with Pope Francis. The week before, Davis and her attorney Mat Staver, head of the rightwing Liberty Counsel, had claimed that a rally of 100,000 people had been held in Peru in support of Davis. That, too, turned out to be a lie. The appropriation of the papal visit by Davis was headline news after Staver leaked it to the press late on the night of Sept. 29. The Vatican, especially, apparently, Pope Francis, was not pleased. Initially they said they could neither confirm nor deny that the Pope had met with Davis. But after Staver was all over TV giving interviews to CBS, ABC and CNN saying it was a private meeting, and the outrage from not just the LGBT community but also progressives who had warmed to the Pope was palpable, the Vatican stepped in. Fr. Tom Rosica, who assists the Vatican press office, said Pope Francis personally approved the clarification. That means this isn’t just underlings scurrying to clean up their own mess. It means Pope Francis is succinct that he didn’t know who Davis was and does not validate her stance. CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN were all on the story on the morning shows Oct. 2 when the Vatican released a terse statement that Pope Francis had no idea who Kim Davis was before meeting with her with “dozens of other people” in a receiving line at the Vatican embassy. “The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said. He said “several dozen” people were present at the Vatican Embassy at the same time as Davis and her husband. Lombardi also said, “Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability. The only real audience granted by the pope at the nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.” That student, Yayo Grassi? Openly gay. Family? His partner of 19 years, Iwa Bagus. Oh snap. Our faith is restored. On Sept. 30, Davis had told ABC’s Paula Faris, “Just knowing the Pope is on track with what we’re doing,

and agreeing, you know, kind of validates everything.” Well, no, since Pope Francis had no idea who she was or what she was doing. If Pope Francis is validating anything, it’s gay families, with the only private audience being with a gay man and his partner. Our guess is Staver thought the Vatican would never say anything. Just like he thought the Peruvian government wouldn’t reveal that the photo Staver had given the media of the alleged rally for Davis was actually a political event that took place in 2014. Isn’t lying a sin for Apostolic Christians like Staver and Davis? Because it is right there in the 10 Commandments.

Hot topics

It was a bad week for homophobes all around on the tube, which makes a nice change. We were chuffed to Pope Francis: claims of a private audience were refuted. see That’s So Raven getting all up in the grill of Candace smackdowns, Bollywood’s gorgeous be “de-gayed.” Because she’s been Cameron-Bure on The View on Oct. Priyanka Chopra debuted as FBI there, done that. Her own mother 1. We regularly diss Raven-Symone agent Alex Parrish in Quantico, wouldn’t attend her lesbian wedfor muting her lesbianism, but when ABC’s new Sunday night terrording. This enrages the girl’s mother, the ladies started on their Hot Topism thriller, on Sept. 27. This show but her father is silent. After Callie, ics segment, the first one was lesbiis getting enormous buzz as “the Alex and Meredith all step in, the faans, and Raven-Symone was on it. most feminist show this season.” thers of the girls bond. and Jessica’s It seems Melissa and Aaron Klein, We’re not sure we agree with that father tells her she won’t be going to owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, assessment, as we think that’s out the camp. the Oregon couple who refused gay showrunner Greg Berlanti’s new How to Get Away with Murder to bake a wedding cake for lesbian terrorism drama Blindspot (NBC, revealed a whole new side of Ancouple Laurel and Rachel BowmanMondays), but Quantico has some nalise (Viola Davis) with the season Cryer, are also refusing to pay the pluses, including a cute gay characopener. The Oct. 1 episode was state-ordered damages of $135,000, ter, Simon (Tate Ellington). nothing like we’ve ever seen on even though they raised more than What we really like about Quantinetwork. Annalise requested than a half-million on their co, other than the gorgeous Chopra, an old classmate from Harvard Law GoFundMe site. So who was a Miss World in 2000 at 18 School, Eve Rothlow (Famke JansWhoopi Goldberg poses and is a movie star in Bollywood, sen!), help her with a case. Drama the question of whether is the multicultural casting. Since ensues. We can tell there’s backstory, or not this is okay – the Fox sent Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy but oh what backstory there is. fine, the couple not Project packing (it’s now on Hulu), The reveal? The two were lovers in making the cake – and Chopra is representing South Asian law school. Then Annalise left Eve Raven goes off. While actresses on network TV. Quantico’s for Sam (Tom Verica), her nowCandace says it’s a diverse ensemble is female-driven, murdered husband. matter of religious perlike Shonda Rhimes’ TGIT lineup. Annalise is possibly the most secution, free speech, Aunjanue Ellis, Yasmine Al-Masri, complex female character on prime and all the other rightJohanna Braddy and Anna Khaja time. We know she’s a bit of a monwing excuses for denying us our make for a stellar female cast. Does ster, she even acknowledged it in the rights, Raven took the whole table this make the show feminist? MayOct. 1 episode. But we also know on. But oh, did she read Candace. be. We need more than one episode she has reasons for being a monster. And her hair, omg, so fantastic. to be sure. So we cut her an irrational amount The day before, Raven had taken Sunday nights are already very of slack. Because like Eve, we just on Republican presidential canstrong for female characters. Recan’t quit her. In the Sept. 24 season didate Rick Santorum, who was a turning faves Madam Secretary and opener, we know Annalise and Eve guest on the show because two of The Good Wife (CBS) portend to be ended up in bed together. But we the hosts are right-wing loons, and superb this season, what with the didn’t have the backstory, and it one, Nicole Wallace, is a moderate presidential election going on. Juliseemed like Annalise was just using Republican. Raven asked Santorum, anna Margulies was on The Tonight Eve like she uses everyone else. “Why can we not have equal marShow with Jimmy Fallon on Sept. But in the Oct. 1 episode, OMG. riage rights, in your opinion?” 30, and she dished Good Wife and The two end up in bed together. Santorum said a bunch of stuff presidential politics. Gay actor Alan On screen. Kissing, touching, Eve about traditional marriage being Cumming is front-and-center this lying on top of Annalise. The whole about children, which ended with, season on Good Wife, always a treat everything. So much everything “When you have a law that says, as to watch. Meanwhile, season five of that when Janssen read the script the court said, that marriage has Showtime’s terrorism drama Homeshe said, “Really? On network TV?” nothing to do with children anyland debuted Oct. 4, with Mandy Viola Davis said on Jimmy Kimmel more, then you’re not going to have Live on Sept. 29, “Listen, I’m not Patinkin as a character who is going a society encouraging the behavior comfortable with any sex scene. I to make life especially hellish for that is in the best interest of children just don’t want my mom seeing it, Carrie (Claire Danes). and the future of society.” We supso what I’m doing is every Thursday Grey’s Anatomy opened its new pose he thought that stump speech night I give her money to go to the season with a powerful storyline was enough, because he seemed casino. This Thursday especially, she about a lesbian teen couple who genuinely surprised when Raven, will be going to the casino.” attempt suicide together by jumpwho was sitting thisclose, said, “I Janssen told The Wrap her first ing in front of a train. If it sounds don’t understand why you feel like response to the role and the sex gruesome, it was. Spoiler alert: people in the gay and transgender scenes was, “That’s fantastic. I they survived, but the path to surcommunity can’t raise a very smart, thought cable did these types of vival was very fraught. This was a beautiful, intelligent child as well as things. I’m really excited about it. I powerful episode, brava to Shonda a man and a woman. Sometimes, really hope that the audience conRhimes for opening the 12th season coming from a heterosexual family, tinues to like Eve and her together with this timely and provocative there’s a lot more fighting, there’s with Annalise. Or not together with story. The 15-year-old couple (one a lot more stuff going on. I don’t Annalise.” Peter Nowalk, you fab gay girl is Christian, the other Muslim; understand why you feel like that showrunner, you have our heart. it wouldn’t be TV if the gay couple community can’t give and provide Meanwhile, the fallout from weren’t interracial) wanted to be tofor that child just as well as a straight Oliver’s reveal that he’s HIV+ congether. But the Christian girl’s parcouple can.” tinues to impact him and Connor ents were sending her to a reparative Then Santorum agreed with her: as well as the rest of Annalise’s crew, therapy camp that day. So the girls “I’m not saying that a same-sex since Connor tells them all about planned their suicide instead. When couple can’t have a positive and Oliver’s status. Connor is even takCallie (Sara Ramirez) discovers the nurturing environment, but the ing Prep, and Oliver won’t let them girls are lovers (they have matching natural mother and natural father have sex together until the two-week heart tattoos on their arms), she of that child is what historically is in period for the drug to kick in is up. steps in to advocate for Jessica, the the best interest of that child.” Connor isn’t leaving Oliver, he still girl who is going to be sent away to Speaking of fabulous hair and

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wants to have sex with Oliver even when Asher freaks out and says Connor could die from it. He loves Oliver. Just like real life. This is really great stuff. Nowalk is gay, and he’s putting lesbian and gay characters front and center, and making them real. We felt much less sure about the Sept. 30 episode of Law & Order: SVU, which was an almost verbatim account of the 2013 Oakland case of 18-year-old genderqueer Sasha Fleischman, the victim of an assault by three black teens. SVU had all the pieces right, but the story got lost somewhere in the strident re-telling of this complex, tragic story. Killing off the trans teen to make the TV version more dramatic made some of the pieces fit together less well. There was little explanation of transgender lives or why straight boys might have issues with trans persons. There was also a high-toned “we’re going to make an example of this boy” aspect to the prosecution that complicated the viewer’s empathy, steering it from the victim, the trans teen, to the boy responsible for her death. Also, why did the opening splitscreen have both victim and killer getting out of bed in exactly the same attire: shorts, no shirt? If the episode references Avery (the standin for Sasha) as female, why were we seeing her naked from the waist up? Why not at least a T-shirt? SVU would never have shown a teenaged girl naked from the waist up. So: big mistake that no one caught, because when you don’t have LGBT people behind the camera, errors happen. Just saying. Speaking of straight people telling LGBT people what to do, what is up with Matt Damon? Just a few weeks ago we reported that he had told black queer filmmaker Effie Brown that she didn’t understand race on Project Greenlight, for which he is still apologizing. Now he says that gay and lesbian actors should stay in the closet if they want to keep working. Damon went on Ellen’s show to try and clean it up, and she stood up for him, but really, no. Don’t do a Whoopi on us, Ellen. Damon was flat-out wrong, what he said was indeed homophobic, and putting the blonde smiley face and a little dance on it won’t make that different. Speaking of Ellen, Mrs. DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, is just tearing it up on Scandal this season. Bad Elizabeth North. We love her. And we love that Cyrus is the puppeteer behind the scenes. We knew he couldn’t really be off the canvas, no matter what happened in last season’s cliffhanger. We also loved Ellen Page on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert talking about her new film, Freeheld with Oscar winner Julianne Moore. Page told Colbert that it was great to be out. Moore told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that the film was one of the most important things she’d ever done, and that it was an honor to tell these women’s stories. Finally, don’t forget that new shows are still rolling out. Two to set the DVR for are Oct. 26, the CBS debut of Greg Berlanti’s muchhyped Supergirl, and Oct. 27, ABC’s Wicked City. Billed as an “erotic thriller,” Wicked City is set in 1980s Los Angeles, with noirishness and a hardboiled detective. Looks killer. Starring Jeremy Sisto, Ed Westwick and Erica Christensen. So for lying faux-Christian haters, queers behind the camera, and the political drama that will unfold with the first Democratic debate on Oct. 13, you know what to do: stay tuned.t

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18 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

Spectacular operatic voices on disc by Tim Pfaff

pera season on disc rarely gets off to the spectacular start this one has. Of today’s most bankable stars in opera – the ones who sell out a performance no matter what they sing – one, who records plenty and indiscriminately, recently opened her house-diva-at-the-Met season there with the latest bulletin on the perilous state of her moneyin-the-box voice. The other two, mezzo Joyce DiDonato and tenor Jonas Kaufmann, have rung the opera stock-market’s opening bell with revealing new recordings that entail the partnership of Antonio Pappano, whose day job is music director at London’s Royal Opera, Covent Garden. He tickles the ivories for DiDonato on Joyce and Tony Live at Wigmore Hall (Erato), recorded there a year ago. Few singers ever have built careers as solidly on the basis of sheer discipline as has DiDonato, the “diva from Kansas” who reliably takes fans of bel canto to places that aren’t Kansas anymore. The first disc of her new recording celebrates its rewards with the recital-platform equivalents of that repertoire by way of Haydn’s cantata Adrianna a Naxos and Rossini songs, delivered with her alchemical mix of heartrending feeling built on immaculate vocalism. On the more problematic second disc, which ends with this Dorothyno-More’s “Over the Rainbow,” we get the saucy saloon-belter wannabe of the album’s cover. Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” conjures the DiDonato sorcery unforgettably, but the results are more mixed as a string of show tunes including “My Funny Valentine” leads to an “I Love a Piano” that strives for a bit of raunch. She has earned the right to sing anything she wants (which gratefully still includes some

contemporary opera, new music and illuminating forays into Ravel and Berlioz), but I get the Bubbles Sills “I’m going to be America’s diva” heebie-jeebies from DiDonato in this lighter rep. It’s clearly an unalloyed pleasure for her larger audience, so I’m willing to bid temporary adieu to the vamping DiDonato with a hearty “You go, girl.” If Jonas Kaufmann has sung anything more off the beaten track (for a German tenor) than Engelbert Humperdinck’s Koenigskinder and Brahms’ Rinaldo, I’m unaware of it. But no other singer working today has shown greater wisdom in taking on and leaving repertoire. There’s a Verdi Otello (with Pappano) announced for 2017, and credible promises of a Tristan in the imaginable future. But Kaufmann knows that once he’s sung either, opera companies won’t want him for anything else. So while the rest of the world leans on him for the things they’d like him to do (my list includes Peter Grimes and Pelleas) he keeps the patient comfortable with singing of the most glorious kind.

I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into Puccini ever since I wore out my LPs of Madama Butterfly (Leinsdorf, with Price and Tucker) as a teenager. I made an almost complete surrender with Callas’ incomparable work on the newly re-mastered studio-recordings set, but with Kaufmann’s new Puccini arias disc, Nessun Dorma (Sony), I’m all in. Sold. Finito. It’s the kind of let-it-rip singing every singer wants to do, and Kaufmann does it with such taste, refinement and consummate technique, say nothing of idiomatic Italian, that you revel in the sheer transport. It pushes into the corners of the repertoire without putting on airs. The bits from Edgar, Le Villi, La Rondine and Il Tabarro don’t make you wish impresarios built productions of them around him. But their case cannot have been better argued. The singing throughout is faultless, and his sure-footedness as Pinkerton, Cavaradossi, and Rodolfo as previously demonstrated is confirmed, with interest. But the make-your-hair-stand-up stuff is in the more substantial excerpts from

Manon Lescaut and La Fanciulla del West. (DVDs of complete productions of both, with Kaufmann, are due out from Sony this year.) Domingo called the role of Des Grieux, in Lescaut, as difficult as Otello, and the sheer commitment it requires is audible in Kaufmann’s no-holds-barred rendering of this music of lacerating passion. The Dick Johnson of Fanciulla emerges as a complex, torn-to-the-point-of-madness character previous recordings have only hinted at. And while no one tenor will ever own “Nessun Dorma,” while you’re listening to Kaufmann’s immaculately crafted yet shudderingly masculine take on it, you won’t be thinking of anyone else’s. If there’s a tinge of regret about this disc, its that his partner, soprano Kristine Opolais, a regular colleague onstage and a singer of comparable artistry, spontaneity and abandon, sounds a tad recessive, “flown in” for the takes. Catch her as his Manon on YouTube, and watch them catch fire. His partner in crime on the disc is Pappano conducting his Orchestra and Chorus of the Accademia Nazionale de Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Cinderella

From page 13

With the rise of San Francisco Ballet and the expansion of the Opera season, the great international companies are frozen out of the Opera House, and such as we see of them now comes in Berkeley, courtesy of Cal Performances, the remarkable arts-and-lectures wing of “the world’s greatest public university,” the University of California at Berkeley, where last week the oldest and perhaps the greatest Russian company, the Mariinsky (aka the Kirov, the Kirov/ Mariinsky) Ballet and Orchestra from St. Petersburg, danced Prokofiev’s Cinderella at Zellerbach Hall. When the Bolsheviks took over, they kept the ballet but renamed it Kirov after a general; since the fall of the Soviet empire, it’s been re-renamed the Mariinsky, after their home theater, which when it was built in 1860 was the largest in Europe and got its name from the Tsar’s wife, Maria Alexandrova. When they arrived last week, with a “small” touring delegation of 144 dancers and musicians, the main company was still performing at home (“all seats sold out,” according to their website Sunday morning). In short, they are a colossal theater organization, bigger than anything in this country, and part of a greater organization including an opera company, all directed by the globe-trotting superstar conductor Valery Gergiev. Moreover, they are the fountainhead of all ballet companies in the English-speaking world, which were all founded in the Russian diaspora, by artists fleeing the upheavals in Eastern Europe of the early 20th century. Headlining the shows was the ballerina Diana Vishneva, who created the role of Cinderella back in

Vladimir Baranovsky

The Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra presented Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella in Zellerbach Hall.

2002 and has since become an international superstar; she performed opening night. Unfortunately, your reviewer had to teach that night, and saw the up-and-coming dancer Nadezda Batoeva, who (to judge her against footage of Vishneva available on YouTube), without doing anything ugly, barely sketched in the choreography for the ball scene. Ratmansky’s Cinderella held the mirror up to Nature in postGlasnost Russia (2002) in ways that must have been explosively disillusioning and simultaneously explosively funny. Cinderella’s father is a failed Perestroikaist; he and his Professor Longhair friends are a troika of drunks, with a dazzlingly off-balance array of pirouettes that tells a whole dead-end story in 30 seconds, and all he’s asking now is, “Can you lend us a dime?”

The Stepmother’s an AbFab fashionista, Pats with a Buster-Brown do. The stepsisters are spoiled but actually kind of adorable, hoping to make their way in café society with dance lessons. The curtain goes up on them with hairdressers straight out of Mark Morris’ Hard Nut, preparing them to make it in the kleptocracy (that Putin’s now got well-entrenched), already putting down good roots and having taken over the town in the ball-scene. The Fairy Godmother is a bag-lady with a Groucho walk. Perhaps there is a Russian equivalent for Yeats’ lines, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” In this case, the worst just seem to want every perk they can get – but the best (the Prince and Cinderella) seem to have no idea what to do,

except to stay together. When she’s lost, he becomes sincerely, genuinely bereft. Perhaps the most expressive choreography in the ballet was the Prince’s third-act solo, full of agitated, beaten steps I’ve never seen before. Or perhaps it was just the meeting of a fine dancer and the dance that ideally suits his gifts. Ratmansky was free from the censorship and threats of imprisonment that earlier artists had to work under (in the 40s, Prokofiev’s wife was in the Gulag as he was writing the music for Cinderella). His ballet is as Western as a portrait by Diane Arbus – disturbing, bold-faced, and ugly. The stepmother embodies this: furious, ugly, and bored. Desperate fashionista that she is, her dancing is hideous, uglier even than the Roman General’s wife’s in Spartacus. I hasten to add that this

They’re back at it in a new studio recording of Verdi’s Aida (Warner Classics) that comes as a reminder of how tall the endangered species of studio recordings once stood. It makes good on Pappano’s claim that the opera is “an intimate opera for grand spaces.” The engineers’ evocation of intimate spaces is at its most telling in the tomb of the lovers’ final scene. In its multi-layered playing areas, the culmination of the entire drama – shimmering strings, full chorus, the devastated Amneris lamenting above the expiring Radames and Aida – makes the impact the entire opera has led up to. What Kaufmann has most in common with Domingo is his almost uncanny ability to remain an ensemble performer. Exquisite as his contribution to that final musical tableau is, it’s also in perfect proportion. That his Aida, Anja Harteros, one of the finest on record, is a regular colleague in Europe will come as no surprise. No singer at Kaufmann’s level of achievement is spared the brickbats of naysayers, and he’ll be charged with crooning and scooping and vocal grandstanding in one of the most remarkable versions of “Celeste Aida” on disc. No one else has so fully realized the swell and diminuendo on its final note as Kaufmann has. But it’s all part of the long, perfect line of the aria, and the characterization of Radames as a whole. Only a mastersinger can manage the repeated notes at the beginning of the tomb scene, with the lilt on the name “Aida,” the way he does, aching with emotion. Lest anyone think this is the work of the engineers, a just-published recording, surely by a cellphone, of the recent Munich premiere of his stage debut as Radames, under less-thanideal conditions, makes it clear he can do this in the house. Lucky that house.t is an intentional distortion of ballet idiom, created to reveal the moral ugliness of the high-class oppressor; in particular, it uses the strength of the pointe shoe, which allows the dancer to hit a pose of terrifying extension and hold it, to burn the image on our retinas – and for this character, Ratmansky has devised some really ugly imagery. She is violently bored. In fact, everybody in the ballet is bored except Cinderella; the Prince (the truly charming Vladimir Sklyaurov) has not yet been deadened by boredom, though he is lonely. The rest are all essentially zombies. Both the “Hey Big Spender” prostitutes and the sleek gay boys the Prince meets on his search dance amusingly, though they’re not enjoying it, and both laugh at the glass slipper when the prince presents it. The great weakness of the show I saw was the up-and-coming ballerina Nadezda Batoeva, whose bland sweetness of nature never made any shape out of the choreography, which even when Vishneva dances it, is floating, vulnerable, improvisatory, rather like the “released” dancing of Suzanne Farrell in Balanchine’s Don Quixote. Vishneva danced like smoke, and you were fascinated. It was wonderfully light, but though it was an elusive dance, you could feel its emanations. Batoeva seemed never to communicate anything to me until the final pas de deux. Ratmanksky’s collaborators included the set designer Ilya Utkin, whose constructivist scaffoldings are interesting to think about but made the ugliest stage-design I’ve seen since The Death of Klinghoffer. They also seemed to take up way too much room on the stage – one dancer actually banged into a column, while another fell in the near proximity.t

Fine Art>>

October 8-14, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 19

Women behind the lens

Courtesy RayKo Photo Center

Sonja Thomsen, “effaced 22” (unique peeled Polaroid).

Courtesy RayKo Photo Center

Johnna Arnold, “Rainbow Chard with Mealybugs” (unique chromogenic print).

by Sura Wood

hough it has been stated before, it’s worth repeating that female artists across all mediums are denied the exhibition space they deserve, and their work is shown proportionally less than their male counterparts. Intentional or not, it’s a form of ingrained discrimination which has real implications and consequences for professional artists who happen to be women, yet the lopsided statistics persist. Enter Femme Papel, a crackerjack new exhibition at RayKo Photo Center and Gallery that spotlights dynamic new work by seven very fine women photographers – Johnna Arnold, Jenna Kuiper, Vanessa Marsh, Klea McKenna, Maggie Preston, Meghann Riepenhoff and Sonja Thomsen – most of whom are local

and who’ve had residencies at the center, a lively hub of activity where the art of traditional darkroom photography, a vanishing beast in the age of digital, is still practiced. The exhibition, whose title is a play on femme fatale – the working title, Chicks on Paper, lost out to its classier French cousin – acts as a small corrective to the male-dominated trend. But more importantly, the images, many of them quite large statement pieces, are strong, inventive and singular, each one-off print as unique as the voice of its creator. I’ve been following Johnna Arnold’s rich explorations of color for some time, and she just gets better and better. She’s represented by several cliché verre prints, a variation of the photogram process in which she places objects into the enlarger head instead of directly onto

the photographic paper. Acting as a self-described “slightly mad scientist” examining magnified everyday objects under an ersatz microscope, she uncovers the unexpected mystery and the magical beauty of utilitarian things. “Artichoke Seed,” for example, gleams like an antique gold, enchanted egg pulsing in the bottomless velvet black one might encounter in a Velazquez or Dutch Masters painting; “Rainbow Chard with Mealybugs” features a couple of larger-than-life-size leaves, veins and all, in unlikely shades of iceblue and purple; and in “Onion Rings from Sparky’s Burgers,” which at first glance looks like an earth-orbiting satellite, she has done wonders with saturated fat. The Milwaukee-based artist Sonja Thomsen, whose art practice combines photography, sculpture

Stormtrooper startler by David-Elijah Nahmod

ndrew Wackerfuss’ justpublished book Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement will no doubt raise many eyebrows. The book tells a previously little-known chapter in the history of the Third Reich. We will most likely never know the actual number of people who were killed during the Holocaust. Six million Jews are known to have died, while millions more from other targeted groups also perished, including LGBT people. The total number of Holocaust dead, all groups combined, has been said to be around 11 million individuals, though some historians have speculated that the actual number may be considerably higher. Many heroes have emerged in Holocaust histories, as well as Nazi collaborators whose participation in the horrors shocked people as much as the events that took place. In Stormtrooper Families, Wackerfuss, who is openly gay, recounts the histories of Nazi Stormtroopers, early fighters in the Nazi movement. Through court records, memoirs, personal letters and police surveillance records, he recalls the gay stormtroopers. The author, who holds a Ph.D. in German History from Georgetown University, now lectures and teaches at his alma mater and works as a government historian in Washington, DC. “The stormtroopers were the Nazi party’s paramilitary militia,”

Wackerfuss told the B.A.R. in a phone interview. “Most of the major political parties had this – their job was to disrupt political meetings of their enemies, protect their own meetings from disruption, and carry out electioneering activities. They especially liked to stage public spectacles of intimidation.” The stormtroopers, Wackerfuss said, lived together in barracks. In the years following the First World War, a time known as the Weimar Era, gays in Germany enjoyed a previously unprecedented freedom and openness, which may have contributed to the Nazi emergence. “After the war, openly gay bars and cabarets began pretty much for the first time,” Wackerfuss said.

“German culture: theatre, writing, even the first films, began to explore homosexuality in a more sympathetic way. But this also created a backlash by those outraged by the supposed decline in morality.” During the Holocaust, gay men in Germany were forced to identify themselves with pink triangles sewn on their clothing. In 1935, the German government passed Paragraph 75, a law that outlawed homosexuality. This raises the question as to how the gay stormtroopers were able to function. Wackerfuss said that their heyday was actually earlier during the movement. “Gay stormtroopers predated the concentration camps,” he explained. “We’re talking 1920s and 30s, not the 40s. They really should have known better. German author Thomas Mann, himself gay, wrote at the time that gay men joining the Nazi movement were tying their own hangman’s noose. And he was right.” The Nazi movement, he also points out, was homophobic from the start. “Couldn’t they see that it wouldn’t end well for them?” he asks. Wackerfuss sees a parallel in gay Nazi party members and gays today who join anti-gay religious groups or the Tea Party GOP. “I have worked for 15 years now to try and understand what draws a small percentage of gay men in every generation to right-wing parties who want to eliminate them,” he said. “Far from supporting the theory of gay fascism, the book shows how incompatible those concepts have been.”t

and site-specific installations, embarked on her Fuji color Polaroid series Efface in her spare time. The project could well be called Defaced given the ghostly white silhouettes of figures that remain after she peels away their humanity from the surface of the pictures. Thomsen draws from snapshots of her friends and family, who are seen outdoors, sunbathing in lounge chairs or standing in front of a clapboard house, stripped of identities that have been excised, their souls disappeared, the only traces of their existence the empty outlines of who and where they once were. An expression of an ongoing investigation of the mutability of nature, Meghann Riepenhoff ’s cyanotype triptych “Littoral Drift” was made without a camera and with the assistance of the ocean, which came into direct contact with photographic paper as it rolled in at the Marin Headlands, where she had a residency. The angry sea with its brine and bubbly foam recalls the cartoonish waves of Japanese anime and woodblock prints. Visitors who sampled the cosmic reveries of Night Begins the Day, a

recent exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, will recognize Vanessa Marsh’s large-scale “Mountains 10” from her Falling series. The work benefits from the bare-bones context at RayKo, where the grandeur of her nocturnal landscape, a night of 1,000 stars interrupted only by the silhouettes of distant peaks and the splash of a metallic violet nebula in space, is even more dazzling. The vista is stirring enough to make one want to strap on a backpack and head for Death Valley to catch an awesome view of the constellations. But in fact, it’s not a real landscape at all but a complete fabrication, a collaged convergence of hand-cut papers, drawings, painting and darkroom technique. The series came out of the artist’s intrigue with the cosmos, the properties of light and time, and the memory of sleeping outside under the stars in the San Juan Islands, gazing up at the Milky Way. That childhood experience drives a desire to create what she calls “a relatable false reality,” something everyone should have.t Through Oct. 30 at RayKo Photo Center, 428 3rd St., SF.

/lgbtsf

<< Out&About

20 • BAY AREA REPORTER • October 8-14, 2015

Out &About

O&A

Castro Romero Flamenco @ Palace of Fine Arts

Fri 9

Celebravery by Jim Provenzano

hat’s in a line? A bold stroke of forthright truth, a fictional vision, a dancerly swoop, a sardonic jab at pop culture? Too many choices this week, and plenty more online at www.ebar.com

Thu 8 All the Others Were Practice @ Embarcadero Center Cinema Screening of the new independent San Francisco-produced queer romantic comedy. $10. 7:30pm. One Embarcadero Center, Promedade level. www.atowp.com www.landmarktheatres.com

Avenue Q @ Julia Morgan Theatre, Berkeley Berkeley Playhouse’s production of the Tony-winning musical comedy with naughty puppets. $17-$60. ThuSun, various times thru Oct. 11. 2640 College Ave., Berkeley. (510) 8458542. www.berkeleyplayhouse.org

Black Virgins are Not for Hipsters @ The Marsh Echo Brown’s comic solo show follows a young women’s impending sexual encounter, and its political implications. $20-$35. Thu 8pm. Sat 8:30pm. Extended thru Oct. 29. 1062 Valencia St. at 22nd. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Breakfast Fight Club @ Piano Fight The irreverent theatre ensemble’s mash-up of Fight Club and The Breakfast Club. $16-$20. Thu-Sat 8pm. Thru Oct. 24. 144 Taylor St. www.pianofight.com

CounterPulse Opening Party @ The Hall The dance and performance space’s move to 80 Turk Street is celebrated with tours (at 80 Turk St.)and a party nearby. Donations, cash bar. 4pm7pm. The Hall, 1028 Market St. counterpulse.org thehallsf.com

Curse of the Cobra @ Hypnodrome Thrillpeddlers’ new Halloween season spine-tingling show offers terror and titillation! Previews. Opens Oct. 10. Wed-Sat 8pm. Thru Nov. 21. www.hypnodrome.org

Dear Armen @ La Peña Cultural Center Kamee Abrahamian’s experimental theatre work about the struggles of queer and gender nonconforming Armenians, with dance, live music and stories. $15-$20. 7:30pm. 3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. www.deararmen.com

Dogfight @ SF Playhouse Bay Area premiere of Peter Duchan, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s musical adaptation of the film about a young Marine in the Vietnam era who dares to ask an “ugly” girl on a date, only to find empathy and love. $20-$120. Tue-Thu 7pm. Fri & Sat 8pm. Sat 3pm, Sun 2pm. Thru Nov. 7. Kensington Park Hotel, 2nd floor, 450 Post St. 677-9596. www.sfplayhouse.org

Joe Goode Performance Group @ Joe Goode Annex The innovative dance-theatre creator presents Poetics of Space, an interactive work inspired by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. $30. Thu & Sun 7:30pm. Fri & Sat 7:30 & 9:30pm. Thru Oct. 11. 401 Alabama St. at 17th. (866) 811-4111. www.joegoode.org www.zspace.org

Michael Feinstein @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko The acclaimed singer-pianist, and the namesake of the upscale cabaret, performs five nights of Ira Gershwin & Me, his tribute to the prolific composer. $80-$95 ($20 food/drink min.). Wed & Sat 7pm; Thu & Fri 8pm. Sun 3pm. Thru Oct. 11. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason Street. (866) 663-1063. www.ticketweb.com

Monstress @ Strand Theatre American Conservatory Theatre’s staging of Philip Kan Gotanda and Sean San José’s drama about FilipinoAmerican Bay Area life and struggles. $20-$100. Tue-Sat 7:30pm. Wed & Sat 2pm. Sun 2pm & 7pm. Thru Nov. 22. 1127 Market St. 749-2228. act-sf.org

New & Classic Films @ Castro Theatre Oct. 8: Sweet Smell of Success (7pm) and The Night of the Hunter (8:50). Oct. 10 & 11: Disney’s Aladdin (2pm) and sing-along Mary Poppins ($11$16). Oct. 10: Electric Boogaloo, the Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films (10pm). Sat & Sun 7pm. Oct. 13: Amy (7pm) and The Rose (4:30, 9:20). Oct. 14: The Lineup (7pm) and Escape From Alcatraz (8:40). Oct. 15: Margaret Cho (see Thursday). $10$15. 429 Castro St. castrotheatre.com

Star Trek Live @ Oasis Enjoy another wacky parody performance of a TV script, this time the classic sci-fi show, with Leigh Crow, Honey Mahogany, Jordan L’Moore, Amber Sommerfield, Jef Valentine and others. $25 and up. Thu-Sat at 7pm. Thru Oct 31. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Truck Stop @ Thick House Crowded Fire Theater’s U.S. premiere production of Lachlan Philpott’s dark comedy about two girl prostitutes who lure truckers at rest stops. $15$35. Wed-Sat 8pm. Thru Oct. 24. 1695 18th St. 523-0034. crowdedfire.org

Fri 9 Amélie @ Berkeley Repertory Theatre World premiere of Craig Lucas and Daniel Messé’s new musical based on the popular French film about an enchanting young woman who creates magic and joy in Montmartre. $29$97. Tue, Thu-Sat 8pm. Wed & Sun 7pm. Also Sat & Sun 2pm. Extended thru Oct. 18. 2025 Addison St. (510) 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org

Art for AIDS @ City View at Metreon Juried exhibit/auction of 180 works of contemporary and modern art to benefit the UCSF Aliance Health Project, including a limited edition print by the late Rex Ray. $125 and up. Cocktails, food and music, too. 5:30pm-10pm. 135 4th St. at Mission. www.artforaids.org

Beach Blanket Babylon @ Club Fugazi The musical comedy revue celebrates its 40th year with an ever-changing lineup of political and pop culture icons, all in gigantic wigs. Reg: $25$160. Beer/wine served; cash only; 21+, except where noted. 678 Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd (Green St.). 4214222. beachblanketbabylon.com

Castro Romero Flamenco @ Palace of Fine Arts The vibrant Madrid flamenco company presents Esencia Flamenca, a powerful new work with six dancers and six musicians. $45-$95. 8pm. 3301 Lyon St. Also Oct 10, 7:30pm at the Tower Theatre, 815 E. Olive Ave., Fresno, and Oct. 11, 2pm at Fox theatre, 2215 Broadway, Redwood City. www.castroromeroflamenco.com

David Schein @ Exit Theatre The veteran comic actor performs his two solo works, Distraction and the gay-themed Out Comes Butch, along with readings, workshops, and later this month, duo shows with Bob Ernst. $10-$20. Fri & Sat 8pm. Thru Oct. 24. 156 Eddy St. (800) 838-3006. www.ftloose.org

Día de los Muertos @ SOMArts Cultural Center Today is the Shadow of Tomorrow, the annual juried group exhibit of Day of the Dead altars, installations and art works by Latino and Hispanic artists. Opening event Oct. 9, $12-$15, 6pm9pm. Free during reg. hours. Tue-Fri 12pm-7pm. Sat 11am-5pm. Sun 11am3pm. Thru Nov. 7. www.somarts.org

For the Love of Comrades @ New Conservatory Theatre Center U.S. premiere of Micheál Kerrigan play about the 1980s British group of gay rights activists who joined striking mine workers in a rural town. $20$45. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Oct. 11. 25 Van Ness Ave., lower level. www.nctcsf.org

HeroMonster @ Fort Mason Center Chapel We Players’ new drama tells the epic tale of Beowulf, in a show created and performed by Nathaniel Justiniano and Ava Roy; original music by Charlie Gurke. $45. Thu-Sun 6:30pm (different times; check online schedule). Thru Nov. 1. Bay St. at Franklin. 547-0189. www.weplayers.org

Sat 10

Mon 12

Date Night at Pet Emergency @ The Marsh Berkeley

30 Years of Collecting Art That Tells Our Stories @ GLBT History Museum

Lisa Rothman’s comic solo show about domestic hell, pet panic and trying to find a date night amid it all. $20$100. Saturdays, 5pm. Thru Dec. 5. 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. www.themarsh.org

Exhibit of collected drawings, paintings and sculptures from three decades of queer donations, guestcurated by Elisabeth Cornu. Free (members)-$5. 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

Flagging in the Park @ National AIDS Memorial Grove

Porchlight Storytelling @ Verdi Club

Veteran DJ Steve Fabus spins disco classics at the festive outdoor party and fundraiser for AIDS Housing Alliance. Bring blankets, flags, picnics. Donations. 1pm-4pm. Golden Gate Park, Nancy Pelosi Drive at Bowling Green Drive. www.flaggercentral.com

Inappropriate in All the Right Ways @ The Marsh Ann Randolph’s serio-comic solo show about family loss and death. $20$100. Saturdays, 5pm. Thru Oct. 17. 1062 Valencia St. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Texas Rose Country Dance @ Lake Merritt Dance Center, Oakland The monthly (2nd Saturdays) queer women and trans dance event, this month with a performance by Clogging Express. $10. 6:30pm-11pm. 200 grand Ave., Oakland. www.texasrosedance.com

Yerba Buena Night @ Yerba Buena Lane, Jessie Square, YBCA Fifth annual free outdoor festival of music, dance, art and performance (Duniya Dance, Pacific Edge Voices, Culture Shock, Post: Ballet, Amy Seiwert Imagery, Roem Baur, Lily Cai Dance, Rin Tin Tiger, Lady Chi, and Sarah Wilson, and more) in three venues. 6pm-10pm. www.ybnight.org

Lizzie @ Victoria Theatre Ray of Light Theatre’s production of Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Alan Stevens Hewitt and Tim Maner’s daring rock musical adaptation of the story of 1890s (alleged!) axe-murderess Lizzie Borden. $15-$36. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Oct. 17. 2961 16th St. at Mission. www.rayoflighttheatre.com

Mugwumpin @ Intersection for the Arts The innovative theatre ensemble presents Joe Estlack and Christopher White’s Blockbuster Season, a comic critique of Hollywood disaster movies. $25-$35. Thu-Sat 8pm. Thru Oct. 18. 925 Mission St. 626-2787. www.mugwumpin.org

The Nance @ New Conservatory Theatre Center Douglas Carter Beane’s heartfelt dramedy about the real-life Vaudeville actor Chauncey Miles, who played effeminate stock characters before the 1939 pre-World’s Fair crackdown on burlesque. P.A. Cooley stars, with musical direction by Scrumbly Koldewyn. $25-$45. Previews. Opens Oct. 10. Thru Nov. 1. 25 Van Ness Ave, lower level. 861-8972. www.nctcsf.org

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? @ Belrose Theater, San Rafael Edward Albee’s classic drama about a troubled childless couple and their trapped guests. $22-$25. Fri & Sat 8pm. Also Sat 3pm, thru Oct. 24. 1415 5th Ave., San Rafael. 279-2287. www.kenbaconproductions.com

Bestselling authors tell tales under the theme Kill Your Darlings: The Unpleasant Act of Starting Over, with Pamela Holm, Ali Liebegott, Heather Mackey, Neal Pollack, Mark Haskell Smith, Martha Tolles, Siamak Vossoughi, and hosts Alrine Klatte and Beth Lisick. $20-$25. 8pm. 2424 Mariposa St. 861-9199. www.porchlightsf.com www.verdiclub.net

Tue 13 Portals of the Past @ de Young Museum Portals of the Past: Photographs of Willard Worden (thru Feb. 14); Royal Hawaiian Featherwork (thru Feb. 28); Between Life and Death: Robert Motherwell’s Elegies (thru Mar. 6). Other exhibits of modern art as well. Free/$25. Thru Sept. 20 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive. www.famsf.org

We Can Do It! @ Hurwich Library Exhibit of paintings, tapestries and other works by Bay Area artists with disabilities. Thru Oct. 22. 1 Beach St. www.niadart.org

Wed 14 Ah, Wilderness! @ Geary Theatre American Conservatory Theatre’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s lighthearted family comedy about young love, poetry, small town gossip, and coming of age at the turn of the century. $20-$100. Tue-Sat 8pm. Wed & Sat 2pm. Sun 2pm & 7pm. Thru Nov. 8. 415 Geary St. 749-2228. act-sf.org

Litquake @ Multiple Venues The annual literary festival of readings, panels and workshops also includes parties, including opening night Oct. 9 at Z Space (8pm, 450 Florida St.), with a 19th-Century San Francisco theme. The festival culminates in the multi-venue Lit Crawl, Sat., Oct. 17 6pm-9pm. www.litquake.org

The Book of Ava @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko

Thu 8

Breakfast Fight Club @ Piano Fight

Sun 11 Abrazo, Queer Tango @ Finnish Brotherhood Hall, Berkeley Enjoy weekly same-sex tango dancing and a potluck, with lessons early in the day. $7-$15. 3:30-6:30pm. 1970 Chestnut St., Berkeley. (510) 8455352. www.finnishhall.com

Crescendo @ The Ritz-Carlton Chad Michaels ( RuPaul’s Drag Race finalist and Cher impersonator) performs at the 10th anniversary gala fundraiser for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, which includes lavish auction items (SF Opera and SF Ballet tickets, Sonoma Wine Country getaway, vacation packages, theatre tickets and more) an open bar reception, and a delicious brunch. $150 and up. 12pm. 600 Stockton St. www.sfgmc.org

Vanessa Bousay @ Martuni’s Get an early jump on Halloween with Black Magic Woman, the drag singer’s wickedly amusing cabaret show. $10. 7pm. 4 Valencia St.

The Waiting Period @ The Marsh Brian Copeland returns with his acclaimed solo show about gun rights, suicide attempts and his personal struggles. $30-$100. Sundays 5:30pm. Thru Oct. 25. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

The father-daughter duo performs their concert of classics, with a theme of marriage quality. $35-$50. 7pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason Street. (866) 663-1063. www.ticketweb.com

The Submarine Show @ Harry’s UpStage, Berkeley Aurora Theatre Company presents Emmy-winner Slater Penny and Cirque Du Soleil alumnus Jaron Hollander’s wacky physical theatre clown show. $28-$32. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Oct. 25. 2081 Addison St., Berkeley www.auroratheatre.org

Thu 15 Holly Penfield @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko Direct from her sold-out London show, the SF native performs her acclaimed show, Holly Penfield Sings Judy Garland. $20-$35. 8pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason Street. (866) 663-1063. www.hollypenfield.com www.ticketweb.com

Margaret Cho @ Castro Theatre The amazing outspoken comic, actress, activist, and musician brings her PsyCHO tour to the Castro. $35$55. 8pm & 10:30pm. 429 Castro St. www.margaretcho.com www.castrotheatre.com

Pound @ Brava Theater Center Marga Gomez’ hilarious satire solo show skewers lesbian cinema depictions with a cast of crazy characters. $15-$20. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sun 3pm. 18+ only! Upstairs Studio, 2781 24th St. at York www.brava.org

t <<

Film>>

October 8-14, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 21

Mill Valley

From page 14

sexual outlaw at a time when neither the Pope nor his Protestant enemies regarded queers with any fondness. (This well-produced history is no replacement for Rouben Mamoulian’s early-talkie 1933 classic Queen Christina, with Silver Screen icons Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.) (Lark, 10/9; Sequoia, 10/10, 15) Youth (La giovinezza) kicks off with the meeting of a retired composer, Fred (Michael Caine), and his retired film-director buddy, Mick (Harvey Keiel). Youth is writer/ director Paolo Sorrentino’s second English-language film, a follow-up to his 2013 Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. The all-star cast includes Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, and Jane Fonda. (Sequoia, 10/16; Rafael, 10/18) The Assassin Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien returns after an eight-year hiatus with a sophisticated martial-arts drama in which a female assassin (Shu Qi) is ordered to kill a political leader with whom she’s been intimate. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (CenturyLarkspur, 10/8; Rafael, 10/17) Beyond Measure From Benjamin Franklin through philosopher John Dewey, Americans have been wrestling with how to craft an education system that serves prodigy, special-needs and average-Joe students. Viki Abeles delivers a compelling sequel to her exploration of the American education quagmire Race to Nowhere. Even at 85 minutes, this doc treads into highly contested waters. The press screening was followed by a lengthy lecture/Q&A from the filmmaker, who’s likely to repeat the same following Festival screenings. (Sequoia, 10/11; Rafael, 10/17) Dheepan French director Jacques Audiard is justly celebrated for terrifying excursions into subterranean pockets of his country’s underground economy, where immigrants and social misfits do the dirty work that greases the wheels of a modern state. In Dheepan, a onetime soldier with the Tamil Tigers lands in a suburban Paris highrise ruled by white anti-immigrant thuggish youth. Dheepan is himself a fraud, entering the country with a wife and child who are not his. Audiard presents emotional and psychosexual scenes guaranteed to push anyone’s buttons. This odd mix of Marx, Che and Mickey Spillane will stay with you. (Sequoia, 10/17; Rafael, 10/18) Dogtown Redemption The term recycling once had all sorts of “save the planet” connotations. In their candid poke around Oakland’s recycling hub “Dogtown,”

Courtesy MVFF

Scene from director Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years.

Bay Area co-directors Amir Soltani and Chihiro Wimbush take a less enthusiastic view, showing us a big redemption center where homeless men and women make as much as $100 daily, while still not able to have a clean, dry place to rest their heads. (Rafael, 10/10; Lark, 10/18) Hitchcock/Truffaut Conventional wisdom once regarded Alfred Joseph Hitchcock as little more than a creature of Anglo-American mass-media hype. French critic/ New Wave director Francois Truffaut was discouraged by colleagues from undertaking a serious study of this master of fear. But Truffaut had a week’s worth of in-depth conversations with Hitch about the foundations of filmmaking. Kent Jones distills 60 hours of TruffautHitchcock chats into a complex 80-minute doc fleshed out with observations from Hitchcock disciples. In English, French and Japanese, with English subtitles. (Lark, 10/15; Rafael, 10/17) Radical Grace Rebecca Parrish shines light on an undercovered skirmish in the liberal-conservative mud-wrestling over Pres. Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. While the US Conference of Catholic Bishops attacked “Obamacare” for reputedly funding birth control and abortions, a spirited group of American nuns, under the banner “Network,” started to testify, agitate and tour the country on behalf of government-sponsored health care for women. Filmed as they appear at rallies across the country and travel in a bright green “Nun-mobile” fully-equipped bus, the middleaged nuns describe the sources of inspiration for their work. Pointing to a portrait of the late leader of the American Farm Workers Union, one nun notes, “This guy taught me everything I know about organizing: Cesar Chavez!” The battle over women’s health care in America transcends the ancient lines of

Courtesy MVFF

Scene from director Mika Kaurifmghi’s The Girl King.

authority in the Mother Church, lines that proscribe women from being ordained as priests or deacons. “My very first vocational leaning was in second grade, at mass. I was so attracted, struck, entranced by the beauty of the music, the incense. I thought, ‘Oh, if I could, I’d love to be a priest. But I’m a girl, and girls can’t be priests!’” (Sequoia, 10/12; Rafael, 10/14) 479 Castro Street , San Francisco • (415) 431-5365 • www.cliffsvariety.com Taxi Banned by the Iranian government from pursuing filmmaking, Jafar Panahi pretends to be a Tehran cab driver, covertly recording his passengers’ conversations via hidden dashboard camera. This witty excursion provides a unique eye and ear on a society where free expression is severely curtailed by religious censors. Some of his fares recognize him, some don’t; some bluster and reveal their worst side, others are civilized and respectful of rights their society does not observe. An entertaining reminder that human kindness can still be found in the unlikeliest places. (Rafael, 10/13; Lark, 10/17) Surviving Skokie Eli Adler and Blair Gershkow relate harrowWE’VE GOT THEM ALL ing history through the indelible memories of a Holocaust survivor, Eli’s tough Polish-Jewish dad Jack. They link Jack’s close call at the hand of the Nazis in Poland with an eerie parallel tale, the emergence of a 1960s neo-Nazi movement led by an American Fascist with his own twisted roots. (Sequoia, 10/11; Rafael, 10/16) One Floor Below Romanian director Radu Muntean’s existential mystery is a pleasure for a couple of reasons. First, the story of a Romanian small businessman, Mr. spartacusworld.com/app Patrascu, is fascinating minimalist cinema: how does a middle-aged man with a wife and teenage son find himself embroiled in the question of who killed Laura, his 20something neighbor? Was it the 02_Spartacus_App_95x127mm.indd 1 suspicious-looking man he saw coming out of her apartment? The film also whets our appetite for a rebirth of the Romanian New Wave. (Lark, 10/10; Throckmorton, 10/12) Interwoven V.W. Scheich spins out multiple tales from the denizens of an apartment building. Indianborn brothers are following their mom’s favorite recipe while one attempts to collect overdue rent from a violinist whose playing is upsetting the neighbors. (Rafael, 10/9, 11) The Automatic Hate Justin Lerner’s twisted dark family comedy kicks off when a young man (Joseph Cross) encounters a stranger claiming to be his cousin. The pecking order in this family is strange enough to make incest feel worthy of an Olympic sport. (Sequoia, 10/15; Lark, 10/17) A Light Beneath Their Feet Vale Weiss’s drama puts a young woman, Beth (Taryn Manning from Orange is the New Black), in the uncomfortable position of having to choose to get on with her own life at college or perpetually care for her bi-polar mom. (Sequoia, 10/10, 14; Rafael, 10/12)t

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15.01.15 12:30

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GER N I A Y E AT

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S S E R T S N O M

“O’NEILL’S MOST

CHEERFUL WORK!” NEW YORK TIMES

1E4R T O C E AT

Eugene O’Neill DIRECTED BY

Casey Stangl

SEARY TH N I E G .’S G

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On the Town

NIGHTLIFE

Blacklisted

SPIRITS

DINING Pixie Vision Productions

The comic multi-talent gets ‘PsyCHO’ at the Castro Theatre by Jim Provenzano

ummarizing the past few decades of Margaret Cho’s career in a single interview is like attempting to stuff a cloud of genie genius back into the bottle. Known mostly as a stand-up comic, Cho has branched out into TV, films, social causes, books, music and more. She’ll bring her new PsyCHO tour to her hometown on October 15 at the Castro Theatre, and that’s the main point. To witness Margaret Cho perform live is to have your soul tickled and spanked. See page 24 >>

Margaret Cho rocks

On the Tab

October 8-15, 2015

opportunities for social fabuundraisers, galas and literary fests offer Or just get down with some arts. the g ortin lism. Have fun while supp Listings start on page 26 >> groovy local and visiting bands.

Litquake kicks off @ Multiple Ven ues

{ THIRD OF THREE SECTIONS }

Shooting Stars

SOCIETY

ROMANCE

www.ebar.com V www.bartabsf.com

Fri 9

LEATHER

PERSONALS Vol. 45 • No. 41 • October 8-14, 2015

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

24 • Bay Area Reporter • October 8-14, 2015

and the AIDS drama It’s My Party, even the thriller Face/Off.

Talking the Talk

Mary Taylor

Margaret Cho in her Los Angeles home with her Chihauhua, Gudrun.

Margaret Cho

From page 23

Cho’s current tour is taking her to 22 U.S. cities, and almost a dozen gigs in Europe through the end of this year. But the Castro Theatre show holds a special place in her heart. Born 46 years ago in San Francisco, Cho enthusiastically shared memories of her early life in the Bay Area. “I’m very proud of my background there,” said Cho from her Los Angeles home, where she’s lived since 2000. “It’s probably because I come from San Francisco and was born into an amazing culture that I’m the way I am.” Longtime fans of Cho know her early comedy routines about her Korean parents and their life running the Polk Street Paperback Traffic book and magazine shop, which included gay erotica titles like the infamous Ass Master. “I grew up in the era of all of those exciting events,” Cho said of the emerging gay community. “In the ‘70s on Polk Street,” [the gay neighborhood before the Castro became its center], “everybody looked like the Village People, or like a live drawing by Tom of Finland. All these people came from around the world to find acceptance and love. Just to be around that, I found the experience helpful.” Recalled as an era of tragedies as well, Cho said, “It was also a very harsh and emotional time, and incredibly devastating; Harvey Milk’s assassination, the Jonestown massacre, really such an enormous era. We were a block away from The Peoples Temple in the Tenderloin.” As a teenager, Cho had problems in school after a series of sexual assaults, until she was accepted into the San Francisco School of the Arts. Among her classmates were actors Sam Rockwell and Aisha Tyler. Cho eventually found a queer community, despite not knowing herself what she was. “I felt very unsafe around men, but felt protected with gay men. I thought I was a lesbian at first, but then realized I was bisexual.” Her early stand-up work developed as the nearby queer culture emerged with a renewed activism. Around the time she premiered shows at Josie’s Juice Joint and other venues, Cho performed in many benefits for AIDS nonprofits, and the San Francisco branch of the activist group ACT-UP.

“All this stuff was so thrilling, and relates to the story of my own development, wanting to talk about the world,” she said. As she developed her irreverent material, Cho landed a series of gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld, appearing on a Bob Hope special, and on The Arsenio Hall Show. In 1994, Cho was lauded with the American Comedy Award for Best Female Comedian. Numerous awards, including a second Grammy nomination this year, would follow. But the sitcom All-American Girl, while eagerly anticipated by fans, became a bit of a Waterloo in 1994. While recent comedy shows with autobiographical themes and Asian-American stars have been enjoyed by viewers (Fresh Off the Boat and Dr. Ken), Cho was, as is often the case, ahead of her time. Cho’s humor was too risqué for

TV executives, one of whom also criticized the star’s looks, which led to health risks from her crash diet. The jokes and Asian-American characters were lambasted as being too stereotypical. After 19 episodes, the show was cancelled. A bout of drug and alcohol problems followed for Cho.

On the Road Again

But recovery, in her life and career, thankfully became the fuel for I’m the One That I Want, her successful 1999/2000 tour (also filmed as a DVD) and related book. Subsequent tours included Notorious C.H.O (2002) Revolution (2003), Assassin (2005), The Sensuous Woman (2007), Beautiful (2008) and Mother (2013). Cho was also part of Cyndi Lauper’s music and comedy tour True Colors in 2007 and 2008. The comic actor has enjoyed

Margaret Cho on Dancing With the Stars with Louis Van Amstel in 2010.

more than a bit of revenge in TV land, with hilarious guest-starring spots as Kim Jun Il on 30 Rock. That role garnered Cho an Emmy nomination, and ironically, viewer complaints when she performed as Kim Jong Il at The Golden Globe Awards. Other TV shows in which she’s performed include The Nanny, Sex and the City, Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, Sordid Lives and Drop Dead Diva. Music has also become a refreshing outlet of expression, and Cho composed a series of songs that became her album Cho Dependent (2010). She’s also collaborated on various music and video projects with The Dresden Dolls and The Cliks. Cho can also be heard on the weekly podcast Monsters of Talk with Jim Short. She also costarred in the amusing 2004 indie film Bam Bam and Celeste,

Speaking openly is a trademark of Cho’s humor, as is her ability to discuss some unpleasant and personal topics while still making audiences laugh. She recently got divorced from husband Al Ridenour after announcing their separation last December. Her family life is a part of her material, as are her own personal struggles. “I’ve been talking about being sexually abused for a while, including in my first book,” said Cho. “There’s so much of a need to talk about rape and sexual molestation. You can turn the events of being a victim into becoming a survivor. It’s something that’s difficult as a standup comedian. People feel so empathetic, it’s hard to laugh. I figured out how to address it, with a song called ‘Kill My Rapist.’ It’s really an anthem, a very cathartic thing. I premiered it in Oakland for an audience of mostly women, many of them lesbians. They’d never heard a song like that. I encourage people to sing with me, until everybody is singing it and screaming the chorus!” Cho said that fans have shared their stories with her as well. “I figured out a way to talk about it that wasn’t insensitive, and instead empowering.” After discussing the latest bout of queer, trans and political topics, including Black Lives Matter, Cho expressed an enthusiasm for what she sees as a cultural shift. “This time is so beautiful, because we’re finally addressing these problems with language and society; people in the trans community, and other sexual minorities, are pushing the way that language is used. It doesn’t work when it’s used to silence us. Because of my multiple minority status, I’m one of the people who could be complaining, but I’m working with it. I do have a bit of a free pass to explore it.” Surprisingly, her October 15 show is Cho’s first solo gig at the

Margaret Cho at the Grammy Awards in 2004.

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