July 13, 2017 Edition of the Bay Area Reporter by Bay Area Reporter

Whitaker talks Joplin affair

ARTS

Sophie Calle

Jennifer Holliday

The

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Since 1971, the newspaper of record for the San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ community

Hate crimes up in CA by Seth Hemmelgarn

Vol. 47 • No. 28 • July 13-19, 2017

LGBT data collection underway in CA, SF

ate crimes rose in California by about 11 percent from 2015 to 2016, according to a new report from state Attorney General Xavier Becerra The 2016 edition Rick Gerharter of the Hate Crime in Attorney General California report says Xavier Becerra there were 837 biasmotivated incidents in 2015 and 931 in 2016, an 11.2 percent increase. Hate crime incidents related to the victim’s sexual orientation went from 188 to 207, an increase of 10.1 percent. “When someone commits a crime motivated by hate, it is not just an attack on one innocent person, but an attack on the entire state and our communities,” Becerra said in a July 3 news release announcing the report’s publication. “We can see from today’s report that words matter, and discriminatory rhetoric does not make us stronger but divides us and puts the safety of our communities at risk. This is why condemning hate crimes, discrimination, and racism is critical to ensuring all Californians live without fear of being targeted because of their race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation. “As California’s attorney general, I am committed to working with local law enforcement agencies, schools, and local communities to enforce California’s anti-hate crime statutes to the fullest extent of the law. I strongly encourage anyone who believes they are a victim of a hate crime to report it to local law enforcement immediately,” he added. The report is drawn from data submitted by police departments, district attorneys, and other agencies throughout the state. While hate crimes went up last year, the report shows there’s been a decrease in the last decade. In 2007, 1,426 bias-motivated crimes were reported, meaning there was a drop of 34.7 percent by the end of 2016. Hate crime incidents related to sexual orientation have also decreased since 2007, when 263 such cases were reported statewide, leading to a 27.1 percent drop over the last decade. The attorney general’s report says that cases related to race/ethnicity/national origin bias were the most common kind of hate crime over the past 10 years, while incidents related to the victim’s sexual orientation were the second most common. According to the report, crimes motivated by a bias against gay men went from 108 in 2015 to 152 in 2016, a 40.7 percent jump. In San Francisco in 2016, there were 36 See page 14 >>

Natalie Summers from Openhouse, right, took a photo of Sister Rose Mary Chicken and E.J. Hebert in Jane Warner Plaza in May as part of a project that asked federal officials not to remove LGBT elders from the National Survey of Older Americans.

by Matthew S. Bajko

n the late 1970s Prudence Hull and her colleagues at the community college district in San Francisco worked to defeat a proposed policy that would have banned gay and lesbian people, and possibly straight educators who had gay friends, from working in California’s public schools. To their relief, voters rejected the statewide ballot measure, known as the

Briggs initiative, in November 1978. At that time if a government agency had asked someone about their sexual orientation, “people would have absolutely freaked,” said Hull, 66, who is straight, as she prepared to march in this year’s Pride parade in San Francisco with a contingent honoring those who successfully campaigned against the homophobic measure. Throughout her life Hull said she couldn’t

recall ever being asked to specify her sexual orientation on a government form or in a health care setting. She doubted she would have provided such information had she been asked to due to privacy concerns. “The only person I could think would ask such a question would be my gynecologist asking about my sexual health history,” said Hull. See page 11 >>

Guerneville looks at homeless options Rick Gerharter

by Charlie Wagner

ngry residents shot down a Sonoma County proposal for a homeless service center in the LGBT-friendly town of Guerneville earlier this year, as the tourismdependent area struggles to develop next steps to deal with what some call a growing issue. After county officials announced a $1 million plan to buy a small horse ranch on Armstrong Woods Road for the center, residents packed a meeting of the Sonoma County Community Development Commission, which is tasked with managing the homeless population. Exact figures on the number of homeless weren’t available (the county’s Point-In-Time count is slated for next year), but some residents estimate it to be around 200 people. While small compared to the thousands of homeless people living on the streets in San Francisco and other Bay Area cities, Guerneville residents have raised concerns about tent encampments near the Russian River and the possibility of water pollution from trash and human waste. According to the SCCDC website, the proposed center would have provided substance abuse counseling, primary care, dental care, and other services and would have contained a seasonal emergency shelter with 25-35 beds. County employees and possibly volunteers would have staffed it. The April SCCDC meeting drew hundreds of people, including Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, whose district includes

Charlie Wagner

The “pantry” area being set up in the Vacation Beach encampment in Guerneville.

Guerneville. Groups represented included the Guerneville Community Alliance, formed by Mark Emmett and other residents, and the Committee to Protect Guerneville School Children, Seniors, and Environment. Five locations in and near Guerneville were discussed at the meeting. Attendees were given green dots to place on a board to indicate which location they favored, although only Armstrong Woods was immediately available. News reports on the meeting suggested most residents opposed

{ FIRST OF THREE SECTIONS }

any new shelter and favored continuing to use the Veterans Building in town, which operates a seasonal winter shelter from December to March. Not everyone agrees on what most residents want. “I don’t think the majority of residents favor the status quo,” Hopkins said in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter. “Most of the green dots were on the other locations.” Emmett said, “Unless we want to expand our infrastructure with more ambulances and deputies, most residents oppose a new shelter.” Debra Johnson, the broker-owner of the Berkshire-Hathaway real estate office in Guerneville, said, “For people at the April meeting, the answer is yes, they oppose any change. But lots of people are afraid and there’s no easy solution.” Johnson is one of the organizers of what she calls the “Garbage Patch Kids.” Her group works with local environmental organizations like Riverkeeper and Clean River Alliance to keep homeless encampments from spilling garbage and human waste into the Russian River. In early May Hopkins said the county was no longer pursuing the Armstrong Woods property and was planning alternative strategies, according to the Sonoma West newspaper. “We’re changing our approach based on community feedback,” she told the paper. According to the county’s Homeless Management Information System, over 70 percent of people who are homeless in the river area were See page 14 >>

What is TRUVADA for PrEP? TRUVADA for PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is a prescription medicine that is used together with safer sex practices to help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 through sex. This use is only for HIV-negative adults who are at high risk of getting HIV-1. To help determine your risk of getting HIV-1, talk openly with your healthcare provider about your sexual health. Ask your healthcare provider if you have questions about how to prevent getting HIV. Always practice safer sex and use condoms to lower the chance of sexual contact with body fluids. Never reuse or share needles or other items that have body fluids on them.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION |What is the most important information I should

know about TRUVADA for PrEP?

Before taking TRUVADA for PrEP: u You must be HIV-negative before you start taking TRUVADA for PrEP. You must get tested to make sure that you do not already have HIV-1. Do not take TRUVADA to reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 unless you are conﬁrmed to be HIV-negative. u Many HIV-1 tests can miss HIV-1 infection in a person who has recently become infected. If you have flu-like symptoms, you could have recently become infected with HIV-1. Tell your healthcare provider if you had a flu-like illness within the last month before starting or at any time while taking TRUVADA for PrEP. Symptoms of new HIV-1 infection include tiredness, fever, joint or muscle aches, headache, sore throat, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, night sweats, and/or enlarged lymph nodes in the neck or groin. While taking TRUVADA for PrEP: u You must continue to use safer sex practices. Just taking TRUVADA for PrEP may not keep you from getting HIV-1. u You must stay HIV-negative to keep taking TRUVADA for PrEP: • Get tested for HIV-1 at least every 3 months. • If you think you were exposed to HIV-1, tell your healthcare provider right away. u To further help reduce your risk of getting HIV-1: • Know your HIV status and the HIV status of your partners. • Get tested for other sexually transmitted infections. Other infections make it easier for HIV to infect you. • Get information and support to help reduce risky sexual behavior, such as having fewer sex partners. • Do not miss any doses of TRUVADA. Missing doses may increase your risk of getting HIV-1 infection. u If you do become HIV-1 positive, you need more medicine than TRUVADA alone to treat HIV-1. TRUVADA by itself is not a complete treatment for HIV-1. If you have HIV-1 and take only TRUVADA, your HIV-1 may become harder to treat over time. TRUVADA can cause serious side effects: u Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. TRUVADA is not approved to treat HBV. If you have HBV and stop taking TRUVADA, your HBV may suddenly get worse. Do not stop taking TRUVADA without ﬁrst talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to monitor your health.

|Who should not take TRUVADA for PrEP?

Do not take TRUVADA for PrEP if you: u Already have HIV-1 infection or if you do not know your HIV-1 status. If you are HIV-1 positive, you need to take other medicines with TRUVADA to treat HIV-1. TRUVADA by itself is not a complete treatment for HIV-1. If you have HIV-1 and take only TRUVADA, your HIV-1 may become harder to treat over time. u Also take certain medicines to treat hepatitis B infection. |What are the other possible side effects of

TRUVADA for PrEP?

Serious side effects of TRUVADA may also include: u Kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider may do blood tests to check your kidneys before and during treatment with TRUVADA. If you develop kidney problems, your healthcare provider may tell you to stop taking TRUVADA. u Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious but rare medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat. u Severe liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain. u Bone problems, including bone pain, softening, or thinning, which may lead to fractures. Your healthcare provider may do tests to check your bones. Common side effects in people taking TRUVADA for PrEP are stomach-area (abdomen) pain, headache, and decreased weight. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any side effects that bother you or do not go away. |What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking

TRUVADA for PrEP?

u All your health problems. Be sure to tell your healthcare

provider if you have or have had any kidney, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis. u If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if TRUVADA can harm your unborn baby. If you become pregnant while taking TRUVADA for PrEP, talk to your healthcare provider to decide if you should keep taking TRUVADA. u If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed. If you become HIV-positive, HIV can be passed to the baby in breast milk. u All the medicines you take, including prescription and over-thecounter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. TRUVADA may interact with other medicines. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine. u If you take certain other medicines with TRUVADA, your healthcare provider may need to check you more often or change your dose. These medicines include certain medicines to treat hepatitis C (HCV) infection. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.FDA.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Please see Important Facts about TRUVADA for PrEP including important warnings on the following page.

Have you heard about

TRUVADA for PrEP™ ? The once-daily prescription medicine that can help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 when used with safer sex practices. • TRUVADA for PrEP is only for adults who are at high risk of getting HIV through sex. • You must be HIV-negative before you start taking TRUVADA for PrEP. Ask your doctor about your risk of getting HIV-1 infection and if TRUVADA for PrEP may be right for you.

visit start.truvada.com

IMPORTANT FACTS

This is only a brief summary of important information about taking TRUVADA for PrEPTM (pre-exposure prophylaxis) to help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 infection. This does not replace talking to your healthcare provider about your medicine.

(tru-VAH-dah) MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT TRUVADA FOR PrEP

POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS OF TRUVADA FOR PrEP

Before starting TRUVADA for PrEP: • You must be HIV-1 negative. You must get tested to make sure that you do not already have HIV-1. Do not take TRUVADA for PrEP to reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 unless you are confirmed to be HIV-1 negative. • Many HIV-1 tests can miss HIV-1 infection in a person who has recently become infected. Symptoms of new HIV-1 infection include flu-like symptoms, tiredness, fever, joint or muscle aches, headache, sore throat, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, night sweats, and/or enlarged lymph nodes in the neck or groin. Tell your healthcare provider if you have had a flu-like illness within the last month before starting TRUVADA for PrEP. While taking TRUVADA for PrEP: • You must continue to use safer sex practices. Just taking TRUVADA for PrEP may not keep you from getting HIV-1. • You must stay HIV-negative to keep taking TRUVADA for PrEP. Get tested for HIV-1 at least every 3 months while taking TRUVADA for PrEP. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you think you were exposed to HIV-1 or have a flu-like illness while taking TRUVADA for PrEP. • If you do become HIV-1 positive, you need more medicine than TRUVADA alone to treat HIV-1. If you have HIV-1 and take only TRUVADA, your HIV-1 may become harder to treat over time. • See the “How To Further Reduce Your Risk” section for more information. TRUVADA may cause serious side effects, including: • Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. TRUVADA is not approved to treat HBV. If you have HBV, your HBV may suddenly get worse if you stop taking TRUVADA. Do not stop taking TRUVADA without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to check your health regularly for several months.

TRUVADA can cause serious side effects, including: • Those in the “Most Important Information About TRUVADA for PrEP” section. • New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. • Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious but rare medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: weakness or being more tired than usual, unusual muscle pain, being short of breath or fast breathing, stomach pain with nausea and vomiting, cold or blue hands and feet, feel dizzy or lightheaded, or a fast or abnormal heartbeat. • Severe liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get these symptoms: skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow, dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored stools, loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, or stomach-area pain. • Bone problems. Common side effects in people taking TRUVADA for PrEP include stomach-area (abdomen) pain, headache, and decreased weight. These are not all the possible side effects of TRUVADA. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any new symptoms while taking TRUVADA for PrEP. Your healthcare provider will need to do tests to monitor your health before and during treatment with TRUVADA for PrEP.

ABOUT TRUVADA FOR PrEP TRUVADA for PrEP is a prescription medicine used together with safer sex practices to help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 through sex. This use is only for HIV-negative adults who are at high risk of getting HIV-1. • To help determine your risk of getting HIV-1, talk openly with your healthcare provider about your sexual health. Do NOT take TRUVADA for PrEP if you: • Already have HIV-1 infection or if you do not know your HIV-1 status. • Take certain medicines to treat hepatitis B infection.

HOW TO TAKE TRUVADA FOR PrEP • Take 1 tablet once a day, every day, not just when you think you have been exposed to HIV-1. • Do not miss any doses. Missing doses may increase your risk of getting HIV-1 infection. • Use TRUVADA for PrEP together with condoms and safer sex practices. • Get tested for HIV-1 at least every 3 months. You must stay HIV-negative to keep taking TRUVADA for PrEP.

BEFORE TAKING TRUVADA FOR PrEP Tell your healthcare provider if you: • Have or have had any kidney, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis. • Have any other medical conditions. • Are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. • Are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed. If you become HIV-positive, HIV can pass to the baby in breast milk. Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take: • Keep a list that includes all prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements, and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist. • Ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist about medicines that should not be taken with TRUVADA for PrEP.

HOW TO FURTHER REDUCE YOUR RISK • Know your HIV status and the HIV status of your partners. • Get tested for other sexually transmitted infections. Other infections make it easier for HIV to infect you. • Get information and support to help reduce risky sexual behavior, such as having fewer sex partners. • Do not share needles or personal items that can have blood or body fluids on them.

GET MORE INFORMATION • This is only a brief summary of important information about TRUVADA for PrEP. Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist to learn more, including how to prevent HIV infection. • Go to start.truvada.com or call 1-800-GILEAD-5 • If you need help paying for your medicine, visit start.truvada.com for program information.

TRUVADA, the TRUVADA Logo, TRUVADA FOR PREP, GILEAD, and the GILEAD Logo are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. All other marks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. Version date: April 2017 © 2017 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. TVDC0095 05/17

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6/8/17 PM 6/5/17 12:24 4:16 PM

Community News>>

July 13-19, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 5

Trans woman jailed in San Jose shooting by Seth Hemmelgarn

transgender woman is in jail after allegedly shooting her ex-husband outside the South Bay Costco where he worked. Nori Tejero, 44, of San Jose, has been charged with assault with a firearm in the July 5 shooting and is being held in Milpitas’ Elmwood Correctional Facility on $175,000 bail. Tejero is expected to enter a plea July 31. Dani Castro, a friend of Tejero’s, described her as “very loving” and said, “Nori has contributed decades of her life to improving the lives of trans people, and she’s mentored many, many trans women.” However, Castro, who is also a transgender woman, said that Tejero’s long marriage to the victim had ended because of “years of abuse.” The shooting happened at about 12:30 p.m. last Wednesday in the parking lot of the Costco at 5301 Almaden Expressway. According to police, responding officers located the male victim “suffering from at least one gunshot wound.” He was taken to a local hospital to be treated for non-life threatening injuries. Tejero “was located at the scene and taken into custody without incident,” police said. The gun was recovered. In a news release, police said, “The motive and circumstances surrounding the shooting are under investigation.” Officer Albert Morales, a police spokesman, said in an email Monday that no further information was

Jo-Lynn Otto

Nori Tejero in 2016

available. Castro said the victim, whose name the Bay Area Reporter isn’t publishing, is “very quiet” and “tended to be friendly,” but she’d heard about his abuse of Tejero “constantly.” Asked about behavior she’d seen firsthand, Castro said that the victim “was very controlling and manipulative and would never let her go out alone. ... He wouldn’t say anything verbally, it was more like he would give her a look and she would just back down and say, ‘OK, sorry.’ It was hard to get time with her away from him.” Castro said she hadn’t seen the victim in about a year. The B.A.R. wasn’t able to reach him for comment. Asked whether Tejero had reported abuse to police, Castro said, “I’m

not sure what’s OK to say and what’s not OK to say.” Tiffany Woods, a transgender activist based in the East Bay, said in a Facebook exchange that she knows Tejero “pretty well,” but she hasn’t had much contact with her in the past couple of years. Woods said that Tejero broke up with the victim “several months ago,” and that it had been “a controlling relationship.” She said Tejero hadn’t talked to her directly about the problems she was having with her husband, but “I always thought [he] was a bit too quiet. ... Seems he was a quiet controller. Like with a look that she understood. Nori was never without him at events.”

Posts before shooting

Facebook posts made under the name “Noriel Herras” and provided to the B.A.R. indicate that Tejero had been agitated in the days leading up to the shooting. In a June 29 post, Tejero made disparaging remarks about her “replacement.” “Every time I ask him: Do you tell her about me at all? He says NO so I tell him ... ‘So why the fuck are you telling me about your ugly old lady then’ And the conversation ends with him always getting upset and calling me very nasty names,” Tejero said in the post, which was written at 3:16 a.m. In a post that afternoon, she wrote, “He acted in ways that tested my patience and it took 7 long years of hell before I got the hint and left.

SF shelter director leaving by Seth Hemmelgarn

he director of the nonprofit that runs Jazzie’s Place, the homeless shelter in San Francisco’s Mission district for LGBT adults, is leaving. Wendy Phillips, 47, who’s served as executive director of Dolores Street Community Services for over five years, said she’s “very proud” of the agency’s work in that time, including the 2015 opening of the LGBT-welcoming shelter, which has 24 beds and is the first space of its kind in the country. The shelter is named for Jazzie Collins, a transgender woman who advocated for housing, seniors, and other issues and died in 2013. Phillips said getting the shelter up and running “is one of our big accomplishments in terms of growing the program and being able to provide that service for the LGBT homeless community.” In an email blast announcing her departure, she said that she and her family are moving to her hometown of Chico, California “in order to be closer to extended family there, and to live in a place that is economically more sustainable for us.” Phillips, a straight ally, has accepted a job as director of property management at Community Housing Improvement Program, which helps low-income people with housing. She’ll stay at Dolores Street until mid to late August and will start her new job in September. “This was a very difficult decision to make,” said Phillips, who’s been at Dolores Street for almost 12 years. Her salary there is $84,000. Besides Jazzie’s Place, Dolores Street, which has a budget of approximately $6 million, also operates other facilities for people who are currently or formerly homeless, those who are homeless and living with HIV/AIDS, as well as immigration and employment assistance services.

Rick Gerharter

Wendy Phillips

“I am deeply grateful for the opportunities I have had to work alongside many of you to advocate for and create affordable housing, organize for tenant rights, and support programs providing shelter to our homeless communities, legal services and education for immigrants, and employment and empowerment for day laborers and domestic workers,” Phillips said in her email. An interim executive director will be brought in until a permanent replacement can be found, she said, adding that she’ll be available to Dolores Street “on a consultancy basis until the transition to new leadership is complete.” Mason Jeffrys, Dolores Street’s director of administration and development, said in an interview that he and Phillips have worked “very, very closely together over the years, and I’m going to miss her dearly.” Jeffrys, who’s gay, said that Phillips’ departure “should not have any impact on Jazzie’s Place. Over the last couple of years, we’ve developed a really strong senior management team.” He said, “Things are great” at Jazzie’s, and “It’s fully occupied. There’s a waiting list for folks to get

in, so there’s definitely a need for more LGBT safe spaces in the shelter system.” He’s not going to apply to replace Phillips because “I’m a more internally focused person, where the executive director needs to be more externally focused.” Jeffrys, who’s white, also noted that many of the agency’s clients are immigrants, and he said its next director “should be a person of color.” Yesenia Lacayo, program manager for the Dolores Shelter program, said there haven’t been many complaints from clients about Jazzie’s Place compared to other shelters. The city’s Shelter Monitoring Committee said in its report for the quarter covering January through March that Jazzie’s Place didn’t have any infractions and only had one complaint against it. Details weren’t available, but the alleged violation was related to the standard to “treat all clients equally, with respect and dignity,” The shelter “has responded to the complaint, but [the] complaint is still open pending the client’s response,” the report says. Lacayo, who’s bisexual, didn’t have details about the complaint, but she said problems that have come up have largely stemmed from people adjusting to being in such a space and learning the rules. “It’s tough,” said Lacayo. “You’re with strangers at the beginning of a 90-day reservation, and most of the clients have never been at a shelter.” Dolores Street wasn’t able to provide any clients willing to be interviewed for this story. Dave Ferrier, president and CEO of Community Housing Improvement Program, Phillips’ new agency, said she was chosen “primarily because of her leadership skills and her background in affordable housing and community-based work. We’re very fortunate she’s desiring to move back to Chico.”t

I told him NO ONE should have to suffer the way I did but I was too stupid and in love with him ... It’s hard to forget 24 years together and even harder to let go of it when there is still no closure, for he still has lots of my things in his custody, as I left with only the clothes on my back ... He also thinks that playing games with me is fun and pushing my buttons by telling me lies is the best thing in the world.” A July 5 post headlined “End of relationship” and written less than three hours before the shooting said, “Now I truly know the meaning of the ‘If I can’t have you no one else will even if I got someone to replace you and don’t want you back’ while keeping MY replacement so close to him so there is no chance for me to try to return the favor. ... #myexisshittierthanyours.” Citing “privacy issues,” Deputy District Attorney Marina Mankaryous declined to confirm the victim’s name, but she said, “He had a gunshot wound to the lower leg.” She couldn’t comment on his current condition. Mankaryous said that “at this point in the investigation, I don’t have information to release” on whether there had been abuse in Tejero’s relationship with the victim. However, it’s “considered a domestic violence case,” said Mankaryous, since information she has shows that they had been dating. Dennis Dawson, Tejero’s public defender, didn’t respond to an interview request.

years, and she’d helped her start the “Transpowerment” HIV prevention program there. Tejero left DeFrank more than a year ago, said Castro. She indicated it was because Tejero had disagreed with the agency’s approach to working with trans people. Since then, Tejero’s been “applying for jobs and trying to find a way to survive,” said Castro. “She was marginally housed when all this happened,” said Castro. “She was staying on friends’ couches.” She also said that Tejero’s mother died “a couple years ago.” Castro has spoken to Tejero in jail. “She just was in a state of shock and very emotional and crying,” said Castro. She said Tejero explained to her what happened, “but I can’t go into detail.” Gabrielle Antolovich, the DeFrank center’s president, declined to comment on Tejero because she can’t talk about past employees. Antolovich said she has “no idea” whether Tejero and her ex-husband had had problems with each other, “and that’s also something I wouldn’t even comment on.” The B.A.R. wasn’t able to find any Santa Clara Superior Court records online indicating there had ever been trouble between Tejero and the victim. A woman who answered the phone at the Costco where the shooting occurred declined to comment.t

Former Pride grand marshal

Castro said that Tejero, a 2010 grand marshal for the Silicon Valley Pride festival, had worked at San Jose’s Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center for more than five

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<< Open Forum

6 • BAY AREA REPORTER • July 13-19, 2017

Volume 47, Number 28 July 13-19, 2017 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 Michael Nugent • Paul Parish • Sean Piverger Lois Pearlman Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota Bob Roehr •Donna Sachet • Adam Sandel Khaled Sayed • Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro Gwendolyn Smith • Sari Staver • Jim Stewart Sean Timberlake • Andre Torrez • Ronn Vigh Charlie Wagner • Ed Walsh Cornelius Washington • Sura Wood ART DIRECTION Max Leger PRODUCTION/DESIGN Ernesto Sopprani PHOTOGRAPHERS Jane Philomen Cleland • FBFE Rick Gerharter • Gareth Gooch Jose Guzman-Colon • Rudy K. Lawidjaja Georg Lester • Dan Lloyd • Jo-Lynn Otto Rich Stadtmiller • Steven Underhil Dallis Willard • Bill Wilson ILLUSTRATORS & CARTOONISTS Paul Berge • Christine Smith ADVERTISING/ADMINISTRATION Colleen Small Bogitini VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING Scott Wazlowski – 415.829.8937 NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE Rivendell Media – 212.242.6863

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Kennedy needs to stay on court T

he U.S. Supreme Court’s term ended a couple of weeks ago without any of the justices announcing their retirement. But anticipation that Justice Anthony Kennedy might retire after the court’s 2017-18 term ends next June has been building since NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported that he had told law clerks he was “considering retirement.” A reporter from Above the Law later confirmed that the justice had informed at least one law clerk applicant that he might retire next summer. As Mark Joseph Stern wrote in a widely shared article on Slate.com, “The consequences of Kennedy stepping down are difficult to overstate.” That’s because Kennedy has been the key vote in numerous LGBT rights decisions, including the landmark 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. It’s not lost on us that should Kennedy step down, President Donald Trump likely would nominate another hardline right-winger in the mold of Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed this spring. That would be a disaster, not only for LGBT people, but also for women, minorities, and the environment. Crucially, Kennedy’s departure under a Republican president would leave Chief Justice John Roberts as a possible swing vote, and his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage case, is instructive. In his dissent, Roberts contended that the majority “relied on its own conception of liberty” and that its opinion was rooted in “social policy and considerations of fairness.” Obviously, a majority of justices disagreed, and Kennedy, who authored the opinion, wrote, “the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.”

“The court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them,” his opinion stated. Observers like Stern noted that in one of its last decisions of the term just concluded, the Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas law that sought to bar samesex couples from listing both names on their children’s birth certificates. Clearly, that state law violated Obergefell, though the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld it. The unsigned decision included a dissent from Gorsuch and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, but as Stern noted, that doesn’t mean Roberts was in agreement with the majority. “His silence could mean that he accepts Obergefell – or it could mean nothing at all,” Stern wrote. Already in his brief tenure, Gorsuch has shown that he is not waiting to make his mark on the court. He has come out swinging, both in oral arguments and in written decisions. In his dissent in the Arkansas case, Gorsuch wrote that the state’s high court “did not in any way seek to defy but rather earnestly engage Obergefell,” which Stern called laughable “given the lower

court’s obvious desire to avoid compliance with that ruling.” Two years later, a few states are still resisting the Obergefell decision, just as there are states fighting the court’s 1973 abortion ruling. And the Supreme Court itself has chipped away at Roe v. Wade, the Voting Rights Act, and other laws. There is no guarantee that, should Kennedy retire, the court won’t start to carve out exceptions for same-sex couples and their ability to legally wed. This fall, the court will review a lower court ruling in Masterpiece Cake v. Colorado, a case involving a baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, claiming it violated his religious beliefs. Wedding cake baker Jack Phillips has lost at every level, with the Colorado Supreme Court declining to hear the matter. But Phillips is being represented by the anti-gay Alliance Defending Freedom, which took the case to the Supreme Court. The justices had previously declined to hear a similar case out of New Mexico in 2013 involving a photographer who said her religious objections to homosexuality should trump the state’s interests in eradicating discrimination against LGBT people. She was also represented by ADF. Now, with Gorsuch, who’s from Colorado, on the court, this wedding cake case could be the first to allow vendors to discriminate against people based on their religious beliefs. This has broad implications beyond same-sex couples, and could see all manner of businesses start to refuse services to Muslims, divorced persons, or unwed mothers, for example, or other religious or minority groups. There would be endless possibilities to discriminate using religion as a pretext. Too many people need Kennedy to continue serving on the Supreme Court. The country must have at least one branch of government to serve as a check on any attempted assault on our rights by the president or Congress. LGBTs have finally achieved marriage equality – we need Kennedy on the court to make sure it stays that way. t

We shall not be moved by Jesse Oliver Sanford

adjacent garden, a gorgeous unused green space in the heart of the y friend Dahn van Laarz has Castro. a key to my house. He’s a tall Spaces like Grand Central are salt-and-pepper daddy on a motorworth preserving, too. One of the cycle who checks mail here for one Faeries’ spiritual and political pracof the Radical Faerie nonprofits and, tices is the offering of sanctuary. across the street at PO Plus, for the Over the last decade, my houseLeather Alliance. Van Laarz commates have extended themselves to mutes to work in downtown San thousands of queers of all genders, Rick Gerharter Francisco from his home in Marhelping people move to the city and Jesse Oliver tinez, then hangs around to work stay in the city, offering food, shelSanford for our community. I’ve spent many ter, and dressing room services to hours in meetings and group process people of many genders, colors and with this man, whom I admire for his situations. For years, Comfort & calm, warm, grounded energy. Fittingly, the FaJoy, one of the largest and oldest gay Burning eries know him as “Happy Worker.” Van Laarz Man camps, operated out of Kitten’s bedroom. has been part of the queer and leather commuWe host weekly community dinners that draw nity in the Castro since the early 1980s, but in a diverse crowd of 30-40 people. And in just 2003 rents drove him across the bay. the last year, hundreds of people have showMy house is also known as Grand Central. ered here, from traveling transgender perforIt’s a Radical Faerie collective above the Saumance artists to a gentleman who lives in the sage Factory, the classic Italian restaurant in park to several straight elected officials. the Castro. Our home gets its name from the I’ve proposed a queer land trust to raise sex voicemail business once run in the same funds to acquire and operate the Saulocation by the Hog Farm and managed by sage Factory building and other Jahanara Gravy, wife of Wavy. It’s equal parts properties in critical, highly visLove Shack and forested pagan temple in the ible LGBT neighborhoods in San heart of the city. We have been tenants here Francisco. The land trust model for 15 years. And as this paper has recently rehas been in use in San Francisco ported, our building is on the market. for 50 years. Marty’s Place, a colThis is a rare opportunity to transform the lective house for HIV-positive possibilities at 18th and Castro. Whether the people, was purchased last year Sausage Factory name and sign carry on is by the San Francisco Communiup to the current owners, but I would love to ty Land Trust, with which we are extend the restaurant’s hours and expand the working closely, but what we need to do now community use of the banquet room, which is apply the model to the Castro and Folsom already hosts groups as diverse as the Rotary strips, the Compton’s Transgender District in Club and the Log Cabin Republicans. As the the Tenderloin, and other strongholds from first small business on Harvey Milk’s block, the which we must not be moved. Sausage Factory is an ideal site for an intensely Land trusts can help protect these key locacommunity-focused, queer-operated projtions from losing their character and their exect, perhaps offering supportive job training isting queer-occupied rent-controlled housing services. The restaurant could even provide stock. They can reduce displacement and creactive management for the Bank of America’s ate affordable homes for queers to whom the

property arrangements of the nuclear family are not accessible. Collective ownership offers cost reductions and the security of knowing that a space could be available to provide sanctuary over generations. It has been enormously heartening to find that, whether they are on team “progressive” or “moderate,” it seems everyone understands the crisis of LGBT displacement and wants to revitalize and protect our queer neighborhoods. I’m grateful to those who’ve already pledged major funds toward the acquisition of the Sausage Factory and stepped forward to join the advisory board for the new land trust. Van Laarz tells me he doesn’t mind living in Martinez. He and his partner enjoy the extra space. But where are they going to live in their 80s? Where are any of us going to live in our 80s? I wager we want to be around our loved ones, our queer families, our community. Openhouse’s senior living facility at 55 Laguna is a good start, but to protect the character of the Castro we need to locate right in the midst of it. LGBT neighborhoods have disappeared before. Walk down the Polk Street strip and there is almost no indication that you are visiting what was once the heart of the gay and trans community in the city. The same could be said of the Barbary Coast, or of any number of former enclaves in other cities. The gay population in the Castro has been declining for 25 years: first we lost friends and lovers to AIDS, then to the rising cost of rent. Yet the Castro still has the densest LGBT population in a major city and San Francisco the highest LGBT percentage overall. Much is possible here. We can’t turn back time, but neither must we go gently, and we won’t. t Jesse Oliver Sanford is a longtime Castro resident.

Letters >>

July 13-19, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 7

People before the Pentagon

While members of the Republican majority are competing to see who can make the deepest cuts, there is a budget proposal before Congress that would boost the economy for all of us while cutting the number of people in poverty in half. It’s the People’s Budget, proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The People’s Budget invests in safe and productive infrastructure, education, affordable housing, health care and nutrition, child care, and working family tax credits. It calls for increasing the minimum wage. These investments will create 3.6 million jobs, and set us on a path to cut poverty in half in 10 years. The People’s Budget invests $2 trillion in infrastructure spending, expanding rural broadband, universal Pre-K and free college tuition at state and community colleges. Every year without fail our elected representatives give over half of the discretionary budget to the Pentagon, leaving less than half to be divided up to fund education, healthcare, environmental spending, infrastructure, and everything else. M J Sanches San Francisco

Thanks to retired nurse

I just wanted to add my thanks to Val Robb for her years of dedicated service at Ward 86 [“Longtime AIDS, hep C fighter retires,” July 6]. I remember meeting Robb when she first came to the clinic. She was always upbeat, knowledgeable, and friendly to those in her care for HIV and hepatitis C. She helped me in more ways that I can describe. I remember when I was trying to get the new treatment Harvoni, for hep C. Robb, already one of my caregivers, became a champion to me. I did not want to get a liver biopsy, which was required at the time to get the new drug. Let’s just put it this way, I’m a coward. Robb convinced me to have the procedure and walked me over to the main hospital and held my hand while the doctors extracted a small piece of my liver. She filled out all the necessary paperwork, petitioned the insurance

company and government to pay for the new drug, and with her persistence I was eventually approved to receive this very expensive life-saving treatment. Without her help, knowledge, and determination I would probably not have been approved for the drug while it was still so new. I am now cleared of hep C. She is, and always will be, an awesome lady and a hero in my life. I hope to see her at some of the anti-Trump-Pence demonstrations. There is one coming up on July 15. Sadly, it seems we will be losing two heroes from Ward 86, not only Robb but Dr. Dan Wlodarczyk – he has been my primary care physician for over 20 years – is also retiring. I will miss both of them very much and thank them for the rest of my life. Tom Battipaglia San Francisco

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Don’t sign tobacco ballot measure

There’s a campaign afoot, likely funded by the tobacco industry, to get signatures for a ballot measure to repeal the new law ending the sale of menthol and other flavors in all tobacco products sold in San Francisco. I urge the community not to sign on. The law was passed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors, after thorough consideration of the evidence. The effort was led by African-American advocates because menthol has had a stranglehold on their community and plays an outsize role in smoking initiation, addiction, and its deadly consequences. Ecigarettes come in thousands of flavors, and are luring middle schoolers into nicotine dependence. More kids are now using e-cigs than conventional ones. Those who do so are far more likely to progress to conventional cigarettes. This new law will save lives. Obviously, we’ve hit a nerve and the tobacco industry is worried about shoring up its replacement smokers and its profits. Don’t let this corporate monster run roughshod over the will of the people of San Francisco and the supervisors who represent us. Naphtali Offen San Francisco

Leader of gay SF GOP group settles into role by Matthew S. Bajko

ichael Gallardo readily admits he was reluctant, at first, to serve as president of the Log Cabin Republicans’ San Francisco chapter. But having now led the conservative LGBT political group for six months, he has settled into the role. “It was not a position I sought. My arm was twisted by some gentlemen who were very convincing,” said Gallardo, 61, during a recent interview with the Bay Area Reporter. “I think I kind of have grown into the position.” When he agreed last fall to serve as vice president of the chapter, Gallardo wasn’t looking to someday become the public face of the group. He was thrust into the president position due to the sudden resignation in February of his predecessor, Troy Bodnar, who had been elected to serve a full one-year term last October. But Bodnar, a registered nurse, lost his job in the Bay Area and ended up taking a six-month contract position in Honolulu. Not only did he step down from his Log Cabin position, Bodnar also resigned from his elected seat on the local Republican County Central Committee and quit the Republican Party altogether. He cited President Donald Trump’s positions on health care and immigration for his decision, as the B.A.R. reported in its online Political Notes column at the time. Although Gallardo favored Texas Senator Ted Cruz during the Republican presidential primary race last year, he told the B.A.R. he has supported Trump ever since he secured the GOP nomination last July and continues to do so. He said

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Officers of San Francisco Log Cabin Republicans, from left: Jason Clark, Kernan Jang, Edward Bate, Gene Epshtenyn, and Michael Gallardo.

he isn’t concerned about the president’s use of Twitter or constant haranguing of the mainstream media as “fake news.” “I think he speaks the vernacular of the American people,” said Gallardo. “His message doesn’t have to be filtered by anyone.” While LGBT advocates dinged Trump for not issuing a Pride Month proclamation, Gallardo noted that both the defense and state departments held Pride events during June. “I am not sure I would say I am disappointed. He has a lot on his plate. I would have hoped he would issue something,” said Gallardo, adding that, overall, “I think Trump is on the right course.” Living in one of the most liberal cities in America, Gallardo often refrains from expressing his own political views in public. In fact, he voiced some reticence about being profiled as president of the Log Cabin chapter.

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“I don’t go out of my to way court controversy. I am very careful with whom I discuss politics,” said Gallardo. “I have a lot of liberal friends and we agree to disagree and move on from there.” His partner, Jose Cardoza, as it turns out, is a registered Democrat who backed Hillary Clinton in the November election. With how heated last year’s election became, the couple opted not to display any campaign signs on their Alamo Square home. “He is definitely CNN, I am definitely Fox,” said Gallardo, who has worked in various retail positions but this spring starting driving for Lyft. Born in San Francisco, the oldest of four children, Gallardo grew up in Yreka, California, a small town near the Oregon border that is the Siskiyou County seat. His grandparents owned a local restaurant in town, and his father, who was in the Marine Corps, decided to relocate the family there. “I was the first Republican in my family. In high school I volunteered for Richard Nixon,” recalled See page 14 >>

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<< Community News

8 • BAY AREA REPORTER • July 13-19, 2017

Lesbian recalls ´60s love affair with Joplin by Alex Madison

standing-room-only crowd filled the GLBT History Museum in the Castro recently, to hear the story of Jae Whitaker, an African-American lesbian who experienced San Francisco at the height of the Beat Generation. Whitaker rubbed shoulders with the likes of the late gay poet Allen Ginsberg, poet and City Lights Bookstore co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and had a 10-month romantic relationship with rock star Janis Joplin. “It was a special time. It all was special because I was living it. When I look back on it, it will all be special,” Whitaker said at the July 6 event. Joey Cain, curator of the museum’s current exhibit, “LavenderTinted Glasses: A Groovy Gay Look at the Summer of Love,” sat down with Whitaker as part of the museum’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the summer when young people, many self-described hippies, flocked to the city’s HaightAshbury neighborhood. Whitaker, 79, did not lack an ounce of the spunk that shines through the picture of her in her early 20s that hangs in the museum. The audience was in stitches during the two-hour event reacting to her jokes, stories, and wittiness. Born in Brooklyn, Whitaker said by the time she was 5 years old,

Jane Philomen Cleland

Jae Whitaker, left, laughs during her conversation with Joey Cain about LGBT aspects of 1967’s Summer of Love.

she knew she was different. After graduating high school, she traveled across the county with a woman, eventually landing in San Francisco in the early 1960s. Whitaker talked about her memories living with Joplin, discovering Bob Dylan’s music, and brought the audience back to a time when being a black lesbian was far from acceptable. “Blacks were not accepted too well,” Whitaker said. “I was like a fly in the buttermilk everywhere I went, but we made it.” Stories of segregated facilities and even attempted attacks on Whitaker were discussed. Times became even tougher when she entered a biracial

relationship with Joplin after meeting her at a bar. Being a black lesbian dating a white woman in those times, Whitaker said that she was often vilified. Because of this, Joplin herself did not accept her own bisexuality, she said. “She didn’t want anyone to know she was gay,” Whitaker said. “She wouldn’t let anyone even take our picture together.” Whitaker and Joplin still had an eventful relationship and hobnobbed at North Beach bars Gino & Carlo and the Coffee Gallery, the first of which still stands today. “There were never any exclusively lesbian bars back then,” Whitaker

said. “We couldn’t afford to have an exclusively lesbian bar.” Maud’s, a lesbian bar in the Haight, had just opened. Joplin was performing and writing music, while Whitaker worked various jobs. The relationship eventually faded, and Whitaker went on to work for the U.S. Postal Service and play music herself in a trio band. Whitaker has since been featured in the documentary, “Janis: Little Girl Blue,” which discusses Joplin’s multiple lesbian relationships. In the ACT production “A Night with Janis Joplin,” playing at the Geary Theater through July 16, Joplin’s none-too-secret bisexuality is ignored, as Bay Area Reporter critic Richard Dodds wrote in his review. Joplin died in 1970 of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. The history museum event ended with a standing ovation for Whitaker and the fulfillment of the exhibit’s purpose, which as Cain said is, “to reclaim the major queer figures who were responsible for the Summer of Love.” One audience member, Arthur Corbin, a San Francisco LGBTQ activist for more than 40 years said, “There is almost no one left from her generation.” He spoke about the significance of learning from the past. “History is really important,” Corbin added. “It’s important for people like Jae to speak out and talk about their history and

support the younger generation who are still struggling. History helps us to understand that times like now are manageable. It’s not without its challenges, but we know we can do it.” For Kerby Lynch, a student at UC Berkeley who identifies as a lesbian, Whitaker’s talk inspired gratefulness. “I have great appreciation for Jae. She has so much wisdom,” the 22-year-old said. “African-American women in history have faced intense times of oppression. We have much more freedom today and we have to appreciate the times we live in.” After the event, two women sat side-by-side discussing Whitaker’s tenacity, spirit, and the influence of the Beat Generation on today’s LGBTQ community. “She has an incredible spirit despite the things that happened to her,” said Grace Santana, a San Francisco native. “The freedom we have today is based on how people fought and lived then. They changed the public’s view.” Her friend, Erika Huggins, said, “What I took away was her jokes, resistance, joy, and her complete wholeness. She’s just a wonderful human being.” “Lavender-Tinted Glasses: A Groovy Gay Look at the Summer of Love” runs through September 17. For more information, visit http:// www.glbthistory.org.t

AIDS grove in SF hires deputy director compiled by Cynthia Laird

he National AIDS Memorial Grove has hired a local philanthropic leader as its new deputy director. Joe Garrett started work about two weeks ago on a part-time basis, but expects to transition to full-time status soon. Garrett, a gay man, has experience with several other AIDSrelated organizations. John Cunningham, the grove’s executive director, told the Bay Area Reporter that Garrett will “primarily focus on development.” “His influential voice in the AIDS movement and being a well-respected philanthropic leader will be a tremendous asset to our organization and mission,” Cunningham said in a news

Courtesy National AIDS Memorial Grove

Joe Garrett

release announcing Garrett’s hiring. Earlier this year, the grove announced that it’s exploring a national museum to chronicle the story of the

epidemic. At the time, Cunningham said that the grove would be embarking on a feasibility study, the results of which are expected in a couple months. This week, Cunningham was asked if Garrett’s hiring was to help raise money for the museum project. “No, the position was created regardless” of the museum project, Cunningham said, adding that the feasibility study is being completed by an independent consulting group and that he needed someone like Garrett to help with various development projects. Garrett, 59, said that his work in the AIDS field was always as a volunteer until now. He served as an adviser on major donors and board development at the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation, which used to be the international arm of the San Francisco

AIDS Foundation and is now its own program in Zimbabwe. He also served on the board of the Contra Costa AIDS Project back when AZT was the principal line of defense against the disease, and was board chair of Project Inform, which provides information on HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C. Garrett said that his goals “continue to be to grow the organization.” “I have a lot of experience with start-ups,” he added. The grove is currently involved in ramping up the HIV Story Project and is looking at additions to the memorial in Golden Gate Park, Garrett said.

In recent years, the grove has emphasized its national designation – it’s the country’s only federally recognized AIDS memorial – and Garrett said that is worth highlighting. Cunningham said that the grove’s annual operating budget is about $1.85 million. That figure includes about $100,000 the grove pays to the city of San Francisco each year to cover the cost of a gardener (salary and benefits) and additional funds it pays the city covering the infrastructure of the memorial. The grove does not seek public funding; it has always maintained that See page 14 >>

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<< Community News

10 • BAY AREA REPORTER • July 13-19, 2017

Q Foundation helps bi woman obtain housing by David-Elijah Nahmod

bisexual woman who recently secured an apartment thanks to the Q Foundation said that the move to permanent housing has saved her life. Patricia Hayashi, 60, was evicted from her Western Addition apartment, where she had lived since 1970, 13 months ago. Hayashi had undergone full knee replacement surgery shortly before her eviction. She had also been diagnosed with amyloidosis, a form of cancer. Hayashi’s doctor would not allow her to begin chemotherapy until she had a home because Rick Gerharter the treatments would make her nau- Best Wedding Photographer Patricia Hayashi, with her dog, S now, shows the keys to her new seous and drain her energy. as votedasbyQBAR readers apartment Foundation’s Brian Basinger looks on. “I feel so peaceful, so human, so complete,” she said in a recent interview just after moving into her unit. forced onto the street. Hayashi and her small dog, Snow, “My puppy kept dragging his bed and “My former landlord knew about currently get around with a walker. bowl by the front door of the apartmy illness,” Hayashi told the Bay Area Her belongings are in storage, but ment thinking we are not staying. We Reporter as she and Brian Basinger, can soon be moved into her oneboth got the best sleep ever because we who runs the Q Foundation, met in bedroom unit; she plans to restart are safe, warm, and not outside sleepthe office of her new landlord to sign the services she lost. The mid-Maring with one eye open.” her lease before she moved in. “I lost ket apartment includes a full electric Hayashi said that she lost medimy physical therapist, my in-home kitchen, a walk-in closet, and a walkcal and other services after being care, and my Meals on Wheels.” in shower, which will be helpful for Hayashi due to her disabilities.

The bulk of Hayashi’s $1,133 monthly rent will be paid for by the Q Foundation, which provides rental subsidies for low-income LGBTQ people with HIV and other disabilities, as well as for low-income LGBTQ seniors. Q Foundation also has a free lunch program and offers seminars during which the homeless are taught how to apply for belowmarket units online. Both Basinger and Hayashi smiled as assistant property manager Moe Hakimi went over the terms of the building’s standard lease agreement. “I’m very happy,” Hayashi said as she signed the lease. During her months on the streets, Hayashi joined Basinger for a number of actions and hearings at City Hall, where they fought for funding so the Q Foundation could obtain housing for additional clients. Hayashi often broke down into tears when she spoke at these events. “I don’t want to die on the streets,” she told several members of the Board of Supervisors. And now she won’t have to – her medical treatments should begin shortly, she explained. “My cancer is not curable,” Hayashi

said. “It got into my lungs and is now in my heart. The treatments will lengthen my life.” Hayashi added that she hopes to live for five more years, with good quality time. Without the treatments, two years is all she could hope for. Basinger also expressed joy over Hayashi’s lease signing. “Every time the work my co-workers and I do leads to safe, decent, and affordable housing for our members inspires me to continue the work – I want to work harder, longer, and smarter because the model we’ve created works,” he said. Hayashi expressed her gratitude to Q Foundation. “Without Q’s guidance, I wouldn’t know how to go online and apply for a below-market unit,” she said. “You need guidance to do this.” Now that she’s moved in, Hayashi said that she has already begun making friends in her new abode. “My neighbor is super sweet. He helped me throw my trash away and gave me his number if I need anything,” she said. “For a big building it’s full of such friendly people – I got invited to a Fourth of July party here.”t

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community meeting Monday, July 17, will explore issues facing long-term survivors of HIV/ AIDS. The forum, entitled “A Resilient Generation Looks Ahead,” will discuss available resources and a new study of psilocybin-assisted group therapy. “When I first heard that there

was research planned for long-term survivors, I realized our community has come a long way since we began to mobilize four short years ago,” forum organizer and long-term survivor Matt Sharp told the Bay Area Reporter. “We are the definition of resilience, and we should come together to celebrate our accomplishments and continue our work into the future.”

Currently, more than 60 percent of people living with HIV in San Francisco are age 50 or older, and more than 20 percent are over age 60, according to the latest San Francisco Department of Public Health HIV Epidemiology Report. HIV-positive people are at higher risk for age-related conditions such See page 13 >>

t <<

Community News>>

July 13-19, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 11

LGBT data

From page 1

“She is the only person who needs to know that information. I can’t think of anyone else who does.” Her daughter, Greta Hull, 26, who is also straight, questioned why a government agency would need to ask a person if they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender outside of collecting such demographic data on a census form. “I shouldn’t have to give all my information to the state all the time. They don’t need to know that,” she said. Yet officials in San Francisco and Sacramento are aiming to make answering questions about sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) routine as they begin to collect such data in a variety of settings and on various forms. For many people, it will be the first time they have been confronted with such inquiries. And it remains to be seen if people will be willing to divulge such intimate details about themselves to the government. The questions will be voluntary to answer. A 2013 survey of 301 community health center clients in Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, and Beaufort, South Carolina, of which 51 percent identified as straight or heterosexual, found that 74 percent agreed it was important to ask about sexual orientation on forms. The survey, discussed in a paper published in the September 2014 issue of PLOS One, also found that 82 percent of the respondents felt it was important to ask about gender identity. “This indicates broad support among LGB patients, as well as among heterosexual patients, for sexual orientation data collection in clinical settings,” concluded the paper’s authors, led by Sean Cahill, Ph.D., the director of health policy research at the Fenway Institute, a program of Fenway Health that operates the Boston clinic included in the survey. San Francisco and California officials, as well as LGBT advocates and health researchers, have spent months scrutinizing not only how to frame the SOGI questions but also how to train the frontline staff that will be asking the questions. Their goal is to ensure enough people disclose their sexual orientation and gender identity so that the data collected produces a wealth of valuable insight into the health and well-being of the LGBT community. “Individuals coming to us should feel comfortable sharing their life’s journey with us to help them with their care,” said Barbara Garcia, the director of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. For Garcia, a Latina lesbian, the issue is not only one she is committed to professionally. She has personally experienced what it means not to be counted in official data. “Throughout my career I have always been told Latinos don’t need this program or that program and I would want the data to show it. I would be told they didn’t have the programs so they don’t have the data,” said Garcia, who was asked by her OB-GYN about her sexual orientation. “It is one of these issues where science creates a myth about me from a lack of data to show it.” LGBT advocates and policymakers argue that the health needs of the LGBT community are largely “invisible” because of the lack of demographic data on it. Without asking people to disclose if they are LGBT, they contend it is impossible to know what health ailments are prevalent in the community and difficult to request adequate funding from state agencies to address them. In its Fair Share for Equality report released in early 2016, the statewide LGBT advocacy group Equality California noted, “The collection of accurate, timely data about the LGBT community is vital to reducing disparities in health and well-being, simply because if we are not counted, we do not count.”

Rick Gerharter

Health Director Barbara Garcia

It argued that government agencies, lawmakers, health professionals, and other entities providing social services “need to know how many LGBT people are being served by existing programs in order to assess how to better meet LGBT health and wellbeing disparities.” Amanda Wallner, the director of the California LGBT Health & Human Services Network, acknowledged that people might find it “invasive” to be asked such questions. She has yet to encounter SOGI questions herself on a government form or survey. “But really, for folks who have been advocating for resources for LGBTQ communities, for resources to address the health needs of our communities ... it is incredibly important for us to be visible and to be counted,” said Wallner, a lesbian who advocates on behalf of 60 organizations across the state. “That is why we fought so hard to have these questions included. We hope the data, when it is released, will help with our future advocacy.” Due to legislation signed in 2015 by Governor Jerry Brown, California’s departments of health care services, public health, social services, and aging are required to begin collecting demographic data on LGBT people by next summer. State officials are working through how they will ask, collect, and secure such information and have consulted with LGBT advocates on how to do so in a culturally competent manner. “We wanted to provide some best practices,” said Wallner, “on collecting sexual orientation and gender identity that has been tested in the field and easy for people to understand and yield accurate results.” The California Department of Public Health declined the Bay Area Reporter’s interview requests for this article. In response to emailed questions, the agency said it has been working on implementation of Assembly Bill 959, which was authored by state Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) and sponsored by EQCA, since last October and would meet the deadline to do so by July 1, 2018. It is recommending the adoption of the federal Office of National Coordinator standards for collection of SOGI data. The department added that it “will allow programs and subject matter experts (that are designing the surveys) to determine how the questions will comply with legislation.”

Recent surveys

In recent years several state surveys have included SOGI questions, such as the California Behavioral Risk Factor Survey, the California Refugee Health Assessment, and the California Reducing Disparities Project. On the 2015 California Health Interview Survey, for example, respondents were asked in the fourth section, under the heading of “General Health, Disability, and Sexual Health,” the question: Do you think of yourself as straight or heterosexual, as gay, lesbian, or homosexual, or bisexual? It was the 18th question asked in that section of the biennial survey, which has asked about sexual orientation since 2001. Then, after being asked about being tested for HIV

and if they have a same-sex spouse or domestic partner, respondents were asked what their sex was listed as on their birth certificates. They were next asked if they “currently describe” themselves “as male, female, or transgender” and then asked to state their “current gender identity.” (A study that looked at the response rates to the sexual orientation question between 2003 and 2011 found that each year roughly 98 percent of respondents answered it.) As it works to add SOGI questions to more surveys and forms, the California Health and Human Services Agency has sought input from LGBT organizations and experts in the collection of SOGI data. The state’s health department said it had received a memo from 19 LGBT organizations that outlined some of the concerns around SOGI data collection and recommended it look at measures developed by the Williams Institute, an LGBT think tank based at the UCLA School of Law that has been a pioneer in the field of LGBT demographics. “CDPH is allowing subject matter experts to frame the questions (given their specific program needs) but working on framing the responses that users will be able to voluntarily select,” said the agency.

SF agencies add SOGI questions

In San Francisco city departments and contractors providing health care and social services had to submit plans by July 1 on how they would collect and analyze data concerning the sexual orientation and gender identity of the clients they serve. The policy, adopted in 2016, stemmed from a recommendation made by the city’s LGBT Aging Policy Task Force. Similar to the state forms and surveys, answering the SOGI questions asked by the city agencies will be voluntary for clients. The agencies covered by the policy are the departments of public health; human services; children, youth and their families; aging and adult services; the Mayor’s

Office of Housing and Community Development; and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. The agencies were given two years to submit a report to the city administrator that analyzes the data and identifies all services and programs where LGBT people are underrepresented. They were also tasked with developing plans to make their services and programs more accessible to the LGBT community. The Department of Aging and Adult Services began collecting SOGI data Monday, July 3. One of the agency’s primary tasks is to care for 22,000 people who need in-home supportive services; most are seniors but some are younger people with mobility issues. “It makes a clear statement we support LGBT seniors and older adults. And it is a statement to our staff and to our nonprofit partners that we care about these issues,” said Shireen McSpadden, a lesbian and the executive director of DAAS since April 2016. By collecting the SOGI data, McSpadden said her agency will gain a better understanding of the people it is serving and be better able to tailor its services to meet the needs of the LGBT aging community. “We have been collecting data on people’s ethnicity, age, and gender,” noted McSpadden. Adding SOGI to the list “is telling us more about the story of whom we serve,” she said. Earlier this year three DAAS staffers

took part in a training conducted by Openhouse, a nonprofit that provides services to LGBT older adults, so that they could then train all 100 of the agency’s employees, as well as those at 40 community-based organizations it contracts with, how to ask the SOGI questions and why it is important to gather such information. Those trainings were completed in June. “I am very excited about this,” said McSpadden. “I feel we are in a position to take a lead on it. We are one of the first to do it.” As part of the training Tom Nolan, 72, a manager of special projects for DAAS, spoke about his own experience coming out as a gay man later in life after being married to a woman for years. He also discussed how many LGBT people who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s lived in fear that their being LGBT would be exposed and lead to losing their jobs or being ostracized by family. And he pointed out how many older gay men lost loved ones and many of their friends to AIDS in the 1980s. “I felt personalizing it was pretty important because most of the people over there are quite young, most in their 30s and 40s. They have no way of knowing what it was like in those days,” explained Nolan. A key focus of the sessions was going over the right and wrong way to ask SOGI questions, said Nolan. The employees role-played different See page 15 >>

“We hope the data, when it is released, will help with our future advocacy.” –Amanda Wallner, Director of the California LGBT Health & Human Services Network

<< Business News

t Businesses, nonprofits urged to seek legacy status 12 • BAY AREA REPORTER • July 13-19, 2017

by Matthew S. Bajko

GBT businesses and nonprofits in San Francisco are being encouraged to seek legacy status under a city program that can result in financial benefits and longterm leases. Steve Adams, a gay man who is vice president of the Small Business Commission, would like to see such entities become legacy businesses ahead of the 2018 Western Business Alliance LGBT Economic Summit and Conference, set to be held in San Francisco in

March. The confab brings together LGBT chambers of commerce from six West Coast states and British Columbia, Canada. “Myself, as a small business commissioner, I am trying to identify LGBT businesses that have been in business over 30 years and recommending them to the mayor and supervisors to recognize as legacy businesses,” said Adams, a senior vice president at Sterling Bank and Trust and a former president of the city commission as well as the business association in the city’s gay Castro district.

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At the urging of gay former Supervisor David Campos, the Board of Supervisors established the legacy business registry in March 2015. That November voters then passed Proposition J, which established the Legacy Business Historic Preservation Fund, which allows for $500 grants per full-time employee per year to those businesses or nonprofits listed on the registry. Landlords who extend the leases of legacy businesses for at least 10 years are then eligible to apply for Rent Stabilization Grants of $4.50 per square foot of space leased per year. The business grants are capped at $50,000 annually; the landlord grants are not to exceed $22,500 in a given year. The program, overseen by the city’s Office of Small Business, is meant to benefit businesses and nonprofits that have operated for at least 30 years in the city and have significantly contributed to the history or identity of a particular San Francisco neighborhood or community. Businesses and nonprofits at least 20 years old that are facing a significant risk of displacement can also apply. The application process requires several steps, the first being nomination by either the mayor or a supervisor, plus the filing of a written application. The Historical Preservation Commission must then endorse the listing, while final approval lies with the Small Business Commission. As of June 26, 93 local businesses or nonprofits had secured legacy status. “It is not just LGBT businesses, even a big corporation like Levi Strauss & Co. is a San Francisco legacy business. It should be listed,” said Adams. “I think we should list the big ones and the small ones together.” Since the start of the program, six LGBT-owned businesses and three nonprofits focused on the LGBT community have won legacy business status, according to the online registry kept by the small business office. The LGBT-owned businesses are EROS: The Center for Safe Sex (2051 Market Street), Dog Eared Books (489 Castro Street), Lone Star Saloon (1354 Harrison Street), Moby Dick (4049 18th Street), San Francisco Eagle Bar (398 12th Street), and the Stud Bar (399 Ninth Street). Also on the list is men’s clothing retailer Rolo San Francisco Inc. (2351 Market Street), which is co-owned by Mark Schultz, who is gay. And three straight-owned businesses located in the Castro are on the registry: Anchor Oyster Bar (579 Castro Street), Cafe du Nord (2174 Market Street), and the Cove on Castro (434 Castro Street).

Rick Gerharter

The Shanti Project, whose supporters rode in last month’s Pride parade, is one of several nonprofits that have received legacy business status.

The legacy nonprofits are the Castro Country Club (4058 18th Street), Project Open Hand (730 Polk Street), and the Shanti Project (730 Polk Street #3), the most recent to win approval. “More nonprofits should apply,” said Shanti Executive Director Kaushik Roy. “I think it is a great way to let newer folks in San Francisco know about nonprofits or businesses that helped create the character of San Francisco.” Founded by Charles Garfield, Ph.D., 43 years ago, the agency provides emotional and practical support services to people with life threatening and chronic illnesses, in particular individuals living with HIV or AIDS and women battling cancer. Two years ago Shanti merged with PAWS (Pets Are Wonderful Support), ensuring that the agency that cares for the pets of people unable to do so themselves didn’t close its doors. In her recommendation letter for Shanti, District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim noted the agency serves more than 2,000 city residents per year with close to 90 percent living below the federal poverty line. “For many longtime San Franciscans, Shanti defines what ‘compassionate care’ truly means, I offer my whole-heartened endorsement for the legacy business registry,” wrote Kim, whose district includes Shanti’s Polk Gulch location. Roy, whose agency leases office space from Project Open Hand, told the Bay Area Reporter that he is unsure of what financial benefits his agency will reap due to being a legacy business. Nonetheless, as he researched the program, he felt Shanti would benefit from it, as would its landlord. “The more I looked into it, it made more sense for Shanti, if we got approved, to have this recognition for being in San Francisco for so long,” said Roy. He cautioned business owners

and nonprofit leaders that the application process is quite lengthy and thorough, likening it to what nonprofits must fill out when seeking grant funding. “It does take some work,” said Roy. “Whether you are a for-profit business or nonprofit, they want to know about the historical impacts you have made in influencing San Francisco’s character.” The B.A.R. is in the process of seeking legacy business status. Regina Dick-Endrizzi, executive director of the Office of Small Business, said her office has submitted a request with Mayor Ed Lee to recommend the B.A.R. for listing. Bob Ross, along with Paul Bentley, founded the B.A.R. on April 1, 1971. Bentley sold his interest in 1975 to Ross, who led the paper as its sole publisher until his death in 2003. It remains to be seen how, or if, the paper would benefit financially from being listed on the legacy business registry. B.A.R. publisher Michael Yamashita said he had not looked into those details or spoken to his landlord about the possibility of entering into a decade-long lease. “It is an opportunity to be recognized as a long-standing business in the community,” said Yamashita, who expects to have the paperwork filed by the fall. Adams said the B.A.R. is exactly the type of business within the LGBT community that should be seeking legacy status. “You play an important part in our community, and not only in our community but the citywide community,” he said. “You guys should be a legacy business to me.” To learn more about the city’s legacy business program, visit http://sfosb.org/ LEGACY-BUSINESS. The full list of legacy businesses and nonprofits can be found online at http://sfosb.org/legacybusiness/registry. t

Pennsylvania, 1971, and Stetson University, in Florida, in 1975. David began his career at Walt Disney World, which led to a series of positions and promotions, most notably at Levi Strauss & Co. David completed his career as a hospital director of patient experience in Phoenix, Arizona, before relocating back to his beloved California. Ever thoughtful, David loved to create magnificent birthday cakes for friends and family. He enjoyed traveling with his husband, John Hipps, seeking “big fun,” and wrote colorful and imaginative short stories about his adventures near and far. His sharp humor, bright smile, and sparkling

blue eyes will sadly be missed by all. David is preceded in death by his parents, Raymond E. and Agnes Toole Slover. In addition to his husband, David is survived by sisters Nancy Slover (John) Kernan; Suzanne Slover Leahy; and sister-in-law, Christiane Hipps. He is adored by many nieces, nephews, and many more friends and family across the country. A celebration of David’s life will take place in Sacramento, California at David and John’s home Saturday, July 29, at 10:30 a.m. Please contact John for directions or information atrememberdavid916@gmail.com.

Got a tip on LGBT business news? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 829-8836 or e-mail m.bajko@ ebar.com.

Obituaries >> David Raymond Slover April 15, 1953 – June 19, 2017 David Raymond Slover, 64, of Sacramento, California, died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease on June 19, 2017. Formerly of San Francisco, David was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and raised in Pennsylvania. He was a graduate of Pennsbury High School, in

Commentary>>

July 13-19, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 13

Queers need to build coalitions to resist Trump by Christina A. DiEdoardo

and – in sharp contrast to some of last fall’s events and the January 20 protest – Deplorable hecklers mostly stayed away. After reaching the pier, the march turned around and returned to the plaza for concluding remarks.

ummer often brings change. In this case, that means a new author for this column. For those of you who aren’t personally familiar with me, I am – in reverse order of importance – a criminal defense attorney, a historian, and an activist. As a trans woman and a lesbian, I’m proud to have served with anti-Fascist (Antifa) forces at all three “Battles of Berkeley” in February, March, and April this year, despite having been hit with chemical agents twice by Deplorables (i.e. self-described Donald Trump supporters) and, on one occasion, taking a weapon off a Deplorable who was beating someone with it. I’ve also participated in multiple other actions, from serving as a volunteer lawyer at San Francisco International Airport during the first round of litigation over Trump’s initial Muslim travel ban to attending as many other marches and vigils as I can. I’m honored to follow in Liz Highleyman’s footsteps and I look forward to continuing the tradition of excellence she set. Specifically, I’d like to accomplish the following goals for this space. First, I want to make this column one of your primary resources to stay informed about resistance opportunities in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Second, I want to encourage other queer folks to work with groups that we may not have worked with as a community in the past but who share our desire to remove Trump and his illegal regime from power. To build the coalition we need, our people need to show up.

National Day of Protest

Christina DiEdoardo

Protesters calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump gathered at Justin Herman Plaza July 2.

Impeachment March draws big crowd

Getting people to show up wasn’t a problem for the organizers of the July 2 Impeachment March in San Francisco. The event, which was sponsored by Indivisible, Alameda4Impeachment, and a host of other groups, drew over 1,000 people to Justin Herman Plaza at the Embarcadero despite the July 4 holiday weekend. “Suddenly, being quiet and humble is obscene,” said DC Scarpelli, a local artist and activist, when discussing the Trump era. “Suddenly, speaking out is an obligation. “Don’t be scared to howl into the void,” he said. “Resist and resist loud, so loud that we won’t hear the door slam as he’s dragged from office.” After hearing from Scarpelli and

other speakers, the march proceeded north from the plaza down Embarcadero toward Pier 23. While the organizers had planned for the march to take place on the sidewalk based on their permit, the San Francisco Police Department closed The Embarcadero to vehicle traffic for the duration of the protest, allowing participants to use the street instead. It wasn’t clear whether this was due to the sheer number of attendees (who appeared to be numerous enough to take up the entire sidewalk) or whether, as one marcher speculated, it was due to a desire by the police to minimize the impact of the march, since closing the street meant that the participants wouldn’t be seen by those who would otherwise be driving by a march on the sidewalk. In either case, one couldn’t ask for better weather for a march

HIV forum

Trump’s tweets

It’s a sad comment that far more media attention was paid to Trump’s offensive attack on “Morning Joe” co-anchor Mika Brzezinski than to anything he’s said about his Muslim and refugee ban that is likely to get people killed. In any case, Trump’s verbal assault has spawned an effort by genderqueer model Rain Dove to persuade Twitter users to report Trump for harassment. I understand Dove’s argument, but on balance I think the Resistance gains more from the tweets than it loses because they strip away Trump’s facade of respectability. Banning him from Twitter would only enable his handlers to shield him from public accountability even more than they have been doing. Instead, with every tweet, Trump reduces their best efforts to dust.t Got a tip? Email me at christina@ diedoardolaw.com.

7 NEW BMR

From page 10

as cardiovascular disease, bone loss, and cognitive decline, and many are also dealing with isolation and the trauma of losing many friends and loved ones to AIDS. Sharp will talk about his work with the Reunion Project, a series of summits for long-term survivors that have been held in cities across the country. Dr. Meredith Greene will discuss the Golden Compass program at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86, which offers a range of care and services for HIV-positive people age 50 and older. Researchers will inform attendees about how to participate in two studies for long-term survivors and older people living with HIV that will start enrollment in August. Dr. Brian Anderson of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry will discuss the Psilocybin for AIDS Survivors Study (PASS), a clinical trial looking at whether the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” can facilitate group therapy for long-term survivors. “PASS will assess the safety, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of combining group psychotherapy with psilocybin to treat hopelessness, a lack of meaning in life, and prolonged grief in gay-identified men who are long-term AIDS survivors,” Anderson told the B.A.R. “Based on the promising results of recent clinical trials of individual psychotherapy combined with psilocybin to treat depression and anxiety in patients with cancer, we think that when psilocybin is administered in a controlled clinical setting it can act as a psychotherapy catalyst, making talk therapy more effective and more fast-acting.” Rebecca Erenrich from ACRIA will talk about the Research on Older

RefuseFascism.org is conducting anti-Trump marches in several cities as part of its National Day of Protest and San Francisco is no exception. The local event, which is also sponsored by RefuseFascism Bay Area, begins at 2 p.m. Saturday, July 15 in United Nations Plaza, near the Civic Center BART and Muni stations. Under the theme of “The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!,” the protest is intended to inspire and focus resistance to Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim and refugee, and anti-black and antiLatinx policies. The event also condemns Trump’s military actions around the world as well as his attacks on health care, children, the elderly, the poor, and the environment – i.e. everything Trump has done since January 20. For more information, see the event listing on Facebook

at https://www.facebook.com/ events/287223228415418/?active_ tab=about or Refuse Fascism Bay Area’s Facebook page at h t t p s : / / w w w. f a c e b o o k . c o m / RefuseFascismBayArea/.

Home Ownership Opportunities At The San Francisco Shipyard Courtesy Facebook

Forum organizer Matt Sharp

Adults with HIV (ROAH) 2.0 study, a follow-up to a previous ROAH survey on the needs and experiences of older people with HIV done over a decade ago. This study is being conducted in cities across the United States, including San Francisco. Other speakers will include PrEP researcher Dr. Robert Grant from the UCSF Center for AIDS Research, National AIDS Memorial Grove board Chair Mike Shriver, and District 8 Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, who is himself an HIV-positive long-term survivor. “The forum will note progress we’ve made – Golden Compass is providing state-of-the-art health care at SFGH, we’ve got money in the budget for housing subsidies for seniors and people with disabilities, and money to address social isolation,” Sheehy told the B.A.R. “But there are still enormous challenges and more work needs to be done. We will talk about what we’ve achieved, but also about what we still need to do.”t A Resilient Generation Looks Ahead: A Community Forum for Long-Term Survivors of HIV and their Allies takes place July 17 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., at UCSF HSW-300 Auditorium, 513 Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco.

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<< Community News

14 • BAY AREA REPORTER • July 13-19, 2017

Guerneville

From page 1

housed in the river area prior to becoming homeless. Hopkins could not confirm that statistic but believes a “significant portion” of homeless people come from the local area. Johnson said the 70 percent figure sounds about right, that the existing winter shelter is “behaviorallybased,” which means the person’s only obligation is to conduct themselves in an acceptable way inside. The shelter does not require a person to be completely sober when they enter, but consumption of alcohol or drugs on the premises is not permitted. Johnson dismissed the idea that the winter shelter is a desirable place drawing homeless people from out of town. “It’s laughable that anyone would come to Guerneville to use our shelter, as the people sleep on the floor, have one shower to share between 38 to 40 people and can only be there between 5 p.m. and 7 a.m.,” she said. The only meal the homeless get is a dinner provided by community

News Briefs

From page 8

it did not want to take public dollars away from other HIV/AIDS programs, and Cunningham said that had been followed with the exception of a state grant the organization received years ago due to the work of former state lawmaker Carole Migden. Garrett declined to state his salary. He lives in Berkeley with his husband, Spike Lomibao.

Larkin Street gets SFPOA grant

Larkin Street Youth Services received a $5,000 grant from the San Francisco Police Officers Association. The SFPOA issues its community investment grant once a quarter;

Political Notebook

From page 7

Gallardo, who returned to San Francisco in 1976 to attend San Francisco State University and never left. Forty years ago this August, Gallardo joined the group Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, which was launched by San Francisco Republicans, both gay and straight, as a way to fight against a proposed policy that would have banned LGBT people, as well as their straight allies, from working in the state’s public school districts. Known as the Briggs initiative, the ballot measure was defeated in November 1978. Gallardo credited former governor Ronald Reagan’s decision to publicly oppose the homophobic measure with helping to sway public opinion against it. “Because of Reagan coming out in opposition to it, it went down to defeat,” he said. Nearly a decade later, in August 1987, CRIR rebranded itself as the Log Cabin Club of San Francisco/ CRIR. In October of that year, the local group helped launch a national umbrella organization with other Log Cabin chapters from within California and in other states. In the 1980s the San Francisco chapter had 250 members, recalled Gallardo. But it saw its membership decline after former Governor Pete Wilson in October 1991 vetoed

Hate crimes

From page 1

hate crime events and 45 offenses. (There may be one or more offenses for each event.) The number of anti-LGBT incidents wasn’t immediately available.

volunteers. Although its operations are limited to a few months, Johnson claimed the shelter is a life-saver. “Before the shelter opened last December and after it closed in March, we saw an average of one person per month die,” she said. Wendy Bignall, a lesbian resident of Guerneville, also cited the 70 percent figure. “I am not an advocate of homeless people as much as an advocate of better management of the homeless issue,” Bignall said. She also noted that, “Lots of homeless people actually have jobs but still cannot afford to rent an apartment.” Bignall started working with the homeless in late 2015 when she joined Clean River Alliance. “I visited my first homeless encampment shortly after I joined CRA and felt a wide range of emotions, from ‘these assholes are ruining the river’ to ‘how can this happen in America?’” she said. She described how about 50 encampments that existed in early 2016 have been consolidated into five current camps, moving people away from the river to avoid polluting it.

Bignall observed first-hand how “the camp residents started to make the connection that they were part of our community.”

Larkin Street was the group’s third quarter awardee, according to a news release from the association. In the release, Larkin Street said it would use the grant to support YouthForce, its youth employment services program designed to provide youth experiencing homelessness in San Francisco with an accelerated pathway to employment. The SFPOA said applications are being accepted for its next grant round. Interested neighborhood nonprofit organizations can apply at http://www.sfpoa.org/giving-back/ community-investment-grant.

an ordinance that will end the sale of flavored tobacco products – including menthol-flavored cigarettes – throughout the city and county. Mayor Ed Lee is expected to sign the measure into law. The legislation, introduced by District 10 Supervisor Malia Cohen, will go into effect April 1. Groups advocating for the law praised its passage. They said that tobacco companies have aggressively marketed menthol-flavored tobacco products to African-Americans, often targeting youth. Tobacco companies have also aggressively marketed to the LGBT community over the years. “With this decision, San Francisco has yet again raised the bar for public health policy around tobacco control and paved the way for communities considering similar measures in the

SF to end sale of flavored tobacco products

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has given final approval to

The ‘War Zone’

Bignall and a reporter visited one camp, which currently has between 26 and 30 residents. Though the county has not legalized the encampment, the residents are working to meet three conditions sought by the health department: trash pickup, proper sewage treatment, and a drinkable water supply. Residents have achieved the first two already. Camp resident Linda Del Castillo explained how she had been living in a trailer in Duncans Mills until a flood rendered it uninhabitable. “It was full of mold and I had to leave almost everything behind,” she said. She is personally involved in organizing the camp and is the unofficial manager of the “pantry,” which they hope will serve the entire camp. Her friend and fellow resident Glynis Moeller calls their organizing group the Independent Coalition for the Residentially-Challenged. But Del Castillo has a more serious nickname for the camp itself: the War Zone.

Perhaps the most contentious issue among locals is the impact of the homeless on local crime. Guerneville is served by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office due to its non-city status and the local sheriff’s station was slated for a staffing cut. But Hopkins said that cut was canceled and the recently approved county budget included $300,000-$400,000 to maintain current staffing levels. Hopkins said that, “people with more challenging mental health issues tend to stay in town rather than in the woods.” Emmett believes law enforcement is key and claims that arrest logs show incidents are up to 60 percent homeless-related. Johnson described how about two years ago the Russian River Chamber of Commerce hired a private security team for patrolling downtown. After several homeless-related incidents in late April, the sheriff’s office responded by increasing patrols. Sonoma West prints excerpts from the sheriff’s office daily log, with entries ranging from “dumping/ littering” to “assault with a deadly weapon.” Most are for non-violent incidents. Between May 9-14, 45

incidents were reported and two were “homeless-related.” For May 15-21, 44 incidents were reported and five were homeless-related. The most serious of the seven was for “display of weapon.” During the recent budget hearings, Hopkins pushed hard for extra funds to provide homeless services in the lower Russian River area, which includes Guerneville. The budget approved in June includes $1 million for this purpose and SCCDC is developing new proposals to present to the public. Funding for permanent housing may also be considered in the future. “I would support permanent housing if it is done right,” Emmett said. “We’re for solutions.” Johnson said, “My goal in life is permanent housing. I want to do what we can to help, rather than spend $300K for the sheriff to get the homeless to scoot along.” Hopkins, who was elected in November 2016, remains optimistic. “I’m lucky to represent a constituency who are passionate about community,” she said. “In the future, I’d like to see more solutions-oriented discussions.”t

Bay Area, California, and across the country,” Dr. Alden McDonald III, president of the board for the Greater Bay Area Division of the American Heart Association, said in a statement.

includes $375,000 to develop the new Compton’s district; $470,000 to help current and recently incarcerated trans women; and $285,000 for workforce development for trans people. “Transgender-run nonprofits have been doing incredibly impactful work without the kind of funding that other communities get from City Hall,” Kim said in a news release. “This year we fought to change that.” Honey Mahogany, an organizer of the Compton’s district, praised the funding. “Jane Kim and Supervisor Ronen showed up for the trans community this year,” she said in a statement. “We’re excited to see these new funds to help preserve and grow the transgender community in San Francisco.”t

Trans groups get city funding

San Francisco Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Jane Kim have announced that groups serving the transgender community will receive over $1 million in funding in the city’s new budget. Ronen represents the Mission district, which has a large population of Latina trans women. Kim represents the Tenderloin and recently passed legislation to create the Compton’s Transgender District there. Funding to the trans community

Assembly Bill 101, which would have banned anti-gay job discrimination in the Golden State. Wilson’s decision incensed many within the LGBT community who saw it as a betrayal. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Republican had reportedly pledged to support the legislation in meetings with gay activists during his gubernatorial campaign against former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein. “It upset a lot of people, and many gay Republicans said, “That does it. I am through,” said Gallardo. Today, the local Log Cabin chapter has close to 50 members. As chapter president, Gallardo would like to grow the group’s membership and further its participation with other Republican clubs. “My main goal is to maintain the integrity of Log Cabin Republicans,” he said. Should he be elected to a full term as president this October, Gallardo will help marshal the chapter members to work on the 2018 re-election campaigns of Assemblywoman Catharine Baker (R-Dublin), the Bay Area’s lone Republican legislative member, and state Senator Andy Vidak (R-Hanford) in the Central Valley. “We are a volunteer organization and provide a lot of shoe leather,” said Gallardo, noting that club members in 2014 helped re-elect Vidak to his 16th Senate District seat, which

he had won the previous year in a special election to fill a vacancy. “He accepted and appreciated the support of Log Cabin.” It has been three years since San Francisco’s last Republican elected official, James Fang, lost his seat on the BART board of directors. Party members are working to regain some local political power at the ballot box but acknowledge it could take some time. “I fully expect to have another Republican elected to office in the next four years,” pledged Jason P. Clark, a gay man who is chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party. Just don’t look for Gallardo’s name to be on the ballot. “No, absolutely not,” he said when asked if he would seek public office. Making fun of the U.S. Senate Democratic minority leader, Gallardo added, “I am always behind the scenes. I have no desire to compete with Chuck Schumer for camera time.”

Lesbian Berkeley school board member Judy Appel has officially entered the race for the open 15th Assembly District seat. The incumbent, Assemblyman Tony Thurmond (D-Richmond), is running to be the state’s superintendent of public instruction after serving two two-year terms in the Legislature.

“With your help, I’ll represent our voices in Sacramento with the same compassion and determination I’ve brought to everything I’ve ever done. Together, we’ll fight to strengthen our public schools, reform our criminal justice system, and ensure fairness for working Californians,” wrote Appel, 52, in a July 11 email to supporters. “We’ll make sure that health care is a right, affordable housing is a reality and paid leave is the norm.” The announcement about her campaign had been expected, as Appel had told the B.A.R. in May she planned to run for the legislative seat. The Assembly district includes the cities of Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Emeryville, Hercules,

San Leandro had more hate crimes last year than any other city in the East Bay, with 22 events and 22 offenses. In San Mateo County, 16 events and 20 offenses were reported. The totals for Santa Clara

County were 40 events and 97 offenses. About half of those cases were from San Jose, the Bay Area’s largest city. Greg Carey, chief of the volunteer group Castro Community on Patrol, said he suspects hate crime incidents are

underreported. When people are making a 911 call and speaking to police about an incident that they suspect is a hate crime, they need to make that clear, he said. The level of underreporting hate crimes “is likely people just

Lesbian school leader joins East Bay Assembly race

Assembly candidate Judy Appel

Kensington, Piedmont, Pinole, Richmond, San Pablo, Tara Hills, and a portion of Oakland. Appel and her wife, Alison Bernstein, live in Berkeley with their two children, Kobi, a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College, and Tris, an incoming Berkeley High junior. Formerly the executive director of Our Family Coalition, which advocates for LGBT families, Appel is now executive director of the California School-Based Health Alliance. She is the third out candidate to seek the Assembly seat. Lesbian Richmond City Councilwoman Jovanka Beckles was the first to enter the race this spring, while last month bisexual East Bay Municipal Utility District board member Andy Katz launched his second bid for the seat. The Berkeley resident dropped out of the race in 2014 due to a lack of financial support and endorsements from community groups and local leaders. Should one of them win the seat, they would be the first LGBT state legislator from the East Bay. Also running for the seat are two straight candidates: Oakland City Councilman Dan Kalb and former Obama campaign aide and White House staffer Buffy Wicks, who lives in Oakland.t Political Notes, the notebook’s online companion, will return Monday, July 31.

not understanding they need to speak up,” said Carey, but “if they don’t mention it, it probably isn’t going to be investigated as one.” The attorney general’s report is available at https://openju s t ic e.doj.c a .gov /re s ou rc e s / publications.t

International News>>

July 13-19, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 15

Chechen queer purge ignites again by Heather Cassell

ussia’s leading LGBT rights organization has sounded the alarm that individuals suspected of being queer have begun to be rounded up in another wave of detentions and tortures in Chechnya. The news broke just before last week’s G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Friday while both were in Hamburg. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sat in on the meeting. The Russia LGBT Network’s emergency hotline, which was set up following Novaya Gazeta’s April article that broke the news of detainment and torture of presumed gay and bisexual men, received around 10 calls since June 24, the end of Ramadan, reported BuzzFeed. The network has evacuated about 40 gay men from the remote Muslim-majority region, placing them in temporary undisclosed safe houses around Moscow, according to media reports. One man arrived safely in his host country, France, reported the New Yorker.

Chechen LGBT purge

Monday, July 10 marked 100 days since the news first broke about the human rights atrocity and no action being taken by Russian and U.S. leaders, noted All Out, an international LGBT rights organization. Since Novaya Gazeta’s first story, the newspaper has reported an estimated six secret prisons where suspected LGBT individuals and others have been detained and tortured. It’s now believed that 27 people were killed in January, some identified as gay men, according to experts at Russian LGBT Network and Human Rights First, who reviewed the list of names recently

LGBT data

From page 11

scenarios in order to learn how to respond to clients who may be reticent about answering the SOGI questions. The agency’s in-take forms don’t get to the SOGI section until after clients are asked for their age, ethnicity, address, and Social Security number. It is asking its clients who speak Spanish, Tagalog, and Chinese the questions, having had native speakers vet the translations. “My sense is we will have a lot of declines to state. My age and above they were closeted for a long, long time. They are concerned, rightly, about privacy issues and simply talking about it, especially some of the ethnic communities,” said Nolan. “There is a reluctance to talk about this. My generation is not used to talking about this; my generation didn’t talk about sex, we barely believed in it. Younger seniors may not be so concerned about it.” The DAAS employees were instructed they should not treat the SOGI questions any differently from the other demographic questions they ask. But they are to explain to people they don’t have to answer the questions, and no matter what they decide to do, it won’t affect the services they receive. “We wanted to normalize it,” said Nolan, adding that the staff was instructed not to say, “Now we have some very sensitive questions” when they got to the SOGI section. “We are trying to make sure people feel welcome and understood,” said Nolan. “We began this with, when asking demographic questions, do a prelude to it: ‘I need to ask you a few

A.P.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and President Donald Trump met for the first time July 7 on the sidelines at the G-20 summit.

published by Gazeta, according to media reports. New evidence is surfacing that men aren’t the only targets of Chechen authorities. While many human rights advocates have stated queer women haven’t been targeted, Chad Griffin, president of Human Rights Campaign, wrote in a July 5 letter to Trump, that lesbians and women assumed to know gay men are also being swept up in the crackdown. HRC published a 43-page report, “They Have Long Arms and They Can Find Me,” documenting human rights violations perpetrated by Chechen officials by gay survivors and reporters covering the story. Lesbian Russian journalist and author Masha Gessen corroborated HRC’s findings in her article in the New Yorker when Ali, a gay man using an alias who escaped Chechnya with the help of the Russian LGBT Network, described the chambers in which he was tortured. Ali told Gessen that he saw both men and women who were screaming as they were being “beaten with fists and batons,” in a chamber deep in a basement. Gessen, who lives in Brooklyn with her family, interviewed several men who were living in the undisclosed safe houses in

Moscow waiting to be evacuated. “My colleagues and I have seen first-hand the pain and suffering of those who have survived the horror of illegal arrests and torture [in Chechnya],” Igor Kochetkov of the Russian LGBT Network said July 6 in a joint news release with All Out.

questions designed to help the entire community.’” The agency plans to evaluate the responses it receives to the SOGI questions in a few months but has asked its staff to report any issues they are seeing sooner so they can be addressed. “We can modify it as we go along and be an example for the other departments,” said Nolan. The city’s Department of Public Health, with more than 8,000 employees in various divisions and settings, from community clinics and the hospital emergency room to the county jail, plans to begin its training about asking SOGI questions in the coming months. It is still figuring out when clients will be asked SOGI questions and how to incorporate them into the new electronic health record system it will be transitioning to next year. Health officials are also still determining the best way to collect SOGI data when a person is being seen at the emergency room or a mental health clinic, situations where the individual may be unable to answer such questions. The department plans to select up to nine sites to test pilot how it asks the SOGI questions so it can make any necessary adjustments or tweaks before rolling it out across the entire agency. “We are not going full steam ahead in terms of tomorrow everybody will be asked this question. We are starting the process to get our staff ready and then the community ready to hear these questions in a non-threatening way,” said Dr. Ayanna Bennett, director of interdivisional initiatives at the health department. “It will be a slow rollout.” Bennett, who is straight, chairs

the department’s SOGI Steering Committee, comprised of 15 to 20 people from different sections within the public health agency. Some sections, such as those focused on HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, have been collecting SOGI data for decades, while for others it will be the first time. “We do have some agreement on how the questions will be asked. The difference will be in who asks them and in what circumstances,” said Bennett. It is important for a person’s health care provider to know what pronouns their patients use and if their name they are called differs from that on their insurance, Bennett noted, as well as if their gender is different from the one they were assigned at birth. “We have clinical reasons to know all of those things. They impact the care you get in certain circumstances,” she said. “It needs to be explained to people why we are asking it. It doesn’t have a impact if you are seeing a podiatrist, but it does when seeing a gynecologist.” For the last 12 years Bennett has been asking the adolescent patients she sees if they are LGBT. Over that time she has noticed a difference in their reactions to the question. “It has become uninteresting to them,” she said. “It used to elicit an eyebrow and now not at all. Now they are much quicker to answer than they used to.” She suspects the same will be true of the general public as people become conditioned to being asked the SOGI questions. “What we find when we start is not what we will find two or three years down the line,” Bennett predicted.

Russian failure

Kochetkov called out Russia for “failing in its responsibility to allow its own citizens to live in safety” and for failing to “hold anyone to account for the appalling abuses that have already taken place.” In May, following a month of international outcry, Putin reportedly acquiesced to the pressure by agreeing to investigate the situation in Chechnya after Kremlin officials and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov denied the widespread detainments. However, the organizers of the Russian LGBT Network issued a statement June 26 stating that Russian officials were derailing the investigation. “There is strong evidence showing that the Russian authorities have no interest in initiating a just and transparent investigation and lead the public (both Russian and international) into an error,” wrote the organizations’ leaders in the statement citing the promotion of a high-ranking officer and the country’s human rights ambassador refusing to visit Chechnya. In May, Colonel of Justice Igor

Sobol, an expert in Chechnya, was assigned to investigate claims of LGBT persecution. He was replaced by Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Polivanov, who has no experience in the region. That same month, Russia’s human rights ambassador, Tatyana Moskalkova, who was also assigned to investigate, publicly stated that she had no reason to go to Chechnya personally because no LGBT person from Chechnya appealed to her office, according to heads of the Russian LGBT Network. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters July 6, “If there is such a question [on gay rights] then there will be an answer,” reported Russian news agency Tass. “We will inform you if this issue is raised,” he said.

Trump ignores Chechnya in Putin meeting

Trump reportedly didn’t raise the question during his more than twohour meeting with Putin on the sidelines at the G-20, according to media reports. Leading up to the summit, 25 U.S.- and United Kingdom-based international LGBT and human rights organizations urged Tillerson and Trump to address the humanitarian crisis in Chechnya during meetings with Putin. The global LGBT and human rights advocates called out Tillerson and Trump for their sharp turn away from America being a leader in human rights to embracing “a range of dictators.” White House officials admitted that Trump wasn’t even “aware” of the persecution of LGBT Chechens, according to a July 7 GLAAD news release. t

To read the full article please visit us at www.ebar.com Got international LGBT news tips? Contact Heather Cassell at oitwnews@gmail.com.

“People have to hear it a few times to decide what they think about it.” When he worked for a legal assistance agency in San Francisco whose clients were mostly gay men, Owen Stephens said he would always ask if people identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. “Sometimes people didn’t want to answer the question,” said Owens, 39, who is gay. Rarely has he been asked such a question in his personal life, said Owens, explaining that he purposefully picked a gay doctor as his primary care physician so he would feel comfortable disclosing his sexual orientation. As long as such personal information is kept safe, Owens said he has no problem having SOGI questions be asked on government forms. “We have to be visible somehow, and data is a way to be visible,” said Owens of the LGBT community. “I would hope they always ask it in a neutral enough way what is your sexual orientation. They should let them answer it, and if they don’t know what to say, give them an option.” Wallner, with the network of LGBT service providers, stressed that SOGI data collected by local and state agencies is kept confidential. “If you are ever concerned about your privacy, you have every right to ask about that and to make sure you feel assured any information you want to keep confidential is kept confidential,” she said. t This article is the first of three looking at LGBT data collection and was written as part of a California Health Journalism Fellowship project with the University of Southern California-Annenberg Center for Health Care Journalism.

Legal Notices>> SUMMONS LOS ANGELES SUPERIOR COURT NOTICE TO DEFENDANT: COOMBS PROPERTIES, ET AL.” YOU ARE BEING SUED BY PLAINTIFF: ANGIE BAGDASARYAN AND ZARUI ADJIAN CASE NO. LC104582 Notice: You have been sued. The court may decide against you without your being heard unless you respond within 30 days. Read the information below. You have 30 CALENDAR DAYS after this summons and legal papers are served on you to file a written response at this court and have a copy served on the plaintiff. A letter or phone call will not protect you. Your written response must be in proper legal form if you want the court to hear your case. There may be a court form that you can use for your response. You can find these court forms and more information at the California Courts Online Self-Help Center (www.courtinfo.ca.gov/selfhelp) your county law library, or the courthouse nearest you. If you cannot pay the filing fee, ask the court clerk for a fee waiver form. If you do not file your response on time, you may lose the case by default, and your wages, money, and property may be taken without further warning from the court. There are other legal requirements. You may want to call an attorney right away. If you do not know an attorney, you may want to call an attorney referral service. If you cannot afford an attorney, you may be eligible for free legal services from a nonprofit legal services program. You can locate these nonprofit groups at the California Legal Services Web site (www. lawhelpcalifornia.org), the California Courts Online Self-Help Center (www.courtinfo.ca.gov/selfhelp), or by contacting your local court or county bar association. NOTE: The court has a statutory lien for waived fees and costs on any settlement or arbitration award of $10,000 or more in a civil case. The court’s lien must be paid before the court will dismiss the case. The name and address of the court is: Los Angeles Superior Court 6230 Sylmar Avenue - Van Nuys, CA 91401. The name, address, and telephone number of the plaintiff’s attorney, or plaintiff without an attorney, is:

MARVIN LEVY, ESQ.; (SBN 101042) 12340 SANTA MONICA BLVD., STE. 234, LA, CA 90012 (310) 571-2320. Date: 09/01/2016; Clerk, by Sherri R. Carter, Executive Ofﬁce Clerk.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-17-553111

In the matter of the application of: IN HWAN HO, 880 43RD AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121, for change of name having been ﬁled in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner IN HWAN HO, is requesting that the name IN HWAN HO, be changed to IN HWAN HEO. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 10th of August 2017 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037639900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ACRI DDC, 759 20TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94121. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed DAVID ACRI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/14/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/14/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037645500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: A-TRACK CLEANERS, 5442 GEARY BLVD, SAN FRANCISO, CA 94121. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed LE HIEN THNG. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/19/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/19/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037642200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: KANNON GOODS, 1201 PACIFIC AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed HOVIN WANG. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/16/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/16/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037631000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PEREZ CONSTRUCTION, 551 44TH ST, RICHMOND, CA 94805. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed EVERSON PEREZ. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/08/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/08/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037626400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SAN FRANCISCO ATM NETWORK; SF ATM NETWORK, 3473 17TH ST #1, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed JACOB MALEKZADEH. 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 06/05/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037629100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PERFECT EDGE, 562 BANKS ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ALIREZA SABOURI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/07/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/07/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017

<< Classifieds

16 • BAY AREA REPORTER • July 13-19, 2017

Classifieds>> FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037639400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: UNIVERSAL FLOW MONITORS (CHINA), 2211 YORBA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed DAPRO CORPORATION (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/14/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/14/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037639200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SAN FRANCISCO CIVIC MUSIC ASSOCIATION, 1243 28TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed CIVIC SYMPHONY ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 05/04/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/14/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037634200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BLACKWELL INC., 3173 24TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed BLACKWELL INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 05/15/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/09/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037613800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LA CORONA WELLNESS CENTER, 3326 MISSION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed BCOK, INC. (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 01/25/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/26/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037639300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: FLASH DRAFT, 239 DUNCAN ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed DRAFT PARTY INC (DE). 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 06/14/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037637700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PACIFIC UNION PROPERTY MANAGEMENT, 1699 VAN NESS AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed PACIFIC UNION INTERNATIONAL, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 11/05/16. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/13/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037639000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PERFECT PUFF, 1376 HAIGHT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed PERFECT PUFF, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/08/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/14/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME

STATEMENT FILE A-037641900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MAXFIELD’S HOUSE OF CAFFEINE, 398 DOLORES ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed MAXFIELD CAFE LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 04/01/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/15/17.

JUNE 22, 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 NOTICE OF PETITION TO ADMINISTER ESTATE OF OTTO E. HOFFMAN IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO: FILE PES-17-300996

To all heirs, beneficiaries, creditors, contingent creditors, and persons who may otherwise be interested in the will or estate, or both, of Otto E. Hoffman. A Petition for Probate has been filed by: Werner Heisserer in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. The Petition for Probate requests that Mario Avila and Werner Heisserer be appointed as personal representative to administer the estate of the decedent. The petition requests the decedent’s will and codicils, if any, be admitted to probate. The will and any codicils are available for examination in the file kept by the court. The petition requests authority to administer the estate under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. (This authority will allow the personal representative to take many actions without obtaining court approval. Before taking certain very important actions, however, the personal representative will be required to give notice to interested persons unless they have waived notice or consented to the proposed action.) The independent administration authority will be granted unless an interested person files an objection to the petition and shows good cause why the court should not grant the authority. A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows: July 19, 2017, 9:00 am, Probate Dept. Rm. 204, Superior Court of California, 400 McAllister St., San Francisco, CA 94102. If you object to the granting of the petition, you should appear at the hearing and state your objections or file written objections with the court before the hearing. Your appearance may be in person or by your attorney. If you are a creditor or contingent creditor of the decedent, you must file your claim with the court and mail a copy to the personal representative appointed by the court within the later of either (1) four months from the date of first issuance of letters to a general personal representative, as defined by section 58(b) of the California Probate Code, or (2) 60 days from the date of mailing or personal delivery to you of a notice under section 9052 of the California Probate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may want to consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court. If you are a person interested in the estate, you may file with the court a Request for Special Notice (form DE-154) of the filing of an inventory and appraisal of estate assets or of any petition or account as provided in Probate Code section 1250. A Request for Special Notice form is available from the court clerk. Attorney for petitioners: Mr. Aaron M. Palley (260544), 6200 Antioch St. #202, Oakland, CA 94611; Ph. (510) 339-0233.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037650800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SNOW, 2175 MARKET ST #K, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed MICHAEL HO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/20/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/20/17.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 20, 2017

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037652700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MANAGE, 1203 UNION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed JU LEE KANG. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 10/16/16. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/21/17.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 20, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037646000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BUREAU, 498 WALLER ST #9, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed PHILIP TRAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 04/01/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/19/17.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 20, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037644700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: GROW YOUR FUNNEL, 44 TEHAMA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94105. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed PETER CHENG WANG. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/13/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/19/17.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 20, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037641300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BERRIES, 566 YALE ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SHAUN MITCHELL. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/15/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/15/17.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 20 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037655600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TREECRAFT DISTILLERY; TREECRAFT SPIRITS; TREECRAFT CRAFT DISTILLERY, 849 AVENUE D, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94130. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed TREEHOUSE CRAFT DISTILLERY, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on NA. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/23/17.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 20, 2017 STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME FILE A-036310700 The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as: BUREAU, 498 WALLER ST #9, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117. This business was conducted by an individual and signed by LAWRENCE LI. The fictitious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 02/17/15.

JUNE 29, JULY 06, 13, 20, 2017 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-17-553143

In the matter of the application of: CINDY WONG DASTIDAR, 325 BERRY ST, #616, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94158, for change of name having been ﬁled in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner CINDY WONG DASTIDAR, is requesting that the name CINDY WONG DASTIDAR, be changed to CINDY VAN WONG. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 22nd of August 2017 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037662400

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FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037668500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TIP TOP BEAUTY SALON, 1547 CHURCH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed NGA TU LAM. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/29/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/29/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: CONTAINER SURVEYOR SERVICES, 4308 IRVING ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94122. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BEHZAD SADEGHI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 07/01/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/05/17.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037634700

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037674000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: COGNIGENCIA, 2355 LEAVENWORTH ST #405, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed RYAN HANAU, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/05/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/12/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE HUMMINGBIRDS, 155 BORICA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94127. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ADELA MACMILLAN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 08/01/07. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/10/17.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037660400

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037669000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PARTRIDGE, 575 10TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed CLARA ROSE, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/01/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/28/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ILL-MONOTONOUS ENVOY, 11555 VISTA PLACE, DUBLIN, CA 94568. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ROBERT ANDERSON. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 07/04/2017. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/05/2017.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037661700

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037672100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SAN FRANCISCO INSIGHT AND INTEGRATION CENTER, 4257 18TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed GREGORY WELLS 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 06/29/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: GLC CONSTRUCTION, 2420 TARAVAL ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed GLC AND COMPANY (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 07/07/2017. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/07/2017.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037658300

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037659700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE WORTHINGTON LAW CENTRE, 582 MARKET ST 17TH FLR, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94104. This business is conducted by an unincorporated association other than a partnership, and is signed BRIAN M. WORTHINGTON. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 02/08/13. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/27/17.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037659800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NOE VALLEY FAMILY CHILDCARE, 309 30TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed NOE VALLEY FAMILY CHILDCARE LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on NA. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/27/17.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037660900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ROCKSTAR CELLPHONE COMPUTER REPAIR, 2601 SAN BRUNO AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94134. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed CELLPHONE DEVICE REPAIR LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/27/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/28/17.

JULY 06, 13, 20, 27, 2017

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: UNCLE JOE, 2101 21ST AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed UNCLE JOE, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 06/27/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/27/17.

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037661300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ZANELLO PROPERTIES, 1869 MARKET ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a married couple, and is signed ARTHUR ZANELLO & SYLVIA ZANELLO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 08/01/00. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/28/17.

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037664800

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BUCHANAN’S BIRTH AND BABYCARE, 124 DARTMOUTH ROAD #4, SAN MATEO, CA 94402. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed BUCHANAN’S BIRTH AND BABYCARE LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 07/03/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/03/17.

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037667700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: REVEILLE COFFEE CO., 937 HARRISON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed EVER88 LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 07/05/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/05/17.

Classifieds Movers>>

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037663700

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as: EMPORIUM SAN FRANCISCO, 616 DIVISADERO ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed EMPORIUM SF, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on NA. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/30/17.

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037670500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TRUE LAUREL, 753 ALABAMA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed FLOWER SHOP, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ﬁctitious business name or names on 07/01/17. The statement was ﬁled with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/06/17.

JULY 13, 20, 27, AUG 03, 2017

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Real news

Sophie Calle, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, Galerie Perrotin

Sophie Calle, missing in plain sight by Sura Wood

Strand Releasing

he French conceptual artist and agent provocateur Sophie Calle has arranged for a private investigator to follow her, shadowed and photographed a man traveling through Venice, impersonated a stripper, invited a series of strangers to sleep in her bed so she could observe them, and interviewed people listed in a lost address book she found, and published her findings in a newspaper. Calle’s bravado, voyeurism, and penchant for violating boundaries and standards of appropriateness have brought celebrity and notoriety to a 40-year career characterized by risk, exhibitionism, intrusion, role-playing, a fondness for games, and a predilection for the wild side. “I thought you’d be in jail,” she recalls her lawyer saying to her when she ran into him on a Paris street, gleefully adding that she’d “love to have a trial.” See page 24 >>

Sophie Calle, “Take Care of Yourself, Laurie Anderson” (detail, 2007). Video, screen, color print, frame.

Sex & the single bird-watcher by David Lamble

“T

he Ornithologist” is the latest extraordinary visual and sensual trip from openly queer Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues. In its first act, Fernando, a solitary bird-watcher, is nestled in a canoe, trying to spot a black stork, when his small craft is trapped by the rapids. This moment, akin to Alice slipping down the rabbit hole, begins a surreal adventure in which his life will be repeatedly threatened, rescued, interrupted, and finally, completely up-ended. It all turns Fernando into perhaps a better man, but also a creature he himself would barely have recognized at the beginning of the picture. See page 18 >>

Scene from director João Pedro Rodrigues’ “The Ornithologist.”

{ SECOND OF THREE SECTIONS }

Limit 8 tickets per person. All dates, acts and ticket prices are subject to change without notice. All tickets are subject to applicable service charges. *Advance tickets will still be available with NO SERVICE CHARGE on Sunday 10:00am to 3:00pm at the Fillmore box office only. Charge by phone at 800-745-3000. Buy tickets at livenation.com.

<< Out There

18 • Bay Area Reporter • July 13-19, 2017

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EXPLORE THE GAY WORLD

Bay Area Musicals

Daniel Barrington Rubio as Horton and Kennedy Williams as Jojo in Bay Area Musicals’ production of “Seussical The Musical,” now playing at the Alcazar Theatre.

by Roberto Friedman

he wildly imaginative works of Dr. Seuss (pen name for Theodor Seuss Geisel) have entered our language, become part of our cultural patrimony. Many of us grew up on his delightfully illustrated books, populated with bizarre characters and otherworldly flora and fauna. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan cited his seminal “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” in a 2015 court case. The odious US Senator Ted Cruz famously read aloud from “Green Eggs and Ham” in a filibuster on the Senate floor – though given his zeal for depriving the poor and the elderly of health care, a more appropriate work for him to deliver would have been “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Now the fledgling theatrical troupe Bay Area Musicals closes out its second season in San Francisco with its production of the Broadway hit musical “Seussical The Musical” at the Alcazar Theatre. The show’s flamboyant master of ceremonies, The Cat in the Hat, tells the story of Horton, an elephant with sensitivities who discovers a tiny speck of dust containing a whole community of Whos, including the littlest Who, Jojo, a child who stands accused of

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Ornithologist

From page 17

João Pedro Rodrigues (born 1966) is a youngish filmmaker with a terrific visual talent whose storytelling skills can go a tad sideways for the taste of some snooty critics, for example those on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb). Ignore this carping and instead surrender yourself into the cinematic arms of a god who has his benighted hero hog-tied by a pair of young female Chinese pilgrims or vagabonds who fear Fernando’s male powers. And then there’s the full frontal male nudity and the explicit male-on-male-sex that arrives deep into the story and leaves a lasting impression on Fernando and on us humble viewers. Warning: the films of João Pedro Rodrigues are not conventionally cast or plotted – see “To Die Like a Man” (2009), “Two Drifters” (2005) and “O Fantasma” (2000) – but they break

committed performances. Kudos all around to the whole ensemble, but especially to the star turns of Daniel Barrington Rubio as Horton, Andrea Dennison-Laufer as Gertrude McFuzz, Vinh Nguyen as The Cat in the Hat, and Kennedy Williams as Jojo. Out There exited the theatre with a renewed appreciation for the wit and wisdom of Dr. Seuss. “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” “Think your thinks!” “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” The Seussian canon seems large enough for a sequel: untouched here, for example, are both the impassioned environmentalist The Lorax (“I speak for the trees!”) and homely Myrtle the Turtle, who could well be played by US Senator Mitch McConnell. You’d have to be a Sour Kangaroo to resist an invitation to this imaginative world.t

thinking too many “thinks.” Seuss creates a moral universe with important lessons for contemporary Americans. Horton protects the endangered Whos on their dust-speck, while at the same time nurturing an egg abandoned by the feckless Mayzie LaBird, both simply because he gave his word: “I said what I meant, and I’ll do what I said.” Jojo learns the value of independent thinking, even in the face of being ostracized, and rejects the militaryindustrial complex as the bloody scam that it is (“The Butter Battle”). Miss Gertrude McFuzz abandons the empty promises of cosmetic enhancement (“The One Feather Tail of Miss Gertrude McFuzz”) yet still obtains her desired love object (Horton). Tony Award winners Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (“Ragtime”) offer up a lively score that covers all the Seussian bases. Several children attended opening night, and they seemed captivated by the piece. Director Rachel Robinson keeps the stage picture full of energy and life. Her actors do not condescend to the material, giving totally

“Seussical” runs through Aug. 5 at the Alcazar Theatre, 650 Geary St., SF. Tickets ($35-$65): (415) 340-2207 or bamsf.org.

the rules with intelligence and a firm grasp of the absurdities – particularly of the gay male division of human nature. Nothing that Fernando and his companions do is alien to us, but their behavior is forbidden, deeply taboo in the Catholic world they were raised in and in some cases expelled from. The lead actor, Paul Hamy, is a profoundly masculine everyman whose appeal will register even with those audience members whose type he is not. Part of the appeal of “The Ornithologist” is the way Rodrigues seduces and almost abducts you into seeing the world his way. By the end of the film, when Fernando literally hits the highway, you’ll be glad you came along for the ride. Rodrigues deftly employs Fernando’s problem with his cell phone as his jumping-off point from the reality of his boyfriend on the line back in Lisbon. From this moment on, his life veers madly out of control,

much like a character in writer James Dickey/director John Boorman’s 1972 adventure with another mad river, “Deliverance.” Rodrigues is saying that human beings are part of and subordinate to the rules and whims of Mother Nature, that LGBTQ people are very much part of Nature’s plan, and hold onto your seats, it’s going to be a very bumpy if gloriously queer ride. One of the film’s many delights is its total immersion in the forest/river systems of Eastern Portugal, near the border with Spain. This land that time seems to have forgotten becomes a character in Fernando’s pilgrimage, and is all the more alluring because it is depicted without cloying sentimentality in all its fury and indifference to human affairs. “The Ornithologist” is for adults of all persuasions, and features characters conversing in Portuguese, Chinese and English, with English subtitles.t

Books>>

July 13-19, 2017 • Bay Area Reporter • 19

Dungeon mistress by Jim Piechota The Scarlett Letters by Jenny Nordbak; St. Martin’s Press, $25.99

side from the usual perks of being called Madam, savoring devilish mind games, and getting to call all the shots in the sack, being a Hollywood dominatrix requires work, dedication, and extreme focus and patience. Jenny Nordbak, author of the recently-published tellall about dungeon life on the BDSM circuit in Los Angeles “The Scarlett Letters,” knows all about that, and happily spills the beans. Raised in small villages in Scotland and France, the author’s personal history isn’t one of abuse, but of familial unrest. Divorces and step-parents made her restless as a young woman, which led to a particular appreciation for playing the villain in theater productions. College at USC brought the freedom to fully explore her own wants and needs apart from those of her boyfriend, who left her unfulfilled and neglected. On a personal dare, she applied for a job at the Dungeon, where a no-experience-necessary advertisement seemed perfect, aside from the venue’s location in an “unassuming house in a mostly residential neighborhood.” It was there where Nordbak’s alter-ego Scarlett was born amidst the Dungeon’s ranks of “subs, Switches, and Dommes.” She learns fast, though her initial reactions to certain clientele are as hilarious as they are embarrassing, as when finishing with an older man with a tickling fetish. “That was so creepy! I mean, he’s old enough to be my grandpa and he’s pretending I’m super young. And tickling? Really? Who gets off on that?” Needless to say, her initiation into the group wasn’t without its speed bumps. The author writes of living a secret double-life for years; her day job on construction sites as a “bimbo secretary” eventually took a backseat to the massive sexual education she received at the Dungeon. From this point, the book blossoms into a delicious voyeuristic expose of dominance and submission, push and pull, strong will and gracious surrender. A vivid parade of fascinating kinksters marches through the book and into the hal-

lowed sanctuary of Scarlett, where she plays dress-up (“Sissy Harry”), gets spanked (“Harvey”), appropriates hot wax and clothespins (“Slave Wes”), and walks around barefoot in dirt and smelly sandals to appease a foot fetishist named Randall. It’s all described in explicit detail, and the types of clientele she encounters are all searching for release of one sort or another via every deviant kink under the sun. For her part, it’s a careful dance hinging on satisfaction, respect, and boundaries. “It’s all about nuances,” she admits. Her clients are mostly men, some famous in Hollywood, who have fetishized a particular act or circumstance from their childhood, and wish to will that erotic charge back to life as an adult. Or they’re just into getting off on having their balls punched and bruised, or their heads waterboarded (in one of the book’s heavier scenes). The book is fascinating and the author’s clientele diverse. The fetishes and situations that Scarlett is expected to navigate make her a true professional in satisfying her customers sexually, experimentally, and psychologically. In sartorial terms, the sky’s the limit. Ambiguous clients who haven’t stated a particular fetish or play preference when booking a session receive Scarlett’s catch-all “go-to power suit,” which consists of “sky-high platform heels, a black leather dress, and a corset that cinched my waist into an impossibly tiny 21 inches.” Formidable and sexually indestructible, she becomes “a bitch with whom you do not fuck, ready for war.” Despite its excitement, all this commissioned debauchery concludes on a swooning fairy-tale note far removed from Mistress Scarlett with her riding crop and flogger clomping their way off to more sizzling adventures, as readers would expect. Nordbak flirts with construction job co-worker “Kris” and experiences the kind of mindblowing, unfettered physical and mental connection that “stripped away all the bullshit and left me wondering how I could have existed without him to complete me.” Their elopement in 2013 spelled the end of her days in the dungeon. But as a new wife and mother, a condition that has “softened my hard edges,” Nordbak has come full circle and ended up on top yet again.t

JENNIFER HOLLIDAY

JOHN LLOYD YOUNG

MARILYN McCOO & BILLY DAVIS JR.

July 21

August 10 – 12

August 17 – 19

For tickets: feinsteinsatthenikko.com Feinstein’s | Hotel Nikko San Francisco 222 Mason Street | 855-322-2738

We are the future of the LGBT community. “The world still has its challenges but things are getting better. From the way we first met on line to marriage equality to our daughter’s upcoming Quinceañera our life together is more fulfilling every day. We keep up with events and entertainment on EDGE, because that’s where we see our future at its brightest.” The people depicted here are models. Their image is being used for illustrative purposes only.

<< Theatre

20 • Bay Area Reporter • July 13-19, 2017

Race relations down on the plantation by Richard Dodds

t’s appropriate that the first known use of the term “mashup” derives from an 1859 play titled “The Octoroon,” since Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ contemporary take on that slave-era melodrama is most certainly a mash-up. Not only do theatrical worlds collide – Carol Burnett’s antebellum sketches seem one inspiration, but so do Bertolt Brecht’s distancing didactics – but the mash-ups carry into skin colors. There is black face, white face, and even red face as actors swap out racial identities in a story embedded in racial identities of both today and 158 years ago. In his 2014 play now at Berkeley Rep, Jacobs-Jenkins deconstructs and then reconstructs Dion Boucicault’s musty melodrama that was nearly as popular as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in its day. The Dublin-born Boucicault was hugely successful on both sides of the Atlantic as an actor, playwright, and producer, and among his steady output of melodramas, “The Octoroon” was the only one to deal with slavery in the American south. On this topic, he was definitely a progressive, which in that era meant he thought slaves should be treated more like family than like chattel, with the villain of the piece intent on destroying a plantation idyll that a financially struggling family has built. Jacob-Jenkins has maintained the basic plot of “The Octoroon,” subtly changing the title to “An Octoroon” and not so subtly heightening the melodrama into mockery, and then adding a kind of quasi-contemporary vernacular for several slaves who become something of a Greek chorus, and who carp about their situations but have trouble conceiving of a world beyond the

boundaries of their plantation. Jasmine Bracey, Afi Bijou, and Afua Busia expertly play off each other in a series of recurring scenes. But the centerpiece role belongs to Lance Gardner. Actually, it’s centerpiece roles, for Gardner plays not only a stand-in for playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins who introduces us to the proceedings, but also both the kindly master of the financially failing plantation and the scoundrel who is trying to take control by any means necessary. Identified as BJJ, Gardner arrives on stage stripped down to his underwear, and as he applies whiteface, he shares with us his dilemma. “I’m a black playwright,” he says, “but I don’t know what that means.” Jacobs-Jenkins uses his variation on “Octoroon” to share his puzzlement, and provoke some of the same in the audience, as the actor moves from a makeup table on a bare stage to the world of Louisiana of 1859. Now in whiteface, Gardner is playing George Peyton, an erudite young bachelor recently returned from studies in Paris to help save the family plantation. Whatever disconcertion arises from his painted face soon gives way to acceptance of Gardner as this character, certainly not as Boucicault intended but in a kind of reverse minstrelry in which he creates a comically exaggerated, high-minded dandy. It’s a wonderful performance that is magnified by the fact that Gardner also plays the mustached villain M’Closky with both a leer and a wink – and the actor is even called upon to play both characters simultaneously in a scene that leads to a bout of fisticuffs. The two women in Peyton’s life, whose faces are not painted beyond traditional stage makeup, alternately provide the low comedy

and moments of genuine pathos. Jennifer Regan is a hoot and a holler as Dora, a wealthy neighbor and over-the-hill ingénue with a clueless sense of allure suggesting Carol Burnett in dimwitted damsel mode as she sets her sights on George. But George’s true love is the pure-

of-heart Zoe, one-eighth black – an octoroon – and forbidden fruit for a white man’s attentions. Sydney Morton plays her with such sincerity that the performance works on an earnest level that can become comic in its contrast to the outsized performances around her.

Kevin Berne

Jennifer Regan as a faded southern belle tries to woo a plantation owner, Lance Gardner in whiteface, in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “An Octoroon,” a social satire based on an actual 1859 melodrama, and the final show in Berkeley Rep’s season.

A curious subplot in Boucicault’s original play, and preserved here in buffoonish fashion, is the friendship between a ditzy slave boy and a hulking, monosyllabic Native American, played in blackface and red face, respectively, by Amir Talai and Ray Porter. When M’Closky accuses Whanotee of thievery and drunkenness, the angelic Zoe flutters to the Indian’s defense: “Whanotee is a gentle, honest creature, and he remains here because he loves that boy with the tenderness of a woman,” a line that Jacobs-Jenkins has preserved from the original play. Talai sharply shuttles between the young slave and Old Pete, an overseer of the plantation’s slaves who is a slave himself but spouts racist tirades at his charges to impress the white folks. In addition to his work in red greasepaint, Porter makes a swaggering appearance as the 19th-century author of the original “Octoroon,” spewing obscenities over his forgotten status in theatrical history. “Matinees,” he barks at the audience. “That’s right, bitches, I invented matinees.” Jacobs-Jenkins pulls and pushes at the audience, and borrows and invents for this play that raises issues for which some answers are provided mostly obliquely, and in one case with an unsettling sledgehammer. But director Eric Ting inventively handles the juggling act that the playwright has provided. Not all of the balls remain airborne throughout the production, but this is not a creation with much precedence. For at least seven-eighths of its time on stage, “An Octoroon” remains airborne.t “An Octoroon” will run through July 29 at Berkeley Rep. Tickets are $45-$97. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to berkeleyrep.org.

Joan Rivers liberation by Brian Bromberger

Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers by Leslie Bennetts; Little, Brown and Co., $28.

t could easily have been a scene out of a movie. The first lady of comedy Joan Rivers had been fired as television’s first and only female late-night talk-show host at the new Fox network. Her husband Edgar, unable to bear his failure as her manager and producer, had killed himself. Her daughter Melissa blamed her for her father’s death. Rivers discovered through Edgar’s mismanagement on bad investments that she was $37 million in debt. Nobody wanted to hire her as an entertainer. She sat on her bed with a gun in her lap contemplating suicide. Her Yorkshire terrier Spike jumped onto her lap and sat on her gun. Then Joan thought, If she ended her life, who would take care of the cute but mean and spoiled Spike? Putting the gun away, in the words of longtime “Vanity Fair” writer Leslie Bennetts, Rivers “accomplished over the next quarter of a century what would be a stunning achievement by anyone, but for an aging woman in an unforgiving sexist entertainment industry it was unprecedented.” Despite being a pariah professionally, she would go on to recreate herself as a cultural icon and a business powerhouse, building a billion-dollar company, arguably the greatest comeback in showbiz history. When she died in 2014 at age 81, she would be rich, unstoppable, and at the top of her game.

No one was expecting great things from Joan Molinksky, born in Brooklyn in 1933 of Jewish parents: a stingy, successful physician father, and an extravagant mother who idolized her attractive daughter Barbara and castigated the “ugly” Joan. Moving to Larchmont in Westchester, her parents weren’t supportive of her acting/comic aspirations, threatening to cut her off financially, even at one point attempting to stop her by having her committed to a mental institution. They wanted her to marry a rich boy, and Joan would later joke, “As I’m the last single girl in Larchmont, my mother is desperate. She has a sign up: ‘Last Girl Before Freeway.’” Years of desperate struggling (including taking her agent’s last name as her own) led to her big break appearing on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” in 1965, which made her a star. That year she also married Edgar Rosenberg (she had a brief marriage a year out of college, but soon divorced), and he became her manager. She continued to work regularly on Carson, and in 1983 became his permanent guest host. Having seen a leaked NBC memo listing possible successors to Carson’s job with her name not on it, she accepted Fox’s offer, but didn’t tell Carson she would be competing against him, which he interpreted as betrayal. He never spoke to her

again. Edgar’s unceasing meddling and poor ratings doomed the show. This catastrophe would be the prime motivation for Rivers’ remaining years. She never felt she reached the top again, despite writing 12 bestselling books, success on Broadway, her popular QVC jewelry line, an Emmy-awarded daytime talk show, a plethora of stand-up comedy gigs, a well-received documentary on her career, winning Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” and her hit cable-TV series “Fashion Police,” insulting the famous on their red-carpet clothes and looks (“Who are you wearing?”). Her August 2014 vocal cord biopsy went horribly

awry, leading to brain death. Melissa eventually settled a wrongful death suit for millions in May 2016 against Yorkville Endoscopy. At her celebrity-studded funeral, people eulogized how groundbreaking Rivers was. She received the recognition she never got while alive. Bennetts manages to convey the roller coaster spectacular triumphs and crushing failures of Rivers’ life, as well as her contradictions. Boundary-breaking woman performers like Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, and Chelsea Handler owe her a great debt. She was the first Jewish American woman to break the glass ceiling of comedy to become a superstar and talk about taboo topics like sex (“Before we make love, Edgar takes a painkiller”), abortion (“I knew I wasn’t wanted when I was born with a coat hanger in my mouth”), gynecology (“An hour before you come in, the doctor puts his hand in the refrigerator”), even the Holocaust. Nothing was off-limits. Although a feminist by being careerist, she didn’t like the label, remaining traditional by allowing her incompetent husband full rein over her business affairs. She ridiculed the unrealistic beauty standards imposed on women, but she followed them herself by starving herself to the point of bulimia (living only on Altoids) and having cosmetic surgery so excessive she was almost unrecognizable. Yet Rivers was angry and could be cruel, moving in her career from

victim to oppressor by ridiculing other women (inventing the terms fat- and slut-shaming) who didn’t meet her standards of beauty, weight, or were promiscuous, her most famous target being a plump Elizabeth Taylor (“Elizabeth wore yellow, and 10 schoolchildren got aboard”). Taylor got even in a practical joke in one of the best incidents in the book. Having lost weight and looking beautiful again, she surprised Rivers by accompanying uninvited George Hamilton to her dinner party, being charming, discomforting and silencing her. Rivers was a very early supporter of LGBT rights (gay men adored her) and the first celebrity to do an AIDS fundraiser. She had extramarital affairs while married to Edgar, could throw a fax machine across a room when riled, had ornate taste (her Manhattan apartment looked like Versailles), and promoted the talentless Melissa, happy to coast on her mother’s fame. She had an ambitious drive and voracious work ethic, believing stamina was more important than talent. Can we talk? The book is dishy, though it is hard to tell whether Bennetts likes Rivers or not. Melissa didn’t cooperate with her. Organized by topic, the book is not linear. Events are raised but not fully discussed until a later chapter. The final chapter is a spectral update of Rivers from the afterlife. Still, Rivers would probably have liked this biography. While candid, it is also fair. For all her insecurity, Rivers was the poster girl for resilience. Her greatest legacy was to help liberate women to tell the truth about their experiences. Rivers did indeed help change the world.t

DVD>>

July 13-19, 2017 • Bay Area Reporter • 21

The utter madness of the king by Tim Pfaff

he puzzling over the name tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has become as repetitive and determinedly fixed in place as the hair, if hair’s what that is. The questions, Is this a man?, Is this a human? are not of the variety that are answerable in autopsy, and we look hither and yon for correlates in the natural world that will yield if not comprehension then an explanation, but we hunt in vain. The fracas over New York’s al fresco “Julius Caesar” is as precise a metaphor for the addled modern spectator mind as could be. A perfect storm of misunderstanding and false identification, it was protested as the very thing it was – is – not, that is, an apologia for assassination, let alone a call for one. As theatersavvy New Yorkers pointed out, portraying Caesar as about-to-beassassinated American Presidents is less a Freudian wish than, these days, a theatrical cliche. How close are we now to a leering Lear? Milton’s Satan is a cardboard cutout next to Shakespeare’s senescent king if only because Satan, scene-stealing though he is, awes his creator to the extent

that Milton is humorless about him. But wit and humor prevail in the playwright’s depiction of the muttering, gaseous monarch, and the horrors the gaffe-master wreaks, wittingly and not, are black comedy. Post-election, postinauguration-coronation, I hauled my Complete Works off the shelf, hoping that I would find in it a pertinent urtext of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” What I found instead was Shakespeare’s unsparing eye for vanity, for the explication of which he had in mind the stage. Almost simultaneously with the drizzly ceremony of the inauguration a new video of “King Lear” (Opus Arte DVD/Blu-ray) appeared. It’s the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2016 production caught live, and as its tragedy unfolds, a striking element is the audience’s quick responses, sharp laughter in particular. Essential to its brilliance is Gregory Doran’s realization of this grand, universal, “cosmic” play on the sparest and most claustrophobic of thrust stages, decorated with Niki Turner’s exquisite yet minimal set pieces. The playing space is so narrow you start making up sto-

ries about the audience members seated right up to the stage lip, the playing field so tight that you know subconsciously that the characters making their swift entrances and exits off its ribbons are never fully out of earshot of the action we all witness. We spectators are in on the action, collectively the frog in pot being brought slowly to a boil by Doran’s relentless direction of action whose ineluctable conclusion we know going in. Our laughs become ever fewer, gaspings for breath that are, if anything, too few and far between. The camera (producer John Wyver, director Robin Lough) accentuates and adds to that feeling of compression verging on explosion. In a vaulting exit timed with his transformation from Tom o’ Bedlam back to Edgar, the camera slurps up the superb, tasty Oliver Johnstone until his face, wondrous to behold, looking back, eats up the screen. God knows the RSC had enough of its own aging monarchs to make a caustic update, but it passed on that option. Such as the costumes have period, it’s more then than now. The King Lear, Sir Anthony Sher (Doran’s long-time artistic and civil partner) shrugs off molds and stereotypes

for increased range of responses. Confirming that this is a man “more sinned against than sinning,” who should not now, or ever, be king, he reveals more than ravages of age. The first act’s grandiose divvying up of the kingdom among family by a man who’s now finding his toohard-a-job mimicked the transition in Washington, but it was only days before I watched the play that CNN broadcast the master commanding praise and devotion from his

underlings. While any number of the play’s touches have their modern analogies, it’s less any action in specific than the overarching egoinflation, smothering everyone and everything around it, that strikes an American viewer. Crazy is an equalopportunity employer, but vanity is reserved for the select few. The deadly, death-dealing confusion sewn among the minions, too, is striking for its headlines-reflecting quality; as for the vile sisters and their treacherous, self-interested, doubledealing suitors, the competition is stiff. No one would mistake the good Cordelia, here the magnificent Natalie Simpson, who is black, for the demurely adulatory cobbler daughter, Brecht’s blond Jewish Wife instead. This “Lear” is magnificent Shakespeare, not fake or breaking news, and tellingly, its king is capable of change, albeit too late for lives in his care. That’s such lesson as Shakespeare’s play has to offer, offset by some lines that chill: “The tempest in my mind – that way madness lies.” The late Lear is proclaimed “every inch the king,” but what strikes the audience to the core is the sane Edgar’s declaration, “The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’”t

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<< Music

22 • Bay Area Reporter • July 13-19, 2017

Beautiful singing from the Class of 2017 by Philip Campbell

he Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was packed last week with friends, colleagues and cheering family members for the Schwabacher Summer Concert. Named in memory of Merola Opera Program’s late Chairman James Schwabacher, the annual event also served as a joyous kick-off for Merola’s 2017 Summer Festival. Featuring simply and effectively staged scenes by director David Lefkowich from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana,” Douglas Moore’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” Massenet’s “Thaïs,” von Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia,” and Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the cavalcade satisfied both as an exciting showcase for new talent and also as a really big and wellexecuted show. Conductor Anne Manson led a skilled and beautifully prepared orchestra through the highly varied scores, providing a rich and supportive backdrop for the impressive array of young singers, all bursting with energy and eager to perform. And perform they did, with confidence and thrilling vocal power. The long but fast-moving concert built to fever pitch with impassioned scenes from French and Italian composers in the second half, finished off by an all-American (immigrant) ode to ice cream from “Street Scene,” by Langston Hughes, Elmer Rice (lyrics) and Kurt Weill (music). Versatility and ease with contrasting performance styles are important aspects of the Merola training. The sheer variety of the recent bill offered an engaging chance

to witness the early promise of the Class of 2017. Right out of the gate, mezzosoprano Alice Chung (Loma Linda, CA) dominated Scenes 2 and 3 from Act I of “The Ballad of Baby Doe” with her steady and warmly produced tone. Her bitter reaction to betrayal by her husband (handsome, assured Canadian baritone Dimitri Katotakis) was touchingly convincing. As her errant spouse, Katotakis first sang with ardent eloquence to the titular heroine, soprano Kendra Berentson (Portland, OR). Her rendition of “The Willow Song,” was both tender and sweet. The attraction between the pair was easily understood. Berentson was a more artful coquette in Act II, Scenes 8 and 9 from “Der Freischütz.” Her bright sound was a perfect foil for darker-toned soprano Felicia Moore (Princeton, NJ) as Agathe. Moore won a knockout in the third round, filling the dry acoustics of the Hall with a limpid tone that still bloomed with color. Soprano Alexandra Razskazoff (New Brighton, MN) was another standout as the title-villainess in Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia.” Her coloratura skills were tested and proved in music from Act I, as her character chanced upon her unwitting son Gennaro. Tenor Andres Acosta (Miami, FL) sang robustly and with intense pathos as the boy faced with the legendary poisoner. Both attractive singers made the potentiality of incest seem a little less repellant – only in grand opera with persuasive performers. After a congenial intermission, the party ramped up for dramatic scenes

Kristen Loken

Alexandra Razskazoff (soprano) and Andres Acosta (tenor) in a scene from the Schwabacher Summer Concert.

from Massenet’s sensuously perfumed “Thaïs” and Mascagni’s verismo shocker “Cavalleria rusticana.” The last time I heard “Thaïs,” legendary and beloved soprano Beverly Sills was tearing up the stage of the War Memorial Opera House. I realize I am aging myself, remembering her indelibly etched late-career portrayal, but I am happy to report, soprano Mathilda Edge (Chandlerville, IL) nailed her own characterization of the doomed courtesan and admittedly, she is more age-appropriate for the part. Edge’s confrontation with the tormented monk Athanael (baritone Thomas Glass, Edina, MN) from Act II not only vindicated La

Sills’, but also my own guilty-pleasure admiration of the work. Massenet’s melodic charms are seductive, and Edge added her pure voice and alluring stage presence to create a believable portrait. Glass sang with strong commitment from his side of the moral divide, to make his vaguely ridiculous character sympathetic. Choosing the “Easter Sunday” scene from “Cavalleria rusticana” to go next proved a wise decision. Only Mascagni’s steamily overheated drama could top the agitated passion of Massenet. Alice Chung returned to center stage as Santuzza, and wowed the rapt audience again

with another display of vocal radiance. Chinese tenor Xingwa Hao was a clarion-voiced Turiddu. Alexandra Razskazoff also returned to impress as the sultry Lola. The trio made us long to hear them in the entire score. There was a palpable sense of accomplishment in their excerpted scene, and judging by the tumultuous audience response, everyone felt the same. Merola affords invaluable “on the job” training for new singers. Celebrated singers like the late-lamented “Bubbles” herself have endorsed the program, and the Schwabacher concert was a great example of its worth.t

All-summer-long LGBTQ playlist by Gregg Shapiro

ueer singer-songwriter Sia has been messing with her appearance on her album covers for years. It didn’t just start with 2014’s 1000 Forms of Fear or either version of 2016’s This Is Acting. For example, for 2010’s We Are Born her face was peppered with colored dots and colorful pipe cleaners were woven into her hair, making her look like a hipster Medusa. But it can all be traced back to her third album, 2008’s Some People Have Real Problems (Monkey Puzzle/Concord), newly reissued in its first-ever vinyl pressing. On the cover, Sia is grasping a trio of magic markers with which she has drawn a heart and lines on her face. As for what’s contained inside, the songs on Some People Have Real Problems marked something of a turning point for Sia. Sounding more confident than ever, in total control of her powerful instrument, Sia belts out original numbers “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine,” “Day Too Soon,” a cover of The Kinks’ “I Go To Sleep” and the CD hidden track “Buttons.” She’s also joined by Beck on “Academia” and “Death by Chocolate.” It’s easy to understand why, shortly after the release of this album, she became an in-demand guest vocalist on other people’s albums, and a sought-after songwriter who would go on to provide hit songs for others. King of the key change, the newly officially out Barry Manilow has released one of his best albums in many years. The news of Manilow’s gayness might not have shocked devoted Fanilows, and few can dispute his longstanding love affair with his hometown, which he celebrates af-

fectionately on This Is My Town: Songs of New York (Decca), a career high. Manilow’s schmaltzy vibrato is in full effect on this soaring set of originals and covers. The best of the Manilow tunes include the showstopping title cut and the bright and bouncy “Coney Island,” as well as “I Dig New York” and “On the Roof.” Manilow still has decent interpretive skills, as you can hear on the “Downtown/Uptown” pairing, the Bernstein/Comden Green composition “Lonely Town” and the eight-song “NYC Medley,” which is as jampacked as a rush-hour subway car.

To call the phenomenal No Shape (Matador) by the brilliant Perfume Genius (aka Mike Hadreas) his most accessible album to date is really saying something. But it’s true. By no means abandoning the subversive nature of his previous albums, including 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It (including the song “Hood,” which featured the now-deceased gay porn-star Arpad Miklos in the video) and 2014’s Too Bright (featuring the incredible single “Queen”),

No Shape sounds like an altogether more soulful effort. There is another side to opener “Otherside.” “Slip Away” is the first of the album’s irresistible future-pop numbers, such as “Wreath,” the stunning “Sides” (a duet with Weyes Blood), and the modern soul of “Die 4 You.” Perfume Genius, Car Seat Headrest, Frank Ocean, John Grant, Shamir, and a few others are redefining queer male pop music and setting the stage for what’s to come.

Young, queer “nu-folk” goddess Marika Hackman and guest backing band the Big Moon raise a ruckus on Hackman’s second album I’m Not Your Man (Sub Pop). Opening with a laugh and inviting listeners in on the joke, “Boyfriend” is the musical equivalent of Gloria Steinem’s “like a fish needs a bicycle” quote. The only difference is that you can dance to “Boyfriend.” A close chum of queer model-actress Cara Delavigne, Hackman explores a range of

ing her country side. Songs such as “Girl Thing,” “Roll Over Me” and “Roman Holiday” are among Knapp’s mostly proudly out numbers. You might not expect to find alt-metal band Linkin Park in a column about LGBTQ music, but here they are. The explanation goes like this: the band’s 2012 album Living Things featured a collaboration with gay singer-songwriter Owen Pallett on the song “I’ll Be Gone.” Five years later, Linkin Park’s new album One

Palehound, led by Ellen Kempner, a lesbian singersongwriter in the vein of straight artists Elliott Smith and Liz Phair, as well as queer contemporaries SOAK and Tegan and Sara, returns with the outstanding second album A Place I’ll Always Go (Polyvinyl). A song cycle of love and loss, the album features “If You Met Her,” “Turning 21,” “Flowing Over,” and the heart-wrenching “Feeling Fruit,” followed by “At Night I’m All Right with You,” which conjures Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise just in time for the Twin Peaks revival.

female relationships throughout the album, with songs including “Good Intentions,” “Time’s Been Reckless,” “Eastbound Train” and the incredible “My Lover Cindy.” Produced by Viktor Krauss (brother of Alison), Love Comes Back Around (Graylin) by lesbian singer-songwriter Jennifer Knapp, who famously began her career as a Christian musician, is the third album she has released as an openly queer artist. Now back in Nashville after living in Australia for several years, Knapp can be heard embrac-

More Light (WB) features another unexpected collaboration. The song “Heavy,” featuring vocals by Kiiara, was co-written by gay hit pop songwriter Justin Tranter. That song, “Sorry for Now,” and a few others on the album, are distinct departures from Linkin Park’s trademark rap/rock sound.t Perfume Genius performs on July 18 & 19 at The Independent in San Francisco. Marika Hackman performs on July 31 at Starline Social Club in Oakland.

TV>>

July 13-19, 2017 • Bay Area Reporter • 23

Seeing is not believing by Victoria A. Brownworth

t felt a bit surreal on July 6, watching MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow explain in excruciatingly precise detail, as only a semiotics major might, how forged NSA documents were being shopped to mainstream media outlets. “See these dots here?” she asked her audience as we saw a letter with some yellow dots around it come up onscreen. Then there was discussion of a crease in a page, some folding, and that name out of a punk spy novel, Reality Winner, and we felt, not for the first time, that we were down the rabbit hole with the Trump presidency and deception upon deception. This is “The Americans,” circa 2017. Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes called Maddow’s report “a real public service.” He noted that the methodical way Maddow investigated the hoax of the faked documents being sent to news outlets to undermine their authority was “public forensics.” If you missed her report, it’s available at MSNBC.com. There is also her written report, which is definitely worth reading. The day after Maddow’s report, on July 7, Trump met with Putin, allegedly for the first time. (Trump has said in various interviews that he’s met Putin before.) The two leaders were in Hamburg, Germany, for the G-20 summit. Trump said it was “an honor” to meet the Russian leader who interfered in the November election on a multi-faceted scale to, as U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed, prevent Hillary Clinton from being president. More than two hours later, after a private meeting between Trump and Putin in which Trump agreed to partner on cybersecurity with the man who sundered ours, Sec. of State Rex Tillerson told the media that there would be “no re-litigation of the past.” According to Trump, Putin’s orchestration of the 2016 election is no longer relevant, an extraordinary statement from the head of our democratic government. Forget that pesky Congressional investigation or the data amassed from several branches of the U.S. intelligence community and Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence agency. Forget that ignoring what happened means it will continue. As was noted on Maddow’s show July 6, the 2018 and 2020 elections are imperiled. Forget those video clips of former DNI chief James Clapper telling Congress this 2018 and 2020 breach wasn’t just likely, it was probable. MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, never an alarmist, said, “It becomes harder and harder to believe Trump isn’t counting on massive voter disenfranchisement and Russian aid to win re-election in 2020.” Reid also noted, “Donald Trump is either oblivious to the principles that have bound America together for centuries, or hostile to them.” Juliette Kayyem, national security analyst for CNN who was assistant secretary for Homeland Security in the Obama Administration, was succinct. “I think it’s safe to say now that President Trump is an enabler of Russia’s interference.” But for Trump, Putin said nyet, so da, it must be true. Unsurprisingly, Russian state TV emphasized the length of the private meeting, which was four times what was scheduled. Russian TV also leapt at the U.S. statements of forgive-and-forget, and presented this alleged resolution in glowing terms, referencing Trump’s statement that it was an “honor” to meet Putin, who is known globally for his brutal suppression, targeting of opposition press, and repression of LGBT people. Given this background, MSNBC

couldn’t have planned their July 7 debut of “On Assignment with Richard Engel” better. The network is running what it calls a “special series” with the renowned reporter who is NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent. Engel will take over Maddow’s slot on Friday nights throughout the summer, delving into political issues from his own multi-award-winning vantage point. Maddow’s show has seen a ratings boom since Trump’s Inauguration, and finished the second quarter as the most-watched cable news show. Promoting Engel’s work every week will give MSNBC yet more news gravitas while also affording Maddow three-day MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow explained on her show how forged NSA documents weekends through Labor were being shopped around to media outlets. Day, so she can rest up leading into September’s “Dying to be Famous: The were outright shocking. If you ratings war. Versace Murder” aired on ABC’s missed this eye-opening report, it’s In his superb July 7 foray, Engel, “20/20” July 7, definitely worth a available at MSNBC.com known for his reporting from war look if you missed it. The episode zones, took on Putin. He charted the South Parked delves into gay serial killer Andrew rise to power of the former veteran Remember when there was no Cunanan, a Castro denizen and husKGB intelligence officer, and how shibboleth sacred to Comedy Centler of wealthy men. Cunanan murBoris Yeltsin ceded power to him in tral’s beloved “South Park?” Say dered five men, including his then1999 in exchange for a full pardon. the n word? Sure. Satirize Obama, partner, over a three-month period Putin has been in power ever since. George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary in the summer of 1997. Cunanan’s He was acting president when YeltClinton? Absolutely. Take on Trump? final and most infamous killing was sin resigned, then elected president Never. In an interview on July 6, Trey of fashion designer Gianni Versace, for two terms through 2008. He Parker, co-creator with Matt Stone whom Cunanan murdered in front was appointed prime minister for of the show that premieres its 21st of Versace’s Miami Beach mansion Dmitry Medvedev from 2008-12, season in August, said on July 15, 1997. Days later Cuwhen he again ran for “South Park” is scaling nanan killed himself. president (Russia had back its political humor. The shocking murder of Versace four-year term limits like Parker said the show and the manhunt for Cunanan was the U.S., but Medvedev, could “get crazy ratings” headline news 20 years ago. While widely viewed as Putin’s for lampooning Trump we know many of the facts of the puppet, extended these as they have other presicase, Cunanan’s killing of Versace to six years.) Putin has dents and contenders and his other victims is getting been president since, (Al Gore, John McCain renewed interest and dramatic TV and is expected to run and Mitt Romney have treatment. Ryan Murphy (“Ameriagain in 2018 and win. also had the “South can Horror Story”) has chosen to Engel took viewers Park” treatment). But, highlight the Versace murder and inside Putin’s repressive regime. Parker said, the show doesn’t want to Cunanan in an upcoming series as He got shoved by armed riot police be “SNL” or CNN, where you tune in part of his “American Crime” anat several demonstrations, most to see what we’re going to say about thology project. Murphy’s Emmyrecently last month, but avoided Trump.” Parker said he thinks Trump winning series “American Crime arrest. Engel interviewed dissidents, uses “comedic art” to get attention. Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” including several marked for death “The things we do, being outrageous debuted in 2016. by the Putin administration yet able and taking things to the extreme Darren Criss (“Glee”) is slated to to survive poisonings and fourto get a reaction out of people, he’s play Cunanan, and Edgar Ramirez story falls, as well as others who have using those tools. At his rallies he gets will portray Versace. The complex been jailed, like members of the nopeople laughing and whooping.” To story is based on investigative torious Pussy Riot group. Engel also quote “South Park”: Mmkay, but that reporter Maureen Orth’s book detailed the murder of an American makes me a sad panda. “Vulgar Favors: Gianni Versace, businessman working in Russia. The kind of history being forged Andrew Cunanan and the Largest Near the end of his report, Engel in Washington, D.C. may have Failed Manhunt in U.S. History.” put up a screen with all the people caused you to ignore the HisThe “20/20” segment will definitely who had met with untimely poitory channel in recent months, tempt you for more of this fascinatsonings or falls, most of whom but two new offerings are worth ing story of predation in and on the succumbed to their injuries. It a look. “Amelia Earhart: The Lost gay community. was a massive number of men and Evidence” continues our fascination Another real-life murder myswomen, including journalists: 34 with the mystery of the missing avitery is being highlighted on Spike. have been murdered under Putin. atrix and how she might have been By contrast, only three journalists captured by the Japanese during have been killed in the same time WWII and lived out her life in the period in China, and two in the Pacific where her plane disappeared U.S., Virginia reporters shot on-air in 1937. She could not be alive still in August 2015. (she’d be 120), but her legacy lives Part of the Engel report was a and breathes. segment by NBC News London corThe eight-part “American Riprespondent Kelly Cobiella. In it she per” series delves into a different but delved into the broad acceptance of endlessly fascinating unsolved mysPutin by the Republicans and the tery: Who was Jack the Ripper? The evangelical right in the U.S. CobiHistory series posits he might have ella’s report, replete with interviews, been an American, H.H. Holmes was most unsettling. As she detailed, aka Herman Mudgett. Jeff Mudgett, the tectonic shift from Reagan’s asattorney and great-great-grandson sessment of Russia as an “evil emof America’s first serial killer, argues pire” in the 1980s to the Tea Party’s Holmes/Mudgett could have esevangelical embrace of all things caped his execution and fled to LonPutin underscored why Trump supdon. There, the series suggests, he porters couldn’t care less about the was engaged in dozens of murders, Russia investigation. As she noted, including the notorious Whitechapolls show more than half of GOP pel eviscerations attributed to Jack voters find Russia to be a friend and the Ripper. Is this probable or even ally. possible? Even if “American Ripper” As Cobiella reported, America’s doesn’t make a strong case for Jack right agrees with Putin, who shares being a Yank, it’s an engaging look at their love of guns and hatred of America’s first serial killer and how gays. The interviews with Repubthat crime was born. lican businessmen lauding Putin

“Gone: The Forgotten Women of Ohio” debuts July 22. It details what happens when young, female societal throwaways go missing and turn up dead. Academy Awardnominated and Emmywinning documentarian Joe Berlinger has teamed up with Spike to shed new light on a growing number of unsolved murders that have cast a dark shadow over a small Ohio town, Chillicothe. Berlinger breathes life into the true-crime genre with this compelling series that’s about far more than the killings themselves. He asks and gets some answers about why these women’s disappearMSNBC ances and deaths received so little attention from law enforcement. This is a story about class, economics and small-town discrimination. An absolute must-see. If you are looking for something less dark, TNT’s new period drama “Will” centers a hot and hunky young playwright, William Shakespeare (played by the sexy Laurie Davidson), in his complicated 16th-century London milieu. There can never be enough Shakespeare, and this prequel to the bearded and balding bard we are most familiar with is an intriguing change. The series was created by noted Australian screenwriter Craig Pearce. A plethora of fave series are returning in the next weeks: “The Fosters” on Freeform, because we need some reliably gay storytelling; “Suits” on USA, for its seventh season, because pretty men are always needed, and this drama has never failed to entice; Ryan Philippe’s tour de force performance as the “Shooter” in the USA series returns for a second season July 18; “The Strain” on FX, because that combo of HIV/AIDS allegory and horror has always resonated for us. This is the fourth and final season for “The Strain.” If you are looking for something compelling to binge over a week of staycation, this is the series for you. It has everything: the CDC, Holocaust survivors, Russian mobsters, and it’s the creation of Guillermo del Toro. We’ve lauded this series every season, and the final season will undoubtedly be spectacular. So for real-life mysteries and scripted dramas, a touch of froth and a soupcon of WTF, you know there’s no avoiding it: you really must stay tuned.t

<< Film

24 • Bay Area Reporter • July 13-19, 2017

Poltergeist perambulations by David Lamble

rriving four months before Halloween is a scary summer treat whose 93 minutes play like a homework assignment in a liberal arts freshman college course in Existential Angst 101. With “A Ghost Story,” David Lowery, whose bigscreen resume includes “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” provides an adult summer movie that shuns cheap tricks and instead offers a full-submersion baptism into heavy themes: loss, legacy, and our ongoing desire for meaning and connection. The story kicks off with a man who has just died returning to his suburban family to comfort his distraught wife, “M” (Rooney Mara). This brand-new ghost, or “C” (played by freshly-minted Oscar winner Casey Affleck), is horrified to discover that his new state of being has left him unstuck in time,

Sophie Calle

From page 17

“Missing,” now on view at Fort Mason, is the artist’s largest exhibition in the U.S. to date. Curated by Evelyne Jouanno, founding director of Ars Citizen, it brings together four projects created since the 1980s that revolve around her preoccupation with loss and absence. The show, installed in three buildings on the waterfront site, could have been called “Inside the Mind of Sophie Calle.” It’s her ideas and unorthodox, some might say outrageous methods that are the main event. By her own admission, she’s not an especially good photographer, but she is an adroit storyteller with a keen ear for the absurd that manifests in cool, sober, understated prose that can be mordantly funny. Describing her work doesn’t adequately trans-

forced to watch helplessly as everything he worked for and cherished in his life is quickly swept away. Our emotionally and spiritually unmoored ghost finds himself starting out on a philosophical journey through memory and history, facing life’s ineffable questions and the enormity of existence. A meditation on love and grief, “A Ghost Story” is a unique experience that may, for its fans, linger long after they stumble out of the theater. As a precocious teenager I was fond of TV plays on New York City’s brand-new “educational” channel (they hadn’t yet coined the brand name “Public TV”), plays like George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” with their dark humor and class-conscious plots. In some ways “A Ghost Story” is a throwback to that type of drama, as illustrated in this scene between C and M. M: “What is it you like about this late the experience of encountering it. There’s no one quite like her. While Ft. Mason’s scenic beauty provides a cinematic backdrop for Calle’s experiential art-form, the buildings don’t add as much as one might think in the way of atmospherics. In fact, the tour de force that is “Take Care of Yourself,” the exhibition’s most successful and sure-to-be-talked-about section, is mounted in the conventional, albeit large, high-ceilinged Gallery 308. For the project, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Calle contacted 107 women from different professions and invited them to perform, read aloud, comment on, analyze and otherwise interpret a break-up email she received from a former lover. Among the respondents: actresses, singers and dancers, a grammarian, a physicist, an 18thcentury historian, a philosopher,

David Lowery

Casey Affleck plays a phantom in director David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” opening Friday in the Bay Area.

house so much?” C: “History.” “When I was little and we used to move all the time, I’d write these

notes and I would fold them up really small. And I would hide them.” “What’d they say?” “They’re just things I wanted to

a geisha, a mathematician, several lawyers, a clown with a bulbous nose and floppy hat, and a markswoman who shot the letter with three bullets from a distance of 15 meters. She didn’t miss. Through videos, photographs and text, they deconstruct the self-justifying correspondence in inventive and deliciously amusing ways, forming a chorus of female solidarity, contempt, empathy and scathing humor. “It usually takes me 10 years to [formulate] an idea for a project; this one took me three days,” Calle revealed during a recent talk. The unedited responses, laid out on tables and stacked on top of each other on the walls, include a woman reading the letter to a naked female blow-up doll seated across the table from her; a film of a melodramatic Punch & Judy-style puppet show; and an analysis from a criminologist, who delivers the following conclusion: “He’s an authentic manipulator, perverse, psychologically dangerous and/or a great writer. To be avoided at all costs.” But the prize goes to the sarcastic psychiatrist who notates her disdain next to the letter writer’s offending sentences with comments like, “We don’t care!,” “The poor dear,” and, “Hypocrite.” When he laments that he would have liked things to have turned out differently, she retorts: “Yes, of course, blame it on Mom, the priest, the president, Madonna, Don Juan, the riots in the suburbs, and who knows what else.”

A cluster of videos plays soundlessly on monitors surrounding a central screen with audio. It’s frustrating if you’re waiting for particular renditions to cycle up. In my case: Jeanne Moreau, Laurie Anderson, and French coloratura Natalie Dessay, belting out her version on a grand staircase. The piece generates lively debate, its universal appeal evident in the chatter and raucous buzz the evening I visited. After all, who among us hasn’t received a kiss-off from an unworthy, self-centered jerk? Calle says she was so excited about the project, “I was afraid he would come back.” The unnamed “he” in the equation learned about it a year after it premiered but didn’t interfere, though he has since penned an 1,800-page rejoinder for a book coming out in September. Evidently hell hath no word limit like a writer scorned. Though Calle’s oeuvre may seem a forerunner of the oversharing on social media, hers is a controlled, methodically staged, faux intimacy. She presents her pieces with clinical detachment, similar to a police report, which doesn’t mean the origins of the material aren’t deeply personal. “Rachel Monique,” for example, is about the 2006 death of her mother. After learning she had three months to live, Calle installed a camera at the foot of her mother’s deathbed to document the exact moment life fled her body. The re-

remember so that if I ever wanted to go back, there’d be a piece of me there waiting.” Warning: “A Ghost Story” isn’t for all tastes. Those desiring simpler spectral entertainment have two entertaining but worthy alternatives: (1) is the lovely Anthony Minghelladirected 1991 British ghostly comedy “Truly, Mad, Deeply,” where a bereaved woman (Juliet Stevenson) discovers that her recently departed husband (a charming Alan Rickman) is haunting their old mansion in the company of some rather odd layabouts. (2) is a terrific 2001 Spanish-set tale, “The Devil’s Backbone,” where director Guillermo del Toro places sexy teen boys in ghostly peril in a story set during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Meanwhile, “A Ghost Story” delivers upscale chills for the art-house crowd. If that’s what you hanker for, this scream is for you.t sulting 11-minute video, “Couldn’t Capture Death,” is shown behind the altar in the Ft. Mason chapel, which appears set up for a funeral except for unusual features like the head and long, graceful neck of a stuffed giraffe, protruding from a side wall and looking down on the proceedings with doleful eyes. Framed and posted around the space are tart entries from Monique’s diaries, such as, “I didn’t give you much and you returned the compliment”; Calle’s account of transporting Monique’s diamond ring to an iceberg at the North Pole; and a memory of a morning they spent together when her mother abruptly stopped in front of a hotel and told her to shut up. “Silence,” she said. “This is where I lost my virginity.” Unlike her gregarious mother, Calle’s late father, a doctor, Pop Art collector and very private man, will not be addressed overtly in her art. “When he died, I was lost,” she says. “His were the first eyes to judge my work. I thought without his eyes, I should stop being an artist.” Fortunately there’s no danger of that happening any time soon. Her next project: men hunting for women.t Through Aug. 20. fortmason. org. “Sophie Calle: My mother, my cat, my father, in that order,” a concurrent photography exhibition at FraenkelLAB, runs through Aug. 26. fraenkelgallery.com.

Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture/JKA Photography

“Take Care of Yourself” (2007), by Sophie Calle, is installed in Gallery 308, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco.

On the Town

Puff at The Stud

Out &About

O&A

Vol. 47 • No. 28 • July 13-19, 2017

www.ebar.com V www.bartabsf.com

Jennifer Holliday The incomparable singer returns to the Bay Area by Jim Gladstone

“I

f I had a chance to start a new era of recording at this point in my career,” said Jennifer Holliday, “I would be at my best ever.” See page 26 >>

Jennifer Holliday

oist a stiff drink, or a soft one, and enjoy the midsummer fun out there in nightlife land. Hodor spins grooves, sober dragst ers rock, iconic music talents croon, and comics make us cackle.

Listings begin on page 27 >>

July 13-20

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THE OFFICIAL SATURDAY NIGHT DANCE PARTY OF

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JULY 29, 2017 / 9 pm - 4 am Public Works / 161 erie Street San FRancisco

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This is a 21+ event • Photo by Gooch

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Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

26 • Bay Area Reporter • July 13-19, 2017

Jennifer Holliday

From page 25

Holliday soared to national attention –and took home a Tony and a Grammy– in 1981, when she originated the role of Effie White in the Broadway production of Dreamgirls, and subsequently won her first recording contract. “When I made my first records,” Holliday explained in a recent interview from her home in Atlanta, “I was uncomfortable with the process. I was used to singing live, from the stage, in a very big voice. And taking my big voice into that little booth, trying to sing without the orchestra and the audience; it was a little awkward for me back then.” Her signature number from Dreamgirls, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” was the extraordinarily rare theater song that makes

the leap to the popular music charts. A #1 Billboard R&B hit and #22 in the Hot 100, “And I Am…” was a phenomenon. “I’d like to be able to show my growth as an artist at 56 years old,” said Holliday. “I think I sing better now. People may think of me as just a belter, but over the years I have worked at developing my lilt and the softer parts of my voice. I have a richer tone, and I have much more control of my instrument.” Holliday had a string of modestly successful albums in the 1980s and early ‘90s, but “And I Am…” –with its message of passionate tenacity– proved to be both an albatross and a prophecy. “When you only have one big hit, you find yourself singing a lot of cover tunes,” recalled Holliday. “And while I was performing cover tunes, R&B kind of got replaced.”

Rap and hip-hop began to edge out old school soul on the radio, allowing record companies to cut back on having separate budgets for songwriters. Holliday’s celebrity dimmed through forays into gospel and Christian recording over the following decades. And, like Effie White, Holliday struggled with her weight and personal relationships (two brief marriages ended in divorce). She has also spoken of a battle with depression. Through it all, the spirit of perseverance captured on “And I Am,” pervaded Holliday’s life as well. The LGBT community’s adoption of the song as an anthem helped her remain at least a glimmer in the public eye. For decades, when work was thin, she was regularly booked for benefit concerts and pride events. “The LGBT community was mostly responsible for birthing my career and I am deeply indebted to you,” Holliday wrote this past January after provoking a wave of vitriol with her agreement (later reneged) to sing at the Trump inauguration. “You have loved me faithfully and unconditionally and for so many years you provided me with work even though my star had long since faded.” So why did she ever agree to the inaugural performance? “I think I’ve expressed everything I have to say about that at the time,” said Holliday during her interview with the Bay Area Reporter. “I don’t have anything to add.” What Holliday expressed, in an open letter to the community, after withdrawing from the concert, was this: I did not take into consideration that my performing for the concert would actually be taken as a political act against my own personal beliefs and be mistaken for support of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. I sincerely apologize…for being uneducated on the issues that affect every American at this crucial time in history and for causing such dismay and heartbreak to my fans. Just weeks after the inauguration, Holliday was a featured performer on an Atlantis Events gay charter cruise, a show booked after the controversy. While a modicum of cynicism is not unreasonable, it is worth noting

Jennifer Holliday

that Holliday has clearly suffered from cultural isolation in other aspects of her career. In the late 2010s, while in New York, she ran into the late Marvin Hamlisch, whom she knew from her Dreamgirls days. “He said to me, ‘Jennifer, I don’t see you performing much anymore. Why aren’t you singing?’ And I told him I hadn’t been finding much good new material. And Marvin Hamlisch said, ‘You should think about singing jazz standards. Your voice would be great for that.’ Well, to tell you the truth, I’d never heard the standards. I wasn’t familiar with them. I went from the church to Broadway when I was 19 years old and I had just never listened to this music. I knew church music and Aretha. When I first came to Broadway, I didn’t know who Streisand was. “So, I took his advice and I started to do my research. I started to listen to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday; just bathing myself in all the differences they brought to the way they sang these songs. It was a great education for me. You know I’d never realized how important composers were. People used to become famous through sheet music.” Holliday’s research led to an expansion of her repertoire and style. “I decided to choose songs I felt were suited for my voice, and songs that I could interpret well. My voice wouldn’t work with all the music

Jennifer Holliday’s recent and early albums.

from back then. But some composers, like Harold Arlen, their songs had some teeth. I could really dig into them.” Holliday began performing standards as a guest vocalist with symphonies around the country and discovered a broader audience than she’d played to in her R&B years. “These songs have appeal to everyone; black, white, older, younger.” Holliday’s most recent album, The Song Is You (2014), released on the small independent Shanachie label, consists mostly of middling, overproduced R&B. But it offers a glimpse of her potential with standards in a reading of Burt Bacharach’s mid-century classic, The Look of Love: Holliday defrosts the chill of Dusty Springfield’s version, her voice slithering through the lyrics with a seductive, sensual energy. At her San Francisco concert, Holliday will perform a mix of standards and show tunes accompanied by a five-piece combo. And of course, she says with a mix of appreciation and resignation, I’ll do “And I Am Telling You…” “I can never go anywhere and leave without singing it. So it shall be done.”t Jennifer Holliday performs at the Marines’ Memorial Theatre on Friday, July 21. $68-$118. 8pm. 609 Sutter St. www.feinsteinsatthenikko.com

On the Tab>>

July 13-19, 2017 • Bay Area Reporter • 27

Thursday Night Live @ SF Eagle

The Speakeasy @ Palace Theater

Music night with local and touring bands. $8. 9:30pm. 398 12th St. at Harrison. www.sf-eagle.com

The immersive theatrical Prohibitionera nightclub experience includes drinks, food, entertainment, 1920s costumes requested of patrons (rentals available in advance; $125 and up), and hours of bootleg fun. $95. Thu-Sat thru Sept. 9. Columbus at Broadway. thespeakeasysf.com

Tubesteak Connection @ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge Disco guru DJ Bus Station John spins grooves at the intimate retro music night. $5. 10pm-2am. 133 Turk St. at Taylor. www.auntcharlieslounge.com

Fri 14 Beach Blanket Babylon @ Club Fugazi The musical comedy revue celebrates its 43th year with an ever-changing lineup of political and pop culture icons, all in gigantic wigs, now with new ‘Summer of Love’ numbers. $25-$160. Beer/wine served; cash only; 21+, except where noted. Wed-Fri 8pm. Sat 6pm & 9pm. Sun 2pm & 5pm. 678 Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd. (Green St.). 421-4222. beachblanketbabylon.com

Sun 16

Katya Presents @ Martuni’s Linda Lee

Beck @ Greek Theatre, Fox Theatre

Edited for space. Full listings at www.ebar.com/bartab

Thu 13 Aimee Mann @ Uptown Theatre, Napa; UC Theatre, Berkeley The former lead singer for Til Tuesday performs her original music, with Ted Leo, including songs from her new album, Mental Illness. $35-$65. 8pm. 1350 3rd St., Napa. Also July 14, 8pm, at UC Theatre, 2036 University Ave., Berkeley. aimeemann.com

After Dark @ Exploratorium The hands-on science museum’s adult cocktail parties include drinks, music, and a lovely Bay view. July 13: Sample delish hot sauces. July 20: an Ernie Gehr Variety Show (avantgarde films). $10-$15. 6:30-9:30pm. Embarcadero at Pier 15. www.exploratorium.edu

Beer Bust @ Lone Star Saloon Weekly beer bust and benefit for local charities. 9pm-11pm. 1354 Harrison St. www.lonestarsf.com

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

Nightlife @ California Academy of Sciences Enjoy stimulating festive and fun parties at the earth sciences museum return, with 21+ music, drinks, demos and exhibits. July 13: outdoor stage, psychedelic pop, music by Connan Mockasin with Morgan Delt; DJ set by Chulita Vinyl Club. $12-$15. Weekly 6pm-9pm. 55 Music Concourse Drive, Golden Gate Park. www.calacademy.org/nightlife

Paula West @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko The acclaimed local vocalist performs an extended concert residency at the intimate nightclub. $28-$60. Thu & Fri 8pm. Sat 7pm. Sun 5pm. Thru July 16. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.feinsteinsatthenikko.com

Picante @ The Cafe Lulu and DJ Marco’s Latin night with sexy gogo guys. 9pm-2am. 2369 Market St. www.cafesf.com

Nancy French stars in the title role of Erica Schmidt and Andrew Sherman’s acclaimed campy musical adaptation loosely based on the classic ‘70s football-cheerleader straight porn flick. $25-$35. Wed-Sat 7pm. Thru Aug. 5. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

The Art of the Tease, a saucy classy women’s burlesque show with elaborate costumes and lavish production numbers. $50 and up. 7:30pm. Also July 15 & 16. 1805 Geary St. www.dita.net www.thefillmore.com

Gayface @ El Rio Queer weekly night out at the popular Mission bar. 9pm-2am. 3158 Mission St. elriosf.com

Junk @ Powerhouse

Cubcake @ Lone Star Saloon Bears, cubs, beers and sweets, with DJ Paul Goodyear. $3. 9pm-2am. 1354 Harrison St. www.lonestarsf.com DJ Blackstone, cruisy vibes and drink specials. $5. 10pm2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Friday Nights at the Ho @ White Horse Bar, Oakland

Queer joke night, with host Nasty Ass Bitch. $15. 7pm. 43 6th St. clubomgsf.com

Wesla Whitfield @ Hotel Rex

MrPam and Dulce de Leche cohost the weekly underwear strip night and contest, with sexy prizes. $5. 10pm2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

The Klipptones @ Top of the Mark

Rock Fag @ Hole in the Wall

Local and visiting Asian drag queens’ weekly show with DJ Philip Grasso. $5. 10:30pm show. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com Enjoy hard rock and punk music from DJ Don Baird at the wonderfully divey SoMa bar. Also Fridays. 7pm-2am. 1369 Folsom St. 431-4695. www.hitws.com

House music and cocktails, with DJs Shareef Raheim-Jihad and Ellis Lindsey. 9pm-2am. 2120 Broadway. (510) 759-7340. www.club-bnb.com

Wesla Whitfield @ Hotel Rex The talented local favorite singer performs “Having Any Fun?” her new cabaret show, with pianist Mike Greensill; cocktails and small plates available. $35-$60. 8pm. Also July 15. 562 Sutter St. societycabaret.com

Latin Explosion/Club Papi @ Club 21, Oakland The Latin dance night also includes drag acts hosted by Lola and Dorys, with half a dozen gogo studs. $10-$20. 9pm-4am. 2111 Franklin St., Oakland. www.club21oakland.com

Red Hots Burlesque @ The Stud The saucy women’s burlesque show hosted by Dottie Lux will titillate and tantalize: July shows feature Dulce de Leche, Miss Savvy, Shells Bells and Lez Purr plus special guests. $10$20. 8pm-9:30pm. 399 9th St. Also Sunday brunch shows at PianoFight Theatre.144 Taylor St. www.redhotsburlesque.com

Heklina hosts the fun drag show with weekly themes. July 15 is a tribute to Chicago the musical. MC2 spins dance grooves before and after the show. $15-$25. 10pm-3am (11:30pm show). 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Nitty Gritty @ Beaux Weekly dance night with nearly naked gogo guys & gals; DJs Chad Bays, Ms. Jackson, Becky Know and Jorge T. $4. 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

Otter J Antics @ The Stud Underwear party for otters (slim furry guys) and their admirers, with DJs Kevin O’Connor, Collin Bass and porn stud ABeardedBoy. 9pm-3am. 399 9th St. www.studsf.com

Pete Escovedo Orchestra @ Yoshi’s Oakland The legendary Latin jazz percussionist and his musicians perform at the restaurant-nightclub. $34-$75. 7:30pm & 9:30pm. July 16 7pm & 9pm. 510 Embarcadero West, Oakland. www.yoshis.com

Sun 16 Beer Bust @ Lone Star Saloon Beer, bears, beats at the weekly fundraiser. June 11 benefits Bears of San Francisco. $15. 4pm-8pm. 1354 Harrison St. www.lonestarsf.com

Beer Bust @ SF Eagle The popular daytime event, with your $10-$12 cuppa going to local charities. 3pm-6pm. 398 12th St. at Harrison. sf-eagle.com

Daytime Realness @ El Rio

Sat 15 ABeardedBoy at Otter J Antics @ The Stud

Heklina and Carnita cohost the fun patio party, with drag acts Qween, Sasah Devarde, Helen Heels and Tiny Teese; guest DJs Robin Simmons and Rosegold, and resident Stanley Frank. $10. 2pm-8pm. 3158 Mission St. www.elriosf.com

Disco Daddy @ SF Eagle DJ Bus Station John plays a Stevie Wonder tribute at the retrolicious monthly T-dance. $5. 7pm-2am. 398 12th St. at Harrison. www.sf-eagle.com

Lick It @ Powerhouse

Hella Gay Comedy @ Club OMG

Rice Rockettes @ Lookout

The local jazz band performs weekly at the swanky hotel lounge bar. 7pm11pm, thru August. 999 California St. www.klipptones.com

It’s Morrissey Night at the monthly New Wave queer dance night, with multiple DJs (Xander, Tomas, Donimo, Starr) and other sounds in different rooms, plus glow bracelets, gogo dancers and ticket giveaways for the July 25 Psychedelic Furs concert at The Fillmore. $5-$8. 9:30pm3am. 1190 Folsom St at 8th. www.catclubsf.com

Enjoy wine-tastings, dinners, tea dances and more at the luxury weeknd full of events. Single event or full schedules are $65, $125, and up (VIP packages). Thru July 16. Sonoma Valley Inn and other locales. www.outinthevineyard.com

Fri 14

Vibe Fridays @ Club BnB, Oakland

Boy Division @ Cat Club

Gay Wine Weekend @ Sonoma Valley

Dita Von Teese @ The Fillmore

The groovy monthly women’s (and friends) night includes DJs Jibbz and China G. $20. 10pm-2am. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

The innovative pop singercomposer performs with his band; Thundercat opens. $60. 8pm. 2001 Gayley Road, UC Berkeley campus. July 15 at Fox Theatre, $60-$80. 8pm. 1807 Telegraph ave., Oakland. apeconcerts.com

Dance it up at the historic (and still hip) East Bay bar. 9pm-2am. 6551 Telegraph Ave. whitehorsebar.com

Debbie Does Dallas @ Oasis

Uhaul SF @ Oasis

Mother @ Oasis

Sat 15 Beatpig @ Powerhouse Juanita MORE! and crew’s monthly eclectic drag and hunks night. $5. 10pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

La Bota Loca @ Club 21, Oakland Dance night at the Latin, hip hop and Electro music night. 9pm-4am. 2111 Franklin St., Oakland. www.club21oakland.com

BreastFest Beer Festival @ Marin Center, San Rafael Drink up and enjoy food, games, music, and prizes at the 17th annual fundraiser for the Charlotte Maxwell Clinic. $50-$65. 1pm5pm. Fairgrounds, 10 Ave. of the Americas, San Rafael. www.thebreastfest.org

Gameboi SF @ Rickshaw Stop The monthly Gaysian and pals dance night. $12. 9:30pm-2am. 155 Fell St. www.rickshawstop.com

Jock @ The Lookout Enjoy the weekly jock-ular fun, with DJed dance music at sports team fundraisers. 12pm-1am. NY DJ Sharon White from 3pm-6pm. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

Katya Presents @ Martuni’s Katya Smirnoff-Skyye’s monthly cabaret concert features veteran crooner Tom Reardon. $12. 7pm. 4 Valencia St. at Market. www.russianoperadiva.com

Sundance Saloon @ Space 550 The Country-Western line-dancing two-stepping dance night. $8. lessons at 5:30pm, dancing til 10:30pm. Also Thursdays. 550 Barneveld Ave. www.sundancesaloon.org

Sunday’s a Drag @ Starlight Room Donna Sachet often hosts the weekly fabulous brunch and drag show, now celebrating its tenth anniversary. $45. 11am, show at noon; 1:30pm, show at 2:30pm. 450 Powell St. in Union Square. 395-8595. starlightroomsf.com

Makeout Party @ SF Eagle

Mon 17

Nark Magazine’s monthly smoochfest, with free shots in the photo booth. $5. 9:30pm-2am. 398 12th St. at Harrison. www.sf-eagle.com

Collide-O-Scope @ Oasis The Seattle movie clips, bloopers and visual oddities show comes to SF. $10. 8pm. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Mascara @ Eureka Valley Rec. Center

Musical Mondays @ The Edge

Castro Country Club’s sober yet wild drag show, hosted by MGM Grande, with Landa Lakes, Roxy Cotton-Candy, Miss Shugana, and many more. $15-$20. 7:30pm. 100 Collingwood at 18th. www.castrocountryclub.org

Sing along at the popular musical theatre night; also Wednesdays. 7pm2am. 2 for 1 cocktail, 5pm-closing. 4149 18th St. at Collingwood. www.edgesf.com

See page 30 >>

<< Out&About

28 • Bay Area Reporter • July 13-19, 2017

Tue 18

Out &About

O&A

Midsummer of Love @ El Sobrante Park

We Players presents another site-specific environmental play, this time an arboreal adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. July 15, 16, 22 & 23 ($30-$60). July 27-30 in Golden Gate Park’s Strawberry Hill, 6:30pm ($40-$80). www.weplayers.org

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot @ Tenderloin Museum

Dr. Ajuan Mance @ Folio Books

Thu 13

SF Choral Society @ First Unitarian Church Open rehearsal and charity silent auction of items, including travel packages and local arts event tickets. 1pm-5pm. 1187 Franklin St. www.sfchoral.org

Summer of Love @ ArtHaus

ake a bow for supporting the arts, in visual, auditory and theatrical forms. For nightlife events, see On the Tab listings on page 27.

Edited for space. Full listings at www.ebar.com/arts

Thu 13 Bay Area Playwrights Festival @ Custom Made Theater Annual festival presents six new works by emerging playwrights. $17-$80. Thru July 23. 533 Sutter St. bayareaplaywrightsfestival.org/

Classic & New Films @ Castro Theatre July 13-16: 70mm 2001: A Space Odyssey (8pm, Sat & Sun 5pm & 8pm). July 15 & 16, Sing-Along Moana (1pm). July 17: Rosemary’s Baby (7pm) and Get Out (9:30). July 18: Repulsion (7pm) and Personal Shopper (8:55). July 19: Chinatown (7pm) The Passengers (9:25). July 20Aug 6: SF Jewish Film festival (see Thu 20). 429 Castro St. castrotheatre.com

Each and Every Thing @ The Marsh Dan Hoyle’s acclaimed solo show about searching for community in a fractured world. $25-$100. Thu 8pm, Fri & Sat 8:30pm. Thru Aug. 26. 1062 Valencia St. www.themarsh.org

A Night With Janis Joplin @ Geary Theater American Conservatory Theatre presents the acclaimed musical about rock singer Janis Joplin, with classic hits from her era, and visits by Etta James, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. $20-$120. Tue-Sat 8pm. Wed, Sat, Sun 2pm. Extended thru July 16. 415 Geary St. act-sf.org

Radar Reading @ SF Public Library Queer Reading series features Magnoliah Black, Faluda Islam, Daniel Riddle Rodriguez and Rene Vazquez. 6pm. 100 Larkin St., Children’s Room, 2nd floor. www.sfpl.org

SPF 10 @ Joe Goode Annex SafeHouse Arts’ tenth annual Summer Performance Festival, with dance theatre works by Linda Bouchard, Marika Brussel, Slick Babble Dance Project, Sienna Williams and Diana Kalaji, and V. Carly Lave. $10-$15. Thru July 16. 401 Alabama St. joegoode.org

Summer of Love @ ArtHaus Opening reception for a commemorative group exhibition of works in various media. 6pm-8pm. Reg hours Tue-Fri 11am-6pm. Sat 12pm-5pm. Thru sept. 30. 411 Brannan St. at 3rd arthaus-sf.com

SF Ethnic Dance Festival @ War Memorial Opera House The annual dance festival presents more than a dozen companies from diverse countries. $25-$45. 8pm. July 15 & 16. 301 Van Ness ave. www.sfethnicdancefestival.org

Vignettes On Love @ Potrero Stage PlayGround and Noise Pop present the world premiere of a new multimedia play based on the writings of David Steele; mature audiences only. $25-$55. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sun 7pm. Thru July 30. 1695 18th St. www.playground-sf.org

Fri 14 Anne-christine d’Adesky @ The Green Arcade

Opening reception for a new exhibit of vintage tintypes, mugshots and historic documents of LGBT lives, curated by Paula Lichtenberg and Bill Lipsky. Other exhibits as well. 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

Sun 16

In the Heights @ Contra Costa Civic Theatre

AIDS Walk @ Golden Gate Park

Celebrate Community @ Harvey Milk Photo Center Group exhibit of LGBT communitythemed prints by prominent local photographers (Rick Gerharter, Gareth Gooch, Mick Hicks, Sandra Hoover, Dan Nicoletta and more), curated by Dave Christensen and Nicola Bosco-Alvarez. Thru July 23. 50 Scott St. harveymilkphotocenter.org

Flower Piano @ SF Botanical Garden The annual amazingly pleasant installation and informal concert series of a dozen pianos placed in scenic spots throughtout the gardens. Enjoy prepared and “openpiano” performances through each day; special Night Garden Piano benefit of evening performances on July 22, 7:30pm $40. Thru July 24. Reg. free admission for SF residents. sfbotanicalgarden.org

Will Durst @ The Marsh The witty comic performs his new solo show, Durst Case Scenario, with plenty of barbs at Hair Furor, aka Trump. $20-$100. Tuesdays, 8pm. thru Sept. 19. 1062 Valencia St. www.themarsh.org

SF Hiking Club @ Berkeley Rose Garden

Crazy Famous @ The Marsh Berkeley

Sat 15

Group exhibition curated by Steven Wolf includes several works by the late Jerome Caja, and others with adult themes. Thru Aug. 19. SF Arts Commision Gallery, 401 Van Ness Ave. www.sfartscommission.org

The affable MC of LGBT comedy nights hosts a night of free stand-up comedy at the elegant cabaret, with Joe Nguyen and Samson Koletkar. $20 food/drink min. 7pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.feinsteinsatthenikko.com

The author of The Pox Lover: An Activist’s Decade in New York and Paris discusses her work and AIDS activism with author/journalist Renate Stendal ( Kiss Me Again, Paris). 7pm-9pm. 1680 Market St. http://www.thegreenarcade.com/

East Bay production of the 2-Tonywinning musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) about three generations of a New York City Latino family. $17-$31. Fri & Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru July 16. 951 Pomona Ave, El Cerrito. ccct.org/in_the_heights

Tiny Bubbles @ SFAC Gallery

Lisa Geduldig and Friends @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko

Anne-christine d’Adesky @ The Green Arcade Books

Faces of the Past: Queer Lives in Northern California Before 1930 @ GLBT History Museum

The Mills College professor and author of 1001 Black Men, Gender Studies and queer comics, discusses her perspectives on pre-Harlem African-American literature with author Wayne Goodman. 7pm. 3957 24th St. www.foliosf.com

Wed 19

Fri 14

Sharon Eberhart’s solo show about a young musician in search of a great song. $20-$100. Fridays, 8pm, thru July 14. 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. www.themarsh.org

Second reading of a play inprogress about the pre-Stonewall hsitoric trans rights events. 6:30pm. 398 Eddy St. www.tenderloinmuseum.org

Join GLBT hikers for a five-mile, after-work hike in the Berkeley Rose Garden for a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Continue up various staircases to Grizzly Peak Blvd, then return to Berkeley BART. Dinner afterward in downtown Berkeley for those who are interested. Meet 5:15 at downtown Berkeley BART. (510) 910-8734. www.sfhiking.com

Smack Dab @ Dog Eared Books

Annual fundraiser for various AIDS/ HIV nonprofits, with opening/closing ceremony guests Carson Kressley, Frenchis Davis, and several RuPaul’s Drag Race stars. Sharon Meadow. 8:30am-1:30pm. sf.aidswalk.net/

Homopolis @ SF Public Library Photos from Gay San Francisco in 1981, a new exhibit curated by Ken Maley. Thru Aug. 24. James Hormel Center, 3rd floor, 100 Larkin St. www.sfpl.org

Mark Abramson @ Dog Eared Books The prolific local author reads from and discusses his new memoir, Minnesota Boy, about his teenage life in the Midwest, his mother, and his visits to Europe. 4pm. 489 Castro St. www.dogearedbooks.com

Mon 17 William Blake in Color @ William Blake Gallery Exhibit of classic plates in the new gallery of historic art by the 18th- and 19th-century poet and illustrator. Mon-Fri 10am-5pm. Sat 11am-5pm. 49 Geary St. #205. www.williamblakegallery.com

The eclectic open mic series, cohosted by Dana Hopkins and Larry-bob roberts, features trans writer-actor Roman Rimer. 7:30pm sign-up. 8pm show. 489 Castro St. www.dogearedbooks.com

Thu 20 The Black Woman is God @ SOMArts Cultural Center Opening reception and performances with 60+ artists in various media challenging Eurocentric notions of God. 6pm12am. Performances also Aug. 25 & 26. Thru Aug. 26. Tue-Fri 12pm-7pm. Sat 12pm-5pm. 934 Brannan St. www.somarts.org

In the End @ PianoFight SF playwright Brian O’Berne’s short play about two gay men meeting on the last day of the world. July 20-22, 7pm. Part of the Shortlived play fest/ competition. 144 Taylor St. www.pianofight.com/

SF Jewish Film Festical @ Various Cinemas 37th annual festival of short, feature and documentary films by and about Jewish people and culture. Thru Aug. 6 at Castro Theatre, Landmark Albany Twin (Albany), CineArts Theatre (Palo Alto), Rafael Film center (San Rafael), and the New Parkway (Oakland). www.sfjff.org