July 14, 2011 Edition of the BAY AREA REPORTER

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Altering immigration debate

Guilty plea in hate crime

Summer galleries

The

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Youth housing project causes uproar

Senate sets hearing on DOMA repeal

by Matthew S. Bajko

by Lisa Keen

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he Senate Judiciary Committee has set Wednesday, July 20 to hear testimony on a bill to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The specific bill Senator in question is the Patrick Leahy Respect for Marriage Act (S. 598), introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) for herself and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York)

Vol. 41 • No. 28 • July 14-20, 2011

Jane Philomen Cleland

Sizzling party planned T

he folks at Grass Roots Gay Rights West have another sizzling Real Bad party planned for September and at the group’s annual summer soiree July 10 announced that Florida-based Bryan Reyes will be the main dance floor DJ at the September 25 party at Club 1015 that closes out the Fol-

som Street Fair. Above, from left, Suzan Revah, John Wong, Kenshi Westover, Trey Allen (head down), Andrew Lopez, Tony Baca, and Lucas Ringhofer enjoyed the festivities.

Real Bad XXIII organizers also announced that this year’s beneficiaries would be the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness

Center, Bay Area Young Positives, the Native American AIDS Project, No Bully, Project Open Hand, and San Francisco Suicide Prevention. GRGR West donates 100 percent of the funds raised by ticket sales to its benefiting organizations.

For ticket information, visit www.realbad.org.

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bitter fight over a Cow Hollow housing project for youth at risk of homelessness and those aging out of the state’s foster care system will play out before San Francisco’s Planning Commission meeting Thursday afternoon (July 14).

Two service providers, Community Housing Partnership and Larkin Street Youth Services, plan to house up to 24 youth, aged 18 to 24, at the former 30-room Edward II Inn. The vacant boutique tourist hotel is located at 3155 Scott Street and Lombard.

It is estimated that up to one-third of the youth will be LGBT as studies have found they account for 10 percent of the young adults who “age out” of the foster care system. Queer youth also account

See page 21 >>

Court issues order in DADT case

by Lisa Keen

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he 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued yet another order this month, this time giving the federal government 10 days to show cause why the court should not dismiss as moot an appeal seeking to Attorney defend the military’s Dan Woods anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

The court’s order, issued July 11, gives the federal government, the House of Representatives, and other parties 10 days to See page 3 >>

See page 16 >>

DA Gascón addresses hate crimes, death penalty

by Seth Hemmelgarn

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s he gears up for his first political campaign, District Attorney George Gascón is discovering the contact sport that is San Francisco politics.

New to campaigning, Gascón has had to fine tune his position on the death penalty and other issues as he faces two progressive challengers: criminal justice expert and former Police Commissioner David Onek and veteran Alameda County prosecutor Sharmin Bock.

Gascón recently met with the Bay Area Reporter, where he spoke about the importance of prosecuting hate crimes, his criticism of the death penalty, and other issues.

In January, former Mayor Gavin Newsom, in one of his last acts before becoming the state’s lieutenant governor, appointed Gascón, who was the police chief at the time, to the DA’s position. He’s running in November to hold on to the job. Newsom’s pick surprised most political observers, but supporters pointed out that Gascón has a law degree.

One of the topics Gascón addressed during an hourlong interview with the B.A.R. was the importance of people reporting crimes. He spoke of crimes going unreported and said people may ask, “Why should I bother?” He

Rick Gerharter

District Attorney George Gascón announced his campaign for election during an event in Harvey Milk Plaza earlier this year.

said that could lead perpetrators to think they have impunity.

“I really want the LGBT community to feel very comfortable reaching out to our office,” Gascón said. People “should not feel like

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they’re alone.”

Last month, Gascón disagreed with a San Francisco judge who dismissed felony hate crime charges against two men accused of See page 20 >>

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July 14-20, 2011

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Rick Gerharter

Lina Guevara worked on a painting in the Youth Space of the Eureka Valley Recreation Center.

Castro queer youth space off to slow start

by Matthew S. Bajko

W

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earing a sleeveless black dress, the young drag queen contestant sat patiently as a woman applied his eyelashes and worked on his eye makeup. A sliver of nervousness could be detected in the 14-year-old’s voice, as he was about to make his debut as a female impersonator.

“No, I have not done drag before,” said the San Francisco resident, adding that he doesn’t identify as gay. “I am more curious.”

The teenager was part of a handful of youth who turned out in midJune for a Pride party held at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center in the Castro. The event was a coming out of sorts for the facility’s revived queer youth space program, which launched May 31.

Since then it has been a slow start for the recreation offerings, which range from weekly drag queen and cooking classes to arts and crafts sessions and karaoke nights. A Saturday program aimed at creating a queer zine for youth failed to attract participants.

Depending on the day and the program being offered, anywhere from zero to a few dozen youth may attend. The most popular session has been the Thursday night dinner and a movie, but even that can be hit or miss.

When a reporter and photographer from the Bay Area Reporter stopped by in late June, no one apart from rec and park staff assigned to the program was there.

“It is going to take a little bit of time,” acknowledged Don Franklin, a recreation coordinator in charge of alternative recreation who works out of the Castro rec center.

While participation may not be at the levels rec staffers would like to see, they are committed to ensuring

the queer youth space become a safe haven for the city’s LGBT and questioning youth, as well as their straight friends, under the age of 25.

They manned a booth at this year’s Pride festival to spread word about the program and have been reaching out to local youth service providers and education officials.

The youth space also has its own Facebook page, with 84 followers, to promote its offerings.

“My staff has been hitting every neighborhood we can and hitting community groups all over the city,” said Karla Rosales, a Latina lesbian who is the agency’s recreation supervisor for adult and alternative recreation. “Those are folks maybe don’t come to the Castro often or need a different invitation to come in.”

Hugo Lopez, a DJ and karate instructor at the rec center, has been helping with the outreach. He said most youth he speaks with hadn’t heard the program was back.

“They are surprised it is open.

Most people wouldn’t know it is open unless I had told them,” said Lopez, 27, who is bisexual. “We expect a bigger turnout during the school year. When they do come, they have a good time.”

Part of the problem is the program launched when schools were already out on summer break.

Another factor is lingering distrust among some LGBT youth and their advocates with the rec and park department’s handling of the queer youth space over the last year.

As the B.A.R. has been reporting, LGBT youth and adult allies had pressed the Recreation and Park Department to reopen the dedicated youth space at the Castro facility since its closure last summer. An agency reorganization had led to a See page 21 >>

Community News>>

▼ Trial starts in case of former Patrol Special volunteer

by Heather Cassell

considering picking up the case again by appealing to the California Supreme Court after the criminal trial is over.

T

he morning after Americans celebrated their independence, Willie Adams sat with his criminal defense attorney Randall Knox across from Judge Andrew Y.S. Cheng, members of the jury, and Assistant District Attorney Diane Knoles at the Hall of Justice.

Adams, who wanted to be a San Francisco Patrol Special Police officer, is charged with 19 counts, 10 of which are felonies. The charges range from drug possession to drug paraphernalia, loaded firearm, impersonating a police officer, theft, forgery, false registration of vehicles as police cars, and false statements to the Department of Motor Vehicles. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The trial is expected to take a month.

“Finally I get an opportunity to tell my side and tell Jane [Warner’s] side of what was really going on out there,” said Adams, about the events of the past decade leading up to the trial. He said he has faith that “justice will prevail.”

“I feel it in my heart and I always have,” said Adams, who sold everything he owned to fight the charges and is looking forward to starting his life over again.

Warner, who died of ovarian cancer in 2010, was a patrol special police officer who patrolled the Castro, Mission Dolores, and Noe Valley neighborhoods for nearly two decades and was the outspoken president of the organization’s association who sponsored Adams’s application. Warner also wrote the Bay Area Reporter’s crime column.

According to Knox, witnesses told him that Adams was “helpful” and “professional,” that he “used good judgment” and “helped backup the police” as a security officer at a popular Castro bar. Adams didn’t disclose the name of his current employer.

“Willie feels that he’s been unfairly targeted and I agree with him,” said Knox, frustrated with some of the charges, like the theft of Patrol Special beats 141 and 144 located in St. Francis Woods and Ingleside/Taraval areas that Adams paid for. The beats were later returned to Patrol Special Police Officer Cliff Stevens, the beat owner, who Adams claimed sold the beats to him, after the San Francisco Police Commission rejected the sale.

Adams never received a refund for

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DADT From page 1

submit their arguments.

The order came just five days after a 9th Circuit panel ordered the Department of Defense to stop enforcement of DADT, the federal law banning openly gay people from serving in the military.

“Today’s order forces the government to state, once and for all, its position on the constitutionality of DADT,” said Dan Woods, the attorney representing Log Cabin Republicans in Log Cabin Republicans v. U.S. In that lawsuit, a federal district court in California ruled last September that DADT is unconstitutional and ordered the government to stop enforcing the law. The Department of Justice appealed that ruling to the 9th Circuit and asked the circuit court to delay the district court’s order that the Department of Defense stop enforcing DADT. The 9th Circuit initially granted the request to delay enforcement of

Testimony

Adams was arrested just over four years ago.

“It’s suspicious that they went after me,” Adams told the B.A.R. in 2007 after his first criminal hearing.

“I definitely believe that this whole ordeal is related to my lawsuit.”

Adams, 47, a gay black man living with HIV, was arrested three months after he filed a discrimination lawsuit against the city in 2006. He filed the suit after he learned that he was rejected for the patrol special because of “moral turpitude.” In the suit, Adams said he’d told a police sergeant about two criminal offenses that had been expunged from his record and were over 20 years old.

This was the second time Adam’s application was rejected. The first time was in 2003, Knox told the court in his opening statement July 5.

The civil suit was tossed out by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Patrick Mahoney nearly a year and a half later. The judge ruled that the city wasn’t Adams’s employer and that the city had a legitimate business reason for not hiring Adams.

The case was appealed by Waukeen McCoy, Adams’s civil attorney. The appellate court upheld the lower court’s decision.

Adams told the B.A.R. that he is

Adams wanted to serve the community and volunteered in a public relations capacity with Warner for Serge White, who owns the Castro/Noe Valley beat, as well as performed paid contracted public relations for other patrol special beats, for five years.

Prosecutor Knoles told the jurors “we are all here largely due to her actions,” referring to Warner, who sponsored Adams’s application.

While Warner has since died, Knoles told jurors that they would view her testimony at Adams’s civil trial as well as hear testimony from police and patrol special police officers, heads of homeowners associations and business owners, and community members who worked with or were familiar with Adams and Warner.

Knoles’s first witness was Sergeant William Braconi, who led the investigative team that searched Adam’s house and vehicles in 2007.

Braconi kept glancing over at Adams and turning his head down, pausing during his testimony the first two days of the trial. He repeatedly responded to Knoles’s and Knox’s questions by stating that he couldn’t recall due to the lapse of time since the investigation.

Other officers have offered similar testimony, providing no definitive statements to the charges, said Adams and Knox.

In addition, the paid informant, who Adams was dating at the time and tipped off San Francisco police, has since been let go after it became clear he was an unreliable source, according to Adams and Knox.

Cheng upheld Knoles’s request not release the name of the informant due to the nature of the work.

Patrol special police are supervised by the SFPD and overseen by the Police Commission, creating an intricate relationship that allows Patrol Special Police to do more than standard security guards but not all of the capabilities of a police officer. According to the SFPD’s website, patrol special police are not regulated by the California Penal Code nor are they sworn officers or members of the police department, but they do follow some procedures and regulations.▼

the district court’s order, but, on July 6, it reversed that stay.

All this comes against a political backdrop in which Congress has passed and President Barack Obama has signed a law repealing DADT but the law remains in force until 60 days after the president, the secretary of defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff submit written certification that the military is ready to implement repeal without detriment to military readiness.

“In our view,” said Woods, “the government has been evading that important issue for too long and today’s order forces the government to ‘fish or cut bait.’”

The order was not signed by any specific judge but ordered the government to advise the 9th Circuit as to whether it intends to notify Congress that it will not defend the constitutionality of DADT. If the government does not defend DADT, said the court, the court “may allow” some third party to do so.

Servicemembers Legal Defense Network issued a statement saying

it hopes the Justice and Defense departments “will not continue” to defend DADT “and we will soon have finality with certification and repeal.”

Meanwhile, in a mostly symbolic gesture, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted 236184 on July 8 to prohibit military chaplains from performing marriage ceremonies between same-sex partners on military bases.

“Repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was supposed to be about allowing people in the military to serve openly,” said the amendment’s author, Representative Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas), “not about promoting same-sex marriages in contravention of the Defense of Marriage Act.” Echoing a phrase that has been in use recently by Republican opponents of same-sex marriage, Huelskamp also said the amendment would promote “consistency” of marriage laws around the country.

The language was approved as an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2012 appropriations bill for the defense department.▼

Heather Cassell

Attorney Randall Knox

the transaction, which was arranged

by Warner, according to the charges.

Theresa Sparks, former Police Commission president, couldn’t confirm if Adams owned any beat in 2007. The Police Commission regulates and issues sales of beat ownerships.

Cuffed

July 14-20, 2011 •

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July 14-20, 2011

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Hate Crime >>

Man pleads guilty

by Seth Hemmelgarn

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26-year-old man pleaded guilty in San Francisco Superior Court this week in an anti-gay hate crime case.

Scott Barnett, who’s in custody, personally entered his plea Tuesday, July 12 on a felony assault charge and admitted to a hate crime allegation.

He’s expected to receive a suspended imposition of sentence and three years of probation, with credit for time served. Conditions could include alcohol counseling and anger management.

The incident occurred Thursday, June 23. The Bay Area Reporter hasn’t been able to obtain a copy of the police report, and many of the details aren’t clear.

The victim, whom Judge Jeffrey S. Ross identified as Paul John DeGuzman Capili, said outside court Tuesday that he didn’t want to talk to the B.A.R. However, Deputy Public Defender Phong Wang, who’s representing Barnett, said before the hearing that Capili and his friends had left a bonfire at Ocean Beach and were waiting for a bus when they encountered Barnett.

Courtesy SFPD

Scott Barnett

He “hit [Capili] a couple times with twigs” and yelled homophobic epithets, she said. She said Barnett had “had something to drink” and “misperceived the situation.”

The incident “was just one of those really unfortunate situations,” she said.

Assistant District Attorney Victor Hwang said outside court that the attack had been unprovoked and had involved tree branches. He said the word “faggot” had been used during the attack, but there had also been “a

much longer monologue.”

He added, “The word ‘faggot’ alone doesn’t make it a hate crime.” He said he didn’t think Capili, whom he said is a San Francisco resident, had been hospitalized.

Barnett had pleaded not guilty in the case Tuesday, June 28. The preliminary hearing had been set to begin Tuesday, July 12, but attorneys worked through much of the day to reach an agreement.

Asked if Capili is gay, Hwang said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever asked him that question. ... It doesn’t matter to us.”

Wang said Barnett had served in the National Guard for four years and had no prior convictions. That information couldn’t immediately be confirmed. She also said that Barnett had written an apology, which she couldn’t provide a copy of Tuesday afternoon.

Barnett’s currently receiving counseling in San Francisco County jail in San Bruno, Wang said.

Hwang had been prosecuting the case but Assistant District Attorney Michael Maffei was handling it Tuesday.

Barnett’s sentencing is scheduled for August 2. ▼

LGBT murders up in 2010

by Tony K. LeTigre

T

ebar.com

he National Coalition of AntiViolence Programs announced Tuesday that there were 27 murders of LGBT and HIV-affected people in the United States and Puerto Rico in 2010, the second highest total ever recorded.

The coalition, made up of antiviolence agencies around the country, released the finding in its annual report, “Hate Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and HIVAffected Communities in the United States in 2010.” The group collected data from 17 anti-violence organizations in 15 states, including Community United Against Violence in San Francisco.

The report also notes a continuing trend of violence disproportionately targeting transgender women and people of color.

The report, which is believed to be the most comprehensive source of data on the subject in the U.S., documents 27 murders in 2010 – second only to 2008 as the largest number of murders yet recorded, with 29, and 23 percent higher than the 22 murders reported in 2009.

Of those murders, 70 percent were people of color.

“These figures could represent a true increase in hate crime violence, or an increase in reporting,” said Lisa Gilmore of the Center on Halsted in Chicago, an LGBT community organization serving the greater Midwest, during an audio press conference held Tuesday, July 12 to highlight the report’s findings.

Overall, reports of violent crime against LGBT, queer, and HIVaffected people rose 13 percent from 2009.

Gilmore said that NCAVP does not purport to document all antiLGBT violence in the country, but that the project does capture more data than the criminal justice system.

“A bureau like the FBI will only have data from local law enforcement agencies, and only those agencies who report things as a hate crime. The FBI is never going to get a report from Indiana because no hate crimes statute exists

Kat Fitzgerald/MysticImagesPhotography.com

Lisa Gilmore of the Center on Halsted

in Indiana,” Gilmore said.

Locally, CUAV, in its section of the report, noted that reports of anti-LGBTQQ violence rose by 65 percent, from 129 in 2009 to 213 in 2010. The increase is attributed to better staff and volunteer outreach and improved data accuracy, according to the report.

Two notable trends locally were the increase in reports of violence occurring at the workplace and in a police vehicle, jail, or precinct.

In 2010 CUAV, which has faced severe budget cuts in recent years, primarily served LGBT survivors of violence, 80 percent of whom were people of color, according to the report. The highest forms of violence reported were intimidation and assault without a weapon.

Maria Carolina Morales of CUAV, in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter following Tuesday’s phone conference, said the organization’s outreach and volunteer work has remained stable over the past year, and that 2010 was the healthiest fiscal year CUAV has seen in a decade.

“In the past year we’ve implemented a new strategy in which hate crime survivors do community engagement work, which increases how much we are able to extend into the community,” Morales added.

Personal accounts in the report range from a biracial lesbian woman and mother of three in Denver who

sought the aid of a pro-bono legal advocate after being assaulted by police to a gay Latino man shot in the head in San Antonio after reportedly coming on to another man to a number of transgender women murdered in Puerto Rico in incidents not officially classified as hate crimes.

“We documented a substantial increase in the reporting of hate motivated violence in California during the Proposition 8 controversy,” said Jake Finney of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. “We haven’t seen anything similar to date in response to the FAIR Act, we’re on the lookout, but it’s pretty recent.”

He was referring to SB 48, state Senator Mark Leno’s bill that would include the contributions of LGBT Americans in school instructional materials. The bill is on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk and anti-gay groups are reportedly flooding his office urging him to veto it.

Finney said that the federal hate crimes law, signed by President Barack Obama in 2009, benefited the LGBT community during a highly publicized attack on a femaleto-male transgender grad student at California State University, Long Beach last April. “Because of the law we requested that the FBI step in to lend their skills and expertise to the investigation, and they had the jurisdiction to do so,” he noted.

Others on the call urged public figures to join in the conversation around LGBT rights.

“We have noticed the way that LGBT issues are used as a wedge to encourage people with anti-LGBT sentiment to get to the polls,” said Ejeris Dixon, deputy director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, during Tuesday’s teleconference. “A key way to combat that is for public figures – whether politicians or celebrities – to speak out each and every time that an anti-LGBT message appears.”

The full report, which can be accessed at www.avp.org, includes a compilation of first-hand narratives from survivors of sexual and gender-based violence around the country as well as accounts of murders that occurred last year. ▼

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Immigration >>

July 14-20, 2011 •

Rick Gerharter

Jose Antonio Vargas, left, talked with Phil Bronstein during an appearance at the Commonwealth Club.

Gay undocumented reporter pushes immigration reform

by Matthew S. Bajko

G

ay journalist Jose Antonio Vargas brought his campaign to alter America’s immigration debate to San Francisco this week, and expressed regret for his decision to remain in the country after discovering at the age of 16 that he had been sent here illegally from the Philippines.

Vargas, 30, lives in New York City and grew up in Mountain View outside San Jose. He graduated from San Francisco State University and worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. He then landed in the newsroom of the Washington Post, where he was part of the awardwinning team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings.

From there he went to work for the Huffington Post and profiled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last year for the New Yorker. He also interviewed former Vice President Al Gore for Rolling Stone and helped helm a documentary about Washington D.C.’s AIDS epidemic that is based on his reporting for the Post.

All the time he was hiding from his employers the fact that he is an undocumented immigrant.

His mother sent him to live with his grandparents at the age of 12, and it wasn’t until he applied for a driver’s license that he discovered his documentation was counterfeit.

His grandfather had hoped he would marry an American and gain citizenship through that route, but those plans were dashed when Vargas came out as gay. While his teachers and high school principal knew about his immigration status, it wasn’t until he went to the Post that he first revealed to a newsroom colleague that he was here illegally.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter went public with his stunning revelation in a personal essay he wrote for the New York Times magazine that was published Sunday, June 26, the same day as San Francisco and New York held

their annual Pride parades.

“I made a choice. I am sorry for that. I am sorry we are in this situation,” Vargas told a packed audience Monday, July 11 during a talk hosted by the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. “I am sorry I had to lie to the newsrooms. I am sorry my teachers had to be in this position. I am sorry we have to make these choices but what are we supposed to do?”

He has started a new organization called Define American to refocus the immigration debate and push for passage of the Dream Act, which would allow youth who came to the U.S. illegally to receive citizenship if they graduate from college or join the armed forces. Congress failed to enact the bill last year, and with Republicans in control of the House, the legislation has stalled.

Through his new advocacy group, Vargas is trying to educate the public and fellow journalists that the narrative built up in recent years about illegal immigrants is not the full picture.

“We are not what you think we are,” said Vargas.

Although former Chronicle executive editor Phil Bronstein wrote that he “was duped” by Vargas and is “collateral damage” in his story, he called him a “colleague and a friend” in his introductory remarks at the Commonwealth Club forum.

Tried to recruit Earlier this year Bronstein, an editor-at-large for Hearst Newspapers, tried to recruit Vargas for a job in New York. He said it wasn’t until Vargas met with him as part of his research and interviewing for the magazine piece that he learned the truth.

When he asked Vargas what he would tell students in a similar situation, Vargas struggled to come up with words of advice.

“I don’t know what to tell them.

See page 21 >>

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<< Open Forum

July 14-20, 2011

Volume 41, Number 28 July 14-20, 2011 www.ebar.com PUBLISHER Thomas E. Horn Bob Ross (Founder, 1971 – 2003) NEWS EDITOR Cynthia Laird ARTS EDITOR Roberto Friedman ASSISTANT EDITORS Matthew S. Bajko Seth Hemmelgarn Jim Provenzano CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Dan Aiello • Tavo Amador • Erin Blackwell Roger Brigham • Scott Brogan Victoria A. Brownworth • Philip Campbell Heather Cassell • Chuck Colbert Richard Dodds • Raymond Flournoy David Guarino • Liz Highleyman Brandon Judell • John F. Karr • Lisa Keen Matthew Kennedy • David Lamble Michael McDonagh • Paul Parish Lois Pearlman • Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota Bob Roehr • Donna Sachet • Adam Sandel Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro Gwendolyn Smith • Ed Walsh • Sura Wood

ART DIRECTION Kurt Thomas PRODUCTION MANAGER T. Scott King PHOTOGRAPHERS Jane Philomen Cleland Marc Geller Rick Gerharter Lydia Gonzales Rudy K. Lawidjaja Steven Underhill Bill Wilson ILLUSTRATORS & CARTOONISTS Paul Berge Christine Smith

GENERAL MANAGER Michael M. Yamashita DISPLAY ADVERTISING Colleen Small Scott Wazlowski CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING David McBrayer

NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE Rivendell Media – 212.242.6863

LEGAL COUNSEL Paul H. Melbostad

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News Editor • news@ebar.com Arts Editor • arts@ebar.com Advertising • advertising@ebar.com Letters • letters@ebar.com A division of Benro Enterprises, Inc. © 2011 Published weekly. Bay Area Reporter reserves the right to edit or reject any advertisement which the publisher believes is in poor taste or which advertises illegal items which might result in legal action against Bay Area Reporter. Ads will not be rejected solely on the basis of politics, philosophy, religion, race, age, or sexual orientation.

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▼

Brown must sign FAIR Act G

overnor Jerry Brown has an opportunity to help dispel the persistent lies about LGBT Americans whipped up by the pro-Proposition 8 camp. He can do that by signing state Senator Mark Leno’s SB 48, the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful Education Act. The governor has only five days left in which to act on this important piece of legislation, and we urge him to sign the bill.

The FAIR Act, as it is known, would ensure that the historical contributions of LGBT people are accurately and fairly portrayed in instructional materials by adding LGBT people to the existing list of under-represented cultural and ethnic groups already included in the state’s inclusionary education requirements.

Earlier generations well recall that when they were in school, textbooks did not teach about Harvey Milk, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, or LGBT contributions to American history. The history that is usually taught about famous figures such as Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, Noel Coward, Gertrude Stein, and Herman Melville omits their sexual orientation. Leno’s bill would correct these omissions in future materials.

But more importantly, the FAIR Act would benefit all students, gay and straight alike.

Over the past 15 years or so, kids have been coming out at earlier ages. That has resulted in positive developments like the popular gaystraight alliances on school campuses. But coming out has also led to bullying and anti-gay violence. Bullying, of course, has been present in schools forever, and it is usually students who are perceived as “different” that are the targets of teasing or worse. It is not uncommon, as was widely reported last year, for some to take the drastic step of ending their own lives because they could not take the torment any longer.

For LGBTQ students, the FAIR Act would inform them that they are not alone, that there have always been LGBT people in society. Such inclusive education materials would improve students’ self-esteem and self-respect, inspiring

hope that they, too, can aspire to dreams of pursuing any career.

For straight students, the bill is perhaps even more important because they will be exposed to information about LGBT people and the many contributions they have made to society. Kids can often sense at an early age when others are different from themselves. The bill would give faculty inclusive information to all their students about people who may be different and who were often discriminated against. Indeed, teachers need more tools, not fewer, when it comes to LGBT history.

As Leno has noted, “We can’t tell our youth that it’s okay to be yourself and expect them to treat their peers with dignity and respect when we deliberately deny them accurate information about the historical contributions of Americans who happen to be LGBT.” Inclusive education is not a partisan issue either. When Leno’s bill came up in the Assembly last week, Republican Assemblyman Nathan

Fletcher of San Diego voted for it. Fletcher, a moderate, is eyeing a run for mayor in that city – likely against an out lesbian – but nonetheless, his support of the bill shows that LGBT rights can be seen as mainstream.

During the Prop 8 campaign three years ago, the Yes on 8 side skillfully used fear to convince voters to strip away rights from same-sex couples. Television ads bombarded the airwaves with messaging that instilled panic in families: Kids would learn about same-sex marriage or gay sex in schools. There was no end to their exaggerated lies. The No on 8 campaign never did develop an effective counterargument and even now, nearly three years after the election, anti-gay groups are still using those same tactics.

Here’s the bottom line: kids should be taught the truth about the contributions of LGBT people. Leno is absolutely right when he states, “We are selectively censoring history when we exclude LGBT Americans, or any other group of people, from our textbooks and instructional materials.”

No more censorship of our lives. Governor, sign SB 48.▼

AIDS Walk sparked a movement

by Tom Perrault

I

n 1987, I was living in Houston. At that point, HIV/AIDS was something we’d known about for only six years. But already, doctors had diagnosed more than 46,000 people with AIDS; over half of those people were dead. We were in the throes of a terrible epidemic and we were powerless to stop the disease.

In 1987, after several years of pain and loss, President Ronald Reagan finally gave his first speech on AIDS. While it was a major step in the right direction, not once did the president mention the word “gay,” despite the disease’s overwhelming impact on the gay and bisexual community. Indeed, we were facing desperate and uncertain times in 1987. Researchers were only beginning to understand HIV/AIDS, let alone find treatments for it. San Francisco was at the epicenter of this health crisis.

But in 1987, this city also witnessed something quite spectacular. That year will forever be remembered as the year when San Franciscans, from all walks of life, took a stand and sparked a movement that lives on today.

Thousands of people gathered in Golden Gate Park for the first-ever AIDS Walk San Francisco. Little did they know, on that brisk day, that they would be changing the course of the epidemic forever.

That very first AIDS Walk was born out of the desire to save lives and bring much-needed awareness to HIV/AIDS here in the United States and around the world. People in our city had been watching their lovers, friends, family members, and co-workers die of AIDS. They were fed up and they needed a place to come together, hold hands, share stories, mourn, and take action. AIDS Walk took the collective energy of this city and channeled it into a force for progress. After 25 years, that spirit of community activism lives on today, and it’s thriving.

This weekend I will join more than 25,000

SFAF board chair Tom Perrault

walkers in Golden Gate Park for the 25th annual AIDS Walk San Francisco. I will be surrounded by walkers who’ve been participating for decades, and some people who are brand new to the event. There will be people of all ages, races, and sexual orientations. Some walkers will have suffered tremendous loss, while others may not know anyone living with HIV. But no matter our backgrounds, we will be one community united by one cause – to see the end of HIV/AIDS in our lifetime.

We can make that dream a reality, and we’re taking the right steps. We must increase our testing efforts across San Francisco, and we’re doing that. We must link more people to care as soon as they find out they’re infected with HIV, and we’re doing that. We must ensure that vital programs to stop the spread of HIV and provide care to those living with the disease are fully funded, and we’re doing that.

Still, there are two new infections every

day in San Francisco. Nationwide, 1.1 million people are currently living with HIV/AIDS, the highest number in the history of the epidemic. Rates of new infections are still on the rise for gay and bisexual men, the only risk group for which this is the case. We have made tremendous strides over the 30-year history of the disease, but we cannot become complacent.

This is why we participate in AIDS Walk.

We walk so that no more families have to lose a brother, sister, son, daughter, or parent.

We walk so that people get the information they need to make responsible decisions about their sexual health. We walk to make sure HIVpositive people have stable housing so they can take care of their health. We walk to prevent the spread of infection in our city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, through programs like needle exchange and condom distribution.

We walk to provide free HIV tests. We walk to ensure community support programs thrive so that nobody feels alone. We walk because we care, and we want to see a world without HIV/AIDS. Within the last year, President Barack Obama released the first ever National HIV/ AIDS Strategy. Scientists have discovered that drugs currently used to treat HIV can also be used to prevent infection. Trials of vaccines to prevent HIV or slow its progression are happening around the world. Major research is now under way to fully understand the relationships between HIV and aging. It’s remarkable to see how much things have changed since 1987.

But one truth remains – there is no cure for HIV. Until that day arrives, we will continue to participate in AIDS Walk and support organizations across the Bay Area that are fighting HIV/AIDS every day. Will you join me on Sunday, July 17 in Golden Gate Park?▼ Tom Perrault is board chair of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. He is vice president of human resources at Meebo Inc. To register for the AIDS Walk, visit www.aidswalk.net/sanfran/.

▼

Politics >>

July 14-20, 2011 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 11

SF mayor taps gay man for redistricting panel

by Matthew S. Bajko

I

nterim San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has appointed an out gay school district official to the city’s Redistricting Task Force. The nineperson oversight panel will redraw the city’s 11 supervisor districts and is expected to complete its work ahead of the 2012 races for odd-numbered districts.

The mayor on July 8 named Mission District resident Myong Leigh, 40, to one of three seats he was tasked with filling. Leigh is the San Francisco Unified School District’s deputy superintendent for policy and operations.

A member of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club’s board, Leigh is the sole out LGBT person on the panel. He was approached by the mayor’s office about serving on the task force.

Since neither the Board of Supervisors nor the city’s Elections Commission included an out person among their three picks for the panel, Lee was under pressure to see that the LGBT community was represented.

“It seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something fascinating and meaningful in a role I wouldn’t otherwise be able to be exposed to,” Leigh told the Bay Area Reporter when asked why he agreed to serve. “Due to my interest in democracy and open government, I thought it was an intriguing opportunity.”

He said being the sole LGBT panel member comes with a “special responsibility” in ensuring the community’s interests are taken seriously.

“I am also Asian American and lucky enough to be a member of both significant communities in San Francisco. I take it very seriously,” said Leigh, who has been with his partner, school psychologist Mark Haugen, for seven years.

At the same time Leigh said he approaches the task force’s work with an open mind on how to redistribute the city’s residents into the various supervisor districts.

“I don’t really have any preconceived notions, or for that matter, a lot of detailed info about what is contemplated. I know there will be significant changes for District 6 in particular, but I can’t say I have gone through great lengths to study the maps in great detail,” he said. “I am going to enter the process with an open mind, learn quickly, and hear all the information that will be provided to the whole task force.

I don’t come into it with a lot of preconceived notions.”

The mayor’s other two picks for the panel are Sonia Melara, executive director of Rally Family Visitation Services of Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, and Marily Mondejar, president of the Filipina Women’s Network, a nonprofit professional association for women of Philippine ancestry living in the United States.

“The census has shown the population of San Francisco has grown, and changes to our voting districts must adequately reflect our communities and our city.

Leigh, Melara and Mondejar all will bring valuable community involvement and experience to the Redistricting Task Force that will have lasting impacts on our residents and our city,” stated Lee in a release announcing his picks.

The task force has yet to schedule its first meeting, but it is required to

Jane Philomen Cleland

Local redistricting panel member Myong Leigh

hold a host of community hearings to elicit public comment about how to carve up the city’s population based on the 2010 U.S. Census into evenly balanced supervisor districts.

It must turn in a final plan outlining the new supervisorial district lines to the Board of Supervisors by April 2012.

Ethics panel reprimands lesbian library commissioner In an unprecedented decision, the city’s five-person Ethics Commission unanimously voted this week to find that Library Commission President Jewelle Gomez, a lesbian who works for the LGBT grant-making nonprofit Horizons Foundation, violated the city’s open meetings law and suggested that she be removed from the oversight body.

The commission determined that Gomez did not follow the city’s Sunshine Ordinance when she refused to allow Sue Cauthen to speak during public comment at the Library Commission’s June 4, 2009 meeting. After watching a videotape of the meeting, ethics commissioners also faulted Gomez for behavior toward Cauthen it found “unacceptable.”

The commission is drafting a letter to send to the mayor calling for disciplinary action to be taken against Gomez, which could include removing her from the library board.

Rick Gerharter

Library Commission President Jewelle Gomez

At the hearing Monday night, Gomez apologized for her behavior at the meeting in question. She told the B.A.R. in a phone interview Tuesday that “I did lose my temper and that was inappropriate.”

Nonetheless, Gomez said she does not believe that one incident should result in her being removed from the commission.

“This one incident was an anomaly. Anyone who knows me knows I almost never raise my voice,” said Gomez. “I thought she was disrespectful of the commission as a whole. The city attorney told me after the meeting that I was correct.”

She chalked up the disciplinary action against her as a personal vendetta.

“I think this is particularly directed against me as a lesbian of color. I think they have had it in for me ever since I took over the job,” said Gomez, who is African American and was first appointed to the Library Commission in 2005 by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and was elected president in 2008.

Whether Lee will act against Gomez is unclear. Francis Tsang, the mayor’s chief deputy communications director, did not respond to a request for comment.

As of Tuesday afternoon Gomez had yet to speak with Lee. “I figured he has a lot more important things on his plate rather than worry about whether I was rude in a commission meeting or not,” said Gomez, who is preparing for the premiere of her new play Waiting for Giovanni, about gay black author James Baldwin, this August at the New Conservatory Theater.

The disciplinary action stems for a hearing the Library Commission held two years ago to discuss the design of the North Beach Library.

At the meeting Cauthen, a member of a citizens library advisory committee, had wanted to address the library commissioners during public comment about historic preservation of the city’s libraries and not specifically about the branch library’s design.

Gomez, however, cut her off and told her she had to wait until the library design item was called.

According to a report prepared by ethics staff, “Ms. Cauthen attempted to explain that she was not speaking about the design of North Beach.

Ms. Gomez continued to raise her voice while asking Ms. Cauthen to sit down. Ms. Cauthen then returned to her seat.”

The staff report concluded that Gomez’s “conduct falls below the standard of decency, good faith and right action impliedly required of all public officials.”

While the Ethics Commission itself lacks the authority to remove an appointed person to one of the city’s oversight bodies, it can request the appointing authority, in this case the mayor, to do so. The staff report stated that the letter to the mayor “indicate the commission’s belief that Ms. Gomez’s actions fell below the standards appropriate for a public official.”

Back in July 2009 the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force had found that “Gomez willfully violated” the city’s open meetings laws and that the “treatment Sue Cauthen received was inexcusable.”

Cauthen, a member of the task force, recused herself from hearing the matter. She did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Save the date The Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club and the San Francisco Young Democrats have announced that on Thursday, August 11 they will be hosting a debate among the candidates running to be San Francisco’s next mayor.

The time and location for the forum have yet to be announced. ▼ Keep abreast of the latest LGBT political news by following the Political Notebook on Twitter @ twitter.com/politicalnotes.

ebar.com

12 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

July 14-20, 2011

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 13

14 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< Business News

July 14-20, 2011

▼

Gingerfruit jungle

by Raymond Flournoy

T

he once popular restaurant Mecca may be gone, but a new eatery hopes to rekindle some of its magic.

“We want to bring the space back to where it was in the heyday of the old Mecca. We want to be part of the gay community and we want to give back to the gay community,” said general manager Henry Lamb, talking about his central message as he describes the concept of Gingerfruit, the latest restaurant to occupy the space at 2029 Market Street.

And it looks like some old favorites may be coming back to the space.

“We have partnered up with Betty’s List (www.bettyslist.com) to bring back the Thursday night Ladies Night events. I’m working on getting the permits to bring back the live entertainment and drag shows.

We aren’t afraid to be known as a ‘gay bar’ or a ‘gay restaurant,’” said Lamb, who is gay.

Gingerfruit is owned by Hong Kong restaurateur Francis Tsai. Tsai also owned Pudong, the Chinese restaurant which occupied the same location and which shuttered suddenly in March after only three months of operations.

Lamb blamed the quick closing of Pudong on poor branding as well as an ill-conceived emphasis on fine dining at a high pricepoint. Gingerfruit has a completely new concept, menu, chef, and management.

“We are aiming at an atmosphere which is more casual and inviting,” he said. “A place where people come to meet up with friends.”

Lamb describes Gingerfruit’s menu as “Asian-fusion tapas – Southeast Asian cuisine with Mediterranean flavors.”

The kitchen’s signature dishes are skewered scallops wrapped in bacon and Kobe beef tartare.

To see the full menu, visit www. gingerfruit.com.

Get healthy fast Also opening recently is Beautifull, a counterservice cafe that occupies the storefront at 2301 Market Street. The space, connected to Gold’s Gym’s lobby, is another location that has seen a revolving door of restaurants over the years.

This is the third location for the local chain, which is owned by restaurateur Eric Greenburg.

Beautifull’s eatery at 816 Irving Street remains its flagship restaurant.

Director of sales and marketing Yann Sauvignon said that the inspiration for Beautifull was “the realization that the country is in a health crisis, and that so many health problems can be traced back to our diet of fake and bad foods.”

In response, Beautifull’s mission is to provide what Sauvignon calls “healthy fast-food.”

“I know that at the end of a day at work it is hard to cook yourself and make sure that you are eating right every day,” Sauvignon said.

“Beautifull provides a simple, quick way to pick up a healthy, balanced meal, which you can eat in, carryout, or order for delivery.”

According to Sauvignon, the ingredients for all of the menu items are locally sourced and organic when possible, the beef is grassfed, and the seafood is sustainably fished. The menu is overseen by senior vice president of culinary operations Donna Insalaco, who is an out lesbian.

Beautifull’s menu is posted on-

Steven Kasapi

General manager Henry Lamb presides over the newly opened Gingerfruit Restaurant, which is located in the space that formerly housed Mecca.

line at www.beautifull.com. Delivery is available for minimum orders of $15, with a $3 surcharge going to the driver.

Silicone valley “To be happy in life, do what you love.” So say the old words of wisdom, and the founders of new company Product 54 seem to have taken this advice to heart.

The company’s first product is a 100 percent pure silicone lubricant named 9x6, which the company founders initially produced for personal use.

According to President Jack Miller, “We originally made it for ourselves, and then made small batches which we distributed to friends. But then people started coming back to us asking where they could get more, and we realized that we might have a business on our hands.”

Miller describes 9x6 as “nonstaining, with no residue. It’s organic and made in the USA.” The product’s name comes from the dimensions of its bottle, which is 9 inches tall and 6 inches wide.

Along with Miller, Product 54 is co-owned by Tony Hogdahl, Keenan Kawamura, and Miller’s life partner Mike Fell. The team’s background is in venture capital and high-tech, but with 9x6 they hope to expand to other personal care products.

Product 54 will donate $1 from each bottle of 9x6 to two charities, Project Open Hand and the Housing Equality Law Project.

Matchmaking name. The events, held at locations such as Moms Pharmacy (4071 18th Street) and the Castro Country Club (4058 18th Street) are themed for specific sub-communities such as bears or daddies.

According to Arce, the inspiration for the speed-dating events was to “provide a new, cool experience for guys to meet.”

The events have attracted upwards of 60 daters for an evening of four-minute “mini-dates.”

Participants use “speeding tickets” to indicate the people whom they would like to contact again, and the next day an email notifies daters of the successful matches.

Morris and Arce intend to expand beyond speed-dating to general event and party planning, and the 9x6 event held at Lime (2247 Market Street) was their first foray into this new business.

Check out the Confidential Gay Matchmaking website at www. cgmsf.com for announcements of upcoming events.

Dough for doggies On July 16, Muttville Senior Dog Rescue hosts Moolah for Mutts: Night of 1,000 Mutts, a benefit fundraiser. The event features food and drink, music, auctions, and raffles, all in support of the organization that specializes in finding homes for older dogs.

The event runs from 6:30 to 10 p.m. at the Swedish American Hall (2174 Market Street), and tickets cost $85 individually or two for $150.

To order tickets visit www. moolahformutts.org.

GGBA mixer Quickly dated Miller and crew celebrated the official launch of 9x6 at a June 22 event organized by Confidential Gay Matchmaking, a new company founded by life partners Blu J. Morris and John Arce.

Six months ago Morris and Arce began hosting monthly speeddating events in the gay community under the Confidential Gay

The next Golden Gate Business Association “Make Contact” mixer takes place Tuesday, August 2 from 6 to 8 p.m.

The event, sponsored by Redwood Credit Union, is free for GGBA members, and $15 for the public.

At press time, a location had not been announced. For more information visit www.ggba.com.▼

Read more online at www.ebar.com

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 15

<< Community News

▼ New policy puts Presbyterians on path to equality

16 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

July 14-20, 2011

by Chuck Colbert`

A

new policy that opens the door to ordination of openly gay deacons, elders, and ministers in the Presbyterian Church (USA) took effect on Sunday, July 10, with prayer vigils and liturgical celebrations to mark the historic occasion held across the nation from Pittsburgh to Nashville to Denver and beyond.

“We give thanks to God that the Presbyterian Church enters a new era of equality,” said Michael Adee, executive director of More Light Presbyterians, a church advocacy organization that pressed for the policy change.

“We are grateful that our church devoted to end discrimination and allow the ordination of qualified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender church leaders,” Adee said. “Our hurting world needs as many persons answering God’s call to serve and make a difference. As the prophet Isaiah has said, ‘God is doing a new thing in our midst’ and these LGBT leaders will be a blessing to our church and world.”

For decades,advocacy organizations within the Presbyterian Church have worked to remove a constitutional

barrier to gay ordination – one that dates back to 1978.

Finally, last summer Presbyterian activists bore witness to the ban’s dismantling during a meeting of the 2.1 million-member’s general assembly, a gathering held in Minneapolis. There, the denomination’s highest governing body voted to approve Amendment 10-A, which deleted language in the denomination’s Book of Order that in effect barred the ordination of non-celibate gay candidates by requiring them “to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and woman or chastity in singleness.”

New language requires that “the governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability.”

The July 8, 2010 balloting in general assembly for ordination equality was close. The amendment passed by a vote of 373-323 – a margin of 53 percent to 46 percent.

But before the official change in church policy could be implemented, a majority of the 173 regional presbyteries were also required to approve the measure.

More Light Presbyterians Executive Director Michael Adee

On May 10, formal approval of Amendment 10-A came with a favorable vote for it by the Twin Cities presbytery, a regional governing district. That action pushed the ordination equality measure over the top.

The San Francisco presbytery gave its approval earlier this year.

In all, 97 presbyteries voted in favor of ordination equality, with 71 against, according the church’s Office

of the General Assembly.

“What the Presbyterian Church is saying with the policy change now in effect,” said Adee, “is that LGBT people are morally and spiritually equal to heterosexuals. We are not better or worse – just the same.”

Consequently, Adee said that he expects more people will come out, “telling the truth of their lives with grace and integrity.”

He added, “Ministers who have

already been ordained will be testing the waters to see if it will be safe to be out in their presbyteries.”

For that reason, Adee said, More Light Presbyterians and other supporters of this change must be “absolutely vigilant” to ensure that Amendment 10-A is “fairly and accurately interpreted in all 173 presbyteries.”

And it appears that some clergy have come out in response to the change.

The Reverend Janet Edwards, co-moderator of More Light Presbyterians, acknowledged in an op-ed on the Advocate’s website that she is bisexual.

Edwards said in a conference call with reporters that the move to embrace ordination equality means that “our Gospel message to the world can ring out clear and strong and with integrity.”

As she explained, “We taught our people: ‘Jesus loves me, yes, I know;’ but at a certain point we had to say ‘not exactly.’ If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, that’s not quite what we told you.”

Now with ordination equality, Edwards said, “My whole self bursts with joy.” ▼

New EQCA director coming to San Francisco compiled by Cynthia Laird

Equality California Executive Director Roland Palencia

Bayview Tuesday, July 19 to discuss the state of LGBT community in the city’s southeastern neighborhoods.

The meeting takes place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Bayview Hunters Point YMCA, 1601 Lane Street.

The bulk of the meeting will be discussing “Beyond Castro – Building LGBT Community in District 10.” The district has LGBT residents, some of whom moved to the area for its comparatively lower housing prices. It has also had LGBT candidates for the supervisor’s seat, although none have thus far been successful.

The advisory committee plans to hold its September meeting in the Castro.

SF HRC panel to meet in D10

Lighthouse fundraisers coming up

R

oland Palencia, the new executive director of Equality California, will be in town next week and interested community members are invited to a welcoming reception.

Hosted by the boards of directors for EQCA and its affiliated Equality Institute, the event will take place Tuesday, July 19 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Bubble Lounge, 714 Montgomery Street in downtown San Francisco.

Palencia has been crisscrossing the state since he started at EQCA July 5. At next week’s reception, he will talk about his plans and vision to enhance the organization’s work and build a stronger LGBT movement across the state.

Admission is free but people must RSVP to attend. To sign up, email events@eqca.org.

<<

Youth housing From page 1

for 40 percent of the homeless youth population.

The development is being vehemently opposed by some nearby neighbors and merchants, whose concerns range from seeing property values plummet to whether the site is an appropriate location for at-risk youth. They point to the fact that nearby is the Bridge Hotel, a magnet for criminal activity that the city attorney’s office targeted last year for numerous code violations.

In a letter to city officials, Greenwich Street resident Peter Blumberg wrote that he does “not think that this is a suitable location for young adults with two bars next door and across the road. The Chestnut Street area is and has always been family friendly with little or no drunkenness or rowdiness and any changes to this would be most undesirable.”

Backers of the project, however, contend it is vitally needed housing stock for a population in particular need. It would also be the first affordable housing project to be built in that area of the city.

They contend that some of the project’s detractors are misinformed about the youth population that will

Rex Wockner

The LGBT Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission will meet in the

be living there.

“I think that likely some of those concerns are based on not knowing or understanding the issues about youth in the foster care system or on the streets who are or were homeless.

I think that is unfortunate,” said Sherilyn Adams, Larkin Street’s executive director. “We will continue to work with the neighbors and continue to educate them about the lives of the youth we are serving. These are young people we are all responsible for ensuring have opportunities as full members of society. This housing project is a part of our efforts toward that goal.”

The partnership bought the property in 2010 for $3.45 million.

The cost to remodel the building’s interior is estimated at $9 million, $4.4 million of which will come from city funds.

In order to house the two-dozen youth, more than current zoning allows, the project needs a special use district. Planning department staff has recommended that the oversight body approve the project.

It will then need to be adopted by the Board of Supervisors. Five of the board’s straight supervisors last month introduced an ordinance to allow for the project’s zoning requirements. They are Supervisors

The Lighthouse Community Center in Hayward has several upcoming events, culminating with

its 11th anniversary celebration next month.

First up is a tri-tip barbecue fundraiser Saturday, July 16 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The cost is $10.

On Tuesday, July 19, join friends for bingo at the Lighthouse from 6 to 9 p.m.

Bingo cards are $4 each or six for $20 (10 games). Prizes will be awarded.

Then on Saturday, August 6 the anniversary celebration takes place from 1 to 4 p.m. and will include food, speakers, and presentations.

The center serves as a hub for the LGBT community in southern Alameda County. All the above events take place at the center, 1217 A Street in Hayward. For more information, call (510) 881-8167 or visit www.lgbtlighthousehayward.org.

Sherilyn Adams, executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services, stands in front of 3155 Scott Street, the site for a proposed foster youth housing facility.

Rick Gerharter

John Avalos, David Chiu, Jane Kim, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi.

Neither of the board’s two gay members, David Campos and Scott Wiener, has come out to publicly support the project. Both told the Bay Area Reporter this week that they are remaining neutral since an appeal of the planning commission’s decision is expected to land before them.

“I believe that the Edward II project will be coming to the board as an appeal of a conditional use permit.

A CU appeal is a due process appeal, meaning I’m not permitted to take a position on the specific project,” explained Wiener in an emailed response.

Were they to comment, both said they would be barred from voting.

“What I can say is I think we need more housing for transitional age youth,” said Campos.

Wiener added that, he too, is “very supportive of affordable housing for emancipated foster youth, and I’m looking forward to learning more about this project.”

Supervisor Mark Farrell, whose district covers where the project will be built, has been one of the most vocal opponents. It is the second transitional youth housing development in recent months he has come out against.

While he is supportive of the overall need for such housing in his district, he told the B.A.R. he does not believe, in this instance, that the hotel site is the right location. He suggests selling

Castro Valley to hold Pride rally Members of Castro Valley’s LGBT and allied community will hold a Pride celebration Saturday, July 23 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in the RiteAid parking lot on Castro Valley Boulevard.

The group plans a short march from the parking lot down Castro Valley Boulevard to the community center.

Participants are encouraged to bring rainbow flags, noisemakers, and signs. People are asked not to bring confetti, silly string, spray paint, fireworks or “anything that will leave behind a mess.”

More information is available on the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/event.php? eid=212650075446539.▼

the property and using the money to buy another parcel.

“They are putting this project in the Lombard Corridor where it is fraught with a lot of risk. To me, what I think is lost in a lot of advocacy around this, is what it is going to be like for the kids who live there,” said Farrell, who has pledged to help find a new location for the housing.

He also criticized city officials for not gathering community input prior to teaming up with the service providers on the project. Not doing so, he said, has lead to much of the ill will and opposition surrounding the project.

“I don’t care if we are talking about affordable housing, paid housing, or market-rate condos. In my opinion, it is so important to give adequate notice to and have neighborhood involvement to that project itself,” he said. “There was no community input or thought process about what the neighbors might say or have you. To me, that is a mistake.”

While it is expected that the project will ultimately be approved by the city, it is also highly likely it will face a legal challenge in court.

The Planning Commission meeting begins at 1 p.m. today (Thursday, July 14) at Room 400 in City Hall.▼

▼

International News >>

John Hein/ScotsGay

A group of lawyers marched in the London Pride Parade earlier this month.

A million attend London Pride

by Rex Wockner

A

round a million people turned out for the Pride Parade in London on July 2. Contingents included police officers, soldiers, and lawyers; the latter group sported the white wigs they use when appearing in court.

Indian health minister: Gay sex is ‘totally unnatural’ Gay sex is “totally unnatural,” Indian Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said July 4.

Speaking in the Hindi language at a national HIV/AIDS conference, Azad said, “Unfortunately, in the world and in our country also, this disease has come where men have sex with each other, which is totally unnatural and which should not happen, yet it does. In our country, the numbers of men having sex with men are substantial.”

Azad later said he had been quoted out of context.

“I did not use the word ‘homosexuality’ and I didn’t use the word ‘gay,’” he said in English. “I was referring disease, but HIV, which is a disease.”

LGBT and HIV groups denounced the comments and cast aspersions on the clarification. Some called for an apology and others demanded that Azad resign.

“These outrageous remarks linking consensual sexual activity to a disease simply encourage discrimination against men who have sex with men,” said Emily Gray, Amnesty International’s researcher on sexual orientation and gender identity. “The health minister must retract his comments, and the Indian government must reaffirm its commitment to protect the rights of all of its citizens, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or consensual sexual behavior.”

Trikone, a nonprofit organization for LGBT people of South Asian descent that was founded in the Bay Area, also criticized Azad’s remarks.

“Like our sister organization in India, we at Trikone have lost faith in Mr. Asad to lead the country as health minister,” the group said in a statement.

A solidarity march was planned for Wednesday, July 13 at the intersection of Geary and Arguello, near the Indian Consulate in San Francisco.

Calcutta’s Telegraph newspaper harshly criticized Azad in an editorial.

“Although, as a citizen of a liberal democracy, Mr. Azad is entitled to his personal views, backward and ignorant as they may be, he has no right to air them on a public platform as the health minister of the nation,” the paper said. “Mr. Azad has not only seriously undermined the fight against HIV/AIDS in India but has

also tainted the image of an aspiring superpower on the international stage.”

Gays arrested at Russian Embassy in Paris Five gay people were arrested outside Russia’s embassy in Paris on July 8.

They were attempting to present a petition from AllOut.org, signed by some 14,000 people, opposing Moscow’s years-long ban on gay pride and Russia’s flouting of a European Court of Human Rights ruling that the bans violate European law.

Arrested were ACT UP/Paris’ Audrey Grelombe and Eric Marty, International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia President Louis-Georges Tin, Moscow Pride founder Nikolai Alekseev, and American photographer Charles Meacham.

They reportedly were detained for not having permission to gather. Early reports suggested Alekseev might face an additional charge for some kind of alleged altercation with a police officer.

Alekseev was held in custody much longer than the other detainees. Upon his release, he wrote on Facebook, “Spent 10.5 hours under arrest in Paris police station. It is my first arrest outside of Russia. Hello to [President Nicolas] Sarkozy and [Paris Mayor Bertrand] Delanoë! It is the first time I am being put in handcuffs (did not even happen in Russia). My fingerprints were taken 3 (!!!) times ...

I was violently attacked by the furious police officer who even wanted to open criminal case against me! There is a saying: ‘To see Paris and to die.’

Today I can rephrase it this way: ‘I saw Paris and don’t want to die. Paris died for me.’ Forever!”

Later in the evening, some 45 people protested at the embassy against the earlier incident. Reports said 150 anti-riot police and 25 police vans showed up for the second demonstration.

Same-sex marriage campaign launches in Uruguay Uruguay’s Colectivo Ovejas Negras (Black Sheep Collective) has launched a TV ad campaign featuring 34 Uruguayan celebrities saying they support legalization of same-sex marriage.

A marriage-equality bill was introduced in Parliament three months ago.

“The bill – written by Uruguay’s first transgender lawyer – will soon be discussed by Parliament, and we’re optimistic,” said the collective’s Álvaro Queiruga.

The ads are online at www.youtube.com/ovejasweb.▼ Bill Kelley contributed to this report.

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 17

18 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< The Sports Page

July 14-20, 2011

▼

Lines in the sand

by Roger Brigham

O

ne athlete used words that could be seen but not heard, the other used words that could be heard but not seen. One used words as a friendly joke with a friend, the other used words angrily lashing out at an unseen caller. Both could have been used for one of those Southwest Airlines “Wanna Get Away?” commercials.

Chicago White Sox second baseman Gordon Beckham used his feet to scratch out the message “GETZ IS GAY! GB” in the sand near second base July 4 as a joke for Kansas City Royals second baseman and former teammate Chris Getz.

Now, middle infielders have been using the dirt around second base as a giant Etch-a-Sketch to leave messages for each other for ages, and if you’ve ever stood around for hours on a hot sunny day as a Little Leaguer waiting for the damned ball to be hit your way and yet petrified that it actually will be hit to you, you’ll understand the impulse.

The creativity usually does not rise above a casual game of tic-tactoe – baseball cleats are not the tool to try things like engraving the Gettysburg Address on the head of a pin – but it does pass the time.

But we live in a modern world in which information published on the Internet is almost instantly replicated virally through any number of social media, so whether your flub is meant as a “harmless” joke between friends or you are botching a retelling of Paul Revere’s

Chicago White Sox second baseman Gordon Beckham

ride, word will get out and out and out as never before. And as word ripples out, repercussions ripple back.

Beckham’s swift apology once the story broke in the Chicago Sun-Times did not commit the sin of so many non-apologies before it of using the word “if ” over and over again, but his use of the word “obviously” three times in two sentences made it clear that a) he figured everyone would realize he sincerely wasn’t trying to be offensive; and b) yeah, he would like to get away from and beyond this as quickly as possible. Someone book him on a $49 Southwest special out of cyberspace.

Caught in a bit bigger Internet shit storm of his own making was

Philadelphia Eagles wideout DeSean Jackson, who unloaded on a radio caller with a homophobic rant that took a week to be transcribed for circulation and posted on YouTube.

When a caller on a radio talk show June 30 asked Jackson if he “ever had his dick knocked in the dirt,” (that is, if he was ever knocked unconscious during play) Jackson responded, “What kind of question is that? Say no homo, gay-ass faggot.”

Outrageous lack of alliteration, don’t you think? Jackson tweeted his apology in three messages on July 9, saying he was sorry, intolerance is unacceptable, and that his words “meant no disrespect to the gay and lesbian community.”

The latest wave to break on the shoals of homophobia was Oakland A’s minor league pitching prospect Ian Krol, whom the team suspended indefinitely July 10 for, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, a “comment on Twitter that included a homophobic slur and offensive language.” The comment has been removed from Twitter, but as of Monday morning this week no apology has been issued. The day before Krol’s suspension, pro wrestler Phillip Jack Brooks, a.k.a.

CM Punk, apologized for earlier calling a spectator a “homo” in June.

String this run of faux pas together and it begs the question: What planet are the folks running elite sports living on? What Neanderthal time warp are they locked in? When will they get, for heaven’s sake, a clue?

In recent weeks, LGBT athletes have been feted in high profile events by the president of the United State and the prime minister of Great Britain. This is being called See page 21 >>

Obituaries >>

On the web Online content week includes the Transmissions column, more news briefs, a longer version of Jock Talk, and an update on a Pink Saturday incident. www.ebar.com

Rico Mendez

Mattie Posth

July 21, 1955 – July 8, 2011

June 23, 2011

Rico Mendez passed away peacefully at home on July 8. Born in Falls Church, Virginia on July 21, 1955. A true San Franciscan since his arrival here in 1974.

Azucarrr!

Rico suave cha-cha-cha-ed down the roads of life leaving behind a contagious air of vibrant tender love. He poured his passion, creativity, and compassion into every space so that his joyful energy kissed the hearts of friends, family, and strangers alike. He transformed his reality into a work of art: as an artist, gifting the breath of life and beauty in his surroundings. Rico suave gave endlessly and never ceased celebrating the gift of existence.

Rico is the son of Colonel Louis G. Mendez Jr. (deceased) and Jean J. Mendez of Falls Church, Virginia. Rico is survived by his loving partner of 29 years, Lance La’shagway, his 11 brothers and sisters and their spouses, and his 35 nieces, nephews, great-nieces and -nephews. Rico has far, far too many friends that are left behind. Rico, a true citizen of the Castro.

Though in deep sadness, we will always hear Rico: A gozarrr!

Funeral Mass to be held at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic church in the Castro (pending).

Mattie Posth died by suicide at 4:20 a.m. June 23, when she drove a rental car to the middle of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, left the car door open, and jumped. Her body was found the next day near Crissy Field. She was 51.

Mattie (born Matthew) graduated from UC Berkeley and taught philosophy at Northwestern, her friend Jon Sugar said. She moved to the city about 20 years ago and lived in the Haight, where she was wellknown and where she began living as a woman.

Perched in public areas, sitting in the sun, her beloved 19-year-old cat Wendall on her lap, reading a book, she chatted with everyone, Sugar said.

Until a year ago she had worked out of her home but that job came to an end and she ran out of money.

Survivors include her friends in the building at 901 Stanyan Street where she lived; her brother Mark Posth, sister Salynn, and mother, all of San Francisco. Sugar and his friends are taking care of Wendall.

A memorial was held July 2.

If there’s something you’d like to share about Mattie, please comment through Wendall’s Facebook page, “Wendall Posth.”

Harris memorial next week

A

memorial for longtime lesbian activist and Democratic Party member Jean Harris will be held Thursday, July 21 at 6 p.m. at Delancey Street Foundation, 600 Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Ms. Harris, a former executive director of the California Alliance

for Pride and Equality (later Equality California), died unexpectedly June 25 at her home in Palm Springs. She was 66.

Those who do plan to attend are asked to RSVP to Carol Stuart at cstuartsf@aol.com.

– Cynthia Laird

▼

Obituaries >>

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 19

Memorial for Vicki Marlane Sunday

by Cynthia Laird

A

celebration of life will be held Sunday, July 17 for drag performer Vicki Marlane, who died July 5 at St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco. She was 76.

The cause of death was AIDSrelated complications, her friends said.

Known locally as “the lady with the liquid spine,” for her performance moves, Ms. Marlene was a beloved San Francisco treasure and will be missed by many.

An out transgender woman, Ms. Marlane started a drag revue at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in 1998. The show, called “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” evolved into the popular regular Friday and Saturday show called, “The Hot Boxxx Girls,” which drew large crowds from around the Bay Area.

“She was an inspiration,” said Matt Cavalli, who performed with Ms. Marlane under the drag name Aurora Styles and also emceed the show for 10 years.

Cavalli attributed the success of Ms. Marlane’s shows to her being unpretentious.

“It was a drama-free cast, which translated on stage and translated to the audience,” Cavalli said. “And

the show’s consistently good. It was a mix of classic drag and modern drag and we had every shape, size, and persuasion and people respond to all of that.”

Ms. Marlane was a community grand marshal in the 2003 San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade. In an article in that year’s Bay Area Reporter, she talked about the transphobia that she experienced after coming out.

“When I first came here we weren’t even allowed in the gay bars if we were in drag,” she recalled. “During the first gay Pride Parade my friends and I rode in a convertible, and we got just as many ‘boos’ from gay people as we did from straights.”

Her ride in a convertible in the 2003 parade generated much warmer responses from those along the route.

Ms. Marlane was born Donald Sterger in Crookston, Minnesota on September 5, 1934. After a difficult childhood she left the farm where she grew up and ran off to join a traveling circus, playing the fifth and sixth legs of the “Six Legged Woman.” She also starred as the “Alligator Woman,” covering her skin with crackling glue and using green food coloring to give her “alligator eyes.”

Rick Gerharter

Vicki Marlane rode up Market Street as a grand marshal in the 2003 LGBT Pride Parade.

When she left the circus, she traveled all over the country performing in drag shows in New Orleans; Flint, Michigan; Portland, Oregon; and at the Club Chesterfield in Chicago, where she was known by the stage name “Mister Peel.” She moved to San Francisco in 1966 and worked at the Top of the Town, the Frolic Room, the 181 Club, Jackie D’s, and the Gilded Cage. She made many

of her own costumes, embellishing them with beads, sequins, and rhinestones and later added to her collection many gowns from Sue Wong, her favorite designer.

In the 1980s Ms. Marlane temporarily retired from performing after sex reassignment surgery and later moved to San Diego to live near her close friend Judy Kane. After Kane’s death, she returned to San Francisco and began performing again at Peter Pan, then at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge. Her passionate, sexy style was always delivered straight from the heart and created a huge following of dedicated fans.

“Her passion to perform was what truly mattered; the house could be packed to the rafters, or ‘dead,’ yet Miss Marlane never failed to deliver,” said her friend James Reed, who uses the stage name Bus Station John. “She taught me that true show people ‘bring it’ regardless of how many people show up, focusing not on who isn’t there, but who is. ... In recent years it ‘bringing it’ wasn’t always easy for Vicki; during episodes of illness, she would summon forth all her energies to create magic at the corner of Turk and Taylor, then return home and crumple. Yet there she’d be, the next night or the next week, bewitching us all over again.

This was her gift – a gift to us, to San Francisco, to the world.”

Ms. Marlane held many benefit shows for charities and gave command performances at Imperial and Ducal court coronations.

She worked with and was a close friend of the late Pat Montclaire of Marlena’s in Hayes Valley.

An independent film about Ms. Marlane’s life, Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight by Michelle Lawler, has captivated audiences at film festivals in San Francisco; Los Angeles; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Portland, Oregon; and in England, Australia, and New Zealand.

Recently a performance by Ms. Marlane was filmed for Limehouse, a documentary by Marjorie Conrad about the Barbary Coast. It won best narrative at the Excelsior Short Film Festival, the audience award at the juried San Francisco State University Film Previews, and held the place of honor at the SFSU film finals screening.

Ms. Marlane is survived by her sisters Norma Sears, 74, and Judy Horner, 62, and many friends and admirers.

Sunday’s celebration of Ms. Marlanes’s life will be from noon to 7 p.m. at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, 133 Turk Street in San Francisco.▼

Longtime nurse practitioner Joseph Molaghan dies

by Cynthia Laird

J

oseph Bernard Molaghan, a retired nurse practitioner who specialized in HIV treatment and education, died peacefully June 29 at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. He was 57.

Mr. Molaghan’s family did not release a cause of death.

A longtime resident of San Francisco, Mr. Molaghan, known as “JB,” was born August 31, 1953 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He graduated from Fitchburg High School in 1971, Berkshire Community College in 1973, and went on to complete the nurse practitioner program at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge. He specialized in the field of HIV treatment and education and worked for many years in the Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital. He was a pioneer in the education, research, diagnosis, and treatment of HIV/ AIDS. He inspired and mentored the nurse practitioners, nurses, and doctors who came to work with him.

Mr. Molaghan, who was openly gay, lectured nationally on many facets of HIV. He received the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights Award and received recognition from many organizations for his tireless and inspiring work with HIV/AIDS treatment. Colleagues

described him as a “shining light in the darkest of times” and “a hero whose fearless honesty and irreverent sense of humor provided balance to so many.”

Mr. Molaghan first worked at the Fenway Health Clinic in Boston before moving to San Francisco in the early 1980s. He was the first nurse practitioner hired for a new clinic specializing in AIDS care at SFGH. He worked in this setting for 20 years and was a constant source of support and advocacy for staff, patients and the community. After many years as a nurse practitioner and charge nurse, Mr. Molaghan continued his healing work at UCSF through the Adolescent Trials Network and other projects. He retired earlier this year.

“JB’s contributions to the HIV/AIDS cause have been immeasurable,” said Catherine Lyons of the Positive Health Program. “He was a tireless advocate for people living with HIV/AIDS – both in his work and in his personal life. He touched not only the patients he cared for, but all of those who worked with him or knew him personally.”

Mr. Molaghan, one of six children born to Irish American parents, was known for his engaging, personable nature and an overflowing sense of good humor. He had a love of

theater and participated in a number of community theater productions.

He was an entertaining storyteller, and he frequently used humorous anecdotes to put his patients at ease while on the job. He was at his best when times were most demanding.

“In 1983, nurse practitioners were licensed to ‘deliver care to healthy adults’ and we hired NPs to practice as full-fledged providers caring for very sick people,” said Dr. Paul Volberding, who was director of the AIDS program at SFGH and is now chief of medical service for the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “On Ward 86, we pioneered the practice of bringing in a cadre of NP providers who became experts in HIV care and who were very sensitive to the social setting of the epidemic; JB was a national model for this – he was hugely important.”

Diane Jones, the HIV testing and linkages to care coordinator at SFGH, also worked with Mr. Molaghan.

“I’d consider him one of the pioneers of HIV care in the Bay Area,” Jones told the Bay Area Reporter.

Jones also recounted his “absolutely fabulous sense of humor,” but when things got tough, such as a patient dying after being part of a clinical trial, Mr. Molaghan “would just be devastated,” she said.

Joseph Bernard Molaghan

Said longtime colleague Dr. Donald Abrams, “JB was one of the two pioneer nurse practitioners to join the AIDS program on Ward 86 in 1983. Through those dark days of HIV/AIDS he was a beacon of light and energy, sustaining not only his patients but the clinic staff with his care and humor.”

Former program manager Barbara Woodruff, upon hearing of his death said, “I can still hear him flying through Ward 86 saying ‘Film at 11.’”

Mr. Molaghan’s blonde hair and dimpled smile were his signature, friends said.

“He was thoughtful and compassionate,” said his sister Nancy Ornduff. “I only wish every girl could experience the love and devotion of an older brother like JB. I was so lucky to have him but he is, quite simply, irreplaceable.”

Mr. Molaghan was the son of the late Annabelle and Phillip Molaghan.

He was predeceased by his brother, Marty Molaghan in 1975. Mr. Molaghan is survived by his sisters Patty Ward of Columbia, South Carolina and Nancy Ornduff of Lexington, South Carolina; brothers Michael Molaghan, Worcester, Massachusetts and Tim Molaghan, Northampton, Massachusetts as well as his beloved cat, Charlotte.

Also, seven nephews and two nieces and many, many friends. Friends said that his enduring legacy will be one of passion for his work, his charismatic personality, unique wit and humor, and his deep love for his friends and family.

A private burial will be held at St. Bernard’s Cemetery in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Memorial services and a celebration of life will be held in San Francisco and Fitchburg at a date to be announced. To receive updated information on the memorial in San Francisco, please email christys1@earthlink.net and notification will be sent to you when final arrangements have been made.▼

Former ACT artistic director Edward Hastings dies

by Cynthia Laird

E

dwards Hastings, the openly gay former artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater, died July 5 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 80.

Mr. Hastings died of natural causes, according to a statement from ACT officials.

A company member of ACT since its founding in Pittsburgh in 1965, Mr. Hastings also served as executive director under founder William Bell. His tenure as artistic director marked a commitment to largescale productions, new plays and emerging playwrights, and diversity.

Edward Hastings

Along with then-production manager James Haire, Mr. Hastings was responsible for keeping ACT open following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, when the company temporarily lost its permanent home at the Geary Theater due to damage from the disaster. The men worked to secure different venues around San Francisco to continue the company’s ambitious production schedule.

“Ed Hastings truly saved ACT by picking up the mantle after the Bill Ball years and carrying forward with grace and determination,” ACT artistic director Carey Perloff said in a statement. “Of the many things Ed did so beautifully as artistic director,

one of the most important was his nurturing of young and emerging theater companies throughout the Bay Area: among them, Turtle Island Ensemble, Asian American Theater Company, Encore Theater Company, and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.”

Perloff added that Mr. Hastings was “incredibly welcoming” when she took over as artistic director in 1992.

Haire, a longtime friend, said that Mr. Hastings was a passionate artist and an “amazing administrator.”

“In the 1980s he was able to completely reshape the company and put ACT on solid financial

footing without any upheaval, which was no small feat,” Haire said in a statement.

Mr. Hastings became ACT’s executive director in 1975. When Ball resigned in 1986, there was general consensus that ACT’s second artistic director should be someone familiar with the organization and its history and the decision was made to appoint Mr. Hastings.

After leaving ACT, Mr. Hastings continued to work as a respected director of classics, new plays, and operas around the country and internationally.

Mr. Hastings is survived by his longtime partner, Eugene Barcone.▼

20 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< Community News

July 14-20, 2011

<<

www.ebar.com

DA Gascón From page 1

attacking Mia Tu Mutch, a 20-yearold transgender woman, in April.

Lionel Jackson, 32, and Maurice J. Perry, 37, face charges including assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury and seconddegree robbery. Gascón is pressing for a jury to hear evidence that he said supports prosecuting the accusations as a felony hate crime.

Jackson and Perry have both been held to answer on the assault and robbery charges, but on June 22, Judge Bruce Chan certified the hate crime accusation only as a misdemeanor.

Last Thursday, July 7, Jackson and Perry were again arraigned with the hate crime and other charges as a felony. Both pleaded not guilty.

The trial is scheduled to begin October 14.

Gascón said Tu Mutch was singled out because she’s transgender, and he wants to send the message that such crimes are “unacceptable.”

He said taking the felony hate crime charge to trial “raises the burden on us,” since Chan already rejected that, but “very disgraceful comments against transgender women in general” had allegedly been made, and there’s a “nexus” between those comments and the assault.

“I want to be on the bully pulpit and be aggressive about it” in cases like this, he said.

In an interview shortly after Chan’s decision on the hate crime allegation, David Harrison, the attorney representing Perry, said Chan had made the right call.

“The allegations of a hate crime were not supported by the evidence that was presented,” Harrison said.

He also said that Tu Mutch and two witnesses have said that Perry hadn’t done anything. When Perry was in handcuffs just after the incident, Tu Mutch had said, “That’s not him,” Harrison said, citing testimony.

A transcript of the preliminary hearing wasn’t immediately available. Asked this week about what Harrison said, Tu Mutch wouldn’t comment on his remark about Perry not doing anything.

However, she didn’t think she’d ever said, “That’s not him.” She said she hadn’t been able to positively identify Perry at the time, “because I wanted to be 100 percent sure” it was him. She did positively identify Jackson, and other witnesses have confirmed Perry’s identity, she said.

Deputy Public Defender Michelle Tong has been representing Jackson.

Tamara Aperton, a spokeswoman for the office, said shortly after Chan issued his decision, “To convict someone, the evidence has to support their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

▼

She said even though the threshold for guilt is “much, much” lower at a preliminary hearing, Chan “didn’t think there was enough evidence to support those charges.”

Death penalty Gascón told the B.A.R. he’s “not a believer” in the death penalty, citing costs, disparities in treatment, and wrongful convictions as reasons.

However, he said, “It’s important to recognize it is state law.” The state constitution needs to be rewritten to eliminate the death penalty, he said. He noted that he had decided the death penalty wasn’t appropriate in the case involving Mechthild Schroer, a German tourist who was shot and killed in August 2010.

He said his ideas include calling for a statewide referendum to repeal the death penalty as well as change California’s three strikes law.

During a recent forum, Bock took a jab at Gascón when she said that the job of DA is not for someone with “just a law degree.” Gascón was asked about that comment and he said he agreed with Bock, but added, “a district attorney is not a trial attorney.”

He pointed to his experience running large organizations and creating policy, and said the position also requires someone who is “a visionary.”

Before arriving in San Francisco and serving as police chief, Gascón had been police chief in Mesa, Arizona. He also held high-level positions in the Los Angeles Police Department.

Gascón also commented on accusations from Public Defender Jeff Adachi that police officers had stolen property from drug suspects or conducted illegal searches.

Gascón said the allegations “involved a very small group of officers” and he’d moved “very quickly to dismiss cases” that could be tainted by the scandal.

He said the trial integrity unit that he established is re-evaluating the cases, and he added that his office is also working with federal officials.

Realignment As part of efforts to close the state budget gap, Governor Jerry Brown recently signed into law Assembly Bill 109, which aims to send some California prisoners to county jails.

Gascón called the law “a good thing,” but he said the money the city would get “is not necessarily enough to cover all the expenses.”

“We don’t have a full jail system, but we don’t want to create one,” he said.

The district attorney recently launched a neighborhood court program designed in part to help ease the burden on the city’s jails.

He said Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Prozan, an out lesbian, “is the lead there. She’s the one that is making all this work.”

Gascón said his office is receiving funding from the city for another prosecutor for the program, and the goal is to have it citywide within 12 months.▼

â&#x2013;ź <<

Community News>>

Gay reporter

From page 5

Basically, you have to do what you got to do,â&#x20AC;? he said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am not going to tell them to check boxes they shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t.â&#x20AC;?

Had any of the people he revealed his undocumented status to told him he should return to the Philippines, Vargas said he likely would have. But no one did, and he sought out ways to remain stateside, going as far as getting an Oregon driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s license because of the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lax paperwork requirements.

When he did seek out legal advice on how to gain U.S. citizenship, he said he was advised that his past subterfuge prevented him from doing so.

<<

DOMA repeal From page 1

and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont).

Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, announced last week he would hold a hearing on the bill â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the first congressional hearing on a proposal to repeal DOMA. The Respect for Marriage Act

<<

Castro queer youth From page 2

shuttering of the space.

Apart from a few fee-based classes, the room, built with its own separate entrance, went mostly unused for nine months.

After an outcry about the loss of the program during an April town hall with Mayor Ed Lee and subsequent press coverage, rec and park officials announced several employees had been assigned to staff the youth space and provide free programming on a drop-in basis during set hours throughout the week.

While those advocates applaud the city agency for committing resources and staff to the program, they continue to question how they are advertising the offerings. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I will say that I was both pleased by the schedule that came out for the youth space and was happy to hear from a few youth that they went to the space during the first week of its reopening as well as to see the Youth Commission received information about a scholarship workshop for youth. On the other hand, after checking with youth and a few area service providers, outreach for programming schedule and scholarship application was not being received by them,â&#x20AC;? wrote Adele Carpenter, one of the advocates pressing for the programâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s return, in an email.

Carpenter, who is in Texas conducting research this summer, believes more collaboration needs to take place between the agency and the community in order to ensure the youth spaceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s success. â&#x20AC;&#x153;As ever, I think that having a well attended and well run space will entail direct collaboration with neighborhood youth and community partners and that

<<

Jock Talk From page 18

the gayest LGBT sports year ever with unprecedented numbers of athletes coming out of the closet.

Yet you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go online without a record of a homophobic taunt in sports turning up on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or a bunch of blogs. Locker room humor has always lingered around the lowest common denominator at a juvenile level that would make a grammar school kid cringe at its immaturity, and in a hypermasculine environment it has always targeted those of perceived weakness or vulnerable imperfection.

As more and more targets become

July 14-20, 2011 â&#x20AC;˘

â&#x20AC;&#x153;In 2002 I went to a lawyer who said because I already checked a box you werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t supposed to check you would have to go back to the Philippines and for the next 10 years be barred from the U.S.,â&#x20AC;? said Vargas, who said a family friend upon leaving that meeting told him not to come forward. â&#x20AC;&#x153;If he had said that is what I should do, I probably would have left.â&#x20AC;?

Today, Vargas uses a passport the Philippine Consulate in New York issued him so he can fly around the country for his public appearances.

He has yet to be contacted by immigration officials, and due to his high-profile status, is not expected to face deportation hearings. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am ready for anything and

everything that could happen,â&#x20AC;? he said.

Having revealed his truth, Vargas is unable to work for a salary and no longer holds a valid driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s license. His travel expenses are being covered by the $60,000 Define American has been able to raise since April. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nobody can pay me, which is hard,â&#x20AC;? said Vargas, adding that his lawyers are trying to figure out a legal way for him to make money.

As for going back to the Philippines, Vargas is reluctant to do so. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I would love to see my mom,â&#x20AC;? said Vargas, noting there is â&#x20AC;&#x153;a lot of damage thereâ&#x20AC;? in their relationship.

But, he added, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I want to be able to come back to America.â&#x20AC;?â&#x2013;ź

would also stipulate that, â&#x20AC;&#x153;for the purposes of any federal law in which marital status is a factor, an individual shall be considered married if that individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s marriage is valid in the state where the marriage was entered into. ...â&#x20AC;? It also calls for recognition of marriages licensed in other countries.

The bill currently has 27 cosponsors, including Democratic

Senators Barbara Boxer (California), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Richard Durbin (Illinois), and John Kerry (Massachusetts). No Republicans have yet co-sponsored the bill.

Live webcasts of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings can be viewed at the committeeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website: www.judiciary.senate.gov. The hearing is scheduled for 7 a.m. Pacific time.â&#x2013;ź

anything short of that will create conditions in which the space is not well attended or attended by youth who most need it, leaving its future in jeopardy,â&#x20AC;? wrote Carpenter, who will be returning to town in August. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Personally, I think I made the dept. angry enough at me that it is important that I step back from this and leave the issues of ongoing collaboration and oversight to youth and area outreach and service providers. I will be very interested to hear what folks experience of this has been when I return in August and to help facilitate any conversations to support those ends.â&#x20AC;?

Seeing only a trickle of youth attend the queer youth space programs is no surprise to Mitchell â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mitchoâ&#x20AC;? Thompson, the gay man who launched the teen program at the Castro rec center in 1996. He, too, struggled to attract participants, and recalled only 10 youth showed up for the first dance he held. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I think it takes a long time for the young people to come,â&#x20AC;? said Thompson, who returned last month for the Pride party. â&#x20AC;&#x153;They did drop the ball for a while. It is going to take a while. I think they are trying to offer those programs, and in time, the young people will start showing up.â&#x20AC;?

Seeing the enthusiasm from his former colleagues and new hires for the program, Thompson said he believes the youth space is off to a nice start. â&#x20AC;&#x153;This is a good, honest effort.

The staff is really excited. They have assembled a nice crew,â&#x20AC;? he said.

The staff has already retooled some of its offerings and the time the space is open in order to attract more youth. One lesson they learned early on was the importance of advertising that it is not just for queer teens and young adults. â&#x20AC;&#x153;If they are younger it is harder

for them to come by themselves.

They want to come with their friends,â&#x20AC;? said Paola Marinero, 25, a straight recreation leader assigned to the program.

The program offerings are being renamed to reflect that anyone can attend. In the fall schedule the term queer is being jettisoned for the phrase â&#x20AC;&#x153;LGBTQI and friends.â&#x20AC;? The space has also been dubbed â&#x20AC;&#x153;Evys Clubâ&#x20AC;? to reflect its all-are-welcome sentiment.

They staff is also seeking input from the youth on what they would like to see scheduled as part of the program. Ideas range from planting a rooftop garden at the rec center to outdoor outings such as camping, fishing, and bike rides. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We are constantly asking our community and youth what do you want to see here. The sky is the limit,â&#x20AC;? said Adela Dominguez, 44, a lesbian recreation coordinator overseeing the youth space.

The teen rec space is currently open noon to 6 p.m. Mondays; 12:30 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; and 12:30 to 2 p.m. Saturdays. It is closed Sundays.

The program is in need of items such as a karaoke machine, nonperishable food supplies, LGBT books for a lending library, and financial donations to defray the cost for certain fee-based classes for those youth who may be homeless or unable to pay.

Donations can be made directly to the program through the San Francisco Parks Trustâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gear Up Fund.

On the donation form, donors need to specify the EVRC youth space under the option to apply their donation to a certain recreation center.â&#x2013;ź

For more information about the youth space program, call (415) 831-6815.

off limits because of increasing political correctness, more and more queerness becomes the thoughtless barb du jour.

It has been observed by others far wiser than me that straights are not bothered by homosexuality so much as they are bothered with having to think about it. Thus, with the increasing social media scrutiny of sports homophobia and the defensive backlash of criticism and the onslaught of repetitive and often halfhearted apologies, we see now yet another wave of backlash criticizing the critics for being â&#x20AC;&#x153;too sensitive.â&#x20AC;?

Sit down and shut up, they say; youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re blocking the view and we just want to watch the game.

To which I respond: Tough.

Deal with it. We are not 98-pound weaklings for you to kick sand in our face and run us off the beach.

There are so many sports-related homophobic blips on social media not because anyone is suddenly being particularly watchful, but because unacceptable behavior and language occurs all of the time in sports, and there has yet to be a responsible, discipline-wide response. It Gets Better videos are nice, but sincere introspection, real education, and training, are what is needed. Sport by sport by sport, program by program.

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re wearing cleats and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re here to stay in the game. Get with it or get out. Maybe then weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll sit down.â&#x2013;ź

To donate online, visit www.gearupfund.org.

BAY AREA REPORTER â&#x20AC;˘ 21

Legal Notices>> NOTICE OF APPLICATION FOR CHANGE IN OWNERSHIP OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE LICENSE To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : KAWABAWER INC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 2257 Chestnut St., San Francisco, CA 94123-2607.

Type of license applied for:

41- ON-SALE BEER AND WINE â&#x20AC;&#x201C; EATING PLACE JUL 14, 2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION TO SELL ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : LUMAT INC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 5800 3rd St.,#1004, San Francisco, CA 94124-3149. Type of license applied for:

41- ON-SALE BEER AND WINE â&#x20AC;&#x201C; EATING PLACE JUL 14, 2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION FOR CHANGE IN OWNERSHIP OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE LICENSE To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : MOSQUITO LLC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 1337-39 Grant Ave., San Francisco, CA 94133. Type of license applied for:

47- ON-SALE GENERAL EATING PLACE JUL 14, 2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION FOR CHANGE IN OWNERSHIP OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE LICENSE To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : HONG LIU. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 5037 GEARY BLVD., San Francisco, CA 94118-2813. Type of license applied for:

41- ON-SALE BEER AND WINE â&#x20AC;&#x201C; EATING PLACE JUL 14, 2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION FOR CHANGE IN OWNERSHIP OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE LICENSE To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : ZHI HAO LU. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 850 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112-2228. Type of license applied for:

41- ON-SALE BEER AND WINE â&#x20AC;&#x201C; EATING PLACE JUL 14, 2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION FOR CHANGE IN OWNERSHIP OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE LICENSE To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : INDIGO PIE LLC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 687-689 McAllister St., San Francisco, CA 94102. Type of license applied for:

47- ON-SALE GENERAL EATING PLACE JUL 14, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033628900 The following person(s) is/are doing business as BRUNCH DRUNK LOVE, 2389 Mission St.,San Francisco, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, signed Jonathan Panday.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on NA. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/15/11.

JUN 23,30,JUL 7,14, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033631200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as CICILâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S, 101 Spear St., Suite B-5, San Francisco, CA 94105. This business is conducted by a husband & wife, signed Juan Carlos Prado.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on 06/16/11. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/16/11.

JUN 23,30,JUL 7,14, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033619600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as KURAYA, 2425 California St.,San Francisco, CA 94115. This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Jin Li.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on 06/09/11. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/09/11.

JUN 23,30,JUL 7,14, 2011

TRANSBAY BLOCKS 6/7 Request for Proposals The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency is soliciting proposals from TXDOLĂ&#x20AC;HG GHYHORSPHQW WHDPV WR purchase urchase Transbay Blocks 6/7 6/7, a 1.6-acre -acre site located in Downtown Downto San Francisco, and develop a high-density igh-density residential proje project with ith approximately 350 marketmark rate and inclusionary housing units, u approximately oximately 150 affordable housing ho units, neighborhood serving reta retail, and a child d care facility integrated into int two master-planned l d blocks. bl k For F a copy of the RFP, visit the Agencyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website at http://www.sfredevelopment.org, call (415) 749-2481, or email christine. maher@sfgov.org. Proposals must be received by October 5, 2011. Â&#x2021; &16 BAY AREA REPORTER STATEMENT FILE A-033619500 The following person(s) is/are doing business as KURAYA, 2345 Harrison St.,San Francisco, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Jin Li.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on 06/09/11.The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/09/11.

JUN 23,30,JUL 7,14, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033599800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as CUSTOMIZED HEALTH SOLUTIONS, 1454A Union St.,San Francisco, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an idividual, signed Kathryn Heath.

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on NA. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/01/11.

JUN 23,30,JUL 7,14, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033635200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as HOUSE 530, 530 Valencia St.,San Francisco, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Krittiya Meeriyagerd.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on 06/17/11. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/17/11.

JUN 23,30,JUL 7,14, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033651900 The following person(s) is/are doing business as PENGUINS ON HENRY,45 Henry St.,#1,San Francisco, CA 94114. This business is conducted by state or local registered domestic partners, signed David Geoffrey Stafford.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on NA. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/27/11.

JUN 30,JUL 7,14,21, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033630000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as NUKA, 1345 Bush St., San Francisco, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, signed Jean-Luc Kayigire.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on 06/10/11. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/15/11.

JUN 30,JUL 7,14,21, 2011 STATEMENT FILE A-033640400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as CAFE BUNN MI, 417 Clement St.,San Francisco, CA 94118. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Peter Lee.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed ďŹ ctitious business name or names on NA. The statement was ďŹ led with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/21/11.

JUN 30,JUL 7,14,21, 2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION TO SELL ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are WHOLE FOODS MARKET CALIFORNIA INC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 3950 24th St., San Francisco, CA 94114-3704. Type of license applied for:

21- OFF-SALE GENERAL JUL 14,21,28 2011 NOTICE OF APPLICATION TO SELL ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are PEARLS DELUXE BURGERS LLC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 1001 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94103-1605. Type of license applied for:

41- ON-SALE BEER AND WINE â&#x20AC;&#x201C; EATING PLACE JUL 14,21,28 2011

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

22 • Bay Area Reporter • July 14-20, 2011

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nOTICE OF APPLICATIoN to sell AlCOHOLIC BEVERAGEs To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are BURGER URGE LLC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 1599 Haight St., San Francisco, CA 94117-2912. Type of license applied for:

41- On-sale beer and wine – Eating place jul 14,21,28 2011 statement file A-033653600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as BROTHER CONSTRUCTION, 1485 Bayshore Blvd.,#128,San Francisco, CA 94124. This business is conducted by an individual, signed John H.A. Lee.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/28/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/28/11.

jul 7,14,21,28, 2011 statement file A-033657400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as MUDPUPPY’S, 536 Castro St.,San Francisco, CA 94114. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, signed Daniel Bergerac.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 6/29/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/29/11.

jul 7,14,21,28, 2011 statement file A-033662400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as Q-CUTS, 4035 18TH St.,San Francisco, CA 94114. This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Thomas Karabin.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/01/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/01/11.

jul 7,14,21,28, 2011 state of california in and for the county of san francisco file# cnc-11-547882 In the matter of the application of JEAN PIERRE MICHAUD for change of name. The application of JEAN PIERRE MICHAUD for change of name having been filed in Court, and it appearing from said application that JEAN PIERRE MICHAUD filed an application proposing that his/her name be changed to JOHN PETER GAUDINO Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Room 218 on the 15th of September, 2011 at 9:00 am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 state of california in and for the county of san francisco file# cnc-11-547865 In the matter of the application of KALLIE ANN LEWIS for change of name and gender. The application of KALLIE ANN LEWIS for change of name and gender having been filed in Court, and it appearing from said application that KALLIE ANN LEWIS filed an application proposing that his/her name be changed to KALEB WESLEY LEWIS and his/her gender be changed from female to male. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Room 218 on the 8th of September, 2011 at 9:00 am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033654000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as STUDIO GALLI PRODUCTIONS, 5173 Diamond Heights Blvd., #119,San Francisco, CA 94131.

This business is conducted by an individual, signed Andrew J. Galli.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 06/28/11.

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-0336615000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as THIRD PYRAMID, 531 Duboce St., San Francisco, CA 94117. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Thomas D. Hubbard.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 06/30/11.

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011

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Real Estate>> statement file A-033668800

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as FASHION POND, 125 Camden Drive, #10D,San Francisco, CA 94132. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Vered Ozarov.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/05/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/05/11.

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as THE HAPPY COLLECTIVE,158A Yukon St.,San Francisco, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Myke E. Reilly.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/01/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/06/11.

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jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033661000 The following person(s) is/are doing business as KING DRYWALL, 275 5th St.,Suite 409,San Francisco, CA 94103. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Gary King.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/30/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/30/11.

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as WEN XING BILINGUAL FAMILY DAY CARE, 1153 Goettingen St.,San Francisco, CA 94134. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Bi Xian Zhu.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/14/10. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/11/11.

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jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033679300

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The following person(s) is/are doing business as H & A COMPUTER SERVICES,870 Market St.,Suite 1056, San Francisco, CA 94102. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Serge Ulyanov.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/01/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/08/11.

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033679800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as MELA TANDOORI KITCHEN, 536 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Sohel Subedar.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 07/08/11.

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033676500 The following person(s) is/are doing business as LATKER DESIGN SOLUTIONS,80 Uranus Terrace,San Francisco, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, signed Craig Latker.

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/13/02. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/07/11.

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011

PATRICK MCMAHON

BANKRUPTCY ATTORNEY

We file Chapter 7 & Chapter 13 for individuals & small businesses who face:

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033679700

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033681300

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jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033672400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as ANIMEZINGWORLD, 530 Francisco St.,Unit 418,San Francisco, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Edward Young.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/08/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/08/11.

PATRICK MCMAHON

We file Chapter 7 & Chapter 13 for individuals & small businesses who face:

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033661100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as CHAO TIAN ANTIQUES & FINE ARTS, 1503 Pershing Drive, Apt. B, San Francisco, CA 94129.

This business is conducted by an individual, signed Shun Chao Deng.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/06/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 07/06/11.

BANKRUPTCY ATTORNEY We file Chapter 7 & Chapter 13 for individuals & small businesses who face:

jul 14,21,28,AUG 4, 2011 statement file A-033671100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as CONSTRUCTION CONSULTING UNLTD.,INC.,275 5th St.,Suite 409,San Francisco, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Renee A. Clark.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/30/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 06/30/11.

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July 14-20, 2011 • Bay Area Reporter • 23

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Garden The

The Bay Area Reporter’s Indoor/outdoor guide to your home.

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Vol. 41 • No. 28 • July 14-20, 2011

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Gallery-hopping in the summertime • by Sura Wood

U

nlike in NYC, San Francisco gallery owners don’t pack up and head for the Hamptons when July hits. Summer in the city here means galleries – and special programs at select museums – hopping with edgy work by emerging and veteran talent, from downtown and the South Bay to the Mission and SoMa. Frey Norris Visitor Center: Since Frey Norris moved into their new digs, a dramatic, ultra-modern, architecturally renovated space in the Yerba Buena arts district, the works shown there – and visitors – have benefited from the stripped-down yet theatrical setting. It’s an ideal backdrop for Mary Anne Kluth’s latest project: a re-creation/fantasy See page 30 >>

A Volcano Millions of Years Ago, a Rock with Eensy-Beensie Holes (2010) by Mary Anne Kluth; C-Print on aluminum.

Courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern

Patricia Nell Warren returns home

Author Patricia Nell Warren.

~ by David-Elijah Nahmod ~ My West: Personal Writings on the American West: Past, Present and Future (Wildcat Press, $29.95)

N

obody would believe that a gay, cigar-smoking Buddhist lives in Deer Lodge,” a man named Jan said to the celebrated lesbian author Patricia Nell Warren. Warren was recalling Jan, a gay male friend she knew in her Montana hometown.

She, Jan and Vivian, a woman in her 90s, would meet for tea in Vivian’s old Victorian house in a shabby but

historic part of town. Through Vivian, the author learned a great deal about the town as it existed in the 1860s.

Wrote Warren: “Since Vivian was the mega-matriarch of Deer Lodge society, not a single homophobe in town dared to say a word against Jan.” But Jan wasn’t worried. “If they shoot me,” he said, “they’ll be sorry when they meet me in my next life.”

This profoundly moving essay, titled “A Coming Out Tale of Old Montana,” was first published on the Bilerico Project website in 2008. It’s one of

many unforgettable stories in My West, Warren’s just-published collection of short pieces that focus primarily on the state where she spent her youth.

Patricia Nell Warren remains bestknown as the author of the classic 1974 novel The Front Runner, the first gay novel to make both The New York Times and Time magazine bestseller lists. A masterful tale of coming out and falling in love, Runner remains essential reading to this day. In an e-mail to the B.A.R., Warren revealed that Runner’s See page 31 >>

{ SECOND OF TWO SECTIONS }

Courtesy the author

26 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< Out There

▼ Cornucopia of new Bay Area artworks

July 14-20, 2011

by Roberto Friedman

B

ay Area Now 6, the triennial exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts devoted to regional artists who work across disciplines from performance to visual art, to film and video, brought Out There to YBCA last Friday night for the show’s opening event. The 18 Bay Area-based artists or artist collectives included were chosen

by YBCA curators on the basis of studio visits, and commissioned to create works expressly for the exhibition. As is often the case in grou p shows, any attempt to

ebar.com

draw conclusions about the state of the arts circa 2011 is doomed to fail. But many of the works on display do demonstrate these artists’ confidence and willingness to experiment, as shown by their art practices and products.

We were especially struck by the patchwork quilts and embroidered jeans jackets created by Ben Venom, in which (traditionally masculine) heavy metal T-shirts and memorabilia are sewn into (traditionally feminine) handicrafts; Tammy Rae Carland’s I’m Dying Up Here series of color photographs, which pay homage to female stand-up comedians; the Alison Smith Untitled (Pitcher Collection Series), collage on paper; and many other artworks.

Weston Teruya’s architectural constructions seem unbelievably fragile; Sean McFarland’s landscape photographs seem improbably dark; and Robert Minervini’s large urban landscape paintings are clearly informed by his past practice as a muralist. As usual, the survey show comes complete with a number of installations and artistcreated environments, which help fill YBCA’s inhospitably cavernous central gallery space.

The opening night was fun, with live music filling the Grand Lobby, and a path through “backstage” spaces previously closed to the public, leading to the building’s loading dock and food trucks parked outside on 3rd St. (hello, Pop Chips!). Can we just say in a digression, we do not get the younger generation’s fascination with food trucks. When we dine out, we prefer to have a roof over our head, or at least a patio under our feet. Part of what we’re paying for in restaurant service is the respite from pavement and asphalt, not to mention the aroma d’sewage grate.

Anyway, established Bay Area conceptualist artist Tony Labat contributes a large green neon cannabis leaf for the gallery’s main entrance, and reminds us that the name of the arts complex, Yerba Buena, translates from the Spanish into “good herb.” So perhaps you should smoke up a decent doobie before visiting the latest installation of Bay Area Now. That would, after

Courtesy YBCA

Am I Demon (2010) by Ben Venom: handmade quilt, heavy metal T-shirts, fabric, batting and thread.

all, be in keeping with our Bay Area regional ethos.

Two entries in the exhibition’s film/video component are especially relevant to B.A.R. readers, and we tell you why from the press materials: Passing Strangers by the late filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. (Thurs., July 28, 7:30 p.m., YBCA Screening Room): “Two men meet through a personal ad in the Bay Area Reporter, and an intense relationship begins.

Somewhere between gay porn and art film, this extremely rare work combines explicit scenes and elements of tenderness (like holding hands and amorous courting) generally lacking in more graphic films of the time. Director Bressan went on to make several key (non-porn) films in the history of gay cinema, including Gay USA and Abuse. Winner of the first prize at the San Francisco Museum Erotic Art Film Festival (1974, 60 min., 16mm).”

The Meatrack by Richard Stockton (Michael Thomas) (Fri., Aug. 5, 7:30 p.m., YBCA Screening Room): “Shot mostly on the mean streets of San Francisco, this is a gritty, brooding tale of a bisexual hustler who’ll go to bed with any man or woman who offers him enough money and sexual kicks.

Using both sexploitation and art-

film aesthetics, The Meatrack is an essential and compelling artifact of pre-hardcore adult cinema (1968, 65 min., 35mm).”

BAN 6 shows through Sept.

25, 701 Mission St., SF. Ticket & program information: (415) 978ARTS or www.ybca.org.

Datebook recap What else is up in the sleepy Bay Area summertime? Well, you know Out There, we’re more out than in. Last Wednesday night, we saw the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times at the Bridge, and were greatly amused by Times columnist David Carr’s skill at putting website aggregators in their rightful place. Thursday night, we caught filmmaker Werner Herzog’s 3D spelunking into the Chauvet Cave in France to see prehistoric art, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, at the Castro Theatre. Friday night was our YBCA experience, see above; and on Sunday night, plucky Pepi in tow, we took an Indian-style “Bollywood” Sunset Cruise on the Bay aboard the Royal Prince, a vessel of the Red and White Fleet. It was fun to sail away from Pier 43 ½ and enjoy Indian food, music, and dance while unmoored from land and untied to deadlines: find more info at www.redandwhite.com.

Upcoming, if you’ve seen and enjoyed the Tony Award-winning musical Billy Elliot now playing at See page 28 >>

Courtesy the artist

Urban Splendor (2010) by Robert Minervini: acrylic on canvas.

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Theatre >>

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 27

Belligerent puppets & other freaks

by Richard Dodds

E

ven with its cluster of sandwich boards on the sidewalk, the narrow entryway into the performing arts center that has developed at 533 Sutter St. is easy to bypass. Its anchor tenant on the ground floor is the long-running Shelton Theatre and acting studio.

Up the well-worn staircase is the prestige occupant, the SF Playhouse, which employs both a larger theater and a small black-box venue for experimental fare. And then, deep down in the basement, there’s the small, unpredictable, and feisty Stage Werx, which will be vacating the premises in the fall.

Founded in 2007 by sisters Cory and Ty Mckenzie, Stage Werx may be the least-known of the location’s three theaters, but it may have the most ecumenical of mission statements: “We’re here to open opportunities for freaks, starving artists, newcomers, and old hats to get their stage on.” Stage Werx plans an October move to the former Intersection for the Arts space in the fall, but it’s business as usual on Sutter, and a look at its near-term schedule provides quick confirmation of the mission statement.

For example, there’s The Shadow Circus Show: Two Evenings of Monsters, Music, and Mayhem. The performances on July 15 and 16 mark the return after a hiatus of Shadow Circus Creature Theatre, which bills itself as both “San Francisco’s only puppet-hosted variety show” and the city’s “most belligerent puppetry troupe.” In addition to the life-sized latex and foam puppets, the new show features guest artists Jason Brock, Lady Satan, magician/sideshow artist Herman Cortez, and dancers Angela Mae and Jodi Waseca. Tickets at www. shadowcircus.com.

Daly City native and longtime SF gay standup comic Scott Capurro returns from his home base in London to perform in the Previously Secret Information series that uses the stand-up format for personal stories of comedy, tragedy, disaster, and points in-between. Capurro’s July 17 turn is titled Who Are the Jocks, inspired by his own efforts to do a comedy set in front of a hostile audience shortly after the death of his coke-dealing mother. Reviews from England indicate real-life audiences are not immune from attack. Tickets through www.brownpapertickets. com.

The Kurt Weill songbook helps raise the curtain on the new Underground Sound music series being launched at Stage Werx on July 20. The Kurt Weill Project presents five classical singers performing songs by the composer of such stage classics as The Threepenny Opera, Lost in the Stars, and Lady in the Dark. The bill also includes alt-pop singer-songwritermusician Kat Downs. Tickets at www. brownpapertickets.com.

Stage Werx is also home to the ongoing Solo Sundays series of oneperson performances. The July 24 presentation is a double bill featuring writer-performers Lisa Marie Rollins and Coke Nakamoto. Rollins’ monologue is titled Ungrateful Daughter: One Black Girl’s Story of Being Adopted into a White Family …

That Aren’t Celebrities. Nakamoto’s Soft Tissue – The Other Vagina Monologues explores her locked-down sexuality, and disparate and desperate solutions that she seeks out for a cure.

Tickets at www.brownpapertickets. com or (800) 626-2064.

Shindig at ‘Verona’ Two gentlemen seek same for

cocktails, fun, and maybe something deeper. Gay is OK. Also open to lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals, plus friends and allies. It’s California Shakespeare Theatre’s OUTdoors Shindig, an LGBT party prior to the July 15 performances of The Verona Project. And it’s included in the price of a ticket, not mention a $5 discount if you use the coupon code OUTDOORS, and even further discounted if you’re 30 and under (coupon code: SHINDIG).

Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona is the inspiration of this world-premiere production that straddles the notions of theater and rock concert.

In writerdirector-composer Amanda Dehnert’s hybridization, eight actors playing multiple musical instruments explore the pleasures and pains of first love through Shakespeare’s characters, fairy tales, same-sex attractions, and something known as “real life.”

The Verona Project, a rare original production for the once all-Bard outdoor theater, will run through

Courtesy Scott Capurro

Scott Capurro returns to SF for his one-man show about comedy and death as part of Stage Werx’s Previously Secret Information series.

July 31. Tickets at www.calshakes. org or (510) 548-9666.

‘Curtains’ call For the Broadway babies among us, musicals about putting on musicals – especially when they evoke insider-y jokes about old shows and backstage stories – have

Jeff Spier

A scene from an earlier production by the Shadow Circus Creature Theatre, opening a new show as part of the eclectic schedule at Stage Werx.

a particular allure. Curtains is a musical about putting on a musical, but enough of a curiosity that it may be someday be one of those bits of trivia in which theater mavens are always in pursuit.

Foothill Music Theatre is run by one of those mavens, Artistic

Director Jay Manley, so it is befitting that the Los Altos Hills theater is presenting a rare production of Curtains as its summer musical (July 21-Aug. 14). What helps give Curtains its rialto cred is See page 31 >>

28 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< Music

July 14-20, 2011

▼

Indispensable Handel

by Tim Pfaff

A

www.ebar.com

riodante has long been considered one of the greatest of the probably-gay Handel’s 40-plus operas. A bitch to stage, it’s fared well on disc, and six remarkably different commercial recordings of it, each irreplaceable in its own way, are regularly hauled out as proof of its quality. Elbowing its way into the mix is Alan Curtis’ radical, edgy new recording (Virgin Classics), which sweeps the others, including an earlier Curtis version on DVD, right off the stage.

Curtis, the out early-opera specialist, made his big splash with Ariodante 30 years ago in a fully staged production at Milan’s Piccolo Scala that people still talk and write about. Cassette tapes of that Ariodante coursed through the still-fledgling early-music gut-and-skin trade like heirloom contraband, and piraters still trade in it. Not out at that time, Curtis was, however, on the outs with many of his fellow music professors at UC Berkeley, for being too much of a “performer.”

Guilty as charged. He’s still one of the world’s ranking Handel scholars, but it’s all in the interest of taking it on the stage. What the new recording, made prior to but in conjunction with a series of concert performances that only recently ended, shows is that over those three decades, Curtis’ view of Ariodante has only deepened, matured and seasoned.

One of the things that makes his new Ariodante indispensable is that it has more of the music Handel composed for the work’s 1735 premiere than any previous recording. As is his wont, Curtis restores music he considers too good not to include, and none of the restitutions is minor music.

None of it is banished to appendices, either. Curtis trusts the music to work, and does it ever.

The performing edition wouldn’t matter much if this Ariodante didn’t grab you by the hair and ruin your sleep. But if you’ve ever felt betrayed in love or tasted the poison of jealous rancor, this Ariodante’s going to get right under your skin and just bother the hell out of you.

The most conspicuous musical additions are the ballets ending all three acts. Curtis’ long championship of period dance as a central aspect of the Baroque opera experience has resulted in a high level of discernment about this music, and

Virgin Classics

Joyce DiDonato sings Ariodante in a new release.

it’s good to have it back. The suite of dances at the end of Act II, depicting the princess Ginevra’s dreams and nightmares – music Handel had to cut – is particularly juicy stuff, and all the dance music finds the players of Curtis’ Il Complesso Barocco at their most fleet-footed.

David Vickers makes a complete tally of the vocal music in his invaluable notes, which detail

Handel’s “remarkably flexible use of musical forms, wider and more unpredictable than in many other of his finest operas.” It’s precisely that depth, unpredictability, and excoriating psychological insight that Curtis’ new version mines.

“Scherza infida,” dead center in the opera and its molten core, is as unflinching a depiction of personal betrayal, sexual deception, and emotional dejection as opera (prior to Berg’s Lulu, anyway) has to offer, and Curtis and his Ariodante, Joyce DiDonato, go for the burn. In their hands – it’s impossible to tell who’s influencing whom, but when these

two musicians start mixing it up, you want to be there – this comes close to being ugly music. The aria’s musical line as envisioned by Curtis and rendered by DiDonato has lacerating, spiny shapes, and at peak moments steps far outside comfy norms of singing or, for that matter, music. It’s Baroque Sprechstimme, and you won’t be forgetting it anytime soon.

DiDonato sings the aria with grave beauty on her F Furore Handel CD with C Christophe Rousset, so there’s h hard evidence that she can s it better than anyone else. sing S instead of singing it better So t than that, she just climbs inside A Ariodante’s despair and lets y have it with both barrels. you And in case you thought t that was a one-off stunt, she c comes back at the beginning o Act III – different day, same of m mood – with “Cieca notte, i di sguardi,” truly polished infi s singing that takes DiDonato to s some of the lowest notes she’s c committed to disc, and it makes y your blood run backwards.

It comes at a price, this kind o music-making. DiDonato, of the girl who’s got it all and can do anything, hands in some (every-soslightly) imperfect singing along the way – and at a time when the British press is cannibalizing itself, it’s chilling to watch some biggest names in the critic business starting to round on her for it. But if there were anything to forgive, you’d forgive her everything for her wild ride through “Dopo notte” (daring and executed to perfection) and the rapture of her final duet with her Ginevra, the more-stupendous-by-the-day Karina Gauvin.

This is I-dare-you Handel. Take the dare.▼

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kidnap 1,000 children. It’s from the fertile imagination of the immortal Dr. Seuss.

Out There From page 26

the Orpheum Theatre, here’s your chance to continue the infatuation.

On Mon., July 18, the Castro Theatre is presenting Billy Elliot, the 2000 film that spawned the play, featuring a score by Sir Elton John.

Before the screening, the audience will be able to meet and greet cast members from the play, and win trivia-contest prizes, including a chance to see Billy Elliot: The Musical. The meet-and-greet is at 6:30 p.m., and the film shows at 7 p.m., starring the young Jamie Bell and Julie Walters. The later show (9:05 p.m.) is a fine complement: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), in which a piano teacher plots to

News in arts Hometown honors from the classical world begin with some news from San Francisco Ballet (all items following are from the press materials). John Neumeier, artistic director and chief choreographer of the Hamburg Ballet, invited SFB Principal Dancer Yuan Yuan Tan to perform at his prestigious Nijinksy Gala, which was held on July 10 at the Hamburg State Opera. Tan danced the role of Marguerite in the Act III pas de deux from Lady of the Camellias, partnered with dancer Thiago Bordin.

See page 29 >>

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Theatre >>

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 29

Personal connections

by Richard Dodds

P

lacing a personals ad was probably pretty rare before moveable type came along. Of course, you could always hire a monk to pen a handbill for something like “centered serf with own vegetable patch seeks virgin with good teeth who enjoys walks in the rain.” But once newspapers with their classified advertisements became the common medium, could personals be far off for the shy, lonely, awkward, or otherwise romantically frustrated?

And whither life follows its dramatic documentation.

The most famous and enduring lineage of the romantic pen-pal story was provided by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo with Parfurmerie in 1937. That became the source of the 1940 movie The Shop Around the Corner, which begat In the Good Old Summertime in 1949. The 1960s musical She Loves Me was also based on the Laszlo play, and the 1998 screen hit You’ve Got Mail took Laszlo into the Internet age.

Although AOL’s ubiquitous “You’ve got mail” voice is now quaint nostalgia of earlier days in the high-tech revolution, people are electronically connecting with increased ease and technological advances. Grindr may not create many Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan happily-ever-after scenarios, but unlike the stood-up women in the variations on the Laszlo play, a global positioning satellite app will show that their blind dates are actually hovering outside the restaurant door. All of this is offered as a preamble to a notion that the amiable new computer-dating musical OMFG! may be a bit late out of the starting gate.

Other than a brief reference to Skype, there’s nothing much to set OMFG! in modern times, which has an increasingly shrinking definition.

The story setup in the ODC Theater production is all-too-comfortably familiar as two lonely hearts on either side of the stage – played by the likeable and able Cindy Goldfield and Jackson Davis – enter their fudged ages, cautiously chosen favorite authors, digitally enhanced photos, and obfuscated professions into a matchmaking service. Gavin Geoffrey Dillard’s script follows the hills and valleys of Heather and Brandon’s online communications, as well as their privately revealed

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Out There From page 28

San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the SFS’ Keeping Score: Mahler – Origins and Legacy DVD has been awarded the most prestigious German recording award, Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, by the German Record Critics’ Award Association.

The winning DVD includes a twohour documentary on composer Gustav Mahler, hosted by Tilson Thomas, and two SF Symphony concert performance programs.

Keeping Score: Mahler won the award in the DVD Classical: Concerts and Documentaries category.

And in the Bay Area art-world, this news: The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) announced the gift of 33 photographic prints by celebrated Bay Area photographer Richard Misrach to each institution respectively. The photographs were taken immediately following the catastrophic firestorm that struck the Oakland and Berkeley hills in 1991. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the devastating

Margo Moritz

Cindy Goldfield and Jackson Davis play a couple who meet on the Internet and then try to avoid meeting in the new musical OMFG! at ODC Theater.

fears that an in-the-flesh meeting will ruin it all.

At times, they communicate to each other and to the audience through pop-flavored songs composed by Christopher Winslow, with lyrics by Dillard. A few of the songs feel like filler, but others provide the most originality in the show. Heather, who finally admits to being 43, realizes she’s probably too late to find a man who can be sustained by memories of how hot she used to be. As she looks at her sagging body, Goldfield deliciously belts out “I’ve Got Those Gravity Is Getting Me Down Blues.” When Brandon chickens out of an actual date, and the two have an online argument, it becomes a song amusingly based on increasingly childish insults.

Dillard’s script gets off some good ripostes in the Internet interplay, and some of the more obvious lines can be chalked up to early Net chat room interplay, such as, “What’s a nice girl doing in a chat room like this?” But attempts at contemporary humor can fall flat. Heather’s notion of an ideal man? “Not a congressman. I need someone I can trust.”

With sturdy direction by Tracy Ward, mood-enhancing projections by Marilee Tarkington, and a somewhat superfluous but nonetheless agreeable ensemble made up of Juliet Heller, Calia Johnson, and Reggie D. White, the show moves along comfortably to its happy conclusion. OMFG! offers a wellworn story without an originality that could take its recognizable devices into new territories. It’s a dial-up show in a G4 era.▼

event, Misrach has donated these photographs. Exhibitions of his work documenting the fire aftermath will take place at both institutions this fall.

Filmies, take note: On Sun., July 24, the 31st San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) will present its Freedom of Expression Award to Hollywood icon Kirk Douglas on the stage of the Castro Theatre in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Spartacus and Douglas’ proudest professional achievement: breaking the Hollywood blacklist.

Douglas, who is Jewish (born Issur Danielovitch), bravely broke the Hollywood blacklist when he insisted on giving a screen credit to blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for Spartacus, which Douglas starred in and produced. Though the decision was widely criticized at the time, Douglas is now celebrated as having helped put an end to the legacy of the McCarthy era in Hollywood. At 94 years old, with over 87 films, 10 plays and nine books to his credit, Douglas continues to regard breaking the blacklist to be his proudest career achievement.

Arts & Culture’s full coverage of SFJFF offerings will appear in next week’s issue.▼

OMFG! will run through July 17 at the ODC Theater. Tickets are $15$18. Call 863-9833 or go to www. odcdance.org.

www.ebar.com

30 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< Music

July 14-20, 2011

▼

Music >>

All you need: guitar, some weed

by Jason Victor Serinus Troubadours – The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter (Concord)

I

s it right for music reviewing to be this much fun? Troubadours, Concord’s two-disc DVD-CD package, is one grand trip through memory lane. Centering on the role that The Troubadour, Doug Weston’s folk music club in Los Angeles, played in the rise of the singer-songwriter/ country rock era of the late 1960s and early 70s, the DVD Troubadours includes vintage performances and/ or interviews with Carole King, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Elton John, Steve Martin, David Crosby, Bonnie Raitt, Cheech & Chong, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell, JD Souther, Eagles, and many

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other greats of the period.

Complete with a separate CD that contains seminal tracks by Taylor, John, Raitt, Kristofferson, King, Linda Ronstadt, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, and Little Feat, this is the package that conveys what the music of these greats meant to the youth and adults of an earlier era, and continues to mean in 2011.

Besides the extraordinary performance footage from the present and past, the host of personal reminiscences from the veterans of The Troubadour and inhabitants of Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon shed light on the joys and mysteries of the period. “Everybody smoked

ggrass, literally everybody d did,” says one of the many p personalities. “Grass was tthe sacrament.”

“You got high for the first time, and you ask, ‘‘Wow, what else they been llyin’ about?’” says Cheech. ““The sex was great in tthe period between birth ccontrol and AIDS,” adds C Crosby. If there were gay p people around, and you can b be sure as hell there were p plenty, they remain either aanonymous or too blitzed o out to speak.

Then came down the d downside. “When we st started doing coke and h heroin, things went to shit, aas they will,” says Crosby.

Im Immediately, the footage

switches to Taylor’s manager, who suggests what he had to do to get his increasingly addicted star onto the stage and through his tour. Taylor takes up the thread, reminiscing to Carole King that he finally got clean in 1983. As he explains, he is one of a minority that made it out the other side into recovery; 85% die of their addiction.

“How long can free love and pot exist as a cultural foundation?” asks Martin. “It can’t, really.” But while it did, in this rich period when the feminist and anti-war movements went hand-in-hand with music, drugs, and deep-rooted personal commitment, the music was great. It’s the music you’ll enjoy on this fabulous DVD. For the remainder of the stories, check with the living and all the tell-all biographies and autobiographies you can find. ▼

Gallery-hopping From page 25

hybrid, which draws on dioramas, theme parks and taxonomy for a faux natural history museum whose fabricated props, fog machines, fake cactus, painted geologic specimens, and gauzy landscape displays are supported by totally unreliable information.

Kluth utilizes photographs, painting, sculptures and the rock collection of her geologist father for an imaginary trek through earth history, and a meditation on our unknowable immediate families.

Through August 27. www.freynorris.com Ratio 3 Margaret Kilgallen: Unheralded Bay Area artist Margaret Kilgallen, who died at age 33 of breast cancer a decade ago, excelled at personal, handmade art. Influenced by American folk

Chandler Fine Art

Young Kirin (2010) by Jesse Allen; watercolor and prismacolor: exotic imagery distilled in the artist’s mind.

art, letter-press printing and mural and sign painting, Kilgallen, along with her husband and collaborator Barry McGee and Chris Johanson, was part of the Mission School that emerged in the late 1990s. (She was also a graffiti artist who went by the tags “Meta” and “Matokie Slaughter.”) Working by hand in gouache and acrylic on discarded papers like brown bags and book pages, she was partial to the imperfection – and the humanity – of the results. On view are paintings on canvas that are cut and stitched together, and works on paper of

trees, leaves, full lips, female figures and at least one airplane. Through August 5. www.ratio3.org Chandler Fine Art Closed Patterns: The untamed wilderness, mythical beasts, a palette of intensely vibrant colors and the golden light of his native Kenya inform Jesse Allen’s multifaceted watercolors and prints. Before his breakthrough exhibition at Stanford in the 1960s, Allen, a self-taught artist, sketched rural areas and the East African flora and fauna of his youth. Those motifs prevail in detailed, mazeSee page 36 >>

Courtesy of the Estate of Margaret Kilgallen and Ratio 3, San Francisco

Untitled (c. 2000) by Margaret Kilgallen; acrylic on paper.

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Books >>

Patricia Nell Warren From page 25

lead characters may not have been as fictional as they had seemed.

“The character of Billy Sive was inspired in part by distance runner Steve Prefontaine, as well as a few closeted runners that I got to know while being involved in open distance running myself in the late 1960s,” Warren wrote to us. “The same for the character of Coach Brown: my growing knowledge of the sports world told me there were closeted coaches out there.”

Two more novels followed.

The Beauty Queen (1978) was a novelization of the notorious Anita Bryant debacle. But it might be The Fancy Dancer (1976) that’s closest to Warren’s heart. This story of closeted priest Tom Meeker, led into a world of “forbidden love” by half-breed Vidal Stump, was set in fictional Cottonwood, Montana, which the author says is a stand-in for Deer Lodge.

“The character of Father Tom, and his Jesuit confessor, as well as a number of the town and rural characters in the story, were inspired by real-life people that I knew.”

These novels were published less than a decade after Stonewall, yet there was little backlash. “There were some nasty letters from individuals, but nothing major from an institutional level,” reported Warren. “By then, the Catholic Church couldn’t deny there were gay priests, and Dignity was already active nationally. As for athletes, David Kopay’s coming out in 1975 started answering the question about whether there was a real-life closet in sports.”

Over the years, Warren published more novels, and she was also an editor at Reader’s Digest. She traveled the world, but her Montana roots remained near and dear to

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Backstage From page 27

the sad fact that it was one of the final collaborations of legendary songwriters Fred Ebb and John Kander, whose resume includes Cabaret and Chicago. Lyricist Ebb died in 2004, following the 2003 death of librettist Peter Stone, and Rupert Holmes (Edwin Drood) was brought in to put the pieces together.

Curtains made it to Broadway in 2007, and managed a respectable

July 14-20, 2011 •

her. As she studied the history of her beloved home state, she found a long, strong line of LGBT people.

As we all eventually find out, she was not alone.

My West features 47 previously published nonfiction pieces that came from deep within Warren’s soul. Rooted in the Montana of her childhood, the essays are grouped together according to theme: agriculture, animals, arts, gender, sexuality, politics, spirituality, and others. Her homespun, fluid style makes for heartwarming, uplifting, and often thought-provoking reading.

In “MLK Day in Choteau, MT,” Warren opines that Dr. King might have been concerned with the now very real threat of global warming.

“Little black kids and brown kids and white kids need more than schools where they can learn in equality.

They need food to eat and a world to grow up in that isn’t devastated by war and natural disaster.”

Warren’s sense of history is extraordinary, as when she writes about Quarra Grant, the first woman who lived in the ranch house where she grew up, some 75 years before she was born. She also shows a strong sense of family. In “What My Mother Did,” she eloquently shares her churchgoing Mom’s reaction to her gay novels. “’Well,’ Mom said, after the publication of The Beauty Queen, during which time the religious right was first making itself known. ‘They do hate homosexuals, don’t they?’”

But Mom’s most amusing reaction was to The Fancy Dancer. “I suppose everyone in town is running around to find a copy of your darn book, to see if they’re in it!”

My West: Personal Writings on the American West: Past, Present and Future is now available in stores and at Amazon.com.▼ More info: www.WildCatIntl.com.

run with the help of David Hyde Pierce, who won a Tony Award as the stagestruck detective investigating the murder of the leading lady of a floundering musical during its out-of-town tryouts. In the Foothill production, Ryan Drummond is playing the detective who turns out to be both sleuth and play-doctor.

Performances are in the Lohman Theatre on the Foothill College campus. More info at (650) 949-7360 or www.foothillmusicals.com. ▼ BARstage@comcast.net

BAY AREA REPORTER • 31

32 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

July 14-20, 2011

queen. $12-$15. 9:30pm-3am. Show at 11pm. 375 11th St. www.trannyshack.com www.dnalounge.com

Working for the Mouse @ La Val’s Subterranean, Trevor Allen’s one-man show about the dark side of working as a costumed character at Disneyland, including drugs, sex on rides, and getting kicked in the crotch by kids. $10-$20. Thu-Sun 8pm. Thru July 16.

1834 Euclid Ave., Berkeley. www.impactheatre.com

Sat 16 >> All My Children @ The Marsh, Berkeley

Chris Dilley @ The Rrazz Room Curb your Monday blahs with a drink and a crooning hunk. The formerly local singer and member of the Kinsey Sicks returns for a special solo song night. $25. 8pm. 2-drink min. 21+. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. (800) 380-3095. www.TheRrazzRoom.com

Fri 15 >> Billy Elliot @ Orpheum Theatre Elton John and Lee Hall’s hit Broadway musical adaptation of the wonderful film about a boy who takes up dance lessons; starring Tony Award winner Faith Prince. $35- Tue-Sat 8pm. Sat, Sun & some Wed 2pm. some Sun 7:30pm. Thru Sept. 17.

1192 Market St. at 8th. (888) SHN 1799. www.shnsf.com

Cityscapes @ John Pence Gallery Opening reception for a group exhibit of paintings of urban San Francisco. 6pm8pm. Thru Sept 2. Mon-Fri 10am-6pm Sat til 5pm. 750 Post St. 441-1138. www.johnpence.com

Chris Botti, SF Symphony @ Davies Hall Famed jazz trumpet player performs with the symphony. $30-$80. 8pm.

201 Van Ness Ave. 864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org

Cultural Encounters @ de Young Museum Special evening event with museum access, to see Masterpieces from the Museé National Picasso, Paris, a new exhibit of classic early modern works by the Spanish master painter; with live French Gypsy Jazz from Gonzalo Bergara Quartet. Free/$12.

5pm-8:45. 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive.

750-3600. www.famsf.org

Division of Labor @ The Lab Experimental music, sound, performance events with different ensembles each night, including Nao Bustamante, Phillip Huang, Phatima Rude, Damion Romero and many others. $11-$12. Festival pass $36. 8:30pm. Also July 16, 22 & 23. 2948 16th St. www.thelab.org

Fabulosa Fest @ Walker Creek Ranch, Petaluma Women-centered music, film, comedy, craft and healing arts fair set on a green estate. Camping sites and rooms for rent.

Single pass $35 to $385 full pass. Thru July 17. Walker Creek Ranch Retreat and Conference Center, 1700 Marshall Petaluma Rd, Petaluma. www.fabulosafest.com

Geezer @ The Marsh Veteran clown and actor Geoff Hoyle’s witty solo show about his young life in England and his ruminations on aging. $25-$50. Wed & Thu, 8pm. Sat & Sun 5pm.

Thru July 10 (returns mid-August). 1062 Valencia St. at 22nd. (800) 838-5750. www.themarsh.org

Kristina Wong @ The Jewish Theatre Comic solo performer tells of her crosscountry quest for ecologically-sound living in Going Green the Wong Way. $12-$15.

8pm. sun 3pm. Thru July 17. 470 Florida St. www.brownpapertickets.com

Macbeth @ Forest Meadows Ampitheatre Marin Shakespeare Company performs “the Scottish play.” Pay-what-you-can previews; July 15 opening night is also a full moon! Fri-Sun 8pm. In repertory thru Aug. 14. $20-$75 (season tix). 1475 Acacia Ave., Dominican Universaty, San Rafael. www.marinshakespeare.org

Marga Gomez @ The Marsh

Metamorphosis @ Aurora Theatre, Berkeley

ABBA cover band performs classic hits with the symphony. $30-$75. 8pm. 201 Van Ness Ave. 864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org

Aurora Theatre Company’s production of Mark Jackson’s absurd and horror-tinged play based on Franz Kafka’s classic book about a salesman’s transformation into a giant insect. $10-$55. Tue 7pm; Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm & 7pm. Thru July 24. 2081 Addison St. (510) 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org

Beach Blanket Babylon @ Club Fugazi Musical comedy revue, now in its 35th year, with an ever-changing lineup of political and pop culture icons, all in gigantic wigs. $25-$130. Wed, Thu, Fri at 8pm.

Sat 6:30, 9:30pm. Sun 2pm, 5pm. (Beer/ wine served; cash only). 678 Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd (Green St.). 421-4222. www.beachblanketbabylon.com

Fri 15

Dan Hoyle’s moving and funny solo show, with multiple characters based on Midwesterners on the right and Coasters on the left, asks how a politically divided America can survive. $25-$35. Fri 8pm, Sat 8:30pm. Thru July 24. 1062 Valencia St. at 22nd. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Soulful Stitching @ MOAD Opening reception for Patchwork Quilts by African (Siddis) in India, a new exhibit of 32 colorful hand-crafted works. 7:30pm.

Thru Sept. 18. Reg. hours Wed-Sat 11am6pm. Sun 12pm-5pm. Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St. at 3rd.

358-7200. Wwwmoadsf.org

Benefit for Muttville Senior Dog Rescue includes auction items, food, drink and pet-friendly fun. $85-$150 per couple.

6:30pm-10pm. 2174 Market St. www.moolahformutts.org

Teatro Zinzanni @ Pier 29 Joan Baez returns to Teatro in Maestro’s Enchantment, the new show at the theatre-tent-dinner extravaganza, with Ukranian illusionist Yevgeniy Voronin. $117-$145. Saturday 11:30am “Breve” show $63-$78. Wed-Sat 6pm (Sun 5pm).

Thru Oct. 9. Pier 29 at Embarcadero Ave. 438-2668. www.teatrozinzanni.com

Tigers Be Still @ SF Playhouse

Twelfth Night @ Theatre in the Woods, Woodside Skatetown USA @ Roxie Theater Roll in the retro ribaldry. It’s Scott Biao vs. villain Patrick Swayze (in his feature debut); a wonderfully awful 1979 roller-skating movie.

Free tube socks! Beer (for adults)!

Part of Indie Fest, with a real roller skating after-party at Cell Space, 20th St. at Bryant. Movie $7-$10.

7pm & 9pm. Film & party $15.

3117 16th St. at Valencia. 4313611. www.roxie.com

Salty Towers @ Exit Theatre Thunderbird Theatre Company’s madcap farce about Poseiden’s attempt to host an undersea Olympics to bring business to his failing hotel. $15-$25. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sun 3pm. Thru July 23. 156 Eddy St. 289-6766. www.thunderbirdtheatre.com

Moolah for Mutts @ Swedish American Hall

Quirky endearing comedy about an art therapist whose family and work life is complicated; oh, and a tiger’s escaped from a local zoo. $40-$50. 8pm. Tue & Wed 7pm. Thu-Sat 8pm. Sat 3pm. Thru Sept. 10. 533 Sutter St. near Powell. 6779596. www.sfplayhouse.org

OMFG! @ ODC Theater

The Real Americans @ The Marsh

Kim Nalley @ The Rrazz Room

Arrival, SF Symphony @ Davies Hall

Our fave lesbi-Latina comic tells of her childhood years vs. today, with kids taking over, in Not Getting Any Younger, a Workshop. $15-$50. Thursdays 8pm, Saturdays 8:30pm, Sundays 7pm. Thru July 24. 1062 Valencia St. at 21st. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Christopher Winslow and Gavin Geoffrey Dillard’s “Internet Dating Musical” about people facing midlife crises who reinvent themselves online. $15-$18. Fri & Sat 8pm.

Sun 2pm. Thru July 17. 3153 17th St. www.odctheater.org

Annie Sprinkle and her partner Elizabeth Stephens’ curated group exhibit of ecological erotic art. Thru July 24. 1349 Mission St. at 9th. 902-2071. www.loveartlab.org

Acclaimed local singer performs her musical tribute to Nina Simone. $35-$37.50.

Wed, Thu, Sat 8pm; Fri & Sun 7pm. Thru July 17. 2-drink min. 21+. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. (800) 380-3095. www.TheRrazzRoom.com

Rick Compton and Betsy Bennett’s witty musical about senior lives and the joys and woes of aging; delicious Dim Sum banquet with each show. $79.59-$99.50.

Sat 12pm. Sun 12 & 5pm. Thru July 31. 818 Washington st. (888) 885-2844. www.assistedlivingthemusical.com

Dutch and Flemish Masterworks @ Legion of Honor Famous artists such as Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Hendrick Avercamp are featured in this exhibit of works from the collection of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, who have been called “the most important

Shakespeare’s bittersweet comedy about cross-dressing loves, heartache and romance, is re-set in colonial New England at the beautiful outdoor ampitheatre. $15$25. Sat & Sun 1pm thru Sept. 4. 2170 Bear Gulch Road (West), Woodside. www.theatreinthewoods.com

The Verona Project @ Bruns Ampitheatre, Orinda California Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Amanda Dehnert’s rock music hybrid revisioning of Two Gentlemen of Verona. $35-$66. Tue-Wed 7:30pm. Fri-Sat 8pm. Sun 4pm. Thru July 31. 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way (formerly 100 Gateway Blvd.), Orinda. (510) 548-9666. www.calshakes.org

Sun 17 >> Antiques & Collectibles Faire @ Candlestick Park Stuff! Furniture, collectibles, jewelry, toys, and more, lots more, showcased by hun-

See the fun 1984 Talking Heads concert documentary at the movie theatre doomed for closure. $7-$9. 7:15, 9:15. Also July 16, 2pm, 4pm, 7:15, 9:15. 1727 Haight St. 6683994. www.redvicmoviehouse.com

The Kylie Minogue tribute night, with host Heklina, includes drag acts by Raya Light, Precious Moments, Cookie Dough and others, set to the music of the gay fave pop

What a tale of tranny tribulations!

Persepolis, Texas, the solo performer’s story of being an Iranian girl in Texas who became a drag queen in San Francisco, opens at the popular dance space. $15-$20. 8pm. Thru July 17.

1310 Mission St. at 9th. 626-2060. www.counterpulse.org

dreds of sellers. $5-$10. 6am-3pm. (650) 242-1294. www.candlestickantiques.com

The Art of Howl @ Cartoon Art Museum Exhibit showcasing Eric Drooker’s drawing and animation for the film about Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem. Free-$7. Tue-Sun 11am-5pm. 655 Mission St. (415) CARTOON. www.cartoonart.org

Daytime Realness @ El Rio DJs Carnita and Stanley Frank spin tunes at a new daytime drag show, with Gina La Divina, Ambrosia Salad, others, and host Heklina. $8. 3pm-8pm. 3158 Mission St. www.elriosf.com

The English Beat @ Stern Grove Popular ska band returns to town for a lively outdoor concert. Free, but arrive early for good spots. Low chairs, blankets, picnics welcome. 2pm opening act. 3pm full show.

2750 19th Ave. www.sterngrove.org

Gold Rush Pageant @ Twinspace Ducal Council’s annual pageant and fundraiser for the Castro Country Club; celebritry judges Heklina, Bevan Dufty, Cassandra Cass; Landa Lakes and Pollo del Mar cohost. $10. 5pm. 2111 Mission St. 420-2281. www.sfducal.org

Katya Presents @ Martuni’s Katya Smirnoff-Skyy hosts the intimate cabaret showcase at the popular martini bar. 7pm. 4 Valencia St. at Market. www.dragatmartunis.com

Outlook Video @ Channel 29 Monthly LGBT news show; Cynthia ChinLee, author of Operation Marriage, 30 years of AIDS, Carmelita Limas, Prop 8 updates, and the GLAAD Media awards. 5pm. Also streaming online. www.outlookvideo.org

Scott Capurro @ Stagewerk Theatre Gay comic with a darkly absurdist edge performs a serious yet funny story Who are the Jocks? Joe Klocek performs Ever Do Something Romantic and Then Mall Security Gets Involved? $25-$35. 7pm.

533 Sutter St. near Powell. www.scottcapurro.com

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories @ Contemporary Jewish Museum

Sex Workshops @ Good Vibrations

Tales of the City @ A.C.T.

Trannyshack @ DNA Lounge

Maryam Farnaz Rostami @ CounterPulse

Exhibit of personal artwork, collected work and archival materials showing how the lesbian poet’s life, mostly in Paris, changed over the decades before and after WWII. Free-$10. Thru Sept. 6. 11am-5pm daily (closed Wed), Thu 1pm-8pm. 736 Mission St. 655-7800. www.thecjm.org

Stop Making Sense @ Red Vic Movie House

American Conservatory Theatre’s funny and sweet world premiere musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s first novels in his popular series, with book by Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q ) and music/lyrics by Jake Shears and John Garden ( Scissor Sisters (ASLinterpeted July 23). Extended thru July 31.

Tue-Sat 8pm. Wed, Sat & Sun 2pm. 415 Geary St. 749-2228. www.act-sf.org

Fri 15

Ecosex Manifesto @ Center for Sex & Culture

Matt Smith’s comic tale of a man who claims to be the father of six children of his ex-girlfriends. $20-$35. Fri 8pm. Sat 8:30pm. Thru July 23. 2120 Allston Way. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

Assisted Living, the Musical @ Imperial Palace

Mon 18

collectors you’ve never heard of.” Also, Picasso’s Ceramics (thru Oct. 9), Marvelous Menagerie: A Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel (thru July 24) and a fascinating permanent collection. $7-$11. Tue-Sun 9:30am-5:15pm. Thru Oct. 2. 100 34th Ave. at Clement, Lincoln Park. 750-3600. www.famsf.org

▼

Fri 15 Silent Film Festival @ Castro Theatre See an amazing array of rare, classic and astounding silent films by John Ford, F.W. Murneau, early Disney cartoons, others starring Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks and Lon Chaney (photo); with live musical accompaniment by various musicians, plus archive panels and talks. $12-$15 single; $175-$200 full pass.

Various times. Thru July 17. 429 Castro St. www.silentfilm.org

Learn about new sexual tips and techniques. At the Polk St Store: Bondage for Rough Sex with Two Knotty Boys (July 17, 2pm-4pm, $20-$25), Sex Toys for Couples (July 18, 6pm), Orgasmic Meditation (July 19, 6:30-8:30pm $20-$25), Erotic Photography (July 20, 6:30-8:30pm, $20-$25), Vacations Sex (July 21, 6:30pm).

1620 Polk St. www.goodvibes.com

The Steins Collect @ SF MOMA Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian AvanteGarde, an exhibit of pivotal artworks originally collected by lesbian poet Gertrude Stein and her family. 4th floor galleries.

▼

Read more online at www.ebar.com

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 33

Vagabondage @ Bazaar Café The local Americana-folk-gypsy band, fronted by John Flaw and Cindy Emch, performs with Flip Cassidy. No cover.

7:30pm. 5927 California St. www.vagabondageband.com

Wed 20 >> Blue Room Comedy @ The Stud Comic David Hawkins has moved his popular bawdy laughfest to a roomy nightclub; No cover. 8pm. 399 9th St. www.studsf.com

The Kurt Weill Project @ Stage Werx Theatre

Sat 16 Vice Palace @ Hypnodrome Thrillpeddlers, the fabulous ensemble that brought us Pearls Over Shanghai and Hot Greeks, continues its hit run of the saucy 1972 revue of songs and sordid silliness, a very loose Fellini-esque parody of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. $30-$35. Fri & Sat 8pm Sun 7pm. 575 10th st. at Bryant/Division. Thru July 31. www.thrillpeddlers.com

Free (members)-$25. Thru Sept. 6. 11am5:45pm daily. Closed Wed.; open til 8:45pm Thu. 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

Sunday’s a Drag @ Starlight Room Donna Sachet and Harry Denton host the fabulous weekly brunch and drag show. $45. 11am, show at noon; 1:30pm, show at 2:30pm. 450 Powell St. in Union Square.

395-8595. www.harrydenton.com

Mon 18 >> Billy Elliot, the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T @ Castro Theatre Jamie Bell stars in the popular film that became a musical (see Friday); 6:30pm meet & greet with some cast members from the musical. Also screening, the strangely comic Dr. Seuss musical about kids kidnapped by a mad piano teacher. $10. 7pm & 9pm. 429 Castro St. www.castrotheatre.com

6:15, 8pm, 9:40pm thru July 20. 3117 16th St. at Valencia. 431-3611. www.roxie.com

Tue 19 >> Andrea Marcovicci @ The Rrazz Room Stage actress-singer performer Blue Champagne: The History of the Torch Song. $35-$45. Tue-Sat 7:30pm. Sun 5pm. Thru July 31. 2-drink min. 21+. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. (800) 380-3095. www.TheRrazzRoom.com

Funny Tuesdays @ Harvey’s Ronn Vigh hosts the weekly LGBT and gayfriendly comedy night. One drink or menu item minimum. 9pm. 500 Castro St. at 18th. 431-HARV. www.harveyssf.com

Jotas, Home After Dark @ Galeria de la Raza Opening reception for two group exhibits focusing on Latin home life, Two-Spirit Native American and queer youth. 7:30pm.

Reg. hours Tue 1pm-7pm. Wed-Sat 12pm6pm. Thru Sept 17. 2857 24th St. www.galeriadelaraza.org

Marga’s Funny Mondays @ The Marsh, Berkeley Marga Gomez brings her comic talents and special guests to a weekly cabaret show. $10. 8pm. 2120 Allston Way. (800) 8383006. www.margagomez.com www.themarsh.org

Stephen Honicki @ Magnet Exhibit of photos with text documenting a metephoric encounter between men. Thru July. 4122 18th St. at Castro. www.stevehphotography.com www.magnetsf.org

Ten Percent @ Comcast 104 David Perry’s talk show about LGBT local issues. Mon-Fri 11:30am & 10:30pm, Sat & Sun 10:30pm. www.davidperry.com

TV Noir @ Roxie Theater Mini-festival of surprisingly dramatic and innovative early TV dramas, with some majors stars in some of their earliest roles. Daily

Poison, Safe @ Castro Theatre Two unique films by gay director Todd Haynes. Poison, based on Genet’s writings (3pm, 7pm); Safe stars Julianne Moore as an immune-deficient housewife.

(4:35, 8:40). $10. 429 Castro St. www.castrotheatre.com

Quit Smoking Group @ LGBT Center The Last Drag’s helpful LGBT weekly 8-week quit smoking support group returns. Free; registration required. 7pm.

1800 Market St. at Octavia. 339-STOP. www.lastdrag.org

Same-Sex Dancing @ Queer Ballroom Ongoing partner dance lessons and open dancing in a variety of styles; different each night. $5-$25 open dancing to $55 for private lessons. 151 Potrero Ave. at 15th. www.QueerBallroom.com

Smack Dab @ Magnet Wonder Dave is the guest performer at the eclectic often queer-themed reading and performance open mic night co-hosted

by Larry-bob Roberts and Kirk Read.

7:30pm sign-up, 8pm show. 4122 18th St. www.magnetsf.org

Frank Bailey @ Books Inc. Author of Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of Tumultuous Years discusses his book and inside gossip on working for the former Alaskan governor and failed VP candidate. 7pm. 2275 Market St. 864-6777. www.booksinc.net

Gota Hall Productions performs an ensemble cabaret show featuring Weill’s music with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and others. Kat Downs also performs original music. $12. 8pm. 533 Sutter St. near Powell. www.brownpapertickets.com

Sat 16

Thu 21 >>

Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance @ Asian Art Museum

The Art of Howl @ Cartoon Art Museum

The expansive exhibit of more than 100 historic art works showcases the practicality of the performing and visual arts in this beautiful culture. Enjoy a special live performance by shadow puppet master Larry Reed’s Shadow Light company, July 16 & 17, 12pm-4pm. Reg. admission: $7-$17. Reg. hours Tue-Sun 10am5pm. Thu til 9pm. Thru Sept. 11.

200 Larkin St. www.asianart.org

Larry Harvey @ the Commonwealth Club Founder of Burning Man discusses the organization’s new SF headquarters, and the annual desert arts festival. $12-$20.

6:30pm. 595 Market St. 2nd. floor. www. commonwealthclub.org

A Thin Line @ Visual Aid Works by Daniel Goldstein, David King, David Wojnarowicz and Philip Zimmerman.

Opening reception July 7, 5:30-7:30pm.

Thru Aug 31. 57 Post St. 777-8242. www.visualaid.org

Exhibit showcasing Eric Drooker’s drawing and animation for the film about Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem. Gen admission Free-$7. Tue-Sun 11am-5pm. 655 Mission St. (415) CAR-TOON. www.cartoonart.org

Jewish Film Festival @ Castro Theatre Opening night of weeklong festival of films by and about Jewish people. The Mabul (6:30pm) and Rabies (10pm). Thru July 28.

Various times and prices. 429 Castro St. www.sfjff.org www.castrotheatre.com

Our Vast Queer Past @ GLBT History Museum New exhibit from the GLBT Historical Society, with a wide array of rare historic items on display. Screening of Last Call at Maud’s, the documenatry about the famed lesbian bar, at 7pm. Free for members-$5.

Wed-Sat 11am-7pm. Sun 12pm-5pm.

4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

Not a Genuine Black Man @ The Marsh, Berkeley Brian Copeland’s longrunning autobiographical solo show about racism in San Leandro. $20-$50. 7:30pm. Thru July 14.

(800) 838-3006. www.themarsh.org

Picasso @ de Young Museum Masterpieces from the Museé National Picasso, Paris, a new exhibit of classic early modern works by the Spanish master painter. Free (members)-$25. Tue-Sun 9:30am-5:15pm. Wed 9:30am-8:45pm (the Aug). Thru Oct. 9. 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive. 750-3600. www.famsf.org

Pornography in Denmark @ YBCA

Tue 19 Jeffrey Long @ Toomey Tourell Gallery Birds of California, the West and Other Places, an exhibit of watercolors with a subtle social commentary, is only one of several exhibits worth checking out at 49 Geary, home of several art galleries. Tue-Fri 11am-5:30pm (Sat til 5pm).

49 Geary St., 4th fl. 989-6444. www.toomey-tourell.com

SF porn pioneer Alex de Renzy’s 1969 semi-documentary about a straight sex expo in Copenhagen. More adult films and docs each Thursday thru August. $6-$8.

7:30pm. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. 978-2700. www.ybca.org

To submit event listings, email jim@ebar.com.

Deadline is each Thursday, a week before publication.

For more bar and nightlife events, go to www.bartabsf.com

bartabsf.com

34 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< Leather+

July 14-20, 2011

▼

Up yours!

by Scott Brogan

I

t’s that time again. Up Your Alley (aka Dore Alley) street fair is just a few weeks away (Sunday, July 31).

In brief, the fair originated in 1985 as the Ringold Alley Street Fair (on the infamous Ringold Alley between 8th & 9th Streets) and was intended in part as a sort of “Folsom Street Fair for the locals.” The street fair officially became “Up Your Alley” when it moved to Dore Alley in 1987.

Both the Up Your Alley and Folsom Street fairs are run by the nonprofit Folsom Street Events, who focus specifically on the San Francisco adult alternative communities. The fairs and other events they organize or fund year-round raise money for over 15 different local beneficiaries.

In 2010 alone, they raised over 325k.

A couple of highlights are: 1) Bay of Pigs, the official Saturday night event (July 30) of Up Your Alley weekend, from 10 p.m.-4 a.m., at 525 Howard St., featuring DJs Frank Wild and Paul Goodyear; 2) Play, the official Up Your Alley TDance & Closing Party at the Mezzanine (444 Jessie St.) on Sun., July 31, from 5 p.m. to Midnight. Those are just two of the many events going on during the weekend. Check out their website at www.folsomstreetfair.com for details about these and the other events they organize and/or sponsor. Most events have discount specials if you purchase tickets early.

Sirs & boys & bootblacks: oh my! The International Leather Sir/ boy and Bootblack weekend runs concurrently with Up Your Alley, at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway (1500 Van Ness) from July 2830. The highlights of the weekend are the two contest nights: Part 1 on Friday night (8-10 p.m.) and Part 2 on Saturday night (5-8 p.m.). Both are early enough to give everyone time to enjoy the Up Your Alley events later on each night, so no excuses!

The contests feature over 22 con-

Scott Brogan

George Schaeffer (center) has an unforgettable time at the Up Your Alley street fair last year.

testants in the Sir/boy categories, and nine in the Bootblack category.

The producers and their staff made last year’s events incredible fun.

This year should be no different. Go to: www.leathersir.com for details, including info about all the great workshops and events planned during the days.

Naturally, I wish everyone luck, but I’m biased towards our own California contestants: Bootblack Luna, LeatherSIR Todd, and Leatherboy Mike. I think California should win everything, all the time. Good thing I’m not a judge.

Speaking of which, the judging panel is a who’s who of the accomplished in our community.

Judging the Sirs and boys are: Master Mike Zuhl, Master Tony Palazzo, Brad Hill, Boy Stallion, Debra Isadora, Luke Daniels, Race Bannon, Queen Cougar. Judging the bootblacks are: “black,” Syr Evan, Lamalani, Driller, boy Elena Franco, and Master C. I’ve

been on judging panels before and it’s not easy, but if anyone can pick some good representatives for our community, this crew can.

One last plug: Be sure to stop by and have Luna polish your boots.

I always say that a good bootblack will make you feel like you’re getting a great foot massage through your boots. Sweet!

The gang’s all geared. Looking for something to occupy your time the weekend before Up Your Alley?

Try out the all-new first annual Gear Up Weekend at the Saratoga Springs Resort (July 22-24). This is a menonly fetish weekend featuring tons of great activities for novices and the uber-experienced alike. The resort is ensuring privacy, so expect a lot of freedom, if you know what I mean. Go to: www.gearupweekend. com for details. It’s not too late to get tickets!

The panel to end all panels.

On July 27, the Leathermen’s Discussion Group is hosting a historic discussion panel titled “Is Leather Dead? Does it Need to Die?” at the SF LGBT Community See page 35 >>

Coming up in leather and kink Thu., Jul. 14: Locker Room Thursdays at Kok Bar SF (1225 Folsom). 9 p.m.-close. Free clothes check.

Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Thu., Jul. 14: Underwear Night at The Powerhouse (1347 Folsom). 10 p.m. Wet undie contest and drink specials. Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Fri., Jul. 15: Truck Wash at Truck (1900 Folsom).

10 p.m.-close. Live shower boys and drink specials.

Go to: www.trucksf.com.

Fri., Jul. 15: Circus of Sin at the SF Citadel. 8 p.m.-1 a.m. $25 plus Citadel membership. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Sat., Jul. 16: All Beef Saturday Nights at The Lone Star (1354 Harrison). 100% SoMa Beef & Co. 9 p.m.-2 a.m. Go to: www.facebook.com/lonestarsf.

Sat., Jul. 16: Beatpig at The Powerhouse. 10 p.m.-close. $5, goes to the Transgender Law Center (www.transgenderlawcenter.org).

Cheap boozin’, hard cruisin’ and Luna’s on hand to shine your boots! Go to: www.facebook.com/event. php?eid=233975546632588.

Sat., Jul. 16: Kok Block at Kok Bar SF. 4-9 p.m. $50 pool tournament starts at 6:30 p.m. Go to: www. kokbarsf.com.

Sat., Jul. 16: Wild Nights by Frank Wild and The Steamworks Boys at Kok Bar SF. The fun starts at 9 p.m. Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Sat., Jul. 16: Stampede at the SF Citadel. A full day of petplay, let your inner creature out to play! 2-6:30 p.m. Dinner break 6:30-8 p.m. followed by the Open Play Party at 8 p.m. $30 for classes, $25 for the party plus $10 membership. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Sun., Jul. 17: AIDS Emergency Fund event at Kok Bar SF. 9 p.m. Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Sun., Jul. 17: Castrobear presents Sunday Furry

Sunday at 440 Castro. 4-10 p.m. Go to: www.castrobear.com.

Mon., Jul. 18: Trivia Night with host Casey Ley at Truck. 8-10 p.m. Featuring prizes and ridiculous questions! Go to: www.trucksf.com.

Mon., Jul. 18: Dominant Discussion Group at the SF Citadel. 7:30-9:30 p.m. Doors open at 7. Please RSVP in the week preceding the meeting to DJ Mora, MommaD@sfcitadel.org or DJMora.SFLeather@gmail.com. A $5-$15 donation to the SF Citadel, is requested.

Mon., Jul. 18: Dirty Dicks at The Powerhouse.

Starts at 4 p.m. $3 well drinks. Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Tue., Jul. 19: 12-Step Kink Recovery Group at the SF Citadel. 6:30-8 p.m. Open to all kink-identified people in recovery who want a safe space. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org. Tue., Jul. 19: You have what? Discussing Health and Disability in BDSM presented

by Chelgrrl at the SF Citadel. 8-10 p.m. $20. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Wed., Jul. 20: Naughty Knitters at the SF Citadel.

7-9 p.m. $5. Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Wed., Jul. 20: Underwear Buddies at Blow Buddies. This is a male only club. Doors open 8 p.m.-12 a.m. Play till late. Go to: www.blowbuddies.com.

Wed., Jul. 20: Bare Bear, a night at the baths at The Water Garden (1010 Alameda, San Jose). 6-10 p.m.

Go to: www.thewatergarden.com.

Wed., Jul. 20: Bear Bust Wednesdays at Kok Bar SF. $6 all you can drink Bud Light or Rolling Rock drafts. Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Wed., Jul. 20: Nipple Play at The Powerhouse. 10 p.m.-2 a.m. Specials for shirtless guys. Go to: www. powerhouse-sf.com.

▼

Karrnal >>

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 35

Built to thrill

by John F. Karr

T

he godlike bodybuilder Von Legend explains why he made a pair of movies for filmmaker Ron Lloyd’s Body Image Productions in the candid and gracious interview section of a recently issued DVD, which is Volume 2 of the company’s Signature Series. The congenial hunk felt he’d fulfilled his goals and was at his peak. I’ll second that emotion – he’s phenomenal. What he doesn’t explain is what impelled him to go whole hog, from posing and flexing his muscles to pounding and five-fingering his member. Not that I mind; I just wonder.

There’s no indication that he’s gay, although he does talk candidly about cock size in relation to body mass (and practically blushes).

He seems oblivious to the double entendre when he says, “Look at the telephone pole across the street, and it looks small. But when you get on it, it’s really gigantic.” Well, you know you gotta have a big one for it not to be diminished when it hangs on a body like Legend’s.

And that’s the wonder. Legend, who has entered competition under the name Matt Davis, is 6’5” and carries 270 lbs. with single-digit body fat. Incredible. He’s a reserved performer, posing smoothly with quiet confidence. The first movie on the DVD concentrates more on musculature than masturbation, though it does deliver the latter. The way I see it, you can only watch a guy fan out those latissmus dorsi so many times in a row, no matter how extraordinary he looks. I’m always impatient to get to the meat. But you know me – it’s all about the bone.

Fortunately, Legend reverses the formula in the second film, and delivers the best orgasm of the pair, a projectile gusher.

Legend promises at the end of his interview that there’ll be more. But the rest has been silence. Googling reveals precious little info. With such a slim historical record, Von Legend might truly become legendary.

The very well-known Zeb Atlas has not been silent at all since filming his career-launching scene for Body Image in 2002. That and another solo episode are collected in Volume 1 of the Signature Series, along with an interview.

Like Legend, he’s str8, yet already feeling the call of gay money when he admits in his interview that he found “playing” in front of the

<<

Body Image Productions

Bodybuilder Matt David, a.k.a. Von Legend.

camera “expansive.” And he’s been so comfortably and ever-more expansively gay-for-pay ever since.

He, too, promises more in the future.

And he’s delivered, hasn’t he? These Signature Series scenes show how hard work has already transformed his body (though he’s certainly not as big as he’s become). I find even more impressive the gift with which he was born – you can’t do repetitions at the gym to build up a cock like Zeb’s, with its thick girth and appreciable length, fulsome head and broadly flaring corona. These scenes, particularly the second, lord upon this most excellent cock from every angle, so you see for sure that it doesn’t short you. The video does, however, clocking in at 40 minutes (29 of those constituting pose-n-play).

Neither minutes nor cock are shorted in Legend Men 1, a continuation of the company’s Body Solo series. A little over two hours, it presents eight engrossing men in nine solo scenes. Boyish stud Braun Drek deservedly gets two scenes – he certainly triumphs

over his unfortunate last name.

Micah Alexis – pale blue eyes, fitn-trim body, very long cock, and a copious cummer – returns for the movie’s 10th and last scene, sucking and fucking with husky friend Eli. Since I’d wanted to suck most every one of the fine cocks Legend Men 1 presents, it was nice of Lloyd to satisfy that desire (at least at secondhand) by providing this capper scene of penetrative sex. I thought its cocksucking and rimming were juicy, and was taken aback by its barebacking. I just didn’t expect it – although Micah’s cock is so fine it’s nice to watch it at work unsheathed.

Lloyd’s men are handsome, high-quality guys; their handsome cocks are mostly cut, and classically shaped; size is not as important to Lloyd as quality. Lloyd’s men are composed; he provides an environment that’s a safe haven for their crescendo of sex. There’s no faked excitement here, and no stumbling film craft. Lloyd’s wellmade movies are the epitome of what a sexographer’s work should be. His website, though, is confusing to navigate. Persevere. ▼ www.BodyImageProductions

Leather + From page 34

Center (1800 Market) in the 4th Floor Andrew Spencer Ceremonial Room. The once-in-a-lifetime panel brings together the esteemed Guy Baldwin, Race Bannon, Gayle Rubin & Michael Thorn for what will surely be a spirited and thoughtprovoking discussion about the state of the “Leather Community” in today’s world.

Folsom Street Events has graciously stepped up to underwrite the panel so it can be held at the Center, with food and refreshments also being donated by the Powerhouse, Truck, and Café Flore. If you can, please bring a donation for the Leathermen’s Discussion Group to help with the cost of the room rental. The discussion starts at 7:30 p.m., but get there early to ensure you get a seat. Go to: www. sfldg.org for details. Please note that although the name is “Leathermen’s Discussion Group,” their discussion groups are always open to all gender identifications.▼

Scott Brogan

2010 Int’l Leather Sir Hugh, Leather boy ian, and Community Bootblack “redwarrior” will close out a great year at the Int’l Leather Sir/ boy/Bootblack Weekend in San Francisco July 28-30.

www.ebar.com

36 • BAY AREA REPORTER •

<< Books

July 14-20, 2011

▼

AIDS lit redux: about a quilt

by Gregg Shapiro

W

ith the 30th anniversary of AIDS on many people’s minds, the arrival of Dan Loughry’s debut novel Patchwork (Harvard Square Editions) couldn’t come at a more crucial time. AIDS literature, which saw its heyday during the 1990s and reached its peak in the mid-2000s with John Weir’s What I Did Wrong and Richard McCann’s Mother of Sorrows, began to fade from view while AIDS itself was never far from sight. Loughry’s Patchwork begins in Chicago in 1989 at a time when AIDS was a rapid death sentence, and concludes in Los Angeles in 1999 after AIDS became a manageable illness through a variety of means. It’s a powerful piece of work about loss and survival, family and friendship, the tragedy of the past and the promise of the future.

I spoke with Loughry shortly before the publication of the book.

Gregg Shapiro: The first chapter of Patchwork appeared as a short story in the anthology Voice from the Planet. Is this the genesis of the novel?

Dan Loughry: In 1987, I went to the Second National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights, and was amazed by the turnout, the passion of the protesters, and at the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt that was on display on the Mall. It was overwhelming yet not as morose as the Vietnam War Memorial. This response to the AIDS crisis, though unmistakably tragic, seemed embedded with humor and resiliency. A few years later, I wrote

a one-act play that was entirely set at the Quilt, and performed in workshop as part of the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School.

Patchwork grew from that, but with a slight twist in conception.

What if, I wondered, you created your own patchwork quilt before you died?

How much of Dan is in the characters Sal and Randy?

I want to say very little, but whatever you write cannot help but reflect your personality. In this case, it was important for me to reflect that generation of men who came of sexual age in the late 70s/early 80s, the ones who were cut down in their prime, and the ones, inexplicably it seemed at the time, who weathered that first wave in the face of massive public and political indifference.

The publication of the book coincides with the 30th anniversary of the official arrival of what came to be known as AIDS. Was this a conscious decision on your part, or coincidental?

Completely coincidental. Believe me, when it was first pointed out, I wrestled with it. That there is an anniversary for what came to be known as AIDS is frankly horrific;

and to be in a place where the novel could be perceived as exploiting that dubious benchmark is alarming.

What impact did AIDS literature have on you? What do you consider to be important AIDS novels?

The first wave of AIDS literature – and in this I’m including plays, since they were immediate and incendiary

– was fuelled by ra fear and a very rage, he healthy indignation.

La Larry Kramer’s The N Normal Heart; David W Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives; Tony K Kushner’s visionary A Angels in America; th later, The Coming then of the Night by John R Rechy; Michael Cunning ham’s T The Hours; Alan H Hollinghurst’s The L of Beauty. These Line w works of art are e emotionally accurate, h historical records of h human behavior in i best – and let’s its b honest – ugliest be f forms.

I wanted t honor that, and to a also explore that t time when the d drug regiments c changed; when b being HIV-positive w went from a certain death sentence to a time of cautious, contemplative optimism.

enormous tragedy – the waste of all those lives due to bureaucracy and religious intolerance – and also a presence of spirit that’s lifeaffirming, jubilant.

The viewing of the Names Project Quilt at Navy Pier in Chicago is a very powerful section of the book.

I mentioned the Vietnam Memorial before, and when you descend into its glossy blackness, you feel as if you’re being buried alive. With The Names Project, when you stand in the middle of the laid-out quilt, you feel both the

Have you begun work on your next book project?

I’m halfway through a novel about hate crimes that’s a highly fictionalized version of the Matthew Shepard murder. And I’m toying with a political thriller inspired by the phrase “the gay agenda.” That phrase makes me wince and cackle with delight!▼

In Patchwork, you juxtapose the Quilt with a gay art exhibit.

“Gay art” is one of those concepts that makes me bristle. Does the art fuck itself? It’s just a label, the ghettoization of experience.

That said, it’s been fascinating to watch “gay art” go from a niche demographic – for homos only – to an entity with some cache. I think The Names Project helped do that, perhaps inadvertently, by giving our sorrow a public forum. And also the controversial Mapplethorpe exhibit.

Say what you will about the subject matter, but his photos are classically beautiful, be they calla lilies or a bullwhip in the rectum. When that exhibit was in Hartford, the bluehaired art matrons were clustered around the sex photos more than the portraits!

Sal speaks of being in a “sex fog” in regard to his relationship with Eduardo. Have you ever found yourself in a sex fog?

I keep waiting for the fog to lift, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere!

Prisoner of war

by Jim Piechota The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq, by Bronson Lemer; Univ. of Wisconsin Press, $24.95 paperback, $12.95 e-book

T

he internal struggle of a gay man fully entrenched in military service is poignantly portrayed in Bronson Lemer’s impressive memoir The Last Deployment, an impassioned chronicle tracing his unexpected year-long tour of duty in the Iraq war.

The book opens with a dinner date in Boston with his former boyfriend Jeremy, whom he’d left many years prior to join the North Dakota National Guard in 2003. He writes that Jeremy hadn’t changed much, but that he, Lemer, had become a different person, a gay man who’d “gotten so used to hiding my sexuality from other men that now I have a hard time forming

<<

Gallery-hopping From page 30

like landscapes teeming with life.

One enters a magical kingdom of circuitous trails, multiple scorching suns hanging in endless skies, lush palms and blood-red trees, splendid creatures, predatory birds cruising in packs and exotic imagery distilled in the artist’s mind. They’re visions of a prehistoric Eden promising beauty and terror, death and innocence before the fall, safely enclosed within the borders of a picture frame. Through July 30. www.chandlersf.com Fraenkel Gallery Irving Penn: Radical Beauty (1946-2007): Brother of film director Arthur Penn, Irving, a notorious perfectionist, is best known for the stark simplicity

a meaningful relationship with another man.”

Beginning in his senior year of high school, Lemer joined and would spend the next five years with the North Dakota National Guard working in their carpentry and engineering unit. Finally feeling the sweet sensations of impending freedom at 22, he anxiously awaited the end of his time with the Guard, hoping to grow a winter beard. But Lemer was then swiftly deployed to Iraq. His structured departure from U.S. soil and arrival on foreign turf are bound by unbending military protocol; this level of detail becomes exhaustive to imagine and read about, let alone live through.

These particular sections will surely remind readers that their freedoms are not to be taken for granted.

Lemer’s time in Kuwait (“all sand and stars”) is spent hot and hungry, punctuated by poignant (and unreturned) e-mails back to Jeremy as a way to reconnect himself to his homeland (and his homosexuality).

Lonely and ever-bound by the U.S. military’s infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Lemer keeps his “secret” as the long, arduous military tour begins to darken him internally.

Time progresses, and the author’s life in Kuwait becomes a “personal punishment.”

Eventually returning home to the “raw and unfamiliar” environs of America, Lemer moves on with his life, and never looks back.

This is extremely touching material.

Lemer describes the emotional turbulence of being gay in the military, tortured with the strong natural desire to connect with his fellow soldiers yet unable to reveal

and minimalist elegance of his insightful portraiture, and his mesmerizing fashion photography for Vogue. The 30some photographs in this show represent six decades of a less-explored aspect of his career: his investigation into the nature of beauty in a society where media images have proliferated while the definition and standards of physical perfection have narrowed.

Though he toiled in the upper reaches of the cultural and fashion elite, these transfixing images, including pierced tribal warriors of New Guinea regarding the camera with penetrating stares, or faces decorated and obscured, sometimes completely, in disturbing yet hypnotic ways – aping the guises of fashion – reflect an embrace of the human form in its many

permutations. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the power still belongs to whoever is wielding the camera. Through August 20. www.fraenkelgallery.com SFMOMA In New Work, two contemporary artists move the medium of ceramic sculpture well beyond the mug and ashtray conventions. Czech-born Swedish artist Klara Kristalova mines the unsettling, often sinister realm of childhood, Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and stuffed animals for stoneware artworks such as “The Owlchild,” a piece with malevolent undertones (inspired by an image of a child suffocated by a bag over its head) that stands as tall as a three-year-old, and is dressed in a haunting owl costume covering its face and upper body;

h himself because of his ssexuality. There is real p pain in that kind of p personal concealment, aand it permeates this m moving, substantive aaccount.

Never mawkish o or maudlin, Lemer kkeeps his story honest aand clear-eyed as he n navigates the muddy tterrain of real-time w war and its lasting rrepercussions.

His d duties as a soldier may h have been difficult, and th the author may have long o outgrown his original in intentions to serve the ccountry, but thankfully, h he makes no excuses an and remains true to his o original commitment.

“I signed up for this,” he w writes unapologetically.

W Words spoken like a true he hero.▼

“She’s Got a Good Head,” in which a small child sits cross-legged on a chair clutching a face mask; and “Game,” a disturbing bust of a blindfolded, ivory-skinned, longhaired girl that implies a scenario more threatening than playful.

The work of Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, who, in his teens, was an underground comix artist in Brazil, is infused with native folklore and adventure stories, as well as subject matter that tilts toward the violent and the sexual. “Garganua Rex,” for instance, is a vile, fleshy, decadent figure with crown and scepter, reminiscent of the slug-like creature Jabba the Hutt, while “Nietzschean Anthropomorphism Scratching His Balls” is a grotesque, savage take on Titian’s reclining Venus, the Renaissance ideal of beauty. Through

October 30. www.sfmoma.org Cantor Arts Center You can sample a bit – actually a large chunk – of art al fresco on the Stanford University campus, where you’d be forgiven if you mistook the solemn congregation of tormented souls on Memorial Court to be a gathering of flesh-and-blood men rather than Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais,” the self-sacrificing heroes on their way to slaughter. The latest addition to the Center’s great outdoors is the installation of “Sequence,” a monumental sculpture made from 200 tons of contoured steel, by the Bay Area king of the gigantic, Richard Serra. Regarded as one of his finest achievements, it’s on display for the first time since its birth in 2006, and will remain until 2016. www.museum.stanford.edu ▼

▼

Read more online at www.ebar.com

July 14-20, 2011 •

BAY AREA REPORTER • 37

DVD >>

Christopher Isherwood unbound

by David Lamble

Y

ou hope but seldom trust that a book you really love and take to your heart will turn into a good movie, let alone one that bears some of the DNA of a minor classic. In 1976 I bought my first real queer book, Christopher and His Kind, at Dallas’ Lobo Books: 10 bucks.

Gulping it down between stints as a rock-n-roll news guy, I was intoxicated by Isherwood’s Berlin baptism in 1929, just as the Reichstag was considering legalizing gay sex, a move put on indefinite hold by the US stock market crash. I read of his silly crush on an itinerate lad named Bubi, the slightly snobby but knowing way his college chum and sort of boyfriend Wystan Auden would read the motives of the Cosy Corner’s hetero butch-boy trade, and how Isherwood would chastise himself for lacking the courage to interrogate Herr Goebbels, Goering or Hitler in 1932, when these monsters in the wings might have submitted themselves to a visiting newsman of impeccable Aryan credentials.

The made-for-BBC TV film (now on DVD) opens on a starry-eyed fugitive: the boyishly handsome Christopher Isherwood (Matt Smith), having rejected Mommy’s plan for his life, is speeding off to join Auden for an assault on the boy bar precincts of Berlin. Wystan (Pip Carter) is the one person who sees through Isherwood’s protestations of political ideals. “The only cause you care about, Christopher, is yourself. You’ve turned it into an art-form.”

Briskly directed by Geoffrey Sax from a script by Kevin Elyot that is a funny/sad synopsis of Isherwood’s memoir, Christopher and His Kind dispenses with the half-truths and heterosexist myth-making that have previously characterized the screen treatments of Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, notably the multi-Oscarwinning musical Cabaret. In this version, Isherwood is no longer the asexual objective observer of others’ follies, but rather an eager, selfish, rather self-absorbed hedonist

for whom Berlin stood not for apocalyptic politics, but for the 24/7 pursuit of boys.

Rebuffing the future stormtrooper Caspar, Christopher falls for doe-eyed street-sweeper Heinz, who is trapped supporting a TB-afflicted mother and a Nazileaning, unemployed brother.

Attempting to smuggle Heinz into England on a servant’s visa, Christopher is thwarted by Mum’s suspicions of the Hun, and a closeted, jealous minion in His Majesty’s immigration service.

As the closing-night film at the 2011 LGBT film festival at the Castro, Christopher received a standing ovation, waves of love pouring forth for its Londonborn director Geoffrey Sax and “the Widow Isherwood,” painter Don Bachardy. Our pre-show chat unfolded in the Castro’s upstairs green room.

The film is especially good at revealing Isherwood’s efforts to free himself from the Victorian values of his patrician mother, Kathleen.

An unfortunate byproduct of this mother/son battle for supremacy was the shadow it cast over the life of Isherwood’s younger brother, Richard, himself a prolific diarist, letter writer, author of unpublished fiction, and sadly, a life-long “mama’s boy.” Tragically, in 1960, Richard Isherwood would awaken to find his 90-year-old mother dead beside him. Sixty years later, Don Bachardy has an unvarnished take on his lover’s brother.

“He looked like the village idiot.

He had wildly messed-up hair, a very red complexion with lots of broken veins – he was a heavy beerdrinker – his two front teeth were missing, and the front of his clothes were always dribbled on. He never looked you straight in the eye, but he was such a keen observer in his letters that I knew he could describe me minutely without my ever catching him looking at me.”

David Lamble: What did Chris tell you about the German boy Heinz?

Don Bachardy: Heinz was already

Sax: If it were a work of fiction, he would probably have taken up a cause and gone into the resistance, but as he always said in [the play upon which Cabaret was based] I Am a Camera, he felt he was there to observe and record. Like a lot of great writers, he remained impartial.

Bachardy: He was much more interested in being a novelist than a hero, that was his true vocation.

He also knew the dangerous pitfalls in heroes’ lives. He was a genuinely modest man.

That sex scene between Caspar and Chris in bed, the one very vigorous one – was Isherwood essentially a top?

Bachardy: Yes, I can verify that.

Because he’s topping this boy who becomes one of Hitler’s stormtroopers, it’s really kind of funny, with an ironic tension involved.

Sax: We wanted to show he had come to Berlin, basically, to have a great time, and we wanted to show him celebrating that, and also to contrast it with the time when Nazism crept in like a virus. As the virus spreads the film gets darker and darker, so we wanted to start it hedonistic and joyous, showing him having fun with a gorgeous guy.

married and had a grown son by the time I knew Chris. I never got to meet him because they were in Germany. I think that’s a wonderful scene, that last scene with Heinz where he suggests that he and his wife and son become Chris’ family.

How was that scene conceived?

Geoffrey Sax: We felt the return to Berlin would be a very poignant way of closing the third act. In the original three-hour script, there were scenes of him revisiting The Cosy Corner, and it’s all bombed out, but we really thought this was an important one to preserve; and it was quite a challenge because we had to age [both actors] up, and Douglas Booth, who plays Heinz, is only 18.

What fell out of the three-hour

version? Was there more about Heinz on the lam from the Gestapo?

Sax: There’s that, and Gerald [Heard] came back in: a scene in Amsterdam where he tried to fix a fake passport for Heinz. It was an embarrassment of riches.

Isherwood is now seen as a big hero, and properly so, but in the film you point out that he wasn’t necessarily a hero in his own eyes.

He was bold in the boy bars, but in respect to Germany’s chaotic politics he was very cautious, to the point of timidity. In the book he underscored the fact that he wasn’t so much fighting Hitler as fighting for the right to love according to his nature.

Tom Wlashchiha plays Heinz’s brother, a Nazi street thug, who represents the German lumpen class who became Hitler’s workingclass shock troops.

Sax: Many Germans thought they were getting a very tough ride, and Hitler was very seductive, saying, “I can make sure everyone has jobs,” and that character is the voice of those people.

Bachardy: It’s amazing complexity in an hour-and-a-half: so many characters, yet each of them is vivid in his own way. I wanted to say a bit more about Chris being a top: he was too interested in experience to allow himself just one of two choices. He was a novelist who wanted to be able to write from all points of view. ▼ Christopher and His Kind is out on DVD from BBC Video ($24.98).

Film >>

Ecological extremism: justified or not?

by David Lamble

I

n the meticulously researched, thought-provoking, balanced and humane new doc If a Tree Falls, Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman plant us inside a reckless moment when a small band of environmental radicals went toe-to-toe with folks they considered evil-doers: logging companies, meat-packing plants, SUV dealerships, university agriculture labs, local cops, and fatefully, the US Department of Justice.

Beginning in the mid-1990s with relatively mild tree-hugging protests, the kids from a looseknit network calling themselves the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) introduced bold new tactics that would be labeled eco-terrorism.

The violence on both sides escalated rapidly: riot police in Eugene, OR, are seen applying pepper spray and tear gas to protestors, prompting ELF to launch a sophisticated series of fire bombings across the country, becoming the FBI’s #1 domestic terrorism target and causing the creation of a special Federal task force that would prompt memories of the Nixon-era battle to stamp out the Weather Underground. In the wrong hands, this material – shots

The kids from a loose-knit network calling themselves the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) introduced bold new tactics that would be labeled eco-terrorism. of clear-cut old-growth forests, wild horses butchered in dog-food plants, SUVs in flames with their horns bleating like dying beasts – might get us riled up at the usual suspects without shedding any light on disturbing, underlining issues: the insidious power of the federal government to prompt activists to rat each other out; the real personal and emotional toll from the destruction of private property; and the loss of innocence as many families discovered just who their idealistic kids grew up to be.

The filmmakers turn the hunt for ELF members, their prosecution made difficult by a lack of physical evidence at the crime scenes, into a riveting cat-and-mouse game,

with revealing comments from felines and rodents alike. We meet Daniel McGowan, at first glance an articulate, conscience-stricken future felon who is spending long days under house arrest in his sister’s New York apartment.

“In 2001, I was involved with the Earth Liberation Front in two separate arsons. If people look at my case they think, ‘What if that motherfucker burned down my house?’ I think people think it’s just a bunch of young crazies walking around with gas cans lighting things on fire that piss them off. They think, ‘What if I burned things that pissed me off? That’s kind of crazy,’ which it is, kind of crazy. But people need to realize that this thing is not

Clear-cut forest in If a Tree Falls: American ecotopia despoiled.

that simple.”

This former Catholic schoolboy, who became such a committed recycler that he once stripped the labels off all the canned goods in his sister’s pantry, wins our hearts

by taking us beat by fateful beat through a trial by fire that has him facing life in prison.

If a Tree Falls portrays a battle for souls in the heart of American ecotopia.▼

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

38 • Bay Area Reporter • July 14-20, 2011

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