June 1, 2017 Edition of the Bay Area Reporter

SF library goes all out for Pride

ARTS

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21

SF Doc Fest

31

Jose Xtravaganza

The

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

Vol. 47 • No. 22 • June 1-7, 2017

National LGBT health study seeks participants

by Matthew S. Bajko

A

yearslong national health study of LGBT residents of the United States being conducted by researchers based at UCSF is now seeking participants.

Known as the PRIDE Study – the acronym short for Dr. Juno ObedinPopulation Research in Maliver is co-director of the Identity and DispariPRIDE Study. ties for Equality – it is the first longitudinal study of a cohort of LGBTQ adults in the country.

The web-based health study aims to enroll 100,000 people in the U.S. and its territories over the next decade. Those taking part in the survey must consent to annually filling out an online survey about their health and lifestyle choices, such as if they exercise regularly or if they smoke and drink alcohol.

“We are a study for and by the LGBTQ community. For that, we need as many voices and experiences as possible,” said Dr. Juno ObedinMaliver, a co-director of the PRIDE Study and an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at UCSF. “We ask that people stay connected and stay engaged.”

Its launch comes amid concerns about the Trump administration’s moves to remove questions about sexual orientation and gender identity from a number of federal surveys and research-based initiatives.

At the same time, there have been efforts at the local and state level to increase data collection about the LGBT community. Officials in San Francisco and Sacramento, for example, are working to add questions about sexual orientation and gender identity to numerous local and state surveys and health intake forms.

Without such information, LGBT advocates argue the health needs of the community cannot be adequately addressed. It is insight the PRIDE Study researchers aim to glean at a national level.

“We need to know what’s happening with people’s health, the good and the bad, in order to do a better job of helping them,” said Dr. Ward Carpenter, director of primary care services at the Los Angeles LGBT Center and a founding member of the PRIDE Study’s advisory committee.

It takes approximately 40 minutes to complete the PRIDE Study’s annual survey, which can be accessed via a computer or any internetconnected device. Since announcing its call for See page 17 >>

Gay SF ‘Survivor’ player plots return

by Matthew S. Bajko

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aving landed in fourth place his second time out on the CBS game show “Survivor,” and believing he had a path to victory, gay San Francisco resident Tai Trang is ready to compete a third time on the long-running show. He told the show’s producers and host

Tai Trang, left, and Zeke Smith talk during the just-concluded season of “Survivor: Game Changers – Mamanuca Islands.”

Jeff Probst they should invite him back during the 34th season’s recent live finale and reunion show.

But just not right away, Trang clarified in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter May 26, two days after “Survivor: Game Changers – Mamanuca Islands,” which was filmed in Fiji, had crowned police officer Sarah Lacina

the million-dollar winner.

“I need some time off, one or two years off to give me some perspective,” said Trang, 53, a gardener for the Port of San Francisco, speaking by phone from Mexico. “This game we taped nine months ago; watching it again psychologically does a lot of trauma to you, See page 8 >>

Queer arts fest expands to S. Bay

Courtesy CBS

by Heather Cassell

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he National Queer Arts Festival is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and is expanding to the South Bay. “It’s very exciting. It’s actually the very first event ever to happen in the South Bay as part of the National Queer Arts Festival, so we are very excited and honored,” said Maya Scott-Chung, a consultant who has been working with De Anza College’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education since last fall producing Queer and Now. Pam Peniston, artistic director of the National Queer Arts Festival and the Queer Cultural Center, which produces the festival, said that the expansion of the event to the South Bay is important, as an increasing number of LGBTQ artists are locating to cities outside of San Francisco.

“In the last decade, more and more queer artists and audiences were moving to the East and South Bay,” wrote Peniston, 67, who described herself as a “big ole dyke,” in an email interview with the Bay Area Reporter.

Last year, the festival received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support its goal to bring queer arts to Bay Area residents where they live, wrote Peniston. The festival was awarded a larger grant this year, despite President Donald Trump’s administration and attempts to defund the NEA, she added.

Some of the events around the Bay Area that the QCC is most excited about this year are the Topsy Turvy Queer Circus in San Francisco, the

Elena Rose

Femme Space participant Luna Merbruja.

Singing Bois and Dena Underwood performing for Vintage Q in Oakland, and the “Femme Space” exhibit at De Anza College in Cupertino.

“This is so important for the Queer Cultural Center’s expansion of programs throughout the Bay Area,” said Peniston. “It’s a chance to see what queer artists in other parts of the bay are creating; what concerns and topics are driving the work. But to also have a chance to be a part of it and initiate closer participation among artists in the South Bay, that’s amazing.”

The series of events for Pride Month will kick off Thursday (June 1) with “Femme Space,” an

exhibit of portraits exploring femme identity by the late femme photographer Amanda Arkansassy Harris.

Additionally, there will be a screening of Luna Merbruja’s film “For All My Homegurls Who Are Semi/Non-Passable” and Dulce Garcia’s “With Conviction” from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the California History Center classroom at De Anza College.

This is the second time “Femme Space” has been exhibited. The works first appeared at last year’s queer arts festival in Oakland. “’Femme Space’s’ vision portrays the true diversity of femmes from varying racial and ethnic groups, abilities, sizes, ages, and regions of the country and is inclusive of trans, cis, and gender fluid/nonconforming femmes,” wrote Peniston.

Participants in the project are looking forward to it.

“There’s so few places where I see us, queer femmes, taking up space,” wrote Celeste Chan, a 30-something queer femme who is one of the participants in the exhibit, in an email interview with the B.A.R. The San Francisco transplant from Seattle said she participated in the exhibit because, “I don’t see other queer Asian American femmes often enough.”

“I remember coming out as a teenager in Seattle, and thinking ‘but I can’t be gay, there’s no one who looks like me here,’” she wrote about how lonely it made her feel.

See page 18 >>

{ FIRST OF THREE SECTIONS }

Without pride, it’s just a parade.

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Community News>>

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 5

Mission police captain hopes to increase patrols

T

he new police captain at San Francisco’s Mission Station, which includes the Castro, Mission, and other neighborhoods, recently told police commissioners and community members he hopes to increase patrols and address homeless complaints and other issues.

With a population of about 46,000 people and more than 85,000 calls for service annually, Mission Station “is one of the busiest districts, if not the busiest district, in San Francisco,” said Captain Bill Griffin as he addressed a May 17 meeting at James Lick Middle School in Noe Valley.

The most common calls for service across the Mission police district were related to people sitting or lying on the sidewalk, complaints about homeless people, and wellbeing checks, with more than 900 calls each, according to data that Griffin presented.

The 3,000-plus calls related to mental health that police get is “remarkable, and it illustrates the challenges officers face every day,” he said.

Griffin, who came to Mission Station from the airport bureau in March, said his goals for the year include increasing the number of foot patrols and engagement with the community.

“That’s a priority for me, is getting those officers back out there,” he said.

Over half the station’s officers have been trained in crisis

Seth Hemmelgarn

MISSION SFPD Station Captain Bill Griffin.

intervention, and Griffin said he hopes to increase that this year, too.

Decreasing “quality of life” issues – which are typically related to homeless complaints – and cutting the number of auto break-ins and other property crimes are among Griffin’s other goals.

Crime stats

Overall, violent crime decreased from 1,171 to 1,112 from 2015 to 2016 in the neighborhoods covered

by Mission Station, according to Griffin’s data, but property crimes went from 2,645 to 2,730.

Detailed statistics for the Castro district weren’t readily available, but data from the police department indicate overall crime has stayed about the same, with 284 incidents

in January and around 300 from late April through late May. Commission Vice President Tom Mazzucco said at the police oversight panel’s meeting that there’s been less discussion of “gang violence and deaths and shootings” in the Mission since he joined the commission several years ago.

“I’m sure the problem still exists, but it looks like we’re getting a handle on it,” said Mazzucco.

Griffin, 57, a straight ally who grew up in San Francisco, told the Bay Area Reporter, “Our concerns are the same for the Castro” as for other parts of the police district, including addressing incidents that may happen as people are enjoying the area’s bars.

He said there would be “an emphasis on community engagement, quality of life, and making a safe environment.”

Police are also focused on ensuring safety in the Castro’s public spaces, including Pink Triangle Park and Harvey Milk and Jane Warner plazas.

Griffin replaced former Captain Dan Perea, who was promoted in February to commander after leading Mission Station for almost three years.

Castro Merchants President Dan Bergerac said in a phone interview that Griffin’s “done a great job on getting us some beat cops up in the Castro ... I’ve just noticed in the last month or so a real increased presence of cruisers and guys with boots on the ground.” t Contact the author at s.hemmelgarn@ebar.com .

Despite efforts, worries about ADAP remain

by Seth Hemmelgarn

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dvocates for people living with HIV and AIDS are still worried about clients’ access to medications as California officials continue fixing the state’s AIDS Drug Assistance Program.

Problems with the system emerged after contractor AJ Boggs was brought on to handle eligibility and enrollment about a year ago. After several months of trouble, including clients being turned away by their pharmacies or even being dropped from ADAP, the California Department of Public Health terminated Boggs’ contract.

The state extended eligibility for all ADAP clients to ensure that nobody’s eligibility would expire before July 1.

But with that date getting closer, there are fears that problems with the program, which helps 29,000 people, still won’t be ironed out.

Martha Ayala, an enrollment worker at APLA Health, said, “My main concern of what can happen is that based on our past experience” with the state’s Office of AIDS, “they’re not prepared for this type of contingency.

When something like this happens, they’re not prepared, and clients fall through the cracks.”

That could mean people being “turned away” from their pharmacies and interruptions in insurance payments, among other problems, said Ayala.

“Clients have not been notified of any of this,” she added. “Clients come and they have no idea that they’ve been extended. ... I’m the one that tells them.”

In response to the Bay Area Reporter’s emailed questions, CDPH spokespeople said, “All client eligibility end

dates are staggered based on client birthday, so only a certain number of clients whose birthday or halfbirthday is in July will need to renew eligibility in July.”

That’s about 5,000 people, according to the agency.

“CDPH has reminded ADAP enrollment workers to re-enroll and recertify clients in a timely manner so their eligibility is extended,” spokespeople said, adding, “CDPH will continue to emphasize this important reminder. To assist enrollment workers with this important task, by the end of May, the ADAP enrollment system will have a new feature that allowing enrollment workers to see a list of their clients and their clients’ eligibility end dates.”

Courtney Mulhern-Pearson, director of state and local policy at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said in an interview, “The good thing about them extending the eligibility is that clients shouldn’t have been impacted too much by the transition in the contracts ... but once that extended eligibility ends, that’s when we’ll be able to see if the system is really working or not.”

Clients notified, state says

CDPH spokespeople said that it does notify people of what they need to do in order to extend their eligibility.

“Enrollment workers across the state also work with clients to ensure

they remain enrolled and do not lose access to their medications,” the agency said. “Clients must meet with their enrollment workers before their birthdays each year to re-enroll in ADAP,” and people with birthdays in July should have received postcards in mid-May “reminding them to meet with their enrollment workers before their birthdays.”

Spokespeople also said that clients have to “self-attest to their ADAP eligibility before their half-birthdays via a form that is mailed to them from CDPH.” People with half-birthdays in July should have received the forms in mid-May. Clients who have questions about the forms should get in touch with their enrollment workers or call ADAP at (844) 421-7050.

Mulhern-Pearson, who encourages people to check their mail for anything from CDPH, said, “We really need more transparency around what the functionality is now, what systems improvements they’re working on, and what the timeline of those improvements is going to be.”

She said she wants to see at least a page on the state’s website devoted to the information. The way it is now, “You hear slightly different things depending on who you talk to.”

CDPH spokespeople said that on April 27, the agency posted “a list of past, current, and future features planned for the ADAP enrollment system.”

The list is “being updated every four weeks and will be shared with enrollment workers and posted to the ADAP website each time it is updated,” the agency said. t Contact the author at s.hemmelgarn@ebar.com.

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<< Open Forum

6 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Volume 47, Number 22 June 1-7, 2017 www.ebar.com PUBLISHER Michael M. Yamashita Thomas E. Horn, Publisher Emeritus (2013) Publisher (2003 – 2013) Bob Ross, Founder (1971 – 2003) NEWS EDITOR Cynthia Laird ARTS EDITOR Roberto Friedman BARTAB EDITOR & EVENTS LISTINGS EDITOR Jim Provenzano ASSISTANT EDITORS Matthew S. Bajko • Seth Hemmelgarn CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Ray Aguilera • Tavo Amador • Race Bannon Erin Blackwell • Roger Brigham Brian Bromberger • Victoria A. Brownworth Brent Calderwood • Philip Campbell Heather Cassell • Belo Cipriani Richard Dodds • Michael Flanagan Jim Gladstone • David Guarino Liz Highleyman • Brandon Judell • John F. Karr Lisa Keen • Matthew Kennedy • Joshua Klipp David Lamble • Max Leger Michael McDonagh • David-Elijah Nahmod Michael Nugent • Paul Parish • Sean Piverger Lois Pearlman Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota Bob Roehr •Donna Sachet • Adam Sandel Khaled Sayed • Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro Gwendolyn Smith • Sari Staver • Jim Stewart Sean Timberlake • Andre Torrez • Ronn Vigh Charlie Wagner • Ed Walsh Cornelius Washington • Sura Wood ART DIRECTION Max Leger PRODUCTION/DESIGN Ernesto Sopprani PHOTOGRAPHERS Jane Philomen Cleland • FBFE Rick Gerharter • Gareth Gooch Jose Guzman-Colon • Rudy K. Lawidjaja Georg Lester • Dan Lloyd • Jo-Lynn Otto Rich Stadtmiller • Steven Underhil Dallis Willard • Bill Wilson ILLUSTRATORS & CARTOONISTS Paul Berge • Christine Smith ADVERTISING/ADMINISTRATION Colleen Small Bogitini VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING Scott Wazlowski – 415.829.8937 NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE Rivendell Media – 212.242.6863

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Outgames’ spectacular flameout F

orget the flame being extinguished at the conclusion of the games. In the case of Outgames Miami, the flame was never lit. Opening ceremonies, the vast majority of sporting events, and the closing ceremonies were abruptly canceled last Friday – the start of the competition – just as some LGBT athletes had arrived and others were en route.

What a calamity. What a waste.

What a major disappointment for the participants.

As several gay sports writers have opined in recent days – and as our sports columnist foresaw in late March – Outgames is finished.

The Gay and Lesbian International Sport Association, or GLISA, which licenses Outgames to the bid cities, has much to explain, as do the Miami-based Outgames officials.

We got a call from Outgames’ PR flack, Michael Goodman, last Monday, letting us know that Outgames would no longer speak to Jock Talk columnist Roger Brigham because he was asking too many questions. “It’s not in our best interest” to respond, he told us. In hindsight, it’s clear why Goodman didn’t want to answer questions – organizers knew there would be no sporting event.

Outgames Miami CEO Ivan Cano was desperately hoping for a Hail Mary pass. Outgames had already received a $200,000 donation from the city, according to the Miami Herald, which had extended other generous benefits like extending permitting deadlines and waiving fees. Miami Beach City Manager Jimmy Morales told reporters last weekend that the city is already working on an audit of the organizers’ finances.

Unsurprisingly, the Herald reported that city staff was worried about Outgames’ financial stability in March.

“Even the total budget was unclear late in the process, according to financial statements provided to the city,” the paper reported.

“When the Outgames first persuaded the Beach to commit to a

sponsorship, organizers estimated a budget of between $5.35 million and $11.1 million. When the city got an updated budget that range went down to about $2.5 million to $3 million.

“By late March, financial records show the Outgames had $31,499 on hand with anticipated expenses of about $2 million,” the Herald noted. “As the opening weekend approached, organizers grew panicked. An elected official who spoke with the Herald on the condition of anonymity said Cano sent a text message late Thursday asking for $250,000 – a quarter-million-dollar request two days before the start of the games.”

It’s clear that even if Outgames had secured the $250,000, many venues didn’t appear to be ready and numerous sports had already been canceled.

Holding a large, multi-sport event is rarely a money-maker (just look at the Olympics). And Outgames has a long history of red ink, starting with its first event in 2003, which reportedly lost millions of dollars. No financial figures or attendance numbers have ever been provided for Outgames 3 in Antwerp (2013), which drew fewer athletes than Outgames 2 in Copenhagen in 2009. In fact, the one accurate thing about Outgames seems to be that each event has fewer participants. With that track record, it’s obvious

that the Outgames model is not financially viable.

But it’s the utter lack of transparency, halftruths, and lies by Outgames that are really detrimental to the LGBT sports community and its fans. GLISA and Outgames have a problem releasing accurate information so that people can make an informed decision about whether to spend all that money to participate. It’s not free to be in Outgames. There are registration fees, travel expenses, and other costs. This year about 2,000 LGBTQ athletes were willing to shell out that money, but given that Outgames had initially projected 15,000 athletes – a number that Brigham noted has never been achieved by any LGBTQ sporting event – it was obvious that the math wouldn’t add up.

The next challenge in this sorry tale will be borne, fairly or not, by the Federation of Gay Games, which stages its event in 2018. Fortunately, FGG has safeguards and oversight built into its model, and the federation keeps tabs on the host cities. While FGG has had its own issues, in recent years it has upped its game, probably spurred on by the disastrous Outgames. To many people, however, there’s no distinction between FGG and GLISA (partly due to merger talks the two groups have had over the years, though no such combined event ever materialized). And that’s what FGG will have to contend with. FGG should immediately work with athletes planning to attend Gay Games, as well as sponsors and others so that it is clear the event is fiscally responsible. It should also educate the larger community about the differences between FGG and GLISA. We know gay groups are often loathe to criticize one another, but after the meltdown in Miami, it’s time for action. It’s time for people to understand that Outgames has always put more emphasis on the parties than the playing field. And last weekend the community was shown a stark reminder of how fragile and unsustainable that model is. t

Equal benefits: Needed now more than ever

by Jeff Sheehy & Ken McNeely

realities. Respecting gender identity community. That was the as well as sexual orientation must be a case with companies like wenty years ago Thursday (June focus of our collective work.

AT&T, who along with 1), San Francisco’s Equal Benefits AT&T ranks at 100 percent on the supporting San Francisco’s Ordinance became law. It is a simple Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate effort adopted one of the law with a powerful purpose – makEquality Index because it prohibits nation’s first domestic parting sure companies doing business discrimination based on gender idenner benefits programs for with the city provide every employee tity or expression in all operations and its LGBT employees, and the same benefits no matter who they offers transgender-inclusive health it has turned out to be the Rick Gerharter love. coverage, as well as having an emcase across the country.

Courtesy AT&T When the Equal Benefits Ordi- Supervisor Jeff ployer-supported Employee Resource Even though our quest Ken McNeely nance was conceived, the challenges Sheehy Group. This comprehensive approach for full marriage rights to the LGBT community were severe. to equality should serve as a model of would be undeniably On the heels of “Don’t Ask, Don’t responsibility to replicate. And during delayed by DOMA, comTell,” the so-called Defense of Marriage Act was Pride Month this year, employees’ stories of community members knew equal benefits provided moving forward at the federal level. In legitimate ing out will be shared through powerful videos tangible results for our families right away. Evenanger and frustration, three leaders of the Harthat will be broadcast to visitors at AT&T’s One tually over 7,000 companies with millions of vey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, Geoff Kors, Powell store. employees complied with the law.

Jeff Sheehy, and Carol Stuart, got together on a The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will This activism in the workplace fueled the sunny Saturday afternoon and Kors put forward begin working this summer to update the culture change in corporate America that the idea for the Equal Benefits Ordinance. city’s equal benefits and contracting realized that LGBT rights are human They took the proposed legislation to the laws to better align our city’s values rights. During the Supreme Court Board of Supervisors, and with the leadership of with our dollars. At 10:45 a.m. Thurscase on marriage equality, 379 comout Supervisors Tom Ammiano, Leslie Katz, and day (June 1), we’ll join City Adminpanies and employer organizations Susan Leal, the Equal Benefits Ordinance was istrator Naomi M. Kelly and other signed an amicus brief on the side passed without a vote in opposition and signed leaders at City Hall’s North Light of history. From AT&T to United

by Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. into law. The city’s Court to celebrate 20 years of the Airlines and Ben & Jerry’s to our Human Rights Commission, led by chair Martha equal benefits ordinance and disworld champion San Francisco Knutzen and Executive Director Cynthia Goldcuss the meaningful impact it has Giants – diverse companies led by stein, developed regulations and enforcement had in our communities. example and lent their voices to our mechanisms that gave the measure real teeth.

The challenges ahead for LGBT cause. Very few companies lined up Then-city Attorney Louise Renne and her depupeople are daunting and unknown, especially in opposition. ty, Dennis Aftergut, brilliantly worked to defend at the national level. As we develop strategies Support from businesses provides a valuable any legal challenges against the ordinance. to protect LGBT people, respect and dignity in resource when many states and localities lack While a handful of companies took issue with the workplace must remain a top priority. Now legal protections for LGBT residents or pass disthe law and sued, other companies in San Franmore than ever, the actions of state and local govcriminatory laws against LGBT residents. The cisco, such as AT&T, stood with LGBT activists ernments and responsible employers will play a goal must always be to convince government to and local government due to the foundational large role in determining our future progress. We provide full legal recognition of our rights and support of their internal LGBT organizations. invite you to join us in the next citywide converrelationships. In the meantime, workplace poliThirty years ago, AT&T employees came togethsation on workplace equality to make equal bencies on non-discrimination and equal benefits er to form the LGBT employee group LEAGUE – efits stronger now and for the next 20 years.t mean even in every state, an employee can find one of the first of its kind in the country. During work at a responsible company with confidence the equal benefits campaign, this group was althat if she gets married one day, she won’t be Jeff Sheehy is a longtime HIV/AIDS activist ready a decade old, making it a valuable partner. fired the next. and represents District 8 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Ken McNeely is Companies realized the law would also San Francisco has a key choice to make movthe president of AT&T California and the improve their bottom line by attracting and ing forward. We can keep the status quo or we can first openly gay officer of AT&T Corp. retaining dedicated employees from our align this 20-year-old law with today’s modern

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Letters >>

Chronicle columnist is great

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 7

While I found myself in agreement with the gist of your editorial about the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of out public figures, I was shocked to see your use of Beth Spotswood’s column about me as a further example [“The Chronicle’s gay problem,” Editorial, May 25]. First of all you make it sound as if Spotswood chose the word “partner” over “husband,” when in fact I am sure she just accurately reported what I said. Yes, I am aware of the difference between partner and husband and you are correct that Fernando is my husband.

However, sometimes I still find myself referring to him as my partner because we were partners for longer than we

have been husbands and sometimes old habits are hard to break.

So, while I accept full responsibility and apologize for any offense my inaccurate use of words may have caused, I also apologize to Spotswood for making you doubt that she is anything but a fair, sensitive, and accurate reporter. She is a great writer whose stories of everyday San Franciscans are well worth reading because they provide an incredible commentary on a wide variety of people in our city.

Bill Wilson San Francisco

Another top gay SF mayoral staffer to depart

by Matthew S. Bajko

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teve Kawa, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s longtime chief of staff, will retire at the end of June, ending a 25-year career at City Hall that spanned the administrations of three mayors. A onetime supervisorial aide, Kawa also served as deputy chief of staff to former mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom.

His departure follows that of Tony Winnicker, another top gay aide to Lee who left in April. Succeeding Kawa will be Jason Elliott, a straight man who has served as Lee’s deputy chief of staff since 2014.

Kawa did not respond to an interview request from the Bay Area Reporter, which broke the news of his departure on its blog Thursday afternoon.

“It has been a great honor to work on behalf of the city I love for so many years,” stated Kawa in a news release announcing his plans. “I am incredibly grateful to have worked alongside so many passionate and dedicated employees and to have served under Mayors Brown, Newsom and Lee, all of whom I respect deeply.”

He started out as an aide to former Supervisor Tom Hsieh in 1991.

Among Kawa’s more high profile achievements was helping shape Newsom’s pro-marriage equality stances in the early days of his first term in 2004. During the first weekend of same-sex weddings that February, Newsom married Kawa and Dan Henkle, a top executive at retailer Gap Inc., one of a few he presided over at the time.

“I have built important relationships and made countless friends,” stated Kawa, who legally wed Henkle in September 2008. “Above all, I am proud of our collective efforts to make this city an inclusive, fair and just place for San Franciscans.”

It marks the second time that Kawa, 55, nicknamed by some as the “shadow mayor” inside Room 200, has announced plans to leave city government. In December 2006 Kawa quit in order to focus on his family, as he and his husband have two adopted children, Michael and Katherine.

Kawa had been serving as the executive director of the Willie L. Brown Jr. Leadership Center at San Francisco State University when, in August 2008, he agreed to return as Newsom’s top deputy on a six-month interim basis. Yet he never left, and after Newsom’s election in 2010 as lieutenant governor, Kawa’s name was floated as a potential pick to serve out Newsom’s mayoral term.

Instead, Lee emerged as the Board of Supervisors’ surprise pick for mayor in January 2011, with Kawa pegged as playing a leading role behind the scenes in scrounging up the votes for Lee, at the time the city administrator. Over the ensuing six years Kawa has played a powerful role by

Jane Philomen Cleland

Mayoral chief of staff Steve Kawa

Lee’s side, credited with being a tenacious negotiator during contract talks and legislative battles.

“He has worked tirelessly on the city’s emergency disaster responses to ensure all residents are safe, led countless labor negotiations, and ensured the long-term financial stability of the city through pension reform,” stated Lee. “Steve was the calm amongst many storms. We are lucky to have had such a compassionate and brave public servant.”

Progressives, however, claim Kawa is Lee’s puppet master and manipulator, ensuring the policies pushed by the mayor benefited his campaign backers, especially market-rate housing developers and tech industry titans.

“While serving three mayoral administrations, Steve Kawa fought hard to maintain Room 200’s allegiance to the most powerful economic players and interests,” former Supervisor John Avalos wrote in a Facebook post. “Serving the wealthy and powerful first, may have helped the city to become solvent in bad economic times, but the approach did not address how San Francisco could turn its resources towards a city that worked for all. In fact, Kawa worked hard to prevent the communities and leaders who sought to share justly the great wealth in our local economy.”

Former Obama aide enters East Bay Assembly race

A former campaign aide and White House staffer for former President Barack Obama has entered the race for an open East Bay Assembly seat in 2018.

Buffy Wicks officially announced her candidacy for the 15th Assembly District Seat Tuesday, May 30.

“California has the unique opportunity to achieve bold, progressive goals that reflect our shared values and actually help people: economic security for all women and families, equity for all people, and clean air and water for all our kids. The next Assemblywoman from our district should be leading this fight, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” stated

Wicks, who lives in Oakland with her husband Peter and her 6-month-old daughter, Josephine.

A grassroots organizer for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Wicks went on to work for the United Food and Commercial Workers, leading the campaign to fight Wal-Mart for better wages and health care for its employees. In 2007, she was an early hire on Obama’s presidential campaign and later worked for him in the White House focused on helping to pass the Affordable Care Act. Lesbian Richmond City Councilwoman Jovanka Beckles is also seeking the seat, as the incumbent, Assemblyman Tony Thurmond (D-Richmond), is running to be the state’s superintendent of public instruction. Oakland City Councilmember Dan Kalb is also running to succeed Thurmond, and lesbian Berkeley school board member Judy Appel is expected to also enter the Assembly race.

The district includes the cities of Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Emeryville, Hercules, Kensington, Piedmont, Pinole, Richmond, San Pablo, Tara Hills, and a portion of Oakland. If an out candidate were to win, they would be the first out state lawmaker from the East Bay. Beckles, who is both black and Latina, would become the first out African-American state legislator should she win the race.

Beckles, who is both black and Latina, would become the first out African-American state legislator should she win the race. She has moved quickly to lock up endorsements from progressive groups and leaders, with the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club set to early endorse her campaign later this month.

Ahead of the San Francisco group’s vote, a number of LGBT progressives in the city endorsed Beckles in the race, including gay former Supervisors Harry Britt and David Campos, as well as former Milk club president Peter Gallotta and current Milk club board member Brad Chapin.

Gay former supervisor and state lawmaker Tom Ammiano also early endorsed Beckles, stating in a release that he did so “because she has continually represented the LGBTQ community with dignity and grace, and she is the fierce legislator we need representing the diverse Assembly District 15 and all LGBTQ persons in Sacramento.”t Web Extra: For more queer political news, be sure to check http:// www.ebar.com Monday mornings at noon for Political Notes, the notebook’s online companion.

The column returns Monday, June 5.

Keep abreast of the latest LGBT political news by following the Political Notebook on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/politicalnotes.

Got a tip on LGBT politics? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 8298836 or e-mail m.bajko@ebar.com.

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<< Community News

8 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

<<

’Survivor’

From page 1

to your psyche. In the middle of the night I wake up thinking of all the decisions I made.”

Other former contestants have warned him that, for years, he will be thinking about what he should have done differently in order to win.

“Be careful if you go on ‘Survivor,’ you will think about it forever,” Trang warned anyone thinking about applying to compete on the show, which will return this fall for its 35th season.

Contestant outed

One moment from this past season that created a cultural firestorm was the outing of contestant Zeke Smith as transgender by Jeff Varner, a gay real estate agent. The show was criticized for airing the outing during a tribal council, though it worked with LGBT advocates in advance of showing the episode, with Smith granting several interviews and penning a personal essay about being outed.

At last week’s live finale show Smith, who now writes for the Hollywood Reporter, said the experience helped him find the “courage and boldness” to be a transgender spokesman, especially for young people. Varner, who was fired from his job and said his life became “very ugly” for a time after the outing episode aired, announced he had a new job and was writing a book tentatively titled “Surviving Shame.”

Trang, who immediately denounced Varner at the tribal council for outing Smith, told the B.A.R. there was no way for the episode not to air. He noted that the remaining contestants all verbally said they would vote Varner out that night, making it unnecessary for them to go through with the normal secretive voting process.

“Survivor is real, it happened.

I am not wanting that to happen and Zeke to be outed, but when it

Courtesy CBS

Tai Trang, right, gets a hug from his partner, Mark Philpot, during a quick family visit on “Survivor: Game Changers – Mamanuca Islands.”

happened look at what positive things came out of it,” said Trang.

“There is positive international dialogue on what it means to be trans, what it means to be outing somebody. The best thing came out of it.”

As for how he was depicted in his second season, Trang felt the audience didn’t get to see as much camp life this time because the returning 20 players kept upping their game play. He was happy to see his streaking at camp made it into one episode.

“So many things happen in this season. Don’t have time to show everything,” he said.

Trang became a fan favorite playing “Survivor: Kaoh Rong,” which aired last spring, and made it all the way to the final round that season.

Although he came in third place and didn’t win the $1 million prize, he was awarded $50,000 by the singer Sia for his promoting animal rights on the show and protecting a chicken from being slaughtered for food by his fellow tribe members.

Initially Trang, a vegetarian, and his partner, Mark Philpot, 57, who works as a nurse in the Tenderloin for the city’s public health department, had applied to be contestants on another CBS competition show, “The Amazing Race.” They didn’t make the cut, but a casting director suggested Trang apply for “Survivor.”

t

During his first season, Trang proved adept at outlasting and outplaying the other competitors, particularly due to his knack for finding immunity idols and other life-saving advantages in the game.

Asked to come back for this season, with its game changers twist, Trang again found several hidden immunity idols and several times dodged being voted out by the remaining tribe members.

This season Philpot, whom Trang plans to marry “sometime soon,” was flown to Fiji with the relatives of other players in hopes of getting to spend time with his partner. Even though Trang lost the reward challenge, and they only had five minutes together, the visit was still spirit lifting.

“It does make you feel a lot better after the family visit,” said Trang.

“You have a shot of energy.”

In the end, Trang’s turning on his allies led retired pro football player Brad Culpepper to lose trust in him and opt to take Lacina to the final three. Nonetheless, Trang said he feels “real good” about how he played a second time.

“I had fun playing it even though there was a lot of drama toward the end,” he said.

At the reunion show, a survey of the 10 members of the jury found they would have split their votes between Trang and Culpepper, giving the tie breaking vote to this season’s third-place finisher Troy “Troyzan” Robertson.

While Robertson said he would have chosen Culpepper as the sole survivor, Trang told the B.A.R. he believes he could have secured the jury’s votes if he had made it to the final three.

“There was a good chance I could have won this season,” he said. “A lot of people were advocating for me.”

It is sure to keep him up at night for months to come.t Contact the author at m.bajko@ ebar.com.

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<< Queer Reading

10 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Trans parent is complicated, Faludi learns

by Brian Bromberger

I

t was perhaps the email of her lifetime when, in 2004, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Susan Faludi, best known for “Backlash,” her book on feminism, was contacted by her father, whom she hadn’t heard from or seen in years.

“Dear Susan, I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside,” her father wrote.

Attached to the message was a series of snapshots of her father, now known as Stefanie, dressed in blouses and skirts, following her gender reassignment surgery in Thailand. She had returned to her native Hungary.

While not a total shock because a relative whom Stefanie had already notified had contacted Faludi, she had no inkling that her father had ever identified as a woman.

Faludi would go to Hungary and her father would ask her to write a book on her life. Published last year, “In the Darkroom,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in the biography category (though she didn’t win). Faludi, 58, was in the Bay Area in early May when she met with the Bay Area Reporter for an interview.

“I had a whole nest of reactions all at once,” Faludi, a straight ally, said of her father’s bombshell email. “Part of me was hopeful that maybe this was the key to explaining everything

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about my father, the ticket to understanding I didn’t have before, if only it were that simple. I thought I had my father pegged but I didn’t know the first thing.”

Her father had been abusive to her and her mother (even while separated, stabbing the man she was dating), eventually leading to a divorce, with only sporadic communication through the years. A wily Jewish Holocaust survivor whose family was decimated, her father eventually relocated to the U.S. and became a respected photographer whose specialty was manipulative techniques such as dodging (making dark areas look light) and masking (concealing unwanted parts of the picture).

Faludi quotes her father, “You don’t expose what you don’t want exposed,” which could be her major theme as she was constantly reinventing herself, obscuring or forgetting the past.

“When my father first transitioned she was embedded in an excessive frilly girliness, a kind of delayed adolescence, to break out of that carapace of hypermasculinity, claiming she loved being a woman because men could do everything for her, but eventually she could let that all go and be the idiosyncratic character she was:” the assimilated Jew who adored the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and returning to Hungary, an antiSemitic country that decimated her family during World War II. “My father needled me, pushing back on sacrosanct positions in feminism, goading me by saying a woman’s place is in the kitchen. He was a type of trickster and liked to provoke people,” Faludi said. “My feminism gave me the tools to help me understand what was going on with my father, to put together the intersectional analysis including gender, Jewish identity, the national politics of Hungary. My father’s story confirmed for me that gender is infinitely varied, and that once she surrendered the out-of-the-box Doris Day persona (complete with wigs and high heels), she became a more complicated interesting person who couldn’t be defined by gender. You can’t determine someone by a sex role that has been regulated by the culture.”

No generalizations

Because her father was complicated and contradictory, and carried so much historical baggage, Faludi is

loathe to make any general comments about transgender people; to say that because her father acted in such a way, that explains why trans people do something.

“In my research, Jenny Boylan has this great line: if you’ve met one trans person, you’ve met one trans person,” Faludi said, referring to the trans writer. “For example, my father would be talking about his trans identity, then he would switch over to how the Jews were treated during the Holocaust, because what Jews had to do to ‘pass’ in the 1940s to escape imprisonment or death was connected in her mind to how to pass as a woman. This is not to say there is a causal relation, but again, it was all intertwined in her mind. I think my father thought that becoming a woman would be the solution to fix all her other problems and that was not the case. My father didn’t become a different person as all the baggage was still there, all that undiagnosed anger.”

Faludi stated that her father shows how contradictory people are, that people want freedom to express themselves in all their variations, yet at the same time people are terrified of standing out and just want to follow societal formulas.

“For many trans people gender identity and sexual identity are kept separate, but they were intertwined in my father,” Faludi said. “In her fantasies I discovered a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage, humiliation, and orgasm, as the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step. She would come into my room with her robe open revealing her lingerie, objecting to my sleeping with the door closed, saying she wanted to be treated as a woman, to walk around without clothes and for me to see it as normal.”

For Faludi, one of the biggest mysteries was why her father returned to Hungary right after the communists fell.

“Perhaps he was hoping the country would undergo a cultural rebirth similar to the one that occurred in between the two world wars that her parents had experienced,” Faludi said. “Because Hungary wanted to become part of the European Union, it became the first country to include transgenders as part of a protected minority, but half of the parliamentary members didn’t know what they were

t

Brian Bromberger

Susan Faludi holds a copy of her book about her father’s life and gender transition.

voting on. While it’s officially on the books, it’s nothing honored. Just look at the violent reaction to gay Pride parades year after year. ... Anyhow, my father may have returned to fit in, figuring he might be more acceptable as a woman, perhaps less Jewish-looking and more Christian-like. Or maybe it was the reverse, with my father coming back to tell them to screw off and say if you didn’t like me as a Jew, well try my becoming a woman on for size.

I still don’t fully understand why he went back to Hungary.”

For the trans people who have gotten in touch with her, they appreciate Faludi’s more complicated portrayal focused on one person with her many dimensions of identity battling each other, rather than the cheerleading “I was always a woman” tale, a standard of this genre. Faludi is amazed that there has been such a growth in acceptance of transgender people in the last decade, “especially when you think about gay and women’s rights and what a long slough it was, but maybe it seems like the natural next step because of the groundwork laid by these two movements.”

By the time her father died in 2015, they had definitely become closer.

Stefanie was proud of her daughter’s accomplishments, and began to trust her expertise. She was at last willing to look at her past as well as Faludi’s childhood and talk about it. Faludi struggled to come to grips with her father’s reinvented self, to decode her riddle.

“She remained to the end something of a puzzle, but so is identity, which is never singular. You can’t pull one thread because everything is in conversation with everything else including sexuality.” t

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<< Pride 2017

12 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

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he San Francisco Public Library kicks off Pride Month in a big way with book and author talks, rainbow crafts, exhibits, and its beloved Drag Queen Story Hour.

“There is no better place to celebrate Pride than at the public library,” said Tom Fortin, a gay man who is chief of the main library.

“The public library has often been the singular place where many in the queer community first found acceptance, whether through literature or programming. The Hormel center exemplifies the best public libraries have to offer and we celebrate being the queerest library ever.”

The library’s James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center starts Pride month Thursday (June 1) with RADAR Superstars, the annual birthday bash for superstar and emerging writers. Featured on the stage of the main library’s Koret Auditorium will be Ana María Montenegro, Clement Goldberg, and MariNaomi, hosted by Juliana Delgado Lopera.

RADAR Productions will also be bringing Drag Queen Story Hour to three different libraries on Saturdays in June. Take the whole family to these crowd-pleasing events at the main library, and the Bernal Heights and Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial branches, featuring Panda Dulce, Honey Mahogany, and Yves St. Croissant.

“We love the different twist on story time that Drag Queen Story Hour provides,” explained Jason Hill, a gay man and the children’s librarian who booked this year’s program with RADAR Productions.

“This is the first year that we’re having the Drag Queen Story Hour at the main library and at the Bernal

Courtesy SFPL

Honey Mahogany is one of several drag queens who will take part in the San Francisco Public Library’s Pride Month programming.

Heights branch – places where the kids and families don’t usually see this type of program.

“We want to highlight cultural diversity – there’s always a book about being one-of-a-kind and the kids get to dress up and celebrate their own uniqueness,” he added. “And of course, we’re returning to the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial branch as well.”

A Pride Month highlight will be a reading with lesbian author Dorothy Allison June 3 at the main library. Allison is the author of the iconic book, “Bastard out of Carolina.” Allison will talk about her work, share some of her recent projects, and be available for a book signing.

The exhibit, “Homopolis: Photos from Gay San Francisco in 1981,” fills the Hormel center through August 24 with photographer Robert van der Hilst’s images that poignantly capture the heady days just prior to the AIDS epidemic.

The library’s Chinatown/Him

Mark Lai Branch celebrates Pride this year with a book discussion and film screening on June 3 featuring the Oscar Wilde classic, “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

On June 17, the Castro branch library will feature author and retired librarian Lynne Barnes reading from her poetic memoir, “Falling into Flowers.”

In addition, the library has also gone full rainbow with rainbow storytimes, rainbow candy necklaces, and rainbow bridge building. t For a full list of Pride programs, events, and book selections, visit the library’s Pride page at https://sfpl.org/index. php?pg=2000991201.

Pride programs are supported

by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. All events are free and open to the public.

Researcher seeks ‘Tales’ fans compiled by Cynthia Laird

I

f you read the groundbreaking “Tales of the City” when it appeared in the newspaper, a gay researcher wants to hear your story.

Author Ramzi Fawaz, Ph.D., who’s an assistant professor of English and LGBTQ studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is in San Francisco this summer and looking for people who read Armistead Maupin’s serialized gay fiction “Tales of the City” in its original format that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle between 1976-1983.

According to a flier, Fawaz, who is in San Francisco from June 1 until August 31, is available to meet with eligible study participants. Interviews, which can be done in person, or via phone or video chat, will be recorded.

People who read the Chronicle series can also send him an email or letter describing their reading experiences.

Maupin’s stories revolved around a cast of eccentric characters – gay and straight – led by marijuana-growing landlady Anna Madrigal, who lived at 28 Barbary Lane. An entry in Wikipedia noted that because the stories were published so soon after Maupin wrote them, they included references to events at the time.

Fawaz is also the author of “The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Cities.”

Fawaz can be contacted at fawaz@ wisc.edu. Letters can be sent to him at 600 North Park Street, Madison, Wisconsin, 53706.

For more information about Fawaz, visit www.ramzifawaz.com .

Paul Jermann

Researcher Ramzi Fawaz

‘Patient No More’ exhibit at SF library

An interactive, multimedia exhibit about the disability rights movement will be at the San Francisco Public Library to commemorate the 40th anniversary of an iconic Bay Area event that continues to transform lives of disabled and nondisabled people today.

“Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights,” will be in the Skylight Gallery at the main library, 100 Larkin Street, from June 10 through September 3.

The exhibit, organized by San Francisco State University’s Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, tells the story of how more than 100 people with disabilities occupied 50 UN Plaza in San Francisco for nearly a month in April 1977 to demand that a precursor to

the Americans with Disabilities Act, known as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, be signed.

Supported by groups such as the Black Panthers, Delancey Street, Glide Memorial Church, and politicians, including Philip Burton, George Miller, and Mayor George Moscone, the protesters emerged victorious after a 26-day demonstration.

The exhibit was previously shown at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley two years ago, and has been on tour since then.

“Patient No More” features video interviews with some of the protesters and has built-in accessibility features so that those with various cognitive disabilities, vision, hearing, and mobility impairments can visit.

Some of the changes the protesters fought for are now taken for granted.

“Like curb cuts for wheelchair users that now help parents with strollers, bike riders, and skateboarders, these access features have unintended benefits for everyone,” said Catherine Kudlick, professor of history and director of the Longmore Institute.

The exhibit will be open during the library’s regular hours, and will have several guided tours and accompanying programs.

To learn more and explore the virtual exhibit, visit www.patientnomore.org .

San Mateo County Youth Commission seeks members

The San Mateo County Youth Commission is looking for passionate young people between the ages of 13-20 to join a strong, energetic group of youth dedicated to making a difference in the community.

See page 18 >>

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14 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Santa Fe has long welcomed LGBTs

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anta Fe, New Mexico has long been one of the country’s most gay-friendly destinations. With more than 400 years under its belt, the city, about an hour outside of Albuquerque, is the oldest state capital and the U.S.’s third oldest European-settled town, behind St. Augustine and Jamestown. From its early days as a trading post, it developed a tolerance for outsiders from different religions and ethnicities. That tradition of tolerance very much extends to the LGBT community. Santa Fe elected its first openly gay mayor, Javier Gonzales, three years ago. He was joined by two out lesbians on the city council, effectively making a third of the city’s elected representatives gay.

Santa Fe still looks much like the Old West. During the City Beautiful movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Santa Fe decided that it would be the “City Different,” and maintain the look that made it distinctive from Anytown, USA. The city jealously protects its adobe architecture from modern influences.

And you won’t see any modern high-rises. No building is allowed to be taller than the town’s cathedral.

If you look around downtown, you will see a mixture of traditional Victorians as well as adobe.

New Mexico didn’t become a state until 1914. Early efforts to elevate it from a territory to statehood were rebuffed in part because of the look of its adobe buildings, which were constructed from a mixture of mud and straw. Santa Fe got the message and built more traditional wooden structures and changed the names of some of its Spanish streets to very Americansounding names, including Washington and Jefferson.

Now, instead of trying to blend in with the rest of the U.S., Santa Fe very much celebrates and capitalizes on its Old West rough-andtumble past, welcoming thousands of tourists every year. Summer is the most popular time for tourism. Because of its 7,000-foot elevation, the city’s temperature rarely gets much above 90 and it cools down quickly when then the sun goes down. Albuquerque is about 2,000 feet lower in elevation and gets seven to 10

Ed Walsh

Clues await inside Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe.

degrees warmer in the summer.

The fall and spring are also popular times to visit Santa Fe, when the weather is cool and it is less crowded. The town is also popular in the winter with skiers. The closest ski resort is about 45 minutes away.

Santa Fe Pride 2017 will be held this year in mid-September. The parade starts at 7 p.m. Friday, September 15, and the Pride festival is Saturday, September 16.

The Spanish-Mexican influence in the city is evident at every turn in the downtown area.

In keeping with the Spanish trad i t i o n , a plaza is in the center of town, along with a gazebo surrounded by local government buildings.

America’s oldest church, San Miguel Mission, looks very much like a smaller version of San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. It was built in 1610, more than 150 years before Mission Dolores. Like San Francisco, Santa Fe’s patron saint is Saint Francis of Assisi. But instead of being named for a saint, the town took the name that means Holy Faith.

Santa Fe’s main cathedral, Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, was dedicated in 1887 but its towers were never fully completed because of a lack of funds. Another of Santa Fe’s most tourist-popular churches opened nine years before the Basilica. The Loretto Chapel features a “miraculous staircase” that was built by a mysterious carpenter who connected the upper balcony of the church with the main floor. A construction error

didn’t leave enough room for a traditional staircase. The resulting “miraculous” circular staircase is as beautiful as it is durable. But to keep it for many more years, only newly married couples are allowed on it now, when they pose for photos.

Native American heritage

Santa Fe celebrates its large Native American population. Much of the land between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is owned by Indian tribes.

Many of the Native Americans in the area are Catholic and celebrate their traditional culture along with Catholic religious traditions.

Santa Fe has long attracted artists who undoubtedly are drawn to the city’s natural beauty and colorful sunsets. A number of artists collaborated in creating one of Santa Fe’s newest and, already, one of its most popular attractions. Meow Woof (https://meowwolf.com/) was created in an artist space occupied by an abandoned bowling alley. The building’s name is emblazoned on a giant bowling pin sign in front of the parking lot. A giant spider and what looks like a 1950s menacing sci-fi space alien stand watch over the parking lot.

The space’s main attraction is The House of Eternal Return, which opened a year ago as its first permanent installation. It is a replica of a Victorian home from Mendocino whose fictional family mysteriously disappeared. Clues are left throughout the house about what may have happened to the residents.

You can read their mail, look at their computer programs, and read their See page 17 >>

Saturday,

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<< Sports

16 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Fiasco in Miami

by Roger Brigham

U

ntil last week, internet searches for the words “World Outgames Miami 2017” offered scarcely any mention of the quadrennial event scheduled in Miami Beach other than a handful of exceedingly positive promotional puff pieces touting the thousands of athletes, artists, and “thought leaders” expected to enjoy

the opening and closing ceremonies.

Now, after those ceremonies and the vast majority of its sports programs were abruptly canceled just hours before the scheduled opening (See, www.ebar.com/blogs, “Outgames’ ceremonies and sports canceled at last minute”), online media outlets have been erupting with stories of angry, frustrated athletes; calls for government investigations into the

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organizers and their suspected misuse of funds; and widespread calls for an end, once and for all, to the Outgames.

Athletes, government backers, and sponsors alike were being reassured

by Outgames organizers until the last minute that everything would go on as scheduled and finances were not a concern – even after several sports events were canceled in the two months leading up to the games, registrations were abysmally low, and behind the scenes local government was being asked for a $250,000 bailout less than 24 hours before the event was called off.

“It is incredibly disappointing that organizers would guarantee the public they would not cancel the event, then wait until hours before the opening ceremony to cancel it,” Cyd Zeigler, co-founder of Outsports. com, wrote last Friday. “Athletes are now stuck with vacation time they may not want and travel costs they will never recover. The news today will have one lasting international impact: This is the end of the World Outgames.”

(Note to readers: Buenos Aires has already declared its intention to bid for World Outgames 2021 and has a Facebook page to market its bid.

Someone should send them this and other stories on the Miami Outgames experience to warn them.

We don’t want to be crying in Argentina four years from now.)

The only official Outgames sports to be held were aquatics, soccer, and country western dancing, and even those were affected by a scarcity of promised volunteer help and transportation services. A few other sports

t

Most of the sports at the Miami Outgames were abruptly canceled last Friday.

tournaments were hastily organized by athletes stranded in Florida after the canceled Outgames.

Denver swimmer Dick Smith was one of those who competed in the scheduled swim meet.

“The sudden and shocking cancellation of the 2017 World Outgames Miami was not surprising, nor unexpected,” Smith wrote for Compete Network. “There have been red flags for at least a year. Myself and many other athletes, in addition to the City of Miami and Dade County, have raised concerns and have done our best to provide support and assistance to World Outgames and Gay and Lesbian International Sport Association to help ensure the event’s success.

“Most of this support, however, has been simply ignored, and now we see the result,” Smith continued. “The future of LGBTQ sport is a world without the Outgames and GLISA. It is time for those organizations to understand and accept their failures to achieve their goals and missions and to cease to exist. They have not accomplished

anything to advance the causes of LGBTQ, and, specifically, sports communities. Even if GLISA can somehow salvage anything from this and try to organize another event, nobody will register. Including myself. I am embarrassed enough to have put my name, brand, and reputation behind this event. As athletes, we must expect better. In fact, we must demand better.”

Thus the Outgames die the way they were born more than a decade ago: with arrogance and anger; disrespect for the sports they are alleged to showcase and the athletes they are supposed to serve; and enough “alternative facts” (aka, lies) to make the current White House occupant blush with embarrassment.

Now, I am sure you are left with questions. As one who had the chance to observe GLISA and past event organizers through meetings, interviews, and correspondence – and who is in some respects at least partially responsible for the creation of all of this, as I was the one who cast the deciding vote in Chicago in 2003 that spelled the end of negotiations to host the 2006 Gay Games in Montreal – I shall attempt to answer some See page 17 >>

Mixed reactions san francisco ColumbariuM on medical pot in recovery THIS IS THE

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any people in recovery refer to themselves as being clean and sober, but Sharon Bertrand calls herself “green and sober” because she uses medical marijuana but refrains from recreational drugs and alcohol.

Bertrand, an Oakland ally who is a data specialist and registrar with United Cannabis, a biotechnology company, said that using medical marijuana is “compatible” with being in recovery from a drug or alcohol addiction.

In a telephone interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Bertrand said that she and a close friend each celebrated their 25th anniversary in recovery but use marijuana medically.

By using her firm’s cannabisbased therapies, Bertrand said that she’s been able to reduce the dosage of her medications for blood pressure and diabetes as well as eliminate the statins she took to control her cholesterol.

One Loraine Court between Stanyan & Arguello COA 660

Sari Staver

Castro Country Club manager Brandon Stanton

“My doctor was blown out of the water” by the changes in the laboratory tests she attributed to the use of medical marijuana, she said.

Bertrand uses cannabis-laced capsules made by her company and

occasionally takes “a hit off a joint” or eats an edible, she said.

“Bottom line is everything in moderation,” she said. “Cannabis is my medication.”

Others involved with the recovery community offered their own take on the question of using medical marijuana during recovery.

Billy Lemon, a gay man who is executive director of the Castro Country Club, a nonprofit that is a hub for San Francisco’s LGBT clean and sober community, said the decision to use medical marijuana “is a personal one and is nobody else’s business.”

Twelve-step programs, which meet at the country club, “are there for support,” said Lemon in an interview at his office.

“We’re not doctors but we do offer support for people trying to get well,” he said. “Everyone is welcome to attend” 12-step meetings at the country club.

See page 17 >>

Obituaries >> Beverly Hocking Case April 3, 1925 – March 18, 2017

(415) 771-0717 FD 1306

by Sari Staver

Community ally Beverly Mae Hocking died peacefully in the Hillsborough home she shared with her “surrogate daughter,” Darlene Popovic.

Bev earned a degree in public speaking from UC Berkeley in 1945. While there she

stage-managed the theatre department, accompanied the boy’s glee club, and played bass in the Cal symphony.

After studying accounting at Northwestern University, in Chicago, she moved to New York to work for Price Waterhouse.

Returning to San Francisco, she worked for Macy’s, where she met Robert C. Case.

They married in 1948 at Grace Cathedral and had three sons, Robert C. Case Jr., Steven B. Case, and John H. Case.

Bev sang with, directed, and choreographed for the women’s harmony group Sweet Adelines. The couple relocated to

Kansas City, then back to Hillsborough in 1971. With singer/comedienne Darlene Popovic, she collaborated on chapter shows nationally for seven years, eventually playing Royal Albert Hall in London. Bev encouraged Dar to begin performing locally, becoming her mentor and coach.

While on the board of 42nd St. Moon, Bev produced a successful fundraising tribute to Bob Grimes.

Bev was a class act; her humor, determination, and generosity will be missed by her family and many friends.

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Community News>>

LGBT health study

From page 1

participants last month, the study has already enrolled more than 5,100 people.

“We hope to get a really good representative sample, that is an aspirational goal,” said Obedin-Maliver.

For now, LGBT people at least 18 years old can take part. The researchers hope to include youth age 13 to 17 by the end of 2017 and are working on being able to do so with the study’s institutional review board.

“We really want to make it ultimately accessible to youth participants without parental consent,” said Obedin-Maliver. “Clearly, with sexual and gender minority youth, if there is a requirement for parental consent it would limit some youth from being able to participate.”

Among the early participants, younger people have been more apt to sign up, according to the researchers. To encourage people in older age groups to take part in the PRIDE

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contact info is kept separate from their health information. And the study uses a certificate of confidentiality from the National Institutes of Health, which means its list of participants cannot be subpoenaed or revealed to outside entities.

“We have stringent privacy rules for the study,” stressed Obedin-Maliver.

Participants do not need to be U.S. citizens, merely residing in the country or its territories. Although the survey does ask about the participants’ citizenship, people can choose not to answer the question.

As with their health information, their answers to the question will not be divulged to outside parties, noted Obedin-Maliver.

“I think there have been concerns in respect to the current political climate. That is something we want to ensure that cannot happen,” she said.

In 2015 the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute funded the study with a grant of $1,680,008 that runs through 2018.

The total estimated budget for the study’s first four years is $2,062,837, with private donations and funding from UCSF making up the difference.

The researchers hope to find additional funding sources so that the PRIDE Study will continue for decades to come. Its community engagement arm, known as PRIDEnet, will be ongoing and includes more than 40 partner organizations around the country, including health organizations, community centers, and national organizations that support or serve sexual and gender minority people.

A Spanish-language version of the study is also planned, but there is no date yet for when it will be rolled out.

To learn more about the PRIDE Study or to enroll in it, visit https:// pridestudy.org. t

2. Should athletes who spent thousands of dollars to get to Miami, and used up their vacation time to get to their events only to find them canceled as their planes were landing follow through on threats to sue for breach of contract and calls for fraud investigations? Damn right! The first World Outgames lost millions of dollars and stiffed local businesses – that’s the legacy of Outgames without oversight that Miami inherited.

It’s about time someone called them

out on it.

3. Why were there not more warnings, information we could have used to guard ourselves from this massive letdown?

A few reasons. First, organizers were not transparent and candid in the information they provided. For instance, I had contacted them and my questions were met with assurances that proved empty, and eventually my calls were refused entirely, especially once I started honing in on financial issues. Second, the local mainstream media showed its disregard for LGBT issues by not asking probing questions and writing nonpromotional pieces in the months leading up to the event. Finally, for the most part LGBT media showed their disregard and lack of respect for sports in general by writing similar puffery and focusing it on the social, cultural, and conference aspects rather than athletics. Ironically, the collective failure of the mainstream and queer media argues all the more why we need legitimate LGBT sports extravaganzas such as the Gay Games and Sin City Shootout.

4. Will this scandal hurt the 2018 Gay Games in Paris? Sure as sunshine. Most LGBT sports constituents have long viewed the Gay

Games and World Outgames as two sausages coming out of essentially similar factories. They aren’t aware of the safeguards and oversights built into the Gay Games, the interactions between the FGG and host cities, or the behind-the-scenes work performed by LGBT sports representatives to help stage the sports competitions and sports standards. That lack of awareness will undoubtedly lead to wariness and reluctance.

Back in March 2004, when I was one of the eager and enthusiastic athlete volunteers helping the FGG stage its quadrennial sports celebration, the FGG asked me, just months after meeting me, to fly to the Gay and Lesbian Sports Foundation convention in Boston to observe the Chicago and Montreal hosts and the representatives of the FGG and newly formed GLISA – then report back what I observed.

In my report, I said the thing that struck me most was the lack of sports organization experience among the Montreal and GLISA representatives, as well as a lack of interest in learning the issues involved. While Chicago and FGG reps stayed after formal meetings to answer club representatives’ questions about their venues, event insurance, and mission issues,

such as inclusion and acceptance of straight athletes, their GLISA and Montreal counterparts were off to the bar for cocktails.

I also noted that while Montreal organizers were obviously proud of their fundraising – they said they had already raised $3 million – they were equally adept at big spending, since it turned out they had already blew through that $3 million more than two years before the 2006 Montreal Outgames, without using so much as a dime on the actual sports event itself.

I told the FGG board that I thought that the Montreal Outgames would be called off months in advance – or if it went forward, it would be a financial disaster.

I didn’t ever think I could feel so bad about being so right about something – until last week with Miami.

Now sports registrants are led with one overriding question: where did all of the money go?

That, my friends, remains for government probes to uncover. Brace yourselves for the answers. Ugly is about to turn uglier.t

including cannabis.

“Not that I thought I’d get addicted to cannabis,” said Stanton, “but for 20 years, I had never spent time without some intoxicating substance. It was time for me to experience life.

“If your physician feels medical marijuana would be beneficial, following that advice might make sense,” he added. “If I was suffering chronic or debilitating pain, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose cannabis over prescription pain killers.”

Terry Beswick, a gay man who managed the country club for seven years before taking his current position as executive director of the

GLBT Historical Society last year, said in an email to the B.A.R., “I’m not a medical expert but from my extensive, albeit anecdotal, ‘research’ in the field, I would advise anyone who wants to stay abstinent from drugs and alcohol to avoid marijuana, which is a mind-altering drug after all. If they have a medical condition, there are often many options for treatment and they might try things that don’t get them high first. And if nothing else works, they should discuss with their doctor and their sponsor (if they are in a 12-step program). In any case, it’s certainly none of my

business what they do.”

Gary McCoy, a gay man who has been sober for more than six years, said in an email that “harm reduction was my introduction to recovery and there are many avenues to recovery and many recovery programs and options.”

“Eventually, when I realized abstinence from all drugs and alcohol was best for my own recovery, I stopped using everything, including pot. For me, it was necessary to identify the root of my drug and alcohol use, and that meant going into treatment and therapy with a completely clear head,” he said.

“My view on medical marijuana in my program of recovery is that if a primary care physician that specializes in infectious diseases and

HIV/AIDS care prescribes it and it is used as prescribed, then it’s appropriate,” McCoy added. “I know what works for me, and can only comment on my personal experience. Other people’s programs of recovery are none of my business.”

Calls to reach addiction specialists at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the UCSF Alliance Health Project were not returned by deadline. t

Local artists convinced Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin to help buy and rehab the building and they created New Mexico’s most unique attraction.

The world-famous Santa Fe Opera (https://www.santafeopera. org/) kicks off its 61st season June 30 with performances until August 26. The big buzz this year is the opera’s world premiere of “The (R) evolution of Steve Jobs.” The opera company promises the show will “illuminate a side of Steve Jobs that we have never seen before.” The opera noted that the late genius behind Apple “helped connect us all while

building a firewall around his own emotions. At the heart of this world premiere is the story of a man who circles back to the formative events in his life while learning to acknowledge his own mortality.”

With appreciation for art comes appreciation for well-crafted drinks.

Santa Fe celebrates its favorite beverage, the margarita, in style with a 31-stop Margarita Trail. For $3, you can buy a Margarita Passport that entitles you a $1 discount at stops along the trail. Get your passport stamped (maximum of two stamps per day). You will get a free T-shirt for five stamps, “The Great

Margarita Book” for 20, and if you complete all the stops on the trail, you get a Margarita Bartender Kit. If the Margarita Trail isn’t enough to satisfy you, check out the Chocolate Trail. The seven-stop trek includes shops that will let you sample chocolates made with ingredients native to New Mexico including chile, pinon nuts, and lavender.

Two years in the making

Work on the study began in 2015, with more than 18,000 participants enrolling and contributing to the study’s development during its extensive pilot phase. Their input resulted in expanded electronic access, a customized dashboard for participants to view data, and enhanced security features for the study, noted the researchers overseeing it.

The pilot phase participants were also asked to vote on what topics to

Jock Talk

Bay Area Cannasseur

From page 16

Brandon Stanton, the manager of the country club, had a lot of exposure to the cannabis community during the five-year period when he managed the guesthouse owned by gay pot activist Dennis Peron.

In an interview at the country club, Stanton said he also used cannabis during the years he was addicted to methamphetamines, but “never felt addicted” to pot.

With approval from his physician, Stanton used medical marijuana to combat the nausea he suffered from anti-HIV drugs. But when he started a recovery program five years ago, Stanton said he decided it would be best to “stop everything,”

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include in the actual survey. Their input led to the inclusion of questions about depression and anxiety, teen suicide, and the role of family support in health.

“At the same time in looking at those themes, we were also developing the technology and the platform to be able to do what we are now doing. We have a novel platform we created for just this study,” said Obedin-Maliver.

The researchers customized the platform for the online study to include features the pilot phase participants had suggested. Those taking part in the PRIDE Study can see how many other people are in the study, for example, broken down by their different identities. They will also receive alerts about additional surveys they can fill out other than the yearly one they are required to complete.

They have also taken a variety of steps to ensure the participants’ information and privacy is secure and protected. People’s names and

Study, the researchers have partnered with the national nonprofit SAGE, which stands for Services and Advocacy for LGBT Elders.

“There is some sense people who are more advanced in age might be less comfortable with an online health information study.

Mostly because it is online but also their comfort with disclosure in this type of setting,” said ObedinMaliver, who identifies as a cisgender lesbian and is in her late 30s.

From page 16

of them to the best of my ability.

1. Should the Federation of Gay Games and GLISA now do what some have called for repeatedly for over the years and merge their dueling quadrennial events into one event?

Hell, no! The FGG should disavow any talks of merger of events or organizations. It should do a better job of educating its constituents about its core mission (LGBT empowerment through sports participation, not conferences or parties), and the fundamental differences in its business model that GLISA has rejected consistently and repeatedly (official involvement of LGBT athletes through every step of event planning and organization, rather than merely charging a licensing fee and then hoping a host can figure everything else out on its own).

Those with long memories may recall that when Montreal walked out of negotiations in 2003, it complained that the FGG demanded too much accountability and oversight power – the very things that were sorely lacking with the Miami World Outgames.

Santa Fe

From page 14

written diaries to figure out what happened. After entering the living room, visitors who make their way to the kitchen can open the refrigerator door, and walk through a “wormhole” into a parallel universe filled with rooms that resemble sets from 1960s sci-fi TV shows. You can walk from a room with laser beams that you can play like a musical instrument to another room that looks like a black and white cartoon to other rooms that appear at first glance to be a normal family home.

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 17

Denver swimmer Dick Smith

Accommodations

One of New Mexico’s finest resorts is a little less than an hour outside of Santa Fe. The Hyatt See page 18 >>

Contact the author at m.bajko@ ebar.com.

Contact the author at jocktalk@ yahoo.com.

Bay Area Cannasseur runs the first Thursday of the month. To send column ideas or tips, email Sari Staver at sari@bayareacannasseur.com.

Ed Walsh

The interior of San Miguel Mission, America’s oldest church, built in 1610.

<< Legal Notices

18 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

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Santa Fe

From page 17

Regency Tamaya Resort and Spa (https://tamaya.regency.hyatt.com) is very popular for destination weddings and regularly hosts same-sex couples. Even if you are not planning on getting hitched in New Mexico, there is plenty to do on the property, with its three restaurants; three pools, including an adultsonly pool; bicycle trails, and free bike rentals.

The property has three separate wedding venues. Summer weekends are the busiest time for weddings, but you can get some good deals if you opt for an off-season, Friday evening, or sunrise wedding. The

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Queer arts fest

From page 1

Cinnamon Maxine, 29, who identifies as a Black queer femme, agreed.

“I just want to talk to people about gentrification. I want people to think about the ways they take up space and give space to other people,” said Maxine.

The power of “Femme Space” is why Scott-Chung selected it as an opening to the National Queer Arts Festival’s South Bay event.

“There are so many things that I love about the ‘Femme Space’ exhibit,” said Scott-Chung. “Each of the portraits people choose to reclaim those spaces and become visible and audible in spaces where we felt marginalized or otherwise left out of. It’s a really powerful way to transform trauma and build community and I was really drawn to it.”

The exhibit runs through June 30.

Scott-Chung, 51, who identifies as a queer femme mama artivist and has been working on producing the Queer and Now series of events with Veronica Neal, the director of the Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education at De Anza College.

An LGBTQIA++ Ancestor Altar will be set up in the “Femme Space” exhibit to honor friends and loved ones who’ve died. Attendees are

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News Briefs

From page 12

County Supervisor David Canepa said in an email that currently there is only one member of the commission who resides in the northern portion of the county and encouraged interested young people to apply. Canepa represents northern San Mateo County.

The commission meets from 6:15 to 8:15 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month in San Mateo. On the fourth Thursday, it meets at the same time but in Redwood City.

Meeting attendance is mandatory for commissioners.

The panel serves as an advisory body to the supervisors and forms committees to work on specific projects each year. Committees usually fall into the following subject areas: teen stress and happiness, immigrant youth, adolescent needs, legislative, and environmental protection.

People can apply by Friday, June 2, at http://bit.ly/2rpNC2B . For Spanish, go to http://bit.ly/2rZ2m5k .

AIDS grove announces new membership levels

As the National AIDS Memorial Grove enters its 25th year, officials have announced new membership levels in a bid to retain current supporters and add new ones.

In its email newsletter, grove Executive Director John Cunningham and board President Michael Shriver said that in order to maintain the memorial and advance the grove’s mission, financial support is needed.

“That’s why in 2017 – our silver

property is truly a destination wedding location that you may never want to leave. It can accommodate weddings from just a handful of people to hundreds. The hotel is about 30 minutes from Albuquerque, so it makes a good home base for exploring Santa Fe or Albuquerque. The hotel makes getting to Santa Fe easy – it offers a free shuttle to a train that goes directly to the city.

If you prefer to stay in downtown Santa Fe, La Fonda (https:// www.lafondasantafe.com) is the city’s oldest and largest hotel and also regularly hosts destination weddings. Its rooftop patio makes a good backdrop for an outdoor

wedding, with a perfect view of the cathedral across the street. The hotel has a large pool in the courtyard, a rarity for a downtown hotel.

The gay-owned bed and breakfast, the Turquoise Bear B&B (https://www.turquoisebear.com/), has 10 rooms, and is situated in a quiet section of the city, about a 15-minute walk from downtown.

The main part of the hotel is in a historic 19th century building.t For more information, visit Santa Fe’s official tourism website at https://santafe.org.

Contact the author at edwalsh94015@yahoo.com.

invited to bring images and notes to place on the altar.

The series of events through June will also feature a screening of director Patty Berne’s documentary, “Sins Invalid.” The documentary is about a performance project that celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists. The screening is June 8 from 1:30 to 3:20 p.m., at the college’s Multicultural Center, MCC 214.

A pop-up interactive exhibit of the “The Loving Quilt” will happen June 13 as a part of a one-day event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned bans on interracial marriage. The quilt will be featured, along with screenings of award-winning filmmaker Debra A. Wilson’s “Butch Mystique” and “Jumping the Broom: The New Covenant” from 10:30 a.m. to 12:20 p.m., in the Intro to LGBT Studies class.

Queer and Now originally was a one-day conference launched by students about four years ago and was taken over by the De Anza College’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education/Jean Miller Resource Room for Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Neal’s office is committed to making the successful one-day

student-led conference a part of the “foundation” and a “normalizing component of the culture, not just the periphery,” on campus she said.

Her goal is to institutionalize the event and queer issues by integrating LGBT subjects throughout the college campus throughout the year.

“There is a lot of conversation taking place at De Anza about, ‘How do we decolonize the curriculum and campus?’ Part of that is decolonizing gender and orientation and thinking about what does it mean to have a visible presence and not just to do that one time of the year,” said Neal.

It’s been a success, with the community college’s administrators, faculty, and students participating and supporting a variety of events that already have been hosted throughout the campus, said Neal and Scott-Chung.

Queer and Now is open to the public and is funded by the Equity State Initiative and DASB Heritage Months Program. t

anniversary – we are launching a new membership program to create a lasting, stable base of support for the grove for future generations,” the men wrote. “By joining at a level that suits your budget, you play a lasting role in ensuring the influence and significance of the National AIDS Memorial Grove, now and in the future.”

“Friends of the Grove” allows members to give $100-$999. Several benefits are included, such as acknowledgment on the grove’s website and member discounts to ticketed events.

The other level is “Sustaining Friends of the Grove,” which allows donors to give $25 or more a month ($300 annually). Such donors also receive member benefits.

Earlier this year, the grove announced it wants to build a national museum to chronicle the story of the AIDS epidemic. Cunningham said at the time that the grove was having a feasibility study done, which is expected to be completed by the fall.

For more information on becoming a grove member, visit http://www. aidsmemorial.org/membership .

a.m. at San Jose City Hall, 200 E. Santa Clara Street. It will lead to the Pride rally at Plaza De Cesar Chavez at 1 p.m. Both events are organized by members of the LGBTQ community.

“As national Pride Month, June is typically a time to celebrate, but with elected officials challenging LGBTQ civil rights protections across the country, and with an emerging federal pattern of exclusion of LGBTQ-related data and defunding of programs, it is more important than ever for our community and its allies to be civically engaged and publicly visible,” Maribel Martinez, director of the Santa Clara Office of LGBTQ Affairs, said in a statement.

Organizers said that the rally would feature a line-up of diverse local speakers, community engagement tables, and readings of open letters.

“After the change of power in D.C., we were inundated with messages from fellow members of the LGBTQ community who feared their hard-fought rights may be revoked,” said Nathan Svoboda of the Project More Foundation, which is part of the event’s steering committee.

The grassroots march and rally was organized by several groups, including Silicon Valley Pride, the LGBTQ Youth Space, the Rainbow Chamber of Commerce, and the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center.

For more information, visit www.equalitymarchsj.org.t

SJ plans Equality March

If you’re in the Bay Area and want to take part in an affinity march for LGBTQ equality, then San Jose is the place to be next weekend.

San Jose is joining the national movement in support of equality, unity, and Pride in a march and rally Sunday, June 11, the same day that the national Equality March for Unity and Pride takes place in Washington, D.C. The march will take place at 11

For more information, contact Maya Scott-Chung, conceptionsconsulting@gmail.com or (510) 381-0876 or visit http://qcc2.org/ nqaf2017.

Contact the author at heather@ heathercassell.com.

Contact the author at c.laird@ ebar.com.

Legal Notices>> SUMMONS (FAMILY LAW) SUPERIOR COURT, VENTURA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA NOTICE TO RESPONDENT: JENNIFER IVEY, YOU HAVE BEEN SUED. PETITIONER’S NAME IS TIMOTHY CENICEROS CASE NO. D369912

You have 30 CALENDAR DAYS after this Summons and Petition are served on you to file a Response (form FL-120 or FL-123) at the court and have a copy served on the petitioner. A letter or phone call will not protect you. If you do not file your Response on time, the court may make orders affecting your marriage or domestic partnerships, your property, and custody of your children. You may be ordered to pay support and attorney fees and costs.

For legal advice, contact a lawyer immediately.

Get help finding a lawyer at the California Courts Online Self-Help Center (www.courts.ca.gov/ selfhelp), at the California Legal Services website (www.lawhelpca.org) , or by contacting your local county bar association.

NOTICE-RESTRAINING ORDERS ARE ON PAGE 2: These restraining orders are effective against both spouses or domestic partners until the petition is dismissed, a judgment is entered, or the court makes further orders. They are enforceable anywhere in California by any law enforcement officer who has received or seen a copy of them.

FEE WAIVER: If you cannot pay the filing fee, ask the clerk for a fee waiver form. The court may order you to pay back all or part of the fees and costs that the court waived for you or the other party.

Clerk of the Superior Court by J. LUNA, Deputy.

STANDARD FAMILY LAW RESTRAINING ORDERS: Starting immediately, you and your spouse or domestic partner are restrained from: 1.

Removing the minor child or children of the parties, if any, from the state or applying for a new or replacement passport for those minor children without the prior written consent of the other party or an order of the court; 2. Cashing borrowing against, canceling, transferring, disposing of, or changing the beneficiaries of any insurance or other coverage, including life, health, automobile, and disability, held for the benefit of the parties and their minor children; 3. Transferring, encumbering, hypothecating, concealing, or in any way disposing of any property, real or personal, whether community, quasi-community, or separate, without the written consent of the other party or an order of the court, except in the usual course of business or for the necessities of life; and 4.

Creating a nonprobate transfer or modifying a nonprobate transfer in the manner that affects the disposition of property subject to the transfer, without the written consent of the other party or an order of the court. Before revocation of a nonprobate transfer can take effect or a right of survivorship to property can be eliminated, notice of the change must be filed and served on the other party.

You must notify each other of any proposed extraordinary expenditures at least five business days prior to incurring these extraordinary expenditures and account to the court for all extraordinary expenditures made after these restraining orders are effective. However, you may use community property, quasi-community property, or your own separate property to pay an attorney to help you or to pay court costs.

NOTICE - ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE HEALTH INSURANCE: Do you or someone in your household need affordable health insurance? If so, you should apply for Covered California. Covered California can help reduce the cost you pay towards high quality affordable health care. For more information, visit www.coveredca.com. Or call Covered California at 1-800-300-1506.

WARNING – IMPORTANT INFORMATION California law provides that, for purposes of division of property upon dissolution of a marriage or domestic partnership or upon legal separation, property acquired by the parties during marriage or domestic partnership in joint form is presumed to be community property. If either party to this action should die before the jointly held community property is divided, the language in the deed that characterizes how title is held (ie: joint tenancy, tenants in common, or community property) will be controlling and not the community property presumption. You should consult your attorney if you want the community property presumption to be written into the recorded title to the property.

The name and address of the court are SUPERIOR COURT, 800 S. VICTORIA AVENUE, VENTURA, CA 93009; The name and address of the petitioner’s attorney, or the petitioner without an attorney are: TIMOTHY CENICEROS, 257 N. LOMITA, OJAI, CA 93023, 213-304-0862

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUNE 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037582000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ROOTS & BLOOMS, 1177 CALIFORNIA ST #1502, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BRITTNEY KERRIGAN. 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 05/03/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUNE 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037583100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TRANSFORMA THERAPY, 842 CALIFORNIA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ORLANDO ZUNIGA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/01/17.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 03/04/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUN 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037588300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MAYDAY HAULING, 316 HAIGHT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed DAVID DENSON. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 01/22/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/05/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUN 01, 2017

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FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037558500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: TE’SHELIMA, 121 9TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed SARAH KIDANE. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/14/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/14/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUN 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037578500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: NUG MEDICAL CANNABIS DISPENSARY, 1190 BRYANT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103.

This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed BI MZ1, INC. (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/28/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/01/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUN 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037568100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HIGHER GRADE, 518 BRANNAN ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed HGV GROUP, INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/21/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/21/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUN 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037565700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: YELLOW CAB OF SAN FRANCISCO, 2060 NEWCOMB AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124.

This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed BIG DOG CITY CORPORATION (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/20/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/20/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUN 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037574200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HURLEY HOTEL, 201 LEAVENWORTH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed HURLEY HOTEL LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/13/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/27/17.

MAY 11, 18, 25, JUN 01, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037593500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: PROGRESSIVE PALATES, 17 SAN ANDREAS WAY, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94127. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed NICOLE COOPER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/10/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/10/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037577400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE CONFIDENT SPEAKER, 1740 BROADWAY #305, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed RICHARD R. BANNIN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/28/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/28/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037597200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: ESQUIRED LEGAL SEARCH, 2443 FILLMORE ST #3804769, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115.

This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed EMMA RAIMI-ZLATIC. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/11/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/12/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037594100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: LALLY EVENTS, 3018 BAKER ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94123. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed LALLY CLARK. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 02/01/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/11/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037590600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HAIR BY ANTHONY SF, 1504 CHURCH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94131. This business is conducted by an individual and is signed ANTHONY SENADOS CUEVAS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/01/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/09/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037581500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: POP UPS UNLIMITED, 1214 POLK ST #315, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed DERRIK SOARES. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/02/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/03/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017

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FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037567600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: QUIETROCK VIDEO PRODUCTION, 2045 ASCOT DR #A, MORAGA, CA 94556. This business is conducted by a married couple, and is signed VALERIIA KHARLAMOVA & ALEKSEI KHARLAMOVA. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/21/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/21/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037591000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: RAB MOTORS, 1307 EVANS ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124. This business is conducted by a joint venture, and is signed RAMONA L. ADDISON & CANDICE M. WILLIAMS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/01/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/09/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037596500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HOTEL ZOE, 425 NORTH POINT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed CREEDENCE LESSEE LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/12/17.

MAY 18, 25, JUN 01, 08, 2017 ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME IN SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO FILE CNC-17-553055

In the matter of the application of: ANTHONY O’NEAL LEWIS, 1180 HOWARD ST #510, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103, for change of name having been filed in Superior Court, and it appearing from said application that petitioner ANTHONY O’NEAL LEWIS, is requesting that the name TRINAROSE SOJOURNER TRUTH LEWIS AKA TRINAROSE LEWIS AKA TRINA LEWIS AKA TRINAROSE S. LEWIS, be changed to TRINA ROSE LEWIS. Now therefore, it is hereby ordered, that all persons interested in said matter do appear before this Court in Dept. 514, Room 514 on the 25th of July 2017 at 9:00am of said day to show cause why the application for change of name should not be granted.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037604900

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037603900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MR INVITE, 828 TAYLOR ST #22, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94108. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BRIAN HICKEY. 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 05/19/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: YMSF, 1905 PACIFIC AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed TIERSA NUREYEV & YVONNE MOUSER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/15/17.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/19/17.

MAY 25, JUNE 01, 08, 15, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037580500

MAY 25, JUN 01, 08, 15, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037595600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MILE HAWAIIAN BBQ, 91 6TH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BRIAN ZHAO. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/02/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/02/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: COMMUNITY, A WALGREENS PHARMACY #15296, 2262 MARKET ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114.

This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed WALGREEN CO. (IL). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/23/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/11/17.

MAY 25, JUN 01, 08, 15, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037600000

MAY 25, JUN 01, 08, 15, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037602600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: WENDY HEFFNER LMFT, 2282 UNION ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94123. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed WENDY HEFFNER. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/17/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/17/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: INTOACTIONS LLC, 1850 PAGE ST #2, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed INTOACTIONS LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/01/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/18/17.

MAY 25, JUN 01, 08, 15, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037598300

MAY 25, JUN 01, 08, 15, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037612000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: DOMAINPROPICKS, 268 BUSH ST #2511, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94104. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ALBERT CLARK. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/08/17.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/15/17.

MAY 25, JUN 01, 08, 15, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037604300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: AUNTIE AUBEE’S APOTHECARY AND SLOW JAMS, 75 VICKSBURG ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ELIZABETH SUMMERS. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 04/24/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/25/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037611300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: THE UNDERGROUND SMOKE SHOP & GIFT, 875B O’FARRELL ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed ADNAN S. RAMAHI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 08/29/12. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/19/17.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MAYA RICO BY LUCHO, 2071 20TH AVE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94116. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed KELLY MARIA BARBIERI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/24/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/24/17.

MAY 25, JUN 01, 08, 15, 2017

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017

MAY 25, JUNE 01, 08, 15, 2017

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City and County of San Francisco Outreach Advertising June 2017 The Assessment Appeals Board resolves legal and value assessment issues between the Assessor’s office and property owners. We have three vacancies on Board 1, which oversees all downtown properties – high rise residential, office, commercial, hotels. Board 1 also oversees all properties over $50 million in assessed value throughout the City.

Assessment appeal hearings are quasi-judicial, conducted in a manner similar to a court setting, with evidence and testimony presented by the parties. The Board then evaluates the evidence and testimony, and renders its decision.

To be eligible for seat appointment, you must have a minimum of five years professional experience in California as either a: (1) public accountant; (2) real estate broker; (3) attorney; or (4) property appraiser accredited by a nationally recognized organization, or certified by either the Office of Real Estate Appraiser or the State Board of Equalization.

For more information regarding the Assessment Appeals Board call (415) 554-6778.

The San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries presents free exhibitions in three Civic Center locations. City Hall ground floor: Jim Marshall’s 1967, featuring 80 photographs of Summer of Love-era icons by the legendary rock ‘n’ roll photographer. SFAC Main Gallery (War Memorial Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness, Ste. 126): Tiny Bubbles, a contemporary group show showcasing nine artists known for producing dark and often funny narratives set in imaginary worlds; Civic Art Collection Focus: Roy De Forest, including early paintings by the legendary Bay Area Funk artist and Innards and Upwards, A San Francisco Wunderkammer, a magical installation by Alison Pebworth made from and filled with recycled treasures. Lastly, Sugar Circus, a two-person exhibition in partnership with Creativity Explored at C + M (Coffee and Milk) cafe, located in the lobby of the Veterans Building. Visit sfartscommission.org for more information.

Count on WIC for Healthy Families WIC is a federally funded nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children.

You may qualify if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, or just had a baby; or have a child under age 5; and have a low to medium income; and live in California. Newly pregnant women, migrant workers, and working families are encouraged to apply.

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WIC provides Nutrition Education and Health information, breastfeeding support, checks for healthy foods (like fruits and vegetables), and referrals to medical providers and community services.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037610500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BAYWORKS PLUMBING, 43 RANDOLPH ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94132. This business is conducted by an individual, and is signed BORIS AUGUSTIN. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/24/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/24/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037600700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: EYEBROW CARE, 3401 CESAR CHAVEZ ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110. This business is conducted by a general partnership, and is signed TARA THAPA & BISSU SAPKOTA CHHETRI. The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/17/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/17/17.

JUNE 01 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037615200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SIMPLYSHE, 149 NEW MONTGOMERY ST 4TH FL, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94105. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed MISSION PETS, INC (DE). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 03/01/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/26/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037607500

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: KOJA KITCHEN SF, 865 MARKET ST #FE10, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed SET KJ INC. (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/22/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037608300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: HERNANDEZ ENGINEERING, 850 RANKIN ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed M. HERNANDEZ CONSTRUCTION, INC. (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 06/08/09. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/23/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037608900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: POKE ORIGIN, 716 IRVING ST, SAN FRANCISCO,

CA 94122. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed TAKUYA INVESTMENT INC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/23/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/23/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037609000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: POKE BOWL, 3251 20TH AVE #250A, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94132. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed POKE STONE INC (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/23/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/23/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037603100

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: DESIGN THEORY HARDWARE, 336 HAYES ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102. This business is conducted by a corporation, and is signed CAN-AUSSIE INC (CA).

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/01/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/18/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037609300

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: SCOTT STREET PROPERTIES, 230 SCOTT ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117.This business is conducted by a married couple, and is signed ANGUS WHYTE & THOMAS GREXA PHILLIPS.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 07/05/07.The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/24/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037608200

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: MCH DEVELOPMENT, 850 RANKIN ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94124. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed MCH DEVELOPMENT, LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on NA. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/23/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017 FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT FILE A-037604700

The following person(s) is/are doing business as: BLACK SERUM, 310 VALENCIA ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94103. This business is conducted by a limited liability company, and is signed BLACK SERUM LLC (CA). The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 05/19/17. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 05/19/17.

JUNE 01, 08, 15, 22, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT DISTRICT NOTICE TO PROPOSERS –GENERAL INFORMATION The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (herein “District” or “BART”) will be requesting proposals for Graffiti Removal Services Districtwide to provide services hereinafter described for its graffiti removal for the Districts East Bay and West Bay locations, more particularly identified as Attachment A-1 and A-2, respectively, in Exhibit 1 of the RFP. The Scope of Services and associated requirements are in the Request for Proposal (RFP.) Proposals must be received by 2:00 P.M., local time, July 11, 2017 at Bay Area Rapid Transit District, 300 Lakeside Drive, 23rd Floor, Oakland, CA 94612.

The request for Graffiti Removal Services Districtwide entered into pursuant to this RFP will be will be for three (3) years, with the District options to extend the Agreement for up to two (2) additional one-year periods, subject to termination, as provided for in the Agreement. The District intends to issue two (2) awards resulting from this RFP; one for the East Bay Locations (Attachment A-1 of Exhibit 1) and one for the West Bay Locations (Attachment A-2 of Exhibit 1) in the RFP. Prospective proposers who are not currently registered on BART’s procurement portal to do business with bart, are required to register on the bart procurement portal on-line at https://suppliers.Bart.Gov/ in order to obtain solicitation documents, updates, and any addenda issued on line.

Proposers who have not registered on the bart procurement portal prior to submitting a proposal, and did not download the solicitation documents for this solicitation on line so as to be listed as an on-line plan holder for this solicitation, will not be eligible for award of this agreement.

Proposer should note that this agreement is subject to the district’s small business program that includes a preference of 5% of the lowest responsible proposer’s price, up to a maximum of $250,000, for a certified small business prime consultant submitting a proposal on this agreement. Proposer’s attention is directed to sections i.F and i.G below which set forth the district’s small business program requirements. Inquiries regarding the district’s small business program shall be directed to the district’s office of civil rights, 300 lakeside drive, 16th floor, oakland, ca 94612, telephone at (510) 464-6100, or to BART’s website at: www. bart.gov/ocr.

A pre-proposal meeting will be held on friday, june 2, 2017 at 10:00 a.m. In the bart offices located at 300 Lakeside Drive, 17th floor conference room no. 1700, Oakland, CA 94612. Prospective proposers are urged to make every effort to attend this only scheduled pre-proposal meeting.

Proposals must be received by 2:00 p.m., Local time, july 11, 2017 at the address listed in the RFP. Submission of a proposal shall constitute a firm offer to the district for one hundred and eighty (180) calendar days from date of proposal submission.

Upon conclusion of the pre-proposal meeting, please direct all questions concerning the scope of services and other administrative issues of this RFP to Steve Alva, contract administrator, via e-mail at salva@bart.gov.

Any questions regarding the small business preference, please contact Stella Becerra at sbecerr@bart.Gov. - Thank you for your interest in district procurements.

PROCUREMENT DEPARTMENT 6/1/17 CNS-3015783#

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You may qualify for WIC if you receive Medi-Cal, CalFresh (Food Stamps), or CalWORKS (TANF) benefits. A family of four can earn up to $3,793 before tax per month and qualify.

Enroll early! Call today to see if you qualify and to make an appointment. Call City and County of San Francisco WIC Program at 415-575-5788.

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Come and see your local government at work, the Board of Supervisors hold weekly meetings most Tuesdays at 2:00 p.m. in Rm. 250 of San Francisco City Hall.

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Without pride, it’s just a parade.

Reach the largest audience of San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ consumers, during their proudest season of the year.

Not every community can turn a simple stroll down Market Street into one of the world’s most extravagant displays of diversity. The Bay Area Reporter salutes those who inspire us by being true to them selves, sharing that truth with others, and proving that the simple power of pride can not only change minds, it can change the world.

The Bay Area Reporter, undisputed newspaper of record for the San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ community since 1971, is now accepting space reservations for our June 22 San Francisco Pride edition, our largest issue of the year.

Distributed widely throughout SF and the Bay Area, our annual PRIDE edition offers the most comprehensive coverage, and resources, for the estimated 1 million+ people, locals and tourists alike, who attend the annual parade and celebrations.

SPACE RESERVATIONS ARE NOW BEING ACCEPTED FOR OUR JUNE 22 SAN FRANCISCO PRIDE EDITION.

Call Scott Wazlowski at (415) 829-8937 or email advertising@ebar.com for more information.

Frameline fix

26

Odd couple

Summer fare

ebar.com

Out &About

25

O&A

22

Vol. 47 • No. 22 • June 1-7, 2017

www.ebar.com/arts

Courtesy SF DocFest

Redemptive documentaries

by David Lamble

I

“New Boobies” by Jerome Caja. Nail polish on paper in found frame.

Back from the edge!

by Sura Wood

“T

iny Bubbles,” a phrase that prompts associations with old Lawrence Welk reruns or memories of wobbly champagne toasts, is actually the title of a new group show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries (SFAC). The exhibition, the first in a series featuring objects from the city’s Civic Art Collection, is designed as a dialogue with the work of Roy De Forest, the iconoclastic Northern California artist who’s been a ubiquitous presence of late; four of his pieces are on display. Curator Steven Wolf, whose former gallery had a history of presenting original, sometimes transgressive LGBTQ material, brings a similarly adventurous, irreverent approach that’s anything but academic or obvious to his latest project. The intro text, where he lays out his novel thinking on De Forest, is an entertaining must-read.

See page 30 >>

Courtesy SF Silent Film Festival

Courtesy SFAC Galleries

Scene from director Riley Hayes’ “Homo the Documentary.”

f you can’t afford travel, accommodations or tickets to Sundance, the folks who stage the 16th San Francisco Documentary Festival (aka SF DocFest) have a deal for you. From May 31-June 15, DocFest unspools at SF’s Roxie, Vogue and Alamo Drafthouse.

A quick glance at their foldout schedule reveals over 50 feature programs at the main venues, plus another six heaping servings of doc shorts. The theme is reconciliation, redemption and the possibility of returning home, all in a punk-rock spirit, See page 27 >>

Lost worlds regained!

by Erin Blackwell

T

o enter the Castro Theatre is a thrill, to sit can be a competition, the vibes and the decor induce awe, the Wurlitzer provokes giddiness, and singing “San Francisco” might make you cry. And then there are the movies.

Any movie will do, but when you get to time travel via assiduously preserved period document, well, that’s a special kind of mass hypnosis.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is back for a limited run of four days, 16 features, assorted odds and ends, live accompaniment, and esoteric glimpses of “the international preservation scene,” starting today, June 1.

See page 25 >>

Poster for “Filibus” (1915), the exploits of an Italian baroness who enjoys dressing as a man and owns a well-staffed dirigible.

{ SECOND OF THREE SECTIONS }

Without pride, it’s just a parade.

SPACE RESERVATIONS ARE NOW BEING ACCEPTED FOR OUR JUNE 22 SAN FRANCISCO PRIDE EDITION.

Call Scott Wazlowski at (415) 829-8937 or email advertising@ebar.com for more information.

<< Out There

22 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

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here’s a certain amount of buzz surrounding Frameline 41, the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival coming up this June 1525. Some of that advance excitement attends the opening-night attraction, “The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin,” a bio-pic of the beloved San Francisco author from director Jennifer Kroot and editor/co-director Bill Weber. But a lot of it results from other diverse entries in the film fest’s full slate of offerings, the state of queer cinema represented by 147 films from 19 countries.

Last week’s press conference at the Oasis nightclub South of Market doubled as a launch party, which meant that serious journalists were greatly outnumbered by blogger hobbyists and members of the general public, presumably present in recognition of their outsize love of film. Still we came away with plenty of dish. Here’s a brief rundown of some of the highlights.

The opening doc centers on Maupin, the living author perhaps most closely associated with our little cowtown, and “shines a light on the enchantment of this place and its cast of characters,” said Frameline executive director Frances Wallace. But the closing-night film, “After Louie,” from first-time director Vincent Gagliostro, sounds equally enticing.

The truly fabulous Alan Cumming stars as a gay man who has survived the plague years but not without scars, embarking on a romance with a younger man (Zachary Booth).

The impressive cast of supporting players includes David Drake, Justin Vivian Bond, Wilson Cruz, and Joey Arias. Cumming, who Wallace said gives “the performance of a lifetime” in the film, will receive the 2017 Frameline Award at the closingnight screening, and deservedly so.

Director of exhibition and programming Des Buford pointed to the large number of trailblazers we meet in some of the festival’s high-profile films, such powerhouse musical talents as iconic macha chanteuse Chavela Vargas (“Chavela”), Whitney Houston (“Whitney. ‘Can I Be Me’), and former American Idol contestant

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Both photos: Courtesy Frameline

Above: Transgender pioneer Marsha P. Johnson, from director David France’s “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson.”

Below: Scene from director Isaac Julien’s classic film “Looking for Langston” (1989).

Todrick Hall (“Behind the Curtain: Todrick Hall”). Other icons of gay culture explored in this year’s offerings include transgender pioneer Marsha P. Johnson (“The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson”), producer Allan Carr (“The Fabulous Allan Carr”) and the immortal illustrator/ cultural influencer Tom of Finland (doc of same name).

A series of screenings and panels, “Barriers & Breakthroughs: Illuminating Filmmakers of Color Before and Beyond ‘Moonlight’” asks whether there’s been a real change in representation post-Oscar win for “Moonlight.”

Part of that series, director Isaac Julien’s classic “Looking for Langston [Hughes]” (1989) is one of several queer “golden oldies” getting screenings at the fest, including directors Harry Dodge and Silas Howard’s “By Hook or By Crook” (2001) and director Donna Deitch’s lesbian classic “Desert Hearts” (1985).

A new category, “Episodic,” points to the growing importance of serial and web-based content, and greatly bolsters the festival’s minority representation, both in front of and behind the camera. The festival’s tag-line, “Genre Queer,” perhaps points to this new disruption of categories.

US-based features include director Trudie Styler’s “Freak Show,” based on club-kid/author James St. James’ young adult novel, which offers a knockout cast including Bette Midler, Abigail Breslin, Laverne Cox and John McEnroe. Tony winner, San Francisco native Lena Hall (“Hedwig”) stars as singer-songwriter “Becks” in directors Daniel Powell and Elizabeth Rohrbaugh’s

Centerpiece feature of the same name. Director Jennifer Reeder’s “Signature Move” is set in Chicago’s Pakistani community. On the edgy, evil front, it’s hard to beat director Marc Meyers’ “My Friend Dahmer,” the portrait of budding sociopath Jeffrey Dahmer.

Senior programmer Peter L. Stein introduced the fest’s World Cinema films, hailing from 17 countries and unfolding in 10 languages. Centerpiece film “Sueno en Otra Idioma” (“I Dream in Another Language”), from director Ernesto Contreras, takes place deep in the Veracruz rainforest. South African director John Trengove’s “The Wound” concerns an indigenous tribe’s manhood initiation rituals.

Director Pouria Heidary Oureh’s “Apricot Groves” features a transmasculine American who returns to Armenia to claim a traditional bride. It’s that rare film that plays in Armenian and Persian dialects.

The number of feature documentaries comes to 26, including director Josh Howard’s “The Lavender Scare,” about the 1953 witch-hunt of gays in the federal government, and director Yony Leyser’s “Queercore: How To Punk a Revolution,” whose talking heads include Lynn Breedlove, Pansy Division, Tom Jennings, and many others. Shorts programs include such perennial favorites as “Fun in Boys Shorts,” “Fun in Girls Shorts,” and “Bi Candy,” but also “Transtastic” and “Portraits of Resistance.” As the Frameline programmers reminded us, short efforts often portend future features.

There’s much more on offer, but all we can do at this point is urge you to find a Frameline 41 catalog or go online at frameline.org, and choose whatever rocks your own particular queer boat. Tickets go on sale to the general public on June 2.t

On the web

This week, find Victoria A. Brownworth’s Lavender Tube column, “Looking for LGBTs during Pride month,” and Out & About online at ebar.com.

<< Music

24 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Shostakovich turns on the dark

by Philip Campbell

F

or the past two weeks the San Francisco Symphony has been keeping the lights on at Davies Symphony Hall with concerts featuring noted guest conductors, one making an impressive and overdue debut, and visits with excellent vocal and instrumental soloists. Both programs were weighted with familiar symphonic works, varied by a few infrequently heard shorter pieces and highlighted with the first SFS performances of Shostakovich’s dark and yearning song cycle, “Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti,” Opus 145a (1974).

Expectations were upended by the results. The biggest success turned out to be a surprising and smashing interpretation last week of Tchaikovsky’s mighty warhorse Symphony No. 5 Marco Borggreve in E minor. Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony German bass-baritone Matthias Goerne Manfred Honeck won the sang Shostakovich at Davies Symphony Hall. most extended standing

ovation of the season in his remarkable local debut.

The palest impression was made by Veronika Eberle playing Schumann’s lovely, but ultimately unmemorable Violin Concerto in D minor. Her introduction to SFS listeners left no doubt of her capabilities, but did little to excite much enthusiasm.

Conductor Roberto Abbado, nephew of the late great Claudio Abbado, returned to DSH to lead the orchestra in Busoni’s richly scored Music from “Turandot” Suite (1905). He also framed Eberle’s proficient rendition of the Schumann Concerto and rounded everything off with a tight reading of Mendelssohn’s endearing Symphony No. 3 in A minor, “Scotch” (or “Scottish,” as it has later been more correctly dubbed).

It was a good, solid and uninspiring bill.

Roberto Abbado is really betterknown conducting opera, and his uncle’s glowing recorded version of the Third set the standard for that old chestnut many years ago.

His version was fine, too, and the orchestra played beautifully, but it is a shame Roberto’s latest appearance, supported by the Louise M. Davies Guest Conductor Fund, couldn’t have offered more adventurous fare. He has premiered a number of works by contemporary composers, including Americans Ned Rorem and Charles Wuorinen.

Why not sneak them into the mix?

The audience was already happy with the Schumann, and San Francisco audiences are usually game for something different.

Last week’s bill certainly offered a special event, featuring German bass-baritone Matthias Goerne in Shostakovich’s troubled setting of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ponderous verses, translated into Russian and presented in DSH with English supertitles. This is late Shostakovich, and it illuminates our understanding of his mood late in life. He still had some hope left, but he was weary after a lifetime of struggle. His masterful way with orchestration makes performance

itche K y n Ga S e

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of the orchestral version preferable to the piano edition, but it also adds a challenge for the singer.

Goerne is adept at lieder singing; his Schubert “Winterreise” at SF Opera Lab in March 2016 proved his soulful understanding. He also has a big enough voice to fill Davies Hall without amplification. His ability to characterize the text and remain audible was a great help in following the long and generally somber verses.

If the cycle moved with a gloomy tread, conductor Honeck seized every opportunity to light up the dark corners with orchestra members’ collaboration. Shostakovich was always a man of the theatre, even in his most despairing scores.

His innate sense of drama was also well-served by Goerne’s textured interpretation. By the time Buonarroti’s words were finally translated into English, only a multilingual listener could judge their impact.

Honeck and Goerne made sure we got the essence.

Honeck left us standing and cheering with his commanding Tchaikovsky Fifth. Cleaning up performance traditions that have sentimentalized the elegant work, the new face at DSH had the orchestra playing like a gloriously tuned machine. There was no lack of warmth, and the romantic aspects of the beloved music were always apparent, but wow, the many virtuoso pages were simply overpowering. Everyone likes big and loud, and standing ovations are commonplace; this was a genuine cause for cheers. If Honeck had to wait too long for his SFS debut (also sponsored by the Louise M. Davies Guest Fund), he definitely ensured a return invitation.

June highlights

As the SFS enters June and San Francisco’s Pride Month, there are a number of enticing events that might interest our out-of-town visitors and local listeners as well.

Guest conductors Susanna Mälkki and Vasily Petrenko (who has backtracked on his ill-advised comments on women conductors) will start the month.

Mälkki has already proven her mastery at DSH, and she will partner this time with pianist Garrick Ohlsson for the delightful Beethoven Concerto No. 1. She finishes the night with Stravinsky’s savagely exciting “The Rite of Spring.”

Petrenko follows her with superstar violinist Joshua Bell pairing up for Lalo’s “Symphonie espagnole.”

Petrenko gets in touch with his Russian roots with Rachmaninoff ’s gorgeous Symphony No. 1.

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas returns just in time for Pride Week with “Music for a Modern Age,” the clunky re-titling of what used to be called “American Mavericks.” Just because the new name seems pitched to new listeners doesn’t mean the menu isn’t filled with delicious and rare American fare. The concert is studded with Charles Ives, Lou Harrison and George Antheil, and the West Coast premiere of MTT’s own composition, “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind.” Mezzo-soprano Measha Brueggergosman will be the soloist. Whatever we’re calling it these days, MTT always make a blast with offbeat American music.

The season closes at the end of June with a personal favorite, Berlioz’s exquisitely subtle and passionate “Romeo et Juliette.” Joining the orchestra and Ragnar Bohlin’s wonderful SFS Chorus are tenor Nicholas Phan, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni. Talk about luxury casting! Thankfully, the performances will be recorded live for the organization’s SFS Media label.t

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Theatre>>

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 25

Stimulated in the flyovers

Jessica Palopoli

Julia Brothers, left, and Susi Damilano play unlikely housemates in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at San Francisco Playhouse.

by Richard Dodds

M

any of us grew up around someone your parents identified as “a bad influence.” You may have even been the bad influence that the other parents were talking about. In Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” the influencer is a divorced middle-aged woman, and the influenced is another divorced middle-aged woman. Or so it seems until the roles are reversed.

San Francisco Playhouse is presenting the Bay Area premiere of “The Roommate,” and also the introduction to the shining-onthe-horizon young playwright.

“The Roommate” is not without its swerves but holds closer to the middle of the road than many of

<<

Silverman’s more off-the-wall or in-your-face plays. There are spikes, both comedic and dramatic, but director Becca Wolff ’s production and its performances don’t heat up “The Roommate” much beyond a temperate setting on Nina Ball’s tidy kitchen-table set.

Yet even in its simmering moods, “The Roommate” sustains engagement through its intermissionless 100 minutes, often through oddcouple comedy, and then through an unfolding series of secrets and their consequences. Both Sharon, an Iowa homemaker who has advertised for a roommate, and Robyn, a hip refugee from the Bronx, are in the throes of mid-life crises of very different sorts, and together they find both balm and breakage.

When Robyn casually lets drop that she is gay, Sharon tries to demonstrate her sophistication in such matters. “Some of my son’s friends are homosexual people,” she says.

And when the vegan Robyn pulls a carton of almond milk from the refrigerator, Sharon recoils as if the box had a skull and crossbones on it. Their bonding begins with a lazy theatrical device: the pot-smoking Robyn gets Sharon stoned for the first time.

Susi Damilano and Julia Brothers are fine as the fledgling roommates, with Brothers bringing more nuance to what are both relatively understated performances. This is truer in the earlier scenes, with Damilano then finding brighter sparks as Sharon becomes intrigued – even stimulated – as she drags facts about a disreputable past from a reluctant Robyn. The notion of being another Thelma and Louise, albeit while maintaining membership in her book club and not neglecting the chores, becomes a false intoxicant for Sharon.

As disparate as Sharon and Robyn are, they share a deeply rooted regret in different levels of estrangement from their grown children.

But Robyn does have a piercingly cynical philosophy on the subject.

When Sharon frets that she doesn’t think her son even likes her, Robyn replies, “Our children don’t have to like us. They just have to live long enough to become us.”t

ebar.com

“The Roommate” will run at San Francisco Playhouse through July 1. Tickets are $20$125. Call (415) 677-9596 or go to sfplayhouse.org.

SF Silent Film

From page 21

Centenarian cinema is an acquired taste, which, once acquired, leaves you longing for more. Lucky us to have fabled cinephile Anita Monga, erstwhile programmer of the Castro on a nightly basis, in a return engagement as the monarch of all things flickering, black-and-white, tinted, believed lost, restored, cherished, carefully selected, and on occasion, even hand-cranked.

Nothing, except maybe actual silver nitrate, is too good for her Castro audients. Once again, the amateur filmgoer is faced with a dizzying array of films from nations European, American, and Japanese, of every conceivable genre or mood, dating from 1912-27.

In the absence of dialogue, the image reigns supreme, Courtesy SF Silent Film Festival sucking your soul out through your eyes to engage with a Scene from “The Dumb Girl of Portici” (1916). dancing shadow in a movement of emotions as intense as it is ephemeral. There’s space as the hapless detective. (6/3, pean politics and art condensed into something about monochrome 2:30 p.m.) a tasty nugget to entertain and edify that focuses the mind and dispels Before there was “Jurassic Park” the masses. Pennsylvanian director distraction, rivets the attention and (1993) based on Michael Crichton’s Lois Weber was a prodigy of cinema confounds the senses by reducing novel, there was “The Lost World” who made 300+ films with a miseverything in the world to a rectan(1925) based on Arthur Conan sionary’s zeal for improving the lot gular composition of light and dark.

Doyle’s. If I had to watch only one of the starving. (6/2, 3:30 p.m.)

Cinema killed vaudeville, for which movie for the rest of my life, it might On the opposite end of the scale, I’ll never forgive it, but the trade-off be this one, because of the Claymathere’s “Filibus” (1915), a surreal are these startling glimpses of great tion brontosaurus whose wibblyserial exhibiting the exploits of an performers long dead adapting their wobbly neck simply slays me. Proof Italian baroness who enjoys dressshtick to the confines of the camera that humans can cohabit with dinoing as a man and driving a detective in order to reach a fickle public. saurs up there on the screen, thanks mad with her innovative burgling Today, we are that public, unto intrepid adventurers who brave techniques. Spoiler: she has a welldreamt of 100 years ago, sitting and the Amazon to make contact with staffed dirigible that no one seems watching Russian prima ballerina a lost tribe of Tyrannosaurus rex. to notice in the sky overhead, allowAnna Pavlova as the mute sister of Utter nonsense of the first order. ing her to pop down onto balconies a rebel fisherman in “The Dumb Magisterial Wallace Beery and and cause all manner of consternaGirl of Portici” (1916), based on the doe-eyed Bessie Love fight for your tion. The film’s whimsical improbFrench grand opera “Masaniello” sympathy with pterodactyls. (6/4, 4 abilities bathe your frontal cortex in (1828), about the 1647 rebellion in p.m.)t a dreamlike soup of suggestion until Naples, Italy, against the Hapsburg you feel as helpless to defend the Spanish occupation. Thus are Eurocategorical imperatives of time and Info: silentfilm.org.

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<< Film

26 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Still more summer movies

by David Lamble

A

last list of reminders that summers are no longer a dead zone at the movies for adults.

All Eyez on Me Benny Boom directs this tribute bio-pic about the late rapper Tupac Shakur (Demetrius Shipp, Jr.).

The Book of Henry Jaeden Lieberber is an 11-year-old prodigy called upon to save the girl next door, abused by her stepfather. The ever-reliable Naomi Watts is mom.

With Sarah Silverman and Jacob Tremblay.

Cars 3 The hit Pixar animation series returns, with characters voiced by Owen Wilson, Cristela Alonzo and Armie Hammer.

47 Meters Down A film that proves that actors will take almost any assignment to be in pictures.

Here two damsels play the role assigned Richard Dreyfus in the original Jaws: stuck in a shark cage cut loose from the mother ship.

Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started It All This is the story of how the Eastern Spiritual Movement got a foothold in America.

Harmonium In this Cannes award-winner from Koji Fukada, a father allows an ex-con to live next door to his family.

The Journey The bitterness of the decades-long war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland is dramatized in an imaginary car ride shared by mortal enemies: Protestant militant Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall) and IRA leader Martin McGuinness (Colm Meany) at the time of the 2006 peace talks.

Lost in Paris Fiona Gordan and hubby Dominique Abel star in a comedy about a Canadian’s misadventures amid the treasures of French culture.

Maudie Sally Hawkins plays Nova Scotian folk artist Maud Lewis, housekeeper and later wife to a grumpy Ethan Hawke.

Moka This Swiss-set revenge thriller finds a mom inserting herself into the life of a driver she believes killed her son. With Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.

Frederic Mermoud directs.

Once Upon a Time in Venice Bruce Willis is a Venice Beach, CA detective whose beloved pooch is held for ransom. With John Goodman.

Pray for Rain A journalist finds that the drought has increased the crime rate in her Central Valley community. With Annabelle Stephenson and Jane Seymour.

Rough Night A bachelorette party goes horribly wrong when one of the guests accidentally kills a male stripper. With Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Ilana Glazer and Zoe Kravitz.

Score: A Film Music Documentary Big names in the business illustrate the craft of writing movie music: John Williams, Danny Elfman, Quincy Jones, and Thomas Newman.

The Bad Batch This dystopian fantasy finds a young woman (Suki Waterhouse) lost in a desert community run by cannibals and misfits.

The Big Sick Zoe Kazan is a girl in a coma, leaving her Pakistaniborn standup-comedy husband to cope.

In Transit The final film from famed docmaker Albert Maysles (he died in 2015) tracks the route of Amtrak’s Empire Builder passenger train from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest.

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press The Hulk Hogan lawsuit that destroyed the Gawker website is examined for its implications for

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The Ornithologist Portuguese filmmaker Joao Pedro Rodrigues follows a bird-watcher on a journey of discovery.

Transformers: The Last Knight Another Michael Bay film about giant robots, with humans Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Hopkins tagging along.

Baby Driver Ansel Elgort is a getaway driver who brooks no interference. Edgar Wright’s action comedy got raves at the South by Southwest Festival.

Pop Aye A Thai man buys an elephant from his youth and sets out on a journey with the animal.

The House A scheme to raise college tuition for their daughter leads a couple to start a casino in their home. With Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell.

Inconceivable Nicky Whelan is a mother new to town, who moves in with a married couple (Gina Gershon, Nicolas Cage) and discovers troubling intimacy issues.

The Little Hours Jeff Baena tells the story of medieval nuns who follow odd vows allowing for promiscuous sex and frank language.

The Skyjacker’s Tale The forgotten story of the 1984 hijacking of an American Airlines plane.

13 Minutes The director of Downfall returns with a gripping drama about the brave German who tried and failed to kill Hitler in 1939. Oliver Hirschbiegel coaxes a magnificent performance from Christian Friedel as the doomed would-be assassin Georg Eiser.

The Wound The attempt of a working man from Queenstown to save a young Johannesburg street urchin becomes a moving fable in this critically acclaimed South African drama.

Lemon Does Sundance have a sense of humor? Great comedy rarely emerges from Park City’s snowy environs. Here an annoying drama teacher (Brett Gelmen acting out his director wife’s script) tests the patience of everyone in his life: Judy Greer, Michael Cera and Gillian Jacobs.

Logan Lucky Was Steven Soderbergh dragged out of retirement to helm this heist caper? Adam Driver

Demetrius Shipp, Jr. portrays the late rapper Tupac Shakur in director Benny Boom’s All Eyez on Me.

and Channing Tatum are brothers lured by the cash at a local speedway. Partners-in-crime include Riley Keough, Hilary Swank, Seth MacFarlane, Katie Holmes, and Daniel Craig.

The Unknown Girl Belgium’s filmmaking Dardenne Brothers showcase a doctor (Adele Haenel) whose conscience is pricked when her failure to answer a late-night ring results in the body of a young woman on her doorstep. The doctor aims to get off the hook. With Dardenne regulars Jeremie Renier and Olivier Gourmet.

Beach Rats Eliza Hittman, whose 2014 first feature It Felt like Love debuted at Sundance, returns with

the tale of a confused Brooklyn teen caught between misbehaving buddies, potential girlfriends and the dark world of online chats with older men.

The Teacher In 1966, what we now call the Czech Republic was ruled by Russian-dispatched thugs.

In that year a tiny B&W romance, Jan Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, a fragile comedy-drama about a naive train dispatcher’s brief fling at love, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Fifty years later, Jan Hrebejk takes a poke at the thugs who held sway over his countrymen in the 80s. Hrebejk’s timid teacher asks students, “What do your parents do?” Oscar awaits the answer.t

Shroud of mystery

ASL interpretation Fri June 16

by Jim Piechota Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney Boylan; Crown Books, $25

J W W W. F R E S H M E AT P R O D U C T I O N S . O R G

t

ennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender activist, collegiate academic, and distinguished memoirist with over a dozen books to her credit, has recently released Long Black Veil, a thrilling suspense novel that mines the complexities of identity and probes the intertwined lives of

a group of college graduates who are forever damaged by a night of spooky fun.

In 1980, a collective of restless students, friends, a young boy, and a high school teacher – all thirsty for a ghostly spookfest before they finish school – ventures into the shadowy confines of Philadelphia’s dilapidated, long-shuttered Eastern State Penitentiary on an exploratory expedition.

Panic ensues when they realize they’ve become locked inside, and each soon discovers, in an even more horrifying revelation, that one of the group has vanished. Though each of them manages to escape, the resulting trauma of their missing friend causes years of torment and repressed anguish.

Though the novel has some difficulty securing its footing from the opening chapters, Boylan reshuffles her characters and plot points, and regains narrative momentum by sprinting the story decades into the future, where the unsolved homicide continues to haunt the original classmates. Adding to the intrigue is some newly discovered evidence that brings the case back into the spotlight for dogged police detectives.

Now-prominent chef Jon Casey,

a darling of the culinary world, is targeted as the killer, and only one in the group, a Maine-based travel writer now naming herself Judith Carrigan, has the proof that can set her friend free of the accusations.

Though Judith’s transgender odyssey may seem like old news to her now, she has failed to disclose her original identity to her own family. Her involvement with this new investigation could blow the lid off her former life, expose her “secret” to the quiet township she resides in, and have disastrous consequences for her married life.

There are many themes at play in the novel. Boylan appears to revel in probing the nuances of one’s past life and how it can affect the present; and in placing a transgender character at the core of the melodrama. As a work of suspense, the book can be difficult to put down in the final third – not for the mystery, which resolves itself rather unconvincingly, but for the amiability of its characters. This gang, and Boylan’s knack for dark humor and snappy prose, drives the book. By the time all is said and done and the mystery is no more, there remains a relatable group of scarred individuals who must wrestle with the realities of aging while attempting to bury a past that refuses to let them rest in peace.t

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Film>>

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 27

Courtesy SF DocFest

Scene from director Laura Paglin’s “Unseen.”

<<

SF DocFest

From page 21

Then there are the parties: the opening-night bash at the DNA Lounge (375 11th St.), where bands include the Pathogens, the Love Songs, Kamala and the Karnivores, and Hammerbombs; Smiths SingAlong at the Roxie (6/2, 9 p.m.); the Bad Art Gallery returns (518 Valencia, 6/3, 8 p.m.); and Ferris Bueller Bingo, with open bar, prizes, and of course, Bueller! (518 Valencia, 6/10, 9 p.m.)

“Homo the Documentary” Riley Hayes is the point man for a gaggle of idealistic straight youth who convert a van into a mobile film unit and set out across the American heartland to find out why otherwise intelligent people lose their bearings when it comes to their LGBTQ fellow citizens. The trip comes a year before Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s historic ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. The trip has its zany moments, including a risibly pompous Bible-thumper who has to be seen to be believed, plus some quirky pit-stops in Mormon country. We discover that, while young people are not always enlightened, they don’t seem to feel that queers pose any real threat to their own pursuits of happiness.

(Roxie, 6/1, 7) “Unseen” Laura Paglin presents a real-life horror story that will stay with you. Unfolding in a Cleveland, Ohio hood that appears to have been ground central for the crack cocaine epidemic, the story features a villain right out of central casting, a drug-dealer/pimp who lures 11 African American women to a house in a slum where he tortures and murders them. Painstakingly assembled with survivor and bystander interviews, the film raises disturbing questions about the failure of the American justice system to protect the vulnerable.

Using police-gathered footage and chats with witnesses including an immigrant convenience-store owner who raises non-PC concerns, “Unseen” is a pioneering use of the doc medium. It will prick the conscience of any viewer who still possesses one. (Roxie, 6/8, 11) “Bogalusa Charm” Steve Richardson searches for and finds the hidden virtues of a Louisiana papermill town previously known for its stinky air and racial bias. The film opens on “Miss Dixie,” a white matron who for 27 years has taken it upon herself to educate young women ages 10-25 on the proper way to carry themselves around the opposite sex. This charm school becomes a device for introducing us to a plethora of “local color.” (Roxie, 6/11, 15) “Resistance is Life” Kurdish filmmaker Apo W. Bazidi tackles his people’s struggle to escape ISIS and claim their homeland. Bazidi finds wonderful collaborators in a refugee Kurdish family with an articulate

young daughter. As the film informs us, the Kurds, now numbering upwards of 40 million souls spread across four countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey), were cheated out of their own piece of real estate by a post-WWI treaty that gave their land to unfriendly neighbors. The film runs down a bit at the end, but provides important ammunition for any just and lasting settlement of the region’s ongoing troubles.

(Roxie, 6/11, 12) “Blue Velvet Revisited” I admit to a 30-year love affair with David Lynch’s genius work about a boy, a girl and a severed ear. The equally “BV”-besotted German filmmaker Peter Braatz takes 8mm footage, still photos and audio recordings from the original shoot and frames them into a dreamy collage that gets to the heart of what Lynch intended.

His surreal nightmare has the 1950s speaking directly to the 80s as if the 70s had never happened. When “Blue Velvet” first appeared, I saw it 11 and a half times, until the projector broke down at screening #12.

Don’t miss this sublime reunion with Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont as he rides in the back seat of evil daddy Dennis Hopper’s souped-up death wagon. As Hopper’s Frank Booth snarls, “What’s this fuck have to do with anything?” we watch in stunned silence as a homoerotic beatdown unfolds between the two men. Queer life will never be the same at the movies.

(Roxie, 6/4, 8) “Nat Bates for Mayor” Bradley Berman and Eric Weiss go behind the scenes of Richmond, CA citizens’ ongoing struggle to breathe in the shadow of the Chevron oil refinery. (Roxie, 6/10, 15) “Memories of a Penitent Heart” The niece of a man who died from AIDS before the cocktail creates a moving remembrance with the assistance of an estranged lover.

(Roxie, 6/4; Vogue, 6/13) “Mabel, Mabel Tiger Trainer” Leslie Zemeckis recalls the hair-raising career of a circus wild-animal trainer who gained fame and scars in the Wild West days of circus life in the 20s and 30s. (Roxie, 6/2; Vogue, 6/11) “End of the Road” The unvarnished story of American war resisters and their Canadian buddies during a time that oddly resembles this one. (Roxie, 6/4, 11) “Almost Sunrise” Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco follow Iraqi war vets on a healing cross-country journey. The story connects the dots on how a kid’s family’s military history can provide the spur to join in on a war despite not possessing real “skin in the game.” The filmmakers begin with a thoughtful definition: “Moral injury is a wound to the soul, caused by participation in events that violate one’s deeply held sense of right and wrong.” (Roxie, 6/3; Vogue, 6/10)t Info: sfindie.com.

We are the future of the LGBT community.

“The world still has its challenges but things are getting better. From the way we first met on line to marriage equality to our daughter’s upcoming Quinceañera our life together is more fulfilling every day. We keep up with events and entertainment on EDGE, because that’s where we see our future at its brightest.”

The people depicted here are models. Their image is being used for illustrative purposes only.

<< Books

28 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Rounding up the usual suspects

by Tavo Amador

I

f movie historians and critics were polled about which films made during the classic studio era (ca.

1930-60) appealed most to contemporary audiences and future generations, the winners would likely be Casablanca (1943), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Gone With the Wind (1939). Of these, only Oz would be considered a true masterpiece. But in We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (Norton, $27.95), Noah Isenberg argues forcefully that the 1943 Best Picture Oscar winner’s hold on the public makes consideration of cinematic art irrelevant.

The book also shows how the studio system worked, and how often its finest achievements were accidental. This was true of The Wizard of Oz. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer wanted Shirley Temple for Dorothy, and when she wasn’t available, reluctantly settled for Judy Garland. He wanted to cut “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” because it slowed the action. Gone With the Wind’s producer David Selznick breathed a sigh of relief when Norma Shearer turned down Scarlett O’Hara. He deftly declined Mayer’s (his father-in-law) proposed casting package of Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Melvyn Douglas, and Maureen O’Sullivan for the leads, but managed to get Gable solo.

Accidental success was true of Casablanca. The picture was adapted from an unproduced play, Everyone Comes to Rick’s, written in 1940 by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Warners bought the movie rights, and producer Hal Wallis assigned the script to Julius and Philip Epstein, twins born in Brooklyn.

Another New Yorker, Howard Koch, also worked on it; the three are officially credited with the screenplay.

Casey Robinson, one of Wallis’ favorite studio writers, contributed to it as well. Together, they created crisp, highly quotable dialogue and a fast-moving story that never seems rushed.

Isenberg refutes many myths about the film, including the casting. Although the studio announced that Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan would play the leads, they were never seriously considered.

That item was simply for publicity – they would star in 1942’s King’s Row. Hedy Lamarr didn’t reject the part of Ilsa – Mayer at MGM wouldn’t lend her for the role.

George Raft didn’t turn down Rick – on the contrary, he was interested – and he was a bigger star than Humphrey Bogart. But Wallis and director Michael Curtiz wanted Bogart, who was amenable. It would be his first romantic lead.

After failing to get Lamarr, Wallis considered French actress Michele Morgan, but really wanted Ingrid Bergman, under contract to Selznick, who agreed to lend her, for far more money than he paid her. Selznick had made her a star in 1939’s Intermezzo, and her popularity was soaring. The third lead, Paul Henreid, was considered a sophisticated European. That image was solidified by 1942’s Now, Voyager, in which he and Bette Davis make smoking look romantic.

Filming began without a final script, which unnerved Bogart, who feared a career setback after becoming a star in 1942’s The Maltese Falcon. When Bergman asked if

Ilsa would stay with Rick or leave with Victor, she was told to play the part ambiguously, because no one was certain of the ending. Henried fought to keep his part equal to those of his co-stars.

Wallis assembled a superb supporting cast: Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Dooley Wilson, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, S.K. Sakall, Marcel Dalio, and Madeleine Lebeau. Isenberg provides a splendid summary of each actor’s career prior to and subsequent to the picture.

He also points out how the movie benefitted from the real Casablanca being much in the news as WWII raged in North Africa as well as in Europe and Asia. Lisbon was the departure point for many refugees fleeing to America, Canada, and South America. Hence the timeliness of the script’s use of fictional transit visas to get people from Morocco to Portugal.

The film’s ongoing appeal, documented perhaps in too much detail by Isenberg, rests on the willingness of the central characters to sacrifice their personal happiness for a greater cause without self-pity or pretensions to nobility. They do their duty. Under his cynical exterior, Rick is a romantic. Ilsa is willing to compromise her honor for one night if it means getting the coveted transit visas for Victor and herself; in fact, she’d relish doing so. Victor senses that something happened between Rick and Ilsa while he was in a prisoner-of-war camp, but doesn’t pursue the issue. He loves Ilsa, and believes she loves him. That’s enough.

Rick and Ilsa are flawed but heroic. Captain Reynaud (Rains) is charmingly corrupt, but in the end

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does the right thing. Major Strasser (Veidt) and the Nazis are unequivocal villains. That suited the era, and continues to please viewers.

Under Curtiz’s expert direction, the performances by Bogart and Bergman, Rains, Veidt, and to a lesser extent Henreid, remain fresh and memorable. Bergman’s radiance justifies Wallis’ selecting her for Ilsa.

She makes audiences believe her emotional crisis. Hers is the pivotal role. Max Steiner’s memorable score and Wilson’s rendition of “As Time Goes By” add immeasurably to the final result.

Isenberg analyzes each generation’s reaction to Ilsa leaving with Victor rather than staying with Rick. Contemporary audiences thought it was natural. But in When Harry Met Sally (1989), Billy Crystal’s Harry expresses his dismay to Meg Ryan’s Sally, incredulous that Bergman could leave Bogey. His is a typical heterosexual male reaction. Gay men in 1943 and subsequent eras probably wondered why such a beautiful woman had to choose between two ordinary (at best) -looking men. Had a gay man cast the film, Errol Flynn might have played Rick. Then Bergman would be seen as truly making a huge sacrifice.

Casablanca was a box office success, and in addition to Best Picture, won Oscars for Curtiz and the screenplay. More importantly, it won a place in movie history that remains unrivaled. Isenberg documents why that’s true. Anyone interested in the magic of movies will relish this book.t SF Symphony screens Casablanca, performs live score, 6/2 & 3. sfsymphony.org.

Alone again & loving it

by Brian Bromberger

Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World, by Michael Harris; Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, $25.99

H

ow refreshing that a book on the virtues of solitude would hold as one of its exemplars Quentin Crisp, the writer who, in 1920s London, rather than hide his sexuality, flagrantly advertised himself in the streets with lipstick, jewelry, and a campy swagger, resulting in his getting beaten regularly. “Crisp saw that the bravery to be undeniably one’s self can be a revolutionary act.” One should develop one’s own ideas and sensibilities by pursuing a

personal style and insisting on being oneself rather “than acquiescing to a larger system.” For the gay writer Michael Harris in his new book “Solitude,” a sequel to his bestselling “The End of Absence,” the capacity to be comfortably alone with one’s own thoughts is a revolutionary act in our larger system of instant, constant connection through emails and social media. Despite our unabated linkage to the rest of the world, more people feel lonelier than ever before.

For Harris, the remedy is not more connections but solitude. He defines solitude as productive and contented time alone, and loneliness as failed solitude, an anxious feeling that one should be some-

where else or spending time with other people.

Solitude becomes a crucial ingredient for a rich interior life, inspiring the ability to arrive at fresh ideas (creativity), selfknowledge and awareness in the sense of knowing what you think or believe independently, helping you to be closer to the people you care about. He gives a charming example: on vacation, if you’re textmessaging your partner every 10 minutes, you’re really not missing him or her. Instead, if you wait a month and write one love letter, “There is a richer experience of that person that is called up, because in order to desire something, you have to be without it.” Per Crisp’s example, solitude, in addition to making us clear-headed and calmer, relieves the pressure of conformity. The only way we can find ourselves is to be free from the hectoring of online crowds and collective taste.

Harris cites a somber research study done in 2014 at the University of Virginia that revealed people would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend time alone with their thoughts. Why do so many people resist being alone?

Harris maintains that society and our education foster collaboration, and our perception of ourselves as good depends on the opinions of others. Harris blames corporations and technology for discouraging solitude because there’s no data or advertising revenue produced if

people disconnect. Harris sings the praises of the wandering mind, or daydreaming, since it doesn’t censor anything and enables you to makes connections. Daydreaming creatively opens us to new options and fresh insights. Harris quotes Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik that the “aha” moment of solving a problem “is the equivalent of an orgasm for the thinking mind.”

Harris is no Luddite. A good portion of the book is spent telling us about digital advances such as Google Maps, WattPad (collaborative electronic rather than solo silent reading), Eterni.me (a Skype from beyond that collects your personal

data now so it can build an avatar to stand in for you after you die), among others, while critiquing our dependence on them. Harris is adamant that you must make a conscious choice to acquire solitude, a habit you develop every day in small changes. He describes his week spent alone, without phone or Internet, on Pender Island in British Columbia. He experienced withdrawal symptoms realizing how addicted he was to social grooming, but eventually walked through the woods noticing aspects of nature that had been invisible. Reconnecting with nature encourages some of our best original thinking, with mornings the best opportunity to recall our solitude before the world pours out too much noise.

Harris’ book is a convincing platform on the transformative power of being alone. He credits solitude with improving his own relationship with his partner Kenny. I wish he had delved more into how being gay and forced to think apart from the status quo might have played a role in his quest for solitude. Also, Harris doesn’t use any spiritual resources about solitude, seen as a spiritual discipline in many traditions, including Christianity (monasticism, prayer) and Buddhism (meditation). But these are small quibbles about a valuable handbook on the necessity of breaking away from the seductions of digital culture to rediscover our deeper selves.t

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Film>>

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 29

Winston Churchill wins the war

CHANTICLEER AN ORCHESTRA OF VOICES PRESENTS

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June 3 - 11

Berkeley, Belvedere, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Clara

Cohen Media Group

Brian Cox plays the title character in director Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill.

by Erin Blackwell

W

inston Churchill (18741965) is a mythic figure of the British battle 75 years ago to keep the Nazis from enslaving Britain. He’s been dead for 50 years, and this year two films about him are being released. Why? He represents a national ideal of sovereignty that has cruelly eroded since the end of World War II, when USA emerged as a geopolitical giant. Does the Britain that Prime Minister Churchill roused into sacrifice and self-defense still exist? Maybe not, but movies can make you believe it does. “Churchill,” an intimate portrait of the great leader in the lead-up to D-Day, opens Friday at the Clay in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley.

Miranda Richardson’s recent film apparitions are rare and frustrating compared with earlier career highpoints “Dance with a Stranger” or “The Crying Game.” Here, however, she proves she’s as good at acting dignified as she was at perpetrating indignities. Mrs. Churchill is a domestic beacon of common sense chafing at her querulous husband’s delusional desire to physically lead British soldiers at the ripe old age of 69. Brian Cox, while never quite incarnating Winston, reveals the vulnerability beneath the bombast.

John Slattery, with all the depth of a male model, is jarringly miscast as Eisenhower, but everyone else muddles through.

“Churchill” shows a man whose powers of action are ebbing, whose hold on reality is enfeebled, but whose ability to speak, write, connect, and inspire a nation into self-belief is at its apex. He spends most of the movie arguing with General Dwight Eisenhower about the daring and dangerous plan to land troops on the beach at Normandy. Old Winston worries aloud redundantly about the young soldiers being sent to their deaths; he proposes drawing up other plans; he prays for rain; he drives the Missus mad. All because he’s haunted by Gallipoli, his failed naval invasion of the Dardanelles in 1915, during WWI.

We’re always fighting yesterday’s wars. That might have been the movie’s take-away theme, except D-Day was a huge success, despite the loss of life, and Churchill emerged from WWII as the personification of Britain’s ability to endure, even as its Empire was crumbling. “Churchill” is a feelgood film about a war fought to defend the Western European democracies against the scourge of fascism. No, it’s a film about an idea of Englishness worth fighting for. No, it’s a tribute to an individual personality who spent his life fighting and writing, politicking and smoking Havana cigars, a gutsy bulldog, an icon.

Icons swiftly slip into self-parody, and the Churchill of “Churchill” is a bit of a voyeur on his own storied existence, commenting to the audience on the action as it unfolds, muttering or bellowing in old patriarch rage at his obsolescence. The cigar never feels real; the homburg hat, the bow tie aren’t lived in; the lines spoken have a studied, heightened, theatrical feel that tips over into camp. But then, so did the man himself, an indefatigable performer of his own existence and prolific chronicler of his own storied career.

The movie is long at 104 minutes, but if you’re in the mood for a leisurely biopic, “Churchill” will waft you back to a pristine past in which war is war, a car is a Bentley or a Rolls, the UK has a king who stutters, and radio broadcasts unite the nation. Alex von Tunzelmann, an English writer of nonfiction whose Guardian column “Reel History” skewers movies for their historical inaccuracy, wrote the script. I assume it’s accurate. It’s also poetic in its evocation of bloody waves on a sandy beach, and psychological in its disciplined rendering of Churchill’s moments of madness.

I didn’t expect to cry, but I did, several times, often right before laughing. Or vice versa. I was being manipulated by director Jonathan Teplitzky, and loving it. I was under the spell of civilized people who know how to act, playing characters who know how to behave.

“Churchill” creates, as did the man himself in his lifetime, the illusion of stability, even at the height of crisis. This alone is worth the price of admission. As is the sense that people then were willing to die for a cause greater than themselves.t

TICKETS AVAILABLE City Box Office: 415-392-4400 CHANTICLEER.ORG

MARIO CANTONE and JERRY DIXON

BEN RIMALOWER HAS PATTI ISSUES

LORNA LUFT

June 2 – 3

June 9 – 10

June 23 – 24

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

<< Fine Art

30 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

<<

Tiny Bubbles

From page 21

Assembling a whimsical, edgy collection of nine artists such as children’s book author-illustrator J. Otto Seibold, rapper Boots Riley, publisher V. Vale, prankster Longmont Potion Castle and local talents Kate Rhoades and Megan Reed among others, Wolf taps into De Forest’s rebel streak. After breaking away from the oppressive trappings of Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s, the artist forged an idiosyncratic path, creating peculiar, wildly imaginative, color-charged menageries tinged with darkness and humor. Likewise, the participants here are wizards of strange, off-planet worlds and weird narratives of their own devise.

Take the late painter Jerome Caja.

When he wasn’t on stage performing at Club Uranus and other underground nightclubs in the late 1980s and early 90s, the beloved drag queen and charter member of the Popstitutes brought a theatrical flair to art that blurred the boundary between pornography and campy visual culture. In explorations of the absurd dimensions of sex and death and extremes of queer sexuality, Caja’s struggle with his strict Midwestern Catholic upbringing is front-andcenter in comic mini-melodramas trumpeting in-your-face sexual content and a cast of saints and sinners.

cycle of being pumped up and Over 30 of his small-format deflated. We’ve all been there, pieces, showcased in thrift-store am I right? frames and inspired by Indian Kate Rhoades, who’s into a miniatures, Hieronymus Bosch combustible combo of comics, and possibly Russian orthodox painting and art theory, has icons, except for the scatoproduced “Precious Flaminlogical references, of course, go,” a podcast miniseries that are included in an installation, reflects this queer lesbian artalong with documentary footist’s quirky turn of mind, but age of his life. Caja died in 1995 deprives us of the delightfully from complications related to Courtesy SFAC Galleries whacky visual sensibility of her HIV. Deploying tools of his “Hot Dog Show” (2015) by Lisa Hanawalt. videos. Her audio tale travels trade: nail polish, eye-shadow, Watercolor and gouache on paper. from the gallery to the Internawhite-out, glitter, lipstick and tional Art Museum of Americrumpled paper – one piece, ca, a mysterious institution in entitled “Shroud of Curad,” is housewives in Caja land. the mid-Market district where all painted on a Band-Aid – and substiPorpentine Charity Heartscape, a the artwork is by His Holiness Dorje tuting dog bowls and pistachio shells youngish, Oakland-based game deChang Buddha III, “who’s either for traditional canvases, he made signer and author of “Psycho Nymph a super holy guy or a freaky fraud work that’s tart and self-referential.

Exile,” has an ecstatic beat voice with cult leader,” explains Rhoades. After In “Nurse’s Prayer,” the masculinea bite. In digital videos that skewer she’s sucked into a lenticular print looking harridan in need of angersexism and gender politics, she subdepicting two flamingos loitering management training who admonverts dystopian sci-fi tropes and takes outside the mouth of a cave, she’s ishes her patient to “Fuck off and some jagged-toothed aliens along for magically transported to an island Die” is a nightmare out of “One Flew the ride. “Eternal Biohellswamp War populated with talking animals over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and probof Girls Slaughter,” a video crawl that’s that bears a striking resemblance ably connects to Caja’s illness. An good merciless fun, lists categories of to Zanesville, Ohio. A new episode assemblage with two rows of bottle females that could double as cheapie is posted every Wednesday at precaps and a red, one-room schoolB-picture titles: 20 pony girls busting ciousflamingo.space. house in the lower right alludes to open vending machines, 80 void girls “Boararina,” a lavender vision in the beating he took on a playground praying to the nebula, 8 gator girls toe shoes and an ill-fitting ballet coswhen he was a youth. An image of a experiencing imminent psychosis, tume demonstrating a backbreaking screaming woman wielding a bloody etc. In “Marshmallowfungusbugarabesque, and the rowdy, hairycarving knife, obviously an escapee pony,” a short video whose name I chested, bikini-clad crew frolicking from a John Waters movie, is framed wouldn’t dare try to pronounce, a on a construction site are just some by a cheerful blue gingham border candy-colored squeeze toy, subjected of the surreal, half-human, halfthreaded with yellow ribbon. No to repeated injections from an air animal hybrids in Lisa Hanawalt’s rest for the wicked, the innocent or gun, squeaks as it goes through a life

mischievous watercolor-and-pen illustrations. “Future archeologists might speculate they were the work of a demented cruise-ship entertainment director who stumbled upon H.G. Wells’ ‘Island of Doctor Moreau,’” notes Wolf, and that’s an understatement. Something is clearly amiss in the world of the L.A. cartoonist’s drawings, which were the basis for “BoJack Horseman,” a Netflix animated comedy series whose off-kilter, often vulgar, comicbook spirit also informs the work in this show. A pair of “Shoe Birds,” one trapped inside a robin’s-egg blue, stiletto-heeled prison – a fate that could befall anyone – and another at the mercy of a high-heeled bootie pressed against its breast, dominatrix-style, inhabit a universe as fully realized as the fantasy dollhouse sets of Wes Anderson’s films.

Last but certainly not least, Megan Reed’s collaged, foam-and-plaster sandwich-board sculptures, which could be mistaken for discarded prototypes of 1950s robots or stage sets for a kids’ musical. Unwieldy and disarming in deep magenta, insistent purple and day-glow orange, they barge into the frame, chugging into view like cartoon clown cars that started themselves up and are rumbling down a road near you.t Through Aug. 19. sfartscommission.org

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On the Town

39

On the Tab

Shining Stars

Xtravaganza power Vogue icon Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza www.ebar.com

Vol. 47 • No. 22 • June 1-7, 2017

www.bartabsf.com

by Cornelius Washington

A

t a June 2 kick-off party to San Francisco’s Pride Month, dancer-choreographer Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza will be a solo performer at Mark Rhoades’ already sold-out event to be held at the stylish Bently Reserve. So while you may miss his performance, we got a chance for an interview with the talented man.

See page 34 >>

Jose Xtravaganza

Savor Sonoma

Valley vintners branch out

by Jim Gladstone

H

ere in the Bay Area, when we head up to wine country for the weekend, we’re just as likely to be visiting Sonoma as Napa. To most of the world, Napa remains the stronger ‘name brand’ when it comes to California wine geography. Even locally, when Sonoma does have name recognition, there’s confusion between the County and the Valley.

See page 32 >>

M. Woolsey

Servers bring appetizer plates at the scenic Beltane Ranch.

{ THIRD OF THREE SECTIONS }

Without pride, it’s just a parade.

SPACE RESERVATIONS ARE NOW BEING ACCEPTED FOR OUR JUNE 22 SAN FRANCISCO PRIDE EDITION.

Call Scott Wazlowski at (415) 829-8937 or email advertising@ebar.com for more information.

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

<<

Savor Sonoma

Sonoma Valley ≠ Sonoma County

The Most Stylish Tastes

Sonoma County incorporates a much larger area than the Sonoma Valley wine region, stretching from Cloverdale in the north to San Pablo Bay in the south; and from Calistoga to the Pacific coast, east to west.

There are vineyards and winemakers countywide in 17 designated American Viticultural Areas (AVAs), but true Sonoma Valley wines are made in only five of them, packed tightly into the county’s southeast corner: The whole bunch can be visited over the course of a single weekend.

Bennett Valley AVA: The smallest of the five Valley AVAs, with just 650 cultivated acres, is cradled and kept cool by Bennett Peak, Sonoma Mountain and Taylor Mountain.

While vintners across the Valley use Bennett-grown Chardonnay and Syrah grapes, Matanzas Creek is its sole open-to-the-public winery and also sells numerous lavenar products. (6097 Bennett Valley Rd., Santa Rosa www.matanzascreek.com).

Sonoma Mountain AVA: With a peak elevation of 2,300 feet, the mountain allows grapes to grow above the fog line with sun-soaked days but chilly nights. Cabernet Sauvignon grapes grow particu-

John McPherson

Earlier this spring, The Sonoma Valley Vintner’s and Growers’ Alliance (SVVGA) made a bold move toward changing that perception, with the debut of an intensive weekend-long showcase of local viticulture, Signature Sonoma Valley.

Local winemakers were celebrated –and oenophiles from across the country were educated– over a series of meals, tastings and in-depth panel discussions.

According to SVVGA Executive Director Maureen Cottingham, the weekend was intended not only to generate national and international buzz for the region’s hundreds of wineries, but to reinforce a sense of pride and solidarity among industry professionals in the Sonoma Valley to launch Signature Sonoma Valley as an annual event. A second edition has already been scheduled for April 6-8, 2018.

A palpable sense of mutual support was felt throughout the weekend, as winemakers visited colleagues’ properties and toasted their peers.

Exemplary of this was a tasting panel held at the Durell Vineyard, during which five Valley winemakers –whose offerings have distinctively different taste profiles– spoke about how they collaborate with growers to custom-cultivate Chardonnay grapes in different areas of the vineyard’s acreage.

These and the dozens of other winemakers and growers who participated in the weekend event are working with the SVVGA to educate the wine-drinking public about the myriad nuances to be found across the local vintages.

Here are some intriguing ideas gleaned from Signature Sonoma that will help you make the most of your own tasting excursion:

larly well here, though most are sent to vintners elsewhere. There’s but one visitable winemaking operation here: Benziger Family Winery (1883 London Ranch Rd., Glen Ellen. www.benziger.com).

Los Carneros AVA: Overlapping Sonoma and Napa Counties alongside San Pablo Bay, hilly Los Carneros produces Pinot Noir along with Chardonnay grapes, many in vineyards owned by major global sparkling wine producers including Taittinger and Moet et Chandon. Oddly, Los Carneros’ Jacuzzi Family Vineyards do not produce a bubbly.

Moon Mountain AVA: The newest AVA in the Valley, officially designated just four years ago, is on challenging rocky terrain just east of Glen Ellen. The turf supports smaller, thick-skinned Zinfandel grapes, a high cost growing situation that yields pricier, high-quality vintages. Several wineries here, including Hanzell Vineyards and Kamen Estate offer tastings and tours by appointment.

Sonoma Valley AVA: Yes, this is confusing. Within the Sonoma Valley wine region the largest AVA –with more than 5,000 cultivated acres and dozens of wineries– is eponymous (Do not try to figure this out after drinking). Considered an “open valley” with two-directional cool air flow (from the Bay and the Ocean) it provides a virtual blank canvas for growing more than two dozen grape varietals. Its wineries also offer some of the region’s most elaborate tasting visits (see below).

From page 31

John McPherson

32 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Among dozens of smaller tasting rooms –where guests will often have the benefit of an actual owner or winemaker on-site and eager to share stories and insight– Sonoma Valley has some larger operations offering experiences that go well beyond a tipple and a chat.

Landmark Vineyards (101 Adobe Canyon Rd., Kenwood. www.landmarkwine.com). Founded in 1974 by a group including Damaris Deere Ford, the great-great-granddaughter of John Deere (yes, the one who invented the steel plow) and now owned

by Charles and Phoebe Resnick, the California agri-preneurs’ holdings include the POM pomegranate and Wonderful Pistachios brands. The winery is set amidst gorgeous, sunsoaked gardens in the foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains.

A contemporary California patio courtyard with a vineyard view is available for picnicking on local charcuterie and cheese, sold in the tasting room, where the handiwork of winemaker Greg Stach is best showcased in some of the Valley’s crispest, brightest Chardonnays.

Farmer-led horse-drawn carriage tours through the vineyards are of-

t

boyant vintner Jean-Charles Boisset. A scion of a French winemaking dynasty, he has become one of the Valley’s most ardent promoters.

Centered around a castle-like complex of stone buildings, the winery incorporates an impressive exhibition on the global history of winemaking, including a collection of hundreds of antique agricultural tools. Boisset’s personally curated collection of crystal decanters is also on display.

A variety of unique tasting experiences are also available, including a blending class and a pairing of wines with live classical music.

Ram’s Gate Winery (28700 Arnold Drive, Sonoma. www.ramsgatewinery.com). Perhaps Sonoma County’s most architecturally spectacular viticulture site, this Carneros AVA winery is set on 28 acres of its own vineyards, which supplement grapes from other Sonoma growers used in Ram’s Gate’s pointedly food-friendly small lot vintages.

The vineyards are set around a stunning modern reception and tasting center at the crest of a hill. Designed by architect Howard Backen, the building’s low-slung profile and harmonious flow of indoor and outdoor spaces feels at once luxe and intimately tied to its natural surroundings. From one of several stone-paved patios, visitors can take in a panoramic view of sun-dappled vineyards and then stroll a path through the vines, descending toward a tree-lined pond where Adirondack chairs invite quiet contemplation.

Visitors are welcomed Thursdays through Mondays, but it’s essential to make an appointment. Experiences on offer include a food-andwine pairing class with small plates tailored to the wines by Ram’s Gate’s in-house chef; a picnic program; and a fullday immersion program that includes an opportunity to work alongside the vineyard team, vintners, on-site gardeners and beekeepers.

Feeling Drowsy

Top: A scenic view at Matanzas Creek Winery.

2nd from Top: Echelon event at Ram’s Gate Winery.

Middle: Buena Vista Winery’s rustic-elegant tasting room.

2nd from Bottom: Serious wine-tasters at the Durell Vineyard event.

Bottom: Benziger Family Winery’s tasting room.

fered on Saturdays. Special events this summer (open to the public, reservations required) include an al fresco lobster feast with Chardonnay pairings on June 30 and a Pig, Pizza and Pinot Noir party on July 22.

Buena Vista Winery (18000 Old Winery Rd., Sonoma www. buenavistawinery.com) is among

the oldest and most storied wineries not just in the Valley, but in all of California. Founded in 1857 by Hungarian Count Agoston Haraszthy de Mokesa –who had previously jump-started the American beer industry as the first cultivator of hops in Wisconsin– the Buena Vista complex is now owned by the flam-

While it’s certainly possible to head up to the Sonoma Valley on a day trip, the sunshine and fine wine are likely to make you wish you’d made it a weekend.

For a wide range of options for spending the night, visit www.sonomavalley.com/lodging, but be sure to consider these two unique accommodations: Beltane Ranch (11775 Sonoma Highway, Glen Ellen. www.beltaneranch.com). Bed and breakfast accomodations on this charming homestead are available in free-standing cottages or in a main building (all rooms have private entrances). The 105-acre property has been passed down through six generations of a single family, and is now committed the organic farming of wine grapes, olives, produce, and livestock in addition to welcoming guests to its six rooms. There’s a tennis court, a horseshoe pit, and endless walking trails for wandering.

Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn (100 Boyes Blvd., Sonoma www.fairmont.com/sonoma). Ideally situated for winery visits throughout the valley, the Mission Inn has a distinctly more relaxed feel than the Fairmont’s urban properties. Standout features include a concierge desk with deep knowledge of local wineries and their offerings to visitors, spa pools full of thermal mineral water from hot springs beneath the property, and daily wine-tastings with local vintners during which a flabbergasting trolley of artisan cheeses is wheeled into the lobby lounge.t For a complete directory of Sonoma Valley wineries and further background information on next year’s Signature weekend, visit www.sonomavalleywine.com

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

34 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

t

Jose Xtravaganza in Madonna’s video “Vogue.”

<<

Xtravaganza power

From page 31

Gutierez is of one of the most dynamic, charismatic, outspoken, intelligent, articulate and gifted artists in the history of LGBTQ culture.

As the favorite dancer in Madonna’s legendary Blonde Ambition Tour, and the dance soloist in her outrageously sensual video, “Justify My Love,” the dancer, singer and choreographer, known to the world as Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza, and legendary member of The House of Xtravaganza, has not rested upon his laurels.

As one of the subjects of the new documentary film Strike a Pose, about the lives of Madonna’s nowiconic dance ensemble, the evolution of his career continues with Katy Perry, for whom he choreographed her May, 2017 Saturday Night Live performances.

Cornelius Washington: Is this your first solo performance in San Francisco?

Jose Xtravaganza: Yes, last year, I came to the premiere of Strike A Pose, and I had a great time. This will be my first performance, and I’m very excited. San Francisco is the city for the LGBT community, and I’m very glad to come and perform for the city and show my appreciation.

Well, honey, we’re honored to have you, and I’m honored to interview you. Let’s start from the beginning. When did you first discover The House of Xtravaganza?

Ooh, I was 15, 16 years old? I encountered them on Manhattan’s West Side, where all of the gays hang out. They were so alien and so beautiful. They carried themselves like superstars. I just had to be a part of that. They represented everything that I wanted to be. What happened is, I walked for them in a ball, and I snatched a trophy in the “Vogue Performance” category. That’s when Angie Xtravaganza and David “The Father” Xtravaganza took me into The House of Xtravaganza. I was the baby of the house. People should see the film How Do I Look?, because in it, I go into much more detail about that period of my life and career.

Thank you! I don’t feel that enough people know about that film, and they should see it. Did you like the film and how you were portrayed in it?

We’re both Aquarians. You tell me. Did you like the film?

I thought that the film was packaged and promoted poorly, but the film itself was amazing! I was so glad to see your evolution.

You’re achieving legendary status.

I loved seeing the evolution of Octavia St. Laurent, and the reemergence of the transgendered fashion icon, Tracey Africa. I was very moved by her, and by your work with the late Willi Ninja on the university lecture circuit.

Thank you very much. I knew that you’d give me your honest opinion. I loved and admired Willi.

We inspired and provoked each other. Ours was a very sweet competition, and we would always hire each other for jobs. We traveled all over the world together, and this was before the film Paris Is Burning. I miss him so much.

We are observing the oneyear anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub massacre. Do you have anything that you want to say?

I’m very saddened, not only about what happened to those beautiful people, who simply wanted to gather together and have a good time with each other. I’m also extremely sad about what happened recently, at Ariana Grande’s Manchester

concert. They are all in my prayers, and we cannot let hate overcome us.

Love must win.

Thank you!

You were eighteen years old when you and your fellow dancers performed on Madonna’s Blonde Ambition Tour. You’ve all changed pop culture, and LGBTQ culture. You brought a physicality, a sensuality and an unabashed gay vibe to dance, music, photography and haute couture. Did you have any idea, at the time, what you all had done?

No, we just did it and, no, we were not prepared for it. It was a world of unimaginable excess, and there was just no way, at eighteen years old, that I could possibly be prepared for that. We just did it.

In the world of haute couture, you and your dancers were the conduit between the atelier and the street. Tell me about your work with Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Oh, my God, he was such a fun person to work with! His costumes for the tour were amazing! To actually wear haute couture! The Xtravaganzas taught me about fashion, but to actually work with someone on that level and, yes, I walked and danced in his runway shows, too.

He’s an incredible artist.

Let’s talk about your work with Francesco Scavullo.

Oh, my God; thank you so much for mentioning him! At the time, I didn’t know who he was, and everyone was so crazy about me being shot by him. He was so grand and flamboyant, and fabulous! I wanted to be just like him when I grew up.

Later on, after I learned more about him, I just felt very blessed. He makes everyone look so colorful and sexy.

Darling, the video for “Justify My Love.” Discuss.

It was complete and total provocation, on every level. Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Madonna just took it to a level that hadn’t been done or seen before. Tony Ward was great and, yes, he really did look like that. I remember coming back to New York City from Paris, going to a huge club, and everyone there was dressed as I was in the video: the catsuit, the Marcelled hair, the fingernailed gloves, down to the Doc Martin boots. Hundreds of Joses voguing. It was freakish and amazing. I loved it!

Photographer Herb Ritts stated in an interview that you, as a group, totally inspired him, because of your power and authenticity.

I’m so humbled that he said that.

Wow! Herb is an icon in the world of photography. I also worked with Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel.

Herb was a very special person. He

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Read more online at www.ebar.com

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 35

room with those clothes. I’d have killed to work with Larry LeGaspi.

He’s the genius behind all of the amazing costumes for LaBelle and Kiss. I think that the world of active wear needs a serious boost.

There’s that guy who is the creative director for 2Xist, Jason Scarlatti.

We should get together and create a line of active wear, club wear and yoga wear that would be the truth!

Jason, call me!

Mr. Xtravaganza, what do you want your LGBTQ cultural legacy to be?

Wow, that’s a serious question. What people constantly tell me is that, for many of them, I’m one of the first gay people whom they’ve ever seen, who made them feel good about it. I just want the record to show that I helped set people free with my art, my passion and my realness.

Jose Xtravaganza in various artistic dance poses.

was following the tour, shooting it, as a favor to Madonna. I just hope and pray that one day his foundation will publish those images. It was a very special time in LGBTQ culture.

Let’s discuss the present.

What’s your opinion of the current crop of dance talent shows?

The very young contestants are cool; that’s sweet, raw talent, a true manifestation of the divine. However, the adult contestants obviously lack technique. They’re not going to dance classes. They have “YouTube tutorial technique.” My advice, people, is to take actual dance classes. Develop your talent

and technique, then express your soul and show the world who you really are, as an artist.

I can see you as a judge.

I’d make an excellent judge! Serious, passionate and unbiased. The producers of those shows need to call me, right now.

You live in New York City, one of the world’s fashion capitals.

Living or dead, for whom would you like to walk and with whom would you like to work?

I’d always wanted to work with Alexander McQueen. I saw his recent retrospective, and it was a blessing, just to be in the same

I see an autobiography in your future.

The timing is right, especially after the release of the film, Strike A Pose. I think that the world is ready...actually, the world is not ready, but, I’m going to do it anyway.t Follow Jose Xtravaganza at www.facebook.com/ JOSEGUTIEREZXTRAVAGANZA/

36 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

Steven Underhill

ast Saturday night’s Spotlight on Broadway with the SF Lesbian/ Gay Freedom Band was a boisterous, musical success! The Empire Ballroom of the Sir Francis Drake provided an elegant setting for hundreds of guests seated at round tables glowing from ornate chandeliers above. As guest stars Leanne Borghesi, Jesse Barrett, and this singing columnist entered from the back of the room, “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from the musical Hairspray echoed through the room.

All were encouraged to sing along to their favorites and Artistic Director Pete Nowlen showcased the amazing talents of this first gay band in the country. What would creator Jon Sims think if he could hear their musical talents, see their tremendous enthusiasm, and experience such a night of joy? Invoking his memory, we ended the first half of the concert with “If They Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity sung with Sims’ original rewritten lyrics and a stunning band-only performance of Frank Ticheli’s “Blue Shades.”

The second half started with a spirited live auction and raffle prize announcements, including an African safari, Hawaiian get-aways, SF Giants sports package, a local theatre assortment, and a chance to conduct the band. A couple of auction items were doubled, resulting

Without regular access to a car, we have been remiss in exploring the Bay Area outside of San Francisco, but most recently, our eyes have been opened to a variety of attractions heretofore unknown.

Last Sunday, we joined the core cast of Sunday’s a Drag at Club 1220 in Walnut Creek for a benefit for former cast member, multiple pageant winner, and extraordinary performer Kendra Monroe.

Although diagnosed with ALS last year, she continues to bravely fight the odds and we were there to help her with the monumental medical and other expenses.

Holotta Tymes’ regular UnBOYlievable show became an extravaganza of entertainment and extraordinary fundraising, supported by a friendly and efficient bar staff. Lady Tia mystified the crowd with her sultry talents, Mahlae demonstrated her high-energy antics, Holotta brought out the laughter, and even Sunday’s a Drag crew member Miguel VillaGuevara transformed into Vicodonia for the occasion, while Robert Carstensen managed the front door.

Sir Francis Drake Hotel employees, former manager Kevin Hoskins, friends and family of Kendra united to support her.

As the evening ended, the total raised from the cover charge, raffle, auction, and performer tips exceeded $4000! Sometimes fundraising is personal.

Our next foray across the Bay was the following night, as we headed to the Stoli Cocktail Classic at Oakland’s Club 21, a spacious and welcoming bar with a smiling staff ready to serve. Five competing bartenders showed their stuff to judges Cecil Russell from Gloss magazine, recording artist BeBe Sweetbriar, last year’s Northern California champion bartender Carly Morrison, American Idol finalist and singing sensation LaToya London, and activist Stuart Milk in town for Harvey Milk Day. We were proud to co-emcee the night for the fourth time with National LGBT Ambassador for Stoli Vodka Patrik Gallineaux; believe us, if Patrik invites you to an event, don’t miss it! The evening was full of good-natured competition, musical entertainment from Leanne Borghesi and LaToya London, and signature Gallineaux theatrics.

Among those gathered were Ken Henderson, Kevin Shanahan & Michael Montoya, Linda Lee, Skye Paterson, Nicolas Bettinger, Mike Ho, Fred Dea F, Carlos Gomez, and Richard Fuentes.

As a special surprise, last year’s Stoli Key West Classic Champion Rocky flew in from Dallas for the event. When all was said and done, Sabrina Haley of the nearby Port Bar emerged the winner and will head to Key West Top: Leanne Borghesi sings with for the final competition.

“Pinocchio” at the SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Whatever happened to our Band’s sing-along fundraiser, held at the Sir “do-nothing Monday” rule Francis Drake Hotel. of thumb?

2nd from Top: Attendees at the SF Lesbian/ Wrapping up our East Gay Freedom Band’s sing-along fundraiser, Bay exploration, we discovheld at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. ered one of the oldest con2nd from Bottom: Stoli Cocktail Classic tinuously operated gay bars winner Sabrina Haley of Port Bar (left) with in the country, The White cohost Patrik Gallineaux.

Horse of Oakland. The Bottom: Donna Sachet (left) with supporters afternoon party last Saturof the Glenn Burke sidewalk plaque, at The day benefited the Rainbow White Horse Bar. Honor Walk and unveiled the soon-to-be-placed

plaque honoring Glenn Burke, first openly gay major league baseball player, with the Oakland Athletics.

We joined fellow board members Charlotte Ruffner, Kendall Stulce, Madeline Hancock, Tarita Thomas, Joe Robinson, and a jolly group of White Horse regulars to celebrate this LGBT pioneer while socializing and soaking up the great weather. The staff of the bar, including DJ Luna, could not have been more accommodating. An amazing group of raffle prizes provided

by Major League Baseball ensured that nearly everyone left with a memento. Watch for the upcoming placement of the Glenn Burke plaque, as well as those for Fereydoun Farrakhzod, Rkki Streicher, and Jose Sarria, in and around the Castro neighborhood soon.

We ended our weekend with those crazy members of Krewe de Kinque, the New Orleans-style Mardi Gras club that throws great parties and raises money for worthy organizations. Current King of the Krewe Barry Miles celebrated his birthday at Underground SF with proceeds from the door, Jello shots, raffle tickets, and performer tips going to Krewe de Kinque.

This was a new club to us, but we felt immediately comfortable in the homey surroundings, including a small outdoor deck with wonderful fresh air. On stage, current Queen of the Krewe Lady Cuki Couture kicked off a fun show, including Deana Dawn, John Weber, Kippy Marks, and Erin Lavery. Celebrants included Gary Virginia, David Herrera, Carlos Medal, Mr. Bill, Rick LeBlanc, Colby Michaels, Marcy Playground, and Hans Bustamante, while DJ Sergio Fedasz kept the crowd dancing and bartender Keith Lawrence kept them lubricated. Yes, the good times did roll!

We are frantically reviewing all the imminent Pride events in order to guide our readers to the brightest and best in June. Watch for our recommendations here in our next column. Suffice it to say, here comes the biggest Pride Parade and celebration in the world!t

Linda Lee

L

in even more money raised for the organization.

All year long, you’ve probably seen the SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band at community events, from the Pride Parade and commemorations at City Hall to the lighting of the holiday tree in the Castro and the Imperial Court’s annual Pilgrimage to Colma; at each of those appearances, the band provides high energy music free of charge.

That night was our chance to contribute financially to this incredible backbone of the LGBTQ Community and the audience was indeed generous!

We sang our way through highlights of A Chorus Line, Gypsy, Funny Girl, Shall We Dance, The Sound of Music, featuring soloist David Korn, and a hilarious duet with Leanne from Anything Goes, concluding with a standing ovation and smiles all around. This was the second annual Spotlight on Broadway; watch for next year’s incarnation during the band’s fortieth year and get your tickets early!

Earlier that day, we emceed the first Live in the Castro in Jane Warner Plaza with entertainment from Gregangelo and the Velocity Circus, violinist Kippy Marks, and Castro Flaggers. The sun was out and so was the community! Watch for a variety of noon-time performances there every Saturday through October, brought to you by the Castro Benefit District.

David Perry

by Donna Sachet

Steven Underhill

Prideful music, East Bay engagements

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June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 37

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hatever you’re seeking, find nightlife fun right here in your personally curated fun guide.

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

Fri 2

Thu 1

Ain’t Mama’s Drag @ Balancoire

Kingdom of Sodom @ Nob Hill Theatre Very interactive sex party at the famed strip club, with a live show at 10:30pm. $20. 9pm-1am. 729 Bush St. at Powell.

397-6758. www.thenobhilltheatre.com

Maureen McVerry @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko The vocalist and local musical theatre star performs her cabaret show, Love Will Kick Your Ass. $18-$40 ($20 food/ drink min.).8pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. maureenmcmucho.com feinsteinsatthenikko.com

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

Puff @ The Stud Pass the dutchie for live music and cannabis appreciation with Carletta Sue Kay, Maria Konner and Not From Jersey; DJs Sergio Fedasz and Dank, a kooky drag show and more. 7pm-10pm (followed by love, the drag show hosted

by Mama Dora, Thee Pristine Condition and Ultra). 399 9th st. www.studsf.com

Rice Rockettes @ Lookout Local and visiting Asian drag queens’ weekly show. $5. 10:30pm show. DJ Philip Grasso. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

Sex and the City Live @ Oasis D’Arcy Drollinger, Sue Casa and crew return for the sixth year of the drag parody version of the hit HBO series. $25-$35. Thu 8pm. Fri & Sat 7pm.

Thru July 1. 298 11th St. sfoasis.com

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

Stank @ Powerhouse Michael Romano and Kelly Naughton DJ the funky man-odor-positive night, with Leon Fox and MrPam. $5. 10pm2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Weekly drag queen and drag king show hosted by Cruzin d’Loo. 8pm10pm. No cover. 2565 Mission St. www.balancoiresf.com

Taboo @ Oasis

Billy Gilman, Steve Grand @ Graton Resort & Casino, Rohnert Park Singer from The Voice, and the gay pop singer-composer, perform; part of Sonoma Pride’s weekend of events. $20-$35. 9pm. 288 Golf Course Drive West, Rohnert Park. www.gratonresortcasino.com

Latin Explosion/Club Papi @ Club 21, Oakland

Booty-shaing night where kink gear and drag are welcome-plus; this month, food porn fetishes! $5-$10.

10pm-2am. 298 11th St. sfoasis.com

Sat 3 Bollywood Blast @ Club OMG Enjoy Indian pop dance music at the first Saturdays party. $10. 9pm-2am.

43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

The Latin dance night includes drag acts hosted by Lola and Dorys, with half a dozen gogo studs, and duo Los Horoscopos de Durango live. $10-$20. 9pm-3am. 2111 Franklin St., Oakland. www.club21oakland.com

Club Rimshot @ Club BNB, Oakland

Mario Cantone & Jerry Dixon @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko

Hard French @ El Rio

The married duo perform ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’ their new cabaret musical show. $45-$85. $20 food/drink min. 8pm, and June 3 at 7pm and 10pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. feinsteinsatthenikko.com

Red Hots Burlesque @ The Stud The saucy women’s burlesque show hosted by Dottie Lux will titillate and tantalize. $10-$20. 8pm-9:30pm. 399 9th St. Also Sunday brunch shows at PianoFight Theatre.144 Taylor St. www.redhotsburlesque.com www.studsf.com

RuPaul’s Drag Race Viewings @ Various Bars Watch Season 9 of the popular drag competition show. 8pm at Oasis (cohosted by Honey Mahogany and Sister Roma), Beaux, Toad Hall, Midnight Sun, Port Bar Oakland and other venues. www.logotv.com

22nd anniversary night of the popular weekly hip hop and R&B night, with Kash Doll perfomring live. $5-$15.

9pm to 4am. 2120 Broadway. (510) 759-7340. www.club-bnb.com After seven years, the Finale Finale marks the end of the award-winnig popular soul dance, drag and BBQ party (at El Rio), with DJs Primo, Bus Station John, Brown Amy and Carnita. $10. 2pm-8pm. 3158 Mission St. hardfrench.com elriosf.com

Lips and Lashes Brunch @ Lookout Weekly show with soul, funk and Motown grooves hosted by Carnie Asada, with DJs Becky Knox and Pumpkin Spice. The yummy brunch menu starts at 12pm, with the show at 1:30pm. 3600 16th St. www.lookoutsf.com

Mother @ Oasis Heklina hosts the fun drag show with weekly themes. June 3 is a Katy Perry tribute. DJ MC2 spins dance grooves before and after the show. $10. 10pm3am (11:30pm show). 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Powerblouse @ Powerhouse Juanita More and David Glamamore’s drag makeover night. $5. 10pm-2am.

1347 Folsom St. powerhousebar.com

Sex, Drags & Rock n Roll @ Midnight Sun Mutha Chucka’s wacky drag night returns, with a Pride #Resistance! theme, BeBe Sweetbriar, Mary Wanna, Mocha Frappalatte and more. 10pm.

4067 18th St. midnightsunsf.com/

Sonoma Pride @ Guerneville Lodge

Sat 3 Powerblouse @ Powerhouse

Shot in the City

June 1-8

San Francisco:

LGBT solidarity rally for equal rights June 3, 1pm-4pm. OutWatch film festival at Rio Theatre, Monte Rio, 7pm. March and festival with live entertainment, booths and food June 4, 11am-5pm. 15905 River Road, Guerneville. www.sonomapride.org

See page 38 >>

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

38 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 1-7, 2017

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Sun 4 Dark Meat @ Powerhouse Cyanide, Jim Collins, DJ Sailor Saturn, and Qween serve it up. $5. 10pm2am. 9pm-2am. 1347 Folsom St. www.powerhousebar.com

Domingo De Escandal @ Club OMG Weekly Latin night with drag shows hosted by Vicky Jimenez and DJ Carlitos. (Comedy Open Mic 5:30pm).

7pm-2am. 43 6th St. clubomgsf.com

Flagging in the Park @ National AIDS Memorial Grove DJ Roland Belmares plays grooves at the outdoor flow arts event in the scenic grove. Bring blankets, flags, food, and umbrellas. Donations benefit 1pm-4pm. Nancy Pelosi Drive at Bowling Green, Golden Gate Park. www.flaggercentral.com

Force Skin @ Oasis DJs Shawn Perry and Erik Withakay spin at the Queens of the castro party. $10. 3pm- 10pm. 298 11th St. www.sfoasis.com

Richmond Pride @ Marina Bay Park Third annual LGBT event, with Cleve Jones, Cecelia Chung, Xavier Toscano, community booths, food and drinks. 10am-3pm. Regatta Blvd at Melville square, Richmond. richmondrainbowpride.org/

Sundance Saloon @ Space 550 The Country-Western line-dancing two-stepping dance events celebrates 18 years! Free, including lessons for newbies. 5pm-10:30pm. 550 Barneveld Ave. www.sundancesaloon.org

Swagger Like Us @ El Rio La Favi is the featured performer at the queer hip hop dance party, with DJs Rosa Pistola, DavO and boy_friend, free BBQ while it lasts. $10. 2pm-8pm 3158 Mission St. www.elriosf.com

Browse & Reply FREE! SF - 415-692-5774 1-888-MegaMates Free to Listen & Reply, 18+

Always FREE to listen and reply to ads!

San Francisco:

(415) 692-5774 www.megamates.com 18+

Comedy Showcase @ SF Eagle

Xavier Caylor

<<

Playmates or soul mates, you’ll find them on MegaMates

Kollin Holtz hosts the open mic comedy night. 5:30pm-8pm. 398 12th St. at Harrison. www.sf-eagle.com

Girl Scout @ Port Bar, Oakland The weekly women’s happy hour and dance night with DJ Becky Knox.

6pm-10pm. 2023 Broadway. www.portbaroakland.com

Mon 5 Epic Karaoke @ White Horse, Oakland

Miss Kitty’s Trivia Night @ Wild Side West

Mondays and Tuesdays popular weekly sing-along night. No cover.

8:30pm-1am. 6551 Telegraph Ave, (510) 652-3820. whitehorsebar.com

The weekly fun night at the Bernal Heights bar includes prizes, hosted by Kitty Tapata. No cover. 7pm-10pm.

424 Cortland St. 647-3099. www.wildsidewest.com

One Night Only @ Marines Memorial Theatre The touring cast of Hamilton performs their own song, dance and comedy numbers at the popular benefit for the Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation. $48-$100; $25 for after-party with the cast (with show ticket). 7:30pm. 609 Sutter St. www.reaf-sf.org

Piano Bar 101 @ Martuni’s Sing-along night with talented locals, and charming accompanist Joe Wicht. 9pm. 4 Valencia St. at Market.

Pan Dulce @ Beaux The hot weekly Latin dance night with sexy gogo guys, drag divas and more, returns to the Castro, with Club Papi’s Frisco Robbie and Fabian Torres. $5 9pm-2am. 2344 Market St. www.beauxsf.com

Thu 8

Sun 4 Flagging in the Park @ National AIDS Memorial Grove

Spanglish @ Club OMG Spanish and English drag shows and dance music with DJ Carlitos. $5-$10. 9pm-2am. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

Underwear Night @ 440 Strip down to your skivvies at the popular men’s night. 9pm-2am. 440 Castro St. 621-8732. the440.com

Tue 6 Godless Perverts Social Club @ Wicked Grounds Open topic gathering for queer kinksters of all kinds. 7pm-9pm. 289 8th St. www.godlessperverts.com

Grab ‘em by the Songs @ Uptown Nightclub, Oakland Enjoy women’s songs and storytelling with the Kim Lembo Project and guests Audrey Howard, Essence Goldman and Madelin Tasquin. 7pm.

1928 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. www.uptownnightclub.com

Oakland A’s Pride Night @ Oakland Coliseum Enjoy a baseball game vs. the Toronto Blue Jays, with a pre-game LGBT party and souvenirs. $25-$50. 7pm.

Westside Patio, (510) 563-2344.

7000 Coliseum way, Oakland. http:// atmlb.com/2s4uLpR

Underwear Night @ Club OMG Weekly underwear night includes free clothes check, and drink specials. $4.

10pm-2am. 43 6th St. www.clubomgsf.com

Wed 7 Broadway Bingo @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko Joe Wicht and Katya Smirnoff-Skyy cohost the fun musical theatre trivia and open mic night. 5:30pm-7pm.

Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.feinsteinsatthenikko.com/

Tom Reardon @ Feinstein’s at the Nikko The accomplished crooner returns with his new cabaret concert, Where I’m Bound: Songs From America. $21$50. $20 food/drink min. 8pm. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.feinsteinsatthenikko.com/

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

Email events@ebar.com, at least two weeks before your event.

Event photos welcome.

t

Read more online at www.ebar.com

Shining StarS

June 1-7, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 39

PhotoS by

Steven Underhill haPPy hoUr @ Midnight SUn W

eeknight happy hour is thriving in the Castro, including at the popular midnight Sun, where patrons schmoozed after work, and enjoyed discount cocktails and pop music videos. 4067 18th St. www.midnightsunsf.com More photo albums are on BARtab’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/lgbtsf.nightlife. See more of Steven Underhill’s photos at www.StevenUnderhill.com.

Read more online at www.ebar.com

April 27-May 3, 2017 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 39

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For headshots, portraits or to arrange your wedding photos

call (415) 370-7152 or visit www.StevenUnderhill.com or email stevenunderhillphotos@gmail.com

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