Coast Pride center vandalized
Poet theologian at Glide
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'Dirty White Teslas'
ARTS
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Lil Nas X documentary
The
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Serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities since 1971
Vol. 54 • No. 11 • March 14-20, 2024
Efforts start to pay off as vacancies decline in Castro David Mixner
Gay political activist David Mixner died March 11.
Former presidential adviser David Mixner dies by Cynthia Laird
D
avid Mixner, a gay man who once advised former President Bill Clinton before a falling out over the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military, died Monday, March 11, in New York City. He was 77. The announcement was made on Mr. Mixner’s Facebook page. “It is with a heavy heart that I share the news of David’s passing today,” read a comment under a photo captioned “R.I.P. David B. Mixner. 1946-2024.” A cause of death was not stated. While Mr. Mixner was best known as an adviser to Clinton – Newsweek named him the most powerful gay man in America in 1993 – he was involved in many LGBTQ issues. He became an activist in the civil rights movement over the objections of his parents and protested the Vietnam War, as the Bay Area Reporter noted in a 2008 article. Mr. Mixner worked on the presidential campaigns of the late Eugene McCarthy and Clinton as well as the campaigns of the late Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and former California governor Jerry Brown. A consummate political insider, Mr. Mixner at the same time caused countless headaches for Democratic Party officials as a rebel voice within the party, as the paper previously reported. The falling out with Clinton occurred because the president signed DADT after promising during his 1992 campaign to allow gays to serve openly in the military. DADT was presented as a compromise law whereby gays and lesbians could serve if they remained in the closet. It took decades for DADT to be repealed by a bill in Congress that was signed by former President Barack Obama in 2010. The law went into effect in 2011. According to a 2010 study by the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ think tank at UCLA School of Law, more than 13,000 individuals were discharged for violating DADT. . Mr. Mixner lived for a short time in San Francisco in the late 1970s. While in the city, he worked with the late gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk to defeat California Proposition 6, the 1978 Briggs initiative that would have banned gays from teaching in public schools. He told the B.A.R. during the 2008 phone interview that one of the saddest days of his life was November 27, 1978 – the day that former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White assassinated See page 10 >>
by John Ferrannini
A
year ago, San Francisco’s beleaguered LGBTQ Castro neighborhood was seeking signs of hope. Now, neighborhood stakeholders tell the Bay Area Reporter that they’ve got some. “I feel like things are starting to get better,” said Terry Asten Bennett, a straight ally who is president of the neighborhood’s merchants association and co-owner of Cliff’s Variety at 479 Castro Street. “I’m optimistic. There are issues we still see with vacancies, but we see them going away a lot faster.” In the past year, the neighborhood has seen promise in the reopening of Badlands, agreements to fill the old Harvey’s and Baghdad Cafe spaces, and a smattering of new businesses such as the Hulu Wa China Bistro. But other businesses, such as Q Bar, remain shuttered, and it’s unclear when its doors will open. “I think things are sort of staying the same,” Cleve Jones, a longtime gay activist who was a former aide to gay slain supervisor Harvey Milk and was a cofounder of both the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, told the B.A.R. “Losing Catch is a big blow for me. ... I think things are kind of stuck.” Catch, at 2362 Market Street, closed March 9 after over a generation in the neighborhood, a development making visual the axiomatic truth that progress involves both steps forward and backward. The seafood restaurant occupied the space that
Courtesy the candidates John Ferrannini
Pedestrians walk along Castro Street during a recent afternoon.
was once the headquarters of the NAMES Project. Jones told the B.A.R. that a piece of the quilt that’d been hanging in the space – as well as a bench commemorating the original site of the NAMES Project – would revert back to the quilt’s custodians, the National AIDS Memorial Grove. The grove confirmed this to the B.A.R. “Both the quilt and bench will return to our warehouse in San Leandro, which is open to the public for tours,” quilt conservator and production manager Gert McMullin stated.
The bench had been controversial because when no business was located at 2362 Market, neighboring businesses de facto became responsible for cleaning it regularly. Eventually, Castro businessman David Bach straight up took the bench, as the B.A.R. reported back in 2001, because the city wasn’t taking care of it. It was reported stolen by its caretaker to the police. See page 8 >>
STIs fall in SF after doxyPEP rollout by Liz Highleyman
T
he early rollout of doxyPEP in San Francisco has contributed to a decline in sexually transmitted infections, according to studies presented March 4 at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver. DoxyPEP refers to taking a single dose of the antibiotic doxycycline within 72 hours after sex. “We are seeing early evidence of the potential for a population-level impact of doxycycline on chlamydia and syphilis rates,” said Dr. Stephanie Cohen, director of HIV/STI Prevention for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “I think this is quite an encouraging result, after over a decade of steadily rising STI rates.” In keeping with its pioneering role in the fight against HIV, San Francisco was the first city to issue local doxyPEP guidelines, and it is the first to see outcomes in clinical practice and at the population level. The new real-world findings back up evidence from clinical trials showing that doxyPEP can substantially reduce chlamydia and syphilis, though it is less effective against gonorrhea. “This effort is a tremendous example of the rapid translation of research into public health practice and shows that this promising prevention tool has the impact to help turn the curve on the epidemic of
Liz Highleyman
Dr. Hyman Scott, left, and epidemiologist Madeline Sankaran discussed recent research on doxyPEP at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver.
STIs that we have been facing in San Francisco and across the nation,” gay San Francisco health director Dr. Grant Colfax said a statement.
DoxyPEP in clinical practice
Dr. Annie Luetkemeyer of UCSF reported the
latest findings from the DoxyPEP trial, which enrolled more than 500 gay and bisexual men and transgender women in San Francisco and Seattle who were either living with HIV or taking PrEP. As Luetkemeyer first reported at the 2022 International AIDS Conference, study participants randomly assigned to use doxyPEP saw about an 80% drop in chlamydia and syphilis and a 55% decline in gonorrhea. At CROI, she reported follow-up data showing that risk reduction was sustained among participants initially randomized to doxycycline. Among those initially assigned to standard care and offered doxyPEP after its effectiveness was known, STI incidence fell steeply even though the number of sex partners and condomless sex acts doubled in the short term. Dr. Hyman Scott reported early results from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Magnet clinic at its Strut health center in the LGBTQ Castro neighborhood, where doxyPEP has been offered to around 3,000 active PrEP users starting in November 2022, a month after the San Francisco Department of Public Health issued the first doxyPEP guidelines. As the Bay Area Reporter previously reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the first national doxyPEP guidance a year later. See page 10 >>