November 17, 2011 Edition of the Bay Area Reporter

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Chorus launches 'Dear Harvey'

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Bill would restore vet benefits

Random Dance

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

Day honors lives lost A

Vol. 41 • No. 46 • November 17-23, 2011

Queers hope for more presence at Occupy SF

by Seth Hemmelgarn

s the Bay Area gets ready to observe the 13th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance this weekend, a murdered East Bay transsexual woman will be among those who’ll be honored at the Oakland event.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance typically memorializes those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.

Sunday is the official Day of Remembrance, but the Oakland event marking the occasion will be from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., Friday, November 18, at Nile Hall in Preservation Park, 668 13th Street. Doors will open at 7 p.m. The event is free.

One of the people who will be remembered in Oakland is James “Lucie” Parkin, who was killed September 20 at La Quinta Inn and Suites, 20777 Hesperian Boulevard in Hayward.

Miguel Cardona Inostroz, 29, was arrested September 29 in connection with the incident.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s office charged him October 13 with one count each of murder and assault with a firearm, and an enhancement for possession of a firearm by a felon.

His next court date is December 16 to enter a plea.

Tiffany Woods Tiffany Woods, the TransVision coordinator at the Fremont-based Tri-City Health Center, is planning the Day of Remembrance in Oakland.

Woods said she never met Parkin.

However, based on what she’s heard from clients who were friends with Parkin, Parkin owed Inostroz money, Woods said. She said Parkin identified as transsexual, rather than transgender, and was 36. It’s not clear whether Parkin’s death had anything to do with her gender identity.

DA spokeswoman Rebecca Richardson said she couldn’t provide more details about the case.

She said court records show Parkin’s legal name as James Parkin, also known as Lucy.

A Facebook page apparently belonging to Parkin used the spelling Lucie. The page says Parkin lived in San Lorenzo.

Lieutenant Roger Keener, a spokesman for the Hayward Police Department, said in an email that he couldn’t provide a copy of the police report or discuss the case because it’s See page 13 >>

It was a quiet evening of music and conversation Sunday at the Occupy San Francisco encampment, as a man played a banjo, left, and Alison McClintock, right, held a dog.

Jane Philomen Cleland

by Tony K. LeTigre

I

n less than two months, the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown from an initial protest in Manhattan to a global phenomenon encompassing more than 1,000 cities, and some participants and supporters

locally see in its tactics a reflection of militant queer activism of the past.

“Occupy Wall Street grew out of frustration that a lot of people have been feeling for years,” said Tommi Avicolli Mecca, 60, who helped found Queers for Economic Equality Now in late 2010 and has long been involved in

various queer activist groups.

“The role queers can play is to question economic inequality,” Avicolli Mecca continued. “The queer perspective is all about questioning the status quo. Not just with big banks and Wall Street and the White House, See page 12 >>

Upscale amenities add to gay resort town’s country charms

by Matthew S. Bajko

H

alfway up Guerneville’s Main Street a sign beckoned to passersby.

“Bock! Bock! It’s Chicken Day at the Market.”

A chicken potpie, green chile chicken soup, and a Sonoma chicken and arugula salad were the featured menu items one Saturday in midSeptember at the Big Bottom Market. The gourmet deli and grocery store’s name, which can be read as a gay play on words, is derived from a nickname given to the area in the 1860s due to its location in a flood zone.

Inside locally produced cheeses and mustards line the shelves. Sweets from lesbianowned Poco Dolce Confections and canned vegetables by organic food purveyor Happy Girl Kitchen Company are also for sale.

Among the wine selection are Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs by the gay-owned boutique vineyard Bjornstad Cellars.

Opened this past July the market is one of several new upscale stores setting up shop in Sonoma County’s gay getaway resort town along the Russian River. The establishments are injecting a bit of city life into the tranquil country setting.

“I’ve had this dream of opening up a

Kelly Pulieo Photography

Co-owner Michael Volpatt and a patron enjoy a glass of wine at the gay-owned Big Bottom Market.

place that is very focused on locally sourced products,” said Michael Volpatt, a partner in the market who also co-owns a PR firm named Larkin/Volpatt Communications with Kate Larkin. “I wanted a new project career-wise

{ FIRST OF TWO SECTIONS }

and I also wanted to be a part of what I am calling the Guerneville Renaissance.”

Volpatt, who lives a short drive away from the market, teamed up with co-owner zCrista Luedtke to develop the deli’s menu. Luedtke and her life partner, Jill McCall, are the coowners of Boon Hotel and Spa, a 14-unit resort a half-mile from downtown Guerneville on Armstrong Woods Rood.

The couple also operates Boon Eat and Drink, which is a few doors away from the Big Bottom Market and opened in 2009.

Volpatt and others credit them with showing that more upscale businesses could survive in Guerneville.

“Crista has revived the town. She is inspiring other people to do good work,” said Audrey Joseph, a San Francisco entertainment commissioner who owns a home in the area. “I see young couples walking in town, that is due to her work.”

Joseph, a party promoter for the town’s Lazy Bear weekends for hirsute gay men, recalled that in years past they made sure attendees didn’t need to head into town.

“Guerneville was dying a slow death. There was nothing to do here,” she said. “We did so many events during Lazy Bear they didn’t have See page 8 >>

<< Community News

2 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

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Rick Gerharter

Folsom returns the favor(s) F

olsom Street Events, producers of the Folsom Street Fair, Up Your Ally Fair, and the Magnitude and Bay of Pigs dance parties, distributed $330,745 to the 2011 beneficiaries at a party Wednesday, November 9 at the Armory. This year’s beneficiaries included the AIDS/Breast Cancer Emergency Funds, AIDS Legal Referral Panel, Castro Country Club/Baker Places,

Central City Hospitality House, Dimensions Clinic, Frameline, Mission Neighborhood Health Center, the National AIDS Memorial Grove, Pets Are Wonderful Support, Positive Resource Center, Project Open Hand, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, St. James Infirmary, Stop AIDS Project, and the Transgender Law Center.

San Francisco voters signal OK with status quo

by Matthew S. Bajko

V

ebar.com

oters in San Francisco signaled their acceptance of the status quo by electing two incumbents and a candidate who campaigned largely on keeping his predecessor’s programs intact.

Based on the latest unofficial returns posted November 12, interim Mayor Ed Lee secured a full four-year term with 60 percent of the vote once ranked-choice voting results were tabulated. His final vote tally after 11 rounds was 81,217. His closest challenger was District 11 Supervisor John Avalos with 53,174 votes.

Lee was appointed in January by the Board of Supervisors to serve out the remainder of the second term of former Mayor Gavin Newsom, who resigned to become California’s lieutenant governor. Formerly the city administrator, Lee had pledged to return to his old job but then changed his mind this summer and upended the mayoral campaign.

While his opponents cried foul and tried to tar and feather Lee as a liar and a crony for downtown interests, the attacks failed to nudge him out of the frontrunner status in the race. And many voters failed to see why Lee did not deserve to be elected to a full term.

The same situation played out in the district attorney’s race, where former Police Chief George Gascón secured his own full four-year term with 63 percent of the vote, according to the latest unofficial returns. After two rounds Gascón’s final tally came to 96,324 votes compared to secondplace finisher David Onek, a former police commissioner who netted 57,134 votes.

Gascón was tapped by Newsom to replace Kamala Harris, who resigned after winning election last fall as the state’s attorney general. A one-time Republican, Gascón saw his stance toward the death penalty be used against him in the race. But voters didn’t appear to be bothered by his saying he would not rule out seeking the death penalty in certain cases even though he personally is against it. He pledged to seek repeal of the state’s death penalty law should he be elected.

The one race where the incumbent was not on the ballot this year was for sheriff due to the retirement of

Rick Gerharter

Mayor Ed Lee

Michael Hennessey after 32 years in office. Yet he may as well have been since the winning candidate, District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, repeatedly stressed that he intended to maintain the programs that Hennessey had put in place.

Mirkarimi, who had Hennessey’s endorsement, finished in first place with 81,795 votes. Sheriff’s Captain Paul Miyamoto landed close behind in second with 72,090 votes after the second round.

All three will be eligible to run for re-election in 2015.

Supervisor vacancy Talk has already turned to whom Lee will appoint to fill out the last year of Mirkarimi’s supervisorial term. The person will be up for election to a full four-year term next fall as the odd-numbered supervisor districts will once again be up for grabs.

The mayor could make history by appointing the city’s first out bisexual to serve on the board, Planning Commission President Christina Olague. The bisexual Latina was one of five co-chairs leading the “Run, Ed, Run” campaign this spring and summer to get Lee to run for mayor.

But Olague may be too progressive as Lee looks to shore up the moderate bloc on the board. Currently there are five moderates and four progressives, with Mirkarimi solidly in the second group. Two other supervisors tend to be swing votes, District 6 Supervisor

Jane Kim and board President David Chiu, though he may be less inclined to work with Lee having lost to him in the mayoral race.

Other names that have been floated include the Park and Recreation Department’s General Manager Phil Ginsburg and Paul Henderson, a gay black man who works for Lee as his deputy chief of staff on public safety.

From outside the administration are Malcolm Yeung, who recently departed from a job with the Chinatown Community Development Center, a nonprofit that was a major backer of Lee’s campaign, and London Breed, executive director of the African American Art and Culture Complex.

Whoever is selected is sure to be challenged for the seat. Two names already being mentioned as possible candidates next year are Quintin Mecke, a spokesman for openly gay Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) who ran for mayor in 2007; and Julian Davis, president of the board of directors of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center. Former District 5 Supervisor Matt Gonzalez, now a deputy public defender, could also opt to run again for the seat.

One long shot is gay former District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty.

His house currently lies half a block from the border of District 5 and may end up in the Haight and Western Addition centered district due to the redistricting process.

There is nothing barring him from seeking a third term in 2012. But he told the Bay Area Reporter this week that such a possibility is “as likely as me winning X Factor.”

Mirkarimi told reporters last week that who his successor will be “seems to be the escalating question.” He added that he hopes the mayor consults with him about the selection.

“You’ve got to know the district, and the district has got to know you,” he said, adding, “I’d like to believe we would have a say” in whom Lee picks.

He said he’s “hearing a lot of names,” and there’s a short list, but he said he couldn’t say who he’d be comfortable with in the seat.

“District 5 is one of the most diverse districts in the whole city,” he said. ▼

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Community News>>

November 17-23, 2011 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 3

‘Dear Harvey’ to mark Milk, chorus milestone

by Seth Hemmelgarn

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ore than three decades ago, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus made its first public appearance. The performance took place on the steps of City Hall on November 27, 1978, hours after openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated in his office.

Now, the chorus is soliciting art for a production that will mark its 35th anniversary – and the 35th anniversary of Milk’s murder – and honor the slain gay icon’s life and legacy. Through “Dear Harvey, We’ve Got Hope,” a major multi-disciplinary project, people around the world are being invited to submit video, photos, and other forms of art.

“What we’re looking for is people to give their interpretation of what Harvey Milk’s legacy means to them and how he has impacted their life,” said chorus Executive Director Teddy Witherington. The chorus is especially interested in hearing from people born after Milk’s assassination, he added.

Stuart Milk, Milk’s openly gay nephew and a founder of the Harvey Milk Foundation, said in a statement provided by the chorus, “My uncle literally gave his life over three decades ago to obtain equality, inclusion, and acceptance – his legacy offers an example of determination and hope.”

Courtesy SF Police Department

Ricky Lamark Hodge

Man arrested in anti-trans attack released

by Seth Hemmelgarn

A

man arrested for allegedly attacking a transgender woman in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood is out of custody.

Ricky Lamark Hodge, 38, was released from San Francisco County jail on November 2, Larry Roberts, a spokesman for the San Francisco Public Defender’s office, said in an email. The District Attorney’s office hasn’t filed charges against Hodge in the case.

According to the San Francisco Police Department, Hodge was arrested after the October 31 attack on charges that included aggravated assault and terrorist threats. Police considered the case a hate crime.

Police said the incident occurred at about 9:40 p.m. in the 500 block of Valencia Street, near 17th Street.

Hodge allegedly approached the victim, identified only as a 43-yearold white transgender woman.

Lieutenant Teresa Gracie, head of the SFPD’s special investigations division, has said Hodge said, “Fucking faggot, I don’t like you.

I’m going to kill you.” She said he also called the victim “queer.”

San Francisco Police spokesman Officer Carlos Manfredi has said that after threatening to kill the victim, Hodge allegedly struck her on the side of the forehead.

After the victim noticed Hodge See page 13 >>

Rick Gerharter

The Lollipop Guild and Vocal Minority, ensemble groups from the larger San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, entertained guests at Crescendo, the chorus’ fall fundraiser, which was held last month.

Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in November 1977, making him one of the first out gay people elected to public office.

He was assassinated just over a year later, along with then-Mayor George Moscone.

The production’s world premiere

will be in San Francisco, and Witherington hopes it will be ready for Harvey Milk Day, May 22, 2013.

The first act will speak to Milk’s life and will be choral in content, Witherington said. The second portion will address Milk’s legacy and may contain elements of

theater, dance, photography, video, and other media.

A writing team is being formed for the first act, and composers under the age of 35 will also be commissioned for that part of the production.

The second act will include

choral anchors at the beginning and end, but the middle section is “the wonderful unknown at this point,” Witherington said. “It will depend very much on the submissions that we get.”

The second portion of the show “won’t just be random, disconnected pieces of art,” he added. Submissions will be woven together, “and pieces will be adapted so that Act Two flows in a coherent way.”

Witherington estimated the cost of creation would be less than $200,000, and the cost of production could range from $50,000 to $100,000. Funds will come from foundations, individual donors, and other sources, he said.

There will be at least three cash prizes for the best submissions. Each prize is worth $1,000. Half of each prize will go to a chorus community partner. Each winning artist will get to nominate a partner to share the money. Partners include the Harvey Milk Foundation, Witherington said.

The deadline to submit work is midnight, January 31, 2012. There’s no submission fee. For other rules and more general information, visit www.dearharvey2013.org. ▼

<< Open Forum

4 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

Volume 41, Number 46 November 17-23, 2011 www.ebar.com PUBLISHER Thomas E. Horn Bob Ross (Founder, 1971 – 2003) NEWS EDITOR Cynthia Laird ARTS EDITOR Roberto Friedman ASSISTANT EDITORS Matthew S. Bajko Seth Hemmelgarn Jim Provenzano CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Dan Aiello • Tavo Amador • Erin Blackwell Roger Brigham • Scott Brogan Victoria A. Brownworth • Philip Campbell Heather Cassell • Chuck Colbert Richard Dodds • David Duran Raymond Flournoy • David Guarino Liz Highleyman • Brandon Judell John F. Karr • Lisa Keen • Matthew Kennedy David Lamble • Tony K. LeTigre Michael McDonagh • Paul Parish Lois Pearlman • Tim Pfaff • Jim Piechota Bob Roehr • Donna Sachet • Adam Sandel Jason Serinus • Gregg Shapiro Gwendolyn Smith • Ed Walsh • Sura Wood

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

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CBS ‘ins’ mayor-elect L

ast Sunday’s CBS Evening News aired a two-minute profile on the youngest mayorelect in the country, 22-year-old Alex Morse of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The piece, by anchor Russ Mitchell, showed Morse on election night at his victory party and interviewed him about issues facing Holyoke, including the city’s high 11 percent unemployment rate.

Mitchell pointed out that the working class city in the western part of the state is diverse, and he noted that Morse, a recent college graduate, has his eye on several projects that hopefully will boost employment and the city’s nightlife.

Unfortunately, there was one thing that Mitchell left out of his story: Morse is openly gay. That fact should have been mentioned in CBS’ coverage for several reasons. Above all, it’s part of who Morse is as a person. His election shows other LGBTs that they, too, can run and win key leadership races. And it’s another example that gays are part of mainstream American life, in a city perhaps not known for its gay activism like San Francisco or New York.

Veteran television news man Hank Plante, an openly gay man who retired last year from the CBS5 affiliate in San Francisco, was conflicted about the omission in a note that was shared with LGBT journalists. “I guess one could make the argument that that’s a good thing, and that his sexuality shouldn’t matter,” Plante, now living in Palm Springs, wrote.

On the other hand, he said, gays and lesbians, especially young people, need heroes.

“And since the mayor-elect is open about his sexuality, I think it should have been part of the story. After all, the mostly-straight voters said ‘yes’ to this young man, just as the mostlywhite voters in America said ‘yes’ to our first African American president, and that’s certainly significant,” Plante stated.

We’re firmly on the side of inclusion. Since Morse is out – and was backed by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund in his race – CBS did a disservice to its viewers with its decision to “in” the mayor-elect. Normally, we would

call on the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to enter the fray, and perhaps meet with CBS News officials to talk with them about the importance of this small Massachusetts city electing an out mayor. But these days GLAAD is consumed with reacting to negative situations, such as when a celebrity writes “faggot” in a tweet or uses “tranny” to refer to a transgender person. So we won’t hold our breath with the pc police of GLAAD. In fact, Morse isn’t the only LGBT mayor elected in last week’s balloting. The Victory Fund reported that eight of nine out candidates it endorsed won their elections. The one who lost? That would be Bevan Dufty right here in San Francisco, the so-called gay mecca. Houston continues to be governed by Annise Parker, who won her race easily. And Steve Pougnet won reelection in Palm Springs.

Plante makes another point that CBS leaders – and other mainstream news executives – would do well to keep in mind, especially on TV news shows: the more that LGBTs are portrayed as part of the fabric of everyday life, the better off we are. It is often said that we are everywhere. But we’re not in news stories if reporters continue to keep us in the closet even when we’re out.

Hernandez wins school board seat Speaking of young gay politicos, here’s a shout-out to David Hernandez, the gay congressional aide who helped save the life of Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) after she was shot in the head in January.

Last week he won a seat on the school board in Tucson. He was one of five Victory Fundbacked school board candidates across the country who won last week. We’re confident that Hernandez will add an important voice to local education in Arizona, a state that has been in the spotlight for its anti-immigration stances.▼

LGBTs must stand with immigrants

by Jim Mitulski

I

mmigrant solidarity deserves to be at the top of LGBT liberation issues. I never expected to live long enough to see so many of the causes for which our entire movement has worked for generations see vindication to the extent that we have seen in recent years.

I have seen the place of social stigma long occupied by people of color, once occupied by gays and lesbians in the 1970s and 80s, occupied by people with HIV in the 1980s and 1990s, occupied subsequently by the poor, now give way to a scapegoating of immigrants, particularly Latino/a immigrants, and have been disappointed by the lack of solidarity exhibited by our collective movement as this population integral to our society has been increasingly marginalized and now persecuted to an unprecedented degree by our laws.

While so much attention has been focused on local mayoral races, and so much of our movement’s attention has been focused on marriage equality and on the full integration of gays into the military, other issues and races have been unfolding that merit our collective focus. I was so heartened to see that Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce was recalled in the recent elections there, because it may signal a sea change in public awareness of the virulent anti-immigrant hysteria that is unfolding in our midst. Pearce was the force behind Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant statute SB 1070, some of which has been declared unconstitutional but much of which has been retained. Apparently Pearce went too far even for those who support restrictions on immigration, and even his past supporters characterized him as going too far.

While our community celebrated last December the toppling of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” in the same weekend the Dream Act went down to defeat in Congress, with the help of some Democrats. Our cries of joy at the one victory should have been muted with cries of outrage over the quiet defeat of this national

legislation that was thinly disguised antiLatino/a hysteria. California’s version of the Dream Act, AB 31 did recently pass, but it still is counter to the national trend. Meanwhile the state of Alabama has continued a long tradition of anti-civil rights legislation with HB 56, signed into law in June and facing constitutional tests that makes Arizona’s laws look tame. It is illegal to be without status in Alabama, to rent an apartment or provide utilities to non-citizens, to give rides, or to educate the children of immigrants without papers. Many of these workers provide essential employment to Alabama’s agricultural industry. Since the beginning of the school year over 2,000 students have been taken out of public school, nearly all of who are Hispanic. So strong is the anti-Hispanic prejudice in Alabama that even the negative economic implications of such a severe set of restrictions on undocumented workers is not able to mitigate the hatred of perceived foreigners. The word for this is xenophobia, not part of our vocabulary at this time in the United States, but alive and well nevertheless in our society. If once we knew how to identify and challenge homophobia, it is now morally incumbent on us to identify xenophobia with the same challenge and to make it an issue primarily associated with our community’s agenda to overturn.

The reasons for this are many. We who have experienced the negative effects of homophobia ought to be quick to identify when others experience a similar irrational hatred, and to put to use our political organizing skills in challenging the laws and structures which help reinforce it. Also those affected by laws like those in Alabama and Arizona are part of our LGBT constituency.

Only our own racism prevents us from recognizing the extent to which this is true.

The simplistic notion that immigration is

not a gay issue reveals this insidious internal shortsightedness.

I remember Proposition 64. In 1986, Lyndon LaRouche and his allies managed to put on the California state ballot a measure that if passed and found constitutional would have forced people with HIV from their jobs and into mandatory quarantine. I remember the fear that went through our community in the Castro when we speculated about what would happen if we were rounded up and put in isolation camps in Alameda. We wondered if our non-gay neighbors would stand in solidarity with us, or in tradition of silent bystanders exhibited by Californians during the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans in 1942. Having just read Julie Otsuka’s current bestselling novel, The Buddha in the Attic, which recounts this very narrative, it caused me to reflect on the LGBT community’s relative silence around the xenophobia in our midst.

I hope that in the upcoming year, people will say of our community that we are steadfast, unrelenting, and unflinching allies of undocumented immigrants, that the passion, which has resulted in so many victories for us, has translated into passion for challenging unjust laws and racism without and outside of our community. Let Russell Pearce’s defeat be a clarion call to our community, that whatever reluctance we have evidenced in the past, let us now say no – to presidential candidates who make light of electrified fences, and to laws like SB 1070 and HB 56. Let LGBT rights be interchangeable with immigrant rights in our pursuit of justice.▼ The Reverend Jim Mitulski is pastor of New Spirit Community Church at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley (www.newspiritchurch.org). He has been a gay activist since 1976.

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Letters >>

November 17-23, 2011 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 5

EQCA’s endorsement process needs review As Equality California gets closer to pull-the-plug time, it’s becoming more clear why the organization is on life support. EQCA’s automatic, reviewless endorsement of Betsy Butler in the brand new West Hollywood-toMalibu state Assembly District is one such example.

Butler moved into the district and is running against Torie Osborn. Back in the 1970s, with me and other San Franciscans at her side, Osborn declared herself an out, loud, and proud dyke, and has worked for us ever since. She headed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center.

EQCA issued its auto endorsement because Butler is an Assembly member (in another district) who had voted along EQCA’s recommendations.

This policy made it impossible for Osborn, a pioneer in LGBT rights, to even present herself for possible EQCA endorsement.

EQCA didn’t stand up for same-sex relationships during the Proposition 8 debacle and isn’t standing up for one of our own now. Perhaps the plug will just fall out on its own.

Jok Church San Francisco

Not bitter, but disillusioned Now that the election is over, I can speak out publicly about dirty politics in our community. I was one of two openly gay candidates running for sheriff and decided to drop out as a result of back-door dealings on behalf of our entrusted gay leadership.

First, Bevan Dufty – on Gay Pride Day – chose to endorse a straight opponent. He told me that my campaign was not “serious” because I did not have enough money in the bank, and that I did not have enough experience – when I was a deputy sheriff for almost 10 years and a community leader. Dufty told me that the gay deputies had urged him to support my opponent, not naming a single name. I had gathered almost enough signaturesin-lieu to waive the $5,000 filing fee.

I tried to secure endorsements, as well as debated at public forums in which my platform for sheriff was the main core issue at every debate and was gaining

momentum for my campaign. During all of this I was being backstabbed by the Dufty camp to support my opponent to aid in Dufty’s quest for mayor.

At the same time I actively was fundraising for the Jane Warner Plaque, organizing fundraisers and securing our goal to get the plaque made. Dufty dropped the ball on this, and I agreed to get this project done, out of respect for Jane.

Subsequently, Scott Wiener decided to endorse another straight opponent for sheriff because of back-door politics. His involvement with ex-District Attorney Kamala Harris and City Attorney Dennis Herrera (Wiener’s old boss) influenced his decision to endorse.

Subsequently, I dropped out of the race due to the lack of support from our community. I ran a no-nonsense campaign with a great platform which would have saved taxpayers over $100 million a year. No other candidate proposed any cost savings ideas.

Well, neither Dufty nor Wiener’s candidate for sheriff won. Dufty lost his bid for mayor, spending nearly $300 of our money per vote. Herrera lost. Most importantly, our community lost two openly gay candidates for sheriff because of shady back-door politics.

Our community leadership needs to remember where they came from, not their potential political futures.

We need to support our candidates – and be unified in order to gain more politically. If a leader or community organization does not support a gay/lesbian candidate running for office they have the option not to endorse, rather than divide our community and waste our time and money. These leaders and organizations need to act honorably to hopefully support our candidates and interests.

I learned a lot from this experience and how nasty politics can be. I waited until after the election to open up a dialogue in order to hopefully change the way our community elects our leaders and decides public policy.

Am I bitter about all of this? No. Am I disillusioned with the political process? Yes. We can learn from our mistakes in order to move forward, not backwards.

Jon Gray San Francisco

Tessie still needs Thanksgiving assistance compiled by Cynthia Laird

T

he folks at Tenderloin Tessie are in the midst of organizing next week’s Thanksgiving dinner for those in need, but this year they need more help than usual.

As previously reported, this year the nonprofit organization lost the place where volunteers cooked the turkeys. Board President Michael Gagne said in an email last week that he is still searching for a hotel or other commercial establishment with multiple ovens that could help out.

“We need 50 16-pound turkeys cooked a day or two before Thanksgiving that we would pick up on the 23rd or the morning of the 24,” he wrote, adding that his organization would of course provide the turkeys, pans, and condiments. “A second option would be for some of our volunteers to go into a place that has a kitchen and volunteer their time to cook them.”

Gagne hopes to avoid a third option, which would be to have many people volunteer to cook a turkey or two in their homes and drop them off at the dinner Thanksgiving morning.

The dinner takes place Thursday, November 24 from 1 to 4 p.m. at First Unitarian Church, 1187 Franklin Street (at Geary) in San Francisco.

Gagne said that people are needed throughout the day to help out, including morning set up, helping at the dinner, and tear down in the late afternoon.

Those able to help are asked to email Gagne at tenderlointessiedinners@yahoo.com with their full

Jane Philomen Cleland

In this file photo, Tenderloin Tessie volunteers show off the pumpkin pies that were served at the groups’ annual Thanksgiving dinner. The nonprofit organization needs extra assistance for next week’s event.

name and phone number and indicate for which shift they are available. People should also contact him at the above email regarding the turkey cooking.

Those who have gently used coats or blankets to donate should email Claire Brees at brees.c@gmail.com.

Memorial for Howard Grayson Saturday The Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club and Pride at Work will hold a memorial and celebration of the life of longtime Milk Club member Howard Grayson Saturday, November 19 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 headquarters, 350 Rhode Island Street in San Francisco (entrance is at 17th and Kansas streets).

Mr. Grayson, 66, died suddenly

on September 29 of apparent heart failure.

A longtime leader in progressive circles and organized labor, Mr. Grayson was a professional home care provider for many years.

The public is invited to the memorial.

USF students organize Trick or Can Day food drive A group of University of San Francisco students has organized a fundraising holiday combining the costuming fun of Halloween and the goodwill of Thanksgiving.

Called Trick or Can Day, the event asks kids in participating afterschool programs to go door to door, requesting canned food instead of candy. In San Francisco, children will participate on November 22.

The donated food will go to a local food bank.

Organizer Terry Hastings said See page 6 >>

<< Commentary

6 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Never forgotten

by Gwendolyn Ann Smith

S

ummer wanes, and the days get shorter. Blue skies give way to gray skies and the occasional rain shower. A slight chill now accompanies the sun’s warmth – not too long ago pervasive and penetrating.

The change from summer to fall has been a part of my life for as long as I’ve been alive, but in the last 13 years, it has taken on a new connotation. It reminds that the Transgender Day of Remembrance is coming.

Not that I could forget, mind you. You can tell from its very name that it isn’t here to be forgotten.

For me, personally, it’s indelibly marked on me, as permanent as a scar.

It’s not something that crops up in my calendar app, or that others need to remind me about. It’s not something I program around, like one might hang their seasonal tinsel in anticipation of the holidays.

It’s not the time I start to craft a carefully worded fundraising letter.

In some ways, I dread even having to write about it at all. Not because – after all these years – I won’t have anything to say, but because there are still quite a few things left to speak about.

Back in 1998, when I first had the notion to look at the state of anti-transgender murders, I did not think anyone would care. From what I could tell, our dead were gone weeks after they perished. When Rita Hester died on November 28 of that year, the trial of William Palmer – who had been accused of murdering Chanelle Pickett on November 20 – had concluded roughly a year and a half prior. Yet some in Massachusetts, where both deaths occurred, could not recall Pickett’s case.

So I began to chronicle these names. Not for the hope that anyone would pay attention, or that we’d have a big event every year, or what have you – but that at least someone was not forgetting.

I recently talked with Ethan St. Pierre, who is the Squiggy to my Lenny when it comes to the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

He and I discussed the difficulty in

Christine Smith

chronicling all these cases, how it changes you. You can’t look into the eyes of those we’ve lost lightly. It’s never just another murder, each one is a person, each one could be you, your friend, your family member.

Each one is someone with whom you have a sort of kinship.

I think back to the Gwen Araujo murder in 2002. Seeing her in her coffin at the funeral home. Getting to know her family. Sitting in several courtrooms. Looking at forensic evidence. Watching her killers just a few feet from me, smiling and joking with their own families.

Listening to eyewitness reports of what happened that night – and listening to defense attorneys try to claim that a several-hour beating was somehow a moment of “transgender panic.”

I think back to other cases, and how each affected me. Looking at those photos and hearing their stories, hearing the pleas from their parents and friends, and watching the trials and legal machinations changes you.

Then there are the new cases. You see, it doesn’t really stop, at least not yet. There are cases every couple weeks. There’s many more than we may never know. Even with more than a decade of awareness, even with a lot of transgender victories in both the legal arena and the court of public opinion, we still die at a rate consistent to where we were in 1998.

The cases are no less brutal, either. Not that you’d expect them to be. Our murderers don’t typically kill us and go on their way: they attempt to obliterate us, to erase us fully from existence.

Consider one of the most recent – as of this writing – cases, that of 19-year-old Shelly Moore in Detroit, Michigan. Her mother, Lyniece Nelson, had reported her as missing.

Then Nelson had to identify her child solely from a charred torso.

Moore’s killers did not just kill this teen. They dismembered her.

They burned her. They dumped the

<<

News Briefs

From page 5

that the USF students are working with Seven Tepees middle school and high school programs in the city’s Mission District. There are

remains along a service drive on the side of an interstate. They did all they could to make her a non-entity.

This is why we don’t forget. They may kill us, but we won’t let these murderers get the chance to erase us from existence. We remember, and we fight to make a society where killing us is not an option, where maybe some day we can look at the Transgender Day of Remembrance as a curious part of our past, much like one might baffle over medical treatment in the days before sterilization.

It’s not that we want to have a Transgender Day of Remembrance, it’s that we still need to have one.

Our deaths, as I said above, continue to happen at the same rates as they seemingly always have, from as best as we can tell. Some things have changed, but this remains an alarming constant. We still seem to lack the simple right to exist.

With all this said, I urge you to go to your local Transgender Day of Remembrance event. Show your solidarity with your transgender family and friends. March, light a candle, and be there for those we’ve lost while you remember those we have. If you cannot make it to an event for whatever reason, then just try to take a moment to remember privately.

Further, let us hope for an autumn in our future where we can remember when we had to remember, and when we can see that this brutality will no longer be tolerated.▼ In San Francisco, events are planned for Friday, November 18 at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav (www.facebook.com/event. php?eid=179136982170978) and Sunday, November 20 at Ark of Refuge (www. facebook.com/event. php?eid=181010261982451).

For more events, see story, page 1. Gwen Smith hopes everyone stays safe out there. You can find her at www.gwensmith.com.

over 40 youth involved, and they have designed door hangers, which are expected to be distributed this week in advance of the collection date. The event is sponsored by the National High 5 Project, a nonprofit that starts alternative holidays.▼

ebar.com

Politics >>

▼ EQCA blasted for endorsing straight candidate in LA

by Matthew S. Bajko

E

quality California has come under fire for snubbing Torie Osborn, a lesbian candidate running for a state Assembly seat that covers Santa Monica and West Hollywood, with its decision to endorse her straight opponent, Assemblywoman Betsy Butler (D-Marina Del Rey).

As the Bay Area Reporter noted online November 7, the decision by EQCA’s political action committee was hardly a surprise. Butler serves on the Equality California Institute’s board of directors, which is separate from the EQCA PAC, and had earned the backing of the state’s largest LGBT advocacy group last year when she also found herself running against an openly gay candidate.

But EQCA’s decision in 2010 not to endorse gay Manhattan Beach Mayor Mitch Ward did not produce the same backlash as its announcement has this year. For one thing Ward was not seen as strong a candidate as is Osborn, a former executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center.

And Butler was running for a seat centered in her hometown. This time she has opted to move into the newly drawn 50th Assembly District, provoking Osborn and her supporters to label Butler a carpetbagger.

Butler contends that label doesn’t apply. Even though her current home address is outside the district, a sliver of her 53rd Assembly District does fall within the boundaries of the new AD50 seat.

Courage Campaign Founder and Chair Rick Jacobs issued a statement saying he was surprised by the endorsement and called on EQCA to reconsider. The openly gay Jacobs added that the PAC should first meet with Butler, Osborn, and another candidate, Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom, before making a decision.

“EQCA owes itself, the community and the candidates the decency to withdraw its endorsement of a candidate who sits on their board, interview all candidates in this open district while insisting that it cannot endorse anyone on their board, and making its endorsement process public,” wrote Jacobs. “I would hope that all three candidates would agree that this is the right thing to do to restore faith in an otherwise tarnished and meaningless endorsement.”

Longtime LGBT activist David Mixner wrote on his blog that EQCA had “stepped in it big time” by choosing “the safe straight candidate over an exciting lesbian pioneer.”

The endorsement flap even got the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle over the weekend, which took note of the “mud-flinging” in the race.

EQCA’s PAC has defended its decision, pointing to its policy of automatically endorsing lawmakers up for re-election to the same chamber who earn 100 percent on its legislative scorecards. It does not do dual endorsements, and EQCA leaders note that their role is not merely to see LGBT people be elected.

The group contends it needs to show straight lawmakers who support pro-gay bills they will be rewarded come election time.

“We have an endorsement policy that helps support our mission of working in the Legislature to advance equality,” said EQCA spokeswoman Rebekah Orr. Not everyone in LA thinks EQCA erred. Ari Ruiz, the political vice president for the local gay Stonewall Young Dems club, said Butler has

Equality California has come under fire for its decision to endorse Assemblywoman Betsy Butler.

been a “straight ally” for a long time and has proven she deserves the LGBT community’s support.

“EQCA, I think, did the right decision,” said Ruiz, noting while he supports Butler the Stonewall club has yet to endorse in the race. “It is important for us to have the backs of our straight allies when they need it.”

EQCA isn’t the only group put into an awkward situation due to Butler’s decision to seek the AD50 seat. The LGBT Legislative Caucus has also had to re-examine its stance in the race.

Despite the fact that all seven of its members have individually endorsed Butler in the race, the caucus as a whole is withholding its endorsement in deference to Osborn. Yet up until this week Butler had erroneously included the caucus among her list of endorsers in the race.

It hasn’t been the only confusion over who is backing whom. Both Osborn and Butler for a time this fall listed openly gay state Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) as a backer on their campaign sites. Leno initially had given Osborn his endorsement prior to the new maps being released by the state redistricting commission.

Once Butler jumped into the race, Leno withdrew his support and switched allegiances to his colleague in Sacramento. He acknowledged to the B.A.R. last week that he should have waited for the new maps to be released.

And he agreed with EQCA’s reasoning that when an incumbent ally, who has a perfect scorecard on LGBT interests, is running for reelection that it’s important to support them.

Meeting on SF redistricting this weekend The city’s Redistricting Task Force has been holding a series of outreach meetings to gather community input as it prepares to redraw the boundaries of San Francisco’s 11 supervisor districts. The lines need to be redrawn due to the population growth recorded in the 2010 census.

The task force has until April 15 to complete its work so that the new lines will be ready in time when voters in odd districts go to the polls next November to elect new supervisors.

This weekend it will focus on District 8, which includes the gay Castro neighborhood, as well as South of Market’s District 6 and District 3 in Chinatown and North Beach. The meeting begins at 10 a.m. Saturday, November 19 at the Tenderloin Community School, 627 Turk Street.

The task force’s regular meetings take place the first Wednesday of each month at 3 p.m. in Room 406 at City Hall and the third Friday of each month at 6 p.m. in Room 416 at City Hall.▼

November 17-23, 2011 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 7

<< Community News

8 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Jane Philomen Cleland

Freedom band on parade T

he San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Band marches past San Francisco City Hall at the conclusion of the annual Veterans Day Parade Friday, November 11. Organizers asked the band to lead off

<<

this year’s parade in celebration of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Several members of the band are veterans and the parade also featured contingents from predominately gay American Legion posts.

Upscale town

From page 1

to worry about the town.”

Since Boon emerged on the scene that has changed. The restaurant and music venue Trio, which strives to use local and sustainable products, and Whitetail Winebar, a purveyor of local winemakers right next door to Big Bottom Market, have opened for business. Both would feel right at home in any of San Francisco’s trendy neighborhoods.

The influx of foodie destinations in the river town has caught the attention of food writers. This summer the San Francisco Chronicle’s Inside Scoop blog on Bay Area restaurants noted, “Guerneville is really getting its groove on.”

A writer for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s Guerneville microsite noted in June that in just a six-month time frame in early 2011 the business corridor went from appearing forlorn to looking “like Martha Stewart’s garden, a sprout here, a blossom there, and now we are almost in full bloom.”

Along with restaurateurs, artists have also staked claim to Guerneville.

Several galleries have opened in recent years, including Studio Blomster. It is located in a small shed-like structure at the back of the parking lot on the right of Armstrong Woods Road a few feet from the intersection with Main Street.

David Blomster, a gay man who relocated from Los Angeles, took over the space nearly two years ago and reworked it to show off artwork. He chose the space for its small size to keep costs low and said sales “have been good.”

“It is surprising the amount of sophisticated people who come through town,” said Blomster, who also manages the Boon eatery. “There is a lot of art in the county. I am trying to show stuff that wouldn’t be shown here.”

Business at Boon has also been good, said Blomster, noting waits for a table can stretch to two hours on a busy Friday night.

“We want more restaurants to open.

We are not averse to competition like that at all,” he said.

Gay and straight visitors One trend that has also worked to the advantage of the new businesses is the mix of straight and gay visitors who now vacation in the Russian River area. It no longer is seen as merely a getaway for gay men.

“When Fife’s became a wedding destination it helped diversify the town. It brings more people into our

James LaCroce

Shops such as the Guerneville 5 and 10 have recently upgraded their exteriors.

ecosystem,” said Volpatt. “That is what our businesses want.”

There are more event weekends also helping to drive visitors to town, from a Jazz music festival to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Seismic Challenge daylong bike ride that culminates in the heart of downtown Guerneville.

“Every weekend from April to October something is going on,” said Volpatt.

While businesses still heavily rely on the summer tourist season, they are finding that more and more people are calling Guerneville home year-round. The increased clientele during the slower fall and winter seasons helps keeps the stores afloat and open.

“It is amazing how many people are living here full-time and keeping their city places as pied-a-tiers,” said Beth Rudometkin, a real estate loan officer with Community First Credit Union in Guerneville and secretary of the local chamber of commerce board. “When I left in the 1970s it was mainly a summer destination and the majority of properties were summer homes. Over the past year prices have come down and people are making this a full-time residence.”

The town’s business leaders have been encouraging shopkeepers to modernize their facades through forgivable or low-interest loan programs offered by the county redevelopment agency. Both the Guerneville 5 and Dime, with a retro look, and the River Theater, with its Art Deco-inspired marquee, have upgraded their exteriors.

The new sense of vibrancy along the town’s main thoroughfare has been noticeable, said Rudometkin, who grew up in Guerneville and moved back to town 15 years ago.

“Four years ago we had a lot of empty storefronts. Landlords were wanting sky-high rents and they were not up-keeping their properties,” said Rudometkin, who joined the

chamber board about four years ago.

“We all pulled together and got things going to turn the town around.”

Other improvements have been adding flower baskets along Main Street, replacing the light bulbs on the pedestrian bridge that crosses the river, upgrading sidewalks and repainting crosswalks. A group of Realtors and residents get together monthly to do a town cleanup.

“It just adds more beauty to the town and shows we respect it,” said Rudometkin.

It also sets a tone for visitors, residents and other merchants, said Volpatt.

“The more beautiful we make the town it sends a message that this is not a place to be if you want to create blight,” he said.

The new businesses, in addition to the re-opening this fall of the old gay Triple R Resort as 3R, are having another impact. They are providing jobs for a younger generation of locals. Rudometkin saw one son ditch town for San Francisco to find work while her other son, Mason McGahan, stayed put and “stuck it out” she said.

McGahan, who is gay and works at a variety of places, said he wanted to remain and help see his hometown thrive rather than abandon it.

“To me it is about the people who live here and wanting to see the town succeed. I felt if I left that would be one less person to keep the businesses going and running smoothly,” he said.

“I’ve lived here since 1997 and seen the town go through a lot.”

Key going forward is having the 3R back in business, said McGahan, with its 24 rooms a block away from the commercial corridor and pool parties drawing in people staying elsewhere in the area.

“It provides more access people can have to the town. They can walk and check out the shops and the difference in the businesses going on,” said McGahan, who worked for the

Community News>>

▼ CA could be first in nation to offer redress to gay vets

by Dan Aiello

A

ssemblyman Dr. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) announced last week that he will author legislation that will restore state veterans benefits to gay and lesbian service members who were discharged or courtmartialed for being homosexual.

If passed, Pan’s legislation will be the first such effort at redress by any state or federal agency.

“I am proposing this legislation to assure that gay and lesbian veterans who would otherwise have qualified for these benefits, see them restored,” Pan told the Bay Area Reporter. “We need to correct this past injustice.”

Asked if the legislation would include language apologizing for the unwarranted discrimination, Pan said, “Personally I believe an apology is due. They fought to defend our country and our country rejected them. The language is not yet finalized but because you have asked me, I think it’s an important question I will certainly look to add to the language an apology.”

Brian O’Hara, Pan’s media director, told the B.A.R. that the proposed legislation will be introduced January 4, the first day of the legislative session.

Pan estimates there were approximately 3,000 Californians discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The military’s 17-year-old antigay policy was repealed last year

by Congress; the repeal went into effect September 20 after a number of certifications were completed by Defense Department officials and President Barack Obama.

If passed, Pan’s law would apply to all service member discharges or court-martials where the only crime the veteran committed was being homosexual.

State benefits that would be restored include home loan assistance, college assistance for state schools for both the veteran and his or her children,

November 17-23, 2011 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 9

Sacramento Valley Veterans Michael D. Williams and President Ty Redhouse joined Assemblyman Dr. Richard Pan and Mario Guerrero, director of government affairs for Equality California, at a press conference last week where Pan announced proposed legislation to give state veterans benefits to LGBT service members discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Courtesy Brian O’Hara

business waiver fees, access to health care, and tax breaks for veterans who run small businesses.

“I hope this bill will start a national conversation and lead to other states and the federal government following California’s lead,” said Pan. He referred to DADT as “an unfortunate political compromise” and “blatant and unwarranted discrimination.”

“Our country is safer when gay and lesbian citizens can serve in the military,” Pan told the B.A.R. Asked if this legislation will address benefits or offer redress to the families of service members who have been killed or committed suicide following torment from other soldiers, Pan said it would not.

“There are some tragic, tragic stories. The whole thing is a blight on our nation’s history. I’m under no illusions. This bill is not the end all of addressing every wrong that came with DADT,” he said.

Pan, a physician, said health benefits for ousted vets and college assistance

for them and their dependents are important first steps.

“As a pediatrician I have had the opportunity to care for youth who are LGBT or questioning. I’ve heard about the discrimination they face.

Hearing about the struggles my patients have made, their issues have for me, made me sensitive,” Pan told the B.A.R. “As a minority growing up in this country I have also experienced bullying at times because of my ethnicity, personally, growing up. Not to the extent that I’ve heard from some of my LGBT patients, but enough that I can appreciate their suffering.

The bill may also lead to a national conversation, Pan’s spokesman noted.

“This is an important step to, first of all, send a clear message these vets deserve to be honored by the nation and second, that these benefits are deserved and should be restored,” said O’Hara. “We are looking to right these past injustices and to spark a national conversation.”

Equality California announced on Veterans Day that it was sponsoring

Pan’s bill.

“We say a lot that invisibility is inequality. The contributions of these service members made have largely been invisible to the American public and now we have an opportunity to shine a light on that,” EQCA spokeswoman Rebekah Orr told the B.A.R. Orr said the legislation originated with Pan. “It was an idea that came from Dr. Pan – we were really thrilled to be able to support him with that,” she said.

Retired Staff Sergeant Ty Redhouse, president of the other sponsoring organization, Sacramento Valley Vets, explained that denial of benefits differed between those veterans given honorable discharges under DADT and those who were ousted prior to the Clinton administration policy.

“Some veterans discharged before DADT were deemed undesirable,” Redhouse told the B.A.R. “I have met veterans whose discharge papers listed them as ‘undesirable.’”

Redhouse claimed those veterans

who received dishonorable or undesirable discharges were denied all veterans benefits. Redhouse, who worked as an intelligence analyst for the Air Force from 1998 until 2006, served in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

“I think that the next step is to address the benefits of loved ones of veterans, their partners,” Redhouse said. The most important of those benefits would be college tuition, access to health care and to burial benefits. Because it specifically denies benefits to spouses or domestic partners of gay and lesbian vets, Redhouse said his organization sees the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act as a critical next step in redress.

Redhouse’s organization, online at www.SacValleyVets.org, provides speakers on the repeal of DOMA, as well as California’s pending redress legislation.

“We are very supportive of Dr. Pan and we’re glad to be a part of the announcement of this legislation,” said Redhouse.

Orr said the background that led to DADT almost 18 years ago was one of homophobia.

“I think that the motivations of DADT were very complicated,” stated Orr. “The driver behind every effort to roll back equality, or prevent advances in equality, is to allow our opposition to continue to portray LGBT people as outsiders and not citizens of our country. I think it’s more dehumanizing than that. I think it’s that their efforts have always been to portray LGBT people as harmful to society. Something like DADT or the visibility of committed LGBT couples, those things sort of fly in the face of the lies they tell of LGBT people.”

Pan, a freshman lawmaker, defeated Proposition 8 author Andrew Pugno last year for the 5th Assembly District seat. According to O’Hara, he was the only Democrat in the nation to win a Republican-held seat.▼

<< The Sports Page

10 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Paterno State’s Nittany liars

by Roger Brigham

T

houghts and observations about the Penn State child sex abuse scandal: • After ridding itself of a coach it had employed for decades when it learned that coach, Joe Paterno, has failed to provide adequate, minimal protection for young people in its sports facilities, Penn State claims it has wised up, will install corrective policies and programs, and change its internal culture of arrogant athletic hubris. Then again, it said the same thing after the departure of Rene Portland as the school’s women’s basketball coach after she and the school were sued for discriminating against lesbian student-athletes.

• Cars.com reportedly was one of the first of half a dozen or so advertisers to pull their spots from Penn State football games, beginning with last weekend’s 17-14 loss to Nebraska: a game, incidentally, which ESPN said drew twice the number of expected television viewers. Guess advertisers really don’t like the idea of their money either paying the pensions for the former PSU officials who were involved in the cover-up or to be used for the legal fees in the lawsuits that undoubtedly will start stacking up any day now.

• I love school spirit, but what the hell were those students doing when they were overturning cars and rioting after the firing of Paterno for his failure to act on the initial reports his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was having sex with a minor in the Penn State locker room showers? Talk about clueless.

• Some good will come out of this grim situation if it results in governments adopting appropriate laws and organizations adopting appropriate procedures to help ward off similar abuses in the future and accelerate their proper reporting.

Pennsylvania law, for instance, until this year did not have a requirement that school employees report their criminal histories; and Second Mile, the program Sandusky founded to help at-risk youths and through which he is now accused of having acquired victims, has not required background checks on its employees.

But laws and background checks are in and of themselves not sufficient protection. Sandusky, for instance, had no criminal background and statistics show that most pedophiles do not have previous criminal records. Intelligence, alertness, and the willingness to ask questions and confront situations are the first and best line of defense.

• On the flip side, there will

Saga planning ski trips Saga-North Ski and Snowboard Club is currently planning its winter trip, including the Utah Gay Ski Safari (January 4-8); the 20th annual Gay Ski Week in Whistler, British Columbia (February 5-12); and the Ogen Snowbasin and Powder Mountain Trip (March 3-7).

Trips are open to members and non-members alike. Pricing and reservation information are available on the club’s website at www. saganorth.com. undoubtedly be a chilling effect on volunteerism if the Penn State scandal triggers a witch-hunt atmosphere. False accusations or misinterpretations of spontaneous emotional expressions can discourage the kind of selfless support needed to provide the volunteer sport services at-risk youth benefit from the most.

• Beyond the disgust and rage over the alleged sexual assaults themselves, I, like so many others, am incensed at the institutional and individual failures in Happy Valley.

You see a kid being raped in a shower, you shouldn’t run off to tell someone else and make it their problem, or worry about what effect reporting the incident might have on your career. Damn it, you step in and stop it then and there. An instant waited is an instant too long. You get the kid to people who can take care of him and you get the cops to deal

with the assailant. Period.

An assistant tells you he saw something “disturbing” in the school showers involving a man and a child and you ask questions. You don’t just pass the buck and plead ignorance later. And when the guy keeps showing up you keep asking questions.

If a coach tells you about an incident report, you don’t try to bury it until the day a grand jury report comes out and accuses you of being a Nittany Liar: you bar the accused from your premises and set the legal inquiry in motion.

• If they were to make a movie about the Paterno era, they would create a portrait of the things that go so horribly wrong when a personality cult is allowed to overshadow the program it created and see itself as invulnerable to review.

In fact, I think I saw that movie the past weekend. It was called J. Edgar.

Aussie soccer player suspended for slur Football Federation Australia suspended Adelaide United player Antony Golec for three games after he publicly tweeted a homophobic slur against a referee he said he meant to send to his brother.

After a late loss to Brisbane Roar, Golec sent a tweet that read, “Ben Williams you are gay, biggest homo going around, you gypsy.”

Later he issued the requisite apology.

“I accept without reservation what I did was foolish and that as a consequence Ben Williams has every right to feel insulted and aggrieved,” Golec said. “I unreservedly apologize to Ben. I have also been counseled as to how the misuse of social media can lead to the issues for the club and me personally. The club has told me that it’s up to me to regain the trust and confidence of the squad, I will do that.”▼

China’s LGBT movement finds U.S. friends

by Heather Cassell

C

hina’s LGBT movers and shakers have found inspiration and support beyond their wildest

dreams in the Golden State.

In 2008, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center launched its leadership program, Learn Act Build – LAB for short – to train future

LGBT leaders in other countries, mostly from China.

The program has rapidly grown into a highly sought after and competitive fellowship among

Chinese and, now, people from other countries. Last year, the program hosted its first Fulbright Scholar from Czech Republic, Kristyna Ciprova. It was the first time the fellowship placed a fellow in an LGBT organization.

Two years after LAB launched, one of the program’s first graduates, Yunjun Li, who took a Western name, David, during his fellowship in the U.S., was selected to head up the China Leadership Program, coordinating potential interns for the LAB program in China. The program is a collaboration between the LA Gay and Lesbian Center and its sister center Aibai, China’s oldest LGBT rights organization based in Beijing.

It was a dream opportunity for the 31-year-old openly gay Chinese man. After graduating from the program he aspired to devote his life to China’s LGBT movement, Li told the Bay Area Reporter in an email interview.

“I was so much inspired and decided to devote myself to the LGBT community work in China,” said Li, who has always known he was gay and came out to his family earlier this year.

His parents are “very sad,” he wrote, but they love and respect him. He accepts that it will take his parents years to accept him as a gay man, he added.

Li was already deeply involved in China’s HIV/AIDS and LGBT movement, prior to being selected for LAB. He worked for a Chinese HIV/AIDS organization while volunteering at Aibai for six years.

He also completed a summer graduate course in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University in 2006.

Queer China China’s LGBT movement is emerging as rapidly as the nation has been growing the past decade.

Within the past 10 years the vast country that is home to 1.3 billion people has witnessed for the first time in its history the birth of many organizations devoted solely to LGBT rights.

China doesn’t have any laws against LGBT individuals, but neither are there any rights encoded into the government’s legal system, said activists.

The country’s capital is home to 10 new LGBT organizations alone, wrote Li. LGBT community centers are emerging; student groups are cropping up on university campuses; Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays has opened branches in several cities in China; and queer film and pride festivals are emerging.

“It’s a critical time for the community to increase its visibility and develop its strength,” wrote Li, who runs the program out of his home office.

“Without a powerful community, there is no great advocacy, let alone equal rights.”

LAB operated on $20,000 annually, until recently when it received a $75,000 grant from the Open Society Institute, said Lorri Jean, the LA center’s CEO, and Li. The grant allowed a 14-member delegation of experts to tour China for two weeks in September, said Jean, who participated in the trip.

Li is “glad” to work for the program and to “witness the development” of other incoming and graduate fellows of the program and the “fast development of the LGBT movement in China.”

He anticipates many more organizations will develop in the future, but Li stressed that the community needs resources, skilled leaders and organizers, and guidance as the community continues to become active.

Much of what China needs is See page 11 >>

▼

Obituaries>>

November 17-23, 2011 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 11

Lesbian publisher Barbara Grier dies

by Victoria A. Brownworth

B

arbara Grier, groundbreaking lesbian publisher, activist, archivist, and a co-founder of Naiad Press, died of lung cancer November 10 in Tallahassee, Florida, where she had lived for several decades with her longtime partner, Donna McBride. She was 78.

Born in Ohio, Ms. Grier grew up throughout the Midwest. Her father moved the family often for his job.

Her mother was an actress and early feminist. Ms. Grier came out early, at 12, and by 18 had wooed a local librarian 20 years her senior into a long-term relationship.

In 1956, with the founding of The Ladder by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon as the literary and news organ of Daughters of Bilitis, Ms. Grier became an early voice of lesbian letters. She wrote for The Ladder from its inception until it shut down in 1972. The Ladder, considered the first lesbian magazine in the U.S., published monthly. It was mimeographed and always sent in a brown wrapper. Ms. Grier said it initially was sent to friends of the staff and also to professional women

<<

listed in the San Francisco phone book. The early mailing list was 175 women.

In 1968, Ms. Grier became the editor and immediately expanded the magazine to include more feminist content. The length was expanded from fewer than 30 pages to 48. By the end of Ms. Grier’s tenure, the mailing list had grown to 3,800 women.

In 1971, in the waning days of The Ladder, Ms. Grier met McBride, the woman she referred to as “the love of my life.” Ms. Grier ended her previous relationship and she and McBride then lived together for 40 years, until Ms. Grier’s death.

Ms. Grier and McBride cofounded Naiad Books (later Naiad Press) in 1973 with two other women, Muriel Crawford and Crawford’s partner, Anyda Marchant. The press started with $2,000 and what McBride referred to as Ms. Grier’s devotion to getting books by lesbians and for lesbians to lesbians.

The press’s first cover artist was the late photographer and artist, Tee Corinne.

Ms. Grier had held onto the

Out in the World

mailing list for The Ladder and said she used it to announce the first books from Naiad because bookstores would not carry the openly lesbian books. Naiad maintained a large mail-order business throughout its 30-year run.

Marchant was the author of Naiad’s first published book, The Latecomer, which she wrote under her pseudonym, Sarah Aldridge.

Naiad Books became the first and continues to be compounded by minimal resources and skills, he said.

“This leadership program plays an important role in empowering the community through providing training to the leaders and potential leaders of the LGBT community from China, who will have a big influence over the LGBT movement,” wrote Li.

From page 10

informed education about HIV/ AIDS, human sexuality, and sexual orientation and gender identity, said leaders.

Exporting the U.S. LGBT movement The center’s LAB program plays an integral role by training China’s queer leaders, Li said. Nearly all of China’s organizations are run by LAB graduates, Jean told the B.A.R. in a phone interview.

Five years ago, training China’s current and future LGBT leaders was on the LA center leadership’s mind when Damien Lu, a longtime Aibai volunteer, approached the center’s leadership with the idea for a partnership.

A gay man, Lu, who serves as a program volunteer advocate in the states, is the Chinese gay “Dear Abby” for Aibai. For more than a decade Lu, an American citizen, has answered an estimated three to 30 letters and emails daily for the organization’s newsletter since its founding in 1998 and he travels to China twice a year to give up to six lectures about LGBT issues, he said.

Barbara Grier

Backlash The spark of a Chinese LGBT movement has brought a backlash of homophobia. Chinese LGBT See page 13 >> Courtesy L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center

Yunjun “David” Li

Lu, who handles policy issues for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, isn’t a professional psychiatrist, he said.

His experience told him that these brand new leaders in China starting a movement needed a lot of help, which prompted him to seek out American support.

Li agreed that China’s LGBT movement leaders lacked experience to develop organizations, which was

worldwide publisher of lesbian books. At the time Ms. Grier and McBride closed the press in 2003, selling their remaining list to Bella Books, Naiad had a stable of over 100 authors and had also branched out into video and audio tapes.

Curious Wine, the groundbreaking novel by San Francisco author Katherine Forrest, was Ms. Grier’s choice for the first lesbian novel on audio tape.

Ms. Grier was devoted to publishing books by new lesbian authors, but was equally drawn to reviving out-of-print work by lesbians. She reprinted the pulp novels of Ann Bannon and Gale Wilhelm, but also printed the poetry of 1920s lesbian poet Renee Vivien and the long prose poem by Gertrude Stein, “Lifting Belly,” which Stein had not published in her lifetime, due to its obvious lesbian content.

Ms. Grier’s most controversial publication was the 1985 Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, a collection of personal accounts edited

by Rosemary Kurb and Nancy Manahan. The book, for which Grier had paid a record $500,000, created a national furor and was actually

Obituaries >> Jack Small 1969 – 2011

Jack had a love and superior knowledge of programming computer languages.

He had a far-ranging intelligence coupled with a loving heart. Jack was never one to back down from a challenge. He was an altruist and fierce defender of the underdog. Jack lived with a deep compassionate understanding. A true Southern gentleman, always courteous and considerate, those he touched along the way will miss him tremendously. The smiles on the faces of those who shared with Jack his passion for science fiction, baseball and Duran Duran will never fade. Explore new worlds, my friend, and discover your ultimate bliss.

banned in Boston.

Forrest, who was also editorial director at Naiad between 1984 and 1994, said of Ms. Grier’s passing, “It would be hard to imagine a more significant figure in the growth and development of lesbian publishing than Barbara Grier. Or a more towering and central figure in lesbian culture. We have lost a giant.”

In 1992, Ms. Grier, whose passion was archiving lesbian books, letters, and memorabilia, donated her collection to the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library. Ms. Grier noted that the Naiad Collection is the largest compilation of lesbian letters in the world.

In addition to McBride, Ms. Grier is survived by two sisters, Diane Grier of Willard, Missouri, and Penni Martin of Denton, Texas. There will be no memorial service. McBride said Ms. Grier wanted donations made in her name to SAGE, the country’s largest and oldest organization for LGBT seniors, or because she was a devoted animal lover, Best Friends Animal Society in Utah or the animal sanctuary/rescue organization of the person’s choosing.▼

Obituary policy Obituaries should be e-mailed toobituaries@ebar. com. They must be no longer than 200 words. Please follow normal rules of capitalization – and no poetry.

We reserve the right to edit for style, clarity, grammar, and taste.

Please provide the name and contact information for the funeral home, crematory, or organ donation agency that handled final disposition of the body. This is for verification.

Please submit a photo of the deceased. E-mail a recent color jpg. Deadline for obituaries is Monday at 9 a.m., with the exception of special display ad obituaries, which must be submitted by Friday at 3 p.m.

For information on paid obituaries, call (415) 861-5019.

Obituaries can be mailed to Bay Area Reporter, 395 9th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. Write the deceased’s name on the back of the photo. If you include a SASE for the photo’s return, write the person’s name on the inside of the envelope flap. All obituaries must include a contact name and daytime phone number. They must be submitted within a year of the death.

For archived obituaries, go to www.glbthistory.org/ obituaries.

<< Occupy Movement

12 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

AIDS group brings awareness to Occupy SF

by David Duran

A

IDS Housing Alliance/San Francisco partnered with St. James Infirmary and Homonomixxx on Veterans Day to commemorate the decade-long ARC/AIDS Vigil of 1985-1995 as well as to bring awareness of the housing crisis for people living with HIV/AIDS, queer youth, and transgender people to the campers at Occupy SF. The groups’ mission was to bring together others who were also concerned about their issues and to possibly discuss further actions to take. Along with planning for future events, they provided HIV testing, needle exchange, and a brown bag lunch for those who attended.

Brian Basinger, director of AHA/SF, came up with the idea of bringing people together to react to what he described as, “the city and government not taking care of our community.” According to Basinger, San Francisco has the highest rate of homeless folks living with HIV/ AIDS. “It’s a crime,” he told the Bay Area Reporter.

Organizers hope to meet with Mayor Ed Lee and challenge him to end homelessness for PWAs, sex workers, and queer youth within four years, Basinger said.

<<

Unfortunately, spreading the word and assembling the masses has proved difficult. Friday’s turnout was less than expected but Basinger was confident that his message was still heard. The Occupy SF encampment has a very detailed website with daily schedules and activities. But it appears as if the website may be more of a suggested schedule because Friday was a day where most stayed in their tents. There was live music and performances, but the people enjoying the shows were mostly tourists or locals passing by on their way to sightsee or work.

Basinger also said that he specifically wanted the ARC Vigil commemoration to take place near the Occupy SF encampment.

“Queer San Francisco has been looking for a way to get involved and express themselves with the Occupy movement,” said Basinger. He felt this was the perfect opportunity to put the queer spin on what is needed.

Basinger said that housing for homeless people in San Francisco comes second to medical. He feels housing should come first, followed by all the other support services.

Housing for people living with HIV/ AIDS in San Francisco is currently delivered via the Department of Public Health. A person seeking a

David Duran

AIDS Housing Alliance/San Francisco, Homonomixxx, Glide Health Services, and the St. James Infirmary commemorated the ARC Vigil near Occupy San Francisco last Friday.

roof over their head would first have to register as a client of one of the city clinics before being considered for housing.

He feels this is detrimental to his clients because some don’t want to seek medical attention or register with clinics first.

“We want to build on what was

started and furthermore implement a true vision of housing first in San Francisco,” he said.

The AIDS Housing Alliance works to protect the housing people already have, provides resources to secure new housing, and promotes public policy to expand opportunity for all, Basinger said.

Occupy SF

From page 1

but right here and now, in our own communities.”

Variously portrayed as an occupation, de-colonization, peaceful protest, unruly mob, public safety hazard, and place of sanctuary, Occupy Wall Street and its myriad offshoots have been the catalyst for a broad coalition of heterogeneous groups all seeking redress of grievances for a variety of reasons.

“We’re just completely fed up and tired of being exploited,” said Occupy San Francisco protester Jessica Hurrie, 29, who identifies as queer. Hurrie espouses “anarchist values,” which she defined as “personal freedom and responsibility, food activism, and selfsovereignty.”

Occupy San Francisco began on September 17 – the same day as the eponymous demonstration in New York’s Wall Street district – with 10 protesters outside the Bank of America building at 555 California.

That humble protest morphed into a camp outside the Federal Reserve Building at 101 Market Street, which in turn grew into the bustling tent village that currently graces the south end of Justin Herman Plaza.

Avicolli Mecca, editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The early years of Gay Liberation, asserted that mainstream LGBTs are perpetuating “the 1 percent” by buying into the very system of oppression that gay liberation fought against.

“Marriage has lured queers into the middle class, and the middle class teaches you to reject the lower class,” he said. “That’s why we have this indifference toward the epidemic of homelessness in our community by the gay middle class. When I came here in 1991 I rarely saw a homeless kid in the Castro. Look at them now.”

The Occupy San Francisco encampment has grown into a microcosmic city-within-the-city. It now boasts a kitchen, medical tent, welcome table, learning center with library, safe spaces for children and families, portable toilets and sinks, garbage and recycling pickup, a whiteboard listing daily workshops and committee meetings – plus at least 100 tents.

The encampments in San Francisco and other cities haven’t been without their problems. This week police closed down the Occupy Oakland

Jane Philomen Cleland

Members of Occupy San Francisco participate in weekly marches through downtown San Francisco, such as this one last month, where they rally against corporate greed.

camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza and police cleared the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park of protesters.

Occupy members in both cities vowed to return. In San Francisco, police did a brief raid Wednesday morning, removing several tents that were along Market Street near the plaza. Members of Occupy SF were to meet with Mayor Ed Lee.

Faeries, hippies, and hobos Many of the campers at Occupy San Francisco are chronically homeless.

Reyna Raygoza, 23, who identifies as a transsexual woman, told the B.A.R. that she has been homeless for more than 10 years.

Raygoza expressed anger at some Occupy San Francisco organizers for attempting to distance the movement from the issue of homelessness. She also took issue with the common perception that shelters solve all the problems posed by living on the street.

“They’re really homophobic and transphobic,” Raygoza said of one shelter facility, St. Vincent de Paul’s Multi-Service Center South at 525 Fifth Street. “They make me shower in the men’s room when I go there.

A friend of mine got kicked out of there, too, because he’s gay, and they said he was being inappropriate

with his friend.”

The B.A.R. made multiple attempts to reach a facilities manager at the Multi-Service Center for comment, including a personal visit, but without success by press time.

At times Occupy San Francisco rhetoric can be reminiscent of the Flower Children from the Haight-Ashbury heyday. Gabriel “Garlique” Alfaro, 31, who identifies as a Radical Faerie, came to the camp from the angle of nature and environmentalism.

“There is an energy expansion happening that’s connected to the evolution of all life, and we’re a part of that, too,” Alfaro told the B.A.R. “I’ve joined the Occupy SF camp in order to take part in dismantling the old system while helping to create the new one that will take its place.”

Others have more pragmatic concerns, like ending the Federal Reserve and reforming “too big to fail” banks that invest money irresponsibly, and then require bailouts with public money.

Earlier this month, Occupy participants joined to support Bank Transfer Day, which encouraged consumers to take their money out of big banks and open accounts with local banks and credit unions instead,

a move applauded by Avicolli Mecca.

“That’s what we need to do. That really scared them, I think. Banks don’t care if we occupy a plaza, but they’ll notice if we pull our money out,” he said.

In a very short time, the Occupy San Francisco camp has come to be regarded by its denizens and some of the general public as a makeshift civic institution.

Salon.com, headquartered in a nearby skyscraper, has extended free Wi-Fi coverage to the camp in a gesture of “virtual solidarity.”

A public wedding recently took place in the camp. It was followed in short order by an all-day music festival and an Egyptian solidarity march that started from the camp.

On November 1, a woman who was stabbed in the Tenderloin took a taxi at 3 a.m. not to a hospital, but to the Occupy San Francisco medical tent. She was later transported to a hospital.

Cheers for queers Local queer activist and promoter Christopher Ray, who has been very active with Occupy camps on both sides of the bay, stated without qualification, “OWS is the single most important movement in the

The integrated service model combines affordable housing referrals, emergency financial assistance with back rent and movein deposit assistance, rent subsidies, tenants rights counseling and landlord mediation, a legal services collaborative, and financial literacy education.

Additionally, the organization’s Simply Sandwiches program distributes 10,000 free organic, vegetarian meals annually. And it operates AHA Cafe, a job training and employment program for people with HIV/AIDS located on campus at UC Hastings College of Law. Friday’s gathering comes following a decision in June by the Board of Supervisors to unanimously pass a resolution authorizing the creation and placement of a plaque in United Nations Plaza commemorating what became known as the ARC/ AIDS Vigil. People living with HIV and AIDS and their allies camped out in the public plaza continuously from 1985 through 1995 to demand the federal government recognize and provide research funding for HIV/AIDS. Basinger has been tasked with coming up with the idea for the design of the memorial as well as raising the funds to do so.▼ history of history.”

But Ray went on to lament what he considered a lack of queer presence in the protests thus far.

“There are only a handful of local queers, most of them Radical Faeries, who have made any sort of effort to really get involved,” Ray told the B.A.R. “This is San Francisco, one of the most activist cities on earth, and it’s time to start acting like it.”

Zac Benfield, 34 and a selfidentified “faggot,” said queers don’t need to join the Occupy San Francisco camp, or any camp, in order to participate in the nationwide civilian insurrection.

“We aren’t one demonstration, we are 99 different demonstrations,” argued Benfield, a co-founder of Feyboy, a South of Market-based queer arts and action collective.

“That’s not a weakness, it’s a strength.

Solidarity isn’t uniformity. It’s all of us doing our own thing in our own ways, but ultimately marching together under the same umbrella.”

Tony Millan, a 25-year-old Fremont resident who identifies as queer, criticized Occupy San Francisco for lack of diversity, charging it with failing to recognize or welcome “women of color, indigenous people, biotrans women, queer-identified and gender-variant individuals,” among others.

Millan is a supporter of Womyn of Color for Decolonization, which is leading the Occupy Riverside protest in southern California. The group marched in solidarity with Occupy Oakland after the October 25 police raid, in which Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen was seriously injured.

There are some signs that the shortage of queer activism discerned

by Ray may be ending. Homonomixxx is another new radical, queer, feministinfluenced contingent arising out of the Occupy movement. Its very name links homo-ness to the economy.

“We formed in response to a lack of visibly queer, fierce, and fabulous activism in the early days of the demonstrations,” explained Gilda Cage, 31, a trans woman and queer dyke. “Our mission is to bring wellstudied fierceness, anti-oppression ethics, and keen artistic eyes to social justice activism.”

To that end, Homonomixxx will host a dinner, dance party, and fundraiser on November 23 at a location to be announced. For details, visit www. homonomixxx.tumblr.com.▼

▼ <<

Community News >>

Day

From page 1

being handled by the DA’s office.

James Giller, the attorney representing Inostroz, declined to provide details about the case.

“I defend him, and how we’re going to handle the case, and what it’s about – I haven’t really looked into it that carefully yet,” Giller said. “It isn’t anything I discuss with anybody.”

He said Inostroz would plead not guilty to the charges.

Alameda County Sheriff’s office records show that Inostroz is in custody in Santa Rita jail and is being held without bail.

Giller declined a request to interview Inostroz by saying, “Now

<<

Anti-trans attack

From page 3

had brandished a pocketknife, she pulled out a can of Mace and sprayed him in the face, Manfredi said. Hodge fell to the ground.

The victim, who was left with “slight redness” on her forehead, refused medical treatment, Manfredi said. He said Hodge was transported

<<

Out in the World

From page 11

activists are battling homophobia, lack of visibility and understanding, and an infusion of clinics dedicated to “cure” gayness has cropped up, said activists.

So-called corrective rape is being sanctioned by parents on lesbians, LGBT Chinese face denial of education, housing, and jobs if found out, and more, said activists. The Chinese government’s censorship of information prevents access to accurate information about LGBT issues, added Lu. “The issue of sexual minorities is completely ignored in education; very rarely touched by mainstream media, and LGBT people still face enormous pressure from family and society ... there is still a long, long way to go for most LGBT individuals to live a happy and open life free of fear,” wrote Li. China’s fresh crop of queer activists are arming themselves with information and skills and working closely together with the support of

November 17-23, 2011 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 13

think about that. Have you been a reporter for very long?”

The Oakland remembrance ceremony will feature the reading of the names of people who’ve been killed in the last year. The event also recognizes HIV/AIDS as an epidemic that has disproportionately affected transgender people living in Alameda County.

Keynote speakers at the Oakland event are expected to include Sharon Grayson, co-chair for the AlamedaContra Costa County Community Collaborative Planning Council; and Dr. Kathleen Clanon, director of the East Bay AIDS Education and Training Center.

Several events will be held in San Francisco. On Friday, November

18 from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m., there will be a transgender remembrance Shabbat at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores Street. The event will include special liturgy, music, drash, and the reading of names.

Also, in San Francisco, Day of Remembrance will be observed from 5 to 7 p.m., Sunday, November 20, at the Ark of Refuge, 1025 Howard Street (between 6th and 7th streets). Food and beverages will be provided, as well as American Sign Language translation.

And the Metropolitan Community Church-San Francisco, 150 Eureka Street, will have an observance at its evening worship on November 20 at 7 p.m. ▼

to California Pacific Medical Center, Davies Campus.

Hodge had been jailed on $105,000 bail. According to Manfredi, Hodge has no known address and it appears he’s a transient.

He’s said no witnesses could corroborate the victim’s story, and he didn’t know if video surveillance footage of the incident was available.

Omid Talai, a spokesman for

the DA’s office, said the case was discharged for further investigation.

Manfredi said this week that he had no new information on the case, explaining that the DA’s office would know best.

Susan Fahey, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Sheriff ’s Department, said that she could only disclose that Hodge was no longer in custody.▼

the nation’s queer community as the movement grows. Much of the activists’ work is educating people about the queer community as they fight to gain rights. For the first time since 1968, China is expected to soon get a new book about human sexuality and orientation, according to Li and Lu. Other U.S. support and examples of LGBT Chinese activists have also been instrumental, wrote Li, pointing out that the New York wedding of Chinese American Cheng He to Evan Wolfson, the founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry, a marriage equality organization based in New York, was followed closely by Chinese LGBT activists.

Marriage equality isn’t on the top of LGBT Chinese activists list of rights as they are simply fighting for basic survival and to be recognized at the moment, activists said.

However, Li and his counterparts are inspired by America’s queer rights movement and are taking lessons from successful actions launched by U.S. LGBT activists.

Chinese LGBT activists used the LA center’s Vote for Equality project as a model to create the Out in the Streets project, where queer Chinese hit the streets talking about LGBT issues with people, Li wrote.

“They don’t have a lot of the infighting or failure to collaborate,” said Jean. “They are sort of learning where everyone is. I feel like on a personal level it’s incredible and personally inspiring.”

“It is totally amazing. I just hope that we can continue to keep doing this and helping these young people get the tools that they need and ... skip some of the potholes that we experienced,” added Jean.

Li is optimistic about the future of China’s LGBT movement.

“There has been great progress in the LGBT movement within the past few years, and there will be even greater progress in the coming years,” wrote Li.▼ Got international LGBT news tips? Call or send them to Heather Cassell at 00+1-415-221-3541 or heather@whimsymedia.com.

Jane Philomen Cleland

Real Bad does good G

rass Roots Gay Rights West, the nonprofit behind the Real Bad party that closes out the Folsom Street Fair, presented its 2011 beneficiaries with a combined $180,000 at a party Thursday, November 10

at BeatBox. This year’s community partners included Project Open Hand, San Francisco Suicide Prevention, Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center, Native American AIDS Project, No Bully, and Bay Positives.

Read more online at ebar.com

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

14 • Bay Area Reporter • November 17-23, 2011

Classifieds

t

Legal Notices>>

The

Dated 10/20/11 To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : ALPS HOTEL CORPORATION. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 730-32 Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133-4304. Type of license applied

48- On-sale general public premises Nov.3,10,17,2011 Statement of abandonment of use of fictitious business name: #A-0319415-00 The following persons have abandoned the use of the fictitious business name known as CREATIVE B’STRO, 2325 Third St.,Ste 414,San Francisco, CA 94107.This business was conducted by an individual, signed Jill Bendziewicz. The ficticious name was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 04/22/09

oct.27,nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033894400 The following person(s) is/are doing business as YOSEMITE PROPERTIES,100 Winston Drive, SF,CA 94132.This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Warren Anderson.

The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/17/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/19/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033894100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as AZUCAR LOUNGE,299 Ninth St.,SF,CA 94103.This business is conducted by a limited liability company, signed Jonathan Ojinaga.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 09/30/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/19/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033865800 The following person(s) is/are doing business as NEW INCENTIVES, 625 Bush St.,Apt. 420,SF,CA 94108.This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Svetha Janumpalli.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/05/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/05/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033898200 The following person(s) is/are doing business as FIRST CUT,813 Clay St.,SF,CA 94108.This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Dong Mei Li.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/20/11.

The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/20/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033891700

statement file A-033937800 The following person(s) is/are doing business SF ONLINE MARKETING,170 Eureka St.,SF,CA 94114.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Pamela Card.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/08/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/08/11

Nov 17,24,dec 1,8,2011 statement file A-033948100

Legal Notices>> nOTICE OF APPLICATIoN to sell AlCOHOLIC BEVERAGEs

statement file A-033932800 The following person(s) is/are doing business SAN FRANCISCO FRENCH DESIGN,1900 Vallejo St.,SF,CA 94123.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Sonia Richioud.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/07/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/07/11

statement file A-033894600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as CREATIVE B’STRO, 2325 Third St.,SF,CA 94107.

This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Jill Bendziewicz.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 1/02/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/19/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033910100 The following person(s) is/are doing business as STROGANOFF RESTAURANT, 418 Beach St.,SF,CA 94133.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Alex Rabinovich.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/25/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/25/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 nOTICE OF APPLICATIoN to sell AlCOHOLIC BEVERAGEs Dated 11/01/11 To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : LORIS DINER INTERNATIONAL INC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 449 Powell St., 3rd FL., San Francisco, CA 94102-1503. Type of license applied

41- On-sale beer and wine – eating place Nov 10,17,24,2011 nOTICE OF APPLICATIoN to sell AlCOHOLIC BEVERAGEs Dated 10/27/11 To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : EUPHORIA HOSPITALITY, INC. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 835 Hyde St., San Francisco, CA 94109-5927. Type of license applied

42- On-sale beer and wine – Public Premises Nov 10,17,24,2011 nOTICE OF APPLICATIoN to sell AlCOHOLIC BEVERAGEs Dated 10/19/11 To Whom It May Concern: The name(s) of the applicant(s) is/are : JULIE MAURANGE CORPORATION. The applicants listed above are applying to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control at 71 Stevenson Street, Suite 1500, San Francisco, CA 94105 to sell alcoholic beverages at 1749 Union St., San Francisco, CA 941234406. Type of license applied

20- Off-sale beer and wine, 42- On-sale beer and wine – Public premises Nov 10,17,24,2011 statement file A-033910600

The following person(s) is/are doing business as RMB TRANSPORT,4430 Balboa St., SF,CA 94121.

This business is conducted by an individual, signed Robert M. Babick.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 1/15/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/18/11.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as MINERVA’S LAUNDERETTE,262 Noe St.,SF,CA 94102.This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Lauchlin O’Sullivan.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 3/22/04. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/25/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033888300

Nov 3,10,17,24,2011 statement file A-033910400

The following person(s) is/are doing business as GRISWOLD SPECIAL CARE,155 Clifford Terrace , SF,CA 94117.This business is conducted by a corporations, signed Steven C.Jones.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/13/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/17/11.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as COLE & HAYES COIN WASH & DRY,2100 Hayes St.,SF,CA 94117.This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Lauchlin O’Sullivan.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/24/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/25/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033905700

Nov 3,10,17,24,2011 statement file A-033906000

The following person(s) is/are doing business as SO GOOD BAKING COMPANY,1078 Howard St.,#303, SF,CA 94103.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Leo D. Sheridan.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/24/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/24/11.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as PARKSIDE PAINT AND BODY SHOP, 1830 Taraval St.,SF,CA 94116.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Stanley Koulouris.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/18/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/24/11.

oct.27,Nov 3,10,17,2011 statement file A-033886100

Nov 3,10,17,24,2011 statement file A-033883900

The following person(s) is/are doing business as QUINTEROS RESTAURANT MEXICAN FOOD, 393 Eddy St.,SF,CA 94102.This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Hermelinda Jaime.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/17/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/17/11.

The following person(s) is/are doing business as SIP & DIP BAKED GOODS,610 Webster St.,#14,SF,CA 94117.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Olive A. Loew.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 10/14/11.

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statement file A-033914600 The following person(s) is/are doing business as CREATIVE TANGENT,27 Hattie St.,SF,CA 94114.

This business is conducted by an individual, signed Laurence Bruketta.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/27/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/27/11.

Nov 3,10,17,24,2011 statement file A-033916300 The following person(s) is/are doing business as RON SCHMIDT…AUTHOR, 515 John Muir Drive,A 501,SF,CA 94132.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Ronald H. Schmidt.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 10/27/11.

Nov 3,10,17,24,2011 statement file A-033923700 The following person(s) is/are doing business VIRIDIAN DOCUMENT SERVICES,370 7th St.,#10,SF,CA 94103.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Michael Reiser.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/01/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/01/11

The following person(s) is/are doing business TATAKI CANYON,678 Chenery St.,SF,CA 94131.

This business is conducted by a limited liability company, signed Kenneth Zhu.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 11/14/11

Nov 17,24,dec 1,8,2011 statement file A-033948800 The following person(s) is/are doing business A&T PLUMBING,5945 Wenk Ave. Richmond,CA 94804.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Andrew Lee.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/14/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/14/11

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Nov 17,24,dec 1,8,2011 statement file A-033939300 The following person(s) is/are doing business PRIORITY CARE SERVICES,2636 Judah St.,#207,SF,CA 94122.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Alex Tico.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/09/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/09/11

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The following person(s) is/are doing business PLEASE & THANK YOU, 68 West Portal Ave.,SF,CA 94127.This business is conducted by a limited liability company, signed Michael Ryan Scott.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 11/08/11

Nov 10,17,24,dec 1,2011 statement file A-033934800 The following person(s) is/are doing business LACUNA PROJECT,479 7th Ave.,#4,SF,CA 94118.

This business is conducted by an individual, signed Julia Vanderham.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/25/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/07/11

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Nov 10,17,24,dec 1,2011 statement file A-033924800 The following person(s) is/are doing business JJN APPAREL,2525 16th St.,4th Fl.,SF,CA 94103.This business is conducted by an individual, signed Zhi Chun Liu.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 11/01/11

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Nov 10,17,24,dec 1,2011 statement file A-033899900 The following person(s) is/are doing business GOOD FEET,2109 Market St.,SF,CA 94114.This business is conducted by a corporation, signed Ryan Krebs.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 10/03/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 10/21/11

Nov 10,17,24,dec 1,2011 statement file A-033949200 The following person(s) is/are doing business BULLDOGG, 570 Ellsworth St.,SF,CA 94110.This business is conducted by a general partnership, signed Logan Knight..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 11/14/11

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Nov 17,24,dec 1,8,2011 statement file A-033947600 The following person(s) is/are doing business RYAN JOSEPH HEALTH AND FITNESS,610 Clipper St.,Suite A,SF,CA 94114.This business is conducted by an individual, signed James Ryan Joseph.The registrant(s) commenced to transact business under the above listed fictitious business name or names on 11/14/11. The statement was filed with the City and County of San Francisco, CA on 11/14/11

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Vol. 41 • No. 46 • November 17-23, 2011

}

Random Dance & Dance Brigade perform at YBCA

by Paul Parish

L

ots going on in SoMa at the Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This past weekend, SF Performances presented the Bay Area debut of the very hot Random Dance, of London. This coming weekend, something completely different, the 35th anniversary performances of the lesbian community’s staunchest advocate, the radical feminist dance collective Dance Brigade, are free to the public, first come, first seated.

If you haven’t heard of Random Dance, you might still have seen some choreography by their artistic director Wayne McGregor, the wonderfully weird dance the singer does in Radiohead’s video Lotus Flower (13 million hits on YouTube), or the dance sequences he made for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Or the closing images in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary La Danse.

McGregor is the rock-star of dance right now. La Danse shows him rehearsing a ballet for the oldest ballet company in the world, founded by Louis XIV, the Paris Opera Ballet. He’s set his dances on the Bolshoi, on our own SF Ballet, and has been made resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet. Not bad for a young man from the North of England whose first job was Dance Coordinator for the Redbridge City Council.

His early inspirations, he’s said, were his computer and John Travolta, and we saw aspects of both in the enormously enjoyable, gorgeous ballet Entity, which made up the whole program last Friday night. Much has been made in the press of his use of high tech: computerized projections (in the mode of Merce Cunningham) and computer-made music. Also of his work with cognitive scientists who are studying his dancers See page 29 >>

Antoine Vereecken and Agnes Lopez Rio of Random Dance in Wayne McGregor’s Entity.

Laurent Philippe

Gay night w/Marion Verbruggen & Philharmonia Baroque

by Jason Victor Serinus

Recorder virtuoso Marion Verbruggen: “I love the freedom.”

E

ven in the lavender world of baroque music, Dutch recorder virtuoso Marion Verbruggen stands out. Not only is she internationally respected as an artist of the first rank, but she is also one of lamentably few classical artists who have been out for most of their careers. Verbruggen, 61, was already well-known in the early music community when, in 1970, she figured out she was a lesbian. Living in open-minded Holland, she immediately determined to come out.

“I’m gay, why should I be in the closet?” she asked at the start of our first mutual foray into the world of Skype video-chatting. “I am me. I live in a specific way, and I like to be myself. It’s

the same thing as being a musician; it’s part of me. For me, there is no political reason or whatever to be not open in the society where are we are living. It’s your own choice, of course. If you are afraid for your career, then pity for your career, or pity for you. For me, it’s more important that I can be myself.”

Verbruggen acknowledges that the situation is different in countries where homosexuality is “absolutely out of the question.” She also recognizes, thanks to the long and continuing fight for gay rights, that as much as people can be open in much of Holland, Europe, and the United States, there are places where being an openly LGBT musician comes with a price.

{ SECOND OF TWO SECTIONS }

“I have definitely had situations where they didn’t ask me back because I’m a lesbian,” she says. “So it is. It happened in the more redneck areas of the States, and up by Detroit, in those old Calvinistic Bible Belt communities where people came from Holland and England in the 17th century. They don’t like it when their soloists are too openly gay. I don’t scream it off the roofs. But if they ask me, I talk freely of my 28-year relationship [with physician Marjo Meijer].”

There is a lot to talk about. In 1994, four years before Meijer organized the Gay Games in Amsterdam, the couple came to the Gay Games in New York City to receive the flag from what were See page 28 >>

<< Out There

18 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Chita & the Wolf

by Roberto Friedman

T

hat 100-year-old baby the San Francisco Symphony announced last week that Broadway legend Chita Rivera, she of the starring performances in West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie and Kiss of the Spider Woman, is to be the special guest narrator for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra’s three performances of Sergei Prokofiev’s great Peter and the Wolf on Sat., Dec. 10, in Davies Symphony Hall, and Sun., Dec. 11, at the Flint Center in Cupertino.

Actress/singer/dancer Rivera has won two Tony Awards as Best Leading Actress in a Musical and received seven more Tony nominations. Her electric performance as Anita in the Broadway premiere of West Side Story (1957) brought her stardom, which she repeated in London.

Rivera’s career is highlighted by starring roles in Bye Bye Birdie, The

Rink (Tony Award winner), Chicago, Jerry’s Girls, Kiss of the Spider Woman (Tony Award winner), and the original Broadway casts of Guys and Dolls, Can-Can, Seventh Heaven and Mr. Wonderful. In recent years, Rivera starred in the Broadway and touring productions of The Dancer’s Life, a new musical celebrating her career written by Terence McNally and directed by Graciela Daniele. She recreated her starring role in The Visit, the new Kander/Ebb/McNally musical, at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA (originally done at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago in 2001). She also starred in the revival of the Broadway musical Nine with Antonio Banderas. That’s a legendary career.

San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra Wattis Foundation Music Director Donato Cabrera leads the orchestra in the classic children’s favorite, part of SFS’ 2011 holiday concert season. In addition to Peter

and the Wolf, the orchestra will also perform spirited holiday songs and music from The Nutcracker and Romeo and Juliet, Johann Strauss Sr.’s Radetsky March, and others.

Highlights of the SFS 2011 holiday concert line-up at Davies Hall also include classical Christmas concerts performed by the SFS and Chorus; the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s swinging holiday hits and standards; three performances of Handel’s Messiah with the SFS Chorus; and of course the New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball.

More holidays in Davies: The Snowman animated film, Colors of Christmas with Peabo Bryson, Jennifer Holliday, Lea Salonga and Ben Vereen, Mariachi Sol de México de Jóse Hernández, and Deck the Hall children’s concerts are also featured on the SFS holiday performance schedule. Full info at www.sfsymphony.org.

Laurie Marie Duncan

Stage star Chita Rivera, coming to Davies Hall.

Top chefs Twelve superstar chefs from the San Francisco Bay Area have come together to create the 2012 Chefs of the Bay Area calendar, benefiting Meals On Wheels of San Francisco (MOWSF) and their efforts to serve one of the city’s most vulnerable populations, homebound seniors.

Orders of the limited edition calendar ($20) are available now through Jan. 15 at mowsf.org. The calendars are also on sale at Macy’s Union Square Cellar (170 O’Farrell St., SF) and participating chefs’ restaurants. Every month features a superstar chef in a tasty pose, plus a recipe from each of the chefs. So here’s your chance to try your hand at Jake Godby’s Salt and Pepper Ice Cream, Annie Somerville’s Corn and Cherry Tomato Salad with Arugula, and Kory Stewart’s Black Walnut Sbrisolona. We can’t even spell Sbrisolona.

“I love contributing to Meals On Wheels of San Francisco,” said David Bazirgan, Executive Chef at Fifth Floor Restaurant. “It’s an important cause to me and gets back to the reason I’m a chef: to cook for people. It brings me joy to know that I’m able to help those in need through my passion.” And it brings Out There joy to note that out gay chef Yigit Pura (Tout Sweet), who makes a fetching Mr. December 2012, is photographed bare-chested and covered in yummy sprinkles.

How’d they do that?

Out gay chef Yigit Pura (Tout Sweet) is Mr. December in the 2012 Chefs of the Bay Area calendar.

Daddy dearest Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood, edited by Tomas Moniz and Jeremy Adam Smith (PM Press), combines pieces from Moniz’s zine Rad Dad with entries from Smith’s blog Daddy Dialectic. That’s a lot of Daddy, and all the contributions show that we’ve evolved far beyond the era of Father Knows Best.

Queer performance artist Keith Hennessy gets the party started in his “Notes from a Sperm Donor.”

“And then we did it. Which means I came into a bowl, and then one woman, using a small syringe (I don’t think anyone uses turkey basters), shot my cum inside her lover. Then we held hands, wished for a baby, and I left them to orgasm on their own. Conception happened the first time we tried.”

It gets complicated, as seen in Simon Knapus’ “Fighting the Market: Parenting and Gender.” “I was an established radical queer tranny vegan anarchist commie before I ever started trying to have kids, so I knew that somehow I would have to navigate for my child the space between our home and mainstream culture. Now the wide-eyed papa of a magical almostthree-year-old, I am beginning to realize what a firm grip the rest of the world has on our little universe.”

Here’s how author Cory Doctorow mediates between tech culture and his child (from “Jack and the Interstalk”): “I use a free, open-source video player called VLC, which plays practically every format ever invented. You can tell it to eliminate all its user interface so that it’s just a square of movable

video, and the Gnome windowmanager in Linux lets me set that window as ‘always on top.’ I shrink it down to a postage stamp and slide it into the top right corner of my screen, and that’s Poesy’s bit of my laptop.” Uh, Daddy, could you read me a story from a picture book instead?

Span fan Happy 75th birthday to our secret boyfriend, the San FranciscoOakland Bay Bridge! Yes, that old tart, the Golden Gate Bridge, always gets all the press, but the Bay Bridge has forever been our man-crush. It stands proud, strong, with its zany art deco styling and an air of industrial chic. It has an artificial island stuck smack-dab in the middle of it. It starred in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. And it connects two rather incredible cities.

We’re all for the abstract light installation that’s proposed for the span, now undergoing the Caltrans approval process. The artwork under consideration is a project by light artist Leo Villareal, whose work with LED lights in patterns composed with computergenerated algorithms we know from the National Gallery of Art and a terrific solo exhibition last year at the San Jose Museum of Art. He’s brilliant. Since the light sculpture would be privately funded, one can’t even invoke austerity budgets in opposition to this. We say go for it, Caltrans!

RIP Lesbian literary leading light, Naiad Press founder Barbara Grier, 78, a pioneer.

OK, play us off, LGBT Keyboard Cat!▼

▼

Theatre >>

November 17-23, 201 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 19

Lois Tema

Founding fathers: J. Conrad Frank, Steve Salzman, Seth Thygesen, Justin Gilman, and Jeffrey Hoffman make a pact forming the Mattachine Society in The Temperamentals, now at NCTC.

Making Hay

by Richard Dodds

T

he week after Harry Hay was born, the Titanic sank. It had to be. “Two Titanics can’t exist in the world at the same time,” Hay would say years later, an example of the exuberant self-confidence that drew people to him and then would often drive them away. But in the role of instigator, this braggadocio served him well.

It also makes him a compelling dramatic subject, which playwright Jon Marans has effectively mined in The Temperamentals. This is a docudrama about Hay and the men he recruited to help found the Mattachine Society in 1950, but “docudrama” suggests a drier recounting than what Marans achieved with his well-received play first seen in New York in 2009.

There is unexpected playfulness in how the history behind one of the first gay-rights groups in the world is delivered, and rather than trivializing or diminishing what Hay and company achieved, it brings an enhancing humanity to a story that could easily become didactic.

The combination of historical import and gay sensibility also sets the tone for the Bay Area premiere of The Temperamentals at New Conservatory Theatre Center, thanks to F. Allen Sawyer’s sensitively attuned production and a cast in sympathetic step. At the heart of this dynamic is the unlikely alliance, both personal and political, of the rigid, doctrinaire Hay and the seemingly frivolous fashion designer Rudi Gernreich that the production brings into vivid focus.

The Temperamentals, an abstruse term coined by Hay for homosexuals, opens with Hay and Gernreich playing footsy in a cafe while their above-table demeanor remains rigorously proper. As their

relationship grows, Hay shares with Gernreich his “manifesto” declaring homosexuals to be a distinctive, oppressed society rather than “broken heterosexuals” to be pitied, converted, and/or incarcerated.

“This is the most dangerous thing I have ever read,” replies Gernreich, who agrees to abet Hay in his mission to recruit like-minded men despite warnings, including a curlicue closet-defense by film director Vincente Minnelli, that his burgeoning fashion career is at risk.

Hay and Gernreich are a study in contrasts, and Steven Salzman and J. Conrad Frank are compelling to watch as they play off each other with laser-sharp conviction. Hay, of Mayflower stock, is a card-carrying communist who has played by party rules before suggesting his own expulsion for being openly homosexual. Salzman plays Hay with a steely spine, piercing eyes, and an accessible, if well-protected, soft spot. Frank, as Gernreich, brings a coy, languid bemusement to the Viennese émigré, as he both teaches and learns from Hay before choosing his own path.

Justin Gillman, Jeffrey Hoffman, and Seth Thygesen entertainingly play a variety of other characters, but are mostly seen giving life to a trio of actual Mattachine founding fathers. Lighting by Christian Mejia, costumes by Jorge R. Hernandez, and a simple but attractive set by Kuo-Hao Lo add further touches of refinement to this polished production which reminds us, in intriguing fashion, that modern gay history did not begin with Stonewall.▼ The Temperamentals will run at New Conservatory Theatre Center through Dec. 18. Tickets are $25-$45. Call 861-8972 or go to www.nctcsf.org.

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<< Fine Art

20 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Body as canvas & battleground

by Sura Wood

A

merican photographer Francesca Woodman’s captivating body of work not only endures but has grown more potent in the 30 years since she committed suicide at 22. Ambitious, determined and brilliant, provocative by nature and in practice, Woodman was impatient for the recognition and commercial success she felt she deserved but came too late for her to enjoy. We, however, have a chance to view her striking, unconventional self-portraiture – her naked body was both canvas and battleground for her creative psyche – and bear witness to a young talent that seemed to spring full-blown when she was 16 or 17, already on fire about photography, and a visionary teeming with ideas.

Woodman’s life may have been brief, but that she burned brightly is amply evident in Francesca Woodman, the first comprehensive career retrospective of her work in 20 years. Now on display at SFMOMA, the exhibition features 160 vintage, predominantly black-and-white photographs, some inscribed with lyrical, minimalist text handwritten

by Woodman, her ventures into fashion photography as well as largescale, blueprint studies or diazotypes in which she shot her nude torso draped with flowing fabric in a nod to classical Greek statuary. With her long, dark blond hair, beautifully proportioned body, and deep-set eyes, she had the fine features one might find etched on a cameo.

What’s astonishing is that these visceral, surreal-inflected images were produced during a mere five years while she was still developing as an artist and finding her way as a sexual woman – she did better at the former than the latter. The show is necessarily compressed and concentrated, made up of photographs lifted from a short

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-78; gelatin silver print.

period of student experimentation, before she matured artistically and her talent came to fruition – and what talent. What an artist. Yes, she’s exploring the body’s relationship to space, referencing architecture and

the nude, but there’s something enigmatic and deeper in play.

Emotionally, she felt separate, a person apart, and the photos of herself naked or partially clothed attest to an assertion of her existence

over and over. Her nipples are pinched by metal clips, she stuffs herself partway into cabinets housing specimens and taxidermy animals, curls up beside a bucket of eels, hangs by her arms from the top of a doorway, emerges from under sheets of torn wallpaper covering her body, lays across a loveseat in undone lingerie with her back to us, sits on a sunny sidewalk like some abandoned street urchin as the head of a long-stem flower peers its head tentatively around the corner, or gazes into the mirror. In a ravishing image that speaks of sensuality and surrender, she lays on the carpet, her head turned away, wearing a flowered dress. In the last known picture she took of herself, she looks straight at the lens, her upper body bare, her hair tied back, a black scarf wrapped around her neck and her birth certificate tacked to the wall.

The show is divided chronologically among her investigations while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design

(RISD), where she was miles ahead of fellow students and faculty; Rome, where she spent her junior year (she was fluent in Italian, and her parents had a country house outside Florence); and her final time in Providence. Many pictures were shot amidst ruined interiors: in an abandoned house with peeling wallpaper in Providence, and in an empty spaghetti factory in Italy.

Woodman also experimented with moving images, and the exhibition includes rare short videos. In one clip, she stands behind a tissuepaper curtain and slowly tears it apart, revealing her naked body as if stripping layers away from a vulnerable soul; in another, she lays down in flour that has been spread on the floor, leaving behind her silhouette on the ground when she stands up, like a cartoon character shedding its shadow.

She was the progeny of successful artists married to each other for 60 years – her mother is ceramicist Betty Woodman; and her father, painter George Woodman, gave Francesca her first camera. At home, where art was central rather than peripheral, she learned a work ethic close to religious devotion according to C. Scott Willis’ The Woodmans, a new documentary that may be the best film ever made about the perils and rewards of being a working artist.

Her parents, who were and are competitive with her, and whose reputations have been eclipsed by Francesca’s accomplishments, reflect on their exceptional daughter, their own lives and her unfathomable suicide.

Excerpts from Francesca’s yearning, observant, increasingly despondent journals, included in the film, piece together a portrait of someone so intensely alive, attuned to nuance and disappointment that she could hardly bear her feelings, let alone function in daily life. All she could do was work. “I was inventing a language people could see,” she writes, though that invention came at a price. One friend says that it’s as if she wore her skin inside out; fragility and self-exposure were the psychic risks and cost of being an artist.

With her prodigious gifts, drive and tragic biography, Francesca’s mythology, like that of Sylvia Plath, has been appropriated by feminists for their own purposes. But the art speaks eloquently for itself. Myth isn’t necessary to appreciate the work – for that you need only your eyes.▼ At SFMOMA through Feb. 2012. www.sfmomaorg. The Woodmans at the Roxie Theater, Nov. 18-24. www.roxie.com.

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Rome, 1977-78; gelatin silver print.

www.ebar.com

▼

Theatre>>

November 17-23, 201 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 21

Tennessee bonanza

by Richard Dodds

T

he centennial year of Tennessee Williams’ birth is coming to a close, but its final weeks will see Period of Adjustment, Williams’ somewhat askew attempt at mainstream Broadway comedy, at SF Playhouse, and a production of The Glass Menagerie at Marin Theatre Company that adds a surprise or two to Williams’ first Broadway success.

SF Playhouse is billing its production of Period of Adjustment as the regional premiere, which would mean that no Bay Area theater has presented the play since its Broadway debut in 1960. That’s a surprising notion, but even if contradictory evidence could be unearthed, it is certainly true that it is rarely revived.

SF Playhouse is also billing the play as its holiday show, describing it as “a romantic Christmas comedy.”

Williams himself labeled it as a “serious comedy,” and sexual dysfunction and post-traumatic stress disorder are among the roots of the characters’ problems – which do come to the fore on a Christmas Eve. Whatever desires are being repressed by the male characters, buddies from the Korean War, the surface tensions between them and their respective wives is heterosexual despite a few suggestions that matters are murkier than they might seem. But Williams wanted to keep things relatively light, and when the play moved to the big screen two years later, it was marketed as a sex farce starring Jane Fonda and Tony Franciosa.

Williams acknowledged that he wrote the play at least partly in response to critics’ comments, often couched in homophobia, about his interest in what they saw as lurid and depraved. Most publicly, he was reacting to a conversation he had with Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper.

“The last time I was in Hollywood,” he wrote in 1960, “a famous lady columnist with a way-out taste in millinery got me on the phone one morning and lit into me. ‘I want to know why you are plunging into sewers,’ she demanded.” He responded briefly on the phone and at length in an article for The New York Times: “The theatre has made its greatest artistic advances through the unlocking and lighting up and ventilation of the closets, attics, and basements of human behavior and experience.”

SF Playhouse’s Artistic Director Bill English is staging the play that focuses on two marriages in crisis.

One is coming apart after five years, as the husband admits he was never physically attracted to his wife, with Johnny Moreno and Maggie Mason in those roles. The other marriage is floundering after just one day due to wedding-night trauma in the bedroom with the husband (Patrick Alparone) experiencing post-war

The poster from the 1962 movie version of Tennessee Williams’ Period of Adjustment that promoted the story as a sex farce, though Williams described it as a “serious comedy.” It’s receiving a rare revival at SF Playhouse.

“shakes,” and the wife (MacKenzie Meehan) confused about her new husband’s aggressive sexual manner.

On Christmas Eve, the two couples, in observing each other’s woes, find a way to reconciliation as Williams often aims for laughs that have psychological underpinnings.

Period of Adjustment, now in previews prior to a Nov. 19 opening, will run through Jan. 14. Tickets are available at www. sfplayhouse.org.

The Glass Menagerie, opening Nov. 29 at Marin Theatre Company, is famously a fourcharacter play: Amanda, Tom, Laura, and the Gentleman Caller. But Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis has found a way to add a fifth character to the 1945 play without altering the text.

Instead of the hanging portrait of the absentee husband and father of the Wingfield family that is specified in the script, and to which his wife ruefully refers, trumpeter Andrew Wilke will become a musical representation of the missing Mr. Wingfield. He will be on stage throughout the production, offering live musical accompaniment composed by Chris Houston in collaboration with Wilke.

This musical interpolation is part of Minadakis’ effort to give the

Ed Smith

Craig Marker (left) and Nicholas Pelczar play Tom and Jim in Marin Theatre Company’s The Glass Menagerie, which adds a musical fifth character to the Tennessee Williams classic.

play added contemporary relevance and increase the emphasis on the hardships faced by the characters in the Great Depression setting.

“By redefining the soundscape and claustrophobic physical world of Menagerie,” Minadakis said, “I hope to find new reverberations that echo our own economically troubled time.”

In addition to Wilke, the cast is comprised of Sherman Fracher as Amanda, Nicholas Pelczar as Tom, Anna Bullard as Laura, and Craig Marker as Jim (aka the Gentleman Caller). The Glass Menagerie will run Nov. 25-Dec. 18. Go to www.marintheatre.org for ticket information.

Silver bells, Golden belles Ready or not, the holiday machinery is cranking up. The first Yuletide theatrical gift out of the box is the Dec. 1 return of alldrag renderings of episodes from the erstwhile hit television series The Golden Girls. This is the sixth annual “exdrag-a-ganza” that had its first performances in the parlor of an old Victorian before moving to established performing spaces.

This year, the venue is the larger Victoria Theatre, where local drag legends Heklina, Matthew Martin, Pollo del Mar, and Cookie Dough will, respectively, play the roles originated on television by Beatrice Arthur (Dorothy), Rue McClanahan (Blanche), Betty White (Rose), and Estelle Getty (Sophia). Manuel Caneri and Laurie Bushman play guest stars in the two Christmastime episodes, one about Dorothy’s visiting lesbian friend Jean, who thinks her feelings for Rose are reciprocated, and the other about Blanche’s gay brother, who announces his intention of marrying his boyfriend.

The Dec. 1 performance will also include an appearance by 99.7’s gay radio morning hosts Fernando and Greg, and part of the ticket take will go to Project Open Hand. Performances will continue through Dec. 23. Tickets at ticketfly.com/venue/2161 or www. trannyshack.com. ▼ BARstage@comcast.net

<< Music

22 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Spanish flies

by Philip Campbell

B

izet’s Carmen, possibly the bestknown opera ever, recently opened for the umpteenth time at the War Memorial Opera House as the final presentation in the San Francisco Opera’s fall season. The everlastingly fascinating gypsy woman returned to cast another spell in an overdue revival of JeanPierre Ponnelle’s fondly remembered production of the early 1980s.

Annoyingly disrespectful of Ponnelle’s detailed and stylish original staging, new director Jose Maria Condemi appeared to make use of simply the handsome old sets (Ponnelle) and the authenticlooking costumes by Werner Juerke.

Gone was the glaring, sun-drenched lighting by Thomas J. Munn, replaced by a less inventive albeit colorful design by Christopher Maravich. Less forgivably, a choreographer and fight director have been added to make

some tame attempts at matching Ponnelle’s deft handling of action scenes.

Naturally, after 30 years, it is very possible to soften memories and remember only the good things. I must have forgotten how unthreatening and cozy the setting for the smuggler’s cove looked before (sort of like a manicured tourist area in a national park), and how relatively two-dimensional the rest of the stage designs actually were. No steeply raked playing area back in the old days. Still, I know Ponnelle always had a gift for startling and bold stage pictures, and Condemi has replaced them with routine characterizations and clumsy crowd control. There are moments of pantomime that would look unsubtle in a silent movie, and the staging of the Act IV chorus outside the arena has already been done ages ago to witty effect, in the “Ascot Gavotte” number of My Fair Lady.

I’m not saying the current staging is intolerable, just disappointing, and Carmen didn’t get to be this famous because of countless directors and their vision. Carmen endures because it has one of the best damned scores and librettos in the repertoire, not because it offers so many opportunities for scenic grandeur.

That is where the current production gets back on track. It all starts with the music. Even with rudimentary, “play to the balcony” acting and basic “stand-and-deliver” singing, this is a richly musical experience. It doesn’t hurt that the principals are all attractive and look like the characters they are portraying, but more importantly, they sound like them.

Former Adler Fellow mezzosoprano Kendall Gladen stepped in to share the title part with Anita Rachvelishvili after the originally scheduled Kate Aldrich cancelled.

If it wasn’t a triumphant breakout occasion (one of those “I was there when” moments) for the talented Gladen, it was still a major accomplishment. I would see her again as she grows with the role, for her

Cory Weaver

Mezzo-soprano Kendall Gladen as Carmen in San Francisco Opera’s Carmen, which endures by virtue of its score and libretto.

pleasurably smoky sound, kittenish flirtatiousness and underplayed but believable resignation to fate at the ending.

As the hapless and handsome Don Jose, Brazilian tenor Thiago Arancam (the hapless and handsome Christian of SFO’s 2010 Cyrano de Bergerac) made an uncommonly virile appearance, matched by a big and steady sound. His acting matched Gladen’s for simplicity, but he sounded great if subtly forced at full voice, and he certainly made us understand how Carmen could fall for him in the first place.

Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot, Tony Award winner for the fabulous Broadway revival of South Pacific, made his SFO debut as the thrilling matador Escamillo. Noticeably weightier since his stay on the Great White Way (those toreador pants are unforgiving), Szot still looks terrific, and his voice, just barely strong enough for the War Memorial, sounded rich. His macho posing was eminently in character, and again, it wasn’t difficult to understand the fickle Carmen’s attraction to him.

As the good and steady Micaela (Don Jose’s childhood sweetheart), soprano Sara Cartland, a second-year Adler Fellow, made the most of what director Condemi allowed her for characterization, and she has a clear and pleasing tone. Ponnelle’s Micaela was a tragic and neurotic village girl, passionately attempting Don Jose’s salvation. Here she seems more like a girl from the Seville branch of the Junior League, dutifully bringing messages from home.

Ultimately, conductor Nicola Luisotti sealed the deal on the musical values of the production. He was out of the gate with a propulsive Prelude to Act I, and he kept the long and gloriously melodic score flowing vigorously until the final curtain.

It would take more than a pedestrian revival to dampen the impact of Bizet’s Carmen, and after La Rachvelishvili gets her turn, Kendall Gladen is returning in the title role for the end of the run in December.

Add the two men in her life (three if you count Luisotti), and the new/old Carmen has made a welcome return to town.▼

Duets & duos

by Gregg Shapiro

T

ony Bennett left more than his heart in San Francisco some time ago. It sounds like he also left his voice here. Thanks heavens he teamed up with enough still vital vocalists to help carry him through the various collaborations on Duets II (Columbia/ RPM). Arriving as it did more than a dozen years after fellow crooner Frank Sinatra did something similar, Bennett’s 2006 Duets disc and its 2001 predecessor sounded less processed than Sinatra’s product because he and his duet partners were actually in the same room when the recordings were made. A worthy successor, Duets II improves on the concept by pairing Bennett up with some of the most up-to-the-minute talent.

Lady Gaga is simply radiant on “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and Bennett sounds like he’s having more fun than he’s had in years (perhaps since his collaboration with k.d. lang). Lang can be heard on “Blue Velvet,” renewing the song’s tender touch. “My heart is sad and lonely,” the opening line of “Body and Soul,” a duet with the late Amy Winehouse, takes on new and bittersweet meaning. Other

duet delights include “The Girl I Love” (with Sheryl Crow), “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (with Willie Nelson), “Who Can I Turn To” (with Queen Latifah) and “Watch What Happens” (with Natalie Cole).

Imani Coppola had herself a catchy little hit single in the late

1990s with a song called “Legend of a Cowgirl.” In the interim, she released a few albums under her own name but never reached the same level of popularity. Teaming up with Adam Pallin as Little Jackie, the pair released their debut disc in 2008, and have returned with their brand of vibrant indie-soul on Made

4 TV (Plush Moon). Never one to hold back, Coppola may raise a few eyebrows with suggestive numbers such as “Cock Block,” the antimonogamy “31 Flavors,” and the cougar anthem “21st Birthday Party.”

A compilation of Ron Paul supporter (!) Barry Manilow’s collaborations, Duets (Arista/Legacy) contains “The Last Duet,” a ticklish and tuneful twosome w with Lily Tomlin that alone is worth the price o admission. Equally of a amusing is the snappy r repartee on “Slow Boat t China” with Manilow’s to f former boss Bette Midler ( (from Bette’s Rosemary C Clooney Songbook disc).

Y You have to give Manilow ccredit for working w with and not being d deterred by vocalists w with far better vocal aability, including fellowfo former Midler employee M Melissa Manchester (the p previously unreleased mix o of “You’ve Got a Friend”), R Reba McEntire (playing Dolly to his Kenny on “Islands in the Stream”), previous collaborator Dionne Warwick (the Bee Gees’ “Run to Me”) and Barbra Streisand (“I Won’t Be the One To Let Go”).

Ford & Lopatin (Dan Lopatin and Joel Ford) stuck their thumbs into the 1980s new wave pie and See page 23 >>

▼

Film >>

November 17-23, 201 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 23

Upstaging Olivier

by David Lamble

W

hy was a 14-year-old emerging gay boy watching Marilyn Monroe as his first taste of adult entertainment? In the late 1950s, “adult” didn’t carry the whiff of sex acts or the knowing wink of the Vegas strip. For me, “adult” movies were the B&W films at the cinema in my hood, Long Beach, Long Island’s Lido Theatre. For this kid, “adult” meant anything from the fertile mind of one-time Berlin gigolo Billy Wilder. From Dietrich’s knowing leer, “Wanna kiss me, Ducky?” in Witness for the Prosecution to Marilyn’s tipsy wiggle as she reports for “Sweet Sue’s” all-girl band in Some Like It Hot, Wilder knew how to show me, as Tony Curtis quips, “the sweet side of the lollypop.”

In a few months, Oscar may single out Michelle Williams’ reprise of Marilyn’s wiggle in the smart new British romance My Week with Marilyn, as the lady from Brokeback Mountain dukes it out with Kenneth Branagh’s acerbic yet moving take on Laurence Olivier, who longed for the wiggle as much as he loathed the method.

Angling to steal the spotlight from Williams and Branagh is the young British acting wiz Eddie Redmayne (Tony winner for Broadway’s Red), whose slyly impudent Colin Clark briefly assumes the mantle of Marilyn’s secret lover and Olivier’s confidant/confessor. Based on Clark’s memoir (son of PBS icon Kenneth Clark) during his turbulent stint as third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl, My Week with Marilyn gives a richly entertaining glimpse at Marilyn in mid-career crisis, juggling her new powers as a film producer, wife to playwright Arthur Miller and everso-briefly darling to the pre-Rupert Murdoch British tabloid press.

It’s 1956, the British are still emotionally enslaved to the privations of wartime rationing, and few realize it, but a major social revolution is about to blow through dear old England. Monroe and Olivier had agreed to collaborate on The Prince and the Showgirl, a royal-family exploitation potboiler from acclaimed playwright Terence Rattigan. The creaky vehicle has Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) directing and playing a crusty old prince regent in a tiny Balkan country on the eve of WWI. Monroe is the vivacious American cabaret understudy whose charms completely discombobulate the prince.

British film custom held that third assistant directors, “thirds,” normally glorified gofers, be recruited from the ranks of ambitious, sometimes randy, aspiring filmmakers. Polite to a fault, a still starry-eyed recent Oxford grad, the new third Colin Clark is ordered to keep a close watch on the volatile American beauty.

“For the next four months, you will stay with her day and night.”

“She drinks?”

“Among other things.”

“Pills?”

“They like to keep her doped up, it makes her easier to control.”

<<

Duets & Duos

From page 22

pulled out a Scritti Politti plum, along with other period influences, on their wonderful Channel Pressure (Software). You can hear the SP influence on “Emergency Room,” while “Too Much Midi (Please Forgive Me)” is a definite nod to New Order. Other new wave nuanced highlights include “The Voices” and the dance jam “World

Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn.

First-time feature director Simon Clark’s saucy take on how Sir Laurence lost control of his star to the “randy little third” Colin is peppered with witty, profane asides from Branagh, as Olivier vents his frustrations. “Trying to teach Marilyn how to act is like trying to teach Urdu to a badger!”

The Marilyn of our adolescent imaginings is Some Like It Hot’s immodestly clad girl-band singer Sugar Kane. Fellow girl-band cast member Sandra Warner recalls Marilyn’s special magic on a DVD anniversary edition. “You couldn’t take your eyes off her, because she had a quality of sexiness mixed with innocence, that little extra pinch of salt.”

That pinch pops up in my mind’s eye in the voice of an infatuated, cross-dressing Jack Lemmon getting a breathy reply from a giggly Marilyn climbing up into a sleeper train’s upper berth.

“Good night, Sugar.”

“Good night, honey.”

As Ellen DeGeneres pointed out while flashing her “lesbian smile” at her on her daytime talk show, Michelle Williams can’t match Marilyn in the voluptuous or breathy-asides departments, so what does she bring to the table? A first viewing of Marilyn reveals just how successful Williams is in reimagining Marilyn with her magical mix of sexiness and innocence restored. She’s helped immensely by the mix of Branagh’s vinegar and Redmayne’s fresh-faced Eton-boy idealism. There’s the lovely fantasy of Colin’s impetuous nighttime climb up a ladder into Marilyn’s bedchamber, as well as his Prince Charming-worthy tour of his old Eton prep-school digs, complete with a naked swimming-hole sojourn.

In his diary, the late Colin Clark writes, “This was a fairy-tale that nonetheless was true.” Movie fairytales are meant to restore our faith in childhood fantasies, and Marilyn succeeds in vanquishing many of Norman Mailer’s pompous musings about Marilyn’s eventual downward spiral. You leave this cinema truffle with Marilyn headed off to her latecareer masterwork, Some Like It Hot. Olivier would get his careerreviving jolt from John Osborne’s The Entertainer, while Colin got a broken heart, a successful doc-

making career and this memoir.

of Regret.”

Husband and wife Kevin and Anita Robinson of Viva Voce are a Pacific Northwest version of Mates of State (listen for the organ on “Diamond Mine”). The pair returns with The Future Will Destroy (Vanguard). A few shades darker than acclaimed earlier releases, songs such as “Black Mood Ring,” “No Ship Coming In” and the title cut are good indications of where things are going here.

It’s a Corporate World (Warner Brothers), the full-length majorlabel by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., one of the more unique musical duos, is hard to resist. It’s arty and creative without being pretentious.

That’s the appeal here: the songs are not necessarily commercial (or corporate, if you will), but they’re still appealing. See the almost tropical “If It Wasn’t You” and the funky dance groove of “An Ugly Person on a Movie Screen.”▼

On the record Director Simon Curtis notes, “I came to this story through the Colin Clark diaries. I responded to a young man breaking his way into a world he was passionate to belong to. Then there’s this complicated actress and this inside account of what it was like to be on that set.”

Curtis reveals how he caught lightning in a bottle with his three stars. On Michelle Williams: “Some of the most brilliant actresses around couldn’t play Marilyn. I was thrilled when Michelle read and wanted to meet. This film is about the Americans working from the inside and the English working from the outside, Michelle does both. She would be working on the body language – things in Marilyn’s repertoire that Marilyn had created – and also on the complex psychological makeup of Marilyn.”

Kenneth Branagh is spot-on as a frustrated stage actor who pines for Marilyn’s screen chemistry. “It’s a multi-textured performance of a multi-textured man. Ken’s name has obviously been linked to Olivier’s all through his career. I think he brings such humor, such warmth, such empathy to the character.”

Eddie Redmayne is best known to American audiences for his Tony winning-turn as a young assistant to Alfred Molina’s wounded lion of abstract expressionism Mark Rothko, in John Logan’s Red. I suggest that Redmayne carries over his role as confessor to a great man in his relationship to Branagh’s Olivier.

“I was working [in London as Eddie was] doing the original production of Red. I just had my heart set on him because he’s got such a wisdom and sort of a charming naivety as well. He was just absolutely the way I envisaged the character.”

“Marilyn came to London with such great hopes: she was married to the great Arthur Miller, she had her own production company, and she was coming to work with the great Olivier. So her dreams of reinventing herself were appearing to come true, and the story of our film is how those all sort of collapsed.”▼ My Week with Marilyn opens in theaters on Wed., Nov. 23.

ebar.com

<< Out&About

24 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

Gate Theatre of Dublin @ Zellerbach Playhouse

O&A

Touring production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Watt. $65-$80. 7pm both plays. Endgame only Nov 18 & 19 8pm and Nov 20, 3pm. Watt only Nov 19, 2pm and Nov 20, 8pm. Bancroft Way at Dana Court, UC Berkeley campus. (510) 642-9988. www.calperformances.org

Out &About

Hair @ Golden Gate Theatre

Compagnie Art de Scene at the Hip Hop DanceFest

Classic groovy musical performed with vibrancy by the touring company of the Broadway revival of the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. $31-$95. Thu-Sat 8pm. Wed, Sat & Sun 2pm. Thru Nov. 20. 1 Golden Gate St. at Market. (888) 746-1799. www.shnsf.com

Holiday Ice Rink @ Union Square

Dance, dance revolution

Safeway-sponsored ice rink in the middle of downtown’s busy shopping district. Nov. 18-20, see the construction of the huge Star Wars Santa Yoda made of Legos! A portion of ticket sales benefit Boys and Girls Clubs of San Francisco. $5-$10. 10am-11:30pm.

Thru Dec 31. Powell St. at Geary. 781-2688. www.unionsquareicerink.com

by Jim Provenzano

Kate Lehman, Travis Schlaht @ John Pence Gallery

A

Basil Childers

s the familiar mass ballet of riot police and protesters plays out on our streets, indoors, terpsichorean efforts reflect global and local themes.

Trey McIntyre Project set his new dances to the music of Roy Orbison and The Shins. I want to see how he works that skirt (see photo). $30-$68. Friday, Nov. 18. 8pm. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way at Telegraph, UC Berkeley campus. (510) 642-9988. www.calperformances.org Dance Brigade’s retrospective concert of dance and drumming works celebrates the 35 years of Krissy Keefer’s performing ensemble in its many incarnations.

Free/donations. Fri & Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm.

Trey McIntyre Project Thru Nov 20. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St. 826-4441. www.dancebrigade.org Dance talents bounce, jump and shake it up at the Hip Hop DanceFest, the 13th annual two-day energetic international festival of hip hop dance companies from the Bay Area, New York, LA, London, Denmark, Paris and elsewhere. $40. $75 for both programs. 8pm. Nov 19, 6pm & 9:30pm. Nov 20, 6pm. Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon St. at Bay. www.sfhiphopdancefest.com Dandelion Dance Theater performs with guests Frank Shawl and CSU East Bay’s Inclusive Interdisciplinary Ensemble to perform Radical Inclusion at the Hillside Club, Berkeley. Choreographer Joe Goode also joins in an arts conversation about new ways to move onstage. Proceeds benefit Dandelion’s tour of their production of Sam Shepard and Joe Chaikin’s Tongues. $15-$25. Friday, Nov. 18.

7:30pm. 2286 Cedar St. Berkeley. 8060013. www.dandeliondancetheater.org Hello, My Name is … at ODC Dance Dance Brigade Commons, presents innovative dances by six upcoming choreographers participating in the 59th ODC Pilot Program. $12. Saturday, Nov. 19. 8pm. Also Nov 20. 351 Shotwell St. www.odcdance.org Liss Fain Dance’s new work, The False and True are One, an immersive site-specific dance-installation work, includes Word for Word’s Nancy Shelby reading a Lydia Davis story. Audience members get an array of angles on this unusual piece. $12.50-$25. Thu-Sat 8pm.

Nov 19, 9:30pm and Nov 20, 5pm.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. 978-2787. www.lissfaindance.org www.ybca.org There’s nothing wrong with Dandelion Dance traditional dance, especially when it’s fabulous. Compañia Flamenca José Porcel performs older and contemporary flamenco works at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. $20-$58. Saturday, Nov 19. 8pm. Bancroft Way at Telegraph,UC Berkeley campus. (510) 642-9988. www.calperformances.org

Fri 18 >>

Bingo Night @ Deco Lounge Anna Conda and Mutha Chucka cohost a fun Bingo game and fundraiser for the Shih Yu-Lang Central YMCA’s kids programs; prizes, food and festivity. $5 and up. 7pm9pm. 510 Larkin St. www.decosf.com

Cirque du Soleil @ AT&T Park The Montreal circus spectacular returns with Totem, a visually striking exploration of human evolution, from amphibians to those who seek to fly. Look for the big tents across the bridge and east of the AT&T Park. $55-$360. Thru Dec. 11. (800) 4501480. www.cirquedusoleil.com/totem

Doubt: A Parable @ Live Oak Theatre, North Berkeley John Patrick Shanley’s award-winning play about faith and the search for truth gets a local production by Actors Ensemble. $12$15. Fri & Sat 8pm. Thru Nov. 19. Shattuck St. at Berryman. www.aeofberkeley.org

Fear Over Frisco @ Hypnodrome Theatre Thrillpeddlers’ new trio of Noir-Horror one-act plays, penned by “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller offers a post-Halloween thrill.

Prepare to be shockingly entertained. $25$35. Thu-Sat 8pm. Thru Nov. 19. 575 10th St. at Division/Bryant. 377-4202. www.thrillpeddlers.com

Dual exhibit of compelling realist paintings of animals, still lifes and portraits.

Reception 6pm-8pm. Mon-Fri 10am-6pm.

Sat 10am-5pm. Thru Dec. 17. 750 Post St. 441-1138. www.johnpence.com

Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco @ Mission Cultural Center The chorus performs BrokeBACH Mountain, a whimsical concert of J.S. Bach, P.D.Q. Bach and Offenbach, with Timothy Seelig of the SF Gay Men’s Chorus. $15-$30. 8pm.

Also Nov 19. 2868 Mission St. www.lgcsf.org

Making Porn @ Box Car Theatre Ronnie Larsen returns with a new production of his popular play about, well, making porn, starring muscle stud Matthew Rush, with guaranteed male nudity; adults only! $25-$50. Thu 8pm. Fri & Sat 7pm & 10pm.

Sun 7pm. Extended thru Nov. 27. 125A Hyde St. www.ronnielarsen.com

Marga Gomez @ The Marsh Veteran lesbian comic performs Not Getting Any Younger, a new solo show about her ‘coming of middle age.’ $15-$50. Thu & Fri 8pm. Sat 8:30pm. Sun 3pm. Extended thru Dec 17. 1062 Valencia St. 282-3055. www.themarsh.org

and guest performers. $15-$20. 8pm. Nov 20, 2pm, music by Poulenc and Brahms.

Nov 21, 8pm, brass chamber music. Also Nov 21, 8pm, chamber muisc of Mozart performed by pianist Paul Hersh. $15-$20.

Nov 22, 8pm, works for string and piano.

50 Oak St. www.sfcm.edu

The Temperamentals @ New Conservatory Theatre Jon Marans’ hit Off-Broadway drama about 1950s gay activist Harry Hay and Rudy Gernreich, and their inspiring struggle to form the historic Mattachine Society; stars J. Conrad Frank (Katya Smirnoff-Skyy). $25-$45. Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Dec. 18 (no show Nov. 24). 25 Van Ness Ave at Market, lower level. 861-8972. www.nctcsf.org

Roz Chast @ Wheeler Auditorium, Berkeley

Encore performances of Puccini’s classic opera, with sets by David Hockney. $21-$330.

8pm. Also Nov 22 & 25 (both 8pm). 301 Van Ness Ave. 864-3330. www.sfopera.com

Brilliant comic artist and New Yorker contributor for nearly four decades discusses her drawing and work. $32. 8pm. Bancroft Way at Telegraph Ave. UC Berkeley campus. (510) 642-9988. www.calperformances.org

Two Dead Clowns @ Box Car Theatre Ronnie Larsen performs two one-act plays about serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and John Waters’ film actor Divine. $25-$30.

Thu-Sat 8pm. Fri & Sun 7pm. Thru Nov. 27.

125A Hyde St. www.RonnieLarsen.com

Sat 19 >> The Air We Breathe @ SF MOMA

New group exhibit of works by 30 contemporary artists and eight poets who explore the issues of legalizing same-sex marriage.

Free-$18. Thu-Tue 11am-5:30pm. 151 Third St. Thru Feb 20. 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

Animales y Nahuales @ Back to the Picture Gallery Group exhibit of Mexican folk art in wood, clay, and paintings, depicting people and their animal spirit guides. Portion of sales benefits SF SPCA and Rancho El Uno Reserve. 934 Valencia St. Mon-Sat 10am6pm. Sun 12pm-5pm. www.backtothepicture.com

Sat. 19

Sex Rev @ CounterPulse The Jose Sarria Experience, Theatre Rhinoceros’ production of John Fisher’s funny, sexy retelling of Jose Sarria’s life, starring Tom Orr. $10-$25. Thu-Sat 8pm. Also Sat 10:30pm. Sun 7pm. Thru Nov. 27 (no show Nov 24). 310 Mission St. (800) 838-3006. www.TheRhino.org www.CounterPulse.org

The Soldier’s Tale @ Aurora Theatre, Berkeley Director Tom Ross and former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Muriel Maffre’s new production of the 1918 Igor Stravinsky musical play blends actor-singers and a life-size puppet. $10-$55. Tue Sun 7pm.

Wed-Sat 8pm. Sun 2pm. Thru Dec. 18. 2081 Addison St. (510) 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org

Student Concerts @ SF Conservatory of Music Varied concerts by accomplished music students (free unless otherwise noted). Nov 18, 8pm works by Schoenberg, Beethoven and Schulhoff; also guitar students in recital hall. Nov 19, music by Philippe Hersant with the SFCM Chamber Choir

Harry Potter Marathon @ Castro Theatre Go whole hog for Hogworts with all the Harry Potter films. The Philosopher’s Stone 12pm. The Chamber of Secrets, 2:50pm.

The Prisoner of Azkaban, 6pm.

The Goblet of Fire, 8:35pm. Nov 20, The Order of the Phoenix, 12pm. The Deathly Hallows, Part 1, 5:30pm. Part 2 at 8:10pm. $12 per day. 429 Castro St. www.castrotheatre.com

How to Write a New Book for the Bible @ Berkeley Rep World premiere of Bill Cain’s new play about religion, and how parents’ sins ruin their children’s lives. $14-$81. Wed & Sun 7pm. Tue, Thu Fri Sat 8pm. Sat & Sun 2pm.

Thru Nov. 28. Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. at Shattuck. (510) 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org

The Laybelline Show @ Castro Country Club

Line Dance Classes @ ODC Dance Commons New fun line dance classes taught by Sundance Saloon’s Sean Ray, with a special LGBT-anybody-inclusive ambiance, and not just country music. $14. Weekly Saturdays, 6pm-8pm. 351 Shotwell St. www.odcdance.org

Period of Adjustment @ SF Playhouse

Comedic storyteller Morgan headlines the LGBT open mic night hosted by Barruch Porres-Hernandez. 7pm sign-up. 7:30pm line up. Donations. 2919 24th St. www.mtbs.com

mation, this new exhibit displays more than 100 objects that help narrate the struggles and contributions of African Americans in California. Special events thru exhibit run.

Thru March 4. 685 Mission St. at 3rd. 3587200. www.moadsf.org

Impish drag persona hosts “Thanks, But No Thanks!” a Thanksgiving show at the LGBT sober space. $10. 10:30pm. 4058 18th St. www.castrocountryclub.org

42nd Street Moon’s production of George and Ira Gershwin’s 1926 musical comedy about Long Island bootleggers during Prohibition. $20-$50. 6pm. Wed 7pm. Thu & Fri 8pm. Sat 6pm. Sun 3pm.

Thru Nov 20. 215 Jackson St. 255-8207. www.42ndstmoon.org

Queer Open Mic @ Modern Times Bookstore

Sat. 19

Turandot @ War Memorial Opera House

Oh Kay! @ Eureka Theatre

Previews begin for the local staging of Tennessee Williams’ “serious comedy” about a man who brings his bride to meet his best friend. $20-$50. Tue-Thu 7pm. Fri & Sat 8pm. Opens Nov. 19. Thru Jan 14. 533 Sutter St. near Powell. 677-9596. www.sfplayhouse.org

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Maharaja @ Asian Art Museum Holcombe Waller @ Cyprians Gay musician, former San Franciscan now living in Portland, stops back in town to perform music from his new CD Into the Dark Unknown. $12-$20. 8pm. Turk St. at Lyon. www.liveatcyprians. blogspot.com

Artumnal Gathering @ Bently Reserve Fifth annual fall party and gathering of Burning Man organizers, artists, supporters and entertainers in the stylish classic downtown party venue. Party $35-$55 (9:30pmlate). Dinner $250 (6pm). 400 Sansome St. www.blackrockarts.org/events/artumnal

Beach Blanket Babylon @ Club Fugazi Musical comedy revue, now in its 35th year, with an ever-changing lineup of political and pop culture icons, all in gigantic wigs. $25-$130. Wed, Thu, Fri at 8pm. Sat 6:30, 9:30pm. Sun 2pm, 5pm. (Beer/wine served; cash only). 678 Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd (Green St.). 421-4222. www.beachblanketbabylon.com

Blowoff @ Slim’s Bob Mould and Rich Morel return for their groovetastic dance night, popular with gay bears, but all are welcome. $15. 10pm-2am.

333 11th St. www.blowoff.us www.slims-sf.com

Collected @ Museum of the African Diaspora Subtitled Stories of Acquisition and Recla-

The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts, an expansive exhibit showcasing textiles, jewels and items from the heyday of the early Indian empires. Also, Sanjay Patel’s Deities, Demons and Dudes with ‘Staches: Indian Avatars; Tateuchi Thematic Fallery, 2nd floor, thru April 22. Other special events thru exhibit run. $7-$17.

Tue-Sun 10am-5pm. Thu til 9pm.

Thru April 8, 2012. 200 Larkin St. 581-3500. www.asianart.org

Master Harold and the Boys @ Phoenix Theatre Athol Fugard’s comic drama about British school boys and their gay professor gets a local production. $20-$40. Thu-Sat 8pm.

Thru Nov. 19. 414 414 Mason St. #601.

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

The Matter Within @ YBCA Fascinating new exhibit of contemporary Indian art; installations, sculptures and other media. Don’t miss Sunil Gupta’s alluring gay photo series Love, Undetectable and Sun City. Free-$12. Exhibit thru Jan 29.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. 978-2787. www.ybca.org

SF Underground Short Film Fest @ Victoria Theatre Peaches Christ and Sam Sharkey cohost the night of unusual local short films. $15-$20.

7:30pm & 10:30pm. 2961 16th St. www.peacheschrist.com

Sony Holland @ The Rrazz Room Misty-voiced local singer performs American standards. $25. 3pm. Also Nov. 20, 3pm. 2-drink min. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.therrazzroom.com

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Out&About >>

A Tale of Two Genres @ SF Playhouse

November 17-23, 201 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 25

Sun. 20

Un-Scripted Theater Company’s comic production of An Improvised Dickensian Musical, with audience suggestions. $10$20. Thu-Sat 8pm. Also Sat 3pm. Thru Dec 21. (no show Nov 19 or 24). 533 Sutter St. www.un-scripted.com

Charming local chanteuse returns with the Tammy Hall Trio. $29.50. 8pm. Also Nov 22 & 23, 8pm. 2-drink min. Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. www.therrazzroom.com

Teatro Zinzanni @ Pier 29 The new show Up in the Air, about a struggling radio station, stars Geoff Hoyle, blues musician Duffy Bishop, and a slew of amazingly talented acrobats, singers, musicians, a five-course dinner, and a lot of fun. $117-$145. Saturday 11:30am “Breve” show $63-$78. Wed-Sat 6pm (Sun 5pm) Thru Dec 31, when the show goes on hiatus for World Cup Sailing pier renovations. Pier 29 at Embarcadero Ave. 438-2668. www.teatrozinzanni.com

When I Grow Up @ LGBT Center Group exhibit of mixed media art by local LGBT elders. Thru Nov. 16. 1800 Market St. www.sfcenter.org

Working for the Mouse @ Exit Theatre Trevor Allen’s critically acclaimed solo show about his sex and drug-filled misadventures working at Mauswich, aka Disneyland, as an employee portraying Pluto and other characters. $15-$20. Thu-Sat 8pm. Thru Dec. 17 (no shows Thanksgiving weekend).

156 Eddy St. (800) 838-3006. www.workingforthemouse.com

Sun 20 >>

Anniversary Celebration @ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge Celebrate the 45th anniversary of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, the transgender protest that preceded the New York Stonewall riots. Felica Flames Elizondo hosts. DJ Bus Station John plays music from the 60s and 70s. 5pm-8pm. 133 Turk st. 441-2922. www.auntcharlieslounge.com

Carmen @ War Memorial Opera House San Francisco Opera’s production of Bizet’s passionate opera. $21-$330. 2pm. Nov 23 (7:30pm), 26 (8pm), 29 (7:30pm) Dec 2 (8pm) and 4 (7:30pm). 301 Van Ness Ave. 864-3330. www.sfopera.com

Eric Owens @ Hertz Hall, Berkeley Bass-baritone performs a recital of various classical works, with piano accompaniment. $48. 3pm. Bancroft Way at College Ave. UC Berkeley campus. (510) 642-9988. www.calperformances.org

SF Hiking Club @ Briones Park Join LGBT hikers on a strenuous 11-mile sometimes steep hike to forested and grassy areas. Carpools meet at 8:45am at the Safeway sign, Market St. at Dolores, or 9:30am at the Lafayette BART. (650) 7638537. www.sfhiking.com

Sundance Saloon @ Beatbox The LGBT country-western dance night moves to SoMa on Sundays. $8. Lessons 6pm-7pm. Dancing 7pm-10pm. 314 11th St. www.sundancesaloon.org www.beatboxsf.com

Veronica Klaus @ The Rrazz Room

Eric Ward in Cabaret Showcase Showdown

Cabaret Showcase Showdown @ Café du Nord Katya Smirnoff-Skyy and Trauma Flintstone cohost the finals in the annual cabaret conest, with the winners in each of a dozen categories singing competitionstyle. Previous winners Carly Ozard and Cara Burgoyne also perform; special guest judges for the comedy, drag, crooner and other categories, and the Tom Shaw Trio. $15. 8:30pm. 2170 Market St. 8615016. www.dragatmartunis.com www.cafedunord.com

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

395-8595. www.harrydenton.com

Sunday Skool with Baby D @ Academy of Ballet D’arcy Drollinger (Enrique) returns to SF with a campy aerobics weekly workout set to music from the 80s-today. Retro Spandex and Solid Gold gear encouraged. Dance by donation. Sundays at 11am. 2121 Market St. at Church.

You Roll Away Your Stone, I’ll Roll Away Mine @ Right Window Gallery Rotating group exhibit of varied photographic works curated by Jason Hanasik; Abner Nolan, Patrick Hillman, Melissa Wyman. Thru Nov. 992 Valencia St. at 21st. www.rightwindow.blogspot.com

Mon 21 >> Isaac Bader @ Magnet

Passages, Bader’s exhibit of subtle egg tempera paintings exploring the illusory concept of ‘reality.’ Exhibit thru Nov. 4122 18th st. at Collingwood. www.magnetsf.org

Tue 22 >>

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

Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze @ SOMArts Gallery Diverse group exhibit of women’s art that takes on body objectification, using men and body parts. Events through exhibit run.

Thru Nov. 30. Tue-Fri 12pm-7pm. Sat 12pm5pm. 934 Brannan St. 863-1414. www.somarts.org

Minority Report @ LGBT Center Diversity, Identity, Ethnicity and Gender in the Israeli LGBTQ Community, a talk with Anat Avissar and Mike Hamel of the Aguda, Israel’s first LGBT organization. 7pm. 1800 Market Street, Room 300. www.sfcenter.org

Wed 23 >>

Brett Kaufamn @ 5 Claude Lane Gallery Exhibit of unique multimedia works depicting gay icons like Allen Ginsberg, Harvey Milk and Oscar Wilde. Wed-Sun 11am-5pm.

Exhibit thru Jan 11. 5 Claude Lane near Bush St. 956-1310. www.5claudelane.com

California Dreaming @ Contemporary Jewish Museum Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present, an exhibit about the lives of historic Western American Jewish people, from Levi’s jeans and Ginsberg’s Howl to Gump’s and LGBT synagogues.

Also, Houdini: Art and Magic. $5-$12.

Thu-Tue 11am-5pm. 736 Mission St. at 3rd.

655-7800. Thru Oct. 16, 2012. www.thecjm.org

Our Vast Queer Past @ GLBT History Museum See the fascinating exhibit from the GLBT Historical Society, with a wide array of rare historic items on display. New mini-exhibit focuses on the legacy of activist and performer Jose Sarria. Free for members-$5.

Wed-Sat 11am-7pm. Sun 12pm-5pm. 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org

Salsa Dancing @ Queer Ballroom

Thu 24 >>

Same-sex dancing with lessons and open dancing. 6pm and 7pm classes 8pm-9:30 dancing. Many of these events will end this year, so enjoy them while you can. $5-$30.

151 Potrero Ave. www.queerballroom.com

Annual Thanksgiving dinner “orphan” party with food. 5pm. 1354 Harrison St. www.lonestarsf.com

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

Thomas Jane and Lauren German in Dark Country

Family on Demand @ Lone Star Saloon

The Monster Show @ The Edge Cookie Dough’s weekly raucous drag show with hot gogo guys and DJ MC2 takes a campy look at food with fun drag acts.

9pm-2am. 4149 18th St. at Collingwood. www.edgesf.com

Thanksgiving Potluck @ Castro Country Club Annual dinner party for LGBT sober folks and friends. Bring a dish to share. 2pm.

4058 18th St. www.castrocountryclub.org

Tubesteak Connection @ Aunt Charlie’s Lounge Burn off that turkey fat at the intimate retro disco night where DJ Bus Station John plays classic records. $4. 10pm-2am. 133 Turk St. at Taylor. www.auntcharlieslounge.com

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

Dark matter

Deadline is each Thursday, a week before publication.

W

hat if one of your favorite actors decided to do a TV show where he’s naked in almost every show? What if that same actor were about to pop into town with a deliciously creepy film he stars in and directed, which was almost never seen, but now will be, locally, with said star in attendance for a Q&A? You go see the movie, that’s what.

Thomas Jane, star of Hung and numerous films, directed and stars in Dark Country, his previously unreleased 2009 3-D horror-noir thriller about a married couple whose road trip goes frighteningly wrong. Jane appears in a post-screening Q&A. Friday, November 18. $12. 7:30pm.

The Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St. www.castrotheatre.com For more, read my online-only interview with Thomas Jane on www.ebar.com - J.P.

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

www.ebar.com

<< Leather

26 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Can you mentor?

by Scott Brogan

H

ave you ever thought about being a mentor? Do you feel a need to be mentored? Do you know what a mentor is? For years there has been a lot of talk and debate about the need for mentoring in our community. Some believe there isn’t a need at all, other do, still others don’t care. If some of the comments made during the Q&A at last July’s panel discussion Is Leather Dead? are any indication, our community definitely has the need. More importantly, there are people out there who need and want to be mentored. At that panel discussion, several people bravely spoke up and shared their frustrations about the lack of mentorship and a basic lack of direction for those new to the scene. These people have a real desire to be vital contributors, not just sporadic players.

I think of mentoring as similar to being part of the big brother/ big sister programs, or perhaps a sponsor in a 12-step program.

It’s a simple concept. You help out someone who’s new to the scene.

Take them under your wing. This might require a lot of time, or not much at all. That depends on the person, your relationship with them, and their individual needs.

Before you say, “I can’t do that,” think about it.

Some people assume those who need mentoring are young, therefore, “What would I have in common with them?” Not true. There are a lot of people who are late bloomers, perhaps more so in our community. Besides, most mentorship needs are not age-specific. Some people assume that being a mentor means giving up a huge chunk of time. Not true.

Just the knowledge that someone is there to answer questions or provide support is all some people need.

The good news is that both the SF girls of Leather and the

Scott Brogan

Two of my favorite mentors: Sandy “Mama” Reinhardt and the late Mister Marcus.

Leathermen’s Discussion Group are initiating mentorship programs.

These programs will be varied and specific at the same time. I know that doesn’t seem to make sense.

The programs are designed so you can volunteer to mentor in specific areas that play to your strengths, or be on call for anything and everything. You dictate what you provide.

Are you expert in a specific skill such as flogging or bondage?

Sign up! Are you more social and experienced in public etiquette, or maybe knowing your way around play spaces? Sign up! Are you experienced in transitioning from sub to Dom, bottom to top, vice versa? Sign up! The possibilities are endless. Don’t think that you have nothing to offer. I made that mistake. I assumed I didn’t have anything special to offer until a few people expressed interest in learning

Brian Mills

Mentoring can be fun!

more about my own journey and my relationship with my husband.

It might sound trite or corny, but it’s true: We all have something unique to offer.

See page 27 >>

Coming up in leather and kink Thu., Nov. 17: Daddy Thursdays at Kok Bar (1225 Folsom). Shot specials, specials on Shiner Rock drafts & Shiner Hef bottles. 10 p.m.-close.

Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Thu., Nov. 17: Underwear Night at The Powerhouse (1347 Folsom). Show off your undies for drink specials. 10 p.m.-close. Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com Fri., Nov. 18: Transmission at the SF Citadel (1277 Mission), party for trans people and their friends.

8 p.m.-1 a.m. $25 at door or volunteer to get in free.

Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Fri., Nov. 18: Hardbox: A benefit for Project Open Hand featuring Spencer Reed at the Powerhouse. Win a pair of boxing gloves. Wear your boxing gloves and drink free! Door prizes, loose men, hot bartenders.

9 p.m.-close. Go to: www.openhand.org or www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Fri., Nov. 18: Truck Wash at Truck (1900 Folsom).

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

Go to: www.trucksf.com.

Fri., Nov. 18: Michael Brandon hosts Edging at The Edge (4149 Collingwood). Spanking by Chris, Sexiest Happy Trail contest, go-go boys, drinks specials.

Go to: www.edgesf.com.

boys. 9 p.m.-close. Go to: www.beatpigsf.com or www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Sat.-Sun., Nov. 19-20: Cleo Dubois’ Erotic Dominance Weekend Intensive at the SF Citadel.

For dominant women and women who switch.

Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Sun., Nov. 20: Jockstrap Beer Bust at Kok Bar. $8, wear your jock for specials. 3-7 p.m.

Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Sun., Nov. 20: Castro Bear Presents Sunday Furry Sunday at 440 Castro. 4-10 p.m.

Go to: www.castrobear.com.

Mon., Nov. 21: Happy Hour After Gym at Kok Bar SF. All-day happy hour Mon.; Tue.-Thurs. 6-9 p.m.; Fri. & Sat. 4-9 p.m. Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Mon., Nov. 21: Dirty Dicks at The Powerhouse. 4-10 p.m. $3 well drinks. Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Mon., Nov. 21: Dominant Discussion Group at the SF Citadel. Presented by DJ Mora. $5-$15 donation to the SF Citadel. 7:30-9:30 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m.

Go to: www.sfcitadel.org.

Tue., Nov. 22: Busted at Truck. $5 beer bust 9-11 p.m.

Go to: www.trucksf.com.

Fri., Nov. 18: Mr. Bolt 2012 Victory Party at The Bolt (2560 Boxwood St., Sacramento). Help send Mr. Bolt 2012 Miguel Rubio to International Mr. Leather in 2012. $8 beer bust, raffles, party starts at 8 p.m.

Go to: www.sacbolt.com.

Tue., Nov. 22: Pit Stop Happy Hour at Kok Bar. $1 shots every hour on the hour. 6-9 p.m.

Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Sat., Nov. 19: All Beef Saturday Nights at The Lone Star (1354 Harrison). 100% SoMa Beef & Co. 9 p.m.close. Go to: www.facebook.com/lonestarsf.

Wed., Nov. 23: Leather Buddies at Blow Buddies (933 Harrison. This is a male-only club. Doors open 8 p.m.12 a.m. Play till late. Go to: www.blowbuddies.com.

Sat., Nov. 19: Kok Block Happy Hour at Kok Bar. 4-9 p.m. $50 pool tournament starts at 6:30 p.m.

Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Wed., Nov. 23: Bear Bust Wednesdays at Kok Bar SF. $6 all you can drink Bud Light or Rolling Rock drafts.

Go to: www.kokbarsf.com.

Sat., Nov. 19: Beatpig, Pepper Coated Edition at The Powerhouse. Juanita More! spins saucy grooves while dudes cruise. Mr. S Leather will gear up the go-go

Wed., Nov. 23: Nipple Play at The Powerhouse.

Specials for shirtless guys. 10 p.m.-close.

Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com.

Tue., Nov. 22: Ink & Metal at The Powerhouse. 9 p.m.-close. Go to: www.powerhouse-sf.com.

▼

Karrnal >>

November 17-23, 201 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 27

Forbidden acts

by John F. Karr

I

’m one of those people who didn’t get it. My expectations some 40 years ago were way off – after all, I first saw Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself at the Nob Hill, not at some highfalutin Art Film Institute. Even if the setting had been appropriate, I probably wouldn’t have dug the flick. It gave me a headache with its caustic attitude, purposefully disjunct construction, blurred images and distorted soundtrack.

Yet I’ve remembered most every inch of it ever since. Pretty effective for a bad movie, huh?

If I didn’t get it, William E. Jones most certainly does. His new biography Halsted Plays Himself (216 pp., hardcover, $24.95) might look scarily academic at first glance, with its centerpiece critique of the legend’s S&M/art-film trilogy, L.A. Plays Itself, Sex Garage and Sextool.

Even the publisher’s name is kinda scary: Semiotext(e). But just wait – the book gets down and real dirty.

Jones, whose dust jacket photo shows a kinda cute, bearishly bearded guy, is a longtime porn-biz insider as well as a respected and frequently exhibited independent filmmaker. He’s strongly suited to his project. Matter of fact, his book is so much more than I dared expect, a model of what a gay study can be.

Nearly devoid of academic jargon, it’s authoritative, comprehensive, and personally couched.

Jones’ cogent critique of the movies, putting them in the context of their time, with the how and the why of their making, may be more rewarding than a viewing of the movies themselves. Jones lays it right out in his first paragraph, when he admits that L.A. Plays Itself “looks more like an experimental film than a porno.” As an art film, “the disjunction of sound and image come together in an unstable unity that is an ironic inversion of porn.” It was that “disjunct,” “unstable” and “inversion,” coupled with crude technique, that led me to reject the movie as porn, as well as not appreciating it as either experimental or art film. Of the movie’s depiction of forbidden acts, meant to show them as valid expressions of human sexuality, one reviewer wrote, “The erotic subtlety of the act of fist fucking has never been better represented than in the exquisite scene.” Excuse me: subtlety?

Exquisite?

I’m more in line with Divine, who gaily remarked, “I would eat this film!” Although surely meant as a compliment, it brings to mind what the underground film star is bestknown for eating.

Consideration of Halsted’s films segues into a fascinating biographical account. It took diligent sleuthing for Jones to find contacts who didn’t want to be contacted, and elicit from them information they didn’t always want to give. It’s telling how many of Jones’ sources insisted

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Leather +

From page 26

To find out more about the mentoring programs of these two organizations, go to: SF girls of Leather at www.SFgol.org or the Leathermen’s Discussion Group at www. sfldg.org.

Mr. SF Leather 2012 Judges announced. The Leather Alliance has announced the judges for the Mr. SF Leather 2012 contest, and preliminary details about the upcoming Leather Alliance

on anonymity. He presents a sad story of a very private person who was brutalized by a very public and misleading persona. Halsted saw his sadomasochism as the result of his childhood rape. Deeply disturbed as an alcoholic adult, he was consumed by guilt and hostility. Bipolar, on the anti-psychotic medication Thorazine, and suffering radical mood changes, he spiraled into final decline as his art-house film fame faded and his commercially intended films were rejected. Within a couple years of the death of his lover, business partner and co-star Joey Yale, Halsted killed himself.

Jones reveals for the first time in this book a sad and key element of Halsted’s undoing. When Halsted visited Joey in the hospital where the youth lay dying of AIDS, Joey accused Fred, “You did this to me.”

Jones includes Rosa von Praunheim’s valuable interview with Halsted, reviews of L.A. Plays Itself, and finally, the section where you can start stroking.

Rescued from the archives are a generous number of stories Halsted wrote for Drummer and his self-published magazine Package. They’re raw sex splatted on the page, dozens of scenarios just waiting to be turned into hot porn film.

Abundant photographs make this a grim sort of coffee-table book, illustrating most every aspect of Halsted’s art, life and milieu, such as the hustling trade on Selma St. in Los Angeles, a relatively undocumented gay slice-of-lifestyle that’s long gone. Jones’ insider scrutiny of the porn industry, his

withering assessment, suggest he should write a book on that subject alone. Finally, did you know Halsted claimed to have invented the term “twink,” derived from Hostess Twinkies?

Are Halsted’s movies plague or prize? Despite its impact and excellence, Halsted Plays Himself makes me think that the most interesting Halsted movie might be one of his life.▼

Weekend (March 1-3, 2012). The judges will be: Miss Bethie Bee (Ms. SF Leather 2011); Darren Bondy (Mr. SF Leather 2011); Tyler Fong (American Leather boy 2011); Jorge Vieto (Leather Community Activist); Leo Iriate (Mr. LA Leather 2011); Anthony Rollar (Mr. San Diego Leather 2010, 2nd Runner up at IML 2011); Olivier Pratt (co-executive producer of ILSb); and Yours Truly.

Details about the weekend thus far include: The Contestant Meet and Greet (open to the public) at Mr. S

Leather (www.mr-s-leather.com) on March 1 (Mr. S is the weekend’s platinum sponsor); the 46th Annual Community Awards Dinner on March 2 (at the Whitcomb); the Victory Brunch at the BeatBox (www.beatboxsf.com) on March 4; plus a seminar conducted by Race Bannon at the Whitcomb on March 3. The actual contest will be held at the Whitcomb on March 3. More events and activities will be announced as they’re confirmed. For details, go to: www. leatheralliance.org. ▼

The fictional vision of Fred Halsted, as seen in film.

<< Music

28 • BAY AREA REPORTER • November 17-23, 2011

▼

Feeling spiritual

by Tim Pfaff

T

he more America drifts, the more it seems its musicians dig back to their historical roots in search of something authentic. One of the places out choral director Craig Hella Johnson finds it is in the music of the “enslaved Africans in America,” and Johnson’s new CD of African American spirituals, Sing Freedom! (Harmonia Mundi), with his superb chorus Conspirare, testifies to how grounding this body of music – by people as uprooted as any have been – can be.

It’s in easy memory when spirituals appeared in concerts only as encores by black singers better known from their appearances on opera and recital stages. Even though those spirituals were reliably enough the best things on the program, their very marginalization, sent to the back of the program bus, had its way of tarnishing the undeniable pleasure and release they gave.

To his vast credit, Johnson treats them as an integral repertoire, and pays them homage as the ground of American music. He has asked the question whether the multiracial Conspirare (the name means breathe together), a choir only six of whose members are African American,

should be doing this material at all. The vibrancy, passion, and immaculate musicianship heard on the 16 choral arrangements of Sing Freedom! make clear how emphatically the answer is yes.

Conceding that choral arrangements of spirituals – most of which began as bare, single-line melodies – are a subgenre, Johnson asserts that it has become, since the end of the Civil War,“the largest single body of folk song arrangements in the western choral art tradition.” The variety of arrangement types on his new CD is nearly as remarkable as the songs themselves.

Easily the most famous of the arrangers is the late gay composer Michael Tippett, whose a cappella setting of “Steal Away” is one of the CD’s most luscious. By its second stanza, it ventures into the denser harmonic thickets Tippett favored, and its rhythmic intricacies owe more to the 20th-century British choral tradition than to anything identifiably American. And if you heard Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang’s setting of “Oh Graveyard,” with its trademark dense harmonies and echo effects, you might not recognize it as a spiritual at all.

In fact, the four arrangements

that are Johnson’s own feel both the most integral and penetrating of the lot. They begin with a wrenching if startling direct setting of “Motherless Child” in which the ache in Melissa Givens’ powerful voice finds comfort only in the embrace of Conspirare’s warm sound.

The most emotionally shattering number on the disc is the littleknown spiritual “Hard Trials,” which includes an interpolated third verse based on the testimony of a 19thcentury woman who spent her entire life in slavery. She describes how the day, at age 19, she was put back on the auction block “was de day her heart done died.” Nicole Greenidge’s solo is desolately beautiful, but it’s Johnson’s arrangement that sets it like a tearshaped jewel. His settings of “Soon Ah Will Be Done/ I Wanna Die Easy” and “Been in de Storm/ Wayfaring Stranger” are both masterful pairings in which savvy compositional architecture serves music of such raw power that its musical complexity never distracts you.

<<

ebar.com

The jubilant title track, by Robert Kyr, is the CD’s only wholly new song. It raucously decries presentday as well as historical slavery, but you’d never know its roots are in the music of the first African slaves in America. If it weren’t for Conspirare’s immaculate diction, you might also get through the closing track without knowing it’s “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” but the hushed, densely layered setting

by Tarik O’Regan, one of the bright lights of British contemporary music, ends the CD on the proper note of astonishment.

Flame out With so many of the great, notso-great, and famous flaming out in the headlines now, you might have missed pianist Helene Grimaud’s recent self-immolation.

Over a trivial enough matter – her insistence on using a short, gaudy Ferruccio Busoni cadenza in a recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23 – she had a falling

out with conductor Claudio Abbado, among her longtime champions, who nixed the idea.

That this yielded both a news story in the NY Times and the crux of a profile of Grimaud in the Nov. 7 New Yorker might have been bad news enough. But the headstrong Grimaud saw to it that the two concertos were released on a nasty if edgy new recording with the Chamber Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra (DG).

I’ve tried my best to appreciate this uniquely talented musician for a long time now but had decided, shortly before the Abbado row, to let her go her willful way. It was in her performance of the sublime Adagio of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Vladimir Jurowski (Ideale Audience DVD) that I threw up my own hands at her way of turning everything she plays into a nervous breakdown – and decided to throw her back to her beloved wolves.▼

Verbruggen

From page 17

initially called the Gay Olympics.

Marion used the occasion to organize a gay and lesbian choir for a concert that drew musicians from all over the United States and Europe. It was one of the highlights of the 1994 Gay Games.

This weekend’s concert is Verbruggen’s sixth with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

The first came when record label Harmonia Mundi asked her to record Vivaldi Concertos for recorder with gay conductor Nicholas McGegan and the orchestra.

“That was a pretty sudden phone call,” she says. “They asked if I could do it within five weeks or whatever.

Gay PBO conductor Nicholas McGegan and Verbruggen “liked each other a lot, and they have asked me back many times.

We’ve had a lot of fun and a lot of gayness together.”

– Marion Verbruggen

I said fine, fun, no problem. That’s when Nic and I met. We liked each other a lot, and they have asked me back many times, which is wonderful. We’ve had a lot of fun and a lot of gayness together. Marjo and I have stayed with [Nic and his partner David Bowles] when I’ve had concerts. It’s always party time, as we say.”

The party will continue. Although McGegan was unavailable for this concert – Italian conductor Ottavio Dantone, whom Verbruggen has never met, will conduct Verbruggen and the orchestra in an all-Italian program that includes Vivaldi’s Concerto for Alto Recorder in F Major, La tempesta di mare, and Giuseppe Sammartini’s Concerto for Soprano Recorder in F Major – Verbruggen and the orchestra have organized a special LGBT reception after the Nov. 18 evening concert in the acoustically improved (if hardly perfect) Herbst Theatre. Lest others feel left out, PBO precedes the concert with a special free Student Concert for grades 6-12 at 1:30 p.m. in Herbst, and follows up with its

third annual Family Concert the next afternoon in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church.

Family is how it all began for Verbruggen. Everyone in her family stated playing instruments or going to music school when they were five.

She began recorder the next year.

By the time she was 9, she knew what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

“I completely love baroque music,” she confesses, “and I am a completely addicted recorder freak.

The color and sound of the recorder take my heart. I’m also fascinated by the freedom I have in baroque music. You can make your own ornaments as long as they are in the style, so it’s much more like jazz. You can improvise. Monday is different than Tuesday, and you play different ornaments at 7:30 a.m. than you do at 8 at night. I love the freedom.”▼ Marion Verbruggen and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra perform in Herbst Theatre on Fri., Nov. 18 at 8 pm. For tickets, see www.philharmonia.org or call (415) 252-1288.

▼

Read more online at www.ebar.com

November 17-23, 201 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 29

Film>>

Goethe & the punks

by David Lamble

Y

oung Goethe in Love Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a heavyweight novelist, poet, philosopher and diplomat who cut quite a figure across a stretch of German history (1749-1832) before there was a unified German nation.

Given the obvious need to celebrate pre-20th century German culture, one could readily see bringing a life of Goethe to the screen, perhaps erring on the side of hagiography. But the new comedy/romance Young Goethe in Love fails on all counts: as plausible history, comedy, saucy romance, or a sane way to kill two hours.

Director Philipp Stolzl’s portrait of an academically challenged young Goethe immediately lays a huge comic egg. Arriving at his doctorial oral exam having not cracked a book, our hero (Alexander Fehling) tries to fake out the examining board with Marx Brothers-style double-talk.

The scene starts off funny, but the filmmakers just can’t punctuate a gag, verbal or physical. Five minutes later (it feels much longer), Fehling

finally carves the German equivalent of “Kiss my arse” in the snow outside the examining room.

The handsome young Fehling sustains neither his hotness, the piece’s clumsy humor, nor the sense that this stupid oaf grew up to write the world’s best-in-show Faust. The cast spend so much time banging into the furniture, getting on and off horses and delivering obvious frathouse-party gags that we never sense witnessing a pivotal moment, 1773, before history’s engines would lead into our era’s mass instruments of destruction.

This tart required a better script, plus a Goethe unaware of his own desirability but capable of spinning Germany’s first bestselling romantic tale. My choice would have been Daniel Bruhl, so gloriously mock heroic as the German “Sgt. York” in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

The Other F Word In a new, raw, revisionist doc, The Other F Word, a bevy of aging punk rockers air out their bad-boy back pages for the purpose of affirming their new roles

as married dudes with little mouths to feed. Andrea Blaugrund Nevins’ up-close and personal examination of punk rocker dads shows tattooed anti-authoritarians fess up to their own often-troubled childhoods, vowing to be the great dads they wished they’d had.

Punk rock films are famous for tales of how hardscrabble kids escape violent broken homes and go on to produce F-word-laced anthems of rebellion that draw hardcore fans to mosh-pits within spitting distance of their idols. While The Other F Word presents a mini-history of punk, the film is more about the pressures on a generation of now mostly middleaged musicians. Faced with the digital age’s demolition of the CD as a source of income, they now find themselves on a nonstop merry-go-round of road gigs. They’re in the awkward spot of having to choose between seeing their kids or supporting them. With a who’s who punk lineup – Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – much of the film tracks the agonizing decision of Pennywise’s lead singer Jim Lindberg to quit the

Alexander Fehling as Young Goethe in Love.

road and be a full-time pop.

The film revels in the low comedy of profanity-prone punkers attempting to join the PTA. One funny moment has a daughter recall the low farce of her musician dad showing up to meet her teachers wearing a “Fuck the Police” T-shirt.

A punker dad explains how it’s easier to pass for normal in San Francisco, where “you have to be practically naked and set yourself on fire” to raise a fuss. Another housebound musician dad enjoys the joke of having to find sanitized versions of his old raunchy

Books>>

o our hero escapes without a scratch.

Carlos’ entitled bitchiness does wear on the nerves a bit halfway through tthe novel, and his cocky, campy, o often over-confident attitude leaves a few characters pinned mercilessly b beneath his spiked heels. There’s a ccertain irresponsibility to his actions o on and off the job that he fails to ttake accountability for (borrowed d designer boots should never be rreturned damaged; no freebies at tthe make-up counter, no matter w who they’re for). But Wright might ssimply be exercising his pitch-perfect ccharacterization in creating a 16-yearo old who, though a model of prideful rresilience, may be too big for his own b britches.

Dedicated to “everyone who wants tto make the world prettier,” Wright’s fiction definitely makes the world a m more interesting one for gay teens w who enjoy reading a well-written, rresponsible story.▼

Glamourpuss

by Jim Piechota Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy

by Bil Wright; Simon & Schuster, $16.99

M

anhattan teen fiction writer Bil Wright’s third book Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy (after 2009’s racially-charged, powerful When the Black Girl Sings) is a brilliant study in characterization and a terrific read to boot. It follows Carlos Duarte, a plucky, confident Latino gay boy who has just celebrated his sweet 16th birthday and has already racked up two years obsessing about makeup and makeovers while poring over

<<

the pages of fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. His dream is to be a makeup artist to the stars!

His friend Angie suggests that he apply to work at Macy’s flagship store, which garners him a coveted test-run and then an actual job at the FeatureFace Cosmetics counter.

Under the watchful eye of Valentino, his impatient department manager, all goes well until both begin to find fault with the other. Soon Carlos’ dreams begin to take on a tarnished sheen. Adding to that is the realization that his sister’s boyfriend has been abusive to her (and homophobic toward him), his mother has lost her job, and there’s painfully unrequited

love in a crush on Gleason, a straight classmate.

As evidenced in his other young adult fictions, Wright isn’t afraid to tackle a wide array of contemporary issues and hot-button subject matter. Enmeshed in his engaging story is the plight of young gays trying to accomplish their dreams, their struggles with bullying peers and the ever-present specter of homophobia, not to mention the fight to establish and retain selfesteem, courage, and a positive outlook on the future. Wright thankfully leaves the novel’s ending open for more adventures for Carlos and his cosmetic dreams.

But that doesn’t mean that

Random Dance

From page 17

for insight into the mind-body connection. He has held a position at Cambridge in the Psych Dept.

Like the early modernist poets and painters, he wants to forestall cliché.

His work looks surreal, wonderfully strange, post-apocalyptic, like Devo taken to a new level.

In my one viewing of Entity, I saw as much sci-fi as I did science. First of all, this cadre of dancers is gorgeous beyond belief. They look like mutant superhero-dancers, double-jointed in the shoulders and hips, cushy of thigh, as if a mad scientist took some ostrich genes and put them in human DNA, and got people who can go through the most drastic changes of balance and direction, make it flow and recover, and strut out of it like Garbo. Then wardrobe dressed them in tank-tops and hot-pants. Halfway through, they take off the wifebeaters (though the women’s breasts are covered in black bras).

Their world is a high-tech, unfriendly place, and the movements are not genteel, but the sounds and the moves are not unfamiliar.

The flamboyant spinal rolls, rib isolations, thrilling little jerks into new positions, often evoke the freeform rock-and-roll (the Watusi, Swim, Hustle) that devolved into club thrash-dancing. His dancers vogue when they’re not dancing.

They stand in sexy contrapposti with their butts stuck out, they throw their

Rapt Productions

Feminist dance troupe Dance Brigade founder Krissy Keefer.

hips like DWTS pros, and flare their arms out and back like Travolta. The Random dancers walk like birds, with sway-back knees. The bird-moves are fabulous, especially the pigeontoed poses – no runway model looks better than this.

No wonder they’re popular – they look like us only better, like club dancers at the end of the night when they pull out all the stops and throw in 360s and 720s, and multiple pirouettes and entrechats when the music suggests it. They have excellent

classical training and hit beautiful turned-out positions. Indeed, there were several classical pas de deux; I saw passages that looked very Petipa.

Who knows how random the choreography is. Entity certainly has no story. The personalities are strong, but the society seems loosely structured. It could be an image of the late capitalist world, where we’re all basically alone and nobody belongs anywhere. These people may know each other, but much of what they know seems to come from dancing

songs to play for the kids. In an unintended irony, this ode to the families of the age of no-fault divorce plays like a companion piece to the growing library of films about the new millennium’s same-sex families.

As one aging rebel complains about having to dye his beard and hair to keep the illusion of being peers with a teen fan-base, a look at the hypernormal kids the punks are rearing raises the threat that the next generation may suffer a shortage of anti-authoritarian hell-raisers.

(Both films open Friday.)▼

with each other. As at a club, if you see someone whose dancing you like, you might offer to dance with him without knowing more than that.

The moods seemed to me to change according to the DJ’s ability to throw things into the mix. The intensity mounts as the volume goes up. The sound is mostly electronica, but there’s a honeyed dance for four women on the floor, with music for cellos. There’s one bit with a “world beat” that does not sound like a drummachine loop, and at the end comes the best part. There was a little stretch that seemed to be guys playing Twister.

What I’m certain of is that it held my attention the whole time. These dancers own the movement and belong in McGregor’s choreography better than any of the ballet companies do, where the women look weedy.

This is a man’s company. Like a flock of flamingos, it’s the men who catch your eye and keep it: the dark guy with the wasp-waisted, large-thighed build of a Minoan bull-dancer; the blond guy with the abs of Hercules; the tall brunet with arms like a stork.

The women were fluid, powerful, and capable of poignancy, but only two passages made an impression: a strong solo with a trembling foot, and the last floating lifts in a duet where the woman’s limbs revealed inner currents, like a scarf floating in the wind. May they come again!

Celebrate Brigade Now for something completely different: This coming weekend at the

Novellus Theater is party time for the Dance Brigade, the feminist dance troupe who have been giving aid and comfort to lesbians, gays and freethinkers for 35 years now. They’re celebrating their big anniversary by inviting the world to their shows free of charge.

Krissy Keefer, the troupe’s surviving founder, has been subversive in many ways. She ran for Congress against Nancy Pelosi.

She sued the SF Ballet School over women’s body-type restrictions. As an artist, she helped create populist theater pieces designed to stir you up to act politically. She co-created the world’s first Gay and Lesbian Dance Festival. She co-created the first “alternative Nutcracker,” a satire of Reagan-era greed that involved many in the dance community.

[Full disclosure: I had a small role in it.] Meantime, year-round she ran dance studios (Brady Street, Dance Mission) doubling as theaters, which gave young choreographers a place to develop and show their work inexpensively.

This weekend you can see excerpts from the old rep (including the great dance Endangered, which shocked me when I first saw it, how successfully it dramatized the loss of ecodiversity and political freedom.) When it was new, we hadn’t even heard of global warming. I wonder how it will look today.

Congratulations to Dance Brigade, and thank you for standing up for us.▼

Serving the LGBT communities since 1971

30 • Bay Area Reporter • November 17-23, 2011

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