.
I was tipped off to Avalos’s campaign by a friend of mine who is a queer woman of color and organizer in the Arab-American community, whose politics I trust and work I admire deeply.  There are links to articles at the bottom of this post that speak more to his experience and platform, but here’s what she said about John:

Prior to and during his time as Supervisor, he has been the most humble, passionate, tireless, and generous advocate on behalf of poor and working communities, particularly our communities of color that are being pushed out of SF.

I’ve decided to help out with the campaign, and am one of the “hosts” of a Queers for Avalos Happy Hour on Friday, June 10 at Dolores Park Cafe.  Please consider joining me, even if you don’t identify as queer, someone who lives in SF, or someone who cares about local politics.  We need support from everyone who wants a more sustainable and livable city!

Here’s some easy ways you can get involved:

1. DONATE MONEY! John is running a grassroots community driven campaign, which is how he will also run San Francisco if he’s elected.  He’s using public campaign financing, but still needs the financial support of the community as those funds are matched.  Even $5 helps, for real, and you don’t have to live in SF.
   
   
2. PUT A SIGN IN YR WINDOW + LIKE JOHN ON FACEBOOK. These are basically the same things now, right?  If you can put up a sign, let me know, and I’ll be sure to get you one.
   
   
3. HAPPY HOUR. I’m just including this here again to make it pop.

But can he win?  YES!  Although he may not be a front-runner (yet), it’s always useful to have someone who can raise the important issues (watch the doc on Shirley Chisholm if you don’t know what I’m talking about) AND especially with this being the first Ranked-Choice mayoral election there’s a lot of opportunity (look at Jean Quan in Oakland)!
.

Some early news articles about John Avalos:

• SF Chronicle
• SFBG
• Bay Area Reporter
• SF Appeal

More coming, but just wanted a minute to vent about the fact that Facebook disabled my LMHM account because it wasn’t a “real” name.  They restored it, but with my boy name, which is homo/transphobic and a violation of my privacy.

I am still trying to reason with them, but frankly this is ridiculous.  It makes me realize how much of our stuff they “own” and just how much our virtual identities matter.

More later.

OK, fair enough, I don’t often ride my bike when I’ve got my face on, but I do ride my trusty Gene Kelly (you figure out why I call it that) to work most days, and every now and then I get tired of taking my oversize limousine (er, Muni) to a show.  Trust: I absolutely loathe exercise, but I hate waiting even more and you know Grandma Goldie taught me how to save a couple bucks.  So, since Bike To Work Day is coming up I thought I’d put together a list of tips for BWD (Biking Whilst in Drag):

1. Your wig will not protect you.
Wear a helmet, girl, and protect your brain, but more importantly your face!  Your wig may be huge and could possibly used as a flotation device, but just think about it this way: when you topple onto the pavement and your brain is spilling out onto your flawless paint job, it will not make for a cute photo. Make sure it is snug and secure, just like your…

2. Unlike a microphone, share the road!
One diva, one mic = one diva, one bike?  For once, get off that high horse and share the road with cars, pedestrians, and other bicyclists!  Think of the bike lane as a catwalk – be fierce but not too ferocious.  Follow the rules of the road and stay off the sidewalk, or I will throw you shade!

3. Sequins are good, but spotlights headlights are better.
Find your light, mama!  Once the sun goes down, you’ve got to bring your own source: a white in front for  the “coming” something red and moody behind for the “going.”  I like mine to get all flashy, but that’s just personal taste.

4. Lock it up real tight
Should I go with a Boy Scout knot-tying motif, or a BDSM gag?  Well, you get the drift…  I have had my wheels stolen one too many times, and it is no fun hobbling down that walk of shame with a busted bike.  Lock up your bike securely, the tighter the better, make sure you’ve tied up all the parts to something with a flared base top!

5. Watch your tuck, lady!
OK, this one is totally optional, but from personal experience you might need to shift your ride from defensive to um delicate to protect those lady parts!

That should get you going!  Here’s some photos I took with my good friend Philip in honor of Bike To Work Day and the SF Bike Coalition’s Dress-Up Challenge – hope you enjoy!

 

PS: I haven’t blogged in almost a year, but I’m turning over a new leaf, honeys!

Also, just such great uses of pop music.  Really charming.

Eternal gratitude to Ed and Ryan for being adorable gay sailors (and kind of last minute too).  Everlasting thanks to Des, Jae, and Philip for lending their nautical wear.  And appreciations forever to Jerry Lee for taking video (as well as to Maura for taking the video Ryan posted on Facebook, which I don’t know how to embed – but it’s basically the same)!

SOME THING was so fun and I’m so excited to have a new weekly AND weekend show to look forward to.

Here’s video:

More photos are after the jump.

Photos below (and the one at the top) are by Shot in the City – you can view more photos from the night on their Facebook album:

There are also some photos up at SF Weekly, but I’m waiting on permission (and bigger images) from the photog.

The first was a pretty decent piece by Barbara Ehrenreich, published at Salon: “Slap on a pink ribbon, call it a day.” In it, she looks at the culture around the pink-ribbon Breast Cancer “Awareness” movement, specifically how it seems to forgo science in favor of the medical industry, and how it dilutes a potentially broader movement for women’s health, including affordable healthcare and access to abortion.  She writes: “When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which would take abortion rights away even from women who have private insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.”

And here’s a passage I find particularly compelling:

It’s not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it’s “woman friendly,” what does it do? It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research…

While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk “for the cure.” And while we once sought full “consciousness” of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve “awareness…”

An on-point and concise, if not earth-shattering, analysis.  Her own experience with cancer, though, definitely lends depth.  And her suggestion that this new movement may actually support the medical industry — possibly even to the detriment of women’s health — is heartbreaking.

The second article is by Linda Hirshman, a professor at Brandeis, called “Don’t just swallow it: What women could learn from how the gay rights movement plays politics.” Hirshman’s article examines the liberal gay establishment’s movement to cut of the DNC from donations until the Democrats pass gay marriage, ENDA, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  Her suggestion is that women follow suit in response to the Stupak amendment:

Right around the time the gays took their hands out of their wallets, 64 Democratic representatives amended the House healthcare bill to ban women from obtaining abortion coverage in the new health insurance market, a provision known as the Stupak amendment. Women are supposedly “furious” about what the House Democrats did. But no one with money is on record as striking back. Can you imagine the response from gay political activists if the House voted to strip all money for AIDS treatment from the healthcare bill? Maybe rich women Democratic donors are reconsidering their giving strategies. But they’re being awfully quiet about it.

She also writes:

As the Web site Open Left points out, the DCCC spent $1 out of every $12 it collected from its substantially female donor base electing the 23 Democrats who both voted for the abortion restriction and against healthcare; they must have missed that reproductive rights action circle briefing.

Unlike Ehrenreich’s, I’ve got mixed feelings about her analysis and her approach.

First off, I’m not surprised that folks aren’t getting what they (think they) deserve from the new Administration and Democratic Congress.  Even though they allegedly paid for it.  This girl was never really drunk on the Audacity of Hope.

Second, as always, I’m sick of hearing about gay marriage and DADT.  I’m sick of people acting like this is the time to throw down.  Bullshit.  It’s been time to throw down for a long time, and not because gays couldn’t get married but because queer kids and others on the margins are still being killed and killing themselves in disproportionate numbers.  (More on throwing down in regards to Stupak in a minute.)

Third, while I’m all about finding the tactics to play hardball and hold politicians accountable, I don’t really buy the agument that finding wealthy donors to the DNC is really a way to make change.  What kind of movement does that build?  How does that empower women or queers?  How does that put structures in place that ensure that our work won’t be undermined in the future?  No wonder the HRC “responded not by distancing itself from the activists’ effort but by saying that donors should always think carefully when spending scarce resources.”  Oh, like spending scarce resources on fighting for gay marriage in states like California that already have DP laws that offer all the same rights as marriage, while local LGBT community centers and youth programs struggle to keep their doors open?  Thanks, HRC!  (Sorry, sometimes mama can get a little to sassy sarcastic.)  Yes, it’s hypocritical for the Democrats to take people’s money to get elected and then turn their backs on them when they’re in office, but that’s a symptom that should only indicate that the real problem is the amount of money in politics to begin with.  Put another way: someone’s always ready to pay more.

The thing that I find most troubling about both of these articles, though, is that they’ve both got an implicit assumption that the Democrats’ Healthcare “Reform” package is actually a good starting point, and that the Stupak amendment fucked it all up.  I’m not familiar with Hirshman, but I’m surprised at Ehrenreich for this.  The Dems’ reform is hardly radical and does little to actually make healthcare more affordable or accountable for most Americans. This is the part about throwing down for healthcare: we should’ve been pulling out all the stops on the very first day that big money and the Blue Dogs started getting in the way.  I wasn’t even thrilled by the national plan — I’m a Single Payer girl — but at least that would’ve allowed for coverage of more people and at better costs.

Granted, the Stupak amendment is horrifying and if this is the health care bill that’s going to pass, we should not allow it to pass with a provision that actually limits individuals’ access to abortion. But we also need to be careful about how we frame it, and how we go about our organizing.

But what really gets my goat is that access to abortion shouldn’t be the one “issue” for women in healthcare.  Nor should gay marriage, DADT or ENDA be the “gay issues.”  What happened to solidarity?  Though not directly marketed at us, it feels like this single-issue segmentation is just dangerous as selling products with pink ribbons on them.  Maybe even more dangerous because it comes from our own internal divisions, rather than a capitalist and consumer culture designed to appease and segment us.

I saw this shirt on a blog the other day, and it made me happy — such a simple way of speaking clearly for what we want:

YBCA is having their next Big Idea Night party this Saturday.  Sadly, I’ll be out of town for it, but I caught the very tail end of the last one and it was fun.  I wholeheartedly encourage attendance and I totally applaud a more mainstream art institution for really successfully engaging the community with an explicitly queer night, and one that seems to really aim towards a more politicized and un-essentialized idea of queerness at that.  (Oh, and of course, I love just about anything that Danyol does.)

That said, I’m a bit taken aback by their interactive ad campaign that lets users reconfigure ACT UP’s classic Silence = Death logo with their own images and sayings.  Here’s what the site says:

Gran Fury Collective’s “SILENCE=DEATH” image became the icon of AIDS and radical queer activism in the late-1980s. YBCA invites you to personalize and update this groundbreaking campaign by putting your own spin on it: How would you tailor the design to reflect your activism? Come to YBCA’s Big Idea Night pARTy on Sat, Nov 14 to make your own design into a button. And enter to win the Go Pink Yourself design contest for fabulous prizes!  [Click the links -- they're YBCA's, not mine.]

Maybe I’m too much of a political purist, but this rubs me the wrong way a bit.  ACT UP was one of the gay community’s most successful moments of radicalism (“successful” in at least a few different ways), and played a critical role in expanding access to AIDS-related medications through direct action targeting pharmaceutical corporations, politicians, and the media.  It also supported people living with AIDS through direct action, sometimes through Robin Hood-esque tactics of taking from the rich to give to the poor.  Seriously, it’s the shit that Rent tried to emulate but couldn’t come close to.  (But that’s another story, which I highly suggest you read.)  While I am too young to have really experienced the AIDS crisis in full force, I deeply admire the legacy of ACT UP (though, I’m sure it had its issues too).

In my mind, Gran Fury is also one of the most successful leftist propaganda operations, and added immensely to the movement by providing an array of graphics that are simultaneously devastating, playful, sexy, avant garde, highly referential, and politically savvy.  It’s a queer aesthetic that predates the ascendence of the accolade “FIERCE!,” but honey, it defined it.  Together, Gran Fury and ACT UP proved the importance of visual work in political movements, and understood the necessity of both creatively capturing the attention of traditional media and creating one’s own.  It’s an aesthetic and process I strive for in my own work.

“Silence = Death” is perhaps their greatest known work, but I encourage folks to check out the small gallery posted at the Queer Cultural Center’s website to see more. The phrase reflected many aspects of the crisis, but it was also desperately literal: people were dying due to the silence of Reagan and other politicians, due to a culture that stigmatized gays and disease, and due to a healthcare system that supported profits over saving lives.  It was both a call to the community to come out and fight, and also a calling-out of the Powers That Be for allowing marginalized people to die.  Another common slogan used by members of ACT UP was “This is about people dying!”  Both remind me of something that Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian leader of the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel said at a talk last week: “BDS is a strategy to win.  We’re not in it to make a point.”  In both cases, we’re talking about disasters with real consequences today, tomorrow, and until it stops.  We’re talking about emergencies and halting business as usual.

Which is why I just feel irked by YBCA’s campaign.  I’m happy to see the image continue to circulate, but it saddens me to see it pulled from a truly political context and replaced with ironic sayings and people’s Facebook photos.  And as much as I’m happy to see a celebration of diverse queer culture and activism, that celebration itself is indicative of the fact that we’re in a much different political moment.  Today’s silences, at least when it comes to the gays (and especially those in San Francisco), are not nearly as life-threatening.  I’m not sure I’d blame YBCA — they do, indeed, suggest using it to speak to current political activism — but the strength of the graphic, to me, lies in its specificity and even seeing some that reference things like healthcare still make me wince.  I think it’s too much, too soon, or maybe just in bad taste.

Plus, let’s be real: we’re still in the middle of the AIDS crisis — it’s just (somewhat) shifted demographics.

Anyway, enough about me: What do you think?  I’m posting some more examples of the reinterpreted graphics after the jump.

I haven’t posted any of the ones with people in them because, to be honest, I don’t want to burn bridges right at this moment.

Today Anna Conda announced that Charlie Horse is over, effectively immediately.  I can’t get all the facts straight but it has to do with the gentrification of the Polk — hell, the gentrification of the whole city — specifically yuppies who want to have their cake and eat it too, and developers who want to sell it to them.  Anna thinks that it’s a combination of people complaining about noisy queens and the Polk St. Merchants Association wanting to get rid of the gay bars.  The Gangway (nearby on Larkin) already shut down all DJed parties months ago due to complaints.  It’s ridiculous!

Like I said, I don’t know the full story, so I don’t want to start the blame game or get too much into the specifics of it.

But hello, San Francisco: this is what you get when you invite your city to become a dot-com yuppie playground.  This is exactly how neighborhoods gentrify.  It’s easy to point fingers at artists and gays as gentrifiers — and not to say that we aren’t part of the system — but the bigger picture is about government colluding with the wealthy using tactics like selective law enforcement and policies that favor development.

It’s interesting and upsetting to see a group of mostly younger gays who are more politically- and artistically-inclined (for what it’s worth) being pushed out of a neighborhood so that Marina girls and their Financial District boyfriends can come in to party.  Who’s next?  We’ve already seen so many immigrants be forced out.  Maybe many of us were the first wave of gentrification in this neighborhood — after all, the Polk is historically queer, but really owned by hustlers and street girls — and that’s why it’s got to be more about our right to party.  It’s about everyone’s right to the city.  It’s about preserving a city that’s known for being one of the weirdest, sanest, and most beautiful places on earth (even right now it feels pretty disgusting).

I keep thinking about the Castro’s role in all of this.  I’m saddened and outraged to think that by having “our” neighborhood — just like “we” want so many “rights” — we’re really pulling any sense of queer solidarity apart.  We’ve legitimized a space that is itself exclusive and unaffordable (to say the least) while at the same time legitimizing the takeover of the rest of the city.  It’s similar to critiques of marriage: we’re selling each other and everyone out by trying to get our tiny slice of the pie.

I’ve been doing drag for less than two years, and I’m not even enough of a regular at Charlie Horse to feel real in calling it my family, but right now I feel devastated.  It was truly a unique space, not without its own issues, but with a sense of relaxed and full-of-potential gay-boy community that is so hard to find these days.  It’s the only place I can say I’ve “regularly” performed and it’s really filled the city with The Place to do and see drag in the city post-Trannyshack (and in its own right as well).  Anna did a phenomenal job of building an environment where just about anyone could get up on stage or chat with someone on the patio and actually enjoy themselves, and she deserves so much credit and love for that.

It’s a shame to see it get sold out to yuppies and businesses looking for the next big thing.  I keep thinking of the saying “you get what you pay for” and how it works both ways: when only the wealthy can pay to live here, there’s not going to be anyone left to make it work (or work it).

And of course, the other performers!  All the usuals were phenomenal: Raya, Suppositori, Rahni, Garza and Farrokh (whose number really was delightful, especially the twist at the end).  And then there were the vets who really pulled it out.  Oh, and Artist.  Dear, Artist.

Here’s video of our number — I think someone else took video with a more profesh camera, so I’ll post that if/when I see it:

And some backstage photos (I insisted on some cheesy poses):

(the last one is with some CODEPINK friends I met a couple weeks ago.  photo courtesy of Infinity.)

Oh, and I need to share a little Halloween miracle that also proves a point: The Israeli flag you see in the video I found at Thrift Town on Friday afternoon for $3.99.  I was really trying to find a little black and white number to match the one I already had, but was having no luck.  I wanted American and Israeli flags, but I was resigned to making them since I didn’t expect to find an Israeli flag in a day.  Then, on a whim, I looked at the area where there are flags and fabrics.  Lo and behold.  The moral of the story?  At Thrift Town, if you’re really desperate, it will deliver exactly what you need.  I don’t normally endorse brands like this, but I’m serious.  I one time needed a tambourine.  I was in the shoe section and dropped something, and when I bent down to pick it up, there was a tambourine under the shoe rack.  I kid you not.  The other moral?  If there is a God, she’s anti-zionist and wants me to have the props I need.

Anyway…

Later that night, I ditched my imperialist drag for my real costume: Bee Arthur!  (Get it?  Some people got it right away.  Some people never got it.  Two people thought I was Mrs. Doubtfire in a bee costume.)  Ed and Ryan and Julie and Ellie and Jesse had a phenomenal party, though mama drank a little more of her $4 wine than she should’ve.  Oops.  I did, however, walk all the way from the Castro to 18th & Portrero in my new Zara heels (fine, a low heel).

And there are some pictures to prove it, after the jump:

Bobby was some artist whose name I forget, but who did conceptual work involving gold leaf on his face and dead bunnies.

Matt was the Red Death from Poe.  It was creepy in a good way.

Kevin’s costume made me die a little bit inside in the best possible way.  This photo does not in any way capture my joy and ecstasy.

Danyol and Ed were competing Fridas.

Maura is was a nerd.

Apparently Bee Arthur attacked Sweetcheeks, who was dressed as Lil Miss Hot Mess (!) as Little Orphan Annie!

But we still can bee friends.