Three Queer Cultural Events in Three Hours: A San Francisco Artgasm

Larry-bob Roberts, Michelle Tea and V. Vale

Three uniquely San Francisco queer events happened in three hours on Wednesday Sept. 15. The Radar Reading Series, the Fringe Festival, and Smack Dab all presented events for large crowds, with special appeal for LGBT audiences. It was an artgasm and a pleasure for people who feel deprived of public culture that has creative intellect.

The first event of the evening was an unusually rich literary happening at the San Francisco Main Library. Hostess Michelle Tea has presented her Radar Reading Series for over six years, and she has conquered one of the major obstacles of audience participation by bribing questions out of the throng with gourmet cookies during the Q&A. Pungent chocolate confections from Tartine Bakery were an immediate lure for interaction. Eileen Myles, Larry-bob Roberts, Gina Gold, and V. Vale were the featured authors, and each had a revelatory form of work that drew the audience into the moment while they read.

Michelle Tea and Larry-bob Roberts

Eileen Myles is considered a cult figure of fiction and non-fiction works. Her book “The Importance of Being Iceland” delves into that country’s art, poetry, and not-so-hidden queer identity. She was on a book tour and the audience was happy that she could be in San Francisco.

Larry-bob Roberts introduced his new book “The International Homosexual Conspiracy” which is a collection of his rants and raves about our bizarre modern culture and clever LGBT adaptations to it. It is bound to be waved from pulpits at rapturous, fundamentalist tent shows. Yoko Ono fans and Björk crazies were shredded during his presentation and Judy Garland worshippers were degraded.

Gina Gold is a controversial improv performer who has few boundaries about her personal sex life and her stripping career. Who knew that guys wearing just sneakers and Nixon masks pleasure themselves while watching the dancers perform?

V. Vale tried writing but he discovered that interviewing is his forte. He screened a couple unusual face-to-face encounters for the library audience, including one with a lesbian body-modification pioneer.

Ryan Hayes as Walt Whitman

For the second event of the evening, a couple dozen curious people gathered at the new plaza at 17th and Market Street in the Castro to see Ryan Hayes perform his one-man show "Boys Together Clinging: The Gay Poetry of Walt Whitman." Academics in the audience were electrified — here was the physical manifestation of Whitman in his twenties, shouting out his homoerotic "Calamus" poems 150 years after they were written. Hayes jumped up on a footlocker to wildly gesture and then ambled into the crowd to hold the hand of a young man and speak emotionally of men joining together while eye-locking his new fan. His show was one of the better parts of the San Francisco Fringe Festival.

Marvin K. White

The final cultural event was the monthly Smack Dab open mic at Magnet, with Oakland author Marvin K. White as the featured performer. White is an arts event coordinator and former member of Pomo Afro Homos, the breakthrough queer African-American stage show. White read stridently from his work, increasing the tempo and cadence of his voice with a climax of his popular poem “I Want to Make Black History With You” which is a manifestation of two black men complementing and bonding on an extremely intense level. He received loud sustained applause and it was the perfect finale to a bountiful night.

Chaz Bono Denounced at Magnet’s Smack Dab

TrashCanPoet, aka Gabriel Burke with his poetry book "Bloom"

Smack Dab, the monthly open mic show at Magnet, the Castro’s cultural and medical center, featured the TrashCanPoet, aka Gabriel Burke, on Feb. 17. Magnet has been providing medical services for seven years and operates on the core value that gay men have a right to health and well-being, and that they should expect empowerment.

The shows are coordinated by sfqueer.com’s Larry-bob Roberts and writer Kirk Read, and there is an unusual and unpredictable mixture of music, comedy, spoken word, and more with all genders and ages welcome.

Roberts promotes idealist cultural activism, visionary independent music, and altruistic electoral politics. His highly regarded sfqueer.com website has an extensive list of Queer Things to Do in San Francisco, and it is not unusual to hear the community’s marginalized event promoters emote “I love Larry-bob!” because he stresses diversity. Robert’s exacting holytitclamps.com webzine presents hilarious satire, which he calls ranting foaming at the mouth. Some of his impudent jeers: boring mainstream homos’ websites with zero content, zines that do not get past issue #1, bland gay magazines, skinny body obsession, guys who beg for boyfriends online, and businesses that profit from death.

Kirk Read is the restless author of two books, and he also coordinates performances at Kvetch. He produced Smegma at the Eros sex club, worked at the St. James Infirmary sex worker clinic, and produced a stupendous sex worker variety show at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory.

Featured performer TrashCanPoet, aka Gabriel Burke, is a beguiling high-level slam poet, writer, and spoken-word activist. He has been in the Bay Area for three years, and is welcomed as an honorary queer boy with the Queer Girl Theatre Project and contributed to Artists Against Rape. He has also been featured at the venues Heavy Rotation, SF Queer Open Mic, and the Berkeley Poetry Slam. Burke’s first book is “Bloom” and he is working on a second book of poetry.

Burke raised the room temperature considerably when he yelled out his “Open Letter to Chaz Bono.” The provocative message was that Bono should shut up and not presume to speak for underprivileged and less-than-famous transgenders. The names of Brandon Teena and Gwen Araujo, who were murdered for being open about who they are, were invoked and Bono was warned that interviewers are patronizing him and treating him as a curiosity. He said that many transgenders are attacked, thrown out of school, and forced into sex work — which is not the world that Bono is experiencing. Burke wants transgenders to feel safe in their living spaces, to be able to afford gender reassignments if they want them, and he wants Bono to shut up and listen.

Bob Siedle Khan, Sean O’Driscoll, Mark Abramson, Jeffrey Lilly, Ed Wolf, and Michael Evans also made memorable contributions to the evening’s entertainment, with satisfying ambiguous moments at odds with sheer bewilderment.

For more information on Smack Dab, contact Kirk Read at kirkread@earthlink.net.