The RADAR Reading Series Eighth Anniversary: Michelle Tea Gets What She Wants

The RADAR Reading Series, which for eight years has presented a cavalcade of literary artists for the enjoyment of their fans and the curious in search of new writers, is the wondrous creation of unique writer Michelle Tea. Tea is best known not only for hostessing the queercore RADAR Series, but also as a co-founder of the famous Sister Spit traveling spoken word tour and also her novels "Valencia" and "The Chelsea Whistle."

The special anniversary night at the San Francisco Main Public Library on June 1 featured performers that Tea had fantasized about introducing for years and all four were there, and they came on strong. Renee Gladman is a poet and professor, Chinaka Hodge is a playwright and poet, Jonathan David Katz was the co-curator of the recent National Portrait Gallery Hide/Seek exhibit, and Catherine Opie is a world-renowned photographer with a unique eye for high-impact images.

Karen Sundheim, of the library's James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center, warmly greeted the sizable audience and announced the upcoming events for June, then Tea invited the throng to pick up a piece of eighth anniversary cake.

Renee Gladman is highly regarded for her novel "Event Factory," which is the first in a trilogy about a city in a foreign land that is undergoing crises similar to what is happening in America today. She is the author of four books of prose and her goal of enlarging the definition of what is poetry and what is prose is admirable and is reaching national readership.

Chinaka Hodge is riding high since the East Bay Express awarded her a Best Poet title in 2008. Her most recent book "For Girls With Hips" is in its third publication, due to heavy demand. She read others works that had meaning for her, but then she stepped away from the lectern and performed one of her own spoken word confections, with great physicality and she was met with sustained applause.

Jonathan David Katz drew his former students, political operatives who have been following the censorship media coverage of the Hide/Seek show at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., and activists who knew him when he co-founded San Francisco’s Queer Nation. Katz taught at Yale University and he is the first tenured faculty member of a lesbian and gay studies program in U.S. history. He showed slides of images that were in the D.C. show and he discussed their Sapphic and homoerotic symbolism. Tea interjected that the attentive crowd was being treated to a Yale-level art lecture and that it should be inspirational and enlightening.

Photographer Catherine Opie’s slide show raised the tension level measurably in the auditorium with images of what she said was her type of butch lesbian. S&M scars were another subject of the slides, and her new expansion into photographs of male high school football players made it possible for more of the diverse audience to appreciate the subjects of her work, which she said is influenced by the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. Opie is a professor of photography at UCLA, and it was evident that about half the crowd came by to see her when Tea announced that the June 17 benefit for RADAR at the Verdi Club will not have Good Vibrations sex toys as raffle prizes, since each audience member already owned all of them. There was a loud roar of laughter in a room with almost every one of the 200+ seats filled.

The event did not end when the library closed because a large number of the audience members crowded the sidewalk outside to meet and mingle and discuss what they had seen and heard, long after the RADAR anniversary was over. Coordinator Tea and the Hormel Center deserve multiple compliments for a superb event.

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.

International Women’s Day Celebration at the Library: A Revelation of Women’s Talent

Writers Nina Serrano, Michelle Tea, Diane di Prima, Priscilla Lee and Janice Mirikitani

Current San Francisco Poet Laureate Diane di Prima said that she was surprised and pleased that all of the women writers that she invited as hostess for "A Celebration of International Women's Day" at the San Francisco Main Library on March 9 agreed to participate. The Library’s Joan Jasper was the initial greeter, and she welcomed the readers and the audience.

Di Prima’s recent inauguration on Feb. 2 as San Francisco Poet Laureate had packed the Koret Auditorium and a nearby overflow room — an indication of the affection for di Prima and for poetry. She is the author of nearly four dozen books, and she was one of the few published woman authors of the Beat and Hippie eras. Di Prima is also a prose writer, playwright, social activist, teacher, and the mother of five.

Di Prima gave a short history of International Women's Day around the world then spoke about continuing disgraceful gender inequality. She spoke about a United Nations study that stated when housework is included, women do two thirds of the work and receive 5 percent of the pay they are due, and that they are only receiving 77 cents of a dollar that men receive for the same or similar work. She had not planned to perform her work, but an audience member insisted, and the crowd was pleased when she emoted her poetry.

Published poet Priscilla Lee read about how wearing jockey shorts changed the power balance with her husband, and about the tribulations of the Sunset neighborhood, where “Chinese families go after doing time in Chinatown.” Lee said that her family considered her a freak because she preferred to revere Boy George instead of Mick Jagger like other local youth. She spoke about her experiences in the Sunset to be all about the gritty odors of fish and crab, tequila shots and shark fin soup dumplings, and the fog and stucco, which drew nervous, knowing laughter.

devorah major and Janice Mirikitani

devorah major, a past Poet Laureate of San Francisco, was late for the forum since she was teaching a science fiction writing class. She is a supporter of poetry as an art form that can please and empower, and writes about how to deal with the creative challenges of city life. She read about a heroic Black woman in the 19th century and stated that the Taliban’s biggest nightmare is to be defeated by armed aggressive women in combat units. major read from her poetry about uncompromising, outspoken women and how they can get what they want and deserve.

Poet Janice Mirikitani, San Francisco’s second Poet Laureate, is a visionary and community activist, a novelist and an essayist. She has served at Glide Church for 40-plus years as a founding president of the Glide Foundation, funding a health clinic and housing for low-income citizens. She spoke about women rising above addiction for reclaimed lives. She recounted the landmark case of Inez García, a woman jailed for two years for killing a rapist in self-defense in 1974. Mirikitani and her husband Rev. Cecil Williams welcomed García to Glide Church and provided for her defense fund. The trial of Inez García was a rallying point for Bay Area feminists and her subsequent exoneration was an important legal milestone. Another victimized woman mentioned by Mirikitani was "Tokyo Rose" Iva Toguri, an American citizen who was induced to speak on Japanese propaganda radio broadcasts after being trapped in Japan at the outbreak of World War II and later wrongly convicted of treason in San Francisco in 1948.

Nina Serrano, Michelle Tea (seated), and Diane di Prima

Author Nina Serrano is well known as a poetry workshop teacher at Oakland’s La Peña Cultural Center and as a KPFA 94.1 FM radio host who reads stories in schools and who has received awards for her films. She has published books of her poetry and her work appears in several anthologies. Serrano is also co-founder of San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. She remarked that she had expected a packed auditorium, and quoted this journalist, who spoke to her earlier about San Franciscans, who unlike residents of Seattle and Portland, stay home when there is a threat of rain. She then spoke in a syncopated voice that women hold up half the sky, and while some people see praying hands in the design of Oakland's Cathedral of Christ the Light, she sees a vagina.

The last reader was Michelle Tea, author of four memoirs and a novel, a masterful arts event organizer, and the center of the traveling, rapturously creative women's cultural group Sister Spit. Her Radar Reader Series at the San Francisco Main Public Library and other venues feature diverse and exciting authors, and the Q&A is lively because participants receive homemade cookies. Her compelling work covers feminist, queer, prostitution, race, class, and other themes. Her reading revealed that she has an unusual take on needy queer youth and older gays, considering what has occurred in the Castro and the Haight neighborhoods — she thinks that older gays want to help the youth on sight.

The event was an entertaining adventure and consciousness-raising phenomenon that was only possible because of the stupendous talent on the stage.

Radar Superstars Amaze Their Fans

An unusually rich literary event occurred at the San Francisco Public Library on June 9, 2009. Hostess Michelle Tea pulled together a program of superstar writers for the 6th anniversary of her Radar Reading Series that drew a full room at the library’s modernistic Koret Auditorium. Shawn Stewart Ruff, with a must-read first novel, spoken word performer Raquel Gutierez, club kid turned literary sensation James St. James, and legendary lesbian author and activist Sarah Schulman had the audience hanging on every word. Each author read, then hostess Michelle Tea bribed the notoriously reticent guests with gourmet cupcakes to ask questions.

All of the authors traveled great distances to be at the library. Gutierez came in from East Los Angeles, and Ruff, St. James, and Schulman visited from New York City.

Michelle Tea introduced the readers, saying that they would blow the audience’s mind. New novelist Shawn Stewart Ruff pulled the listeners into a graphic scene from a boy’s life when a man described as a “player” pulled up to his mother’s home in a Thunderbird and invaded a bathroom while the boy was the bathtub.

Raquel Gutierez created an intense atmosphere with her account of a Southern California Latino neighborhood being gentrified, the Night Stalker on the loose, and the pungent toxic mist of state-ordered insecticide in the air.

James St. James related the multiple layers of process for his progression from writing the true-to-life, club kid, murder book “Disco Bloodbath,” that evolved into the book and popular film “Party Monster.” Macauley Culkin starred, and St. James said that his favorite moment came when he saw the young actor’s butt. That drew muffled nervous laughs.

Sarah Schulman’s large fan base was well-represented, and she did not disappoint them. It was a momentous event for Schulman, since it was the 25th anniversary of her first novel “After Delores” and also this year is her 50th birthday. She read from “After Delores” and it was an emotional vision of women trying to get closer to each other while trying to overlook their differences. Schulman is a novelist, historian, and playwright. She has written 14 books, was a founder of the first Dyke March, and protested against AIDS, anti-abortion groups, and homophobic ballot measures across the U.S.

High points of the event came when James St. James said that “The goal is to do away with reality. Reality is for poor people and everyone else.” There was shock and delight and light applause. And Sarah Schulman said that the evident collapse of the traditional publishing industry will make way for young and alternative authors to more easily reach readers. That also was appreciated with light applause and some sighs.

Shawn Stewart’s novel, “Finlater” was promoted by MC Michelle Tea, and Raquel Gutierez mentioned her performance group Butchalis de Panotchitlan and their future projects. James St. James heard gasps when he said that a publisher wants him to write a children’s book. Sarah Schulman mentioned that she is trying to have her plays that feature lesbian heroines produced in uptown New York City, her controversial new novel about teenage sexuality “The Child” is selling well, and that she is working on a book about how 81,000 deaths from AIDS accelerated NYC gentrification. And she worked on the impressive film “ACT UP Oral History Project Series”, which is being screened at the 2009 San Francisco Int’l LGBT Film Festival. It is a remarkable achievement that should be emulated in other cities that had large active groups of AIDS activists.

The evening ended with the literary stars and their fans on the sidewalk outside the library inhaling ozone from a surprise rainstorm, squeezed together for last lingering interactions.