Featured Photo at top of page: Geloy Concepción, 2023.

Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: How are you doing today?

Guillermo Gómez Peña: We’re doing well. We just got back to San Francisco after a three week tour in Texas. Emma will join us to help me answer a few of the more complicated questions, especially when it comes to funding. The more philosophical and anecdotal ones I’ll answer myself.

Emma Tramposch: Hello!

GGP: We’ve prepared ourselves for today with myriad notes. Your questions were very challenging. They forced us to open up the Pandora’s box of memory. I love them, because they are very much in tune with our current research on living archives. I am really proud and happy to be a part of this archive. Thank you for including us. Before we begin, I want to take a moment to dedicate our interview to the memory of Lordres Portillo.

B&A: We are very, very lucky to have you.

GGP: We’re all in the process of working with our living archives. It’s paradoxical. We did a long interview with a Vietnamese historian recently where we had to answer some really tough questions about what we mean by ‘living archives.’  Essentially everything we own here in our San Francisco house, and our Mexico City house, in the Minnesota Street Project, in our suitcases— it’s all part of our living archives. The archives for performance studies and performance artists are very different from the archives of a writer or a visual artist. They include costumes, props, and objects in the house that are evidence of past performances and have been recycled into everyday life. What we do here at home or in your house is part of the living archives. It’s complex.

B&A:  Were you happy with the recent performance you did and we got to be in, at St. Joseph’s Art Society here in San Francisco?

GGP: Out of all the large scale projects La Pocha Nostra has done in San Francisco, this might be my favorite. The collection of individuals and the beauty against the stormy times. Three hundred people attended on a Wednesday night, in a time in which San Francisco is not entirely back. It was a testimony to the artists who worked with us. It was a beautiful project and it filled us with happiness. We are ready to reconvene next year.

B&A: It was definitely a love fest. High art.

ET: I spent most of my time mingling, eavesdropping and observing the audience. The event meant a lot to a lot of people.

B&A: It was a humongous ritual to mourn the state of the world and come together as people.

JJ: Could you please introduce yourself?

GGP: I am a nomadic artist.I transit between cities and countries; between forms and languages. My job is to cross borders and empower others to do it as well. I follow my compass, the mandate of my DNA. My professional ID is that of a performance artist, which means I suffer from a permanent crisis of professional identity. At times I am a reverse anthropologist and cultural detective; other times an experimental linguist, a radical pedagogue, a poetic journalist, but always: an artivist. I use  non- traditional languages to express my social and political concerns. I identify with the term “artist citizen”.

B&A: Wonderful. Could we have some background on who you were before you came to San Francisco? Where were you born and what kind of family did you have growing up? Do you have memories of your high school years?

GGP: I was born in 1955, a year after you, Anita. I was born Guillermo Lino Liberio Gómez-Peña in Mexico City on September 23rd at exactly 12:00 pm. I remember that my bizarre intensity shocked my father. At a very early age, I had a very, may we call it, “performative personality,” and intense gaze. Like Lady Gaga says, I was “born this way.”  My father was a gallant indigenous looking sportsman, civil engineer, and experimental architect who devoted his life to bringing electricity to the Mexican countryside, putting food on our table, and playing jai alai. He built the house we have in Mexico City. My adored mother fundraised for social causes and was the irrefutable nerve center of the family. Since my father was always on the road, the household was a matriarchal heaven. The women in my household loved when I sang ranchero in my tiny mariachi outfit.

I remember elementary school, playing guitar and futbol, traveling constantly to the Mexican countryside with my family, and secretly cross-dressing with my mother’s clothes and wigs. When Emita and I revisited those photos, I asked myself, “Who would ever imagine that that lovely middle class Catholic kid would one day become the seditious Mexterminator?” What caused this dramatic change? Performance art or the immigrant experience? Was it San Francisco? I don’t know…But I do remember that the visits to Mexico City of my US relatives, would instill in me a desire to come north, specifically to California, which I saw as the land of permanent reinvention.

B&A: Were there any artists, musicians, performers that inspired you when you were young?

GGP: Ever since I was a teenager, Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg was my “conceptual godfather.” He transformed me into a performance artist. “Poetic cartographer” and  “neologist” were the words he used. It’s crystal clear to me that Felipe (Rest in Power) is still the most important experimental artist in Mexico and one of the most important in the Americas. For more than 50 years, he contributed with tenacity to the continuous expansion of the territory of art. We are here thanks to artists like him.  He taught my generation to locate ourselves confidently in the Global South and in the so-called “third world” within the first world, including Chicanismo. He taught us the importance for Latin American artists to engage in the project of tracing our artistic and intellectual genealogy away from the cultural centers of Europe and the US. This is a very important idea. These other histories of experimental art are rarely acknowledged in the continuing Eurocentric biases of ‘official’ art history. I would argue this still persists and San Francisco is no exception. But we’ll get to that later.

A&B: When and how did you come to California?

GGP: My family has been migrating to California since the late 1800’s. We saw the “north” as an extension of our own household. More concretely, in 1978 I received a scholarship to study at the California Institute of Arts (Cal Arts) in LA. That year, I remember crossing the US-Mexico border in search of artistic fresh air and my lost Chicano family.

In my first trips to California as a young artist, I suddenly became brown. I was white in Mexico, but in the US I was a “wetback,” a “beaner,” a “greaser.” I ignored the implications of these words. I began my process of Chicano-ization with the unsolicited help of the Los Angeles police, who beat me to a pulp. But that’s another story.

I remember my first first conscious site-specific performances. I did a photo shoot outside of an INS detention center and I walked from Tijuana to the California Institute of Arts (in Valencia) in two and a half days. My head was covered with gauze. I was wearing my father’s suit and carrying a briefcase containing my passport, assorted talismans and a diary. Since then, crossing the US-Mexico border has been my primal ritual of artistic inspiration. I have crossed the border by foot, car, and airplane. I cross it in my dreams and writings. The feeling of crossing a border is liberating to me.

I crossed the border to confront nationalism and xenophobia with words, images, and ideas. I called my “weapons” performance art. The art world became my hideout & office. 23 years later, I became a dual citizen. It was only logical for a citizen of duality like me to certify the existence of my other self. But I am getting too philosophical, Anita, let’s get back to your questions!

JJ: I feel like we’re getting a private performance here.

B&A: We are!

Out of everywhere in the world, why did you end up here in San Francisco?

GGP: Comadres, you are forcing me to open up another pandora’s box of personal memories! But I want to begin to dance with my personal demons. Firstly, I should say that there has always been a historical cultural corridor that begins in Mexico City, moves through Tijuana, San Diego, and LA, and ends in San Francisco. Many of the luminaries in the Chicano movement did that trek.

I followed that corridor. I came here like many of my contemporaries, in search of a myth: San Francisco’s artistic openness, queerness, experimental spirit, conceptual chicanismo. I was very attracted by its bohemia. My work at the time was, fortunately, well received and I could perform any of my multiple identities in public here. That was liberating for me. But my fascination with San Francisco actually began during the summer of love in 1967. I was in San Francisco on a family trip with my mother and cousins, visiting relatives and staying on Lombard street.

As a 12 year old, I witnessed some of the many marches that summer and they completely flipped me out – I saw hippies, nude bodies, rock bands, inhaled the fog of marijuana- I mean, the experience was a full immersion into the city’s zeitgeist.  I remember one day I went to buy my first rock and roll album, as a 12 year old, with my mom. In my broken English I asked the record shop guy to give me “the best music of the time”. He handed me a bunch of albums by Eric Burdon & the Animals, Janice Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors. They all traveled back with me to Mexico.

The seeds for my return were planted during this initial, formative visit to SF, where I discovered the strong mythology of the city as a destination for radicals and as the original source of the protest and free speech movements that we are seeing now in their latest chapters in our universities, where students are protesting the mistreatment of Palestinians. SF was also a permissive setting with a confluence of a myriad cultures from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. That blew my mind. I remember we visited City Lights Bookstore on that trip, not knowing that they would eventually become my publishers.

To me, San Francisco was the city of tender demons and horny angels. Why the hell did we all end up here? But let’s not get entangled in a spiderweb of nostalgia. Next question please.

B&A:  Once you moved here more long term, how did you become engaged in the San Francisco local arts community?

GGP: San Francisco’s Mission District has hosted and nurtured my madness for 39 (0r was it 30?) years.This wonderful barrio was so creative. So full of contradictions. It is the ultimate bohemian den. I revel in my longtime love for this hood. It’s been the stage for my art, my love, my friendships, and my escapades into forbidden territories, both on the streets and inside my psyche. It’s my personal laboratory for permanent existential reinvention. I’m here. I’ve written, performed, danced on fire and ice, loved my jaina, cried inconsolably, gotten drunk out of my mind and flesh, laughed, debated, demonstrated, escaped eviction and despair, confronted the cops, the demons of gentrification and the “alt right’ and neonazis crashing my dive bars here.

And after all these years, I still cannot solve certain mysteries: How come the Mission is sunnier and warmer than the rest of the city? Is it a Latino thing? Is it the heat generated by 700 taquerias? What is the source of this chemical, social, sexual, political and artistic stimulus? What draws people here? What social demons force them out or kill them? Are we seduced by the promise of bohemia in a country of restricted imagination, in an era of constrained freedoms? Are we then seeking freedom of the imagination, attracted by the mythical possibility of reinventing ourselves overnight? Of exercising all the selves and identities we wish to become without having to confront conformity every step of the way? Are we part of the ongoing wave of international exiles escaping failed revolutions and wars, from Salvador to Baghdad to Tijuana to Ukraine? Si? No? Maybe?

I didn’t know that the ultimate “Universal barrio” of the Mission would become a Bohemian theme Park for conservative techies and obnoxious “hipsters”. It’s unsettling!

A&B: Did you have formal training in your art practice?

GGP: Emma helped me research and remember this. From 1974-1978, I studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City and received a Licenciatura/Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Literature with a focus in linguistics. Then, after moving to the US, I continued my studies at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) from 1979-1982, earning both a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice and an MFA in Post-Studio Art. But enough about my CV, next thorny question please.

JJ: Which LGBTQ and or BIPOC artists influenced you the most? Were they in San Francisco too?

GGP: The first gender-complex arts collectives that come to mind are ACT UP and Queer Nation. I became acquainted with them in the early 90’s in Los Angeles. If I’m not mistaken, ACT UP provided access to new therapies and argued that radical care and medication must be everyone’s right. Queer Nation was an LGBTQ activist organization founded in New York City at the time. It was created by HIV/AIDS activists from ACT UP.  The original founders of this amazing organizations were outraged at the escalation of anti-gay violence on the streets and prejudice in arts and media. I admired the group’s confrontational tactics, their slogans, and practices of calling out injustices and corrupt politicians.  Silence = Death is still so pertinent to this day. I was also highly influenced by queer artists of my generation like David Wojnarowicz, John Fleck, Tim Miller and Ron Athey to name a few. They taught me to be bold and uncompromising, and my Chicano colleagues confirmed that call to action. I was groomed by them and I was groomed by the Chicano movement. I was very lucky.

JJ: Did you feel there was an LGBTQ arts community when you arrived in SF?

GGP: Contraband is the first group that comes to mind, with Sara Shelton Mann, Keith Henessey, Jess Curtis, et al. They were our first doppelganger troupe in San Francisco, and when they disbanded, Sara joined La Pocha Nostra on the road for 3 years.

JJ: Oh, really? Did she dance with you? Or do performance art?

GGP: We really pushed the limits to create spoken choreographies, and plastic stationary advances. She was out of her territory, and she loved it. We loved her contributions.

JJ: What venues did you feel the most at home in?

GGP: This is a tough one. We presented work throughout the city at countless art spaces over the years, and I do believe that every corner in the city is a utopian/dystopian space and every space in our own neighborhood is a potential performance space.

But the “venue” I feel the most at home in is my studio, our Casa Museo, here in the Mission. My home here in the Mission connects my life as an artist with a cityscape, the larger Chicano experience and with all humility, with the international performance art world. For over 30 years, this loft has been a demilitarized ‘free zone,’ a bohemian den, where original art parties, performance salons & artistic & political discussions have taken place. These events, attended by rebel artists, activists, intellectuals and dandies and are tied to the San Pancho bohemian tradition of radical hospitality and deviant behavior. The campaign of Green Party candidate “Krissy Keiffer for Congress” was launched in our living room. A local TV station called it “The Smithsonian of the Barrio.”

Now, in the late 90’s, the rampant gentrification of the Mission put our neighborhood in permanent danger of becoming a bohemian theme park, or the headquarters of the tech industry. Then pandemia arrived and the tech industry fled the city, leaving it in ruins. We are now attempting to bring it back.  More recently, during the 2020 lockdown, this site became our survivalist art bunker and zoom broadcasting barrio station for our podcasts and virtual performances. In short, my live/work space continues to be my longest durational performance installation & conceptual zone.

B&A: We’ve seen some of the best performances of our lives in your home.

JJ: You were connected to Galeria de la Raza for so many years. Could you talk a little about that? Did you have a mentor there?

GGP: My formal relationship with Galeria de la Raza began in 1984. My troupe at the time, the Border Arts Workshop, was born at Galeria at precisely the same time Culture Clash was founded. Since then, I was an active member, curator, collaborator and advocate of many Galeria administrations.

In 2010, La Pocha Nostra was formally invited to move into Galeria’s Studio 24 at the corner because it would be “mutually beneficial to both organizations.” We were looking for an anchor in the Latino Mission and Galeria wanted La Pocha’s international scope and connections to Latinx experimental artists within and beyond SF. So, for 7 years, we occupied the corner space of Galeria.

During those years, we co-presented dozens of exciting public events including workshops, performance and spoken word salons and talks pairing local and international artists. Studio 24 at the corner of 24th & Bryant was our ongoing rehearsal, brainstorming, workshop and archival space. Then one day, we got evicted. It broke my heart.

JJ: Before we leave this topic, could we talk about Rene? 1984 was right before he got fired. Do you remember that?

GGP: I thought that was the end of the world for me. This ties into the question you asked, about my mentors. Rene was one of them. I had many…  Rene Yanez, Amalia Mesa Bains, Yolanda Lopez, Susan Lacey and Esther Hernadez to name a few. Amalia taught me an unforgettable lesson. She said to me one day, “Gomez-Peña, if you are offered a mic, don’t give it back.” Those were the words of a true Chicana leader. Rene, of course, was the godfather of the Mission. For over 40 years, he helped make this a city where subversion, creativity, and irreverence were not only “tolerated” but celebrated, where the politics went far to the left of everywhere else in the US. That was the San Francisco he showed me in 1981 when I first met him and the one that welcomed me back in the mid 90s.

This was the place where anyone could come to live out their alternative dreams, where artists and visionaries filled the cafes, a sanctuary city where migrants, outsiders, subversives and deviants could find refuge, including me and all of our close friends. It provided the perfect setting for La Pocha Nostra to emerge and thrive.

JJ: Rene did that for so many people. Culture Clash was Marga Gomez, Monica Palacios.. there were 6 original members, right? Rene was one of the first artists of color to get funded by the city of San Francisco, way back there in the late 70s, early 80s. That’s when I first ran into him. You could tell he had great ideas about once a minute. I think it was Renee who introduced us to each other originally. Or maybe Marie Acosta? I remember that you were staying in my house here and performing in Festival 2000. Did you get paid for that? Or did you get ripped off like most people?

GGP: My financial memory is not in great shape. I don’t know.

JJ: That’s how we got the Cultural Equity Grants Program.  I think it was Marie Acosta who introduced me to you at the Mexican Museum. Another awesome connection is that the head of the California Arts Council was the director of Highways Performance Space. That organization produced so much.

GGP: I’m very proud to say that that was my generation of performance artists in Los Angeles. The Hittite Empire, Dang Guan and so many other artists like Marcus Kulianasario who twisted the arm of Susanna Dakin to make it a performance space.

XX: That was quite a group of people. Keith Antar Mason, Sherry Rabino, the pioneers of the cyberats movement. It was a convergence of amazing minds.

JJ: You were so identified with Rene in San Francisco and with Highways in L.A.. Two really vibrant organizations.

GGP: My dear Jeff, I was so lucky.

JJ: You’re credited as one of the founding members of Highways. I ended up being the grant writer somehow, believe it or not.

I remember that after Rene was fired, I would see him everywhere passing out pamphlets. He got hired by Jack Davis to be the janitor. Can you imagine? One of the most brilliant curators in town got hired to be a janitor. And yet he was thankful.

B&A: Guillermo, what was your first big artistic breakthrough?

GGP: It happened in the Tijuana/San Diego region. In 1984 I formed “The Border Arts Workshop”(BAW/TAF) with a bunch of visual, performance and conceptual artists, a bi-national arts collective involving Chicano, Mexican and Anglo artists. Our objective was to explore US-Mexico relations and border issues using a mix of performance, video, and experimental poetry. I remember proclaiming the border region “a laboratory for social and aesthetic experimentation,” and proposing “the artist as a social thinker and bi-national diplomat.” Our public relations with law enforcement really sucked.

But I remember similar activist groups forming in other parts of the country, including the Guerrilla Girls, Group Material, ACT UP and the Los Angeles Poverty Department.  Performance, political activism and community concerns were completely intertwined in the spirit of the times.

In this context, BAW/TAF’s strictly artistic activities helped protect our backs and legitimize our more activist work and get us out of jail. So in addition to binational art shows, publications, radio programs, town meetings and films, we organized performances right on the borderline, where the U.S. meets Mexico in the Pacific, literally performing for audiences in both countries. When the border patrol got too close, we crossed to the Mexican side. During certain performances, we invited our audiences to cross “illegally” to the other side. We exchanged food and art, caressed and kissed “illegally” across the border fence, and confronted the border patrol in costume. We were protected by the presence of journalist friends and video cameras. The political implications of the site and the symbolic weight of these actions garnering us immediate attention from the international media. These were the origins of the border arts movement and what I consider my early “breakthrough”.

JJ: That was how many years before you got the MacArthur Genius grant?

GGP: Probably 10? The Borderers workshop was founded in 1984, and the MacArthur was in 1991.

JJ: How did government funding impact your career?

GGP: I cede the word to my dear colleague Emma Tramposch, La Pocha Nostra’s Executive Director and Curator of the Living Archives. She has been the holder of the Pocha Nostra House for at least 15 years and is our internal historian on this topic.

ET: I’m happy to help fill in some details. Since La Pocha Nostra is also a non-profit as well as an arts collective many kinds of funding have impacted GP’s career and the organization’s chronology. From the government funding side we are grateful recipients of local, state and national funders including the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, the California Arts Council, NALAC and the NEA. Over the years these funders have supported not only the realization of many performance projects but also with operating expenses related to keeping the lights on and capacity building. La Pocha Nostra also has multiple progressive non-governmental foundations to thank too. But I know the question was about government funding. It’s certainly been a helpful boost over the years.

B&A: I have to ask, what were your first encounters with queer arts organizations?

GGP: That’s an impossible question. I have only ever worked with or collaborated with Queer-identified or queer friendly arts organizations. If they aren’t gender- or race- complex, we simply don’t work with them. Period! We’ve made a few missteps with places we thought were more inclusive and paid for it. But that’s the subject of another book titled “The Touring Misadventures of La Pocha Nostra…in a Post-Democratic Era.” Soon to be published by a random house.

B&A: Any random house! You crack us up.

What unique contribution do you think you made to the City’s queer and or BIPOC arts history?

JJ: You performed in the National Queer Arts Festival. I still have the poster on my wall.

B&A: Plus you have contributed greatly to our ecosexual movement. You oversaw our Ecosex Pride contingent in the SF Pride parade once. And co-authored our Ecosex Manifesto 2.0.

ET: La Pocha Nocha was founded in 1993 Los Angeles by three BIPOC artists with the explicit goal of gaining access to public and private grants that non-white artists rarely seemed to get. The original thinking was that by founding an organization dedicated to creating work that put BIPOC people at its center, this would both lessen their marginalization and – as a non-profit organization – give us greater access to funding that was usually reserved for “mainstream” artists.

At the time, and I believe still to this day, LPN has been a pioneer in the field.  For 35+ years, alongside a roster of national and international touring, LPN has maintained an artistic foothold and base of operations in San Francisco’s Mission District. Here, we have presented several large scale participatory performances (like the Mexterminator Project, in 1997), solos, keynotes, site specific performances and pedagogical intensives at many spaces including SOMArts, Galería de la Raza, Mission Cultural Center, Brava Theater, Fort Mason Center and the SF Arts Commission Gallery.  LPN has also presented countless site-specific pieces commenting on themes pertinent to local audiences such as El Corazon de la Misión (2007), a participatory “bus tour” of the neighborhood and The Phantom Mariachi (2016), an interactive performance piece commenting on gentrification and the displacement of artists and marginalized communities.

B&A: Iconic! We have experienced both of those pieces and they were absolutely fantastic and inspiring.

Which arts discipline would you say best describes your practice?

GGP: Well, like you two, I’ve always created my own artworld. In 1993 when we formed La Pocha Nostra, the objective was “to create an interdisciplinary association of rebel artists interested in collaboration.” We were inspired by Zapatismo, and our collaborative model of “concentric and overlapping circles” has functioned as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of like-minded artists in different cities and countries.

The Spanglish neologism “Pocha Nostra” loosely translates to “our impurities” or the “cartel of cultural bastards or traitors.” It reveals our attitude towards art and society: interracial, poly-post-neo-gender, ultra-retro-experimental, trans/national, or a remix of all of the above…. During all these years we’ve created pedagogical experiments, artivism, books, digital art, and large performance events involving dozens, hundreds of artists and curators. We live across several countries and languages. Sometimes we are strategic insiders in the art world, like tonight; other times outsiders by will.

Ahora, why do we still use performance as a matrix? What interests me the most about performance is its ability to connect the bodies of the artist and the audience with the civic sphere in real time. I think of the human body as a metaphor for the body politic; and the space where the performance or workshop takes place as a metaphor for the social body. We believe in the pedagogical dimension of performance. It provides a portal for liberation.

Nowadays, freedom is a loaded term. But performance artists share a relentless search for freedom. The freedom to be able to move between various territories: art, activism, experimental sexuality, popular culture, journalism, new technologies, etc. Even within the territory of art, performance art does not recognize borders. I can be a visual artist, poet, theater artist, producer, installation and video artist at the same time. People even called me a “vernacular philosopher.”

B&A: We mop, we cook, we clean the space… It never ends.

Do you perceive different evolutionary stages in your career?

GGP: I’ll give it a try, broadly. These are my “periods”.  First, my Mexican period, meaning, the time in my life prior to migrating to the US in 1978. Then, my “border arts period” while I was living in the Tijuana/San Diego area including Los Angeles (when I was studying in CalArts). Those were my formative years. I also lived in New York for 3 and a half years in the early 90s and my art was connected to the multicultural debates at the time, mainly the politics of display and the troubling representations of Otherness in mainstream museums… And since 94, I call this my San Francisco period, a site specific body of work always created in dialogue with the local arts community. I’m beginning to sound a bit pedantic, but the question is such. I also have many other bloody periods.

B&A: Do you feel “otherized”? How and by whom?

GGP: Being Mexican in Southern California meant waking up every day and, as an act of will against all circumstances, deciding to continue being Mexican. Whether we liked it or not, we became part of a culture of resistance. Looking “Mexican” or speaking Spanish in public was in itself an act of political defiance. Our position vis-à-vis the dominant culture of California was paradoxical. We were everywhere and nowhere. We were the largest “minority” in the state and at the same time, the least represented in the power hierarchies; we constituted the backbone of the economy at the same time we were perceived as the monstrous specter in the Anglo-Saxon imagination. More paradoxes: We built the romantic backdrop of California with its favorite cuisine and music, and at the same time we posed a fear of epic proportions: Godzilla with a mariachi hat!

If it had not been for Chicanos and other American Latinos I probably would have died of loneliness, nostalgia and invisibility. Chicanos showed me a different way of seeing myself as an artist and as a citizen. Through them I discovered that my art could be the ideal medium to explore and reinvent my multiple and changing identities (something that would have been unthinkable in Mexico at that time). One of the basics of our work has been precisely to answer this question.

JJ: How do your artworks reflect the eras in which they were produced?

GGP: I firmly believe the role of the artist is to actively engage citizens and local arts communities in the larger debates of our times. I think of collaboration as a form of radical citizenship. I collaborate with performers, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, musicians and poets, and utilize audience interaction as artistic strategies to illustrate my ideas across national borders, race, gender and generations. It sounds heavy but we’ve been doing it for almost 40 years and we’re good at it. My projects involve acts of citizen diplomacy and strategies to create communities of “rebel artists” devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, practice and theory, artist and spectator.

I want to talk briefly about a project that Emma mentioned earlier, my 2007 interactive bus tour projec,t “El Corazon de la Mission” because it’s important for this archive project. The “art bus” was decorated inside and outside by local artists. Passengers on The Mission Tour were invited to participate in a Mexican “processional,” as if they too were personas on a parade float. In a way they were “eavesdropping” on the neighborhood, using the windows of “the Mexican Bus” as a safe vantage point to watch the street…and they were also eavesdropping on my own artistic mind.  For the duration of the tour, people on the street became involuntary performance artists on the stage of the rapidly changing neighborhood, immersed in a traveling poetic/performative journey across a mythical bohemian Mission…Pocha Nostra members were also performing live on the streets. I was the tour guide, and my poetry was the itinerary.

That’s one of our favorite SF based projects, ever.

B&A: Yeah, it’s one of our favorites too.

JJ: I liked that one a lot myself. But the one I remember most is the Mexterminator. That was probably your largest project in San Francisco, if I’m not mistaken. It was operatic. I was the grant writer for Jack Davis, so I wrote the grants for that too. That was a really challenging, in-your-face kind of work.

B&A: Does your art address social justice issues? Which ones and why?

GGP: The idea of creating work that gives voice to those who feel like they have no voice – no ability to affect policies and systems that denigrate their quality of life – has been central to LPN’s creative practice. The consideration of diversity and inclusiveness and attempting through our art to change systemic injustice and inequity is a part of every project we undertake, without even mentioning it. We view artists as citizens of the world whose role is to employ art to achieve social justice.

ET: La Pocha Nostra is committed to so-called “artistic excellence,” but we’re equally committed to pursuing social justice for all the people of San Francisco and the cities we tour, especially those disenfranchised people who routinely have had little or no experience of equity or inclusion. Lately we are committed to our living archives and making them accessible for generations to come. La Pocha Nostra’s living archives are a powerful testimony of a lifetime of artistic border crossings and troublemaking in many directions and cultural contexts. The collection is “American” in the largest sense of the word, but also includes documentation of work done internationally, especially in Latin America. The nerve center of our Living Archives is here in SF. So that’s kind of a circular way of answering your question.

B&A: The way that you support your community is phenomenal. In this alienated post-COVID era, that kind of support for your friends is so important. I remember you brought Rene over here to our house when he was trying to fight his eviction and that was so moving to us. The performances at your home are so beautiful, and a whole range of people are always welcome there, from young artists to old friends. It’s beautiful how you hold your community. I think that’s a real social justice issue too. It’s a lost vision of radical hospitality that you don’t often see anymore. This city is so fragmented now, but we still support each other here. It just doesn’t feel competitive.

GGP: Yes, I agree with you Annie.

JJ: But you know, back before the Arts Commission started giving out money to people of color and queers, it was very competitive. Everyone competed with each other and it was very cutthroat. When we started the Queer Arts Festival, we wanted to show people how much further we could go if we worked together rather than competing with each other. When the SFAC committed to having specific money for POC and queers, it really made that possible. But it just wasn’t true before 1992. If you were a Latino arts organization, you were seen as a challenger to Galleria. That’s the way people thought.

But then we got the funds to empower communities of color and queers, and that was just unheard of. California’s Proposition 209 says that you cannot use race to decide anything. Well, that’s exactly what we did with the Cultural Equity Grants Program, and nobody has challenged it. I don’t know why. They could’ve thrown us out after a month. I think a lot of it had to do with Grants for the Arts’ terrible reputation for being racist.

It’s interesting, too, that you used the phrase “artistic excellence”, which is a term that many people who opposed diversity also used. The diversity and inclusion people won and artistic excellence has gone down the drain. People don’t get funded anymore because they’re doing great artistic work. Now you get funded because you know how to answer the questions on the grant.

B&A: Interesting perspectives, Jeff.

Guillermo what motivated you to advocate for diversity as an artist? What was your role in transforming the SF arts community? Don’t be modest.

GP: Emita, please help me. I don’t like to talk about my own achievements.

ET: La Pocha Nostra’s mission is to create performances that speak to the lives of our region’s Chicanx/Latinx and all people designated as “other” throughout the world. We accomplish our mission by providing an artistic home for a loose network of rebel artists from various disciplines, generations, and ethnic backgrounds whose common denominator is our desire to cross and erase dangerous artificial borders between art and politics, practice and theory, artist and spectator.

By creating work that speaks to the Bay Area’s diverse Latinx communities, which have historically been (and continue to be) economically disenfranchised and underserved, our programs bring to light issues faced by all people designated as “other” (than white, male, English-speaking, straight, Christian and of European descent). We think deeply about what content will “cross borders” – that is to say, we care about cultures and communities other than our own and desire to understand them on their own terms.

Our projects offer audiences the opportunity to be not merely spectators but to interact with performers and each other as performances unfold. We consider ourselves rebel artists, by which we mean we believe that many things that separate people are artificial borders constructed by people/groups/political parties who benefit from divisiveness. As citizen artists, we believe it’s our responsibility to cross these borders.

JJ: Can you tell us about your involvement with organizations like the California Arts Council and SFAC Cultural Equity Grants program? Do you think that these groups contributed to the diversification of the national arts community?

ET: I can help elaborate here. Over the course of GP’s career as a working artist he has received funding from CAC and SFAC for individual projects & performance work and La Pocha Nostra has also received capacity building grants. Most recently from SFAC, GP and LPN were the recipients of the 2023 Artistic Legacy Award honoring over 30 years of artistic leadership. This helped fund the recent extraordinary event that Annie and Beth were involved in at St. Joseph’s. We are grateful for these funds, of course, but I am not sure how I can comment exactly on how these funders have directly impacted the diversification of the national arts scene as a whole… We certainly hope it is true that there has been a significant increase in funding and prioritizing for BIPOC and LGBTQ artists. We also hope that the review panels are equally as diverse and knowledgeable since they are critical to the outcome of an application’s funding.

JJ: Personally, I think it’s time for a total reanalysis of the peer review process. Now it’s just like playing roulette. We have these panels of young people who just showed up to San Francisco who are now deciding how millions of dollars get spent in the arts. They don’t know who you are, or who Annie Sprinkle is. They don’t know anything. It almost feels like I would much rather have the Arts Commission making the decisions instead of these amateurs who come in and are getting on-the-job training while deciding the fate of numerous artists in the process.

Emma: I totally agree. I think the whole system needs to change.

JJ: Foundations are better off in this regard because they’re not pulling in random panelists, and they’re doing research. Their staff are being paid to do this and they do a good job. Previously, they only funded white people because they were afraid that their boards would get bent out of shape if they funded amateur artists or folklorists or whatever.

B&A: Reverend Billy, who just opened for Neil Young last night, was talking with us about artistic excellence versus community also. He had to pick the fifteen best singers to go on this tour and they weren’t necessarily the best community members and he said a lot of feelings got hurt. So it’s a balance. These aren’t opposite things. Hopefully you can have both.

JJ: What have the biggest challenges been to this diversification in the arts? Who pushed back? Why? What prejudices or challenges did you face? Is there as much pushback now as in the earlier decades? Stories please.

GGP: From 2012 to 2015, I wrote obsessively on the dangers of the ultimate “creative city,” the much-touted “post-gentrification era” and what it meant to be a foreigner in my own neighborhood waiting for an inevitable eviction notice.  During this time, my own troupe was evicted from our infamous 24th street studio in the Mission District of San Francisco. My obsessions were also driven by what some may describe as philosophical or material anxieties. In both cases, I ask a similar question: how do I wait? Or should I even continue to wait?

But we endured and decided to remain here. Sometimes I felt like the last standing Mexican artist in the Mission.  More recently pandemia and confinement, and the tragic death of George Floyd shifted the conversation, and cultural institutions were forced to look inward and reflect on their systemic colonial and racist practices. Now, have they done it? They are all now talking about “social justice” as the word of the month. But are they walking the walk? This is a topic for another conversation..

B&A: How important have grant writers been to this change? Could this move towards diversity have happened without the diversity grants for artists?

ET: I see grant writers as providing the invaluable connective tissue between an artist’s ideas and goals and access to a funding source. Since “grant-ese” as we call it internally is such a specific language, grant writers need to be magicians in adapting artistic concepts into pointed grant language that will resonate with a panel or funding body and succinctly describe a project. Yes, I personally believe a “sea change” of diversity would happen regardless. But that funding for artists is vital, and it can assist in realizing a whole artistic trajectory and funding should increase each year.

B&A: Did Jeff write grants for you? What do you think his role was in this sea change?

GGP: We see Jeff Jones as the orchestra conductor of all the non-main stream organizations in the city. Period. His contribution to a “sea change” cannot be overstated enough. We can testify to the importance of his grant writing for organizations like the Galeria de la Raza, Dance Mission, Cultural Odyssey and many others and also for the guidance role he has offered for LPN and many others. He has raised over 100 million dollars for BIPOC and GLBTQ artists in San Francisco. Which has no doubt made for a more equitable and interesting art scene in the Bay Area. He deserves all the medals from the goddesses of the funding world, or at the very least a gorgeous, permanent artist made bronze statue or mural in city hall. Jeff es un chingon!

JJ: Well, I don’t need accolades because I’ve met so many fabulous people. They are my life.

B&A: What was the art scene like in the 70 to the 90s compared to now?

GP: With pandemia and confinement, we were forced to redefine time and space and reconsider body-based art practice. Remember those days? We lost our live audience, our main source of energy. And in the absence of human contact and political certainties, we were ‘zooming’ everyday, and dreaming a lot, trying to artistically survive by performing an illusion of “live art,” online, a contradiction in terms.

In 2020 and 2021, my colleagues and I had a myriad of questions. What exactly was performance art in times of triple pandemia and generalized paranoia?  If everything we loved; – international touring, crossing borders, working in community, in proximity to other bodies and if we couldn’t do it  anymore, how could we possibly reinvent ourselves to bear this perceived impossibility? How could we “embody” our artistic practice on/OFF line or on zoom? Could our wounded bodies and frail minds crossover into Siberia? It was heavy.

Now, in the current political landscape–the culture of pervasive fear, the new social restrictions on sexuality, and the prohibition of the debates on war, imposed by academia and the media, we are presented with more challenges when teaching and presenting performance. A new elliptic culture of euphemisms and circumventions is affecting our aesthetic choices (consciously and subconsciously). The new question is, how can we exercise our full citizenship through performance? How can we continue to talk back to power and fight for freedom in a setting of hyper-conservatism and puritanical discourse coming from the far right and the liberal left? These concerns simply did not exist 10 years ago, or earlier.

B&A: Gay marriage was legalized almost ten years ago and everyone shrugged. But now we’re back at “don’t say gay” and anti-LGBT legislation is being introduced all across the country. It’s pretty disastrous. Abortion rights, civil rights, the fact that librarians in 17 states can now be charged with a felony if they check out the wrong book or that doctors can be jailed for performing abortions.

JJ: I remember that before Michelle Tea left town, the last grant I wrote for her was for the first Drag Queen Story Hour, and it got funded. Now people think “oh my god, they’re grooming children to be queers!” But it wasn’t even for straight kids. It was for children of queer people or even kids of straight parents who didn’t want them to inherit a culture of homophobia. That’s why it was founded, to guarantee that these children would not be brought up with homophobia and sexism and racism as their only options. And look at what they’re doing now. Nazis are assembling outside libraries where something as innocent as that is going on.

B&A: Do you think the future will be more diverse? Or could all of this progress be erased?

GGP: I am afraid that the city will incur the same historical mistake. To hand the city yet again to another tech industry, say AI or biotech…instead of emphasizing the importance of funding arts and culture as the key to bring back the spirit of the city. If I were a politician, I would appoint a board of artists and writers to oversee the so-called return of San Francisco. People tell me…dream Mad Mex.

Now the challenge for arts funders in a city which is almost 16 percent Latinx is to purposely fund Latinx art, which we notice has fallen off the table in the last decade. After all these years, the only visible remaining Latinx organizations in the city (that I’m aware of) are the Mission Cultural Center, the new Galeria de la Raza, Accion Latina and La Pocha Nostra. It breaks your heart.

We wish to convince funders to truly invest in the Latinx communities and believe they have become invisibilized. Why does the contemporary US look towards Asia, Black America and Europe but not as much towards Latin America? We think this is one of the many forces behind why Latinx working artists have had to leave the city.

JJ: In the last two years, the city put out the Dreamkeeper Initiative, in which they poured 2-4 million dollars in the black arts community. Now that community has about 4 or 5 stable groups doing good work. But the Latino arts community is still a mess and there are twice as many Latinos as there are blacks in San Francisco. Mayor Breed is ripe to do something for the arts in the Latino community. But at the same time, the city is about to pull the plug out of the Mexican Museum.

JJ:  Well, the Mexican Museum has been an absolute mess.

B&A: Are there any final thoughts you want to convey in this oral history archive?

GGP: Our intellectual and artistic elders have been abandoned by society. No one is listening to them. Very few young artists are actually working with them. What if all artists chose an elder from their communities to adopt? Once a week they could spend time with their adopted elder, listen to their stories, take them for a walk or a drive to a place of their choice, document carefully their opinions, listen to their new compositions, help them choreograph their latest illusion, organize their archives, and of course in the process, help them make their living spaces more pleasant and vibrant by bringing other artists to talk to them. We can also extend this service to artists who have been impaired by illness and even to the homeless in your street.

In general we also see a new pandemia emerging that has to do with mental health and feel it is important to address this in the arts.

B&A: That’s very true. Wonderful ideas.

Before we go, and as you reflect on your contributions to the arts and the challenges you’ve overcome, do you have any advice or insights to offer to emerging BIPOC and LGBTQ artists who are navigating their own artistic journeys?

GGP: Be clear minded and uncompromising. The times are extremely delicate and dangerous. Art can be one of our possible salvations.

Thank you, Jeff, Beth and Annie, for your work on this project. It’s an important one. Okay, love you. Goodbye.

 

 

Greg Day is an artist, activist and cultural equity advocate. The camera has been an integral part of his journey in America and Europe for over half a century.

As a photographer and cultural anthropologist, he has documented some of the most important cultural milieus and events of our time, including: The Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements in the South, early genderqueer performance artists and Greenwich Village luminaries in New York, African American life on the Gullah/Geechee Coast, the LGBT Rights Movement, California’s cultural diversity and activism and Berlin’s new architecture and queer art scene.

JJ: Why don’t we start at the beginning?

Greg:  I am an artist, activist and cultural equity advocate. The camera has been an integral part of my journey in America and Europe for over half a century. As an artist and cultural anthropologist, I have documented some of the most important cultural milieus and events of our time, including: The Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements in the South, genderqueer performance artists and Greenwich Village luminaries in New York, African American life on the Gullah/Geechee Coast, the LGBT Rights Movement, California’s cultural diversity and activism and Berlin’s new architecture and Queer art scene.

B&A: After we cover that amazing history we’ll move on to how you ended up in San Francisco and what you did here.  How did you grow up? You became a social justice warrior and a very political artist. Were your parents Unitarian or Quaker or something like that?

GD: No, my mother was a secretary from Wisconsin and my father became an attorney from Alabama. They met in Washington D.C. under F.D.R.’s national job program where the government allocated a certain number of federal jobs for each state. My mother won the lottery in Madison, WI and went to Washington D.C.. My parents were not religious. My father was agnostic and my mother was raised Catholic, but hated it. When I came out to my mother, I was in my twenties and she said, “I knew you were gay since you were 4 years old. I don’t care if you’re gay. Just don’t let the neighbors know.” I said, “What did you think when I married Kate Young, my former wife?” She said, “We thought that was really nice.”

I have a Polish immigrant grandfather who hated Poland and the Catholic Church. He married the daughter of German and Polish immigrants in Milwaukee. I come from a family of very outspoken adventurous, outside the box people, who are difficult and argumentative about their rights. My father taught me how to cross barriers. My grandfather was a carpenter and country school teacher. He and my father were workers on the first dam that F.D.R. built in the Tennessee Valley, the Joe Wheeler Dam. Vera Mahala Armstrong, my grandmother, was a descendant of survivors of the Trail of Tears. They were from Alabama so I spent my childhood there. Then my father’s career led him to Washington. We moved there between my junior and senior years of high school. I graduated from high school in Silver Springs, MD.

My father’s family in Alabama was mixed race, although they passed as white. They were Native American, Appalachian, outsider people. My dad was outspoken and he raised me to be that way. My parents supported my being an artist from an early age,

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was an anthropology and photography student at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta. Atlanta was a whirlwind of student activism, anti-war protests, civil rights marches. Dr. King’s Southern Leadership Conference organization was located there. I went to a lot of demonstrations. I used photography to be a part of these activities and to document them. I wanted to make photographs like Dorothea Lange, documentary photography with a social justice agenda. I took the first course in African American culture offered there, by folklorist Mary Arnold Twining. She had completed field research on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina and took us there on field trips.

On these field trips we went to the Gullah Geechee Coast’s basket-making community. On Highway I7, I met Mary Jane Manigault, the community’s matriarch and cultural broker. She was a very well-known basket-maker. I asked if I could take her picture, which is standard there— you buy a basket and then you can take a picture of the basket-maker. She said, “sure, go ahead”, and when I put the camera up to my eye she said, “I know what you’re doing with that camera.” I put the camera down. I thought I had offended her. I said, “what do you mean?” She said, “you’re waiting for your mind to turn on it.”  “When you start out on a basket, you think you’re gonna make a certain type, and while you’re making it, suddenly the wall of the basket has turned in another direction, so I let my mind go with it. I never know what kind of basket I’m going to get until the end. But I know it’s going to be great because I’m following my good mind.”  She used her intuition, and that helped her become one of the most famous basket-makers in the United States. She was invited to the White House, and received a grant from the NEH.  She was really extraordinary. Besides the basket-makers, I met African-American women quilters and the visionary artist Nellie Mae Rowe.

Mrs. Nellie Mae Rowe with her ‘doll children.’ Vinings, Georgia, 1978. © Greg[/caption]

The Mt. Pleasant basket-makers make many things by hand, yet they are very contemporary. In this community everyone is involved in art production. Their process of making art is in the moment, improvisational, spontaneous, and without a lot of planning. They rely on dreams and being present in the moment These are the same principles that show up in every aspect of their life; what they were gonna wear in the morning; who they’re gonna be… They changed my entire conception and practice of photography: their art process and their way of dealing with the world became mine.

Kate Young and I were both accepted in Rutgers University’s Anthropology Graduate program. After we finished our coursework, we moved to Manhattan and lived in Greenwich Village. The city was bankrupt and rent was cheap. In the Village and Chelsea. I discovered a full-blown, underground queer art scene— writers, actors, performance artists — in the streets, clubs and on the piers. Here I met Stephen Varble, Ruth Truth, and Warhol Factory stars, Taylor Mead, Jackie Curtis and Mario Mondelli, The Hot Peaches performance group, Agosto Machado, playwright Doric Wilson, performance pioneer Jack Smith, and Divine. Once again, my camera provided access and I began to document the LGBTQ+ community.

In 1978, I moved to San Francisco as part of a Rainbow Migration that brought thousands of Queers to San Francisco and California. I had a teaching job lined up at San Francisco State. When I arrived, the governor had eliminated the budget and I didn’t have a job. But I had my camera, and I became a member of the gay press. With my Advocate magazine press pass, I could go anywhere in San Francisco without an invitation. All I had to do was flash that press pass.

In 1978, I went to my first Pride Parade in San Francisco. Thirty artists made flags and every flagpole had a different design. I thought “What a fantastic art installation!” There were three large rainbow flags made by Lynn Segarblom (aka Fairie Rainbow Argyle) and James McNamara. Gilbert Baker served as a co-chair of the Pride flag committee with Lynn. In the years that followed he would promote the rainbow flag as an international symbol of our movement.

I went to the Parade Committee meeting and there was a huge fight between women, artists, people of color, and the white male Parade Co-chair who had invited Ronald Reagan to speak. I photographed this historic meeting where the Committee voted to include women and people of color on the stage. But then the Parade leadership refused to do it.

During the Parade, as a member of the press, I was admitted to the area behind the main stage on the Polk Street steps of City Hall. The lesbian comic, Robin Tyler, and a huge group of women and their supporters rushed forward, pushed through the fence and reached the stage. Meanwhile, the Parade’s security told me I could not photograph what was happening.

I was flabbergasted that I was censored and was so angry I couldn’t sleep. The gay press, with the exception of the Bay Times, was misogynist and racist. I had the only photographs of the demonstration. So, I made the editors of the gay papers sign an agreement that they would mention that the Parade Committee ejected me from the press area for taking the pictures. I went to the next parade meeting, and criticized the Committee for failing to support freedom of the press. Somebody made a motion to remove the male co-chair from the parade. Then somebody got up and nominated me. I was so angry that I said OK– and I was elected.

The first motion we made was to change the name of the Pride Parade from “Gay Freedom Day” to “Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day.” Most of the new Parade Committee was made up of artists. My co-chair was Barbara Cameron, a Lakota Sioux whose writing was published in Cherrie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back. Then the new committee proceeded to change the rules of the parade to require that every subcommittee had to have a minimum of 50% women. We agreed to make a good faith effort that by 1983, 30% of the committee chairs would be people of color.

We decided to invite Tom Robinson, a popular gay English rock star to participate in the upcoming Parade. His song, “Glad to be Gay!” was very popular. We were worried that the U.S. Immigration Service would stop him at the border. Somebody said, “Call attorney Mary Dunlap,” Mary arrived at the Parade office our office and said “They are violating your constitutional rights as American citizens to have collegiality with people from other countries. You should sue them.” Barbara Cameron and I looked at each other and said “Yes, let’s do it!

We had a court date 10 days before the Parade. We sued the U.S. Attorney General and the U.S. Immigration Service and the hearing was held before Judge Aguilar, a Mexican American judge. Mary Dunlap won the case, and for the 10 days prior to the Parade, Northern California was the only place a queer person could enter the United States. We organized a big demonstration at the airport when Tom Robinson entered the country. That was my start in San Francisco politics.

At the end of the 1981 Parade, motorcycle police attacked the crowd. We caught it all on video. For the first time Barbara Cameron and I met with Dianne Feinstein, who to her credit, felt her job as Mayor was to meet with everybody. Even though many LGBTQ people didn’t like her and thought that she was too old-fashioned and conservative, I appreciated her fearlessness. We argued that we paid the cops’ salaries and they had attacked us. Feinstein had become Mayor because a former police officer had assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. She told us she would work on it. This was my first introduction to Mayor Feinstein and it opened a doorway to local politics.

Soon I became an officer of the Stonewall Democrats. Then Jeff Jones, recruited me to become the Issues Chair of the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian/Gay Democratic Club. The Alice Club in those days was much more radical than it had been before. Mr. Jones was the Treasurer and was also writing grants for artists and arts organizations. The Arts. Randy Stallings was President, Connie O’Connor was the past president, Sal Rosselli was the Vice President.

One of my boyfriends was on the Mayor’s Lesbian/Gay Advisory Committee. One morning, he said to me, “You complain all the time about Dianne and you’re getting nowhere. You should be on her Advisory Committee. Maybe she’ll listen to and learn from you.” Three days later I started attending the group’s monthly meeting with the Mayor. There were about 40 people, mostly gay male realtors and lawyers and also activists like Pat Norman and Konstantin Berlandt.

Around this time the White Panthers, a group of gun enthusiasts, launched a campaign to recall Mayor Feinstein. Dianne had just vetoed the first Domestic Partners ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors The White Panthers found a willing group of angry gay people on Castro Street who signed the recall petition.

The Alice B. Toklas Lesbian/Gay Democratic Club was close with Dianne because the Harvey Milk Lesbian/Gay Democratic Club had never supported her until the run-off election of 1979, when the choice was Feinstein or Supervisor Quentin Kopp, the most conservative member of the Board.

Dianne needed the endorsement of the Alice Club, the largest Club in San Francisco’s LGBTQ Community. I was the Chair of the Issues Committee and also on its Executive Committee. The Alice leadership decided to ask for a meeting with the Mayor. Once she accepted, Jeff Jones convinced us to think about what funding items we could ask her to support. Everyone on the Committee had ideas and when the list was put together, each of us took responsibility for asking for one item.

I just want to give you a picture here of the Alice Club’s ability to see the politics of the situation. When we met for lunch with the Mayor at an upstairs private room in a restaurant near City Hall, we asked for everything: money to support AIDS education and prevention campaigns: funding for the recently formed San Francisco AIDS Foundation; support for the Rape Crisis Center; a battered women’s shelter; funding for the Women’s Philharmonic; the Lesbian Rights Project; a contract with a Tenderloin Hotel to serve homeless people with AIDS; support for Community United Against Violence (CUAV).  I’m sure I’m forgetting something…

JJ:  Yes you are! We asked Dianne to appoint you to the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Community Development Block Grant Program.

GD: Yes. At the meeting, Dianne Feinstein understood that she would have to deliver on at least some of these items to insure the Club’s would vote “no” against the recall. To our surprise the Mayor agreed to everything! There was only one exception: she refused to march with Alice in the upcoming Gay Pride Parade. She worried that if she did, 1000 drag queens would dress up as Dianne and march behind her. The Mayor received an unanimous endorsement from Alice.

Soon afterwards the Mayor appointed my boyfriend to the Community Development Committee that recommended how she should allocate San Francisco’s Community Development Block Grant that annually amounted to approximately $26,000,000.

At that time, the only City funds awarded to the LGBTQ community were for mental health, probably because most earlier city officials secretly thought we were mentally ill, if not crazy.

I read in the SF Chronicle that the Housing and Urban Development Department of the Federal Government had asked the Mayor to form a new Citizens Advisory Committee since the one currently in existence had conflicts of interest. This announcement happened two weeks before the annual deadline to appropriate $26,000,000 to the City’s non-profits.

That same day I received a call from Jeff Jones who asked me to talk to my boyfriend who had just been removed from the Citizens Advisory Committee, and get him to recommend me to the Mayor as his replacement. I said, “why would I want to be on that committee?” Jones replied, “That committee hands out $26,000,000 dollars every year and the LGBTQ Community doesn’t get any of it.”

So, I joined this committee of 16 people; 8 men and 8 women. There were 2 straight white people and me, a white queer; the other 13 members were people of color. All of us were newly appointed. The Chair was the head of San Francisco’s NAACP. We had one week to review 400+ applications and recommend how the Mayor should allocate the $26,000,000. It was crazy.

Dianne said the arts were not included in this category and that existing groups should be cut by 10%. Immediately there was a huge fight between the Latino and Black communities. To resolve this problem, we put together a multicultural coalition of the Committee’s Asian, Latino, African American, Native American members. We cut every large group by 5% to fund new programs in under-served communities.

The Committee decided to interview the groups seeking first-time funding. One of them was a consortium of arts groups including the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the S.F. Ethnic Dance Festival, Theatre Rhinoceros, the Women’s Philharmonic and the Lorraine Hansberry Theater.  When Marie Acosta of the Mime Troupe was testifying, the only white straight guy on the Committee called her a “Latina bitch.” When the Committee was meeting at 5 o’clock, the same unhinged nutcase started yelling that he would crack my faggot head, I was a “cock-sucking son of a bitch” and that queers were destroying San Francisco.”  The guy physically attacked me but was restrained by other Committee members.

At the Committee meeting I said, we won’t get anywhere with this kind of person on our committee and we only have one week. Some woman made a motion asking the Mayor to remove him. I voted for that! Once the meeting was finished, I went home and soon received a phone call from Chuck Forester the Mayor’s gay assistant who asked “Have you talked to the press yet?” I hadn’t. Then Dianne came on the line and said “Oh, this is so terrible. I can’t believe this happened.” So I asked her to get rid of the man and replace him with Barbara Cameron. I said, Barbara is a peacemaker and would be its first Native American and first lesbian on this committee. Dianne said “Consider it done.”

But before she hung up, she asked me, “What’s this arts stuff?”  Before politics, my life was always in the arts. Not mainstream artists, but women and people of color, as I said earlier, I studied and worked with the Gullah Geechee people and I was a photographer. The arts are where I have always been comfortable. I explained to the Mayor that the Consortium was a coalition of 5 different arts organizations from the African American, Latinx, Asian American, Gay and Women’s communities and the recommended allocation was not a large amount.  She said, “All right, just do it!”

GD: I was very polite with Dianne. I talked to her in an empathetic way. When it came time for the vote at Alice, it was really a tempest. We we’re meeting in the old Swedish American Hall on Market Street. It was packed. Dianne was there to make her speech. Then we presented the Chair’s Issues Report. I got up and I said, “Dianne has agreed to do the following things, but she has never delivered, and I urge a 30 day wait until she does.” She heard that. It was a spectacle. Over 450 people voted and Dianne won.

JJ: And we walked off with all the money. That was the ironic part!

GD: About 2 months later we had the first meeting of the new fiscal year. It was time to elect the Chair. The current Chair tended to cut women off when they were speaking, and women made up half the committee. He was nominated and then Barbara Cameron nominated me. I looked at her like, you want me to run against the president of the NAACP?  All 8 women voted for me and I voted for myself so I became the Chair.

As the Chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee, I was able to open the door to additional city dollars being directed to the LGBTQ community and having Barbara Cameron on the committee was one of the reasons we succeeded. For example, Barbara advocated for the Women’s Building of the Bay Area, which for some reason the Mayor hated. Barbara and all the other female committee members allocated $400,000 to reduce the Women’s Building’s outstanding mortgage balance.

Let me point out that at that time, Dianne was the first elected female mayor of a major American city. Behind her tough facade was a very empathetic person. She listened and learned something from the community members she interacted with. I remember saying to her, “Dianne, I hope you will remember our runaway and throw-away children who are selling their bodies on Polk Street to survive.” This was how the Larkin Street Youth Center was funded. The gay community’s relationship with Dianne deepened as AIDS spread. She became the leading voice of American cities whose public health systems were being overrun with AIDS patients who had no insurance and no income.

GD: So, Dianne expanded her administration when she ran for reelection to include former opponents and activists from the Alice Club, and many other people. I served on many different committees; the adolescent AIDS advisory committee; the Children’s and Families Council. I became the President of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, an independent multi-issue advocacy group.

But I want to go back before I leave anything out here. Mr. Jones kept writing grants to the Citizens’ Advisory Committee. Not just for the LGBTQ, but for many underserved communities like the Russian Senior Services, Women Incorporated and the Buddhist Refugee Resettlement Services, a group dealing with the Southeast Asian boat people. He would alert me to the application, and I advocated for them and they got on the docket. I was… what’s it called…?

JJ: …A channel.

GD: Many in the queer community were insulted by Dianne’s attempt to “clean up” San Francisco. She had grown up in a very prosperous family in a Pacific Heights mansion, and her father was a prominent doctor. She went to the Cathedral Girls School, a very posh private school. For some unknown reason, while gays were having sex in every public park in town, she decided to go on the warpath against the Mitchell Brothers, who ran the largest straight adult entertainment sex club in town. In response, the Mitchell Brothers financed an independent sex film that they screened at their venue for the pleasure of their patrons.

I went to the event they held to make their case against the city which was attended by a lot of people like Herb Caen, one of the iconic journalists upholding old San Francisco’s reputation. The Mitchell Brothers screened the film. The story was set in their movie theater and there was exact look alike of Dianne Feinstein, and Police Chief Con Murphy sitting in the front row. In uniform, Con Murphy reached into his briefcase and pulled out a dildo shaped like a cable car. The Dianne character spread her legs and as he put it in her vagina, she lit up. While the Mitchel Brothers’ film is showing, in the back of the actual screening room, there was this really loud laugh, and it turned out to be Police Commissioner Jo Daley, Dianne’s appointee. She was drunk as a skunk and was quoted in the Chronicle saying, “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

I’m saying all this because Dianne Feinstein became a national hero. Once a U.S. Senator, she campaigned for gays in the military, and became the leading national voice for all things related to AIDS. Many times, she was the only voice and she stood her ground in supporting LGBTQ rights. Not only that, she provided more funding for AIDS advocacy than any other U.S. elected official. Dianne also became the number one advocate against guns in the country.  She introduced and passed a national law outlawing the possession of automatic weapons.  This law reduced mass shootings and lasted for 10 years until George Bush let it lapse without a fight.

So what else is on your list here, Jeff?

JJ: Well, there’s several other things. But since we’re sitting here with Annie Sprinkle, a goddess of porn, would you talk about your history in the porn industry?

GD: Oh, I would love that. You know, it’s so rare to have porn be discussed in the context of queer history unless you’re talking with other sex workers.

Well, when I moved here, I had a job lined up at San Francisco State University but then it fell through. I had to survive. I had my camera, so I became an event and portrait photographer. I also hung out with my artist friends. Early on I got a job photographing the parties at The Trocadero Transfer. These events were really elaborate. They had a designer and they spent lots of money decorating the venue. They hired me because I didn’t do hard drugs, only a little marijuana. The previous photographer of their holiday party did not get one image in focus because the owner of the club put so many drugs up his nose. There was a lot of sex at these big events. This was the real Barbary Coast San Francisco. But the club was in Chapter 11.

I had a friend who did photographic stills for porn companies. I got hired to photograph box covers for gay porn. I also had a lot of requests from people to do portraits of them for their online profiles. There was a lot of sex everywhere and I went to a lot of sex parties. I started writing profiles, and then I became a contributing editor to several publications including “Drummer” and “Alternate” magazines. I also worked for “Hot House Video”.  It was both a personal and professional pleasure.

But when the AIDS epidemic came along, sex became a danger and the scene became mostly obituaries. I stopped doing my erotic work. Then I was diagnosed with HIV. I joined the very first study in 1983. This is an important part of my history. I am a survivor. One of the few. My reason for survival, I guess, is to tell the story of those who are not here. For a long time, I felt that was my job.

Then I went to work for the Shanti Project as the Community Education Director. Shanti Project is a San Francisco non-profit human resources agency that helped people with AIDS very early on. I was in charge of all the training videos, as well as the monthly newsletter. So all of my photography, even some of my commercial portraits, had an activist agenda. These were images of our community taken from within, an immersive research methodology within anthropology. I had learned from the basket-makers that only the native knows best. As a photographer, I began to allow the subject to direct my shoot. I would give up control. I tried to change the dynamic so that it’s not a photographer and a subject. It’s people talking to each other through the camera. That’s what it’s all about.

Same with my erotic stuff that I created with my crew of cohorts in San Francisco. It was about presenting a queer aesthetic, a queer viewpoint of life. This aesthetic didn’t exist in our childhoods, or in much of our adult lives.

After my AIDS diagnosis, doctors told me I would have full-blown AIDS within 3 years and that would be it. But then after 3 years, nothing happened. So I decided that I would make as much change as I could in the short time I had left. It turns out the doctors were wrong. I think I am a mutant. About 5% of people of European ancestry have some inherited immunity related to the plagues, like the Black Plague, of the Middle Ages. So I thought, I’ve got to go back into the BDSM and fetish sex worlds and celebrate the sexuality of the survivors. Many of us who were HIV-positive started celebrating queer sex again, safely.

I got involved in porn. I worked with “Hothouse Video”. My photo models were people I met on the street or in my daily life. In 1995, Rosa Von Praunheim, a celebrated German filmmaker, came to San Francisco to make a documentary about 100 years of queer history. He had a big budget from the “ARTA TV” and a film crew. After his premiere of “Transexual Menace” at the Castro Theater, I asked if he’d been to any San Francisco sex clubs like Blow Buddies. He hadn’t, so I said I’d take him there. He said, “We go tonight!”

Rosa had a large film crew and shot 40 hours of video in San Francisco for a 1-hour documentary.  A year later, Rosa called from Berlin and said, “Darling, we’ll have an exhibit of your photos. Come to Berlin for the Homo 2000 Festival celebrating the 100 birthday of ‘Magnus Hirshfield’s Committee on the Science of Sexuality’; we will pay for your flight and accommodations. I will send somebody to the airport to pick you up.”

The show of my photos was at the “Akademie der Kunste”, which has been a Berlin art center for over 300 years. At my opening, Rosa introduced me as a famous world-renowned photographer from San Francisco. There was a huge crowd with lots of press. Rosa gave me a big kiss, and he told the audience, “Darling, your work is about nature. Cocks and trees. It’s all about nature.”

In Berlin I spent two weeks staying at Rosa’s apartment. When I came back to San Francisco, Tom Ammiano, who was President of the Board of Supervisors, told me he had the same great experience in Berlin. San Francisco felt like a hick town compared to Berlin. This experience made me reevaluate my ideas about art. Berlin opened the door, and the world got bigger and bigger from my European art experience.

In New York, on Thanksgiving weekend in 1995, I met Rick Karp at the Lure leather bar. We hit it off and went back to the hotel where he was staying.  The next day he’s putting on his angora sweater and I told him he could be a porn star, he was a natural. A year later, he called me and said, “I’m coming out to San Francisco and I want you to introduce me to the porn industry.”

At the airport Rick didn’t look like the same person: He was covered with new tattoos by a famous artist, his hair was cut short and he was buff from working out. Hot House Video hired me immediately to do a shoot of him and they also hired him as the star in his first film. They brought me on the set to serve as a fluffer. It was really a big film. There were over 20 porn stars featured! Cole Tucker (Rick’s stage name) was introduced to the porn world!

After that, I did 2 erotic books, both published in Berlin by Volker Johnson, thanks to Rosa. In these books were landscapes, portraits, fisting, golden showers. bondage, flagellation and oral sex. I asked Volker, “How will you get it past US Customs?”  Barnes and Noble ordered the book at a German book fair and placed it in bookstores throughout the US.  Because they were published in Europe and had tasteful covers, it was seen as art and that is how the books got through customs.

In 2000 my mother, who had moved to San Francisco to be near me, had a stroke that left her unable to walk She was in assisted living which was the only place I could house her. She wasn’t happy. Eventually I asked my friend, Jeff Jones what he would do in my position. He said, “you are spending over $30,000 a year on rent and both of you are unhappy. Your mother and you should buy a house in Palm Springs and you should move there. Then your mother can live out her days and you will own a house.”  My mother loved everything about this idea. She was thrilled. So that’s what we did.

Some friends of mine from San Francisco had moved to Palm Springs to retire. They invited me down. It was winter with snow on the mountains and absolutely gorgeous. At the time that I left San Francisco, the dot.com bust was about to happen. The entire United States still has remnants of this diaspora of evicted San Franciscans.

My porn star buddy Rick was working as a realtor at Coldwell Banker in Palm Springs. On the first day of our search, I found the house I wanted and bought it.  It was all serendipitous. My mother lived the last 5 years of her life with me in Palm Springs and it was a gift to both of us.

JJ: Okay, now I want to talk to you about the QCC, the Queer Cultural Center, which you were a founder of. What do you think the impact of the Queer Cultural Center has been?

GD: Each of us who founded the QCC had a desire to present our art as a portrait of our community’s diversity, whether we were a person of color, a woman, or a white sis man.

JJ: When I wrote my first report about the boards and staff of the major arts institutions, you said to me, “Well, what about the queers?” So when I did my follow up study on arts funding at Grants For The Arts (GFTA) I compiled the statistics for people of color, women and queers.

GD: At the time, the mid-1980s, the City’s queer community was primarily white and male. People of color and lesbians were increasingly moving to the East Bay. White Gay men were the demographic majority in San Francisco’s LGBTQ community. The queer community struggled to include women and people of color. Creating the Queer Cultural Center was our dream.

QCC’s by-laws required that the majority of our board were women and people of color. We didn’t just add more activists, we added brokers, and artists who were activists for cultural equity. It was fun to be part of this. Putting the National Queer Arts Festival together and making it balanced and equitable, was a labor-intensive job.  Every one of us was involved. Ours was a working board.

JJ: Yeah, because we had no money. Not yet. The first grant that Queer Cultural Center got was from the California Arts Council’s Multicultural Advancement Program. They were awarding 30 grants of $2,000 a year for 3 years. The program’s Director, a straight Latina, said to me, “If people of color are the majority of your board, QCC is eligible to apply and you should.” We had originally inserted this particular language into our by-laws to give our organization credibility with the increasing number of people of color who were entering the philanthropic field. They were not sure they wanted to fund queers. But if you have a majority of queer people of color on your board, then they perceive your organization in a different way.

When we interviewed Pam Peniston, an African American lesbian, for the position of Artistic Director we were talking about the alliance-building that happened with the Community Development Block Grant Consortium (CDBG) of 1983. We succeeded because we built alliances with people of color. The first CDBG Consortium included Quentin Easter who was queer and African American, Elizabeth Min who was a queer Asian, Marie Acosta a mixed-race Latina/Native American, Alan Estes, a queer white man and Bruce Davis, the straight white Director of the Ethnic Dance Festival. We operated as a multi-racial lobby group; we sent selected combinations of people capable of addressing the interests of each Supervisor.

GD: We found some of the most talented, capable people in these communities. For a long time, I was totally enthralled by black women artists and their influence on me was huge.

JJ: Remember Adrienne Fuzee, the black dyke curator who was one of the original Board members of QCC and who died soon after we started QCC?

GD: Yeah, I loved her. Every government agency, every arts organization has to find a person like her; a queer person of color with a strong artistic vision.

JJ: That’s why Pam Peniston was the artistic director of QCC. Whenever her position was threatened, I stood by her at all costs. She was the key to our funding. She was the face of QCC and she enabled us to secure any number of grants. By 2010, QCC was one of the first LGBTQ arts organization to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. One of Pam’s artist friends started working at the Hewlett Foundation, and suddenly QCC was funded there as well.

GD: But you know, I have not seen Annie and Beth’s live performances but I would love to see them sometime.

B&A: We’ll have to do something in Palm Springs. We’re doing work about loving the Earth, environmental justice and eco-sexuality. These days we are Fluxus-inspired, queer environmental activists. We are curious about preserving your archive. Has your archive been placed yet? Where?

GD:  I have such a huge archive that it’s going to go to several different places. I’m working on that. I don’t have a place for my erotic work except for the Leather Archive in Chicago and possibly the “One Archives” in Los Angeles. I had an exhibit recently at LA’s One Gallery. I am also negotiating with Atlanta’s High Museum about purchasing my collection of baskets and photographs of the Gullah communities of the Sea Islands taken in the early 1970s.

Annie: We have so much in common that I’m surprised we haven’t met before. I lived in lower Manhattan in the 70s to early 90s. I was also briefly a fluffer! I had sex on the piers. I also went to gay men’s orgy bars at the Mineshaft, the Tryst and the Toilet. I had quite the leather wardrobe. I am a photographer too. I majored in photography at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. I shot for all the sex magazines, including gay men’s magazines. I was the woman who shot straight men for gay men.

GD:  New York, in ‘75 or ‘76, was wild and radical, but still you could be sent to Rikers Island or be given a lobotomy if you practiced queer sex. We were still living under archaic laws. In 1976, I visited a boyfriend who retired from the U.S. Navy and went home to San Francisco. I learned that being gay was not only legal in San Francisco, but it was also important. To anybody living in the rest of America, regardless of your background, this was a shock. So I thought I have to get to San Francisco.

Most of us couldn’t come out in our hometown or to our family, because we would have lost our jobs or our children. We could have been listed on a police profile. People moved from small towns to New York or Chicago. In the seventies, and there was a huge move from the East Coast to San Francisco and California. Ever since the Gold Rush, almost 150 years ago, San Francisco has thought of itself as the most important place in the world, when it is really just a village. You could put San Francisco in one neighborhood in Los Angeles. San Francisco is so incestuous and introverted that it believes it has invented everything and that, of course, is not true.

After the recession in 2008, I moved into West Hollywood and then East Hollywood for 12 years. In one month in LA, I met my partner of 15 years, Gordon Pollack, a fellow artist.

Mr. Jones created a following of art groupies, who worked collectively. Jeff created the California LGBTQ Arts Alliance, a statewide network of non-profit arts orgs and individual artists. The grant was challenged by artists in Southern California for under representation. As a former QCC Board Member living in  Southern CA they signed me up to expand the original network. Mr. Jones said to me “I’m sure there are some other queer arts groups in LA. Let’s sign them up to create a network.” But in L.A. there are 7 queer choruses and an orchestra and all women’s groups. L.A. had Harry Hay and the radical faeries, and the Mattachine Society before anything happened in San Francisco.

JJ: The Daughters of Bilitis founded by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon preceded them.

GD: Los Angeles built queers into their economy from the start, because art is the number one business there– a trillion-dollar industry. The art industry of LA has 5 times the economy of the Bay Area, including San Francisco. In one year I recruited 35 different organizations into the statewide queer Arts Alliance, funded by the California Arts Council. Nobody had connected them before. So they all said “sign us up.”

The Fowler Museum’s publicity person there was a very talented young woman who joined. The Hammer Museum joined. The Autry National Museum of the West joined. I discovered that Queers ran many of these organizations and served as the publicity and development directors of the Getty and many others. No one in LA ever said “no” to me. But in San Francisco, that’s the first word out of their mouth. We’ll have to think about it, the committee didn’t give you a high enough score, we don’t know if you qualify. It’s business.

I have to admit that Mr. Jones educated me about the power of money. He had a theory about LA funding. The Alliance held a series of public meetings, one at “Highways”, one at the “Macha Theater” in West Hollywood, a lesbian theater company. People came and listened, but they didn’t say anything, because they thought that they were already in the pipeline, but they were not. There still was no cultural equity. I retired as director of the statewide Alliance five years ago. Dante Alencastre, a film maker documenting trans gender activism, became the new director.

LA County adopted an ordinance about cultural equity that they learned about from San Francisco. Now cultural equity is required by the City and the County of Los Angeles. Los Angeles County has a 5-member Board of Supervisors and each of them has twice as many constituents than a US congressperson. The decisions they make affect everything in the country. Talk about cultural diversity. There are entire cities of Nigerians, suburbs of Ethiopians or Koreans. It’s just like really off the chart. There’s nothing like it. The Bay Area is tiny in comparison. People get the arts in LA. There’s money. Money and work.

B&A: Thank you for all you have done for queer arts, Greg.

JJ: You’ve been a very entertaining interview subject. I didn’t have to say much. I could just let you talk. That’s what my mentor Carlos Villa taught me. “Just let them talk!”

 

Keith Hennessy, MFA, PhD, is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in the fields of dance, performance, activism, affordable housing, and sexual healing. Raised in Canada, he has lived in Yelamu/San Francisco since 1982, and tours internationally. 

Hennessy’s work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by anti-racist, queer-feminist, and anarchist movements. He engages practices of improvisation, ritual, play, and protest to respond to political crises and personal unrest. With a focus on the poetics and politics of collaboration, Keith has shared power and creativity with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Annie Danger, Sarah Crowell, Snowflake Calvert, Marc Kate, Meg Stuart, Peaches, Guillermo Gomez Peña, Jassem Hindi, jose abad, Alley Wilde, Gerald Casel and more. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. Hennessy is a co-founder of CounterPULSE and 848 Community Space. Awards include Guggenheim, USArtist, NY Bessie, and SF Izzies. Venues include Impulstanz/Vienna, Kampnagel/Hamburg, SF MOMA, The New Museum/NY, TBA Festival/Portland, Velocity/Seattle, Ponderosa/Germany, YBCA, CounterPulse, CORE/Atlanta. Keith teaches widely at universities, festivals, and independent studios. www.circozero.org

Keith Hennessy: Hi everyone. Before we start, can you give me some context? What’s guiding the conversation today?

Jeff Jones: We’re interviewing people about the transformation of San Francisco’s arts community after the early 1990s controversies about the City’s arts funding policies. Events from the late 1980s and early 1990s radically altered the City’s approach from supporting big-budget organizations such as the Symphony, Opera, Ballet and Big museums that served primarily affluent white audiences to funding arts organizations rooted in all communities that comprise San Francisco’s population.

​This project is informed by the queer community’s feminism and militancy. Keith, you’ve always demonstrated a strong connection to both of these values, and that’s the specific reason we wanted to interview you. For many years, you have been involved in activities where politics and the arts intersect.  If you have any insights on how and why this process has evolved since the 1990s, that’s really what we’re looking for here.

B&A:  We are also concerned that the people who made this arts funding history started dying before this history has been documented or preserved. So we are creating this archive as a historical record. With all the push-back against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we think it’s important for artists, elected officials, educators and community leaders to be able to say, “Hey, they did this in San Francisco. Maybe we can do it here too.”

​And we have also witnessed and experienced your incredible contributions to sexual politics, sex education, sex worker rights and sex positive culture. Keith, you came from a small coal mining region in Canada, correct?

KH: Not coal– nickel. I grew up in Sudbury, Ontario. My hometown had the biggest nickel mine in the world from the 1930s to the 1970s. The entire post-WWII boom in the US was built from steel that is alloyed from the nickel from my hometown.

B&A: How did you go from that mining region to where you are right now?

KH: Who knows why some of us escape our hometowns and some of us don’t. I left Sudbury because I had to. Before I had any language to understand the kind of artist that I was to become, I knew that whatever I was, I didn’t belong in Sudbury. I dreamed of moving to a big city from the age of 11 or 12 years old. The furthest my mind could imagine was Toronto, 5 hours away.

​I started dancing in high school. I was being called a faggot every week and it got worse and worse. No classes or lessons, but I was a competitive social dancer. I worked with one partner and we would rehearse in the hallways and after school. In late high school, we started escaping to Toronto and going to clubs, including gay clubs, because that’s where the best dancing was. We were underage.

​The year after high school, I was so fed up with being told what to do that I worked 3 jobs, saved up all my money and moved to Europe for a year. I quickly realized I was a small-town kid with no idea of how the world functioned. I didn’t know how to be there. Then I saw modern dance. I saw Nureyev and friends (that was the name of the concert) in Paris. ​My path got clearer and clearer.  Mostly I spent time in France, because I spoke French.  I grew up in a bilingual-ish town and had taken French classes in high school. I wasn’t amazing at it, but I was functional. I also went to Germany and other places, but that was harder.

When I was in  France, I learned that the cool city in Canada was not Toronto, but Montreal. By then I understood class warfare and I knew I needed a college degree. So I went to university in Montreal, which is where I really started dancing. There’s a very vibrant dance community there.

I also became an anarchist in Montreal, but I didn’t want to be an anarchist with a college degree so I quit in my last semester of school, just so I wouldn’t have the degree or any other validation from the state. When I left university the first time, I thought to myself, ‘I will never come back except as a teacher, to change the system from within, and to work with students.’ I kept to that.

B&A: But didn’t you get a Ph.D. at UC Davis.?

KH: Not until I was in my forties and fifties.

B&A: Was that experience useful for you?

KH: Totally. I was raised in a family where we were supported to think big. I had older brothers and sisters who charted the path. Some of them went towards politics, or psychedelics, or travel… and by the time it was my turn, as the fifth kid, I was out of there. None of them traveled as far away as I did. I realized I could live anywhere in the world.

After Montreal, I hitchhiked with a buddy to a juggling convention in California. I decided I was going to stay in San Francisco and be a dancer, and that’s what I did. If you’re an anarchist, you disrespect nation-state boundaries. So when I moved to the USA, I stayed here illegally for the first 10 years.

B&A: What was your UC-Davis dissertation about?

KH:  I called it Ambivalent Potential. I focused on the 1970s and ended up whittling it all the way down to a queer and critical race analysis of contact improvisation. I looked at the internal tension within post-sixties politics: they could be liberatory or they could reproduce hegemonic or normative structures. Contact improv had all the ingredients to be one of the most radical dance technologies, but at the same time it was predominantly practiced by white people.

​How did it happen that a group of mostly straight white people could go into this space where everyone’s included, whether it’s the rave community or the Burning Man encampment, where alternative technologies look like they have liberatory potential but ultimately continue to reproduce heterosexual white norms? I’ve always been wrestling with that question about supposedly alternative cultures so that’s what I did my dissertation on.

B&A: Have you published it?

KH: Only as a ‘zine, but with over 1000 copies sold and probably 2000 copies in circulation.

B&A: Which artists or people inspired you the most in your teens and twenties?

KH:  I didn’t know many artists in my teens and twenties but I had an uncle who was a figurative sculptor, aka naked bodies. He was the first professional artist I ever knew. He was the freak of the family and lived further from middle class norms. When I moved to Montreal I was very inspired by Margie Gillis, a super emotional solo dancer and by a group called Mime Omnibus, who worked at the experimental edge of physical theater through mime with rich visual images and non-narrative dream structures. I didn’t have a mentor until I moved to the Bay Area and worked with Lucas Hoving when I was 22. Lucas, a former dancer with the Jose Limon Company, moved to the Bay Area from New York when he was an older man. His rigorous improvisation and composition classes left a deep impression on me.

JJ: What year did you arrive here?

KH: 1982.

JJ: The first time I saw you perform, Keith, was in 1989. You were with Contraband, right? I think I saw you dance at the Isadora Duncan Awards.

KH:  The Izzies, yeah.

JJ: When I first saw you, you were dancing with Sara Shelton Mann’s Contraband. Could you tell us what Contraband pioneered as a dance company that nobody else did?

KH: I think Sara Shelton Mann has had a profound effect, not just on San Francisco’s dance community, but also on dance as both a political act and as a healing art. Through a feminist lens you can track her career’s trajectory and her significance as a world-changing artist. She’s one of these classic, complex artists who has always been afraid of political identities and would probably never refer to herself as a feminist, even though last year she made an extraordinary work about reproductive justice that referenced the illegal abortion she had 60 years ago in the American South.

Sara’s body and mind know these stories very deeply and she has traveled a very feminist route. She has worked in male-dominated scenes and yet still found ways to assert herself and create her own path. She’s worked with extraordinary feminists such as the internationally recognized, pioneering lesbian feminist dance company, The Wallflower Order.

When Wallflower broke up and evolved into the Dance Brigade, Krissy Keefer and Nina Fichter hired Sara to make new work with them, and I got to be Sara’s assistant. They were the very first people in the local dance community to embrace Contraband. They brought us into Furious Feet: The Dance Festival for Social Change that they organized in the 80s and 90s.

Krissy and Anne Bluethenthal, two feminist queer women choreographers who lead with politics, created the first Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival. When they invited me to participate, I invited my two straight collaborators from the Contraband era — Jess Curtis and Jules Beckman, and we made this legendary dance piece Ice Car Cage with a driverless moving car that continues to be celebrated by people all over the world.

The work of many artists is deeply informed by feminism, but at the same time, there’s endless push-back. Not many young artists respond favorably to the word feminism because it conjures up the white feminists who resisted the brilliance and leadership of women of color, specifically Black women, among other conflicts about sex, sex work, porn, penetration, art…

As a teacher, I constantly have to walk students through white feminists who were intersectional before the word even existed. Socialist feminists like Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English were always lifting up intersectional politics because they were deeply involved with socialism and hard-left 1960s politics. They were always thinking about class and race. Now a weird trip is going on with dissing terms such as “feminism” and even with  “dyke” or “lesbian.” Simultaneously, I’m working with some younger queer and femme artists who really want to know, “Who were the queer women in Bay Area dance before us?”

With Clarissa Dyas, Alley Wilde, and Queering Dance Festival we are producing a public talk called Dykes in Dance, which is going to happen June 18 in Berkeley. There was definitely push-back from some of our younger colleagues who are very hesitant to embrace or see themselves in community with lesbians or dykes, as if these historical terms meant exclusion to them. When they hear “lesbian,” they assume those are the people who excluded trans women, or bisexuals, or sex workers, and the people who didn’t embrace Audre Lorde.

Anyways, many of the artists who were attracted to Sara were very politically engaged. Kim Epifano came out of the Dance Brigade. I came out of different anarchist scenes. Nina Hart was also very involved in anarchist and feminist politics. I was obviously queer from the late 80s onwards, and was extremely involved in ACT UP and Queer Nation; both crucial to the queeruption aka cultural and political uprisings in response to AIDS.

Those perspectives were always embraced in Contraband, but if you tried to pin down the group’s actual politics, you couldn’t do it. It was a liberatory kind of dancing. When you saw it, you felt like these people were making a new world: they were bringing more freedom to the body, and to each other, and to their communities. Contraband’s dancing, which normalized contact improvisation’s genderless roles and women-lifting-men worked through and against the structures of misogyny.

Sara is of legendary significance because she impacts all the political artists, from the people at NAKA Dance Theater doing really important work with immigrants and refugees to the Black queer collective “rupture.” Sara has worked with  and mentored 4 or maybe all 5 of them, including collaborations with them in her own work. But Sara herself does not fit into any of the dance categories or identity categories or arts for social justice / artist as social work categories that today’s grants demand.

JJ: Sara and I moved here in the same year—1978– and we’re the same age. Every time I saw her work, I could never figure out how to categorize it. It felt like there was some Buddhist overlay that I couldn’t put my finger on. She’s always had a really bad approach to fundraising: she writes descriptions of her work that only she can understand.

KH: I think she just doesn’t have the capacity to be a successful fundraiser because she grew up with extreme trauma and didn’t graduate from college. She doesn’t feel like she’s one of those classy people who can get through the gate.

​In terms of the funding world’s changes, Sara couldn’t get much funding in the 80s or 90s because she was too experimental, not strictly dance, and that kind of work was rarely valued by grant panels, especially in SF compared to NY. Now that kind of work can be valued, but she can’t get funding because she’s white, old, cis and doesn’t use the required politically correct language to describe herself or her working process.

​The fact that you can’t categorize her should be lifted up as what’s so exemplary and radical about her. The fact that you can’t figure out her exact relationships to people is the queerest thing about her. The fact that some of the more politically engaged artists to ever come out of dance in San Francisco, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Mexico City are deeply impacted by Sara Shelton Mann is significant. And yet she can’t get funding because she can’t connect her work to any particular political stance, social service, or any fundable dance style. In California and across the US the arts funding agencies have weaponized shallow versions of racial diversity and woke language and used it against actual political artists.

​I’m fairly successful at writing grants because I lie through my teeth and use bullshit language about race that embarasses me and my collaborators. I have to apologize to my collaborators of color and ask, “Do I have your permission to prioritize your role in the piece over mine, to overly emphasize your skin color and your historical background so that we can get money?”

These experimental queer Black, Filipino, Asian, Latino, and Indigenous artists go, “Yes, you get the coin, and you can say (almost) whatever you want about me. We know that arts bureaucracy is bullshit.” But the problem is that those of us who are actually political radicals and anti-racists helped create that language. You, Jeff, helped create that language. Because of you and me, especially you, so many new artists of color, queer artists of color, have been brought into the funding scene.

But at the same time, the language we created is now being used against us. It’s paying lip service to anti-racism and decolonization, saying that they’re going to lift up artists of color when they’re never actually going to give them enough money to live off, to support a child, to retire. In fact, they’re reproducing segregationist language, encouraging the most inflexible, separatist, and essentialist ideas about racial identity, and that language is then reproduced in the artworks all around us.

JJ: Yes, it feels to me like we are back to where the arts world was in the mid-1980s, when we had words like “multiculturalism” and nobody knew what it meant. The California Arts Council is a really great example. They have a so-called “peer review” process, but it’s not the peer review system of 40 years ago that was facilitated by specialists in the arts discipline, who knew the significant artists and organizations and who was empowered to interrupt and correct any mis-statements of facts made by the panelists.

​Today, to determine who the agency should fund, CAC and the Arts Commission rely on inexperienced panelists who often don’t know what they’re talking about, and the facilitators are supposed to remain silent. As a result, funding decisions only minimally take into account the quality or the originality of the art being created or the history of the organization. Unless you can employ the jargon of cultural equity and inclusiveness, what you’re doing as an artist becomes irrelevant. Moreover, last year CAC awarded a $60,000 grant to a non-profit with an operating budget of less than $10,000 because the process no longer takes into account the applicant’s capacity to manage the funds.

KH: I’m totally fine with giving artists and small non-profits huge grants. $60,000 is not very much money. If a tech worker of the same age with less experience in their field than any dance maker had a good idea they’d be given millions in venture capital. But CAC’s decision-making process is almost completely irrelevant. To get a better understanding of what was happening, I volunteered to be on one of the California Arts Council’s review panels. The pay was incredibly low and I confronted them about the absence of a decent wage. CA’s staff wrote back and said, “Well, we just do what we can with state funding, blah, blah, blah.” And that’s bullshit. If they wanted to fund excellent art with high community impact, they could pay more. Instead, they operate a totally bankrupt decision-making process and label it cultural equity.

​Being on a review panel showed me how it works: CAC recruits low level arts administrators who have full-time jobs. When these folks serve on the panel, CAC’s meager stipends supplement their existing salaries.  As a result CAC can continue to easily recruit review panelists with limited knowledge and experience instead of attracting working artists or seasoned and knowledgeable reviewers.

The process takes place entirely on Zoom and there’s no personal contact allowed between the panelists. You can’t even message each other. I was on one panel where you couldn’t see who else was there and I had to ask, ‘Could you please reveal the other people who are on the panel?’ They don’t want you to talk to each other. Some bureaucratic CAC staff member has conned the field into believing that this system produces equity and otherwise there will be bias. In “the old days,” being on a grant panel meant debating the proposals, learning from folks with different perspectives, even arguing. Now it’s all scoring. Data wins. As if increasing bureaucratization and dehumanization doesn’t create its own bias. We’re not that far away from AI grant reviewing.

JJ: Beth and Annie recently applied to the SF Arts Commission for a Cultural Equity Grant and the panelists tore them apart. The panelists had little or no idea about how non-profit arts organizations develop or how to measure success. Instead, the panel’s facilitator didn’t feel empowered to correct any statement that was untrue. Since many of the panelists only read some of the proposals, the main presenter of the proposal is crucial to the process being fair. The current system needs to be trashed and re-invented from scratch. I think it would be better to pay specialists in the non-profit arts world to decide the recipients of grants of $50,000 than to continue operating the current system, that is of the same caliber as Russian Roulette.

KH:  It’s complex. We would have a different set of troubles if we did that. I think we need a funding ecosystem where some grants are peer reviewed and other grants, especially for longer term organizational development grants where you need to build a relationship with the funder, are not. It’s weird to be subject to a new panel every year. For certain projects the concept of peer review panels makes sense, but the panelists need to be paid better. Low paid panelists reproduce certain problems that a more engaged panel wouldn’t. I just wrote a grant to the Arts Commission, my first one in many years, where I’m the only lead artist, and I got the lowest score I’ve ever had.

My bias is that I don’t talk to any funders ever. I don’t respect what they’re doing. They’re probably good people, but I’m lying to them constantly. If we talk, I’m going to reveal what’s actually going on, which is that the people getting the most funding are the biggest liars who have learned to game the system, not the best artists or the most curious and rigorous artists or the most dangerous to capitalism artists.

JJ: Yeah, the performative nature of contemporary American politics has completely taken over. Apparently, there’s no such thing as truth. All that’s left is the hollowed-out and endlessly repeated rhetoric that disguises the basic corruption of the status quo.

KH: Right. But the thing is, Jeff, you had some really strong critiques that were totally supported by your community. When you were pointing out the white supremacy in local and national arts funding, you were supported by a community of artists who were coming from the left, including many people of color. What’s happened now is that the language that you helped generate is literally now being used against people, to strangulate and stagnate the community.

​Three years ago, the California Arts Council basically said you had to pass a political obedience test to even apply. You had to write an approved racial equity statement to even be able to submit your grant. I spent days on it. I got so deep that by the end I felt humiliated because of how much I cared about it. Eventually I took the racial equity statement that the CAC used as their model, copied it, changed two words, sent it back, and it was accepted by the system. Proof that it was nothing but a fake gesture.

JJ: Many organizations of color should just say “I’m Black; what else would you like to know?”

KH: Right. My org helps a lot of queer artists of color to write grants and they’re like, “Do I actually have to tell them I’m Black and I’m gay in every answer?” I say, ‘Unfortunately, yes, you do.’ Then white applicants, who mostly don’t even mention that they’re white in their bios or mission statements, have to portray themselves as anti-racists who prioritize racial justice. If you don’t say it, you’re not going to get the money. That has little or nothing to do with producing good art.

​In fact, if you’re doing good art, you probably won’t get funded at this point because the people judging you have no idea what good art is. And yes I know there’s no such thing as good art, and that “good art” has been used against politically-inspired artists, especially non-white and queer artists. Despite the difficulty of determining quality I still think we should be concerned about it, constantly undermining normative understandings of good and interesting and valuable, but not giving up on art itself, on quality, rigor, experimentation, impact on the field. Undoubtedly there are great and curious artists getting CAC money, but there’s a disconnect between what they write and what they do.

​If I can lie,it means anyone can lie, even though I actually do create art with as much integrity as I can put into action. But we are also seeing new works that have no actual community involvement and the people of color who they supposedly “collaborated” with had no actual power.

JJ: Let’s go back to Contraband. What I remember most about Contraband was that it was a multidisciplinary performance where there was nudity and contact improvisation. Did that come out of Contraband, or out of Sara? Or did that come out of somewhere else?

KH: There was definitely skin in Contraband shows, but there was very little actual nudity. That was more in the works that happened around it, from artists like me or Jess Curtis who were more connected to sex positive scenes, queer scenes and sex worker culture. In Feminist and queer performance art there is a vital relationship to the body. Carolee Schneemann pulling a scroll from her pussy predates so many of us. But she leads directly to Karen Finley, who leads to different queer artists, and Ron Athey, who’s cutting himself and bleeding as an HIV positive artist. I love artists who transcend the boundary of the flesh; orifices and bodily fluids are important in my work.

Annie Sprinkle, you changed the world. You’re the most visible sex worker turned performance artist in the history of the world. There are really important things that happened in the long-running and constantly evolving post-porn project. We can see all of this movement between the Public Cervix Announcement and your Pornstistics, that asked questions such as  “What if I added inch by inch the dicks I’ve sucked, would they equal the height of the Empire State Building?”

There is a combination of shamelessness and self-reflection on the shadow sides of the porn industry that inspired thousands of people. This is feminist work. We see an independent woman fighting for the autonomy of her own body, rejecting shame as a colonial, patriarchal construction that tries to keep people down. The whole notion that sex work should upset us on moral grounds is bullshit propaganda that comes out of a colonized mindset. Queers have different ways of seeing this through sex-positive, feminist and queer legacies.

Sara is impacted by these worlds, but in the same way that she defends herself by refusing the disciplinary boundaries around dance, she also refuses to join any movement. She’s never felt at home anywhere. Part of her practice has been the idea that she is disconnected from everything and therefore she is in this liberated space. Faustin Linyekula, from Congo (DRC), one of the most important contemporary African dancers, who in his lifetime had experienced multiple names for the country of his birth once said, “The only country I know is my body.” He was also responding to political trauma on the body and refusing to participate in any particular identity.

Contact improvisation is a dance form that was first named in 1972, but comes out of a series of experiments impacted by 1960s era feminism, hippy culture, and critiques of power and hierarchy. It’s an anti-hierarchical form with no gender roles and no leadership, neither a choreographer or a man leading a woman in a duet. The ideals of 1960’s feminism, gay liberation, and left politics were adapted into this free-flowing dance form. At its worst, it’s a hippie/new-age modality that really should fade away. At its best, it’s one of the most radical technologies we have for rethinking intimate human relationships at the level of the body. It encourages us to improvise and negotiate how we touch and play with each other.

Sara was exposed to contact improv and it blew her world apart because she came from a dance world where the choreographer is in control, there is a correct technique, and you do it until you kill yourself. There’s a recording of Sara saying that when she found contact improv, it was the first time she could push against a man and be met in her physical strength and not pay for it, not be punished for it, not be hit back for it.

Sara brought contact improvisation into modern dance and merged it with psycho-spiritual practices from different teachers. She studied every new-age and alternative healing modality on Earth and she synthesized all of these practices. And she keeps moving. The work she makes today doesn’t look like what she made 10 years ago, or 30 years ago.

Her refusal to be categorized should be seen as queer, revolutionary and liberatory. I was rejected for many of my early grants because the panelists would say “that’s not dance”. They just didn’t get it. But Sara and Contraband did change the world. Now people recognize what I do in the dance world. It’s also why I had a home in Europe for half my life, because there you can be rewarded for rigorous approaches to conceptual and experimental dance where you don’t have to lead with a political statement to get gigs or funding.

Now we’re constantly divided by bizarre tensions: in the funding world, the weaponization of woke language; in the current struggle for Palestinian liberation, the revisionary and weaponized notion of anti-semitism. If you cared about antisemitism, you wouldn’t back the extremist right, white supremacists who have been anti-semitic since day one. You wouldn’t back an apartheid regime or justify a war that kills children, or support putting our tax dollars into the war machine instead of into the arts.

JJ: It’s all connected. In 1980, I was the person who ran the Census in San Francisco. That gave me a really good understanding of who lives where. But when I started looking at my clients such as Theatre Rhinoceros, the Women’s Philharmonic and the Mime Troupe, there was a disconnect: most of the arts money was spent entertaining affluent white people!

KH:  Not just any white people, to be clear: it was the upper class and the wanna-be upper classes who were being served… affluent!

JJ: The 1980 Census found that San Francisco was a city where people of color were the majority. I saw that maybe 1% of the money was going to queers, 1% was going to Black people, 1% was going to Latinxers and almost 2% to Asian Americans. The pure tokenism of it all kept bugging me. So by 1985, because I demographically knew who San Franciscans were, it became clear that the vast majority of the residents were not even taken into consideration. When it was time to hand out arts funding, the arts were perceived as something for the well-educated, the well-bred and the well-fed.

KH:  Let me do a slight intervention here. I think if you only lead with race, you create some of the problems that we want to avoid. If you refer to the audience of the opera as white and then refer to Contraband as white, you’ve really done a disservice to the actual liberatory politics that we want to uplift. What’s significant is that the core audience for the opera is people who own their own homes, while the artists and the audiences of Contraband were low-income people living precariously in rental housing. Sara Shelton Mann has been working with economically disenfranchised artists for her entire life. But there’s nowhere to write that on a grant application. Contraband was primarily an all-white troupe because of how segregated the dance scene was in the 1980s, but Contraband didn’t create that segregation, and with no money to pay  artists Contraband didn’t really have much power to change it.

​What’s different about the Bay Area compared to New York is that the vast majority of artists of color in the Bay Area did not work in experimental forms for many years. In New York and Paris they did. But in San Francisco, Black artists did Black dance. In Contraband white modern dancers had to work for almost no pay and attend a minimum of 3-hour long rehearsals 3 times a week; there was only a very tiny group of freaks that would and could do that. And none of us at the time were living off family funds… We worked in bakeries, restaurants, teaching dance, driving trucks and mostly did not eat out except in Mexican restaurants that served burritos.

JJ: I know that the end of Contraband was complicated. Sara herself told me that the problem was that she could not raise the money to support the company.

KH:  What happened is that the world gentrified and San Francisco hyper-gentrified. You could no longer make work here and not pay everyone. Sara had a highly functioning, amazingly productive, world changing company from 85 to 95. It’s also part of her working style to build things up, destroy them, and start again. It’s a very creative practice but it’s not sustainable.

JJ: But I don’t think that was true in the 80s. I moved here in 1979 and it was cheap. Sara told me that financing the Company became impossible.

KH:  Right. But what year do you think that happened?

JJ: I thought it was 1990. You’re saying it’s 1995.

KH:  Yes. The company continued with Mira: Cycles all the way until 1995. When Sara moved here around 1980, she saw that Margaret Jenkins and Brenda Way had companies; she wanted one too, but she was never supported and couldn’t figure out why.

JJ: She wasn’t part of the 4-person sisterhood: Kary, Margie Jenkins, Brenda Way and Chris Hellman, the Chair of the Ballet Board.

KH:  It wasn’t just that sisterhood. I would guess that all of them were raised with more money and more family coherence than Sara. She never assumed (or lucked into or sought out) that she would meet a man, marry him, have kids, get a college job or broad social support. Sara is the ultimate lesbian archetype without actually being a lesbian. She’s the crone witch who inspired thousands of children but never had a family of her own. She sacrificed family-making and financial security to build a world through dance.

JJ: Sara’s inheritors were people like you and Jess Curtis and others who started doing original work. After Contraband split up, didn’t you become a member of another collective?

KH:  Yes, CORE was made up of 5 people, the three “boys” from Contraband – Jess Curtis, Jules Beckman, me – plus Stanya Kahn and Stephanie Maher. We made one show, Entertainment for the Apocalypse (originally titled Psychic Driveby),which we performed in various places around the Bay, and in Salt Lake, LA, New York and Germany. It was similar to Contraband in that there were no political slogans on the stage, but the work was deeply political in terms of how we were thinking through the politics of the body, anti-hierarchical leadership, and what it meant to commit to expressing yourself. That’s not exactly true because both Stanya and I wrote and performed more explicitly political texts, but still not slogans. We produced work with no funding. We built everything ourselves. We performed in gorgeous shit-ass warehouses. I remember the conclusion of an early CORE performance: I was in heels and a gold dress swimming in the toxic dump of Islais Creek/San Francisco Bay while the other artists were on a pier holding giant flaming torches. You couldn’t use straightforward social justice language to describe the work. But you saw people who refused to be categorized by boundaries, women who were totally fierce in their relationship with the men on stage, grief about the death of revolutionary politics, and performances in alternative community spaces that we took over and transformed for our site-specific work. The body-art-collective as a site of activist ritual performance. The body and performance as a site of healing. CORE existed for about 4 years and then dissolved as we all moved on.

JJ: Where did you go after that?

KH:  Jess Curtis, Jules Beckman and I moved to France to be in Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard, an experimental circus that had money to pay us. Stephanie Maher moved to Berlin and created a dance space in a former squat, and had two kids. Then they bought land and made Ponderosa, an influential rural community and art space outside of Berlin with workshops and residences for experimental art and improvisation, which has linked San Francisco and Berlin for the last 20 years. Stanya Khan became a successful filmmaker and visual artist. She lives in LA, has a child, was in the Whitney Biennial, and had a big show at the New Museum in NY.

JJ: Wasn’t she a dancer also?

KH:  She started off in dance, but was always also a writer, visual artist, and activist. She was raised in a 1960s militant radical household, so she’s always engaged politics in her dance and visual art. She moved into filmmaking with her former partner, Harry Dodge, and they exclusively worked in film for years. A lot of Stanya’s notable works are experimental films that are primarily exhibited in galleries and museums. They’re brilliant.

JJ: I remember she was in the second or third National Queer Arts Festival.

KH:  Her work at that time was more performance art than dance. In one piece, she did a monologue about her mother while she took apart, cleaned and put back together a real gun on stage, next to a vase of jasmine flowers.

B&A: Tell us about 848 Community Space.

KH:  848 was founded in 1991, when Contraband was still going strong.This couple had a community art space that they didn’t know how to make sustainable. They were going to get rid of the space, so we decided to take it over. We kept the name 848. I was at the very beginning of my work in sexual healing and sex radicalism and I said, ‘I’ll co-found this place with my straight friend Michael Med-O Whitson, but it’s going be a very gay space.’ 848 ran for over 10 years on Divisadero before it became Counterpulse on 9th Street, and then another ten years before it moved (and purchased!!!) 80 Turk St in the Tenderloin.

​From the outset we tried to make a space that wouldn’t be identified with a single community. The very first Trans performance art and photography shows happened at 848 because no other venue would host them. Before there was a Black Choreographer’s Festival, we held a mini-weekend festival of all Black choreographers. Before there were any Asian dance festivals, we had weekend performances showcasing Asian choreographers and dancers. There was a contact improv jam every Tuesday. Carol Queen and Patrick Califia held sex parties at 848. There was a sex worker support group that met there and produced performances. There was a sex worker art festival. And buddhists met there weekly for silent meditation at 7am.

It was a very queer, sex positive space, but the people involved in that side of it often didn’t know that it was also a vibrant contemporary dance space. Some of that vibe emerged from Contraband, which mixed contact-improv with social justice politics, feminism and queerness. Both CounterPulse and 848 were very liberatory spaces for experimental and politically-activated performance.

San Francisco had been a hotbed of experimental work, but only now is there a thriving community of BIPOC artists doing experimental dance and performance. Look at the work that Amara Tabor-Smith has done for the last 10 years, or rupture collective, or the work that Jess Curtis lifted up with some of the emerging Black artists fiscally sponsored or produced by his non-profit Gravity. Gabriel Christian and Chibueze Crouch of oysterknife just did a massive Black mass at Grace Cathedral called mouf/full. These experimental Black artists are referencing Black folkloric forms and Black diasporic culture, but they also see themselves as contemporary artists who don’t want to be constrained by their racial identity, but liberated.

JJ: Where did Jessica Robinson go? Is she still around?

B&A: She became the brilliant Executive Director at CounterPULSE.

KH:  Jessica Robinson Love rocked CounterPULSE. She took it from this ragtag, barely funded group and stewarded the transition of 848 to CounterPulse, from Divisadero St to on 9^th & Mission. Jessica grew the staff in a way that empowered queer women’s leadership.  She networked with funders and secured grant money to pay rent, staff, and to innovate expansive programming. With a team, she pioneered all kinds of amazing anti-racist and pro-immigrant dance projects. Jessica supported a very expanded concept of dance.

​After 10 years, just as the organization was going to move to the new building, she stepped down. I imagined her thinking, “Whoever takes on the ED job is taking on a project for 10 years and I’m going to bow out.” She went into philanthropy. She was never that solid as an art maker, but her creativity thrived in arts administration and executive leadership. Jessica left CounterPulse and the arts to move towards funding larger social justice projects.

JJ: Did she leave San Francisco?

KH:  No, she stayed. She really dropped out of the art world and went onto the field of international development. She passed the leadership of CounterPULSE to Julie Phelps, who literally came into the art world in the Bay Area as Jess Curtis’s assistant and then mine. Julie stewarded CounterPULSE for 7 years and raised 7 million dollars to buy that building.  She further developed the organization’s queer, anti-racist, feminist, and neighborhood-based politics. With her team she created programs of art for poor people and for disenfranchised and marginalized populations. Jessica Robinson Love and Julie Phelps have left an extraordinary legacy in San Francisco.

JJ: I noticed that soon after the Cultural Equity Grants Program started operating, most of the organizations Grants for the Arts wouldn’t fund got funded by the Arts Commission, and then subsequently got funded by Grants for the Arts. That was the new approach for many people.

KH:  Yeah, many people did that, including me.

JJ: I could never figure out why you were shut out in the first place.

KH:  Because the head of Grants for the Arts was a fucking idiot and a control freak. No one will say that publicly, but this can go into your archive. The GFTA panel recommended me for funding and she blocked it. This isn’t only about me. GFTA criteria was biased towards more professional and more normative organizations, gatekeeping who could advance in SF arts. GFTA didn’t give enough money to small organizations, while prioritizing millions for the large white led and white serving art institutions. For years GFTA offered the only steady annual operating funds, which is what you need to be able to hire staff. When you’re just getting project funds through the CAC or the SF Arts Commission, you can’t build an organization. You can’t build power.

JJ: I understand that. But in 1993 the reality was that Grants for the Arts was the biggest arts funding source. Back then, Blacks, Latinos, AAPIs, Native Americans, women, queers, together received about 8% of the agency’s funding and almost half went to large organizations.

KH:  The creation of the SFAC Cultural Equity Grants Program was brilliant and goes down as one of your central legacies Jeff. Your tombstone will have a lot of text, but that will be one of the statements on there. Without Jeff Jones we wouldn’t have had the Cultural Equity Grants program and its very radical impact on the Bay Area’s arts community or its global impact because what happens in San Francisco affects the world.

JJ: Yeah. No other city has set up a Cultural Equity Grants Program anywhere else, but by osmosis it seems we won that battle.

KH: Now grants across the US use the language of racial equity and radical inclusion to lift up disenfranchised people because of the pioneering work that you and others did with the San Francisco Arts Commission.

JJ: At one point, after I wrote my first report on hew agency, Kary Schumann contacted the Board Chairs of my clients and told them that they needed to fire me.

KH:  She’s part of a long line of nepotistic, jealous people in the San Francisco city government. But I need to say, at one point you said, “ Close GFTA and leave only the Arts Commission.” I fought you on that behind the scenes. I did not agree.

JJ: I’m very happy I lost that battle because I’ve noticed that some GFTA decisions are now actually better than a lot of those happening at SFAC.

B&A: How long was Kary Schumann the head of Grants for the Arts?

JJ: From 1978 to 2019: 41 stagnant years. When London Breed got elected to a full 4-year term as Mayor, the first thing she did was fire Kary.

KH:  Kary was a tyrant, but her replacement Vallie Brown was a completely inept person who was involved in the pettiest shit-ass nepotistic politics in San Francisco history.

JJ: Annie and Beth got funded. That’s all I’ll say.

KH:  We are not better off with Vallie Brown and it’s wonderful that she’s leaving the job. The best thing to happen with GFTA recently is that they’ve realized it should be a multi-year grant. So now the applications will be for two years. Many countries with more intelligent arts funding give multi-year grants to established artists and arts organizations.

​The Republicans have basically gone to war with San Francisco and have declared the city’s death on their national news. It’s the combination of real politics and the politics on the street, from San Francisco not taking care of its houseless people to the Republican’s war on the City’s reputation. The decrease in tourist dollars equals a decrease in GFTA money.

JJ: Yes. The amount available to the city is unknown right now. San Jose adopted that 2-year approach 10 or 15 years ago. I could never figure out why San Francisco didn’t follow suit. The California Arts Council has those absurd state and local partner programs which are a total waste of money that should go to artists instead. Each one of the 56 counties gets a minimum of $75,000. What do they do with it? Nobody knows.

B&A: How important have grant writers been to you, Keith?

KH: Grant writers have never been useful to me because either they cost too much money or they don’t understand my work. So I have learned to write grants in opposition to grant writers. I’ve always been very inspired by Jeff Jones and I’ve followed his work very closely, but I was never the right candidate for him to write my grants.

JJ: That’s untrue. I wrote the MAP proposal that funded you.

KH: One grant, yes, and only because I was part of National Queer Arts Fest. But in general you were not my grant writer and the grant writers that my friends worked with all charged too much and wrote extremely generic bullshit, which of course worked but I wasn’t yet prepared to compromise like that. I tried working with Nancy Quinn and a few other people when I had some money. Every one of them failed for me. They tried to fit me into boxes that were not real. If I used any of my own language, I was immediately unfunded. So I had to fight my way into the grant world and in the last 10 years I’ve really enjoyed the money that has produced all my projects and it has allowed me to support hundreds of other artists.

B&A: We are so glad you’re getting the bigger bucks now, Keith.

JJ: In the early nineties, there were a number of radical political factors at play. Frank Jordan was running for Mayor. He went to the Castro and a bunch of people hijacked his shoes and displayed them in the front window of the Castro’s Queer bookstore. Right before that, when the governor vetoed the gay & lesbian rights bill, a bunch of people marched down to the state building and set it on fire. I was there.

KH:  Me too. I was not in the front line, but I was two steps behind. When the barricades went through the window, I was standing right there cheering.

JJ: Then right after that, there was the Hunky Jesus controversy. And there was the controversy over the minister who Mayor Jordan appointed to the Human Rights Commission who said that queers should be stoned to death because that’s what the Bible says. It was really amazing to be in City Hall watching people from our community screaming at the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors. They knew they had to do something. You were still doing 848 then, right?

KH:  Yeah, we started in ’91. I think we were also very much in that 1990s zeitgeist. There were all these different trajectories through the 1980s, including ACT UP, Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers, and other groups. But there were also hundreds of smaller groups, collectives, and artist collectives.

​There was a massive queeruption or queer cultural uprising all over the Western world in response to the political repression of gay men and queers during AIDS. When people realized that the government would let you die and actually participate in your death, that was a radicalizing moment when a huge political shift occurred. It’s not unlike what’s happening right now around Palestine. Watching Biden’s regime trying to silence dissent and seeing the big universities surrender to Congresswoman Stefanik’s McCarthyite trials has literally empowered the protestors. They have nothing to lose now. The government is more concerned about people saying “from the river to the sea” than about the fact that the US is buying the white phosphorus bombs the Israelis are dropping on Palestinian families.

In the early 1990s, the first waves of massive gentrification affected cities. Embattled artists and queers who needed cities to survive were being pushed out. There was the AIDS activism and the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. But by then, those battles were over at the street or community level. The people leading the 1990s intersectional feminist movement were anti-racist and pro-sex and understood the class politics of the sexual body.

People don’t realize it, but we were having early discussions of antiracism and sexism in queer politics too. Every single ACT-UP and Queer Nation chapter had to ask, “Are the white gay men in charge, or are we gonna let women be in charge? Are we going to let people of color speak and lead?” Every chapter had to face structural racism and sexism in their organizing. The diversity we have today resulted from those struggles, even if many of those fights seemed petty and annoying.

The last thing I’ll say is that there were aesthetic impacts too. The cultural revolution in response to AIDS and the zeitgeist of class politics, race politics, gender and sex politics, produced an extraordinary amount of art and culture. The legacy of those lines of inquiry and artistic production are still very activating today.

JJ: Yeah, what was happening in art happened in politics. In the early 1990s it was almost anarchy. We weren’t afraid and we didn’t care if straight people didn’t like Piss Christ, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos or the Hunky Jesus contests on Castro Street on Easter Sunday. It was a bigger movement that took many different forms. Everything seemed to converge: Queer Nation, the Transgender Rights Ordinance, the mayor’s shoes being ripped off, the launch of the Cultural Equity Grants program, the defeated re-election campaign of George Bush Sr. It was an extraordinary moment of queer politics.

KH: A book could be written about the history of the unpermitted marches in San Francisco. I’ve been here long enough to watch multiple generations wake up to the fact that you don’t actually need, and generally shouldn’t ask for, permission to march. The Dyke March became legitimized through arts funding and got permits afterwards, but not at the beginning.

We, my Circo Zero co-worker Alley Wilde and I, produced an event last year called Queer Joy. It was a very off the grid thing where we got different performers to perform along Valencia Street in alleyways and parks. We traveled to each site with a sound system and a group of people waving these beautiful flags made by Monica Canilao, a collaborator of mine who also works with Annie and Beth. The police came and asked, “Where’s your permit?” We said, “You must be new here. We don’t need one. Keep us safe or go away. Or hang out and enjoy the art!” And they admitted, “You’re right. You don’t need a permit.” You don’t need a permit to walk down a street in San Francisco if you’re too numerous for a sidewalk: it’s freedom of expression and you have a right to do it. I’m from the anarchist school of culture, so I would do it anyway.

B&A: What unique contribution do you think you made to San Francisco’s art history?

KH:  I think I helped foreground an anti-disciplinary approach to experimental performance and to pioneer a mashup of the sex-positive world with the art world and with the world of far-left politics. I brought those things together and nurtured a legacy that is still in progress. I also  pioneered “no one turned away for lack of funds.” I advocated for it starting in the 1980s and now it’s a norm in many places in the Bay Area.

B&A: Thank you for all that. What more do you hope to achieve, if anything?

KH: I have a lot of artistic ideas I’d still like to explore. I want to find ways to bring together the work I’ve done around dance, anti-racism, sexual healing, intimacy and pleasure healing. I would like to build more bridges between dance and performance and the sex and intimacy work that includes trauma informed consent and new ways to practice and innovate more ethical and free relationships between humans, as well as between humans and all beings and the earth itself. I think about capitalism politically and as a system of relationships that we need to redesign through practice. It’s not about taking down leaders, but about creating new political systems by creating new forms of human relationships. And I want to spend more time in water, dancing and healing in water.

B&A: How do you feel about trigger warnings for dance performances?

KH:  I’m definitely disappointed that the bar for trigger warnings is so low. In 2023 CounterPULSE wanted to post a trigger warning for potential nudity in my performance with Ishmael Houston-Jones, in a venue I originally co-founded as a sexually explicit performance space. I do understand how some younger queers  are thinking and feeling, especially the trans or nonbinary people with their different ways of processing gender dysphoria and gendered abuse. I don’t think a nudity warning, for example, should happen for dance or performance art. Especially for elder gay, politically radical, artistically experimental artists who have been naked on stage for 40 years. But I do recognize the importance of certain kinds of trigger warnings.

​ In early feminist theater, there was a real question: if your work was anti-rape, are you allowed to show a rape on stage? Feminist theater has now hit a point where it was no longer useful to show rape on stage because it pushes too many people into their traumas without giving them a way out. This is constantly an issue in film. If you reproduce the slavery era in a movie, should we see brutal whipping or should it happen off-screen? What do we lose or gain if we don’t acknowledge it? There are reasons to think about the potential for art to trigger trauma, but when trigger warnings happen at the very lowest common denominator, they’re actually a form of surveillance and control that feels neither democratic nor liberatory.

I think “safe space” as a political strategy is a dead end. I think we need to do more work, not only around safety, but around resilience, risk assessment, and being able to work with trauma.

B&A: We agree completely. You’ve been an artist on the cutting-edge doing radical work and sexually-oriented work. Do you have any guilt or remorse over any “mistakes” you may have made?

KH:  I wouldn’t be human if I hadn’t made some mistakes and I wouldn’t be a good human if I couldn’t own up to them. I should have tried to institutionalize myself in the funding world earlier than I did, but my anarchist tendencies kept me from doing so. In terms of both race and gender politics, at different points in my career I have overstepped my bounds as a white male artist. I do recognize that I did things that hurt people’s feelings and hurt some relationships. There are a few occasions where I just exploded and burnt things down or provoked more than made sense to the context when I should have found a more subtle way to move forward, but mostly I regret not being more radical and louder. Oh and sometimes I really regret that I didn’t save and invest any money.

B&A: As you reflect on your contributions to the arts, and the challenges you’ve overcome, what advice or insights would you offer to emerging BIPOC and LGBTQ artists today.

KH:  The first thing I would say is to put aside a minimum of $1,000 per year into savings for retirement. Next, I’d say have no shame about gaming the system that was literally structured to oppress you. You’re allowed to lie. You’re allowed to misrepresent. You’re allowed to double dip. You’re allowed to, as Remi Charlip asserted and practiced, make the same work twice and simply change its name.

Alley and I have had to convince many artists of color that in grant writing they’re allowed to bend the truth, exaggerate, even lie and cheat. Grant guidelines do not want you to write what many artists really want to write: “We want to get together with some excellent people and develop new ways to love each other and lift up each other’s creativity. We’re dancers and musicians who love a good show but we’re not sure what will happen. Most likely there’ll be a show, but if not, your meager $20K or $50K will be well spent supporting artistic experimentation that reimagines white supremicist capitalist heterocis patriarchy. Oh and by the way here are samples from the beautiful work last year and the year before.”  You wouldn’t believe the contortions we go through to rewrite that proposal in exactly the right number of words and characters, with necessary yet repetitious assertions of our commitment to racial equity. Artists of color are so much more familiar with being surveilled and being targeted, of needing to be respectful and follow bureaucratic rules, while white people get away with a lot more. I really try to empower younger artists to disrespect the government and to disrespect bureaucracy when it’s not serving them. You’re allowed to speak out of both sides of your mouth. You’re allowed to lie on paper. ​

The third thing I’ll say is that your community and your political movements are beautiful inspirations and holders of your work. Be connected to political movements. Develop an ethical ground for your actions.. If your overall intention is to lift up your community and to lift up a revolution against colonial shame of the body, then say whatever you need to get the grant! Stay radical and experimental and uncontainable and ever changing.

JJ: I’d like to have a longer conversation with you about the current quagmires that we’re in around funding and politics, and how we’re in a period of American history where there doesn’t seem to be any ethical or moral backbone anymore.

KH:  I tend to stay away from the idea of morals and I go to ethics, because I want people to have an ethical base for what they do, more than a moralistic sense of right and wrong. So yes, I think we need political ethics. We need to actually understand what feminist ethics look like, what a kind of queer ethics or anti-racist ethics or de-colonial ethics look like, and ground ourselves in those kinds of movements.

B&A: Thank you so much for sharing your life experience, thoughts and your survival strategies Keith.

JJ: Yeah, this was great.

KH:  Love you people. Good luck. Goodbye.