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.

 

Marga Gomez is the writer/performer of 14 solo plays which have been produced in New York at La MaMa ETC, Dixon Place, Under The Radar Festival, and internationally at the Edinburgh Fringe and Montreal’s Just For Laughs Festival.

She is an artist-in-residence at Brava Theater in San Francisco. Her awards include the GLAAD Media Award for Theatre, The San Francisco Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, The Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, and the 2022 United States Artists Fellowship. Her acting credits include “Fefu and Her Friends” (American Conservatory Theater) and a guest role in Netflix Sense8. She was raised in Washington Heights in a show business familia. Marga is also a stand up comedian and tours nationally. She also coaches solo performers online. Her website is margagomez.com

__________________________________________________________________________________________

B&A: Hi Marga, we just saw your show, Swimming with Lesbians. It was incredibly brilliant. We laughed so hard. It felt so good. You’re such a skilled performer. We are excited to talk to you.

JJ: Marga: When did you move to San Francisco?

MG: I moved to San Francisco in…well, I’ve always been cagey about the years because of, you know… show business. But I figure I’m not going to live forever. So, I’ll just be upfront with the years. I moved to San Francisco in 1976, the bicentennial year. My parents were entertainers who lived in New York City and I was their only child. I grew up in that milieu. I shared their passion. They worked in Spanish-language arts and entertainment. The community was a marginalized community: lots of people in it, but not mainstream.

When I came to San Francisco I didn’t really have any kind of plan except for freedom. Growing up with my parents, even though they were entertainers, my mother was very repressive and strict. I wanted to get away from her. They had just found out I was queer. I came out here with my first girlfriend but we broke up on the ride.

When I first got here, I assumed that the Castro would be a Cuban neighborhood. I went to the Castro Cafe because I thought they’d have rice and beans. They did not. Guys were wearing Fidel Castro hats and green khakis. Then I realized nobody spoke Spanish. But I found a place to live very easily because there were all these cafes, like the Meat Market Cafe in Noe Valley where there were big bulletin boards everywhere, because we didn’t have Craigslist or anything like that. Everything I did came from a bulletin board. I found a cheap room to rent. At that time, artists could afford to live in San Francisco.

The central radius of my life became the Castro. My housemate lived in Duboce Triangle but she wouldn’t let me use the kitchen. She made costumes for the Angels of Light. So that was my first introduction to the Angels of Light and the Cockettes. Then I started going to feminist theater. There were companies like Four Short Women, Les Nickelettes and Lilith Theater.

I lied my way into a job at the Acme Cafe on 24th Street. Everyone who worked there, be it a cook, barista, or wait person, was an artist. Plus, I had another job working at Fanila’s Finnish Bathhouse. I gave out the towels. Some people there had sex and some were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The woman who worked the counter with me was in Lilith Theater. So, I asked her all about it.

One day, in the morning as I was putting the muffins out at the Acme Cafe at 7 am, I saw Carolyn Meyers from Lilith walking by. I ran outside and asked her, ‘do you ever have auditions?’ They just happened to be having auditions for women of color. This is sort of a double- edged sword because it’s tokenism; but whatever, I auditioned. I was pretty green and erratic as a performer, but they took me because I am Latina. And I’m charming. In 1978, I wound up in Europe on tour with Lilith Theater. I was 21.

B&A: How old were you when you got to San Francisco? Wikipedia said you were born in 1960.

MG: Alright, I’m gonna say it. I was born in 1954. I lied to my Wikipedia. That’s show biz. But the jig is up, and even now as I’m talking to you, I’m trying to recalibrate what the actual years were. So I think I arrived when I was 19. You can do the math.

I went from this feeling of entitlement, being a kid with show business parents who were stars in the Spanish language community, to suddenly touring with a feminist theater company throughout Europe. The governments in Europe were very supportive of the arts and artists, so we were treated royally. We played in a lot of festivals, circus tents, that sort of thing. There were so many feminists and lesbians who came to the shows. And men who were feminist in their own way.

My touring performances in Europe were the first time that I actually earned money as an entertainer. I worked with Lilith on and off. I think I went on a second European tour with them in 1981; then I came back to my job making omelets at the Acme. There was a publication back then, called Backstage I think, where you could find out about auditions.  I auditioned for Les Nickelettes and worked with them on a couple of shows. That was basically my life from 1976 to 1982.

Lilith was savvy with getting grants and doing business. We shared this big office space at the Women’s Building on 18th Street with Women Against Rape and various other organizations. I’m glad to see that the Women’s Building is still there, which is kind of amazing. We were right over the Irish bar, which I don’t think is there anymore, right?

JJ: Absolutely. Yeah, that was the Dover Club, the Irish Republican Army bar in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The bar was already there when the Women’s Building bought the building.

MG: From 1978 to ‘82 I worked with the Les Nickelettes which was a lampoony, satiric, silly company. But they were doing something important because at that time women weren’t doing bawdy burlesque comedy. Denise Larson published a book in 2021, Anarchy in High Heels: A Memoir about Les Nickelettes. Denise is a lovely person, and she has been so supportive. There is also a documentary about the Les Nickelettes in the works.

In 1982, just before we knew anything about AIDS, I was working at a store on Castro Street called High Gear selling gym wear: T-shirts, gym shorts, duffel bags, socks, jockstraps… Selling jockstraps is a pretty easy job. I worked with 2 gay men that I loved very much. I was pretty happy. Around that time the comedy scene was blowing up. There was Jane Dornacker with her hilarious traffic reports, and her band Leila and the Snakes. She also performed live with the rock band, The Tubes for a couple of years.

I really wanted to do stand-up comedy so I started going to comedy clubs. I think Robin Williams began Mark and Mindy a little bit before that. There was the Holy City Zoo, a dark, aggressive and misogynistic club that was not good for me at all.  The Other Cafe was a little bit better. Sometimes Paula Poundstone or Ellen Degeneres came through the door.

But I did not do very well at The Other Cafe. At the open mic nights, they always put me last on the bill, if they even put me on at all. They called it, “comedy audition.”

I was in Europe when Harvey Milk was shot. In 1979, there was that demonstration with the police cars turned over and all that. I remember seeing the newspapers with the largest, darkest headlines. I couldn’t believe it. When I got back in 1982, people were discussing releasing Dan White from prison. We held a big demonstration on Castro Street and a lot of us were mixing political activism with comedy. We knew that comedy was a powerful weapon. So we were pumping up the crowd, rallying with the upper hand that you have as a comedian.

Then, on a telephone pole, I saw a notice about Valencia Rose’s gay comedy night. I went and it was like a complete 180 from what I had been experiencing at the straight comedy clubs.

You know, when you do stand-up, you have to make yourself into a persona. As a lesbian, I didn’t know how to do that, I just did quirky stuff. But I didn’t mention anything about my sexuality. But the first time I went on stage at the Valencia Rose I could just talk about dating, about coming out. There was always a full house, because finally queer people were not the butt of the jokes. These were the jokes that everybody was waiting for. We were doing them, with waves of love and laughter simultaneously.

Donald Montwell and his boyfriend Jimmy managed the Valencia Rose. Donald was definitely one of my mentors, because I was still not sure if I wanted to be out.  Did I want to risk not getting my own sitcom or anything like that? Which is what happened if you were out.  Ellen was doing really well doing comedy in San Francisco, but she was not out.

Donald and Jimmy were not your stereotyped gentle gay artists.  Instead, the two of them were brawlers. On White Night in May 1979, when the cops rioted on Castro Street and were  beating the shit out of everybody at the Elephant Walk Bar, I guess the cops pushed Donald over a newspaper box.  He was injured, he sued and got lots of money. He and Jimmy were always down to fight with cops.

JJ: Ron Lanza and Hank Wilson owned the Valencia Rose.

MG: They were school teachers. Tom Ammiano was also a school teacher before he became a politician. He was always a very funny person who wanted to do stand-up. Of course, we all knew that if you went to a club like The Punch Line, it would be pretty painful and very hard to beat the misogynists in the audience.  Tom wanted a place to do standup and they came up with the Valencia Rose.

JJ: I had been Tom’s campaign manager when he ran unsuccessfully for the School Board in 1980. I also became one of Hank Wilson’s long-term political allies. He asked the questions that most people didn’t dare ask. Tom’s motivation was that he really wanted to be a stand-up comedian and the Valencia Rose started his career. That’s where I first saw you Marga, with Tom, on a double bill.

MG: At the Valencia Rose, everyone there knew Whoopi Goldberg. That’s where I met Whoopi Goldberg.

JJ: Me too.

MG: Whoopi was always supportive of Donald and Jimmy, who was also very good at throwing comedians out of the club. Because when we would have an open mic, some comedians would come up there and they would be kinda disrespectful and weird, Jimmy would just smile because he would get to throw somebody out. He just had this bouncer side. He was a playwright as well.

One of the Jehovah’s Witnesses I met at the bathhouse told me that the Valencia Rose building had been a mortuary. She said that it was a painful place for her because that’s where the previous owners had made most of their money during the Vietnam War. It was one of the main mortuaries where the corpses of the soldiers killed in Vietnam ended up.

JJ: It was ironic that this former mortuary became not only a comedy club, but by 1985, a place where the friends and families of people who had died of AIDS began holding memorial services that were celebratory.

MG: Then they lost the Valencia Rose. There was a tax issue or whatever.

JJ: The building was purchased by the now defunct New College of California.

MG: Yeah, now it’s a bicycle store. It fell out of their hands because they were artists, so they weren’t really keeping the books that well. But that’s where I established my voice as a comedian because my mentor, Donald Montwell, was very firm that I had to stay out of the closet. I couldn’t go back in.

He had this philosophy that being queer isn’t just about who you fuck. Being queer is about being subversive and being a resistor: like Paul Krasner, a straight satirist who published The Realist, a magazine that was quite renowned in the anti-war movement and the resistance movements that came after that.

I’d say Donald, Joan Menkin and René Yañez were my 3 mentors.  Joan was one of the most magnetic, arresting performers you could ever see on stage. She was radical politically and most of her work was with the Mime Troupe. She was very committed to the people’s movement and to crating art for the people. They might have reached out to me because they were looking for a Latina.

I appeared in a Mime Troupe show called Crossing Borders. It was about Salvadoran immigrants and what they were going through. I went on tour with that show. That’s where I met Stacy Powers-Cuellar, who now runs Brava Theater. Maria Acosta played my sister in the show, or a cousin or something. It was a great experience to work with them. But I didn’t really have the chops, to be honest.

A lot of my growth as a performer has been by working with really great performers. I never took an acting class that wasn’t corny. By throwing myself into the highest levels of a performance company, I had to sink or swim. That’s what made me the performer that I am, or am not.

My connection to The Mime Troupe and Culture Clash happened around the same time.  Culture Clash happened because I was with Monica Palacios, one of the comedians I met at the Valencia Rose. We wound up being lovers for about 5 years. Well, she says 3. I say 6 years. So, we’ll split it at 4. We started a little comedy duo called Gomez and Palacios, the funniest Latina Chicano comedy duo in the Universe and Oakland. We did some skits.

Monica had a connection with René Yañez from Galeria de la Raza. She and René were very close. She wound up doing some events and installation projects with René. I think this was in 1984. He wanted to do something different from the usual folkloric Cinco de Mayo kind of entertainment. He loved comedy and wanted to have an evening of Chicano, Latina, LatinX comedians. So, Monica brought me in. He brought in Richard Montoya who has gone on to be a very renowned playwright.

JJ: His wife is now the head of the California Arts Council.

MG: Cello? No kidding! Wow, that’s great.

JJ: Cello. Yeah, she’s the chair. Ellen Gavin was on that committee.

MG:  At first there were 6 of us:  it was Richard Montoya, Jose Antonio Burciaga, Herbert Siguenza, Rick Salinas, Monica and me. But basically it was more of a variety show because Monica and I were really the only ones who told jokes. Then Richard did. Herbert was very much into doing drag. Then Burciaga would come on stage. He was like our anchor. We loved him so much. He was a stout guy, very Tex-mex. He came out and he pulled out a machete, and had the audience drink from a bottle of tequila and then he’d read his poems. He was really our favorite. So, the 6 of us worked as a group. A variety show really was what we were. Then 3 of us left and Rick Salinas, Herbert Siguenza and Ricardo Montoya became the Culture Clash that most people know today.

JJ: Around that time, didn’t Ron Lanza open up Josie’s Cabaret?

MG: It was right next to the empty lot at Noe and Market where the Eureka Theatre formerly was before it burned down in the late 1970s. It was across from Cafe Flor. That little triangle was amazing. Then Josie’s got even more popular than the Valencia Rose. Now we get to the stage of the AIDS crisis. There was resistance to the inaction of President Ronald Regan

JJ: I remember seeing Brian Freeman at Josie’s. He started a group called the Pomo Afro Homos—the Post-Modern, African American, Homosexuals– that produced very dark satirical comedies.

MG: Brian actually changed my life when I was just starting to do my first solo show. At Josie’s I did stand up but I also started to stage my one-person shows there. It was a comedy club and a cabaret. It was a wonderful place to do solo performances, and shows with a small cast as well.  Brian put my name in the ear of George C. Wolf of the Public Theater who brought my first one person show to New York.

So, okay, now we’re in the 1990s. In San Francisco I met Josh Kornbluth at one of the comedy clubs.  He had just come from Boston. He was very frustrated by the comedy scene because it was just so apolitical and still racist and sexist.

He wanted to do solo theater so he just started to do it. Then the Marsh Theater opened up, which specialized in new shows. It started at the Hotel Utah. Stephanie Wiseman and her partner went from having a one-night show at Hotel Utah to getting the back room of a place called the Cafe Beano on Valencia Street. That’s where I did my first solo performance, Memory Trick, a piece about my mother. The show was presented by The Marsh, which now owns its own space at 1062 Valencia.

In the late 1980s, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was a very high femme. She was always disappointed with how masculine I seemed to her. I was unlike the little frilly girl she wanted. Our relationship was fraught. I never got to work it out with her when she was healthy, so I had to work it out when she was ill.

Both Josh Kornbluth and Whoopi Goldberg both made their careers as solo performance artists. The dramatic solo form has been really good for queer and BIPOC performers to get our stories out there, and good for our audiences.

So, I did this show, and I thought, I don’t know if I should be doing this. I thought my audience might get mad because I had only been doing comedy for years. But Memory Trick was very well received. Thanks to Brian I had a connection who wanted to bring the show to New York. After that, I just continued being both a stand-up comedian and someone telling stories.

Some of my solo shows weren’t just about my family. Some of them were about being queer. I did a show called Pretty Witty and Gay. That was in the 90s, the time of lesbian chic, when lesbians started going on the talk shows. I was asked to go on the Geraldo Rivera show. Well, I just couldn’t do it. I thought, this is a trap and I’m not gonna do it. It just felt wrong, like I was reducing myself to something on a TV show in between commercials with Geraldo. Even though he is Latino, I passed on it.

Instead, I wrote a show about lesbians in the media that I premiered at Josie’s and I had workshopped it at The Marsh. I was doing the show but I didn’t have all the lines. So, I had little cheat sheets everywhere. I wound up dropping my notes and they flew all over the place. I had to go down on my knees and just read them in front of the audience, which included Laurie E. Seid, and Kate Bornstein. They loved that I fucked up and kept going. From there, my show Pretty, Witty and Gay, got booked at the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

I do feel like I’ve been able to find opportunities without trying too hard. I don’t know if that’s the most sensible plan. I don’t know that I’d recommend that strategy because that’s also why I never paid much attention to the long range, to grant writing and all that stuff. Because I figured, hey, someone’s always going to be out there to book me at another biennial. The 1990s in San Francisco, for me, was a mix of queer comedy, Latino comedy, and I started doing a lot of events for Latino organizations.

B&A: When was the Whitney show?

MG: I think it was something like 1994. I remember thinking this is sponsored by Philip Morris. I’ve gotta say that cigarettes are bad. I just got to, because my dad had pretty much died because of cigarettes. So yeah, I’m no angel. I took the cigarette money. If I had known Jeff then, I wouldn’t have needed the cigarette money.

JJ: Did you perform at Life on the Water?

MG: Yes, I did. In fact, I got an award from the Solo Mio Festival. Who was responsible for that?

Annie: I was in the Solo Mio Festival too. There were four producers; Joe Bullock, Marcia Crosby, Kate Boyd and Billy Talon. Billy now performs as the Reverend Billy with the Church of Stop Shopping. Billy and the Choir are touring the USA with Neal Young right now.

MG: Yeah, but wasn’t it Ellen Sebastian Chang?

JJ: Yeah, and Joe Lambert was involved.

MG: A year later, Donald Montwell was pretty ill. He got an award as well from Life on the Water or maybe from the People’s Theatre Coalition. I think Susan Hoffman was the head of it.  I remember doing something for Joegh Bullock when he ran Climate Theater. I think it was some kind of crazy Halloween party or something on 9th Street.

B&A: I was just at his memorial. He was an incredible events producer. So, were you ever in the Queer Cultural Center’s Queer Arts Festival? You probably did several of them, right?

MG: Yes.

B&A: Jeff Jones would have written some grants to help fund those shows.

MG: Yes, my relationship to grants back then is that I worked for presenters who got grants. I personally never got a grant. But I must have gotten paid with some grant money.  When I did Memory Tricks, the show I did in New York about my mother, I remember not liking the audience feedback session because I felt they were telling me what to do as an artist.

JJ: Did you ever meet playwright Toni Press? We used to work together. She read a play at BRAVA and said the same thing as you about community feedback. She said it was the worst experience to be subjected to a bunch of people telling her how to write a play when she’s already written 20.

MG: Yeah, they’re called “talk backs” where you get to listen to audience members tell you “it’s not Latina enough;” “It’s not feminist enough.” I’m sorry, please go see something else!’

JJ: Yeah, the whole premise is that people are gonna come in and give you feedback but eventually you end up with people telling you what you should have done.

B&A: What’s your greatest achievement in your life and work? What do you feel most proud of?

MG: I’m a Gemini. So, my real answer is that my greatest achievement has yet to come. But off the top of my head, I feel very proud of how I adapted to the COVID lockdown. I didn’t stop and was able to put work out with live streaming. Work that meant something to people. Now suddenly overnight, I’m getting this thing, people are calling me a “Legend.” “Iconic.” That seems nice.

JJ: Okay, you’re getting really old.

MG: Right. It’s like, “why aren’t you dead?”  Sometimes on social media I see where somebody goes, “Oh I love her.” Then somebody as old as I am, if not older goes, “She’s still doing it.” Yeah, and my work is better. I run into people who say, “Oh, I saw you in the 1980s.” What am I supposed to say?  Do you think I’m the same person? Do you think I have made no progress? What is it like 40 years later? Come check out a show. All I ask is that every 40 years you come to a show!

Annie:  What gets me is, “You look so much better in person than in your pictures.” Ouch!.

MG: I think that’s better than the reverse. People should just shut the fuck up.

B&A: What gets us is that sometimes a person will just come up to me and talk about my old work and just ignore Beth. That’s just rude. All my work for 22 years now has been created with Beth. We are a team. Have you run into a problem when you are with somebody and suddenly you are “a legend.” “An icon,”

MG: Yes, it’s bad. It hurts. I will just say, ‘this is my partner’ and if they continue with their weird ass-kissing, I’ll just repeat, ‘this is my partner’. Sometimes you have to train people. They think there’s only one person there, and there’s usually two or sometimes there’s a group, and they’re just myopic. I would never just talk to just one person when there are two people there.

Annie: Of course, sometimes I get ignored, because Beth is a hot shit professor, and I’m not. So, it evens out.

JJ: I want to go back to the 90s. I remember that you were doing a show at the Castro Theater. You had just come back to town. You had gone to LA or to New York, or both?

MG: Oh yes. Was that the show with Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams?

JJ: It was in the early 90s, because I remember it being after the Mapplethorpe controversy, and Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ.

MG: That was probably 1993. We can look that up. It was a benefit for Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s film, The Celluloid Closet. Harvey Firestein was the emcee and he told some sort of lesbian joke that pissed off the women in the audience. Robin Williams was there and saw it happen. I was up next. So, I go up. I can’t remember what I did. Maybe something like ‘this is what a lesbian looks like.’ No big deal. But it was a big deal because the show had fallen into this pocket of doom that Firestein had accidentally caused. But then everybody came back up and everything was great again. Basically, I saved the show from disintegration. Robin saw me do that. Then he booked me on the spot to be on HBO’s Comic Relief.

B&A: Can you talk about the Vagina Monologues?

MG: The second time I did the Monologues was I think in 2002. Jonathan Rice, who went on to produce one of my shows Off Broadway, contacted me to be one of the vaginas with Rita Moreno and Vicki Lawrence. That was at Theater on the Square. I wasn’t very good and I was on the verge of getting fired. I knew how to write my own stuff and perform it, but to take someone else’s piece and perform it, I didn’t really know how to do that. I got a call from David Stone who was the producer in New York. He wanted to know if everything was okay. I knew he meant that Rita and Vicki were not pleased.

So, I got my video camera, set it up and did all the monologues into the camera so I could see immediately what not to do. Then that night, I came in and killed it. I remember Rita said to me, “I don’t know what you’re taking, but don’t stop.” After that they loved me. One bad night then, boom! Again, it was trial by fire.

B&A: You are still living in San Francisco. What keeps you here?

MG: Yeah, I’m still here and I’m still alive. I still get to perform in New York a lot. If there was any other place for me to live it would probably be New York. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t leave here. I remember seeing Sandra Cisneros, another mentor, and her advice to new authors was to get cheap rent. Live wherever you never have to worry about rent, and then be an artist. So, now I can pay my rent. But if I couldn’t, I would just go live anywhere where the rent was cheap and I can be an artist.

B&A: Have you worked in Central or South America?

MG: No. Unfortunately, I’m not bilingual, I don’t know a lot of Spanish. My last show I did that went off-Broadway was Latin Standards, which was part of the Under the Radar Festival. That show is a story about my father and our parallel arcs. He had his struggles, and so did I. While starting a comedy night at the SF-based Latinx gay bar Esta Noche, I had to get my piece translated into Spanish in order to have subtitles. I would love to have all my shows subtitled, especially the shows about my family and Latino life in New York City so they could be performed in Spanish, if not by me, then by someone.

B&A: Could you see yourself doing movies? Your shows could be made into movies.

MG: Well, I know from my experience in L.A. and from all the stuff we hear about what a hassle it is to finance a film and to have to deal with all lawyers.  I’ve been in movies. You’ve got to be very patient to make a film. The hurry up and wait, filming all the angles, and all the money it costs. I don’t like the work.

One thing I’d like to do is to record an audio version of all my shows…. What I would love is to have my performances filmed like they’ve done to various solo performers throughout the years. Of course, if somebody wanted to turn one of my stories into a film, that’d be okay with me.

B&A: You said earlier on that you were tokenized. Do you still sometimes feel tokenized, or is that less of an issue nowadays?

MG: Oh gosh. All the time. And if I need the money, I’ll take it. I just got this invitation from a random lesbian festival. I happen to know that they have all white performers. They don’t know anything about me. They just wanted to have me on the bill so they can say, “We have a Latina.” Stuff like that. I prefer that they know my work and they are booking me because it’s me. But if you get an opportunity, you take it and try to be as great as you can be. Then maybe they’ll learn.

On Facebook I follow groups of performers of color and I think that there are a lot of people watching and calling out. I have seen administrations, boards of directors, and the leadership of some theaters reflecting the fact that it can’t just be all CIS white men. There’s a long way to go. But at least there is some awareness now. But I’m not sure what the gatekeepers are doing behind our backs.

JJ: What did you think about Jonathan Moscone being at the California Arts Council today and gone tomorrow.

MG: I met him with Marie Acosta. She arranged a little cocktail thing I went to for Stacy Powers-Cuellar who runs Brava.  I went with Rodney Jackson. I said, ‘Oh, Jonathan. I’ll put you on the list for this comedy series I’ve been running at Brava Theater.’ Then Stacy said we’re not really supposed to do that, because it’s like a bribe or something.

JJ: We really didn’t talk about the solo performance art form, which I don’t know if it’s uniquely American, but I sense it has allowed people from different communities to tell their stories in a format that was much less expensive than a full multi-character production. I think the first time I saw Guillermo Gómez Peńa was at the Solo Mio Festival: he was doing Border Brujo. Back in the 1980s, how many artists from marginalized communities got to tell their stories through the art form of solo performance?

MG: That’s right. Tim Miller. Holly Hughes, Annie Sprinkle, my show Memory Tricks, which all got a lot of press attention. I was invited to be in the Sundance Writer’s Lab. It was the first time that Sundance invited playwrights.  We would tell the filmmakers our play, our story, then talk about adapting it to a film. One night 5 of us soloists each did our shows on stage and everyone in the audience was a filmmaker. This really taught me the power of the solo art form.

That experience sold me on solo performance. When a person reads a novel, they make a movie in their own head. I think it was so great for so many of us who didn’t want to jump through all the hoops to get that Hollywood or Broadway green light. All we needed was someone who was going to listen to us. That’s kind of why I stuck with solo performance. I love standup. But I felt that there were stories from my life that I wanted to share with the world. I think that it’s something that a lot of us in the queer community, Latino, BIPOC community have really been able to nail.

JJ: I’m sure that Europeans did this too, but I don’t know if they were dealing with the multiracial democracy that we clearly have to create, and not only in California but also in the entire country.

MG: It’s storytelling. You can perform a solo piece around a campfire and you don’t need permission to do it. People that inspired me to do solo performance were Lily Tomlin, David Kale, Charles Bush and Whoopi Goldberg.

JJ: Did you see Whoopi Goldberg when she did Moms?

MG: Well, of course.  Ellen Sebastian Chang directed it. That’s when I met Whoopi Goldberg at the Valencia Rose. We were both at the cappuccino counter. She saw the tail end of my stand up. She was developing Moms with Ellen there, and she said to me, we should workshop together. One of my biggest regrets is that she gave me her fucking phone number and I never called. I never called! I did see her a few years later when she was emceeing a KQED Comedy night at the Great American Music Hall.  Whoopi was the big star and the emcee. She came backstage to find me to say “what’s up.”

AB: Did you ever get to perform for your mom and dad?

MG: No. My parents never saw me perform as a professional, just in school plays. But the first time I ever went on stage was at my father’s show. He had me do a walk-on with a chihuahua. He and my mother had a sketch called The Funny Family– La Familia Comica. They were performing while getting a divorce, and I was basically the punchline. They’re dividing what they owned according to what’s masculine and what’s feminine. Then I walked on with the chihuahua and they both dropped to their knees to pet the chihuahua–i.e. the baby. That was my first time on stage and they saw that.

My dad passed away in the early 1980s. I had to close up his apartment so I have his photographs of all the artists that he booked and all his scripts. He never saw me perform, but he knew that I was starting to do it. There’s a story I tell, which is true, that he would tell his friends that I went to medical school and was a doctor!

My mother passed away in the early 1990s. I started writing Memory Tricks while she was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. That was how I was able to cope. I felt it was a tribute to her. I would visit her in the hospital and I would perform it for her.

JJ: Thank you so much, Marga. It was great just listening to you talk.

B&A: Yes, thanks so much. We love you! And we really look forward to your next show.

 

 

KK:  What do you want to know?

JJ:  Hi, Krissy. First your basic bio, like where were you born and where did you go to school?

KK:  I was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. My parents met at the University of Vermont and my mother got pregnant and had to leave school. My parents subsequently got married and moved to Florida. I was raised in the South between Florida, South Carolina and Cincinnati. I went to Indian Hill High School, which is the number one public high school in the United States. It’s in the richest neighborhood and since I lived next to that neighborhood, I got to go to that school. Then I went to the University of Oregon where I started the Eugene Dance Collective and formed The Wallflower Order in 1975.

I am the oldest of five children and I lived in South Carolina during apartheid, where everything was completely and utterly segregated: the water fountains you could use; where you could go swimming; where you went to school; how you interacted with black people specifically. And the dominant question was always, “Are you a Yankee or a rebel?” Literally, we were still asking that question to each other all through grade school, and I, being from Rhode Island, would say I was from Florida because Floridians stayed out of the conflict, so I didn’t have to take a stand.

My parents were not liberals. They were Republicans, but they were educated and they were slightly separated from the dominant narrative of white supremacy. So, I didn’t take the constant racism home with me the way my friends did. But I lived it. I lived and internalized white supremacy because it was in your face every single day. I think growing up in South Carolina had a huge impact on me. Then we moved to Cincinnati where I went to High School. From the 9th grade onwards I very much identified as a hippie. I read Life Magazine and smoked a ton of marijuana from the 10th grade onwards. From about 16 to 22, I think I was stoned every single day. I was in love with Janis Joplin. I was in love with Grace Slick. I was in love with their music, and I wanted to be like them. I knew someday I would go to California and live in San Francisco.

I graduated in 71. I was a terrible student. I ended up getting into the University of Oregon because my partner in Wallflower Order–Nina Fichter–had a mother who made it her life’s journey to get people into college. So she got me into the University of Oregon where I majored in dance.

JJ:  When did you start dancing?

KK: My mother was a dancer, when she lived in New York, and she and her sister both danced because my grandfather thought it was really important that they do something. They lived in Larchmont NJ, so he sent them to New York City every Saturday. My cousins ran a big dancing school in Rye NY, and my mother used to teach dance to all the neighboring children when we were living in Florida.

I started dancing ballet when I was 6 and took it very seriously until I was 13 and then got into boys and drugs and had a hard time going to class. I didn’t really have the right body type for ballet: Balanchine’s aesthetic type was very tall and very thin and I didn’t get enough feedback to stick with it. But I never stopped dancing. I danced in the living room. And then I went to the University of Oregon as a dance major.

B&A: Who’s Nina?

KK:  Nina Fichter and I became friends when I was in fifth or sixth grade. We met each other at ballet school. She went to Bard College and then she dropped out; she came to Oregon and ended up joining Wallflower Order. Later, she and I directed the Dance Brigade until 1998, when she e moved back to Ohio and died of bladder cancer in 2004.

JJ:  So you and Nina started working on Wallflower in Oregon?

KK:  Yes. I was a member of the Eugene Dance Collective, but that broke up for the summer and so Laurel Near, me and two others, Alex Dunnette and Linda Rose started the Wallflower Order. Then Lyn Neely joined and then Nina joined 2 years later when Alex left. Eugene OR was the Wild West of the women’s movement in the 1970s.  There were all these women’s collectives: Jackrabbit Press, Gertrude’s Café, Mother College Bookstore, Star Flower (a lesbian trucking company that trucked food all over the place), a collective bicycle shop, you name it.

The women’s collectives were embedded in every part of Eugene’s economic structure; that spirit was actually the give-and-take that created the style of Wallflower Order. Huge groups of women, primarily lesbians, would come to our concerts and applaud madly and also give us very direct feedback on what part of our material was working and what was offensive.

After Laurel’s sister Holly Near came and saw Wallflower perform, she paid Road Work to book our first national tour in 1977. And I would say that the lesbian movement of that era really dominated the politics and the feel and the look and the community. Eugene is very flat, so everybody rode their bikes everywhere.

JJ:  So when you started Wallflower, did you perceive what you were doing as performance art?

KK: I didn’t see what we were doing as performance art. But when Anne Bogart from the Saratoga International Theater Institute came to see Wallflower in New York in 1981, she said, “Oh, this is like performance art.”

But since we were from Eugene Oregon, we didn’t know what to call what we were creating; we never followed trends. The feedback we’re getting is from the West Coast: Holly Near took us on tour to help defeat the Briggs Initiative in 1978, which had it passed, would have outlawed any LGBTQ to be employed in California’s public schools.  We were trying to make our material accessible to women and to reflect the concerns of women’s lives. If we had to sing or dance, or recite poetry, or make skits that were funny, we would do that.

I don’t think we were thinking of our art form as much as about creating something that was highly relatable, highly politically charged, and something that impacted our audiences deeply. There was no question as to what our narrative was like: our work kind of tapped us into Russian social realism, or like the famous Chinese ballets red detachment of women almost like we were two fisted women.

I would say honestly, that Sarah Shelton Mann’s work with Contraband, which came out in the 1980s, was more performance art than we were. What we were doing was telling a story that we wanted the audience to understand: “to be women like us, you have to change, then we’ll all be great together.” I’m not really here to debate whether that was a good thing or a bad thing; I just know the people who showed up at our shows appreciated what we were doing. And of course, we had our detractors, too; “oh my God, there’s so much narrative!”

B&A: Well, more than Anna Halperin?

KK: She was in Marin and I don’t think she approved of us: she referred to us as “the angry ones.”

JJ:  So, the performance art thing had a very heavy visual component to it that was very abstract and at first it seemed very academic to me. But that’s why when I saw what you were doing, I thought it was very different.

KK: The political landscape in the 1980s shifted dramatically: the 1970s was all about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate, creating community, collective actions and Chairman Mao. And in 1980s artists were trying to find a new path now that Ronald Reagan had taken over.

All the women and lesbians I knew, suddenly wanted a piece of the pie, even Ferron and Holly Near. Jackson Browne took over the solidarity movement. Crossing over seemed like the goal. Melissa Etheridge or Bonnie Raitt took what we were doing and made it accessible to a more mainstream audience. We wondered why not us?

JJ: Thinking back on the 1970s, I remember living in Austin where everything was very community-focused and it was all right there in front of you; all day long, from the minute you got up, you knew what community you belonged to. The culture seemed more like Eugene than San Francisco’s.

When I came to San Francisco in 1979, I noticed that instead of going to a different one of my friend’s houses every other night for dinner where everyone got stoned and plotted against the reactionary City Council that ruled Austin’s politics, instead I found myself in public spaces as opposed to in people’s houses. Here it seemed like every night I was at a political event of some sort, which was usually followed by a bar-visit; at both, alcohol was omni-present.

But what I really want to know about the most is when Wallflower arrived in San Francisco, did you see what you were doing as feminist art?

KK:  When Wallflower moved from Eugene, Oregon to Boston in 1981, we had been touring all over the United States, in Europe and Latin America and our work occupied the intersection where lesbian feminism meets solidarity work, exemplified by Chile’s Pinochet and many other US-propped up dictators across the globe.  Lesbians were at the center of most solidarity groups supporting the liberation of Nicaragua and El Salvador. Our work married these two struggles on stage and there was an audience for it wherever we went.

Originally, we had moved to Boston so we could be a part of the university scene there and tour more easily. But we hated Boston. Even though our shows attracted a thousand women at Berklee School of Music, we didn’t like being there. So, we moved to Berkeley. Then I moved here to San Francisco and I wondered whether we should locate the Dance Brigade in Berkeley or San Francisco. Suddenly, Oakland announced it was now funding the arts, so we went there.

We did a lot of work in Oakland but once that money evaporated, we moved the Company to San Francisco and I started to like it, especially when the Cultural Equity Grants Program specifically named women as a targeted community for funding.

JJ:  I remember that when I went to your early shows there would be several hundred people: every other modern dance company I went to see usually had about 50 people in the audience, most of them the friends, family and relatives of the dancers. Your concerts had political content and in the mind-numbing Reagan era, you had an audience.

KK:  Yeah, we were popular.  And it’s interesting because we got reviewed in The Village Voice, we got reviewed in the New York Times, we got reviewed in the Kansas City Star where they said “The Wallflower Order is a national treasure.” However, when we moved to the Bay Area we were really not sophisticated enough for the left here.

The Company’s dancers were involved in a variety of political organizations. I was involved in the Uhuru House movement. Another Wallflower Dancer was in the Line of March; somebody else was doing El Salvador solidarity work. And another was with Workers World, (CPUSA). Politically, none of us agreed and we imploded.

We fought over the name, sued each other, and went to court. It was horrible and very public. There was no money in the bank: we were fighting over the name because the name was our only real asset. We tried to negotiate a settlement and we settled on dividing into two groups with the tag, “a new group from Wallflower Order.” But the other faction’s dance group broke up within six months. And here I am today–almost 40 years later–with an awful, horrible name: Dance Brigade, a new group from Wallflower Order.

So anyway, that was a fucking trauma and everybody knew all about it. And at the time, you told Marie Acosta that I was the one who would continue working in the arts because the others didn’t have the choreography chops.  And really, they didn’t have it. You can’t take away my ability to create dances!

JJ:  I think some of these earlier pieces and events you were producing resonated. What about Furious Feet?

B&A: Yes, please tell us the genesis.

KK:  The Dance Brigade missed the NEA’s Dance deadline so we decided to apply to the presenting and commissioning program. I, with Ellen Gavin’s assistance, made up the title:  Furious Feet: A Dance Festival for Social Change. We wrote the grant but didn’t get funded for an obvious reason: President Reagan was not a fan of social change. But we started the festival anyway.

Our main question following the Wallflower break-up was, do we integrate the company or do we do solidarity work.  Ultimately, we decided to present artists of color instead of trying to integrate them into our group. So Furious Feet presented artists of color such as Zulu Dance Theater, a South African Ethnic Dance Company. We produced the San Jose Taiko Group, Priscilla Regalado, a Chicana artist, and Contraband.  I think that was the very first Furious Feet that we did. Our goal was to make our resources available for people of color to show themselves in their best light, in their own cultural manifestation.

We also did the very first public piece on artists supporting AIDS at the second Furious Feet Festival in 1986, which we dedicated to those who were confronting AIDS: people with AIDS, caregivers, family members, advocates, activists etc. No one in the arts world, outside the Queer community, would touch that issue in that time period. We weren’t dealing with the awfulness of what it was internally. I mean, we were all dealing with it as a community, but no one in our company had the stigma of having AIDS.

JJ: But let’s return for a minute to the break-up of Wallflower.  How long did this trauma go on?

KK:  About a year and a half. It was horrible. In some ways, I would never recover.

JJ:  Once that was out of the way, you found yourself in Oakland?

KK:  Yeah. So, then that’s where we first did Furious Feet and created the Nutcracker. But I think what you’re trying to understand is what was the work that went on between 1975 and 1983, and there was a lot of work out there. When we toured nationally, there was a women’s production company in every city across the country and we were able to tap into that. At that time there were four main women’s touring groups: the Wallflower Order, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Ferron and Holly Near. We were out there between 1975 and 1985, and then the touring thing kind of eroded financially. I think we went into a financial crisis; people stopped their production companies and also the funds started drying up at the universities. It was the same kind of experience the Mime Troupe was having at the same time.

JJ:  Yeah, in the early years of the NEA and the CA Arts Council, touring was actually funded.  But since the 1990s, it hasn’t been supported at all and that’s really made a big difference between whether you consider yourself nationally significant or whether you were just parochial.

KK: Well, Sean Dorsey’s out there a lot.

JJ: I mean, there’s a few people who have succeeded.

KK: And Bandaloop are out there, Axis Dance Company is out there. If you have an audience for your thing, you can get in on that network.

JJ:  But other than that, what I was interested in was the difference between the gay art world such as the Gay Men’s Chorus and Theater Rhinoceros and the Women’s Building, the Dance Brigade, Brava for Women in the Arts, Redwood Cultural Work and the Women’s Philharmonic, organizations that were actually run by lesbians in the eighties but called themselves women’s arts groups. All of these groups had heavy lesbian representation, the Women’s Philharmonic especially.

KK: But don’t you think that being a lesbian outside of the lesbian ghetto was pretty stigmatized? I mean, you couldn’t just be out in the same way that you could once it became more mainstream, like in the last 10 years or so. I just feel like now anybody can be a lesbian and everybody’s queer. But before, if you were running the Philharmonic, you didn’t center its narrative around the fact that the Director was a lesbian.

JJ: But nevertheless, I would go to these concerts that had 800 ticket buyers and 80% were dykes but the language was not there. The woman I was married to in Austin, who started one of the nation’s oldest feminist arts groups, did the same thing: she avoided the word Lesbian and named it ‘Women And Their Work.’

In 1979, when I first went to the meetings of the Harvey Milk Club or the Alice B Toklas Club, I noticed there were very few women. At one meeting I asked a woman why there were so few women, she said to me “Look, my history has been with women’s consciousness groups and I come to these political meetings and I get to sit here and listen to men arguing with each other, hour after hour. And I just really don’t feel like this has anything for me.”

I soon noticed how Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were perceived by the Harvey Milk Club as moderate assimilationists; now that I’m older, I see that these two women created LGBTQ history for 40 or 50 years. They founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first Lesbian political group I know of, in mid-1950s.  When Glide Church and others formed The Council on Religion and the Homosexual, Del and Phyllis were there. They were among the founding members of Alice B Toklas, the oldest LGBTQ Political Organization that is now over 50 years old.

I first heard of Del Martin in Austin, when a group of women started a battered women’s shelter. Del Martin had written a book called Battered Wives and all the women I knew were reading it. So, I originally thought that Del Martin must be really super militant. But once I arrived in the Bay Area, according to many gay men, she was an assimilationist.

KK: But let’s go back to San Francisco. The largest lesbian community in the United States is in Oakland. San Francisco real estate is too fucking expensive. So after the 1970s when on Valencia Street, you had Amelia’s, the Bearded Lady, the Artemis Café, Osento, the Lesbian bathhouse, the Old Wives Tale Bookstore, the Paper Tiger Print Shop, the Women’s Building and Good Vibrations. By the early 1990s, this strip on Valencia Street had completely evaporated because the majority of lesbians had moved to Oakland. And I think the ones that stayed were doctors and lawyers and professional people who could afford to own real estate.

Then the narrative changes. I think that the narrative of “Queer,” kind of erased lesbian culture in a way, or at least participated in the erasure of lesbian culture. It assumed that kind of equalization around everybody’s oppression. So, what was particular about being a lesbian in the seventies was that The Women’s movement was influenced by class politics. It wasn’t heavily butch femme. We all wore wear jeans and a work shirt and vests at least in Oregon. And this went on for a while I mean, I’m not really being super deep about it, but I’m saying something that I believe happened. There are women who have written about the erasure of women and lesbians in the last 10 years.

JJ: Well, I did see this in the beginning of the nineties, that’s when I saw these very young lesbians moving into the Valencia Corridor: Tribe 8, early Michelle Tea, Sini Anderson etc.

KK: But when you talked to them about being lesbians, they’re like, “no, we’re not lesbians.” Like it was cool to be anything but a lesbian. There was something about being a lesbian that was really not cool enough. So who are we talking about? Help me out, because I don’t really know the answer.

JJ: I’m not part of the lesbian community. I just happen to know a whole lot of lesbians who have frequently challenged my assumptions and observations.

KK: Anne Bleuthenthal and I started the Lesbian/Gay Dance festival in 1997 and it was really great for a while. But there weren’t that many women who identified as lesbian who were choreographers, and we hit a wall around that. We would do our shows and I felt like there was something missing. There’s no edge to this. And then I realized that we weren’t working with the whole scene on Valencia Street around Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson and that whole Sister Spit crowd. I felt like we were kind of boring.  Then you came along with the National Queer Arts Festival and opened up a whole other chapter in the story.

JJ: There were at least ten years between the Furious Feet and the Lesbian/ Gay Dance Festivals.  The 1980s were a mess because we were just inventing how to understand the Non-profit arts world. From the 1990s onward, we did very well.  Now there are organizations and people who can deal with whatever your organizational, technical of emotional problem is.

KK: But during the AIDS epidemic, the people’s collectives broke up. Reaganomics made a huge cultural shift in this country and kind of destroyed everything that we had tried to create in the 1970s.

JJ: Well, maybe we just got older. In the 1990s a lot of things started happening, maybe because the AIDS epidemic started receding. But from 1983 until about 1992, there were almost no new Queer arts groups during that period.

The groups that existed before AIDS were still around, like the Gay Men’s Chorus, the Theater Rhinoceros, the Women’s Philharmonic, John Simms Center, etc. But the only new gay groups that formed during those ten years was Joe Goode, and the 848 Community Space that Keith Hennessy, Med-O Whitson and Todd Eugene started on Divisadero Street.

B&A: That was a great venue.

JJ: That’s where Queer Arts started coming back in the 1990s. But most of the time before 1990, people were not creating great art. People were dying. Allen Estes the founder of Theater Rhino died. The founder of the Gay Men’s Chorus and the Marching Band Jon Simms died. Chuck Solomon died: he was with the Mime Troupe and Theater Rhinoceros. Choreographer Ed Mock died. Then Ken Dixon, who was the director of Rhino died of AIDS in the early nineties. It was just very hard then.  Most of the gay men who built the early Queer arts community had died by that time.

I remember noticing that the John Simms Center, the place where the LGBTQ community arts groups were housed, was suddenly being directed by Lauren Hewitt. So, it all re-started again, I would say, with Keith Hennessy and Joe Goode. They had a lot to do with the reemergence of the gay arts community.

B&A: Jeff, I think you had a lot to do with the queer San Francisco art scene, obviously. I would like to know from Krissy, when did you meet Jeff?

JJ: 83? Somewhere in there.

KK: I don’t know who introduced us.

JJ: Nobody introduced us. You just showed up at my door.

KK: No, I didn’t just show up. I was invited. We had a date. You invited me over to talk about the Wallflower Order. Then when I showed up, you put some snacks on the table, and I ate every single one of them. That’s all I can remember.

JJ: I remember asking myself after you left: Who the fuck was that?

KK: And he started writing our grants—always in long hand–and he worked with Kayla Kirsh. We all got funded for individual artist grants from the NEA. I got the first one, then Nina and Pam. We got $5,000 each, which was an enormous sum in 1983. Then I don’t know if it was because we broke up or they stopped funding people for a while, or if there was a collapse in the NEA? I can’t remember. They almost didn’t give enough money to make it worthwhile.

JJ: Well, they ended up eliminating all individual artists fellowships, soon after the Mapplethorpe controversy. They decided they’re not funding any individual artists at all except for writers.

But during the early 1980s, when Theater Rhinoceros was already funded by the NEA, the Reagan NEA decided to send a reviewer to go and check it out. And they sent Marie Acosta; I don’t think they suspected that she knew Allen Estes. And we didn’t really understand how politics intersected with funding.

Artists started learning this lesson in 1983, when the Federal Government passed the Emergency Jobs Act. In San Francisco the City got a ton of Community Development funding to hand out. The decision-making process started with the Citizens Advisory Committee, appointed by Mayor Dianne Feinstein. This committee was eventually chaired by Greg Day. I created a consortium of 5 of my arts clients and we applied. After the Committee, the next step in the process was the Board of Supervisors, where Supervisor Carole Ruth Silver moved to award us $135,000.

B&A: A million dollars now.

JJ: Yeah. It was a lot of money and I understood that the only reason we secured these funds was because I had worked on her campaign, and I asked her to support the Consortium’s proposal. She moved to give the Consortium $135,000 to pay the performing fees of Un-employed and under-employed artists.  The next year, Greg Day (See attached Interview) became the Chair of the Citizens Committee and the Consortium received almost $500,000 over the next few years. This experience taught all of us involved in this effort that securing funding was a political process.

But about 15 years after that event, Dance Mission became the poster child for what was going wrong here during the mid-1990s dot.com boom. Could you talk about how that period impacted the Dance Brigade?

KK: I was running the Brady Street Dance Center and I ended up having a falling out with the landlord. We had created this kind of miraculous situation where Brady Street became a very high-profile venue over the two years that we were there with Joey Williams. So, I moved to 24th and Mission Streets where I opened Dance Mission. I built the theater space there. When the individual who had leased the entire space didn’t pay the  rent, they tried to shut us down.

It became a very public battle; I told the landlord we would have people demonstrating around the building all the time. I organized a demonstration where people came down and danced in front of City Hall that got a lot of press. Then we went inside and talked to the Board of Supervisors. I remember just spouting off to Ammiano, “if the City is going to go in this direction, you need to find some legislation to pay for all the rent increases.” So Ammiano found $1,000,000 in the city budget and gave it to Alma Robinson (the Director of California Lawyers for the Arts) to hand out.

While rents at arts venues were doubling overnight, suddenly the Crash of the dot.coms took place and everything soon went back to normal. Literally, my rent went from $6000 a month to $12000 and then within a year back down to $6000 because the whole economy imploded.

I worked with Keith Hennessey, and there were other organizations that banded together and held demonstrations around the City and at City Hall. We got a lot of attention around space and equity.

JJ: Well, I think you should think about that particular period when you’re talking about the doom and gloom of today. Every ten years the City’s economy is impacted by events outside of its control and it veers off in an entirely new direction: we saw this with the hippies in the sixties, with AIDS in the early 1980s, the 1989 earthquake, the dot.com boom and bust, the advent of the bio-medical industry, COVID, the near-death of downtown and the arrival of the Artificial Intelligence industry. The City always seems to come back from these events.

B&A: Our organization, EARTH Lab SF creates queer and nontraditional environmental art outside the box. Can you say anything about how you’ve engaged with environmental justice?

KK: What’s interesting is that in 1975, people already knew about what was happening with the environment. We were all lit up around it and it was in all of our work, even 40 years ago. I’ve been talking about the polar ice caps melting in my work since 1998, saying that we don’t have a future, and people didn’t hear it. And they still don’t hear it now.

We just did a whole show called The Butterfly Effect, which tried to tie all of these environmental justice issues together and to understand the consciousness that we have right now about how environmental catastrophes are coming at us like a steamroller and we just can’t move–we’re frozen in time.

The thing that’s so shocking to me is how many of the victories won in the 1970s have been lost: abortion rights, the environment, black people are still being killed by the police. The unions have all but disappeared. We’re still fighting very basic things around social justice. And now the massacre in Gaza. Really, its 2024 and we are solving a problem by slaughtering women and children of color and hoping nobody notices. Who are we?

I’m just kind of overwhelmed by it all. I feel like I don’t really want to make work anymore.  Is it really worth using up all these resources to make all these dance pieces? Is this really where we should be putting our energy? I don’t know. I feel like we should be stockpiling food and weapons and guns because the censorship is real and takeover can feel immanent.

JJ: Really. You may be right.

KK: Yeah. I feel like we’ve had that eco-feminist perspective at the core of our work.

JJ: So, before we leave that item, I want to go back to the late 1970s, early 1980s. Did you see Wallflower Order as a feminist group or as a social justice group? Or was feminism part of the larger movement for social justice?

KK: We were a feminist dance company. When you opened our brochure, the first review identified us as a lesbian organization. We didn’t call ourselves a lesbian feminist organization. I think our tagline was, “Five Women from Eugene, Oregon.” Then we had reviews that talked about the power of women being together. When I talked to Lisa Vogel from the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, she said “your company had the most explicit and demonstrative work that talked about relationships between women.”

We were fearless in a certain kind of way. But we also got a lot of positive reinforcement.  Unlike the Women’s music community, where almost all the musicians at a certain point I knew wanted to crossover to the mainstream, dancers don’t get famous, so we never thought about crossing over. Our only goal was to get more money for our work. We were never going to be Baryshnikov. Nobody was going to take our work and put it on their dancers or imitate us. People who came to our workshops and took classes from us, and saw us, they imitated us. But hardly anybody was paying us.

JJ: Two weeks ago I read this thing about Tee Corrine, the Lesbian artist who published the Cunt Coloring Book. And she said, “I’m the same age as Robert Rauschenberg, but there’s no place in the art world for me to go.” Rauschenberg did indeed just walk right into the visual arts community and become a millionaire painter; Jack Kerouac had a similar experience in the literary world. Tee Corrine had to invent a place for herself.

KK: Look at Yayoi Kusama. She took herself to the Venice Biennale and started showing her artwork on the sidewalk. They kicked her out and she went crazy and went home. But she’s famous now and she’s 90. She went into a mental institution in Japan in order to hide from her mother so she could work. But she had a nervous breakdown after trying to make it on her own in the 1960s; now she’s treated like a living goddess. People think she’s the genius of installation art. So yeah, I think you see a lot of women artists having a Renaissance right now. Judy Chicago’s work is all over the place. A lot of women in their eighties and nineties are having real careers after not having gotten their due.

B&A: Have you worked in academia? I’m sure people wanted you to be a professor.

KK: No, I dropped out. I went to the University of Oregon for two years and was wasting my mother’s money, so I just quit. But you didn’t have to have a degree to teach at the university. You could teach if you had enough chops. You could just slide into a department. Now, they don’t let that kind of thing happen.

B&A: Well, you are a legend. Is there satisfaction in being a legend, even if it wasn’t mainstream.

KK: I don’t really feel like I am anything. The Isadora Duncan Dance Awards has a Sustained Achievement Award. I haven’t even gotten that. I have been at this for 50 years. My entire adult life.

B&A: That’s crazy! You’ve done so much for so long. WTF?

JJ: But maybe that’s your own lack of self-worth, which is hard to believe, but it’s surprising.

KK:  What I lack is not self-worth, it’s money. I don’t clamor for it, but every day I look at the bank account. I really feel like coming out of the collective mentality and structure but seeking individual fame is a cheap shot. I spread the accolades around as much as possible.

Beth: We were just talking to artist Linda Montano. She hasn’t had the big awards yet either. And she’s so important to many different groups of people. The art world can be so cruel. The way that it makes people compete against each other, and it breaks up friendships. Success seems always somewhat arbitrary.

Annie: I was a sex worker artist, and I found the art world surprisingly welcoming.

Beth: But it was different if you called yourself a lesbian. In the early days, in and around the 1980s, if you called yourself a lesbian, it was the kiss of death within the art world.

KK: You could be a lesbian, but you couldn’t define yourself that way. Never, ever. There’s a whole story about how Holly Near was the first lesbian to publicly come out in the women’s music scene. She was the first lesbian to come out in People Magazine; it was a really big deal.

JJ: What I’m struck by when I think about Holly Near is how young she was when she was doing all that. She started Redwood at 23.

KK: She was 22 when she toured with Jane Fonda. I was 22 when we started Wallflower Order. Edna St Vincent Millay was 19 when she wrote her best poem. And Ferron was 19 when she was traveling all over the country.  Joni Mitchell wrote Both Sides Now at 19.

B&A: How do you feel about the art world in San Francisco these days? I always tell people that artists are very supportive of each other here. It doesn’t feel competitive. How do you find it now?

KK: I feel like in dance everybody works with everybody. All the dancers move through many different choreographers because nobody can afford to pay a company except for the ballet, Michael Smuin, Alonzo King and Sean Dorsey. But most dancers move back and forth.

I have 11 dancers in the show that I’m working on right now, and they all have a million other jobs. You can barely get them all to rehearse. It’s very community oriented and it’s very family. And everybody knows everybody and everybody goes and sees each other’s work. We go to see each other’s work but we don’t exactly like each other’s work.

The big grants are so competitive. So there is competition, and there’s also this phenomenon: the white choreographers are now being pole-vaulted over for equity reasons. The only reason I’m being funded is because I present and produce so many other artists. It’s not for my own work. I don’t get any money to create my own work. But I do enough work through Dance Mission that I save up money to produce myself.

JJ: You found your source of income. I mean, not many artists have been able to actually figure out how to turn their life into something that’s supported by a nonprofit arts organization.

B&A: You have over 1,000 people coming through Dance Mission every week. That’s incredible. That’s a lot of bodies.

KK: People come to Dance Mission to take dance classes, to participate in GRRRl Brigade, the Youth Program, and to see the dancers who perform at our venue and the audiences who attend events there. The pandemic slowed down our attendance figures but we’re building them back up.

B&A: You know, the performances I’ve seen of yours just blew me away and profoundly inspired me and I think they’re incredible.

JJ: The ones that I remember the most are from the 1980s and 1990s. I remember The Nutcracker Sweetie in Oakland. What was the name of that venue?

KK: Well, we started at Laney College but we eventually moved it to the Scottish Rite.

JJ: Scottish Rite. That’s it.

KK: It was majestic there.

JJ: How many times did you perform that piece?

KK: We did that for ten years. Once it got really going, probably 5000 people annually saw that piece over a ten-year period.

B&A: What are your greatest professional achievements? Have you achieved some dreams? Have you accomplished something unique?

KK: I think definitely The Wallflower Order. Creating that collective was the beginning. I think creating the GRRRl Brigade too. Besides that, I think starting the Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival and the first Festival presenting sky dancers– “Women who Fly through the Air.”

I think the interesting thing about the Lesbian/Gay Dance Festival was that it was the first in the country. Also, Dance Mission is really phenomenal: what we’ve done there, I don’t take credit for it by myself, but I was definitely leading it. I’m its mother. I think that’s a great achievement.

B&A: Does your archive have a home yet?

KK: My archives are all over the place. Parts of them are in the costume storage. Some of them are above the bathroom in Dance Mission. There’s some stuff in my home’s closet.

You know, one significant thing that I left out is the complaint I filed with the City’s Human Rights Commission against the San Francisco Ballet. My daughter–Fredricka Keefer—was denied acceptance to the Ballet school because she was not tall and thin. This episode drew an enormous amount of international press coverage. Many people in the United States were debating whether I was a terrible mother or that I was bringing something up that should have been dealt with years ago. Anyway, this controversy was covered in the New York Times and in the Wall Street Journal; we were also on The View.

B&A: Yes, I remember that. Huge amount of news coverage everywhere. Good for you!

KK: But I also infuriated Warren Hellman, who decided he was going to ruin my career for my complaint against the Ballet. So he talked to the Chronicle, which did not review my work until David Wiegand and Alan Ulrich and Warren Hellman all died. San Francisco can be very punitive.

JJ: Warren Hellman was the husband of the President of the Ballet’s Board of Directors; he also built the Parking Garages in Golden Gate Park.

KK: Warren Hellman started the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. So, he had big, big, big bucks. So I would talk to Alan Ullrich, who was the Chronicle’s dance reviewer, and when I asked Alan why he wasn’t reviewing my work, he confessed that his editor “doesn’t like you.” So, from 1998 until The Butterfly Effect in 2020, I did not get any reviews in The Chronicle because of my dispute with the Ballet.

JJ: Both of us got blacklisted because we didn’t play ball with the in-crowd.

KK: You got demonized super bad. I remember when someone came to meet with me—she had just been assigned by the NEA to be Dance Brigade’s Advancement Consultant. They told me “You gotta stop working with Jeff.”  I didn’t understand what was going on.  But I do remember looking at a finished grant that just sat on the floor of the closet because you had written it. It was that you were calling Kary Schulman’s Agency (Grants for the Arts) racist and they were all coming after you.

JJ: I lost all of my clients.

KK: And me too.  I didn’t understand what was going on. We were still in Oakland at the time, so I didn’t even know what they were talking about.

But then I do have to say in Jeff’s complete and utter defense and glorification, that the Cultural Equity Program is the singularly most important program that happened in San Francisco in terms of funding. It changed everyone’s life. It changed my life completely. To get those individual artists commissions and then get those Project Grants and then keep moving up and getting the bigger Cultural Equity Initiative Grant.  I created lots of work off those individual artist commissions. There weren’t that many artists that were doing political work in San Francisco that could navigate the work that the grants went to.

I think that where I related to what Jeff was doing was through Redwood Records and the women’s music community. You know, Jeff took Redwood from being a profit organization to a nonprofit. He created that format for them, which allowed them to apply for grants and really changed how they were working and how they were perceived and how they became much bigger and produced the Redwood Festival and all of that. So that’s one of the bonds that we had really. Because I didn’t actually have a lot of bonds. I didn’t really know who your other clients were at the time Jeff.

JJ: Redwood, La Pena, the Mime Troupe, the SF Ethnic Dance Festival, Dimensions Dance Theater, the Jewish Film Festival, the Arab Film Festival. Theater Rhinoceros, and about 5 Oakland-based Ethnic Dance Companies.

KK: Did you guys get enough? Thank you for taking the time to do this.   If you need to get back to me about anything you want to know more about, just call me.

B&A: You’ve been amazing. It’s not easy being ahead of your time for such a long time. You’re a great bad ass.

 

In 1989, on the basis of material developed while conducting classes at the San Francisco County Jail, Rhodessa Jones created “Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women”, a performance piece based on the lives of the incarcerated women she encountered. During the work’s creation, Jones and jail officials were made aware of issues that were specific to female inmates, such as guilt, depression, and self-loathing, which arose in response to feelings of failure in the face of community. These issues directly contribute to recidivism among female offenders. Based on this observation, Jones founded THE MEDEA PROJECT: THEATER FOR INCARCERATED WOMEN to explore whether an arts-based approach could help reduce the numbers of women returning to jail.

Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: Hi Rhodessa. Beth Stephens and I have a nonprofit called EARTH Lab SF. We do environmental art through an ecosexual and environmental justice lens. We got a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission to interview 10 important artists like you.

So in a nutshell, we’re recording the history of GLBTQ and BIPOC artists and activists who changed things in a big way in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. On June 1st, 2024  we’ll present our findings at the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library and launch this archive online. Beth has been a professor at UC Santa Cruz for 30+years.

RJ: Is that where Angela Davis is?

B&A: Yes! She’s retired, but she was at an event the other night.

RJ: Hi Jeff. How are you?

Jeff Jones: Hi Rhodessa, I’m doing well.

Let’s start. We can begin the interview with some background on where you grew up and how you got to San Francisco.

RJ: I was born in Florida. My mother and father were migrant farmworkers and they got their first agricultural contract the year that I was born, in 1948. My dad gathered some people together, got a couple of vehicles, and we drove from our home in Florida all the way up to New Jersey, picking fruits and vegetables. We were gone for 5, 6, even 7 months a year. After a point, my mother decided we had to stop because she wanted us to have a better education than she and my dad had received. So we ended up living in upstate New York outside of Rochester, NY. We settled in a little town called Wayland; I graduated from high school there.

I fell in love with Riley, a crazy Irishman. We met in Rochester and ended up going to Costa Rica because we wanted to leave the United States. We had some friends in Bogotá, but when we got to the border in Colombia, they wouldn’t let us into the country because we were hippies and we didn’t have any money. I had my kid with me, she was 9. My kid was born when I was 16 years old and I was still in high school.

We had been living in Costa Rica and my daughter got really ill. I had friends in Palo Alto, California and they sent me the money so I could come to California to take care of her. She had gotten some bad bug. She was really sick with a high fever. I always tell people it was jungle fever. We had to travel from Costa Rica back to LA and then up to Palo Alto. We moved to San Francisco in 1973 or 74.

B&A: We were reading about how you supported yourself while you raised your kid. Would it be possible for you to talk a little bit about that?

RJ: Sure. I was dancing with a company called Tumbleweed, which was a women’s dance company here in San Francisco. All of the dancers who were performing and making art were also dancing nude at night. When I got word of it, I thought I could do that. I’d been an artist’s model and nudity was nothing to me. They wouldn’t hire me in North Beach, because they didn’t hire black girls then in North Beach. So I ended up going to the Tenderloin. There I met a great couple, who had set up Fantasies in the Flesh. They thought I was so cute, and I had my wig and great legs and they said, “Sugar, you can work here with us.” They didn’t want me to wear my Donna Summer wig. They were saying, “Oh, you are so much more beautiful, so much more dignified, without your Donna Summer wig.” And I said, “Girls, this ain’t about no dignity down here.”

We had a great time. The place was owned by a guy named Al Brown, who kind of fed on young black women. I liked to read. One night I was reading Shogun and I put the book down to go on stage. James Clavel the author of Shogun just happened to be at the club. When I come off, Al says, “Which one of you bitches is reading Shogun?” I said, “I’m reading it.” He said, “Well, this is the author.” Mr Clavel offered me his autograph but I said, “No thanks darling. I have your book. I don’t need your autograph.”

It was an interesting time. I started to flex my femininity and my feminine politics. The management didn’t feel responsible to clean up the club, instructing the dancers to do it. They felt like we were naked, dancing, and that we should clean up. One night, a woman was lying on stage, turning around and a mouse ran across her body. She freaked out. We all freaked out.

Al said, “Well, clean the place up.” I said, “Oh, no, no, no; secretaries do not clean up offices, Sir.” He had decided I was a cop. I said honey, “I’m many things, but I’m not a cop.” And, he said, “I got my eye on you, Lily.” And the women were curious as to who I was because I had an opinion and that was out of character.

This was an incredible time in San Francisco. But after the assassinations at City Hall, I remember being afraid.  The peep-show booths at Fantasies in the Flesh had two sections. I sat behind a window and customers on the other side would put in coins and the curtain would open. I would just sit there with my legs open, you know, because I figured that’s what they wanted to see. Later, I wrote a performance piece entitled, The Legend of Lily Overstreet; it was about nude dancing in America.

The big questions for me were what do men want from women and what do women want from men? And why do sex and race make such interesting bedfellows? These are the questions that I posted in my journal as I started to write Legend of Lily Overstreet. There was a young black guy whose job was to clean the cum off of the windows. At first he thought he was gonna get to peek at naked women. I said, “No, no, honey, this is a job.” And he and I started talking and it turns out he went to San Francisco State. He brought in books by Franz Fanon, books about race and culture. He and I started talking about life and dreams. I saw him opening his eyes to the fact that this was just “a job”.

I wasn’t a bimbo; I wasn’t sex crazed- I was working. I remember once while I was working, I would play Mose Alison’s music. A guy came in and said, “Who’s playing this music?” And I said, “I am. You’re Mose Alison!” And he asked incredulously, “you can see me??” And then he just left. Once Richard Pryor came in and in Richard Pryor fashion, he tucked money into all the windows treating all the customers. He left quickly as well.

I told my family what I was doing. I said, “I’m dancing nude downtown”. My father ordered my brother to “go see what’s happening with Rho. See if she’s okay.” So one night I looked up and my little brother was looking at me in the window like, “Oh my god.” And he leaves quickly because I’m his big sister. But he reported to my dad that I was safe. I was just dancing, I felt loved and cared for. I wasn’t judged.

I was judged by the black women in the San Francisco community. They thought I could do it, but I shouldn’t talk about it. Every woman was so politically invested, that they were disappointed in me. I said, “Honey, I got it so I will flaunt it.” I had a lot of fun. I was outrageous and ahead of my time.

B&A: What years were those, when you worked in the Tenderloin.

RJ: Mayor Moscone was assassinated in 1978. One of the fears that I had was that somebody would go on a shooting spree and they would come in and shoot all the nude girls sitting behind the glass. That’s how freaky it was.

We were told, inevitably, we were gonna get busted. So every night I had my fur coat. Sure enough, the raid happened and the police didn’t really let us put on clothes, but I had my fur coat.

At Fantasies in the Flesh, we would take turns managing. On this particular night, a young blonde girl confessed to me that she was only 15. I said, “oh shit!” The police were kicking down the door and she and I both were trying to run. You couldn’t escape into the alley, so we were arrested and taken to the police station and had to stay there all night until Al came and bailed us out.

I met some amazing people. I think a lot about the hookers,  the women who were “in the life”, and the kind of men they attracted. I remember there was an old black man who was probably in his late seventies and his wife had died. He was lonely so he would come down and see me. I’d have my feet up on the glass and he would put his hands on the glass where my feet were and act as if he was rubbing my feet and tell me all about his wife. He would come in often and look at me and talk to me.

Then there was a young sailor from Iowa, a young white corn-fed boy, with big blue eyes and pink cheeks. He had never ever seen a naked black woman before. He and his friends all came in together and they’re all looking at me. I said, “No, y’all gotta keep putting the money in the slot.” So this kid comes back later, alone and he says, “You sure are pretty. You’re just about the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen.” I said, “Thank you, but you gotta put more money in the slot.”

B&A: Do you think any of the skills you learned working at that club in the Tenderloin helped you in your art career? How did your life as a sex worker translate to your role as a creator of theater?

RJ: Well, other than shaking my nude body, I wasn’t interested in being a sex worker. I loved the very interesting exchange of energies. I paid attention to all that stuff. I just took it into the realm of art making. Cause it’s all art. It’s artwork.

B&A: Performance art for sure. How long did you do sex work? How do you feel now about having done that work?

RJ: I started dancing nude at 30, and I worked in that business for probably 5, 6, 7 years. I’m proud of myself.  I benefited from having been a nude dancer and I think I freed some younger people. They think they wanna get down and dirty and I’m like, “honey, if you have great sex with somebody, that’s wonderful, but it’s not your full life. Don’t get caught up in throwing it all in one pile.” I think I’ve learned how to be honest and clear about so many things because of the journey I’ve taken.

Beth: There are so many artists who’ve done sex work here in San Francisco. Michelle Tea, Carol Queen, Madison Young, who is our chosen daughter. There are so many people who became artists because they learned something about sex, or performance or care.

JJ: Back to Rhodessa. When I arrived here, you were performing in a church over on Market Street.

RJ: It was the Eureka Theater. I had evolved and wanted to put a show on stage.

B&A: Your show was The Legend of Lily Overstreet. Was that your stage name?

RJ: Yes, that was my dancer name, “Lily Overstreet” from New Orleans.

JJ: So, my question is, why did you stage this work in the gay community?

RJ: Well they found me. Some nights my audiences were all just gay boys from the Castro who’d be sitting there. The gay guys were great to me. There was a bookstore in the Castro called “Does your Mother Know You’re Here?” That was a song that I had created for the show. I don’t know what the chemistry was but the place would be full of gay men and it would sell out. That’s one way dancing helped my career— I learned this queer language. “Oh stop. Quit. You better work!” I mean, I heard this stuff through the men who were out in the audience. They were so encouraging.

B&A: Was it a solo performance?

RJ: Yes.  I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be heard.  I wrote everything myself. The most popular black actress at the time was Cicely Tyson, who had done Miss Jane Pittman. I wanted my show to be out front. I already had some notoriety in the dance world because I was so strong, outrageous and courageous.

Simultaneously, I was also performing with Tumbleweed, the dance company. We carried each other using contact improvisation. We danced naked. We did rope work, flipping and hanging upside down. Tumbleweed had some notoriety and the country was just opening up.

B&A: The one-woman show was a particularly new American art form. Dramatic soloists.

RJ: Yes. Now in my work with incarcerated women, I tell them, “tell the truth and shame the devil. Practice Revolution.”

I was trying to find my way and doing my show gave me a place. My brother Bill T. Jones, the choreographer, used to joke  that we were incredible exhibitionists. We knew that we were more attractive than most people and we wanted the art world to make room for us to do our art.

B&A: When did you get involved with Idris Ackamoor and Cultural Odyssey?

RJ: The late 1970s, early 1980s, I met Idris Ackamoor. We immediately had a connection. He liked my spunk and my drive. People had this idea that I was a man-eater. I really wasn’t. I was just independent and Idris recognized this. We talked for almost a year before we got serious and sexually involved. We had already toured Europe and one day he told me to quit my day job to be artists full time.

JJ: Okay, so we’re now up to 1981, 82 or so. Cultural Odyssey was the first black arts group that became a nonprofit that I’m aware of except for Wajumbe. So you two were the only nonprofits in the black community involved with Grants for the Arts except for the African American Historical Society.

RJ: The thing I really admired about Idris Ackamoor was that he just had no problem stepping up to the person we were working with and asking for the money. He’d say, “okay man, when do we get paid?” I still think he’s one of the most amazing business artists that I know. He wasn’t afraid of asking for what was his. He was very honorable and he would make deals. But you better come through.

I remember being in Berlin with Cecil Brown, the writer. I was doing some nude work in Berlin and this crazy woman came to the club. She was taking us over to her house for dinner, but then she pulled out a gun. Cecil said, “Whoa, what the hell?” And she said, “Do YOU have a gun?” I think the goddamn gun went off.

I’m so glad that Cecil and Idris stayed with me because she wanted me to go with her, but I don’t know what that would have been like. You know, Idris is not a huge guy, but don’t mess with him. He will run through you with his anger and his indignation; I’ve seen him turn into a stiletto. He’s not a gangster but he can go there.

Idris and I weren’t even aware of it at first, that I was now a part of Cultural Odyssey. We were writing grants. We were going to meetings. We were going to things set up by the NEA because it was the way to the funding. You had to know how to raise money and we knew that we had the stories. We took the Legend of Lily Overstreet and created a whole score. From there, Keith Haring did the sets for it, because he was a friend of my brother Bill. We just liked to be seen. We wanted to be honored for what we did.

JJ: I remember Cultural Odyssey as the only contemporary arts group in the black community that wasn’t afraid to really be who you were, back there in the mid-1980s. You were not a historical society; you were contemporary artists. At that time the only person in the Latino community like that was René Yañez.

RJ: Yes, exactly.

JJ: So, in 1985, when I did my first report about City arts funding, I found that the black community got less than 1% of city funding, Latinos got less than 1%, and the queers got less than 1% and the Asians got almost 2%.  Collectively, we got 5%. That was where things were in 1985.

RJ: Well, we’re still up against the Ballet and the Opera right?. They are still getting most of the money.

JJ: If I remember correctly, you started the Medea Project around this time. Could you talk a bit about the Medea Project?

RJ: Well, The California Arts Council awarded the Sheriff’s Department a grant to hire me as a resident artist in the Women’s jail. My job was to go into the jails and teach aerobics to incarcerated women. Looking back, I realize that they just didn’t know what else to do with all of these women in jail.

So they thought, “Well, Rhodessa Jones looks like them and she can teach them aerobics.” They were largely black women incarcerated because of crack cocaine. I started going to the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street. The women were not interested in exercising. They would look at me like, “Bitch, please.” And I would respond by doing cartwheels and handstands.

I was turning 42 or 43 years old and I started talking about my daughter who just got married. I talked about being a grandma, and these women were like, “Who the hell is this?” And then one woman asked, “Can we just talk?” And I said, “Yes. As long as we agree that everybody’s story is valid. Everybody has a right to her story. And everything we say stays here.”

Then we began trading stories of how these women arrived in jail and became who they were. After a while, it wasn’t just black women. It became more multicultural and diverse, a snapshot of San Francisco. The women were eager to share the circle. Michael Hennessey, the sheriff of San Francisco county became aware of what was happening with the work that I did in the jail.

My first time being in the jails, there was a young black woman who decided she was gonna challenge me. She said, “Wanna play basketball?”  While I was attempting to create a space where we as a group of women would do some movement and some talking and some dancing, she wouldn’t put the basketball down. She was dribbling. I thought, “this is my right of passage. If I don’t make this happen, I am nothing in this place.”

The other women were like, “Why don’t you stop, Deborah?” And she’s dribbling and catching the ball and finally I had these two little angels on my shoulders, a little black angel and a white angel. And the little black angel said, “You go and snatch that ball from that bitch.” And I did it! I went out and I grabbed the ball.

I said, “let me tell you something. I’m going home at noon. They pay me to be here. You’re in lockdown. Who’s smarter?” And she started whining about jive ass black girls from fancy schools and I said, “Call it what you want honey, they’re paying me and the deputies are watching to see if I’m ok and if I can handle it.” Then I said, “Deborah, are we okay?” All of a sudden she’s like, “Ummmm, we’re okay.” Today, she’s still doing okay. All this got back to Sheriff Hennessey. And then I met Sean Reynolds, who became my mentor.

JJ: At this time, I was Mike Hennessey’s grant writer. I had  heard about Shawn Reynolds, technically a social worker, and about you, I recall her saying to me “These women need more than aerobics!”

RJ: I had two brothers who were cops. My brother Steve in San Francisco and my brother Gus in the East Bay. They turned me on to the welfare fund that cops have for when they need a break, or when they’re gonna party. I told Hennessey that I wanted to put the women prisoners on public stages.

He said, “Well, tell me how we’re gonna do it.” He was kind of amused. I told him the City has these funds where we can pay the cops overtime to take the women out under guard. He was just fascinated. I had done my homework. My plan was to take the women from the jail to the theaters under guard.

I taught drama, I taught writing, I taught everything inside. I wanted the chains to be removed from them. But I made the cast—both the prisoners and the professional actresses– enter the stage accompanied by uniformed sheriff deputies. Sheriff Hennessey showed up to every opening night with his father, sometimes with his wife. Then I knew to invite this guy up on stage. He was the man. He just loved that.

JJ: I worked in his campaign the first year I came here. So when he became sheriff, I stayed in touch with him and I also knew several of the people in the Sheriff’s Department from politics. One was Connie O’ Connor and another was Louise Minick. All three of us were on the Executive Committee of the Alice B.Toklas Democratic Club. Also at this point, my grant writing partner was Ellen Gavin. I think Ellen was producing the Medea project.

RJ: Yes.

JJ: It all fit together because it was a very small community. We all knew each other then. It’s bigger now. Things don’t happen the same way because there are too many people.

Beth: Oh, it’s still a pretty small world, Jeff. Not as small as it used to be, but it is. The problem is there’s some infighting in the art world and the pool of money is not growing.

RJ: Ellen’s in LA now, right? She’s on the California Arts Council.

JJ: Yes, the CAC. Recently, we seem to be talking frequently. Moving on… So the Medea Project basically pre-figured reality TV. The white people in the audience were listening to Black women telling stories that were totally foreign and unimaginable to white people.

RJ: Yes, and in the beginning, I had some pretty heavy hitters. They helped me to ground the words and get women to stand up straight and tell the truth. We had a lot of fun. Shawn Reynolds  came in and she told the women she was a lesbian. And the women said, “Can we say that?” and Shawn said “If you’re a lesbian, then yes.”

You could see women flowering. Wow, it was a new day. They didn’t have to hide, and I was just so grateful. Amy Meuller, a friend of Ellen’s who used to be with the Playwrights Festival worked with me for a while too. We had a great time. We grew and we were able to feed each other all of these ideas through experimental theater.

I think that’s what gave women, and men, the room to speak their own truths. And that’s San Francisco. It was Martha Graham who said, “People from California believe anything is possible” That was a thought that I carried around inside of me for a long time; I’m from California and I can make this happen.

JJ:  The first Medea Project production was Reality is just Outside the Window. Your solo show Big Butt Girls, Hard-headed Women was also about incarcerated women. You were doing something very different than everyone else in the theater world. Medea wasn’t just a solo performance. It was a reality-based performance featuring both professional actors and prisoners. The weird thing was that the audience couldn’t always tell who was a prisoner and who was a professional actor.

RJ: That was a running joke for us, trying to figure out who’s the convict and who’s not. All I would say to the women is that when we move on stage, we’ve got to move like an army. If people that knew some of the women from the streets got word about the show, they would come and they wanted to try to rap. That’s why I always sat in the theater. I never let them just run their mouths.

Jack Carpenter, the Technical Producer everyone used at that  time, said to me, “Rhodessa, you have to stay with this process because when you’re upfront, they are so focused.” I’m glad that I was able to manipulate the whole thing and give the women a focus.

It was like giving them eyeballs saying, “Come on, stay with me and we can talk about anything.” I remember one piece that a girl wrote. It was all about, “Hey baby. How much to fuck?” She had been a prostitute on the streets and she wrote this great little jingle about fucking and sucking and how much it cost. She asked me, “Can we say it?” I said, “We’re gonna say the whole thing.”  I guess it was experimental. But it was time for more people in our community to speak their truths.

JJ: Then if we move forward to 1989, I was writing all these grants for your piece entitled, I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.

RJ: Oh yeah, the Ike and Tina Turner show. That was a duet with a musical score. Again, it was so original in how we did it.

JJ: Right before the show opened there was the Loma Prieta earthquake. You were staging this production at the Valencia Rose right?   It really became the gay performance space. I wrote the first grants for that building also in 1983 I think. It was Tom Ammiano’s brainchild, along with Hank Wilson and Ron Lanza.

But back to the show. It sold out almost all the time. How were you thinking about that work? Did you see yourself as Tina Turner?

RJ: We just thought it would be a great piece to put on.  Ed Bullins wrote it and Brian Freeman directed us. I remember Tina Turner was writing her book and all of a sudden Tina left Ike and it was big news. It was a perfect piece for Idris and me. Idris was a little nervous because people got him confused with Ike and were sometimes rude to him because he played the Ike character so well.  But it was a lot of fun because it was fresh and bold. And it was fun working with Brian and Ed and having a band. It was timely.  I had great legs, so I could do it.

That’s one of those pieces I am so proud of having been able to pull off. We did it everywhere,—in  Chicago, New York at La Mama, around Europe. We had to remind Europeans that Tina Turner was a real person, cause everybody just wanted me to sing and strut my stuff on the stage. Nobody was interested in Tina’s personal story in Europe. They were interested in her only as a performer.

JJ: Did Pam Peniston have anything to do with Medea?

RJ: Not on the first Medea. We started working together on Perfect Courage, a production that was the opening night show for Festival 2000. Pam and I are still working together on the Medea piece that we’re doing in the Bayview.

B&A: When is that piece going to be up, Rhodessa?

RJ: We’re gonna do a workshop performance on June 14th. Then we’re gonna move to Brava and continue to build on it.

JJ: Great. So let’s return to Festival 2000.

RJ: Yeah, Perfect Courage opened the Festival. We didn’t know all the behind-the-scenes stuff that was going on about lack of money. But I think we got paid. There were people that didn’t get paid. It was a great idea but it fell through the cracks.

Whatever happened to Lenny Sloan? They brought him in as the Director of Festival 2000, right? I think he moved to New Orleans.  I was so proud to be a part of the planning committee for Festival 2000. But then to find out that behind the scenes, there was no money? That was drama. But I still had a lot of fun.

I just had dinner with Brian Freeman 2 or 3 weeks ago: he did Perfect Courage with us. I often tell him that Coleman Domingo is getting all this coverage for Bayard Ruskin but Brian Freeman is the person that introduced the community to who Ruskin was.

JJ: So, going back into the history, it was Festival 2000 that got us the cultural equity grants program. That’s where it came from.

RJ: You know more about the backstory than me because you and Idris talked a lot about that. But I’m glad we did it. Cultural Equity is not a bad thing. We deserve it, damn it.

JJ: Yeah, when I look back on Festival 2000, I thought it was great that Grants For the Arts had thousands of dollars that they could spend on anything. They spent $35,000 to put a car in that little outside space between the Opera House and the veterans building because some car company  was sponsoring some opera production. I think  Grants For the Arts spent $35,000 on that. But when it came time to bail out the people who got screwed at Festival 2000, suddenly there was no money. Money for the opera or ballet, but not for anyone else. Even though it took us two years, Festival 2000 launched the Task Force that resulted in the Cultural Equity Grants program.

RJ: Wow, Jeff, I have to give you your props. You were wheeling and dealing, baby, and a lot of people didn’t like seeing you coming because you were gonna let them have it. That was one of the things the artists talked about; That you were a bit more than just a grant writer. You had your flag and your bully club and all that other stuff too. I applaud you for that. I really do. I love the history of how you did it. You’re making me remember things that I’d for sure forgotten.

JJ: And you’re still out there. Lily Overstreet showed again 20 years after the first one.

B&A: Oh, yeah. At Fort Mason, right?

RJ: Yes, and it was outrageous. Yeah, Lily had turned 50. It was Lily’s 50th birthday party.

B&A: When’s Lily turning 75? You could have another party.

RJ: Well, I’m 75 now, so let me give it some thought.

JJ: I’m gonna be 80 soon and, I hope, I’m every bit as obnoxious as I used to be.

RJ: Yeah, you really are the classic old pain in the ass and that’s what we need.

B&A: So, after that, you continued doing the Medea Project, right?

RJ: Yeah, well, all these women would not let it die. I got invited all over the world; Egypt, South Africa, the Caribbean. We were down south. We were in New York. We were everywhere. When I was in South Africa, I actually built a whole company of African women in jail. The Medea Project was very malleable, and just right on time as a piece of artwork.

B&A: So how did you become a resident artist at Yale and Dartmouth and all these other places?

RJ: Well, I was one of the early people doing art as social change. Also, I was from California, where there was this idea that you could really create artwork rooted in politics. I think that’s what it was. I had a great time at Yale. They didn’t know what to do with me because I didn’t have a ton of letters after my name. But the students loved me. I got them to write. How do I do what I do?

I have a chair right now at Cornell. I’m able to bring members of the Medea Project to teach; Angela Wilson and Felicia Scads, the ex-offenders. They teach the project now and I just sit and witness it. But to answer your question, I think that I helped give birth to the idea of artists creating social change. So when I go to colleges and universities there are all these students who are interested in talking about that and being a part of it.

B&A: So you’ve had a good experience working with universities?

RJ: I’ve worked at Yale and Cornell. I was fascinated that they wanted me to come and talk about my work and my life. People are telling me now, “You ought to go back to the university.” I go back when they invite me and they pay me well. I’ll do a residency and spend a week working with the students. For my next residency at New York’s Hamilton College, the students will develop a performance piece about gun violence.

B&A: Now at New York University there is a program where you can get a Masters in Theater & Social Change. That’s clearly something that came from your work.

RJ: Yes. Was it at the University of Michigan or Pittsburgh that had prisons attached to the campuses? Cornell has a prison project. You can go into the prisons while you’re there and that’s been a pretty amazing thing to be a part of too. But it’s still largely men, not women.

Beth: Rhodessa, we’ve gotta get you down to UC Santa Cruz where there is an Institute for Arts and Sciences. It’s all prison abolitionist programming. Plus I started a program in the Art Department called the Environmental Art and Social Practice Program.

RJ: Oh, that’d be great. Maybe I can bring my crew and we can work with the students to make a performance. I’d really like to make that happen.

B&A: That’d be beautiful. I’m curious to know, back in the day, what theaters and what kinds of spaces did you feel most comfortable working in? What artists were you going to see?

RJ: Well, you know, in my early youth, my sisters and I were girly girls, very influenced by Motown. We used to sneak in and perform at this bowling alley in Rochester NY because we weren’t old enough to be in a bar. My mother had been a singer in a gospel group, so singing and dancing were the early things in my life. Every holiday, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, you were expected to put on a show. That’s how I cut my teeth.

Then, of course, after I moved to San Francisco, I was raising my kid in Potrero Hill and took performing for granted. Then Teresa Dickinson, the founder of Tumbleweed, asked me if I could come and dance with the company. All of a sudden I was back into modern dance and contact improvisation with these women. So that’s where I met Mangrove and John La Fan and Robert Henry Johnson.

Yes, these were the people that I was interacting with all the time, and my brother Bill, and his partner Arnie Zane. I was going to New York and seeing them and going to La Mama. That was just some crazy stuff going down. But I liked it.

B&A: You told the funniest damn story about Bonnie Ora Sherk when you went to New York in your bus.

RJ: Oh, Bonnie. What a trip the Farm was, huh? The Farm was part of shaping my consciousness because it was a performance space and a farm located at Potrero and 26th street in the Mission.

So back to your question about what shaped me. There were all these ideas coming down about what theater could be and what you could manifest through stage work. And I had a children’s company. We did political theater. I worked with the Mime Troupe too for a while. I did love that.

B&A: Did you ever perform at Glide Church in the Tenderloin?

RJ: The Medea Project and I have performed at Glide Church; we created a piece based on bits and pieces of classical literature. I used to love Janice Mirikitani. Janice was really kind to me and a great poet. She would ask me to come to her poetry reading and I’d go. I got my PhD at the edge of the world. I was looking at everything.

B&A: What venues did you go to here in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. What was your home theater?

RJ: I remember performing at The Art Institute in San Francisco, we were invited there often. The Eureka Theater was another venue that I worked at a lot. Like I said, I was a hippie chick before I was a performance artist. So I loved working at outdoor venues. When I was working with my brother Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane,  I remember Peter Coyote asked us, “What’s the Jones company? A band of junkies?” And we said, “Oh no, we’re family.” I learned early that the stage was this incredible space to share energy from, or to protest. But theater kind of found me. I didn’t go around looking for it.

JJ: The Eureka Theater where you performed Lily Overstreet had as its Artistic Director –Tony Taccone;  Later, he commissioned Tony Kushner to write Angels in America and the Eureka premiered it in San Francisco.

RJ: I auditioned for late night with Julie Hebert. She really liked me. Julie was really the key to me being there at all.

B&A: You also performed at Brava Theatre. Now you’re at the Bayview Opera House.

RJ: Yes I am at the Bayview Opera House right now, it’s great to be back and funded by Black on Both Sides for Life on the Swerve. But Brava has been the Medea Project’s home in San Francisco for a long time.

JJ: In addition to your long history of creating new, innovative and experimental work, Cultural Odyssey worked so well that you both have a retirement package, and that’s rare for a small-to-midsize non-profit arts company.

RJ: Yeah, we do.  I’ve already bought a house in Houston, Texas. It’s a 5-bedroom house with a swimming pool. It was only $400,000. My granddaughter, my daughter, and my great grandson are living there now. I like that area. But nothing compares to the Bay Area in a lot of ways.

B&A: What do you see yourself doing in the future? Do you think you’re ever going to retire?

RJ: Well, I always say that I am, but I am actually working on a book. The book is titled, Nudging the Memories. It’s a handbook about how I make theater with “other” populations and I’m only halfway through but it’s becoming a collection of my own stories as well as the stories of the women that I work with.  My sister and I are also working on something entitled Just Outside of Babylon. It’s about living in America, coming out of a migrant family. So I have those two projects happening.

I might go back and make my own documentary of the Medea Project, just to see the people in the group that have grown immensely like Angela Wilson. She runs the women’s unit with the sheriff’s department and I met her in jail. She was a addict and now she runs this program and she’s getting her degree at SF State.

B&A: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

RJ: 12 brothers and sisters.

B&A: Wow. So, our last question is, as you reflect on your contributions and challenges, what advice or insights would you offer to emerging BIPOC and/or LGBTQ artists who are beginning to navigate their artistic journeys?

RJ: To the people dreaming or being hesitant, I would say, “take some deep breaths, and follow your own heart.” Because that’s a hard one. People say, “oh my God, be careful.” But this is all we got. I have grown into my heart, and I trust her. I trust her more than anyone. Yeah, you’re gonna get knocked down a few times. That’s gonna happen. But trust your own instincts. Trust your heart. There are people who need to hear your stories. Practice revolution.

And don’t be afraid to write it down. Lily Overstreet really grew out of the fact that I took a little journal to work with me when I worked at the Tenderloin peep-shows. I’d never done that before.  So much was going on. Later I’d go back to this journal and I’d have a lot of  things that made sense and a lot that didn’t make any sense at all. But I chronicled my own experience and I  think that’s a very good tool to be able to hone in and call your own.

Annie: As I’m approaching 70, I’m thinking about the mistakes I made. They always say, “oh, don’t be afraid to make mistakes.” But then you’re 70 and you go, “fuck, I made a lot of fucking mistakes.” Do you feel that way?

RJ: Yeah. You look back and you go, “Wow, what was I thinking?” I wish that I had been more careful with my kid who’s a tad wounded by things that I said or did or by the people I exposed her to.

I always tell people I pulled this life out of my ass. There was no school to attend to be an exemplary new dancer. You have to trust in creative survival. Everything that you’re handed is a jewel of some sort. Trust it. I am a creative survivalist. I’ve taken what the world gave me and I’ve made it work for me.

I think I surprised my daughter, because I have no problem saying, “I hope you can forgive me.” I think she looks at me sometimes and thinks, “You’re my mom. What does that mean?” My daughter is so much like my mother. She carries a big stick. My mother would say, “I’m not your friend, I’m your mother.” Okay, but do you have to roar so loud? All in all theater saved my life. If not for theater I’d be a bitch with a very bad attitude, or dead.

B&A: Thank you so much Rhodessa. Thank you for your life’s work, from the peep-show to the theater, to the prison work, to the teaching and to the work you’re doing now.

RJ: Thank you so much. I enjoyed this. It was a walk down memory lane. Thank you, Jeff. It was really interesting. Alrighty. I’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.