Bay Area Issue of LOCUSPOINT is finally Out!

I'm so excited to announce the launch of the Bay Area issue of LOCUSPOINT, a journal founded by Charles Jensen of Lethe Press, who invited me to be guest editor.

This issue features new and exciting work from Brenda Hillman, Dan Bellm, Brian Teare, Randall Mann, Michael Montlack, Kevin Simmonds, Catharine Clark-Sayles, and many, many more!

Brenda Hillman

Kevin Simmonds

LOCUSPOINT is a poetry journal whose mission is to spotlight different regions of the country in each issue in order to explore the rich synergism and magic that occurs in literary communities. 

Here is an excerpt from my introductory essay:

"...By 1955, the San Francisco Renaissance was in full flower. Poets Kenneth Rexroth and Madeline Gleason were busy ringleading a community of Beat and avant-garde poets that included Diane Di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Patchen, Phillip Whalen, Dick McBride, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and for a short time, Jack Kerouac..."

Click HERE to read the Bay Area issue of LOCUSPOINT. 

Live FREE Music!

San Francisco is chock full of music and musicians, much of it free! Here are two upcoming shows I'll be participating in: 

Friday, August 27

Marianne Barlow, Brent Calderwood, and Russell David @ SoCha Cafe

Acoustic rock, folk and alt country songs at the hip Mission venue, which serves coffee, beer, and wine.. Free. 8:30pm-11pm. 3235 Mission Street (@ Valencia). www.brentcalderwood.com, www.simplemuzik.net, www.mariannebarlow.com

Sunday, September 12

Drew Boles and Brent Calderwood @ Brainwash

Queer singer-songwriters Drew Boles and Brent Calderwood perform acoustic and electronic guitar- and piano-based pop and folk music at the hip SoMa cafe, where you can do your laundry, throw back lattes and beers, and get a taste of the local music scene all at the same time! 7pm-9pm. 1122 Folsom Street (@ Langton). www.drewboles.com, www.brentcalderwood.com

I've been seeing lots of great singer-songwriters and local musicians lately. One of my favorites is Carletta Sue Kay, a San Francisco performer/band headed by Randy Walker (Carletta) that deftly combines rock, roots music, country, camp and cabaret all into one satisfying package. If my ears were right last time I heard Carletta Sue Kay live, one of her songs has the hook, "It's not love till someone calls a cop." If that's not right, someone let me know—'cause I'll use it myself!  Their next show is this Thursday, August 26 at 111 Minna Gallery, 9pm-1:30am. Also playing are the fabulous Ex-Boyfriends! 

Last May, I attended a great evening of gay singer-songwriters, some local, some touring, at the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco. Called Sing Out San Francisco, the evening showcased cutie Tom Goss, along with the sensitive-but-edgy Dudley Saunders, Daniel Owens and Jeremiah Clark in diverse evening of original pop, folk and jazz music. I was impressed by all of them, especially the guitar and piano stylings of Clark and Owens.

I'll be updating you on other local musicians and artists in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, here's a few videos to tide you over!

Drew Boles, Brent Calderwood, and Russell David at Bluesix, Thursday May 20, 9pm Sharp!

Start Time:	Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 9:00pm
End Time:	Friday, May 21, 2010 at 12:00am
Location:	Bluesix
Street:	3043 24th Street at Treat
City/Town:	San Francisco, CA
	View Map

Drew Boles, Brent Calderwood, and Russell David @ Bluesix
Local queer singer-songwriters Drew Boles and Brent Calderwood perform acoustic and electronic guitar- and piano-based pop and folk music at the hip Mission club. Singer-songwriter Russell David also performs. Singer-songwriter Marianne Barlow makes special appearance. Cover charge: $5. 9:00pm 3043 24th Street (at Treat). www.drewboles.com, www.myspace.com/brentcalderwood, www.simplemuzik.net 

LGBT Youth Fighting for Basic Rights, Then As Now

The fracas I blogged about on Sunday in Mississippi over a lesbian high school student having the temerity to want to take another girl to her prom—and the school's ensuing decision to cancel the whole darn thing!—reminded me of the famous hubbub caused by Cumberland, Rhode Island high-schooler Aaron Fricke, who in 1980 had to file suit in a U.S. District court in order to take a male date to his senior prom. That was 20 years ago, but to many modern ears it sounds ridiculous, as well it should. Fricke attracted national media attention including, famously, Donahue, and later wrote a tender, moving book about his experience, Reflections of a Rock Lobster. 

Over 10 years later, in 1993, my Livermore, California high school considered canceling its prom after the Oakland Tribune announced I would be taking a male date. Luckily for the school, my absences and truancies—I was cutting because of death threats and attacks—made me ineligible to graduate and attend anyway, so the prom went on without a hitch. 

But the resulting melee led to more death threats and more news stories, even national TV appearances. But then, that was 1993, the year when there were literally more talk shows on TV than any other before or since. Corny catchphrases were legion ("You go girl!" and others), and even Jerry Springer tried to make his show stand out by ending each hillbilly slugfest with a "Final Thought"—a trite aphorism here, a pinch of advice on how to change the world with nonviolence there. Silly. Lesbian author Linnea Due, author of the wonderful lesbian teen recovery novel High and Outside, said it best when she interviewed me and wrote in her informative 1995 study Joining the Tribe: Growing Up Gay & Lesbian in the '90s:

"There are very few gay youth activists, and even fewer who are willing to talk to the media. Half the Queer Nation members I interviewed in '91, though four or five years older than Brent and already safely ensconsed in college, would not allow their names to be used in the [East Bay] Express.... Prepared for violence, he was unprepared for the fact that being willing to talk about it, particularly if he used clever turns of phrase like preferring to be bashed by others than by himself, would set talk show hosts salivating like Pavlov's dogs." —Linnea Due

Does anyone even remember Gabrielle, the short-lived talk show distributed by Fox (sorry!) with Gabrielle Carteris, the actress who played what seemed to be LA's only brainy Jewish girl (oddly, about 30 years old in real life) on 90210? I was flown to Burbank and appeared on an episode with the family and friends of the late Brandon Teena, whose story was eventually made into the film Boys Don't Cry. Also on the show was Mary Griffith, whose son Bobby, tortured by his family's conservative religious judgments about his own budding homosexuality, threw himself from a California freeway overpass and died instantly. Mary and I had a wonderful teary-eyed three-hour conversation over cigarettes in the airport diner after the show, waiting for the same plane back to the Bay Area, in which she told me about a book she was writing which later became a book and then a film with Sigourney Weaver called Prayers for Bobby. (Why is this film not available for sale? Does anybody know?)

Even the Oprah Show called, but, inexplicably, my school's principal didn't feel like being confronted by me and Oprah in front of millions of veiwers, so the idea was dropped (that was back when Oprah was still blantantly naughty—remember?). I wasn't told straightaway, but a week or two later, the Oprah staff sent me a conciliatory XXL T-Shirt which I still have in a box somewhere (why so large, people?). I guess instead of "Oprah" in big purple letters, it should have said: "I risked my life to be famous enough to be on the Oprah show, but all I got was this lousy T-shirt."  Crestfallen about years of high-school harassment and not getting to meet Oprah, I got my GED, moved to San Francisco, and became a journalist.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and a lot of the same old stuff is going down. Sadly I left most of my old clunky VHS tapes, some of which held footage from those talkshows, with an old boyfriend during a transcontinental move I made back in 2006, and shortly thereafter, during our predictable breakup, he threw out all those precious tapes, in a fit of that kind of ungentlemanliness that many among us have been susceptible to during breakups. (Does anyone have suggestions for how to track down the Gabrielle show, for instance?)

I'll wrap up now with exerpts from a longish review of a very important  contemporary book, Dude, Youre a  Fag. These exerpts, by yours truly, appear courtesy of the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide:

          Today’s teenagers, familiar with the heteronormative images of gays they receive from television, film—and, arguably, from the mainstream LGBT political movement—are now able to tolerate gay men who toe the gender-role line, but fags like Ricky remain fags always. This is what Riki Wilkins has termed the “Eminem Exception”—a reference to the rap artist Eminem, who has attempted to absolve himself of the label “homophobe” by claiming he uses the term fag for men who are weak and unmanly, regardless of sexual orientation.

            Dude, You’re a Fag provides persuasive proof that gender identity should not be seen as an expendable addition to employment nondiscrimination laws, nor as an auxiliary to gay liberation—an optional T in our LGBT community. Gender identity is not a side issue; it is the issue. Until we get this message, which Pascoe’s book so clearly spells out, boys like Ricky will be jettisoned, and only those gay boys who can throw a football and those lesbians who comply with notions of masculine supremacy will be able to enjoy the dignity that all humans deserve.

Mississippi School Axes Prom to Avoid Lesbian Dancing, while Stars on Ice Drops Johnny Weir

My friend Bea, all the way in Groeningen, Netherlands, contacted me to alert me to this story by sex columnist and Seattle Stranger editor extraordinaire Dan Savage: High School in Mississippi Cancels Prom to Prevent Lesbian Student From Bringing Female Date—and Potentially Invites Violence Against Lesbian Student.  

That may seem like a long title, but it gives activist Googlers and savvy Stranger.com readers (the only kind of readers The Stranger has, as far as I can tell) the info they need in a nice compact package. "Click to learn more," the headline beckons.

It's the 21st-century version of phone trees—a calling system activists like Harvey Milk (beautifully photographed, here and elsewhere, by legendary San Francisco photographer and activist Daniel Nicoletta) used pre-Internet to get their messages about rallies and protests out as quicky as possible: one person calls ten, each of those call ten, who each call ten, until a united front shows up to scare the bejezus out of the pigs. Already, the article has gone viral in the Twittersphere, and amassed over 172 comments on the original site (the average article in The Stranger or on similar news sites gets about 20 comments in a good month).

Now that a lot of "mainstream" folks—LGBT and otherwise—are out of work too, many middle-of-the-road Americans suddenly feel the way some people from disenfranchized groups, and many students, have always felt—that our politics and our ideals are the only things we reliably own.

That's my theory for why more people are getting angry about injustice of all kinds, from the persecution of LGBT children to music censorship and racism to advertisers of the upcoming Stars On Ice tour deeming gay artist and credit-to-skating Johnny Weir "Not Family Friendly Enough" to include in the extravanza tour, a major source of income for many athletes. (What, too gay for Ice Skating? Too many breathtaking, showstopping Lady Gaga tribute numbers?)

For shame, Smuckers, sponsor of Stars on Ice, for your Bible-Belt-pandering. I guess that's what we get, LGBTers and gay-savvy straight folks, for having switched to Polaner All Fruit, a corn-syrup-free preserves we found more salutory and palatable, decades ago. Now Smuckers is punishing all us urban sophisticates for our glucose-eschewing habits by choosing to disavow what should be their pride in one of the greatest athletes and charismatic artists to grace Ice Skating in a long, long time.

Evidently, Smuckers likes their Ice Shows to be as cloying and flavorless as their jams and jellies. And c'mon guys, Smuckers? You call yourselves "Smuckers" and you think Johnny Weir isn't family friendly? You sure provided my brothers and I with our share of naughty jokes in the breakfast nook growing up.

Anyone who thinks this is "just an ice skating issue" is just plain wrong. This is about gender roles and assimilation versus all of us embracing our unique gifts and contributions to the world as "queer" or somehow "deviant" or "different" people.

Get angry, people. Get very angry. Then contact GLAAD, and find out more about possible solutions. In the meantime, I suggest throwing out any stray jars of Smuckers you've been serving to undiscerning guests or using to hold up the wonky shelf in the bathroom cabinet.

So, other than raising my hackles, what's the connection between these two stories? Gender. Two girls dancing together freaks the heck out of some parents and principles in Mississippi, and the Smucker's guys' real fear is that Weir is too effeminate. Being a gay man is OK as long as you're masculine—even Eminem says so—but people can't stand a man who's feminine. Masculine's the thing to be in the U.S.—it's even OK for women and girls, as long as they know their roles at home and on the dancefloor.

But more on all that tomorrow.