A year into COVID, how are we coping?
How has COVID – and the political and societal turmoil of the past year – affected our mental health? And how are we coping? (Though much of this week’s discussion applies to everyone, we especially…
Queer Comix From Prison Depict Incarcerated Life
Casper Cendre started writing letters to queer people in prison when they was in high school. Cendre wanted to know what queer life was like from the inside. Since then, he’s received thousands of letters…
Big Freedia — no guns, more twerking!
“Queen of Bounce” Big Freedia is famous for her music and twerking; her life story and anti-gun activism are less well known. Big Freedia was shot twice in 2004 and her brother was killed on the…
Drawing Political Lines; Challenging Marriage-Equality Governor
Lines are being drawn for the once-a-decade mapping of US Congressional and states’ legislative districts and for county and city offices based on the prior year’s census. This time around in California, there are more…
SF’s sole gay supervisor on queer culture, housing, COVID recovery
San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman says his passion for politics goes back to age 5 and his passion for providing mental health services to combat homelessness from his mother “spiraling into mental illness” some years…
The Freezer Door mourns ‘the dream of queer’
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new book, The Freezer Door, mourns losing “the dream of queer” — a “world without borders and hierarchies” — that she says consumerism, technology and gentrification are destroying. Sycamore terms the…
Manny’s revives civil discourse
Can we have civil civic discourse in these fractious times? Manny Yekutiel, activist and owner of the cafe, bookstore and civic events space Manny’s, passionately believes so. Manny opened his “people-powered and community-focused meeting and…
Blackmail, My Love shows SF’s sordid homophobic past
Blackmail, My Love is a noir murder-mystery novel set in San Francisco, 1951 – “The Dark Ages of Queerdom,” as author and illustrator Katie Gilmartin puts it – when cops raided gay and lesbian bars,…
2020 in the Queer-View Mirror
Happy New Year!? We all hope 2021 will be kinder to us than 2020 … but only time will tell. So this week: 2020 in the queer-view mirror and a look ahead into 2021 with national…
Searching for Intimacy During COVID
In the Bay and across the country, we’re nearly 10 months into COVID restrictions. Some of us are skin-starved, many of us even love-starved. No hugs, no spooning, no sex. No Friends. No family. It’s…
