Arts & Entertainment

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Out CNN Anchor Don Lemon Hits Back: Trump Is A Racist Bully

“Let me not mince words here. This president traffics in racism and is fueled by bullying. President Trump is trying a divide-and-conquer strategy here and here’s how it goes. He divides by race and tries to conquer decency by smearing and besmirching the truth and the people who fight to uphold it. Referring to African-Americans as dumb is one of the oldest canards of America’s racist past and present — that black people are of inferior intelligence. “Unlike this president who lashes out wildly at anyone who criticizes him, LeBron James — in addition to being a brilliant black man, […]

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Cotati Accordian Festival Slated for Aug. 18 & 19

The 28th Annual Nonprofit, Multi-cultural Cotati Accordion Festival, the “Woodstock of the Accordion World”, will be taking place this coming August 18th & 19th in La Plaza Park in downtown Cotati, Ca. Internationally acclaimed virtuosos from Italy, Finland and Germany, joined by an ongoing two day dance party featuring five zydeco bands, will all be at the famed multi-generational event. Don’t miss the Jam Tent, the Polka Tent, the Student Stage, the alternative Accordion Apocalypse Stage, the Zydeco Dance Party, the two main stages, the Redwood Cafe Friday show, and over 70 vendors, food, wine and beer. Tickets are available […]

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Legendary Adult Theatre in San Francisco Will Close Down

Credit: Nob Hill Theatre San Francisco is about to lose one of its precious gems that dates back all the way to the golden era of porn. Nob Hill Theatre, the legendary male strip club in SF, will be permanently closing its doors on August 19th. The owners, Larry Hoover and Gary Luce, have decided to retire and head south to Palm Springs. The married couple bought the club six years ago, which found an increase in profits as time went on. It will officially close after an appreciation barbecue for customers and appearances by house performers.”We’ve enjoyed owning the […]

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“Nanette” Special Faces Up to Reality

Comedy, at its best, is supposed to stare down the truth. Once a fairly simple task, any kind of reckoning with “truth” becomes slightly more complicated in today’s world, where there are as many truths to one story as there are people who lived it, witnessed it, and hear about it. It’s a comedian’s job, in the world of #MeToo, to figure out how to poke fun at trauma while actually taking it very, very seriously. No one has yet managed to walk this line better than the gay Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, whose stand-up show “Nanette” recently started streaming […]

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Book Review: ‘Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions, and Criticisms’ by Michelle Tea

“It’s one thing to discuss your family’s trauma with other family,” writes Michelle Tea. “It’s another thing entirely to release their stories to a world that doesn’t love them.” She’s writing about the HAGS, a San Francisco group of lesbian punks active in the 1990s, but the sentiment could easily apply to many of the essays in Against Memoir, a new collection of Tea’s writings from Feminist Press. The pieces brought together in Against Memoir navigate the difficult balance of the personal and the communal, and the dynamics of discussing fraught issues within a community (especially queer communities), versus discussing […]

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Book Review: ‘The Unpunished Vice’ by Edmund White

As the consummate memoirist, you would think Edmund White (My Lives, City Boy, Inside a Pearl) had left no page unturned, but then this diamond surfaces: The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading. Here is a multi-faceted account of superlative literary reflection, borne from the earthquake (life-quake?) of a heart attack. Here we have memories and discourse on a lifetime of books read, the texts that have influenced White’s art and thinking–books savored, books turned over again and again as new aspects reveal themselves, and most important: the people, the friends and colleagues who delivered these books into his life. […]

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Music Review: “Palo Santo” by Years & Years

Years and Years Before Years & Years appeared on the scene, seemingly from nowhere, with their chart-topping debut Communion, most of us had no idea that their brand of infectious, surprisingly cerebral, and subtly but unmistakably queer synthpop was exactly what we all needed in our lives. Palo Santo () finds the British band more heavily preoccupied than ever with matters of spirituality, sexuality, and the many points of overlap between the two. This time, however, they ditch the subtlety. The direction taken on Palo Santo is inseparable from frontman Olly Alexander’s rapid rise as an outspokenly gay pop superstar. […]

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Book Review: ‘Paper is White’ by Hilary Zaid

Set in the late 1990s in the Bay Area, Hilary Zaid’s debut novel, Paper Is White, follows Ellen Margolis, assistant curator at the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory, as she navigates the choppy waters of history, kicked up by two very intense and very important personal involvements. The novel opens with an Indian tale in the place of an epigraph,  about a woman who knows a story and a song, but refuses to give voice to either. The story and song tire of never being let out, and so betray the woman by shifting shape into men’s shoes and […]

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Book Review: ‘Portraits’ by N.A. Diaman

Diaman is an experienced gay writer with seven novels and three memoirs under his belt.  This newest novel is a quiet, charming story of long loving relationships in San Francisco and Europe (Germany, then mostly in Paris) and finally, briefly, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.  There are three chapters, the first named for Theo, the son of Greek emigrants from Istanbul, who opened a Greek bakery, which became a landmark in the Bay Area.  Theo works in a book store and becomes a manager.  He falls in love with Sebastian, an American son of Ethiopian parents.  Sebastian is a […]

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Janet Mock Makes History as First Trans Woman of Color Directing a TV Show

Activist and writer Janet Mock made history on Sunday, when the episode of Pose she wrote and directed aired on FX to virtually unanimous acclaim. Mock became the first transgender person of colour to direct a TV show. “Love is the Message” was the sixth episode of the show’s inaugural season, for which Mock also worked as a writer—the first trans woman of colour to write for television—and producer. Set in the late 1980s, Pose focuses on life and society in New York City, from its iconic ball culture to the rise of the Donald Trump-like billionaires, against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. The musical […]

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