sex

Up there

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea,

I’m a muff-diving dyke, sort of. The first few times with my new girlfriend, I enjoyed her taste. However, most recently she tasted much different — and, frankly, worse. I almost blurted out that she might have a yeast infection (luckily I caught myself before completely ruining the mood). Curious, the other day I tasted myself, and I had a similar terribly pungent, unappealing taste. I know my body well enough to know I don’t have a yeast infection! So now I’m wondering, is it related to menstrual cycles? Previous physical activity? Sharing of bacteria and yeast?

Love,

Wannabe Diver

Dear Muffy:

Could be any of those, with yeast less likely since it doesn’t like sour things itself. Of course, I could be misinterpreting "terribly pungent" to mean terribly sour, or maybe you meant … OK, stop me there. See, this is why even proper medical personnel are discouraged from attempting to diagnose things in absentia — you don’t want them to do it wrong, and frankly, you don’t want me doing it at all.

The pH of the vagina does change over the course of the menstrual cycle, getting higher (more neutral) at ovulation, when the vagina welcomes sperm whether or not its owner thinks that’s a good idea (and whether or not there are any sperm present or expected, like, ever), and more acidic at either cycle end, when any sperm that wandered by would be doomed anyway, so we might as get it over with. The thing about menstrual cycles, though, is that they’re cyclic, so whatever she tastes like on, say, day twenty, she’d have tasted that way last month too. I’m not diagnosing, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear you had a mild, mutual bacterial infection, but you’ll never know unless you get it checked out. You could sneak off discreetly and get fixed up, of course, but that’s not going to help her any, so, much as you might like to gloss this over in the interest of romance and mood maintenance, I’m afraid I can’t let you off that easily. You’re going to have to do the "Hey honey, I couldn’t help but notice …" thing, but hey, so what? It’s all in a day’s relationship work, is it not? And you are in one of those, are you not?

I ask because I couldn’t help noticing something myself, and unlike you I am not loathe to bring up uncomfortable truths, no matter how conversation-stopping. So hey, dudette, how come you could recognize your girlfriend in a blind taste test, while she wouldn’t know you from, you should pardon the expression, Adam? Is this lack of reciprocity part of some larger plan, or is she being kind of a piglet about this? And if it’s the latter, well, don’t you have more to talk about than who tastes nasty all of a sudden?

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My gyno prescribed estrogen cream (Estrace) to combat chronic yeast infections apparently brought on by vaginal dryness he says may be associated with my long-term use of the pill. He said it wouldn’t have any effect on my male sex partner, but then he also said an IUD was more effective than tubal ligation, so I don’t know whether to believe him. The Rx insert says nothing; the Mayo clinic suggests that estrogen cream could have an effect on my partner, and also that it is harmful to condoms (which we use in addition to the BCPs because I really don’t want kids). Plus, you know, there was that House episode a few weeks ago where a guy ‘s hormone cream seeped through his skin and made his kids sick.

Love,

Bad Medicine

Dear Med:

Wow, really, there was nothing in the insert? Because while I couldn’t turn up anything superspecific, there is no question that the Estrace people themselves say to "avoid exposing your male sexual partner … by not having sexual intercourse right after using these medicines. Your male partner might absorb the medicine through his penis if it comes in contact with the medicine." Unless you’re both some kind of demented, round-the-clock, insatiable sex monkeys, it really shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out the time of day that you’re least likely to find yourself suddenly and spontaneously exposing your partner to conjugated estrogens, and apply the cream then. As for oral ingestion, dunno, but it should be equally avoidable. Apply in the morning, get head at night, or vice versa.

The creams are indeed harmful to condoms, just by virtue of being greasy, and I’m appalled that your doctor wouldn’t mention that, or any of this, really. He isn’t really wrong about the IUD, incidentally, but he’s very wrong not to mention sex when prescribing something you put up your lady parts. He may be wrong about more than that — any chance you could see somebody else? As for the doc on TV, well, I adore the show for the quips and the sexy crip, but you could get better medical information from This Old House or maybe Animal House. Estrace has a 1-800 line, you know.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

The fundamentals of Fucked Up

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You needn’t be too wary of the dialogue surrounding Fucked Up, Toronto’s jewel of esoteric hardcore punk. The members’ beliefs and their names are hidden, but they’re not out to brainwash anybody. And they’re certainly not hiding anything in the songwriting department: the melodies are blistering and as uninhibited as the band, which has a knack for subverting punk conventions.

"For hardcore bands especially, politics are often made out to be black-and-white," rhythm guitarist 10,000 Marbles says on the phone from Toronto. Critics and listeners have puzzled aplenty over this pseudonyms-only band in their attempts to pin down Fucked Up’s political allegiances. Before releasing its debut, Hidden World, on Jade Tree last year, the band had spent the prior five years releasing 17 vinyl singles with artwork and lyrics that cited magick, anarchism, the Spanish Civil War, and André Gide. These may look to be the makings of a bizarre cult agenda, but Fucked Up’s "culture of confusion" and conflicting political ideas — the most bizarre instance coming in the form of a photo of a Hitler Youth rally on the cover of its 2004 split single with Haymaker on Deep Six Records — are more about kick-starting independent thought than advancing any specific, concrete ideas.

"We originally wore the anarchist tag pretty proudly," rhythm guitarist Gulag says, also calling from Toronto. "But now we’re more interested in leapfrogging cultures and ideas. It’s a more fulfilling way to live, if a little unprincipled." As amorphous as the members’ personal beliefs may be, Fucked Up doesn’t express any disdain for punk as a sound: Mustard Gas’s bass lines and vocalist Pink Eyes’s deep growl-howl are quite reverent toward the ghosts of hardcore past, and surprisingly enough, the band’s new 12-inch, Year of the Pig, marks its first waltz with rhetorical clarity and straight-ahead activism. The A-side title track examines the ongoing problem of violence toward women through the lens of prostitution, which is legal in Canada. It’s the culture of repression and guilt surrounding these subjects that has inspired the unusually pointed song, 10,000 Marbles says: "It’s taboo issues like sex work that people like us have a responsibility to talk about."

"Year of the Pig" is pretty daring stylistically and structurally, but to Fucked Up’s great credit, it’s also fantastic. Eighteen minutes long and starting as something of a twee shuffle before shifting into organ-backed operatic bellows from Pink Eyes, the song deftly delves into pummeling, psychedelic kraut rock riffage the likes of which might make Earthless or Major Stars jealous. Fucked Up’s sheer disregard of genre pigeonholes is especially evident in its recent doings. "We’re trying to bring in the electronic crowd now," Gulag says. "We just recorded a cover of [French dance duo] Justice’s ‘Stress.’ "

Venturing into Daft Punk–related territory: there’s a first for hardcore! It’s this staunch avoidance of cliché and political boundaries that very nearly makes Fucked Up punk for the Reading Is Fundamental set. More than anything else, the imperative is to ignore convention and get informed, which isn’t a fucked-up MO at all.

FUCKED UP

Sat/30, 8 p.m., $7

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

Also July 4, 9 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Sex, Lies and Videotapes

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By Sarah Phelan
with editorial research by Joseph Plaster

Dalybudget.jpg
photo by Terrie Frye
Admit it! Would you even be reading this story if Daly hadn’t said “allegations of cocaine use”?

For those few running dogs of the press who actually hung around for Tuesday night’s four-hour hearing on proposed cuts to public health programs, Sup. Chris Daly’s comments on Newsom’s substance abuse problems seemed, well, entirely appropriate.
As the two reporters who were actually there know full well, Daly’s speech, which lasted eight minutes, only spent 30 seconds referring to allegations of Newsom’s cocaine use. The rest of the speech focused on the reality that there’s been an annual ping-pong match going on between the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, ever sinceNewsom came to power. In this match, Newsom proposes making cuts to public health programs–and the Board objects. Then those impacted have to show up to protest at City Hall. At which point, the Board’s Budget Committee responds by restoring funding to the programs that Newsom has once again targeted.

Ammiano says today…

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“In honor of gay pride, Supervisor Daly and Mayor Newsom will have makeup sex.” B3

A real dialogue on trans issues

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OPINION What I love about the queers in this town is just how messy and offensive we allow one another to be in our unified goal of relentlessly trying to strengthen our community. In some circles, the evolution of dyke space into a multigender population of transsexuals, genderqueers, femmes, tg-butches, bisexuals, lesbians, and men of all birth sexes has led to tension about queer visibility and discussions about misogyny, privilege, and appropriation. I am frequently pissed but never lacking for a group of people who will continue to engage the issues and attempt imperfect solutions no matter how hurt they have become in the process.

And yet, during Pride season there will be countless potentially offensive voices we will not hear. The ex-gay and right-wing Christian movements — arguably homosexual communities in their own right — will not be given unchallenged space at our events, and there won’t be an uproar that these views should be included for the purpose of "fostering dialogue." As many journalists and artists can attest, ensuring the free exchange of ideas often means knowing what to leave out.

Still, it was predictable that supporters of lesbian director Catherine Crouch’s film The Gendercator would claim censorship and blame transgender community allies for "silencing dialogue" when the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival decided last month to pull this film from its June schedule. It was a setup; victims could either remain silent during an attack or speak up and "prove" that they have malicious intentions to take over the world.

For those unfamiliar with The Gendercator, a quick look at Crouch’s film summary and deliberately defamatory director’s note says it all: Trans people are the product of "distorted cultural norms" who uphold antigay values and change their sex "instead of working to change the world." Male-identified trans people are altered lesbians, despite the fact that many have never held that identity. And not even the femme dykes are safe, considering Crouch’s tomboy-or-else definition of acceptable queerdom.

Crouch says the film comes from her anxiety about what she perceives as the loss of gender-variant women and the rise of binary gender norms. But the film itself strikes a different note, depicting trans bodies as sci-fi horrors and trans characters as coercive perpetrators of nonconsensual body invasions — all the familiar rhetoric used to justify antitrans violence and deny basic civil rights.

If there’s a dialogue to be had about our community’s valid anxieties surrounding the spike in sexual reassignment surgeries, it certainly wasn’t raised in Crouch’s The Gendercator. Unlike the creators of other films that have been controversial in the trans community, Crouch is disinterested in the lives of the people she portrays in this work. Imagine making a film alleging an inherent pedophilia in gay people to "spark dialogue" about gay culture’s obsession with eternal youth. As Rae Greiner, a queer woman who launched the Frameline letter-writing campaign, points out, "You can’t foster genuine discussion when you demonize your subjects or when you intentionally forego nuance in favor of stereotypes, false accusations, and outdated perceptions."

In fact, The Gendercator provoked very little dialogue at all until San Francisco activists protested it. Far from trying to silence it, they aimed to call attention to the film and create an actual conversation. They distributed flyers with Crouch’s position and responded with the truth about trans people’s lives: trans people are often queer social-justice activists with a nuanced and feminist view of identity.

The reason nontrans gay people have not seen blatantly antigay or antilesbian films yanked from their festivals is that such movies don’t make it past the selection committee. To decry the ban on The Gendercator is thus disingenuous, particularly when many of the "anticensorship" and "nonbinary" voices support events that ban trans people from attending based on the presence or absence of a penis.

Yet there are some important messages about this film that should not be lost.

First, if our community artists are going to claim dialogue as justification for blatant attacks, then they should expect to have that dialogue. Some of the questions the queer community has posed in its discussion of the film are: Why does Crouch think her views are nonbinary? How do femmes, bisexuals, butches of color, nonop male-identified trans people, and dykes who choose breast cancer reconstruction fit into her limited view of sex and gender? How does the glorification of masculinity in lesbian circles and the sexism in butch and genderqueer communities contribute to this perceived pressure to transition to male?

Most important, if gays and lesbians feel that the growing transgender population means they are under attack, how can we come together to make sure this concern is heard and validated without demonizing one another? Several events exist in San Francisco to deal with such tensions, but perhaps they aren’t reaching the smart and articulate people whose need for real dialogue has been reduced to lamenting the loss of a 15-minute monster movie.

Opposing the inclusion of a deliberately divisive and dialogue-stopping film in an event designed to build community was something we did not do because we don’t want to have a community conversation, but because we do. *

Zak Szymanski

Zak Szymanski is the producer and editor of the short film The Wait.

Flaming creators

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› johnny@sfbg.com

They’ve got passion to burn, whether there’s 100 percent pride or a potent dose or two of critical shame in their game. They’re the dozen-plus-one LGBT artists who constitute this year’s lineup of flaming creators — individuals and groups adding radical perversity, butch dyke glitter, b-boy funk, punkified monkey love, dandified bear flair, and more to the Bay Area. It seems apt to pun off the title of Jack Smith’s still-revelatory 1963 film Flaming Creatures in uniting this wildly varied group: all of them ignore or defy the conformist strains of mainstream gay culture to blaze new trails of truth and fantasy.

NAME Keith Aguiar

WHAT I DO Currently, I am photographing a community of queer artists who continue to resist assimilation and express themselves freely without compromise to both hetero and homo normative values that have imprisoned so many of our generation. I want the viewer to enter my world of rich color, texture, and chaos to find the intricate beauty that comes from reconnecting with more primitive forms of expression. More recently my work has been progressing to include portraits, erotic photography, and even a few landscapes. I’m currently seeking funds for my next show and have started to do commissioned work on the side.

MOTTO Create your own reality. Live your own myth. Be your own God.

MORE KeithAguiarPhotography@gmail.com; www.flickr.com/photos/untamedvessels

NAME Emerson Aquino

WHAT I DO I’m cofounder and executive artistic director of the nonprofit professional dance company Funkanometry San Francisco. In 2005, I helped establish the Funksters Youth Dance Company through summer camps and dance-intensive programs. I’ve trained and danced with groups such as 220, Anarchy, Culture Shock Oakland, and SWC and showcased my choreography with Funkanometry SF in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, and Bogotá, Colombia. My most recent project is an all-male performing group called Project EM, featuring 12 principal dancers.

MOTTO Life’s not about how much money you make; it’s about the number of people you inspire.

MORE emerson@funkanometrysf.com; www.funkanometrysf.com; www.myspace.com/project_em

NAME Dreamboat, Where Are You? (Carrie Baum and Jessica Fudim)

WHAT WE DO We’re a punk pop duo with choreographed vaudevillian antics and a penchant for monkeys, monsters, and Yiddish innuendos. We’ve been described as "the Buzzcocks meet the Muppets." We’ll be leading a Dancers’ Group Rock Theater workshop July 21, and we also have our own projects: Carrie’s Exit Sign: A Rock Opera and Jessica’s dance show Please Feed My Animal will both be previewing at CounterPULSE’s "Rock 4 Art" benefit Aug. 4. (Carrie also runs Big Star Printing; Jessica is a certified Pilates trainer.)

MOTTO Be sure to share your cookies.

MORE www.myspace.com/dreamboatwhereareyou

NAME Edie Fake

WHAT I DO Food fetish zines (Foie Gras), dirty comics (Gaylord Phoenix, Anal Sex for Perverts, Rico McTaco), apprentice tattoos, perv-formance art, rare appearances, desert adventures, and general feminism.

WORDS OF WISDOM Someone was yelling on the bus the other day that anal sex produces no children.

But that is false!

Anal sex produces

ILLEGITIMATE GOLDEN CHILDREN

and they grow up to become

THE PERVERT SAINTS OF THE CATACOMBS.

MORE www.ediefake.com

NAME James Gobel

WHAT I DO Paint, serve as a member of the California College of the Arts faculty, chub 4 chub.

WORDS OF WISDOM I hope my paintings make people want to be big, bearded, and queer. I could be wrong, but I think it was fellow whiskered gay chubby chaser and one-time San Franciscan Alice B. Toklas who said, "I loves ’em tubby, and so should you!"

MORE www.heathermarxgallery.com; jamesgobel@hotmail.com

NAME David King

WHAT I DO I make collages, which often syncretize the camp and the spiritual. Some of my work can be seen at Ritual on Valencia during June.

WORDS OF WISDOM I don’t have words of wisdom. I have dissertations of wisdom, to which I subject only my most tolerant friends, who have other reasons to love me.

MORE www.davidkingcollage.com

NAME Torsten Kretchzmar

WHAT I DO Present good old electropop music with a German twist.

MOTTO My motto is "I know what girls like." I really do! With the hip music of the Men of Sport, I present this old Waitresses song in my three new video clips. The DVD release party will be Aug. 5 at Club Six, and I expect a lot of guys to show up to find out about my secret.

MORE www.kretchzmar.com

NAME Dolissa Medina

WHAT I DO Experimental films mostly, but I plan to move into more multimedia and installation work at UC San Diego, where I’ll be starting an MFA program this fall. I’m interested in San Francisco history, Latino and queer experiences, and mapping urban space through mythologized storytelling. Last year I produced Cartography of Ashes for the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake; we projected the film onto the side of a fire station in the Mission District. My film 19: Victoria, Texas will also be on display at Galería de la Raza this August and September.

MOTTO Viva la caca colectiva!

MORE mercurious3@yahoo.com

NAME Lacey Jane Roberts

WHAT I DO I make large-scale, site-specific knitted installations that often involve guerrilla action. My work, which is knitted by hand and on children’s toy knitting machines, aims to traverse boundaries of art and craft, the handmade and the manufactured, as well as categories of gender and class, through fusing seemingly contradictory materials, methods, and contexts. Additionally, my work seeks to illuminate the connections between craft and queerness and shift this position into one of agency and empowerment.

MOTTO I don’t really have a motto, but I would like to thank my friends for always showing up and helping me install, especially in places where I am not supposed to.

MORE www.laceyjaneroberts.com

NAME Erik Scollon

WHAT I DO I try to queer up our ideas about what art can do by remaking and repurposing functional objects. At the same time, I’m trying to retell new histories in old languages. I want to make objects that exist in between the sculptural and the functional in an effort to insert art back into everyday life.

WORDS OF WISDOM Art objects are useless; craft objects are utilitarian.

MORE www.erikscollon.net

NAME Jonathan Solo

WHAT I DO Draw, eat, sleep, sex, draw, dance, laugh, cry, scream … not in that particular order. I roam the city and its late-night haunts with my beautiful, crazy, talented friends, protected by a black rose on my chest and my custom Jobmaster 14-hole oxbloods. I have a piece in a current group show at Catharine Clark Gallery and a solo show there next year. I also have contributed to the Besser collection at the de Young, opening this October.

WORDS OF WISDOM I observe the beauty and decay of humanity. Aren’t the strange the most interesting, powerful, and telling of who we are? I’m fascinated by the amount of energy we use to oppress our true selves. I say fuck ’em! Own who you are and walk forward boldly — it’s made me a more sensitive artist, lover, friend, son, and brother.

MORE www.cclarkgallery.com; (415) 531-3376

NAME Matt Sussman

WHAT I DO I am a freelance film writer, and I DJ under the moniker Missy Hot Pants. My friends and I run a party in Oakland called Dry Hump. Our sets include everything from Gui Boratto to Baltimore club remixes to Ethel Merman doing disco. We’re playing Juanita More’s Playboy party at the Stud on June 30, so come work off your post-Pride hangovers.

MOTTO "Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen." Robert Bresson.

MORE www.myspace.com/thedryhump

NAME Jamie Vasta

WHAT I DO Working with glitter and glue on stained wood panels, I create "paintings" of figures exploring dark, dazzling landscapes. I am interested in predatory beauty and the balance (or imbalance) between nature and culture. My work is currently on view in the group show "Stop Pause Forward" at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery. I’ll be having a solo show there in mid-October.

WORDS OF WISDOM Glitter connotes an image of cheapness made glamorous — the superficial, the frivolous. But to dazzle is to have power — this is something drag queens have known all along.

MORE www.jamievasta.com; www.patriciasweetowgallery.com *

Hot Secs

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

Since every third column I’ve run recently has harked back to one I wrote about the movie Secretary a couple of years back, I thought I’d bring it full circle, and then let’s all move on to something else. Here’s the original (published in fall 2005).

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My manager is leaving at the end of the month. I’m pretty sure from hints that he’s dropped that he’s into S-M, particularly whipping. I’m attracted to him and I believe it’s mutual. I’m not interested in pursuing a dominant–submissive relationship with him but am definitely interested in having a one-off because a) he’s my boss, b) he’s kinky, and c) he’s my boss. I’d like to initiate an encounter between us, preferably on his last day at the office, but I am new to the scene and I’m not sure how to go about it.

Love,

Ms. Secretary

Dear Sec:

Two things come to mind when I think about Secretary and its stars, the unaccountably attractive Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has a face like a none-too-bright, six-month fetus, and creepy-sexy James Spader, who is at this point indistinguishable from the waxwork simulacrum of himself that undoubtedly exists in some museum somewhere, although I kind of dig him anyway: a) it was hot, and b) it was fiction.

I was listening to a colleague-friend give one of my favorite talks this weekend, the one about acceptable and unacceptable objects of desire and how they shift over time and space, and I thought about Secretary too. "Think about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky," my friend says. "Where we are right now [San Francisco in particular, but any blue-state bastion with a women’s studies department will do], the socially acceptable response was, ‘Oh! She’s just an intern! Think of the power imbalance! Uncool! Unclean! How could she give consent when he was so powerful and she was so lowly?’ But what do you think was really going on for 22-year-old Monica, on her knees in front of Superpower Man, the one and only leader of the free world? What do you want to bet that the power imbalance was exactly what was hot for both of them?"

More fantasy, of course. We have no idea what was really going through either of their heads (well, hers, maybe, but — hey! — that’s not what I meant!), and it doesn’t really matter, since we’re just using them as puppets called "Bill" and "Monica," not seriously examining the ethics of seducing interns or flashing your thong at the leader of the free world, depending. I liked your list (he’s my boss, he’s kinky, he’s my boss) and certainly trust you to know what’s hot for you and why, but let’s remember that this is neither a quirkily erotic indie movie nor a puppet show; it’s part of your actual life, and his, and it has consequences. Hot as a last-day quickie may sound to you, chances are he will be a little busy that day, plus, until all the paperwork is done, he is still your boss, and it could still go rather poorly for him to be found in the supply closet, whaling on the clerical staff with a … what? Unless he’s far kinkier than we ever suspected, he will not have his gear with him, so unless you want to get spanked with a three-hole punch while bound with extension cords and blindfolded with Post-its (wait — this is sounding kind of hot, isn’t it?), maybe you’ll want to wait.

Look, give him a break. Let him pack up his stuff and make his good-byes like a grown-up, and then corner him very late in the afternoon, just as he’s leaving, and tell him you’re sorry to see him go and you wonder if he’d like to get together sometime. Ask if he likes indie movies. Tell him you really dug Secretary. Really, really dug it, you know? That should work. To tell you the truth, I have some reservations about a boss who would drop hints about his kinky sex life around the office — that seems kind of, well, actionable to me, really, plus just kind of indiscreet in an icky way, but hey, he’s your fantasy, not mine.

One thing people who know nothing about S-M (I’m not necessarily talking about you here, Sec) might miss about Secretary is that the way Gyllenhaal’s character, Lee, is initiated into the joys of submission isn’t exactly the way it goes down most of the time. In real life, at least where there’s an organized "scene" with rules and regs and a public image to maintain, no mysterious and compellingly attractive Mr. Grey would, all unannounced and uninvited, order our heroine to bend over for a spanking, thus unleashing her deep longing to find freedom through submission and so on. Instead, he would have invited her to a "munch," where they could negotiate their scene, choose a safe word, and exhaustively disclose their physical limitations ("I have hypoglycemia — you’ll have to feed me." "I had tennis elbow but I think it’s better now"), emotional vulnerabilities, and time constraints. Then they would shake hands and agree to meet at his place on Friday evening to "play." Safer, more ethical, and much, much more boring.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

The Muppets take San Francisco

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Be warned: the following is in no way a professional, measured critique of the career and oeuvre of one Jim Henson, master puppeteer, kiddie empire creator, and upcoming Yerba Buena Center for the Arts retrospective honoree. Oh, no. Below are the semicoherent ravings of a Muppet-philiac Henson fangirl. One whose first experience of the legitimate thea-tah was not The Pirates of Penzance but "Pigs in Space." One whose initial exposure to the ways of l’amour involved a pig and a frog getting it on after extensive rounds of bike riding and loaded sexual repartee. One who breaks into Muppet palsy — spastic flailings of staccato, head-wagging ecstasy — whenever she hears The Muppet Show siren song of "It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights." One who, in her aggressively weird late teens, sported a sassy shag haircut dyed a deep shade of Grover blue because, perhaps, she secretly wished she were a Muppet.

And who could blame me, uh, her? After all, Muppets can do anything, and they usually have a good time doing it. These anarchic, orgiastic amalgams of felt, foam, and fun fur are investigative reporters, musicians, demolition experts, hack comics, boomerang-fish throwers, mad scientists, misunderstood performance artists, masters of the ancient art of ka-rah-tay, and so much more. Above all, they are vaudevillians with the incessant desire to entertain — just like their ingenious creator. Part Walt Disney (minus the Nazi sympathizing), part Groucho Marx — and looking like the cloned offspring of Lyle Lovett and Jesus Christ — the late Henson was nevertheless about as unassuming as they come. He is universally remembered as the nicest guy you’ve ever met (or, in my case, wish you had). But while his Muppets may have gained superstardom on Sesame Street, it may surprise some to know that cooperation didn’t always "make it happen" in Henson’s working relationships.

"We were very competitive with each other," director and longtime Henson collaborator Frank Oz (the voice of the inimitable Miss Piggy) admitted when I used a recent promotional tour for an Oz project as a chance to quiz him, quickly, about his Muppet past. "We put each other in lousy situations and tried to screw each other over." Of course, that’s not to say Henson was the Eve Harrington (as in All About Eve) of the puppet world. He valued collaboration with his fellow artists above all else; competition was a creative catalyst. "He appreciated everybody else’s work too," Oz, who calls Henson a "genius," clarifies. "There was a camaraderie, a great affection amongst all of us."

Henson’s creative fervor and Puritan work ethic helped make the Muppets a success, but so did his business acumen, something he leavened with that patented nice-guy attitude. "He really wanted everyone to be happy in a business deal," says Muppet performer (the Great Gonzo) and Marin resident Dave Goelz, who worked with Henson from the early ’70s until Henson’s sudden death from pneumonia in 1990. "The reason Jim was such a good businessman was very simple: people loved to work with him." Goelz, who will make appearances at the YBCA on June 21 and 22 to introduce "Muppets 101," fondly remembers the sense of community Henson fostered, having never experienced the tug-of-war that characterized Henson’s relationship with Oz.

The YBCA retrospective is thrillingly comprehensive, although it could be more cohesive. The three Muppet features being screened comprise what I like to call "the real original trilogy": 1979’s The Muppet Movie, 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper (viva Charles Grodin!), and 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Also included are assorted Muppet marginalia (Mike Douglas appearances, the infamous "Sex and Violence" Muppet Show pilot, some fantastic behind-the-scenes footage), forays into less kid-friendly puppetry (a betighted David Bowie in the Terry Jones–penned Labyrinth, the gloriously strange Dark Crystal), early commercial and experimental work, and later TV work like Fraggle Rock, the corny yet inspired (the Muppet modus operandi) ’30s gangster-movie send-up Dog City, and episodes of the gothic fairy-tale theater The Storyteller.

The Muppets aren’t lowering the stage curtain anytime soon. In addition to a planned Dark Crystal sequel, a Fraggle Rock movie is in the works. Disney bought the rights to the Muppets in 2004 (something, believe it or not, Henson was trying to make happen shortly before his death, recognizing that the juggernaut could give his franchise the protection it deserves). And the Jim Henson Co. continues to produce work in part inspired by Henson, like the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s MirrorMask. Still, no one has the gall to suggest it’s like it used to be. "Sammy Davis Jr. died on the same day," Oz notes. "There’s no other Sammy Davis Jr., and there’s no other Jim Henson."

Why exactly have the Muppets managed to endure? The answer, according to Goelz, is simple. "They are us," he says. "They describe a world that’s filled with conflict, but nonetheless they’re motivated by charity. It all came out of Jim’s philosophy. He believed that people are basically good, and he operated that way."

So it turns out I am a Muppet after all. The really good news, it seems, is that we all are. Corny? Maybe. But also pretty damn inspired.*

MUPPETS, MUSIC, AND MAGIC

June 21–July 1; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

The Queer Issue: Back to the future?

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I’m supposed to meet my editor, Marke B., to talk about this piece at noon at some cheap Mission restaurant that won’t bankrupt my lousy checking account. I arrive 15 minutes late; he’s running at least 30 behind. As I sit and wait for him, I can’t help but laugh — queers are always late. As a queer with a drag-queen alter ego, Felicia Fellatio, I know this is especially true — that hoary old chestnut about "running on drag time" has the ring of solid validity. Trannies are like Muni: we’re never on time.

But a growing body of scholarly queer literature suggests that the underlying cause of our tardiness may be more than simply wanting to be fashionably late. In fact, our predictable lack of punctuality might be a symptom of what many psychologists see as the gay community’s prolonged adolescence; there may be a sense of time unique to homos that exists outside heterosexual norms.

WIND IT UP


Put simply, queer temporality theory says that because our lives can’t be completely legally or socially mapped out according to the heterosexual model (getting married, having kids, sharing retirement benefits, expecting inheritance), we feel less pressure to conform to other aspirations (completing a degree, saving for a house, planning retirement) in the stereotypical Game of Hetero Life. Basically, tardiness is a form of subconscious queer rebellion. This can manifest itself as a rejection of all schedules, however quotidian. It can also lead to a profoundly different view of what the future means to queer people, especially in terms of freedom of choice. Well-known queer theorist Judith Halberstam elaborates on this theory, from a transgender point of view, in her book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York University Press, 2005).

Some studies also posit that, because many of us grappled with the whole coming-out thing at the same time we were going through puberty, our adolescent maturation period was extended, thus stretching out our psychological development — and effectively slowing down our mental clocks. We just need more time to process things and act on them. Other queer temporality theories focus on the psychological effects of AIDS, which instilled in our community a sense of imminent mortality that negated the future and focused our attention on the present. Rather than making decisions based on what may be, we began to concentrate on what is, creating art and culture that offered immediate transcendence through humor and rage, rather than any abstract hope for the future. "AIDS quickens that sense of needing to and actually being able to draw forth from one’s spirit that work which will have resonance for other people," the late, great filmmaker Marlon Riggs said, and the recent work of performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz tries to show how queers have incorporated that sense of "quickening" into their lives and actions.

SPRUNG FORWARD


Of course, we may just run late for things because we’re busy, either at work (most of us rely only on ourselves for financial stability) or at play (our culture is still pretty party-centric, so we have a lot of hangovers to deal with). Plus, putting on all that makeup is practically a full-time job for us queens. Cut us a little slack so we can look fabulous. And all of the theories above seem awfully generalized — some may bristle at the suggestion that we be cast as supposed victims of a pathology that prolongs our adolescences and screws with our mental clocks. It’s not as if there aren’t queer people living as much as they can according to the hetero model, especially now that legal restrictions against same-sex marriage and adoption are relaxing in some areas.

In fact, the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way in terms of the queer rebellion against the straight timeline. As noted by broadcast journalist Tovia Smith last month on National Public Radio, in her piece "Marriage Causes Shift in Gay Culture," it seems that queers have gone "from a radical movement bent on challenging societal norms to a community now eagerly embracing those conventions as their own."

Smith drew her conclusion based on an interview with an upper-middle-class white gay couple from Cambridge, Mass. — the type of control group against which queers have traditionally defined themselves. Whatever negative connotations the phrase "prolonged adolescence" may conjure up, a case could be made that this is precisely what allows queer culture to thrive. Adolescence is when a personality is at its most fluid, and queer identity is the essence of fluidity. Halberstam sees queer temporality as a positive, radical reaction to heterosexual society’s mores, pitting it against the "time of inheritance," whose purpose is merely to shore up "the historical past of the nation" and protect "national stability." In the ’90s, a vibrant queer culture of artistic expression, political activism, and social and sexual interaction embraced the notion of prolonged adolescence.

FALLING BACK


Queercore bands like Pansy Division and Tribe 8 co-opted the in-your-face, live-fast-die-young aesthetic of punk, inviting listeners to throw off the shackles of heterosexual society’s expectations and, in the words of Pansy Division, "join the cocksuckers club." Homocore fanzines reveled in childlike graphics and gleefully reinterpreted teen fan magazines like Tiger Beat, giving them a decidedly homosexual spin. The hallmarks of puberty — geeky awkwardness, swoony crushiness, questionable outfits, wanton partying, sexual exploration — became queer fashion statements. Prolonged adolescence was also a means of connection in a time of grief and frustration, a flashpoint where queer history met the present. The AIDS Quilt used a common symbol of childhood comfort to unite and console mourners, and activist organizations like ACT UP and Queer Nation energized their members with the élan of belonging to a rebel schoolyard gang.

But that was the past, and there’s no denying that, with more access to the heterosexual lifestyle opening up for queers, the future is upon us. HIV is no longer a death sentence (for people who can afford the meds), and any evidence of necessary rebellion is awfully hard to find in young gay people these days, at least on the face of it. Prada and Beyoncé have replaced vintage clothing and queercore as coins of the young gay realm, and the psychological and social effects of the current lust for consumerism and mainstream pop culture on queers today will be for future theorists to puzzle out. To me, it represents a sad trend that aspires more toward societal acceptance than political subversion, an adjustment of our internal clocks to tick to the tired straight beat. Call me nostalgic, call me behind the times — just don’t call me late for cocktails.

The Queer Issue: Commitment slut

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› culture@sfbg.com

I’m going to miss Pride this year. I’ll be on the East Coast at a wedding while queer sex parties and dungeons throw open their incredibly inviting doors to a host of the proud play-minded. Outlaws versus in-laws, polyamorous queers versus monogamous marrieds. Does it all come down to such fixed oppositions? For me, a bi girl with a boyfriend (who for the purposes of this article has asked to be identified by the curvaceous and inviting letter O), this question had reached the pitch of a psychic emergency.

It might seem obvious to you, dear reader, that like all nasty dichotomies this one was bound to wobble, to yield, to come undone. But some days it felt as though a bright line was running down my center and I had to choose a side. As Pride Month approached, I decided to resist and reinvent these oppositions with a little research of my own. What I found were queer activists fighting for same-sex-marriage equality while swinger parties thrived for horny partnered types of every ilk.

CRUISING THE GAME


And there I was in the middle: happy with O, really love-struck, but wondering where to go with my queer desires and identity. Crushes flickered. Girls floated around in my dreams like alluring phantoms. I vented, haltingly, to O. It’s the price a guy pays for dating a bi dyke. He was a sympathetic listener. And it wasn’t just a one-way conversation: O is erotically adventurous in his own right, and he’d revealed hints of unplumbed inclinations in the areas of pain play and submission. We’re pretty good at working through hard stuff with a minimal amount of drama, so it seemed both safe and exciting to experiment.

The quest for random sex presents a logistical conundrum for a shy person such as myself: I have a tendency to run in the opposite direction from anyone I find attractive, whether that obscure object of desire is a girl, a boy, or someone in between. And now that I’m done with my days of ecstasy and blackout drinking, I knew I’d have to be forthright in my quest for a bawdy experience.

My first stop was Fantasy Makers, a house of bondage and fetish nestled in an East Bay suburb. Lorrett, the house coordinator, gave me a tour of the facilities one late-spring afternoon. "This culture penalizes alternative sexualities," she said, her bright blue eyes flashing with intelligence and curiosity. "Normal!" She shuddered. "I hate that word."

Fantasy Makers offers toy shows, BDSM, and more (no actual sex between workers and clients, though — it’s illegal). Its hourly rate is the same for singles and couples, in order to encourage shared kinky experiences. Lorrett showed me the well-outfitted dungeon, replete with custom-built throne; the medical room, which featured a beautiful antique examination table and a complete array of surgical instruments; and the all-purpose room, which could be quickly cleared for any kind of wrestling one desired.

"Now I’ll turn you over to the girls," Lorrett promised, leading me down to the kitchen–<\d>employee lounge, where she introduced me to a swirl of workers. It was a hot day, and Mistress Tatiana looked up from her laptop wearing nothing but panties and an appraising grin. Priscilla and Elizabeth lounged on a long black couch and waited for calls to come in while watching a movie about strippers unionizing.

I was filled with hope on learning that one is not born a pro dom but rather becomes one: the Fantasy Maker folks filled me in on play parties and classes that are open to newbies and lifestylers alike. This crew favored the DIY style of Screw Up, a monthly BDSM instructional organized via Tribe.net by and for "freaky queers who don’t identify as male or female," as Priscilla put it. Topics range from flogging to mummification.

Tatiana talked about classes she teaches at Quality S-M, then neatly turned the tables to ask, "What about you?"

"Big dykey streak, boyfriend, open to playing with others together," I replied. That was the setup O and I had agreed on, and I discovered an abundance of creative commitment styles among the Fantasy Makers crew. One of the women was in a long-term open relationship and had just registered as a domestic partner with her genderqueer lover. Another had a primary submissive male friend and a panoply of mostly female playmates. And Lorrett had not one but two husbands.

TAKING IT OUTSIDE


I left Fantasy Makers feeling inspired and a tad electrified. It was time to move theory into practice. O and I did our makeup, squeezed hands, and set out for the queer-friendly Club Kiss, a monthly Mission District play party, along with our adventurous companion X. I would like to report that the stiletto-shaped love seat, the stripper pole, and the back room with its tiki theme and lurid row of mattresses all enabled me to happily re-create the careless, drunken foursomes of my college years, but in truth, I freaked out. I found myself on the sidewalk, orally fixating on cigarettes while hot jealousy spurted through my veins. O coaxed me back inside, where he soothed my wakened jealousy demon in the manner of a horse whisperer braving flying hooves. X, meanwhile, worked the room happily, as if arriving at a long-awaited home.

Finally, X, O, and I reunited, and as my head cooled, I tasted a little morsel of what these parties promise besides the obvious — the opportunity to witness a side of your partner you may never have seen before. For example, I learned that O likes to be tied up and spanked until he sees a white light while assembled parties look on in shock and pleasure. Who knew? I felt proud of O: raw, turned on, weird, excited, wounded, and open to a world of possibility.

That world of possibility is infinitely expanding, especially here in the Bay Area. There is, for example, the Queer Playground, a play party held on Pride Weekend at the bastion of worldly sex play in the Bay, the Citadel. The infamous Kinky Salon is also hosting something giant for its members of all genders. And Pride private play parties are multiplying by the dozen.

But I’ll miss it all, because of a wedding.

BI IN THE MIDDLE


It’s a weird thing, marriage. It makes me bitter that through the contingencies of gender, chance, and choice, I can chose whether or not to gain legal rights and social legitimacy with my current honey but couldn’t do so with past partners.

It wasn’t that I’d yearned for nuptials in my past decade of dating girls; in no way did I dream of the ostentatious engagements and rehashed nuclear-family model. I balked at those things, and if I ever thought of myself as married to my ex, I had married her in subtle and various ways that seemed more meaningful to me than public social contracts ever did — in road trips and alter egos, in getting to know each other’s families and then running away from holiday gatherings to smoke pot together in my little sister’s car. It seemed that our vows were forged of a shared, unspoken resistance to such conventions and institutions as marriage, and I took a roguish pride in sticking it out longer than the friends’ marriages that had come into being and died while she and I stayed together.

And now, happy as I am to destabilize gender binaries, to watch Bend Over, Boyfriend on repeat, to hold on to my queer family, to try sex parties on for size, I can simply marry O if I want to. Legally, civilly, so that we receive the roughly 1,000 rights granted by the federal government and the additional 500 given by the state. And on some days marriage seems like an adventure, a love riot, something we can define ourselves without accepting grody ceremonials or monogamy mandates. We can elope! Our honeymoon can be a class on flogging!

But here it is: straight privilege — mine. Bam. And bitterness doesn’t do much in the way of gaining those rights for my dyke-partnered buddies or my genderqueer friends whose identities don’t match up with the "man" and "woman" boxes on the marriage forms. So I checked in with Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, to find out more about the fight for same-sex marriage equality.

Minter is the lead counsel in the marriage cases that are currently being tried before the Supreme Court of California. The lawsuits argue that California’s statutory definition of marriage violates equal-protection clauses in the state constitution by sanctioning discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation. Minter expects the cases to be settled within the year. While the outcome looks hopeful, the issue still needs plenty of support from queers and straight allies. According to Minter, four ballot initiatives seeking to amend the state constitution to define marriage as heterosexual have been submitted with the attorney general. "It’s pretty likely that Californians will be voting on this in 2008," he informed me.

Which gave me an idea for a present for the happy couple whose wedding will keep me from getting my queer on: a donation on behalf of the bride and groom to Equality California, an organization dedicated to outreach, education, and coalition building for same-sex-marriage equality. It ain’t no toaster, but the historical impact may be a lot greater.<\!s>*

www.fantasymakers.com

screwup.tribe.net

www.clubkiss.us

www.sfcitadel.org

www.kinkysalon.com

www.nclrights.org

www.eqca.org

The Queer Issue: Rainbow retirement

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Lionel Mayrand spent more than a decade working with the elderly. He helped train staff for the National Meals for the Elderly Project and wrote the first grant application for Elderhostel, an international senior travel network. Along the way, Mayrand found and lost one of the great loves of his life. "I am an AIDS widower," he says. "My financial life was wiped out by the illness of my partner in life and business. I lost so many friends to AIDS, I’m starting to forget their names." Recently, the sixtysomething tax specialist noticed the Senior Services meal program located near his house and suddenly found himself wrestling with the idea of attending. It was not so much a matter of pride or of realizing his age, but of community. With his unique life experiences, would he feel welcome?

QUEER PIONEERS


Getting older is a challenge for many people. But retired LGBTs often face unique difficulties. They feel a sense of isolation and discrimination — more hurdles for a group that weathered straight hatred and the AIDS pandemic. There’s also a lack of established infrastructure particular to their needs: many LGBT people of the baby boom generation, which is just now hitting retirement age, had to leave their families behind in order to live openly, so they may not have an inheritance or traditional family support to turn to. And because AIDS left so few survivors of earlier queer generations, the health care system is woefully unprepared to meet current senior queer physical and psychological needs. In a way, today’s senior queers are pioneers.

"Queer seniors often lack the family support systems that older straights take for granted," says Michael Adams, executive director of New York–<\d>based Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders, or SAGE. Now 29 years old, SAGE is the oldest and largest organization in the country focusing on the needs of LGBT seniors. "Many queers may have been disconnected from their birth families for many years, and they’re less likely to have had children of their own. Older queers are also likelier to live alone and less likely to be in relationships," Adams says.

Meanwhile, older queers also face more discrimination from senior organizations, nursing homes, and health care providers, he adds. Some groups, such as the Red Cross, are committed to discrimination for religious or philosophical reasons. In other organizations, individual staffers may just have an issue. Worst of all, "a lack of support in the LGBT community itself" exacerbates this problem, Adams says. "There’s ageism in every community, but when you’re talking about a population of seniors that faces such difficulty in the senior world," the indifference of the LGBT community compounds the problem.

Local organizations, however, are stepping up to provide the kind of help non-LGBT seniors might not get from their nuclear families or the gay community at large. The queer-oriented New Leaf Outreach to Elders in San Francisco offers 24 senior activities and 50 meetings per week at different sites around the city, as well as health and counseling services at its clinic on Hayes Street. And New Leaf isn’t afraid to use the past to help the future.

"The way in which the gay and lesbian communities mobilized to take care of the HIV pandemic has become a model for organizations taking care of straight people," says Bill Kirkpatrick, a New Leaf social services worker. Even mainstream organizations taking care of the elderly are learning from the queer response to HIV, he says. "As the epidemic created models for us to take care of ourselves, the same thing is happening in the aging community."

TAKING IT STRAIGHT


Accommodating the needs of queer seniors doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel, Kirkpatrick adds. A big part of his work at New Leaf involves helping LGBT people connect with traditionally straight, more established programs. "We want to make sure these services have been culturally trained," Kirkpatrick says. New Leaf takes LGBT seniors to staff meetings at organizations like Meals on Wheels and other home health care agencies so the seniors can tell their stories and educate workers.

But what about the seniors themselves? Kirkpatrick says a big part of his job is working to gain the trust of "someone who has survived by hiding from the mainstream services and is distrustful." New Leaf organizes volunteers to visit the homes of isolated seniors and check on them. The organization takes great care to avoid pathologizing problems like depression, isolation, and low self-esteem as if they’re strictly mental health issues, Kirkpatrick says.

SAGE provides many of the same services as New Leaf, but it also lobbies for public policies that are designed to advance the rights of LGBT seniors. "Too often, LGBT seniors have not been on the radar screen when it comes to the policies and programs that get developed for seniors at the state and national level," Adams says. In 2005, SAGE sent the first openly gay delegate to the White House Conference on Aging, an event that happens once every 10 years. "Those are the kinds of places where policy gets made, [and] funding streams and priorities get influenced."

SAGE also provides counseling on sexuality. The rate of HIV infection among older people is increasing, according to the National Institutes of Health. And recent studies have shown that HIV and other STDs are more likely to go undiagnosed in seniors because doctors assume older people don’t have sex or engage in other risky behavior.

Some seniors with HIV have been living with it for years, but others have acquired it recently. Many are taking advantage of the increased opportunities for sex thanks to Viagra — often without protection, Adams says.

A HOME OF THEIR OWN?


Another challenge facing LGBT seniors: when a same-sex partner dies, the surviving partner may not be able to inherit a pension or Social Security benefits. Transferring the title on a house can be more difficult for couples who aren’t legally married, notes Moli Steinert, executive director of Open House, a San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to building LGBT senior residences. Steinert is trying to get approval from the city for Open House’s first housing project, at 55 Laguna Street, part of a larger redevelopment project on that site. She says Open House is also in the process of identifying a low-income housing site. "Our mandate is really to develop mixed-income housing. You just can’t get housing all in one location for all populations, so we’re working on trying to find land that will lend itself to filling out the spectrum of needs in our community," she says.

Open House educates health service organizations about LGBT senior issues and reaches out to isolated queer seniors, similar to what New Leaf is doing. And Open House advocates for LGBT seniors at the citywide level, trying to make sure housing and other services are open to queers.

What exactly makes housing LGBT-friendly? According to Steinert, it’s a matter of making sure queer culture is represented and the staff is trained to recognize the needs of the population. For example, a transgender resident of a nursing home may need help with bathing and wouldn’t want an attendant who’s insensitive or transphobic.

"It would not be easy for an LGBT senior to feel at home in a traditional senior housing facility," Steinert says. "They would basically need to go back in the closet. They would not feel able to disclose their partner or their history and feel like it would be accepted." Even if you succeeded in training the staff to be sensitive, you might not change the culture among the people who’ve been living in the facility for years, she points out.

The first LGBT-focused housing facility for seniors in the Bay Area will probably be the Barbary Lane Senior Communities at Lake Merritt in Oakland. Preleasing began March 1, and people will start moving in this fall. The Barbary Lane team is transforming the classic art deco Lake Merritt Hotel into a safe space for seniors, doing everything from doubling the size of the elevators to using universal design to get rid of knobs and handles. The kitchens and bathrooms in the apartment units are designed to be easy to use for disabled people and people with arthritis or other mobility issues.

With the Parlor Suite starting at $3,295 and the Merritt Grand at $4,295, you couldn’t accuse Barbary Lane of being low-income housing. But these prices are typical for retirement communities, and they include meals and other amenities seniors would otherwise have to pay for separately, says David Latina, Barbary Lane’s president. "A schoolteacher could afford to live here," he adds. Hard-up residents could share a studio apartment, he suggests. Programming and activities will be queer focused, and Barbary Lane will try to involve the local queer community as much as possible, opening its lavish dining area to outside events such as queer weddings and fundraisers.

Barbary Lane will only house people who are mostly able to take care of themselves. Once they need more than an assisted-living level of care, they’ll have to move to a nursing facility or nursing home. When that happens, Barbary Lane will make sure they go to facilities that are LGBT-friendly and have well-trained staff, according to Latina.

Latina says his organization aims to open five more facilities in California and is partnering with another organization to open a facility in New York. There are 17,000 queer seniors in the Bay Area alone, Latina claims, and even if only a quarter of them are looking to move into retirement homes, that could mean more than 4,000 residents for places like Barbary Lane. Rainbow flags flying over retirement communities could become a common sight in the near future.<\!s>*

www.sageusa.org

www.newleafservices.org

www.openhouse-sf.com

www.barbarylanesenior.com

Revenge of the nerds

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"Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!" Rodney Dangerfield’s character, Al Czervik, says in one of the classic lines from Caddyshack. Oakland’s Replicator sample the line as the tag end of "Delicious Fornicake," the opening track of their new album, Machines Will Always Let You Down (Radio Is Down). The inclusion is telling: Caddyshack celebrates the redemption — nay, triumph — of the little guy, the lowly, the nobody, the nerd, the caddy, for chrissakes, despite the oppression of greedy, classist boors. Machines is, in its way, a tight, terse, aggro, nerd-rock opera, with tweed cubicles replacing expansive set pieces, and hard, noisy post-punk reminiscent of geek-rock kingpins Big Black, in an alternate universe where Steve Albini doesn’t take himself so seriously. "It’s kind of, for lack of a better term, big rock," vocalist-guitarist Conan Neutron says over the phone from his apartment. In the opening track, the narrator, with the help of "a few beers, some Scotch, and a pack of cigarettes," builds "a robot with which to have sex." In "Payment www.yzzz.rd" (pronounced "wizard"), Neutron, an IT guy for a "major financial institution" when not living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, sings, "I just got paid / So come get my cash / Come take my money / Come get it fast," the refrain of wage slaves everywhere.

The next track, "Assloads of Unrespect," is in the voice of a degenerate dot-com millionaire, the kind who crawled the Bay Area like a new species of roach in the mid- to late ’90s: "Let me begin / By saying I’m rich / I’m well-dressed / Good-looking / Hey — ain’t that a bitch? / Because I own you / That’s right, I own you." In an example of Neutron’s biting, often hilarious lyrics, the boss we love to hate goes on: "I heard it said the meek shall inherit the earth /Well, just make damn sure to shine my shoes first." The album goes on to tackle such subjects as time travel, the Enigma machine, and the spy-versus-spy uses of nanotechnology, before ending with the Office Space–like "Login with My Fist" — the battle cry of cubicle commandos everywhere — which winds down in a cacophony of screams and guitar squall, an implacable Commodore VIC-20–style voice repeating, "It does not compute," in the background.

It’s worth noting that the disc isn’t a celebration of all things techie, often a nerd stereotype. Rather, it’s a scathing denunciation of technology, or, more accurately, the devious and inhumane uses that technology has been put to in the hands of the powerful and ethically impaired. When the nerd class stops letting itself be pimped out for the glory of so-called pure science, then maybe it’ll inherit the earth. And when people stop being enamored of machines making life easier, maybe they’ll realize they’re being enslaved by technology — that, indeed, machines will always let you down.

"We make music for very pissed-off smart people," Neutron says. He goes on to acknowledge that this target demo is a small slice of the music-listening public: "Our music isn’t very popular." Formed in 1999, Replicator — Neutron, Ben Adrian on bass and keyboard, Chris Bolig on drums, and "junior partner" Todd Grant on guitar — have seen trends come and go. "First everyone was really into indie pop," Neutron says. "Then everyone was into sounding like Radiohead and then garage rock and then everyone wanted to, like, wear a mask and not really play music."

Through it all, Replicator have released three pissed-off, smart records, toured heavily, and brought to mind a time "when it was not an insult to be considered brilliant," as the lyric on "Login with My Fist" goes. I’m not saying they’re brilliant — nor am I saying they’re not — but what they’re attempting doesn’t accept mediocrity. This uncompromising approach often seems to have relegated them to the middle slot of shows while the underground flavor du jour headlines above them. Like Dangerfield, they get no respect.

One of the titles kicked around for the new album was Fuck You, Still Here. "I see bands that are more careerist," Neutron says. "They have this idea: ‘Oh, we’re going to get signed and then we’re going to make this video and go on tour with this band.’ That seems to be their end goal.

"Our end goal is to return the ass-kicking that music has given us."

REPLICATOR

With Moggs and Colony of Watts

June 30, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Pay, pal

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Fuck Lars Ulrich — he can play drums on my balls with his teeth!" Them’s fighting words from the beefy bruiser in a tinsel page-boy wig, perhaps provoked only by four wannabe skids’ burning need to cover Metallica’s "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at last week’s first but — fortunately for your inner and outer sketched-out Priest hooligan with a nonironic mullet, prematurely weather-beaten mien, and herbally truncated short-term memory — not last "Hesher" night at the Parkside, where it’s now semiofficially installed after starting its smokin’ life at Annie’s Social Club. Still headbang or nod out to "Sweet Child o’ Mine"? All is forgiven and even drunkenly applauded at "Hesher," a metal karaoke and air guitar contest. Yet as delightful as it is to rock out with your crock out to such unrepentant cock-rock versions of "Eye of the Tiger" and "Round and Round," I couldn’t help but think that all of us ruddy walleyes were just cruising upstream against a current zeitgeist hell-bent on nailing culpables caught with their greasy paws in the cookie jar. How else to explain the crowds crowing to punish Paris or throw the book at I. Lewis "Lemme Scoot" Libby? Why else were latently Catholic viewers so outraged that Tony Soprano didn’t go down in a hail of bullets rather than simply cutting to black? After years of the Bush and Cheney show, the hordes have become less hesher than harsher.

Maybe we’re waiting for justice, answers, something to believe in — and perhaps the once-wronged and now recognized and fully redeemed Spoon’s Britt Daniel is ready to give it to us, just as he and other indie savants like Feist turn in their subtlest, slowest-growing recordings to date. In fact, the opening track of Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge), "Don’t Make Me a Target," could serve as the theme song for a rockin’ version of Chicago starring the most hated Hilton in America: it soft-shoes the bristly snarl of "Waiting for the Kid to Come Out," off last year’s reissued Soft Effects EP. In spite or perhaps because of the troubles he saw when he was pushed off Elektra, griping loudly all the way, Daniel has always sounded like one of the angriest dogs on the lot, barely leashed to those leathery pop hooks.

With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Daniel ventures into other textures and tempos, moduutf8g his bark and bite with plangent pings and drastic pressure drops, floating in an echoey "The Ghost of You Lingers" and snapping suavely to the hand-clapping "Don’t You Evah." Though the infectious brass, Daniel’s streetwise taunts, and the band’s pugilistic punch conjure up memories of a certain cheesy piano man, as Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker has pointed out, aligning "The Underdog" with Billy Joel’s "Only the Good Die Young," I’d venture that Daniel is less conjuring stereotypically cornball urban bluster pop straight out of some tourist fantasy of a Little Italy than continuing the same cranky conversation that began back around the hard-assed, grunge-era Soft Effects, now aged artfully into a modern-day Bobby Darrin–y hep cat. Much like the album’s cover girl, sculptor Lee Bontecou, Daniel’s finding new mettle — and much softer metals — with which to channel his rage.

FOLKLORE LURE Court and Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger honcho and teacher MC Taylor is answering the siren call of higher education and leaving the Mission digs he shares with his wife, Abby, to move to Chapel Hill, NC. "We both wanted a change of scenery, wanted to live in the country and have a garden. I got accepted to the grad program in folklore at UNC, so everything worked out perfectly," he e-mailed on the eve of a moving sale that promised "the craziest set of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game books that you’ve probably ever seen — seriously." Taylor will continue the more improvisational HGM in his sweet home North Carolina, though sadly C&S will probably call it a day — but not before a finale July 6 at Cafe du Nord.

MICKI ON THE MEND? Many know Stork Club owner Micki Chittock as the Oaktown stalwart who moved the Stork from its cubby near the Tribune tower to its current Telegraph Avenue clubhouse. But how many, booker Joel Harmon wonders, have come through for Chittock since her serious van accident in April? Suffering from a broken femur, pelvis, back, and ribs, Chittock has three weeks left in intensive care before she’s transferred to a recovery room, Harmon e-mailed me, after doctors gave the club owner a 50 percent chance of recovery. Harmon has put together two benefit shows to ease the medical expenses, and he’s working on more because, he writes, "I’m thinking that in order for the Stork to survive, Micki has to survive." *

HEAR, YOU GO

SEX VID AND FUNEROT


Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll sweethearts sweat it out with kindred Northwestern miscreants. Wed/20, 9:30 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

SEAN HAYES


The SF singer-songwriter whoops it up in honor of Flowering Spade, which found him in a groove with Etienne de Rocher. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.musichallsf.com

THE JOINT


Crown City Rocker Headnodic breaks out hip-hop, soul, and dancehall alongside Raashan Ahmad. Thursdays, 10 p.m., $5. Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 548-1159, www.shattuckdownlow.com

WHITE MICE


Load Records rodents bite headliner Skinny Puppy’s butt; don’t be surprised if they also gnaw their way onto a bill at the Bakery in Oakland. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $27.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

SEA WOLF


Turn-of-the-century wolf moniker and contemplative songcraft. Fri/22, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

DEAD SCIENCE AND IMPLIED VIOLENCE


A Wu-Tang dance party ensues after the twisted pop eccentrics couple with the experimental-theater ensemble fixated on dance, politics, and illness. Fri/22, 9 p.m., sliding scale. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. (510) 444-7263, www.21grand.org

NOMO


Elliot Bergman’s free-funk, Afrobeat, and noise eight-piece fires up the mbira, gamelan, and glockenspiel. Tues/26, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

FEIST


The ex-Peaches sidekick issues a subdued, ambitious, and multitextured Reminder (Cherrytree/Interscope). June 26–27, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

Tastes like chicken

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FILM Always be suspicious of any documentary that starts off with this snippet of dialogue: "Is it real, is it not real?" In fact, for the first 10 minutes of American Cannibal, directed by Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro, I suspected I might be watching a mock doc. But nope, it’s real — more authentic than reality TV, anyway, which is the subject it chronicles via both insider insights (from showbiz types like Fox Reality Channel honcho David Lyle) and the tension-fraught journey of Gil S. Ripley and Dave Roberts, writing partners who turn to reality TV as their last make-a-buck resort. That chance comes in the form of skeezy Kevin Blatt, proud promoter of jailbird Paris Hilton’s sex tape, who bypasses their pitch Virgin Territory ("When you win it, you lose it!") in favor of American Cannibal, an extreme twist on Survivor that Ripley tosses out as more of a joke than anything else. Before he and Roberts can believe what’s happening, an American Cannibal pilot — presented to potential cast members as Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge, part of the show’s bait-and-switch tack — is in motion. Morals and friendships are soon tested, as is the idea that reality TV spells instant money and success for whoever can bring the last great idea to some new, more sensational level.

Seriously, though, would you actually eat someone’s finger for prize money, even if you were really, really hungry? Would anyone? American Cannibal the documentary proves far more fascinating than American Cannibal the failed reality show ever could have been. It does feel like America’s rabid urge to devour prepackaged reality has settled down a bit, but you and I both know it’s never going away. Representing the craze’s high end, American Idol vet Jennifer Hudson has an Oscar. At the low end, take your pick (wherefore art thou, The Littlest Groom?). But if Ripley and Robert’s American Cannibal — a show that was to strand constants on a desert island and starve them, then tell them they had to eat human flesh to survive — sounds so ridiculous that you feel kind of sorry it never made it to the airwaves so you could watch, you’re not alone. As doc interviewee and The Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead points out, "If the lowest common denominator was a muscle, it could kick the shit out of anything else."

AMERICAN CANNIBAL

June 22–28, $4-8

See Rep Clock for showtimes

Red Vic

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

Police-records legislation on its way to state Assembly just as SFPD officer is charged with lewd act

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By G.W. Schulz

UPDATE! Here’s an SB 1019 alert from the Northern California ACLU.

Have you caught up with this week’s lurid law-enforcement story involving an SFPD officer facing criminal charges in the East Bay for sleeping with a 14-year-old prostitute? Scaaaaaaandalous.

If formal criminal charges had never been brought against the 37-year department veteran and he merely faced internal disciplinary proceedings for having sex with an underage girl in his car, there’s a chance you never would have learned about it. The state Supreme Court in a now-infamous decision handed down last year blocked the public from being able to access police disciplinary records.

If police hadn’t discovered the two in Sgt. Donald Forte’s civilian car at the dead end of an East Oakland street and the lewd act had simply been reported by a colleague internally, how else could the public have ever learned that a police officer had allegedly committed statutory rape?

Outside of a possible leak, the public may never have known a thing.

Two stories we published this week were also affected by that Supreme Court decision. Our story on three sheriff’s deputies in San Francisco accused in federal court by former county-jail inmates of assaulting them was limited in part because some personnel records generated in the case were designated confidential by a judge, so we couldn’t look at them.

woodfox1.jpg
Mack Woodfox alleges he was beat while in custody

She’s a man, baby!

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In a hilarious gaffe, local free monthly-ish paper for women The City Edition published a wild-eyed editorial this week accusing the Guardian of promoting prostitution, causing anorexia, keeping women from “tapping into orgasmic potential,” and basically steering any girl under the age of 18 into a hellacious vice-hole from which she’ll never return. (We caused Paris Hilton? Good for us.) City Edition didn’t identify us by name for some reason, but it ran a pic of our cover and called us a ” local alternative newspaper publishing out of a warehouse in Portrero Hill.”

Read the glorious editorial here (PDF)

So what have we done to deserve such epithets? While it’s no secret we’re an unalloyed den of iniquity, editorial writer Rosemary Regallo especially took issue with our depictions of half-naked covergirls, in particular our recent Summer Guide model, Marina Bitch:

marinabitch.jpg
Marina Bitch: “A sparsely clad, anorexic model who looks like she’s aching to get laid”
Photograph by House of Herrera

Thing is, Marina Bitch is a man.

In fact, almost all of our recent covergirls have been drag queens — naked club star Anna Conda graced our Sex Issue cover with a giant python wrapped around her (something SFist didn’t catch ) and Marina and Candi Gurl were peekaboo see-through on our first SCENE magazine. (In retrospect, I’m now limiting myself to one gender illusionist cover model a month. Too much of a good thing, maybe.)

Regallo writes:

“Sexualized and at times racist imagery of young women in so-called alternative newspapers is paving the way for a generation of damaged girls and a proliferating global sex trade. So why does the S.F. Public Library continue to distribute the city’s most popular porn, prostitute and adult entertainment guide at all its branches?” [italics mine]

Because of course young women can’t be counted on to make their own decisions, the poor little things. Then Regallo goes on to talk about ancient goddess cults and prescribe more images of women as firefighters. I smell Fall Arts Preview cover: Heklina with a hose!

Second nightlife

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It may sound cliché, but there’s no other way to put it: my nightlife sucks. With two shitty day jobs and a barely blossoming career as a freelance journalist, it’s nearly impossible for me to find enough time or money to enjoy this city after dark. It hasn’t always been this way: I used to spend my evenings gleefully cross-eyed, rubbing knees with random hedonists, pushers, and hell-raisers. I used to go skateboarding in night goggles and camp nude in the Tenderloin. Goddamn it, I used to have it all!

I’ve thus far managed to maintain sanity by telling myself that hard work produces success, but my self-imposed exile to the sunlit hours is rapidly taking its toll. Gray hair, bedroom alcoholism, and soul-crushing anxiety shouldn’t affect me for another 10 years or so. Yet here I barely stand at the ripe age of 28, a boring fucking wreck. In order to salvage some of my formerly wild personality — and rather than shoot myself or seek expensive therapy — I decided recently to take the plunge into the comprehensive virtual world of Second Life. Might as well throw down with some wart-nosed trolls and weirdo Wizards of Nardo, right? Pass the magick toad grog, Tinker Bell. Yep, I’m just that desperate.

A LITTLE HELP HERE?


With all the hype surrounding Second Life and its maker, Linden Labs, you’d think the game would be a fairly simple thing to pick up. Not so, my friend. The first obstacle I ran into was of the technical variety. After installing SL and choosing a sly code name (Justyn Jewell, natch), I thought I was good to go, but my poor old Dell crashed whenever I tried to wiggle my virtual buttocks. My friend Tony, a notorious group gamer at Stanford, hates it when I call him with computer questions but was surprisingly enthused about the opportunity to share his SL wisdom. He even agreed to come over that very night and lend me his vacationing roommate’s brand-new MacBook Pro until she got back. Score.

First lesson: customizing an avatar. Perversely, I chose the Boy Next Door body template and then altered its features to match my own. After some meticulous tweaking, Justyn Jewell was no longer your average joe. He was a tragically good-looking skinny white dude with slick brown hair and sleek black shoes. I also gave him a handlebar mustache, because I’m up-to-the-minute like that.

Tony spent the next few hours teaching me the basics. When he left that night, I was able to walk, fly, teleport, take a piss, and hold brief conversations. I was still having trouble picking things up, touching people, and not walking into corners, but it was too early to worry about socially acceptable advanced maneuvers. For a man who hadn’t touched a video game since Mario Bros. III, simply stumbling through SL’s intricate landscape felt like enough. Getting beyond that was going to be a bumpy road, but Tony promised to come back and teach me some more when the time was right.

AVATAR, AWAY!


My first few weeks with Second Life were just what I needed. Whenever my brain grew weary from writing another puff piece about the latest hair-removal technique ("Experience the smooth, toning pleasures of La Cage Aux Follicles"), I would log on and select one of the thousands of clubs from the Popular Place menu. Immediately, I’d shoot to an island dedicated to house, techno, hard rock, hip-hop, or what have you. Each venue was full of kitted-out avatars who acted as though they were at a real party. "Woo-hoo!" they would say. And "This party is sooo amazing!" I knew it was all fake, but I was getting a visceral thrill watching my doppelgänger mingle with squirrel people, virtual heshers, cocky shot-callers, and impossibly elfin ravers.

The possibilities kept me endlessly occupied. I started out mainly going to standard Ibiza-like situations but soon wound up frequenting a hip-hop club called Insatiable, where people ground to slightly less-than-cutting-edge tunes by Ludacris and Fat Joe. I tried to spice things up by talking to people wherever I went, but my standard greeting, "Whacha gonna do with all that ass, all that ass inside them virtual jeans?," was often met with a cold shoulder or yawn — even at Club Insatiable! The reason was obvious. While nearly everyone else had wild hairdos, tattoos, designer outfits, and sparkling electro-bling, I was still in stock attire, a boring newbie who didn’t know shit. It was time to get some gear.

Perusing boutiques in SL made me realize just how Vegas-like this virtual world can be. Everything is for sale. Shirts, pants, drinks, cars, body parts … Most items struck me as rather excessively priced or ephemeral, but a few choice pieces had me reaching for my Linden dollars, the coin of the realm.

One of my first stops was a store called Dicks and Pussies, where I somehow managed to score a free T — skintight, red and white, with the name of the store emblazoned across the chest. It was fine for walking around in an adult boutique, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the damn thing off. What would they say at Club Insatiable? In the hopes of finding a better free shirt, I teleported to a few other stores, but no luck. I was stuck looking like a freebie-grubbing douche bag until Tony could help me. Luckily, we had made a date for that night.

CLICK ON THE BLUE ONE


By 10 p.m., Tony and I were in an alcohol-fueled Second Life frenzy. After scoring some more Linden dollars, we flew around to goofy places like Hedonistic Isle, where you can gamble, listen to streaming audio, and lounge in lawn chairs. There were volleyball courts, bonfires, and beach toys all over the place, but I had other plans. Talking, dancing, and roasting electronic marshmallows were great and all, but what kind of nightlife would be complete without one-night stands?

I felt I had to act. "Hey Tony," I said. "How do you have sex in this place?" Tony stopped tapping at his keyboard and looked me dead in the eye. "I’m not exactly sure," he said. "Why don’t we find out?" I took a sip of my third real Jack and Coke and said, "Follow me."

Besides complimentary dorkwear, Dicks and Pussies has everything your perverted avatar could ever want. For less than a thousand Lindens (about $3) you can get a gigantic schlong with veins or a vagina with hyperrealistic stretch action. There were electric toys, erotic hairstyles, and even peekaboo lingerie. "All right, dude, I’ll buy you a vagina and myself a dick, but you have to show me how to put them on and work them," I said. "Fuck it, why not?" Tony said after a slight pause. That’s all I needed.

Within seconds Tony was wetting things with his brand-new vagina, and I was setting the flesh tones on my penis. "All right, man," I said. "How do you work these things?" I thought we would have to purchase some animation codes or something, but Tony knew a shortcut. Next to the showroom floor was a bedchamber with little balls hovering all over the place. Tony walked up to one and said, "Come on, dude, I’ll click on the pink ball. All you gotta do is click on the blue one, and we’ll be off."

Within seconds Justyn Jewell was balls deep in Tony’s avatar. Hilarious. Tony and I spent the rest of the night drinking and taking screen shots as our avatars explored each other’s software.

I passed out sometime around 2 a.m. and awoke the next morning to a pissed-off girlfriend. "What’s wrong, baby?" I asked. She refused to speak to me for an hour or so and then finally said, "I heard you last night. That was sort of weird that you fucked Tony."

I was immediately assaulted by a flurry of flashbacks: the sound of ice clinking in glasses, the sight of my avatar in the throes of passion, the giggles, the grunts … "Don’t say it like that," I said. "I didn’t fuck Tony. He was just, like, showing me how to have sex so I could buy some later." She stared at her coffee for a full minute and then said, "Well, I don’t know why you have to have sex at all. Is something wrong?"

The more I tried to explain that Second Life was just an entertaining outlet for when I was too busy to take her out, the worse it sounded. Why was I obsessed with that particular aspect of the game, anyway? And why, of all people, did I pick my friend Tony to experiment with? I waited until my girlfriend was in the shower before looking at the screen shots from the night before. Jesus Christ, what a pervert. Thanks a lot, Linden Labs! Now I have two shitty lives to deal with.

www.secondlife.com

Eat on the beat

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Once upon a strange, overly prepared, possibly paranoid post-9/11-related time not so long ago, I’d bring my lunch to shows at Shoreline Amphitheatre, then–Concord Pavilion, and all those other mammoth Sleep Train–sponsored yet intrinsically antisnooze behemoths. I’d pack a heaving Dagwood of cold cuts and assorted cheeses and energy bars into a backpack for random spates of balls-out rockin’ in burbs and office parks. What was I thinking? Guess I felt goofy partaking in those pricey, once-no-frills concession stands o’ paltry choices. Will it be a $7 Bud or $12 Corona, milady?

My only point in this pointless universe of sunburn, service fees, and loud, loud music is that it looks incredibly silly to come too correctly sometimes, especially when one takes in all-day musical twofers like the Harmony Festival and BFD in one fell weekend, hoping to study the cultural disconnect.

Still, the disjunction started way earlier, while at Harmony, cruising the many-splendored superwheatgrass concoctions, nut ices, and organic brown-rice-and-veggie-bowl stands (here somewhat more affordable than making a meal at a movie theater) and sticking out like a black-garbed Trenchcoat Mafiosa amid the dreadlocked sk8ter bois and Marin wealth gypsies with perfectly crimped hair. So too at BFD, playing arcade basketball backstage, studying Interpol and the Faint as they attempted to summon dark magic in broad daylight, and feeling peckish and jaded for noting the all-male standard-issue modern-rock lineups dominating the main stage.

I just didn’t go far enough in packing num-nums for all-day summer music lovin’ — after all, when in Rome and paying Rome’s hefty ticket prices, why not dress, smell, and quaff like those kooky Romans do? (And why not get a brain transplant while you’re at it?) As author Kara Zuaro might say, "I like food, food tastes good," but I also like saving nonexistent moolah and embedding myself seamlessly clad in average fan camouflage.

Hence a modest proposal for blending in at and sneaking grub into this summer’s shed performances:

THE SHOW: The Police, the Fratellis, and Fiction Plane. Wed/13, 6:30 p.m., $50–$225. McAfee Coliseum, Oakl. www.ticketmaster.com.

THE LOOK: Blond wig, placenta facial, an afternoon in the spray-tanning salon, tantric sex charm bracelet.

THE FLASK: Guinness-laced nut milk shake to please the food police.

THE SHOW: Gwen Stefani, Akon, and Lady Sovereign. Tues/19, 7:30 p.m., $25–$79.50. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Blond wig, stunna shades, ab-baring lederhosen, and a pout.

THE LUNCH BOX: A single Ricola in sympathy with Stefani, who claims to have been dieting since she was 10.

THE SHOW: Vans Warped Tour, including Bad Religion, the Matches, Flogging Molly, Pennywise, and Tiger Army. July 1, noon, $29.99. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Black T-shirt, faux-hawk, and black low-top Converse or checkerboard Vans — why not one on each foot?

THE BROWN PAPER SACK: Not Dog, PBR, Ritalin.

THE SHOW: Ozzfest, including Ozzy Osbourne, Lamb of God, Static X, Lordi, Hatebreed, Behemoth, and Nick Oliveri and the Mondo Generator. July 19, noon, free. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.ozzfest.com

THE LOOK: Black T-shirt, stunna shades, floppy shorts.

THE FANNYPACK: Seitan, cheddar cheese Combos, a quart of Gorilla Fart No. 666.

THE SHOW: Bone Bash VIII, with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Pat Traves, and Laidlaw. July 20, 5:45 p.m., $10.77–$59.50. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Uh, blond wig, floppy shorts, ab-bearing lederhosen.

THE TRUNK: Rice Chex and raisins, leftover tuna noodle casserole, Arkansas Buttermilk.

THE SHOW: Projekt Revolution Tour, including Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, HIM, and Placebo. July 29, 12:45 p.m., $24.50–$70. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Floppy shorts and tantric sex charm bracelet.

THE PLASTIC SACK: Fried ramen with faux duck, Kit-Kat, Sparks, and Tylenol.*

HIGH THERE

Pills and purists might accuse Sean Rawls of appropriating Aislers Set for his reggae-scented SF party supergroup Still Flyin’ — or simply appropriating Jah lovers’ rock sans the spirituality — but that doesn’t bum out the ex–mover and shaker of Athens, Ga.’s Masters of the Hemisphere on the June 5 release of an EP, Za Cloud (Antenna Farm): "Some people hear Still Flyin’ described to them and automatically think that it’s such a horrible idea for a band, which I can understand. But what we’re trying to do is just have a good time. Most bands aren’t into that."

When Rawls moved to SF in 2003, he simply asked everyone he knew — including AS’s Yoshi Nakamoto, Alicia Vanden Heuvel, and Wyatt Cusick — to join his new band. He didn’t think 15 unlikely suspects from groups like Maserati would accept.

After an East Coast tour this fall, Rawls aims to record an album of even dancier material, provided more instruments don’t get stolen by fans, as they have been in Sweden. "They also steal our beer. Either way it sucks," Rawls says. "We’re partying hard, and beer is a vital ingredient."

STILL FLYIN’ WITH ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI Sat/16, 9 p.m., $16. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. (415) 474-0365

GET THE BREAD OUT

BOTTOM AND TARRAKIAN


The Bay’s metal maidens meet the Totimoshi spinoff group, as the latter toast a new EP, The Swarm (No Options). Fri/15, 9 p.m., $7. Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. (415) 974-1585

LADYBUG TRANSISTOR


Following the sad passing of drummer San Fadyl, the Brooklyn nostalgia rockers carry on, twanging sweetly on Can’t Wait Another Day (Merge). Fri/15, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455

NO DOCTORS


The Docs are in with their third album, Origin and Tectonics. With Wooden Shjips, Fuckwolf, and Sic Alps. Fri/15, 10 p.m., $6. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. (415) 552-7788

SCISSORS FOR LEFTY


The SF combo skipped pants at BFD. Fri/15, 9 p.m., $13. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422

COOL KIDS


The Chicago duo kick out the streamlined boom-bap. Tues/19, 8:30 p.m., $8–$10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016

SCARY MANSION


No creeps — just poignant, eerie rock from the Thunderstick-wielding Brooklyn trio. Tues/19, 9 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

Take another letter

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I just saw Secretary yesterday, and then read your column that mentions the same movie and similar sentiment ["Thwang," 5/30/07]. My situation is a bit different because I’ve known how I feel for a while but never seen or experienced it. Also, I’m a stripper and rarely have sex but am extremely sexual. I’ve got a serious lust affair with the eroscillator but think I’ve maybe given up on a love that will be feminist but dominating and aggressive, too. In the movie, Maggie is looking through classifieds for a partner, and that is way too dangerous for me. How do I quiet the arguments between feminism and being truly submissive? Also, having to be seriously up-front about wanting some serious kink might kill the whole deal for me. Do these relationships actually happen in real life? How?

Love,

Sub Grrrl

Dear Grrrl:

Right. There was a moment when every other conversation, magazine article, and academic conference was devoted to exploring the conflicts and connections between radical feminism and radical sexuality. It was called "the ’80s." You probably missed it owing to not being born yet, but that stuff is still in print, and whatever isn’t is gathering dust in the sorts of used bookstores heavily populated by overweight cats and should be easy to find. Most of the best-known pro-kink feminists of the time were very, very lesbian (see Gayle Rubin on the academic side and Pat Califia for "literotica"), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have anything to say to straight women.

Obviously, of all the possible permutations, male dominant–female submissive is likely the most discomfiting to you. But, happily, the flip side of the "this weird sex thing goes against every political, ethical, or religious principle I consider right and true" coin is so often the Big Hot. Go to any upscale S-M party (yes, these really do exist) in San Francisco or Seattle, and at least half the women crawling around their master’s boots begging to be punished ’cause they’ve been very bad are in real life junior partners at onetime all-male law firms, or teach gender theory at small but prestigious liberal arts schools. In other words, they are quite fully "empowered," thanks, which doesn’t keep them from voluntarily surrendering said power come Saturday night, and may in fact add to the appeal. The classic, even clichéd, old-style S-M enthusiast, after all, is a member of Parliament who reports like clockwork to the bawdy house every Thursday afternoon for a brisk caning …

Um, yes. Where were we? I’m not sure where you, who perform naked for sexually aroused strangers for a living, got the idea that playing the personals is particularly dangerous. Perhaps from the same episodes of Law and Order in which a few pieces of S-M gear stashed under a suspect’s bed signal that a severed head in a shoe box cannot be far off? I would never suggest that you meet someone for coffee and immediately go home with him to check out his cool dungeon. Far from it. But the meeting-for-coffee part is perfectly safe. After that, you proceed as normal, which includes sharing your interests and aspirations … which is the next place we’re going to have some trouble, I see.

If being up-front about your weirditude is a potential deal-breaker for you, then I suspect you are a spontaneity freak. They are common, but many or most can have the need to proceed by whim or fancy beaten out of them by a stern application of reality. Spontaneity is fun and sexy, but it’s also responsible for most of your unwanted pregnancies, a vast number of STD transmissions, and who-all knows what other havoc. It’s also inconsistent with S-M at any level more technically advanced than the (admittedly often completely satisfactory) bend-over-and-spank variety. If you do go ahead with this, and you do find someone worthy of your submission, you are going to have to talk about it, whether you want to or not. Not only is it unsafe to do S-M with people you know nothing about, it isn’t even fun. What if you want to wear a neat little skirt and heels while bending prettily over nearby furniture, while he wants you to be a bad puppy and sleep in a kennel in the kitchen? What if your idea of submission is saying, "Yes, sir," a lot, while his idea of domination includes branding irons and cattle prods? Can you see how this could get ugly?

In romantic fantasy, the heroine meets the rough but passionate and shirtless master of the manor when she fetches up at his door as a penniless et cetera. In real life, I’m sorry to tell you, she meets him online or at an S-M "munch" or through kinky friends or at a party. And then they talk. I’m sure you’d rather toss your hair tempestuously while a dark and stormy stranger bends you over his knee and yanks down your pantaloons, but you’ll get over it.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Reform the recall

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EDITORIAL The Board of Supervisors — and the very notion of representative democracy — is under attack in San Francisco.

As city editor Steven T. Jones reported in last week’s paper ("Hazy Recall") and on our Politics blog ("Connect the Recall Dots"), a recall campaign has targeted Sup. Jake McGoldrick, citing his advocacy of car-free spaces in Golden Gate Park and a bus rapid-transit initiative that recall advocates believe district residents oppose.

Behind its claims of being a grassroots effort with legitimate concerns about McGoldrick’s leadership are some troubling indicators that there’s a lot more to this than potential petition signers might realize. The campaign’s biggest financial contributions come from the Residential Builders Association (which has long battled McGoldrick over conditions and restrictions he’s tried to place on developers) and the conservative property rights group Small Property Owners of San Francisco.

The lion’s share of the $24,000 raised so far has gone to Johnny K. Wang’s JKW Political Consulting. Among JKW’s other clients are the reelection campaign of Mayor Gavin Newsom (who would get to appoint McGoldrick’s successor, and whom the supervisor publicly criticized over Newsom’s sex scandal), Google and Earthlink (which Newsom wants to build a wireless Internet system for the city, a deal McGoldrick has taken the lead in scrutinizing), and malevolent downtown player Citizens for Reform Leadership (an attack group created by Newsom treasurer Jim Sutton).

It’s no surprise that Newsom and his downtown allies would want to knock off McGoldrick or any of the progressive supervisors who have been effectively setting the city’s agenda for at least the past two years. In fact, critics of the board have now launched another recall campaign, against board president Aaron Peskin, as well as a lower-level effort against Sup. Chris Daly. And this follows an unsuccessful 2004 effort to recall Sup. Sophie Maxwell, which had some behind-the-scenes support from downtown attack dog Wade Randlett.

None of these four supervisors have committed the acts of corruption, incompetence, or gross malfeasance for which the tool of the recall was created. Instead, people are trying to recall McGoldrick, Peskin, and Daly simply for being effective legislators with whom some of their more conservative constituents disagree.

This is an outrageous and dishonest abuse of the recall. Newsom should immediately and publicly express his opposition to the recall campaigns, and citizens of the district should refuse to sign the petitions. But that’s not enough. It’s time for the Board of Supervisors to consider placing a charter amendment on the ballot that would reform the way recalls are handled in the city, which is far more lenient than under state law.

The San Francisco signature threshold of 10 percent of registered voters is ridiculously low, particularly for district-elected supervisors, for whom only about 3,500 signatures are needed. Statewide, the standard is 20 percent of registered voters, and that should be our standard as well.

Raising the signature threshold is particularly important given the advantage that downtown interests have in recalling supervisors. The City Charter treats recall campaigns like ballot measures, allowing for huge political contributions rather than the $500 limits applied to candidates. This is grossly unfair to truly grassroots groups and should also be changed to cap contributions at $500.

Finally, we should remove the temptation for allies of the mayor to use the recall as a way of undoing popular elections and giving more power to the mayor. Most recall elections in California entail the replacement of a successfully recalled official by a vote of the people (as we saw when Gov. Gray Davis was recalled), but in San Francisco, the mayor chooses the successor. That needs to change.

Too often these days, the recall is a weapon wielded recklessly by wealthy special interests to subvert the true will of the people. By setting reasonable financial contribution limits, creating a high but still attainable signature threshold, and making the recall more democratic, San Francisco can once again make the recall an honorable — and seldom used — tool of the people. *

From the ashes

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"They may label you, try to classify you, and even call you a crazy bitch — but don’t flinch, just let them," Honey of Radio Phoenix says to the women of New York City after her black feminist–run station gets bombed by government agents, after her comrade in arms is found dead in her jail cell, as the fireworks are about to go off in a certain tall tower in Lower Manhattan.

There’s no denying the evocative weight of that last image these days. But Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames — and in particular, advice like Honey’s — comes to mind every time I watch a film in which grrrls are running riot in the street or on the radio or in the clubs, a slowly but surely growing subgenre as the decades pass (at least in my home video collection).

In the thin line of plot running patchily through Borden’s vérité-style feature, surfacing at the Roxie Film Center on June 22, the War of Liberation has brought about a single-party system run by Socialist Democrats, the postrevolution economy is in the toilet, and working women are bearing the brunt of the mass layoffs that have ensued. Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) is the leader of the Women’s Army, a loose circle of radical lesbian feminists — or vigilantes, as they’re called on the nightly news — who, among other pursuits, patrol the streets on bicycles with whistles at the ready in search of men behaving badly.

Norris begins to see their basically peaceful efforts to gain equality going nowhere and becomes convinced that armed struggle is the only way to get the government’s attention and force a change. When she dies in jail, the news sends a charge through the gathering underground, bringing together disconnected feminist forces that have long kept their distance. Borden’s aim, perhaps unrealistic and perhaps naive, is to present an expanding patchwork of radicalized women unified across lines of class and race in the face of overarching sexism.

You couldn’t call the women of Born in Flames riot grrrls with a straight face. The spiky commentators at Radio Regazza — trash-talking, white punk-rock counterparts to Radio Phoenix’s Honey — look familiar, but this is the second wave of feminism personified (evidenced, for one, by an unquestioning opposition to sex work). But if Borden’s point in setting Born in Flames in a future United States run by socialists, of all things, is that nothing much has changed for the second sex postrevolution, there’s a parallel in watching as a new clan of young women is born in flames onscreen every few years.

Such latter-day films — Kristine Peterson’s 1997 Slaves to the Underground, documenting the Portland DIY scene of the early ’90s; Barbara Teufel’s 2003 part-fiction, part-doc Gallant Girls, set amid the direct-action anarchopunks of late-’80s Berlin — regularly surface at the Frameline fest. And this year adds a couple more to the pack: closing night’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a tale of teen radicalization by But I’m a Cheerleader‘s Jamie Babbit (who cites Born in Flames as an inspiration), and the Spanish film El Calentito, by Chus Gutiérrez, set in 1981 on the eve of a coup d’état by Fascist vestiges of Francisco Franco’s gang. These, as well as Flames contemporaries Times Square (Allan Moyle, 1980) and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1981), are filled with rude girls hijacking the radio waves or the stage, flinging out slogans and manifestos, and screaming bloody murder. Though only Borden’s future radicals are prepared to cause it. *

BORN IN FLAMES (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983). June 22, 10:30 p.m., Roxie

Hit it or quit it

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Black White and Gray (James Crump, US, 2007) If Andre Téchiné’s The Witnesses colors the early ’80s red, this documentary about Sam Wagstaff (and by extension Robert Mapplethorpe) opts for a relatively bloodless palette. Though its voice-over shows class chauvinism in asserting that Patti Smith brought validity to punk, Black White and Gray perceptively uses its enigmatic subject as a window onto the changing role of photography within the art world. (Mapplethorpe’s objectification of black men is left uncriticized.) Crump brings in some excellent sources, such as Hanuman publisher Raymond Foye. He also brings in at least one horrible blabbermouth: spewing bitter opinion, historian Eugenia Parry deserves every hearty hiss she’s going to get from a Frameline crowd. The film ends on a flat note by allowing Smith to recite one of her pedestrian recent lyrics, but otherwise she’s a trustworthy and likable source on the relationship between Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe. Maybe the DVD version will bring more of her reminiscences and less of Parry. (Johnny Ray Huston)

June 21, 7 p.m., Victoria

DarkBlueAlmostBlack (Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, Spain, 2006). The term Almodóvarian is being thrown around these days with almost the same frequency as the term Hitchcockian (Almodóvar’s Bad Education was called Hitchcockian) and just as vaguely, but screenwriter-director Sánchez Arévalo’s DarkBlueAlmostBlack is Almodóvarian, resembling his postscrewball phase: it has melodrama without histrionics, likable characters doing absurdly unlikable things and vice versa, malleable (different from queer) sexuality, and near-incestuous family dynamics. The only thing missing is a hideously decorated apartment. In a world littered with the fruits of vacant and wild-eyed Almodóvarians (see — or don’t — Frameline 30’s unintentional disaster film The Favor), a disciple with some chops is cause for applause. Bitterly funny and narratively exciting — it toys with an amiable glibness that always comes back from the brink with devastating human emotion —Sánchez Arévalo’s dark but not quite jet-black comedy could be one of Almodóvar’s strongest films. (Jason Shamai)

June 20, 9:30 p.m., Victoria

Finn’s Girl (Dominique Cardona and Laurie Colbert, Canada, 2007). While other lesbians in the fest ponder whether to start a family, in Finn’s Girl conception is a fait accompli. How exactly it was accomplished is a bit of a mystery, but more pressing questions present themselves. One is whether Finn, a workaholic running a besieged Toronto abortion clinic and mourning the death of her wife, will get her head blown off by antichoice snipers — apparently, religious wingnuts live in Canada too. Another is whether she’s up for single-parenting the charming, precocious, enraged, and increasingly unmanageable Zelly, whose expressive 11-year-old eyes are particularly off-putting when narrowed above the smoke of a joint. Finn’s Girl covers a lot of terrain (grief, reproductive rights and technology, the travails of parenting, tween sexuality) with a fairly light tread, though Zelly’s scenes carry a particular charge of unpredictability. The result is a somewhat involving, sometimes sketchy picture of a family in transition. (Lynn Rapoport)

Sun/17, 12:30 p.m., Castro; Tues/19, 6:30 p.m., Parkway

Fun in Girls’ Shorts (various). Excluding Filled with Water, a smart, beautifully shot animation about a woman who falls for a TV-enclosed ballerina, and Succubus, a semicomedic film about a lesbian couple struggling to have a child, adolescent identity issues and anxieties constitute the major themes of this short-film compilation. With its attractively blurry cinematography, Pariah, about a 17-year-old black girl who keeps switching identities to please her parents and friends, is the most complete example of the suffocative effects that the suppression of one’s identity can have on a person, let alone a teen. (Maria Komodore)

Sat/16, 1:45 p.m., Castro; June 24, 11:30 a.m., Castro

Homos by the Bay (various). Though uneven, this program of shorts by local filmmakers does boast some standouts, including a stop-motion pair by Samara Halperin (who notably queerified Beverly Hills, 90210 in 2001’s Sorry, Brenda): the minute-long rhapsody on hot dogs, Plastic Fantastic #1, and Hard Hat Required, featuring two Lego men who do more than construction on the job. The Clap’s Gary Fembot uses his DJ skills for Mondo Bottomless‘s delightfully vintage pop soundtrack, a perfect match for its 16 minutes of cavorting men in bathing suits. And Nao Bustamante has a joyful punk-rock awakening in the black-and-white suburban fantasy The Perfect Ones. (Cheryl Eddy)

June 23, 1:15 p.m., Victoria

Jam (Marc Woollen, US, 2006). This is a fantastic, fascinating Roller Derby doc about Tim Patten, a local HIV-positive man who ferociously attempted to revive the sport after its virtual demise in the ’70s and, with it, the legendary Bay Area Bombers team. In San Francisco in the late ’90s, Bombers matches at Kezar Stadium were the hottest after-dark tickets in town, uniting swing revivalists, rockabilly fans, queer hipsters, and anyone into exquisitely goofy WWF-type antics but not into scary WWF crowds. Director Woollen takes us behind the scenes of those derby matches, delivering plenty of colorful history and personal drama (along with a few trade secrets) and uniting the disparate stories of the eccentrically flamboyant gang of wheel-heeled dreamers who signed on to Patten’s dream into a rollicking tale of subversive triumph. Now that’s a party. (Marke B.)

Mon/18, 7 p.m., Victoria

No Regret (Leesong Hee-il, South Korea, 2006). If you like movies about sexy orphans who become male prostitutes, you have at least two options at Frameline this year: Twilight Dancers and No Regret. Neither really addresses the issues it promises to (class politics, sex politics, et al.). But No Regret — essentially Pretty Woman for gay male depressives — is at least a better time at the movies. The South Korean film successfully tricks us into thinking its condom-thin melodrama is worthy of our tears, which is nothing to sneeze at. Just don’t expect to come out of the theater having unpacked the psyches of mopey Adonises for hire and their equally mopey rich lovers. (Shamai)

June 22, 10 p.m., Victoria

On the Downlow (Abigail Child, US, 2007) Some of the best pure moviemaking in this year’s festival can be found within this documentary by Abigail Child. Reflecting Child’s background as an experimental filmmaker, On the Downlow finds a lot of poetry and grit in urban Cleveland: a shot of a hooker moseying across the street and a sequence set at a barbecue are great examples of the poetry in motion that can happen when a talented woman with a camera looks at another woman. (Shot by men, these sequences would almost unfailingly be presented in a crude fashion or simply left ignored.) Of course, the main subjects here are men. Child also films them well, adding portraiture to talking-heads segments. On the Downlow‘s somewhat frustrating paradox is that it can’t really directly present its title subject — the guys talking here are either in love with DL guys who aren’t interviewed or they’re young gays- or bi’s-to-be taking awkward first public steps toward an out identity. (Huston)

June 23, 6 p.m., Victoria

Tan Lines (Ed Aldridge, Australia, 2006). The Aussie surfside ensemble drama has deep roots, stretching at least from preasshole Mel Gibson’s 1977 feature debut, Summer City, to last year’s superb, as-yet-unreleased (at least here) crime docudrama Out of the Blue. Landing somewhere between Gus van Sant and shark-bait territory, director Aldridge’s first feature focuses on the few days when 16-year-old surfer Midget (Jack Baxter) falls in first love — or at least first lust — with his best mate’s briefly returned, gay-disgraced brother, Cass (Daniel O’Leary). With its cannily used nonprofessional actors and streaks of absurdist humor, Tan Lines is an offbeat delight for half its length. The charm fades a bit thereafter, but this is still worth a look. (Dennis Harvey)

June 23, 3:30 p.m., Castro

Tick Tock Lullaby (Lisa Gornick, UK, 2006). Flirting with the idea of having a child and confronted with the difficult question of how to go about having it, Sasha (Gornick) and Maya (Raquel Cassidy), a lesbian couple living in London, set out on a sperm escapade. Inspired by the thought process that Sasha goes through as the couple’s hunt progresses, three additional stories emerge and intermingle, representing variations on the potential of becoming a parent. Shot with a beautifully fluid camera, Tick Tock Lullaby is an intimate, complex, and elaborate exploration of sexuality, relationships, and most important, parenthood. (Komodore)

Sat/16, 9:30 p.m., Castro

For more short takes on Frameline 31, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

The suggestions

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am writing to quibble with your response to Imagine ["You May Find Yourself …," 11/8/06], the fellow in college who complained that after "a couple of rounds a day for a few months," he had difficulty reaching orgasm without either fantasizing about another woman or taking matters into his own hands. You suggested that he might just be someone who needs a certain amount of novelty or fantasy to get up and over, and you left it at that.

The reason I felt driven to write is that he described exactly how I feel when I try to have sex too often. Even back in college, I was never voracious sexually — once a day is just dandy. If I try to have sex twice a day for several days in a row, I can still get erections but have difficulty achieving orgasm. The only way to get up and over is to introduce something novel or to switch to masturbation (because, like most men, I am the world’s foremost expert at getting myself off).

So, I would counsel Imagine to try going cold turkey for a day or two. If a sexual hiatus miraculously (but temporarily) cures the problem, then it’ll prove he may just be trying to have sex more often than his body really wants to.

Love,

Just Me

Dear Just:

Yeah, OK.

A few weeks ago I ran a column I called "The Corrections" [5/2/07], mostly because I’d finally got around to reading that book that everyone else in the universe read like five years ago. But I get as many suggestions as I do corrections, so what the heck? Here’s yours.

I agree with you actually. Dude was probably not only a little bored (yes, even college boys can get bored during sex!) but physiologically fatigued. I’m going to assume this is no longer a problem for that particular college boy, though, since it was a few months back and sadly (or happily, depending), "Help, we’re having too much sex!" tends to be one of those self-limiting relationship problems.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I have some advice for the guy who was too tall to do it doggy-style with his short partner [5/23/07]. Doggy-style is my favorite position also. I’m a tall guy, and one thing that works great is standing by the side of your bed while your woman presents to you near the edge. While it takes more energy since you’re vertical, you can bend your knees and her waist to make it a pleasurable experience for you both.

Love,

Tallboy

Dear Tall:

OK, then! Indeed, for lots of size-discordant couples a "he stands, she crouches" position will work handily. Not dignified, mind you, but any activity that allows your dangliest dangly bits to not only hang low but to wobble to and fro has little claim to dignity in the first place.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Readers:

The last thing I wanted to cover is not so much a suggestion as a follow-up, except insofar as I suggest that interested parties check it out ASAP: the Food and Drug Administration approved the "never have to have a period again" pill. The Red Tent is no more. We can have a female president now.

Well, let’s not get carried away.

While a large majority of women in a large number of recent studies (there’s a good run-down of recent research at the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals site, arhp.org) would like their menstrual cycles to be different, this includes women who’d merely like them to be less painful or more regular, and really, big duh. Still, it appears that most women asked have some interest in at least occasional menstrual suppression. Women surveyed at six sites across the United States seemed overwhelmingly, even shockingly eager to abandon the old moon goddess entirely. According to that poll, 59 percent said they "would be interested in not menstruating on a monthly basis," and one-third said they "would choose never to have a period." I don’t recall seeing them say that they’d choose never to have a baby, but presumably that exception was addressed somehow or other.

Unsurprisingly, women in the military seem most eager to jump. I was likewise unflabbergasted to see that Dutch and German women seemed a little less eager to embrace a novel, high-tech body-mod that’s radical and (perhaps excessively) clean-freakish — aren’t these the same women who were famously late (if ever) adopters of leg and pit shaving? — but even they were pretty intrigued by the possibility. And finally, just to prove menstruation’s ickiness and expendability is almost entirely a matter of cultural perspective, Nigerian women who were asked about menstrual suppression wanted nothing to do with it.

How about you?

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question!

Thwang!

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have always enjoyed having women walk all over me with lots of stomach stomping. Shoes, boots, or barefoot, this is something that I crave daily. Now my problem is that after doing this for most of my life, I just can’t seem to find women who are cruel enough. I try to select women who are 200-plus pounds, but even they leave me needing more (though it hurts like hell). I know my body can’t take much more, but I enjoy it. I just can’t get stomped hard enough. Am I out of control?

Love,

Stomp Me

Dear Stompy:

Dude.

I’d say you were a bit out of control if I believed any of this had ever escaped the realm of fantasy and stomped its way into the harsh light of day. You "try to select" women over 200 pounds, do you? From what pool of eager applicants would you be selecting them? And why would the cruelty quotient of the available pool be diminishing?

The only way you could regularly fulfill this fantasy is by engaging professionals, not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s no shortage of large women (or reasonable facsimiles of women) who would be willing to do this for you as cruelly as desired. If that is how you’ve been scratching your itch and it really is getting harder to scratch, then you may indeed have some sort of satiety problem. If so, you’ll have to do what anyone else who’s built up too much of a tolerance to alcohol or heroin or any other abusable substance does: cut way down or quit it until you can indulge at a reasonable dosage again.

This isn’t harmless. So if you’re really doing it and not just flapping your face, I suggest that you keep an eye on how much weight you’re taking and where. I can’t believe that a gentleman with your proclivities has never heard Kirsty MacColl’s "In These Shoes?," a song that pulls off the not-inconsiderable trick of being both seductive and hilarious:

"Oh," he said.

"Won’t you walk up and down my spine,

It makes me feel strangely alive."

I said, "In these shoes?

I doubt you’d survive."

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m 21 and female and have always felt kind of indifferent about sex. I can enjoy it OK. I get horny as much as other people my age, as far as I can tell. It just isn’t that interesting to me.

I thought maybe I was gay, but I’ve experimented with women and nothing changed. Then recently I watched the movie Secretary, and it was like a revelation! I want the kind of relationship portrayed in that film — loving but desperately kinky. Do you think it is possible for BDSM to be an inbuilt kind of sexual preference, as unchangeable as homosexuality? And what happens if you suggest it to a boyfriend who hasn’t expressed any previous interest in it? I don’t want to scare anyone off.

Love,

Take a Letter

Dear Letter:

Indeed, but neither do you want to commit the sin of false advertising — passing yourself off as normal so as not to frighten the boat or rock the horses or whatever, only to send a man off screaming when you finally get around to telling him what you’re really after. It’s far less comfortable and a hell of a lot more work just to try to find a compatible fellow kink in the first place, but trust me here — it’s worth it.

As for kink as an inborn tendency like (most) homosexuality: Oh, hell yes, I think it’s possible. We all know people who’ve gone freaky for a while because it seemed for whatever reason to be the thing to do and then reverted, but for every trendoid there’s an earnest freak who can remember being the kid who always wanted to be the captive princess or the cowboy tied to the fence by wild Indians and was never all that enthusiastic about being rescued when the time came. I believe a lot of people can enjoy a little role play or think it’s fun to get tied up prettily and tickled or teased, but people can enjoy a little of all kinds of things. If you see something like Secretary and feel the deep and unmistakable thwang of a chord being struck way deep in your soul, I think you can trust that that cord was there all along awaiting striking.

I can’t help wondering just how many such strikings that movie is singularly responsible for. I thought it was sizzling hot myself, but I think the writer and producers have a lot to answer for. I get the feeling there were a lot of people, young women in particular but not exclusively, who were just going about their lives, la la la, and then James Spader bent Maggie Gyllenhaal over that desk, and thwang! They’ll never be the same.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

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