Cop killings in the SF Bay Area, a small list

I have just returned from a march in solidarity with the Committee for Justice & Love for Alex Nieto, who was killed by SF police earlier this year. Alex was unarmed, eating a burrito in a local park before going to work as a security guard. Inspired by the national uprising in response to the unjust and racist killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, I decided to take a moment to familiarize myself with a few of the many non-threatening people shot and killed by local police. Street protests and riots, in addition to legal and bureaucratic activism, are shifting the public discourse, building communities of resistance, and will hopefully result in more indictments and imprisonment of police. We have to increase the costs and consequences - lawsuits, civil unrest, imprisonment, public relations - for police brutality, racial profiling, and murder. And we have to increase support and respect for the families of the victims, those who have to deal with the ongoing insult of being denied justice and honesty from local police, judges, media, and government.

No justice, no peace
No racist police

Killing children is a crime
Frisco Ferguson Palestine

Idriss Stelley
23 years old
June 13, 2001

Idriss' girlfriend called SFPD from the Metreon (a multiplex cinema) requesting 5150 (medical care for a mental health emergency) for Idriss who was having an emotional emergency/breakdown. 9 SF police officers arrived, emptied the theater, and killed Idriss, shooting 48 bullets.

Gary King Jr.
20 years old
September 20, 2007

Stopped for questioning upon exiting a North Oakland store, Oakland police shot Gary twice in the back after he attempted to flee. .

Oscar Grant III
23 years old
January 1, 2009

Killed by BART (metro) cop Johannes Mehserle, while already laying face down, hands cuffed behind his back.

Kenneth Harding Jr
19 years old
July 16, 2011

Killed by SF police for running away from cops asking him to show his $2 transit fare. Police report says that Harding shot himself. Harding lay bleeding for nearly 30 minutes and was denied immediate medical care.

Alan Blueford
18 years old
May 6, 2012

Shot 3 times by Oakland cop Miguel Masso. Blueford was hanging out with friends at night in East Oakland, when an unmarked car without lights approached. As cops emerged to question them, Blueford was shot running away. Last words, “I didn't do anything.”

Mario Romero
23 years old
September 2, 2012

Killed by Vallejo police Sean Kenney and Dustin Joseph who fired over 30 bullets into the car, 11 which hit and killed Romero. An additional 5 bullets hit but did not kill Romero's brother in law Joseph Johnson.

Andy Lopez
13 years old
October 22, 2013

Sonoma county deputy sherriff Erick Gelhaus shot Andy seven times because the 8th grader was carrying a toy gun designed to look like an AK47.

Errol Chang
34 years old
March 20, 2014

Chang, who had documented mental health issues, barricaded himself in his house in Pacifica. A SWAT team broke into the home. Chang stabbed one of the team and was then shot and killed.

Alejandro “Alex” Nieto
28 years old
March 21, 2014

Shot at over fourteen times and killed by the San Francisco Police Department, on Bernal Hill Park in San Francisco, without justification.

Yanira Serrano-Garcia
18 years old
June 23, 2014

Killed by San Mateo county deputy Mehn Trieu who was responding to a call for fire department paramedics. Yanira had a history of mental health issues and was extremely agitated.

Jacorey Calhoun
23 years old
August 4, 2014

Shot in the head by Alameda county deputy sheriff Derek Tomas as he fled, unarmed, in East Oakland.

To confuse, coverup, and deny their illegal and deadly actions, the police have withheld reports, denied family access to the body, presented conflicting stories about the incident, tried to protect the identity of the cops, slandered and blamed the victim, and/or tried to sabotage investigations of the death. In multiple situations the police have lied about what happened. In several situations the victim had a known history of mental health issues which was communicated to the officers. These cop killings, and thousands of others, are instigated by chronic, structural practices: racial profiling of young black or brown men, police violence and other militarized responses to non-threatening situations and mental health emergencies, and a total lack of accountability for police brutality, racism, and murder. Oscar Grant's killer, thanks to intense street protests and bureaucratic activism, is the only law enforcement officer to be jailed for unjustly killing an unarmed person.

What is remembered lives.

Notes on the T-word Debates of 2014

Heklina was a tranny.
Justin V Bond and Auntie (Kate Bornstein), too.
Ru Paul was a tranny.
Tranny, tranny, tranny, tranny,
tranny, tranny, tranny.

That said, and following this post, I intend to never use the word publicly again. The battle - and why it had to be a battle I don't know - is over.

I was called a fag at least weekly for most of high school. It hurt. It sucked. It was violent. Sometimes I fought back (e.g., "you're just mad cuz I came in your hair last night," was a favorite retort. Then I ran, into a classroom or the library.) When I moved to SF and met self-identified radical faggots I delighted in referring to myself and my gay buddies as fags and faggots. I still use the term to promote intimacy playshops when I want to invoke a particularly fierce energy of my/our history and to challenge the gentrification of the mind that continues to erode radical solidarity.

When queer emerged as a collective name, I finally came fully out, and fully home. I had been waiting for an anti-assimilationist identity that separated me from Castro clones and capitalist gays and linked me to a motley crew and their dissident differences. Queer was an intersectional action poem of punk rage and gay liberation and lesbian feminism and SM dykes and bisexual playparties and trans visibility and radical faerie and poly hippy and AIDS activism and genderqueer body/fashion poets... and all kinds of dissident, fierce LGBT and POC identities and scenes. Queer was intensely debated during its rise in popular and academic use, especially by old school gay men who had been cut, bashed, and terrorized by the word, and the legalized violence that backed up that insult. Perhaps if transpeople had been the most vocal (or most heard) in rejecting the term queer, it wouldn't be in use today. But we recognized then that the effort to freeze the word queer as an insult, as embodied pain, would be a conservative mistake, a reactionary misstep in the movement towards our healing and liberation. We could compare the strategic re-appropriation of queer or tranny to the movement around the slurs faggot, nigger, and dyke.

What's new about today's debate (besides that it is happening online where folks can dismiss or insult anyone they disagree with, without having to look at them or learn anything about them), is that this time, the folks who want everyone to agree on a single meaning and a single history for a word, are winning. Of course, one could also recognize that the folks that speak from the margins, from the place of hurt, for the (most) oppressed, are winning, finally, one small battle among thousands.

Those who defend an immediate stop to the queer use of the t-word cannot accept or even acknowledge that several high profile, pioneering, transgender artist-activists reject the 'censorship' of tranny. They use tranny on themselves, and their friends, and accept it almost as a term of endearment. Is it really that simple to call these people blinded by privilege and out of touch as if aging made them stupid instead of wise? Multiple generations and diverse communities do not always share a word's value, meaning, history, uses, habits, or intentions. I wish that was OK or that we had more strategies for dealing with paradox and difference, and that includes the asymmetrical power dynamics that structure so much violence in and around difference. Violence for some, privilege for others. That's what difference is. How could we possibly agree on a single language or tactic for confronting that violence? And why would anyone, familiar with the violence of exclusion or social death, take a prohibitionist or censorship stance towards a word used more within their communities of solidarity than without?

I'm going to miss the détournement of slander and I await the blooming of a new Q generation's action-poetry of identity, healing and solidarity.

The issue about drag queens not 'entitled' to 'appropriate' the word tranny is messed up in all kinds of ways, especially if you've been to SF Bay Area drag clubs where transgender, cisgender, crossdresser, transvestite, butch, femme, and genderqueer have all been involved in various approaches to drag performances. I've seen many trans people in drag in SF, and many a drag artist has transitioned genders after making community in queer drag scenes. It's complicated, and I mean the intersection of our bodies our lives our experiences our suffering our vision our social death our resistance our creativity our options our lack of options our solidarity our alienation...

I am not a 'fan' of the t-word and I rarely use it. And only after it's prompted or already part of the conversation, and never to name someone I don't know. 

Camp and transgressive humor are healthy and subversive responses to pain and insult, violence and inequity. Trannyshack is a club where a lot of great things happened for a lot of people. Integral to the club's charm was the (lite) transgression of the borders and rules that queers have set up to protect ourselves from further harm. Gender was not the only 'situation' that was re-framed, satirized, toyed or fucked with through drag. There was race and ethnicity drag, dis/ability drag, age (too young, too old) drag, celebrity drag, and more shit jokes than can be counted... As fast as queers could come up with new identities, fashions, sexual habits, STDs, and political issues, they would be imitated, appropriated, and clowned at Trannyshack along with politicians and pop stars. 

The name of the club was part of that clowning transgression. It was post punk Camp. We knew it was wrong but we smiled inside when we said it. And we knew that we were participating in a temporal yet crucial experiment in queer culture, the kind of ritual that, yes Dorothy, actually creates a better world than the one we grew up in. But all naming is political and I guess the powerlessness of being unable to change mainstream culture's naming (sexist and racist sports naming, pop culture naming, official history book naming...) leads us to practice on smaller targets like a drag club. Unfortunate.

PS

Heklina has asked for support and patience as s/he rebrands the club - Trannyshack - that gave many of us more life than we knew was possible. The fucked up and campy name was part of the charm, and I mean charm politically, aesthetically, and spiritually. If you want some queer-is-supposed-to-be-disturbing nostalgia, watch the documentaries I Am Divine and Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, or read Philip Huang's notes on the importance of being offensive.

PPS

The opening poem is a reference to/appropriation of Patti Smith's Rock n Roll Nigger.


PPPS
For further discussion, I recommend this excellent short video by a smart young queer/trans activist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3ZACug7dPU&feature=youtu.be
as well as FB posts by Annie Sprinkle, Justin V Bond, Heklina

848: queer, sex, performance in 1990s San Francisco (article DRAFT)

Keith Hennessy

(in dialogue with Tessa Wills)

(This is a draft of an article for Dance & Theatre Journal (UK)...but it is way too long for them so I am also seeking other sites for distribution...your comments and suggestions are very welcome, especially via email. thanks.)

848 was an artist-run, collective art space and home in San Francisco. Inspired by Tim Miller and Linda Burnham at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, I went to an Alternate ROOTS gathering at the site of the original Black Mountain College in the summer of ‘91. I met people who were fusing community-based art-making with social justice work, devising original works for the stage across genres, and having a very developed conversation on race that I wasn’t having in San Francisco. That fall, some friends moved out of a funky, second floor, commercial space on Divisadero Street. In Nov 1991, Michael “Med-O” Whitson, Todd Eugene and I adopted the space and its name. In a windowless 1100 sq ft studio, with moveable risers that seated fewer than 50 people, we hosted a weekly Contact Improvisation jam and hundreds of performances, concerts, exhibitions, and parties emerging as a vibrant site for cultural experimentation. Very early on it became a sex radical space, which organized safe-sex parties and safer-sex education inspired by sex-positive feminism, pagan ritual, and AIDS and queer activism. Todd moved out within the first year and Jess Curtis moved in. With Jess and others, I lived at 848 for 10 years, on and off, but mostly on. During my last five years at 848, approximately 10,000 people a year came through the space.

(from More Out Than In, Notes on Sex, Art, and Community, eds Rachel Kaplan and Keith Hennessy, 1995, Abundant Fuck Publications)

“When the three founders of 848 (Med-O, Todd Eugene, and myself) first met, I was very clear that I wanted our new space to include sex events within the spiritual artist activist weave. Specifically, I wanted a place to hold experiential, naked, queer workshops and rituals focussed on sexual healing. The previous year, Jack Davis and I had started Phallic/Image, a ‘school’ for trainings in safer sex, creativity and spirituality for queer men. Inspired by the work of Joe Kramer and Body Electric, we decided to offer low cost, pagan-based events that affirmed gay sex. As the faggot liberationist, goddess honoring, anarchist grandchildren of Wilhelm Reich, Emma Goldman, Betty Dodson, Walt Whitman and The Living Theater, we wanted nothing less than the abolition of sex shame, HIV ignorance, homophobia, male rigidity, rape and sexual violence, and closeted love. Our work emerged from the common field nurtured by feminism, body and earth based spiritualities, gay lib, contemporary art movements, radical environmentalism and anti-racist/civil rights organizing. We were leftist community organizers offering group sex and intimacy in a ritual setting. And we discovered that there was a shortage of places to do this work.{...} Thus the first “sex events” at 848 were born.”

In 848’s Fall ‘94 calendar, Med-O and I wrote, “We’ve provided an essential public space for several micro-communities, including those that operate at the queer edges of society, dance-based performers, body-based women visual artists, and more. What next? We want a bigger gallery/theater, with room for more people to live in community. We want to be an evolving resource for artists creatively manipulating hard core political issues that make the city hell to live in. We know that sexual liberation sells more tickets and gets more press than class war activism. We dance in this schism and get as subversive as necessary to pollinate both fields with the wisdom of the other. Aware of the incessant violence in all directions, we look for work that makes life worth living”

Pioneering Fusions of Sex & Art at 848 Community Space (1991-2005)

SF has always been a hotspot for sexual libertines. It's a port town. It's a home base for prostitutes and returning soldiers. It's a pioneer town. We have streets named after hookers and brothel owners. It's about Beats and Hippies and social and political dissidents. It's about people escaping mainstreams established by New England puritans. SF has been a magnet for US and international LGBT refugees for generations.

Then AIDS.

SF was hit hard, becoming an epicenter of both the pandemic and the activist-artistic mobilization it inspired. Most of the sex activity at 848 in the early 90s was a direct response to AIDS. We were forced to rethink sex and the relationship of gay sex to community. The Queen of Heaven1 parties and many other sex positive happenings were framed as safer sex events. The court ordered closing of SF bathhouses in 1984 was a homophobic response to AIDS; an opportunity for closed minded and homophobic citizens to backlash and scapegoat gay men for having pleasure palaces. The defense of the safer sex party in this historical context was that people in public, having sex in front of friends and strangers, would be more likely to follow the new community ethic of using condoms. All of the sex or play parties at 848 had some kind of monitor or host that made condoms and lube readily available, as well as gloves, saran wrap for eating pussy and ass, and a generally convivial environment for changing our sex habits and behaviors.

The people who led sex events or rituals at 848 were also artists: dancers, performance artists, writers and visual artists. These artist-sexpert-organizers included Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence, Jack Davis and myself, Ann Rosencranz, Jess Curtis, Matthew Simmons (aka Peggy L’eggs), Patrick Califia2, the folks from Black Leather Wings3, Mark I Chester and others. The people engaged in radical sex practices, whether they were gay or not, were heavily impacted by AIDS - by friends getting sick, by the activism, by the work to re-imagine sexual community. In queer scenes no one was untouched, no one was unmoved. Artists and dancers have always been a part of communities where sexual experimentation, faggotry and non-heteronormative sexual relations and practices have been celebrated or explored. A disproportionate number of male dancers are gay and bisexual, so the dance community was deeply implicated in the struggle with AIDS and the efforts to reclaim visibility, solidarity, and pride during the sex wars of the 80s.

The styles, genres and political tactics of performance that happened at 848 were influenced not only by contact improvisation and the experimental wing of the contemporary dance scene, but also by feminist and queer performance, the experimental drag scene, and visual art by radical lesbians, gays, transfolk, bisexuals, poly and leather folk.

In the early 90s in the Bay Area, a super vibrant feminist and dyke scene blossomed in both the dance and queer performance scenes. Young feminists had come of age during the sex wars of the 80s, their politics formed in the conflicts between sex positive and sex worker positive feminists and the feminists who prioritized a radical critique of rape culture and anti-pornography. Among these young women who organized and/or performed at events at 848 were Stanya Kahn, Stephanie Maher & Kathleen Hermesdorf, Kneejerk, The Femme Show (which was followed by the Butch and Switch group shows), Madrone aka Kim Jack, Lisi DeHaas, Pearl Ubungen, and Miriam Kronberg. Miriam was central in creating the women’s performance space LunaSea, one of several spaces whose founding was inspired by 8484.

There is a crucial history of bisexual leadership in sex liberation and sex worker activism in SF that is rarely acknowledged. From BiPol5, Society of Janus6, and COYOTE7 in the 70s, to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Human Sexuality, and most specifically their training for the SF Sex Info call line, there have been countless bisexuals who have been key to sex worker, BDSM, LGBT, feminist and queer art, healing, and organizing. Many of these people came through 848, producing events, telling their stories through performance, having sex, making videos, attending visual and performance art events.

Queer and sexual cultures, at least in the Bay Area, seemed more engaged with dancers and dance performance than with theater. It’s a common observation that dance, sexuality, and gender are grounded in bodily performance and experience. Also dance tends towards more porous borders than theater - or maybe that’s just how I’ve experienced it in San Francisco. And I mean more porous borders with performance art, experimental theater, burlesque and erotic performance. Dance is mythically linked with sex work: strippers, sexy dancing, belly dancing, skirt dancers, dancers as escorts, the revealed legs of women in tights dancing men’s roles in Ballet...going as far back as our fantastical and orientalist imagining of ancient temple dancing. Dancing is a form of sexual and erotic performance. Feminist and queer performance pushed the limits of nudity and sexual imagery in art, revealing a mutual influence between dance, body-based performance and radical sex cultures.

In Bay Area performance history, nudity is “natural”, what dance theorist André Lepecki referred to as a “utopic project,”8 more under the influence of Isadora Duncan and Anna Halprin. This contrasts with the more confrontational nudity in New York of The Living Theater and Richard Schechner’s ‘Dionysus’ in 69. Even the softcore “O Calcutta” by Kenneth Tynan which opened Off-Broadway in 1969 was more prurient sexy than Halprin’s 1965 “Parades and Changes” in which the dancers dressed and undressed repeatedly. Nudity in Bay Area performance in the 90s was influenced as much by a post-Halprin, Bay Area casualness as by the shock tactics typical of some feminist and queer performance. At 848, nudity and sexual imagery in visual art and performance were both frequent and contested.

(from More Out Than In, 1995)

The body. The body. The body. It’s only a body. My god, it’s a body! The dance comes from the body. The dance comes through the body. The personal body. The animal body. The collective body. The earth body. The universal body. The specific body. Great and not-so-great artists have by stripping the body, exposing the body, studying the body forever. Etienne Decroux, the great teacher of corporeal mime, had his students rehearse in loin cloths before there was any conversation about sexual revolution. From Michelangelo to Anna Halprin, The Living Theater and Pilobolus we’ve been given the naked body as form, as objet d’art, as subject, as being, as beautiful reflection, as perfection, as human, as goddess.

I believe that contemporary performance audiences are much more concerned about formal experiments in the theater, e.g performers entering the audience, shows with no conceivable structure, improvisation and/or audience participation, than with nudity on stage. Yet presenters repeatedly put warnings on the door where i perform alerting the potential audience to ‘mature themes and nudity’. Recently at a gig produced by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis I added ‘and lots of improvisation’ to the warnings in the lobby.

When Jack Davis and I started the Phallic/Image events there were very few spaces that wanted to host this work. For political events at that time we frequented the Women's Building (a women owned and operated community centre) but they, understandably, didn't want to host a naked men's cock worship event. We ended up in dance studios because that's where I had connections. When we started 848 I asserted to my two hetero male collaborators that the space had to be available to my workshops with Jack and other sexual healing or erotic arts events. As West Coast anarchists, this was a non-issue. As soon as various people in the sex community found out that the space was available and cheap, we had many requests. Our relationships to many sex and body pioneers came from simply opening the doors.

As I recall it, the radical sex folks found me more than I found them. They came to performances and attended workshops. Affinities flowed. In 1985 I was invited into a life-changing collaborative project with Sara Shelton Mann. The result was a punk-influenced dance about love, gender, and violence called ‘Evol’, which revitalized Sara’s company Contraband. The first review about ‘Evol’ was by Mark I Chester in the gay (men’s) paper, Bay Area Reporter. Besides being an occasional art critic Chester was, and still is, a noted photographer who documents the underground BDSM scene in San Francisco. And then some of the first fans and supporters of my solo performance (starting with Saliva in 1988) were from the leather scene. They weren’t the gay sweater clones who were too afraid to come to an illegal, under a SOMA freeway performance where I smeared myself in audience spit and danced in a black jockstrap, boots, and a leather jacket painted with Dead Animal Skin on the back. Internationally recognised Kink educator, Cleo Dubois was with Mark Chester at the initial Contraband performances. She took performance workshops at 848 and then performed there both solo and with her partner Fakir Musafar, the father of the modern primitive movement. Carol Queen and Fakir were very quick to rent 848 for their sex/ritual/fetish events following the visibility of the gay men’s sex/intimacy workshops that I facilitated with Jack Davis. Carol, with her partner Robert Lawrence, was already hosting sex parties, within a context of pangender and poly organizing that had historic roots in SF bisexual community and activism. Their Queen of Heaven parties moved to 848 around 1992 or 93. Mark, Carol, Jack, Cleo and Fakir were all connected through underground BDSM, public sex party, and Radical Faerie scenes. Their involvement in the space as both artists and sex event organizers were instrumental in 848’s reputation as a site for community-based experiments in both radical sex and contemporary art and performance. I felt recognized as a fellow freak or outsider, someone wanting to live at the extremes of bodily and social experience, even if my primary practice wasn't in a sexual context but a theatrical dance and performance context.

Methodology: four stories moving between sex and art

There were some key practices and experiences to which many of us were first exposed in group sexual healing contexts that had direct impact on our dancing and performance making. These included intense breathwork, the de-privatizing of sexual or intimate bodily experience, and the expansion or unmaking of bodily limitation, e.g., recontextualizing endurance, pain, ecstasy, and social relations. Crediting the development of artistic and social practices, like all history making, involves a network of personal narratives and positioned perspectives. Here are a few stories:

one

Joe Kramer is a sexual healing pioneer, the founder of The Body Electric School, and responsible for professionalizing and legalizing sexological bodywork. Kramer adapted the Rebirthing(tm) breath practice to his “Taoist” Erotic Massage. There was a resonance with ReBirthing to Stan Grof’s Holotropic breathwork which was introduced by Neil MacLean to my community of friends in DIY healing rituals. In both of these breath practices there is a ‘breather’ and a masseur or support person. I have adapted these consciousness shifting and ecstasy-instigating breath practices into a para-theatrical improvisation ritual in which a group assumes both roles of client/healer or breather/sitter with everyone breathing and everyone looking out for everyone. Full connected breath, trying to overdose on oxygen, for one hour or more, with dynamic music playing...while dancing, jumping, pushing, running, hugging, spinning, holding... This ritual is part of a series of exercises and events that constitute Potential Shamanic Action, a five-day laboratory for dancers and performers that I have taught in various contexts, mostly in Europe, since 2007.

two

Wanting to nurture mutual influence between sexual healing and contemporary dance scenes, Jess Curtis & Stephanie Maher developed bonesex, a series of exercises rooted in Contact Improvisation and somatic dance practices. The work, which included clothing optional dancing, involved a rigorous, experiential study of touch and sensation, or what Curtis refers to as “the physics of sensual pleasure.” Jess has continued to develop this work at Felix Ruckert’s space Schwelle 7 in Berlin as well as in the nomadic Touch & Play Festival instigated by Daniel Hayes. The recent programming at Schwelle 7 and Touch & Play are very much resonant with the sex and art, dance and BDSM, experiments at 848 in the 90s. In a 2011 promotion, Curtis writes that the Bonesex workshop is intended to “Develop tools to allow your sexual body to safely inform all of your dancing.”9

three

After an experience with flogging at The Body Electric School in the early 90s, I developed an exercise that I continue to explore in dance workshops and laboratories for creating new performance. In a three-on-one whole body hitting score, participants start with light tapping and escalate to hard slaps. Like a gradual, or graduated flogging session, the slow start helps both to trigger endorphins (useful when the “pain” increases) and to deconstruct the emotional or psychological implications of hitting and being hit. In a BDSM context, the exercise would be considered light, an introduction. For others unfamiliar with negotiated pain or power play, the escalating intensity of the slaps is provocative and generative on many levels. One person’s experience might focus on whole body sensation while another is pushed to personal limits of intimacy, pain, or fear. Memory of previous violence or fear of violence can be triggered. The exercise becomes an opportunity to teach or utilize tools for sensing, moving and grounding energy. Overlapping certain shamanic or contemplative practice with SM practices, I use the exercise to recontextualize pain and intense bodily experience, as well as to magnify blood and energy flow throughout the body (and by body I mean whole bodymindetc).

four

The Oil Action, which I first encountered at Touch & Play (Berlin, Schwelle 7, 2010), has become an ongoing practice among some of friends and dance colleagues in the Bay Area. Also, the Oil Action, as performance and ritual research, directly influenced my recent project Turbulence (a dance about the economy). Naked, eyes closed, and covered in warm coconut oil, we writhe and tumble, sliding into an altered social relationship that challenges the normative economies of lover, family, community, and culture. Participants report experiences of not knowing where their body ended and another’s began, or not knowing what part of another’s body was touching them, or how many bodies, or how much time had passed, or where one was in a room, or how good it can feel to not know anything except warmth, moisture, and contact, or how lonely one felt while anonymous in a mass. The practice stimulates physical and conceptual experimentation, as well as inspiring community and friendship.

I started teaching for Body Electric in 1989, during the peak decade of AIDS before protease inhibitors. I joined a community of gay and bi men actively surviving the AIDS pandemic while trying to re-imagine male-male sexuality as healing. My work at Body Electric combined whatever I was doing and learning with Contraband, at 848, and among my artist and anarchist circles of friends, with the gay sexual healing practices developed by Joe Kramer and the teachers he curated. I was always looking for ways to bring the personal healing work into a more ritual and social change context, to politicize group practice as social movement. Following my experiences, several of my friends decided to participate in Body Electric’s sexual healing trainings. This included women and hetero-ish men once BE started offering workshops outside of gay male exclusive contexts. Most of these friends then instigated their own events at 848, furthering a cross-pollination of people and practices between 848’s more artist-centered culture and Body Electric’s approach to queer sexual healing, pleasure, and liberation.

Some of us took courses or attended rituals that others developed while many of us created our own practices and contexts. For some of us the overlap of sex and art practices and communities is a life-long project. For others, it was more of a phase or an intense period when 848 sex events, AIDS-influenced safer sex parties and sexual healings, Body Electric, Queen of Heaven, Radical Faeries, Black Leather Wings, and Annie Sprinkle were collectively creating a more saturated sex/art scene than most of us experience in our daily lives today.

These stories remind me of the ongoing influence of Wilhelm Reich’s proposal that free bodies must be sexually free. It was first with Reich, and then re-imagined through feminism and gay liberation, that I learned to recognized the politics of sexual oppression, to recognize that how people’s sexuality is controlled (limited, named, surveilled, punished) will directly influence their political voice, or subjectivity. Frank Wilderson (Incognegro, 201010) complicates this understanding of sexual or bodily freedom by indicting sexual liberation’s embodiment of white privilege and white supremacy. The always unfinished projects of liberation challenge Reich’s theories but do not completely dismiss them. How is sexual repression linked to spiritual repression linked to political repression? How can some people’s liberation depend on others’ oppression or is it true that until we’re all free, no one is free? Queers and feminists of color, in fields ranging from sex work to academic research, political organizing, burlesque and performance art, have consistently labored in the cross-hairs of optimism and pessimism that mark the naked body in public. For over a decade, artists and teachers at 848, experimented with queer and feminist performance, public intimacy, experimental dance, and communal celebrations as part of a larger utopian project to host a liberated space, however imperfect or temporal or invisible.

848 was a thriving site in the queer zeitgeist of the early 90s, hosting the emergence of artists from previously underground communities, including BDSM practitioners, sex workers, transgender men, femme dykes, and bisexuals, among other burgeoning communities activated by internet organizing, a new queer cinema, third wave feminism, and AIDS activism. Because the space was so cheap to rent and easy to use, and because many of these emerging communities or social contexts did not have social centers of their own, 848 hosted countless queer and sex radical organizers who curated events far beyond the imaginations of the core artist collective at 848. These performance events, especially the group shows in which several short performances were featured in a single evening, were witness to unpredictable genre and community blurring. BDSM practitioners “came out” with intense images and actions that referenced both body art and identity politics narratives. Many an individual artist and ensemble created their first performance works at 848. And many an established artist shifted their practice to create works for events specifically themed around sex, gender, and sexuality. Choreographers experimented with play piercing and flogging, dominatrixes experimented with personal narratives, rape survivors wrote monologues about sexual healing, improv jazz musicians got naked, drag queens MC’d for non-queer events, heterosexuals created queer performance, kink writers moved from reading their work to adding elements of sensual and sexual performance...

There were two events in particular that blew apart our perceptions of what could happen at the intersections of queer, art, sex, ritual, community, and performance. The first did not happen at 848 but its influence traveled north from Los Angeles in the bodies and experiences of several Bay Area participants. “Rites of Ecstasy and Transformation” at Highways in Santa Monica, was curated by Doug Sadownick. The weekend festival brought together SM performers from Club Fuck, modern primitive ritualists, and performance artists from both LA and San Francisco. Ron Athey and friends performed ritualized piercing and bleeding for the first time outside of a nightclub. Jess Curtis and Jules Beckman participated as dancer and drummer in a communal ball dance hosted by Fakir Musafar in collaboration with his partner Cleo Dubois and members of the Black Leather Wings community. The ball dance is based in part on a ritual practice in Savite Hindu culture during which metal balls or limes are sewn to the skin of the participants who dance into a pain-transmuting endurance trance. One of several performers at the festival, I climbed into the rafters of the low-ceiling warehouse theater wearing only a jock, a climbing harness, and some boots. Referencing Schneeman’s “Interior Scroll,” I read a text pulled from (a condom inside) my ass as I floated, suspended above the audience. The encounters between body art, post colonial ritual, community practice, and queer performance set an example and provoked a series of questions, which continued to engage many of us for several years.

The second legendary event worth mentioning here was Loren Cameron’s photo exhibit “Our Vision, Our Voices: Transsexual Portraits and Nudes” in 1994. Recognizing that transgender bodies were primarily documented by cis-gender (non-trans) fetishists, whether sexual or medical, Cameron dedicated several years to documenting his own and other trans people's bodies and lives. When no other gallery in San Francisco would present the work, Cameron came to 848 and self-produced the exhibit, buying the track lighting that shifted 848 from an empty room with good intentions to an actual gallery. The opening featured readings and performances by acclaimed gender outlaw Kate Bornstein, leading trans advocate Jamison Green (of FTM International), among others. When over 200 people showed up, we jammed more than 100 into the space while another 100 waited patiently on the sidewalk for nearly 90 minutes, cued down the block, and then the entire program was repeated for this second audience. The mood was electric. Most of us - cis and trans - had never been in the presence of this many transgender people at one time. The show was reviewed in The New Yorker which brought it national acclaim but it also revealed the emerging power of the internet in shifting public discourse and visibility for marginalized communities, identities and bodily practices. Cameron's work was expanded into a second exhibit at 848 in 1995, that was eventually published by Cleis in 1996 as “Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits.” David Harrison's ground breaking performance “FTM” also premiered at 848 in 1994, part of the ground swell of trans male cultural production, activism, and social networking that marked the mid-90s. That my partners at 848 (Curtis & Whitson) were hetero men (influenced by hippy anarchist queer feminist ethics) will probably not register in any queer or trans histories but I think it was no accident that a space marked as gay or lesbian was not where trans male artists first found, if not a home, then a space to take over. In San Francisco that space was 848.

Research: Dance, Intimacy, Pleasure, Culture

Dancing at 848 had two primary influences, Contact Improvisation and Contraband. 848 hosted a weekly CI jam started by Stephane Maher in 1993 or 94. That jam continues on Tuesdays at CounterPULSE 20 years later. Contact Improvisation, as instigated by Steve Paxton in the early 70s and developed in collective and community contexts since then, is primarily a duet dance, in which dancers improvise around an ever-shifting point of contact between their two bodies. It is necessarily intimate and close, involving deep bodily listening (or physical awareness) to self and partner. More horizontal and circular than vertical, the dancing-by-touching in CI challenges hierarchies and meanings of bodily value, i.e., head rolling across thigh as dancers yield to gravity, or shoulder pushing into butt as one dancer lifts another. Despite Paxton’s insistence to focus on physics rather than biology as a way to decenter or unfocus the potential sexuality of dancing, many of us have learned more about intimate touch through CI than from our romantic and sexual partners. For some of us, CI is a postmodern approach towards enhanced intimacy, unrestricted by Modernity’s heteronormativity. The emerging sexual healing scenes that emerged at 848 during the first decade of AIDS offered a place to share this queer sensibility, to crossover from the CI subculture to the radical sex subculture. The CI jams at 848, and in the Bay Area in the 90s, were non-static, research-based, sites for experimentation. In addition to working on physical feats and sensitivity, we used CI as a ground for considering sex and intimacy, political subjectivity, spiritual and contemplative practice, healthy anatomy and biology, therapeutic potentials, feminism, white privilege and exclusivity, notions of community, resistance to mainstream culture.

The Contraband influence was grounded in the pioneering work of choreographer and researcher Sara Shelton Mann and then extended by other members of the company who were actively teaching and performing in the 90s especially Kim Epifano, Julie Kane, Jules Beckman, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Shannon McMurchy, and 848 co-directors and residents Jess Curtis and Keith Hennessy. Mann’s work combined modern dance, release techniques and somatic practices, CI and other forms of dance improvisation, talking, objects, drawing, engaged collaborations with musicians and visual artists, and psycho-spiritual practices. Mann introduced at least three generations of Bay Area dancers to various kinds of meditation and mind-body-spirit-energy practices for which she has a voracious appetite, learning from one Chi Gung master to the next new age healer to the next explorer of consciousness. At 848, an encounter between dance and sexual healing practices revealed a wide open field of possibilities for making performance.

An enormous number of dancers were active at 848, and much of the richness of the space was generated by its inclusivity, or lack of exclusivity. The space was simultaneously cliquey, suggesting a home base for a particular group of friends, but also radically accessible as the cheapest theater in San Francisco. Outside of the previously mentioned influences that impacted the dance culture at 848 were Pearl Ubungen, Robert Henry Johnson, Osseus Labyrint, OnSite Dance Company, Rick Darnell & The High Risk Group, Zeltzman & Coburn and many others.

More Out Than In: Points of Contention

In 1995, Rachel Kaplan and I decided to publish a zine to make public the gossipy debate about the intersections of sex and art at 848 Community Space. We wanted to challenge the critiques that seemed sex negative or that implied that artistic research and production was being trumped by sex programming. As well, we wanted to give voice to the complaints by inviting a more formal articulation and accountability that published writing offers. We received so many texts that we decided to publish a book, one of four small press projects released by our own Abundant Fuck Publications. The title More Out Than In reflected a common sentiment around issues of community and clique, as well as being a joke about how much sex really happened at the space.

The following section introduces four points of contention internal to the organizing collective11 and among the larger community of artists and sex educators who used the space. Quotes are from my 1995 essay in More Out Than In. My intention with that essay was both to respond to criticism as well as to situate criticism within a larger struggle of community-based arts organizing and the tensions between DIY grassroots and non-profit institutions.

The 848 calendar: our public face

848’s monthly calendar would list performances, exhibitions, the weekly Contact jam, and various sex/intimacy events. The latter distinguished the space from all other art spaces and could be quite provocative. Clothing optional and assertively gay or queer, these events shifted how the dance and other art events at the space were perceived. Frequently the art on the walls, which stayed up during performances and jams as part of an integrated gallery experience, featured naked bodies or sexual themes. There was an ongoing friction about the sexual expliciteness of the space, which prompted an ongoing question about how much to share with a broader public through the calendar. “Though the ratio of sex specific programming at 848 has increased in the past three years, i noted, as well that the overall volume of programming has increased considerably. {...} I’m often afraid to show the calendar because of the prevalence of sex related events. I’m afraid of freaking people out. {...} sometimes it’s weird enough having a septum ring when I enter cross cultural dialogue, let alone try to convince foundations to fund us. The irony is that the calendar got more sexually explicit after we received our first grant from the SF Art Commission. Who wants to be the next poster child for perversion paraded before an economically terrified populace? Not me.”

Perceiving BDSM

“Artists and audiences who had no connection to the sex events were troubled that BDSM was even happening in the space. (...) At the Queen of Heaven parties, we began to stage the downstairs (a squatted storefront) as the SM space – separating it from the general sex play area.”

BDSM is hugely misunderstood by most non-practitioners and it provides a vibrant screen for all kinds of traumatic projection. Additionally, there are folks who have either participated in or studied BDSM but disapprove. Some disapprove of the physical and relational practices and others are confronted by BDSM’s representations of sexism, violence, and torture. At 848 we bragged that anything could happen. For $100 a night we handed the keys to the space to almost anyone. The NEA12 censorship battles of the late 80s and early 90s implicated queer and feminist performance (NEA four), BDSM (Mapplethorpe), AIDS activism, and religious critique (Serrano, Wojnarowicz). No one in the 848 collective was active in or identified with BDSM scenes when we started the space, but we knew which side of history we wanted to be on with regards to censorship, whether sexual or artistic. Several writers in More Out Than In shared their pro, con, and ambivalent positions on BDSM and this public airing softened the conflict for many of the key critics.

Funding (money for sex not for art)

One of the rumors about 848 was that grant money intended for artistic programming was subsidizing sex events. The opposite was more true, that money raised through sex events subsidized artistic programming. And of course, much of the 848 programming blurred the distinctions between art and sex. 848 regularly presented (or rented out to) sex and sexuality themed performances and exhibitions, as well as art themed events for queer and sex-identified communities including sex workers, BDSM communities, and Radical Faeries. “Whether or not we were spending grant money that came to support arts programming on sex events (we weren't, and in fact sex events raised money that supported general infrastructure (rent, utilities...)”

Sex versus Race and Class, the challenge with intersection

The core organizers at 848 were mostly white, raised in mostly white contexts. Michael Whitson, whose grandfather is Choctaw, was the only non-white member of the core collective. Raised in mostly white, working to middle class communities in small town Washington, he was hesitant to foreground his native ancestry especially if it was perceived as an effort to deny his white appearance and privilege. Like most progressive white artist collectives in the 90s we made considerable effort at outreach to artists of color. These efforts were sometimes successful for a single event and we did establish a few ongoing relationships with artists and curators of color. Generally, however, it was difficult to get past tokenism and temporary multiculturalism. Sadly, most of our white constituency didn’t notice, while most people of color considered 848 to be a white space. As organizers we lamented “...the lack of race/class activism or awareness within the mostly white sex lib scenes, or the sex events being more focused on personal pleasure than social change...” This lament was challenged by white queers including Jack Davis who wrote in More Out Than In, “I do not have the privilege of thinking that my sexuality is not political” and “being publicly queer is political.”

Sustainable threads: from then to now

Of the many ways we might consider the current moment, one is a historical thread of feminist, queer and sex/erotic art that extends from the celebratory breakthroughs of the late 70s, coming of age during the political intensity of the AIDS era, and arriving in the new millenium sanctioned by both academia and (limited) foundation funding. Pre-dating 848 by a decade, the mere presence of a noted porn star, Annie Sprinkle, in a “reputable” art or performance space was a provocation. Obviously there has been some movement, change, progress, and drift...

I recognize sustainable threads from 848’s more radical experimentation to some of the activities at CounterPULSE13 and in the ongoing local ecology that includes a wide range of queer performance tactics, cliques and contexts (including ‘This Is What I Want’). CounterPULSE is clearly not 848, and the de-privatizing of sex and sexual healing is not on their agenda. But in 2011-12 CounterPULSE hosted several artists working at the intersection of queer sex and art including: post-colonial burlesque artist Xandra Ibarra, extensive nudity and onstage pissing in my own project Turbulence (a dance about the economy), Seth Eisen’s portrait of queer pioneer and pornographer Sam Steward, and appearances by sex-ecologist-artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. The images and actions of these artists have both visible and invisible threads linking them to a previous generation when queer sex and live art were more actively scrutinized, questioned, punished, or hidden. In comparison with these recent projects, the often amateurish efforts at 848 were groundbreaking in setting a context for many of today’s artists.

The tactics of identity based and intersectional queer performance that are staples of the annual National Queer Arts Fest have traceable roots to the performers at 848’s frequent group shows in the 90s. This Is What I Want is kin, like a younger sibling or cousin, to the many sex and desire-themed group shows at 848. This is less about praising 848 as it is an attempt to recognize the larger movement that happened in performance during the 90s, under the influence of queer uprising, the cultural response to AIDS, and the shifting tides in the feminist sex wars. Nationally, 848 was one space among many, with a particular San Francisco flair with regards to sexual and identity politics, where dance and performance experimentation thrived and culture was renewed. Influential mid-career artists, including Jess Curtis and myself who lived, researched, taught, and performed at 848 for over a decade, continue to be influenced by the current generation of Bay Area artists, in a kind of generational feedback loop that is both generative and frictive.

848 was a laboratory for experiments in staging desire, for coming out as sexual agents, for using our personal relationships as impetus for choreographic action, for exhibiting and viewing naked bodies as provocation, healing, activism, and delight. We picked up some threads from the pioneers of sex and art that preceded us. We gave it our best shot. We left a lot of work undone. And some of that work is now being picked up, remixed, re-searched and updated.

1 Queen of Heaven was a safer-sex party/orgy/ritual for all genders and (most) desires. Organized by Carol Queen & Robert Lawrence in 1991. For more information read Carol’s Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, Cleis, 1997, 2002.

2 Patrick Califia published several books influential to radical sex communities in the 80s/90s under the name Pat Califia.

3 “Black Leather Wings is a group of people who since 1989 have built an ongoing community around exploration of body, BDSM, body based rituals, sex, sensation and laughter together as they grow old” -Neon Weiss, long term BLW member.

4 Spaces modeled on or inspired by 848: Cellspace (neighborhood art and culture space, live/work artist collective), LunaSea (queer women’s performance space), Center for Sex and Culture (library, archive, exhibition and performance space founded by Carol Queen & Robert Lawrence), Mission Control (a poly gendered sex party venue), K77’s movement studio and weekly jam in Berlin...

5 Bi-Pol is a bisexual feminist political action group founded in 1983 Named after Reich’s Sex-Pol.

6 Society of Janus (founded 1974 by Cynthia Slater and Larry Olson) - Advocating visibility and rights for BDSM practitioners with a focus on building community through trainings and social events.

7 COYOTE (founded by Margo St James 1974) or “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics” - American Sex worker run sex worker activist organization

8 Skin, Body and Presence in European Choreography, André Lepecki (1999)

9 http://www.schwelle7.de/JessCurtis.html

10 Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Frank B. Wilderson, III, South End Press, 2008

11 Founded in 1991 by Michael “Med-O” Whitson, Todd Eugene and Keith Hennessy but co-directed for most of its history by Michael “Med-O” Whitson, Jess Curtis, and Keith Hennessy, with additional collective members or ongoing curators at various times including K. Ruby, Jack Davis, Tanya Calamoneri, Tracy Vogel, Tara Brandel.

12 National Endowment for the Arts. The outcome of the censorship battles around the NEA four, Mapplethorpe, Serrano et al was an end to funding of individual artists by the federal government. This policy continues today.

13 CounterPULSE was founded in 2005 by a transitional collective that included original members of the 848 collective (Whitson, Hennessy), Chris Carlsson of ShapingSF, as well as Jessica Robinson Love, Sonya Smith and Ali Woolwich. Under the artistic direction of Jessica Robinson Love, CounterPULSE has become a thriving mid-level non-profit producing more queer and cutting edge dance and performance than any venue in SF. Their current mission statement opens with “CounterPULSE provides space and resources for emerging artists and cultural innovators, serving as an incubator for the creation of socially relevant, community-based art and culture.”

The Mission School (of Painting)

I was asked to respond to the question, "Was there ever a Mission School?" for an upcoming catalogue accompanying Barry McGee's retrospective at Brooklyn Art Museum. When I told a few friends about my attempt to document some other Mission 'schools' it seemed that most of them were not aware of any aesthetic or market phenomenon called The Mission School, which was first named by art writer Glen Helfand to identify a certain 'neo-folk' 'urban rustic' hybrid under the influence of graffiti, comics, mural traditions, skate and zine cultures, recycled wood, sign painting, and SFAI art school painting concerns, that emerged in the mid-90s as a kind of Bay Area style, centered in the Mission neighborhood. The style, or collection of resonanting styles, is linked to many artists including the following: Barry McGee (Twist), Alicia McCarthy, Chris Johanson, Andrew Schoultz, Ruby Neri (Reminisce), Margaret Kilgallen (Meta), Rigo 23, Aaron Noble, Clare Rojas.

Work shown above: Clare Rojas (top) and Margaret Kilgallen (lower). Kilgallen demonstrates one of the Mission school exhibition tactics, a group of tightly bunched paintings that accumulate to mural-scale.

A few of the schools I know in the Mission (in-process draft)

Keith Hennessy

For those of us who were in the Mission before the mid-90s and are still here, the idea of a Mission School (of painting) is an odd joke. The work that blossomed here at that time can’t be separated from the vibrant and complex scenes – artistic & political, migrant & resident – that have made this neighborhood noteworthy for generations. Naming a Mission School in the 90s masks the problematic complexity of the School’s roots in both SF indigeneity and gentrification. San Francisco and Oakland in the 90s were vibrant and engaging sites for artists and activists. Pre 9/11, pre-dot-com boom and bust, street artists around the Bay were mostly ignoring the gentrification of the world. We watched the rents get higher as more and more of us moved to Oakland (or LA, Portland, Tennessee, Berlin…). We flooded the streets in ’91 to protest the first Gulf War and whether we were queer or not, we were somehow moved by both the devastation of AIDS and the queer cultural tsunami that crashed against the hetero shores. Many of us, but not all, blossomed in this fast-paced and turbulent time. But the art structures that supported us (or not) and the aesthetics that inspired us (or not) had been evolving since at least the early 70s, since the cultural revolutions of Chicanos, feminists, gays and lesbians rewrote the text of San Francisco streets, especially in the Mission and Castro and the evershifting borders between them.

Mission High School

– the visual focus and community center. A big underfunded vibrant public highschool that frames the south end of Dolores Park, where Latino teens and SF Mime Troupe audiences and gay guys in speedos and hella hipsters and dog walkers and babysitters and tennis players and pot/smack dealers and the homeless have been getting schooled for generations. Doloroes Park is also home to both the Dyke and Trans marches and countless other gatherings of folk that make up the other America of Mission School ethics and aesthetics, which in DC are referred to as San Francisco values.

Mission Mural School

– since way before the mid-90s, thousands have come here, and even more have grown up here, getting schooled in the art of public wall painting. From Muralistas Feministas to Galeria de la Raza’s digital murals, from Precita Eyes ongoing schooling and public touring to Clarion Alley Mural Project and all the alleys where Mexican/Mission style murals meet the latest trends of art school kids and the anarcho politics of everyday life in the activist Mission.

Mission School of Public Performance

– From weekly low-rider processions on Mission Street in the 70s to Contraband’s dance rituals in the Gartland Pit at 16th & Valencia (site of a landlord arson that killed elderly and disabled tenants) to Jo Kreiter’s 2010 performance with dancers flying along the epic muraled walls of the Women’s Building on 18th Street. The Aztec dancers are probably the most ongoing phenomenon of Mission School performance. They always lead the annual dia de low muertos procession and can be seen blessing many events, from the anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium to marking the site of a recent murder at the corner of 24th & Shotwell.

New College of California

– Now a dead and defunct school but its legacy lives on in the visions and labors of the many of us who studied and/or taught here when no other university wanted us. From 1971 to 2008, NCOC was a site for leftist schooling, community organizing, political fundraisers, feminist psychology, socially-engaged conferencing, and three generations of activist artists and lawyers.

The book stores of the Mission

– For many of us, this is where we really went to school, I mean in the traditional sense, of (re)learning how to read books and the world. Modern Times is the flagship of leftist bookstores but it has always thrived in relationship to a social and spatial eco-system that includes so many other independent (say what!) bookstores and zineshops including Adobe, Dog Eared, Borderlands, Needles and Pins, Goteblüd, Bolerium, Forest… And most of these bookstores exhibit local art, and talks about local art.

The Roxie

– This is where Mission residents and tourists go to get schooled in independent film, specially the low-budget, the local, the weird, the queer, and the dissident.

Dance will never be sold like art, so there will never be a noted

Mission school of dance

that is written about in the NY Times. But there is and has been for 30+ years a Mission school of dance that is marked by some of the same hybridities and tendencies of what is referred to as Mission school painting. Thousands of dancers live here and come here to take class and rehearse. Mission dance schools include Dance Mission (home of the world’s longest running feminist dance company, The Dance Brigade), ODC, Capoiera Abada (now renting the former site of Dancers’ Group/Footwork, site of an occupation in 2000 when the dot-com era landlords raised the rent 400%, forcing eviction), and the many smaller studios in Project Artaud and the Sears building. Dancers in the Mission rehearse all year long for Carnival which showcases dances of the entire world, with a particular focus on dances of the Americas.

The Mission (like any complicated, dense, and historically rich neighborhood) has a diverse and rich eco-system of schools, that share and/or compete for, limited architectural, social, and fiscal resources. If we scratch the surface of Mission School painting to reveal the values, ethics, aesthetics of the movement, we find the same things taught at

Meadows-Livingston School

, a 30-student elementary school for African-Americans looking for any alternative to education systems that will always expect them to fail. Meadows-Livingston operates out of a converted farmhouse under a massive freeway vortex at Cesar Chavez & Potrero. Called

The Farm

when it was reclaimed in the 70s, the building has been host to punk shows, Mime Troupe performances, countless exhibits, artist housing, the Pickle Family circus, and Survival Research Laboratories, while also operating as an actual urban farm for Mission youth. Clearly this scene is a significant tap root for Mission School painters who hybridize high and low, folk and pop, legal and illegal, cartoon and fresco, white dude and everyone else.

The Burrito School

– If you are what you eat then the Mission School is about 50% burrito, the SF indigenous hybrid of Mexican fast food. Without El Toro, Cancun, El Farolito, La Taqueria, Papalote, Mission Villa, La Rondella, El Tonayense, El Mariachi, and the margaritas at Puerto Allegre the Mission painters would have starved or made some other kind of art. The late night crowd is also well-fed on Salvadoreña and now Oaxacan food, especially pupusas.

PS

about nationalism and capitalism

The visual and conceptual tendencies of the Mission School can be spotted in trendy art scenes all over the world. That is to say, that globalism with its inescapable hegemonic tendencies, is always in effect. What makes a dollar in San Francisco will inspire and influence the work that gets made elsewhere. And vice versa. We used to call it co-optation or selling out.

Keith Hennessy is one of tens of thousands of queer and dance refugees in the Bay Area. He has been working (studying, teaching, performing indoors and out, protesting, altering billboards) in the Mission since 1982 and lives on Folsom near 24th.

WHY I READ MY TEXTS IN PERFORMANCE

WHY I READ MY TEXTS IN PERFORMANCE:

THE ROLE, MEANINGS, AND PRESENCE OF THE TEXT

1. Because they’re fresh, reworked until the last minute, just written and I don’t have time to memorize while dealing with production, promotion, choreography, costumes, lights, volunteers, ticket sales, press, documentation, props and rigging, shopping for necessary stuff, and practicing the action, the dancing, and/or some crazy stunt.

2. Because I saw Karen Finley read, mixing trance ritual performance with alienated Brechtian interruptions... a schizoid presentation of emotional release and the commentary on the release, refusing to let herself, or the audience, get lost in the trance, provoking us, often with humor, to recognize the absurdity and artificialness of the theatre, of our relationship to the art and artist, and from there to recognize the absurdity of the violence or trauma that she is communicating. After seeing Karen Finley read in performance I not only gave myself permission to read text without memorizing but I gave myself permission to put my whole body-voice into performance. Within six weeks of being a chorus dancer in Finley’s performance* I was performing Saliva under a freeway in SOMA/downtown San Francisco. This was my birth as an artist. (*1988, Life on the Water, me dancing in Jennifer Monson’s line dances, naked for one dance and then in Finley’s personally chosen drag, getting to watch her five nights in a row.)

3. Because Jeanette Winterson wrote Written on the Body among a generation of feminist performers, writers, artists and thinkers that articulated the ways that language is inscribed on the body, the ways that culture and politics and society and history and tradition get written into our gestures and behavior, influencing all the texts and performances that we (co)produce in daily life.

4. Because Carolee Schneeman pulled a scroll from her pussy and suggested that the text comes from the body as well as from a cultural inscription upon the body (Interior Scroll, 1975). I have pulled text from my ass while hanging suspended above an audience, asking what would the ass – the other mouth, lips, orifice – say? (Highways, 1993, Rites of Ecstacy & Transformation, curated by Doug Sadownick). This led me to write a series of body texts about racism after the LA riots, poetically imagining what the white male queer body might say if it could bypass mind/media/society. Of course this was a utopian imagining, not a ‘realistic’ trip. I pulled texts from my ear, nose, mouth, and then had a naked male assistant come on stage, put on rubber gloves and pull a text ensconced in a condom in my butt. (Heat, Hennessy, 1993).

5. Because Guillermo Gomez Peña defended the practice for all the above reasons and more in his essay, “In Defense of Performance.” (LiP Magazine, 2004).

In drama theatre the actors are not usually also the authors. On the other hand, in performance art the performers are almost always the authors. In most theater practice based on text, once the script is finished, it gets memorized and obsessively rehearsed by the actors, and it will be performed almost identically every night. Not one performance art piece is ever the same In performance, whether text-based or not, the script is just a blueprint for action, a hypertext contemplating multiple contingencies and options, and it is never "finished." Every time I publish a script, I must warn the reader: "This is just one version of the text. Next week it will be different."

(Maybe a later or earlier version of the essay actually mentioned reading text..., k)

6. Sometimes I have the text in hand so that I can improvise in relation to it, using the text as the stable language and my body/voice/performance in live interaction with an audience as the instable, flexible, available for insight and response language. (Box, 1996 – speed reading cue cards with as many additional ‘fucks’ and other interventions as possible in a staged telephone conversation about prison and race in the US, the OJ trial, and more.Chosen,  2003 – riffing off cue cards that held the keys points for an analysis/deconstruction of the idea of being chosen – to live in Israel, to be an artist, to be queer. Heat, 1993, in the closing section I had several pages of text, all of the source writing, and would read only selections from it... different stuff in each performance... although the document was a living document with notations and circled text and moved towards a finished text (without ever arriving) as the work was repeatedly performed.

7. The text as book as fetish object, invested with repeated touch and performance energy (the symbiosis of audience and artist and ancestors)... hand-made books with images or painting (Saliva, 1988/9 and Palpitations, 1997). Text boards (Sacred Boy, 1990/92) with updated versions taped over previous, adding notes from the previous to the typed version of the 2nd and then beginning the process of notes again... Not unlike a favorite or family bible. An old manuscript. A palimpsest. Revealing the ritual of process: Where did this come from? I wrote it and printed it and glued/taped/bound it into a book.

8. In Sol niger I am working, after the alchemists, with language as a material to be transformed through play, study and manipulation. Projected text – recalls CNN news bar (“The CNN news bar is a bar to news” Terrance McNally,Crucifixion 2005), and other sites of constantly streaming headlines, stock markets, and military-capitalist propaganda.

I want to speak and write in multiple layers, a polyvocal voice, multiple personality dis/order:

Exploring the ways that my language is not my own (and neither is yours)... through cultural inscription, adopting of certain ideological or political positions. Dancers know that the shapes you make influence feelings and thoughts, not only that you communicate, but that you feel or think.

Revealing a voice that has experienced relentless interference from excessive unnecessary information and promotion, including an obsessive repetition of brand names - commodity fetishism and corporate infiltration into daily life – and ‘spectacular’ news that, as Chomsky has articulated, manufacture consent.

Dancing the collaboration between analytical and emotional voices.

An attempt to poetically synthesize a large amount of focused reading, theory, & analysis, revealing the process of filtering language and ideas through my body/consciousness the way I process food... transforming it into energy or shit or...

A complicated/multiple voice includes found text and plagiarism (more like samples than thefts, almost all citations are credited). I am sparked by conversations and art. While at MacDowell Colony working on the Sol niger text I saw Dust a film by Eric Saks in which the word Islam was rhymed with lip balm. I was sparked. That’s the kind of interference I want. These two words opened a portal into a kind of language play that gave my writing a style I hadn’t used before... but that I’d been looking for (my own version of) since reading about Pollesch.

Joah Lowe, my first SF dance teacher

In 2004 David Gere asked me to write a short piece about a dancer who had died of AIDS for his book release celebration.

Gere, who came of age as a dance critic at the height of the AIDS epidemic, wrote How To Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, the first book to examine the interplay of AIDS and choreography in the United States, specifically in relation to gay men.

I can't brag too much about the book because I'm lucky to be featured in it, but the writing is lovely and the research is generous and precise.

I decided to write about my first teacher in San Francisco, Joah Lowe. I'm including this 2004 writing about a teacher I worked with in 1982-83 for two reasons. 1) I like the writing. 2) This year when teaching a Queer Performance class at USF I heard from several students that they really weren't aware of how intensely AIDS had impacted gay life and culture. In honor of our ancestors, let's keep remembering.

Letter for Joah Lowe

Dear listener, dear living dancer, dear dead dancer, dear Joah Lowe:

To write a love letter is to willingly open memory’s door. To invite the images and sensations of yesterday to obliterate the distractions of today. But once the door is open everyone comes rushing through. There are so many half-told stories, half-choreographed dances. I’m writing for Joah but I want to write for everyone. For Tracy Rhodes and Peter Kadyk, for Ed Mock and Jim Tyler, for Wayne Corbitt and Arnie Zane, and for all the guys whose names I can’t remember: the one who came to all my sex healing rituals for queer men, the one who gently confronted our Body Electric retreat about our fear of dying, the bedridden one whose voice was barely a whisper yet requested that I come and sing with him at the Hartford St. Zen Hospice.

I’m afraid to write to you. Your presence has become a complicated pattern in a fabric I wear like skin. I hesitate to unravel you individually for fear of my own unraveling. Who am I without you, here, now?

I remember dance class with Joah Lowe, over 20 years ago, in a studio (in this building) at 8th & Folsom. Joah was my first teacher in San Francisco. All the basics that would become Release and Releasing, he shared with us a decade earlier under the names of Aston Patterning, developmental movement, improvisation and whether or not he ever studied with Halprin or Laban, he taught us their rituals as well. Every good dance teacher transcends technique, copywrite, and culture. I’ve been lucky to be in the zone of the one dance, the prayer dance, the now dance, and Joah took me there. He wasn’t the first or the last but because of it he’s unforgettable, indivisible from my story, my dance.

Joah taught a weekly class, an introduction to contemporary dance that involved technique and improvisation. Open to beginners, his class gave me knowledge and confidence to graduate to Lucas Hoving’s Mon-Wed-Fri technique classes, where I folded myself into dance history for the next three years following Lucas from Margie Jenkin’s studio at 15th & Mission, to Footwork (aka Dancers’ Group now Abada Capoeira), the Women’s Building and Third Wave (now Dance Mission). I can’t remember if Joah sent me to Lucas or Lucas sent me to Joah. I’m sure it’s written in some journal that I’ll never read again. I only remember that I refused to study technique with anyone that didn’t also teach improvisation and that’s how I chose them as teachers.

I remember Joah in Lucas’ class and I remember Joah performing but these memories are cloudy, distant. I remember hanging off the ballet bar, learning to maximize the tilt in my pelvis. I remember Joah’s hands on my hips and only later, years later, did I recognize this memory as sexual. Years later when I really learned to fuck, to release into being fucked, I knew what I had learned from Joah. I’ve thought about Joah and those pelvic rolls and tilts a million times, while warming up, studying Pilates or Klein technique, masturbating, fucking, even riding a bike or hanging below freeways, yelling to god (Saliva 88-89, Spell 04)

I remember asking Joah about his own history in dance. All I remember is an injury and some kind of betrayal, I think with Graham technique. I was a wannabe revolutionary pacifist anarchist feminist then and assumed that all orthodoxy caused pain so this out-of-context image became another brick for me to throw at the glass house of Dance. Now I’m one of those who occupy that house, only part-time. I show up to do repairs; to work on additions to the house so more folks can visit. There’s always work to do.

I hope Joah is proud of me. He’s the kind of ancestor from whom I want praise and recognition. I know it’s supposed to go the other way, so I hope that this letter fulfills some of the debt I owe. Joah, thanks a lot. Thanks for welcoming me, for steering me into the future and away from the past. Thanks for paying just enough attention to me, which was not much, because I was not yet ready to be seen, to be revealed, even to myself. Maybe you knew that but probably you just sensed it. You were my first authentically intuitive man. The more I write this the more your body comes to mind, to body. I’m seeing your legs now. They’re very strong. I could go on, but I’m getting nervous, now that your body has caught up to memory and all this presence, yours and mine, is alive, here, now. Thanks again. I bow to you.

With love, Keith

Ps.

Just before printing this letter, I had a twinge of insecurity. Do I really remember? So I googled you. Yes I googled an ancestor. And there you were, noted teacher of Lessons in the Art of Flying, releasing your signature bowling ball to the sky, in a piece called Bowling Lesson #1 – Letting Go of the Ball.

Dance. Lesson. Memory. Body. Letting Go. Love. Thanks.

Photo:

Joah Lowe in his

Bowling Lesson #1—Letting Go of the Ball

(1984).

Photo by Christine Uomini, courtesy David Gere, lifted from the awesome site The Estate Project. Check it out here:

http://www.artistswithaids.org/index4b.html