Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: Hi Rhodessa. we have a nonprofit called E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF. We do environmental art through an ecosexual and environmental justice lens. We got a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission to interview 10 important artists like you.

So in a nutshell, we're recording the history of GLBTQ and BIPOC artists and activists who changed things in a big way in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. On June 1st, 2024  we'll present our findings at the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library and launch this archive online. Beth has been a professor at UC Santa Cruz for 30+years.

RJ: Is that where Angela Davis is?

B&A: Yes! She's retired, but she still comes to events about social justice.

RJ: Hi Jeff. How are you?

Jeff Jones: Hi Rhodessa, I'm doing well.

Let's start. We can begin the interview with some background on where you grew up and how you got to San Francisco.

RJ: I was born in Florida. My mother and father were migrant farmworkers and they got their first agricultural contract the year that I was born, in 1948. My dad gathered some people together, got a couple of vehicles, and we drove from our home in Florida all the way up to New Jersey, picking fruits and vegetables. We were gone for 5, 6, even 7 months a year. After a point, my mother decided we had to stop because she wanted us to have a better education than she and my dad had received. So we ended up living in upstate New York outside of Rochester, NY. We settled in a little town called Wayland; I graduated from high school there.

I fell in love with Riley, a crazy Irishman. We met in Rochester and ended up going to Costa Rica because we wanted to leave the United States. We had some friends in Bogotá, but when we got to the border in Colombia, they wouldn't let us into the country because we were hippies and we didn't have any money. I had my kid with me, she was 9. My kid was born when I was 16 years old and I was still in high school.

We had been living in Costa Rica and my daughter got really ill. I had friends in Palo Alto, California and they sent me the money so I could come to California to take care of her. She had gotten some bad bug. She was really sick with a high fever. I always tell people it was jungle fever. We had to travel from Costa Rica back to LA and then up to Palo Alto. We moved to San Francisco in 1973 or 74.

B&A: We were reading about how you supported yourself while you raised your kid. Would it be possible for you to talk a little bit about that?

RJ: Sure. I was dancing with a company called Tumbleweed, which was a women's dance company here in San Francisco. All of the dancers who were performing and making art were also dancing nude at night. When I got word of it, I thought I could do that. I'd been an artist's model and nudity was nothing to me. They wouldn't hire me in North Beach, because they didn’t hire black girls then in North Beach. So I ended up going to the Tenderloin. There I met a great couple, who had set up Fantasies in the Flesh. They thought I was so cute, and I had my wig and great legs and they said, “Sugar, you can work here with us.” They didn't want me to wear my Donna Summer wig. They were saying, “Oh, you are so much more beautiful, so much more dignified, without your Donna Summer wig.” And I said, “Girls, this ain’t about no dignity down here.”

We had a great time. The place was owned by a guy named Al Brown, who kind of fed on young black women. I liked to read. One night I was reading Shogun and I put the book down to go on stage. James Clavel the author of Shogun just happened to be at the club. When I come off, Al says, “Which one of you bitches is reading Shogun?” I said, “I'm reading it.” He said, “Well, this is the author.” Mr Clavel offered me his autograph but I said, “No thanks darling. I have your book. I don't need your autograph.”

It was an interesting time. I started to flex my femininity and my feminine politics. The management didn't feel responsible to clean up the club, instructing the dancers to do it. They felt like we were naked, dancing, and that we should clean up. One night, a woman was lying on stage, turning around and a mouse ran across her body. She freaked out. We all freaked out.

Al said, “Well, clean the place up.” I said, “Oh, no, no, no; secretaries do not clean up offices, Sir.” He had decided I was a cop. I said honey, “I'm many things, but I'm not a cop.” And, he said, “I got my eye on you, Lily.” And the women were curious as to who I was because I had an opinion and that was out of character.

This was an incredible time in San Francisco. But after the assassinations at City Hall, I remember being afraid.  The peep-show booths at Fantasies in the Flesh had two sections. I sat behind a window and customers on the other side would put in coins and the curtain would open. I would just sit there with my legs open, you know, because I figured that's what they wanted to see. Later, I wrote a performance piece entitled, The Legend of Lily Overstreet; it was about nude dancing in America.

The big questions for me were what do men want from women and what do women want from men? And why do sex and race make such interesting bedfellows? These are the questions that I posted in my journal as I started to write Legend of Lily Overstreet. There was a young black guy whose job was to clean the cum off of the windows. At first he thought he was gonna get to peek at naked women. I said, “No, no, honey, this is a job.” And he and I started talking and it turns out he went to San Francisco State. He brought in books by Franz Fanon, books about race and culture. He and I started talking about life and dreams. I saw him opening his eyes to the fact that this was just “a job”.

I wasn’t a bimbo; I wasn’t sex crazed- I was working. I remember once while I was working, I would play Mose Alison’s music. A guy came in and said, “Who's playing this music?” And I said, “I am. You're Mose Alison!” And he asked incredulously, “you can see me??” And then he just left. Once Richard Pryor came in and in Richard Pryor fashion, he tucked money into all the windows treating all the customers. He left quickly as well.

I told my family what I was doing. I said, “I'm dancing nude downtown”. My father ordered my brother to “go see what's happening with Rho. See if she's okay.” So one night I looked up and my little brother was looking at me in the window like, “Oh my god.” And he leaves quickly because I'm his big sister. But he reported to my dad that I was safe. I was just dancing, I felt loved and cared for. I wasn't judged.

 I was judged by the black women in the San Francisco community. They thought I could do it, but I shouldn’t talk about it. Every woman was so politically invested, that they were disappointed in me. I said, “Honey, I got it so I will flaunt it.” I had a lot of fun. I was outrageous and ahead of my time.

B&A: What years were those, when you worked in the Tenderloin.

RJ: Mayor Moscone was assassinated in 1978. One of the fears that I had was that somebody would go on a shooting spree and they would come in and shoot all the nude girls sitting behind the glass. That's how freaky it was.

We were told, inevitably, we were gonna get busted. So every night I had my fur coat. Sure enough, the raid happened and the police didn't really let us put on clothes, but I had my fur coat.

At Fantasies in the Flesh, we would take turns managing. On this particular night, a young blonde girl confessed to me that she was only 15. I said, “oh shit!” The police were kicking down the door and she and I both were trying to run. You couldn't escape into the alley, so we were arrested and taken to the police station and had to stay there all night until Al came and bailed us out.

I met some amazing people. I think a lot about the hookers,  the women who were “in the life”, and the kind of men they attracted. I remember there was an old black man who was probably in his late seventies and his wife had died. He was lonely so he would come down and see me. I'd have my feet up on the glass and he would put his hands on the glass where my feet were and act as if he was rubbing my feet and tell me all about his wife. He would come in often and look at me and talk to me.

Then there was a young sailor from Iowa, a young white corn-fed boy, with big blue eyes and pink cheeks. He had never ever seen a naked black woman before. He and his friends all came in together and they’re all looking at me. I said, “No, y'all gotta keep putting the money in the slot.” So this kid comes back later, alone and he says, “You sure are pretty. You’re just about the prettiest woman I've ever seen.” I said, “Thank you, but you gotta put more money in the slot.”

B&A: Do you think any of the skills you learned working at that club in the Tenderloin helped you in your art career? How did your life as a sex worker translate to your role as a creator of theater?

RJ: Well, other than shaking my nude body, I wasn't interested in being a sex worker. I loved the very interesting exchange of energies. I paid attention to all that stuff. I just took it into the realm of art making. Cause it's all art. It's artwork.

B&A: Performance art for sure. How long did you do sex work? How do you feel now about having done that work?

RJ: I started dancing nude at 30, and I worked in that business for probably 5, 6, 7 years. I'm proud of myself.  I benefited from having been a nude dancer and I think I freed some younger people. They think they wanna get down and dirty and I'm like, “honey, if you have great sex with somebody, that's wonderful, but it's not your full life. Don't get caught up in throwing it all in one pile.” I think I've learned how to be honest and clear about so many things because of the journey I've taken.

Beth: There are so many artists who’ve done sex work here in San Francisco. Michelle Tea, Carol Queen, Madison Young, who is our chosen daughter. There are so many people who became artists because they learned something about sex, or performance or care.

JJ: Back to Rhodessa. When I arrived here, you were performing in a church over on Market Street.

RJ: It was the Eureka Theater. I had evolved and wanted to put a show on stage.

B&A: Your show was The Legend of Lily Overstreet. Was that your stage name?

RJ: Yes, that was my dancer name, “Lily Overstreet” from New Orleans.

JJ: So, my question is, why did you stage this work in the gay community?

RJ: Well they found me. Some nights my audiences were all just gay boys from the Castro who'd be sitting there. The gay guys were great to me. There was a bookstore in the Castro called “Does your Mother Know You're Here?” That was a song that I had created for the show. I don't know what the chemistry was but the place would be full of gay men and it would sell out. That’s one way dancing helped my career— I learned this queer language. “Oh stop. Quit. You better work!” I mean, I heard this stuff through the men who were out in the audience. They were so encouraging.

B&A: Was it a solo performance?

RJ: Yes.  I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be heard.  I wrote everything myself. The most popular black actress at the time was Cicely Tyson, who had done Miss Jane Pittman. I wanted my show to be out front. I already had some notoriety in the dance world because I was so strong, outrageous and courageous.

Simultaneously, I was also performing with Tumbleweed, the dance company. We carried each other using contact improvisation. We danced naked. We did rope work, flipping and hanging upside down. Tumbleweed had some notoriety and the country was just opening up.

B&A: The one-woman show was a particularly new American art form. Dramatic soloists. 

RJ: Yes. Now in my work with incarcerated women, I tell them, “tell the truth and shame the devil. Practice Revolution.”

I was trying to find my way and doing my show gave me a place. My brother Bill T. Jones, the choreographer, used to joke  that we were incredible exhibitionists. We knew that we were more attractive than most people and we wanted the art world to make room for us to do our art.

B&A: When did you get involved with Idris Ackamoor and Cultural Odyssey?

RJ: The late 1970s, early 1980s, I met Idris Ackamoor. We immediately had a connection. He liked my spunk and my drive. People had this idea that I was a man-eater. I really wasn't. I was just independent and Idris recognized this. We talked for almost a year before we got serious and sexually involved. We had already toured Europe and one day he told me to quit my day job to be artists full time.

JJ: Okay, so we're now up to 1981, 82 or so. Cultural Odyssey was the first black arts group that became a nonprofit that I'm aware of except for Wajumbe. So you two were the only nonprofits in the black community involved with Grants for the Arts except for the African American Historical Society.

RJ: The thing I really admired about Idris Ackamoor was that he just had no problem stepping up to the person we were working with and asking for the money. He'd say, “okay man, when do we get paid?” I still think he's one of the most amazing business artists that I know. He wasn't afraid of asking for what was his. He was very honorable and he would make deals. But you better come through.

I remember being in Berlin with Cecil Brown, the writer. I was doing some nude work in Berlin and this crazy woman came to the club. She was taking us over to her house for dinner, but then she pulled out a gun. Cecil said, “Whoa, what the hell?” And she said, “Do YOU have a gun?” I think the goddamn gun went off.

I'm so glad that Cecil and Idris stayed with me because she wanted me to go with her, but I don't know what that would have been like. You know, Idris is not a huge guy, but don't mess with him. He will run through you with his anger and his indignation; I’ve seen him turn into a stiletto. He's not a gangster but he can go there.

Idris and I weren’t even aware of it at first, that I was now a part of Cultural Odyssey. We were writing grants. We were going to meetings. We were going to things set up by the NEA because it was the way to the funding. You had to know how to raise money and we knew that we had the stories. We took the Legend of Lily Overstreet and created a whole score. From there, Keith Haring did the sets for it, because he was a friend of my brother Bill. We just liked to be seen. We wanted to be honored for what we did.

JJ: I remember Cultural Odyssey as the only contemporary arts group in the black community that wasn’t afraid to really be who you were, back there in the mid-1980s. You were not a historical society; you were contemporary artists. At that time the only person in the Latino community like that was René Yañez.

RJ: Yes, exactly.

JJ: So, in 1985, when I did my first report about City arts funding, I found that the black community got less than 1% of city funding, Latinos got less than 1%, and the queers got less than 1% and the Asians got almost 2%.  Collectively, we got 5%. That was where things were in 1985.

RJ: Well, we're still up against the Ballet and the Opera right?. They are still getting most of the money.

JJ: If I remember correctly, you started the Medea Project around this time. Could you talk a bit about the Medea Project?

RJ: Well, The California Arts Council awarded the Sheriff’s Department a grant to hire me as a resident artist in the Women’s jail. My job was to go into the jails and teach aerobics to incarcerated women. Looking back, I realize that they just didn't know what else to do with all of these women in jail.

       So they thought, “Well, Rhodessa Jones looks like them and she can teach them aerobics.” They were largely black women incarcerated because of crack cocaine. I started going to the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street. The women were not interested in exercising. They would look at me like, “Bitch, please.” And I would respond by doing cartwheels and handstands.

I was turning 42 or 43 years old and I started talking about my daughter who just got married. I talked about being a grandma, and these women were like, “Who the hell is this?” And then one woman asked, “Can we just talk?” And I said, “Yes. As long as we agree that everybody's story is valid. Everybody has a right to her story. And everything we say stays here.”

Then we began trading stories of how these women arrived in jail and became who they were. After a while, it wasn't just black women. It became more multicultural and diverse, a snapshot of San Francisco. The women were eager to share the circle. Michael Hennessey, the sheriff of San Francisco county became aware of what was happening with the work that I did in the jail.

My first time being in the jails, there was a young black woman who decided she was gonna challenge me. She said, “Wanna play basketball?”  While I was attempting to create a space where we as a group of women would do some movement and some talking and some dancing, she wouldn't put the basketball down. She was dribbling. I thought, “this is my right of passage. If I don't make this happen, I am nothing in this place.”

The other women were like, “Why don’t you stop, Deborah?” And she's dribbling and catching the ball and finally I had these two little angels on my shoulders, a little black angel and a white angel. And the little black angel said, “You go and snatch that ball from that bitch.” And I did it! I went out and I grabbed the ball.

 I said, “let me tell you something. I'm going home at noon. They pay me to be here. You're in lockdown. Who's smarter?” And she started whining about jive ass black girls from fancy schools and I said, “Call it what you want honey, they're paying me and the deputies are watching to see if I’m ok and if I can handle it.” Then I said, “Deborah, are we okay?” All of a sudden she's like, “Ummmm, we're okay.” Today, she’s still doing okay. All this got back to Sheriff Hennessey. And then I met Sean Reynolds, who became my mentor.

JJ: At this time, I was Mike Hennessey’s grant writer. I had  heard about Shawn Reynolds, technically a social worker, and about you, I recall her saying to me “These women need more than aerobics!”

RJ: I had two brothers who were cops. My brother Steve in San Francisco and my brother Gus in the East Bay. They turned me on to the welfare fund that cops have for when they need a break, or when they're gonna party. I told Hennessey that I wanted to put the women prisoners on public stages.

He said, “Well, tell me how we're gonna do it.” He was kind of amused. I told him the City has these funds where we can pay the cops overtime to take the women out under guard. He was just fascinated. I had done my homework. My plan was to take the women from the jail to the theaters under guard.

I taught drama, I taught writing, I taught everything inside. I wanted the chains to be removed from them. But I made the cast—both the prisoners and the professional actresses-- enter the stage accompanied by uniformed sheriff deputies. Sheriff Hennessey showed up to every opening night with his father, sometimes with his wife. Then I knew to invite this guy up on stage. He was the man. He just loved that.

JJ: I worked in his campaign the first year I came here. So when he became sheriff, I stayed in touch with him and I also knew several of the people in the Sheriff's Department from politics. One was Connie O’ Connor and another was Louise Minick. All three of us were on the Executive Committee of the Alice B.Toklas Democratic Club. Also at this point, my grant writing partner was Ellen Gavin. I think Ellen was producing the Medea project.

RJ: Yes.

JJ: It all fit together because it was a very small community. We all knew each other then. It's bigger now. Things don’t happen the same way because there are too many people.

Beth: Oh, it's still a pretty small world, Jeff. Not as small as it used to be, but it is. The problem is there’s some infighting in the art world and the pool of money is not growing.

RJ: Ellen’s in LA now, right? She’s on the California Arts Council.

JJ: Yes, the CAC. Recently, we seem to be talking frequently. Moving on… So the Medea Project basically pre-figured reality TV. The white people in the audience were listening to Black women telling stories that were totally foreign and unimaginable to white people.

RJ: Yes, and in the beginning, I had some pretty heavy hitters. They helped me to ground the words and get women to stand up straight and tell the truth. We had a lot of fun. Shawn Reynolds  came in and she told the women she was a lesbian. And the women said, “Can we say that?” and Shawn said “If you're a lesbian, then yes.”

You could see women flowering. Wow, it was a new day. They didn’t have to hide, and I was just so grateful. Amy Meuller, a friend of Ellen’s who used to be with the Playwrights Festival worked with me for a while too. We had a great time. We grew and we were able to feed each other all of these ideas through experimental theater.

I think that's what gave women, and men, the room to speak their own truths. And that's San Francisco. It was Martha Graham who said, “People from California believe anything is possible” That was a thought that I carried around inside of me for a long time; I'm from California and I can make this happen.

JJ:  The first Medea Project production was Reality is just Outside the Window. Your solo show Big Butt Girls, Hard-headed Women was also about incarcerated women. You were doing something very different than everyone else in the theater world. Medea wasn’t just a solo performance. It was a reality-based performance featuring both professional actors and prisoners. The weird thing was that the audience couldn't always tell who was a prisoner and who was a professional actor.

RJ: That was a running joke for us, trying to figure out who's the convict and who's not. All I would say to the women is that when we move on stage, we’ve got to move like an army. If people that knew some of the women from the streets got word about the show, they would come and they wanted to try to rap. That's why I always sat in the theater. I never let them just run their mouths.

Jack Carpenter, the Technical Producer everyone used at that  time, said to me, “Rhodessa, you have to stay with this process because when you're upfront, they are so focused.” I'm glad that I was able to manipulate the whole thing and give the women a focus.

 It was like giving them eyeballs saying, “Come on, stay with me and we can talk about anything.” I remember one piece that a girl wrote. It was all about, “Hey baby. How much to fuck?” She had been a prostitute on the streets and she wrote this great little jingle about fucking and sucking and how much it cost. She asked me, “Can we say it?” I said, “We're gonna say the whole thing.”  I guess it was experimental. But it was time for more people in our community to speak their truths.

JJ: Then if we move forward to 1989, I was writing all these grants for your piece entitled, I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine.

RJ: Oh yeah, the Ike and Tina Turner show. That was a duet with a musical score. Again, it was so original in how we did it.

JJ: Right before the show opened there was the Loma Prieta earthquake. You were staging this production at the Valencia Rose right?   It really became the gay performance space. I wrote the first grants for that building also in 1983 I think. It was Tom Ammiano’s brainchild, along with Hank Wilson and Ron Lanza.

But back to the show. It sold out almost all the time. How were you thinking about that work? Did you see yourself as Tina Turner?

RJ: We just thought it would be a great piece to put on.  Ed Bullins wrote it and Brian Freeman directed us. I remember Tina Turner was writing her book and all of a sudden Tina left Ike and it was big news. It was a perfect piece for Idris and me. Idris was a little nervous because people got him confused with Ike and were sometimes rude to him because he played the Ike character so well.  But it was a lot of fun because it was fresh and bold. And it was fun working with Brian and Ed and having a band. It was timely.  I had great legs, so I could do it.

That's one of those pieces I am so proud of having been able to pull off. We did it everywhere,—in  Chicago, New York at La Mama, around Europe. We had to remind Europeans that Tina Turner was a real person, cause everybody just wanted me to sing and strut my stuff on the stage. Nobody was interested in Tina’s personal story in Europe. They were interested in her only as a performer.

JJ: Did Pam Peniston have anything to do with Medea?

RJ: Not on the first Medea. We started working together on Perfect Courage, a production that was the opening night show for Festival 2000. Pam and I are still working together on the Medea piece that we're doing in the Bayview.

B&A: When is that piece going to be up, Rhodessa?

RJ: We're gonna do a workshop performance on June 14th. Then we're gonna move to Brava and continue to build on it.

JJ: Great. So let’s return to Festival 2000.

RJ: Yeah, Perfect Courage opened the Festival. We didn't know all the behind-the-scenes stuff that was going on about lack of money. But I think we got paid. There were people that didn't get paid. It was a great idea but it fell through the cracks.

Whatever happened to Lenny Sloan? They brought him in as the Director of Festival 2000, right? I think he moved to New Orleans.  I was so proud to be a part of the planning committee for Festival 2000. But then to find out that behind the scenes, there was no money? That was drama. But I still had a lot of fun.

I just had dinner with Brian Freeman 2 or 3 weeks ago: he did Perfect Courage with us. I often tell him that Coleman Domingo is getting all this coverage for Bayard Ruskin but Brian Freeman is the person that introduced the community to who Ruskin was.

JJ: So, going back into the history, it was Festival 2000 that got us the cultural equity grants program. That's where it came from.

RJ: You know more about the backstory than me because you and Idris talked a lot about that. But I'm glad we did it. Cultural Equity is not a bad thing. We deserve it, damn it.

JJ: Yeah, when I look back on Festival 2000, I thought it was great that Grants For the Arts had thousands of dollars that they could spend on anything. They spent $35,000 to put a car in that little outside space between the Opera House and the veterans building because some car company  was sponsoring some opera production. I think  Grants For the Arts spent $35,000 on that. But when it came time to bail out the people who got screwed at Festival 2000, suddenly there was no money. Money for the opera or ballet, but not for anyone else. Even though it took us two years, Festival 2000 launched the Task Force that resulted in the Cultural Equity Grants program.

RJ: Wow, Jeff, I have to give you your props. You were wheeling and dealing, baby, and a lot of people didn't like seeing you coming because you were gonna let them have it. That was one of the things the artists talked about; That you were a bit more than just a grant writer. You had your flag and your bully club and all that other stuff too. I applaud you for that. I really do. I love the history of how you did it. You're making me remember things that I'd for sure forgotten.

JJ: And you’re still out there. Lily Overstreet showed again 20 years after the first one.

B&A: Oh, yeah. At Fort Mason, right?

RJ: Yes, and it was outrageous. Yeah, Lily had turned 50. It was Lily's 50th birthday party.

B&A: When's Lily turning 75? You could have another party.

RJ: Well, I'm 75 now, so let me give it some thought.

JJ:. I'm gonna be 80 soon and, I hope, I’m every bit as obnoxious as I used to be.

RJ: Yeah, you really are the classic old pain in the ass and that's what we need.

B&A: So, after that, you continued doing the Medea Project, right?

RJ: Yeah, well, all these women would not let it die. I got invited all over the world; Egypt, South Africa, the Caribbean. We were down south. We were in New York. We were everywhere. When I was in South Africa, I actually built a whole company of African women in jail. The Medea Project was very malleable, and just right on time as a piece of artwork.

B&A: So how did you become a resident artist at Yale and Dartmouth and all these other places?

RJ: Well, I was one of the early people doing art as social change. Also, I was from California, where there was this idea that you could really create artwork rooted in politics. I think that's what it was. I had a great time at Yale. They didn't know what to do with me because I didn't have a ton of letters after my name. But the students loved me. I got them to write. How do I do what I do?

I have a chair right now at Cornell. I'm able to bring members of the Medea Project to teach; Angela Wilson and Felicia Scads, the ex-offenders. They teach the project now and I just sit and witness it. But to answer your question, I think that I helped give birth to the idea of artists creating social change. So when I go to colleges and universities there are all these students who are interested in talking about that and being a part of it.

B&A: So you’ve had a good experience working with universities?

RJ: I've worked at Yale and Cornell. I was fascinated that they wanted me to come and talk about my work and my life. People are telling me now, “You ought to go back to the university.” I go back when they invite me and they pay me well. I’ll do a residency and spend a week working with the students. For my next residency at New York’s Hamilton College, the students will develop a performance piece about gun violence.

B&A: Now at New York University there is a program where you can get a Masters in Theater & Social Change. That's clearly something that came from your work.

RJ: Yes. Was it at the University of Michigan or Pittsburgh that had prisons attached to the campuses? Cornell has a prison project. You can go into the prisons while you're there and that's been a pretty amazing thing to be a part of too. But it's still largely men, not women.

Beth: Rhodessa, we’ve gotta get you down to UC Santa Cruz where there is an Institute for Arts and Sciences. It’s all prison abolitionist programming. Plus I started a program in the Art Department called the Environmental Art and Social Practice Program.

RJ: Oh, that'd be great. Maybe I can bring my crew and we can work with the students to make a performance. I’d really like to make that happen.

B&A: That'd be beautiful. I’m curious to know, back in the day, what theaters and what kinds of spaces did you feel most comfortable working in? What artists were you going to see?

RJ: Well, you know, in my early youth, my sisters and I were girly girls, very influenced by Motown. We used to sneak in and perform at this bowling alley in Rochester NY because we weren’t old enough to be in a bar. My mother had been a singer in a gospel group, so singing and dancing were the early things in my life. Every holiday, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, you were expected to put on a show. That's how I cut my teeth.

Then, of course, after I moved to San Francisco, I was raising my kid in Potrero Hill and took performing for granted. Then Teresa Dickinson, the founder of Tumbleweed, asked me if I could come and dance with the company. All of a sudden I was back into modern dance and contact improvisation with these women. So that's where I met Mangrove and John La Fan and Robert Henry Johnson. 

Yes, these were the people that I was interacting with all the time, and my brother Bill, and his partner Arnie Zane. I was going to New York and seeing them and going to La Mama. That was just some crazy stuff going down. But I liked it.

B&A: You told the funniest damn story about Bonnie Ora Sherk when you went to New York in your bus.

RJ: Oh, Bonnie. What a trip the Farm was, huh? The Farm was part of shaping my consciousness because it was a performance space and a farm located at Potrero and 26th street in the Mission. 

So back to your question about what shaped me. There were all these ideas coming down about what theater could be and what you could manifest through stage work. And I had a children's company. We did political theater. I worked with the Mime Troupe too for a while. I did love that.

B&A: Did you ever perform at Glide Church in the Tenderloin?

RJ: The Medea Project and I have performed at Glide Church; we created a piece based on bits and pieces of classical literature. I used to love Janice Mirikitani. Janice was really kind to me and a great poet. She would ask me to come to her poetry reading and I'd go. I got my PhD at the edge of the world. I was looking at everything.

B&A: What venues did you go to here in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. What was your home theater?

RJ: I remember performing at The Art Institute in San Francisco, we were invited there often. The Eureka Theater was another venue that I worked at a lot. Like I said, I was a hippie chick before I was a performance artist. So I loved working at outdoor venues. When I was working with my brother Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane,  I remember Peter Coyote asked us, “What's the Jones company? A band of junkies?” And we said, “Oh no, we're family.” I learned early that the stage was this incredible space to share energy from, or to protest. But theater kind of found me. I didn’t go around looking for it.

JJ: The Eureka Theater where you performed Lily Overstreet had as its Artistic Director --Tony Taccone;  Later, he commissioned Tony Kushner to write Angels in America and the Eureka premiered it in San Francisco.

RJ: I auditioned for late night with Julie Hebert. She really liked me. Julie was really the key to me being there at all.

B&A: You also performed at Brava Theatre. Now you're at the Bayview Opera House.

RJ: Yes I am at the Bayview Opera House right now, it's great to be back and funded by Black on Both Sides for Life on the Swerve. But Brava has been the Medea Project’s home in San Francisco for a long time.

JJ: In addition to your long history of creating new, innovative and experimental work, Cultural Odyssey worked so well that you both have a retirement package, and that’s rare for a small-to-midsize non-profit arts company.

RJ: Yeah, we do.  I've already bought a house in Houston, Texas. It’s a 5-bedroom house with a swimming pool. It was only $400,000. My granddaughter, my daughter, and my great grandson are living there now. I like that area. But nothing compares to the Bay Area in a lot of ways.

B&A: What do you see yourself doing in the future? Do you think you're ever going to retire?

RJ: Well, I always say that I am, but I am actually working on a book. The book is titled, Nudging the Memories. It’s a handbook about how I make theater with “other” populations and I'm only halfway through but it's becoming a collection of my own stories as well as the stories of the women that I work with.  My sister and I are also working on something entitled Just Outside of Babylon. It's about living in America, coming out of a migrant family. So I have those two projects happening.

I might go back and make my own documentary of the Medea Project, just to see the people in the group that have grown immensely like Angela Wilson. She runs the women's unit with the sheriff’s department and I met her in jail. She was a addict and now she runs this program and she's getting her degree at SF State.

B&A: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

RJ: 12 brothers and sisters.

B&A: Wow. So, our last question is, as you reflect on your contributions and challenges, what advice or insights would you offer to emerging BIPOC and/or LGBTQ artists who are beginning to navigate their artistic journeys?

RJ: To the people dreaming or being hesitant, I would say, “take some deep breaths, and follow your own heart.” Because that's a hard one. People say, “oh my God, be careful.” But this is all we got. I have grown into my heart, and I trust her. I trust her more than anyone. Yeah, you're gonna get knocked down a few times. That's gonna happen. But trust your own instincts. Trust your heart. There are people who need to hear your stories. Practice revolution.

And don't be afraid to write it down. Lily Overstreet really grew out of the fact that I took a little journal to work with me when I worked at the Tenderloin peep-shows. I'd never done that before.  So much was going on. Later I'd go back to this journal and I'd have a lot of  things that made sense and a lot that didn’t make any sense at all. But I chronicled my own experience and I  think that's a very good tool to be able to hone in and call your own.

Annie: As I'm approaching 70, I'm thinking about the mistakes I made. They always say, “oh, don't be afraid to make mistakes.” But then you’re 70 and you go, “fuck, I made a lot of fucking mistakes.” Do you feel that way?

RJ: Yeah. You look back and you go, “Wow, what was I thinking?” I wish that I had been more careful with my kid who’s a tad wounded by things that I said or did or by the people I exposed her to.

I always tell people I pulled this life out of my ass. There was no school to attend to be an exemplary new dancer. You have to trust in creative survival. Everything that you're handed is a jewel of some sort. Trust it. I am a creative survivalist. I've taken what the world gave me and I've made it work for me.

I think I surprised my daughter, because I have no problem saying, “I hope you can forgive me.” I think she looks at me sometimes and thinks, “You're my mom. What does that mean?” My daughter is so much like my mother. She carries a big stick. My mother would say, “I'm not your friend, I'm your mother.” Okay, but do you have to roar so loud? All in all theater saved my life. If not for theater I’d be a bitch with a very bad attitude, or dead.

B&A: Thank you so much Rhodessa. Thank you for your life’s work, from the peep-show to the theater, to the prison work, to the teaching and to the work you’re doing now.

RJ: Thank you so much. I enjoyed this. It was a walk down memory lane. Thank you, Jeff. It was really interesting. Alrighty. I'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.

Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

Susan Stryker: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here.

Jeff Jones: Hi Susan. Let's start with your life before you moved to San Francisco.

SS: I did not grow up in a family that prioritized engaging with art. Most of my access was books, film, television and music, things that I found through mass culture growing up mostly in southwest Oklahoma. The things that spoke to me then about gender were Bugs Bunny cartoons, seeing the Warhol superstars on late night TV talk shows, Lou Reed in his Walk on the Wild Side phase. Then it was Bowie on the Midnight Special doing the Ziggy Stardust character. And then Prince. Those were the things available to me that allowed me to see some representation of trans-ish-ness being connected to some positive sense of culture, something cool.

JJ: Where did you grow up in Oklahoma?

SS: Lawton. My dad was in the Army, field artillery. We were stationed half the time at nearby Fort Sill, the field artillery training center, and half the time on other Army bases in Texas, Hawaii, Germany. I was in Oklahoma during high school, and got a great scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, so I went there for my undergrad.

B&A: Where in Germany were you?

SS: We lived in Dachau, on the grounds of the former concentration camp. When the Allies liberated the camp, they turned much of it into a US Army base, from 1945 to 1971. Then it became housing for Olympic athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, and then the training academy of the Bavarian State Police. When I go back to Germany nowadays, it’s mostly to Berlin.

B&A: So do you speak German?

SS: I used to, but now it's really rusty. Besides living there, I've had ten years of formal classroom-based instruction in German from grade school through college. But since I don't use it, I kind of forget it.

JJ: When did you move to San Francisco?

SS: I was accepted into UC-Berkeley’s Ph.D. program in United States History in 1983. I was spending a lot of time in San Francisco by the mid-1980s, and working here by the early 1990s. I finally moved into the City proper in 2002.

JJ: What year did you become the director of the GLBT Historical Society?

B&A: AKA the “Queer Smithsonian.”  Formerly the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. Which now also has a museum, which is very cool.

SS: In January 1999. I served until November 2003, one month shy of five years. But I started volunteering at the organization in 1991; I joined the Board in ‘92. Then I became the first paid Executive Director in ‘99.

JJ: Allan Bérubé was one of the founders of the GLBT Historical Society.  He subsequently won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship for publishing Coming Out Under Fire, a history exploring why San Francisco became the center of LGBTQ rights during the 1970s. Bérubé said it was because of the number of dishonorably discharged military personnel who were released here following the conclusion of World War II. Many of them chose to stay in San Francisco rather than returning to their home towns. Was Allan on the Board when you joined the Historical Society, or after?

SS: I knew Allan from late 1980s forward, through my grad school friend Sharon Ullman, also one of the founders of the GLBT Historical Society. He wasn’t on the Board when I was on the Board, but he rented a room in the archive to store his WWII project papers, and he was around all the time. Allan was a really important role model for me. We’d go out for burritos. He really took the time to teach me how to be an independent, community-based queer scholar. He moved to New York in the mid-1990s and had a place in Liberty, upstate New York, in the Catskills. He died in 2007, well after my time as director.

JJ: I haven't really been able to put together in one place all the information I have accumulated over the years about the transgender arts community. So I'd like to know how you remember some of the things that I remember.  The first time I remember encountering a trans artist, they were somebody who was starting Tranny Fest.

SS: Shawna Virago and Christopher Lee started that.

JJ:  I know Shawna’s still around. Whatever happened to Christopher?

SS: He chose his own exit time in 2012.

Annie: My film, Linda/Les & Annie–the first F2M Love Story, screened in that first Trans Film Fest. Or maybe it was the second one. Alex Austin co-founded it in 1997 with Christopher Lee. In 2003 Shawna Virago became Artistic Director.

SS: I remember that a little differently. I guess we could go to the archive and figure it out. Definitely 1997. Definitely Christopher Lee. Alex definitely had their finger in lots of pies. I remember Alex helping Tranny Fest in many ways, like, drafting their articles of incorporation. But I think Shawna was involved from the get-go. Maybe not with a title, but certainly involved.

B&A: The Trans Film Fest was every other year at the start, then due to popular demand, it became annual.

SS: There was also a London International Transgender Film Festival, which I know was in 1997, because I was there—it was the first time I’d left the country since my gender-transition, and I had to get a new passport. There was also a trans film festival in Montreal that year, Counting Past Two.

B&A: According to Wikipedia, Tranny Fest became the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, and it was the world’s first trans Film Festival. And we were there! Memories are full.

SS: I really think there were three “first” trans film festivals—SF, London, Montreal—but I’d be happy to stand corrected! Eventually the London Festival moved to Amsterdam, and morphed into the Trans Screen Festival.

JJ: Around the time, I first ran into Shawna Virago, who was the Grand Marshal of the 2001 S.F. Pride Parade. Why do you think that happened?

SS: First, it was about damn time for some trans representation there. But also, because Shawna and Chris were very proactive and campaigned hard to become the Parade’s co-Grand Marshals. At all the events they attended, they promoted themselves and recruited supporters to vote for them.  They were just activating their networks, passing out fliers, and talking themselves up to queer community organizations. It was a full-court press.

My own involvement in the queer community started in the leather community. I was publicly transitioning and coming out around 1990, ‘91, ‘92, in the period right around Queer Nation. I’d been part of the leather scene, on the down low, since ’88 or ’89. When I was coming out, the T had not yet been added as a separate initial to LGB, but that was starting to change.

My own take on that moment was that LGBT was the neo-liberal accommodation of queerness: just adding more letters to the alphabet soup, not destabilizing the categories through which heteronormativity reproduced itself. In the early 1990s, none of the larger LGB organizations really acknowledged trans people. By 1995, several of the larger organizations were starting to change their names to LGBT. That was the year the Pride Parade became the LGBT Pride Parade

But the trans community still felt very marginalized within the LGBT non-profit cultural sector. There were not a lot of T-inclusive institutions until the later 1990s. Then the change was pretty rapid. Not only was I Executive Director of the Historical Society, but Prado Gomez became the Executive Director at Proyecto Contra SIDA por Vida, the HIV prevention agency in the Mission. He had come up through Brava for Women in the Arts, where my partner Mimi worked, and was a protégé of Cherrie Moraga and Ellen Gavin.

There was money from the Horizons Foundation around that time to pay for Executive Director support and professional development and life coaching, for leaders in the LGBT non-profit sector. I remember meeting other trans people who were involved in nonprofit work through my involvement there. I feel like that's when I was first starting to get plugged into some of the work that you were doing, Jeff, with grant writing for the arts. That’s when you came onto my radar screen.

The other people who I thought were super central to trans arts and cultural production stuff in the ‘90s were Jordy Jones, who soon joined the QCC Board, and Stafford. I know the three of you know both of them. The club that they used to host, Club Confidential, was a major event that brought in all kinds of performers. It was the place to see and be seen in Trans SanFrisco back in the 1990s. Monika Treut profiled the club in her film Gendernauts, about the trans community in San Francisco. Then she did the follow-up film Genderation, that Annie and Beth were involved in. Gendernauts came out in 1999, Genderation in 2021. Sandy Stone was featured in both, as was I.

Annie: For Gendernauts Monica filmed me on my Sausalito houseboat. I wasn’t a trans person but had trans lovers. It was a wonderful film that really captures the late 90s in San Francisco.

Beth: Genderation is a really great film too. It revisits the main subjects of Gendernauts and where they are now. It addresses aging in the trans community.

SS: So yes, the late 90s was the moment when I think trans moved a little bit to the foreground in the nonprofit arts community.

JJ: As an aside, let me mention how the “B” entered LGBT. In 1984, I was the co-chair of the Mobilization Against AIDS with Bisexual activist Maggie Rubinstein. It was during the early years of AIDS when there were no tests for HIV. Maggie kept insisting that bisexuals had to be thought of as part of the Queer community because bisexuals were the channel through which AIDS was being transferred into the straight community.

Annie: I remember there was a lot of resistance to adding the B back then.

JJ: So finally, everyone just said, okay, now we'll be the LGB community.  That was 1985 because that’s when my partner died of AIDS. Soon afterwards I decided that after four years of AIDS work, I had paid my dues and I could return to the arts world. It was pure denial, but it worked. But I could not recall when LGB changed to LGBT.

SS: The Pride Parade added the T in 1995.

JJ: I originally thought you had said something about Q being the umbrella that everybody could fit under. But a lot of people did not agree with that.

SS: Right. Which is why I think it became LGBT.

JJ: The first time I had to get up in front of a public audience and say “I’m here representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community” I knew I would never do that again. It felt linguistically terrible; it only sowed confusion and led to the proliferation of LGBTIAQQ+ and it didn't say anything.

SS: The word salad has no nutritional value.

JJ: That's it. It just did not register. I didn’t know how we would pass that on, but we did: to queer.

SS: Honestly, I think it went the other way. The lesbian and gay establishment was, as we would say today, very cis-normative and gender binary. First it was a purportedly all-inclusive “gay,” then lesbians got almost-equal billing, then occasionally there was an awkward, in parentheses, “B”. Trans was just not on anybody's radar screen at the time when those moves were being made.

There has always been a trans intersection with gay life broadly defined—thinking of homosexuality as a gender “inversion,” butch and femme, drag performance. But trans life began intersecting with gay and lesbian community politics in San Francisco in new ways around the time of Queer Nation and ACT UP. To combat AIDS you needed to get past the sexual identity politics that tried to cast it as “gay cancer.” You needed to talk about risk factors and transmission vectors and vulnerable communities such as those once labeled the “4-H”’s: hemophiliacs, Haitians, hookers and hard drug users.    

That was the context in which the old epithet “queer” took on new meaning, naming the unlikely coalition of affected constituencies in the AIDS crisis, and pushing back on sexual identity labels as being the most salient thing. “Queer” kind of meant “everybody affected by AIDS who's pissed off at the government.”

The wave of trans activism that started in the ‘90s in San Francisco, and later fueled a wave of cultural production, came out of that sensibility. It was a way of meeting the moment with regard to the impact of AIDS—trans women of color engaged in survival sex work had the highest infection rates of any demographic—as well as contesting the historic relationship between trans life and an often transphobic cis-gay and cis-lesbian community.

When I was involved with Transgender Nation, which began as a Queer Nation affinity group, I remember making the rounds of public forums and membership meetings at the existing gay and lesbian and AIDS groups, and calling the question: are you queer, meaning broadly anti-homonormative, or are you a special interest group for people who share your identity? Are you in favor of the coalition of all the perverts who are marginalized by the current organization of power, or are you in it to win it only for people like yourself? That’s what was at stake in the question of trans inclusion in the early ‘90s.

Ultimately, a trans demand for a queer coalitional politics was watered down into a tepid tacking-on of a T to LGB, and a half-assed version of inclusion. It was like you could drop the T any time if you had trouble pronouncing it.

B&A: Wasn’t Kate Bornstein performing around San Francisco earlier?

SS: Yeah. She was slightly ahead of the curve. She’d been in Philly, I think, and came out to SF right on the cusp of things starting to get interesting here for trans. Did you ever meet Kate?

JJ: I didn’t, no. Adele Prandini, who was the Director of Theater Rhino often mentioned Kate to me, but I only met her after she had moved to New York when she performed in the National Queer Arts Festival around the Millennium.

SS: Kate was really important to me. Still is. I first came across her in Lily Burana's ‘zine, Taste of Latex, which had a feature on Kate when she was performing at Theatre Rhino. She was doing Hidden: A Gender, her first big play. It was just before I publicly transitioned, and I was like, huh, I guess it really is possible to be a trans lesbian—cool! So I immediately went to the show—which was also the first place I ever saw Vivian Justin Bond perform—and hit Kate up afterwards for a coffee date. It was when she was working on her book, Gender Outlaw.

She was a really important figure around town at the time. I also saw her perform at Josie's Juice Joint. I think Adele Prandini was Kate’s dramaturg.

JJ: The first really aggressive trans artist I met was Sean Dorsey. In 1996, Krissy Keefer and Ann Bluethenthal organized the Lesbian/Gay Dance Festival. When they stopped doing it after 5 years, Sean Dorsey told me he was going to start something in the dance world called Fresh Meat. At that point, QCC gave away about five $1000 commissions to artists per year, and we gave one to Sean. His first event was amazing: it was sold out and you couldn't get in. More than half the people on that program were not trans, but they were people of color.

Another one of the people from that time that I always remember was Lynn Breedlove.

SS: Yeah, I know Lynnee. We used their all-dyke-and-trans bike messenger service Lickity Split when I was ED at the Historical Society, and I later served on the board of Lynnee’s community ride-share non-profit, Homobiles. Their band Tribe 8 was awesome.

JJ: I never actually went to a Tribe 8 performance, but I heard about these events all the time.

SS: So, I remember I met Sean Dorsey in the very early days, maybe even before Fresh Meat. I think I first saw Sean as a guest performer at an academic conference. We wound up hanging out when I found out he was in San Francisco and was in an on-again off-again relationship at that time with Shawna Virago. I mentioned that just because I had already known Shawna for years, even before Sean came down from Vancouver. It was like, “Oh! You two are together. Cool! Oh, you're not together. Too bad. Oh, you're back together!” That at least was my memory of them back in the day. They were both very influential figures in the trans culture scene.

When Fresh Meat started, it was this really innovative, trans-centered, but not trans-exclusive performance series. I remember Storm Flores being connected with that early on. I thought the work I saw there was indeed really fresh. I also loved Lou, the work Sean developed based on the diaries of the pioneering gay transguy activist Lou Sullivan, performed by the Sean Dorsey Dance company. It was just brilliant.

I remember seeing Shawna Virago at LunaSea and elsewhere. Shawna was part of the fabric of trans life in San Francisco in the early, early nineties, well before Sean Dorsey arrived. At one point she was working at Community United Against Violence, and I was working at the GLBT Historical Society, which was in the same building at 973 Market Street, and we’d run into each other in the elevator all the time.

Now, Lynnee Breedlove, I remember hanging out back in the day at Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Truckstop Café on 14th Street in the Mission. Several Tribe 8 members had their day jobs at Red Dora's. I don't know if Lynnee actually worked there. But I know that Harry Dodge did. And I think Flipper. Red Dora’s was a dyke-centric genderqueer community and performance space that was a super important cross-over point between different scenes. The lesbian cartoonist Kris Kovick curated a performance series there. I co-curated my first art exhibition there, and did spoken word there a time or two. It was where Tribe 8 kind of held court. I would see Lynnee there all the time.

Annie: Oh! I always knew that place as just the Bearded Lady Café; it had a great little art show of drawings by Harry Dodge, who had drawn a series of anuses. I bought an anus. It was only $25 per anus.

SS: Tribe 8 was a lesbian punk band, but they had their alter ego side-project: Harry Dodge and the Dodge Brothers. It was all the same people, doing their drag king personae and performing country and western music instead of punk. They played regularly at Jordy Jones and Stafford’s Club Confidential, which those guys hosted once a month in a hotel on the fringes of the Tenderloin that had a totally sleazy dive bar on the ground floor. Trans folk would take it over and make it fabulous. It had a little stage where the Dodge Brothers would perform. I saw Veronica Klaus perform there, too.

Veronica was another big part of trans arts and performance culture in the ‘90s. When Jim Van Buskirk and I wrote Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, we hired Veronica to be the performer at the book launch party at the new Main Library in San Francisco. Jim was the Director of the Library’s James Hormel Center. The book launch party for Gay by the Bay was one of the first things that happened in that building once it opened; Veronica was there with a full band and just raised the roof.

JJ: So I remember that when Sean Dorsey arrived on the scene, right after that Michelle Tea started to appear in my life nonstop. Every place I went, Michelle Tea seemed to be there.

SS: Yeah, my first connection with Michelle goes back to Gay by the Bay, too. Jim and I had just published the book, and publicity was starting to roll out. It got a feature story on the cover of The Bay Times—Stafford and Jordy’s Service Station graphic design business did all their covers—and the story itself was written by this young dyke named Michelle Tea, newly arrived in San Francisco who was trying to figure out how to make a living as a writer and culture-worker. She became so central to so many things, and was super important to Sister Spit and Radar Productions, which put on the Queer Writers’ Series at the Main Library.

JJ:  Don’t forget to add Transforming Community and Drag Queen Story Hour. So for 11 years Michelle Tea and her non-profit Radar Productions presented Queer Writers the library. There was a piece that QCC commissioned for the National Queer Arts Festival in 2005 called Transforming Community: Michelle Tea organized six trans writers to author and present a ten-minute piece. She had poets, she had Shawna Virago giving us a lecture, Rocco, Max Wolf Valerio, Julia Serano, Lynnee Breedlove and Marcus Renee Van, a Black F-to-M who went to Taiwan and was teaching English there.  I remember going on the show’s opening night and it was just mind blowing. There were people in the audience who just screamed during the whole show. This free performance ran for 4 nights in June and was packed every evening.

This production presented 7 different views of what trans was about. That was the genius of Michelle Tea. She figured out how to present six different perspectives by Trans artists about various Trans topics and then it was her turn: she wrote about how Rocco’s transition impacted her. They were partners at the time. Going out in public with Rocco, who was now a man, Michelle noticed that her friends started treating her like someone in a straight relationship who was no longer a lesbian.

But going back just a little before that, do you remember the year when the Dyke March decided that they were not going to allow anyone except ‘real’ women to march in the parade?

SS: The way I remember it was you had to be a lesbian to march in the parade, and they were not exclusive of trans women who were lesbians. But they were saying, if you're one of our trans brothers, even if you've had connections to this community, we ask that you stand on the sidewalks and cheer us on. It wasn't that they were transphobic to trans women. They were saying it's a dyke march, so if you're not a dyke, then don't march. I marched in the very first one.

There was a complicated relationship between the Dyke March and the emergence of the Trans March, some controversy about porous and overlapping community boundaries, how you define who’s a what and who gets to decide. I don’t know all the details because I wasn’t centrally involved. But I did march in that first Trans March, too, and often spoke at the rallies in Dolores Park before the marches.

JJ: I was the grant writer for the Dyke March when those controversies were taking place. I remember the first Trans March and how nobody offered them any help.  Word of mouth produced about 2000 people. That was really the first time that Trans visibility was heightened on Pride weekend: it was not a million people but it was not small either.

Here’s how I remember it: The Trans March emerged right after the controversy with the Dyke March. And after endless community discussions, and after the second Trans March, the Dyke March changed its position. Both events were held in Dolores Park on back-to-back Friday and Saturday: both needed a stage, security, sound systems, emergency medical services and insurance. Somehow, after the initial conflict they started working together. Before the third Trans March the two Marches figured out how to share their production costs. Since I worked for both Parades, I really didn't have an opinion; all I could do was point out how the money could be raised and spent, and how the two parades might consider sharing costs.

I remember the first time Fresh Meat got funded. It was at a community meeting and I noticed Kary Shulman was there. So I got up and gave a speech about how Grants for the Arts absolutely discriminated against lesbians.  Someone in the audience said “What about trans artists?” I replied “none are funded.” I believe Sean Dorsey stood up and said “how can trans people get GFTA funds?” Kary said, send me a proposal; by next morning, one was delivered to her office. 

At that time, I often wondered if anyone actually read the proposals I annually wrote to Grants for the Arts. The only person whose opinion mattered was the agency’s Director Kary Schulman. She alone would decide how much money you were getting, or if you were getting anything at all.  She always gave the Dyke March the smallest grant her agency made and she never increased it.  So when Schulman was publicly maneuvered into a position where she really couldn’t answer why her agency awarded no grants to the Trans community, I felt that getting her to fund trans artists was a major achievement. That was in 2005 or 2006.

All of these things were connected. I remember that at the time of the 2002 Dyke March, Michelle Tea wrote a really snarky article in the Bay Guardian titled “What is a Woman?” She asked who was going to inspect the genitalia of the marchers and what evidence would be acceptable since neither birth certificates nor driver's licenses could irrefutably answer the question.

Then Fresh Meat began and Sean became so central to moving the agenda forward. That process continues today. Sean just got some $100,000 grant from the New England Federation of the Arts to tour New England and the United States.

SS: This conversation has started things percolating in my memory. I’m remembering other trans art stuff back in the 1990s. One of the other major venues besides Red Dora’s was 848 Community Space. Loren Cameron, a really important trans photographer, had an exhibit there called “Our Vision, Our Voices.” So many people showed up for the opening that the venue said, “Could some of y'all please come back for a second showing, because we're at capacity, and the fire marshals are going to shut us down.” That was, to me, one of the major breakthrough moments in the public recognition of trans artists in San Francisco. I was on the discussion panel. It was me, Loren, Kate Bornstein, trans writer Jamison Green, and maybe Stephan Thorne who was a trans guy in the SFPD, maybe the poet Max Valerio, I can't quite remember.

Another place that was really important was The Lab. They held these conferences for a few years called The Illustrated Woman: Feminist Activism and the Arts. I'm not sure how many there were, at least three, but maybe more. When I started getting involved in the art scene here in SF it was really through the Illustrated Woman. I think it was the second conference in 1994, which was held at Yerba Buena.

I am not trained as an artist. I'm a historian by training. But because I was transitioning, there was no way in hell at that time I was going to get a job as a professor teaching U.S. history even though I had a Ph.D. from Berkeley. That was just a non-starter. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, and how to make a living by any means necessary. I didn't have to worry about what I was going to do to make tenure. I could do whatever I wanted, because, like Janis sang, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I could write tranny porn, I could do performance art, I could be a rabble-rouser, and it wasn’t going to cost me anything extra.

I had a sense early in my life that I wanted to go into a creative field. Fiction. Film. But I played it safe. I’m from a working-class background and financial stability and upward mobility appealed to me. I do honestly love history, and thought becoming a history professor would offer me a nice secure middle-class life. When I was in college, I believed that if I could get into one of the top five history PhD programs, I'd have a good chance of getting a professor job in history. If I didn’t, I was just going to be a bartender and work on my novel or my screenplay. But I got into the top-ranked program at UC-Berkeley.

I was transitioning right as I was finishing up my doctorate, and since that meant I didn’t have a snowball's chance in hell of getting an academic job, I just threw caution to the winds.

I still did scholarship on the side—who knew it would eventually turn into my paycheck job!—but I also started doing spoken word stuff in club settings. I started curating a little bit. I started writing and publishing fiction, doing journalism.

I was running the speakers’ series for the GLBT Historical Society; I put together a program at Modern Times Bookstore when The Crying Game came out, that had an actor who played cross-gender roles, the president of Frameline’s Board, a Berkeley professor who specialized in Irish postcolonial studies, and me, presenting all these different angles on the film. An artist named Paula Levine was in the audience, and she recommended me to her friend Barbara DeGenevieve, a really influential photographer and mixed media artist then at San Jose State. Barbara was curating a panel called “Bad Girls” at The Lab’s Illustrated Woman conference. She invited me to present a Trans version of what it meant to be a bad girl.  I became super close with Barbara, who was an amazing mentor and friend, and who supported a lot of trans artists. She eventually relocated to the School of the Art Institute at Chicago, where she worked until ovarian cancer took her out of this life.

I wrote a well-received piece called “The Surgeon Haunts My Dreams” to present at the Illustrated Woman conference. That put me on the map locally as somebody who could make art as well as do activism. The San Francisco art press was comparing me to the French feminist performance artist Orlan, which I admit I found quite flattering. I was starting to feel like I maybe could actually have a life as a trans creative instead of being a tweed jacket wearing, elbow patched, pipe smoking historian dude after all!

At that same conference I hooked up with the artist Kathy High, who hooked me up with the artist Shu Lea Cheang, who had just been commissioned by the Guggenheim to create its first-ever born-digital commission, called Brandon, about the Brandon Teena murder. Working on that with Shu Lea put me on the arts map in a totally different way. In hindsight, I’d have to say that the 1994 Illustrated Woman conference at The Lab was what launched whatever “arts career” I’ve managed to have.

B&A: We just hung out with Shu Lea in Austria. Such a great artist. Didn’t know she did stuff in San Francisco.

SS: Shu Lea is a global nomad who works everywhere and is very collaborative. She passed through San Francisco regularly. Jordy Jones did a lot of the graphic design on the parts of Brandon that I scripted. I worked with Shu Lea on Brandon-related projects in London and Amsterdam as well as San Francisco.

JJ: Who was running The Lab back then? Do you remember?

SS: The person that I worked with the most was Zoë Kroll. She was not the Director but she was the one I had the most interactions with at the Illustrated Woman conferences.

AB: Laura Brun was the director for quite a long time, I think. Then Elizabeth Beard became the director.

SS: Yes! Laura Brun.

JJ:. So what do you think about what's happened in the trans arts community here in San Francisco since like maybe 2008 or so?

SS: I don't know if I'm the right person to ask about that because around 2007, 2008 I started working out of town more. My academic career picked up—trans studies was becoming a thing, and I had achieved some profile based on some of my side-hustle scholarship, as well as the film Screaming Queens I made with my friend Victor Silverman about the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot which won an Emmy—and I started getting recruited for various professorships.

I was actually eager to move into a career that I thought had been denied to me at an earlier phase of life. I kept one foot on the ground here, and have always lived in the same house. My day jobs at universities were air commute jobs. I was in Vancouver, I was in Boston, I was in Bloomington, Indiana, and later I was in Tucson. So between 2007 and 2019 I was really not that plugged in to what was happening around here. But in general, it seemed to me that a lot more interesting trans arts was happening in New York and Los Angeles.

Trans cultural production was totally hitting the mainstream. Like Zackary Drucker directing things for the Duplass brothers that streamed on HBO. Or Sam Feder’s Disclosure on Netflix, or Joey Soloway’s Transparent on Amazon. Trans artists were being shown at the Whitney and the Tate, and winning MacArthur genius awards and the Turner Prize. To me it seemed that trans arts in San Francisco became more local and provincial: it might be good and have an interesting San Francisco flavor to it, but San Francisco wasn't where the bleeding edge of trans art was, either commercial arts or fine arts.

JJ: It seemed to me that there was a lot of Trans art right after the millennium but by 2010 that had sort of dispersed.

SS: That aligns with my sense of things. To me, it seemed a local trans art scene started to pick up in San Francisco in the early 1990s. By the end of the decade, it became something that was on other people's radars. After 2001, lots of trans artists were getting recognition, getting funded, getting reviewed. That was an interesting time. But then, to me at least, it felt like the scene plateaued. There were other places where trans artists started taking the game to the next level. I don’t see people in San Francisco doing that right now.

JJ: Yeah, I wonder if it had something to do with the total Manhattanization of the city when it became too expensive?

SS: I think that is a huge part of it. It became too expensive a place to be an arts incubator for emerging talent. Gentrification pushed a lot of people out. I remember when I was Executive Director at the Historical Society in 1999, we needed to move from 973 Market Street because our rent was going up 300% and we couldn't afford it. But before we could find another place, the bottom dropped out of the market, in 2001-02, when the Dot.com Boom became the Dot.com Bust. We were being shown places that were the worst gawd-awful examples of bad postmodern corporate architecture that reflected the “irrational exuberance” of capitalism at that time. We were able to move into a space that was both bigger and cheaper.

After 2012 or so, by the time Ed Lee became Mayor, my personal opinion is that the City just handed over the mid-Market area to the tech industry, and it drove everything out. From 2012 onward through COVID, I think from then it was just really, really hard for people to keep their feet on the ground here.

The San Francisco economy has not yet recovered from COVID. But I think that maybe this is the moment for young artists to move to San Francisco again, maybe get in on the ground floor of San Francisco’s next iteration.  I think after a decade of being underwater in a swamp, we’re starting to see little green shoots of new possibilities poking their heads up here and there.

JJ:  The city has to change. It can't exist with 10,000 people living on the streets. What’s really happening now is that San Francisco is becoming the international headquarters of the Artificial Intelligence industry. But the same types of people who were making more money than they knew what to do with in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the techies—are back in force.

If we think about all the people you've talked about here and all the people I've talked about, most of them are no longer here. They are somewhere else like Los Angeles or New York, right?

SS: Maybe. L.A. is where Michelle is.

JJ: And Ali Liebegott and Beth Pickens.

SS: I talked with Rocco Kayiatos and Amos Mac when they decided to discontinue publishing Original Plumbing because the Institute for LGBT Studies I was running at the University of Arizona was thinking of maybe acquiring that magazine and running it like an archive and a service learning project for the trans community. But that wound up not happening.

That was probably ten years ago, about 2014 or so. I've totally lost track of Rocco. I intersected with Amos around a film he was involved with, No Ordinary Man: The Billy Tipton Story, that was ultimately directed by Chase Joynt. I was a talking head in it. Amos had written the first treatment for that, and Chase came in and got it across the finish line. Yeah. Couldn't say where Rocco is.

JJ: I heard from him recently about a Trans retreat he’s organizing in Northern California. But by 2016 it didn’t feel like there were outstanding new artists showing up here. There were people from New York who were brought in and were doing some interesting things. But for the most part, they weren't from here. I think that's what made Fresh Meat seem so original originally.

SS: Fresh Meat started feeling less fresh to me than it did at first. After a while it started to feel to me like it was the same people there every year. That’s kind of to my point of feeling that by the 2010s, San Francisco was not where most of the most innovative trans work was coming from.

JJ: That may be true.

B&A: Did you have any sense that the Cultural Equity Grants Program has provided more support to queer and BIPOC artists here than in other cities? Jeff’s hypothesis is that the local cultural equity grants Program has influenced arts grantmakers throughout the country to push arts funding in the direction of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Beth: I'm thinking about what was happening in queer arts before our time, like during the 50s, 60s, 70s. You've talked about the Compton’s Cafeteria being the real launch of the gay rights movement, ahead of Stonewall. Were you aware of trans theater? There were probably a lot of trans people in the early drag shows. Right?

SS: Of course. A lot of the people we've been talking about are artists who self-consciously identify as transgender or transsexual, who make work as part of expressing a trans identity. “Transgender” as a socially salient identity category really started taking off in the early 1990s, and that moment of trans emergence was the moment of a self-styled “trans arts” scene.

But gender variance and gender-variant artists who might not think of themselves as trans in a contemporary sense, or even trans artists who made art that didn’t specifically revolve around expressing a trans identity, has a much longer, deeper, richer history. I’m thinking here of people like the Warhol superstars, like Candy Darling or Holly Woodlawn or Jackie Curtis. Or Greer Lankton's work. There has been an amazing amount of really brilliant cultural production around gender variance and non-normative expressions of gender that has retroactively been folded into something called “trans art” that first cohered under that name in the early ‘90s. The nonbinary surrealist Claude Cahun, for example.

I’m thinking, too, of someone like Jayne County, once a drag queen from the South who hustled her way up to New York City doing sex work, became part of Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous, and became a major punk icon with her band Wayne County and the Electric Chairs before she transitioned. They had this amazing song called If You Don't Want to Fuck Me, Baby, Then Baby, Fuck Off. She brought this total, in-your-face punk sensibility to the work that she was doing. She titled her autobiography Man Enough to Be a Woman. She became a fixture at Max's Kansas City, and her style influenced everybody from the Dolls to Bowie to Lou Reed to Blondie. She was an incredibly seminal cultural figure. Is that “trans art” now? I think so. By the time the 1990s rolled around, a late-career Jayne County put out an album called Transgender Rock and Roll. And she paints. She has a really interesting outsider-artist style.

B&A: The history we are trying to collect is about the funding of artists; we’d like to know, what organizations, foundations, corporations, government grants, etc. were supportive of funding trans artists and culture back in the day? And which weren’t? Let’s give credit where credit is due.

JJ: Sean Dorsey’s Fresh Meat Productions was the pioneer test case that determined whether public funding would be available to trans artists. Sean broke new ground at the San Francisco Cultural Equity grants Program, and then moved on to the California Arts Council. Next was Grants for the Arts and finally, the National Endowment for the Arts. Sean succeeded because his work clearly achieved a level of artistic excellence that was undeniable. The only other successful trans art organizations I’m aware of are the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival and Peacock Rebellion in Oakland.

B&A: From your historical perspective, was San Francisco ever really a leader in trans culture?

SS: The Cockettes were totally brilliant. I would consider that trans. Or somebody like Steve Arnold, who directed Luminous Procuress and helped establish the whole midnight movie phenomenon. He started programming late-night avant-garde stuff at the Pagoda Palace in Chinatown before the Cockettes thought it would be a cool place to present their shows.

San Francisco in the sixties played a tremendous role in blowing open space for something that we might now call genderqueer or genderfuck, that kind of trashy, baroque, hippie, counterculture stuff. The Cockettes, the Angels of Light. San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s had a lot of cross-fertilization between different gender subcultures—street drag, drag club performance, hippies, punks, and high art—that laid a foundation for the queer scene in the 1980s and 1990s. People like Jerome Caja. San Francisco had cultural venues where radical experimentation with gender presentation and gender performance could take place, places like the 181 Club in the Tenderloin, a punk venue that used to be a drag bar.

B&A: Wonderful. Thanks Susan. One last question. What artists have inspired you?

SS: Well, that changes moment by moment. I’m always fangirling somebody new. I just saw the Kehinde Wiley show at the De Young and that rocked my socks off.

B&A: It was totally amazing.

SS: I've also been paying attention to Wangechi Mutu recently, I think she's brilliant. I had a chance to collaborate in a very minor way with Charlotte Prodger at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and obsessed about them for a while. I just find people I like and binge them for a bit and then move on when some new pretty thing catches my eye.

B&A: Thank you so much for your wisdom, information and sharing this piece of herstory.

SS: And thank you for the work that you do! And good luck on this project.

AP:  Jeff,  you were at the center of this wonderful wheel of creativity and were involved with many Queer  arts organization in the Bay Area. Your finger was on the pulse of everybody’s work. You are the ideal prism to re-experience and re-witness this history. It would be a gift to everybody, a gift to Bay Area history, not to mention the great gift it would be to the arts community to have it filtered through your experience

JJ:  In 1981 I remember being interviewed by Allan  Estes, who was Theatre Rhino’s founder and Artistic Director. He put two lines of cocaine on his desk, lit up a big joint and said, “Okay, what can you do for me?” I thought: That’s a great opening line!

Allan was really the embodiment of the manic gay energy of that time: he was about 25 years old, and he was somewhat political.  In 1978 he had already convinced Harvey Milk to help Theatre Rhinoceros to secure  some of the City’s Hotel Tax funds and he had met with the gay head of the CA Arts Council, who urged him to submit a proposal. He had also applied to the NEA and secured a grant from the Theater Program.

Allan was really the embodiment of the manic gay energy of that time: he was about 25 years old, and he was somewhat political. In 1978 he had already convinced Harvey Milk to help Theatre Rhinoceros to secure some of the City’s Hotel Tax funds and he had met with the gay head of the CA Arts Council, who urged him to submit a proposal.

Before his assassination, Harvey Milk spoke directly to the Chief Administrative Officer (Roger Boas), who exclusively controlled how and to  whom Hotel Tax revenues were awarded.  As a result, Theatre Rhinoceros and the Pride Parade were the first queer cultural arts groups to get funded.  When Allen and I looked at which LGBT agencies were funded by Grants for the Arts (then known as the Hotel Tax Fund), we noticed the Pride  Parade received the smallest amount awarded in the Parade category,  even though it was much larger than the Columbus Day Parade, the Chinese New Year’s Parade, Carnaval , the St Patrick’s Day Parade or the Cherry Blossom Festival. 

Allen insisted  that Milk’s “Gay rights ordinance” meant the City bureaucracy could not discriminate against Lesbians and gays. Even though Allen was thankful to receive a grant from the City,  he made it clear to me that he was ready to  challenge the obvious inequities. 

We both remembered that a Chronicle reporter had asked Roger Boas to explain why the Pride  Parade received only $5000, while he awarded substantially larger grants to all the other parades that attracted much smaller crowds.  On the front page of the Chronicle on Pride weekend 1979, Boas explained that funding the gay parade was not good for the City’s business community because it fostered  a bad image of San Francisco.

JJ: Adele, I’m particularly interested in talking to you because you were an active participant in the  Queer arts community before I arrived, and I didn’t personally know many of the people in the City’s early Lesbian arts community.  So I'd like to start at the beginning: Where were you born and raised?

AP: I was born and raised in San Francisco. I'm a native and I think there was always an LGBT community,  since the city was first founded during the  Gold Rush.  As kids, in the 1950s , we would hear about Finocchio's great drag shows because our working class parents used to go to North Beach to watch Finocchio's drag shows. The club was a landmark, it was where a visible butch dyke would park the cars. I don't recall her name, but she was a part of the show right there in the parking lot. There was always a presence of visible dykes and drag queens in North Beach.

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, St John's Academy for Girls on Mission Street. The nuns warned us about the City’s lesbian elements; “Don’t hang out with older girls,” that sort of thing. Nobody went away to college in my very working- class family; we went to City College.

I took theater classes at the community college, but college was not a good fit for me. I went into a class where the teacher, a guy, informed us that “In this class you will learn how to manipulate people.”  I walked out because I did not have any interest in manipulating people for money. It was not where my heart was. After exhausting the theater courses there, I went to work with an organization called Performing Arts Workshop. Do you remember them?

JJ:  Yes, I do. I remember the woman who started it, Gloria Unti.  I used to write grants for her in the 1980s.  

AP: There was also a fabulous actor there called Skip Mancini. I learned everything I could from her.  Performing Arts Workshop was set up for inner-city kids. I learned a ton there. But  I moved to Berkeley where I discovered an organization called A University Without Walls.

There were lots of women's courses: a women's music collective, a women's bookstore but no women's theater group. So I started a lesbian comedy improv class . There was no such thing as the Internet; it was all done by getting together in person and in groups. Many women joined this comedy group—It’s Just A Stage--it stayed together for almost 8 years. Some of the members were myself, Andy Leonard, Barbara Haley, Marge Neff, Jill Rose and Lynn Crowley.

JJ:  Did you actually put on productions?

AP: Yes, I think at first around the coffeehouse scene, and the bars. Then we performed live at Oak Theater. Then in San Francisco we performed at the Full Moon Coffeehouse, and at the Artemis Café on Valencia Street.

There used to be so many churches and cafes that weren't traditional theaters, but you could do theater in them. It was such a wonderful time.  where you could just go and do theater. At this time in the Bay Area there were over two hundred small community theater spaces.

And there were lots of folks doing lesbian theater. In addition to It’s Just A Stage, there was – The Whole Works Theater Company which included Elaine Magree and Michele Simon. Then Stephanie Johnson and Vicki Dellajoio were also doing lesbian theater.

JJ:  Are you talking about that church on Market and Sanchez that burned down?

AP: They had a marvelous performance space.  It was I believe the space where the Eureka Theatre got started.

JJ:   That’s  where Rhodessa Jones staged  Lily Overstreet.  

AP: Yes. In 1974.  Throughout the seventies, not only were we lesbians, but we openly used the F-word: By that, I mean Feminist.

JJ:  When looking at who Grants for the Arts funded back then, there was a theater company called Lilith.  I could never figure out who that was.

AP: Terry Baum.

JJ:  So did both of these entities—your Lesbian improv comedy group, (It’s Just a Stage) and Lilith both existed at the same time?

AP: Yesl, we were established first.

JJ: If we look back on that period, we can see there were multiple arts organizations that were really run by lesbians but they called themselves women's arts groups.

AP: You got it. “Oh don't worry, they'll grow out of it. It's just a stage.” Hello?

JJ:  Okay, so Allan Estes arrived here in ‘77 as a 23 year-old college graduate from Boston and started Theatre Rhinoceros.

B&A: Which is still “America’s longest running LBTGQ  theater.”

JJ: Allen produced some play at a leather bar and it did so well that he opened a 50-seat theater in the Goodman Building, on Geary St, between Van Ness and Franklin. After he produced a few plays there, he had enough money to rent the space in the Redstone building on 16^th Street between Mission and South Van Ness.

One of the first things that happened was that City started a performing arts loan fund that enabled groups to borrow money, renovate a performing arts space and then pay the City back. So that's how Rhinoceros renovated its main stage and developed a second stage in the basement.

AP: My initial entry into Rhino began when Estes scheduled my play A Safe Light in the FY83-84 season and  Chuck Solomon directed it.

JJ:  Wasn't he with the Mime Troupe?

AP: Chuck? No. Prior to working with Rhino, Chuck was part of the Gay Men's Theater Collective, a group of 8 men who were doing what we were doing, utilizing all of the little performance spaces. What was unique about  San Francisco at that time was its small venues . Every weekend you could go and see us, you could see Lilith and the Whole Works Theater Company, another lesbian company formed by Elaine McGree, and Michelle Simon. It was just a hotbed of performance.  

JJ:  So I'm trying to remember when I met you at Rhinoceros. Didn’t you teach a playwriting course?

AP: Yes, The Playwriting Workshop. I was the Playwright in Residence. I was also the production manager, assistant artistic director, then artistic director…  I sort of played all the different roles there.

JJ: I remember writing the California Arts Council grant that I think was the one that hired you as the playwright, right?

AP: Yeah.

JJ:  When I look back, what I remember about Allan was that he did not have the typical gay man's approach to women. He could see that that he was going to have to have lesbians as part of his future theater. That's why he aggressively pursued the California Arts Council so that he could hire you to run the workshops and classes.  He was desperate to raise money: the first time I went to a Theatre Rhinoceros play there was a table in the lobby where volunteers were selling poppers.

AP: Allan was a visionary. He was also a very creative business man. I mean, I have never worked in a more underfunded, under-supported place. Rhino was blessed. We did so much with so little. We did a five-play mainstage season and a really full studio season. The Playwrights Workshop produced a little season of its own plays. That's the way people learn, by getting their play up on its feet and seeing it. So it was really fulfilling to produce there.

JJ: But at that time, while it was possible to get funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and Grants for the Arts, no foundations or corporations would fund Rhino. I remember Allan telling me he would meet people at the theater who would tell him “This show was really great and I'm so happy you did this.  I work for such and such foundation or such and such corporation.” Allan would say, “Well, can you help Rhino get funding?” And they would say, “Absolutely not…  I'd have to come out of the closet. I don't want to lose my job.” It really infuriated him.

Allen was an attractive and flirty gay man, as well as a relentless fundraiser. The three places Rhino did get funding were the City because of Harvey Milk, and the state ( where the Director was a gay man) and the NEA, I can’t remember how he secured that grant but he did. However, once someone from Ronald Reagan’s administration heard that the NEA was funding a gay theater company, they started searching for a way to defund it. The NEA Theater program assigned somebody to review Rhino’s organization, hoping to find a financial problem or some other irregularity. Ultimately the NEA staff defunded Rhino on the grounds that its artistic quality was below standard.   

Both Allen and I were totally committed to figuring out how to fund Rhinoceros. We both felt aggrieved that LGBT taxpayers were being ripped off by bureaucrats who acted like they were doing us a favor to award us a grant.  On occasion, we both felt entitled to act unscrupulously to overcome the institutionalized discrimination in the funding world.  

AP: I like to call Allan's business model ‘creative,’ rather than unscrupulous.

JJ: I remember how awful it was to be trying to fundraise for The AIDS Show, the first play about AIDS. No matter what funder Allen talked to, they all said the play was ineligible for their funding because its subject—the AIDS epidemic was “too political.”  

AP: First of all, Theatre Rhino was underfunded. Secondly, it was under-supported. Thirdly, we didn't realize it at the time, but we were not in post-traumatic stress, but in permanent traumatic stress. People were fighting for their lives

People would ask, “what do you think about this spot?” Of course, it’s a lesion and you’re pretty sure it's AIDS. However,  you wanted to be kind and sometimes kindness is better than honesty. But how do you handle that?

At first Rhino tried keeping a list of people who were sick, or who had died, but we couldn't keep up with the names. It became hard to produce a play: actors would come in, be there one day, and gone the next. We couldn't put on shows because there just weren't enough performers to do them. People outside our community couldn’t really understand what that was like; they just couldn't believe it.

JJ: I was already involved in writing the grants for The AIDS Show when Allen died and Cleve Jones recruited me to be the grant writer for the SF AIDS Foundation. Then I founded Mobilization against AIDS with Paul Boneberg. I was the first grant writer for Open Hand. Then my partner came down with AIDS and I took care of him until he died six months later. Suddenly AIDS just took over my life. Soon I had little time to work in the arts community because I was consumed by the absence of public funding.  After almost three years of pursuing AIDS funders, the situation had vastly improved: it was really exhausting—and terrifying. Finally I said  I'm out of here. No more AIDS stuff: I have paid my dues. I’m  going  back to raising funds for Queer arts and artists.  This was 1986.   Is there a recording of The AIDS Show that you know of?

AP: Theater Bay Area did one.  All of the shows at Rhino were taped. They were recorded for posterity. Oh, who were those filmmakers who made the films about AIDS?

JJ:  Rob Epstein and his partner Jeffrey Friedman. Maybe they  have a copy of the show?  Before I had started working for Theatre Rhino, I had met Rob Epstein when he was a ticket-taker at the Castro Theater.  It took him 5 years to secure funding for The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.  Not a single person, or foundation, or arts agency, or anybody would help fund it. Rob had to go to New York to raise the money. Allan was experiencing the same thing as Rob: that everyone in the Bay Area funding world was afraid that they would lose their job if they funded queers.

AP: Does The Performing Arts Archive still exist?

JJ:  Yeah, It is now called the Museum of Performance + Design. https://www.mpdsf.org

JJ:  I saw The AIDS Show over and over. I would take my friends  to see it. People had various reactions. One guy who I took to the AIDS show for his birthday present almost had a nervous breakdown. I assumed that because he and I were somewhat good friends and members of Alice B Toklas, that he knew about and practiced safer-sex. Then he confessed to me, no, I'm the kind of person that picks somebody up on the bus while I'm coming home from work, has a quick orgasm and then heads home to have dinner with my partner. He was barely able to make it through the show.

AP: To create the AIDS show, all of us at  Rhino came together to recruit artists to propose scenes. I don't think there were very many cuts. My piece in the show was called Mama's Boy. It was based on my experience being at the hospital with Allan and his mom in 1984, when Allen was one of the first LGBTQ artists to die of AIDS.

Hospitals treat AIDS patients better now. But back then, everyone covered themselves completely in hazmat suits to go into AIDS patient’s hospital rooms. People were saying the most shameful, cruel things to Allan’s mother, like, “Well, you know, if your son didn't act the way that he did…”  This woman's son is dying and this is the way people were responding to her.  We surrounded them and tried to just be as loving as we could. That's what inspired my piece.

JJ: I didn't know that. I remember Allan called me and said, “I just checked into Davies Hospital, I'm not feeling good.” Later that night I went to the hospital to see him on my way out of town. I was only gone for 3 weeks but by the time I got back, he had died.

AB: And what year was that?

AP: 1984

JJ:  Yeah, Allan died before the show went up.

Annie: I lived through the ‘great dying’ too. I was living in Manhattan. I did some safe sex porn for the Gay Men's Health Crisis and did a couple of projects with Act-Up. I remember when AIDS first hit and I lost many friends and lovers. Time heals, and time sort of erases the pain.

JJ:  Yeah, it's not something people really want to talk about anymore.

Beth: You know Seth Eisen's walking tour that he did about Sylvester? The best moments of that entire walking tour was his piece about AIDS. The elders were all crying.  The younger audience members were just staring blankly at us, because they didn’t live it like we did.

Annie: By the way, I performed at Theatre Rhinoceros around the Millennium.  The Queer Cultural Center, including Jeff, produced my show, Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn. We sold out all the six or seven shows. QCC generously paid me 70% of ticket sales. It was great. Pam Peniston did the set.

AP: I remember the first big grant we got together was that $75,000 grant? I was beside myself. It was a three-year grant, $25,000 a year.  I was just so thrilled. It was because the grant officer was also gay. It was from one of the private foundations. Yeah, this lovely man. I don't remember the foundation.

When the AIDS Show went up, it became Rhino’s cash cow: it ran for 9 months, five or six shows per week.  Then there was the second AIDS Show called, Unfinished Business. Then Grants for the Arts decided to pay for the show to tour to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC,  to Dallas and to San Diego. But when we were trying to raise money for the initial show, GFTA would not go near it. Leland Moss, after Allan died, took over as the director. Then he died too.  I tell you, it was a time.

JJ:  Yeah. Did you ever meet Ed Mock? He died in 1986.

Beth: You know, Darryl Smith, the co-Director of the Luggage Store, invited me to do an installation about Ed Mock which incorporated some of Mock’s costumes and footage of his performances. It was in that triangular space on Market Street across from the Luggage Store Gallery.

AP: Linda Hope, who was with It’s Just A Stage, danced with Ed Mock. She was a piano tuner.

AB: Jeff, did you say you were his grant writer?

JJ:  Yeah. He was one of the most brilliant dancers in the city’s nonprofit arts community. There was nobody else like him. So after Allen died,  why did the Board decide to hire Kris Gannon as the director? Why didn't they hire you?

AP:  Chris brought me in. She brought in Doug Holtzclaw. I think she brought in John Carr. She brought in a lot of people.

JJ:  Frameline had to respond to the question of why there were so very few lesbian films being screened in the annual festival. Then when Frameline  decided they would have a screening of lesbian films, I think at the Roxy, but after the lights were dimmed and the film started,  it was two men having sex. Frameline  had to deal with this issue. Michael Lumpkin, the founder of Frameline and its leader for almost 20 years, was committed to solve this problem. Back then you couldn’t just make a film on your computer. Michael Lumpkin believed “the reason we don't have enough films by lesbians is because making a film is expensive.” Nevertheless, Lumpkin seriously addressed the issue of how does the lesbian community fits into predominantly gay male organizations like Rhino and Frameline.

B&A: Yes, the gay men and gay women’s communities were very separate. Then when AIDS hit, lesbians stepped in to help with caregiving and AIDS activism.

AP: Not only were we dealing with people dying, at the same time we were dealing with how to deal with each other. That just didn’t happen automatically. You need to build trust, and that takes time and a lot of hard work. Men and women don't trust each other automatically. It's not there.

I know I'm not the easiest person in the world, but I am genuine. I will genuinely try to work on a relationship with you. So I have that going for me. We were underfunded, overworked, and we had to deal with different personality types. But at Rhino we had a great working relationship. I saw it. So learning to trust and work together at the same time was happening.

Kris Gannon started introducing women's work. She scheduled Jane Chambers’ plays. That brought a lot of women into Rhino.  So did having women working at the theater.  I tried to bring in women of color to make new works and to build relationships with other organizations. I brought in the first trans work.

AB: Was that Kate Bornstein? Was Kate's the first trans work that you produced ?

AP: Yeah, but  there may have been other trans stuff before her.

JJ:  Was Kate already trans when you met her?

AP: Yeah.

JJ:  After Kris Gannon there was Ken Dixon, who was a very queer black guy. He had a very strong view of how everything should be. I didn't have very much to do with him because he didn’t hire me. But when he died,  you became the director, right?

AP: Yeah.

JJ: You knew Tony Press, who worked for me at that time. All three of us were here in Pacifica. But what year did you become the director of Theatre Rhinoceros?

AP: Well, I was acting director for a couple of years. It's almost like a curse to really accept the reins. So I was just an acting director. I was there for about 15 years in total.

 JJ:  So in the 90s, Theatre Rhino was more or less a mature organization. I think the only reason queers ever achieved large-scale acceptance in the funding world was because of AIDS. For the first time it was ok to fund queers. Then it was possible for you as the director to get funded.

 AP: Yeah, right. I was doing stuff like trying to work with Theater Esperanza, bringing the Lesbian Brothers out from New York and trying to just give people space and let them do their thing. You know, that was a big thing for me. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I will give you the space to do what you want, because I think that's what people need.

 JJ:  So which play by Cherrie Moraga did you produce?

 AP: We produced GIVING UP the GHOST in Rhino’s 88-89 season

 JJ:  That's before she and Ellen Gavin were living together, right?

 AP: Yes, exactly. An interesting thing about Brava Theater Center is how it morphed.  Rather than close down It’s Just A Stage, Ellen and I discussed transitioning the 501c3 into Brava! For Women In the Arts. Both organizations had similar missions.

 JJ: Oh, I didn't know that. Ellen and I had worked together for four or five years. Everyone totally respected her because she was determined and relentless and she succeeded.

AP: I have a great deal of respect for Ellen Gavin. She created a multifunctional art  space in the Mission that serves a variety of communities.

A&B: What are some of the controversies you've faced in your life?

AP: Well… I'm not exactly sure how to answer that, but there were controversies and controversies. It's this darn lack of integrity, you know?

JJ:  So when did you leave Theater Rhino

AP: In the late nineties. I had a biopsy on my breast. Then I went back to the office and all of a sudden, I looked down and I'm bleeding. I wondered WTF am I doing? Then it occurred to me that this job is no longer good for my health. The Board got shady and it just became too much. There was a lack of integrity and there was infighting, and all of that just built up. It wasn't any one thing.

JJ:  I know you did something with Pam Peniston before you left, right?

AP: Yeah. Pam worked on a lot of my shows and did a number of sets for me. I'm very grateful for all of the artistic relationships. There were so many wonderful people that I worked with that I loved. Vola Rubin was another wonderful lesbian designer. Stephanie Johnson was the lighting designer. Iva Walton was another really talented set designer and production manager. Clay and Rosie, two very talented people who worked in production. So many people that I really adored.

JJ: Now I remember that you were having health problems.

AP: I didn't realize it at the time, but there was a tumor growing in my brain. It was too much.

AB: Did you retire at that point completely or did you go on to do more great things?

AP: I kicked around. I started teaching computer skills for an adult school. I worked with at-risk youth with the Bridges program. People get out of prison and they need those skills. I was also teaching senior citizens. I did that for 15 years.

JJ: And that was easier than Rhinoceros?

AP: You know, it was challenging as well. But I had to make a living so I did it.

JJ: I want to ask you about John Fisher, who now runs Theatre Rhinoceros, because I've never met him.

AP: I only met him a couple of times. I no longer go to Theatre Rhinoceros, so I can't really say. But he is a playwright and director.

JJ: I confess that I haven't gone to any of his plays. I also saw that right around the time you were leaving Rhino, the New American Conservatory Theater came along. We used to call it the “Nude Conservatory Theater” because their early plays were publicized  by advertisements that featured  hot-looking young men of color being leered at by middle aged white gay men. Like me, the director, Ed Decker, was from Austin.  Ultimately, he must have done something right because after the Millennium his theater company began played the role that Theatre Rhinoceros used to play. Eventually they started doing better work: I know Jewelle Gomez did work there.

AP: Yes. Bless her. I did go see her play on Alberta Hunter, which I thought was really well done.

A&B: We did a theater piece there in 2006, Exposed: Experiments in Love, Sex, Death and Art. 
What would you say are your greatest achievements?

AP: In general I would say that my greatest achievement was creating opportunities for theater artists to create work . In so far as my personal work was concerned. I loved “Pulp and Circumstance.” I wrote it in collaboration with Sue Zemel, Anne Bluethenthal did the choreography. Vola Reuben did the set. Stephanie Johnson did the lighting.

As a kid, I wanted to be a country western singer. So the main character is this butch young woman who wants to grow up, move to Nashville and sing country western music. Naturally her mother is horrified. Most of the activity takes place in a lesbian bar in the fifties. The cops come in for their pay off. The owner of the bar is another butch woman. There's a black and white female couple and  a couple of beatniks.

Pulp was extremely successful for the theater. It toured down to L.A. for a festival and it won a number of awards. I also did a play based on Judy Grahn's book Queen of Swords. I'm very proud of that.  I'm proud of both shows for different reasons.  Pam did the sets and the choreography. The set was this fancy scaffolding. Terry Sendgraff did some aerial work with the cast ande there was a chorus of crows that Pam outfitted in masks. Queen of Swords was in Rhino’s 88-89 season.

A&B: Was any of your work focused on environmental issues?

AP: Yes, my play Coconut takes place on an island, when developers are trying to destroy the island. The lead role is a lesbian shaman who runs this resort where people come to get healed. In the end, the island winds up being reclaimed by the volcano.

JJ:  Was that before 1997.

AP: Yeah.

JJ:  I remember Pam was working on that near the millennium. So the two of you have had a very long, collaborative history?

AP: A long and illustrious collaboration, yes. And we still do. Pam and I now collaborate on Photography exhibits

Annie: Adele, were you the director of Theatre Rhino when I did my show, Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn?

JJ:  I think maybe that was the second or third National Queer Arts Festival, which would have been the year 2000 if I'm not mistaken.

AP: Well, I was gone in 2000.

AB: Adele, where is Rhino’s archive?

AP: I think Doug Holtzclaw gave it to the University of California in Berkeley, He was artistic director after me and before John Fisher.

AB: I'm so glad your archive is in a good, secure spot. That's great. You did a lot of really important work.

JJ: It’s been very pleasant for me, Adele, just hanging out with you, after many years of not hanging out. Just to see you.

AP: Yes, it's a pleasure.