Keith Hennessy: Hi everyone. Before we start, can you give me some context? What's guiding the conversation today?

Jeff Jones: We’re interviewing people about the transformation of San Francisco’s arts community after the early 1990s controversies about the City’s arts funding policies. Events from the late 1980s and early 1990s radically altered the City’s approach from supporting big-budget organizations such as the Symphony, Opera, Ballet and Big museums that served primarily affluent white audiences to funding arts organizations rooted in all communities that comprise San Francisco’s population.

​This project is informed by the queer community’s feminism and militancy. Keith, you’ve always demonstrated a strong connection to both of these values, and that’s the specific reason we wanted to interview you. For many years, you have been involved in activities where politics and the arts intersect. If you have any insights on how and why this process has evolved since the 1990s, that's really what we're looking for here.

B&A: We are also concerned that the people who made this arts funding history started dying before this history has been documented or preserved. So we are creating this archive as a historical record. With all the push-back against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we think it's important for artists, elected officials, educators and community leaders to be able to say, “Hey, they did this in San Francisco. Maybe we can do it here too.”

​And we have also witnessed and experienced your incredible contributions to sexual politics, sex education, sex worker rights and sex positive culture. Keith, you came from a small coal mining region in Canada, correct?

KH: Not coal-- nickel. I grew up in Sudbury, Ontario. My hometown had the biggest nickel mine in the world from the 1930s to the 1970s. The entire post-WWII boom in the US was built from steel that is alloyed from the nickel from my hometown.

B&A: How did you go from that mining region to where you are right now?

KH: Who knows why some of us escape our hometowns and some of us don't. I left Sudbury because I had to. Before I had any language to understand the kind of artist that I was to become, I knew that whatever I was, I didn't belong in Sudbury. I dreamed of moving to a big city from the age of 11 or 12 years old. The furthest my mind could imagine was Toronto, 5 hours away.

​I started dancing in high school. I was being called a faggot every week and it got worse and worse. No classes or lessons, but I was a competitive social dancer. I worked with one partner and we would rehearse in the hallways and after school. In late high school, we started escaping to Toronto and going to clubs, including gay clubs, because that's where the best dancing was. We were underage.

​The year after high school, I was so fed up with being told what to do that I worked 3 jobs, saved up all my money and moved to Europe for a year. I quickly realized I was a small-town kid with no idea of how the world functioned. I didn’t know how to be there. Then I saw modern dance. I saw Nureyev and friends (that was the name of the concert) in Paris. ​My path got clearer and clearer. Mostly I spent time in France, because I spoke French. I grew up in a bilingual-ish town and had taken French classes in high school. I wasn't amazing at it, but I was functional. I also went to Germany and other places, but that was harder.

When I was in France, I learned that the cool city in Canada was not Toronto, but Montreal. By then I understood class warfare and I knew I needed a college degree. So I went to university in Montreal, which is where I really started dancing. There's a very vibrant dance community there.

I also became an anarchist in Montreal, but I didn't want to be an anarchist with a college degree so I quit in my last semester of school, just so I wouldn't have the degree or any other validation from the state. When I left university the first time, I thought to myself, ‘I will never come back except as a teacher, to change the system from within, and to work with students.’ I kept to that.

B&A: But didn’t you get a Ph.D. at UC Davis.?

KH: Not until I was in my forties and fifties.

B&A: Was that experience useful for you?

KH: Totally. I was raised in a family where we were supported to think big. I had older brothers and sisters who charted the path. Some of them went towards politics, or psychedelics, or travel… and by the time it was my turn, as the fifth kid, I was out of there. None of them traveled as far away as I did. I realized I could live anywhere in the world.

After Montreal, I hitchhiked with a buddy to a juggling convention in California. I decided I was going to stay in San Francisco and be a dancer, and that's what I did. If you're an anarchist, you disrespect nation-state boundaries. So when I moved to the USA, I stayed here illegally for the first 10 years.

B&A: What was your UC-Davis dissertation about?

KH: I called it Ambivalent Potential. I focused on the 1970s and ended up whittling it all the way down to a queer and critical race analysis of contact improvisation. I looked at the internal tension within post-sixties politics: they could be liberatory or they could reproduce hegemonic or normative structures. Contact improv had all the ingredients to be one of the most radical dance technologies, but at the same time it was predominantly practiced by white people.

​How did it happen that a group of mostly straight white people could go into this space where everyone's included, whether it's the rave community or the Burning Man encampment, where alternative technologies look like they have liberatory potential but ultimately continue to reproduce heterosexual white norms? I've always been wrestling with that question about supposedly alternative cultures so that's what I did my dissertation on.

B&A: Have you published it?

KH: Only as a ‘zine, but with over 1000 copies sold and probably 2000 copies in circulation.

B&A: Which artists or people inspired you the most in your teens and twenties?

KH: I didn't know many artists in my teens and twenties but I had an uncle who was a figurative sculptor, aka naked bodies. He was the first professional artist I ever knew. He was the freak of the family and lived further from middle class norms. When I moved to Montreal I was very inspired by Margie Gillis, a super emotional solo dancer and by a group called Mime Omnibus, who worked at the experimental edge of physical theater through mime with rich visual images and non-narrative dream structures. I didn't have a mentor until I moved to the Bay Area and worked with Lucas Hoving when I was 22. Lucas, a former dancer with the Jose Limon Company, moved to the Bay Area from New York when he was an older man. His rigorous improvisation and composition classes left a deep impression on me.

JJ: What year did you arrive here?

KH: 1982.

JJ: The first time I saw you perform, Keith, was in 1989. You were with Contraband, right? I think I saw you dance at the Isadora Duncan Awards.

KH: The Izzies, yeah.

JJ: When I first saw you, you were dancing with Sara Shelton Mann’s Contraband. Could you tell us what Contraband pioneered as a dance company that nobody else did?

KH: I think Sara Shelton Mann has had a profound effect, not just on San Francisco’s dance community, but also on dance as both a political act and as a healing art. Through a feminist lens you can track her career’s trajectory and her significance as a world-changing artist. She's one of these classic, complex artists who has always been afraid of political identities and would probably never refer to herself as a feminist, even though last year she made an extraordinary work about reproductive justice that referenced the illegal abortion she had 60 years ago in the American South.

Sara’s body and mind know these stories very deeply and she has traveled a very feminist route. She has worked in male-dominated scenes and yet still found ways to assert herself and create her own path. She's worked with extraordinary feminists such as the internationally recognized, pioneering lesbian feminist dance company, The Wallflower Order.

When Wallflower broke up and evolved into the Dance Brigade, Krissy Keefer and Nina Fichter hired Sara to make new work with them, and I got to be Sara’s assistant. They were the very first people in the local dance community to embrace Contraband. They brought us into Furious Feet: The Dance Festival for Social Change that they organized in the 80s and 90s.

Krissy and Anne Bluethenthal, two feminist queer women choreographers who lead with politics, created the first Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival. When they invited me to participate, I invited my two straight collaborators from the Contraband era -- Jess Curtis and Jules Beckman, and we made this legendary dance piece Ice Car Cage with a driverless moving car that continues to be celebrated by people all over the world.

The work of many artists is deeply informed by feminism, but at the same time, there’s endless push-back. Not many young artists respond favorably to the word feminism because it conjures up the white feminists who resisted the brilliance and leadership of women of color, specifically Black women, among other conflicts about sex, sex work, porn, penetration, art...

As a teacher, I constantly have to walk students through white feminists who were intersectional before the word even existed. Socialist feminists like Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English were always lifting up intersectional politics because they were deeply involved with socialism and hard-left 1960s politics. They were always thinking about class and race. Now a weird trip is going on with dissing terms such as “feminism” and even with “dyke” or “lesbian.” Simultaneously, I'm working with some younger queer and femme artists who really want to know, “Who were the queer women in Bay Area dance before us?”

With Clarissa Dyas, Alley Wilde, and Queering Dance Festival we are producing a public talk called Dykes in Dance, which is going to happen June 18 in Berkeley. There was definitely push-back from some of our younger colleagues who are very hesitant to embrace or see themselves in community with lesbians or dykes, as if these historical terms meant exclusion to them. When they hear “lesbian,” they assume those are the people who excluded trans women, or bisexuals, or sex workers, and the people who didn't embrace Audre Lorde.

Anyways, many of the artists who were attracted to Sara were very politically engaged. Kim Epifano came out of the Dance Brigade. I came out of different anarchist scenes. Nina Hart was also very involved in anarchist and feminist politics. I was obviously queer from the late 80s onwards, and was extremely involved in ACT UP and Queer Nation; both crucial to the queeruption aka cultural and political uprisings in response to AIDS.

Those perspectives were always embraced in Contraband, but if you tried to pin down the group’s actual politics, you couldn't do it. It was a liberatory kind of dancing. When you saw it, you felt like these people were making a new world: they were bringing more freedom to the body, and to each other, and to their communities. Contraband’s dancing, which normalized contact improvisation’s genderless roles and women-lifting-men worked through and against the structures of misogyny.

Sara Shelton Mann is of legendary significance because she impacts all the political artists, from the people at NAKA Dance Theater doing really important work with immigrants and refugees to the Black queer collective “rupture.” Sara has worked with and mentored 4 or maybe all 5 of them, including collaborations with them in her own work. But Sara herself does not fit into any of the dance categories or identity categories or arts for social justice / artist as social work categories that today’s grants demand.

JJ: Sara and I moved here in the same year—1978-- and we're the same age. Every time I saw her work, I could never figure out how to categorize it. It felt like there was some Buddhist overlay that I couldn't put my finger on. She's always had a really bad approach to fundraising: she writes descriptions of her work that only she can understand.

KH: I think she just doesn't have the capacity to be a successful fundraiser because she grew up with extreme trauma and didn't graduate from college. She doesn’t feel like she’s one of those classy people who can get through the gate.

​In terms of the funding world’s changes, Sara couldn't get much funding in the 80s or 90s because she was too experimental, not strictly dance, and that kind of work was rarely valued by grant panels, especially in SF compared to NY. Now that kind of work can be valued, but she can't get funding because she's white, old, cis and doesn’t use the required politically correct language to describe herself or her working process.

​The fact that you can't categorize her should be lifted up as what's so exemplary and radical about her. The fact that you can't figure out her exact relationships to people is the queerest thing about her. The fact that some of the more politically engaged artists to ever come out of dance in San Francisco, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Mexico City are deeply impacted by Sara Shelton Mann is significant. And yet she can't get funding because she can’t connect her work to any particular political stance, social service, or any fundable dance style. In California and across the US the arts funding agencies have weaponized shallow versions of racial diversity and woke language and used it against actual political artists.

​I'm fairly successful at writing grants because I lie through my teeth and use bullshit language about race that embarasses me and my collaborators. I have to apologize to my collaborators of color and ask, "Do I have your permission to prioritize your role in the piece over mine, to overly emphasize your skin color and your historical background so that we can get money?”

These experimental queer Black, Filipino, Asian, Latino, and Indigenous artists go, “Yes, you get the coin, and you can say (almost) whatever you want about me. We know that arts bureaucracy is bullshit.” But the problem is that those of us who are actually political radicals and anti-racists helped create that language. You, Jeff, helped create that language. Because of you and me, especially you, so many new artists of color, queer artists of color, have been brought into the funding scene.

But at the same time, the language we created is now being used against us. It's paying lip service to anti-racism and decolonization, saying that they’re going to lift up artists of color when they’re never actually going to give them enough money to live off, to support a child, to retire. In fact, they’re reproducing segregationist language, encouraging the most inflexible, separatist, and essentialist ideas about racial identity, and that language is then reproduced in the artworks all around us.

JJ: Yes, it feels to me like we are back to where the arts world was in the mid-1980s, when we had words like “multiculturalism” and nobody knew what it meant. The California Arts Council is a really great example. They have a so-called “peer review” process, but it’s not the peer review system of 40 years ago that was facilitated by specialists in the arts discipline, who knew the significant artists and organizations and who was empowered to interrupt and correct any mis-statements of facts made by the panelists.

​Today, to determine who the agency should fund, CAC and the Arts Commission rely on inexperienced panelists who often don't know what they're talking about, and the facilitators are supposed to remain silent. As a result, funding decisions only minimally take into account the quality or the originality of the art being created or the history of the organization. Unless you can employ the jargon of cultural equity and inclusiveness, what you're doing as an artist becomes irrelevant. Moreover, last year CAC awarded a $60,000 grant to a non-profit with an operating budget of less than $10,000 because the process no longer takes into account the applicant’s capacity to manage the funds.

KH: I’m totally fine with giving artists and small non-profits huge grants. $60,000 is not very much money. If a tech worker of the same age with less experience in their field than any dance maker had a good idea they’d be given millions in venture capital. But CAC’s decision-making process is almost completely irrelevant. To get a better understanding of what was happening, I volunteered to be on one of the California Arts Council’s review panels. The pay was incredibly low and I confronted them about the absence of a decent wage. CA’s staff wrote back and said, “Well, we just do what we can with state funding, blah, blah, blah.” And that’s bullshit. If they wanted to fund excellent art with high community impact, they could pay more. Instead, they operate a totally bankrupt decision-making process and label it cultural equity.

​Being on a review panel showed me how it works: CAC recruits low level arts administrators who have full-time jobs. When these folks serve on the panel, CAC’s meager stipends supplement their existing salaries. As a result CAC can continue to easily recruit review panelists with limited knowledge and experience instead of attracting working artists or seasoned and knowledgeable reviewers.

The process takes place entirely on Zoom and there's no personal contact allowed between the panelists. You can’t even message each other. I was on one panel where you couldn't see who else was there and I had to ask, ‘Could you please reveal the other people who are on the panel?’ They don't want you to talk to each other. Some bureaucratic CAC staff member has conned the field into believing that this system produces equity and otherwise there will be bias. In “the old days,” being on a grant panel meant debating the proposals, learning from folks with different perspectives, even arguing. Now it’s all scoring. Data wins. As if increasing bureaucratization and dehumanization doesn’t create its own bias. We’re not that far away from AI grant reviewing.

JJ: Beth and Annie recently applied to the SF Arts Commission for a Cultural Equity Grant and the panelists tore them apart. The panelists had little or no idea about how non-profit arts organizations develop or how to measure success. Instead, the panel’s facilitator didn't feel empowered to correct any statement that was untrue. Since many of the panelists only read some of the proposals, the main presenter of the proposal is crucial to the process being fair. The current system needs to be trashed and re-invented from scratch. I think it would be better to pay specialists in the non-profit arts world to decide the recipients of grants of $50,000 than to continue operating the current system, that is of the same caliber as Russian Roulette.

KH: It's complex. We would have a different set of troubles if we did that. I think we need a funding ecosystem where some grants are peer reviewed and other grants, especially for longer term organizational development grants where you need to build a relationship with the funder, are not. It's weird to be subject to a new panel every year. For certain projects the concept of peer review panels makes sense, but the panelists need to be paid better. Low paid panelists reproduce certain problems that a more engaged panel wouldn't. I just wrote a grant to the Arts Commission, my first one in many years, where I'm the only lead artist, and I got the lowest score I've ever had.

My bias is that I don't talk to any funders ever. I don't respect what they’re doing. They’re probably good people, but I'm lying to them constantly. If we talk, I'm going to reveal what's actually going on, which is that the people getting the most funding are the biggest liars who have learned to game the system, not the best artists or the most curious and rigorous artists or the most dangerous to capitalism artists.

JJ: Yeah, the performative nature of contemporary American politics has completely taken over. Apparently, there's no such thing as truth. All that’s left is the hollowed-out and endlessly repeated rhetoric that disguises the basic corruption of the status quo.

KH: Right. But the thing is, Jeff, you had some really strong critiques that were totally supported by your community. When you were pointing out the white supremacy in local and national arts funding, you were supported by a community of artists who were coming from the left, including many people of color. What's happened now is that the language that you helped generate is literally now being used against people, to strangulate and stagnate the community.

​Three years ago, the California Arts Council basically said you had to pass a political obedience test to even apply. You had to write an approved racial equity statement to even be able to submit your grant. I spent days on it. I got so deep that by the end I felt humiliated because of how much I cared about it. Eventually I took the racial equity statement that the CAC used as their model, copied it, changed two words, sent it back, and it was accepted by the system. Proof that it was nothing but a fake gesture.

JJ: Many organizations of color should just say “I'm Black; what else would you like to know?”

KH: Right. My org helps a lot of queer artists of color to write grants and they're like, “Do I actually have to tell them I’m Black and I’m gay in every answer?” I say, ‘Unfortunately, yes, you do.’ Then white applicants, who mostly don’t even mention that they’re white in their bios or mission statements, have to portray themselves as anti-racists who prioritize racial justice. If you don't say it, you're not going to get the money. That has little or nothing to do with producing good art.

​In fact, if you're doing good art, you probably won't get funded at this point because the people judging you have no idea what good art is. And yes I know there’s no such thing as good art, and that “good art” has been used against politically-inspired artists, especially non-white and queer artists. Despite the difficulty of determining quality I still think we should be concerned about it, constantly undermining normative understandings of good and interesting and valuable, but not giving up on art itself, on quality, rigor, experimentation, impact on the field. Undoubtedly there are great and curious artists getting CAC money, but there's a disconnect between what they write and what they do.

​If I can lie,it means anyone can lie, even though I actually do create art with as much integrity as I can put into action. But we are also seeing new works that have no actual community involvement and the people of color who they supposedly “collaborated” with had no actual power.

JJ: Let’s go back to Contraband. What I remember most about Contraband was that it was a multidisciplinary performance where there was nudity and contact improvisation. Did that come out of Contraband, or out of Sara? Or did that come out of somewhere else?

KH: There was definitely skin in Contraband shows, but there was very little actual nudity. That was more in the works that happened around it, from artists like me or Jess Curtis who were more connected to sex positive scenes, queer scenes and sex worker culture. In Feminist and queer performance art there is a vital relationship to the body. Carolee Schneemann pulling a scroll from her pussy predates so many of us. But she leads directly to Karen Finley, who leads to different queer artists, and Ron Athey, who's cutting himself and bleeding as an HIV positive artist. I love artists who transcend the boundary of the flesh; orifices and bodily fluids are important in my work.

Annie Sprinkle, you changed the world. You're the most visible sex worker turned performance artist in the history of the world. There are really important things that happened in the long-running and constantly evolving post-porn project. We can see all of this movement between the Public Cervix Announcement and your Pornstistics, that asked questions such as “What if I added inch by inch the dicks I’ve sucked, would they equal the height of the Empire State Building?”

There is a combination of shamelessness and self-reflection on the shadow sides of the porn industry that inspired thousands of people. This is feminist work. We see an independent woman fighting for the autonomy of her own body, rejecting shame as a colonial, patriarchal construction that tries to keep people down. The whole notion that sex work should upset us on moral grounds is bullshit propaganda that comes out of a colonized mindset. Queers have different ways of seeing this through sex-positive, feminist and queer legacies.

Sara is impacted by these worlds, but in the same way that she defends herself by refusing the disciplinary boundaries around dance, she also refuses to join any movement. She's never felt at home anywhere. Part of her practice has been the idea that she is disconnected from everything and therefore she is in this liberated space. Faustin Linyekula, from Congo (DRC), one of the most important contemporary African dancers, who in his lifetime had experienced multiple names for the country of his birth once said, “The only country I know is my body.” He was also responding to political trauma on the body and refusing to participate in any particular identity.

Contact improvisation is a dance form that was first named in 1972, but comes out of a series of experiments impacted by 1960s era feminism, hippy culture, and critiques of power and hierarchy. It’s an anti-hierarchical form with no gender roles and no leadership, neither a choreographer or a man leading a woman in a duet. The ideals of 1960’s feminism, gay liberation, and left politics were adapted into this free-flowing dance form. At its worst, it's a hippie/new-age modality that really should fade away. At its best, it's one of the most radical technologies we have for rethinking intimate human relationships at the level of the body. It encourages us to improvise and negotiate how we touch and play with each other.

Sara was exposed to contact improv and it blew her world apart because she came from a dance world where the choreographer is in control, there is a correct technique, and you do it until you kill yourself. There's a recording of Sara saying that when she found contact improv, it was the first time she could push against a man and be met in her physical strength and not pay for it, not be punished for it, not be hit back for it.

Sara brought contact improvisation into modern dance and merged it with psycho-spiritual practices from different teachers. She studied every new-age and alternative healing modality on Earth and she synthesized all of these practices. And she keeps moving. The work she makes today doesn't look like what she made 10 years ago, or 30 years ago.

Her refusal to be categorized should be seen as queer, revolutionary and liberatory. I was rejected for many of my early grants because the panelists would say “that's not dance”. They just didn't get it. But Sara and Contraband did change the world. Now people recognize what I do in the dance world. It's also why I had a home in Europe for half my life, because there you can be rewarded for rigorous approaches to conceptual and experimental dance where you don't have to lead with a political statement to get gigs or funding.

Now we're constantly divided by bizarre tensions: in the funding world, the weaponization of woke language; in the current struggle for Palestinian liberation, the revisionary and weaponized notion of anti-semitism. If you cared about antisemitism, you wouldn't back the extremist right, white supremacists who have been anti-semitic since day one. You wouldn't back an apartheid regime or justify a war that kills children, or support putting our tax dollars into the war machine instead of into the arts.

JJ: It’s all connected. In 1980, I was the person who ran the Census in San Francisco. That gave me a really good understanding of who lives where. But when I started looking at my clients such as Theatre Rhinoceros, the Women's Philharmonic and the Mime Troupe, there was a disconnect: most of the arts money was spent entertaining affluent white people!

KH: Not just any white people, to be clear: it was the upper class and the wanna-be upper classes who were being served… affluent!

JJ: The 1980 Census found that San Francisco was a city where people of color were the majority. I saw that maybe 1% of the money was going to queers, 1% was going to Black people, 1% was going to Latinxers and almost 2% to Asian Americans. The pure tokenism of it all kept bugging me. So by 1985, because I demographically knew who San Franciscans were, it became clear that the vast majority of the residents were not even taken into consideration. When it was time to hand out arts funding, the arts were perceived as something for the well-educated, the well-bred and the well-fed.

KH: Let me do a slight intervention here. I think if you only lead with race, you create some of the problems that we want to avoid. If you refer to the audience of the opera as white and then refer to Contraband as white, you've really done a disservice to the actual liberatory politics that we want to uplift. What's significant is that the core audience for the opera is people who own their own homes, while the artists and the audiences of Contraband were low-income people living precariously in rental housing. Sara Shelton Mann has been working with economically disenfranchised artists for her entire life. But there's nowhere to write that on a grant application. Contraband was primarily an all-white troupe because of how segregated the dance scene was in the 1980s, but Contraband didn't create that segregation, and with no money to pay artists Contraband didn’t really have much power to change it.

​What's different about the Bay Area compared to New York is that the vast majority of artists of color in the Bay Area did not work in experimental forms for many years. In New York and Paris they did. But in San Francisco, Black artists did Black dance. In Contraband white modern dancers had to work for almost no pay and attend a minimum of 3-hour long rehearsals 3 times a week; there was only a very tiny group of freaks that would and could do that. And none of us at the time were living off family funds… We worked in bakeries, restaurants, teaching dance, driving trucks and mostly did not eat out except in Mexican restaurants that served burritos.

JJ: I know that the end of Contraband was complicated. Sara herself told me that the problem was that she could not raise the money to support the company.

KH: What happened is that the world gentrified and San Francisco hyper-gentrified. You could no longer make work here and not pay everyone. Sara had a highly functioning, amazingly productive, world changing company from 85 to 95. It’s also part of her working style to build things up, destroy them, and start again. It’s a very creative practice but it’s not sustainable.

JJ: But I don't think that was true in the 80s. I moved here in 1979 and it was cheap. Sara told me that financing the Company became impossible.

KH: Right. But what year do you think that happened?

JJ: I thought it was 1990. You're saying it's 1995.

KH: Yes. The company continued with Mira: Cycles all the way until 1995. When Sara moved here around 1980, she saw that Margaret Jenkins and Brenda Way had companies; she wanted one too, but she was never supported and couldn't figure out why.

JJ: She wasn't part of the 4-person sisterhood: Kary, Margie Jenkins, Brenda Way and Chris Hellman, the Chair of the Ballet Board.

KH: It wasn't just that sisterhood. I would guess that all of them were raised with more money and more family coherence than Sara. She never assumed (or lucked into or sought out) that she would meet a man, marry him, have kids, get a college job or broad social support. Sara is the ultimate lesbian archetype without actually being a lesbian. She's the crone witch who inspired thousands of children but never had a family of her own. She sacrificed family-making and financial security to build a world through dance.

JJ: Sara’s inheritors were people like you and Jess Curtis and others who started doing original work. After Contraband split up, didn't you become a member of another collective?

KH: Yes, CORE was made up of 5 people, the three “boys” from Contraband - Jess Curtis, Jules Beckman, me - plus Stanya Kahn and Stephanie Maher. We made one show, Entertainment for the Apocalypse (originally titled Psychic Driveby),which we performed in various places around the Bay, and in Salt Lake, LA, New York and Germany. It was similar to Contraband in that there were no political slogans on the stage, but the work was deeply political in terms of how we were thinking through the politics of the body, anti-hierarchical leadership, and what it meant to commit to expressing yourself. That’s not exactly true because both Stanya and I wrote and performed more explicitly political texts, but still not slogans. We produced work with no funding. We built everything ourselves. We performed in gorgeous shit-ass warehouses. I remember the conclusion of an early CORE performance: I was in heels and a gold dress swimming in the toxic dump of Islais Creek/San Francisco Bay while the other artists were on a pier holding giant flaming torches. You couldn’t use straightforward social justice language to describe the work. But you saw people who refused to be categorized by boundaries, women who were totally fierce in their relationship with the men on stage, grief about the death of revolutionary politics, and performances in alternative community spaces that we took over and transformed for our site-specific work. The body-art-collective as a site of activist ritual performance. The body and performance as a site of healing. CORE existed for about 4 years and then dissolved as we all moved on.

JJ: Where did you go after that?

KH: Jess Curtis, Jules Beckman and I moved to France to be in Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard, an experimental circus that had money to pay us. Stephanie Maher moved to Berlin and created a dance space in a former squat, and had two kids. Then they bought land and made Ponderosa, an influential rural community and art space outside of Berlin with workshops and residences for experimental art and improvisation, which has linked San Francisco and Berlin for the last 20 years. Stanya Khan became a successful filmmaker and visual artist. She lives in LA, has a child, was in the Whitney Biennial, and had a big show at the New Museum in NY.

JJ: Wasn't she a dancer also?

KH: She started off in dance, but was always also a writer, visual artist, and activist. She was raised in a 1960s militant radical household, so she's always engaged politics in her dance and visual art. She moved into filmmaking with her former partner, Harry Dodge, and they exclusively worked in film for years. A lot of Stanya’s notable works are experimental films that are primarily exhibited in galleries and museums. They're brilliant.

JJ: I remember she was in the second or third National Queer Arts Festival.

KH: Her work at that time was more performance art than dance. In one piece, she did a monologue about her mother while she took apart, cleaned and put back together a real gun on stage, next to a vase of jasmine flowers.

B&A: Tell us about 848 Community Space.

KH: 848 was founded in 1991, when Contraband was still going strong.This couple had a community art space that they didn't know how to make sustainable. They were going to get rid of the space, so we decided to take it over. We kept the name 848. I was at the very beginning of my work in sexual healing and sex radicalism and I said, ‘I'll co-found this place with my straight friend Michael Med-O Whitson, but it's going be a very gay space.’ 848 ran for over 10 years on Divisadero before it became Counterpulse on 9th Street, and then another ten years before it moved (and purchased!!!) 80 Turk St in the Tenderloin.

​From the outset we tried to make a space that wouldn't be identified with a single community. The very first Trans performance art and photography shows happened at 848 because no other venue would host them. Before there was a Black Choreographer's Festival, we held a mini-weekend festival of all Black choreographers. Before there were any Asian dance festivals, we had weekend performances showcasing Asian choreographers and dancers. There was a contact improv jam every Tuesday. Carol Queen and Patrick Califia held sex parties at 848. There was a sex worker support group that met there and produced performances. There was a sex worker art festival. And buddhists met there weekly for silent meditation at 7am.

It was a very queer, sex positive space, but the people involved in that side of it often didn't know that it was also a vibrant contemporary dance space. Some of that vibe emerged from Contraband, which mixed contact-improv with social justice politics, feminism and queerness. Both CounterPulse and 848 were very liberatory spaces for experimental and politically-activated performance.

San Francisco had been a hotbed of experimental work, but only now is there a thriving community of BIPOC artists doing experimental dance and performance. Look at the work that Amara Tabor-Smith has done for the last 10 years, or rupture collective, or the work that Jess Curtis lifted up with some of the emerging Black artists fiscally sponsored or produced by his non-profit Gravity. Gabriel Christian and Chibueze Crouch of oysterknife just did a massive Black mass at Grace Cathedral called mouf/full. These experimental Black artists are referencing Black folkloric forms and Black diasporic culture, but they also see themselves as contemporary artists who don’t want to be constrained by their racial identity, but liberated.

JJ: Where did Jessica Robinson go? Is she still around?

B&A: She became the brilliant Executive Director at CounterPULSE.

KH: Jessica Robinson Love rocked CounterPULSE. She took it from this ragtag, barely funded group and stewarded the transition of 848 to CounterPulse, from Divisadero St to on 9^th & Mission. Jessica grew the staff in a way that empowered queer women’s leadership. She networked with funders and secured grant money to pay rent, staff, and to innovate expansive programming. With a team, she pioneered all kinds of amazing anti-racist and pro-immigrant dance projects. Jessica supported a very expanded concept of dance.

​After 10 years, just as the organization was going to move to the new building, she stepped down. I imagined her thinking, “Whoever takes on the ED job is taking on a project for 10 years and I'm going to bow out.” She went into philanthropy. She was never that solid as an art maker, but her creativity thrived in arts administration and executive leadership. Jessica left CounterPulse and the arts to move towards funding larger social justice projects.

JJ: Did she leave San Francisco?

KH: No, she stayed. She really dropped out of the art world and went onto the field of international development. She passed the leadership of CounterPULSE to Julie Phelps, who literally came into the art world in the Bay Area as Jess Curtis's assistant and then mine. Julie stewarded CounterPULSE for 7 years and raised 7 million dollars to buy that building. She further developed the organization’s queer, anti-racist, feminist, and neighborhood-based politics. With her team she created programs of art for poor people and for disenfranchised and marginalized populations. Jessica Robinson Love and Julie Phelps have left an extraordinary legacy in San Francisco.

JJ: I noticed that soon after the Cultural Equity Grants Program started operating, most of the organizations Grants for the Arts wouldn’t fund got funded by the Arts Commission, and then subsequently got funded by Grants for the Arts. That was the new approach for many people.

KH: Yeah, many people did that, including me.

JJ: I could never figure out why you were shut out in the first place.

KH: Because the head of Grants for the Arts was a fucking idiot and a control freak. No one will say that publicly, but this can go into your archive. The GFTA panel recommended me for funding and she blocked it. This isn’t only about me. GFTA criteria was biased towards more professional and more normative organizations, gatekeeping who could advance in SF arts. GFTA didn’t give enough money to small organizations, while prioritizing millions for the large white led and white serving art institutions. For years GFTA offered the only steady annual operating funds, which is what you need to be able to hire staff. When you're just getting project funds through the CAC or the SF Arts Commission, you can't build an organization. You can't build power.

JJ: I understand that. But in 1993 the reality was that Grants for the Arts was the biggest arts funding source. Back then, Blacks, Latinos, AAPIs, Native Americans, women, queers, together received about 8% of the agency’s funding and almost half went to large organizations.

KH: The creation of the SFAC Cultural Equity Grants Program was brilliant and goes down as one of your central legacies Jeff. Your tombstone will have a lot of text, but that will be one of the statements on there. Without Jeff Jones we wouldn't have had the Cultural Equity Grants program and its very radical impact on the Bay Area’s arts community or its global impact because what happens in San Francisco affects the world.

JJ: Yeah. No other city has set up a Cultural Equity Grants Program anywhere else, but by osmosis it seems we won that battle.

KH: Now grants across the US use the language of racial equity and radical inclusion to lift up disenfranchised people because of the pioneering work that you and others did with the San Francisco Arts Commission.

JJ: At one point, after I wrote my first report on hew agency, Kary Schumann contacted the Board Chairs of my clients and told them that they needed to fire me.

KH: She's part of a long line of nepotistic, jealous people in the San Francisco city government. But I need to say, at one point you said, “ Close GFTA and leave only the Arts Commission.” I fought you on that behind the scenes. I did not agree.

JJ: I'm very happy I lost that battle because I've noticed that some GFTA decisions are now actually better than a lot of those happening at SFAC.

B&A: How long was Kary Schumann the head of Grants for the Arts?

JJ: From 1978 to 2019: 41 stagnant years. When London Breed got elected to a full 4-year term as Mayor, the first thing she did was fire Kary.

KH: Kary was a tyrant, but her replacement Vallie Brown was a completely inept person who was involved in the pettiest shit-ass nepotistic politics in San Francisco history.

JJ: Annie and Beth got funded. That's all I’ll say.

KH: We are not better off with Vallie Brown and it’s wonderful that she’s leaving the job. The best thing to happen with GFTA recently is that they've realized it should be a multi-year grant. So now the applications will be for two years. Many countries with more intelligent arts funding give multi-year grants to established artists and arts organizations.

​The Republicans have basically gone to war with San Francisco and have declared the city’s death on their national news. It’s the combination of real politics and the politics on the street, from San Francisco not taking care of its houseless people to the Republican’s war on the City’s reputation. The decrease in tourist dollars equals a decrease in GFTA money.

JJ: Yes. The amount available to the city is unknown right now. San Jose adopted that 2-year approach 10 or 15 years ago. I could never figure out why San Francisco didn't follow suit. The California Arts Council has those absurd state and local partner programs which are a total waste of money that should go to artists instead. Each one of the 56 counties gets a minimum of $75,000. What do they do with it? Nobody knows.

B&A: How important have grant writers been to you, Keith?

KH: Grant writers have never been useful to me because either they cost too much money or they don't understand my work. So I have learned to write grants in opposition to grant writers. I've always been very inspired by Jeff Jones and I've followed his work very closely, but I was never the right candidate for him to write my grants.

JJ: That's untrue. I wrote the MAP proposal that funded you.

KH: One grant, yes, and only because I was part of National Queer Arts Fest. But in general you were not my grant writer and the grant writers that my friends worked with all charged too much and wrote extremely generic bullshit, which of course worked but I wasn’t yet prepared to compromise like that. I tried working with Nancy Quinn and a few other people when I had some money. Every one of them failed for me. They tried to fit me into boxes that were not real. If I used any of my own language, I was immediately unfunded. So I had to fight my way into the grant world and in the last 10 years I've really enjoyed the money that has produced all my projects and it has allowed me to support hundreds of other artists.

B&A: We are so glad you’re getting the bigger bucks now, Keith.

JJ: In the early nineties, there were a number of radical political factors at play. Frank Jordan was running for Mayor. He went to the Castro and a bunch of people hijacked his shoes and displayed them in the front window of the Castro’s Queer bookstore. Right before that, when the governor vetoed the gay & lesbian rights bill, a bunch of people marched down to the state building and set it on fire. I was there.

KH: Me too. I was not in the front line, but I was two steps behind. When the barricades went through the window, I was standing right there cheering.

JJ: Then right after that, there was the Hunky Jesus controversy. And there was the controversy over the minister who Mayor Jordan appointed to the Human Rights Commission who said that queers should be stoned to death because that's what the Bible says. It was really amazing to be in City Hall watching people from our community screaming at the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors. They knew they had to do something. You were still doing 848 then, right?

KH: Yeah, we started in '91. I think we were also very much in that 1990s zeitgeist. There were all these different trajectories through the 1980s, including ACT UP, Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers, and other groups. But there were also hundreds of smaller groups, collectives, and artist collectives.

​There was a massive queeruption or queer cultural uprising all over the Western world in response to the political repression of gay men and queers during AIDS. When people realized that the government would let you die and actually participate in your death, that was a radicalizing moment when a huge political shift occurred. It's not unlike what's happening right now around Palestine. Watching Biden’s regime trying to silence dissent and seeing the big universities surrender to Congresswoman Stefanik’s McCarthyite trials has literally empowered the protestors. They have nothing to lose now. The government is more concerned about people saying “from the river to the sea” than about the fact that the US is buying the white phosphorus bombs the Israelis are dropping on Palestinian families.

In the early 1990s, the first waves of massive gentrification affected cities. Embattled artists and queers who needed cities to survive were being pushed out. There was the AIDS activism and the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. But by then, those battles were over at the street or community level. The people leading the 1990s intersectional feminist movement were anti-racist and pro-sex and understood the class politics of the sexual body.

People don't realize it, but we were having early discussions of antiracism and sexism in queer politics too. Every single ACT-UP and Queer Nation chapter had to ask, “Are the white gay men in charge, or are we gonna let women be in charge? Are we going to let people of color speak and lead?” Every chapter had to face structural racism and sexism in their organizing. The diversity we have today resulted from those struggles, even if many of those fights seemed petty and annoying.

The last thing I’ll say is that there were aesthetic impacts too. The cultural revolution in response to AIDS and the zeitgeist of class politics, race politics, gender and sex politics, produced an extraordinary amount of art and culture. The legacy of those lines of inquiry and artistic production are still very activating today.

JJ: Yeah, what was happening in art happened in politics. In the early 1990s it was almost anarchy. We weren’t afraid and we didn't care if straight people didn’t like Piss Christ, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos or the Hunky Jesus contests on Castro Street on Easter Sunday. It was a bigger movement that took many different forms. Everything seemed to converge: Queer Nation, the Transgender Rights Ordinance, the mayor's shoes being ripped off, the launch of the Cultural Equity Grants program, the defeated re-election campaign of George Bush Sr. It was an extraordinary moment of queer politics.

KH: A book could be written about the history of the unpermitted marches in San Francisco. I've been here long enough to watch multiple generations wake up to the fact that you don't actually need, and generally shouldn’t ask for, permission to march. The Dyke March became legitimized through arts funding and got permits afterwards, but not at the beginning.

We, my Circo Zero co-worker Alley Wilde and I, produced an event last year called Queer Joy. It was a very off the grid thing where we got different performers to perform along Valencia Street in alleyways and parks. We traveled to each site with a sound system and a group of people waving these beautiful flags made by Monica Canilao, a collaborator of mine who also works with Annie and Beth. The police came and asked, “Where's your permit?” We said, “You must be new here. We don't need one. Keep us safe or go away. Or hang out and enjoy the art!” And they admitted, “You're right. You don’t need a permit.” You don't need a permit to walk down a street in San Francisco if you’re too numerous for a sidewalk: it's freedom of expression and you have a right to do it. I’m from the anarchist school of culture, so I would do it anyway.

B&A: What unique contribution do you think you made to San Francisco's art history?

KH: I think I helped foreground an anti-disciplinary approach to experimental performance and to pioneer a mashup of the sex-positive world with the art world and with the world of far-left politics. I brought those things together and nurtured a legacy that is still in progress. I also pioneered “no one turned away for lack of funds.” I advocated for it starting in the 1980s and now it's a norm in many places in the Bay Area.

B&A: Thank you for all that. What more do you hope to achieve, if anything?

KH: I have a lot of artistic ideas I’d still like to explore. I want to find ways to bring together the work I've done around dance, anti-racism, sexual healing, intimacy and pleasure healing. I would like to build more bridges between dance and performance and the sex and intimacy work that includes trauma informed consent and new ways to practice and innovate more ethical and free relationships between humans, as well as between humans and all beings and the earth itself. I think about capitalism politically and as a system of relationships that we need to redesign through practice. It's not about taking down leaders, but about creating new political systems by creating new forms of human relationships. And I want to spend more time in water, dancing and healing in water.

B&A: How do you feel about trigger warnings for dance performances?

KH: I'm definitely disappointed that the bar for trigger warnings is so low. In 2023 CounterPULSE wanted to post a trigger warning for potential nudity in my performance with Ishmael Houston-Jones, in a venue I originally co-founded as a sexually explicit performance space. I do understand how some younger queers are thinking and feeling, especially the trans or nonbinary people with their different ways of processing gender dysphoria and gendered abuse. I don't think a nudity warning, for example, should happen for dance or performance art. Especially for elder gay, politically radical, artistically experimental artists who have been naked on stage for 40 years. But I do recognize the importance of certain kinds of trigger warnings.

​ In early feminist theater, there was a real question: if your work was anti-rape, are you allowed to show a rape on stage? Feminist theater has now hit a point where it was no longer useful to show rape on stage because it pushes too many people into their traumas without giving them a way out. This is constantly an issue in film. If you reproduce the slavery era in a movie, should we see brutal whipping or should it happen off-screen? What do we lose or gain if we don’t acknowledge it? There are reasons to think about the potential for art to trigger trauma, but when trigger warnings happen at the very lowest common denominator, they're actually a form of surveillance and control that feels neither democratic nor liberatory.

I think “safe space” as a political strategy is a dead end. I think we need to do more work, not only around safety, but around resilience, risk assessment, and being able to work with trauma.

B&A: We agree completely. You've been an artist on the cutting-edge doing radical work and sexually-oriented work. Do you have any guilt or remorse over any “mistakes” you may have made?

KH: I wouldn't be human if I hadn't made some mistakes and I wouldn't be a good human if I couldn't own up to them. I should have tried to institutionalize myself in the funding world earlier than I did, but my anarchist tendencies kept me from doing so. In terms of both race and gender politics, at different points in my career I have overstepped my bounds as a white male artist. I do recognize that I did things that hurt people's feelings and hurt some relationships. There are a few occasions where I just exploded and burnt things down or provoked more than made sense to the context when I should have found a more subtle way to move forward, but mostly I regret not being more radical and louder. Oh and sometimes I really regret that I didn’t save and invest any money.

B&A: As you reflect on your contributions to the arts, and the challenges you've overcome, what advice or insights would you offer to emerging BIPOC and LGBTQ artists today.

KH: The first thing I would say is to put aside a minimum of $1,000 per year into savings for retirement. Next, I’d say have no shame about gaming the system that was literally structured to oppress you. You're allowed to lie. You're allowed to misrepresent. You're allowed to double dip. You're allowed to, as Remi Charlip asserted and practiced, make the same work twice and simply change its name.

Alley and I have had to convince many artists of color that in grant writing they're allowed to bend the truth, exaggerate, even lie and cheat. Grant guidelines do not want you to write what many artists really want to write: “We want to get together with some excellent people and develop new ways to love each other and lift up each other’s creativity. We’re dancers and musicians who love a good show but we’re not sure what will happen. Most likely there’ll be a show, but if not, your meager $20K or $50K will be well spent supporting artistic experimentation that reimagines white supremicist capitalist heterocis patriarchy. Oh and by the way here are samples from the beautiful work last year and the year before.” You wouldn’t believe the contortions we go through to rewrite that proposal in exactly the right number of words and characters, with necessary yet repetitious assertions of our commitment to racial equity. Artists of color are so much more familiar with being surveilled and being targeted, of needing to be respectful and follow bureaucratic rules, while white people get away with a lot more. I really try to empower younger artists to disrespect the government and to disrespect bureaucracy when it's not serving them. You’re allowed to speak out of both sides of your mouth. You're allowed to lie on paper. ​

The third thing I'll say is that your community and your political movements are beautiful inspirations and holders of your work. Be connected to political movements. Develop an ethical ground for your actions.. If your overall intention is to lift up your community and to lift up a revolution against colonial shame of the body, then say whatever you need to get the grant! Stay radical and experimental and uncontainable and ever changing.

JJ: I’d like to have a longer conversation with you about the current quagmires that we're in around funding and politics, and how we're in a period of American history where there doesn't seem to be any ethical or moral backbone anymore.

KH: I tend to stay away from the idea of morals and I go to ethics, because I want people to have an ethical base for what they do, more than a moralistic sense of right and wrong. So yes, I think we need political ethics. We need to actually understand what feminist ethics look like, what a kind of queer ethics or anti-racist ethics or de-colonial ethics look like, and ground ourselves in those kinds of movements.

B&A: Thank you so much for sharing your life experience, thoughts and your survival strategies Keith.

JJ: Yeah, this was great.

KH: Love you people. Good luck. Goodbye.

 

B&A: Hi Marga, we just saw your show, Swimming with Lesbians. It was incredibly brilliant. We laughed so hard. It felt so good. You're such a skilled performer. We are excited to talk to you.

JJ: Marga: When did you move to San Francisco?

MG: I moved to San Francisco in…well, I've always been cagey about the years because of, you know… show business. But I figure I’m not going to live forever. So, I'll just be upfront with the years. I moved to San Francisco in 1976, the bicentennial year. My parents were entertainers who lived in New York City and I was their only child. I grew up in that milieu. I shared their passion. They worked in Spanish-language arts and entertainment. The community was a marginalized community: lots of people in it, but not mainstream.

When I came to San Francisco I didn't really have any kind of plan except for freedom. Growing up with my parents, even though they were entertainers, my mother was very repressive and strict. I wanted to get away from her. They had just found out I was queer. I came out here with my first girlfriend but we broke up on the ride.

When I first got here, I assumed that the Castro would be a Cuban neighborhood. I went to the Castro Cafe because I thought they'd have rice and beans. They did not. Guys were wearing Fidel Castro hats and green khakis. Then I realized nobody spoke Spanish. But I found a place to live very easily because there were all these cafes, like the Meat Market Cafe in Noe Valley where there were big bulletin boards everywhere, because we didn’t have Craigslist or anything like that. Everything I did came from a bulletin board. I found a cheap room to rent. At that time, artists could afford to live in San Francisco.

The central radius of my life became the Castro. My housemate lived in Duboce Triangle but she wouldn't let me use the kitchen. She made costumes for the Angels of Light. So that was my first introduction to the Angels of Light and the Cockettes. Then I started going to feminist theater. There were companies like Four Short Women, Les Nickelettes and Lilith Theater.

I lied my way into a job at the Acme Cafe on 24th Street. Everyone who worked there, be it a cook, barista, or wait person, was an artist. Plus, I had another job working at Fanila's Finnish Bathhouse. I gave out the towels. Some people there had sex and some were Jehovah's Witnesses. The woman who worked the counter with me was in Lilith Theater. So, I asked her all about it.

One day, in the morning as I was putting the muffins out at the Acme Cafe at 7 am, I saw Carolyn Meyers from Lilith walking by. I ran outside and asked her, ‘do you ever have auditions?’ They just happened to be having auditions for women of color. This is sort of a double- edged sword because it's tokenism; but whatever, I auditioned. I was pretty green and erratic as a performer, but they took me because I am Latina. And I’m charming. In 1978, I wound up in Europe on tour with Lilith Theater. I was 21.

B&A: How old were you when you got to San Francisco? Wikipedia said you were born in 1960.

MG: Alright, I'm gonna say it. I was born in 1954. I lied to my Wikipedia. That’s show biz. But the jig is up, and even now as I'm talking to you, I’m trying to recalibrate what the actual years were. So I think I arrived when I was 19. You can do the math.

I went from this feeling of entitlement, being a kid with show business parents who were stars in the Spanish language community, to suddenly touring with a feminist theater company throughout Europe. The governments in Europe were very supportive of the arts and artists, so we were treated royally. We played in a lot of festivals, circus tents, that sort of thing. There were so many feminists and lesbians who came to the shows. And men who were feminist in their own way.

My touring performances in Europe were the first time that I actually earned money as an entertainer. I worked with Lilith on and off. I think I went on a second European tour with them in 1981; then I came back to my job making omelets at the Acme. There was a publication back then, called Backstage I think, where you could find out about auditions. I auditioned for Les Nickelettes and worked with them on a couple of shows. That was basically my life from 1976 to 1982.

Lilith was savvy with getting grants and doing business. We shared this big office space at the Women's Building on 18th Street with Women Against Rape and various other organizations. I'm glad to see that the Women's Building is still there, which is kind of amazing. We were right over the Irish bar, which I don't think is there anymore, right?

JJ: Absolutely. Yeah, that was the Dover Club, the Irish Republican Army bar in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The bar was already there when the Women's Building bought the building.

MG: From 1978 to ‘82 I worked with the Les Nickelettes which was a lampoony, satiric, silly company. But they were doing something important because at that time women weren't doing bawdy burlesque comedy. Denise Larson published a book in 2021, Anarchy in High Heels: A Memoir about Les Nickelettes. Denise is a lovely person, and she has been so supportive. There is also a documentary about the Les Nickelettes in the works.

In 1982, just before we knew anything about AIDS, I was working at a store on Castro Street called High Gear selling gym wear: T-shirts, gym shorts, duffel bags, socks, jockstraps… Selling jockstraps is a pretty easy job. I worked with 2 gay men that I loved very much. I was pretty happy. Around that time the comedy scene was blowing up. There was Jane Dornacker with her hilarious traffic reports, and her band Leila and the Snakes. She also performed live with the rock band, The Tubes for a couple of years.

I really wanted to do stand-up comedy so I started going to comedy clubs. I think Robin Williams began Mark and Mindy a little bit before that. There was the Holy City Zoo, a dark, aggressive and misogynistic club that was not good for me at all. The Other Cafe was a little bit better. Sometimes Paula Poundstone or Ellen Degeneres came through the door.

But I did not do very well at The Other Cafe. At the open mic nights, they always put me last on the bill, if they even put me on at all. They called it, “comedy audition.”

I was in Europe when Harvey Milk was shot. In 1979, there was that demonstration with the police cars turned over and all that. I remember seeing the newspapers with the largest, darkest headlines. I couldn't believe it. When I got back in 1982, people were discussing releasing Dan White from prison. We held a big demonstration on Castro Street and a lot of us were mixing political activism with comedy. We knew that comedy was a powerful weapon. So we were pumping up the crowd, rallying with the upper hand that you have as a comedian.

Then, on a telephone pole, I saw a notice about Valencia Rose’s gay comedy night. I went and it was like a complete 180 from what I had been experiencing at the straight comedy clubs.

You know, when you do stand-up, you have to make yourself into a persona. As a lesbian, I didn't know how to do that, I just did quirky stuff. But I didn't mention anything about my sexuality. But the first time I went on stage at the Valencia Rose I could just talk about dating, about coming out. There was always a full house, because finally queer people were not the butt of the jokes. These were the jokes that everybody was waiting for. We were doing them, with waves of love and laughter simultaneously.

Donald Montwell and his boyfriend Jimmy managed the Valencia Rose. Donald was definitely one of my mentors, because I was still not sure if I wanted to be out. Did I want to risk not getting my own sitcom or anything like that? Which is what happened if you were out. Ellen was doing really well doing comedy in San Francisco, but she was not out.

Donald and Jimmy were not your stereotyped gentle gay artists. Instead, the two of them were brawlers. On White Night in May 1979, when the cops rioted on Castro Street and were beating the shit out of everybody at the Elephant Walk Bar, I guess the cops pushed Donald over a newspaper box. He was injured, he sued and got lots of money. He and Jimmy were always down to fight with cops.

JJ: Ron Lanza and Hank Wilson owned the Valencia Rose.

MG: They were school teachers. Tom Ammiano was also a school teacher before he became a politician. He was always a very funny person who wanted to do stand-up. Of course, we all knew that if you went to a club like The Punch Line, it would be pretty painful and very hard to beat the misogynists in the audience. Tom wanted a place to do standup and they came up with the Valencia Rose.

JJ: I had been Tom’s campaign manager when he ran unsuccessfully for the School Board in 1980. I also became one of Hank Wilson’s long-term political allies. He asked the questions that most people didn't dare ask. Tom’s motivation was that he really wanted to be a stand-up comedian and the Valencia Rose started his career. That's where I first saw you Marga, with Tom, on a double bill.

MG: At the Valencia Rose, everyone there knew Whoopi Goldberg. That's where I met Whoopi Goldberg.

JJ: Me too.

MG: Whoopi was always supportive of Donald and Jimmy, who was also very good at throwing comedians out of the club. Because when we would have an open mic, some comedians would come up there and they would be kinda disrespectful and weird, Jimmy would just smile because he would get to throw somebody out. He just had this bouncer side. He was a playwright as well.

One of the Jehovah's Witnesses I met at the bathhouse told me that the Valencia Rose building had been a mortuary. She said that it was a painful place for her because that's where the previous owners had made most of their money during the Vietnam War. It was one of the main mortuaries where the corpses of the soldiers killed in Vietnam ended up.

JJ: It was ironic that this former mortuary became not only a comedy club, but by 1985, a place where the friends and families of people who had died of AIDS began holding memorial services that were celebratory.

MG: Then they lost the Valencia Rose. There was a tax issue or whatever.

JJ: The building was purchased by the now defunct New College of California.

MG: Yeah, now it's a bicycle store. It fell out of their hands because they were artists, so they weren't really keeping the books that well. But that’s where I established my voice as a comedian because my mentor, Donald Montwell, was very firm that I had to stay out of the closet. I couldn't go back in.

He had this philosophy that being queer isn't just about who you fuck. Being queer is about being subversive and being a resistor: like Paul Krasner, a straight satirist who published The Realist, a magazine that was quite renowned in the anti-war movement and the resistance movements that came after that.

I'd say Donald, Joan Menkin and René Yañez were my 3 mentors. Joan was one of the most magnetic, arresting performers you could ever see on stage. She was radical politically and most of her work was with the Mime Troupe. She was very committed to the people's movement and to crating art for the people. They might have reached out to me because they were looking for a Latina.

I appeared in a Mime Troupe show called Crossing Borders. It was about Salvadoran immigrants and what they were going through. I went on tour with that show. That's where I met Stacy Powers-Cuellar, who now runs Brava Theater. Maria Acosta played my sister in the show, or a cousin or something. It was a great experience to work with them. But I didn't really have the chops, to be honest.

A lot of my growth as a performer has been by working with really great performers. I never took an acting class that wasn't corny. By throwing myself into the highest levels of a performance company, I had to sink or swim. That's what made me the performer that I am, or am not.

My connection to The Mime Troupe and Culture Clash happened around the same time. Culture Clash happened because I was with Monica Palacios, one of the comedians I met at the Valencia Rose. We wound up being lovers for about 5 years. Well, she says 3. I say 6 years. So, we'll split it at 4. We started a little comedy duo called Gomez and Palacios, the funniest Latina Chicano comedy duo in the Universe and Oakland. We did some skits.

Monica had a connection with René Yañez from Galeria de la Raza. She and René were very close. She wound up doing some events and installation projects with René. I think this was in 1984. He wanted to do something different from the usual folkloric Cinco de Mayo kind of entertainment. He loved comedy and wanted to have an evening of Chicano, Latina, LatinX comedians. So, Monica brought me in. He brought in Richard Montoya who has gone on to be a very renowned playwright.

JJ: His wife is now the head of the California Arts Council.

MG: Cello? No kidding! Wow, that’s great.

JJ: Cello. Yeah, she's the chair. Ellen Gavin was on that committee.

MG: At first there were 6 of us: it was Richard Montoya, Jose Antonio Burciaga, Herbert Siguenza, Rick Salinas, Monica and me. But basically it was more of a variety show because Monica and I were really the only ones who told jokes. Then Richard did. Herbert was very much into doing drag. Then Burciaga would come on stage. He was like our anchor. We loved him so much. He was a stout guy, very Tex-mex. He came out and he pulled out a machete, and had the audience drink from a bottle of tequila and then he’d read his poems. He was really our favorite. So, the 6 of us worked as a group. A variety show really was what we were. Then 3 of us left and Rick Salinas, Herbert Siguenza and Ricardo Montoya became the Culture Clash that most people know today.

JJ: Around that time, didn’t Ron Lanza open up Josie’s Cabaret?

MG: It was right next to the empty lot at Noe and Market where the Eureka Theatre formerly was before it burned down in the late 1970s. It was across from Cafe Flor. That little triangle was amazing. Then Josie's got even more popular than the Valencia Rose. Now we get to the stage of the AIDS crisis. There was resistance to the inaction of President Ronald Regan

JJ: I remember seeing Brian Freeman at Josie’s. He started a group called the Pomo Afro Homos—the Post-Modern, African American, Homosexuals-- that produced very dark satirical comedies.

MG: Brian actually changed my life when I was just starting to do my first solo show. At Josie's I did stand up but I also started to stage my one-person shows there. It was a comedy club and a cabaret. It was a wonderful place to do solo performances, and shows with a small cast as well. Brian put my name in the ear of George C. Wolf of the Public Theater who brought my first one person show to New York.

So, okay, now we're in the 1990s. In San Francisco I met Josh Kornbluth at one of the comedy clubs. He had just come from Boston. He was very frustrated by the comedy scene because it was just so apolitical and still racist and sexist.

He wanted to do solo theater so he just started to do it. Then the Marsh Theater opened up, which specialized in new shows. It started at the Hotel Utah. Stephanie Wiseman and her partner went from having a one-night show at Hotel Utah to getting the back room of a place called the Cafe Beano on Valencia Street. That's where I did my first solo performance, Memory Trick, a piece about my mother. The show was presented by The Marsh, which now owns its own space at 1062 Valencia.

In the late 1980s, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She was a very high femme. She was always disappointed with how masculine I seemed to her. I was unlike the little frilly girl she wanted. Our relationship was fraught. I never got to work it out with her when she was healthy, so I had to work it out when she was ill.

Both Josh Kornbluth and Whoopi Goldberg both made their careers as solo performance artists. The dramatic solo form has been really good for queer and BIPOC performers to get our stories out there, and good for our audiences.

So, I did this show, and I thought, I don't know if I should be doing this. I thought my audience might get mad because I had only been doing comedy for years. But Memory Trick was very well received. Thanks to Brian I had a connection who wanted to bring the show to New York. After that, I just continued being both a stand-up comedian and someone telling stories.

Some of my solo shows weren't just about my family. Some of them were about being queer. I did a show called Pretty Witty and Gay. That was in the 90s, the time of lesbian chic, when lesbians started going on the talk shows. I was asked to go on the Geraldo Rivera show. Well, I just couldn't do it. I thought, this is a trap and I'm not gonna do it. It just felt wrong, like I was reducing myself to something on a TV show in between commercials with Geraldo. Even though he is Latino, I passed on it.

Instead, I wrote a show about lesbians in the media that I premiered at Josie's and I had workshopped it at The Marsh. I was doing the show but I didn't have all the lines. So, I had little cheat sheets everywhere. I wound up dropping my notes and they flew all over the place. I had to go down on my knees and just read them in front of the audience, which included Laurie E. Seid, and Kate Bornstein. They loved that I fucked up and kept going. From there, my show Pretty, Witty and Gay, got booked at the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

I do feel like I’ve been able to find opportunities without trying too hard. I don't know if that's the most sensible plan. I don't know that I'd recommend that strategy because that's also why I never paid much attention to the long range, to grant writing and all that stuff. Because I figured, hey, someone's always going to be out there to book me at another biennial. The 1990s in San Francisco, for me, was a mix of queer comedy, Latino comedy, and I started doing a lot of events for Latino organizations.

B&A: When was the Whitney show?

MG: I think it was something like 1994. I remember thinking this is sponsored by Philip Morris. I’ve gotta say that cigarettes are bad. I just got to, because my dad had pretty much died because of cigarettes. So yeah, I'm no angel. I took the cigarette money. If I had known Jeff then, I wouldn't have needed the cigarette money.

JJ: Did you perform at Life on the Water?

MG: Yes, I did. In fact, I got an award from the Solo Mio Festival. Who was responsible for that?

Annie: I was in the Solo Mio Festival too. There were four producers; Joe Bullock, Marcia Crosby, Kate Boyd and Billy Talon. Billy now performs as the Reverend Billy with the Church of Stop Shopping. Billy and the Choir are touring the USA with Neal Young right now.

MG: Yeah, but wasn't it Ellen Sebastian Chang?

JJ: Yeah, and Joe Lambert was involved.

MG: A year later, Donald Montwell was pretty ill. He got an award as well from Life on the Water or maybe from the People's Theatre Coalition. I think Susan Hoffman was the head of it. I remember doing something for Joegh Bullock when he ran Climate Theater. I think it was some kind of crazy Halloween party or something on 9th Street.

B&A: I was just at his memorial. He was an incredible events producer. So, were you ever in the Queer Cultural Center’s Queer Arts Festival? You probably did several of them, right?

MG: Yes.

B&A: Jeff Jones would have written some grants to help fund those shows.

MG: Yes, my relationship to grants back then is that I worked for presenters who got grants. I personally never got a grant. But I must have gotten paid with some grant money. When I did Memory Tricks, the show I did in New York about my mother, I remember not liking the audience feedback session because I felt they were telling me what to do as an artist.

JJ: Did you ever meet playwright Toni Press? We used to work together. She read a play at BRAVA and said the same thing as you about community feedback. She said it was the worst experience to be subjected to a bunch of people telling her how to write a play when she’s already written 20.

MG: Yeah, they're called “talk backs” where you get to listen to audience members tell you “it's not Latina enough;” “It's not feminist enough.” I'm sorry, please go see something else!’

JJ: Yeah, the whole premise is that people are gonna come in and give you feedback but eventually you end up with people telling you what you should have done.

B&A: What's your greatest achievement in your life and work? What do you feel most proud of?

MG: I'm a Gemini. So, my real answer is that my greatest achievement has yet to come. But off the top of my head, I feel very proud of how I adapted to the COVID lockdown. I didn’t stop and was able to put work out with live streaming. Work that meant something to people. Now suddenly overnight, I’m getting this thing, people are calling me a “Legend.” “Iconic.” That seems nice.

JJ: Okay, you're getting really old.

MG: Right. It's like, “why aren't you dead?” Sometimes on social media I see where somebody goes, “Oh I love her.” Then somebody as old as I am, if not older goes, “She's still doing it.” Yeah, and my work is better. I run into people who say, “Oh, I saw you in the 1980s.” What am I supposed to say? Do you think I'm the same person? Do you think I have made no progress? What is it like 40 years later? Come check out a show. All I ask is that every 40 years you come to a show!

Annie: What gets me is, “You look so much better in person than in your pictures.” Ouch!.

MG: I think that’s better than the reverse. People should just shut the fuck up.

B&A: What gets us is that sometimes a person will just come up to me and talk about my old work and just ignore Beth. That’s just rude. All my work for 22 years now has been created with Beth. We are a team. Have you run into a problem when you are with somebody and suddenly you are “a legend.” “An icon,”

MG: Yes, it's bad. It hurts. I will just say, ‘this is my partner’ and if they continue with their weird ass-kissing, I'll just repeat, ‘this is my partner’. Sometimes you have to train people. They think there's only one person there, and there's usually two or sometimes there's a group, and they're just myopic. I would never just talk to just one person when there are two people there.

Annie: Of course, sometimes I get ignored, because Beth is a hot shit professor, and I'm not. So, it evens out.

JJ: I want to go back to the 90s. I remember that you were doing a show at the Castro Theater. You had just come back to town. You had gone to LA or to New York, or both?

MG: Oh yes. Was that the show with Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams?

JJ: It was in the early 90s, because I remember it being after the Mapplethorpe controversy, and Andre Serrano's Piss Christ.

MG: That was probably 1993. We can look that up. It was a benefit for Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's film, The Celluloid Closet. Harvey Firestein was the emcee and he told some sort of lesbian joke that pissed off the women in the audience. Robin Williams was there and saw it happen. I was up next. So, I go up. I can't remember what I did. Maybe something like ‘this is what a lesbian looks like.’ No big deal. But it was a big deal because the show had fallen into this pocket of doom that Firestein had accidentally caused. But then everybody came back up and everything was great again. Basically, I saved the show from disintegration. Robin saw me do that. Then he booked me on the spot to be on HBO’s Comic Relief.

B&A: Can you talk about the Vagina Monologues?

MG: The second time I did the Monologues was I think in 2002. Jonathan Rice, who went on to produce one of my shows Off Broadway, contacted me to be one of the vaginas with Rita Moreno and Vicki Lawrence. That was at Theater on the Square. I wasn't very good and I was on the verge of getting fired. I knew how to write my own stuff and perform it, but to take someone else’s piece and perform it, I didn't really know how to do that. I got a call from David Stone who was the producer in New York. He wanted to know if everything was okay. I knew he meant that Rita and Vicki were not pleased.

So, I got my video camera, set it up and did all the monologues into the camera so I could see immediately what not to do. Then that night, I came in and killed it. I remember Rita said to me, “I don't know what you're taking, but don't stop.” After that they loved me. One bad night then, boom! Again, it was trial by fire.

B&A: You are still living in San Francisco. What keeps you here?

MG: Yeah, I’m still here and I'm still alive. I still get to perform in New York a lot. If there was any other place for me to live it would probably be New York. That's not to say that I wouldn’t leave here. I remember seeing Sandra Cisneros, another mentor, and her advice to new authors was to get cheap rent. Live wherever you never have to worry about rent, and then be an artist. So, now I can pay my rent. But if I couldn't, I would just go live anywhere where the rent was cheap and I can be an artist.

B&A: Have you worked in Central or South America?

MG: No. Unfortunately, I'm not bilingual, I don't know a lot of Spanish. My last show I did that went off-Broadway was Latin Standards, which was part of the Under the Radar Festival. That show is a story about my father and our parallel arcs. He had his struggles, and so did I. While starting a comedy night at the SF-based Latinx gay bar Esta Noche, I had to get my piece translated into Spanish in order to have subtitles. I would love to have all my shows subtitled, especially the shows about my family and Latino life in New York City so they could be performed in Spanish, if not by me, then by someone.

B&A: Could you see yourself doing movies? Your shows could be made into movies.

MG: Well, I know from my experience in L.A. and from all the stuff we hear about what a hassle it is to finance a film and to have to deal with all lawyers. I've been in movies. You've got to be very patient to make a film. The hurry up and wait, filming all the angles, and all the money it costs. I don't like the work.

One thing I'd like to do is to record an audio version of all my shows.... What I would love is to have my performances filmed like they've done to various solo performers throughout the years. Of course, if somebody wanted to turn one of my stories into a film, that'd be okay with me.

B&A: You said earlier on that you were tokenized. Do you still sometimes feel tokenized, or is that less of an issue nowadays?

MG: Oh gosh. All the time. And if I need the money, I'll take it. I just got this invitation from a random lesbian festival. I happen to know that they have all white performers. They don't know anything about me. They just wanted to have me on the bill so they can say, “We have a Latina.” Stuff like that. I prefer that they know my work and they are booking me because it's me. But if you get an opportunity, you take it and try to be as great as you can be. Then maybe they'll learn.

On Facebook I follow groups of performers of color and I think that there are a lot of people watching and calling out. I have seen administrations, boards of directors, and the leadership of some theaters reflecting the fact that it can't just be all CIS white men. There's a long way to go. But at least there is some awareness now. But I'm not sure what the gatekeepers are doing behind our backs.

JJ: What did you think about Jonathan Moscone being at the California Arts Council today and gone tomorrow.

MG: I met him with Marie Acosta. She arranged a little cocktail thing I went to for Stacy Powers-Cuellar who runs Brava. I went with Rodney Jackson. I said, ‘Oh, Jonathan. I'll put you on the list for this comedy series I’ve been running at Brava Theater.’ Then Stacy said we're not really supposed to do that, because it's like a bribe or something.

JJ: We really didn't talk about the solo performance art form, which I don't know if it's uniquely American, but I sense it has allowed people from different communities to tell their stories in a format that was much less expensive than a full multi-character production. I think the first time I saw Guillermo Gómez Peńa was at the Solo Mio Festival: he was doing Border Brujo. Back in the 1980s, how many artists from marginalized communities got to tell their stories through the art form of solo performance?

MG: That's right. Tim Miller. Holly Hughes, Annie Sprinkle, my show Memory Tricks, which all got a lot of press attention. I was invited to be in the Sundance Writer's Lab. It was the first time that Sundance invited playwrights. We would tell the filmmakers our play, our story, then talk about adapting it to a film. One night 5 of us soloists each did our shows on stage and everyone in the audience was a filmmaker. This really taught me the power of the solo art form.

That experience sold me on solo performance. When a person reads a novel, they make a movie in their own head. I think it was so great for so many of us who didn't want to jump through all the hoops to get that Hollywood or Broadway green light. All we needed was someone who was going to listen to us. That's kind of why I stuck with solo performance. I love standup. But I felt that there were stories from my life that I wanted to share with the world. I think that it's something that a lot of us in the queer community, Latino, BIPOC community have really been able to nail.

JJ: I'm sure that Europeans did this too, but I don't know if they were dealing with the multiracial democracy that we clearly have to create, and not only in California but also in the entire country.

MG: It's storytelling. You can perform a solo piece around a campfire and you don't need permission to do it. People that inspired me to do solo performance were Lily Tomlin, David Kale, Charles Bush and Whoopi Goldberg.

JJ: Did you see Whoopi Goldberg when she did Moms?

MG: Well, of course. Ellen Sebastian Chang directed it. That's when I met Whoopi Goldberg at the Valencia Rose. We were both at the cappuccino counter. She saw the tail end of my stand up. She was developing Moms with Ellen there, and she said to me, we should workshop together. One of my biggest regrets is that she gave me her fucking phone number and I never called. I never called! I did see her a few years later when she was emceeing a KQED Comedy night at the Great American Music Hall. Whoopi was the big star and the emcee. She came backstage to find me to say “what's up.”

AB: Did you ever get to perform for your mom and dad?

MG: No. My parents never saw me perform as a professional, just in school plays. But the first time I ever went on stage was at my father's show. He had me do a walk-on with a chihuahua. He and my mother had a sketch called The Funny Family– La Familia Comica. They were performing while getting a divorce, and I was basically the punchline. They're dividing what they owned according to what’s masculine and what's feminine. Then I walked on with the chihuahua and they both dropped to their knees to pet the chihuahua–i.e. the baby. That was my first time on stage and they saw that.

My dad passed away in the early 1980s. I had to close up his apartment so I have his photographs of all the artists that he booked and all his scripts. He never saw me perform, but he knew that I was starting to do it. There's a story I tell, which is true, that he would tell his friends that I went to medical school and was a doctor!

My mother passed away in the early 1990s. I started writing Memory Tricks while she was in the late stages of Alzheimer's. That was how I was able to cope. I felt it was a tribute to her. I would visit her in the hospital and I would perform it for her.

JJ: Thank you so much, Marga. It was great just listening to you talk.

B&A: Yes, thanks so much. We love you! And we really look forward to your next show.