Sad Francisco

Instead of demanding free housing or health care, some people think the answer to homelessness is to build "mental health" jails and forced "rehab" centers to stow unhoused people, indefinitely. With Clio/Thatcher Sady and Tory Becker, from Gay Shame.

• "Cities Across the US Are Stripping Homeless People of Their Autonomy," by Tory and Toshio, for Truthout

In other news:

• April 5 at Bluestockings in New York City: Come hang out with Shuli Branson, Zuri Arman, and Toshio, around the anthology "Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies"

Sad Francisco is produced by Toshio Meronek; this episode was edited by Caitlin Wood. Support the show and find links to all of our past episodes on Patreon.

On February 15, eight artists altered their works at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in solidarity with Palestine. Ralowe Ampu is on to talk about the YBCA's neoliberal nothingspeak response to the artists' - and now many staffmembers' - demands of a museum that claims to be centered on diversity and community. **The museum remains closed as of March 7.

• Love Letter to Gaza, Open Letter from the Artists
• Boycott YBCA Artists' Statement
• Open Letter from YBCA Employees in Support of Palestine and BAN9 Artists
• Artists Alter Their Own Work at YBCA in Pro-Palestinian Protest (Nastia Voynovskaya, KQED)
• Welcome to Airspace: How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world (Kyle Chayka, The Verge)
• Screen Grabs: What did we learn from the fight for the Castro Theatre?
• Brooklyn Museum and PEN America Accused of "Silence" on Gaza Ceasefire (Maya Pontone, Hyperallergic)

Sad Francisco is produced by Toshio Meronek and edited by Tofu Estolas. Please support the show and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

Pierre Labossiere and Charlie Hinton (Haiti Action Committee) speak on common threads between Haiti and Palestine, and how US-enabled death squads are creating chaos in the first country to come out of a successful slave uprising.

• Haiti Action Committee
• HAC: Haiti Ten Years After the Earthquake
• HAC: 'From Haiti to Palestine: One Struggle/One Fight' on Antoine and Georges Izméry, Palestinian-Haitian brothers assassinated by US-backed death squads
• Randall Robinson: An Unbroken Agony (book)
• Graham Greene: The Comedians (book)
• The Comedians (1967 movie)
• Haiti Ransom Project (NY Times)

Sad Francisco is produced by Toshio Meronek and edited by Tofu Estolas. Support the show and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

GrowSF, TogetherSF and other benign-sounding local political organizations are more rightwing innovations from rich tech barons like David Sacks and Michael Moritz. Julie Pitta, a journalist previously at the LA Times, Forbes, and the SF Richmond Review, talks about the newly launched Phoenix Project, which looks at how dark money flows in California politics.

(FYI: The conversation with Julie was recorded in early February, shortly after Garry "Die Slow" Tan's drunken appropriation of Tupac lyrics calling for the death of a bunch of local politicians, and just before a rightwing trolling campaign convinced the Richmond Review's publisher to abruptly end Julie's column there.)

• The Phoenix Project
• 'Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics' (Julie Pitta in the Richmond Review)
• 'The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of a Right-Wing San Francisco' (Gil Duran in the New Republic)
• Our Garry Tan episode (f/ Emily Mills)

Sad Francisco is produced by Toshio Meronek and edited by Tofu Estolas. Please support the show and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

Chris Vargas, on the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA), a project with no real estate that is "forever under construction," and its Bay Area connections.

• MOTHA
• Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects
• Our episode with Susan Stryker (director of Screaming Queens), on the Tenderloin's Compton's Cafeteria

Sad Francisco is produced by Toshio Meronek and edited by Tofu Estolas. Support the show and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

In 2021, Lakeside Investment Company bought the Redstone Labor Temple in the Mission. Poor Magazine's tiny gray-garcia (aka povertyskola), and Rick Gerharter, a movement photographer who's had an office in the Redstone for decades, talk about the significance of the building, as the new landlord drops a gentrification bomb in the form of massive rent increases.

• Poor Magazine
• Rick Gerharter

Sad Francisco is produced by Toshio Meronek and edited by Tofu Estolas. Please support the show and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

Soleil Ho is an opinion editor at the San Francisco Chronicle who recently covered the Berkeley-based writer and wannabe California governor Michael Shellenberger. In Shellenberger's last book, San Fransicko, he says rising homelessness rates in West Coast cities comes from us "loving victims" too much. Shellenberger's latest escapade: positioning himself as an expert on trans people. Soleil breaks it down.

• Soleil's SF Chronicle column on Michael Shellenberger
• Stop Garry Tan to Stop Asian Hate - our episode on Garry Tan, a Shellenberger ally based in SF (f/ Emily Mills)

Support Sad Francisco and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

Mama Ganuush is an African Palestinian American drag artist living in San Francisco. Right now, they're combining direct action, performances, and Bay solidarity to combat Israel's campaign of cultural erasure and colonization - a campaign led locally by gay Israel subs Matt Dorsey, Rafael Mandelman, and Scott Wiener.

• Mama Ganuush on Instagram
• Heritage Anti-Racist Liberation Artists (HALA) - their new artists' collective!
• Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism
• Gay Shame
• BDS Movement
• BBC News: "McDonald's hit by Israel-Gaza 'misinformation'"

Recent episodes on Palestine:

• Can't Hide a Genocide f/ Dylan Rodriguez and Loubna Qutami
• Queers for a Free Palestine f/ Kate Raphael
• Manny's is Your Local Zionist Gentrification Cafe f/ Deeg

Edited by Tofu Estolas (IG: @terabyte_tofu).

New intro is from the soundtrack to 'Criminal Queers' f/ assists from Christen and Ralowe.

Support Sad Francisco and find links to more past episodes on Patreon.

BAGL (Bay Area Gay Liberation) was a major force in 1970s San Francisco labor activism on many fronts, supporting farm workers and gay teachers, and thwarting the Coors beer dynasty's polygraph tests to weed out gays. The group gave BAGL member Charlie Hinton purpose; he describes its ascent and eventual dissolution that resulted over plans to host a gay air force officer.

Read more about queer history from 1970s SF in Christina Hanhardt's 'Safe Space' and Emily Hobson's 'Lavender and Red'.

Edited by Tofu Estolas (IG: @terabyte_tofu).

Support Sad Francisco and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.

Offensively bland art results from the tyrrany of homeowners with too much time on their hands. Two recent cases where Nextdoor.com creeps and gentrifiers at community benefits district meetings made decisions that censored murals and the like, discussed with Christen Cioffi.

Support Sad Francisco and find links to our past episodes on Patreon.