photo by Tiffany Woods

Brandy Martell

I am a woman of Hispanic descent. My parents came here from Colombia and Cuba. Throughout my life, I never really faced discrimination as a Hispanic. I've faced more adversity for being female. During the 2008 election, I picketed against Proposition 8, in San Luis Obispo (where I lived at the time) during a Thursday night farmer's market. One night, a man approached me in a hostile and aggressive way, getting right up in my face. I don't remember what his line of reasoning was, but I do remember him yelling "you people."

"You people are what's wrong with this country!" he yelled.

I realized what he hated about me: He thought I was one of them -- one of the gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, or transgender people who have filled my life since I was a child. At that moment I realized what a hate crime was and just how ugly ignorance makes people. I bring this up because a hate crime recently happened and I have to talk about it.

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Who knew? A periodical called Sexoogy from the 1930s.

Are you afraid that people are judging your paltry, boring home library? You know those barren shelves need more of everything: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, magazines, and periodicals. But where can you find replenishments, volumes that might be rare and maybe even a little racy? Saturday marks the first Library Spring Smut Sale at the Center for Sex & Culture.

If you think the offerings consists of cast-offs, the likes of which you spot haphazardly displayed on someone's front steps or outside a BART station entrance, you're mistaken. The center's library boasts an impressive collection of mostly donated materials, and it seeks to maintain items shunned by traditional booksellers, libraries, and museums. Saturday you have the chance to look through items it chooses to sell.

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Mikki Willis

James Brandon as Joshua in Corpus Christi

Back in 1985, Jean-Luc Godard released a movie called Hail Mary that made Catholics breathe fire. (Paradoxical metaphor noted.) It was a modern-day retelling of the immaculate conception where a woman named Marie gets pregnant even though she is a virgin. But it was also a French experimental film, so Marie has a number of unholy attributes, including a rather foul mouth. She uses words such as "cunt" referring to her own anatomy, and she appears wholly (not holy) unclothed. (Oh, the blasphemy!) I saw Hail Mary at the Roxie in 1985. Why? Because the Catholics were out in force trying to steer people away from it. Would I have seen it otherwise? Not a chance. Did I like it? Not really (hey, I was 18), but I liked seeing it because I got to cross a picket line of religious zealots and tell them just where they could stick their thought-policing.

The Catholics protesting a documentary called Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption could take a lesson from this: They risk sending more people to see the film by making noise about it, especially in San Francisco, a city that contains Catholics who are openly queer and don't feel one bit guilty about it. (Now there's a stand-off we'd love to see: red-state Catholics vs. San Francisco out-and-proud Catholics.)

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Lydia Daniller

The Secret History of Love

Despite all the video games, baked potato bars, and racquetball leagues in our great country, it seems people still care about love. We salute your lizard brain pursuits! You know who hasn't always had easy access to love? Queer people. Homophobia written into law and people's minds has meant a threatened existence for queers in our past, and sadly, in our present. Despite the terrible threat and violence a prejudiced society presented, plenty of folks found creative ways to live out their nontraditional gender expressions, drag personas, and same-sex love. Choreographer Sean Dorsey -- after two years of intensive interviews with LGBT elders -- collects these inspiring tales in The Secret History of Love, which starts a four-day run tonight at Dance Mission Theater.

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A lineup of awesome.

The physical world loves binaries. Day and night. Life and death. Action and reaction. The social world also loves binaries. If you're not white, then you're black. If you're not straight, that means you're gay. You're born either male or female, and you can't change that. These flavors of intolerance come not only from extreme, "red state" schools of thought, but sometimes from the deepest reaches of our great liberal mecca.

An example? Gender politics. Some queer women who were born female-bodied, for example, overtly reject the idea they share anything with transgender women, tossing around ugly terms such as "bio men" and accusing them of co-opting "real" women's space. Others, however, see gender as a variable and shifting thing, and they embrace the common ground that all queer women share regarding romance, family, friendship, employment, and activism.

It's people from this latter group who organized Girl Talk, Thursday at the the San Francisco LGBT Community Center.

The title alone shows us this camp holds the superior sense of humor.

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Not everyone likes to have their cock pierced by needles. But for those who do, they have Larry Townsend as a champion. Credited with having coined the term Leather Daddy, Townsend was an avid collector of the art of hot man pain.

Back in 1972, he was the president of the Homophile Effort for Legal Protection, an organization dedicated to defending gays during and after arrests. A regular contributor to Drummer magazine, an artful early zine celebrating all things leather and bad daddy, ooh bad, he was also the author of The Leatherman's Handbook, the seminal leather daddy bible.

Not your average uncle, Larry Townsend -- as his niece Tracy Tingle discovered upon his death in 2008, when she was made executor of his estate.

"I had known for a long while that he had an extensive S&M erotic art collection," Tingle says. "But once he died and the work of going through all of his belongings began, the depth and amount of work he had was revealed."

Tingle said even though Townsend had stressed the potential financial gain that could be had in selling the work, "I quickly became much more interested in keeping everything that he had together as a complete archive."

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Vaughn Walker did what federal judges occasionally do: He was appointed by a Republican president (George H.W. Bush), but he'll forever be known for at least one ruling that clearly favors a liberal mindset (declaring unconstitutional Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex marriage in California). During that case Walker came under fire from the measure's proponents after they learned he is gay (a fact that Bush didn't know). Despite their protests, he did not recuse himself. Clearly, this man could tell amazing stories. The problem with federal judges, though, is they rarely comment on such matters in order to remain impartial, which is, after all, their job. But we're in luck -- Walker retired last year, so he can talk. He's part of the lineup tonight (Monday) at the Verdi Club for Law and Order, this month's offering from the Porchlight storytelling series, in which six people tell "first-person accounts of being on one side of the law or the other, or perhaps the murky gray area in between."

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She has "tomboy" tattooed on her knee in a delicious shade of bubblegum pink. The tattoo rests along side all the scars still evident from her days as a scrapper. These days, Brynn Gelbard is still challenging the forces that be, but now she does it through a queer activist website Devotecampaign.com, writing, and shamanism.

What?

Say the word "shaman" and many people will conjure up a gaunt, gray-haired indigenous figure with wild eyes, greasy clothes, and the blood of some sacrificial animal on his/her gnarled hands.

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Kevin Coleman

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

It's hard to overstate how much the politics of sexuality have changed in the past 20 years. In the 1980s and '90s, coming out of the closet was a radical act. In 2011, gay men and lesbians are so cute and cuddly and downright marketable in popular culture that even Archie and Jughead hang out with their very own gay pal, Kevin Keller. Riverdale's inhabitants may be so perpetually virginal that they would slap a triple-X notice on a slide show about cellular mitosis, but gayness is now safe enough that Kevin can be counted on to be as impeccably chaste and dull as any other All-American lad.

Writer, editor, and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is like the anti-Kevin Keller. Notoriously flamboyant, brazen, and radical, Sycamore would make the good citizens of Riverdale plotz. She's even been known to have that effect on both straights and gays in the real world. For Mattilda, the current agenda of queer politics, which promises gays and lesbians the right to be just like everyone else, is intolerable. (Notice that promise does not extend to populations such as bisexual and transgender people. Some in the gay-rights movement have long considered them dangerous, self-hating, delusional, or nonexistent.) With anthologies including That's Revolting! And Nobody Passes, Sycamore has established herself as one of the most outspoken critics of the gay mainstream. Her latest anthology turns the volume of criticism up to 11 with the title alone: Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?

The former S.F. resident is back in town, appearing Saturday (Feb. 25) at Viracocha for the Radar Book Club, to promote this book before continuing to Portland and points beyond. We talked with Sycamore about assimilation, queerness, the Occupy movement, and whether it actually does get better.

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Twitter is not your friend. Twitter does not have your back. Twitter is a cold, conniving gossip. Twitter is horrible at keeping secrets. Twitter is an old man who sits on his porch watching everything that goes by and telling everybody what everybody else is doing. Don't get me wrong. It's fun when Twitter is telling me about what other people are doing. We all love other people's dirty laundry. But if you are not careful, one day Twitter will put you it's crosshairs. And it will be all your fault.

Meet Roland Martin. The latest victim of, "Oh shit! I had no idea Twitter was listening." Roland --- a professional CNN'er who was recently voted America's 19th Most Popular Conservative Black Guy -- by me -- was at a Super Bowl party having a good time. He was eating chip and dip and talking shit. The adult beverages were probably flowing. I'm guessing the Champagne of Beers, or maybe because he's connected he had secured an advance case of Bud Light Platinum -- the new malt liquor for white people. And Roland was holding court, as you get to do when you are America's 19th Most Popular CBG. And at the party people were over-laughing at Roland's colored commentary, as people have to do if they want to continue to hang out with "Mr. 19." And Roland said something that got a really huge over-laugh, and he said to himself, "I HAVE TO TWEET THIS! I could get to the sacred 50+ with this baby!"

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