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.

More >>

Joey was a career ironworker in New Jersey who suffered a two-story fall on a job site that left him near death. Yet as paramedics showed up and co-workers surrounded him, his chief concern was not dying. It was being cut out of his clothes, which would reveal shaved legs and toenails painted red. For decades, Joey had been living a lie.

Today Joey is living truly, as Morgan. The accident - a fall from the 28th floor to the 26th, was horrific. A cable prevented the fall from being six more stories yet caused a lacerated liver. Other injuries included 20 breaks in arm bones, and multiple breaks in the pelvis. Morgan now has a rod in her leg, along with eigh carriage bolts.

"I had to fall two stories as an iron worker to realize how precarious life is. That was my wake-up call that was when I realized how quickly your life can change," says Morgan.

Morgan is a professional comedian and storyteller who appears tonight at Viracocha in a variety show called Girl Junk, the first in a monthly series.

More >>

Pink & White Productions

Estelle goes to work.

People are often surprised when I tell them that I never really liked porn. It is not a judgment call; porn just never did anything for me. After being exposed to different parts of the industry in the past year, though, I realized that wasn't completely true. Most of the porn I'd seen before 2010 was mainstream porn, which always looked staged. I fuck, I watch people fuck, and that's not what it looks like to me. But when I was exposed to queer porn, a new door opened. I couldn't pinpoint what was different, but something definitely was.

Shine Louise Houston

Last week I was invited to watch a day of filming on the Crash Pad Series. The series and website is based on Pink & White Productions' first film The Crash Pad, which was released in 2006 and remains popular. (Pink & White was named Best Dyke Porn Studio by SF Weekly in 2009.)

"Its premise is that somewhere in San Francisco there's a secret apartment," says performer Jiz Lee. "If you're lucky enough to be given the key, you can visit the crash pad and have the best sex of your life. There are rules, which include only using the key seven times before passing it on."

Shine Louise Houston, the head of Pink and White productions, explains "the premise of Crash Pad was inspired by Essex Hot Tub, a 112-degree hot tub located in a beautiful yard in the back of a house. The owner changes the keypad code every now and then; it is one of Berkeley's best-kept secrets." (Read an interview with Shine Louise Houston posted during last year's Good Vibrations Indie Erotic Film Festival.)

I arrived Saturday morning to a house in San Francisco that has been turned into a porn set. I was greeted by Lee, Houston, and Tristan Crane. Our talent for the morning was Estelle and Christoph. I walked into the living room, which led to the set. Houston explained they had just redecorated with a new bed. To decorate it they hired a bed stylist -- who doesn't have a bed stylist? apparently it's a real profession. Across the bed was a cupboard filled with sex toys such as plug-in vibrators made by Hitachi.

Click through for the rest. (Warning: NSFW)

More >>

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.)

More >>

Ken Yeung

Jolie O'Dell is one of my favorite San Francisco writers. In the brief time we've known each other, we have eaten lunch at a strip club, gone trampolining at the House of Air, and played charades at the Palace Hotel after Brian Wilson beat us both in the SF Weekly Web Awards for "Best Twitter Personality." By day she's a whipsmart tech journalist, formerly of Mashable, and now of VentureBeat. By night, you can find her waxing domestic at her kick-ass blog, The Single Housewife. O'Dell recently published her first book, Android Photography: A Guide to Mobile Creativity, which teaches you how to create, edit, and share pics with the Android's in-phone camera. Filled with practical tips, app low-downs, and lots of gorgeous photos to inspire, I want to buy this book and I don't even own an Android phone. O'Dell and I talked about her book, whether lesbian hook-up apps are a pipe dream, and Feminism 101.

More >>

Patrick Clifton

No More Words, We Want Action

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Patrick Clifton now spends his days teaching high school in the East Bay, but his Facebook page serves as a retrospective of his former life as an activist photographer. From 1986 to 1991, Clifton focused his camera lens on his San Francisco community, capturing militant AIDS activism through the medium of black-and-white film.

Gerard Koskovich, a curator at the GLBT Historical Society, met the photographer during the high-queer era of the mid-1980s, when the newly discovered human immunodeficiency virus had already infected a large percentage of the city's queer men.

There was no treatment, and the federal government responded at a glacial pace. Homophobic politicians and alarmists in the public sphere attempted to dominate the discourse, using the epidemic to spread hate and fear while the death toll steadily mounted.

More >>

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.

More >>

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."

More >>

Courtney Trouble

I met Courtney Trouble in Las Vegas during the Adult Video News Awards. She was on a sex-positive panel discussing a number of queer-porn related topics. I knew she was up for some awards and I was curious about this young pornographer. Courtney Trouble runs QueerPornTV.com, a small company that is making some big noise. I began to follow her after the AVNs and discovered that one of her films won at a kinky film festival called Cinekink in New York. This is no small feat so I wanted to know where all this began for Trouble.

Trouble does not have the body type usually associated with porn. She is a bigger girl and proud to display all of it on film. Body image is a huge issue in this country. Women are continually given images of what the perfect woman should look like: Barbie dolls, fashion models and pin-up girls. You must be tall, thin, blond and have big boobs. If you deviate from this image, then you are inferior as a female. This is how women are made to feel with the images we are given, and it is problematic in our society. Young women have it hard enough without having to try to live up to what people consider attractive. Trouble decided to make a site where women of all sizes and colors were given a platform.

Trouble started making porn 10 years ago when she was 19. At that time her main source of income was being a phone-sex worker, helping people explore their fantasies. Fantasy fulfillment is an interesting profession and the more you play with it, the more your own desires start to poke through. After a while she began to wonder what her fantasies would look like in pornographic form.

"I wanted to be a porn star so bad I started my own site with the images that I was taking, and very soon afterward, the pictures I was taking of my friends became erotic porn images. I wasn't intending to start a company," Trouble said.

Trouble submitted pictures of herself at one porn website but then realized a girl of her size probably didn't have a good chance of being chosen. So she started her own website, nofauxx.com, and a queer porn company was born.

More >>

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.

More >>