Storied: San Francisco

Listen in as I chat with Broke-Ass Stuart about, well, a lot of stuff. But we also talk about Stuart’s new book, The Worst of Broke-Ass Stuart: 20 Years of Love, Death, and Dive Bars. The book is available at your favorite local indie bookstore and also at Bookshop.org. And get very affordable tickets for next Friday’s (Oct. 17, 2025) book-launch party at Kilowatt here. We recorded this podcast at Emperor Norton’s Boozeland in September 2025. Photos of Stuart by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. To get us caught up to what Lisa is doing these days, we go back to her arrival in The Bay. Her work at the prop shop led to some other jobs, but competition was fierce and she sought a way to integrate art into the labor she undertook. She found it when the production of James and the Giant Peach hired her to do puppet fabrication. The work took place in a warehouse in South of Market and it wasn’t quite as glamorous as people think. In fact, it was grueling, but rewarding. Her boss on that job was a woman named Kat. That was 30 years ago, and the two are good friends today. In fact, Kat is shooting a documentary about Lisa’s incredible life called Made of Iron. More on that below. Lisa wanted to stick with animation, but was never able to get an art director job. She considered moving to LA, but shut that down pretty quickly. And so she decided to learn a trade—something her dad did back in the day. She went to a job fair and asked what the hardest trade represented there that day was. Lisa’s trade became ironwork. Her introduction to the folks who did ironwork was a little rough. She was required to visit job sites and get an ironworker to sponsor her. It took her six months to get hired. She met a guy named Danny Prince who helped her get work in The City making precasts (think parking garages). She’d work during the week and go to classes for ironworking on Saturdays. Ironwork has, quite possibly since its inception, been very much a “man’s” world. Lisa ran head-first into bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination from the get-go. But a combination of her own drive and the advice of a few mentors helped her get through it. There might have even been some “Go fuck yourself”s along the way, too. That said, the highs were high and the lows were low. “I never cried on the job,” Lisa told me. But the tears would come once she was home in the evenings. Still, she persevered, and things got better and better for her. One of her early favorite jobs was on the then-new California Academy of Sciences. Besides it just being a really cool building, Lisa got to do many different jobs all around the place. She says it was incredible watching it all come together. Another job highlight was Lisa’s work on the arena that came to be known as Chase Center (and for Valkyries fans, “Ballhalla”). Photos of Lisa helping build Chase can be seen in the gallery to the left here. Another was Marin General Hospital. And then there was the Golden Gate Bridge. After Chase Center and another, lesser job (and a divorce), Lisa got offered a job working on the Suicide Deterrent Net on my favorite bridge. But it wasn’t just any job. She would be foreperson. She didn’t think she could do it because she didn’t know bridge work (despite working a little on the new Bay Bridge). After being told it was foreperson or nothing, she decided to take the job. Of course the crew she would oversee comprised all bridge-work veterans. Her approach was to be respectful of that. And her crew respected her back for it. The job entails taking out old pieces and beefing up the infrastructure of the bridge, which was finished back in 1933. Lisa talks at some length about a societal need for us all to have more respect for labor. I’m with her 100 percent. There’s a lot that we take for granted every day, all over the place. Many people worked and still do work hard as hell so that we can have shit like roads and sidewalks, transit tunnels, housing, and so much more. We should recognize and respect that work. We end the episode with Lisa’s thoughts about life, her work, and what she loves about San Francisco and the Bay Area. You can donate to help fund Kat’s documentary at the Made of Iron website. And follow that adventure on Instagram @madeofirondocumentary.

Lisa Davidson is an ironworker with Local 377 San Francisco. Her team currently does ironwork on the Golden Gate Bridge. But we’ll get to that. In this episode, S8 E3, meet and get to know Lisa. I first did that back in May at our Keep It Local art show at Babylon Burning (thanks, Mike and Judy!). Someone at the party that night approached me to let me know that there was a person there who works on the best bridge in the world (fact) and that I should meet them. I love when people really get me. Right away, I was drawn in by Lisa’s warmth, charm, and sense of humor. And so we sat down outside in Fort Mason in early August and Lisa shared her life story. She was raised feeling like she had complete freedom. It was something Lisa didn’t realize at the time, but looking back, it became clear to her. She was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in a liberal household. Her grandparents lived in Boston itself, and she loved visiting them when she was a kid. Her grandfather ran a tchotchke store in town called House of Hurwitz, and Lisa says that the place had a big influence on her outlook. It was located on the edge of what they call, to this day, the “Combat Zone” (think: red-light district). Her “wheelin’ and dealin’” grandpa sold mylar balloons to the Boston Gardens for events held there. He told young Lisa that she could blow up balloons and that that could be her future. Lisa has a brother four years younger than she is. Her dad was an electrician. One of his clients was a lithograph press in Boston. He’d sometimes get paged for a job and have to leave his family, although Lisa now wonders whether he just wanted to get away from time to time. When she was a senior in high school, her parents divorced, despite being a very loving couple up to that point. She says her mom was “crazy in an I Love Lucy way. She was raised in the Fifties the way many young women at that time were, in a way that did its best to stifle any creativity. Suffice to say that her mom had fun decorating the house Lisa grew up in. Despite her and her family’s Jewishness, Lisa revolted and wanted to go to Catholic school or just become a preppy L.L. Bean-type kid. She of course regrets rejecting the norms of her family nowadays. It was what it was. The family was more culturally Jewish than religious, though, something Lisa says was a huge influence on who she’s become as an adult. She graduated high school and went to college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It wasn’t Ivy League, but it was (and is) something of a preppy school. Where Lisa grew up, there was an expectation that kids would go to college, and so she went. It wasn’t super far from home, but it wasn’t close either. Her parents did suggest that Lisa maybe go to art school. But in her family, it was the kid dismissing that idea. “That’s a not real school,” young Lisa told them. She liked sports. At Amherst, she joined the crew team. She liked the competition and how good of shape it got you in. She liked it, but it was a lot of pressure. She graduated, took a year off working odd jobs, then dove into art school. So next up was Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She was surprised she got in, and even navigated a bit of impostor syndrome. Surprised by the school’s acceptance of her and feeling somewhat intimidated by other artist students, Lisa ended up doing printmaking. Rather than aiming for a master’s degree, she sought a second bachelor’s. Her studies had her spending a lot of time in the school’s foundry, where she discovered welding. She loved it. During her time back in Amherst, she’d heard of a guy who was going to Alaska. (Lisa and I go off-topic into our shared distaste for camping at this point in the conversation.) Back to the Alaska story, her mom was fully supportive and even took her shopping at an Army Navy store. She went there and worked in canneries through the summer between her junior and senior years at Amherst. While she was up north, doing jobs all over the state, she met folks from California. From the stories they told her, it became a place she wanted to go. But first, RISD. In Rhode Island, she met a guy from Danville in the East Bay. When his family learned of her interest in our state, they invited Lisa to spend a summer with them, which she did. And she and her friend came to The City as often as they could. After those few months, she knew that California—and specifically, The Bay—was for her. She needed to go back and finish that second round of college in Rhode Island, and she did. After that, Lisa “beelined it” back to Oakland. She found work in a prop shop making sculptures out of foam with a chainsaw. Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Lisa Davidson. We recorded this podcast at Equator Coffee in Fort Mason in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as I chat with Joanna Lioce all about the new Mabuhay Gardens. Joanna is booking monthly shows in the new legendary North Beach punk venue through the end of the year. Get tickets for the Oct. 3, 2025, Mabuhay Gardens show featuring Kelley Stoltz, White Lightning (PDX), and The Boars at EventBrite. We recorded this podcast at Vesuvio Café in September 2025.

Listen in as I chat with David Gonzales, creator of Homies and this year’s San Francisco Lowrider Parade Grand Marshal. We recorded this podcast over Zoom in September 2025. Photo of David by Anthony Gonzales

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Although it made all kinds of sense for Shrey to move halfway around the world to go to art school, he says it was "an uphill battle” convincing his parents of the plan. Still, his mom was and is a champion of her son and his art. It was 2018 and Shrey was 20. We talk about his experience of arriving in San Francisco, a city that was “such a beacon of hope” for him. He dedicated himself to his studies at CCA. He also paid serious attention to the news, and even attempted political art. When that didn’t pan out financially, a professor at CCA strongly encouraged Shrey to stay with painting, that it was his lane. This was just before the pandemic. When he got his first stimulus check, Shrey bought an easel and began going out and painting en plein air. He did this so much and promoted his art so well that, by the time he graduated, he had started getting commissions. He was able to become a full-time artist—a dream of his. Shrey is such an artist, through and through, that he even has an art job. Like, a job-job. Four days a week, Shrey works for ArtSpan—a local arts nonprofit possibly best-known for Open Studios. Shrey shares the history of ArtSpan and OpenStudios. What began in 1975 in South of Market as a way for artists shunned by galleries to show their art and sell it today sees around 600 artists opening their studio doors all over The City. Shrey manages the Arts and Neighborhoods program for ArtSpan. That group helps organize exhibitions during Open Studios at non-studio locations. Mission Bowling Club is one such location. In fact, Shrey got his first art show after graduation through help from ArtSpan. It’s a beautiful full-circle story. That first show led to other shows. And Shrey credits his entrepreneurial brain for recognizing an opportunity in all of this—if a cafe has suitable walls, you can talk with the owner about hanging art by local artists, promote an opening, and make things happen. And so that’s what he did. Partly because putting on one art show, not to mention doing multiple shows at the same, is what the kids refer to as a lot, Shrey focussed his efforts at one location. Ballast Coffee on West Portal became the home of Ingleside Gallery. The first art show at his gallery brought in more than $10,000 in sales. I have to insert some editorial here, so thanks for indulging me. Shrey and I recorded this podcast before our Every Kinda People show. I won’t pretend that my own art curation is anywhere close to the level that he (and my friend Anita of KnownSF and countless others around SF, The Bay, and the world) operates on. But Shrey does speak to the nature of both the volume and the intensity of the work that goes into putting on an art show. In my own way, I relate. Back to my and Shrey’s conversation, I ask him to talk about how our lives intersected. It was earlier this year after I recorded with Ellen Lo of Ask Me SF. I needed to drop off a Storied: SF hoodie for Ellen, so she asked me to meet her one Saturday morning on Ocean Avenue. She and some friends and community members would be out there painting a mural over a dilapidated street wall in front of a PG&E substation. Sign me up! After politely declining to add my own (attempted) artistic touch to their creation that day, Ellen introduced me to a friend of hers. Right away, I got a sense of that exuberance Shrey embodies, a trait I am now very familiar with. We end the episode with thoughts about the Every Kinda People show, up at Mini Bar through October 19. Follow Shrey on Instagram @shreypurohit and @inglesidegallery.

Shrey Purohit is the kind of person everyone should know. Not know about (although obviously that’s what this podcast aims to do), but know personally. In this podcast, Episode 2 of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco, meet and get to know Shrey. A few of his art pieces are up at Mini Bar through Oct. 19 in our Every Kinda People show. And at the risk of being hyperbolic, through the experience of putting that show together, I am very happy that I’ve come to know Shrey. We begin with Shrey’s birth, which happened in Mumbai, India, in 1997. Both his parents are doctors. Shrey’s mom comes from a family of doctors going back four generations. Her dad (Shrey’s grandfather) was driven out of what is now Pakistan and went to Mumbai with his possessions in hand to start a new life at just 15 years old. Shrey speaks of how fond he was of that grandfather, even describing some of his hobbies and wardrobe choices (bow ties because regular ties would get in the way of his medical duties). Shrey’s family was rooted in the Sindhi culture in India. It’s a community steeped in entrepreneurship, and his grandfather was one of the first in his area to be a male gynecologist. His wife was an anesthesiologist and worked with her husband. Shrey jumps ahead to note that his parents, too, worked together in the medical field. His dad specializes in diabetes treatment. The two met when Shrey’s dad was treating his mom’s aunt. It was what Shrey calls a “semi-arranged marriage,” but to my understanding, more like a “hey, here’s someone who might be good for you” type of situation. He says his parents’ coming together had some love to it, which is probably more than most arranged marriages. They built a medical practice that became very successful, he says. So successful, in fact, that it allowed both of their children—Shrey and his younger sister—to live abroad. Because his sister was born when he was three or so, he got to help name her. “It was my first creative project,” Shrey says. Shrey lived in Mumbai until he finished school. His formative memories take place in his neighborhood of Colaba in South Mumbai, near the water and the Gateway of India. He says it has “big-town energy with a small-town vibe.” Everyone knows everyone else, and Shrey has brought that same spirit with him halfway around the world. We go on a sidebar about how San Francisco can have that big city/small town feel. Shrey got started doing graphic design while still living in India. He even went to school for it over there. He did well in it, so well that he hired a few employees. But he soon found that people don’t take kindly to being bossed around by a 17-year-old. He pivoted from design to art, something he’d always wanted to do. A formative experience for Shrey was going to an event a Kulture Shop in Mumbai, where he met Jas Charanjiva. Jas, who’s originally from Napa, helped open Kulture Shop to support Indian artists. He was 15 and had found a mentor in Jas. Shrey has an uncle in Millbrae whom he had visited with family a few years before. His uncle took them to several spots around town, including to AT&T Park for a Giants game. His Indian school credits transferred, and so, when Shrey was 19, he moved to The Bay to attend California College of the Arts and study comics, illustration, and painting. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Shrey. And on Friday, look for a bonus episode with the 2025 San Francisco Low Rider Parade Grand Marshal, David Gonzales. This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Root Division in South of Market in August 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Marga had just arrived in San Francisco and lived in a collective house with a lesbian and two gay men ("of course, the decorations were fabulous"). It was a bit of a party house, known for throwing spectacular Halloween fests. Marga talks about collective living, chore charts and stuff like that. Eventually, the woman Marga drove across country with split from her, as so often happens (I certainly relate). Everyone who lived in that first house, she says, was into rolfing and coffee enemas. Marga wasn’t too keen on any of it. The meals were vegetarian and bland, and perhaps most importantly for her, not Cuban. Her roommates gave painful hugs and held hands before they ate. It just wasn’t her scene. And so she found work in a Hippie coffeehouse called Acme Cafe on 24th Street. All her coworkers there were performers. She was just happy to make omelettes. Underground celebrities like R. Crumb and John Waters came in regularly, and Marga loved it. Her fellow cafe employees, many of whom were artists, would ask her, “So, what do you do?” And she would answer, “I make omelettes.” She also worked at a bath house on Market called Finilla’s Finnish Baths. Marga’s job there was to hand out towels to spa-goers. She later learned that the owner sexually abused and exploited workers there, mostly the masseuses. A perk of her job, though, was access to the steam sauna, and Marga took advantage of that as much as she could. That sauna room also served as a meeting space for a group of older women. One of them, an older Mexican woman, would leave her Chihuahua in the lobby while she steamed, the idea being that Marga would take care of the dog. Eventually, Ms. Montoya got 86’d from the bathhouse for steaming flour tortillas in the sauna on the hot stones. Another regular, a famous singer whom Marga won’t name, was kicked out for a different reason. Marga takes a sidebar to explain what a “primal scream” is. Then she takes us back to the sauna and the famous singer, who proceeded one day to launch into her own primal scream. Marga describes other women from the sauna running out frantically. Meanwhile, she says, over in the men’s sauna, “there was a different kind of screaming.” She goes on another sidebar about the time she got crabs at the bathhouse. You just have to listen to that one. Marga also had a job as a gardener at a house in Pac Heights, despite not loving that kind of work. She shares a story of using the “servant’s bathroom” on that job and discovering that she had crabs. Then the conversation shifts to Marga’s next show—Spanish Stew. It will be her 15th one-person show, which she began developing at The Marsh here in The City, where she did her first-ever one-person show back in the day. The New Conservatory Theater Center commissioned the show, which is set in 1976 San Francisco, the year that Marga landed here. It’s also about cooking, something near and dear to her heart. Marga points out that the New Conservatory Theater Center recently lost its NEA funding thanks to the fascist US regime, but that the community is helping keep the theater afloat. Please go see this show. I know I will. It opens October 17, 2025. For more info and to buy tickets, please visit Marga’s website. Follow her on Instagram @themargagomez to keep up with everything she does and says. This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Noe Cafe in Noe Valley in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt  

Marga Gomez grew up in Washington Heights, New York City, immersed in a family of Spanish-language entertainers. Welcome to Season 8, Episode 1 of Storied: San Francisco. I first learned of Marga more than a decade ago, through comedy and performance circles I was adjacent to. Because I don’t have the world’s best memory, I cannot recall exactly where or when I saw her perform, but I do remember feeling an immediate pull to her work. In this episode, Marga shares the story of her parents, growing up in NYC, and coming to San Francisco. We begin in Manhattan, where Marga was born to a comedian/producer/screenwriter Cuban-American dad and a dancer/aspiring actor Puerto Rican mom. Marga went to Catholic school as a youngster, which she says was every bit as harsh as folks say. Looking back, Marga thinks the only discipline she got when she was a kid was through school. Her parents, she says, were narcissists. The two met when Marga’s mom danced in a show produced by her dad. The shows were varietal in nature, and took place on stages live at theaters showing Spanish-language Mexican movies. Her dad had danced in shows in Havana pre-Castro. Some white American show producer-types with Johnny Walker, the Scotch company, brought him to New York, unaware that he didn’t speak English. It was the Fifties—the height of a Spanish entertainment craze (think Ricky Ricardo). Many folks from Latin America were also immigrating to the US, and New York especially, in those days. And they, too, wanted entertainment. Marga’s dad found work in that world, first as a performer, then as a producer. Growing up with locally well-known/borderline famous parents instilled in young Marga a sense that she could do anything she wanted. But when they split up, Marga went with her mom to live in a white neighborhood on Long Island. She was one of the only kids of color in an otherwise homogenous, affluent area. No longer in the Spanish-language community that raised her, she lost that sense of becoming a performer in her own right. She just wanted to graduate high school and get out. And that she did. She ended up at a New York State school on the border of Canada, in Oswego near Lake Ontario. It was still the same weather she used to, but it was time to explore—with pot, acid, and women. She got really into “storyteller” musicians around this time, some women, Dylan, that kind of thing. And she met a woman who later was the reason Marga came to San Francisco. Marga’s impression of San Francisco before she moved here was shaped by a magazine feature about the Hippies here at that time—the Seventies. She owes that attraction to her mom’s strict parenting style—it was a rebellion in every sense. She’d not made it through to graduation (too much acid, she says), but followed her girlfriend across country to this magical new city. It was 1976, the year of the US Bicentennial. Marga’s girlfriend did all the driving (she still doesn’t have a license), taking the scenic route along Route 66, through the heart of the United States during its 200th birthday celebration. They saw a lot of Americana—the good and the bad (racism, misogyny, homophobia). It made landing in SF all the more poignant. They came up the California coast, saw Big Sur, then arrived in The City. We end Part 1 with Marga’s story of the first place in San Francisco she and her then-girlfriend went—Castro Street. That story is also how her upcoming show, Spanish Stew, begins. More on that in Part 2, which drops this Thursday. That’s also the date of the Opening Night of Every Kinda People. We hope to see you at Mini Bar that night for an evening of community, art, drinks, laughter, and love. This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded it at Noe Cafe in Noe Valley in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as I talk all things off-season and the upcoming eighth season of Storied. Topics include: The 2025 Listener Survey, which is up until 9/1/25. Take the survey and you could win a Storied: SF zip hoodie! The “Every Kinda People” art show at Mini Bar. Opening night is 9/4/25. What’s new about the podcast? New music by Otis McDonald, shorter episodes, an even sharper focus on artists, activists, and working people I share my thoughts on these hella messed-up times we’ve all been enduring and how this project flies in the face of everything terrible. Next week’s Episode 1 with Marga Gomez The second and third episodes, one with an Every Kinda People artist and the other with the woman foreperson of the Golden Gate Bridge iron workers.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Carolyn and I talk about making decisions and intentionality vs. circumstance, need, and necessity. We then go on to talk more about Carolyn’s lifelong love of sports. She shares the story of her maternal grandmother coming from The Philippines to live with them and how they’d watch games together. It was the days when, in much of the country, if you wanted to watch Major League Baseball, it was all Atlanta Braves, all the time (thanks to TBS, of course). Carolyn became a Braves fan, especially a fan of Dale Murphy. She watched football, too. She didn’t watch the Giants on TV much, because every game wasn’t televised in those days. But she could easily hop on Muni to see a game at Candlestick Park. Her dad often picked them up, showing up at the ballpark around the seventh inning, getting in free, and watching the end of the game with Carolyn and her friends and/or sisters. We go on a short sidebar about bundling up in San Francisco—at Candlestick and if you just wanted to go to the beach. In addition to Candlestick, she went to Warriors games a bit and also various sporting events at Cow Palace. Her dad learned how to bowl and would take his kids with him. We fast-forward a bit to hear about Carolyn’s years in high school, when she went to the all-girl school Mercy High (which is now closed). Later, she took the same bus, the 29, to SF State that she had taken to Mercy. State was the only college she applied to. We talk a little about her decision not to leave San Francisco for school. In high school, she had decided that she wanted to be a sports writer. In fact, she aimed to become the first woman anchor at ESPN. We rewind a bit to talk about some of the journalism Carolyn did in high school. She had her own column in the school paper called “Off the Bench.” She shares a fun story of calling the Braves’ front office to arrange for an interview with her favorite player—Murphy—the next time Atlanta rolled into town. In her third semester at SF State, Carolyn got pregnant. Around this time, she also took her first Asian-American Studies class, something that kicked in for her and stays with her to this day. She dove in head-first. I ask Carolyn whether and how much of that history her parents were aware of. She says that, for them, much of it was just things going on in their lives in the city they came to—things like the strike at SF State or the demonstrations at the I-Hotel in Manilatown. Learning more and more about the history of her people in the US lead Carolyn to confront her dad. “Why did you bring us here?” she’d ask. She ended up raising her first child, a mixed-race kid, as a single parent around this time in her life. She had figured that her son’s dad would bring the kid the Blackness in his life, and she’d bring the Filipino-ness. Her own ideas of how best to raise the kid had to evolve, and they did, she says. She eventually returned to State and graduated. She lived in South City for a hot minute, held three jobs, and raised her son. She never felt that she couldn’t leave The Bay. It was more, “Why would I?” Then, because if you know Carolyn Sideco, well, you know … then we talk about New Orleans. New Orleans is why and how Carolyn came into my life. My wife is borderline obsessed with The Crescent City. I’d been there some earlier in my life, growing up not too far away and having some Louisiana relatives. Erin and I spent three weeks in fall 2022 in a sublet in Bywater, Ninth Ward. That NOLA fever caught on for me then, and I’m hooked. Back home sometime after that, Carolyn came across Erin’s radar. “There’s a woman in San Francisco who seems to love New Orleans as much as I do and she has a house there!” Erin would tell me. In 2024, at a vegan Filipina pop-up at Victory Hall, we finally met this enigmatic woman. We ended up spending Mardi Gras this year at Carolyn’s house in New Orleans—Kapwa Blue. “New Orleans has been calling me for about 20 years,” Carolyn says. One of her younger sisters lived there awhile. Her oldest son served in AmeriCorps there for three years and kept living in New Orleans four more. Carolyn and other members of her family visited often. This was around the time that Hurricane Katrina hit and devastated Southern Louisiana. A little more than a decade ago, Carolyn learned of the historical markers in the area that told the stories of Filipinos being the first Asians to settle in that part of the world. (Longtime listeners of Storied: SF might recall that Brenda Buenviaje hails from just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.) As Carolyn learned more and more of the Filipino history in the region, that calling started to make more and more sense. Three years ago or so, her oldest son got married in New Orleans. That visit told Carolyn that she, too, could live there. Her husband devised a plan, and with some of Carolyn’s cousins, they bought a house in the Musician’s Village part of town, near the Ninth Ward—the aforementioned Kapwa Blue. They intended to bring that same sense of community her parents found and participated in back in San Francisco all those decades ago to their new neighborhood New Orleans. In addition to the house, Carolyn helped found tours of Filipino history in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Find them Bayou Barkada Instagram at @bayoubarkada Back in The City these days, Carolyn has her own sports consultancy called Coaching Kapwa (IG). “I call myself ‘Your sports relationship coach,’” she says. This means that she provides comfort and advice to anyone interacting with any of the various sports ecosystems. She aims to apply the idea of kapwa to an otherwise competition-driven sports landscape. We end the podcast (and the season) with Carolyn’s interpretation of the theme of Storied: San Francisco, Season 7: Keep it local. She shares what that idea means for her here as well as how it pertains to her time in New Orleans. We’ll be taking August off as far as new episodes go. I’ll be busy putting together the first episodes of Season 8 and getting ready for the season launch party/art opening. “Every Kinda People” kicks off at Mini Bar on Sept. 4. That’s also the theme of the next 20 or so episodes of this show. As always, thank you deeply and sincerely for listening/reading/sharing/liking/commenting/DMing/emailing/subscribing/rating/showing up and really any type of interaction you do with this passion project of mine. If you’re not already, please sign up for our monthly newsletter over on the About page. See you in September!

Carolyn Sideco’s story begins in The Philippines. Her dad, Tony Sideco, was born on the island of Cebu in 1938. Her mom, Linda, was born in Paniqui in 1942. By the time Carolyn’s mom was born, the Japanese occupied The Philippines. Young Tony worked for the electric company, which sent him to Paniqui. He soon met his wife-to-be there when he boarded at Carolyn’s grandmother’s house. It wasn’t an overnight romance. The way Tony (who joined his wife in the room with me and Carolyn as we recorded) tells it, he had eyed Linda for so long that he went cross-eyed. Linda was her parents’ first daughter, and she came after five older brothers. So she was always afforded chaperones. After Linda, her parents had three more girls. One of those girls, Carolyn’s aunt, lives next-door to where we recorded, a tradition of intergenerationality the family carried with them when they migrated to the US. Tony came to the United States first in the late Sixties, shortly after Carolyn and her twin sister were born. His migration was motivated by the so-called “American dream.” Carolyn’s version is different, though. She thinks it had more to do with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which effectively did away with nationality quotas. By the time Tony arrived, several members of both his and his wife’s family were already here, many of them in the Outer Sunset. When baby Carolyn, her sister, and their mom arrived, they first lived on 45th Avenue in The Sunset with her aunt and uncle. Then the family moved to 39th Avenue to be on their own. This was the house that Carolyn grew up in, and the one we recorded this podcast in. A community of Paniquieños already existed all around them. In hindsight, Carolyn thinks it was a lot easier for folks like her parents to move halfway around the world because they landed, in essence, in an expat community. Her mom didn’t have to learn English so urgently when she arrived, to cite just one example. Several of those families are still around, spread around the North Peninsula. Some also still live in San Francisco, like Carolyn. Carolyn talks about various aspects of her life that now, in hindsight as an adult, meant she rarely felt different from those around her. She says that in her adult life, meeting folks her parents’ age who didn’t have the same accent as her parents really opened her eyes. Today, Carolyn is the president of Paniquieñans USA, an organization as old as she is. Then we get back to Carolyn’s personal story. Her and her twin, Rosalyn, joined their mom to go to the US when they were two. She shares a cute story of how their mom loved a party so much that she would celebrate their birthday every second day of the month (their birthday is Feb. 2). Because of this, Carolyn grew up thinking that birthdays happen every month. She was five when her family moved out of her uncle and aunt’s place on 45th and into their childhood home on 39th Avenue, and Carolyn remembers it well. We talk briefly about the real estate agent who sold them the house and how little they paid (“$24,000,” Tony Sideco, who was in the room with us that day, chimes in—that’s the equivalent of roughly $173K today). Linda Sideco found work at Little Sisters of the Poor Convalescent Home on Lake Street, where Carolyn would sometimes visit her. Both of Carolyn’s parents worked graveyard shifts. The young couple were able to save for a year for the down payment on their new home. We take a sidebar for Carolyn to talk about the difference in how service and healthcare work are valued in The Philippines vs. how they’re valued in the US. Carolyn then shares a story of how, when she was in the fourth grade, she and her twin sister started going to a new school in their neighborhood. Prior to this, they were bussed. At her new school, they asked Carolyn if she wanted to play volleyball. But to join the team, she needed to pay five dollars. She ran four blocks home to ask her mom for the money, but turns out she wouldn’t give it to young Carolyn, who was so upset that she cried until her mom relented. She did well at volleyball and even made friends through her new sport. She felt so good about it all that she thought, ‘This is why dad brought us here.’ It was the beginning of what would become a lifelong involvement with sports. We end Part 1 with Carolyn’s foray into many different sports and all the women along the way who inspired her. Check back next week for Part 2 and the official last episode of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco. We recorded this podcast at Carolyn’s childhood home in The Sunset in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Dregs shares the story of the day he started doing graffiti. It was also when he began experimenting with rapping. Dregs talks about all the “cool shit in The City” back then, the early 2000s. From sports and music to the aforementioned underworld of San Francisco, SF was lit. It was a time when you could simply step outside your home and find something or someone or some people. You could take a random Muni ride and let stuff happen. And it happened all over town, with creativity pouring out of so many corners. For Dregs, tagging happened first. He started hanging out more in The Sunset, which was quieter than his own hood. He and his buddies would tag, hang out in the park with their boomboxes, drink 40s, and freestyle. One of those buddies had a computer audio-editing program and a cheap mic (RIP Radio Shack). That friend sent him a track over AIM and it blew young Dregs away. Then he learned that two other guys wanted to battle. Dregs hopped on a bus to Lawton Park to join in. It was his first rap battle. The crew that battled that day ended up uniting and making more and more music together. They formed a tagging crew called GMC (Gas Mask Colony), which didn’t last long as as a tagging crew, but they kept the name for their rap group. But the group splintered. As mentioned, Dregs ended up at ISA in Potrero. He got into a DJ program and honed his skills. Soon, it was time to get into a studio to lay down some tracks. They recorded their first song and people liked it. The crew of four included several different ethnicities and neighborhoods across San Francisco, so they had widespread reach. We take a sidebar to discuss how Dregs got his name. It’s a story that involves the movie Scarface. Because of time, I ask Dregs to walk us quickly through the years between getting underway with hip-hop and starting his show, History of The Bay. He did music with his GMC posse as well as some solo projects. Days of hanging out and drinking 40s gave way to adult-life realities—jobs and such. They hadn’t figured out a way to make money off their art. Dregs went to City College and then spent two years at UC Riverside. He came back and worked as a youth counselor in the Tenderloin. At another job in TL, a woman in supportive housing where Dregs worked had a psychotic breakdown. He was the only employee around, and even though he was about to leave for the day, he helped her out. The next day, a boss type thanked Dregs, but told him he’d never get properly compensated for what he did until or unless he had a bachelor’s degree. And so he enrolled at SF State. He was in his late-twenties at this point, and did better in school than he had ever done. He was a straight-A student, in fact. He took a heavy courseload. It was the first time he’d had Black teachers. One of them advised Dregs to go to graduate school. He looked through the graduate-level programs available and decided that law was his best fit. And so off he went, to law school in Davis. He did well at this level, also. He graduated, passed the California bar, and got hired by a firm. He was making good money and thought about saying good-bye to making music. But then the folks he worked with at the law firm convinced him not to. One of the first cuts he did in that era was a collaboration with Andre Nikatina called “Fog Mode.” When the song dropped, it was the pandemic. Dregs had been doing his law work from home. It “sucked,” he tells me. But the track took on a life of its own. He realized amid it all that it was time to go for it with his art. One of the first steps was to get his social media ramped up. Some people suggested TikTok, but Dregs wasn’t sure what content to throw up on that app. Others said, “Talk about you, talk about your interests.” He looked around and realized that no one out there was really talking about the SF/Bay hip-hop Dregs grew up on, or the prolific taggers he ran with. Around this time, in December 2021, his dad passed away. In the early stages of his grief, Dregs figured it was once again time to quit art and turn his energy and attention to taking care of his mom. But then something happened, something that some of us who’ve experienced loss can possibly relate to. In March 2022, Dregs launched History of The Bay on TikTok. With his music and social media popping, his law work took a back seat. Folks in his firm took notice and laid Dregs off. It was for the best. Find Dregs online at his website or on social media @dregs_one. Get History of The Bay on any podcast app. We end the podcast with Dregs’ take on our theme this season—keep it local.

Listen in as I chat with Gaelan McKeown (director of the SF Art Book Fair) and Lisa Ellsworth (director of Development and Strategy at Minnesota Street Project Foundation) as talk all things 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair. We recorded this podcast at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation in The Dog Patch in June 2025.

Dregs One is a lot of things, including a podcast host. In this episode, meet and get to know this prolific AF graffiti writer, hip-hop artist, and Bay historian. Dregs starts us off with the story of his parents. His paternal grandmother was abandoned as a child. Her mother, a Black woman, was raped by a white doctor. She moved to Chicago, where she met Dregs’ grandfather, who was from Jamaica and, as Dregs puts, was a player. He, too, left the family, abandoning his grandmother after his dad was born. She tried ways of getting help to raise her son (Dregs’ dad, who was 13), but ended up dropping him at an orphanage. Dregs’ dad experienced racism in the Catholic orphanage in Chicago where he spent his teen years. Education helped him emerge from that darkness, though. He eventually became a police officer in Chicago, but left that job after experiencing more racism and rampant corruption. After that, his dad went on a spiritual quest that landed him in San Francisco. His parents met in The City, in fact, but we need to share Dregs’ mom story. Her family was from Massachusetts. Her dad got into trouble when he was young, but managed to become a chemist. He helped develop the chemical process that went into Polaroid film, in fact. He later served in the Korean War before becoming an anti-war activist. He hosted the Boston Black Panthers in his home, in fact. His mom mostly rejected her white culture, owing to many things, including alcoholism. She hung out with Black folks and listened to Black music. She’d be one of or the only white folks in these circles. She went on her own spiritual journey that also ended up here. It was the Eighties in San Francisco when his parents met. Dregs is their only child, though he has some step-siblings through his dad. He says that despite his parents’ turbulent relationship, they provided a nice environment for him to grow up in. Because both parents worked, and because he was effectively an only child, Dregs spent a lot of time alone when he was young. His dad got a master’s degree and started counseling AIDS patients in The Castro. His mom worked a pediatric intensive care nurse. Though Dregs and I were both young at the time, we go on a sidebar to talk about how devastating the AIDS epidemic must’ve been. Dregs was born in the late-Eighties and did most of his growing up in the Nineties and 2000s in the Lakeview. Make no mistake, he says—it was the hood. Although he lived on “the best block of the worst street,” he saw a lot as a kid. His mom often got him out of their neighborhood, boarding the nearby M train to go downtown or to Golden Gate Park. His dad wasn’t around a lot, so Dregs spent a lot of time hanging out with his mom. They went to The Mission, Chinatown, The Sunset, all over, really. Around fifth grade or so, when he started riding Muni solo, Dregs also got into comic books. He read a lot. He drew a lot. He played a little bit of sports, mostly pick-up basketball. As a born-and-raised San Franciscan, Dregs rattles off the schools he went to—Jose Ortega, Lakeshore Elementary, A.P. Giannini, and Lincoln. But when Dregs got into some trouble in high school, he was taken out and put back in. It was a turbulent period. He eventually graduated from International Studies Academy (ISA) in Potrero Hill. One of the adults’ issues with young Dregs was his graffiti writing. For him, it was a natural extension of drawing. He remembered specific graffiti from roll-downs on Market Street he spotted when he was young. He says he was always attracted to the SF underworld. “It was everywhere you went.” Going back to those Muni trips around town with his mom, he’d look out the windows when they went through the tunnels and see all the graffiti, good art, stuff that he later learned that made SF graffiti well-regarded worldwide. While at A.P. Giannini, a friend of his was a tagger. In ninth grade, Dregs broke his fingers and had a cast. One friend tagged his cast, and it dawned on Dregs—he, too, could have a tag. After his first tagging adventure, Dregs ended up at his friend’s house. The guy had two Technics turntables. He was in ninth grade, but his friend was already DJing. Among the music in his buddy’s rotation was some local artists. “Whoa, this is San Francisco?” young Dregs asked. His mind was blown and his world was opening up. Check back next week for Part 2 with Dregs One. And look for a bonus episode on the San Francisco Art Book Fair later this week. We recorded this podcast in the Inner Richmond in June 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Young Ed was studying at UC Davis and exploring his sexuality. He didn’t consider himself bisexual, and instead thought that everyone was fluid. But he thought he had made a choice—that is, to be heterosexual. Part of that decision is that Ed always wanted a family of his own, and therefore, partnering with a woman was the only way to achieve that. But between relationships with women, Ed would visit “cruise-y bathrooms,” places known for their hookup potential. This was before the internet and smartphones. Stuff like this was word-of-mouth and need-to-know. But during his visits, Ed never hooked up with anyone. He says that he merely wanted to be adjacent to that world. After he graduated, Ed stayed in Davis. One day over coffee with a female friend at a lesbian cafe, his friend told him that she might be bi. He said he might be, too. She suggested that they “go to this club in San Francisco” where they could scratch that itch, so to speak. Ed says that The Box remains the most diverse array of folks in the LGBTQIA+ community he has ever been part of. And it wasn’t diverse only on the sexuality spectrum. There were folks from all over the gender spectrum, too, he says. Ed watched men of various ethnic backgrounds dancing with one another and thought, ‘Why are those straight guys dancing with each other? Wait, they’re not straight. Wait, I’m not straight.’ So now he knew. But the question of whether and how to come out was a totally separate question. It was the mid-Nineties. Coming out was, in Ed’s words, “really fucking scary.” He remembered that his dad, who has since come around and is loving and accepting of who his son is, often used homophobic slurs casually when Ed was a kid. Still, Ed summoned the courage and started telling folks. His mom was cool. His dad and brother were cool, too, but also probably confused. His friends shrugged him off in a very “no duh” kinda way. But there was that one member of his friend group for whom the news seemed not to sit well. Brad had been Ed’s friend since seventh grade back in Hawaii. Three months after coming out to his friends, Brad let Ed know that he, too, wanted to come out of the closet, but that Ed had stolen his thunder. Laughs all around. Going back to that night at The Box, Ed met someone and they started dating. His new partner lived in Berkeley and Ed moved in (they had a roommate). Then Ed and that first boyfriend moved to the Tenderloin together, followed by a move to the Mission. Ed got a job teaching at Balboa High School in The City. He says he was so young (23) and blended in with students enough that on his first day, the principal at Balboa told him to get to class. Again, belly laughs. Ed loved teaching and did well at it. He lasted at Balboa from 1996 to 2001, teaching English as a second language to students from all over the world. The conversation shifts to the moment when Ed realized that San Francisco was home. Despite being here so long (since the mid-Nineties), Ed feels that SF is one of several places for him. Hawaii will always hold a place in his heart. He says that his sense of adventure and curiosity have him roaming around to other cultures regularly. But being married and having kids of his own grounds him in The City. One of his two children experiences mental health challenges, so that makes leaving tricky. All of that and community. Community keeps him here. I get it. One space Ed finds community is at The Social Study, where we recorded. It’s his neighborhood bar, the place where bartenders know his drink without him ordering it. The spot where other regulars and semi-regulars ask him details about his life. Sure, he could find that in another part of town or in another city altogether. But right now, that community is his. And he relishes it. There’s also his work. Aside from classroom teaching, Ed did some after-school work, education philanthropy work, and some other education-related jobs. Early in the pandemic, his non-binary older kid struggled. Ed says that in hindsight, he wished he had taken his child out of “Zoom school.” He wanted the kid to pick one topic, whatever they wanted, and learn that. They would spend time outside and hang out together. But that’s not what happened. The teacher in Ed pushed his kid, over and over. Ed and his partner were able to find support groups around SF and the Bay Area that work with children who exhibit mental health issues. That helped, but he eventually realized that his own parenting needed help and support, because it wasn’t meeting the moment. He sought that help, but wasn’t impressed. He says it was mostly folks telling him what he was doing wrong, instead of being supportive and uplifting and actually teaching him. He found a couple of tools that served as Band-Aid solutions, but he was left looking and looking and looking for answers. He needed help that acknowledged and addressed his own traumas. And so he began working more or less on his own. One of his first discoveries was recognizing a moment, however short and fleeting, between his kid’s stimulating action or words and Ed’s reaction. If he could interrupt that automatic reaction and gain control of his own emotions, it would serve both himself and his kid. He worked on stretching out that time … from one second to two seconds and eventually to five. Once he got there, he could respond thoughtfully and lovingly vs. reacting. Realizing that he was able to overcome his shortcomings as a parent all on his own lead to Ed’s founding of The Village Well. He’d met others who were aligned with his parenting experiences. He knew that if they created a space where folks in their situations could come for comfort and sharing and advice, they’d be doing the right thing. If you’re interested in learning more, please visit The Village Well’s website and follow them on social media @villagewellparenting. As we do at Storied: San Francisco, we end this podcast with Ed Center’s take on our theme this season—keep it local. We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as Megan Rohrer and I reconnect after nearly four years to talk all about their new book, San Francisco’s Transgender District. Look for it on Arcadia Publishing in August at your local bookstore. We recorded this bonus episode outside the front door of the Golden Gate Theater in the Transgender District in June 2025.

Ed Center and I begin this podcast with a toast. I’m proud to call Ed my friend. I met him a couple years at The Social Study, where we recorded this episode and where my wife, Erin Lim, bartends. From the first time I spoke with Ed, I knew I liked him. His energy and humor and intellect and heart are all boundless. I’m hella drawn to people like Ed. His story begins in Cebu in the Philippines, with his maternal grandmother. Her family was poor and her parents died in the Spanish Flu of the 1910s. That loss plunged the surviving family members into what Ed describes as destitute poverty. Following that tragedy, her older brother signed up to work for the Dole company in Hawaii. Ed’s grandmother was 13 at this time, but still, it was decided that she would accompany her brother to the islands to help care for him while he worked the pineapple fields and earned a wage. Ed points out that the Dole Food Company (as it was known at the time) intended these migrant workers to honor their contracts and then go back to their home countries. To that end, the company only hired young men. But Ed’s family paid a stranger on their boat $20 to marry his grandmother so that she could join her brother in Hawaii. Ed goes on a sidebar here about the tendency in his family to exaggerate their own history. “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” or so the family saying goes. He returns to the story of his maternal grandmother to share the tale of her younger sister being so distraught about the departure, she hugged her so hard that her flip-flop broke. It was her only pair of shoes. In the Filipino community on Oahu at the time, there was an outsize number of men in relation to women. When Ed’s grandfather first set eyes on his grandma, he began to court her. A year later, they asked her older brother if they could get married, and he said no, that she was too young (14 at the time). But they got married anyway, with the understanding that they would wait two more years to live together. They moved in and Ed’s grandmother had a new baby, including his mom, every other year for the next 20 years. Like her brother, his grandmother’s new husband worked in the pineapple fields for Dole, doing incredibly hard labor. His grandma washed clothes for bachelor workers. The two saved their money and bought plantation property from Dole. The property was affordable enough that they were able to build multiple shacks for the kids to eventually live in. At this point, Ed launches into what he calls “the shadow story” of his family. He learned that shadow story when he was a kid and his mom and aunties were cooking in the kitchen. He’d sit just outside the room pretending to read a book, eavesdropping. There, he learned things like which family members were smoking pot or getting into trouble. But there are more serious elements, which prompts Ed to issue a trigger warning to readers and listeners. His grandmother didn’t quite agree to go to Hawaii. When she told her brother no to the idea, he beat her. He did this repeatedly until she acquiesced. But it was in one of these violent melees that his grandmother’s flip-flop broke. All this to say that Ed’s grandmother didn’t have much agency in her life decisions. The last two of her 10 children almost killed her. After number 10, the doctor gave Ed’s grandfather an involuntary vasectomy. Ed shares the story of how, on plantation payday, the women and children would hide in the fields with the men guarding them. It was a way to try to protect them from workers in the next village getting drunk and coming in to cause trouble. He summarizes the family history to this point by pointing out the incredible amount of resilience his ancestors carried. Also strength and love. But also, violence. All of those qualities manifested in their and their children’s parenting practices. Ed’s mom raised her kids in this way. The severity of the abuse waned over generations, but it was there nonetheless. Ed says he was ultimately responsible for his mother’s emotions. For many of these reasons, in his adult life, Ed founded The Village Well Parenting. We’ll get more into that in Part 2. We back up for Ed to tell the story of how his mom and dad met each other. His dad was in the Army during the war in Vietnam. On a voyage to Asia, his boat took a detour and ended up in Hawaii, where he remained for the next five years. His parents got together and had Ed and his younger brother. They grew up among a much larger Filipino extended family, but Ed didn’t really know his dad’s Caucasian family, who lived on the East Coast. He’s gotten to know them more in his adult life. Ed grew up on Oahu in the Seventies and Eighties. His family was between working class and middle class, and there was always stress about money. But in hindsight, they lived well. We share versions of a similar story—that of parents telling kids that Christmas would be lean, that they didn’t have a lot of money (probably true), but that never ended up actually being the case. Both of our recollections was mountains of gifts on December 25. Growing up, Ed was always feminine. He was also athletic. It was a time before Ellen, before Will and Grace, when “athletic” also meant “not gay.” Ed says he wanted to be “not gay,” but he couldn’t help who he was. That led to his getting bullied. Moving to the mainland for college meant escape—from his own torment and from that of his peers back on the island. Ed went to UC Davis. He had played competitive soccer in middle school and high school, and because his teams were good, they came to the mainland a couple times. But Davis was a whole other world by the time he arrived to go to college. It was the early Nineties. He took what we call a gap year before coming to California. For him, that meant working. In one of his jobs, he served tables at CPK in Hawaii, where Carol Burnett was one of his regulars. We end Part 1 with Ed’s story of his time at UC Davis and not yet accepting his queerness. This Thursday on the podcast, I talk with Megan Rohrer about their new book on the Transgender District in San Francisco. And check back next week for Part 2 with Ed Center. We recorded this podcast at The Social Study in June 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we start off talking about the underground nature of trans and drag safe spaces such as Compton’s back in the Sixities, and well before that. Because of this, precise records of places and events are often hard to come by. Saoirse also speaks to the human psychology of needing other people to act in order to justify joining an action. Of course, everyone’s threshold for this varies. Shane joins in to talk about how queer history is the story of fighting back against hate when there’s nothing left to lose. Folks on the frontlines of these battles don’t always plan the fights that end up happening. Case in point—the events at Compton’s Cafeteria that form the basis of the play. Then we shift the conversation to talk about Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and how the play came about. Mark Nassar (Tony and Tina’s Wedding) saw the Tenderloin Museum’s (TLM) exhibition on the riot at Compton’s and soon got in touch with Donna Personna and Collette LeGrande through a project the two were working on at the time—Beautiful by Night, a short documentary about their lives as trans people and drag queens. Over the course of about a year of periodic meetings at Mark’s house, where Donna and Collette shared their stories of Compton’s and the riot, the three weaved together enough personal stories to create an immersive play. Katie Conry at the Tenderloin Museum told the group that if something ever came out of what they’re doing, to let her know. Shane shares her story of the first time she saw Donna Personna perform. Prior to that, Shane thought that drag was a young person’s thing. She’d never seen someone of Donna’s age do drag. But she was blown away and was able to meet Donna. That night, Donna hinted to Shane about the project she was working on with Mark Nassar and Collette LeGrande. She told Shane that when the time came, when they had something ready, she’d let her know. About a year later, Shane was at Mark’s house reading for the role of Rusty, the character based on Donna. Some of this story has already appeared on Storied: SF, in the podcast on Katie and TLM. The museum helped bring the play to life by getting a space for the production. It was 2018. They were doing it. The first run of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot lasted several months. It was deemed a success and the plan was to bring it back in 2020. But the universe had different ideas. Prior to the pandemic, the biggest challenge was securing a space. But then, Shane says she was at Piano Fight in February 2020 for an event to sign a lease on a new spot. Just a few weeks later, the first shelter-in-place orders were handed down. Shane speaks to what it means, now more than five years down the road and in a very different political and social environment, to get the play staged. And Saoirse talks about how honored she is and how personal it is for her to portray an actual living legend (Collette LeGrande). I ask Shane and Saoirse to respond to this season’s theme on Storied—”keep it local.” Saorise then shares the story of being targeted and harassed by right-wing bigots (is there any other kind?) right here in San Francisco. She tells this story to emphasize that, even in The City, trans people are not safe from fascist transphobia and violence that are spreading across the nation and the world. She also speaks to the massive wealth disparity here in SF and The Bay. All of this to say that for Saoirse, keeping it local requires engaging with all of these truths. Shane begins by riffing off of Saoirse’s response. She works for The City and County of San Francisco and wonders whether some of her coworkers know what’s at risk. She points to right-wing groups coming to SF to hold “de-transition” events. She then ends the episode by cataloging the many reasons she loves The City and wants us all to fight for it. For more information and to buy tickets for Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, please go to comptonscafeteriariot.com. And follow the production on Instagram @comptonscafeteriariot. We recorded this episode in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot play space in the Tenderloin in May 2025. Photography by Mason J.

I joined Erin and Ange of Bitch Talk Podcast for another sit-down with Frameline Executive Director Allegra Madsen to talk all things Frameline49. If it weren’t obvious from that moniker, this year’s is the 49th annual Frameline film festival, the largest and longest-running LGBTQIA fest in the world. After listening to this bonus episode, please browse the Frameline49 program, buy tickets, get your butt in a theater seat, and let’s continue to uplift the LGBTQIA community through art! We recorded this bonus episode at the Frameline offices in South of Marked in June 2025.