 And we're live on YouTube welcome YouTube viewers. And I'm going to start opening the door. John, I'm going to mute everybody except John. I'll start it too. And here we go. Welcome friends will get started at two o'clock. Welcome. Hello and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm John Smalley and I'm a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. The library is proud to help sponsor today's wonderful city stories program, a program created and curated by the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. Please note that today's program is being recorded and streamed to YouTube. So please turn off your cameras if you do not wish to appear on YouTube. While we're waiting for a few more people to join us. I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community. To tell you about a couple of upcoming literary events. And to inform you about free COVID tests and vaccinations. When I'm done with my remarks, I'll hand the microphone over to the Creative Writing Institute's director, Alexandra Costoulos. So once again, thanks everyone for coming. On behalf of the public library, we want to welcome you to the unceded land, the Aloni tribal people. And to acknowledge the many Ramata Sholoni tribal groups. And families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside and work. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these families and community members. And we encourage you to learn more about first person rights. This Wednesday, San Francisco poet, the amazing Tonga Eisen Martin will deliver his inaugural address. You won't want to miss this event. And I will put the link to this program in the chat. On the following Wednesday, April 28th, the eloquent poet and essayist Hanif Abdul Rakeeb discusses his latest book, A Little Devil in America. The public library continues to offer curbside service at the main library and half of our branch libraries. You can place holds on books or other materials online or over the telephone and we'll notify you when materials are ready to pick up. We've recently added a print to go service. This means that you can now send print jobs to the library and then pick those up when they're ready. I'll put a link to this service in the chat as well. As you know, we're all still in the midst of a pandemic. So please continue to wear your masks until we can all get vaccinated. If you live or work in San Francisco and are experiencing symptoms, you can get free COVID tests by going to the website, sf.gov slash city test SF. Lastly, if you live in San Francisco, you can sign up to get notified when you're eligible for vaccination. You can also find out where vaccinations are taking place in your neighborhood. And I will put all of these addresses in the chat also. So that concludes my opening remarks. I'd now like to turn the microphone over to the creative writing institutes director, Alexander Costulus. Welcome. Hi, everyone. I'm Alexander Costulus and I'm the founder and executive director of the San Francisco creative writing Institute. We started this Institute in 2015. After several successful years of teaching Jack Grape's method writing program in San Francisco, it's an independent creative writing workshops. And then they sort of sort of dovetailed into a larger Institute where we invited teachers from different backgrounds and different specialties to come and bring their expertise and teach different types of creative writing to the community at an affordable rate, but at sort of an MFA level education, but for anybody who wanted to take a class. And we envision ourselves as the kind of organization that's accessible for someone who wants to do creative writing as a hobby for fun, but also somebody who might want to pursue it as a calling or a vocation. And we sort of work in that whole spectrum. And our motto is that anyone can find their voice and tell their story. So I'm going to talk a little bit about City Stories Project. And I'm really glad that you guys are here to listen to it. And I'm thrilled to share it with you. It's a really great project. It was started in 2016 and 2017. SF Creative Writing Institute partnered with Safe House for the performing arts to co-produce the program Central Market Now, which featured a live reading series and cultural workshops, actually creative writing workshops. The audience was cultivated from local neighborhoods of mid-market Tenderloin and Soma. The program was supported by the California Arts Council. We took it over in 2016, 2017. It had been going on via Safe House. And then we partnered with them after to do focus specifically on creative writing. And then we curated and hosted readings featuring local organizations, elevating the voices of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and immigrant writers from all over the Bay Area. And one of the things we did that was fun with City Stories was we had six readings. I think it ended up being seven or eight because we did some before we got the grant. But we hosted six after we got the grant where we invited local curators that we liked who were doing reading series anyway that were interesting. And we said, okay, you six curators, each month you're going to bring in your people. And so we invited M.K. Chavez from Lyric's Endurages. She brought in her group. And then we invited Nomadic Press. They did Nomadic Press All Stars. They brought in their group. We invited Marguerite Munoz to do. She does a very nice reading series at Alley Cat Books, which name escapes me, but it's a great one. And they'll probably all remember it at two in the morning. But she did the Futures Female and had a sort of a collaboration between all different female artists, high school, all the way up to emerging to advance. And we sort of did these really great workshops. And then we invited, we had creative writing workshops where we partnered and went into local communities, tried to get people from the SROs to join, you know, the everyday starving artists to join people from different organizations like Larkin Street Youth. We invited them and we hosted them at Safe House for the Performing Arts, the old Safe House on One Grove thanks to Jolie and Dini who let us use the space. And then also at the WeWork on 25 Taylor where we had our location. And we had pizza. And we just hosted these creative writing workshops and said anyone can come. And they were taught by Daphne Gottlieb and later Paul Corman Roberts. And we just sort of rift on the idea of the city, what makes a city, what's your city story. And they were great. And so that's sort of at the end of one of them, we got the idea that we would start to sort of get continue to gather city stories from, from the people that live in San Francisco, a lot of people from Oakland came. And at the end, our last event, I think Paul Corman Roberts left the room to get the pizza. Everybody started crying and we were like, why are you crying? And they had all been affected by the ghost ship fire. And they all were there to sort of emotionally kind of get catharsis and write about it. It was like three or four different people who had lived there and worked there and their friends had passed away. So they, we thought, well, maybe we should expand the idea of city stories to include other cities, you know, Oakland or. But the idea of a city and what makes a city and what makes the writer of a city is interesting. And so that's where we were at. And, and it's been an interesting ride. We took a break, mostly because I had two kids. So, and I, we put it on the back burner and we were running the Institute and then the pandemic happened. But then we thought, you know what, let's bring it back. And with the help of Brittany Delaney, our grant writer, we were able to bring back city stories. And this is the, this is the, this is the comeback. And, and we hope to expand on it and keep adding to it and recording the stories and the people you're going to hear an eclectic mix of writers who've taken workshops with me who, who stories impressed me over the years. And I felt because they were about growing up in San Francisco specifically, also a historian who talks about San Francisco, and then a writer whose work is deeply entrenched in San Francisco and sort of living here in the coming of age in the city and then a dancer and performer and choreographer. And, and so that's sort of like the first of many conversations it's not meant to be exhaustive it's not the entire city here it's just a small fragment of the city and we hope to get funding in the future and really do some hard work to seek the stories of the city and, and find the untold stories and the unheard voices, especially from marginalized communities. But that takes more work on our part which we're willing to do. Anyway, without further ado, I'd like to introduce our readers. Our first reader is Dennis Estrada. And I'm going to just quickly find my Google Doc with this bio. Here it is. Oh, and if you're nervous about reading don't worry I'm nervous all the time. And it's part of part of the part of reading so just even though we're small and we're on YouTube, you know it's just like in person it's just in some ways you're in your living room so it's comfortable, but don't be nervous. But anyway Dennis Estrada is an amazing writer. He was born and raised in San Francisco. He's found passion and meaning in writing about what it was like growing up in the city. And he lost all his hair at the tender age of seven, brown, and living on the cusp of two worlds, that of his Filipino immigrant parents, and the one that existed whenever he stepped outside of the family home. He is an English teacher and associate dean at a San Francisco independent school. Without further ado, Dennis Estrada. Good afternoon everybody. You can hear me. Thank you. You can't hear me. Perfect. Perfect. Great. Okay. Thank you for being here. Stickball softball toss pickup games of hoops and touch football. That's what happened on the schoolyard when I was a kid. And those of us who could throw catch shoot and run. We ruled the asphalt. We chose up the sides we set the end zones and out of bounds we carried the ball set the screens and threw up the shots. We'll take foul V you take a rocker. That's even you guys kick off will receive. Hello, hello, Eddie, you do a down and out Billy. Just go long, Mikey bread and butter foul V stay in the block and make sure you take care of the rocker. Don't let them in. Give me some time on three down. That's just the way it went. We were the untouchables. Most of the time. Every so often though, the tide turned rather drastically. And those of us who ruled the roost, got a taste of someone else's medicine. We hung with McCarthy, Dugan, Zappia, Cesare and Pesci. The sons of good old Italian and Irish families. We were all Catholic school boys. And St. Monica grammar school in the Richmond district was our kingdom. When we weren't in the classroom or gym. We were on the school yard. You see stick ball was played with a sawed off broomstick and a tennis ball. And on Saturdays in between basketball games and runs to bills place for 25 cent bags of fries and bottles of RC Cola from the corner store. We picked sides and swung the stick. In stick ball pitch was a lob, a toss that bounced first before crossing home plate. Just a nice pitch to swing at slow and steady. And yellow, no fastball, no curve, no change up. And no fat barrel of a baseball bat to make contact. Instead, just a thin wooden broomstick handle. Which, as you might imagine, made the game that much more interesting. Come on, Eddie, give me a good one on the outside of the plate. That's a good one. What do you want? Take your cuts. We don't have all day. Come on, picture, picture, picture, belly, picture. There were lots of swings and misses in the game. If the eye hand dance lagged in any way, forget about it. You just took your cuts and sat down. And at one time or another, we all took our cuts and sat down. But when solid contact was made. Nothing felt sweeter. McCarthy stretches, winds up and throws. Pesci swings, swung on, hit deep to left center field. The ball sailed a small yellow dot against a mostly gray sky. Lifting higher and higher, deeper and deeper toward the back of the church and over the garage. And Father Butler's shiny black Cadillac farther and farther carrying the fence bouncing onto the street and finally rolling to a resting place. Against the terrazzo steps in front of the McCabe's home. Catholic school boys. What more can I say? We dressed in black cassocks and white surpluses and serve daily masses in the early mornings before school. We rang handbells at the Sanctus and carry chalices of gold and lit aromatic resin of frankincense and myrrh. We gave up candy during lead and got our throats blessed on the Feast of St. Blaise every year on the 3rd of February. We conjured up wrongdoings and whispered them to men hidden behind plastic screens in the dark of the confessional box. Men whose voices we recognized, but whose faces we could not see. We were small potatoes, really. Small dogs with big barks. Yes, Father, I'll make sure to ring the bells longer. No, Father, I wasn't the one throwing the tennis ball against the rectory wall. Yes, Father, I can serve the funeral on Saturday morning. And yes, I'll be sure to wear black shoes. No, Father, I don't use the Lord's name in vain. One time, a band of public school boys from the local junior high up the street strolled into the schoolyard. They were a group of black and brown boys. African American and Filipino. They smoked. They fought. They hustled. And they carried blades. And they knew exactly where to get their chump change. Their tactics were simple and smart. Once on the playground, they divided and conquered. The tall one went to McCarthy at home. The short one to Zappia on the mound. The skinny one to Cesare at 3rd. The dark one to Pesci at 2nd. The heavy one to me, Estrada at 1st. And then they went on and on, they went until every last one of us was covered. No one was spared. Give me some money, blood. You know, you got some. I don't have anything. I left my money at home. Don't lie to me, blood. I kick your ass. I know you got some. My classmates dimes and quarters and 50 cent pieces were handed over just like that. Their pockets turned inside out, emptied willingly, given up without a fight, without a word of protest. They rolled over and played dead. That's what they did. And I would have done the same if it weren't for a simple twist of fate. Just as the heavy one was ready to shake me down. The short one on the mound with Zappia nodded over to my guy and shook him off. Leave him alone. He said, I recognize the voice first. And then the brown face hidden in the shadows of the black knit cap that stretched down to his eyes. It was Butchie, my cousin. Well, sort of. You see, if you were Filipino, like Butchie and I were, and if your mothers knew one another before they came to America, if they showed up at the same parties and fiestas and pick food from the same tables, if they danced on the same hard-word floors at 106 South Park, if they attended the same high mass at the same time at the same church, if they went to the same weddings and Christenings and funerals, then you were cousins. Period. Butchie was my cousin. And he knew that blood was thicker than water. Leave him alone. He said. And that's exactly what the heavy one did. He left me alone. My coins re-rained with me while all my friends coughed up theirs. They were stripped down and left standing with pockets turned inside out, hanging from their Levi's like velveteen, rather, ears. And for us, the shape down was a lesson in humility. Although we ruled within the perimeter of our small world, cordoned off by cyclone fences and church glass windows, with a shiny black Cadillac and rectory, the outside world still pressed down upon us and seeped through the doorways and iron gates to knock us around and to put us in our place, the tenderizing of sorts, so as to ready us for life's lessons we needed to learn. No one stays on top forever. Leave him alone. Simple words yet steeped in some deeper truth that I wasn't learning on the playground with my white friends. I was one of the few brown boys amidst a sea of white, and at the time it was easy for me to not see that. On the day the hustlers came to town, sure, I was one of the Catholic school boys on the playground who was easy money, but I was also a dark shade of brown. I was Filipino, just like Butchki and the tall one and the skinny one who had come to wreak havoc to turn our parochial world upside down. For me, things went even deeper. Encoded between the letters and spacings of Butchki's three words was yet another truth, one more salient and critical to my own survival than any of the others, and one that would continue to knock at my door over and over and over again. On the day my cousin and the hustlers came to town, brown saved me. End of story. Yes, Butchki, blood is indeed thicker than water. All right, who made the last out? McCarthy did? Who's up then? Cesare, let's play ball. Pitch it, Eddie. Oh, my God, that was amazing. Beautiful. That's beautiful. And I remember when you wrote that in my workshop, and I know that you've edited it and it really works even better. I mean, when you first wrote it as a fragment, it worked. But now it's like a final finished piece. And I love all the layers and how you look back and talk about, talk to yourself at the time and the reflective part, reflexive. And, oh, God, it's great. Thank you so much, Alexandra. Thank you. Welcome. Okay, great way to start off. Our next city story writer is Yvonne Campbell. Also in that same first class that I taught, when I first started teaching creative writing independently, Yvonne found my name on a flyer and took her chances. And that's how we met. And here's her bio. Named by her father after Hollywood starlet Yvonne Decarlo, because he liked Decarlo's legs. I did not know that. Yvonne Campbell was raised by a sheet metal worker and a Scottish immigrant mother who harbored fantasies of a stage career. Yvonne always wrote and now after stints as a stockbroker, visual artist and ESL teacher, and having raised a daughter as a single mother, she has published in journals including Great Weather for Media and Bay Area Generations. Her poem, Anti-Infesto, was selected to be turned into a silk screen poster commemorating the first 100 days of resistance to the Trump presidency. Without further ado, Yvonne Campbell. You're muted, Yvonne. Can everyone hear me? Can hear you great now. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, Alexandra. Welcome everyone. Such a pleasure to be here in Dennis. That was, I still have chills. Thank you. This piece is a homage to my grandmother, Bernice Campbell, the library near Bartlett Street. My father, raised in the city, felt the pull of the American dream, owning a home. And since we were as far west as you could go, this young man went east, moved his family to Concord, taking out a VA loan. East Bay was a big lure for those lucky enough to be the right man to have a union or government job. Workers poured in and bought cookie cutter homes, leaving behind the bag dead by the Bay's magic and neon. The Saturday nights and the mornings after, my mother paid the price. Concord was stoned dead. She dearly missed her kin and the dance clubs, swallowing her grief and Betty Crocker recipes and diet pills. Then there was my father's mother. In her cloth coat with a nylon scarf, tied over her hair. Graham huddled against the late afternoon wind, and peered anxiously at the bus windows, as we rolled into the station on seventh and market. My little sister Corinne clamor down the steps and greeted her with a list of treats and sites. She simply had to eat and see. A survivor of the great earthquake. Graham was an inveterate day tripper. Love to show off the city's jewels. She also spoiled as rotten. Grilled cheese, Jell-O salads, chicken noodle soup, Domino's and Chinese checkers at the kitchen table. Graham's husband, our grandpa had served in World War one. Eventually his sharp no fuse lakes collapsed. He spent his days in an overstuffed chair, smoking camels and reading life magazine. Graham would take us to Golden Gate Park. He would take us to the beach, play land at the beach, where the six foot tall animatronic crone, laughing Sal, frightened Corinne. But Graham was always on a tight schedule and had to get back before grandpa burned the house down or wet his pants. But today was special. My first trip alone with Corinne to the city where dad had been born. Where the bakeries, taquerias and Mexican food marks began around the corner from an art deco style movie theater built in the early 40s. It's landmark marquee, lighting the sky south of Bernal Hill. Beginning with a stroll to the lower 24th street, we gassed the trays of bright pink pastries in the windows, tugging at our grandmother's hands to enter. But she refused. She was planning to bake us a pineapple upside down cake. We continue to Mission Street, straining to keep up with Graham's rapid city pace. Poor Corinne with her tiny legs and feet, hustling past shoppers pulling carts and carrying bouquets and pink bakery boxes with buses hissing and squealing and stopping to discourage riders into the mix. I held Corinne's hand tight, afraid she would topple over and disappear through a sewer grill. Entering the Mission Mart, an indoor market filled with fishing tanks, produce stands and a butcher palace. It's windows steaming with pieces of a freshly slaughtered cow, glistening wet under the overhead lights. We averted our eyes and bake Graham who was haggling over Mericino cherries and pineapple to hurry. Skipping past the florists to a small pharmacy that sold comic books. We each picked one. Corinne preferred the antics. I choose the more mature Lulu. Unexpectedly, Graham turned west at Leeds shoes. Corinne and I were both devotees of the bookmobile that parked near our school. We thought books lived there on wheels and were quickly in and quickly out. It was a space too small to linger. A space that left us unprepared for a real library. For this huge, handsome two-story bow art building inside a broad iron fence dominating the corner. At the top of a series of white stone steps, Graham could barely open the tall wooden door that revealed a lobby as big as her apartment. We followed her in. We're surrounding us with wall-to-wall books. Two floors of them. The ground floor and another below. Down in beckoning cantilevered marble staircase. Graham led us down to a room the size of a roller rink with a reading area under tall double windows framed by black iron casements. Tables were piled high with abandoned books, magazines, and adjustable lamps. Graham went up to hunt for her Dorothy Sayers mysteries, leaving us to excavate the stacks. The books lived in two places. How did they get from the bookmobile to here? We found out that Beverly Clary wrote war books and one about Henry Huggins and that there was a sequel to the lion, witch, and the warbler. Time collapsed as I became immersed in Narnia. Looking up at the chandelier hung from the pitched, wide beam ceiling. I marveled that someone had built this room. Filled its shelves with books. And it was all free. Which felt so un-American. I vowed to become a communist. I liked the word and how it made adults angry. Sitting at the smooth hardware table with Karen, who was swinging her feet that didn't touch the floor. I was experiencing deja vu. My favorite braids. A dim memory of a bibliophile past. My course was set. I would be a communist and move to San Francisco and live in the basement of the library near Bartlett Street. That's beautiful. I love the details, Yvonne. And I love that. I love how it goes back to the World War I, the grandfather, with how he smokes camels. There's a great detail. And then his shrapnel in his leg. And it's like a different San Francisco. And sort of connecting it to the president and saying, well, I would be a communist. This is really cute. Thank you. Even the way that you, you're welcome. And even the way you did the laughing sal and incorporated, you know, grew up in the city or have it. I still remember laughing sal and had feared it as a kid. I know my mom was born in the city and born and raised here. And she also was afraid of laughing sal. And he said he's just freak her out, you know, and actually you can see laughing sal and Santa Cruz boardwalk. Oh, yeah. I saw you laugh a couple of years ago. I don't know if it's, I'm glad she lives on. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. Right. Thank you for sharing. And also working on another, a not novella, called handy fam, which is about a renting out family that rents out their life to stay alive, right? And to survive. Right. Right. It is a novel and it's set entirely in San Francisco. It's a great story too. Beautiful. Okay. Well, thank you very much. And our next reader is also a student of mine. Rowena Choi Henry. And Rowena did not send me her bio, but I have an old one. So I'm going to read it, the old one I have, and then talk about what she's going to read and introduce her while she gets ready. Rowena Choi Henry is a lifelong reader and late blooming writer. Her writings include family stories that reflect her Korean American heritage. And also her experiences as a nurse working with patients on the front lines of the ICU with cancer. And I'm just going to read you a little bit about what Rowena told me she was going to read. Just so you have it. Let's see if I can find it now. She said, she's going to read one of the stories from her memoir. She said, my family is Korean American and we arrived in San Francisco in 1956. And I've spent most of my life in the city and the Bay Area. The story is about waitressing for her mom at a diner on Leavenworth, thinking about not only her experience, but also her story as a struggling immigrant, achieving her dream of owning her own business. And also trying to include a feel for the time the late 60s, early 70s, the neighborhood, their customers, the small Korean community in San Francisco. So hopefully that's still what you're going to read. But Rowena, but it's a great story. So without further ado, Rowena Choi Henry. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to read my story. Thank you Alexandra. And I'm so pleased to see some people I know, and I'm going to read it out loud. I'm going to read it out loud. I'm going to read it out loud. I'm going to read it out loud. My story is called, Today's Special. And it's a story I've worked on, on and off for a few years. Mom never knew how to show us, she loved us, except in the time, on Korean tradition of harsh criticism and cheers. Why do you get to bees? Mom demanded scornfully when she saw my report card high school. But mom, I got four A's I said defensively. So next time you get all A's and dismiss me with a shrug. No compliment, no nothing. Next time I got all season D's. Mom struggled for years as a single mother with three children to raise after my father abandoned us when I was 10 years old. Born into a wealthy family in Pyong in North Korea, she never finished high school, had no job skills, and spoke minimal English. She juggled several low paying jobs, cook, waitress, maid, seamstress, simultaneously to scrape together a living and support us. I was the oldest daughter in my family and all the household chores and childcare responsibilities fell on my shoulders from the time I was 11 years old. So I raised my brother and sister while mom worked umpteenth hours. We lived in a small dark cockroach infested hospital on Leavenworth Street in San Francisco. Considering mom never knew I'll never learn how to cook until after she married my father, a Hawaii born soldier in the US Army of Korean descent. She was amazing in the kitchen. She couldn't read English, never owned a cookbook in her life, had minimal cooking lessons, and yet all she needed to do was taste a dish once or twice, and she could duplicate it and even improve on original recipes. Unfortunately grinding poverty, frustration and bitterness brought out the worst in mom. And we ended up suffering years of physical and emotional abuse from her. She blamed us for the miseries of her life and we learned to tread around her carefully. So when she bought a small coffee shop, an immigrant's dream come true for her, and told her we were all going to work there, we were horrified. Maybe it was mom's way of asserting control. My younger siblings and I had all been born here in America and we were teens now in the conflicts that arose from what we saw as mom's old fashioned outdated. Overly strict traditional Korean beliefs had eroded her authority. But oh my god spending the entire day working with mom was my worst nightmare come true. I fought desperately against the idea. I was 19 years old and for the first time I stood up to my mother. Not in bold defiance of course, because I was a spineless jellyfish but in a sullen, hang doggish kind of way, muttering feeble excuses. I've never been a waitress before. I don't know what to do. I whined. It's easy. I teach you, said mom dismissively, angry at my unexpected, totally passive resistance. She squashed me like a bug by pulling out all the weapons in her well-stocked arsenal shock. You don't want to help me, your own mother? Outrage. You selfish girl. I sacrifice my life for you since your father left bargaining. I pay you more than phone company, under table, cash. You get tips too. And of course my Achilles heel guilt. I do everything for you. What do you do for me? I beg you, help me as usual mom once. So here I was trapped and even worse than working for a mother I both hated and feared was my crippling shyness that made me feel like an outsider. Definitely so because there were so few Koreans in San Francisco compared to the larger, more well-established Chinese and Japanese minorities here. Most Americans didn't even know who Koreans were. I didn't know. All I knew is we were outsiders like all Asian communities overwhelmed by the predominant white culture of the time. Besides hating to work for my mother, I learned to truly hate the breakfast rush. Customers were always in a hurry and everything had to be served right away in piping hot. Plus there were just too many goddamn choices which meant there were multiple opportunities to mess up, especially for a timid and experienced waitress like me. In 1969 you could get a breakfast of ham, bacon or sausage and two eggs any style with crisp hash browns, toast, butter and jam for $1.30 at my mother's coffee shop on Sutter Street in San Francisco. Or you could select today's breakfast special number one with chilled juice, fresh crisp cereal, country fresh egg, three strips of bacon, toast and hot coffee for $1.65. A cup of farmer's brother's coffee was 15 cents and refills were free. I'd mumble and tastefully scratch down the orders of my customers on my order pad, praying I would remember bringing all the right dishes to the right tables, let alone the necessary condiments. Mom's small, shabby little coffee shop on Sutter Street off Jones was an old-fashioned traditional diner. A long narrow room adjacent to a large hotel for budget-conscious travelers and tour groups was dominated by a long bright green L-shaped Formica top counter with a row of padded stools alongside. Plus small Navajad cover booths ran down the opposite wall. Behind the counter was the big coffee machine, the tin canisters for ground coffee and thick white cups neatly stacked upside down on trays with an easy reach. And there was a large display for cakes and eyes. Mom's domain, the cook station was at the end of the counter behind a shoulder-high partition. The customers who frequented Mom's coffee shop included travelers and tourists from the hotel, but are most loyal regulars for the people from the neighborhood. They lived in small, one or two bedroom apartments or studios in the once classically beautiful, now rundown apartment buildings in that area of the Tenderloin. Their proximity to downtown and cheap rents were their main attractions. If you lived here, it meant that you were part of the city's invisible working class. Cabbies, gardeners, handyman short-order cooks, tired waitresses from the Woolworth's lunch counter, aging spinster file clerks, genteel departments towards sales ladies, and retired seniors for the kind of folks who dropped by for meals. As dusk approached, our regular street walkers showed up and plied their trade. They were a few, not many, and mostly young, not like the haggard heritans of lower Tenderloin. In later years, I realized Mom had been lucky to get the coffee shop. At the time, of course, I didn't appreciate the enterprising spirit of Korean immigrants in this country. Many, like my mother, were desperate to get a foothold here and open up their own businesses. They weren't qualified to get loans from established banks. So Mom told me some of them banded together to form their own informal loan operations called Dona Moshi's. Twelve participants would get together and ship in a specified amount of money in the pot every month. Each month, one of the participants was allowed to take the lump sum to buy or start a business. That's how Mom was able to buy the coffee shop. It was a hard life. I saw it firsthand. But at the time, I was young and more interested in my own problems. Sometimes in the mornings, the coffee shop suddenly filled with a tour group in the hotel who all clamored to be served immediately. I was the only waitress and terrified and overwhelmed. I ran ragged trying to serve breakfast to 23 people at once. On really bad days, I ran out of glasses and silverware and frantically washed and dried them in the tiny aluminum sink behind the counter between taking orders, serving customers, pouring coffee, giving them checks, handling the cash register and clearing the tables. The reactions of unhappy customers who received the wrong order or whom I forgot to serve were half as awful as my mother's screaming Korean accent rage when I made a mistake as she berated me in public in front of everyone. You stupid! How you make mistake? What wrong with you? They asked for scrambled eggs. You told me over hard. Now I throw away food, cost me money, all your fault. How I get such a stupid daughter. Mom's venomous tongue lashings left me cringing and dying inside. Sometimes during those first few months, especially I felt like the customers who gave me tips only did so because they felt sorry for me. After a few months of misery became obvious that my poor waitressing skills and inability to communicate were having a negative impact on the tips I'd hoped to earn. I was in despair. My social awkwardness translated into uncomfortable interactions with people. I could barely make eye contact with people because I was convinced I'd see the same critical contempt in their eyes that I saw in my mother's when she beat me or yelled at me and that I saw reflected in the mirror when I looked at myself. Poverty, social isolation and a dominating immigrant mother who I felt was sucking the life out of me all contributed to my overwhelming feelings of alienation and failure. I hungered for the normalcy I read about in books and saw in TV shows and movies. I yearned to fit in. I saw the vast gulf between other people and myself and I didn't know how to bridge it. I needed guidance. Finally, in desperation, I turned to the most reliable resource I had, the woman who'd always been there for me, who offered sound advice and demystified important issues of everyday life in America for me. Dear Abby, I read her daily column in the newspaper religiously. I learned so much. What? You're supposed to have guest towels in your bathroom? What are guest towels? Really, there's a proper way to hang toilet paper rolls? And most importantly to me, how to be popular. According to Dear Abby, the secret to good conversation is to show interest in others. Well, okay, I thought. So over the following months, I applied myself doggedly to my personal self-improving project. I greeted customers nervously with a fake friendly smile when they walked in. And though I cringe mentally, I tried to look at their faces and maintain eye contact. I asked them about their lives and tried to sound interested in their answers. Dear Abby was right. People like talking about themselves. And I learned that nodding and saying, uh-huh, help the conversation flow. Over time, I became interested in their stories. There was the prim gray haired woman, a guest at the hotel, who told me she had a flare for math when young and had been a cryptologist during World War II. The cabbie who fought in the Korean war and remembered the freezing cold winters there. The sweet elderly couple who lived in the neighborhood who apparently didn't have much money, but they would come in once a week and treat themselves to coffee and share a scoop of 15 cent vanilla ice cream. He called her mom. She called him Paul. And they were married the day he returned from the war, the First World War. There was still many times I felt socially inept, but the polite, soft spoken, eager to please, good girl facade I cultivated eventually paid off and people began accepting me at face value. And I finally began earning tips. And the three years I spent working at mom's coffee shop also gave me the unexpected benefit of helping me gain some insight into my mother and her struggles. She'd always been the fiercest, strongest person I knew, and I began to understand why. Later, I realized the real tragedy in her life was not the life of poverty and the abandonment by my father, but her inability to show us how much she loved us. At that time in my life, I was ignorant of my own strengths and only saw my weaknesses. That guys I assumed transformed my life because it helped me develop rudimentary social skills. And eventually it became the foundation of my persona. Though it still took many more years for me to learn how to accept myself and to finally feel comfortable in my own skin. Sometimes I wonder if that facade I created when I was so young was the real me and always been there buried deep under the crushing weight of my unhappiness then. And maybe the real me had just been waiting for the right time and the right place to finally emerge. Thank you. I think we might have lost Alexandra. Okay I was wondering why it was so silent. We do know who's next is Lisa Ruth. I'm happy to introduce myself in the spirit of improvisation here. I am a community historian and I provide public guided tours, city-wide history events. I am a writer and I do archival work around San Francisco history. And I co-direct and shaping San Francisco and the participatory history website found SF.org. And today I want to share some stories about the naming of places or how we know where and who we are. My favorite San Francisco places are those that don't exist anymore or rather that exist in a different form from where they were once known by other names or places where the geography is actually so radically shifted that it is no longer the same place. Our urban centers contain a multitude of these. Yalamu for instance is the name for this peninsula that has been used for thousands of years by indigenous inhabitants of this land well before Spanish names like San Francisco began dotting the landscape. Hi Alexandra, I just got started. Hi my wi-fi was weird so sorry about that but I'm glad you got started. I'm glad you did and keep going. So I just wanted to I'll interject but just quickly that we have a historian and I miss the end of Rowena's piece but Rowena your writing is amazing and now we have the historian's perspective and so without further ado Lisa Ruth Elliott. Okay so I'm focusing on stories of south of market today once known as the 100 Barra district and which contained all of the following place names Lyme Hill, Malikoff Hill, Steamboat Point, Point San Quentin, Rincon Point, South Beach as paired with North Beach, Sitlintak, Chuchui, Happy Valley, Pleasant Valley, Apache Pass and Tar Flats. First I want to share some excerpts from a piece I wrote based on my research of 19th century San Francisco history and which can be found on shaping San Francisco's digital archive foundsf.org. If you've ever wondered about the origin of Soma alleys with the first names of women you've probably heard the fancy myth that these back alleys were named for prostitutes and madams during the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast days. This is even part of the marketing for at least one bar along one of these streets today. There are also theories that early settler families named them after their daughters but the reality is that there are very few streets named after females in San Francisco from any time period and most early streets were named by last name after powerful men who made their mark in some way. I find it hard to believe a street would have been named for a woman who was a sex worker in the 1850s and especially not for women who were likely to be mostly moving through town. At least there would be a Briones street for one of Briones whose father and grandfather traveled with the Deonza and Portola expeditions and he established her own homestead in the 1830s in the settlement of Yerebuena and where are the surviving legends of the ladies in question to accompany the streets named for them? None have survived if there were any. So maybe side streets named for the first names of women didn't come from early ladies of the night but what did and do still people name after their female family members? Let's say it's possible that these streets is named in south of mark that these streets named in south of market might be named instead for ships. Many of the streets in question lie on the north south routes that would have been taken from Yerebuena to Steambot Point along second and third streets. They were also some of the first streets created in the area surveyed in 1847 and known as this 100 Vara survey. From Rincon Point to Steambot Point early south of market was the location of the ship building, ship breaking and steamboat reassembling industry in the mid 19th century. Searching the newspapers from the early 1850s for these names yielded some interesting information about boats. The articles come from a time when Eddie was laying out San Francisco's newly developing areas south of the Yerebuena settlement around 1851. The streets we're talking about are Annie, Jesse, Mina, Clementina and their Tehama, Natoma as well. There are a few that did not survive 1970s redevelopment and have only been preserved on very old maps like Alice, Louise, Jane, Elizabeth, Luconia. In May 1851 according to the Sacramento Daily Union newspaper there was a Peruvian brig named Annie and it was mentioned as having been cleared from the port of San Francisco. A first listing of Annie Street is made in 1852 related to 115 lots for sale in Happy Valley near Jane Street. Another ship mentioned in the same Sacramento Daily Union issue having arrived in May 1851. There was a ship named Jesse which arrived in March 1851. The Tehama esteem boat had her first voyage in June 1850 stocked and bound through the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta. In December 1850 Mina was being listed in the Daily Alta newspaper as the first street below Mission. Perhaps it referred to a ship that came in the early gold rush. A Clementine Street is first listed in the Daily Alta in August 1850 and an article about a Braeman whaling ship, Clementine, can be found in the Californian at the early date of November 1847. One street name is not named for a ship but related to sea journeys. Luconia is the location of a stopping point for a coal depot on the voyage from China to San Francisco. An unanswered question and one for more explanation and research is why these particular ships and not other ships that arrived around the same time were chosen to name streets after like the Don Quixote for example. As mentioned my exploration of streets supposedly being named for women focuses on a small geographic area in San Francisco and a short period of time at the founding of this new urban center. However these are not the only street names using ladies first or last names in town and I leave you to explore San Francisco on your own to find them and their stories. This next story is from a piece also on foundsf.org written by a student of ours Allison Jordan. I just want to interject and say that was really interesting about the women street names and how it was ships. I had never known that. Thank you for sharing that. I should full disclosure that's my theory that no one has backed it up or refuted it actually at this point so you know there's still more research to do but it's an interesting theory. I like Ron commented Bernice one of them's named Bernice like her grandmother same name so it's interesting. Go ahead. So I have two more stories. This one is about South the market as well. The first Japanese immigrants came to Soco as they called San Francisco in 1869. Originally these immigrants were predominantly young men searching for new economic opportunities. In 1870 the first Japanese consulate in the United States was established in San Francisco. After first generation Japanese immigrants settled in Chinatown following waves of immigrants began to colonize the south of market area. Due to its status as an immigrant district south of market was free from the racial covenants that discriminated against Japanese and were common in other areas of the city. The Japanese capitalized on this limited amount of space available to them and it was here that the first Japan town was established town was established and thrived until its destruction by the 1906 earthquake. In the new south of market colony they established exclusively Japanese rooming houses and small businesses. This area was the first to be called Nihonjinmachi or Japanese people town by its inhabitants a different meaning than the term used by outsiders Nihonmachi which translates directly to Japan town. One resident commented on this distinction. The Japanese in those days did not call themselves in English Japan town. Before the wars from time to time I would say Japan town because the majority of the people started saying that but I insisted on saying it was Japanese town. This resident was referring to the fact that the reference to Japanese people by the inhabitants was a form of empowerment through grouped identification. In Nihonjinmachi numerous social economic and political organizations expressly for Japanese were established. It provided a safe area where they had the opportunity to set up their own independent businesses. There were several businesses rooted here by necessity. There was a prevalence of Japanese barbershops as Japanese traditionally were not admitted to white barbershops. The same rule applied to bathhouses and hotels. Japanese shoemakers even established their own union in 1893 as they were unwelcome in the majority of traditional workers unions at the time. The majority of businesses catered exclusively to the Japanese residents of Nihonjinmachi and created a community in which these immigrants were welcome and had their own established institutions to help create a new life in San Francisco. And I have one more short piece and it's a piece I wrote and it was recently published in a People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area. Filipino men had been coming to California since the early 20th century when they sought work as agricultural laborers and merchant mariners spending downtime between seasonal jobs in San Francisco. Their communities grew after the Immigration and Nationality Act in the U.S. of 1965 in the U.S. of 1965 removed the quota system based on national national origins which had given preference to immigrants from northern and western European countries over Asian and African immigrants. San Francisco's already existing Manila town north of Market Street and central south of market became magnets for new arrivals from the Philippines. The Soma Pilipina streets between Folsom and Harrison and third and fourth streets pay homage to this history and have helped bolster community resilience in times of dramatic urban change. Filipinos were activated around housing and development issues during the redevelopment era of the 1950s to the 1970s when this part of the south of market district experienced near total clearance and reconstruction. A multi-ethnic alliance of largely working class residents and community organizers challenged the city's plans. A coalition of housing advocates, labor leaders, longshoremen and seniors organized under the umbrella organization Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment which successfully fought for affordable housing for 4,000 people largely immigrants and seniors. This group later created a housing development nonprofit Tenants and Owners Development Corporation which worked with men from one of the local Filipino masonic lodges to build housing for displaced seniors. They also successfully pressed for the renaming of the surrounding streets to pay homage to Filipino political leaders. The street names point to early stories that shaped Filipino exile culture. Mabini Street is named after Apolinario Mabini, a revolutionary leader and first prime minister of the Philippines when the First Philippine Republic was established in 1899. Bonifacio Street recognizes Andres Bonifacio, the father of the Philippine Revolution for his role in creating the Catipuna movement that started the Philippine Revolution. Lapu Lapu was named for the first indigenous Filipino to resist Spanish colonization in 1521. Rizal Street is named for Jose Rizal, a Filipino nationalist who was executed by the Spanish colonial government for rebellion inspired by his writings. And Tandang Sora Street, which intersects with Rizal, recalls the nickname for the Grand Woman of the Revolution, Melchora Alquino de Ramos. In 2006, the continued presence of Filipinx communities here was recognized formally again when the city approved the Soma Pilipinas Filipino Cultural Heritage District. One of several similar districts created around that time, the district offers political leverage to fund and preserve spaces of cultural programming to create a bulwark against the rapid development of the tech era, which has been centered also in Soma. The district covers about 50 square blocks featuring community organizations, businesses, murals, and traditional cultural spaces. And those are my three south of market stories. Those are amazing. Thank you so much, Lisa Ruth Elliott, People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area and also historian from shapingsf.org. It's interesting to hear the Filipino heritage sort of history, especially after listening to Dennis's piece, because I think one thing I learned from Dennis was that the South Park area was a Filipino community as well, which I didn't know. And that's interesting to think about the tech community and who's left in the city now that a lot of the tech workers have left and are they coming back and all of that. But very, very interesting. So, especially the Soma, and I'll have to go think about these streets and look for them. Our next performer is Joe Landini, and he'll be talking a little bit about the Soma as well, and we'll be showing a video about his choreography and sort of reimagining the Soma. And I'm just going to introduce him. Joe Landini received his BA in choreography from UC Irvine and his MA in choreography from the Laban Center in London. His choreography has been presented at the ODC Theater, Z Space, the Cowell Theater, and Dance Mission, as well as Santa Cruz, Marin, Sacramento, Monterey, Laguna Beach, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Mexico City, and London. He founded Safe House for the Performing Arts in 2007. That's where we met and received the Goldie Award from the SF Bay Guardian in 2012 and in 2020, the Isadora Duncan Award for Sustained Achievement. And Joe is a very nurturing person to work with. He does this really great thing with Safe House for the Performing Arts, where he brings in people who want to learn about their own arts organizations and how to manage a career as an artist, young dancers. And he sort of enlists them in helping Safe House in the kind of co-op model and then teaches them a lot of skills. And so I had the pleasure of serving on the board of directors of Safe House for the Performing Arts for a few years. And Joe sort of shepherded us into teaching us how to write grants and encouraged us to do this original program. So thank you, Joe, for coming and for sharing your work. Hi, everybody. Welcome. I'm out of town right now. I'm actually in this little town in Northern California called Willows, celebrating my sister-in-law's 60th birthday. And they don't have streaming internet, so I'm sitting on a street corner in front of a cafe in a little town called Willows right now. I want to say a special thank you to Alexandra and the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute, as well as the library. I'm sure as everyone who's here today understands these stories are incredible. You know, as San Francisco continues to evolve and gentrify, these stories are incredibly crucial and I think it's really important that we're telling them. So thank you for all the writers for committing your memories to Word. So honored to be here with all of you. And now we're going to talk a little bit about a different side of the Southwood Market. Those of you who know San Francisco know that the Southwood Market has many facets. I was very fortunate in the 80s and 90s to enjoy some of the more underground elements of the neighborhood, which I'm going to be talking about in this video that you're going to be seeing. This video was developed by an amazing choreographer by the name of Amy Lewis who has a company called Push Up Someone Hidden. And what Amy specializes in is designing choreography for locations. And so she finds these amazing locations and she tells these stories about these different locations and she invited me to be a collaborator in I believe it was 19 or excuse me, 2016. Well, what she actually did was she gave me a bottle of wine and asked me to tell her some stories. And I guess I knew we were doing research. But yeah, so in the process of drinking that bottle of wine, I told many stories that at the time my family didn't really know about. That's changed since then. And of course, her being a straight woman, I felt compelled to explain to her a lot of things about queer lifestyle. So luckily I think this version of the video that you're going to see is going to be an R rated version. There is an N17 version of this piece somewhere. It was designed as a walking tour. So Amy and I wrote about seven monologues that were performed at different locations in the South of Market. So an audience would actually follow me and I would tell stories about things that happened to me in these particular buildings. And then Amy and her collaborator, Agnes, wrote a lot of historical text about the neighborhood. So as the viewers were following me through this Byzantine pathway to the South of Market, they were actually listening on the earbuds to a live stream that was both Agnes talking about the historical elements of the neighborhood and me talking about my biographical things in the neighborhood. So with that bottled red wine, there was a tape recorder. And so everything was captured for posterity. So I'm really proud of this version that you're going to see. I'm proud of all versions. It was actually about an hour long performance with all the walking. What you're going to see today is about a 12 minute excerpt. Some of Agnes's work, some of my work. Some of my dancing at around 20 pounds ago. Definitely my pre-COVID pounds. So I think it'll be a really, hopefully illuminating experience for you to see this video. So I think the library has this ready for us. And if we're going to play it now, it would probably be a good time. I'll go ahead and start it. Excellent. Thank you, sir. Soma was still populated by working classmen, many that were retired when the area was approved for redevelopment. Official displacement of the residence began in 1967 and accelerated in 1968 and 69 as the redevelopment agency went in and bought hotels and other buildings in clear land wherever it could. Desperate for affordable and safe housing in the same general neighborhood, the residents of Soma banded and formed the tenants and owners in opposition to redevelopment or tour. With the goal of establishing adequate relocation housing for the south of market residents, tour filed suit against the redevelopment agency demanding alternative housing in the same neighborhood so that residents can maintain their current way of life. Logisiel Rubin discusses how redevelopment and the ensuing lawsuits created space for the leather community. During the period of political and legal wrangling, the old neighborhood was significantly dismantled. Housing was demolished in entire streets disappeared. But the construction of new office towers and public buildings awaited the outcome of litigation, so the new neighborhood remained largely unrealized. The hiatus in redevelopment created a vacant or underused urban niche with plenty of empty buildings both residential and commercial. Rents and land values were cheap. Street life at night was sparse. South of market became a kind of urban frontier. The area began to attract artists looking for affordable studio space, musicians in search of practice venues, squatters who occupied the abandoned factories, and gay men. The relative lack of other nighttime activity provided a kind of privacy, an urban nightlife that was stigmatized or reputable. Flourish and relative obscurity among the warehouses and deserted streets. These leather bars would have back rooms where you could have sex. So it was much easier, like you just chat someone up for five minutes, go to the back room, and have sex in the back room. And that was it. Eventually sexual Sometimes it helps if we all shuddered. Preparation happened in the 60s. And then leather sex emerged, and leather sex is sort of S&M, a bunch of discipline, leather sex, leather vests, chops, stuff like that. Another sex is more what we call power play. So it's about one person being a dominant personality and one person being a recessive or what we call sub. But that kind of started going away during the AIDS scare. So that kind of started disappearing in the mid 80s. But in the 70s, 60s in the 70s, all these men that had been going up the North Beach and Polk Street were sort of like, Oh, it's a sexual liberation. I don't have to pretend like I'm going to wear a sweater and go to what we call a sweater bar. A lot of people that were participating in leather sex didn't want to deal with condoms. There were a lot of drugs. And so condom use and drug usage don't go well together. So there were a lot of drugs in the in the South market. And so what happened was a lot of the leather men went underground. A lot of them passed away. So but then the leather bar started going away because that community started shrinking. And then the internet emerged. And then the internet had a huge impact also because in the 60s and 70s, there was like a whole art of cruising. When the internet came out, that generation that grew up in the internet didn't really learn how to cruise because they started having sex online because there were chat rooms and that sort of thing. And so you had these two things that were happening simultaneously. The AIDS crisis was wiping out a whole generation of leather men, right? And then you had the younger generation emerging who didn't even know what leather sex was, you know, unless it was, you know, a porn video. I mean, that was it really. By the late 90s, there was probably only three leather bars left. Now with San Francisco is kind of blowing up right now. There was a lot of new queer men that are coming here. They're sort of like, I don't want to have sex on an app. I want to go to the South of market. So the South of market is having a little bit of a resurgence and they do a lot of fundraising and they create these really elaborate intricate support systems where they're all friends and they all know each other. And they really that emerged out of the AIDS crisis because there was no one to take care of them. So during that period, they really had to learn how to take care of each other because they were ostracized from their families or families in Montana were not going to fly to San Francisco and make sure you made it to your oncologist appointment at San Francisco General. Like you'd call up your leather brother. I was sort of chill about the whole thing. And then my mom, I think was suspicious and I had porn magazines hidden in my room. And so she found my porn magazine. And so she told my dad who was like this conservative Italian Catholic and so my an alcoholic. And so my dad was just sort of like he confronted me. And I was kind of confused. I didn't really understand why people were so as like, yeah, you know, yeah. And so then my mom was crying and she wanted me to go see a priest and I told her she was out of her mind. So what would happen is like flight attendants would have a two day layover. And instead of getting a room in the hotel at SFO, they would come into the city and they would stay at a bathhouse for two days. That's how crazy it was. And so the city passed a law that you had to be able to look over a door. And so when the health department walked through, they had to be able to shine a flashlight and make sure you were using a condom. So then in 82, the city sanctioned sex clubs. And so the city was like, I hear the rules. If you want to have a sex club instead of a bathhouse, if you if you're willing to adhere to these rules that were devised by the health department. And so it was like, this is a lot of work. We don't really have the staff to monitor these sex clubs. I mean, the city was so decimated by HIV. And what people don't understand is how expensive HIV and AIDS a number of people that have health care. I mean, SF General like almost went under because there was no treatment. And so people didn't get better. You know, it wasn't a manageable disease. Like the city was hemorrhaging. SF General basically became a hospice. Thousands of men dying a year. And so you had this whole community that was devastated, right? And so it impacted the whole city. I mean, the city's almost fell apart during that period. The city's now giving Truvada away for free. The misconception is that everyone's on Truvada, right? So having sex without a condom is fine. It's common now. But because most men who live in San Francisco have relatively low viral loads because HIV medicines are fairly accessible. So I mean, I understand. I mean, the basic premise is if you're HIV, the odds are your viral loads can be low because you've had access to free HIV meds, right? And if you're HIV negative, the odds are you're taking Truvada. So I think everyone's just assuming the odds are pretty good that those two things are happening. Five days before my 18th birthday. So I graduated in June. My birthday was July 19th. I think I had my first sexual experience like July 15th, something like that. And that's when I came out. Like what was a weird experience? I had a supervisor. I worked in another place where they sell cattle food and feed and grain conquered like Hicksville, right? And so I had this supervisor that so he was about like 10 years older than me. I was really naive. And so he we had flirted back and forth. And then finally he invited me to hang out at his house and we were watching, you know, Monty Python's left, right? And, um, and he like he kind of seduced me like I knew what it's going to get to do. So like, it wasn't that big of a surprise, right? So now I got fired right after that because his boss, he wasn't the owner of the business. And so his boss figured out that we were sleeping together. And so I got fired like right away because they were really straight and conservative. And they didn't like the idea that their supervisor was having sex with an underage because I didn't turn 18 for another five days. And we never had sex again. But I'm sure I didn't make it a secret that we had had sex. I didn't encourage me to hide it. I think I was just gushing like, oh, this is such a cool thing. Like everyone should know about it. Like this is a really awesome thing happened last night. And I think I thought I had a boyfriend. I was so like naive. I just think I thought we were boyfriends. And then I got fired and he didn't like jump to my rescue or like want to talk to me again. But I wasn't devastated. I was just sort of like, oh, I guess I don't have a boyfriend and I hate this job anyway. So and then I discovered the primary sex club in the south market, which is called Blow Buddies, which is such a great name. And the city was excited about supporting Blow Buddies because they advocated oral sex. And the city made you give your telephone number back then. Because if the club discovered that there was an STD, they wanted everyone's telephone number so they could call everyone and say there was an STD breakout on the night that you visited the club would really like you to come down to the clinic and get tested. So to this day, they make you sign in. Yeah, I've been doing there probably 30 years. Yeah, no alcohol. It's the health department as it's set up. So the health department feels like alcohol and Paris men's ability to make your choices. And then there's buckets with condoms and Lou. But once safe sex guidelines were really clear, like late 80s, like everyone sort of knew what safe sex guidelines were, and the HIV med started coming out, then the city kind of loosened up a little bit. And so clubs like Blow Buddies were allowed to have anal sex, but they still have the monitors walking through. And so the monitor should be like, if you're not using a condom, they would throw you out. Gail Rubin describes the Folsom as a sexual center of San Francisco, and the south of market as an area that was symbolically and institutionally associated in the gay male community with sex. A decade later, everything changed. Rubin writes extensively about several factors that led to the diminished Leatherman community in the late 1980s. While the gay male population was hugely affected by the AIDS crisis, it was not the only reason that Leatherman were suddenly seen less frequently in Soma. The closures of the bathhouses annihilated an important part of the gay male lifestyle and redevelopment caused rents to skyrocket, forcing many Leather bars and other Leather businesses to shut down. Soma became trendy and throngs of heterosexual people began coming to the area to attend clubs like the DNA lounge. Rubin explains that to get to the remaining Leather bars, a gay man had to navigate through crowds that could be hostile and dangerous. However, the community was and is resilient. Rubin writes that while gay Leather no longer dominates the fulsome nightlife, it is not true that Leather is dead. There is still a large and viable gay male Leather community, and much of it is still centered south of market. Thank you for sharing that, Joe. Do you have any other remarks that you wanted to make? No, thank you for the opportunity. Amy and I spent a lot of time developing that work, so it's really lovely to have an opportunity to show some of it a few years later. It's interesting to hear about the gay Leather community and Soma and gentrification and the pandemic of AIDS now that we're in a new pandemic. I'm wondering how that affects the Leather community, if it does, and even more, or if it will it be resilient or will it move to a new place or move online? It's impacted it in a way that many other communities have been impacted, obviously. You know, a lot of these Leather organizations don't have very big budgets, and so a lot of these businesses have been closed for a year, so I think that's going to be really devastating. Since Amy and I worked on this video, part of Soma has become the cultural district, a Leather cultural district, which I don't know if people know, but there are parts of San Francisco that have been designated as cultural districts where they have access to more funding. But what they're discovering right now is because of the pandemic, a lot of the businesses that were participating in the district are now on the cusp of going bankrupt, so you literally have an entire cultural district which is on the verge of imploding, which is going to be a really unique and unusual set of circumstances for the city to deal with. You know, the idea of the cultural district is to help save a particular culture, right? And so it's going to be interesting to see how economically this community is able to rebound. It's going to look very different, I think. As the whole city is, and I'm just reading a comment from Daphne Gottlieb, who's our next featured reader, and she said, a lot of friends of mine who are positive and who are positive live through the first wave and are having horrible flashbacks right now, thinking about the first wave of the AIDS epidemic. Is that what you were writing, Daphne? The PTSD regarding epidemiology. Yeah. And that's why we're telling these stories. When we started the City Stories Project, we were sort of looking at the height of San Francisco tech gentrification, and now we're kind of looking at in the pandemic what will happen after the tech leaves and will it come back and will that rip a hole in our city or how will that affect the existing culture that's here? So I'm glad we're thinking about this and thank you very much, Amy and Joe, for that important documentary. Our next reader, Daphne Gottlieb, stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author of 11 books, including the forthcoming 1001 about sex, PTSD, personal ads, and survival. Without further ado, Daphne Gottlieb. We're going to put in a quick plug for an anthology called Home that was edited by Sarah Beale and Karla Brundage, which is very much akin to City Stories in that it's people's stories, poems, recollections, and all the proceeds go to Mumps for Housing. It's an amazing collaboration, Home, and they're a really great Sarah Beale, and she takes classes in our workshop. I'm a pleasure of knowing her also professionally and on the poetic front, so it's fun. So this was written for that. It is all found text. The text used to create this were adapted from interviews at voices of the homeless, advertisements for travel, advertisements for knives, newspaper articles, crime blotters, and legal statutes. I won't count the stars. Knife. I was sleeping rugged when the knife came. It was scary dark, rough open eye, not sleeping in the open dark, deer gutting dark. I knew someone would come in small punctures cutting red, black and blue. I thought it would be a friend whose tent stolen red into shreds by the police, black and blue they bone and wood saw blade gutting hook at first to someone a friend who had no shelter into shreds nothing to sleep on or the knife the tent slightest depart open into dumb mouths call it a trophy mount. I hadn't slept in days in the dark someone a light swinging in the dark to kill what we call home to stab or slice and the blade a finger pointing hey the light said you get up neighborhood a tent a sleeping bag in zone a through f when the average scores for needles and condoms when zone C police destroyed district seven all my tent my ID was broken glass was burned up at a rate well above the average but you know I slept zone C district seven district nine zone D additional reports right next to any other district I slept on the ground in district six thirty percent seventy four percent one in four the cops had through nearly all of the cops had the cops had through the standard for that evaluation for broken glass and zone seven four eight in zone three five for human feces for used needle zone four home the cops cut up our tents and threw our stuff in the fire because it burns vacation the mangroves the island pool I needed drugs to get a beautiful place to wake up in the morning in canvas on the streets to refresh body and mind got kicked out of a small grocery store showers and electricity got kicked out of my apartment this isn't really camping lost my job working restrooms no place to go no tourists needed to decide where to put the fire untamed and unique and then me not trust my shelters creature comforts myself no place to go no tour in the mangroves or dark sandy beaches not the island pool the most famous trail leave my stuff alone my canvas hotel room prison home where I went where did I go okay when I was on the streets on a vacation I came here I know that at least on the streets at least I know where the fire goes my stuff and my and my I know a beautiful place I have other people I hear them talk I'm woken by their light I can smell their food and they're watching watching my tent watching me interview but we were asleep we did not know there was a loss of feeling there was numbness or inability to move and I think that was and then he looked down he numbness and a piece of seashell a needle a nail my daughter and I our heads covered by blankets so the officer kind of kicked me to penetrate the skin to wake me up I was awake and I threw the blanket like what repair the girls around here make a wall with the body's fluid and salt to make a wall a good wall someplace safe protective wrapping a lot of the girls down here conductive can fix anything after everything they can fix sleep around or sleep with you know one person can fix anything as one person protective wrapping and stay all kinds of bumps banks and wear and tear from the law for the protection just to know duct tape holds what's inside in place a lot of the girls around here can make a really good duct tape tent fixed rips the girls around here don't so don't use protection if you have duct tape it's not too late to fix field medicine and some of us are bleeding and some of us have bled for this country some of us have risked our lives have stopped not stopped have stopped has not stopped bleeding for this country it's full of money right now we do not have money it's full of dirt we might smell bad cleanse the wound wash with water this police officer these scissors that knife police are searching for police looks at us police tied the woman the woman we are like duct tape like filth the woman we are like does not deserve where to report police here in this town you know I mean come on police refused to clean the wound made me wash with water made me perform a sex act this woman bleeding was thrown bleeding was bleeding into a trash can here in this town you know I mean come on newspaper hey the police cut a hole in the tent a hole not a slash I mean it was a slash and they used it as a hole a fist was inside and inside the fist he maced inside they spray they maced inside they joked about it being bear season we tried to get out bear maist for prostitution or sleeping or stealing a canine unit the police you know blunt force quality of life you know what I'm saying the police stab wounds on the left trauma knocked to the fist hip didn't beat the police are felony murder assault with a deadly hidden run I was hidden run for prostitution I was raped by three cops do you know what hit me do you know his pistol do you know what the blank is protected never a damn thing never and that mace a badge and gun with bears contusions abrasions the police a wooden lot ID arrived stripped me down naked alone tied with duct tape in a trashed hand with duct tape in the police car in a parking lot in the rain alone except the bear there had to be I wish for the bear to come to maul me to death duct tape stuck on his teeth statute my hands through the sleeves the familiar routine he said and I said he said you're he said you're now familiar an emergency you're the shopping cart the body stolen H that I could afford to buy the poles through the tent sleeves nail holes like track marks my ID the tent my sleeves my arms everything the body you know that car is stolen they said you can't take it so I set it on fire I set my everything to ashes walked away my coat on the sidewalk scarf hat sweater they squawk shirt into their walkies pants nothing but my underwear and shoes not nothing but the skeleton I left the cart the police behind me and now the flames easier to carry ashes none of it the body none of it the skeleton none of it mine special summer issue there's a lot of that in the great outdoors I've seen a lot of violence every time the cops busted it down we want a place soft and self-repairing to fix I wish if it was summer time under the bridge or someplace summertime toast some marshmallows someplace if we were someplace we felt safe you know this dream alive duct tape in a place to live nerves blood vessels alive I think hair follicles glands I think most of us if we were someplace to revisit the earth's many wonders you can almost see it from here I think most of us want summertime want to don't you want to I want to be someplace this dream to not watch the sunset to not count the stars wow Daphne golly really brings it excellent work and I love that you're telling the story of the voiceless or of the person you know in the tent and the the sad and and sort of visceral story of the person who can't tell their story because of they're just trying to survive which is a really important thing to think about especially as the homeless population has boomed during the pandemic or seemingly in the tent cities have gotten so big and where did the people go and what are their lives like and and how are they surviving it's very beautiful writing very visceral thank you and I heard while we were reading there's a lot of YouTube comments Anissa wrote in the in the chat there's some YouTube love love coming in thank you for our YouTube viewers and Anissa also said it will have taken a pandemic to bring back the art community and city caregiving which is a very astute and interesting comment well if we're coming to the end of our program I'm Alexandra Costulus a founder of San Francisco creative writing institute we're happy to host city stories if you're interested in in taking a creative writing workshop with us we have a lot on our website at you can visit sfwriting.institute slash events and and if you have a city story that you want to share and you want to be featured in our next programming or event you feel free to email me I'll drop my email in the chat it's alexandra at sfwriting.institute and share your city stories with us we'd love to hear them and include a greater depth and breadth of stories really amazing work and thank you thank you to Daphne Gottlieb thank you to Yvonne Campbell to Joe Landini to Brittany Delaney to Paul Corman Roberts for being the original city stories people to help us get it off the ground and to help us moving it along and thank you to the San Francisco Public Library John Smalley and Anissa thank you very much for hosting us we love working with you guys and to Lisa Ruth Elliott Rowena Choi Henry and Dennis Estrada thank you also for reading your work is amazing and we hope to do this again I think we're going over so we'll end it here but if you have questions or thoughts please reach out we'd love to hear them okay have a great afternoon thank you everyone see you next time