A new-to-me find today: The American Bookbinders Museum in SoMa (35 Clementina St, San Francisco). Engaging and interesting for its bookbinding machines of all sorts, displays of book art and covers, and its lecture series. Well worth a visit and a look also at the special exhibit about LGBTQ+ publications of the first decades of the 20th century.

Today's event featured long-time gay journalist Randy Alfred who talked about the city's LGBTQ+ Journalism in the early days of AIDS/HIV. During this period he worked in print (as editor of The Sentinel newspaper) as well as the host of a popular radio program where he interviewed pioneers in AIDS research and clinical care.

These were the years (1980s) when the "Bay Area Reporter" newspaper's readership was primarily gay men (as intended), when the bi-weekly "The Sentinel" newspaper slipped from offering breaking news about AIDS policy, and when the monthly publication "Coming UP!" (today's Bay Times) emphasized diversity and inclusiveness of matters of importance to women as well as to men, provided in-depth analysis, and presented extensive coverage of the political, medical, social behavioral aspects of AIDS in San Francisco. (disclosure: I wrote for "Coming Up!" from 1982-1985)..

Alfred offered his reflections on both the commendable AIDS coverage as well as the Initial unconscionable lack of reports about the AIDS/HIV epidemic in different publications. Thanks to Randy Alfred and to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco for co-sponsoring of the lecture as part of the Queer Voices lecture series presented by the American Bookbinders Museum. 
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#lgbthistory #museum #HIV/AIDS #bkbindersmuseum

Just in time for Pride Month, lesbian activist Marie Equi (1872-1952) is being honored by the National Park Service (NPS) and the Oregon State Secretary of State for her courage and commitment to economic and social justice.
 
The New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park, part of NPS, triggered the attention to Equi with an exhibit featuring her contributions during the 2018 Pride Month. The profile of Equi highlights her early life, her role as an early woman physician in the West, her controversial fights for women’s and labor’s rights, her romantic and intimate relations with women, and her adopting a child. Equi’s inclusion in the story of the United States by the National Park Service is significant for spotlighting, for the first time, a lesbian doctor and political radical. Read her NPS profile here.

​*Based on research for Equi’s biography, “Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions,” Oregon State University Press, Michael Helquist, 2015.  Available in print and kindle, from independent bookstores and online at Amazon. Also see marieequi.com.

Hold on, Mary Ann Singleton, you’re not the first to seek refuge on Barbary Lane.  Before you escaped Cleveland for the enchantment, intrigue, and sexual freedom of 1970s San Francisco, lesbian agitator Marie Equi camped out there in 1921, direct from doing time at San Quentin Prison. The difference, of course, Mary Ann, is that your muddled, earnest striving fits neatly into the raucous print and film series “Tales of the City,” created by novelist and screenwriter Armistead Maupin. He placed you and the other fictional denizens in a mansion-like set of apartments along the legendary Barbary Lane.
 
Marie Equi’s journey to “Barbary Lane,” however, was all too fraught with real danger, conflict and suffering. She struggled with being an outsider most of her life. She was the daughter of immigrant parents; her father was Italian, her mother, Irish. The family was snubbed for not being enough of either community. Equi’s family was working-class, and she had to drop out of high school to help support her six siblings. She worked in the gritty textile mills until she could take it no longer. Her plight was even more precarious since she was uninterested in marriage as a means of financial support; besides she was attracted to women. It was a time, in the 1880s and 1890s, when the word “lesbian” was neither known nor used.
 
Equi fled to Oregon to live along the Columbia River on a homestead with her girlfriend. She studied medicine on her own, and then bucked the trend to enter medical school when few women did. She graduated in Portland in 1903, and she became known as a passionate advocate for social and economic justice. That’s how Equi got in trouble. She fought for woman suffrage, she distributed birth control information when it was illegal, and she provided outlawed abortions. She marched with jobless workers, picketed at labor strikes, and fought with police. When the U.S. joined World War I, Equi objected to its exploitative, capitalist motives. For speaking out against the war, the federal government charged Equi with sedition. She was convicted and then sentenced to three years in prison at San Quentin, starting October 19, 1920.
 
Ten months later at San Quentin, “Equi collected her possessions changed into the new clothes and hat provided by the state, and said goodbye to her cellmate “KT” and the other women. …The other inmates cheered her release, and she vowed not to forget them. She completed the required paperwork, took the five dollars cash allotted each discharged prisoner, and walked with guards through the gates. There one of her cousins waited to take her to the ferry and leave San Quentin behind.”
 
From the San Francisco dock, Equi was driven to her refuge on Macondray Lane, not the fictitious Barbary Lane where transgender landlady Anna Madrigal tended to her family of seekers and supposed misfits featured in “Tales of the City.” (The actual pathway was named in 1912 to honor the pioneer San Francisco merchant Frederick W. Macondray). Instead of Anna Madrigal, Charlotte Anita Whitney welcomed Marie Equi into her mid-block one-bedroom apartment.
 
Whitney was from an aristocratic family in Oakland, across San Francisco Bay. Like Equi, she was unmarried and had worked as a suffragist before becoming a political radical convinced that fundamental economic and social change was needed in the country. Whitney and Equi had known each other for nearly ten years. They were confidants, perhaps lovers, and they supported each other in the ways independent women must. Two months before Equi’s release, Whitney had taken an apartment on the wooded, well-tended walkway lined by a serpentine rock outcropping on the south side and houses and apartments on the north – all situated high on San Francisco’s eclectic Russian Hill.
 
From the windows of Whitney’s home, Equi could scan the Marin County headlands across the bay.  San Quentin Prison, mercifully, did not mar the view. After months in close concrete quarters, she was just a few steps away from the flowers, shrubs, and trees of the hideaway lane. No longer confined with strangers, she spent her days and nights with an intimate companion of her own choosing, and she tried to make sense of her prison ordeal and what lay ahead.
 
Macondray Lane for Marie Equi, and Barbary Lane for Mary Ann Singleton. One real walkway and one imagined path. Both held the promise of what so many of us seek then and now -- a safe home and companions of our own choosing.
----
If you’re new to “Tales of the City”  by Armistead Maupin, treat yourself to a romp through San Francisco by reading all eight books in the series. Don’t miss the excellent and most recent web miniseries of the same name that premiered on Netflix June 7, 2019.
 
For the life of the fiercely independent Marie Equi, see “Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions,” 2015, Oregon State University Press, Michael Helquist.  A Stonewall Honor Book. Available at independent bookstores and online. At Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Marie-Equi-Radical-Politics-Passions/dp/087071595X

Going to Arizona last month relatively soon after major back surgery – and with my neurosurgeon’s approval -- reminded me of an episode 26 years ago when I astounded my doctor with my travel plans.  

“You want to go to Paris now, in the winter, after having PCP?” he asked. “It’s going to be cold and wet. Couldn’t you go somewhere south, somewhere it’s dry and warm?”

It was mid-November 1993, and I had just beaten a bout of the often deadly AIDS-related pneumonia. After ve days in the hospital, I was discharged to ten days of IV treatment at home.

A few days later I was proposing to my doctor a long flight to Europe where my lungs would be subjected to the cold, fog, and rain. I explained that my partner at the time had his heart set on celebrating his 40th birthday in his favorite city. My doctor relented with warnings to stay warm and dry and avoid long exposure outdoors. (I’ve always thought he agreed partly thinking I should do what made me happy given my overall prognosis. Unexpectedly, I became a long-term HIV survivor). 

So off we went on the day after Thanksgiving for nine days in Paris. It WAS cold and wet and I stayed indoors more than usual. The city was amazing in winter. We were grateful to be staying   in a large, warm and cozy apartment in a 400-year-old building on the Ile St. Louis. 

Back to last month and Arizona. My husband, Dale Danley, and I had planned this trip long before my diagnosis of disk degeneration. The surgery went well, but a fair degree of nerve pain had yet to resolve. We knew travel would be uncomfortable for me and that our long hikes would be curtailed. I was good for about a mile with a cane. But it was Arizona, sunshine and warm days. Or so we thought.

Our first night it snowed. The next morning the temp was 26 degrees. Our windshield was covered with ice. I scraped some of it off with the end of my cane. We were so not ready. We had debated at home how many T shirts and shorts we’d need.

But we had a wonderful trip visiting longtime friends in Sedona and in the tiny town of Clarkdale before settling in Tucson at a sprawling luxe hotel where a Leadership Conference for LGBTQ choruses was convened. Dale attended sessions while I walked around the compound, spent time in the fitness room, and slept a lot. I loved being in the desert again.

During our September 2016 book tour in Massachusetts for Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, our protagonist was hardly known. Audiences at book talks in Boston and elsewhere invariably asked, “Why have we never heard of her before?” Even in Marie Equi’s hometown of New Bedford, relatively few were familiar with the early physician and political agitator who spent her early years in the city. That’s about to change even more.
 
Dale Danley and I brought the story of Equi’s fierce independence and commitment to social and economic justice to the New Bedford Public Library, radio station WBSM, and the historic Rotch Jones Duff House. The New Bedford area’s South Coast Today published feature articles written by Lauren Daley about Equi and the new biography. Earlier this month the same news site announced the launch of a comprehensive, interactive history project to unearth the remarkable stories of women from New Bedford’s past. Marie Equi will be highlighted among these women “who shaped local history.”
 
The project, known as “Lighting the Way: Historic Women of the South Coast,” will feature profiles of 90 women on a website and an app to guide followers on an historic walking trail through downtown New Bedford with stops at more than 30 landmarks that feature women’s stories. (Marie Equi’s nearby birthplace will be noted in the walk). Later a curriculum will be developed for area schools. Then in 2020, the anniversary of the nation’s adopting woman suffrage, the group plans to exhibit the historic women’s lives in public art displays. The New Bedford Whaling Museum has spearheaded the “Lighting the Way” project.
 
See Lauren Daley's article for SouthCoastToday:
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/news/20180305/lighting-way-group-sheds-light-on-southcoast-women

Much of Oregon’s populace rallied to make the state one of the most patriotic in the nation during the World War I era, but what about the other Oregonians, those who objected to, or merely criticized, America’s engagement?  They were subject to harassment, ostracism, and charges of sedition.

Michael Helquist, author of Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, will recount the stories of the nearly 100 Oregonians arrested under the federal sedition law during a talk at the Eugene Public Library, 100 W. 10th Av; Saturday, March 31, at 2pm – 3:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of his award-winning biography of Marie Equi, the only woman in Oregon convicted of sedition, will be available for purchase and signing.