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Tonight San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) members will gather to honor advocates of better, safer streets in the city. The 2019 Golden Wheel Award will be presented to former SF supervisor Jane Kim and to People Protected founders Maureen Persico and Matt Brezina. (People Protected mobilizes activists to form a temporary human barrier on city streets that lack adequate bike infrastructure).
To prep for tonight's celebration, I reviewed the latest issue of SFBC's "Tube Times." For me the 16-page newsletter is impressive for its production and editing quality, readability, and diversity of perspectives. Featured is the article "The Kids Are All Right." It highlights the work of young SF bike advocates who take their demands for safer streets to their schools and neighborhoods and to City Hall. In the words of 14-year-old Oscar Denmark, "It is important for kids to advocate because it is our world as well, and we will be living on it for many years to come." The youth advocates recently promoted -- and won! -- safety upgrades to a street where a soccer teammate was hit and killed by a driver. One of them advised readers of a city newspaper, "It shouldn't take our friend to die to fix this problem." |
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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. #lgbthistory #museum #HIV/AIDS #bkbindersmuseum
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Michael HelquistAuthor Historian Activist Archives
June 2024
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