Sad Francisco
A Bay Area based podcast telling stories that aren't normally covered in traditional media. Featuring community organizers, resistance leaders & underrepresented voices. Working towards the liberation for all, one episode at a time.
Episodes
Jemma DeCristo RETURNS! Her new book The Aesthetic Character of Blackness is out, and covers how revolutionary Black art is co-opted by capitalists and the state, and art's limits as a revolutionary tool (and it's widespread use as a counterinsurgent one).
The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds Like Us (Duke University Press)
Janetta Johnson and zen blossom speak from the home base of Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) in SF. They speak on Miss Major (who led TGIJP for years); the year Janetta turned down the SF Pride grand marshal title; and the status of the Bay Area's reputation for being a haven for trans people.
TGI Justice Project
https://tgijp.org
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
...
Public universities are under constant threat of budget cuts, but somehow administrators find millions to toss at extractive tech, like ChatGPT Edu.
SF State professor Martha Kenney describes how administrators at the CSUs spent $17 million on a contract with OpenAI without asking students or professors if it was a good idea—subsidizing an industry built on hype and plaigiarism.
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San Francisco tried to atone for the war on drugs with a DEI program for recreational weed store owners. In the end, the real winners were rich white dudes like London Breed's old roommate, Conor Johnston.
Chris Roberts—America's top cannabis journalist and historian reporting from America's number-one cannabis producing region—returns. We go deep on his recent Chronicle piece detailing how it all went w...
dee(dee) c. ardan is live in the studio apartment for the first episode about trans/queer media from the Bay's past, showing that indeed, this place has been trans as hell for a long, long time.
Starting with issue one of the 1970s zine GAY SUNSHINE, we deduce how the Bay gained a reputation for being the place you come to push the trans agenda and make life hell for conservatives.
The Tenderloin in 1966: One of the earliest trans/queer actions (that we know of) against police and state violence happened at Compton's Cafeteria. Today, that space (111 Taylor Street) is occupied by Geo Group—otherwise known as the corporation that is America's number-one private prison and ICE profiteer.
Zei Wilder is helping organize the local effort to get Geo Group out of San Francisco and turn th...
For Major, who passed on October 13.
Truthout piece
https://truthout.org/articles/to-honor-miss-major-we-fight-for-the-trans-and-queer-spaces-she-built/
Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary
https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C5592116
A more recent episode with fil...
This episode was recorded before the ceasefire deal went into effect on Oct. 10. Surprising no one, Israel has already broken its promises, continuing to kill Palestinians and withholding aid.
UC Berkeley lecturer Peyrin Kao just ended a 38-day hunger strike to keep Palestine on the minds of people on campus and to raise money during Israel's US-backed starvation campaign. A few ...
Bench Ansfield is a professor in the History department at Temple University. Their book "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" covers how racial capitalism, political corruption, and the insurance industry created a world where landlords can profit more by burning their own buildings down than maintaining them. They were also part of the research team on the 2019 documentary "Decade of Fire".
...Alexis Shotwell is a professor of gender and feminist studies and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa. She's also an anarchist organizer particularly interested in the anarchist fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin.
Alexis's website
https://www.alexisshotwell.com/
Punch Up Collective
https://www.punchupcollective.org/
Episode with Deeg on LAGAI-Queer Insurrection!
https://www.pat...
Court support has spread to Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 100 Montgomery Street, while the mayor and SFPD continue to be complicit with ICE, against the city's sanctuary city policy.
Lxspinguinxs (updates about SF anti-ICE actions on Instagram)
https://www.instagram.com/lxspinguinxs
Lea
on Substack
https://leftylea.substack.com
on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/leftylea_in_sf
Los Angeles T...
Boiler Room is a global event promotion company known for enlisting local DJs and promoters to produce Boiler Room-branded parties. This year, Boiler Room was acquired by a Zionist private equity firm, Superstruct/KKR.
Three people who DJ and throw parties in the Bay—Daria Lourd, DJ Fridge, and Juanny—on creating culture that is removed from the Boiler Room industrial complex.
9/19 at The Stud: No Bias
...
Tracey Helton Mitchell writes about living in San Francisco with an addiction in her memoir "The Big Fix" and now works in harm reduction in the city.
The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin
https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C3207933
Tracey on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@traceyh415.
Tracey on TikTok
https://www.tiktok.com/@traceyh415
Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street - HBO documentary...
Jen Snyder organizes with the Democratic Socialists of America, and recently wrote a piece for Jacobin about socialist policies like free MUNI, and taxing landlords for leaving homes empty. Things that are so popular in San Francisco, people voted to pass them. But then oligarchs and their minions defanged, reversed, or litigated them to death.
San Francisco's Ultrarich Are Blocking a Zohran-Style Agenda
...
Discussing the word "affordable" and how it's weaponized by the real estate industry.
What is Affordable Housing? zine
https://gayshame.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/What_is_Affordable_Housing_2025_zine.pdf
Gay Shame zine: Steal This House: Dissecting the War on Houselessness and the Housing Crisis in the SF Bay Area
https://gayshame.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Steal-This-House-Chronological-Order....
Keith McHenry co-founded Food Not Bombs in 1980, and has been arrested more than 100 times for serving free food to homeless people and protesting the US government. A history lesson on SF's Phil Burton Democratic Party machine, black bloc, and how FNB became labeled as a domestic terrorist group by the FBI.
Food Not Bombs
https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
Seven Steps to Starting a Food Not Bombs
https...
Starting in 2021, a shoplifting panic was hatched and spread by corporate media, cops, and politicians, resulting in life-or-death consequences (see: Banko Brown).
Damena Page called from SF county jail to report on the conditions, abuse, and how reporting abuse can result in retaliation.
Amy Martyn is a journalist based in the Bay, who's been covering the shoplifting panic since the beginning of the pandemic.
Damena on Instagram
...Ten years have passed since the fire that disappeared the apartments and businesses at 22nd and Mission Streets, and killed Mauricio Orellana. Many people continue to suspect landlord arson. Slumlord Hawk Ling Lou inherited the buildings in the 1990s, and owns the now-empty lot, plus about 20 other buildings in San Francisco (some under family members' names).
On May 15, 2025, despite overwhelming community dissent the Planning Com...
Sophie Lewis's book Enemy Feminisms depicts some of Western history's most despicable women, like Alma Bridwell, a Pentecostal preacher who spread the gospel of the KKK, and May French Sheldon, an explorer and genocide apologist for Belgium during the Rubber Terror in the Congo Free State. They were also some of the most celebrated feminist figures of their time, weaponizing feminism for capitalists, authoritarians, and white supre...
Seasons change, fascists remain. Another one where Toshio and Tofu have a semi-incoherent discussion about things in the works at Sad Francisco HQ.
The protests that corporate media is mostly ignoring
(Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam, Waging Nonviolence)
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/03/resistance-alive-well-us/
Citations Needed
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/
Fairness and Accura...
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