Sad Francisco

In 1989, the Golden Gate Bridge was blockaded for the first time by a group of protesters going by the name Stop AIDS Now…or Else! They were sick of their friends dying in a government-facilitated genocide of queer people (the medical industrial complex and corporate media were complicit, too). 

It wasn't till 2016 that another group of protesters (black.seed) blockaded the Bay Bridge, this time propelled by the Ferguson uprisings ...

Chris Roberts is who you call to learn how the Navy’s atomic weapons tests made parts of SF toxic, and the government’s radiation experiments on people incarcerated at San Quentin, military officers stationed at Pittsburg, and the 49ers.

Read Chris’s reporting and listen to Rebecca Bowe’s companion podcast: 

Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunter's Point
sfpublicpress.org/exposed

"The Naval Scientist Who Wanted To Know ...

Zionists are still trying to pinkwash Israel's genocide, co-opting queer and trans institutions in the service of the Netanyahu dynasty and the Christian Zionists behind Project Esther. 

One way they're doing this is by attempting to de-fang the radical history of Dyke March, a march that has happened every Saturday of Pride weekend in San Francisco since the early 1990s. 

With Lisa Roth of Dykes for Palestine, and Jemma and Kira f...

This week, rewind to one of our earliest episodes on how for two years, the SFPD was uninvited to Gay Pride. In solidarity with the cops, politicians boycotted the 2022 Pride parade, and a few pro-cop LGBTs sold everyone else out. 

New episode on the radical history of the Dyke March coming next week, also with Jemma!

Gay Shame's 5-0 Out of Pride video series: https://gayshame.net/index.php...

Self abnegation is the total denial of oneself—which is how Emile Suotonye Deweaver describes what it took to get paroled by a white supremacist institution that is about reproducing power hierarchies, not repair or rehabilitation. He writes about the experience (plus notes on shibari and Dungeons & Dragons) in his new book about surviving 21 years in the California prison system, Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine. 

Ghost in th...

Annalise Ophelian directed and StormMiguel Florez co-produced MAJOR!, the beloved documentary about the beloved Miss Major. The Roxie is screening the movie for its ten year anniversary this month; its messages about community, role models and resilience are relevant as ever given our current political moment.

Annalise and StormMiguel discuss how to make a documentary without objectifying your stars, making movies in the Bay, and t...

Protest is an expression of shared anger and a way to meet and skill-build with people whose politics are aligned with you own. But how do you measure the success of a protest if you have specific material demands? 

It’s an eternal question with no obvious answer that Andrew Lee deals with in their recent essay, “The end of protest,” up now on Substack.

Andrew’s “The end of protest”
https://substack.com/@xandrewleex/p-161567796

Def...

Tourmaline's work spotlighting the life of Marsha P. Johnson began with collecting a popular archive online, then a film, and now a biography that's out May 20. In the book, you learn about the notorious Black, trans heroine who moved to New York when she was thirteen, rioted at Stonewall, protected the dolls with Sylvia Rivera and their group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries/STAR, performed in and around the Village, and...

Even if you don't use Spotify, the streaming platform's anti-labor orientation means it's affecting musicians and thus, the music you listen to, which Liz Pelly covers in depth in her new book, "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist." Discussed this episode: Spotify's in-house "fake"/ghost artists, how it uses a "payola-like" system to charge artists to get discovered, Walter Benjamin's "aura loss,...

CJ Trowbridge discusses his latest land project, the High Desert Institute, and a previous one that was featured on the 2023 reality show "The Garden: Commune or Cult?"--where the founding of an anticapitalist, consensus-based community was chronicled by corporate TV channel producers for a Discovery Channel audience. We also talk about the Cyberpony Express mesh network he's working on (basically, a parallel internet outside the c...

AI is coming for our jobs, the environment, and is even starting to stand-in for human creativity. Derek Allen, Sam Kirchner and Varvara Pavlova are part of the newly formed direct action group Stop AI, which is particularly concerned about the existential threat of Artificial General Intelligence and the potential for robots to outsmart humans, which Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, says is coming this year.

Stop AI
https://www.stopai.i...

Erica Meiners and Priya Kandaswamy on how prison guard unions use the valor of labor movement to reinforce the prison industrial complex. 

TW: Discussion of brutality, murder, sexual assault and suicide of prisoners at the hands of prison employees.

"Prisons Are Anti-Labor Institutions. We Need an Anti-Carceral Labor Movement." (Truthout)
https://truthout.org/articles/prisons-are-anti-labor-institutions-we-need-an-anti-carceral-lab...

Malcolm Harris, on how pragmatism has been monopolized by centrists who fail to take climate change seriously—the same kind of centrists who'd trust tech industrialists to save the human race. We discuss why you need a pharmacist on your apocalypse team, and Malcolm's new book, 'What's Left', which understands how our survival depends on anti-capitalist collectivity, unlike Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Libertarian-leaning Democr...

After last November's election, everyone from campaign consultants, to media critics, to Donald Trump himself credited alt-right media and the manosphere for making the US a more welcoming place for repressive, retrograde politics and values. 

Ome (@sugarskullangelic on social media) is a sociologist and host of the podcast Liberación Army Radio, who speaks to why it's not just Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan followers who get sucked int...

Live from the Mission! A conversation between Deeg, Deni, Jemma and Lavelle recorded March 13, 2025 at 518 Valencia Street, steps away from the Death Star known as Manny's. A night of "tales of queer insurrection" where the audience heard the short and sweet versions of the histories of three longstanding Bay Area queer movement groups: Gay Shame, LAGAI Queer Insurrection!, and Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism! 

Presented in co...

Mario Riveira and Abe Woodliff's first collaborative documentary, The City of Sensitive Frauds, premieres this week. Its topic: gentrifiers and how they homogenize cities.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71eCUCI9CpM

Abe on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/realbayareamemes/

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@abeisabadwriter

Twitter: https://x.com/HeLLaTaLL510

Mario on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mario0o0o0o0o0o

Tikt...

Signal (the phone app) has become an obligatory download for every organizer on the Left in the US. But it was funded through one of the American government's propaganda agencies, and the atmosphere it creates is one of a neverending meeting permeated by paranoia. Epic conversation, care of Jemma DeCristo and Ralowe Ampu. 

LAGAI—Queer Insurrection! [https://episodes.fm/1653309103/episode/OTIxNTJmOWUtMDAxZi00YjgxLWExZGMtZDJlMzBjN2M0...