Feast Your Eyes on LGBTQ+ Arts This Summer
Image by friend of the business Stephen Sherman Wade.
It's Pride Month, and shaping up to be a particularly artful one. Emerging from the doldrums of the pandemic, LGBTQ+ arts are once again ready for their close-up. In April, Liminal Space, a gallery focused on trans artists, opened in SOMA, Duboce Triangle’s queer Schlomer Haus just opened RENEGADE: San Francisco: the 1990s, and this month pop-up Queer Artists Featured (Queer A.F.) opened in the Castro Street storefront that once was Harvey Milk's camera shop (and most recently home to the HRC Store).
But perhaps the most in-your-face display of queer arts to grace the city is the newly unveiled mural Showtime that sprawls across both sides of cabaret Oasis SF, on the corner of 11th and Folsom. Owner D'Arcy Drollinger wanted the mural to highlights the icons of SOMA's counterculture past, including memorializing some of the city's drag icons. (Drollinger is the only living queen depicted in the mural.) The mural augments one they unveiled last year featuring queer musical icon Sylvester.
Speaking of Sylvester, you have just a few more weeks to check out The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy at the SF Public Library, celebrating the avant-garde hippie theater and marking the publication of original member Fayette Hauser's pictorial history. (Sylvester was an early member of the troupe as well.) Listen to original music from the shows on Thursday, June 23, and hit up the closing ceremony on August 11.
Other things to catch before they’re over:
Frameline 46, Castro Theatre, through 6/26
National Queer Arts Festival, multiple venues, through 6/23
BroadwaySF’s The Prom, Golden Gate Theatre, through 7/17
San Francisco Symphony’s Get Happy: A Judy Garland Centennial Celebration, Davies Hall, 6/29
Matthew Martin Is Judy Garland, OASIS, 7/30