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(It wound down in 2008, but has since been resurrected as Mother every Saturday night at Oasis, the club Heklina opened with fellow performer D’Arcy Drollinger and others.)Ī “ Save Our Stud” Facebook group grew big, got active, and - somewhat surprisingly - stayed active. Heklina’s madcap, long-running, monthly drag show, Trannyshack, famously ran for more than a decade. So did Etta James, RuPaul, and a pre-Scissor Sisters Ana Matronic. At a time when the city’s plentiful gay bars were highly stratified and catered to almost comically narrow demographics like “sweater queens,” it was “the first and often favorite mixed gay bar for all the children,” in the words of chronicler Mark Freeman.Ī drag bar, a leather bar, a punk club, or everything at once, the Stud has always been unique - at its original home on Folsom, or at its current digs at 399 Ninth St., where it moved in 1987. Having opened on Folsom Street in the spring of 1966, in what is now Holy Cow, the Stud was unusual from the beginning as a place where women were welcome.
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Bottom Left: Nate Allbee, Maria Davis, Rachel Ryan, Paul Dillinger. Top left: Houston Gilbert, Marke Bieschke, Oscar Pineda, Jerry Lee Abram, Mica Sigourney/VivvyAnne ForeverMore, Dottie Lux, Neven Raja Samara, David Schnur. It’s a risky, utterly Northern Californian way to grapple with a particularly San Franciscan form of urban decay: asphyxiation by prosperity. After equal buy-ins from all parties, suddenly everyone’s an owner and everyone’s a barback.
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A beloved queer bar - written off as dead only five months before, when the rent nearly tripled - has officially transferred ownership to the two queens onstage, plus 16 other members of a collective of DJs, artists, nightlife figures, tech workers, and others. No one thinks 2017 will be pretty, but everybody’s cheering wildly. People grin, counting down, preparing to smooch. VivvyAnne and Honey make smalltalk onstage, as if this were live television and a producer were making a stretchy gesture to indicate that they should slow it down and prevent dead air at all costs. The lighting in here is terrible - a particular hue of terrible that, in this context, sets the scene perfectly and probably generates more envy and more likes. The people closest to the bar gleefully down the surplus flutes of bubbles, taking selfies and posting one last pic on Instagram, bidding adieu to the worst year since the bubonic plague erupted in 1347. The year ahead promises unparalleled irritation and destruction, but at least we can ritually dispose of 2016 together. Focused on her task, a bartender pours way too many Champagne toasts for the packed house to distribute efficiently through the room, like delicate sandbags. Drag queens operate on drag queen time, but not tonight. I’m at The Stud, a 50-year-old gay bar in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, where emcees VivvyAnne ForeverMORE and Honey Mahogany are trying to shoehorn at least one more performer’s act in before midnight. on New Year’s Eve, and everyone around me is drunk.