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In this Issue
HERE'S THE THING : it's said that human beings share 98.5 percent of their DNA with bonobo monkeys, the happy little sex fiends of the animal kingdom. Which is good to know and makes excellent fodder for dinner party prattle. But how much, culturally speaking, do we – in particular, San Franciscans – really have in common with that fun-loving, freewheeling, sex-positive, every-90-minutes breed of wildlife? Put another way, does San Francisco really deserve its slutty reputation? Pen, notebook, shot glass, and Muni transfer in hand, intrepid reporter Heather Smith spent one very long weekend inside our fair city's drinking establishments in search of an answer. There are, perhaps, more scientific ways of investigating the mating habits of San Francisco's young and lubricated and the state of the random hookup, but then, we're not scientists. Look for the results of Smith's boozy anthropological study in "Strangers in the Night," in the summer Bars and Clubs supplement tucked away inside this week's issue. • • • Moving onward, however much we have in common with bonobos, we do have to take a break sometimes, and when we do, we tend to watch movies. And when Frameline's San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival comes along, we tend to watch a lot of them. A decade ago Bay Guardian contributing writer B. Ruby Rich coined the term "new queer cinema" in an article for the Village Voice. This week Dennis Harvey takes stock of a "newer queer cinema" as ably represented in this year's Frameline fest by films like Sébastien Lifshitz's Wild Side, Ian Iqbal Rashid's Touch of Pink, and Rodney Evans's Brother to Brother. • • • Meanwhile, as Liam O'Donoghue reports in Life during Wartime, page 15, members of the San Francisco Police Department are still running amok, this time with taxpayer-funded overkill at an antiwar march and protests against an international biotech conference. Even though police outnumbered protesters, they still felt compelled to make an unnecessary mass arrest that caught a Bay Guardian news intern up in the dragnet. And yet there's also good news on the cops front: as Sitara Nieves and Steven T. Jones report in "POA Gambles and Loses," page 15, San Francisco police officers lost a high-profile campaign to bully District Attorney Kamala Harris into changing her anti-death penalty stance. And some interesting polling data suggests that the Police Officers Association might not be as powerful as it and its supporters have long believed. |
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