Sad Francisco

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 documen...

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...

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-O...

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...

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 o...

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...

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 capitalis...

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 a...

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 p...

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...

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...

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/five-...

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 Cri...

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 sta...

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://substa...

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, perfo...

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 discov...

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...

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...

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-instit...

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 Th...

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...

A quick check-in where we look back at the longest three months in recent memory, with some notes on what's coming up.  Thanks to all our subscribers on Patreon; please join them at patreon.com/sadfrancisco

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...

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://ww...