Questions & Answers
1997 — Burn The Quilt
The Grasshopper Palace
Can you describe the Grasshopper Palace?
The theatre was on an upper floor of 333 Valencia, in a space that had been fitted out for offices. (The gay fetish video studio Factory Video was in the building, maybe on the same floor – I would return to the building for a future porn audition in late 2001, little did I know!). There was a small entryway/lobby with a desk just outside the door to the performance space. The space itself was a “black box” – a basic square
room, walls painted in a dark matte color, and metal folding chairs on either side of the corner-entrance door along the walls, seating for about 30 people. Lighting for the stage was minimal; there was track lighting that illuminated the central area and other smaller lights that could be trained on the wall or on set pieces. There were two doors upstage: one led directly outside to exterior stairs at the rear of the building and into a parking lot, the other to a small anteroom with a sink – likely a break room space for office workers – that served as my dressing room and warmup space. ventilation whatsoever, and when the door was closed you had about 45 minutes before the place turned into a sauna. I opened each performance by telling the audience to take off their coats and sweaters – even though it was August, in San Francisco when the summer fog rolls in the temperature drops like a rock – as I warned them it was gonna get hot in there. Luckily, nobody passed out during the run.
What was the theatre like inside?
It was an office building that was largely empty, maybe early 1970’s vintage. I’m sure that the building architects never contemplated that any of the office layouts would one day be converted into an impromptu pop-up theatre space. The hallways were rectangular, the rooms all squared off, no angles or vaulted ceilings – utilitarian and not much character or distinction. You got the sense that the place had seen better days; not uncommon for that part of the City at that time.
The ground floor was a gym – always a pleasure to behold while waiting for the elevator. The upper floors were a rabbit warren of offices, small shipping and printing businesses, and as mentioned above, at least one gay fetish porn studio. There was a small elevator that could hold maybe three or four people; it got a workout for performances. An open staircase was either immediately to the left of the door or just a few steps beyond the elevator, and the climb up to 3 wasn’t difficult.
What was the neighbourhood like that the theatre was in — around (333) Valencia Street?
It’s a transitional piece of ground, not far from where the grid changes. If you look one block east of Valencia, you’ll see Mission Street – the main boulevard after which the neighborhood is named, that starts at the Bay and runs the length of the City to and beyond the city limits. Mission Street takes a big bend and changes from east-west to north-south just a block or two before the grid settles in and swing firmly into The Mission. So, although it’s technically in the Mission District, 333 felt like it was kind of floating in a nondescript space, neither one nor the other. A gate, if you like – a hinge between the halves.
The numbered streets starting at 14th were residential, densely packed with the Victorian/Edwardian multi-story homes that typify San Francisco neighborhoods. Everybody gets a bay window or two and a view, even in the poor neighborhoods. There was and still is a pizza joint called Pauline’s that had a clamand-garlic pizza that was killer, but expensive as fuck. There was a tankstelle on the corner, used to be an Arco but even then may have been an independent shop that kept the old sign, and on the other corner was a used car lot (still there I think – it’s been a while). To the rear was a nice bodega on the corner of 14th and Valencia – bodegas are corner stores that have sandwiches, ice cream, liquor, beer, groceries cigarettes ... that’s a term you’ll hear in New York and San Francisco.
Just a short way back from the building and up the 14th Street hill heading towards Market (our “main stem”) was a beautifully renovated Victorian known as the Faerie House or more commonly, “Marty’s Place”. That house was a main playspace for the San Francisco kink community for many years, with a fully-eqiupped massive dungeon in the basement (with a waterbed, for Christ’s sake!), and that’s where a
great deal of my play from 1990 through 1998 took place, including a fundraiser for The Animal Ensemble referenced in the press release artifact, and more than one performance on flute at play parties and other gatherings. It was known for the Solstice Parties that would bring 500 people through that house twice a year, where the blue smoke from the copious weed handed out to the revelers rose like the sign of a stoned new Pope from the Vatican chimney and the LSD was bestowed on any who wanted to partake as a blessing to mark the turn of the sun. My first gig there was on the Winter Solstice 1990 crew, and that’s where I met Gilbert Baker, the creator of the Rainbow Flag and a legendary activist even then – that’s when he told me the *real* story of how the flag was created – and who became a dear friend and mentor in both San Francisco and New York for 27 years until his untimely passing.
There’s a boatload of stories and epiphanies from that place, just around the corner from where I performed what was to be my final Animal show.
Do you know what happened to the theatre in the years afterwards (it is no longer operating, and the building itself also doesn’t appear to exist at that address any longer — there is a refurbished / modern office building if you Google Map 333 Valencia St)?
I just did some sleuthing and the building has been thoroughly refurbished inside and out. I thought the architecture and design looked familiar, and you can see the plate glass windows where the first-floor gym had been – now being advertised for lease.
Between the end of August 1997 and my departure for New York in March of 1998, I don’t recall knowing of any other performance at the Grasshopper Palace Theater. Hank Pellissier, the proprietor, would be the authority on that.
Can you describe Hank (the person who invited you to show a piece at the Grasshopper Palace)?
I can, but it would take me a couple of hours to do so, and when I can set aside the dedicated time I’m happy to tell you my experience over the years with Hank Hyena! We met not long after I moved here in March of 1986, and just kept running into each other over the years... One bright sunny afternoon In May of 1997, I was standing at the corner of Castro and Market (the gateway to The Castro where sweater queens still rule) and Hank came riding up on his bike, long and lanky and sending beams of energy every which way. I asked him what he was up to and he said, “I’ve got a new theatre! You should put on a show there!” Sometimes, you do get a direct invitation to mount a project! And for Hank, I’d do anything.
Where were you living at this time? How far was that from the theatre?
When I started writing, I was living in the Rockridge section of Oakland near the Berkeley line. I had moved out of my shared space in Bernal Heights (a neighborhood on a bedrock hill south of the Mission District where I wrote most of my Animal Ensemble work) and took a room in a home over there Rockridge was a stop on the BART train system where I’d go for a “day in the country” – get off the train there, stop at the Aztec Café to have a bowl of their spicy Aztec Soup, then with a pipe filled with sweet green California bud in hand I would walk roughly north along College Avenue, through the Elmwood neighborhood into Berkeley, all the way to the University of California campus – then cut down along the campus to the Downtown Berkeley BART and head back to the City.
At that time, I had just begun to recover from my bout with AIDS wasting syndrome in the summer and fall of 1996 that very nearly took my life. If it hadn’t been for the then-underground cannabis buyers’ clubs all but kidnapping me and force-smoking me out and throwing edibles at me and then watching over me as I ate, I wouldn’t be here today. My viral load was 717,000, T-cells below 50, and I was in very bad shape. Thanks to the clubs, I gained 17 pounds in 3 weeks – enough for me to start the new miracle drugs called protease inhibitors and nucleoside/non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, the very first ones, the ones that gave us lipoatrophy that’s taken my face away and never stops and has wasted more than 40 pounds of body fat from my body and extremities, along with lipodystrophy that redistributed the fat at the base of our necks atop our spine – “buffalo hump” – or into visceral fat behind
our abdominal walls – “Crix belly”, short for Crixivan, the name of the first protease inhibitor. It was Crixivan along with “the D drugs” – d4T and DDI, brand names Zerit and Videx – that caused the fat displacement and disfigurement that for years was the visible marker of AIDS to those who knew what to look for. (One time in 2003 on the NY subway, I was hanging from a strap and the young Asian couple
sitting directly below were looking at me, and then the guy said to the girl, “See the triangle-shaped depressions in his face? That’s how you know that he has AIDS.” I thought to myself, I’m standing right here and I can HEAR you you son of a bitch, but I said nothing. Today, I wouldn’t be so taciturn.)
As an aside – I hate my face and countenance, Chris. I’ve been down to bone and muscle for more than a decade. My face is basically a skull with skin drawn taut over it. There is filler that’s designed specifically for people with AIDS who have been disfigured by this, but it’s expensive, and the patient access programs here have long since expired. But if I’m ever to go back to work in tech, I need to hav my face back and, of course, my teeth fixed (they’re under serious construction right now as I’m fighting with my dental plan to cover the missing front crown and other absent front tooth that makes me look like a meth refugee from a red state). The fill lasts about 18 months, and we have to keep pumping it –and unless I somehow land a major film role or something, the only way I’ll be able to pay for it is the enormous amount of money that tech work pays. I’m 61, and I’m already ancient in tech years; there is a
need for greybeards but we’re in the worst hiring slump in history and it’s not looking good for 2024.) I’m fortunate to have a decent body that’s in good shape and covered with 40 hours of brightly-colored Japanese tattooing, nice tight lean body mass, but... In 1988, one of the reasons I started shaving my head was that I’d been going bald since age 15 and I had a very prominent bald spot – and I thought, I don’t want to look in the mirror and say “I’m ugly” for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be ugly
anymore, and I know it’s a hangup that I have to deal with, but when I have a pup hood on, no one can tell I have AIDS or that I look like a homeless meth addict. There’s comfort in that.
Anyway, I wasn’t really happy living in Rockridge, and I had been placed into a network engineering boot camp for Microsoft by the California vocational rehab people because typing for lawyers had blown out my elbow nerves (cubital tunnel syndrome) that was slated to start in September, so I migrated back to the City to a ticky-tacky house in the Balboa Park neighborhood in the southern part of the City (39 Williar Avenue), where I had a paneled basement room with a ceiling of only five and a half feet – and that’s where I was for Burn The Quilt and stayed through December of 1997. I remember still gulping the pills, it had only been a year since I was sick unto death, and there’s no sickness like being sick with AIDS, and I would walk down the hill to the BART carrying my bulky tech school binders listening to the Burn The Quilt soundtrack on the Walkman praying please God let these pills do their right work in me.
The theatre was on an upper floor of 333 Valencia, in a space that had been fitted out for offices. (The gay fetish video studio Factory Video was in the building, maybe on the same floor – I would return to the building for a future porn audition in late 2001, little did I know!). There was a small entryway/lobby with a desk just outside the door to the performance space. The space itself was a “black box” – a basic square
room, walls painted in a dark matte color, and metal folding chairs on either side of the corner-entrance door along the walls, seating for about 30 people. Lighting for the stage was minimal; there was track lighting that illuminated the central area and other smaller lights that could be trained on the wall or on set pieces. There were two doors upstage: one led directly outside to exterior stairs at the rear of the building and into a parking lot, the other to a small anteroom with a sink – likely a break room space for office workers – that served as my dressing room and warmup space. ventilation whatsoever, and when the door was closed you had about 45 minutes before the place turned into a sauna. I opened each performance by telling the audience to take off their coats and sweaters – even though it was August, in San Francisco when the summer fog rolls in the temperature drops like a rock – as I warned them it was gonna get hot in there. Luckily, nobody passed out during the run.
What was the theatre like inside?
It was an office building that was largely empty, maybe early 1970’s vintage. I’m sure that the building architects never contemplated that any of the office layouts would one day be converted into an impromptu pop-up theatre space. The hallways were rectangular, the rooms all squared off, no angles or vaulted ceilings – utilitarian and not much character or distinction. You got the sense that the place had seen better days; not uncommon for that part of the City at that time.
The ground floor was a gym – always a pleasure to behold while waiting for the elevator. The upper floors were a rabbit warren of offices, small shipping and printing businesses, and as mentioned above, at least one gay fetish porn studio. There was a small elevator that could hold maybe three or four people; it got a workout for performances. An open staircase was either immediately to the left of the door or just a few steps beyond the elevator, and the climb up to 3 wasn’t difficult.
What was the neighbourhood like that the theatre was in — around (333) Valencia Street?
It’s a transitional piece of ground, not far from where the grid changes. If you look one block east of Valencia, you’ll see Mission Street – the main boulevard after which the neighborhood is named, that starts at the Bay and runs the length of the City to and beyond the city limits. Mission Street takes a big bend and changes from east-west to north-south just a block or two before the grid settles in and swing firmly into The Mission. So, although it’s technically in the Mission District, 333 felt like it was kind of floating in a nondescript space, neither one nor the other. A gate, if you like – a hinge between the halves.
The numbered streets starting at 14th were residential, densely packed with the Victorian/Edwardian multi-story homes that typify San Francisco neighborhoods. Everybody gets a bay window or two and a view, even in the poor neighborhoods. There was and still is a pizza joint called Pauline’s that had a clamand-garlic pizza that was killer, but expensive as fuck. There was a tankstelle on the corner, used to be an Arco but even then may have been an independent shop that kept the old sign, and on the other corner was a used car lot (still there I think – it’s been a while). To the rear was a nice bodega on the corner of 14th and Valencia – bodegas are corner stores that have sandwiches, ice cream, liquor, beer, groceries cigarettes ... that’s a term you’ll hear in New York and San Francisco.
Just a short way back from the building and up the 14th Street hill heading towards Market (our “main stem”) was a beautifully renovated Victorian known as the Faerie House or more commonly, “Marty’s Place”. That house was a main playspace for the San Francisco kink community for many years, with a fully-eqiupped massive dungeon in the basement (with a waterbed, for Christ’s sake!), and that’s where a
great deal of my play from 1990 through 1998 took place, including a fundraiser for The Animal Ensemble referenced in the press release artifact, and more than one performance on flute at play parties and other gatherings. It was known for the Solstice Parties that would bring 500 people through that house twice a year, where the blue smoke from the copious weed handed out to the revelers rose like the sign of a stoned new Pope from the Vatican chimney and the LSD was bestowed on any who wanted to partake as a blessing to mark the turn of the sun. My first gig there was on the Winter Solstice 1990 crew, and that’s where I met Gilbert Baker, the creator of the Rainbow Flag and a legendary activist even then – that’s when he told me the *real* story of how the flag was created – and who became a dear friend and mentor in both San Francisco and New York for 27 years until his untimely passing.
There’s a boatload of stories and epiphanies from that place, just around the corner from where I performed what was to be my final Animal show.
Do you know what happened to the theatre in the years afterwards (it is no longer operating, and the building itself also doesn’t appear to exist at that address any longer — there is a refurbished / modern office building if you Google Map 333 Valencia St)?
I just did some sleuthing and the building has been thoroughly refurbished inside and out. I thought the architecture and design looked familiar, and you can see the plate glass windows where the first-floor gym had been – now being advertised for lease.
Between the end of August 1997 and my departure for New York in March of 1998, I don’t recall knowing of any other performance at the Grasshopper Palace Theater. Hank Pellissier, the proprietor, would be the authority on that.
Can you describe Hank (the person who invited you to show a piece at the Grasshopper Palace)?
I can, but it would take me a couple of hours to do so, and when I can set aside the dedicated time I’m happy to tell you my experience over the years with Hank Hyena! We met not long after I moved here in March of 1986, and just kept running into each other over the years... One bright sunny afternoon In May of 1997, I was standing at the corner of Castro and Market (the gateway to The Castro where sweater queens still rule) and Hank came riding up on his bike, long and lanky and sending beams of energy every which way. I asked him what he was up to and he said, “I’ve got a new theatre! You should put on a show there!” Sometimes, you do get a direct invitation to mount a project! And for Hank, I’d do anything.
Where were you living at this time? How far was that from the theatre?
When I started writing, I was living in the Rockridge section of Oakland near the Berkeley line. I had moved out of my shared space in Bernal Heights (a neighborhood on a bedrock hill south of the Mission District where I wrote most of my Animal Ensemble work) and took a room in a home over there Rockridge was a stop on the BART train system where I’d go for a “day in the country” – get off the train there, stop at the Aztec Café to have a bowl of their spicy Aztec Soup, then with a pipe filled with sweet green California bud in hand I would walk roughly north along College Avenue, through the Elmwood neighborhood into Berkeley, all the way to the University of California campus – then cut down along the campus to the Downtown Berkeley BART and head back to the City.
At that time, I had just begun to recover from my bout with AIDS wasting syndrome in the summer and fall of 1996 that very nearly took my life. If it hadn’t been for the then-underground cannabis buyers’ clubs all but kidnapping me and force-smoking me out and throwing edibles at me and then watching over me as I ate, I wouldn’t be here today. My viral load was 717,000, T-cells below 50, and I was in very bad shape. Thanks to the clubs, I gained 17 pounds in 3 weeks – enough for me to start the new miracle drugs called protease inhibitors and nucleoside/non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, the very first ones, the ones that gave us lipoatrophy that’s taken my face away and never stops and has wasted more than 40 pounds of body fat from my body and extremities, along with lipodystrophy that redistributed the fat at the base of our necks atop our spine – “buffalo hump” – or into visceral fat behind
our abdominal walls – “Crix belly”, short for Crixivan, the name of the first protease inhibitor. It was Crixivan along with “the D drugs” – d4T and DDI, brand names Zerit and Videx – that caused the fat displacement and disfigurement that for years was the visible marker of AIDS to those who knew what to look for. (One time in 2003 on the NY subway, I was hanging from a strap and the young Asian couple
sitting directly below were looking at me, and then the guy said to the girl, “See the triangle-shaped depressions in his face? That’s how you know that he has AIDS.” I thought to myself, I’m standing right here and I can HEAR you you son of a bitch, but I said nothing. Today, I wouldn’t be so taciturn.)
As an aside – I hate my face and countenance, Chris. I’ve been down to bone and muscle for more than a decade. My face is basically a skull with skin drawn taut over it. There is filler that’s designed specifically for people with AIDS who have been disfigured by this, but it’s expensive, and the patient access programs here have long since expired. But if I’m ever to go back to work in tech, I need to hav my face back and, of course, my teeth fixed (they’re under serious construction right now as I’m fighting with my dental plan to cover the missing front crown and other absent front tooth that makes me look like a meth refugee from a red state). The fill lasts about 18 months, and we have to keep pumping it –and unless I somehow land a major film role or something, the only way I’ll be able to pay for it is the enormous amount of money that tech work pays. I’m 61, and I’m already ancient in tech years; there is a
need for greybeards but we’re in the worst hiring slump in history and it’s not looking good for 2024.) I’m fortunate to have a decent body that’s in good shape and covered with 40 hours of brightly-colored Japanese tattooing, nice tight lean body mass, but... In 1988, one of the reasons I started shaving my head was that I’d been going bald since age 15 and I had a very prominent bald spot – and I thought, I don’t want to look in the mirror and say “I’m ugly” for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be ugly
anymore, and I know it’s a hangup that I have to deal with, but when I have a pup hood on, no one can tell I have AIDS or that I look like a homeless meth addict. There’s comfort in that.
Anyway, I wasn’t really happy living in Rockridge, and I had been placed into a network engineering boot camp for Microsoft by the California vocational rehab people because typing for lawyers had blown out my elbow nerves (cubital tunnel syndrome) that was slated to start in September, so I migrated back to the City to a ticky-tacky house in the Balboa Park neighborhood in the southern part of the City (39 Williar Avenue), where I had a paneled basement room with a ceiling of only five and a half feet – and that’s where I was for Burn The Quilt and stayed through December of 1997. I remember still gulping the pills, it had only been a year since I was sick unto death, and there’s no sickness like being sick with AIDS, and I would walk down the hill to the BART carrying my bulky tech school binders listening to the Burn The Quilt soundtrack on the Walkman praying please God let these pills do their right work in me.