Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the City, just announced on his Facebook page that his husband, Chris Turner, has a new(ish) social site for bears -- i.e., hairy and/or large homosexual men. Maupin boasts, "My hubby's brand new social site -- BearCentral.com -- already has over 4000 members. So proud of you, Chris!" BearCentral, however, isn't limited only to bears. Quoth the site itself, "BearCentral is a full-featured, easy-to-use platform for ALL men who identify as bears, cubs, chubs, muscle bears, polar bears, otters and admirers." What's more, the site also has a nifty blog featuring such gems as Kevin Smith Marries Bears. Have at it, hairy ones. more ›

San Francisco-based writer Armistead Maupin, creator of the iconic Tales of the City series, was in Australia last week for a book tour when he visited Alice Springs with his husband Chris Turner. (They were there to promote Mary Ann In Autumn, by the way.) When he and his spouse decided to take a break and hit Bojangles, billed as an "'80s saloon and dining room," things took a turn for the horrifying. more ›

The American Conservatory Theater announces their upcoming season today, which includes a couple of exciting highlights: master clown Bill Irwin brings his adaptation of Molière's Scapin first thing in the fall; and come Spring we'll be seeing the world premiere of the long rumored Tales of the City musical, a collaboration of the Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears (pictured), author Armistead Maupin, and librettist Jeff Whitty. more ›

What the hell? We're no where near 40 yet. So why are we receiving the following flyer in our mailbox for assisted independent retirement living? more ›

Serialized gem / siren song Tales of the City drew many folks to SF. Well, it brought us here, anyway. And the character of Mary Ann Singleton acted as a temporary stand-in until many of us arrived. To wit: more ›

We're the first to admit that we're not a big Robin Williams fan. That fast talking, manic thing got stale for us before we hit the "cocaine" unit in health class. We find his beard movies even more tiresome, but do like us some creepy Williams: in he was only eclipsed by Michael Vartan's saggy balls. more ›

So maybe the folks back East were all over Fake Writer JT Leroy first, but San Francisco-based author and journalist Jack Boulware has a piece in Salon on Leroy creator Laura Albert (aka Laura Victoria) that looks at the person behind the persona while also painting a pretty vivid picture of what it was like to live in San Francisco in the 1990s. more ›

Tom Foremski defends his opinion that bloggers, and not Bono, Bill and Melinda, should have gotten Time's recent Person of the Year cover. Om Malik realizes that GigaOm's content is being ripped-off, and wonders what he can do about it -- we see this kind of crap all the time, and hope that there's an especially hot place in the afterlife for the perpetrators. Eric Rice gives a video camera to a five year old for Christmas, and the kid is videoblogging in minutes, it's that easy. more ›

It's almost exactly fifty years later, and it still smacks you upside your beret-wearing cool-cat bongo-beating head, man -- Allan Ginsberg debuted his classic poem "Howl" on Friday, October 7, 1955, at a jam-packed Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. His passionate reading brought tears to the eyes of the crowd, and is widely viewed as having kick-started the SF Beat Movement of the 1950s. On the actual day of (which coincidentally is also a Friday), Howl publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti's a href="http://www.citylights.com">bookstore and literary festival are sponsoring a Howl Redux, where they'll play film footage of Ginsberg himself reading Howl. Afterwards, contemporary San Francisco area writers will read the works of other revolutionary San Francisco area writers (so Daniel Handler is reading Gertrude Stein, Jerry Brown is reading Jack London, and Armistead Maupin is reading Mark Twain, among others. Pick up tickets here. more ›

Our New Yorker finally made the arduous trek from the Conde Nast building and across the high Sierra mountains to our little hinterlands mailbox, exhausted. We opened it up, and to our shock, it featured our little burg in an article! (Article is not online, of course). The piece is an excerpt from the book "Oh For The Glory Of It All," by Sean Wilsey, a McSweeney's editor. OFTGOIA is a tell-all memoir about Wilsey's mother, San Francisco social butterfly and society columnist Pat Montandon; his evil stepmother and A-lister Dede Wilsey; various shenanigans with his family and the Traina-Steeles'; and his own delinquency. San Francisco socialites are set to be scandalized, with Armistead Maupin saying, "there hasn't been a wicked stepmother like that since Cinderella." Yikes! But what's intriguing to us, firmly ensconced on the San Francisco Z-list -- is that Wilsey confirms that his mother, Ms. Montandon, is the basis for the character of Prue Giroux in Maupin's Tales of the City! No way! Like Prue, Montandon was a daffy society columnist who gets all new-agey, seems a little psychotic, and then goes on a number of vaguely dippy save-the-world crusades, with poor Sean in tow. Anyways, the articles are pretty entertaining (though not entirely in the good way), and worth a read. Though Sean -- geez, love your mom much? Paging Mr. Oedipus Rex, extension 333, paging Mr. Oedipus Rex. Picture of May Kay Place as Prue Giroux in the Showtime Tales of the City movie more ›