"San Francisco is a city that is so queer it's easy to forget that, not long ago, it wasn't a safe place to be queer." So says filmmaker Heather Smith, who along with KQED producer Claudia Escobar has just put out this short, a co-production between KQED Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, using footage from Smith's film That They — a film which was inspired by seminal gay porn film That Boy by Peter Berlin.

In the 1970's, as Smith says, SF became the backdrop for a "Cambrian explosion of queerness" that would ultimately spread elsewhere in the country, but was epitomized in gay pornographic films like That Boy. She argues that even if this still isn't a completely safe space to be queer at all hours of any day, small gestures like "sidelong glances" on the street between queer people continue to make it more of a safe place, because of the performance of queer identity in public.

Escobar calls Berlin's work "a pornography of freedom even more than a pornography of sex," and suggests in this brief KQED essay, "Freedom may begin with the simple desire to live in a different world, but in practice it’s something that you perform, until, eventually, that’s what you are."

Mayor Ed Lee was shouted off stage this afternoon by a group of protesters challenging his handling of the ongoing scandal involving SFPD's response to the shooting death of Mario Woods. The Mayor was introducing a an event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was interrupted by protesters.

San Francisco Examiner reporter Michael Barba attended the event, and tweeted out that the loudest person leading the protest and shouting over the mayor was local rapper Equipto. Equipto made news last October, you'll recall, when video surfaced of him confronting Mayor Lee at a restaurant and calling him a "disgrace to Asians."

The above video was credited to Allison Ekevara Kitpowsong.

This disruption followed on a weekend full of similar protests, including one in which a group camped outside Lee's Glen Park home on Sunday morning telling him he should "wake up" and fire SFPD Chief Suhr, and taunting him to come out and sit down for breakfast with them.

Update, 5:10 p.m.: The Chronicle reports that the Mayor had only just begun speaking when the protests began.

“I will not be a focus of interruptions,” the paper reports the "clearly flustered" mayor as saying. “Ladies and gentlemen," continued Mayor Lee, "I am also working for a better city. I appreciate your listening to me. I heard you. May I speak now?”

“Your police chief needs to be held accountable,” one protester reportedly shouted. “You think Martin Luther King would be proud of you?”

The mayor left the stage shortly thereafter.

All previous coverage of Mario Woods on SFist.

San Francisco likes cats, possibly even more than the internet does. This much we know. Now the good citizens of Baghdad by the Bay have a chance to publicly celebrate that love with a three-day Cat Film Festival to be held later this month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The film fest, rather prosaically titled "Internet Cat Video Festival," is set to feature 90 minutes of digital feline antics.

The event's been organized by Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, and it's been tagged as "an offline celebration of online cat videos." It includes over a hundred separate videos including six-second Vines and "short dramas."

Curator Will Braden is famous for the funny web series Henri Le Chat Noir (see below), depicting a semi-nihilistic French cat. One representative line: "My turkey and giblets has begun to taste exactly like my whitefish and tuna in gravy," on-screen text reads as a laconic French-speaking narrator (presumably the cat) hips us to his troubles. "It seems I was made to suffer. And why not?"

The festival runs January 21, 23, and 24. Tickets are $10, and at least one of the showings is already sold out. Purr.

Related: Famed Cat Painting (From San Francisco) Sells For $826,000

For those not familiar, there's an annual fashion-show fundraiser for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence called Project Nunway, featuring the Sisters paired up with local designers, Project Runway-style. The fifth annual event is coming up on November 2 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and to promote it, the Sisters and YBCA are doing a video series that shows the MCs and contestants as they meet with their designers to prepare. Above, the first installment, featuring MC Sister Roma and her designer, Tiffy Tart, as well as a trip to a cool place called Scrap, a non-profit here in the city that provides reused and scrap materials for teachers to help with creative projects.

Below, the second episode, featuring the other MC, Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Gos, and her designer Miss Louise.

Get tickets for Project Nunway here, and note that the evening will include an after-party, complimentary cocktails, and a screening of Yentl. (ha)

This refreshing moment brought to you by Demetrios Lyras.

In 1956, addressing an NAACP Convention in San Francisco, Martin Luther King Jr. told the crowd: "I believe that a day will come when all God's children from bass black to treble white will be significant on the constitution's keyboard." Those words are now inscribed in granite in Yerba Buena Gardens where the city remembers Dr. King with the largest memorial outside of the nation's capital. Today, on MLK Day, a series of events will remember King's legacy and contributions to civil rights.

Commemorative programs kicked off earlier this morning in the park along Mission Street between Third and Fourth Streets. This being the 50th anniversary of King's "I Have A Dream" speech and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the list of special commemorative programs includes conversations with civil rights luminaries and other national personalities throughout the day until 5 p.m. YBCA will also host an awards ceremony for the Dream@50 youth art contest, honoring half a century of progress since King first delivered his address. There is also an MLK Health and Wellness Festival and film screenings from the 2013 Liberation film series.

Nearby in SoMa, the Museum of African Diaspora will also honor with free admission to the museum along with a program of family-friendly events. Outside on Mission Street, the museum will host chalk art and live African drumming ensembles. Inside, there's a scavenger hunt, art projects, film screenings and a college fair hosted by ScholarShare.

Elsewhere around the city, you might take a moment to actually stop and chat with those Planned Parenthood volunteers in the pink t-shirts. As Jezebel notes today, Dr. King was a huge fan of Planned Parenthood and birth control. Another fun fact: the "Montgomery Story" address King gave at the NAACP convention in 1956, which inspired the inscription at the Yerba Buena fountain was delivered on Grove Street, reminding us that San Francisco has always had a close connection with Dr. King's work.

We're a little late getting this to you, but if you don't know yet, you will now. See, you did not win the Grand Prize drawing for the San Francisco Dream House Raffle. That is, unless you're from San Carlos and your name is Vivian Heinzel. Because she's was picked the big winner, who now has the chance to choose between the dream home or $1.8 million cash. Heinzel's new $2.4 million crib, located near Golden Gate Park, features an Edwardian exterior, modern amenities, 4-car garage, chef's kitchen, mahogany floors, 4 bedroom/4.5 bath, views of the tree canopy of Golden Gate Park, and a separate entrance for privacy. Following Saturday's drawing, Kenneth J. Foster, YBCA’s Executive Director, said, "The funding helps YBCA address budgetary needs during this difficult economic time and we plan to conduct another dream house raffle next year during the spring." A list of all winners can be found here.

In case you missed last weekend's Big Idea party at Yerba Buena, or in case you still haven't made it over to see the amazing exhibit "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" by the artist Nick Cave (not to be confused with Nick Cave the musician), we give you this quick interview with him and a look at some of his "sound suits" in motion.

The exhibit is on display through July 5.

Last Saturday night, the YBCA opened its doors for a large-scale, mixed, queer-friendly, *very* San Franciscan party called "What's the Big Idea?" featuring food from the Mission Street Food "taco" truck, galleries open until 3AM (including the Sisters' archive show, and the amazing collection of "soundsuits" created by Nick Cave, which are basically like enormous, haute couture muppet costumes from another planet -- see video of them here), a Sisters' fashion show called Project Nunway, live tattooing, performances by drag queens Anna Conda and Monistat, and music from DJ Dirty Knees and the DJ collective Honey Soundsystem. SFist was there, and fairly wasted, so all we have are these few lousy pictures (look out for a full video of the event from the SF Appeal). But trust us when we say a good time was had by all, and the food -- particularly this deep fried fennel sausage slathered in aoili and onion jam, and a pork belly "taco" that was pure grease heaven -- was fucking fantastic. The museum also may have found a few new devotees after this event, since they were offering free lifetime memberships to anyone who agreed to get the YBCA logo tattoo'd on themselves.*

*It was revealed in the not-so-fine print that despite your committing their logo to your skin, they would not commit to letting you in free should the cost of memberships increase at some point, which we would have to say is a shit deal. But anyway. Fun times.

by Jeremy Hatch

Tonight at 8:00, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will open their new exhibition, transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix, with a big party involving Campari cocktails and Thomas’ Apartment, the LA-based-Vietnamese-American-alterna-rock phenom.

That’s a lot of hypens, I know, but it’s entirely appropriate for this exhibition. Just look at the title. First: “trans,” which means transcendent, in several senses but most of all transnational; and “POP,” which refers both to pop culture and Pop Art. The second half of the name, “Korea Vietnam Remix,” alludes to the 16 featured artists — all of whom are from Vietnam, Korea, or their respective communities in the United States — and their works, which explore the historic and current relationships between the three countries in terms of pop culture and using Pop Art strategies.

That three-way relationship has been fraught at times and friendly at others. The countries are relatively far apart on the Asian continent, but they were brought together by their common invader, the United States. The Vietnam War opened a path for tens of thousands of Koreans to come to Vietnam — a diaspora that paved the way for Vietnam’s “Korean Wave” in popular culture during the ensuing peace. The works themselves employ a wide range of techniques and media, from paint to digital video and everything in between.

The curators are Viet Le, who is an independent artist and curator, and Yong Soon Min, who is an associate professor in the Studio Art department at UC Irvine. The works were previously shown in Seoul, South Korea and at Irvine.

If you come to the party tonight, admission is free for members and $15 to the general public. If you can’t, though, never fear: the works will be on display until March 15. For further insight, you might want to check out this review of the show in Modern Painters and this review of its Irvine iteration.

Image: from Xavier Collection, Courtesy of Goethe Institut