The MacArthur Fellows for 2024 have been announced, and among them are San Francisco-based disability justice activist and writer Alice Wong, and onetime SF resident and famed cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond.

The annual announcement of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships, popularly referred to as MacArthur 'Genius Grants,' typically drops as a surprise, with the fellows themselves typically unaware that they are even under consideration.

The grants these days are for $800,000, spread over five years, and they come with no strings attached — just that each individual use the money to continue their creative or intellectual pursuits.

The only Bay Area-based recipient in this year's class is Alice Wong, a 50-year-old activist for diability rights who was born with spinal muscular atrophy. After receiving a bachelor's in English from Purdue University in 1997, Wong relocated to the Bay Area where she received a master's in medical sociology from UCSF in 2004.

She has gone on to write books like Year of The Tiger: An Activist's Life (2022), and a collection of oral histories of disabled people, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (2020). Her latest book, published this year, is Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire.

Wong announced her award Tuesday on X, saying, "Hard to believe but I am a 2024 @macfound Fellow! I am accepting the MacArthur Fellowship amidst the genocide happening in Gaza and indiscriminate terroristic attacks in Lebanon by the state of Israel on the 76th year of their occupation of Palestine."

"Storytelling is a powerful form of resistence," Wong says in her MacArthur statement. "It leaves evidence that we were here in a society that devalues, excludes, and eliminates us."

Onetime San Francisco resident Justin Vivian Bond, who got their start as a drag performer in the days of Club Uranus at the EndUp and who frequently performs here still, was suprised by the call from the MacArthur Foundation.

Bond tells the New York Times that they were driving a friend to the train station when suddenly their phone was bombarded with calls from an unknown number. After answering "with a very icy hello," Bond got the big news.

"I didn’t really expect it would ever happen to me, because I’m primarily a cabaret singer and I’d never seen anybody who was a cabaret singer win that before," Bond tells the Times.

(In a similar vein, the great Taylor Mac was a MacArthur recipient in 2017, and also came up in the world of cabaret and drag before creating epic song-cycle experiences like the 24-Decade History of American Popular Music.)

Bond is also one half of the famous, fictional cabaret duo Kiki & Herb, who returned to San Francisco with their genre-busting holiday show the past two holiday seasons.

And at the top of Bond's personal website is a music video they made in 2014 covering a very San Francisco song, "The Golden Age of Hustlers," written by her friend, the late Bambi Lake.

Below, Bond's MacArthur Fellow video.