OUT OF SITE, A Queer History Performance Walking Tour Alights In San Francisco This March

Eye Zen Presents is proud to announce the world premiere of OUT OF SITE, a two-part performance event interpreting San Francisco's rich queer history on the sites where it all began. Part one takes place in North Beach, March 10 - 25, and part two in the Tenderloin, May 12 - 27.

Presented in collaboration with Shaping San Francisco, performances run each Saturday at noon and 4 p.m., and on Sundays at 2 p.m. Each event operates as a walking tour covering four to six locations over two hours. Tickets, between $15 and $40, go on sale February 12 at eyezen.org/out-of-site.

Conceived and directed by Eye Zen Founder and Artistic Director Seth Eisen, OUT of Site builds on research conducted with project co-writer James Metzger in collaboration with the cast, and with assistant direction from Natalie Greene. "OUT of Site features a variety of people, places and events from San Francisco's queer history from its Spanish colonial days to the 1970s," said Eisen. "And the project couldn't have found a better partner than Shaping San Francisco, whose stated mission is 'to make the experience of history a creative act in the present.'"

PART ONE: NORTH BEACH
In North Beach, each performance walking tour begins in Mark Twain Plaza at Sansome Street, between Washington and Clay Streets, with an introduction to a Native American Two-Spirit ritual and a 19th-century stag dance, a nod to a time when the city was 90% male and cross-dressing at social functions was common.
The neighborhood's reputation for literature and liquor, which predates the Beat generation, will be brought to life in interactive vignettes about the 19th-century prose stylist Charles Warren Stoddard - famous for his accounts of free love in the South Pacific - and a later generation of queer poets including Elsa Gidlow, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, Yone Noguchi and Jack Spicer.

Tour attendees will meet José Sarria, who in 1961 became the first openly gay candidate for public office in the United States; he was also a drag performer at the North Beach gay bar, the famed Black Cat Café. Another historical figure to make an appearance will be the African American blues singer, Gladys Bentley, who regularly performed at Mona's 440, a club "where girls will be boys."

"From the 1930s to the '60s, North Beach used to have dozens of gay and lesbian bars where people of every color and gender presentation could commingle," said Eisen. "Now there are none, but OUT of Site audiences will have the opportunity to experience them once again."

At the end of its historical scope, OUT of Site will include scenes of the Cockettes, an avant-garde psychedelic theater group which made a home for itself at the Pagoda Palace Theatre in North Beach in the late '60s.

PART TWO: TENDERLOIN
In part two, OUT of Site will move to the Tenderloin, another neighborhood with a long history as a haven for bohemians and queers. Tours will begin at the Tenderloin National Forest, located at 509 Ellis Street. Among the historical events and figures to be covered here will be Vanguard, the United States' first homeless queer youth movement, and the Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966, a revolt predating the Stonewall riots, led by transgender people.

The performance will also return to rituals of Native American Two-Spirit communities before dropping in on the 1960s bar culture that provided a unique community space for Native American queer people displaced by the Federal Indian Relocation Act of 1956.

A number of homophile groups - the Tavern Guild, the Mattachine Society, the Society of Individual Rights and the Daughters of Bilitis - were located in the Tenderloin during the 1950s, and OUT of Site will make a tour of several of these.

The tour will also feature significant historical figures like Babe Bean, a 19th-century trans man and writer who served in the Spanish American War; Jeanne Bonnet, a sex worker rights activist from the turn of the 20th century; and Ray Bourbon, a female impersonator at nightclubs during the Pansy Craze of the 1930s and '40s.

"OUT of Site explores the ways that queer people have historically created community, how our communities have adapted over time, and ways we might sustain and nurture our cultural queer essence," said Eisen. "By collecting and elevating stories from our ever-evolving city, these performances reveal new ways to envision and preserve queer heritage."

OUT of Site is the fifth in a series of works by Eye Zen chronicling LGBTQ history. Blackbird (2010) explored the lives of seven 20th-century queer performers. Buffet Flats (2011) was a pop-up speakeasy and dinner theater series honoring the history of the Pansy Craze and Buffet Flats phenomena of the 1920s and 30s. Homo File (2014) shed light on the English professor, tattoo artist and queer rebel Samuel Steward. And Rainbow Logic (2016) paid tribute to Remy Charlip, best remembered for his contributions to the fields of dance and children's literature.

The performer-collaborators in OUT of Site include Jose Abad, Colin Creveling, Lisa Evans, Diego Gómez, Ariel Harris-Porada, Ryan Hayes, Jean-Paul Jones, Sarah Paradise, Earl Alfred Paus, Molly Shaiken, Silky Shoemaker, Miko Thomas aka Landa Lakes, Mary Vice and Sienna Williams.

The visual designers on the project are Ariel Harris-Porada and Diego Gómez, whose first book of illustrated historical fiction 1963 Is Not An End, But A Beginning was just published. Eli Maliwan is the musical director.

The production manager is Emelia Martinez Brumbaugh. Sydney Lozier is the company manager. Brian Freeman is serving as dramaturge.

For more information about OUT of Site and Eye Zen, visit eyezen.org.
OUT of Site is made possible through the support of the Creative Work Fund, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation and many generous individual donors.