Happening This Month Virtually at SF GLBT Historical Society
| Workshop Leaving a Legacy: Financial Estate Planning |
| Friday, September 412:00–1:00 p.m. Online programFree Careful financial planning ensures that our legacies live on by providing for our spouses, partners, children, relatives and friends. The second event in our two-part series offering estate-planning tools and resources for LGBTQ people, this workshop focuses on a range of financial-planning strategies and instruments. Attorney Alma Soongi Beck will discuss wills, living trusts, powers of attorney, marriage and domestic-partnership considerations, document language for nonbinary and transgender people, property tax, and co-ownership issues for unmarried couples who are not domestic partners. This event will include a Q & A session. Learn more about this series and how to plan for the future here. Register online here. |
| Author Talk Patient Zero & the Making of the AIDS Epidemic |
| Saturday, September 1212:00–1:30 p.m. Online programFree | $5 suggested donation The search for a “patient zero” — popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic — has been key to media coverage of major infectious-disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. At this event, historian Richard A. McKay will read selections from his book Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (Chicago University Press, 2017) which examined how this idea came to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media and popular consciousness. The book, which used materials in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives, focuses on the life of Gaëtan Dugas, a gay man who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American AIDS outbreak. McKay will also engage in a conversation with historian Gerard Koskovich about his archival research and take audience questions. Register online here. |
| Community EventMighty Real: A Celebration of Sylvester |
Wednesday, September 166:00–7:30 p.m.Online programFree | $5 suggested donation To celebrate the birthday of the iconic San Francisco disco diva Sylvester (1947–1988), join us at this event that will highlight the GLBT Historical Society’s archival holdings documenting the singer’s life and times. The society’s museum registrar and curatorial specialist, Ramón Silvestre, will present some of the Sylvester-related objects in our Art and Artifacts Collection. We will also be presenting clips of some of our archival footage, including a rare video of the diva’s 40th birthday celebration in 1987. This footage features some moving clips of Sylvester performing sentimental standards backed by a jazz band. Register online here. |
| Frameline FestivalGLBT Historical Society Copresents Two Queer Films |
| Sunday, September 204:00 p.m.Sunday, September 271:00 p.m.Online programsTickets available from Frameline The GLBT Historical Society is serving as a copresenter for two films focused on queer history at the 44th Frameline Festival, the world’s oldest and largest LGBTQ film festival. The full festival runs from September 17 to 27; each film is scheduled for a formal virtual screening, but will be available for viewing during the entire duration of the festival. For more information and to buy tickets, click on the film titles below or visit the Frameline Festival home page. Killing Patient Zero. Right-wing bigots exploited AIDS to demonize gay men, and no one was more villainized than Gaëtan Dugas, the Canadian flight attendant dubbed “Patient Zero” of the North American AIDS outbreak. In this groundbreaking documentary, director Laurie Lynd explodes the myth of Patient Zero using beautifully framed interviews with Dugas’s friends and the scientists who were unlocking the mystery of what was still known as the “gay cancer.” Killing Patient Zero is an important work of queer archaeology that shines an empathetic light on a generation traumatized not just by a virus but by society’s blame and vitriol. Screening: The formal screening takes place at 4:00 p.m. on September 20 and will be followed by a Q & A. Cured. For most of the 20th century, homosexuality was formally diagnosed as a mental illness and LGBTQ people were subject to drastic medical interventions posing as “cures.” But in 1973, in one of the most significant turning points in LGBTQ history, the American Psychiatric Association removed the stigma of mental illness from its medical manuals. This riveting documentary by Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer goes behind the scenes to reveal the inspiring, courageous efforts of the scrappy band of gay and lesbian activists in the 1960s and 1970s, both within and outside the psychiatric field, who took on the mainstream medical establishment’s views about homosexuality. Screening: the formal screening takes place at 1:00 p.m. on September 27 and will be followed by a Q & A. |