Storied: San Francisco cover art

Storied: San Francisco

Storied: San Francisco

By: Jeff Hunt
Listen for free

About this listen

 A weekly podcast about the artists, activists, and small businesses that make San Francisco so special.Copyright 2024 Storied: San Francisco Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Frameline49 with Allegra Madsen (S7 bonus)

    Frameline49 with Allegra Madsen (S7 bonus)
    Jun 12 2025

    I joined Erin and Ange of Bitch Talk Podcast for another sit-down with Frameline Executive Director Allegra Madsen to talk all things Frameline49.

    If it weren’t obvious from that moniker, this year’s is the 49th annual Frameline film festival, the largest and longest-running LGBTQIA fest in the world.

    After listening to this bonus episode, please browse the Frameline49 program, buy tickets, get your butt in a theater seat, and let’s continue to uplift the LGBTQIA community through art!

    We recorded this bonus episode at the Frameline offices in South of Marked in June 2025.
    Show More Show Less
    31 mins
  • The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 1 (S7E16)

    The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot Play, with Shane Zaldivar and Saoirse Grace, Part 1 (S7E16)
    Jun 10 2025
    Saoirse Grace was one of the first successful in vitro pregnancies in Massachusetts. In this episode, Saoirse is joined by her Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play costar, Shane Zaldivar. The two share short versions of their respective life stories and how they got to the Bay Area and San Francisco. Then we dig into the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, followed by a conversation on the play about the riot, their roles in it, and the actual lived experiences of trans people today. Saoirse, who plays Collette in the play, was born in Boston and grew up a little there, and a little in San Diego. But she got into some trouble in school and was sent to reform school in Austria, near her ancestral homeland in the Dolomites. After high school, not exactly wanting to come back to the US, she went to France for college, where she studied Spanish language literature. This whole time, Saoirse was a professional actor. She started acting in third grade. By seventh grade or so, she knew that acting was something she loved to do. After about a decade of just acting, Saoirse joined an aerial circus, where she was a trapeze artist for a group in Texas called Sky Candy. After a few years in Austin, working and doing circus performances, Saoirse came to San Francisco to go to law school. She says, perhaps half-jokingly, that she still wanted to perform, but to do so in a way that made more money than acting. She went to USF and did some police accountability work, but ultimately, practicing law didn’t work out. And so, after a short time in Las Vegas doing porn and sex work, Saoirse came back to The Bay to do a PhD program to become a professor. It was another opportunity to have an audience, but to also make more money than other performing careers. But that also didn’t pan out. This run with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play is Saoirse’s first foray back into acting in more than a decade. Backing up a little, I ask Saoirse about her first move to San Francisco and what she thought of it. She shares the story of leaving Austin, packing up as much as she could fit on her bicycle in Seattle, and riding down the Pacific coast to get here. Wow. At the end of that roughly 1,000-mile ride, she arrived in The City during the Pride parade in 2013. The timing! She soon found work as a bicycle mechanic, something Saoirse still does more than a decade later. Then we get to know Shane Zaldivar, who plays Rusty in Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. Shane was born and raised in Florida, where she spent time between there and Belize, where a lot of her family is from. Her mom had Shane when she was relatively young, and so she spent a lot of time with her mom’s family, both in Belize and in the US. Life in Florida was rough for Shane. She was bullied a lot early in life for her femininity. She says that when she visits now, she gets no joy out of the place except to be with family members. Belize was much more hospitable for her. She went to middle school and high school in the Central American country. But she ended up getting a scholarship to attend college at Florida International University, which she says is a diverse place. It was at college that Shane had several awakenings—her sexuality, her love of doing drag. But she says her biggest realization, the one that led her to the Bay Area, was around cannabis. Where she had previously bought into the idea that weed was this terrible thing, from the first time Shane tried it, it changed everything for her. Shane set out to learn everything she could about the plant and its medicinal, healing properties. She took a college class in Florida on hallucinogens and in that class learned about a school in Oakland called Oaksterdam University. That’s what led Shane to The Bay. She raised money for the flight and registration at her new school. Once here, she patched together a liberal arts degree in Oakland, studying such topics as hospitality, theater, and anthropology. It was 2014, and she lived in Oakland, too. But it dawned on her later that San Francisco was only a bridge away. After moving around from hostel to hostel, she found an affordable place of her own in The City. It didn’t take Shane long to fall in love with the Bay Area. She soon discovered events like Folsom Street Fair and spots like The Stud. She got a job in the Ferry Building and found a place to live, a place she still resides in 10 years later. She says that San Francisco is where she really got to explore her art and her activism. In addition to being in a band, Shane is the Pop-up Drag Queen, a local fixture who performs al fresco, usually in front of the Ferry Building. Then we talk about her foray into acting, something that came about relatively recently in Shane’s life. From the first time she acted, back in Florida, she felt an intense joy that has stayed with her. It marked the first time she played with gender. Today, she identifies as a trans woman. The first run of Compton’s, back in ...
    Show More Show Less
    41 mins
  • Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce, and “After What Happened at the Library” (S7 bonus)

    Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce, and “After What Happened at the Library” (S7 bonus)
    Jun 5 2025

    Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce is a fourth-generation Chinese-American. Her twin brother has autism, and the two went to Jefferson Elementary in the Sunset because the school had a good inclusive special education program. Kyle says that from an early age, she fought for her twin, all the way up to teaching classmates ASL to be able to communicate with her brother.

    After one year at Lick-Wilmerding High School, Kyle transferred to School of the Arts (now Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts) to major in music. She went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York after that, where she majored in ethnic studies and arts, followed by time at Columbia University for social work.

    Then Kyle Casey Chu came back to her hometown. She says she missed the calmness here, the Queer scene, and her family.

    We shift the conversation to the story of how San Francisco Drag Story Hour got started. Michelle Tea founded Drag Story Hour after having a kid of her own and discovering how hard it was to find spaces for queer parents or parents of queer kids. Tea thought, ‘Why not bring the magic of drag to youth spaces?’

    When she set out, Tea sought drag queens who had worked with youth before, something that proved not too easy. But Kyle and her drag persona, Panda Dulce, did in fact have youth work experience.

    Kyle had worked as a K–5 Spanish immersion teacher, a special ed. teacher, a music teacher, and a camp counselor. That plus her social work degree definitely qualified her for Drag Story Hour. She along with a handful of other queens joined the pilot program.

    Fast-forward to June 2022, when members of the so-called “Proud Boys” (ugh) stormed a Drag Story Hour in San Lorenzo in the East Bay that Panda Dulce had been asked to read at. After barging in uninvited and definitely unwanted, they shouted transphobic slurs and calling Panda a pedophile, a “tranny,” and an “it.” She was forced for her own safety to lock herself in a back room of the library until authorities arrived. When they did, they simply asked these horrible people to leave. No citations. Not even a slap on the wrist or taking of names.

    The goings on in San Lorenzo that day were awful enough. But starting soon after, the missteps by media were relentless for Kyle. Journalists seemed more interested in a preordained narrative than Kyle’s actual experience and associated trauma. It was like the story was being fed to her, rather than coming from her own words.

    But Kyle and her writing partner, Roisin Isner, were talking one day. They decided that they wanted to reclaim authorship of Kyle’s story, to add dimensionality and humanity to her experience. Isner had been through a traumatic event of her own years earlier and could easily relate to her friend.

    We talk at length about Kyle’s reliving her trauma to film the short film that came out of writing sessions with her friend. She says that she never really stopped living it, in fact, and that shooting the movie served as a sort of catharsis for her.

    Then we talk about her new book, The Queen Bees of Tybee County, which is out now wherever you buy books (except for that one place—never buy anything there yuck). When we recorded that day in April, the book had just been optioned and could become a movie in the near future. She’s also got another short coming soon, Betty, which just premiered in New York.

    Follow Kyle/Panda Dulce on Instagram and her Kyle Casey Chu website.

    We recorded this bonus episode during SFFILM fest in The Presidio in April 2025.

    Photography by Jeff Hunt
    Show More Show Less
    19 mins
No reviews yet