In this week's Field Notes: from a chic Mission dog shelter and a mansion under the Bay Bridge to pavement plants and dahlias in Oakland. Also, tactile SF maps, Obon in the park, queer family stories, cat zines, and a Sacramento ghost town.

Inside Muttville’s chic new HQ

In San Francisco’s Mission, Muttville’s new shelter blends style and dog-friendly design with Missoni carpets, playful murals, and Zen rooms for newcomers to decompress.

Interior designer Ken Fulk helped furnish the space with stylish but functional donations from storage. The on-site vet clinic, grooming area, and open adoption rooms keep tails wagging and humans lingering — where short visits often stretch into hours of play and companionship. — Dwell, neemtravels

New film traces LGBTQ+ SF family life

Fairyland, opening nationwide October 10, tells the story of poet and activist Steve Abbott and his daughter Alysia as they build a life together in San Francisco after her mother’s death.

Based on Alysia Abbott’s memoir, the film follows their unconventional family through the city’s queer community of the 1970s and into the devastation of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. It shows how love and resilience carried people through a hard chapter in LGBTQ+ history. — Edge Media Network

A Japanese American celebration in Golden Gate Park

BonPOP reimagines the Obon festival with dance, taiko, and ritual led by Japantown artists and cultural practitioners in Golden Gate Park on August 31.

Obon, a 500-year-old tradition originating in Buddhist and Taoist festivals, is marked across Japan each August with temple visits, lanterns, and family gatherings in honor of one’s ancestors — and BonPOP carries that spirit into San Francisco. — BonPOP

Tactile maps

Maps you can feel, shapes that spark memory and imagination — Fully Tactile Art SF’s Exploring Maps exhibition turns navigation into touch, emotion, and connection.

A nonprofit dedicated to free public art, they create spaces that engage all the senses and let artists reimagine how their work is experienced. Runs August 30–September 7. — Fully Tactile Art

Zine dad

Oakland dad, preschool volunteer, and longtime arts and justice professional, Channing Kennedy, draws the family cats for his kids every school day.

He’ll be at Berkeley’s Zine Fest August 23 (sorry for the late notice) and SF Zine Fest next Saturday, August 31, with new zines, cute stickers, and pawsitive vibes. — Berkeley Public Library

Gold Rush underfoot in Old Sacramento

On Sacramento’s riverfront, Old Sacramento still has wooden sidewalks, brick storefronts, and the kind of Gold Rush atmosphere that feels almost staged — except it’s real.

Decades of digs have made it one of the country’s most intensely studied 19th-century sites, with archaeologists unearthing bottles, tools, and everyday scraps of life. A historic district layered over an excavation site turned tourist stop. — Secret San Francisco

Mansion under the bridge

From the road it’s easy to miss, but tucked on Yerba Buena Island there’s a full-size mansion sitting almost directly beneath the Bay Bridge. It looks out at the water but mostly lives in the bridge’s shadow. Built in 1900 for Navy commanders, the Nimitz House once hosted brass and dignitaries, and schoolkids used to stop by with birthday cards for Admiral Chester Nimitz himself.

For a time, the house served as an event venue, which was short-lived due to the constant hum of traffic. These days it’s just another relic on the island — weathered, quiet, and nearly invisible to drivers above. — SFGate

Life in the cracks

Biology educator Mr. Kelkar turns a crack in the Oakland pavement into a classroom, pointing out foxtail, barley seed, marsh parsley, and other hardy invaders.

His whirlwind lesson shows how a handful of species dominate urban landscapes — and what we lose when they crowd out native plants. — Oakland Now

Explosion of color at Lake Merritt

The Lake Merritt gardens are full of dahlias, lined up for the San Leandro Dahlia Society’s annual show. Rows of yellow, pink, purple, orange, and white flowers fill the space, many named after family members or grown from cross-pollinated varieties.

Award-winning blooms like Olivia Maureen and Verde sit alongside favorites like “Just Married.” Each flower must bloom for three years before it can be officially named, ensuring only the strongest varieties make the cut.

After the show, the plants continue to bloom until October, when tubers are dug up, stored, and replanted in spring. Bouquets are sold to support ongoing garden care. — The Oaklandside

Dancing with visitors

For one day only, Alonzo King LINES Ballet steps into Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, weaving live movement through the iconic video installation on SFMOMA’s sixth floor.

Dancers respond to and expand the work, turning projections into a stage where choreography becomes its own living conversation.

The Visitors installation itself runs through September 28, so catch it while you can. — SFMOMA

Top image: Muttville/Facebook

Field Notes: Recology AIR 35th, Aquatic Park Doc, Rodin with Pipe Organ, and Teen Chase Film

The federal government just cut off 62-year-old HIV activist Paul Aguilar’s disability payments, but also claims he owes them back $200,000 in benefits they’ve already paid him over the last 11 years.

We knew that under the Trump administration, we would hear some heartbreaking stories of people in need who’ve had their government benefits cut because Elon Musk and his team of underqualified DOGE nepo babies decided to take that money and buy Bitcoin with it or wherever. We did not realize that Trump and Musk would try to claw people’s already-granted government benefits back, and eleven years worth of those benefits at that.

But KGO has the shocking story of nearly 62-year-old HIV-positive AIDS activist Paul Aguilar, who says that the government not only cut off his monthly disability payments, but is demanding $201,079.10 back in benefits they already paid him. Agular has been on disability for HIV since 2005, and has been unable to work in decades.

Aguilar tells KGO he recently received a letter "informing me that there were concerns about my benefits and that they should have actually stopped December 2013, and that I now owed them over $200,000 and I had 30 days to pay that $200,000.”

He is hardly some benefits huckster. Paul Aguilar has been an SF Pride Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal, is active with the HIV Advocacy Network, and serves on the board of directors of Mary’s Place Affordable Housing Corporation. The Examiner ran a profile on Aguilar’s 33-year battle with HIV in 2022, and the director of UCSF’s Gladstone Center for AIDS Research Dr. Monica Gandhi will even vouch for him.

"All I can see and I've been watching his health for a while, is that every single time he should have been getting Social Security, he should have been getting Social Security like he needed that for his health," Dr. Gandhi told KGO.

For now, Aguilar has retained an attorney, is going through the appeals process, and has applied for a waiver. But San Francisco will surely keep an eye on this story of DOGE gone wild.

Related: Thousands Attend ‘Hands Off’ Anti-Trump Protests Across Bay Area, Nationwide [SFist]

Image: UCSF

ABC7 reports that a portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is currently on view at San Francisco International Airport through January 2026. The exhibition includes six blocks of the quilt along with objects and photographs from the National AIDS Memorial.    

The quilt is the world’s largest community art project, consisting of around 50,000 panels made by loved ones of the more than 110,000 people lost to AIDS-related illnesses.

The project was last displayed in San Francisco in 2022, in which 3,000 panels were on view in Golden Gate Park in celebration of the quilt’s 35th anniversary.

SFO Museum, International Terminal, Departures — Level 3, Galleries 4B and 4C
Feb 08, 2025 – Jan 25, 2026

Image: Visitors look at panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt on February 13, 2012 in the Castro District. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

We’re gonna need a bigger box of Kleenex, because the largest AIDS Memorial Quilt display since the 2012 Washington, D.C. National Mall display  — and the largest ever here in San Francisco  — is set for June 11 and 12 in Golden Gate Park.

Yes, we know, SFist had previously informed you that San Francisco’s largest AIDS Memorial Quilt display ever was coming to Golden Gate Park. But that was in February 2020, and you realize what happened shortly thereafter. Yet that display was merely delayed, not canceled, by COVID-19, and the quilt’s 35th anniversary is coming up in June.

And so we are going to get that big display, as the Examiner reports that the largest ever San Francisco AIDS Quilt display is scheduled for June 11 and 12 in Robin Williams Meadow and in the National AIDS Memorial Grove. The event, with 3,000 panels on display, will be free.

“Bring family, bring friends,” AIDS Memorial CEO John Cunningham told the Examiner. “Experience the largest community arts project on earth.”

This display won’t be the full quilt, which is now 50,000 panels, with 110,000 names, and weighs 54 tons (The full quilt is currently warehoused in San Leandro.) But there will be 100 new panels never seen in public before on display, as regrettably, we are still losing roughly 5,000 people a year to HIV here in the U.S alone.

June's display in Golden Gate Park will be the largest AIDS Quilt display since the 2012 National Mall display in Washington, D.C.

We can’t help but note that the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was conceived in 1985 by Castro resident Cleve Jones, who’s currently facing displacement from his Castro apartment. (And, Jones has said in interviews, one of the things he has in that apartment is a quilt made by his great-grandmother that was his inspiration for the AIDS Quilt.)

That complication aside, Jones is still marking the anniversary. “Today, the Quilt is just as relevant and even more important, particularly in the wake of Covid-19, and the fact that the struggles we face today that result from health and social inequities are the issues we will face again in the future if we don’t learn from the lessons of the past,” Jones said in a statement.

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display on June 11 and 12,  10 a.m.-5 p.m. at Robin Williams Meadow and the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park.

Related: AIDS Quilt Leftovers Being Hand-Sewn Into COVID-19 Masks By ‘The Mother of the Quilt’ [SFist]

Image: @Historyatnight via Twitter

The elusive HIV vaccine could be on the way, as Moderna is set to begin jabbing 56 adults in the first ever mRNA HIV vaccine clinical trial in humans.

HIV-AIDS has killed 30 million people worldwide since the virus first showed up in the early 1980s. And while the virus is no longer devastating communities here like it once was, and many are using PrEP drugs preventatively, HIV still remains the fourth leading cause of death in Africa. The world could still really use that AIDS vaccine that researchers have never quite been able to develop successfully, despite decades of trying.  

There had been chatter that the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna might show behaviors that, if the vaccine were tweaked somewhat, could be effective as HIV vaccines. And Moderna is moving forward on that front, as ScienceDirect reports that HIV vaccine clinical trials are now underway.

POZ reports that they’ll begin enrolling participants in September, and if medical literature is your thing, the Clinical Trial Registry submission can explain all this better than me. Moderna (and a few universities and research centers) have enrolled 56 healthy adults, ages 18 to 50, all of whom do not have HIV.  They will not be told “Now go have unprotected sex,” in fact, they will not be asked to change their behaviors at all. They will simply be monitored to see if their bodies develop antibodies that would prevent the spread of HIV.

The molecular details are as exciting as they are confusing to a lay person. You understand how the Delta variant brought a new version of COVID that transmitted more quickly. But that’s nothing new to HIV researchers, because the AIDS virus has been mutating like that for the better part of 40 years.

“HIV is not really one virus,” Dr. William Schief explains in the above video. “It’s really like 50 million different viruses around the world right now. We have to elicit antibodies that bind to specific patches on the spike that don’t change very much.”

He refers to these as “broadly neutralizing antibodies,” and the mRNA vaccines are like a “messenger” that tells your immune system what sort of antibodies to develop. The goal here is an antibody that nullifies HIV. They’re actually testing two different but analogous versions of the vaccine candidates, and we’ll know more when they complete the trial in the spring of 2023.

Yes, this is being run by profit-driven pharmaceutical companies who will charge you $2000 for $6 worth of drugs. And it is well-known that these companies knowingly allow people to get sick and die by not releasing new life-saving drugs until the patents expire on the old ones and  generic versions come out. But an HIV vaccine would be a milestone that cannot be overstated, even if the final approved version is still several years away.  

Related: The Photograph That Changed the Face of AIDS [SFist]

Image: CDC via Unsplash

“Chief Quilt Coordinator” Gert McMullin is sewing 80 masks per day out of unused AIDS Quilt fabric that dates back to the 1980s.

There have been a number of haunting parallels between the current coronavirus pandemic and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, and the two deadly viral outbreaks were connected locally when April’s scheduled 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park was postponed, which also delayed San Francisco’s largest-ever AIDS Quilt display. (We’ll hope that still happens if/when this all passes.)

But now the AIDS epidemic is touching the COVID-19 pandemic — literally in the face. The Chronicle reports that the longtime AIDS Quilter Gert McMullin, dubbed by the AIDS Quilt’s conceiver Cleve Jones as “the mother of the quilt,” is making protective masks from leftover fabric that went unused on quilt squares dating back to the days when that virus was still called “GRID” (gay-related immune deficiency).

McMullin’s title of “Chief Quilt Coordinator” seems to have been dubbed by the PeopleTV video above, the 64-year-old’s actual title is “chief quilt production coordinator for the NAMES Project Foundation.”  

“I would have never guessed that sewing would come up again,” McMullin told the Chron. “When you think about a pandemic, and what are the kinds of things that people can do, sewing would not have been on my list.” McMullin moved to Atlanta with all 48,000 panels of the quilt when it was relocated there in 2001, and came back here with it in late 2019.

Cleve Jones credits McMullin with being the quilt’s driving force since its inception in 1985. “She just pretty much turned over her whole life to that project,” he said to the Chronicle. “She’s very funny, she’s very strong, and she’s a workhorse. She would work all day, and then climb up into one of the shelves and fall asleep with the quilt, and then get up and start over again.”

Despite the depressing subject nature of the article, the Chron turns the story into a pretty uplifting rollicking read, describing a “sewing machine graveyard” of discarded 1980s contraptions that still sit in the quilt’s Alameda warehouse, along with vintage disco balls “including one enormous sphere retired from the legendary Trocadero Transfer nightclub.”

The masks are of a caliber that they can be used in hospitals, and some have been, which is quite moving for staff who were around during the HIV crisis. The Chron describes the masks as “double-lined with comfortable, cotton quilting material, they can be worn alone, but also have a sleeve to hold an N95 mask.”

“That fabric helped people heal before,” McMullin told the Chron. “Maybe it will still have some magic.”

Related: AIDS Memorial Quilt To Return To San Francisco Next Month [SFist]

Image: AIDS Quilt Touch

All 50,000+ panels of the 32-year-old AIDS Memorial Quilt are back in the Bay Area, and San Francisco’s largest-ever display of these tear-jerking memoriams will be rolled out April 3-5.

Could anything possibly restrain our joy over a 150-Foot Ferris Wheel Coming to Golden Gate Park to help celebrate the park’s 150th anniversary this April? Yes, there is one attraction that will make everyone cry very hard, roughly 2,500 feet away from where the ferris wheel will be situated. If you’ve ever seen bits of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt at events like the AIDS Walk, you’ve probably broken down sobbing at the touching and extremely personal stories each hand-sewn quilt tells. Those displays are just small pieces of the quilt, and there are now more than 50,000 panels to the overall AIDS Quilt project. And the Examiner reports that the largest-ever San Francisco AIDS Quilt display will also be part of the park’s sesquicentennial “Everybody’s Park” commemoration (April 3-5), as the quilt is nearing completion of its recent permanent relocation to the San Francisco Bay Area.    

The AIDS Memorial Quilt was conceived in 1985 by Cleve Jones (seen above), but the nearly 2,000 panels coming to the park will more highlight the recent additions — that is, the more recent victims of the HIV/AIDS virus. “By highlighting the most recent panels, we hope to show the current state of HIV deaths and remind the nation of the ongoing and immediate toll that AIDS is taking today, nearly 40 years after this scourge began,” Jones said at a Tuesday press conference.

So the entire AIDS Quilt will not be on display a la the 1987 Washington DC National Mall  display, but 2,000 panels is more than has ever been assembled in this city. The quilt has been fully displayed a couple of times in DC since then, most recently in 2012, but its full-time home has been a warehouse in Atlanta. Yet we learned last November that the whole quilt would be returning to the Bay Area, all 54 tons of it, and kept in a warehouse in San Leandro.

“With the Quilt now back home in the Bay Area, it is possible to display its panels as part of events like Everybody’s Park,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman.  “This is where the Quilt belongs, on display in public, memorializing lives lost and inspiring us to do the work to get to zero new HIV infections and zero HIV-related deaths.  Many thanks and congratulations to the National AIDS Memorial and all those who made the Quilt’s return possible.”

According to the Bay Area Reporter, Cleve Jones was also Nancy Pelosi’s guest at last month’s State of the Union address (which you remember for other reasons). Jones went off on the experience in the above Facebook post, probably pissing off the one of the Quilt’s biggest current corporate benefactors. He ends the above tirade by saying “ I felt a chill and sense of doom deep within my bones. This is Gilead,” a reference to where the Handmaid’s Tale takes place. This could not have pleased Gilead Sciences, the Foster City-based pharmaceutical company that developed PrEP and kicked down $2.4 million for the Quilt’s relocation and maintenance.

If you want to get to know the Quilt a little better before April, Microsoft has developed an AIDS Quilt Touch online tool on which all 50,000+ panels have been digitized.

Related: These Are The Real-Life San Francisco LGBT Heroes Portrayed In ABC's 'When We Rise' [SFist]

Image: AIDS Quilt Touch

The Department of Health and Human Services says in a new lawsuit that they own the patents to Truvada, a.k.a. PrEP, and they’re hauling Bay Area pharma giant Gilead Sciences to court in a case that could remake the HIV treatment landscape.

We think of the antiviral HIV treatment Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) as a revolutionary regimen that not only treats AIDS, but also has been shown to prevent the spread of the infection when taken regularly by HIV-negative people. And it does! Porn stars use it! State Senator Scott Wiener uses it! But PrEP, a treatment that comes in the form of a drug called Truvada manufactured by Foster City-based pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, is incredibly pricey at $2,000 a month. HIV activists point out that the drug only costs $6 a month to produce. Sure, that’s just typical American pharmaceutical industry exploitation, but the federal government sees an even more insidious wrinkle in the outlandish cost of PrEP drugs. The Centers for Disease Control argues that they actually own the patent to Truvada, and the New York Times reports that the Trump administration is suing Gilead Sciences for patent infringement.

“PrEP is not Gilead’s invention, it’s the American taxpayer’s invention and because [the CDC] invented it and owns four patents protecting that invention, Gilead needs to in some way pay back the American taxpayers,” PrEP4All co-founder James Krellenstein told Out magazine just after the lawsuit was filed Wednesday. “That can be in monetary royalties — the Financial Times estimates that Gilead owes at least a billion dollars back to the American taxpayer — but it can also be other things. Like commitments to increase access and make sure PrEP is universally available.”

Gilead Sciences has not commented on the lawsuit, but in May announced they’d donate enough Truvada to treat “200,000 patients annually for up to 11 years,” according to the Times. Still, that’s just a small fraction of the estimated more than a million Americans who need the drug, but are priced out from using it.

This is a rare example of the Trump administration taking the lead of far-left Democrats in Congress. Back in May, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) ripped Gilead Sciences CEO Daniel O’Day a new one over the pricing of drug that was invented through taxpayer-funded research.

“We the people developed this drug, we paid for this drug, we led and developed all of the grounding patents to create PrEP, and that patent has been privatized,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the hearing. “People are dying because of it.”

The core of this lawsuit comes down to who really invented PrEP, which doesn’t just treat HIV, but can prophylactically prevent the spread of the infection. "Gilead Sciences did not provide leadership, innovation, or funding for these projects," said Dr. Robert Grant, described by Public Citizen as the ‘father of PrEP.’ "Gilead’s role was limited to donating study medication and placebos."

Related: PrEP Could Become Over-the-Counter Drug In California [SFist]

Image: Tony Webster via Flickr

San Francisco-based filmmaker Leo Herrera has been at work over the last year on a film that explores a vision of a contemporary world in which AIDS never happened, a 59-year-old Keith Haring was still graffiti-ing penises over subway station posters, and a 68-year-old Robert Mapplethorpe had an active Instagram account. It's called Fathers, and Herrera refers to it as a "sci-fi documentary" that combines fiction with real footage of contemporary LGBTQ culture, including the first LGBTQ krewe Mardi Gras in New Orleans and San Francisco Pride, which he'll be shooting this weekend.

"I describe it as Cruising meets Black Mirror, meets Beyonce's Lemonade," says Herrera, a Mexican visual artist, activist, and filmmaker who has called both San Francisco and New York home over the last decade. He's known for queer viral films like 2015's "3 Eras of Gay Sex in 3 Minutes," tackling issues of queer politics, sex, HIV stigma, and history.

In Fathers, Herrera creates cultural artifacts from this imagined present in which the fears around sex that grew out of the AIDS crisis never existed — for instance, he's created faux TV commercials for famous bathhouses, and he's spent time documenting the leather community, which arguably could have become a much larger element of queer culture were it not for AIDS deaths.

"The tools we have to combat HIV [today] will give us the privilege of keeping our queer artists," Herrera says. "But the injustices of AIDS should always live in our collective memory and, more importantly, in our imagination. It’s the only way that we can find creative cures to the damage it caused to our culture and harness the power it gave our community to join against political forces that threatened our lives, now more than ever."

The entire film is being funded by individual donations and art patrons, and you can donate to the project here. Donations come with various rewards that include artwork like the imagined portraits of an aged Haring or Sylvester like those below.

SFist talked to Herrera further about the origins of the project

SFist: How did the initial inspiration form for what you’re calling a “sci-fi documentary”?

Leo Herrera: The inspiration came from wanting to have an answer to what could have been had AIDS not destroyed so much of our culture, but also incorporate all of the incredible things that are happening today in queer culture. A mix a real life events and fantasy to create a vision of queer utopia.

How do you see this as differing from a typical documentary — will you still include talking-head type interviews or archival footage?

We are interviewing queer elders, doing research at the GLBT Historical Society in SF, the Leather Archives in Chicago, recording real-life events such a Mardi Gras in New Orleans and SF Pride (whom we are working closely with), as well as incorporating historical footage, so it is very much created in the format of a documentary, but we are also creating fictional characters, fake commercials, and staged political events. The end-product will be somewhat of a fever dream.

Beyond the what-ifs like what would Robert Mapplethorpe's social media presence have been like, where else are you taking this fantasy visually and narratively?

We are imagining the election of a gay president and what he could have achieved, we are also focusing on the sex-positive communities that were at the forefront of gay culture, such as the leather and Radical Faerie community, and imagine what American sexuality would have looked like now.

For example, we have commercials for bathhouses that closed during the AIDS crisis, and for senior citizen resorts for what would have been a huge GLBT Senior community.

Among those what-if’s, and all the notable names you touch on in the teaser, what’s your most compelling example of someone you wish was still alive in our world, providing an example for a younger generation?

I touch upon many famous people in the project, but it's also folks forgotten by history that intrigue me the most. In my research at the GLBT Historical Museum, I've come across men like Duke Armstrong, who was a queer politician in the 1980's or Marty Blecman, who was 1978's Billboard DJ of the year for SF and helped define the disco era. Of course, there are all of the countless QPOC (queer people of color) and trans family that could have grown to be powerful activists. These are the stories that were buried the deepest, but just by telling them, I think they will already will inspire a younger generation.

Below, an earlier trailer for the project. Learn more about the Fathers project here.

A new approach in the enduring search for a vaccine to eradicate HIV is the focus of clinical trials beginning in San Francisco among other cities and serves as the subject for an interesting health piece in the Chronicle. The new tactic, known as passive immunity, might be seen as something of a workaround or stepping stone on the way to a proper vaccine — but you knew that a real, honest-to-god cure for HIV remains elusive. Still, the approach could present a a key piece in a puzzle whose proportions are still taking shape: Namely, what antibodies work to fight the virus.

The trial is called the AMP HIV Prevention Study, an acronym for Antibody Mediated Prevention. If vaccines are injections of a virus that spark an immune reaction of antibodies, trains those antibodies to defend against an infection, this study is interested, by contrast, in passive immunity. That process relies on injecting patients with antibodies instead of forcing their bodies to create them, and then seeing how those work.

"In traditional vaccine studies, we give people a vaccine and wait to see if their bodies will make antibodies against HIV in response," reads an overview on the study's website. "In this study, we’ll be skipping that step, and just giving people the antibodies directly. We will do this through an infusion, which some people know better as getting an IV or getting a drip. This is the first study testing whether this antibody can prevent HIV infections in people."

Assuming the antibodies are successful, the next step would be finding a way to make bodies produce them on their own. "This is a very important experiment.Stanford biochemist Peter Kim tells the paper. "It will tell us whether or not having these antibodies in a person actually does prevent disease.”

The study, by the way, is still seeking HIV-negative transgender people and/or men who are sexually active with men. Here's some info about that, in case in the spirit of this year's pride someone feels like pursuing it.

Dr. Susan Buchbinder, who is in charge of the Department of Public Health's San Francisco trial, summarizes the push: “What we’re testing isn’t what we would assume would be the final product," she says, "But this will give us a benchmark,”

Related:PrEP On-Demand: Startup Rolls Out HIV-Prevention Drug Delivery

You don’t often see 100 porn stars at a state safety board meeting, but that’s just what happened yesterday at the Harris State Building Auditorium in Oakland. A huge turnout of adult film actors, directors and producers seems to have swayed the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) Standards Board to deny a proposed measure that would have required condoms, dental dams and eye protections in adult film sex scenes.

At the conclusion of a hearing that went for six wearying hours, the board declared the proposal would not pass and the assembled porn industry superstars whooped it up in celebration as seen below.

Technically, the measure received 3-2 majority vote from the Standards Board. But four “yes” votes were required for passage, so the measure is likely to be kicked back to Cal/OSHA staff to be reworked.

"I'm actually more torn over this than I can ever explain," said board member Dave Harrison.

Adult performers felt the measure unfairly targeted their industry as opposed to other fields where workers are potentially exposed to pathogens. “My wife is an emergency room nurse,” said performer Maestro Stefanos, whom you may recognize from Kink.com’s (Very NSFW!) Upper Floor website. “My wife goes to work every day and comes home occasionally with blood all over herself and her scrubs. My wife spends every day working with people that don’t have a known (STI) testing status... Why are my safety protocols more stringent than my wife's, as an ER nurse?,” he argued to the board.

Still, this all might be seen as an early climax. The board's rejection of the proposal does not necessarily mean the end of the condoms in porn legislation. The measure will likely go back to Cal/OSHA management to be revised “with more input from the affected industry”, according to board member Patty Quinlan. Additionally, a measure requiring condoms in porn will be on the California state ballot in November 2016. And oh, are Fox News and Drudge going to have a field day with that one.

Previously: SF Democrats Urge Party To Oppose Ballot Measure Requiring Condoms In Porn

A measure that would mandate all pornographic film performers in California wear condoms during shoots will be on the 2016 ballot next November. The Secretary of State yesterday announced that the measure had received over the required number of signatures needed to qualify. The measure has sparked controversy, with at least one prominent figure calling it necessary to combat the spread of HIV while others see it as potentially driving the regulated pornography industry into the shadows.

The measure was crafted and pushed by AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein, who told the Associated Press how he believes this measure, if passed, will have a broad impact on sexual health.

"The No. 1 way that young people learn about sex in this day and age is pornography on the Internet," said Weinstein. "In porn, real people are having real sex. They're transmitting actual diseases, and the audience knows it. It's not like a fictional Hollywood film."

The (questionable) logic being that if prophylactic use is modeled in porn, then young people are more likely to use condoms themselves.

This argument shifts the focus of a potential condom mandate away from the people that would be legally required to wear them (the pornographic performers), and onto the effect that porn has on society — even though Weinstein has gone via several routes to police condom use in the industry, also arguing for workplace safety (something the industry rejects because of strict testing requirements), and having failed to get a workplace safety measure passed in the state legislature in 2014.

Weinstein has also lately been pushing for porn performers to have wear goggles or other eye protection in porn shoots for the same reason, something the industry, obviously, thinks is insane, and compares to "asking ballerinas to wear boots."

Weinstein is a somewhat controversial figure in the gay community as well, having previous called the life-saving PrEP drug Truvada "a party drug."

This comment outraged many, and even led to a petition to have Weinstein removed as the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (the petition ultimately failed).

Proponents of daily PrEP use include Supervisor Scott Wiener, who has publicly detailed his own use of the drug. The drug, as shown again in a recent study conducted at Kaiser San Francisco, has proven to be highly effective in HIV-negative men in preventing the transmission of HIV.

Opponents of the upcoming ballot initiative include an adult-film industry trade group, the Free Speech Coalition. The organization warns that the ballot measure is fundamentally flawed on numerous levels, one of which being that it allows for any Californian to sue performers who do not wear condoms in films.

Diane Duke, CEO of Free Speech Coalition, further explained the industry's opposition in a press release.

"Unfortunately, the proponent of the bill, Michael Weinstein, is more concerned with his personal moral crusade than the real-life concerns of adult performers," wrote Duke. "It does not seem to matter to him that this initiative endangers performers' lives, nor does it matter that his previous attempts to force condoms on porn stars have been opposed by legislators, HIV activists, editorial boards and the performers themselves."

Duke further argues that producers of pornography will simply leave the state should this measure pass — something that the state's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst estimates could cost California "tens of millions of dollars annually in lost state and local tax revenue" as CBS 5 reports. However, Weinstein doesn't see that as likely, telling to the AP that the state's nice weather — allowing for year-round outdoor porn shoots — will inevitably keep them here.

Apparently he hasn't visited Arizona. Or Nevada.

Previously: Condom Bill Targeting California Porn Industry Dies In Committee

The HIV-prevention drug Truvada, a.k.a. PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) has been a topic of approximately 9 trillion conversations in gay bars over the last year, in large part due to the growing awareness of its reported effectiveness in stopping the spread of HIV without having to use condoms. Now, Supervisor David Campos is launching an initiative to get San Francisco to make the drug more available to all who want it, regardless of their ability to pay.

"PrEP is the first new tool in our fight to protect ourselves from HIV since the epidemic began," says Campos. "San Francisco has been at the forefront of efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS through innovative measures and needs to continue that tradition."

A little background: Truvada/PrEP is a single pill by the drug-maker Gilead that contains two anti-HIV retrovirals, and in 2012, it became the first drug for use in HIV prevention for HIV-negative individuals to be approved by the FDA. A study at UCSF showed that daily use of Truvada was 90 to 99 percent effective in preventing HIV transmission — however the debate about the accuracy of that percentage rages on; dueling pieces in the New York Times and New York Magazine over the summer did well to sum up that debate.

Many are still wary of both the cost (if not covered by some platinum-level health insurance, the drug can cost $8,000 to $14,000 a year) and the possible side effects (and lack of any long-term studies), though anecdotal evidence and data from the UCSF study suggests side effects to be surprisingly minimal.

In terms of cost and access, Campos's new proposal could go a long way to changing the way gay men in San Francisco think about the drug. As Dana Van Gorder, Executive Director of Project Inform says, "Groups in San Francisco are taking steps to address barriers to PrEP use by creating more places where it is being prescribed, working to reduce or eliminate the cost of its use, and making sure that community members have the facts upon which to make a choice about using it."

And Campos adds, "I am committed to taking the steps necessary to ensure access to all individuals wanting PrEP regardless of income - embracing PrEP now will stop new infections and save lives."

Campos is holding a rally at City Hall on Thursday, September 18 to call for S.F. to take a leadership role in the distribution of PrEP. And then he'll be holding a hearing with the Neighborhood Services & Safety Committee with community stakeholders to "develop a plan to provide additional resources for PrEP," including providing funding and patient assistance to ensure easy access to PrEP.

Earlier: More HIV-Negative Gay Men Should Consider Taking Truvada, Say SF Porn Stars

A not-so-sweet story is coming to light this week about 29-year-old Thomas Guerra, who has also gone by the name Ashton Chavez, and whom San Diego prosecutors are now building a case against involving multiple claims that Guerra intentionally infected other men with HIV and lied about his status. It's believed, as ABC 7 and others are reporting, that Guerra is in fact the great nephew of labor leader Cesar Chavez, and that he may have also infected men in Fresno and San Francisco, in addition to San Diego.

Stories like this were a staple of TV news during the AIDS crisis of the late 80s and early 90s, and though we all understand that HIV is no longer a death sentence and should not be as stigmatized as it still is, when cases like this emerge it only further works to vilify those with the virus in the eyes of society.

The story first emerged out of San Diego earlier this week when a recent former boyfriend came forward to local authorities to accuse Guerra of intentionally infecting after lying about his HIV status during a year-long relationship. Another former boyfriend reached out to this one on Facebook to warn him about Guerra, after which the latest boyfriend got tested and found out he was HIV positive. Then he proceeded to find texts on Guerra's phone, "where he’s stating he’s negative to people then bragging to others about giving people his ‘positive load.’"

Now a San Francisco resident has come forward to say that he met Guerra on Grindr or a similar app/site, and that two dated for four months while Guerra was technically living in Fresno. He, too, trusted Guerra when he said he was HIV-negative and he, too, was allegedly infected by Guerra.

Another anonymous victim says he's found 24 separate people who may have been infected by Guerra. A family friend who helped raise Guerra after he came out as gay — and was disowned by his parents — told ABC 7, "I cannot and I don't believe that he is really doing that."

[ABC 7]
[Queerty]