The more things change the more often you find yourself re-enacting Jonestown

When I first moved to San Francisco, six and a half years ago, I sought out experiences that felt as though they couldn't happen anywhere else. Trannyshack at the Stud were the apotheosis of that experience - a mutant lovechild of vaudeville, performance art, sincerity, punk, thrill-seeking and community. Also: manatee drag.

I was there to witness the nominal "end" of Trannyshack, though that ending is a very David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust thing - Trannyshack will still exist, it just won't occur every Tuesday, at the Stud. It will take place in more respectable venues, most likely large enough so that the whole experience will be less like spending two hours trapped in the business of a giant moist amoeba. Crowd-surfing drag queens will no longer be able to kick the ceiling with their stiletto boots. Peggy L'Eggs will probably still throw dead fish into the audience while lipsynching to the theme from Titanic, but she'll have to throw them farther. The audience will be less successful at throwing them back. Peggy will still vomit up seaweed, but not RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. There will be a demure buffer of space between you and the hacking.

Certain mysteries remain unresolved. Why are you so much less likely to be elbowed in the head if you're standing on the left side of the stage? How does the bar make any money if it's too crowded for people to actually make it to the bar and buy drinks? Why is theater better when you're dehydrated? Is what I think is happening on stage actually what is happening?

The final number? The Bowie song "Memories of a Free Festival" played over the loudspeakers. Hippie maidens on stage passed out flowers to the audience, then vanished and re-appeared in fatiques and plastic submachine guns.Every drag queen, drag king, faux queen, and so forth in the audience filed on stage and pantomimed drinking FlavorAid before collapsing into an ever-increasing pile. The death throes seemed to go on and on. Metal Patricia stood behind it all in Jim Jones drag, arms raised in front of a flickering electric cross. The pile got larger and larger.

I spent the past week interviewing people who were personally affected by Jonestown (it didn't happen that long ago, after all, and the People's Temple had close ties to local progressive movements and San Francisco's city government.)

It left me wondering what other events in San Francisco history might be turned into performance art. The 1906 earthquake? The filling of the bay? The dot-com boom?

(mantee drag photo by Heklina, Jonestown photo by StarrSF)