San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cover story
Couple glad they stuck it out in S.F. to pursue their artistic dreams.
When Fontana Butterfield Guzmán and Mary Guzmán unreel their 25year love story, it’s as if they’re storyboarding the next San Francisco film — the kind that indelibly ties the city’s grand, iconic sites to human lives; lives that are smaller, perhaps, but no less grand.
Theirs isn’t the kind of California story that provokes fatuous debates in national publications about whether the West Coast’s promise is over. Guzmán, a director for stage and screen, and Butterfield Guzmán, a performer and improv coach, are not young rich tech bros huffily broadcasting their departure. The couple were here before that crowd, and they vow to be here long after.
But their account — of two artists who stuck it out, through talent, drive, smarts, sweat and some luck — is a Bay Area story for those of us below the 1%.
In scene one, it’s 1989 at San Francisco State University, where the second chapter of Lambda Delta Lambda, the first lesbian sorority, has just been founded. A group of seven, including Guzmán, host an event at the student union looking to recruit more members, but everyone is anticipating the arrival of one particular girl, the crush of another of the seven. Dozens of women show up, but no one cares.
“We want to see the girl, the one that she’s got the crush on,” Guzmán recalls. “Then the door opens, and she comes in with this pink fluffy sweater, and I didn’t even need to know. I just looked up; I’m like, ‘That’s the girl.’ ”
It was Fontana Butterfield, of course.
“I hadn’t really come out to myself yet,” Butterfield Guzmán says. “I just remember thinking, as a dramatic person, ‘Fontana, this is chapter two of your life.’ ”
Then there’s a montage, when the two are friends and collaborators for a long time.
“Mary would come to all my plays,” says Butterfield Guzmán. “She was always in the front row with flowers. She cast me in her films.”
Butterfield Guzmán performed in Guzmán’s short film “After the Break,” and she was casting director and acting coach for Guzman’s “Desi’s Looking for a New Girl,” when the two became a couple, in 1995.
For that moment, slow motion: “We’re walking down in the Mission,” Butterfield Guzmán recalls, “and I just had this overwhelming feeling of, ‘We’re family. I want to be your family.’ ”
Cut to the couple’s three weddings, the camera toggling among all three — but especially the first one, in 2004, during the brief window in Gavin Newsom’s mayoralty when the city issued samesex marriage licenses. They get in line at 4 a.m. Feb. 17 at City Hall. Over the course of the day, protesters try to disrupt the samesex weddings, the
San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus sings “The StarSpangled Banner,” and those waiting in line pass the hat for one couple who drove all the way from Reno but didn’t know they’d have to pay a fee to get married.
Then it’s election day, 2016. The family has long been crammed into a junior onebedroom apartment in the Mission. Even a custombuilt loft bed fails to keep their apartment from feeling smaller and smaller with the growth of their son, Orlando, born in 2009.
“So many of our friends were leaving the area or moving to the East Bay, and we were really stuck,” Butterfield Guzmán recalls. But
Butterfield Guzmán had applied for belowmarketrate housing, which required taking classes and compiling her and Guzmán’s “how many bazillion 1099s.”
“On the morning of the 2016 election, 9 a.m.,” says Butterfield Guzmán, “after we had already voted for Hillary, we got home, I checked the email, and we got our (new) home. That day.” It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
“So we brought Orlando over to see the house,” says Guzmán, when their son was 7 years old. “We showed him: This is where we’re going to live.”
Zoom out to a crowd scene on Market Street. “Then we got back on the street, and there was an antiTrump rally going by, and we just joined the rally. He said, ‘Can I say f—?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ ‘F— Trump! F— Trump!’ Somebody even gave him a megaphone.”
Butterfield Guzmán says, “That day, until that evening, we were like, ‘This is the best day of our lives.’ ”
“But the worst day,” Guzmán adds.
Now, they’re two artists in San Francisco with stable, comfortable housing. There’s a shared fire pit and a plaza where Orlando can pogostick. (He’s been through four sticks since the pandemic hit.) Cue the closing credits.
“It feels extremely privileged, and there are so many people that also deserve it,” Butterfield says of the housing lottery. “I have worry of appearing rich and more privileged than I am. So I’m always like, ‘No no no. We’re artists!’ ”
As they look at their next artistic projects — the film “Lost Dog” for Guzmán, the solo show “Flower Child” for Butterfield Guzmán — they say there’s nowhere else all this could have happened but San Francisco.
That doesn’t mean their feelings about the city have been entirely rosy. Guzmán, who’s Latinx, remembers getting kicked out of the nowdefunct restaurant Radish when she tried to drop by Butterfield Guzmán’s table, she suspects because of the color of her skin. But on the whole, “I can walk down the street with her and not get as much hassle,” Guzmán says.
Nowhere else but San Francisco is there Brava or Theatre Rhinoceros, where Guzmán has directed. Nowhere else was there Film Arts Foundation, which has since been absorbed into SFFilm. Guzmán credits FAF with starting her career.
“When I made my first film, I put a little Postit on the wall that said I needed a cinematographer, and I had four phone calls when I got home,” Guzmán says. “They had bulletin boards. They had classes. I edited my first film on a flatbed at FAF, and down the hall was someone else editing their film.” They’d share snacks and drinks long into the night. “It was a community.”
In San Francisco, Guzman says, you have “the ability to be able to create work that is not Hollywooddriven.” Recently the San Francisco Arts Commission gave her a grant for “Lost Dog.” Though it doesn’t finance the entire project, she says, “It’s a validation of, ‘We want you to stay here. We want you to create here.’ ”
“It’s very hard in a place like L.A. or New York to get noticed,” Butterfield Guzmán says. Here, “money isn’t king” for an artist.
Butterfield Guzmán now teaches improv classes with Speechless, a San Francisco company that helps clients become more comfortable with public speaking.
“It’s a bunch of comedians and improvisers coming together, creating a startup, working with the tech companies. I don’t know where else that would happen,” she says. “Now I’m fully employed. I just got equity in the company. I have stock options, lady! And they’re hiring me for exactly who I am, and I don’t have to be anything different.”