Why are women most of the bad guys?
The envelope that snail-mail-using reader Bill Quist sent was emblazoned with a big fake Trump stamp (created by Don Sachs and picturing the president wearing a witch’s hat, the words “witch hunt” and “Forever USA”). Next to that was a real stamp, one of a new USPS set focused on Disney villains.
It was that series that was the focus of Quist’s note: Why, in a series of 10, are six of the villains women? (Two are animals, two are men. The others: The Queen from “Snow White,” Lady Tremaine from “Cinderella,” the Queen of Hearts from “Alice in Wonderland,” Maleficent from “Sleeping Beauty,” Cruella De Vil from “101 Dalmatians,” Ursula from “The Little Mermaid.”) “The gender issue continues,” writes Quist.
When Danny Nicoletta was curating works for his new book, “LGBT San Francisco: The Daniel Nicoletta Photographs,” were there ones — among more than 300 images made over the past 40 years — that he hadn’t remembered?
“There were not only the sleepers that I thought might be good,” he said, by phone from Grants Pass, Ore., where he lives nowadays, “but lots of surprises along the way, of finding things that ended up speaking to today’s issues . ... I was definitely newly touched by a lot of material, but it’s always subjective because I think I lived my life fully as a vessel for the ghosts.”
As a young man, “I was naturally drawn to androgyny, and that’s on everybody’s lips now with transgender rights . ... I think that having been a gender-fluid kid and being drawn to that tribe really kind of paid off. Forty years later, we’re having very serious conversations about it.”
Nicoletta describes a shot with a kid with a tattoo that says “David” on his arm, “wearing a long skirt . ... It was an idea whose time has come. When I took it, maybe I just thought it was a cute person . ... It wasn’t a big talking point at the time.”
Nowadays, Nicoletta, whose involvement in San Francisco gay history began when he worked in Harvey Milk’s camera shop, is silver-haired, part of the gay establishment. When we talked, he was just back from World Pride Madrid, “the mother ship of Pride celebrations,” he said. “I am so proud of my movement. It’s been such a successful movement on so many levels. To pay tribute to it just leaves me with joy and pride. It doesn’t mean that the struggle is over, it just means we’re right-minded about it, making great strides. And we will transform the world.”
Nicoletta will talk at the San Francisco Library Main Branch on Aug. 24 at 5:30 p.m., and afterward Juanita More is hosting a party at the Veterans’ Building Green Room.
Former Chronicle colleague/outdoor writer/novelist Paul McHugh’s new book is “The Blind Pool,” a thriller about a Russian crime ring that makes its way into the United States and conducts business out of a Texas prison. (This is not an acccount of Vladimir Putin’s vacation.)
Dan Rather calls it “a tight, taut thriller by a terrific storyteller. The political headlines of today make it timely as hell.” A blurb from anyone as well-known as Dan Rather is sought-after, to say the least. So I asked McHugh how he got it.
When McHugh published a journalism murder mystery, “Deadlines,” in 2010, he asked a friend on Rather’s staff if she could show it to him. He was just heading to Africa for a story and needed something to read on the plane. Which led to a very positive blurb that began with, “Every reporter worth his or her notepad is a sleuth at heart.”
A few months later, McHugh learned that Rather was appearing in South San Francisco, he bought tickets and a box of See’s dark chocolate marzipan to give to Rather as a thank-you. The gift begat a sporadic correspondence. But as Dorothy Parker once said, candy is dandy, the climax of the book happens to be set in rural West Texas, Rather country.
The author will read at Books Inc. in Palo Alto on Sept. 8 at 7 p.m.