PODCAST · society
Sad Francisco
by Toshio Meronek
Covering the end of capitalism from a "far Left" trans/queer POV.
Episodes
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Psychic Militancy with Lara Sheehi
Psychic militancy is the practice of consciously bracing yourself against the war on your mind by entities like the CIA and FBI, which started propagandizing us a little under a century ago. Lara Sheehi is host of the podcast Psychic Militancy and her new book is From the Clinic to the Streets:...
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The Oakland People's Arms Embargo with Dina
Dina from the Oakland People's Arms Embargo makes an easy case for why the US has to stop supplying Israel with F-16 bomber parts (and other weapons of mass destruction) via hubs like the Oakland Airport, while corporations like FedEx profit off genocide. Trung co-hosts. Oakland People's Arms...
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Changing the Meaning of Gender with Susan Stryker
Trans historian Susan Stryker has been on the podcast to speak on the Compton's cafeteria riot and her documentary about the riot, Screaming Queens, and in March, she came on to speak about the third edition of Transgender History. Susan's newest book Changing Gender is about gender, but also…
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Why movements split: ACT UP San Francisco with Dean Ouellette, Deeg & Kate Raphael
What leads movement groups to dissolve? Three members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) San Francisco talk about the group's split following the Big Pharma-pilled 6th International AIDS Conference in 1990. You'll get a history of the local chapter of ACT UP, which was the most notorious...
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Daniel Lurie's Web with Jeremy Mack
Another rabbit hole of an episode all about San Francisco's billionaire, Zionist, Levi's jeans-heir mayor and his clique. Mostly a bunch of bored billionaires who want to decide the future of San Francisco and if they get their way, the world. TW for electoralism. The Phoenix Project | Instagram…
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The Google Bus and Gentrification with Manissa Maharawal
A decade ago, the Google bus was a hard-to-escape symbol of the housing unaffordability crisis in SF, as Manissa Maharawal describes in her new book, Anti-Eviction. Manissa works with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and teaches anthropology at American University. Discussed: How politicians...
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Technofascist Manifestos with Eddie Kim
One of our tech overlords, Mark Zuckerberg recently published a manifesto in the Wall Street Journal describing why we should cheerlead him on his quest for infinite growth and profits. Eddie Kim writes for the anti-generative AI outlet Gazetteer SF, and several of his recent pieces contend with...
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Medicine for Melancholy (Sad Framecisco #4)
What was the filmic movement called mumblecore? Jemma Decristo and dee(dee) c. ardan offer an abridged history of the post-college-centric genre that went mainstream in the early 2000s. One of few mumblecore movies with a Black director and Black leads is 2008's indie romance Medicine for...
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It's All Bots, Girl: Chappell Roan and the Fake Outrage Machine with Matthew Lawson (Eating For Free)
In 2026, dead internet theory—the idea that most of the internet is bots and AI-generated content—is more reality than theory. Matthew Lawson co-hosts Eating For Free—a podcast critiquing American culture and politics through the lens of pop culture—with Paper Magazine editor Joan Summers. In…
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Enter the Panopticon with Ian Firstenberg
The government is putting queers on lists and hunting undocumented people at the Home Depot parking lot. Have you ever felt so seen? Sad Francisco Surveillance State Correspondent Ian Firstenberg returns to talk about our current dystopia, but it's not all bad news: people are destroying FLOCK...
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Enter the Panopticon with Ian Firstenberg
The government is putting queers on lists and hunting undocumented people at the Home Depot parking lot. Have you ever felt so seen? Sad Francisco Surveillance State Correspondent Ian Firstenberg returns to talk about our current dystopia, but it's not all bad news: people are destroying FLOCK...
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Judith Butler, Brooke Lober, Mama Ganuush and Lavelle Ridley: Queers Against Zionism LIVE SHOW
THANK YOU to everyone who made it out to our biggest live show ever. The night ended up raising ~$5K for Bay2Gaza Mutual Aid, which will go directly to Gaza (Brooke shares details during the show). The episode was recorded at The Lab in the Mission on June 25, 2026, with music from DJ Parle G and...
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Down the Manny/Scott/Brooke Jenkins Rabbit Hole
A lot has been happening in the lives of three of this podcast's longtime foes: District Attorney Brooke Jenkins; cafe owner and wannabe supervisor Manny Yekutiel; and the state Senator running for Nancy Pelosi's soon-to-be vacant seat in Congress, Scott Wiener. Guests: Balto from Frisco Voices…
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The White Night Riots: No Apologies
May 1979: queer protesters set cop cars ablaze in San Francisco's Civic Center, in response to cop-turned-politician Dan White's relatively light sentence for the assassination of gay politician Harvey Milk and the Mayor, George Moscone. Four people who were there describe the riots, and the...
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Hope You Like Burning Man Sculptures with Max Blue
Max Blue is one of San Francisco's few remaining art critics in legacy media (see: his column in SF Examiner); he also contributes regularly to Hyperallergic. Max gives the best brief introduction of the big art movements San Francisco is most well known for, and names names including: BXP, the...
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I Love Boosters (Sad Framecisco #3)
Brutal honesty is all we have for Boots Riley's overstuffed filmic ode to shoplifters and maybe communism, I Love Boosters. Topics discussed include: The Coup's early work Betrayal by union leaders Megan Ellison, the alleged black sheep of the Zionist Ellison dynasty Tax credits they give you to...
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FKA Bornstein & Bornstein
A monologue revisiting a Truthout piece I wrote back in 2014 for this solo episode and stroll down memory lane featuring a Gay Shame action, crying in eviction court, and one of eviction lawyer Daniel Bornstein's boring-ass webinars where he explains the tricks of his trade. Daniel (who runs...
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Home Sweet Surveillance State with Ian Firstenberg
Ian covers local oligarchs and the surveillance state for 48Hills and The Phoenix Project. We talk about FLOCK adding microphones to their camera network, state repression after the anti-cop protests of summer 2020, and how crypto oligarch Chris Larsen bought off the Trump regime. Ian in 48Hills:...
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The ADL is An Actual Psyop with Emmaia Gelman and Mama Ganuush
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) started as a civil rights organization for Jewish people in the US. It's now a pro-Israel group that spies on Leftist organizations and defends Elon Musk when he does a white power salute. Emmaia Gelman's new book The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State...
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Sweaty DesperAzn with Chris Lee and Jasmine Lee-Ehrhardt
Two Wasian Americans and one classic, everyday Asian American, all millennials, try to make sense of East Asian American discourses in the zeitgeist of the past six months. Recorded shortly before the cursed Wasian meetups in SF and NY. 1. CS graduation rates fall off a cliff. For a particular...
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Sad Framecisco #2: Electric Dreams
dee(dee) and Jemma return to dissect another vintage film set in the Bay. Did Hollywood predict Sam Altman would meet his husband in Peter Thiel's hot tub? Seeking an answer in "Electric Dreams" (1984), an extremely 1980s rom-com in which a young architect working out of the Transamerica Pyramid...
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3 Things Landlords Loathe: Land Trusts, Rent Strikes, and Taxes with Kyle Smeallie
Until Land Back, there's land trusts. Kyle Smeallie from the San Francisco Community Land Trust on removing land from the speculative market and the clutches of real estate industrialists. San Francisco Community Land Trust https://sfclt.org/ Proud Stutter (Maya's podcast)...
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Have a Happy Anti-Technofascist May Day Workers' Tour of the Mission with Gay Shame
May Day 2026, QUEER & TRANS NON/WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE for a tour of some historically significant sites in the Mission, detailed on this episode. All hookers, loiterers, shoplifters, street sellers, truants, 1099 queens, gig workers, students, time theft recidivists, hustlers, welfare fags…
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Black Anarchism vs. State Terror and Billy Porter with Prince Shakur (The Dugout)
Prince Shakur is an anarchist political educator with a book dealing with how he was politicized (When They Tell You To Be Good), a big library of video essays on YouTube, and a Black anarchist podcasts he co-hosts called The Dugout. Prince's site https://www.princeshakur.com/ The Dugout's site...
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AIDS Nonprofit to Gays: Stop "Sexual Mixing" with Michael Scarce
Michael Scarce worked at a now-defunct nonprofit called the Stop AIDS Project till in 2007, he blew the whistle when it began suggesting that to end AIDS, we need to "prevent sexual mixing." Michael's Substack: 'A Parable of Second-Hand Sodomy: Lessons Learned From San Francisco's Failed Attempt…
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Who's Afraid of Gender Studies? with Jane Ward and Trung Nguyen
In March, viral depositions of a couple of 20-something white twinks named Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh (referred to on social media as "DOGE bros") made explicit how careless and nihilistic the federal government was in cutting humanities funding last year, as part of Elon Musk's short-lived...
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Being Seen: It's Complicated with Raquel Willis
Raquel Willis' resume is long: the first trans lead editor at Out magazine, a TIME 100 awardee, memoirist (The Risk It Takes To Bloom), and co-founder of the group Gender Liberation, whose direct actions at the US capitol calling for basic needs like trans healthcare reverberate far outside the...
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Trans SanFrisco with Susan Stryker
The return of Susan Stryker! On this episode: The utopian potential of Trans SanFrisco of the 1990s, and why the new third edition of Transgender History may be her last time editing the classic tome. Transgender History...
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Re: the recent Wired magazine piece "Inside the Gay Tech Mafia"
Friends Stab and Trung both texted me when about a recent, very Sad Francisco-coded feature in Wired magazine. Here's a little response, inspired partially by an impromptu reading group a few friends did around the piece. Mentioned: Alexandr Wang Barry's Bootcamp Gawker.com Melania's box office...
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Sad Framecisco #1: Dirty Harry
First episode covering movies set in the Bay! With dee(dee) and Jemma. Starting with: 1971's DIRTY HARRY, in which Clint Eastwood plays a vigilante cop tracking down a gay Zodiac killer clone in a San Francisco overrun with hippie scum. Jemma on her book "The Aesthetic Character of Blackness:...
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Batman of San Jose, Black Phoenix, Crimson Fist, and Queen Bee (Bay Area Super Heroes)
Uncover the lore of four masked comrades who meet up regularly to offer aid to unhoused neighbors and teach self-defense. We talk about the discourse around wearing frog costumes to ICE protests and giving public comment at San Jose City Hall dressed as Batman (that's the clip at the beginning of...
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'The faggots and their friends between revolutions' with Morgan Bassichis
Morgan Bassichis brought the 1977 queer cult fairy tale "The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions" back to print and stage a few years ago. Its messages about how to live under patriarchy feel extra prescient in 2026. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions By Larry Mitchell…
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JAHA Film Fest and the Zionist War on Culture with Mama Ganuush
Mama Ganuush is back home in San Francisco after hosting the first JAHA Film Festival in December in Lisbon. The festival features all trans-focused films from the Global South, and begins screening online starting this Friday, Feb. 14. JAHA Film Festival https://www.jahafilmfestival.com/ Trans...
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Refugee Landlords with Trung Nguyen
Trung Nguyen teaches Asian American and ethnic studies at San Jose State. His presentation at the last American Studies Association conference covered how the interests of US empire, Airbnb.org, and refugee landlords market property ownership as a humanitarian act. Trung's site https://tpqn.org/...
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Aesthetics of the New Rightwing Tech Intelligentsia with Jimmy Wu
"Meet the New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia" is Jimmy Wu's recent piece for Bay Area Current, a new publication covering labor, culture and politics based in East Bay. In it, Jimmy beautifully describes some of the aesthetics and icons preoccupying the tech elites and their media mouthpieces…
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Rise and Fall of SFs Doom Loop with Jeremy Mack
In 2022, rightwing influencers began using the term "doom loop" to paint San Francisco as a crime- and fentanyl-ridden hellhole that whose downfall was due to too much woke progressivism. It didn't matter that the doom loop narrative wasn't based in reality: the media took it and ran with it. The...
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Fascist Japan's Unit 731 with Jenny Chan
Jenny Chan founded Pacific Atrocities Education in San Francisco after learning about some of Japan's terror campaigns across Asia through World War II. It's history that Japanese conservatives are trying to suppress. The Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 was the chemical and biological warfare...
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The Appropriation of Black Aesthetics with Jemma DeCristo
Jemma DeCristo RETURNS! Her new book The Aesthetic Character of Blackness is out, and covers how revolutionary Black art is co-opted by capitalists and the state, and art's limits as a revolutionary tool (and it's widespread use as a counterinsurgent one). The Aesthetic Character of Blackness:...
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"It's not a movement if the Black trans community is not moving" with Janetta Johnson and zen blossom
Janetta Johnson and zen blossom speak from the home base of Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) in SF. They speak on Miss Major (who led TGIJP for years); the year Janetta turned down the SF Pride grand marshal title; and the status of the Bay Area's reputation for...
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AI Force Feeding Frenzy with Martha Kenney
Public universities are under constant threat of budget cuts, but somehow administrators find millions to toss at extractive tech, like ChatGPT Edu. SF State professor Martha Kenney describes how administrators at the CSUs spent $17 million on a contract with OpenAI without asking students or...
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White Guys Gamed the Weed DEI Program with Chris Roberts
San Francisco tried to atone for the war on drugs with a DEI program for recreational weed store owners. In the end, the real winners were rich white dudes like London Breed's old roommate, Conor Johnston. Chris Roberts—America's top cannabis journalist and historian reporting from America's...
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ZINE SCENE: The Bay's Gay ASF History with dee(dee) c. ardan
dee(dee) c. ardan is live in the studio apartment for the first episode about trans/queer media from the Bay's past, showing that indeed, this place has been trans as hell for a long, long time. Starting with issue one of the 1970s zine GAY SUNSHINE, we deduce how the Bay gained a reputation for...
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The Devil Inside Compton's Cafeteria with Zei Wilder
The Tenderloin in 1966: One of the earliest trans/queer actions (that we know of) against police and state violence happened at Compton's Cafeteria. Today, that space (111 Taylor Street) is occupied by Geo Group—otherwise known as the corporation that is America's number-one private prison and…
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RIP Miss Major
For Major, who passed on October 13. Truthout piece https://truthout.org/articles/to-honor-miss-major-we-fight-for-the-trans-and-queer-spaces-she-built/ Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C5592116 A more recent episode…
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38 Day Hunger Strike for Gaza with Peyrin Kao
This episode was recorded before the ceasefire deal went into effect on Oct. 10. Surprising no one, Israel has already broken its promises, continuing to kill Palestinians and withholding aid. UC Berkeley lecturer Peyrin Kao just ended a 38-day hunger strike to keep Palestine on the minds of…
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Landlord Arsonists with Bench Ansfield
Bench Ansfield is a professor in the History department at Temple University. Their book "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" covers how racial capitalism, political corruption, and the insurance industry created a world where landlords can profit more by...
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It's Anarchist Season with Alexis Shotwell
Alexis Shotwell is a professor of gender and feminist studies and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa. She's also an anarchist organizer particularly interested in the anarchist fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin. Alexis's website https://www.alexisshotwell.com/ Punch Up...
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The ICE Abductions with Angelica, Cebollito, and Lea McGeever
Court support has spread to Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 100 Montgomery Street, while the mayor and SFPD continue to be complicit with ICE, against the city's sanctuary city policy. Lxspinguinxs (updates about SF anti-ICE actions on Instagram) https://www.instagram.com/lxspinguinxs Lea on...
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Boycott Boiler Room with Daria Lourd, DJ Fridge, and Juanny
Boiler Room is a global event promotion company known for enlisting local DJs and promoters to produce Boiler Room-branded parties. This year, Boiler Room was acquired by a Zionist private equity firm, Superstruct/KKR. Three people who DJ and throw parties in the Bay—Daria Lourd, DJ Fridge, and...
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Origins of Harm Reduction with Tracey Helton Mitchell
Tracey Helton Mitchell writes about living in San Francisco with an addiction in her memoir "The Big Fix" and now works in harm reduction in the city. The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C3207933 Tracey on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@traceyh415. Tracey…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Sad Francisco have?
Sad Francisco currently has 171 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Sad Francisco about?
Covering the end of capitalism from a "far Left" trans/queer POV.
How often does Sad Francisco release new episodes?
Sad Francisco publishes regularly with 171 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Sad Francisco?
You can listen to Sad Francisco on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Sad Francisco?
Sad Francisco is created and hosted by Toshio Meronek.
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