Less Bitter–More Glitter at Electric Works

Friday evening the Electrics Work printshop and gallery at 8th and Mission hosted an opening for "Less Bitter–More Glitter"...



...a retrospective of the photos of Daniel Nicoletta (above left, with Gwenn Craig) from his stint at Harvey Milk's camera store in 1975 to the present day.



The event was poignant in that most of the young people pictured in the photographs from the 1970s and 1980s are dead, either from AIDS, hard living, or simple misfortune.



Still, there were a few fabulous survivors from the era holding court, such as Radical Faerie Joey Cain (above).



Paul Brown, above, even found himself in a vintage Castro Street Fair photo. "I'm the one wearing the big white wig."



Photographer Michael Starkman, above, was featured in a 1978 photo with the Strange Fruit Theatre Collective on the steps of City Hall (below left).



The troupe presented a brilliant series of skits that questioned the gender conformity of the late 1970s Castro Clone "butchoisie," with their rigid codification of masculine behavior and appearance. The show also managed to make fun of separatist lesbians and a whole range of other late 70s characters.



There were a selection of stills from the set of the recent Gus Van Sant movie, "Milk," on one wall, but the real highlight of the show was a recent reworking of Richard Avedon's huge 1960s photograph of Andy Warhol's Factory, except in Nicoletta's version it is the cast of the Thrillpeddlers' "Pearls Over Shanghai."



That latter show is still running, by the way, in repertory with another Cockettes musical, Hot Greeks, both of which cannot be recommended highly enough.