This December all live theater and dance events are canceled in Tucson, but you can still take in the Nutcracker at El Toro Flicks drive-in theater (198 S. Granada Ave., 520 449 4468).
On December 21, Danswest Dance Company presents a new, original staging of the classic ballet. Written and directed by Danswest owner and professional tap dancer Megan Maltos, Not Your Ordinary Nut features dancers aged 7–18, plus a few courageous dance dads. NYON is entirely choreographed by Tucson artists, three of whom grew up dancing at Danswest.
The show incorporates elements of all of Danswest’s styles—ballet, yes, but also acrobatics, tap dancing, jazz, even hip hop, and plenty of heart. The dancers had six weeks to learn the choreography before it was filmed in October. Danswest will offer two screenings at 6:00 pm and 9:30 pm. Tickets are $40 a carload. For more information, contact Megan.maltos@gmail.com, (520) 240–2476.
Revisiting Steve Farley’s Broadway Tile Murals, 20 Years On
There’s not much in our city’s history that can be pinned down with a precise date—not the time the first O’odham people settled here, not the week when someone thought it might be nice to build an adobe hut within sight of the Santa Cruz, not the hour when a bureaucrat released the funds to destroy the barrios that lay under what’s now the community center. But it is possible to put a date to the day when, for better or worse, a long-declining, somnolent downtown took the first step toward being reborn: May 1, 1999.
To understand that claim, we need to step back a couple of years before then. Steve Farley, a native of California, was fairly new to Tucson, a transplant from his native Southern California by way of a stint in the Bay Area, where he’d worked for a few years for the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian and then started his own graphic design business. He wanted to get back to drier, hotter country, but Southern California was expensive and crowded. Enter Tucson, a welcoming community for an artist—and Farley was soon right at home here, doing art photographic and graphic design.
Somewhere along the way, not long after he arrived, opportunity came knocking. Farley and his then-wife, Regina Kelly, were working on a public history project with teenagers on the west side, immersing themselves in local lore. Hearing of the project, a resident, Gilbert Jimenez, came to a meeting with a stack of photo albums dating back half a century. The first image Farley and Kelly saw was of a young, purposeful-looking Jimenez striding along Scott Avenue, a pile of books riding on his right hip, headed toward school. Other photographs followed, taking from an angle low enough that the subjects of the portraits appeared to be superheroes out of a comic book, men, women, and children on their way to meet destiny. Jimenez was one, the future his. The pose was much in the vein of the social realist art of the time, but in the half-century since it had fallen out of fashion—and now here it was, with numerous examples to point to.
Farley, who about that time had come up with a new process for printing photographs on ceramic tiles, resolved that one day he was going to figure out a way to incorporate those images into some project or another. Opportunity knocked again, just a few weeks later, when a “call to artists” arrived in the mail from the Tucson Pima Arts Council. Four walls, the call announced, were going to be made available for public art at the new terminus of the Aviation Corridor with Broadway at the underpass under the Southern Pacific railroad bridge, the eastern gateway to downtown. Farley’s idea was to use that space to erect a tile mural highlighting the street photography of the sort he had seen in Gilbert Jimenez’s album. He set about writing a proposal detailing that vision and the processes he would use to print the photographs, a process he calls “more biological than technical.”
“There were a lot of entries,” says downtown art gallery owner Terry Etherton, who was on the advisory board of TPAC at the time. “We narrowed it down to five. I didn’t know who Steve was, only that he was new to town and that he’d never done any public art before. But his proposal was so well grounded in history that it seemed like he’d been here all the time, and it was so well thought through, down to the tiniest detail and the last penny. Really, it was the smartest proposal I’d ever seen, and nothing honored Tucson’s history like his did. I supported the project from the get-go. Twenty years later, I’m glad I did.”
The other judges for the competition were unanimous in agreeing with Etherton, and they awarded Farley $171,000 to complete the project—a sum that sounds comfortable until you calculate the costs of making the art and spread it out over the number of hours required to make that art, at which point Farley might have done better to take a straight job.
He didn’t, but the race was on: From the time he started in earnest until the unveiling wasn’t much more than a year, and in the meanwhile there were photographs to find and tiles to make. The word went out that Farley and Kelly were on the hunt for street images from downtown’s golden age, back when all the city’s barrios were alive and the city center was where you had to come to buy shoes or a soda and see a film. Images began to turn up. One photo of an impossibly thin, impeccably dressed young man, a young god whose shoes gleamed whiter than the sun, turned out to be beloved musician Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero. He joined in the cause, performing at a benefit concert at which Linda Ronstadt made an appearance. Consciousness raised, the word out, people from all over the community began to turn up with images, and where there had been a desert before there was now a flood.
Meanwhile, Farley, Kelly, and the budding researchers with whom they were working began to find out more about the street photographers themselves, who freelanced for a downtown druggist with a charmingly simple operation: They’d snap a photo of an approaching pedestrian, give that person a card with a number and an address at which to pick up the shot, then develop the film and deliver it. A package of eight prints went for a buck and a quarter. The work was artful, capturing downtowners and visitors in midstride as they went about their day. The ploy worked, too. The photographers took as many as a thousand shots a day of the people whom Farley called “heroes and neighbors,” doing a thriving business until downtown slowly began to board up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, as shops moved to new centers such as El Con and Casas Adobes and the north and east sides exploded.
(Steve Farley at the mural dedication in 1999. Photo by Andrea Smith.)
Anyone who’s listened to Steve Farley make a political pitch in the years since knows that he knows that the devil truly is in the details—and that he’s a detail man par excellence. Finding those street images was a monumental undertaking in itself, one fraught with difficulties, for, as Farley says, “There’s always a risk of putting real people in public art.” No one ever complained, he adds, and as it turned out, it was just as difficult to narrow the number of images down once a mountain of them had been assembled as it had been to find and identify them.
In any event, rounding up all those images involved coordinating the efforts of many people and reaching out to many more, making cold calls, knocking on doors, talking and talking, fundraising, meeting, planning, delivering—in short, doing politics. Farley completed the project on time and under budget, but, as he says, “the bug had bit.” It wasn’t too long before he was running for public office, serving as a state representative and later senator, mounting runs for governor of Arizona and, this year, mayor of Tucson.
Working with longtime partners Rick Young and Tom Galloway, Farley has since gone on to do public art projects in cities all over the country. (See www.tilography.com for more on them.) Fifteen years after the Broadway Underpass mural project, the modern streetcar came onto the scene in Tucson, something that he’d been promoting—and scrapping for in the legislature—for years. That added a whole new layer to the downtown he envisioned as a newcomer, one that, at least in its better manifestations, is the one we have today.
As for the murals themselves, Farley points out that, unlike most available surfaces in this town, they’ve never been seriously vandalized. That might be the luck of the draw, but more likely it’s a sign of the respect that everyone in the community has for the army of ghosts and elders who inhabit those walls. A few tiles have been damaged here and there, and the city hasn’t done much to correct it, about the only downside that Farley finds in the whole project. The city, he says, has long since fallen down on its contractual obligation to maintain the project, a matter of some caulk and a few hundred dollars.
That would be money wisely spent, for the Broadway Underpass mural project is among the best known and most heavily visited sites of public art in the state, framed by Simon Donovan’s striking Rattlesnake Bridge on one side and a growing, constantly evolving downtown on the other. Great-grandchildren come to see their great-grandparents enshrined in tile, standing ten feet tall. Their great-grandparents oblige, looking like demigods—more than ordinary mortals, at least—in their crisp new blue jeans, their Stetsons and fedoras, their nearly pressed wool dresses and brilliant white shirts. Abuelas look at themselves as young girls, old men as boys out for a lark on a hot Saturday afternoon. Developers walk alongside artisans, cotton farmers, and window shoppers, lost and now refound in time. As Farley said in his speech marking the opening of the mural, “we have enough monuments to lizards and ocotillos. We have too few celebrating the everyday Tucsonans who built Tucson.”
Call it May 1, 1999, then, the day when Tucson, with a wall of art 18 feet tall by 158 feet long, took a giant step toward remaking a moribund downtown into the space it is today. “The murals were an intentional way of reminding people that downtown was and can be the heart of the community,” says Farley, 20 years on. “And they honor a past that we should always remember.”
“Merry Christmas? How about an angry Christmas?” So says John Waters, filmmaker, raconteur, writer, traveler, and bibliophile, who’s on his way to Tucson to deliver what he describes as “70 minutes of me talking about politics, culture, and everything that has to do with Christmas. How do you go back home when it’s a civil war out there? Some families are very tense, knocking over the Christmas tree—just like what happened in Female Trouble, only about Trump and not cha-cha.”
Waters is no stranger to Tucson, though it’s been a few years since he was last here. He’ll be presenting his show A John Waters Christmas at the Rialto Theatre on December 9 at 8:00 pm, fast on the heels of his new book Mr. Know-It-All (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Always on the go, always in an airplane bound somewhere far away from his hometown of Baltimore, he writes there, “Sometimes I feel like a low-rent Oscar Wilde touring the coal-mining towns of America as he did in the 1880s.” One of those coal-mining towns is ours, just one of 16 to which Waters will bring his Christmas cheer over a period of three weeks. Tucson figures early in the tour because, Waters notes after years of hard experience on the road, you want to do your shows in cities where the weather is likely to be rotten last—and that means the final stop is Chicago. But, no matter how clement the weather here, Waters isn’t likely to notice. “I go from the airport to the hotel to the theater to the hotel to the airport,” he says. “I’m almost never found in real life.”
The book is vintage Waters, a blend of his hallmark sardonic humor with reflections on his work as a filmmaker and guerrilla fighter in the culture wars. On one page he’s taking on Pope Francis, writing that when he becomes the first man to get pregnant, then he’ll be worth listening to on what women should do with their bodies: “Not until he’s given birth to a female transgender Christ child of a different color will we indulge him with a little queer mercy of our own.” On another he’s dissing Madonna for stealing Blondie’s shtick, though not without good cause: Dare rest for a minute on your laurels in show biz, and someone will come along to make it theirs. And on the matter of religion, ever a Christmas-worthy topic, he throws his lot in with the nonbelievers, though in no organized way: Put them in a room, and atheists will drink too much, he says. “Plus atheists dress badly, too. It’s unfortunate, but they are a dreary lot.”
The best parts of the book are his recollections of making his films, of which he names the little-seen Cecil B. Demented as his favorite. “I guess all directors have a soft spot for one of their films that did the worst at the box office,” he notes. Even Serial Mom had its difficulties, he allows, while films like Cry-Baby and Hairspray have entered the mainstream, if improbably, while the films that earned him the sobriquet “The King of Puke” have been enshrined as cult classics, plate-licking, scratch-and-sniff horrors, and all. On the mainstream front, he’s even become a spokesperson for Nike, which, he says, is “ludicrous and ironic.”
But, notes Waters, there are only so many theaters out there and only so many bookings, so in order to keep an act alive, you have to keep putting out new material. “This is a whole new show,” he says, talking with Zócalo a few weeks before the curtain goes up. “I’ve written about three-quarters of it, and I haven’t learned a bit of it yet. But it’s all new stuff—I try not to put anything in the show from the book, since if you’ve bought the book you already know it. I try hard to give you your money’s worth.” Angry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
Pride in the Desert Pays Tribute to the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall
On September 28, Tucson Pride is bringing together the LGBTQIA+ community and allies for a family-friendly day of fun, music, dance, and celebration during the Tucson Pride in the Desert festivities. Replete with the annual parade starting at 11 a.m. and a festival from noon to 9 p.m., Pride in the Desert involves balancing light-hearted jubilation with commemoration, reflection, and mobilization.
“Ultimately, ‘Rise Up!’ is a call to action in our community,” explains Tucson Pride President Sam Cloud over email. “We have made vast progress over 50 years, but there is still so much work to do and we look towards the next generation to rise up and continue the efforts of those who paved the way before us.”
The 50-year landmark Cloud refers to is the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which began in the early morning of Saturday, June 28 when police attempted – yet another – raid on the Stonewall Inn’s clientele. The patrons fought back, organized, and the queer community has been fighting for equal civil rights ever since.
Locally, the LGBTQIA+ community had its own Stonewall seven years later. According to TucsonPride.org, the “Tucson Pride history began with a different tragedy; the brutal murder of Richard Heakin, a young gay man leaving the Stonewall Tavern here in Tucson one evening in 1976. When his attackers were given a slap on the wrist, our community rose UNITED to rally for change, officially forming the organization now known as Tucson Pride. Their efforts led to some of the first LGBT anti-discrimination legislation in the country.”
For the last 42 years, pride events have been held annually – starting at Himmel Park in 1977 with a handful of community members in attendance. Now, it is a large-scale fete that hosts over 4,000 event-goers flocking to Reid Park to enjoy the parade, activities for all-ages – including a Kid Zone, two stages of entertainment, along with loads of vendors and community resources set up throughout the event area.
“It takes a village to put on both the parade and festival,” Cloud shares, laying out the impressive details of producing an event that costs $70,000. The nonprofit’s board of directors navigates numerous local and state governmental agencies such as Parks and Recreation and the Tucson Police and Fire departments, coordinates 150 volunteers, collaborates with over 100 sponsors and vendors, works with other Pride organizations, books entertainment with local and national talent, diligently fundraises, and manages all the logistics that ensure event goers are happy and comfortable.
“We’ve addressed feedback from the community last year related to the festival and how we can improve the experience for all,” Cloud details. “We’ve added cooling tents, free water, more diversity, LGBTQ history, and we’ve implemented new processes to reduce admission line wait times.”
Debby Holiday headlines the main stage at Tucson Pride in the Desert festival on Sat, Sept 28. Photo courtesy Tucson Pride
In addition to live music, Tucson Pride’s Tucson Queerstory R*Evolution committee will have a historic walk through the festival grounds highlighting notable moments in local LGBTQIA+ history, as well as displaying memorabilia and video, and collecting personal stories from attendees for a video archive.
Along with supporting, celebrating, and fostering understanding of a diverse queer community, the focus of Pride in the Desert is firmly rooted in promoting the visibility of the LGBTQIA+ people and the ongoing work for equal rights.
“Visibility is crucial, now more than ever.” Cloud elucidates: “There is a large portion of the population that believes since our community now has the ability to marry same sex partners that we have achieved equal rights. This is far from the truth! Rights of people identifying as transgender have been ripped away from them. We still do not have full protection under the law to be free from employment discrimination, housing discrimination, businesses can still refuse service to us (remember the wedding cake bakery controversy?).
“Locally, one of the key issues happening right now is the ongoing debate over TUSD’s proposed new inclusive, age-appropriate and scientifically based sex education curriculum.”
According to an Arizona Public Media story published in late August, TUSD’s “curriculum is controversial because it moves beyond sexual abstinence as the only effective way of preventing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. The updated proposal also takes a more gender-neutral position toward LGBT students, removing language they might find offensive.” The Tucson Unified School District board will vote on updating the sex education curriculum on September 10.
In an August 22, 2019 KVOA Channel 4 interview on the TUSD sex education updates, Cloud eloquently states, “Education and knowledge is power. That’s how we change things, and to limit children from education that could very well save their lives someday is abhorrent. We cannot do that. Children deserve better. The next generation deserves better.”
The next generation does deserve better. For the progress made over the last five decades (see below for landmark events), the fact that violent hate crimes perpetuated against the queer community still happen and that Safe Spaces are set up at local businesses to assist victims of hate crimes is telling.
“We’re people too,” Cloud said in an August 21 KVOA Channel 4 interview. “We’re just like everyone else, we have families, we have jobs, we deserve the same rights and we deserve to not live in fear.”
The Pride parade is free to spectators, starts at 11 a.m., and wends from Country Club Road and Broadway Boulevard to Reid Park at South Concert Place Way. To participate in the parade, there are nominal fees based on the entry type. The deadline to enter is Sept. 14. Email parade@tucsonpride.org for entry details and costs. General admission tickets for the festival are $20, with various discounts offered. Visit TucsonPride.org/pride2019 for all of the information.
Landmark Events in the LGBTQIA+ Human Rights Movement since Stonewall*
June 28, 1969: The Stonewall Riots put the LGBT movement on the mainstream map due to the size and media publicity.
December 1973: The American Psychiatric Association removes homosexuality as a “diagnosis” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
May 20, 1996: Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) rules a Colorado state constitutional amendment preventing protected status based upon homosexuality or bisexuality goes against the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause in Romer v. Evans.
June 26, 2003: In Lawrence v. Texas, SCOTUS rules that laws prohibiting private homosexual activity between consenting adults are unconstitutional and violate the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment Due Process Clause.
October 2009: The Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act becomes U.S. law, expanding the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.
September 20, 2011: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010 is implemented, “allowing” gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to serve openly in the U.S. Armed Forces. (It did not establish a non-discrimination policy.)
December 2012: The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) adopts a Strategic Enforcement Plan that includes “coverage of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals under the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Title VII sex discrimination provisions, as they may apply” as a top Commission enforcement priority.
June 26, 2013: SCOTUS strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in United States v. Windsor, ruling that DOMA’s denial of federal recognition of same-sex marriages violates the U.S. Constitution’s 5th Amendment Due Process Clause.
January 2015: President Obama acknowledges the LGBTQ community in the State of the Union address. For the first time in U.S. history, the words lesbian, bisexual, and transgender were used in the president’s State of the Union address, when President Obama mentioned that, as Americans, we “respect human dignity” and condemn the persecution of minority groups.
April 2015:President Obama calls for end to conversion therapy. (Note that the link to the WhiteHouse.gov website referenced in the article, along with the petition, lead to a dead link on WhiteHouse.gov.)
June 26, 2015: Love wins! SCOTUS rules in Obergefell v. Hodgesthat marriage is a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. This decision also enables married, same-sex couples to adopt children.
July 15, 2015: The U.S. EEOC rules that discrimination based on sexual orientation is covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Title VII prohibition on sex discrimination in the workplace.
July 23, 2015: The Equality Act is introduced in the U.S. Congress to amend Title VII to extend protection against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination.
June 30, 2016: U.S. Military bans on transgender people serving in the armed forces are repealed. (However, on January 22, 2019, SCOTUS allowed Trump’s March 2018 ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. Armed Forces to take effect.)
November 2018:LGBTQ candidates sweep the U.S. midterm elections. More than 150 LGBTQ candidates are elected into local, state, and national offices, putting a historic number of queer or transgender politicians in positions of power.
May 2019: Just ahead of Pride 2019, New York City announced it will erect a monument in Greenwich Village dedicated to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, activists who played critical roles in both the Stonewall Riots and the NYC queer scene. The two started Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) in 1970, an organization dedicated to helping LGBTQ people experiencing homelessness.
*The United States has no federal law prohibiting discrimination nationwide other than from federal executive orders which have a more limited scope than from protections through federal legislation. This list of dates is certainly not exhaustive.
These dates were outlined by – with a huge thanks to – Tucson Pride President Sam Cloud, along with some additions by this author.
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The 50-year landmark Cloud refers to is the 
For the last 42 years, pride events have been held annually – starting at Himmel Park in 1977 with a handful of community members in attendance. Now, it is a large-scale fete that hosts over 4,000 event-goers flocking to Reid Park to enjoy the parade, activities for all-ages – including a Kid Zone, two stages of entertainment, along with loads of vendors and community resources set up throughout the event area. 
that we have achieved equal rights. This is far from the truth! Rights of people identifying as transgender have been ripped away from them. We still do not have full protection under the law to be free from employment discrimination, housing discrimination, businesses can still refuse service to us (remember the wedding cake bakery controversy?).
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