Hilary Holladay queries a San Francisco photographer CHLOE SHERMAN’S Renegades: San Francisco: The 1990s (published by Hatje Cantz) captures the city’s lesbian and queer life in sexy, buoyantly expressive photos. The heavily saturated colors in many of the pictures give birthday parties and bar meetups a mesmerizing glamor, and the young women in the photos, mostly friends of Sherman’s, exude self-confidence in themselves and trust in their chronicler. That sense of trust and connection strikes me as one of the book’s most distinctive qualities, and it is one that Sherman herself greatly values. I caught up with Sherman recently to learn more about her and the lesbian and queer subculture in and around San Francisco’s Mission District when it was still possible to move there on a youthful whim and, by closing time at the Bearded Lady, have a decent place to live and at least one friend to sleep with. This interview was conducted by email in late December 2023. Hilary Holladay: Since the theme of this issue is “San Francisco,” let’s start with a question about the city. You moved to San Francisco when you were 21 at the beginning of the 1990s, which is the decade that you chronicle inRenegades. What did you do before you enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute and earned your BFA in photography? Chloe Sherman: I was a bike messenger for a bit; I worked in produce at a health food store; I worked some at the Bearded Lady Cafe. I traveled when opportunities arose. I went on a European and a U.S. tour with the band Tribe 8 in my earlier years. There were so many bands at the time—most of my friends were in a band at some point. I started a band with six other people in the mid-’90s called Cypher in the Snow. I played bass, and we recorded a few albums and also toured the U.S. and had a few West Coast tours. There was a “queercore”/“homocore” music movement. There really was room in San Francisco to collaborate and make things come to fruition. HH: What else can you tell me about San Francisco in the 1990s? CS: It was a bustling, dynamic, and creative time. Queer youth, outcasts, and artists flocked to the city to find one another. People were experimental with art, with self-expression, with style, with gender. And the city was viINTERVIEW CHLOE SHERMAN Hilary Holladay, a frequent contributor to these pages, is the author of The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography. brant. A queer cultural renaissance was unfolding while people showed up, joined forces, made new rules, and lived free. The Mission District and surrounding neighborhoods became a hub of queer-centric businesses, clubs, bars, cafés, tattoo shops, bookstores, galleries, and performance spaces. There was a growing and strong sense of community and collaboration, a sense of collective creativity, of support, of pride and a strident defiance of cultural norms. HH: What was it like at the San Francisco Art Institute when you were a student there? CS: I loved my time at SFAI. It was a special place with an impressive history of educating renowned artists like Annie Leibovitz, Cathy Opie, and Dorothea Lange, and the building hosts a spectacular Diego Rivera mural. It was an inspiring and productive place to be—a creative incubator. I was immersed in photography and friends with painters and multimedia artists, all of us talking about our work and brimming with ideas. I had great mentors and professors. My photographic subject was selfguided, but my work was welcomed and well-reviewed. HH: Where did you live in those days, and how has San Francisco changed in recent decades? CS: I lived in the Mission when I first moved to San Francisco, first on 14th St., then on 22nd St. I was briefly in the Lower Haight on Pierce Street near Duboce Park, then I settled for years in Noe Valley off 24th St. It was easy to move into a room in a flat with people you knew. ‘Outcasts and artists flocked to the city.’ 20 TheG&LR Chloe Sherman. Sidewalk Music, 1997.
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