Big Idea Night Party at YBCA: Sounds Like A Great Idea To Me

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This past Saturday night I attended the Big Idea Night party at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is by far the best Queer Awareness event held in an art museum where there are drinks and free music in the entire city! That sounds a bit ridiculous when you write it out like that, but don't let my choice of punctuation dissuade you from enjoying it. In fact, don't let anything keep you from enjoying it.

On paper the details of this event (Put on by The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, $6 drinks, featuring Queer Burlesque and Oaklandish Crunk-Funk acts) would make it seem like the exact opposite of the the kind of thing I'd like to do on a Saturday night. (Except maybe the part that was catered by Orson - I've been meaning to get more pork products in my life.) But that doesn't mean it's an event I do not want to attend.

I was having so much fun I forgot to twitter!As a white male breeder (how pedestrian!) I'm not very good at dancing, have only a cursory interest in the art world, and am subject to budgetary limitations. This means I tend to gravitate towards dive bars where I can imbibe various cheap and amber-colored poisons while silently judging members of my peer group. This is opposed to say, Dance Clubs where I would imbibe various expensive and neon-colored poisons while silently judging members of someone else's peer group. So naturally, I'd be a little out of place at an event like this and my usual defense mechanism is to hide in the corner and drink too much while thinking up snarky comments.

But something in the way everyone in attendance last Saturday was able to completely embrace every stereotype made me check my snark at the door. I was having so much fun I forgot to twitter! I mean, they were serving Campari! Who does that? "Old French Men," quipped an out-of-town friend who came along. It's an acute observation that is perfectly accurate, and highlights the fact that the gay crowd has great taste. Campari is classic: never trendy, but never out of favor either. (And also those Campari Grande Bellas were delicious!)

I'm no Professor Gender Roles over here, but the acts that took the stage throughout the night were playfully subversive. I wasn't concerned with whether or not I found the Diamond Daggers burlesque troupe titillating, rather I was in awe of how many people loved their act and how they fed off the crowd's enthusiastic energy while twirling peacock feathers in their skivvies. Even Hot Tub, the Oakland-based "Punk/Crunk/Funk" band who I've described for another site as "girls who were kicking shins and breaking second grade hearts on the playground" were a perfect fit for the crowd that stayed past midnight to break a few hearts of their own. It's a bit like watching Glee - this really shouldn't be the kind of thing I enjoy, but everyone is just having too much fun to be denied.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that during this whole thing the galleries at YBCA are still open. Which, given the number of heavily buzzed people stumbling about, kind of seems like a bad idea (especially since one piece is an installation involving several bowls of dyed water laying about on the floor). But there were also several dark rooms with projections by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica that may have been very important to silent daytime museum-goers, but in the middle of this whole to-do, they offered a kind of artsy champagne room where revelers could kick back on bean bags on the floor and trip out for a little bit while the shapes on the wall danced.

Speaking of revelers, the entire crowd was enthusiastic. It was clear after a couple Campari drinks that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are good at a great many things (like makeup!), but their greatest strength is their ability to engage everyone, not just the members of the gay community, through events like this. There were plenty of awkward straight guys with worse dance moves than myself, pointing fingers in the air and getting down with the rest of them. A trio of hyper-rad hip hop kids seemed to be enjoying their own little spotlight without looking the least bit out of place, and actually their day-glo accessories would have been a great compliment to the Oiticica pieces in the gallery. A dapper gentleman in an impossible-to-pull-off green suit and purple tie stopped me to take his picture without even asking where he'd be able to find the pictures later. (Hello, sir! Your photos are in the Appeal's flickr stream.)

These events are common ground. Although it is very clearly branded as a queer awareness event, and the crowd was predominantly gay, it's not nearly as intimidating as a Saturday night out in the Castro, where even the tamest bars are overflowing with more machismo than a last-call round of beer pong at Bar None. (Just kidding! Nothing is more competitive than a bunch of dudes wearing pink shirts sloppily trying to dunk their balls after a couple rounds of Jager bombs.)

The bottom line is, like so many things, the gays just do it better.Because our city is so diverse, we have a tendency in San Francisco to get a little overzealous in our attempts to be heard above the cacophony of various activists. This kind of overcompensation is the enemy of the true cause and is so often off-putting. (See also: Critical Mass Backlash of '09.) These Big Idea Night parties are a refreshing change from so much force-fed activism, where even an introverted hetero like myself can just jump in and join the celebration. It sounds kind of cheesy in retrospect, but at some point after I lost count of the Camparis and Sierra Nevadas, it felt like we were all there to celebrate people in all their various forms regardless of who the event was designed for.

The bottom line is, like so many things, that the gays just do it better. I could ignorantly cop some jokes from Will & Grace here, but just look at the evidence: They know good food when they see it. They have impeccable taste in aperitifs. And they can throw a damn good party. It makes me sad for all the awesome weddings they should be throwing.