Jun 18, 2024
I'm super-stoked to do a
podcast all about The Stud and folks
from the collective who run the place!
In Part 1, we start
with Marke B. Many
longtime listeners will remember Marke from his Season 3 Storied
episode. In this go-round, we get a condensed version of his life
story and how he made his way to San Francisco.
In his hometown of Detroit,
Marke threw raves and made enough money on that to put himself
through college. Sometime in those four years of school, he
realized that his dream of writing for a local newspaper or weekly
was damn near impossible. Also, it was the height of AIDS and
Detroit didn't have much of an infrastructure around
that.
His best friend bought two
train tickets and told Marke, "Pack your bags, we're leaving for
San Francisco tomorrow." That didn't sit well with Marke at the
time. He wasn't crazy about SF back then—he hated hippies, hated
the Beats. He had visited with his family at 14, when he tried to
run away from his parents and take a cable car to the Castro. That,
of course, didn't work out so well (try the F-Market trains,
kid).
Despite his dislike of The
City, his desire to get out of Detroit got him on that train.
Two-and-a-half days and a couple bags of potato chips later, Marke
arrived. It was the day after Pride 1994, and he's been here ever
since.
He saw a gay scene that was too
white and mainstreamy. But he found his people—other people of
color, into alternative music—at The End Up. His first time
at The
Stud was on a Monday hip-hop night. Immediately, he felt
he had truly arrived.
Years later, in 2016, Rachel
Ryan and another co-op member asked Marke and his husband, David,
to join their collective. They've both been members since
then.
Then we turn
to Rachel Ryan. Rachel grew up in The City,
Noe Valley specifically. Her parents put her in Live Oak School,
back when it was located in the Castro. That experience helped
to shape Rachel—her kindergarten teacher was young and gay and had
bleach-blonde hair. He was an early role model for
her.
Her liberal family moved to
Marin for that oh-so familiar reason: San Francisco became too
expensive for them. But her dad's work was headquartered near The
Eagle in South of Market, and Rachel spent some time with him in
that area when she was young.
She thinks back on her time in
Marin fondly, from the access to nature to the freedoms her parents
were able to grant her. But at the same time, her parents were
protective of their daughter—she was free as long as she was with
her older brother.
Rachel got into swing dancing
at a young age. She'd come to The City to go to swing clubs in the
Nineties. But once her older brother and his friend graduated high
school and went to college, that ended.
College for her meant UC Santa
Cruz. And after graduating there, she moved back to San Francisco
right away. Today, she lives really close to where she grew
up.
Growing up, Rachel carried
bisexual shame. She felt at times that she wasn't gay enough, but
also found herself immersed in queer culture through friends. Then,
in 2009, a trip to The Stud changed everything. "These are my
people," she thought.
Years later, Rachel and her
people started noticing the closure of more and more queer bars and
spaces around The City. Their friends were getting priced out of
San Francisco more and more frequently, and they were fed up. The
previous owner of The Stud, Michael McElheney, announced that he
wanted to retire and sell the bar, and Rachel, Nate Albee, and some
other of those friends seized the opportunity. The newly formed
Stud Collective took over in 2016.
Next up
is Honey
Mahogany. Honey's parents fled Ethiopia for San
Francisco as refugees. She grew up in the Outer Sunset just off
Taraval in the Eighties and Nineties. Her parents put her through
Catholic school for K–12. It was a rather sheltered, quiet
childhood, one where she could walk to aunts' and uncles' houses in
the same neighborhood.
For college, Honey moved to Los
Angeles to attend USC. She came out down there around this time,
and became, in her words, "super queer." She started doing drag in
LA, in fact. She found her true self in those experiences and being
away from home, where she was able to establish her identity apart
from her family.
But her family still didn't
know about her queerness. One of her cousins outed her to her
fairly conservative, Catholic parents, who reacted negatively.
After she graduated college, they sent her to Ethiopia to "get away
from negative influences." While in Africa, she interned for the
UN. "I've always been involved in social justice," she says, and
the UN was a natural fit ... or so she imagined. And so Honey came
back to The Bay to study social work at UC Berkeley.
Her dad became ill around this
time, and so the move back doubled as a chance to help take care of
him. She found social justice work in Contra Costa County, got a
spot on Ru Paul's Drag Race, and joined the newly
formed Stud Collective.
The Stud was near where Honey
worked in the late 2000s. A friendly bartender endeared her and a
drag queen named Virginia Suicide hypnotized her. She was
hooked.
Please check back next week for
Part 2 of my episode on The Stud.
We recorded this episode at
The Stud in South of Market in June 2024.
Photography by Jeff
Hunt