photo gallery
Gracie Malley
Thursday, March 9, 2017 • 6:30–9pm
ADMISSION: Free with Museum admission ($5 after 5pm); 21+
Delve into the delightfully funny Cary Leibowitz exhibition. Evening includes a drag meghilla starring LOL Mcfiercen and Black Benatar; CHEER San Francisco fires up the crowd with backflips and pyramids; Leibowitz gallery games and crafts; “Ask the Scribe” with Julie Seltzer; noshes by Let’s be Frank and specialty cocktails by Tonic; DJ More Da High, Purim games and activities with Keshet, Reboot, and Sha’ar Zahav.
CHEER San Francisco strikes a pose in the Koret Taube Grand Lobby. View more photos of the event on our Facebook page!
Beatrice Thomas aka Black Benatar is a multidisciplinary performance artist, director, curator, and arts consultant with a BA in Film/Video/Theater and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Design. Her drag persona Black Benatar is a grotesque female-bodied “it” that embodies a dialogue between race, gender, and intersectionality. Black Benatar is not a queen who is out performing everywhere. She uses her time on stage to shine a light on challenging issues or human conditions. She roots her performances in artistic concept or socially relevant topics that make performances feel like a happening.
She hosts Black Love, a quarterly showcase of queer and trans performers from the African diaspora at Strut, a gay men’s health organization in San Francisco, and is a featured drag queen for RADAR Productions “Drag Queen Story Hour” a program that brings drag queens to read stories at public libraries. As a consultant, Thomas works to promote equity and inclusion on the national arts platform, through workshops, public speaking and consulting. She is an inaugural fellow of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals Leadership Fellows Program.
Not unlike Botticelli’s sensuous Venus emerging from a churning sea, San Francisco-based drag queen LOL McFiercen was birthed in a frenzy of rainbows, unicorns, sparkles, kittens, and hearts. LOL creates kitschy performances that queer girlish femininity and subvert patriarchy. She is a co-hostess of The Monster Show and Lilith Bear as well as the founder of the grassroots drag skill-sharing group Make Up Club. LOL performs locally at nightlife venues like The Edge, The Stud, Oasis, and El Rio, and has appeared at cultural sites like the de Young Museum and SOMArts Cultural Center. She participated in the 2015 Austin International Drag Festival and has appeared nationally in Los Angeles, New York City, and Portland. LOL was a core artist on Work MORE 7: Daughters of a RIOT! that retold San Francisco's LGBTQ histories on stage at Brava Theater, and holds the titles of 2012 Miss SOME THING Has Talent and 2013 San Francisco Corn Dog Queen.
Since 1980, CHEER San Francisco®, the Official Cheer Team of the City and County of San Francisco, has been thrilling crowds locally, nationally, and internationally with their unique brand of high-energy performances.
The team works together to develop cutting-edge cheerleading shows for annual events like the Castro Street Fair in the fall and Pride parades and festivals in the spring and summer. Their charitable cheerleading efforts are a year-round labor of love that we embrace and cherish.
The world’s first LGBTQ-identified cheerleading team, CHEER San Francisco was founded in 1980 by Guy Andrade. In 2004, CHEER SF proudly began doing business as their own nonprofit called the CHEER For Life Foundation, Inc. The CHEER For Life platform has become their primary focus, turning their amazing performance work into a means of providing support to organizations that provide services to individuals and families facing life-threatening challenges such as HIV/AIDS and Breast Cancer.