Exiting the BART station at Powell Street you could walk straight up Powell, and a few blocks later find yourself surrounded by enormous corporate luxury hotels—Westin St. Francis, Hotel Nikko, Hyatt, Marriot…. But I didn’t take that route; instead I made a sharp left turn from the station so I would end up at Turk and Taylor streets in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, home to dozens of SROs.

There I watched a rehearsal of aerial dance troupe Flyaway Production’s Down on the Corner (October 3-4 and 9-11, 7:15pm, southeast corner of Turk and Taylor Streets, SF) inspired in part by the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, in the Transgender Cultural District, the first legally recognized transgender district in the world. That 1966 uprising was one of the first times LGBTQ people

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