Smack Dab Open Mic featuring Max Wolf Valerio and Mark Islam April 18, 2007

Open stage hosted by Larry-bob and Kirk Read.
Features: Max Wolf Valerio and Mark Islam (see below for bios.)

All ages, all genders, all the time. FREE!

If you'd like to perform at the open mic, please bring five minutes or less
of your music, writing, dance, performance, cooking suggestions, sex tips,
gossip or whatever it is you want to share. Musicians, one song. Prose
writers: that's about two and a half double spaced pages of prose.

At Magnet, the queer neighborhood health center, 4122 18th Street between
Castro and Collingwood. www.magnetsf.org

Making a rare San Francisco appearance, Mark Islam is by his own admission
"first & foremost a songwriter. I'm the guy who observes with pen in hand,
recording my perceptions." Islam has released two independent albums of
original material, The Recent Past [1998] & The Fine Print [2001], both of
which earned critical praise. To wit, Genre magazine called the Delaware
native "a refreshing new artist who sings and plays by his own rules and his
own convictions," & Billboard called him "a charismatic, endearing
performer." Although he has played "anywhere with a mic & a stage"
throughout the United States, Canada & Australia in support of his releases,
in recent years he's remained homebound in Los Angeles, quietly writing &
workshopping tunes for his next project, an album of deeply personal &
confessional material which he plans to begin recording in late summer of
2007. Please feel free to visit Mark at www.markislam.com or
www.myspace.com/markislam.

Max Wolf Valerio is an iconoclastic poet and performer who is also a
long-transitioned transman. His ancestry is American Indian and Hispano. His
new memoir, "The Testosterone Files," recreates in vivid images and with
irreverent humor the social and hormonal transformation Max experiences as
his masculinity unfolds biologically. The Testosterone Files is a Lambda
Finalist this year, in the Transgender category.
Max has appeared in many documentaries on being trans including: You Don't
Know Dick dir. Candace Schermerhorn and Bustor Cam, Gendernauts, Max from
the feature Female Misbehavior both directed by Monika Treut, Octopus Alarm
dir. Elizabeth Shrang. His essays have appeared in: This Bridge We Call
Home, This Bridge Called My Back, and Male Lust. Max is also featured in
Body Alchemy by Loren Cameron, Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, and
The Phallus Palace. He lives in San Francisco and continues to practice
various forms of seduction and sabotage, mostly while asleep and dreaming,
but often while writing a poem or considering a new work of prose.

Official Website: http://www.sfqeer.com