Page 156 – Bohemian | Sonoma & Napa Counties

Radio Daze: Steve Jaxon, ‘The Drive’ plan next moves

Daedalus Howell

Jun 6, 2023

Radio Daze: Steve Jaxon, ‘The Drive’ plan next moves

Avid listeners of KSRO will notice an unfamiliar sound coming through the drive-time airwaves this week.

As was announced last week and echoed in sundry local media outlets, the long-running radio show, The Drive with Steve Jaxon, has been unexpectedly discontinued by the station’s management. As of this writing, it’s unclear what will replace the show, but whatever it is, it won’t sound like Jaxon.

Jaxon and his longtime business partner, Cathy Ratto, have produced the show for the past 15 years. Last Friday’s 3 to 6pm slot was its final airing on KSRO. The team is currently in talks with another local broadcaster to continue delivering the show to its intensely loyal audience.

With many a misty eye among the dozen or more guests who dropped by during the farewell broadcast (some bearing bottles of chardonnay—Jaxon’s favorite wine varietal), the mood was emotional, especially as tributes to Jaxon and his on-air cohorts (including co-host Harry Duke, the theater critic for the Bohemian and Pacific Sun) began to pour in.

Among them was a heartfelt pre-recorded message from Jaxon’s former producer, Mike DeWald.

“I have to say, if you told me Steve Jaxon was being canceled in 2023, I would’ve thought something very different,” observed DeWald, who is now a reporter at KCBS. “The Drive is a Sonoma County institution, a one of a kind place for the community to gather on the radio. It’s something that never should have worked. It’s an insane idea. A late night show on the radio, news makers, comedians, live music, pop culture, a slice of life of what it means to live in Sonoma County, and yet it did. It worked because of the listeners. It worked because of the crew. It worked because of the guests. It worked because of Steve’s ability to be the glue that holds the whole thing together.”

Indeed, The Drive wasn’t just a local institution but an on-ramp to a slew of adventures across the nation. In his statement, DeWald cited time in the “kitchen with Jon Stewart,” visiting Chris Rock at the Comedy Cellar, the corner office of Lanny Davis and the Democratic National Convention among other highlights.

This is not the first attempt to take Jaxon and The Drive off air. In June 2010, when then station owner Maverick Media unceremoniously laid off Jaxon for three weeks, popular uproar led to his reinstatement and the rebirth of the show in the incarnation that endured until last Friday.

As former Bohemian editor Gabe Meline remarked at the time, “Jaxon just has a certain magnetism, a cool detachment which inspires guests to loosen up and talk freely.”

Among these guests, hailing from Jaxon’s extensive network of contacts who he referred to as “The Drive Hall-of-Famers,” is yours truly, who, with various Bohemian contributors, appeared in a weekly segment called “Boho Buzz.”

The Bohemian has had a fruitful relationship with The Drive and even once recognized Jaxon with a cheeky accolade: Best Damn Media Personality.

“And so it is, as both fan and friend, that I declare Steve Jaxon, the host of The Drive… the Best Damn Media Personality of the North Bay,” I wrote in March of 2021. “With both the personality and pipes—the best in the biz—Jaxon fills not just the ears of the North Bay, but also its hearts.”

Still true.

Haus Party: BROT is wunderbar

Daedalus Howell

Jun 6, 2023

Life is full of odd little coincidences. The longer one lives, the more they seem less like coincidences and more like a glitch in the Matrix.

For example, for reasons known only to the vicissitudes of local advertising agendas, our burger and beer edition happens to also be our Pride edition. And since I can’t think about writing without first driving aimlessly for hours, I had made it as far as Guerneville before my car needed a charge.

I plugged in, strolled into Books & Letters, bought Berlin by Bea Setton, then asked my phone to find me a place to eat. It did, and an AI chatbot called a restaurant on my behalf before I could stop it. Fortunately, the restaurant in question hung up on the robo-call, which I applaud (I mean, why hasten the AI uprising?). Welcome to BROT, which proffers a “modern German concept serving delicious classics in a warm Bavarian atmosphere.”

To be clear, by “modern” we mean contemporary, not a glimpse of the future, which, as anyone who’s visited rural Guerneville knows, only arrives in the rivertown in carefully curated drips (i.e., the car charger). That said, it was there that I tasted the future of hamburgers, a.k.a. the BROT Burger.

Whereas, hamburgers served elsewhere in Sonoma and Napa adhere to the cultural hegemony of the American burger (American cheese, lettuce, pickles, ketchup), BROT makes an assured pivot. Sure they offer the American-style burger (ditto an Alpine-themed variation with Swiss cheese, grilled mushrooms and an aioli), but, as my affable waiter astutely observed when I hesitated, versions of the other burgers are available everywhere—but a BROT Burger is unique to BROT.

With Emmentaler cheese, two types of cabbage (in both sauerkraut and fresh iterations that glow like neon) and a special “haus” sauce, the burger is elegant in its simplicity and complex and powerful on the palate ($20). Served with fries, it pairs well with, frankly, any selection from BROT’s impressive “bier” menu.

I recommend having a liter or two of the Schneider Weisse, original style—a wheat beer that boasts a centuries-old beermaking pedigree, redolent of baked goods, nutmeg and clove.

It was during my second beer that I realized I was reading Berlin, drinking a Bavarian brew and enjoying my BROT Burger, on the eve of Pride in a town dubbed by Insider as a “unique, queer version of rural America.” Right place, right time, in just the right way—I’m definitely living in a simulation.

SoCo Pride: Local LGBTQ Event Comes of Age

Lois Pearlman

Jun 6, 2023

SoCo Pride: Local LGBTQ Event Comes of Age

Contingents representing towns, politicians, nonprofits, places of worship, hospitals and tech companies—along with children, dogs, people pushing wheelchairs and walkers, and even those blowing bubbles—all marched, danced, sang, performed gymnastics and waved rainbow flags, before a crowd of thousands at the June 3 Sonoma County Pride Parade.

Witnessing this exuberant event, and the crowd that it brings to downtown Santa Rosa each year, it is hard to believe that it all started 36 years ago with a simple potluck picnic at Spring Lake, organized by an intrepid little group of gays and lesbians—the LGBTQ terminology was to come later—that called itself Forward Together.

That’s when the newly formed organization decided its first campaign would be to ask the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors to declare a Gay Pride Week. Why not? It wouldn’t cost the county a penny, as one Forward Together founder, Magi Fedorka, recently pointed out. At the time, the county was already celebrating more frivolous things, like National Pickle Week.

But the supervisors refused to put a Pride Week on their agenda, so Forward Together declared its own Pride Week and threw itself a celebration. The group chose the concept of “pride” because it was non-threatening, unlike San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day, and it also countered the stigma that gay men were experiencing during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

So, people from various sectors of the gay and lesbian community brought their pride, their favorite dishes, their children and their dogs, to Jack Rabbit Meadows that happy day in June. Veterans Care, a gay veterans group, barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers, and people partied down, thumbing their noses at the county establishment that thought recognizing gays and lesbians was just going way too far.

Four years later, the Lesbian Voters Action Caucus brought the celebration to the streets of Santa Rosa. Without a permit, which required confining participants to the sidewalk, they held the county’s first ever Lesbian and Gay Pride March.

Finally, in 1992, a Pride Week resolution garnered the needed four-vote majority, and it became an official county celebration. But this was only the beginning of what has turned into two weeks of festivities that attract tens of thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) locals and their friends, as well as tourists and travel writers. Interestingly, the former Forward Together movers and shakers have mixed emotions about how the celebration of Pride Week has evolved over the years into this much bigger, and corporate-funded, experience.

“The sense of community is gone,” said Tina Dugan, who has put together a timeline of LGBTQ activism in Sonoma County, and hosts a class about LGBTQ history through Sonoma County Junior College.

“It seemed more robust earlier on,” is how Janet Zagoria put it. As a photographer, she has chronicled the flow of Sonoma County LGBTQ activism over the years.

While bemoaning that Pride is no longer the political statement that it was in the “old days,” Fedorka admitted that, “There’s an inclusivity in today’s Pride.”

And that is the game changer that a younger generation of activists sees as a new approach to bringing its community into the mainstream of Sonoma County, while also honoring the lives of people who are a little different than the heterosexual and cisgender majority. Cisgender refers to identifying as the same gender a person is biologically, but has nothing to do with sexual orientation.

From this new perspective, Pride made a giant leap forward this year when the Latino organization, Los Cien, co-sponsored Fiesta al Cien, with the local organization Trans Life. The main organizers of the event, Ramon Meraz and Chase Overholt, are both gay men and members of the Los Cien board of directors. They beamed with joy as they described how bringing the LGBTQ community together with the larger Latino community is a dream come true.

“When I went to the state of the Latino community address eight or nine years ago,” Meraz said, “there was no data about LGBTQ people within the Latino community. They didn’t realize that the LGBTQ community is invisible within the Latino community, and the trans community is doubly invisible.”

So this year, under the new leadership of Herman G. Hernandez, a young Latino activist who grew up in Guerneville, the Los Cien board took the courageous step, not only of acknowledging its own LGBTQ people, but also embracing the larger LGBTQ community.

“Herman is so committed to diversity and social justice,” Meraz said.

“It’s a new era,” said Overholt, joking that he has made a pink suit for Hernandez, a straight-but-not-narrow guy, to wear as co-emcee of the event.

While the Santa Rosa celebrations have come and gone, there is still another opportunity to enjoy a Pride event this coming Saturday, June 10, in Windsor. Oh my God, Windsor, a bastion of mom-and-pop, two-kids-and-a-dog families, or so thought Spencer Blank when he moved there a couple of years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I knew Windsor was family-oriented,” said Blank, “but I have never felt discriminated against here. So, I wanted to throw a party that would embrace the whole community. I wanted to come out of the pandemic better than when I came in.”

Blank describes Windsor Pride as the “next generation of Pride festivals… a celebration of identity for all.” And the definition seems to fit because the week of activities, which will culminate June 10 with a celebration in Windsor’s town green, definitely attracts more than the LGBTQ community. Last year, which was the first time for Windsor Pride, it actually drew more allies than LGBTQ folks, Blank said. To make the inclusivity of the event clear to everyone, the Windsor Pride committee calls it “Love Wins in Windsor.”

Nico Reilly Turner, the 16-year-old president of Windsor High School’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance, agrees that love is abundant there. Turner has identified as non-binary since eighth grade. Non-binary means the person does not identify exclusively as male or female.

“A lot of my straight and cis friends come (to Windsor Pride) to have fun with me,” Turner said. “It feels nice that you don’t have to be part of the LGBTQ community to go to one of these events. We love and respect each other, and I’m glad we can all be together.”

Last year, a very special young lady was the junior grand marshal for Windsor Pride. According to her mother, Andrea, Dina Nofi realized at the age of three and a half that she is a girl and not the boy she was born as biologically.

“She came into the room and asked us, ‘When am I going to become a girl?’ We knew it was time for us to start educating ourselves,” said Andrea Nofi.

Dina Nofi and her mother marched last year in the Santa Rosa parade, as part of the Windsor contingent. And Saturday she can be found at her Girl Scout troop’s Windsor Pride booth, where her mom will be offering mom hugs, especially for LGBTQ children who might not get that kind of acceptance in their own homes. Dina Nofi is a member of a Girl Scout troop for LGBTQ, special needs and medically fragile girls.

How did Dina Nofi feel about being a seven-year-old openly transgender girl at the Windsor festival last year?

“Happy,” she said, to be honored for being her true self, and for the fun of wearing her crown and holding her flowers.