As I work on organizing images for the book, I am finding all kinds of forgotten art.
And I mean literally forgotten, from when my MECFS/burnout was so bad I have no memory of making most of these! Back in 2009, a few months before Wicked Grounds opened, I met with Rose and Ryan to talk about drawing postcards for the cafe to sell.
Everything was so organized back then, before the actual opening!
There was a contract I signed and everything. The postcards were about the concept of service, and never went any further than these roughs. I like the detail of the espresso machine and milkshake machine in the top drawing, though I am shocked and appalled at how I drew the “default people” as white, abled and slim.
Latte art at Wicked Grounds in San Francisco. Michealangelo S. via Yelp
Someone else, with much better graphic design skills than me, drew the awesome logo.
Funny thing about opening a restaurant, always: once it starts, no matter how good your plans were, you can’t find your ass with both hands.
San Francisco did not make it easy to open Wicked Grounds. Anyway it was a nice meeting, and ultimately led to me working at Wicked Grounds as an employee in September of that year. After a brutal divorce, losing my Berkeley home and my freelance business and then losing my apartment and being taken in by a beloved Friend-Muse-Patron, I was shattered. I needed connection and community.
Wicked Grounds was my refuge.
I made wonderful friends (many of them seggs workers), got a sweet new boyfriend, reconnected at depth with kink culture and fell even deeper in love with amazing seggs worker spirit. And then I met my husband while working there.
So basically WG saved my life on so many levels.
And I know Wicked Grounds helped a lot of others.
Blessed memories. Sweet kinksters. Puppies frolicking in the back of the cafe where we’d pulled the tables away, drinking milkshakes from dog bowls and shaking the floor with their leaps. “Sanitize as necessary”. Making out with my young boyfriend as we pulled espresso shots!
Live queer porn shoots in the cafe, sign on the door “Closed for porn shoot”. Hot and sweaty Folsom Sunday when we were all topless, wearing just Wicked Grounds stickers on our nipples! Meeting my brother-from-another-mother Mickey Mod, KC and so many more.
Jared from DNA gave me the sobriquet “Velocicougar” – “My God, it can open a door!”
Thanksgiving, Collaring my boy. Our staff Christmas party, and New Years Eve 2009, when my boy and I had the cafe all to ourselves. Candy cane whips, stingy not thuddy!
Leather elders meeting in the cafe. Littles playing! So much beautiful kink scene. So much glorious SOMA leather spirit.
Wicked Grounds, San Francisco’s first kink cafe, at 289 Eighth St., closed Monday afternoon.
Flickr/ Lynn Friedman
Although the physical cafe is sadly closed, the team is still very active, creating educational content, events and classes in a new space, and Patreon community. The Wicked Grounds website has books, classes, calendar of events, toys and more.
You can find Wicked Grounds online on the website, twitter, Instagram, and on Patreon.
You can watch me talk about those days, at Bawdy Storytelling!
As I wind down my life’s work and work on creating a book of my art, you can follow me on substack (free of course) for updates about the book, art bequests and more.
This Sunday I started a big new portrait of my dear friend 
This is my first diptych painting. It is being done on two canvases, which will be hung together or separately at the choice of my curator Thorsten at 
I have wanted to paint Sadie since I met her at “Nude Aid”, an art benefit for the Center for Sex and Culture, in 2007. She is an artist, performer, sex worker and activist and has marvelous style and presence. The day I met her she was working as both artist and model as she often does. She was wearing a cloche, I remember it so vividly!
She was tremendously helpful in the year before we moved here, providing critical advice about how to prepare for life here and apply for an artist’s visa. (By the way I was granted a two-year artist’s visa of my own on August 28th!)
I believe it always happens at exactly the right time.