After a seven-month renovation and a last-minute rescue, SoMa's drag institution reopened Friday. The most surprising sense I took away from the night was how calm it was.
I have been to enough of these homecomings to expect a fire-marshal situation. Anyone else remember when The Stud came back and you could barely move? Ms. Drollinger was there for that one, too.
But Oasis on Friday was breathable. They sold early tickets for I think around forty dollars, and to my eyes, they capped capacity on purpose. The reopening reportedly sold out in five hours, and they said no extra tickets would be at the door. Inside though, the crowd mostly moved together from one room to the next, either for performances, or to catch up with friends on the roof. One space would empty and then the next would fill up. The whole building was not wall-to-wall.
I found D'Arcy Drollinger as I tend to find her lately: sparkly and a little bit elsewhere, the way she gets when a few hundred people all want ninety seconds of her. She presented the night with her longtime collaborator Michael Phillis. I stayed through the early show, which went up at 10, ahead of a second one at midnight, long enough to catch some performances. I'm not what the kids used to call a drag hag, but having seen Oasis since its original iteration, it's lovely to witness the life in it again.
You have probably read the previews already: After roughly seven months of work there is now a gold-tiled bar, a fresh crop of murals, a crocodile-textured wall upstairs. Plastic plant walls for selfies. Mirrors everywhere, and cushy chairs on the roof with 1950s hair salon dryers for added effect. Oasis leans hard into a maximalist, Moulin Rouge cabaret. But to me it's also like Alan Cumming in "Cabaret"; the building at 298 11th St. is still gritty. And people reminisced with me about the venue from the before times—called Splash, maybe—that had an unsanitary actual pool.
Last July, D'Arcy announced the club would close on New Year's Day due to thinning post-pandemic crowds, and margins that never cleared zero. Then a multimillion-dollar gift landed from Mary and Mark Stevens, whose son Sky is a regular. The money let the nonprofit Oasis Arts buy the building outright, reportedly for $3.5 million. D'Arcy has taken to calling this the third iteration: the 2010s opening with the late Heklina, the return after the pandemic, and now as the one where Oasis finally holds its own keys.
"This time is a little different," she told The San Francisco Standard, "because we really know who we are." In the reopening announcement she said it more plainly, welcoming everyone "back home to Oasis."
Home is right, and I guess maybe "storied." I ran into a man I had apparently once matched with on Tinder, and another I hadn't seen in maybe ten years. Almost everyone I talked to remembered Oasis from their younger nights, but those days felt blurry for all of us.
The last series of nights I had been to Oasis were the save-the-place nights that were thick with drag luminaries and other LGBTQ+ notables. Last night though it was a younger crowd just flatly glad the place is back. It was quite honestly the Oasis that I'm sure D'Arcy dreamed about. I think this time it's here to stay.
Photos by Saul Sugarman for The Bold Italic. Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
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In other news
So I've given an interview to the SF Standard on the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. You might remember this story.
Saul Sugarman
The momentum from this news has been growing since I posted it on Instagram. It's also felt like I lost something precious to my life, even though the work was some of the most tedious I've ever done. I wasn't paid. And I quite often threatened to not come back once my term closed out.
Supervisor Shamann Walton shared a statement I've since affixed to the base of my prior article, essentially saying they didn't know their recent decisions would shutter the Sunshine Force. But that also many on the force had been serving for quite a long time and they wanted fresh blood. It all has been looking fishy to me. From what I can tell, Walton has been Supervisor for longer than most the SOTF members. And he voted against Proposition B, which did pass, and essentially tightened term limits for supervisors.
I've said a bit more to The Standard and I'm sure over-shared. I'm told at least one Supe had a response, so that should be interesting.
