If you ask Page Hodel about her many contributions to the LGBT community, her face lights up immediately.
"I've spent most of my adult life making people dance," said Hodel, who has been working as a DJ in the Bay Area for the past 25 years. "Making all the gay people in the Bay Area dance. And the straight people!"
Hodel, 50, who said that she's "worked with pretty much all of the organizations in the Bay Area," has often paired her love of music with her volunteer work. "I did a lot of the AIDS dance-a-thons, flew to New York and L.A. and did the dance-a-thons," she recalled. She's also used her turntables to raise money for groups such as Project Inform and the Women's Cancer Resource Center, and is going to start working with And Castro For All, an organization dedicated to creating gathering places for women and people of color in the Castro that was born out of the Badlands racism charges of several years ago. [Bar owner Les Natali has consistently denied charges that he's racist; he and the complainants reached a confidential settlement in January 2006.]
"Pretty much any organization that contacts me, if they need my support I will say yes," Hodel explained in a recent interview. "There've been times in my life when I've had more money and times in my life when I haven't had any, but I've always given my time. I always give my energy and spirit."
This Sunday, Hodel will be riding in the LGBT Pride Parade as a community grand marshal. "I'm very, very honored and really excited and really looking forward to participating in this event that I've been going to since 1975," Hodel told the Bay Area Reporter just after her selection was announced in early May.
Hodel is outspoken on the issue of equality for everyone. When asked about the issue of gay marriage, she responded, "I think the most important issue is, we deserve the same human rights, period. Legal rights that straight people enjoy."
"I'm really committed to diversity and making sure that everybody has equal rights. It's something I'm really, really fanatic about, that we really learn to understand one another and honor each other. To honor our differences and celebrate the things that we have in common. I've spent my life committed to making places for that to happen."
Hodel related a personal incident that drove home the need for equality. "I had a lover in France," she said. "We were very much in love. She came here and lived with me and ended up having to go back to France because we were not straight. And if I'd been a man I could have married her and she could have stayed here with me ... I'm extremely offended to be excluded [from marriage laws]. I think that it's wrong that people are excluded, period."
Though she is passionate about the many causes she gives her time to, there is no question that music has been the dominant force in Hodel's life. When she was 16 years old, she moved from the Bay Area to Paris to study music, living in her own apartment and playing her guitar on street corners and in the Metro stations. While playing her guitar on the street, she was once given a card from a record executive who worked for the biggest record company in France. She never called him.
"I realized music is so deep and sacred and precious to me, especially when I'm actually making the music myself, it's like standing on a table telling someone your poem," Hodel said. "I also didn't want to put my music through that star-maker machinery, as Joni Mitchell puts it. It's too precious and I'm too tender. I don't have thick skin. I don't think I could have taken it."
After a few years in Paris, Hodel returned to San Francisco, where she worked at a series of what she described as "really trippy jobs."
"I was an underground cable splicer for the phone company ... I climbed telephone poles and worked in manholes and did all this non-traditional work," Hodel remembered. However, it wasn't long before music reasserted itself as a vital part of her life.
"I started throwing these birthday parties. People kind of knew that when they went to my birthday they were going to hear some good music, because I'm a musical person. And I got a phone call from one of the big lesbian bars, kind of the big happening club at the time, and my friend there said, 'Girl, I don't know what you're doing at these birthday parties, but you need to come do it over here!' So I said, 'well, all right.' I quit all my day jobs and sold my guitar to buy turntables."
Hodel went on to DJ and do promotional work for many successful, long-running bars and clubs, such as Amelia's, Oasis, Bay Brick, and Club Q. In 1987, she began throwing a weekly club party called The Box, which ran for 11 years.
"It was a smash success right out of the gate," Hodel recalled. "It was the most incredible melting pot. Men, women, straights, gays, and a really beautiful racial diversity: really, the whole purpose of this club was to create a place for everybody."
This month marks Hodel's re-launching of The Box tonight (Thursday, June 21) with a kick-off party called Box Pride. She's also throwing her annual Girl Pride party on June 22 at the Sound Factory.
Hodel was recently involved in an attempt to open a women's bar in Oakland called Velvet. She left the project due to interpersonal conflicts, but Hodel is undeterred.
"In all of my career, I haven't seen anything take wings so fast," she said of the bar. "It was obviously something that people wanted so much. The good news is, that tells us that it's something the community needs and wants, and the very good news is that many women have come forward and offered to invest. There's a very good chance that this actually will take shape."
Hodel lived in San Francisco for many years, but rising rents eventually drove her to Oakland.
"[The dot-com era] priced all of us out," she said. "You have to have quite a bit of money to live here now. I'm very disappointed in that. It was so funny, you know, the reason all these people wanted to come here was to be around interesting, creative people, and now [the creative people] all have to move away. That whole financial explosion really changed the demographic here."
Hodel lived in a cottage on a hill during her time in San Francisco, but her dream home is the giant converted school bus she calls Roxanne Roxanne. With a dreamy smile, Hodel talked about the period she spent living in her bus among the trees, taking moon baths in the evenings. Though she lives in more conventional housing now, Roxanne Roxanne is still part of her life.
"I was hoping to use Roxanne Roxanne as my vehicle [in the Parade]," Hodel said, "and I'm going to put all my friends in the back and have a huge sound system and have a dance party going on inside the bus. I'll sit on the roof."
Hodel, who received permission to drive Roxanne Roxanne in the parade, is delighted to be chosen as one of this year's grand marshals. "It's a long legacy, and I'm really honored to be a part of it," she said. "There's a lot of other people that [volunteer]; I'm no big deal. But that's just what my life's about."