Stillness and Survival: Celebrating Sheena Rose’s New Memoir

Thursday June 4, 2026 | 6:30-8pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

$10 Suggested Donation (+ tips for drag performers) | Register via Humanitix

The Tenderloin knows and loves Sheena Rose as a fixture of the queen scene at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge. Earlier this year, Sheena–aka Jacob Anthony Rose–published a powerful debut memoir entitled Stillness and Survival: A Life Between Trauma, Glitter, and the Echo of My Own Voice. TLM kicks off Pride month by celebrating this essential TL artist’s story of survival, queerness, and becoming with a reading and drag show. 

Jacob Anthony Rose is a San Francisco–based author, performer, and recording artist whose work explores survival, identity, and self-expression. His debut memoir, Stillness and Survival: A Life Between Trauma, Glitter, and the Echo of My Own Voice, details his story from silence to song: a journey of survival, queerness, and becoming. 

Tenderloin Museum celebrates Rose & his new book with a reading and drag show featuring many longtime friends and collaborators like Bliss, Kelly Rose, Olivia Hart, Sophilya Leggz et. al. All perform regularly at the Tenderloin’s oldest (and last) LGBTQ+ watering hole, Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, an essential queer space where community is forged and “becoming” is nurtured across the generations. In the spirit of Aunt Charlie’s, TLM is honored to share Rose’s story, animated by his friends’ performances, in the context of Tenderloin history. Join us on June 4th, during the SF First Thursday Art Walk in the Tenderloin! 

Learn more about Jacob Anthony Rose and his work via his website. He has this to say about Stillness and Survival:

“I was a quiet boy with loud dreams. But dreams don't grow well in a house full of fear. As a gay child in a home where silence meant survival, I learned to vanish. For years, I kept my voice hidden - not just from the world, but from myself.

Then came music. Drag. Glitter. Applause.

And, for a time, freedom. Onstage, I could be someone bigger than the pain. For twenty years, I sang and performed my way into pieces of joy I never thought I'd know.

But trauma has its own rhythm.

In the quiet of the covid years, the past came roaring back. I lost my voice again - this time to adulthood pain, depression, and the unhealed echoes of my childhood. STILLNESS and SURVIVAL, is a story of silence and expression, queerness and survival, collapse and return. It is about finding your own voice - again and again - even when the world tries to take it away.

This is not just a memoir. It's a reclaiming.”