Out of Necessity: A Lit Event this Sunday at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts

The brilliant African-American poet/activist/novelist Audre Lorde once said: "We write because we must." This has guided my own writing ever since I heard it, when I was 17, the year she died.

This Sunday's event, part of the National Queer Arts Festival—a monthlong powerhouse of cultural innovation that descends on The City every June—promises similar insights and inspiration for writers seeking community and purpose, and also for anyone with a heart..

Out of Necessity features award-winning and emerging poets: REGIE CABICO, CHERYL CLARKE, ACHY OBEJAS, VANESSA HUANG, SUZANNE DEL MAZO, NAJVA SOL; moderated by Camille Dungy, curated by Cole Krawitz and Arisa White. If you haven't heard of all these people, look them up, or better yet, go! This is the real thing, folks. 

Sunday, June 5 · 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts
2868 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA
Tickets: $12-20 sliding scale (advance tickets recommended)
For more info: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/174170

Want more? Regie Cabico and Achy Obejas will be leading follow-up workshops for writers to develop their skills in a more focused, intimate environment. I can't wait!! 

 June 4, 12-3pm: "Conflict in Fiction" with Achy Obejas: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=100663470028502
June 5, 12-3pm: "Verbal Fire" with Regie Cabico: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=125212524225742

"We Were There" Tells a Story That Needs Telling

Emmanuelle Antolin, Tamara Loewenstein, and Melonie Green

We Were There
June 10 – September 30, 2010

African American Arts & Culture Complex
762 Fulton Street @ McAllister
San Francisco, CA 94102-4119
(415) 292-6172

I recently visited “We Were There: The Lesbian Response to the Early AIDS Epidemic among Gay Men," a new exhibit showing now through September 30, co-curated by Melonie Green and Tamara Loewenstein. "We Were There" is also the name of a moving short film created in conjunction with the exhibit and directed by Emmanuelle Antolin. 

photo by Leigh Meryhew

I spoke with Antolin, Green, and Loewenstein about the project.

Q: Who helped you make this project happen? 

 TL:The National Queer Ar ts Festival and Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco awarded Emmanuelle Antolin with a small grant that allowed her to begin film production. The African American Arts & Culture Complex (sisters Melora and Melonie Green) have been incredibly generous with their space, resources and time. 

Q: What's the response been like so far? 

MG: Those who were featured in the project (via photographs, featured in the film, pamphlets on the walls, etc.) were so moved. Some were surprised to see their work on the walls. They certainly didn't expect to see their words on the walls. I think seeing the exhibition made things very real for them. The film was such an inspiration. It received laughs, tears, applause.

Q:  Describe the curatorial process for the exhibit.

TL: The curatorial process was a very collaborative one. Emmanuelle was able to gather most of the images during her research in New York City and at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, among other resources. The three of us went through all the images we had gathered and decided together which ones should be key images or themes within the exhibition. Later, Melonie and I worked together to finalize our selection of photographs, images, posters and ephemera. From the beginning we wanted the space to have an ambiance of intensity that communicated the activist sensibility of the period.

MG: Tamara and I discussed putting the words on the walls. we had a few ideas. I suggested that we hand write the quotes ... because in the grand scheme of things, this was a DIY movement and seeing the quotes on the walls gave it a very organic and "real" vibe and feel. From there we decided to paste and post the posters on the walls unframed to continue that element of DIY and "in the moment" feel.

Q: What's the future of this project?  

EA: As we go further with this project, we feel that quality film production, in-depth research, interactive web presence and more are integral to making this piece come alive the way it is meant to. So far, I have funded the entire project from my personal savings, with the exception of a $500 seed grant from the Queer Cultural Center, and a few donations. I did this because I got into it, I knew this story had to be told, and had to be told right. Now I am seeking funding to help me complete the film and expand the project.  I'd love to talk to anyone who feels the same and would like to discuss funding.

LGBT Youth Fighting for Basic Rights, Then As Now

The fracas I blogged about on Sunday in Mississippi over a lesbian high school student having the temerity to want to take another girl to her prom—and the school's ensuing decision to cancel the whole darn thing!—reminded me of the famous hubbub caused by Cumberland, Rhode Island high-schooler Aaron Fricke, who in 1980 had to file suit in a U.S. District court in order to take a male date to his senior prom. That was 20 years ago, but to many modern ears it sounds ridiculous, as well it should. Fricke attracted national media attention including, famously, Donahue, and later wrote a tender, moving book about his experience, Reflections of a Rock Lobster. 

Over 10 years later, in 1993, my Livermore, California high school considered canceling its prom after the Oakland Tribune announced I would be taking a male date. Luckily for the school, my absences and truancies—I was cutting because of death threats and attacks—made me ineligible to graduate and attend anyway, so the prom went on without a hitch. 

But the resulting melee led to more death threats and more news stories, even national TV appearances. But then, that was 1993, the year when there were literally more talk shows on TV than any other before or since. Corny catchphrases were legion ("You go girl!" and others), and even Jerry Springer tried to make his show stand out by ending each hillbilly slugfest with a "Final Thought"—a trite aphorism here, a pinch of advice on how to change the world with nonviolence there. Silly. Lesbian author Linnea Due, author of the wonderful lesbian teen recovery novel High and Outside, said it best when she interviewed me and wrote in her informative 1995 study Joining the Tribe: Growing Up Gay & Lesbian in the '90s:

"There are very few gay youth activists, and even fewer who are willing to talk to the media. Half the Queer Nation members I interviewed in '91, though four or five years older than Brent and already safely ensconsed in college, would not allow their names to be used in the [East Bay] Express.... Prepared for violence, he was unprepared for the fact that being willing to talk about it, particularly if he used clever turns of phrase like preferring to be bashed by others than by himself, would set talk show hosts salivating like Pavlov's dogs." —Linnea Due

Does anyone even remember Gabrielle, the short-lived talk show distributed by Fox (sorry!) with Gabrielle Carteris, the actress who played what seemed to be LA's only brainy Jewish girl (oddly, about 30 years old in real life) on 90210? I was flown to Burbank and appeared on an episode with the family and friends of the late Brandon Teena, whose story was eventually made into the film Boys Don't Cry. Also on the show was Mary Griffith, whose son Bobby, tortured by his family's conservative religious judgments about his own budding homosexuality, threw himself from a California freeway overpass and died instantly. Mary and I had a wonderful teary-eyed three-hour conversation over cigarettes in the airport diner after the show, waiting for the same plane back to the Bay Area, in which she told me about a book she was writing which later became a book and then a film with Sigourney Weaver called Prayers for Bobby. (Why is this film not available for sale? Does anybody know?)

Even the Oprah Show called, but, inexplicably, my school's principal didn't feel like being confronted by me and Oprah in front of millions of veiwers, so the idea was dropped (that was back when Oprah was still blantantly naughty—remember?). I wasn't told straightaway, but a week or two later, the Oprah staff sent me a conciliatory XXL T-Shirt which I still have in a box somewhere (why so large, people?). I guess instead of "Oprah" in big purple letters, it should have said: "I risked my life to be famous enough to be on the Oprah show, but all I got was this lousy T-shirt."  Crestfallen about years of high-school harassment and not getting to meet Oprah, I got my GED, moved to San Francisco, and became a journalist.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and a lot of the same old stuff is going down. Sadly I left most of my old clunky VHS tapes, some of which held footage from those talkshows, with an old boyfriend during a transcontinental move I made back in 2006, and shortly thereafter, during our predictable breakup, he threw out all those precious tapes, in a fit of that kind of ungentlemanliness that many among us have been susceptible to during breakups. (Does anyone have suggestions for how to track down the Gabrielle show, for instance?)

I'll wrap up now with exerpts from a longish review of a very important  contemporary book, Dude, Youre a  Fag. These exerpts, by yours truly, appear courtesy of the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide:

          Today’s teenagers, familiar with the heteronormative images of gays they receive from television, film—and, arguably, from the mainstream LGBT political movement—are now able to tolerate gay men who toe the gender-role line, but fags like Ricky remain fags always. This is what Riki Wilkins has termed the “Eminem Exception”—a reference to the rap artist Eminem, who has attempted to absolve himself of the label “homophobe” by claiming he uses the term fag for men who are weak and unmanly, regardless of sexual orientation.

            Dude, You’re a Fag provides persuasive proof that gender identity should not be seen as an expendable addition to employment nondiscrimination laws, nor as an auxiliary to gay liberation—an optional T in our LGBT community. Gender identity is not a side issue; it is the issue. Until we get this message, which Pascoe’s book so clearly spells out, boys like Ricky will be jettisoned, and only those gay boys who can throw a football and those lesbians who comply with notions of masculine supremacy will be able to enjoy the dignity that all humans deserve.

Mississippi School Axes Prom to Avoid Lesbian Dancing, while Stars on Ice Drops Johnny Weir

My friend Bea, all the way in Groeningen, Netherlands, contacted me to alert me to this story by sex columnist and Seattle Stranger editor extraordinaire Dan Savage: High School in Mississippi Cancels Prom to Prevent Lesbian Student From Bringing Female Date—and Potentially Invites Violence Against Lesbian Student.  

That may seem like a long title, but it gives activist Googlers and savvy Stranger.com readers (the only kind of readers The Stranger has, as far as I can tell) the info they need in a nice compact package. "Click to learn more," the headline beckons.

It's the 21st-century version of phone trees—a calling system activists like Harvey Milk (beautifully photographed, here and elsewhere, by legendary San Francisco photographer and activist Daniel Nicoletta) used pre-Internet to get their messages about rallies and protests out as quicky as possible: one person calls ten, each of those call ten, who each call ten, until a united front shows up to scare the bejezus out of the pigs. Already, the article has gone viral in the Twittersphere, and amassed over 172 comments on the original site (the average article in The Stranger or on similar news sites gets about 20 comments in a good month).

Now that a lot of "mainstream" folks—LGBT and otherwise—are out of work too, many middle-of-the-road Americans suddenly feel the way some people from disenfranchized groups, and many students, have always felt—that our politics and our ideals are the only things we reliably own.

That's my theory for why more people are getting angry about injustice of all kinds, from the persecution of LGBT children to music censorship and racism to advertisers of the upcoming Stars On Ice tour deeming gay artist and credit-to-skating Johnny Weir "Not Family Friendly Enough" to include in the extravanza tour, a major source of income for many athletes. (What, too gay for Ice Skating? Too many breathtaking, showstopping Lady Gaga tribute numbers?)

For shame, Smuckers, sponsor of Stars on Ice, for your Bible-Belt-pandering. I guess that's what we get, LGBTers and gay-savvy straight folks, for having switched to Polaner All Fruit, a corn-syrup-free preserves we found more salutory and palatable, decades ago. Now Smuckers is punishing all us urban sophisticates for our glucose-eschewing habits by choosing to disavow what should be their pride in one of the greatest athletes and charismatic artists to grace Ice Skating in a long, long time.

Evidently, Smuckers likes their Ice Shows to be as cloying and flavorless as their jams and jellies. And c'mon guys, Smuckers? You call yourselves "Smuckers" and you think Johnny Weir isn't family friendly? You sure provided my brothers and I with our share of naughty jokes in the breakfast nook growing up.

Anyone who thinks this is "just an ice skating issue" is just plain wrong. This is about gender roles and assimilation versus all of us embracing our unique gifts and contributions to the world as "queer" or somehow "deviant" or "different" people.

Get angry, people. Get very angry. Then contact GLAAD, and find out more about possible solutions. In the meantime, I suggest throwing out any stray jars of Smuckers you've been serving to undiscerning guests or using to hold up the wonky shelf in the bathroom cabinet.

So, other than raising my hackles, what's the connection between these two stories? Gender. Two girls dancing together freaks the heck out of some parents and principles in Mississippi, and the Smucker's guys' real fear is that Weir is too effeminate. Being a gay man is OK as long as you're masculine—even Eminem says so—but people can't stand a man who's feminine. Masculine's the thing to be in the U.S.—it's even OK for women and girls, as long as they know their roles at home and on the dancefloor.

But more on all that tomorrow.