London's GFest, the capital's leading LGBT cross-arts festival, including visual arts, theatre, dance and performance, LGBT short films, debates, workshops and parties, began yesterday and carries on through Sunday, November 21. Only in its fourth year, the fest features more than 100 artists at events in the city's most august spaces, including the National Gallery, the V&A, Hampstead Town Hall, the Westminster Reference Library, and select screening rooms. Their site boasts official messages of support from Sarah Waters, Peter Tatchell, Stephen Fry, many MPs, the mayor, and the Prime Minister.
Beginning tonight and running through Sunday, November 14 is Mix NYC, the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Now in it's 23rd year, it's the city's oldest LGBT film festival, founded by author activist Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard in 1987. Since then, it has grown to include boundary pushing live performances and art installations. The six nights of film and video presentations run the gamut from several collections of shorts -- including ten minutes on Billy Strayhorn -- to the French documentary Too Much Pussy (right) about the European road tour of seven sex-radical women, "activists, artists, writers, musicians, sex workers, porn stars," to a piece called 50 Faggots celebrating a wide range of effeminate men defiant against the last three decades' love affair with "straight acting," to Bruce La Bruce's closing night world premiere of his revamped undead bloodbath L.A. Zombie: Hardcore. It's great praise, and desperately needed in our public homo homogeneity, to say that at Mix NYC not everything is for everyone. Thank god.
Reworking a classic with a twist, three black queer women poets are embarking on a four city tour inspired by the salons of yesteryear, called The Revival. In each location -- DC, Philly, Brooklyn, Baltimore -- they will perform with a local poet, and the event will not be in bookstores but in private homes open to the public. The spoken-word concerts, with music and more, will break "the envelope of safe space for today's queer artists and allies." As inspiring in its originalty as it is intimate in its setting, the tour features (left to right, below) LOVE the poet, Venus Thrash, and J. Pope. Promising a night that is "sexy, vibrant, and diverse," they say they are "connecting women, creators, and changemakers." Exact locations in each city are posted here, where you can buy advance tickets for $10. At the door they will be $15.
November 11, Washington, DC, with lowercaseletters.
November 12, Philadelphia, with Ms. Wise.
November 13, Brooklyn, with Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene.
November 14, Baltimore, with Queen Earth.
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