This year more than ever, we needed to be with our LGBTQ brothers and sisters at opening night of the San Francisco LGBTQ Film Festival. As it happened, the Frameline 40 opening-night film, "Kiki," profiled queer youth of color, so it seemed right up-to-date with the week's blood-soaked headlines.
"Kiki" was fun and uplifting, a documentary about the New York ballroom scene that inspired with its portraits of these queer young things, incredibly creative, athletic and community-building with their mad vogueing skills. Director Sara Jordeno and co-writer Twiggy Pucci Garcon joined other "Kiki" stars such as Gia Marie Love and Chi Chi Mizrahi on the Castro Theatre stage for tumultuous applause, and afterwards for the opening-night gala party at The NWBLK.
Decades after partying down for "Paris Is Burning," "Out There" exulted in the fresh energy, artistry and confidence of these ballroom youths. They gave us the shot of gay adrenaline we needed to start off Pride Week in San Francisco.
That terrific party, in the warehouse NWBLK space, was the first time we could think of that arriving guests were wanded down and checked for metals or weaponry at the club door. Sign of the troubled times: It's as if our entire society has been taken hostage by psychopathic killers, the bloodthirsty NRA, and the pandering GOP. Appallingly, there is still such a group as the Log Cabin Republicans, deluded souls that they are. And the Western World has passed through another door, wanded down, and it seems that we're never going back.
Victorian Novel
Catching up: The 28th Annual Lambda Literary Awards, or the Lammys as they are affectionately known, were held June 6 in NYC. It was a record year, with 933 submissions (up from 818 last year) from 321 publishers. Submissions came from major mainstream publishers and from independent presses.
The B.A.R.'s own Victoria Brownworth won the Lammy for lesbian mystery, one of the most competitive categories, for her horror novel "Ordinary Mayhem," published by Bold Strokes Books. In a recent interview with Curve magazine, Brownworth, who was the first out lesbian columnist for a daily newspaper in the U.S., said of her novel, about a lesbian photojournalist, "I have spent all of my life as a journalist writing about the people no one wants to write about, especially the lives of marginalized people. I wanted to bring those people to life in this novel in a more personal way than I have been able to do in news stories. I particularly wanted to highlight the impact of violence against women."
Upon winning the award, Brownworth told the B.A.R., "This novel, more than almost any of my books, feels acutely personal to me. It's in part my own story as a journalist, in part my own story as a victim of life-altering male violence that left me permanently scarred. I am thrilled to have won this award. I know this isn't an easy book to read, but I think 'Ordinary Mayhem' is an important story, and I hope winning the Lammy, an award so important for LGBTQ writers, will bring the book to a new group of readers."