LGBT+
SOLID AS A DOC Summer is finally here, and *hopefully*, by the time this is printed the sun will have emerged, coinciding nicely with the city’s reopening after a year of Zoom calls from our kitchen tables. If, after a year on the sofa, you are craving some physical activity, TransActive are back with sessions open to all trans, non-binary and gender questioning people with weekly online fitness sessions on Mondays and swimming sessions at Heeley Pool on Saturdays. For those of you who are missing the dancefloor, CuckooBox Carnival is heading to Sidney & Matilda (Sat 26 Jun) with two rooms playing a mix of funky vocal, tech house, nu disco and electronica. The big screen makes a return with Sheffield’s internationally renowned DocFest at Showroom Cinema, which this year features its largest queer lineup yet. Year of the White Moon (Fri 4 Jun) features a series of telephone conversations between a superstitious mother living in the Russian Provinces and her gay son. Gender-fluid time travellers feature in Octavia’s Visions (Sat 5 Jun), imagining a queer utopia. Short film selection Tales of the City (Sat 5 Jun) features Something Said, a queer exploration of black British history; and Twilight City
featuring Octavia and her friends’ demonstrations for gay rights. Black Queer photographer Ajamu and his one-man show in Huddersfield is the feature of The Homecoming (Sat 5 Jun), while filmmaker Isaac Julien invokes Langston Hughes as a black gay cultural icon in Looking for Langston (Sun 6 Jun). As well as queer history, we have documentaries bringing us right up to date looking at the impact of modern events on LGBT+ communities with Alone Together (Sun 6/Mon 7 Jun) taking a deep dive into the personal stories of Charli XCX’s decidedly global, predominantly LGBTQI+ fanbase, many of whom are navigating precarious situations, including unemployment, isolation and anxiety. Elsewhere, Caught (Wed 9 Jun) acts as a tribute to the work and legacy of Lorena Borjas, the mother of Latin trans women living in Queens, one of the first victims of Covid-19 in New York in March 2020. Two Sons and a River of Blood (Thu 10 Jun) explores a self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man. Maisie (Fri 11 Jun) features David Raven, still shaking his sequins at 85-years-old, as ‘Maisie Trollette’, Britain’s oldest drag artist. The story of the queer comic, Gay Comix, first published in 1980, is told in
No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics (Sun 13 Jun) detailing a period of censorship in the USA and marginalization even among underground cartoonists. And more art is featured in Drawings of my BF (Sun 13 Jun): when Artist Wilfrid Wood meets his muse, Theo Adamson, on a gay hook-up app, what begins as an artist-model relationship develops into something deeper. The queer highlight of the DocFest calendar is Destroy | Disturb | Disrupt – Decolonising Queer Desire (Fri 11 Jun) curated by Campbell X. Black queer filmmakers craft an intervention into desire for the Black queer body on film with shorts including The Attendant, Fetish, Blackn3ss, Bloom, Batería, BMB (Black, Muslim and Bi) and Umbilic. Campbell returns for Reframing Our Desires (Sat 12 Jun), joining filmmakers from his programme to explore how they create their own filmic language to disrupt our colonised historical framing by the white, straight cisgender lens. That’s your lot for this month, readers! Keep an eye on facebook.com/sheffieldlgbtevents for updates and announcements on the latest events and news.
Until next time, socially-distanced Love and rainbows...
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