March 2009
45 posts
Date: Saturday, March 28, 2009
Time: 7:00 pm - 1:00 am
Location: Velvet
Street: 3411 MacArthur Blvd & 35th Avenue
City State Zip: Oakland, CA
NO COVER IF YOU ARRIVE BEFORE 8 P.M.
Singles mingle 7-8 p.m.,
Couples welcome of course.
Stick around after the singles mingle for the hotter than hot readings by Jennifer Cross. Jen joins the Body Heat: Femme Porn Tour as we read and riot and ricochet down the West Coast, this year with kathleen delaney, Vagina Jenkins and Meliza Benales! http://writingourselveswhole.org/index.htm
Dress to impress (ties, cocktail dresses, OR whatever makes you
comfortable). ALL ages! Yes, people come alone.
Since I’ve been asked yes, all welcome, and this has been OUR policy since we started:
butch, femme, lesbian, queer, trans, bi
To volunteer as a greeter, butchfemmesocials@yahoo.com
Ask for your hosts,
Rope or T
Family Week is the largest national gathering of LGBT families and their friends in the United States . This year marks the 14th annual Family Week, which originated as a backyard barbecue in Provincetown , MA , hosted by Scott Davenport and Tim Fisher.
For one week during the past 13 summers, LGBT parents, their children, extended families, prospective parents, and friends have gathered at the tip of Cape Cod to relax and enjoy the fun gay-friendly Provincetown has to offer; create connections that last a lifetime; and learn through sharing experiences how to make the world a better place for all loving families.
There are workshops, social gatherings, meals, and much, much more for all ages. Family Week is a one-of-a-kind experience for the LGBT family and allied community.
Thursday March 19, 2009
$10 gen. $5 (students, youth, disabled) - 7:30pmA multi-generational poetry conversation featuring four-time National Poetry Slam champion, HBO Def Poet Patricia Smith, Palestinian-American poet & editor Deema Shehabi, Emcee Jen Ro featured on VH1 & MTV, DJ Munkee Pants, P4P poets, & special guests! Hosted by P4P Director Aya de Leon.
Join us this Thursday, March 19 at Third Thursday women’s open mic talent showcase at Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts, 1650 Mountain Blvd. in Oakland, corner of Mountain and Thornhill off Hwy. 13, 7:30 pm. 510-654-4088 for info. $ 7 - 10 sliding scale at the door.
Only a few open mic spots left!! See info. below about how to sign up.
This is an all-women event and all women are welcome.
This month is comedy with feature ALICIA DATTNER! Alicia is an edgy, confessional standup comic, specializing irreverent insight into the human condition. Her outrageous stories and characters are packed with punch lines, and intersect themes of love, politics, environmentalism, spirituality, and modern culture. She has shared the stage with many funny, talented comics including Jasper Redd, Bill Santiago, Eugene Mriman, Vanda Mikoloski, Arj Baker, Ryan Stout, and Amy Stiller in San Francisco, Hollywood, and New York. Alicia’s first solo show, “The Punchline”, was at the SF Fringe Festival in September 08, and her-even-newer show, “Eat, Pray, Laugh” about traveling in India is currently playing across the country. Check her out at <http://www.aliciadattner.com>.
AND…the heart and soul of Third Thursday: YOU, either as performer or audience member. Drop in for some laughs, songs, poems, prose, instruments, spoken word, and any other talents you have. Each performer has 5 minutes to do their thing, sometimes more in the second half if time allows. It is an evening rich with entertainment.
PERFORMANCE SIGN-UP is at 7 pm, show is from 7:30 to 10:00 with an intermission. Spaces are limited so we can end at 10:00, allowing our volunteer crew get get home at a decent hour and keeping the neighbors happy. To assure your spot, email ahead <janetrac@berkeley.edu> and arrive before 7:30 to check in. A cappella, acoustic, or plugged in are all welcome. We have a keyboard and a small sound system.
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE: If you are an artist, author, craftswoman, contact me at <janetrac@berkeley.edu> for information about showing and selling your work at Third Thursday. Thank you for keeping this event scent-free. Event is wheelchair accessible. Let me know at <janetrac@berkeley.edu> if you need disabled access parking *one day in advance.*
Janet Rachel, Host/MC
Hip Mammas
April Gathering
April 5, 4-6pm
East Bay Location
Email for Address and Directions
gabglance@gmail.com
We are a diverse group of queer single hip mammas and hip mamma-lovers who meet once a month to share stories and resources, to socialize and schmooze!
“I am launching a new portrait photography project with the working title, “AND: A Queer, Masculine Terrain Of Gender & Sexuality.”
The images I’m planning to include in this body of work will embody the handsomeness found in people of a queer gender.
I am using the word “AND” to describe this work because I want it to be expansive and inclusive. I’m very interested in photographs that portray the diversity of queer masculinity.
I want to photograph butches, bois, genderqueers, transgender folks, FTMs, and anyone else living in a queer or fluid space with their gender and/or sexuality. As a butch lesbian, I am particularly interested in female masculinity. However, what I’m trying to do with this project is celebrate a wide spectrum of possibility and beauty. I want to increase the visibility of women, men, neither, both, and others who are generally left out of positive representation.
This celebration is not necessarily in opposition to a simple gender dichotomy. It’s not necessarily about a linear continuum of sexuality. It is outside of the “norm.” It is queer. But I don’t need to step away from imagery that already exists or even be in relation to it. We are our own people. We need to see more of each other. The world needs to see more possibilities circulated, celebrated, and reflected back. Let’s look at one another eye to eye, see our reflection, and celebrate our differences.” Angela D. White
Access Advisors Open House and Disability Arts Festival March 28 2009
to De Young Museum for directions and other info:
1. Title: Goin’ to the Dance: Disability & Desire: Disability Culture Presentation by Anthony Tusler Time:10:00 AM - 11:00 AM March 28, 2009 Piazzoni Murals Room Description: Anthony Tusler is a pioneer in exploring disability culture. He created one of the first disability-centric art shows and disability performing arts festivals, “Disability and the Arts2.” He has written curricula for the World Institute on Disability and taught Disability in Americaat Sonoma State University.
2. Title: 3 Degrees of Separation: Art Inspires Art Inspires ArtAccess Programs Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM March 28, 2009Wilsey Court Description: Performances on themes from Warhol Live, produced by Maia Scott with master of ceremonies Ron Jones. Part of the Access Advisors Open House and Disability Arts Festival. PerformersJenny Hillebert: vocalist, since age 8 has been a prolific performer, ranging from local musical theater and solo appearances. Ron Jone is an author, storyteller, and beat poet who performs all over the Bay Area and internationally. He has written well-recognized books such as The Wave that has been adapted for plays, rock operas, and movies, and The Team that Never Lost a Game, that was made into a TV movie. Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus, who perform collectively as the Olimpias, recently co-wrote and relased their latest book, Cripple Poetics. Neil is a performer of buttoh dance, contact improvisation, and performance art. Petra Kuppers is a performer, English professor and disability culture activist. Maia Scott is a performance artist and producer of 3 Degrees of Separation, Maia is a massage therapist and workshop facilitator with roots in the arts and disability community. She has co-directed Theatre Unlimited, performed throughout the Bay Area, and presented workshops at state and national conferences. Michael Valcour is an operatic vocalist who has performed throughout California.
3. Art Slam 2009 Time: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM March 28, 2009 Room: Koret Auditorium Description: Art Slam 2009 is a slide show of one work per artist with disabilities paired with the artist’s statement. Helen WalshDiverse Disability Mediadiversedisabilitymedia@comcast.netdisabled lesbians over 40 in the art exhibit and in attendance
Come out and support our local women musicians performing with one of the
great lesbian musicians of all time!
Heather Combs will open for Ferron TONIGHT at Cafe Du Nord in SF. There
are still a few tickets left:
Tonight! Sunday Mar 15
FERRON w/ HEATHER COMBS
Cafe Du Nord
2170 Market St, SF
Doors open 7pm, show at 8pm
Tix: $20 at www.cafedunord.com
Ferron will also be playing next Sunday in Santa Cruz with Julie Wolf and
friends:
Sunday Mar 22
FERRON w/ JULIE WOLF and friends
Kuumbwa Jazz Center
320-2 Cedar St, Santa Cruz
Doors open 7pm, show at 7:30
Tix: $25 at www.brownpapertickets.com
or at:
Streetlight Records, 939 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz
Logos Books & Records, 1117 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz
Body Heat — Femme Porn TourMonday, March 23
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM (doors open at 7:30)
$10
a collective of fierce, brazen Queer Femme artists, writers, and poets
Body Heat is a collective of fierce, sassy, irreverent Femme artists setting ablaze performance art communities and smashing Femme stereotypes. Porn, Kink, Smut, Erotica - Body Heat is not reclaiming our sex so much as OWNING it.
We will turn you on.
We will challenge all of your Gender, Sex, Feminist, Social, & Political boundaries & assumptions.
We will entertain the hell out of you.
Mostly we will leave you panting, begging, dripping for more.Body Heat is about shamelessly reclaiming, celebrating, owning the power of Femme desire.
During last year’s groundbreaking national tour, Body Heat was hailed “the ‘experts’ in literary smut, “ We have taken the often private erotic imagination and turned it into a social AND public art form. In our mind-blowing and non-conforming performances, we have realized a vision where art and sex happen in open, community spaces. We aren’t content being simply ‘safe’ — we want to promote social change with our DESIRE — and desire CAN do exactly that. We have laid claim to every erotic and pornographic assertion and confabulation and named it to be our personal truth — by which we really mean, both political and revolutionary truth.
IMsL—International Ms. Leather Contest is March 19-22nd
Details for event tickets or one day tickets including DJ dancing with Olga T on Friday evening, www.imsl.org
Butch/Femme Socials folks will be in the hospitality suite with ACLC-Alameda County Leather Corps and SVL—Sacramento Valley Leather from 11:30-1 p.m. on Saturday, March 21st. We are visiting NOT hosting this year (it’s the economy <g>). Come meet the members of ACLC and SVL—great groups that would like to share with you about their leather club.
Did I mention the hospitality suites are FREE? Check the board in the lobby of the hotel for hospitality suite locations as well as daily events at IMsL.
Host hotel/event site is Holiday Inn Golden Gate, 1500 Van Ness and California, best all day parking is found on Polk, one block down and one block over.
If you’ve ever wanted to know more about what all these people are doing dressed in black, come to the workshops and learn. Great entertainment, vendors and hospitality suites as well as play spaces.
Spring 2009
Jennifer Cross, is an experienced group facilitator and has been certified in the Amherst Writers & Artists method, described in Pat Schneider’s book Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press (2003). She has been facilitating writing groups since 2002.
Spring 2009
Special 5-week workshops — contact for rate information!
Write Whole-Survivors Write: April 6- May 4, 2009. Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma. Declaring Our Erotic: April 7- May 5, 2009. Open to folks of all sexualities and all genders! Join us!n Memory of our Founder
A Community Celebration of the Life of
Norma Hotaling
March 23, 2009
San Francisco City Hall, North Light Court
This is a free community event that will start promptly at 4pm
If you would like more information about SAGE, or would like to make a donation in honor of Norma, please visit our website at www.sagesf.org or you can contact Allen Wilson or Francine Braae at 415-905-5050.
.Benefit for Richmond Jane Doe Lesbian Hate Crime Survivor.
GBT people and our allies anxiously await the California Supreme Court decision either affirming or rejecting the hateful anti-gay Proposition 8.
But we won’t just wait. Whatever the decision, we must act.
Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron will star as Lili Elbe (Einar Wegener) and Gerda Wegener respectively in a new movie based on David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl. Lili Elbe is the first documented transwoman who underwent a series of highly experimental surgeries to transition. She was born Einar Wegener in 1886 and met Gerda Gottlieb while they were students in a Copenhagen art school.
They settled in Paris in 1912 and worked as illustrators, with Einar focusing on painting landscapes while Gerda found commercial success focusing on books and fashion magazines. Lili’s body type also allowed her to pass quite easily as a woman, which she did from 1910 onwards.When one of Gerda’s models didn’t show up one day, she asked Lili to fill in to great success. Gerda then continued to use Lili in a series of paintings as her model. Sometimes she was dressed in high fashion clothes, other times in the nude.
Beginning in 1930, after Lili’s examination by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, she underwent an experimental series of operations in Berlin to finish her transformation to woman. She had an ovarian transplant performed in the second surgery, but after she experienced severe abdominal pain, had emergency surgery to remove them. She died in 1931 as a result of complications from that failed transplant and is buried in Dresden, Germany.This sounds like an amazing story and hopefully the film will do this fabulous couple some justice, but why Nicole Kidman? Why not an actual transwoman? Just like a straight actor playing Harvey Milk, it’s a little odd. I mean, I know they have to make money and big names are the way to go, but isn’t this kind of belittling and demeaning? Not to mention straight actors are cashing in on the remarkable stories of queer folks. Something just doesn’t feel right to me.
What do you think?
Family Builders is here to help find loving families for children and youth in need - that’s our only goal. We connect children with individuals and couples who can provide safe, stable, nurturing families. Our services are free and confidential, and include adoption, foster care and other forms of permanency.We have experience working with all types of children, youth and families.
We welcome and encourage single men and women„ Spanish speakers and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Please call or email for more information.
SPECIAL- a new One Act Play by
Lesbian Writer/Director Ann P Meredith
Premieres at The Fringe Festival of Marin April 18th 2009
Best friends since high school the women knew they shared a bond that went
deeper than most friendships. Now in later years a chance has presented
itself for them to reclaim their stolen innocence through finding their
voice and speaking the truth as they heal from sexual abuse.
Sat April 18th – 730pm
Fri April 24th – 730pm
Sat April 25th – 730pm
Sat May 2nd – 730pm
Sun May 3rd – 200pm Closing Performance
Tickets are $15.00 each and by Reservation only
Call 415.673.3131
SWORDFISH PRODUCTIONS 415.623.9048
A writer’s group for those who enjoy writing GLBTQ erotica.
We meet to read and critique (and praise!) each other’s work with the goal of publishing and selling what we write. Group moderator is David Holly, an erotica writer whose stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, magazines, digests, and paying web sites.
The group meets on second and fourth Saturday afternoons from 2 to 4pm and participants must be at least eighteen years of age.
For more information please contact David Holly at purple-prose@hotmail.com.
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
2-4pm
Q Center, the NEW location
4115 N Mississippi Ave, Portland (map)
free
From This American Life:
Lilly and Thomasina have a lot in common. They’re both 8 years old. And they were both born boys, although it became clear pretty early on that they’d prefer to be girls. There aren’t all that many kids in the world like them, but recently, at a conference in Seattle on transgender parenting, they met. And they immediately hit it off. They could talk about things with each other that they’d never been able to share with other friends back home. And that’s comforting, even if they never see each other after the conference ends….
“So basically, hating somebody heightens your judgment and your ability to assess what other people are likely to do next. The researchers note that in this way hatred is neurologically unlike love, which tends to deactivate judgment.”
This photo is part of a larger body of work from photographer Sophia Wallace called Truer: An Autobiographical Love Story. View many more of the photos in the series here. Here’s the artist’s statement:
Truer is an autobiographical love story. The title is aimed at challenging the idea of a singular truth regarding love, sexuality, and gender. This body of work was inspired by the resplendence of an unfolding relationship. Through photographs of intensely private moments both joyful and in conflict, Truer seeks to engage the viewer in questioning pervasive visual depictions of truth in love, gender norms, and feminine beauty. Truer situates itself within a largely unseen history of photography of lesbian lives by lesbian photographers.
Vote for Truer at ArtSlant through March 10th to call the judge’s attention to Sophia’s work!
courtesy- QueerToday.com
After 13 long and painful years of blatant discrimination by our government against same-sex couples, GLAD has taken the bold and much anticipated step to challenge the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
On March 3, 2009, GLAD filed its lawsuit in the federal district court in Boston, MA on behalf of eight married couples and three surviving spouses from Massachusetts who have been denied federal legal protections available to spouses. Two of these couples will be filing suit after receiving rejections of their amended tax returns from the IRS. Each plaintiff is currently eligible for a particular program or benefit, applied for it, and was denied that legal protection because of Section 3 of DOMA.
After enduring all these grueling years of oppression by our own government, the time has arrived to use the mometum of the gay rights movement to challenge the illegality of this law, among others. It’s time to record DOMA as a embarrassing but short page in our American history.
“If a black man from Chicago was taught to stand far away from gay people because he didn’t want to be accused of being gay. What would happen if he’d run into a gay man? What’s the talk? What would he learn, what would I learn? I learned that people in Chicago were wrong and I had been an a**hole all along.”
—Kanye West on homophobia
” —The Bilerico Project | Kanye West talks some more about homophobia- Add your name and statement to our Advocates Page.
- Add your organization and statement to our Organizations Page.
- Add your Personal Narrative of psychiatric abuse or stereotyping.
- Submit comments and suggestions to the DSM-V Task Force.
- Contact DSM-V Task Force members.
- Check out the Listserves and Web Groups discussing these issues.
excerpt
As Suze Orman pointed out in her Valentine’s Day wish for gay marriage, same-sex couples do not have the same privileges as straight married couples when it comes to inheritance. If your partner passes away and leaves her estate to you, you have to pay up to 50 percent of the value of your inheritance in taxes. However, if you and your partner were recognized as a married couple, you wouldn’t have to pay a dime. And it is precisely this unjust double standard that got Annie Leibovitz into financial trouble.
When Sontag died in 2004, she bequeathed several properties to Leibovitz, who was forced to pony up half of their value to keep them. Yes, she makes a nice chunk of change from Vanity Fair, and yes, she probably could have just sold the properties when the market was good in 2004, but that’s not really the point. The point is she should never have been in the position of paying or selling to not pay as much in the first place. Her wealth and poor decision-making are incidental.
We are currently running eight Phelps-A-Thons all over the country. When the “God Hates Fags” clan is protesting at a high school because of the schools GSA, we will be collecting donations for that same schools’ GSA. So they will actually be raising money for the exact same thing they are protesting.
delightful
Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund and PFLAG New York City invite you to Christine Jorgensen Reveals: A very special benefit performance supporting the work of Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund and PFLAG New York City
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
7:00 PM to 8:30 PM
The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street (Between 9th and 10th Avenues)
