kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
There are only 3 days left to fund this project!
Pay It No Mind: Marsha P. Johnson
About this project
Dear Friends, Documentary Film Supporters, Activists, and Admirers of Great Courage,
We are in the final post-production stage of an hour-long documentary about the revolutionary trans-activist Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. was a seminal figure in the downtown New York City scene from the ‘60s through the ‘90s. Known as “The Saint Of Christopher Street,” Johnson was an instigator at Stonewall, an Andy Warhol model, and a proud, take-no-nonsense drag queen.
We are so close to finishing this inspirational film, and interest in it has been such that we were invited to screen the rough cut version at New York’s IFC Theatre. We want to share this documentary with you, but we need just a little help with some finishing funds to help us pay for archival video clips, historical photographs, a sound mix, videotape stock, digital transfers, and a few film festival application fees (programmers are already interested in the film).
Antony, founder of the musical group Antony and the Johnsons has generously donated his music and contribution gifts to make this documentary a reality. (And for those of you that didn’t already know, Antony originally named his band in honor of the documentary’s subject, Marsha P. Johnson.)
This historic documentary includes interviews with performer Agosto Machado, author Michael Musto, performer/director Jimmy Camicia, Warhol superstar and poet Taylor Mead, and the Stonewall Uprising historian David Carter, among many others.
Please help us to tell this vital, entertaining, and moving story.
Everyone working on this film has donated their labor. We just need a small financial push to get Marsha’s story out to the world, where it rightly belongs.
Thank you for your love.
(via so-treu)
Featured Interview: Jackie Anderson, 69
From The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project documentary, by tonia.m.
![tiona.m. is a multi-media artist whose mission is to make the invisible, visible and humanize her subjects. She believes that her work as a filmmaker and visual artist can inspire various communities by affirming their existence in contemporary society and culture. Her last film, black./womyn.: conversations with lesbians of African descent, provides a platform for Black lesbians to speak for themselves and to confront the hyper-sexualized image of the Black lesbian.
Tiona continues to develop and create films on progressive topics with the hope of directing a narrative feature-length project in the near future. She is currently in production with her next feature length documentary The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project,a short narrative film Bumming Cigarettes, and an experimental short series called Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, which is an magical realism themed take on the Black American experience.
[via her tumblr in the meantime… + trailers on vimeo ]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2xmhjSlYs1qaqhqdo1_250.jpg)
tiona.m. is a multi-media artist whose mission is to make the invisible, visible and humanize her subjects. She believes that her work as a filmmaker and visual artist can inspire various communities by affirming their existence in contemporary society and culture. Her last film, black./womyn.: conversations with lesbians of African descent, provides a platform for Black lesbians to speak for themselves and to confront the hyper-sexualized image of the Black lesbian.
Tiona continues to develop and create films on progressive topics with the hope of directing a narrative feature-length project in the near future. She is currently in production with her next feature length documentary The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project,a short narrative film Bumming Cigarettes, and an experimental short series called Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, which is an magical realism themed take on the Black American experience.
[via her tumblr in the meantime… + trailers on vimeo ]
from QZAP - The Queer Zine Archive Project which you can still submit print queer zines to.
(via Gladys Bentley) a better pic.
Courtney Gillette (via The real lives of celesbians | AfterEllen.com)
Way before Janelle Monae made cute suits her signature, or Lady Gaga was flaunting her alter ego Jo Calderone, there was Gladys Bentley, flirting and singing the blues in men’s clothing during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance.
Why no one has paid Betley homage with a proper documentary or biography is baffling to me. She wasn’t just into women (gossip columns were all a twitter when Bentley married a white woman in Atlantic City), she was an openly lesbian performer, who sang the blues not only at rent parties and speakeasies but at well known gay establishments. As for her style and preference for suits (and top hats! Homegirl rocks a top hat like nobody’s business!), she later told Ebony magazine, “It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought so….From the time I can remember anything, even as I was toddling, I never wanted a man to touch me…Soon I began to feel more comfortable in boys clothes than in dresses.”
The sad ending, though, came when Betley caved to the conservative pressures of the McCarthy era and “reformed,” marrying a dude, donning dresses, and saying she’d been cured. She also denounced her former ways as an effort to gain a mainstream audience, but that flopped. Gossip, style, blues, speakeasies, love affairs: Gladys Bentley’s life has the makings of some killer nonfiction. Who’s game?
Legendary 1930s blues singer Gladys Bentley. Openly lesbian, Bentley was the headliner at the Clam House, a gay and lesbian club on 133rd street in Harlem where she performed popular songs with double-entendre lyrics in top hat and tuxedo.
I’ve wondered why she hasn’t received better recognition and queer homage to. Even allowing for the combined erasure of specifically lesbians, butch/bulldagger women and WOC in queer media, Bentley was just such an innovator socially and creatively, through such influential periods in queer history. Her story would appeal to just about any audience that aren’t far right haters.
*though she had accepted conservative public norms by the time of her death, so I dunno about the implications for intellectual property.
(via heyfatchick)
“Herstory Repeats:” Kathleen Hanna
Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA
March 30, 2011
I love you for posting this!
Betty Davis - They Say I’m Different (via MichelCouillard)
They say I’m different ‘cause I’m a piece of sugarcane
Sweet to the core, thats why I got rhythm.
My great grandma didn’t like the foxtrot.
Naww! Instead she’d spit her snuff and boogie to Elmore James.
Today’s theme = resisting ahistorism via music videos.
Why did Betty Davis have to be *just* before the advent of music video, with her awesome style!?
SHAKEDOWN is the story of a black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles. The film is anchored in the stories of three women: Ronnie Ron, the creator and emcee of “Shakedown, a large butch/stud lesbian and former Jehovah’s Witness; Egypt, a single mother, beauty pageant fanatic, and dedicated self - (re)inventor; and Jazmyne, the complicated and sometimes conflicted “Queen” of Shakedown. We go through the process of their labor with them and record what they do, and how they feel about what they are doing.”
(via femmefluff:polypeopleofcolor)
More from the director Leilah Weinraub’s statement and kickstarter fundraising page [which only has a few more days to go, if you can support it!]
The films structure employs the cycle of money exchanged and passed through the world as a metaphor for energy; from costume maker to security guard to patrons to the dancer’s children. SHAKEDOWN emphasizes the symbiotic nature of how things work in a system.
SHAKEDOWN is a feature-length video documentary about women’s work, and how work forms identity. Its also a history of Los Angeles, or a history of Los Angeles’ black lesbian nightclub scene, and its genesis. It’s a history told in opposition to other histories of black performance art. It is important to me to show that this world / structure was created, planned and built.
(via sexartandpolitics)
The Heretics trailer
(discusses the world of feminist art and its artists)
Ignore the ad, 10 min trailer with lots of artists.
“From my point of view, no label, no slogan, no party, and no…um skin color, and indeed no religion, is more important than a human being.”
I’ve been super busy and forgot to post this, but Monday was James Baldwin’s birthday.
I am really intrigued by a new exhibition at the DRKRM Gallery in Los Angeles. The Fairoaks Project, polaroids by Frank Melleno taken in 1978 at the Fairoaks Hotel, a bathhouse in San Francisco.
Situated in a refurbished Victorian building near a black ghetto, The Fairoaks was known for its laid-back and racially integrated ambiance. Bold and unapologetic, Melleno’s images capture an aspect of gay life rarely seen in snapshot photography: sexually candid encounters that are playful, spontaneous and often affectionate. The dark storm of drug abuse and pandemic disease that would soon overtake the community is not visible in these celebratory pictures.
The link is not-safe-for-work but the candid shots are beautiful. There’s always a danger in waxing elegiac about pre-AIDS gay culture, but these images seem to capture a particular moment of innocence.
glbtq » Special Features » Pink and Bent: Art of Queer Women
Gail S. Goodman (b. 1952) created the “Sal and Me” series as a gift and tribute to her friend Sal, who had AIDS and was losing a sense of his own body. The images in the series create a deliberate ambiguity so that, like Sal, viewers struggle to ascertain what body part—and whose body—they are viewing.
FYI those who don’t follow her blog, radical femme, feminist, author, lesbian community historian and activist Joan Nestle has cancer again.
Thoughts are with her and hoping for the best, as she shows her usual grace about living:
“This is the glory of life, celebration and wearing down”
