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  Celebrate our nationalism in any way you choose. For instance, use an American flag postage stamp as a sexy loincloth to barely cover your naughty bits! Thursday
Rice, Beans, & Collard Greens – Pride’s not over according to Basic Rights Oregon, API Pride, Black Pride and Latino Gay Pride as they round out the month with a dance party for queer and trans people of color. And a great way to usher in our fireworks-crazed American Pride celebration weekend. (I’m already hearing the firecrackers going off in my neighborhood as I write).
RnRCFG benefit with Portlandia stars Brownstein and Armisen – So many great things in one: comedy, philanthropy, helping girls rock out, movies, music, TV and a VIP room with two talented comedians/musicians who’ve made our city the Pride of liberal-loving America and the butt of its jokes at the same time. What’s not to love?
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 !W.A.R. ! Women Art Revolution is a new film by Lynn Hershmann Leeson. In case you didn’t know, Lynn is a much respected artist whose works often explore feminism, consumerism, and privacy. She’s been making ground-breaking art since the 1950’s, and has been a key player in the feminist arts movement. In other words, she’s a pretty rad lady.
I got to see this film on it’s last day of screening at the NW Film Center. I’m saddened I didn’t attend earlier so that some of you could run out and see it. It’s worth your time and money. I knew something about the feminist art movement, specifically, the things happening for women during the late 1960’s and 1970’s, but nothing to compare to what this documentary showed me.
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  Michelle Tea in San Francisco's Mission district in the '90s Local filmmaker Aubree Bernier-Clarke (who you might also know from Swan Island or a recent Portlandia cameo) has issued a casting call for a short film she’s producing from Chapter 3 of legendary 90s dyke author Michelle Tea‘s Valencia. Below is her description of the project. If you’re interested in getting involved email valenciapdx@gmail.com.
This film will be part of a feature film based on the book, with different directors creating short films for each chapter. The novel dramatizes the hopes and hurts, apathies and ambitions of young lesbians looking for love in San Francisco’s Mission District in the early 1990s, focusing on Michelle, a poet navigating the druggy, boozy dyke scene while consorting with a series of lady loves.
I’m casting for the following roles:
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  Hello Sailor! 'Maggots and Men' screens Thursday at the Hollywood Theater Thursday
Beartown 16 goes all weekend long with an array of amazing events. Perry has some highlights in an earlier post. She was particularly excited about massages but I’m kinda down with the UnderBear Dance Party and how fun it would be to traipse Mississippi with a clan of cubs.
Maggots and Men: Queering History/Revisioning Utopia – This film revisions post-revolutionary Russia with a sailoriffic genderf***ed twist. I love how awesome and weird we can be sometimes. The historic Hollywood Theater is the perfect place to indulge in this film. Fleetweek here we come!
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 Queens... keeping the galaxy safe from boredom. I knew it. Somewhere, deep in the solar system, is a planet where only women can gaycation. Well, mostly drag queens really, but that’s better in my opinion. In 1991, the famous San Francisco drag queen, Doris Fish, released a really low budget movie called, Vegas in Space. She’d been scraping money together for eight years before she could actualize her dream. The best part? Vegas in Space is based on a party she threw.
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  Put This on the Map is a documentary featuring 26 different LGBTQ youth living in East King County. In the film the youth speak about what it means to be LGBTQ and discuss both gender expression and sexual orientation. One of the things I enjoyed most about the film was that youth from across the LGBTQ spectrum were included. We get to hear from youth that identify as trans, gender queer, bisexual, lesbian and gay. They talk about their experiences with bullying, their families, coming out, school, friends, their relationships, and their hopes for the future.
The film offers good basic information but is a little too after school special-esque. It doesn’t really delve into any specific topic as the experiences of so many youth are touched on.
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  I am is filmmaker Sonali Gulati’s coming out letter to her mother. Eleven years after her mother’s death, Sonali explores the possibilities of how her mother might have reacted to her sexuality by returning to her childhood home in New Delhi and gathering the coming out stories of Indian queers and their parents.
Some might think a film of coming out stories from a country which only decriminalized homosexuality in 2009 would be intolerably grim. But the film includes many heartfelt interviews with Indian parents philosophizing on parental acceptance, the meaning of unconditional love and the process of letting your children become who they are. Some of these parents showed real bravery to stick by their kids and to change their own expectations. They’ve challenged the expectations of their extended families and a society that is very focused on heterosexual marriage. Many are clearly still struggling with it, but there is a lot of love in this film.
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  Last night I took a friend who was visiting from New York to the airport. We got in a great philosophical conversation about whether gay rights are the inevitable result of a free society. At this point in history, it’s possible to view gay marriage and other advances as “just a matter of time”. The truth is there are people who faced police brutality, unemployment, societal rejection, and death to make this conversation even possible. There are people who still face these horrors, but that’s another film…
On These Shoulders We Stand puts us across the living room from a fabulous cross-section of the activists of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. There’s Ivy Bottini, founder and president of NOW New York. She was sacked when the term “Lesbian Menace” was coined.
There’s Dale Reynolds, the Hollywood leading man who founded Gay Actors RAP to fight homophobia in the film industry. Then there’s Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church who helped organize the first Pride Parade in L.A. a year after Stonewall.
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  It's hard to be pretty when being pretty makes you hard. The Adonis Factor, a film by Christopher Hines, is a look into the objectification and beautification inherent in the gay male world. Hines also brought us the movie, The Butch Factor. Both films discuss social and personal roles and image in gay culture. However, The Adonis Factor focuses more on beauty and image expectation.
I love queer documentary. I forget how narrow my perspective can be as a lesbian, and I’m always thrilled to find new beautiful pathways, and dark alleys in which to peek. I do kind of feel, that when I opened the door on this documentary, all that stood before me were boring pant suits. The emotional standpoint attempts to create empathy towards muscle ridden gay men, and remind us all that “beauty is a curse”. I can understand that breaking your back to reach a social expectation is grueling, but I’m not so sure sitting and watching an entire documentary on this one issue is eye opening.
I found the perspective narrow. Midway through, I got a sense that these men felt their pressure to work out and starve themselves was exclusive to them. There was an attitude that maybe straight people and other queer communities don’t have it quite as rough with pressure to be perfect. I did find some of the interviews to be interesting, but I couldn’t help that “I’ll give you something to cry about” feeling welling up inside me like an angry demon ready to devastate some carbs.
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  Patty Schemel I won’t say that I’m always particularly verbally eloquent but I was a little aghast at my rambling questions posed to Hole drummer and subject of QDoc Friday night film Hit So Hard Patty Schemel. I wasn’t necessarily nervous, but I can’t deny that Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This was second only to Team Dresch as the most played tape on my Freshman year walkman. And despite any verbosity on my part it was great to hear Schemel’s take on the documentary, and I’ve included the uncut audio below, in addition to the written interview. For a brush up on the film you can read the earlier post reviewing Hit So Hard.
[display_podcast]
qPDX: How was it coming out publicly as a musician in the 90s? Any contrast to being out personally?
Patty: I didn’t have any concerns about it. I was out with my peers and in my band. In my band it was a safe place to do that.
q: Any public backlash?
P: None that I knew about. It was a good experience. I got a lot of kids that would say thanks for coming out.
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