Well hello my lattes, cortados and double-doubles, my soothing mint tisanes and my bracing bitter shots of espresso. Welcome to a highly-caffeinated edition of “Queer Culture Catch-Up.” I, your resident nerd avid consumer of LGBTQ2S+ cultural business of all kinds, have scoured the wild internet, buffeted about by heterosexuality on every side, to find and present to you a selection of queer jewels to excite and/or relax you, whatever the case may be.
The Badass Trans Women of Comedy
Our friends at We Are Trans curate monthly shows of all sorts of trans talent and it has come to my belated attention that they’re running a monthly, pay-what-you-can trans women’s comedy show called The Badass Trans Women of Comedy on the second Saturday of the month. The show on April 9 (7 p.m. ET) looks very exciting, with comedians Chloe Koser, Cindy Rivers, Ellie Rodriguez and household fave Kai Quix, whose incredibly dry take on queer encounters in the heterosexual wild fully made me aspirate my coffee this morning. Sometimes with a bill of comedians who all share an identity you get a lot of joke overlap, but in this show I’m looking forward to just a lot of jokes.
Five Films for Freedom, BFI Flare
The fine folks at Flare, the British Film Institute’s annual LGBTQ2S+ film festival, have programmed a tremendous selection as usual but unless you’re in the U.K., your streaming options are limited. However, queers beyond the Empire will be pleased to know that again this year, the BFI have made their human rights film selections free and available to stream worldwide under the heading Five Films for Freedom. This year brings us five lyrical shorts about queer experiences that interrogate the concepts of family, borders, sexual orientation and love. Stream films reflecting experiences from India, Panama, Croatia, China and Nigerians in the U.K. until March 27 (and make sure you have a handkerchief when you sit down to watch).
The Masc and Femme We Wear: The Queer Bodypolitic of Ethnicity
This event sent me running to the library to learn more about the writers curated by Berend McKenzie, whose work I first read in Between Certain Death and A Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, which I kvelled all about in an earlier column. I am now 100 percent excited about this event, which includes writers C.E. Gatchalian, Tia Kushniruk, Serena Bhandar, Lili Robinson, and Kyle Shaughnessy. I honestly don’t think I could describe the event better than the ticket link copy: “Join our performers as their work explores and begs the following questions: What are the costs of masking or revealing one’s inner self under the glaring stage lights of colonialist supremacy? How do the expectations of a salacious white gaze fit, chafe, bind, or even unravel the BIPOC queer body and spirit? How is the BIPOC queer body eroticized and fetishized?” You can stream The Masc and Femme We Wear: The Queer Bodypolitic of Ethnicity for free on Saturday, March 26, at 6 p.m. ET.
Crying Nazi Dinner Theater: An Antifascist Purimshpil (Part 2)
If you are exhausted in the first degree by Nazis and their bullshit, this event is for you. Some of our favourite lawyers are taking the Purim tradition of mocking fascist authorities and celebrating heroes (both trickster and straightforwardly valorous varieties) with a live reading of the latest lawsuits and court documents from particularly foolish and incompetent Nazi Chris Cantwell, who pepper-sprayed people at a Unite The Right rally and then ugly-cried and doxxed himself online when he was alerted to the idea that being a straight white man did not in fact give him carte blanche (get it?) to injure people who disagreed with him. You can watch Crying Nazi Dinner Theater: An Antifascist Purimshpil (Part 2) on Saturday, March 19, at 8 p.m. ET by donation, with live captioning (and you should, it’s going to be absolutely hilarious). A note: it’s a Purim tradition to get absolutely hammered during the mocking-fascists portion of the celebration, so there will probably be some drunkenness on display—be advised if that’s not cool for you.
Spicy Showcase: Queer & Kinky Erotica from Writing Spicier
Hosted by Sinclair Sexsmith (of Sugarbutch fame) and featuring the amazing Kiki DeLovely along with other participants from the Writing Spicier workshop, this showcase promises to be a mixed grill of queer, pervy and otherwise spicy hotness. Enjoy it from home, where you can open yourself to receiving any number of queers right into your hot and horny (ear)holes. DeLovely, an internationally renowned smut-spinner, headlines Spicy Showcase: Queer & Kinky Erotica from Writing Spicier and you can likely expect some sweaty power-exchange business in her work, but tune in to see what the other participants might bring on Sunday, March 20, at 7 p.m. ET.
And those, my loves and lights and lingering glances, are the doings of the next couple of weeks here in queerlandia, where the coffee stays iced and the gossip stays steaming. I hope you get sweetness and hotness and connection and love in the coming weeks; I hope spring is springing and taking you with it into the warm and wet. I am greeting the new season with cautious optimism but trying hard to keep it as much optimism as caution, and I wish the same for you. As always, if you’re making something new, drop me an email or DM me the details—I love to hear from you.
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