The BC Gay and Lesbian Archives (BCGLA) is a diverse collection of LGBTQ2+ history, started by Ron Dutton in 1970s and recently donated to the City of Vancouver Archives. Of the over 5,400 images that have been digitized, about 1,000 photographs depict people and events that are currently unidentified.
In partnership with the SUM Gallery, the City of Vancouver Archives is asking for help to identify these people and events in the BCGLA photo collection. Spanning from the 1940s to the 2000s, capturing moments from drag performances to City Hall protests, these photos tell the story of a long and powerful history of LGBTQ2+ resistance, solidarity, and strength.
Join us to look through these photos and by sharing your stories, enhance access to this collection. This photo identification event is free and open to the public.
Curated by Justin Ducharme in collaboration with the artist, this year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival offers a pop-up exhibit featuring new and retrospective works from artist Zachery Longboy.
Longboy is from Churchill, Manitoba and is of Sayisi Dene lineage. This new and retrospective collection continues the artists’ exploration within a fractured cultural experience through deeply felt layered videos, paintings and archival film.
The exhibit has been held over until September 14.
Fri Jun 28 | 9pm | Free with QSO ticket | Party only $20 – $15
You can’t get that shit out!
On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the closing of QAF 2019 we’re throwing the party of the half-century! Get ready for a culmination of the creative outpouring of this festival season and the past fifty years of queer art and culture.
Join us at The Roundhouse in collaboration with Vancouver Pride Society, The Frank Theatre Company, and Zee Zee Theatre to revel in the queerevolution with live performances, DJ’s spinning us through the decades, and more!
It’s not your story. It’s your LEGEND.
QAF 2019 rEvolution gathers together artists who disassemble, push, and transgress: art as the evolution of the revolution.
“Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.” — Jeanette Winterson
This concert recognizes the fiftieth anniversary of homosexual rights in Canada and celebrates the many, many vibrant voices that make up our queer community.
This concert is presented in partnership with Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (VSO).
This opportunity is for emerging artists to work with the celebrated Queer Songbook Orchestra, and use your own personal narratives as an entry point for creating music. Young artists of all disciplines welcome – bring your songs, poems, stories, dance, images, or just your fierce self. This is a drop-in workshop, no registration necessary.
Celebrated national chamber ensemble Queer Songbook Orchestra unearth the queer backstories and personal narratives inspired by musicof the past several generations, weaving together stories told by local narrators including Monica Meneghetti, jaye simpson and Marv Houngbo with arrangements by Canada’s foremost composers.
Alex Samaras
Chelsea D.E. Johnson
Stephen Jackman-Torkoff
Joshua Zubot
Peggy Lee
Sam Davidson
Shaun Brodie
Ellen Marple
Thom Gill
Veda Hille
Daniel Fortin
Barry Mirochnik
The Wide Open, curated by Lacie Kanerahtahsóhon Burning, continues from media art in community centres throughout Vancouver through their Trans, Gender Diverse, and Two-Spirit Inclusion team to the big screen. This media project puts LGBTQ2S+ narratives fearlessly out in the open with a focus on intersectionality.
Justin Ducharme – Positions
Fallon Simard – Prayers for Dreamy Boys
Nicole Jones Abad & Lisa Bui Why Do You Stay Here?
Wapahkesis – My Pride Is
Chhaya Naran – Gif me something to hold onto
BiG SiSSY – Black Star
Kent Monkman – Miss Chiefs Praying Hands
Image credit: Lacie Kanerahtahsóhon Burning
NOTE: Entry to all QAF events requires membership to the Pride in Art Society. Memberships are available for $3 online or $5 / $2 concession at the door (or included in passes). We welcome you to the bar which opens at 6pm. For reservations please arrive 15 minutes before the 7pm showtime to ensure your seats.
The Frank Theatre presents a reading of Diaspora: an interdisciplinary, devised performance created by queer refugees and immigrants. This collaboration between the Frank’s Artistic Director, Fay Nass, and an ensemble of immigrant artists and community members explores the challenges and freedoms that come with living in exile. Through text, video and physical theatre, it asks audiences to look beyond the Western perception of LGBTQ+ identity, towards diverse notions of gender and sexuality. The personal stories in Diaspora reveal how language and culture shape queerness, and how many queer newcomers leave their country in search of community, only to be excluded from Western queer subcultures. Artistically innovative and emotionally authentic, Diaspora will move audiences and incite cultural exchange.
NOTE: Entry to all QAF events requires membership to the Pride in Art Society. Memberships are available for $2 online or $5 / $2 concession at the door (or included in passes). Please allow a few extra minutes at your first event to obtain your new card.
Mon Jun 24 | 7pm | with Landon Krentz and re:Naissance Opera | Pay What You Can
JESSE – AN ASL OPERA is a workshop reading by Landon Krentz, Heather Molloy & Paula Weber resulting from a two-week experimental process that gathered Deaf and Hearing artists to explore how poetry, music, English and ASL intersect. Bi-cultural and bilingual, this experience reflects a creative process that was both riveting and uncomfortable.
Sun Jun 23 | 7pm | Multidisciplinary Music| $20 – $10
Performances by young artists from QAF’s Technical Knockouts music lab, mentored by Kinnie Starr, DJ O Show and Tiffany Moses. QAF’s emerging artist program.
NOTE: Entry to all QAF events requires membership to the Pride in Art Society. Memberships are available for $3 online or $5 / $2 concession at the door (or included in passes). Please allow a few extra minutes at your first event to obtain your new card.
The Queen in Me explores the constraints of conventional opera roles and their reliance on gender and sex stereotypes, exploding operatic expectations of demure muses and femme fatales by turning the genre on its head.
The curtain rises mid-performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, as the Queen of the Night’s highly anticipated aria, Der Hölle Rache, begins. However, this time, the Queen rebels against her expected narrative, refuses to finish the opera, and tells her story in her own words for the first time – at a cost.
“Somewhere our truths collide, all sung unamplified.” — Queen of the Night
Kasahara, a biracial, masculine non-binary female artist, takes inspiration from their career as a professional opera singer alongside their lived experiences as a queer, feminist, person of colour to re-imagine the Queen of the Night, one of opera’s most infamous “fallen women,” and places her in the centre of a metaphor for silenced and discarded women everywhere.
Created and performed by Teiya Kasahara
Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, pianist
Directed by Andrea Donaldson
NOTE: Entry to all QAF events requires membership to the Pride in Art Society. Memberships are available for $3 online or $5 / $2 concession at the door (or included in passes). Please allow a few extra minutes at your first event to obtain your new card.
