LGBT Events

Focus Is On ‘B’ in LGBTQ

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Bisexual Awareness Week, also known as #BiWeek, is an annual celebration co-founded by GLAAD and BiNet USA to promote cultural acceptance of the bisexual community as well as create a platform for advocating bisexual rights. Bisexuals represent approximately 40% of the LGBTQ community, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey.

On Friday, Sept. 18, #StillBisexual celebrates bi+ representation and bi+ artists in film in a series of three virtual events,  from noon to 7 p.m. (PT). The cost to watch the entire program is $5. Tickets can be purchased at Eventbrite.

Ashlei Shyne

The series kicks off at noon with “Elevating Bi+ Voices and Stories through Media,” a panel featuring Bi+ & Queer filmmakers Michelle Sam, Giovannie Espiritu, Florencia Manovil, Mara De La Rosa, and Stacy Jill Calvert.

At 2:30 “Celebrating Black Voices” will screen two bisexual web series: “#TMI,” a web series created by and starring Ashlei Shyne, and “Bi: The Web Series,” created by and starring David J. Cork. Both creators will have a conversation with one another after screening their work.

“I find it difficult to see myself in film festivals, on TV, in film,” said Shine, an actress-producer and #StillBisexual board member. “Usually the stories that are chosen for these festivals are ones where we are either coming out as bisexual or having a threesome. They are not our whole entire story.

“I wanted to get a group of bi, fluid, pan, and queer filmmakers together and really talk about reclaiming our story and really shaping the smeared images that I feel like mass media have created about the experience of being bi and pan, especially during bi visibility week and bi visibility month,” she said.

The day concludes with the 4:30 p.m. screening of “Disarm Hate,” a feature documentary film by Julianna Brudek.

Narrated by actor Harvey Fierstein and directed by Brudek, the film chronicles nine diverse LGBTQ+ activists who come together after the Pulse nightclub massacre to join Jason P. Hayes, a hairdresser, and an activist from New Jersey who is on a crusade.

Without political experience, Hayes builds a national rally to demand LGBTQ+ equal rights, fight the NRA, and challenge America’s obsession with gun violence. The film seeks to create awareness about gun violence against the LGBTQ+ community, with the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando that took 49 lives as the impetus.

A Q&A will follow the screening, featuring a panel that includes Brudek, Asher Glynn and Alexis Sanchez, and moderated by Jackie Steele.

#BiWeek 2020 runs from Sept. 16 through Sept. 23, culminating with Celebrate Bisexuality Day, held annually on Sept. 23. Bisexual Awareness Week is also a platform to recognize bisexual and LGBTQ advocacy throughout history.

Tickets are $5: Purchase at Eventbrite.

About #StillBisexual

#StillBisexual is an education and advocacy organization focused on empowering those who are attracted to more than one sex and/or gender. Our media campaigns and education programs raise awareness, promote inclusiveness and foster understanding about the unique challenges faced by bisexuals, pansexual, fluid and queer members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

 

Vic Gerami is an award-winning journalist and editor & publisher of The Blunt Post. Gerami is also the host and co-producer of the national headline news & politics program, THE BLUNT POST with VIC on KPFK 90.7 FM (Pacifica Network). The Wall Street Journal featured Gerami as a “leading gay activist” in its landmark 2008 coverage of opposition to Proposition 8, the ballot measure that for years denied same-sex couples in California the freedom to marry. In addition to his years of volunteer work as a leading advocate for marriage equality, Gerami served as a Planning Committee member for the historic Resist March in 2017. In 2015, Gerami was referenced in the landmark Supreme Court civil rights case, Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court held in a 5–4 decision that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process and the Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

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