Mainer's Against Equality, in video and print

Two media pieces about the gay marriage campaign in maine are hot off the presses. Check out the video below which premiered on the Maine Video Activist Network this month as well as the article from Conrad which appears on the blog bilerico and in print via UltraViolet!



Article Link: Against Equality, In Maine and Everywhere

Solidarity Supper - December 19th in Turner

The JED Collective, bang@rang, Faire-Op invite you to the 7th Annual Solidarity Supper to benefit: Outright L/A (Lewiston) & Treatment Action Campaign (South Africa)

Please join us this Saturday December 19th @ Turner Center Grange (directions at www.jedcollective.org)

5:30 Harvest Supper
6:30 Music, Performances and Auction

• Music by Ethan Miller & Seth Yentes (riotfolk.org/?m=katebovermanethanmiller)
• Wiffletree -Seth & Tyler Yentes- (myspace.com/whiffletreemusic)
• Evan Greer (riotfolk.org/?m=evangreer)
  

Every year the Solidarity Supper raises money for important organizations in our community and in the global south. This year we are raising money for Outright L/A (based in Lewiston) and Treatment Action Campaign (based in South Africa).

In a climate in which open discrimination against queer and trans members of our community is still welcomed and accepted we feel it is necessary to show support for the one organization working with queer, trans, questioning, and allied youth in Lewiston/Auburn.

Outright L/A supports queer, questioning, and allied youth through working with local GSAs to offer support in schools and by offering weekly "drop-in" hours on Friday nights - where youth have a safe space to watch movies, do arts projects, or just hang out with one another.

Treatment Action Campaign, based in South Africa, has the vision of A unified quality health care system which provides equal access to HIV prevention and treatment services for all people. Their mission is to ensure that every person living with HIV has access to quality comprehensive prevention and treatment services to live a healthy life.

Please help support these incredible and important organizations!

Also if you would like to help out with food, please contact Daphne: 266-5895 daphneloring@gmail.com

General questions: 782-3604
More info: www.jedcollective.org
Need a place to stay? Need a carpool?
Give us a call and we'll try to accommodate: 782-3604 or 266-5895

World AIDS Day 2009 - Put the Pressure On!

Maine AIDS Alliance Call to Action:

December 1, 2009 10:30am to Noon
Maine State House, Hall of Flags, Augusta

Please join the HIV/AIDS community for an event with lawmakers, community leaders, and those affected by HIV in a call to action at the Maine State House. Looming state funding cuts are threatening our prevention, education, housing and care programs here in Maine. We must show lawmakers that HIV/AIDS continues to affect thousands in Maine and cutting these programs will have very serious effects on the health and well being of Mainers.

Join us to show lawmakers and the Maine public that we MUST maintain vital HIV/AIDS services.

On display will be panels of the AIDS Quilt and 1,300 individualized postcards from Mainers across the state; each postcard will represent one person living with HIV/AIDS in the state of Maine.

FMI contact Andrew Bossie at 207-899-9983 or andrew.bossiegmailcom

Facebook Event Page Event

MaineTransNet Announces Transgender Day of Remembrance Event in Portland

The Transgender Day of Remembrance is an international annual event to remember the individuals who were murdered in the past year due to anti-transgender bias. Please join MaineTransNet on Saturday, November 21 at 5:30 in Portland's Monument Square to remember and honor those who lost their lives this year simply for being who they are.

Following the vigil, there will be a potluck dinner at 6:30 at Williston West (32 Thomas St., Portland) to celebrate our community and give thanks for the lives and opportunities that we enjoy. Please bring some food to share if you are able.

We hope you can join us on the 21st.

Questions? Contact MaineTransNet at mtn@mainetransnet.org or 408-1685.

(facebook event link)

One Naughty Norther Responds to Gay Marriage Defeat in Maine on KBOO Radio!

On Monday, November 9th Conrad was interviewed on the Old Mole Variety Show, a program of KBOO 90.7fm in Portland Oregon. KBOO is an all volunteer run community radio station and the Old Mole Show is socialist feminist social justice radio program. The segment is available below and linked back to KBOO's site! Enjoy!




Old Mole Variety Show on KBOO

Queer Theory, Stonewalled - Nov 17th in Waterville!

Tuesday November 17th, 4-6pm in Lovejoy 103, Colby College, Waterville, Maine.

Light refreshments, All are welcome!

In 1990, Eve Sedgwick boldly announced what for many gays and lesbians by then seemed obvious: “The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century.” Periodizing The Closet, Sedgwick specifies that “the phrase ‘the closet’ as a publicly intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made available, obviously, only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out of the closet.” Characterizing these politics in an early prefiguration of the political organizing and theorizing that has of late come to be known as intersectionality, bar-goer Philip Eagles affirmed of Stonewall, “It was the heart and soul of the Village because it had every kind of person there.” But in the decades since Stonewall, “every kind of person” has not received equal play time in Queer Theory-- certainly not the kind of person who happens to be a sex worker. In contrast with their gay and lesbian comrades at the altar, the ghosts of sex workers still sit on their barstools at the Stonewall Inn, “waiting for their turn at justice” (as Erotic Services Providers Union founder Maxine Doogan puts it). Given this profound disconnect between Queer Theory and the Sex Worker Rights Movement-- movements that would to many seem highly compatible and/or mutually implicated movements, predicated as they both are on a resistance to sexual stigmatization and marginalization--my intent with this talk is three fold: 1) to signal the curious silences that have from the inception of Queer Theory enshrouded the subject of prostitution/sex work, 2) to read into these silences —to consider them, per Sedgwick’s articulation of the silences enshrouding The Closet, as “speech acts” in and of themselves; and 3) to sketch the losses Queer Theory has suffered in the wake of its failure to make common cause with the Sex Worker Rights Movement.

Gay Marriage is not Universal Health Care

As the gay marriage and health care reform debates rage on in our ground zero state, we can't help but wonder how we got so off track. Since when did a corporate friendly "public option" replace our demands for trans inclusive universal health care? How did shared health care plans through our soon-to-be spouses replace our demand for health care for all people of every class, including working class queers who still won't have health care once they're happily coupled because neither of them have it from their employer in the first place. How did so many of us get sucked in to these distractions? And a further burning question... Why should only married people be allowed to live?

To remind ourselves, and our larger communities, that neither gay marriage nor health care reform anything short of universal single payer is going to bring us any closer to the kind of health care access we've been dreaming, we postered both Portland in Lewiston with our newest broadside. Queers must demand universal health care for all the fags, dykes, trannies and queers, even those of us who are marginalized, poor, disabled, elderly and/or poz.

and yes, there's even a historical precedent of queers fighting for universal health care in maine, like this ACT UP/Portland rally in 1994 documented by Annette Dragon for the old gay paper, Apex.

Panel Discussion From Future of the Past: Reviving the Queer Archives Posted!6

for higher quality player click here!

On June 18th, 2009 over sixty people participated in the panel discussion accompanying the exhibition, Future of the Past: Reviving the Queer Archives. The panelist, Susie R. Bock, Erica Rand, Ryan Conrad and Jen Hodsdon, opened the dialog by sharing their personal experiences with queer archiving and activism in Maine. A lively dynamic discussion followed exploring a wide range of issues. For more information about the exhibition, go to exhibition website.

This exhibition and panel event were made possible by the generous support of the Maine Community Foundation’s Equity Fund, Naughty North!, Resources for Organizing and Social Change, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine at the University of Southern Maine, Moth Press, and the Maine College of Art Graduate Studies Program.

Future of the Past: Reviving the Queer Archives Panel Discussion - June 18

There will be a panel discussion accompanying the Future of the Past exhibition during Southern Maine Pride week. The panel will focus on Inter-generational queer/trans activism and how we will continue to document and tell our stories. Light refreshments will be served.


Panelist Include:

Susie R. Bock was hired as Head of USM’s Special Collections in May 1999. In 2002 she was appointed Director of the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine. Both positions make her responsible for developing and caring for the LGBT Collection which contains the papers of individuals and the records of organizations active Maine’s LGBT communities.

Erica Rand is a writer, critic, activist, and Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Women and Gender Studies at Bates College. Her writings include Barbie’s Queer Accessories and the Ellis Island Snow Globe, and she serves on the board of the journal Radical Teacher. In the 1990s, she participated in many of the political actions chronicled in Annette Dragon’s photographs and wrote a sex/politics advice column called Ask Thighmaster: Advice with Holes for Apex, the publication that Dragon co-founded.

Ryan Conrad is an MFA candidate in the Studio Arts Program at the Maine College of Art and a radical queer activist living in Lewiston, Maine. Both his academic work and activism center around the theory and practice of radical queer activism, queer historiographies and queer cultural resistance. He is a member of the Maine based radical queer direct action collective, the Naughty North!, and an ardent archivist.

Jen Hodsdon is a lesbian mom and a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine. She has varied experience in local activism, including co-hosting a radio show on WMPG, planning the Transgender Day of Remembrance, coordinating the Maine SpeakOut Project, co-editing a zine of working class literature, and directing the Vagina Monologues. She has lived her whole life in the state of Maine.

http://www.futureofthepast.wordpress.com for more information!

Future of the Past: Reviving the Queer Archives Opens in One Week @ MECA

Grand Opening: June 5th, 5 - 8pm
June 5th – July 3rd
First Floor, Front and Back Lobby
@ the Maine College of Art
522 Congress Street
Portland ME 04101

The exhibition features nearly one hundred photographs by Annette Dragon documenting the brilliant and varied queer activism that flourished in Maine over the last two decades of the 20th century. This exhibition seeks to revive and reexamine the histories depicted in her photographs in order to better understand the present and re-imagine our most fantastic queer futures.

Susie R. Bock, Director of the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine at USM explains, “These photographs can reach across the decades to tell the story to generations not yet born. They are an invaluable resource for LGBT history in Maine.”

In addition to the exhibition, an intergenerational panel discussion on queer/trans activism in Maine will take place during Southern Maine Pride week in lecture hall 305 at MECA on Thursday the 18th of June at 6pm. Exhibition catalogs featuring all of the exhibition photographs as well as new writing by Susie Bock, Erica Rand and Ryan Conrad will be available at MECA and online.

More information about the panel discussion and exhibition catalog is available elsewhere on this website.

This exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the Maine Community Foundation’s Equity Fund, Naughty North!, Resources for Organizing and Social Change, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine at the University of Southern Maine, Moth Press, and the Maine College of Art Graduate Studies Program.