Sunday, December 1st, is World AIDS Day. Safe Link Alberta (formerly known as AIDS Calgary) Calgary Queer Arts Society and Contemporary Calgary have come together to present an afternoon called ARTS and HIV. Reflections, Joy & Hope.
Hosted by drag performer Misty Meadows, the celebration will feature a recorded interview with Joe Average, an acclaimed Vancouver HIV-positive artist, a screening of award-winning filmmaker Laura O’Grady’s Undetectable and a Q&A panel moderated by James Demers. ARTS and HIV begins at noon and runs until 4:30 at Contemporary Calgary.
There will be inspiring drag performances by Misty Meadows, Argintina, and Shane OnYou. The event will also offer attendees a chance to bid on an online silent auction featuring Joe Average’s original piece Thinking Cap.
In lieu of admission, the organizers suggest leaving a donation in remembrance of someone lost to HIV/AIDS.
There is an unsung hero of the Calgary Gay History Project. His name is Gordon Sombrowski and he is married to research lead Kevin Allen. Consequently, he volunteers (or is “voluntold”) when asked to help out. This short list of tasks includes carrying the microphone on gay history walks, schlepping books, fulfilling book orders, and staffing the history booth at the Calgary Pride Festival—he’ll be there again in 2022. Fortunately, he is an enthusiastic queer history participant. But meanwhile, in the background, he has been creating his own legacy in Calgary.
Join Gordon for a pride week reading from his latest collection of short stories, What Narcissus Saw, on Sept. 1 at Shelf Life Books. Last month, What Narcissus Saw became a finalist for the 2022 Whistler Independent Book Awards. His delightful tales take place in Fernie, BC, Gordon’s hometown, and include several LGBTQ2 characters—people whom you’d swear you know. Although he likes to remind us that “all characters are fictional and events like those told in these tales happen every day and everywhere.”
Gordon is an active community volunteer. He is a founder and current volunteer for the Calgary Chinook Fund, which supports charitable organizations providing services, programming, and education, for and about the LGBTQ2 community.
Chinook Fund Members: Tony Hailu, Michel Bourque, Chris Post and Gordon Sombrowski with Nola Wuttunee (centre) receiving the Hero Award in memory of her father Bill Wuttunee in 2019.
Gordon is a past-president of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Association (GLCSA), now Calgary Outlink and was the founding president of Fairy Tales Presentation Society, now Calgary Queer Arts Society, when it became its own society separate from the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF) in 2004.
Festival Preview photo in FFWD Magazine: June 3, 2004
Pride Festival volunteers: Ayanna and Gordon at the History Booth in 2017
Thank you, Gordon, for all that you do for Calgary’s LGBTQ2 community, and good luck at the Whistler Independent Book Awards ceremony in October. And Happy Pride!
The Calgary Gay History Project’s Kevin Allen has created a historic poster exhibition for the City of Calgary’s Open Spaces program. Open Spaces began in 2009 and celebrates the diversity and quality of works by regional artists, with gallery windows on the Centre Street LRT platform: enlivening the Calgarian commuter experience.
The Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival premiered in Calgary on June 17, 1999, and has become a treasured annual event ever since. The LGBTQ2 Festival has a history of engaging talented local artists to design its festival posters. Over the years, Fairy Tales accumulated a backlog of visually iconic posters that served as both marketing vehicle and artwork. Queer Film Saved Us is a curated retrospective of those beautiful posters. They assert—on the walls, streets, and bulletin boards of Calgary—that queer people were here and always have been.
Seeing ourselves represented on the big screen was alchemy and moved LGBTQ2 rights forward when public funding for queer cultural events was considered controversial. Festival organizers routinely got harassing phone calls and hateful mail but kept the event going—defiantly.
Fairy Tales posters would paper the streets every year at festival time, claiming space in our city. Queer Film Saved Us is a retrospective of those claims: stylized, beautiful and proud. Artists and graphic designers represented in this exhibition include Lisa Brawn, Glen Mielke and Toqueboy Studios.
Poster from the 5th Annual Festival created by Toqueboy Studios
We especially thank Heather Campbell, Public Art Consultant for the City of Calgary, who managed all of the administrative details for this exhibition. She is a delightful and enthusiastic collaborator.
Calgary Gay History 