Tag Archives: Calgary Queer Arts Society

Our Gay Gordon

Posted on August 25, 2022 by Kevin Allen | 3 comments

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!

{KA}

3 Comments

Posted in Gay history

Tagged bisexual, Calgary Outlink, Calgary Pride, Calgary Queer Arts Society, Chinook Fund, CSIF, gay, Gay history, Gordon Sombrowski, lesbian, queer, Shelf Life, transgender

Queer Film Saved Us

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

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.

The 23rd Annual Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival, produced by the Calgary Queer Arts Society, is happening soon (online again this year): running from May 21 – 30, 2021.

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.

{KA}

1 Comment

Posted in Gay history

Tagged bisexual, Calgary Queer Arts Society, City of Calgary, Fairy Tales Film Festival, gay, Glenn Mielke, Heather Campbell, lesbian, Lisa Brawn, Open Spaces, queer, queer cinema, Toqueboy Studios, transgender, twospirit

Fairy Tales 22 Launches

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Kevin Allen | 2 comments

Readers of the Calgary Gay History Project know that we are fans of the fabulous queer film fest, Fairy Tales. The annual event produced by the Calgary Queer Arts Society is now in its 22nd iteration. The Festival often takes a special interest in our community’s history and resiliency. That resilience is being tested in 2020 with the global pandemic, yet impressively the Festival has pivoted to offer all of its films online.

{They also have a fun magpie theme for 2020 – very YYC – Join the Digital Flock!}

Check out the entire festival schedule; running from May 14 – 24, 2020. There are 38 films from over 14 countries to see, but here is a list of ones with historical interest.

May 14 at 7:00 PM (tonight). Fairy Tales launches with

Stonewall: Paving The Way For Gay Pride. Every year in June, the Gay Pride parade is a wild party. It hasn’t always been like this. While 2020 marks the parade’s 50th anniversary, it was originally the first time gays and lesbians walked the streets in New York, claiming publicly to be out, and this procession was intended to commemorate the Stonewall riots that had occurred a year earlier.

stonewall

May 20 at 7:00 PM

Sex, Sin, and 69. This is a historical, retrospective film about the 1969 legislation to ‘decriminalize’ homosexuality in Canada. Told through contemporary voices including queer academics, historians, activists, educators, artists, and community builders, the film attempts to challenge our understanding of queer history by shining a light on widely adopted misconceptions surrounding decriminalization.

May 22 at 7:00 PM

Button OUT! A short film that is a lively animated personal homage to the filmmaker’s own history of protest and the wider story of the LGBTQ2S+ experiences contained in the collection of over 1200 buttons housed at the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ archives in Toronto.

May 22 at 7:15 PM

Bitter Years. This feature film retraces the life of Mario Mieli, among the founders of the Italian Homosexual Liberation Movement, created at the beginning of the Seventies. Born in 1952 in Milan, Mario killed himself in 1983, before he was 31. He was an activist, an intellectual, a writer, and a performer: a key figure in the Italian cultural panorama at that time.

May 24 at 7:00 PM

Take Me to Prom. This short film traces the evolution of queer acceptance in society by asking a multigenerational selection of people to recount a story from their high school prom. It notably includes Marc Hall, whose 2002 court case over his school’s refusal to allow him to bring a same-sex date to his prom, became a landmark LGBTQ2 rights case in Canada.