Spring Forward
A new festival adds a queer twist to Women’s History Month.By Jason A. Heidemann
Who says that culture and nightlife for Chicago’s queer women are dead? Certainly anyone crying into her beer over the recent closing of Andersonville watering hole Star Gaze. But not C.C. Carter, executive director of POW-WOW (Performers or Writers for Women on Women’s Issues), a female-fueled gathering of artists who meet weekly at South Side fixture Jeffrey Pub. “It’s kind of unfair that everything we do as LGBT happens on the North Side,” Carter says. “Everybody was very upset about Star Gaze closing, and yet Jeffrey Pub is there every Tuesday and it’s right off of Lake Shore Drive and the Metra line.”
The need for a greater awareness of queer cultural options for women of color on the South Side drove Carter to co-create the inaugural Chicago Women’s Pride 2010, a performing and cultural arts festival that kicks off Tuesday 2 at venues all over the city and happens throughout Women’s History Month.
The new fest includes a slam poetry competition every Tuesday in March at Jeffrey Pub; a kickoff fund-raiser on March 5 presented by B.Blyss! Productions; a production of Eve Ensler’s Any One of Us: Words from Prison at Northeastern University on March 12; a night of comedy at Bronzeville club Jokes & Notes on March 14; and the Rainbow Shoe/Tie Affair, a gala and awards ceremony on March 21. The fest will raise bucks for the building fund for Jackie’s Place, a temporary women’s housing shelter for victims of unemployment, sexual assault and domestic violence.
Carter, a professional spoken-word performer and onetime military brat who’s lived in Chicago for 15 years, was introduced to poetry by her grandmother, whom she calls “the fiercest spoken-word poet never known.” In junior high school, Carter won the 5th Annual Guild Complex Gwendolyn Brooks Spoken Word Competition. As an adult, while traveling the country performing spoken word, she noticed a dearth of friendly venues for queer women of color. “There weren’t a lot of spaces for LBT women artists interested in social justice and socially transformative work,” Carter says. “Even my friends who were the most prolific poets would water down their set when we were in certain kinds of audiences.”
In 2003, Carter cofounded POW-WOW as an ongoing cultural event for queer women of color and male allies, but she discovered that many of its followers were women in need. “My intent was to deal with the cultural-arts aspect of what was missing in the community,” Carter says, “but when you have a woman go on stage and talk about an incident that happened to her and then other women say, ‘Hey, this happened to me, too,’ suddenly I’m getting calls at two in the morning.” Now staffed by 200 volunteers, the org operates a 24-hour crisis hotline, offers workshops in the Juvenile Court Building and Dentention Center for girls and just launched Boys to Studs, a new program for gender-variant women.
Carter says she wants to give women a fest not dominated by men, such as Pride or Black Pride, while also bringing attention to the South Side. “There’s some phenomenal talent that’s not being recognized because of location and geography,” she says. “Bronzeville and Hyde Park are these up-and-coming areas that are vibrant with art and culture.” Yet the festival also has partnered with North Side events like the Chicago History Museum’s OUT at CHM on March 6 and Andersonville fixture Sappho’s Salon at Women & Children First on March 20.
The timing is no accident: Carter says the city still hasn’t figured out how to include lesbians in its Women’s History Month lineup. “I love the things the city puts out for Women’s History Month, but it lacks a lesbian focus,” she says. “The word lesbian is the elephant in the room for so many people.”
Chicago Women’s Pride 2010 kicks off Tuesday 2 at Jeffrey Pub.
Time Out Chicago / Issue 261 : Feb 25–Mar 3, 2010
Read more: http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/gay/83108/chicago-womens-pride-2010#ixzz0iXlP4e0n
