"Telling Queer Stories" - GSWS Welcome Event

Still of two young people from the film Thanks To Her plus part of an old newspaper ad about Pittsburgh as "Gay America's Best Kept Secret"

 

The Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program  invites new and returning members of the Pitt community to “Telling Queer Stories:  Thanks To Her and the Pitt LGBTQ Archival Education Project,” a webinar and welcome event to be held Friday, September 10, 5-7 pm.  The event will feature two ongoing projects that contribute to queer storytelling.

Thanks to Her:  This short film won the 2021 Rising Voices Film Festival Award and blew up on YouTube, partly because of its treatment of sexuality (including asexuality, morphing sexuality, and experiences of LGBTQIA+ people across generations).  The filmmakers, Pitt alums Sam Orlowski and Sam McCoy, began filming a feature-length expansion of the original premise in Pittsburgh this summer and will offer a sneak peak of some of the new material and the challenges posed by the expansion. The filmmakers and commentators Dr. Julie Beaulieu (GSWS) and Dr. Dana Och (Film and Media Studies, GSWS, English) will talk about the film in relation to contemporary queer filmmaking and storytelling, LGBTQIA+ media studies, and LGBTQIA+ youth cultures.

Note:  Only clips will be shown, but the entire short film can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0pr3gzO_Tk.

The Pitt LGBTQ Archival Education Project:  Launched in 2020, this open-access project involves Pitt students in telling, investigating, and complicating stories about the pasts and futures of Pittsburgh’s LGBTQIA+ communities by drawing on archival materials. Hosted by Pitt, the project aims to bring together, organize, and offer interpretive frameworks for archival holdings at several institutions in addition to identifying and soliciting new materials.  Pitt students working with the project take up questions of queer historiography and archival ethics as well as the challenges of understanding many dimensions of queer life and queer communities in our area.  Pitt students who have contributed to the project will walk through some of its features with Dr. Julie Beaulieu.

For more information and to register for the webinar:  https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_L7MDvBEQT42M-PNpEiXAew.

At the end of the program, we invite anyone interested to stay for a few minutes of information about what GSWS has to offer.