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Clare Mulroy

Between loneliness, capitalism and immigration, ‘Against the Wall’ has a lot to say about life

Posted on April 18, 2022

By Clare Mulroy

 This article was first published in The DC Line here.

“Whoever says you can’t live in two places at the same time is dead wrong” is my favorite line in Alberto Roblest’s recently published book of short stories, Against the Wall. Capitalizing on themes of loneliness, power and self-discovery, Roblest delivers a collection that masterfully comments on the human condition.

Translated from Spanish, Roblest’s prose brings readers through a variety of first-person and third-person accounts of human life. While many of the characters in Against the Wall are not tasked with anything particularly remarkable, even a journey like moving a mattress to a new home or going to a casino provides a vehicle for social commentary.

Roblest, a local author and founder of Hola Cultura, has a lot to say about the crumbling myth of the American dream and the overwhelming disappointment of mainstream politics. In one notable story, “Blackened Obelisk,” the Washington Monument becomes encased in roaches. The nation panics. White House officials and strategists propose blowing up the monument and rebuilding it to profit off of the tourism and sponsorship it’ll attract. You would’ve thought filmmaker Adam McKay himself took inspiration from this short story for his December release Don’t Look Up. 

But there are more subtle conversations about national identity and capitalism throughout the book. Immigration is an undercurrent in almost all of Roblest’s short stories, showing how natural-born citizens often treat immigrants as if they’re disposable, even though they are the backbone of this country’s labor and production. Even when immigration doesn’t seem at the forefront of a particular story, there is a throughline of expedition and feeling lost in all of his work. 

The magic of Against the Wall is that each story builds on the previous one to create a sort of time-capsule memory — by the time you get to the latter half of the collection, each new story with new characters feels charmingly familiar. Sometimes it feels like we already know the character after just a few paragraphs, and often it’s painful to leave a character and move onto the next story so soon.

The book’s weakness is the jarring way it sometimes toggles between realistic fiction and mystical storytelling. In one story a man moving with his family reflects on political scandal and class differences, and in the next a female monster chases a man through a maze of garbage and starving children. Just as you feel you’ve grasped the essence of Roblest’s writing style, he pivots, sometimes leaving you puzzled.

Still, it’s captivating enough to slip into these stories. “Lost and Found” sees a man waking up trapped in a bus terminal, unsure how he got there. As he searches for his luggage, the tale becomes more intense with each step. Reading the story felt like waking up from a puzzling dream, sitting in bed trying to interpret what it is my brain is telling me. “Cat Life” features a character who is led to out-of-body experiences through the felines that live in the house where he rents a room. Stories like this are sometimes so abstract it’s hard to pull yourself back down to earth, but at least spending so much time in the clouds makes you think.

Roblest’s storytelling gives the feeling of gathering bits and pieces of a puzzle until, in the last paragraph of each story, you are finally able to push back your chair and see the entire masterpiece. Roblest skillfully buries messages just below the surface; lessons about immigration, capitalism and the passage of time masquerade as everyday human interactions.

In the collection’s last story, “The Apparently Abandoned God-Forsaken City,” the narrator speaks candidly to the reader: “Whenever I get scared, I grab my balls.” While the detail is a slightly graphic one, the paragraph ends with a beautiful tribute to the human body and the connection between our soul and physical being. 

“Holding onto myself, I face the world and proceed.”

This last story rounds out the entire book, which is filled with people setting out on journeys — either metaphorical or real. In these varied stories, Roblest comments on living in the present while looking toward the future, on being in New York City and on the contributions of immigrants to this country. And though the stories’ connections aren’t always obvious, readers can see humanity of all shapes, sizes and colors at the forefront of the book’s most important themes — destruction, growth, change and time. I am not an immigrant and have not experienced the attendant discrimination and xenophobia, but the skill of their portrayal nonetheless allows me to feel a personal connection to the characters. Roblest marries narratives that might not be recognizable to every reader with human experiences that all of us share.

In the last section of the final short story, Roblest seems to break the fourth wall, telling us, “So I’m finally here … telling you my life story.” And while it may just be the voice of another character, I can’t help but think that maybe Roblest has lived a thousand other lives before.

Against the Wall: Stories by Alberto Roblest and translated by Nicolás Kanellos (134 pages, $18.95) was published in September 2021 by Arte Público Press.

This article was produced in conjunction with Day Eight’s February 2022 conference on “The Crisis in Book Review.” The DC Line worked with conference organizers on the New Book Reviewer Project, an initiative to grow the cohort of qualified local book reviewers. Clare Mulroy is one of eight writers assigned as part of the conference to write a review for The DC Line or the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Virtual exhibits transform traditional museum experience with longer exhibition times, interactive elements

Posted on August 25, 2021

By Roy Gao

This article was first published in The DC Line here. It was developed within Day Eight’s week-long, 2021 summer arts journalism institute.

With just the movement of a computer mouse, a silver pitcher covered with two winged camels and foliate patterns is viewable from all angles and at various scales. This Central Asian artifact, made in the late seventh or early eighth century A.D., is just one of numerous 3D items that visitors can access through a National Museum of Asian Art virtual exhibition. The museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, is far from alone in having launched virtual exhibits at a time when the pandemic kept museums and galleries from fully reopening.

Even as DC art institutions like the National Museum of African Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery have gradually reopened their doors to the public, not everyone is ready to head downtown, particularly with the rise in COVID-19 cases due to the spread of the delta variant. Luckily, the city’s museums have adapted over the past year to offer an equally valuable experience through online exhibitions. Antonietta Catanzariti, assistant curator for the ancient Near East at the National Museum of Asian Art, notes that visitation to their website has doubled in the past year, and remains high even as the museum and others have reopened.

That’s hardly surprising. “Virtual exhibitions are similar to physical exhibitions, often capitalizing on the web’s capacity for a personalized experience in which the user directs their own journey,” wrote Ngaire Blankenberg in her 2014 book Manual of Museum Exhibitions. (Blankenberg, formerly a cultural consultant, became director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in July.)

Here are examples of what you can find online from three DC museums: 

National Museum of Asian Art (formerly the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery)

The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads, curated by the National Museum of Asian Art, has been open since 2019. With no specified end date, this timeframe is rare for physical exhibitions, which are usually open for weeks or months. 

Kimon Keramidas, New York University professor of digital humanities and a curator of the show, said digital exhibitions can usually last for five to six years before advances in technology lead to complications. Even then, however, they can still be updated and recovered.

Digital exhibitions also allow for the display of artifacts that might not otherwise have been available. The curators of the Sogdians exhibition, for instance, decided to go digital due to challenging geopolitical circumstances, according to Keramidas: The trade embargoes that followed Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 prevented important collections from loaning objects.

The exhibition is packed with about 700 pieces of material, including 3D models, images, custom maps, drone footage and more. The exhibit’s subject matter is similarly rich in diversity. 

Julian Raby, director emeritus of the museum, calls the Sogdians an “underestimated” people. They were an ethnic group that lived in the first millennium A.D., occupying a vast terrain of Eurasia and significantly shaping Silk Roads culture and commerce. As merchants, craftsmen and entertainers, the Sogdians lived and traveled everywhere from China to the lands of the Byzantine Empire. 

In one section of the virtual exhibition, the visitor follows a historical trade route and sees a moving map, photographs of the terrain, and text describing each location. Unlike maps on gallery walls that could be easily overlooked, here the geographic tour takes center stage in the experience. 

“There is a sense of immediate rapport that could be quite powerful,” Raby said in an interview.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery

Hirshhorn Museum’s Lost in Place: Voyages in Video debuted in May 2021 as a direct response to the pandemic, which the exhibition text states had “greatly diminished our radius of movement — collapsing home, office, and school into a single location — and recalibrated our sense of personal boundaries.” Drawn from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection, the digital exhibition brought together 11 videos by contemporary artists from around the world. They were each made available for viewing in sequential and overlapping four-week spans, with the last one accessible through Aug. 20.

One of the videos, Laure Prouvost’s Swallow, inundates the viewer’s eyes and ears with a sensual intimacy that is almost unsettling. While following a group of nude bathers in a stream, Prouvost’s camera fades in and out of extreme close-ups on body parts, flapping fish, and crushed berries. This all occurs while recurrent sounds of breathing and shots of an open mouth span the entirety of the video’s run. After a year of Zoom-room socializations, such sudden closeness with bodies and nature is especially striking.

Purchase Fund, 2008 (Photo courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden)

Among the other featured videos were Pierre Huyghe’s One Million Kingdoms, starring a digital avatar traversing a lunar landscape generated by her voice; the artist collective Superflex’s Flooded McDonald’s, a meditation on the fast-food restaurant chain’s material footprint that depicts a kitchen slowly filled with 20,000 gallons of water; Carlos Amorales’ Dark Mirror, featuring animations of wolves, bears, falling airplanes, and other images evocative of danger; and Guido van der Werve’s Nummer Negen (#9): The Day I Didn’t Turn with the World, a time lapse of the geographic North Pole, where the artist stood for 24 hours facing away from the sun.

National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA)

The NMWA’s online exhibitions, which are running indefinitely, mimic carefully crafted walking tours. They employ sequences of web pages that are as immersive as museum displays, which viewers navigate with their mouse and arrow keys.

The first online exhibition curated by the museum is the ongoing show A Global Icon: Mary in Context, which launched in 2015. The featured sculptures and paintings of the Virgin Mary come from Europe as well as Japan, Ethiopia, Mexico and more. With each page turn, the web window can zoom into a detail of the work or present an explanatory video that highlights the various contexts in which the biblical figure Mary appears.

The same kind of seamless passage from content to content characterizes NMWA’s newer exhibitions, like Ambreen Butt — Mark My Words, which launched last year and interlaces videos of her work process with displays of her paintings, prints and collages.

In June 2020, the museum redesigned its website to host its online exhibitions as part of an ongoing effort to enhance its digital platform. Laura Hoffman, the director of digital engagement, explained that the pandemic had prompted discussions in the field about what a museum experience without physical access ought to look like. 

With NMWA undergoing a major two-year renovation as of Aug. 9, Hoffman said the pandemic provided a useful — and timely — opportunity to explore the museum’s digital capabilities leading up to its temporary closure.

“The pandemic almost felt like a test run for all the digital possibilities there are,” Hoffman said.

Roy Gao was born in Boston, MA, but grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and in Beijing, China. Before college, he lived in and studied in both the United States and China. Roy received his bachelor’s degree in 2021, from the University of Pittsburgh, with a double major in Art History and Philosophy. For the fall, he has been admitted to the Master’s program in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2020, Roy was a top-ranked applicant for the Fine Foundation Fellowship at the Carnegie Museum of Art (before the fellowship was cancelled due to COVID-19). He was the curator of “Footsteps” at the China Millennium Monument in 2019, and co-curator of “This Is Not Ideal: Gender Myths and Their Transformation” held at the University Art Gallery of the University of Pittsburgh in 2018.

Area arts organizations every writer (and reader) should know.

Posted on July 8, 2021

By Clare Mulroy

This article was first published July 1, 2021 in Washington Independent Review of Books here.

Even throughout the pandemic, we were reminded of the resilience of the arts. Now, with the world beginning to open again, read how a few local nonprofits are contributing to the arts and literary scene in DC.

826DC

Under the storefront of Tivoli’s Astounding Magic Supply Company in Columbia Heights, 826DC provides free writing and publishing opportunities to young people in the District.

According to incoming Senior Manager of Communication and Development Sarah Richman, nonprofits like 826DC are essential in serving DC’s youth.

“Too often, literary spaces only feature adults, and that is such a disservice to young people who have incredible and powerful things to say, but also to us,” Richman says. “We’re missing out on magnificent stories, on important points of view, and on a really valuable slice of the human experience.”

826DC focuses on creating relationships both with the writing community and among writers. Supporting newspaper clubs at schools in DC is one way it encourages aspiring journalists to identify what is important to them within their own communities and nationally. Students not only find mentors in 826DC volunteers; older students get the opportunity to mentor younger ones.

The organization also hosts programs like the “Young Authors’ Book Project,” which gives students the hands-on experience of writing, editing, and publishing their own book. This year’s project is “Sometimes I Have to be Brave,” which includes personal narratives and poems about community written during the coronavirus pandemic.

Though the pandemic shifted 826DC’s operations to fully online, Richman says it gave the organization another unique opportunity to foster space for young people to cope with and process difficult changes in the world.

Day Eight

An artist and writer himself, Robert Bettmann created Day Eight as a way to further connect the world of the arts and creative projects. According to Bettmann, the “left and right hands” of the organization are its poetry publishing and arts journalism work.

Day Eight offers opportunities for local poets through publishing and performance. The organization is currently working on a nature-themed anthology featuring the work of 16 poets and four visual artists.

For the past six years, Day Eight has also hosted the DC Poet Project — one part poetry reading series, one part open-mic contest. Accompanying the competition is the DC Poets for DC Schools Project, where finalists and winners of the contest are invited to perform and teach in local schools.

Day Eight’s work with students doesn’t stop there. They also host an Arts Writing Fellowship, which is designed to support early-career arts writers. The program is often sought out by college students, and Bettmann says that this kind of experience is particularly important for young journalists entering such a competitive field.

“By creating this program where we make the decisions for who is included based on the quality of the writing, we feel like we can actually affect that trajectory a little bit,” he explains, “helping people stand out as having been recognized as one of the best writers in the area and also make actual connections with editors and mentors who could possibly hire them.”

The Inner Loop

When Rachel Coonce and Courtney Sexton moved back to DC in 2014 after college, they struggled to find a literary community that wasn’t affiliated with a school or specific program.

Soon after, they launched the Inner Loop, whose mission is creating connections between local writers and the community. With around 75 attendees at their first event in April 2014, Coonce and Sexton realized that there was an empty space in the District that needed to be filled.

Years later, the Inner Loop is operating with that same mission. The organization has five distinct programs. Their writing series brings both established writers and beginners in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry together each year. “The Inner Loop Radio” is a podcast hosted by the pair. The Inner Loop also hosts a summer writers-in-residency program and fall retreats, and their author’s corner project works as a publicity campaign for newly published writers by partnering with local restaurants to promote their work.

During the pandemic, this project became especially important as the arts and food-and-beverage industry struggled to adapt to a newly virtual world.

“How can we engage and support them and our writers at the same time?” Sexton recalls asking. “The idea there was this ‘side of literature’ with your order, essentially. Encouraging people to patronize the restaurants where our writers were being featured.”

They started an “inspiration series” on the podcast, too, speaking to authors about coping during lockdown, and they launched a writing contest in partnership with District Fray. Surprisingly, Coonce and Sexton say event enrollment did not suffer during the pandemic. The need, evidently, persists.

[Photo of future authors courtesy of 826DC]

Day Eight fellow Clare Mulroy is a rising senior at American University studying journalism and minoring in both sustainability and women’s, gender, sexuality studies. Her freelance work appears in the Hill, Cape Cod Health News, and Tagg Magazine. Clare is also an intern at NBC News’ Washington Bureau. She lives in Washington, DC, but hails from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In her free time, you can find her searching for something new to paint or picking up a good book.

Rainbow Families 2021 Conference to Feature Indigo Girls, Conversations on Parenthood, and Programming for Kids

Posted on May 24, 2021

By Clare Mulroy

This article was first published May 17, 2021 in Tagg Magazine here. 

Rainbow Families is embarking on their second year of online conferencing due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, Vice President of the board Liz Dean is confident that this year’s festivities will be a hit.

The Rainbow Families 18th Annual Family Conference will be held on May 22 and 23. The two-day event will feature Congressman Mondaire Jones (D-NY17) as keynote speaker and recipient of the Rainbow Families Hero of the Year 2021 award, as well as a performance from the Indigo Girls.

This conference has been a staple with the non-profit organization since 2003, where it began as a full day conference of workshops, educational speeches, and panels. When in person, the conference is typically held at a D.C.-based vendor and marketed to LGBTQ families in the DMV.

But when last year’s virtual conference skyrocketed attendance numbers with a more accessible platform, Rainbow Families transformed their marketing to reach families all over the country.

“We are lucky to be in Washington, D.C. because D.C.’s super gay, D.C. is super liberal, and D.C. has health resources and reproductive resources,” says Dean. She adds, “However, if you’re in a smaller city or in a state that’s anti-trans — there’s a lot with legislation that’s anti-trans especially for a trans youth — I think the need is definitely there, which has helped us to be able to meet this need and the kind of rise to the occasion.”

On the virtual platform Hopin, participants will be able to attend workshops and Expos via a virtual room where you can move your icon from booth to booth. Parents can attend parenting workshops, and prospective parents can learn about the fertility journey. There will also be a coffeehouse feature where attendees can chat with other attendees and meet new people. There will be two different programming paths for kids — stretching activities for 4-7 year olds and pilates for 7-12 year olds.

The theme of this years’ conference is “Forward, Together…” which emphasizes resiliency.

“The last four years were hard for people,” explains Dean. “And this theme just shows we’re here together, we’re moving forward together. We’re in this: you have a community, you have people you can talk to, you have other families you can learn from.”

The conference caters to all different kinds of LGBTQ families — it doesn’t matter what “makes you rainbow.” Many of the conversations will address diversity in the queer community.

“We don’t expect that everyone comes in [as] two moms and two dads and that’s their family,” she says. “We’re very open to and cater to families that are of all family structures.”

Another prominent conversation topic at this year’s conference is mental health. For parents-to-be, the fertility journey can be difficult mental health-wise.

“It’s been a rough year,” says Dean. “And I think that [in terms of] mental health just in general in the queer community, it’s hard to find a good therapist, it’s hard to find competent care that’s inclusive, and that meets the needs of the queer population.”

Candice Taylor on Art, Community, and Being Unapologetically Herself

Posted on April 12, 2021

By Clare Mulroy

This article was first published April 5, 2021 in Tagg Magazine here. 

Candice Taylor got her start as an artist drawing on walls as a child. When her father was tired of cleaning walls, he helped her channel that energy into coloring comic strips and painting doll houses he built.

Taylor is the co-founder of CreativeJunkFood, a multimedia creative studio founded in 2010 that explores areas of public art, experiential art, and installations. The studio also hosts workshops and works regularly with museums and schools.

Taylor considers herself an artist-activist. “Art with function” is what drives her work. Recently, CreativeJunkFood partnered with the Civil Rights Corps to create graphics for criminal injustice initiatives and events honoring the leadership of Black women. They also animated a video for Stonegate Filmworks called “Turn it Blue,” a schoolhouse rock-style video advocating for voting blue in Georgia during the 2020 election season.

“It’s one thing to be an artist and make beautiful images, but it’s another thing to create art that also functions, and that also goes to better people’s lives and empower movement [and] social commentary,” says Taylor.

Much of Taylor’s work is community-focused. As a Washington, D.C.-based organization, CreativeJunkFood regularly designs community art, like a #LoveShaw animation and Ward 7 Speaks murals, and is working on the branding and launch for an upcoming refurbished Metro railcar coming to the District this spring.

One aspect of community art Taylor particularly enjoys is connecting with younger kids and artists as an educator. In the future, she says she hopes to expand workshops to make the “wealth of information more available.”

“That’s what empowers me when I’m thinking about that social justice…being able to help this younger generation,” she says. “I feel like those voices are the voices we need to be listening to, so I’m doing whatever I can do to amplify that.”

According to Taylor, coming from a marginalized community and now being an artist has positioned her uniquely to understand the impact and value of art in daily life. Taylor says she is determined to use her art to create an environment that she wished she had as a kid—she was encouraged to pursue her dreams but didn’t necessarily have the resources to accompany them.

In her own words, Taylor has a “tenacity for breaking barriers,” which she says means simply not seeing them at all.

“It’s just a constant climb, it’s this constant ‘What’s next?’ and it’s constantly challenging of yourself, it’s challenging the norms,” Taylor explains. “That’s why I have all these colors in my hair—that’s why I show up to my business meetings in the same outfit that I wear when I’m painting a mural.”

She views being a lesbian in the same vein—it’s not something she ever tries to hide, but also not something that she feels she has to flaunt.

“It’s a package, and I approach it as such,” Taylor says. “It’s about being really unapologetic about it.”

The Butch Boudoir Project is a Platform for Butch People to Be Unapologetically Themselves

Posted on April 5, 2021

By Clare Mulroy 

This article was first published March 29, 2021 in Tagg Magazine here.

Though Gabby Horner has been “out” for over 20 years, she didn’t truly find herself until about five years ago. In the time since she’s been more comfortable identifying as butch, she’s made waves with the Butch Boudoir Project, a movement to empower butch and masculine people across gender identities.

The Butch Boudoir Project began two years ago as a photoshoot with photographer Graciela Valdes to expand the traditionally feminine concept of boudoir photos modeled by Horner herself. The revelation came when she was looking for inspiration on Pinterest and found virtually nothing.

“I can’t find butch women doing anything other than completely fully dressed, or they look like MMA fighters,” says Horner. She adds, “If I couldn’t really find anything on Google, it’s not enough.”

It was then that Horner and Valdes realized this was much bigger than just one photoshoot. The “impressive” reaction made her realize that butch visibility needed a bigger platform. Her next endeavor was an Instagram account for the project.

“The only thing I had access to was myself, [so] the only thing I could do was continue to showcase myself,” she explains. “So I started pushing myself and my boundaries to take more photos of my daily life.”

But from the moment the project became more than just one photography session, Horner knew it had to be bigger than just herself. She gathered a group of friends, known affectionately as the #ButchCrew, for another photoshoot set in a barber shop. In between haircuts and a candidly-shot game of pool, Horner says the “butch siblinghood” was powerful.

“That’s insanely underrepresented. I think it tears down toxic masculinity that is sadly common that a lot of butch people feel intimidated by other butch people,” says Horner. She adds, “Those types of toxic concepts are totally shattered if you can get a group of us together, hanging out, being friends.”

Now with over 3,000 followers on Instagram, the Butch Boudoir Project has become a hub for virtual discussions and questions. The questions have ranged from a humorous “Are you single?” to inquiries about how to best support butch people in your life.

“I thought about butch visibility, I thought about being able to see people like me,” she explains. “But I did not think about people who are attracted to butch people having questions and needing to see that representation as well.”

By nature, this is a particularly personal project for Horner, who is a graphic designer by trade and the co-founder and vice chair of Ignite Community Services.

Horner identified as a “tomboy” at a young age but struggled with how her discomfort with femininity fit in with her gender identity.

“I thought you couldn’t be a girl and also want those things,” Horner says. “I firmly identify with being a woman, and that’s not a question for me, but I don’t identify with being feminine.”

That changed when she found other people who celebrate masculinity within their womanhood and individuals who prefer gender-neutral terms. Now, at 35, Horner says it’s an indescribable feeling when someone tells her she’s handsome.

Next year, she is looking forward to creating a calendar featuring the growing #ButchCrew. The Butch Boudoir Project will likely expand to more in-person conversations when the coronavirus pandemic ends. However, the virtual community they have online is something she never wants to abandon.

“Those conversations are also a big deal, they’re important,” says Horner.

Ahead of the Curve is the Story of Franco Stevens, Curve Magazine, and Lesbian Visibility

Posted on March 24, 2021

By Clare Mulroy

This article was first published March 17, 2021 in Tagg Magazine here. 

Jen Rainin had no directing experience before taking on Ahead of the Curve, but she knew it was a story she had to tell.

Her wife, Frances “Franco” Stevens, the founder of Curve Magazine, told stories over the years — taking out a dozen credit cards and betting on horses to come up with money for the magazine. She won three times and used her winnings to launch Curve Magazine (formerly Deneuve) in 1991.

Armed with these stories and a garage full of archives from Stevens’ life, Rainin spent the next three years making the documentary, which is set for its worldwide premiere on Apple TV and Amazon Prime on June 1.

“As I was researching for it, I realized how little our history as queer women has been documented,” she explains. “I realized I actually think I owe it to the community to tell this story first as a nonfiction film.”

Rainin says the best part of creating Ahead of the Curve was learning about her wife through the eyes of those who knew her decades before the two met.

“She has such trust in me. She knew that I was going to tell a balanced and fair and honest story,” Rainin says. “She’s a badass, but she’s a flawed human, like everybody, and she wanted people to see that.”

The filming and post-production process had its own plot twists, however. During filming, Stevens received an email from the current owner of Curve Magazine saying that the magazine might not be able to survive another year. Stevens sold the magazine in 2010 after a disabling injury.

The coronavirus pandemic also modified the film’s festival circuit. The crew was set for a grand debut at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco for Frameline44, but when in- person events closed, co-director and producer Rivkah Beth Medow suggested changing the event to a drive-in screening. The event was held on the day originally slated for Dyke March, and the audience rolled up decked out in pride and protest gear.

“We’re focused on making sure that our historical stories and our present-day stories are told and shouted from the rooftops,” Rainin says.