A wide range of local LGBT artists is coming together to perform under the banner of the Phreak N’ Queer Arts & Music Festival, Aug. 4-7. The festival will feature bands, DJs, visual and performance artists, poetry and puppetry at various locations throughout six events.
Kate Gormley, one of the event’s many organizers, said the festival has long been in her plans.
“It’s something that my friends and I have been talking about for some time,” she said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of top-40 and very mainstream music happening at queer events and we sort of missed the old days of going to gay parties and the DJ would play music you never heard before, and it was a great way to get turned on to new artists. We’re missing that in the scene a little bit. We wanted to put together something that would highlight the local talent and push the boundaries of what was acceptable music and take it back to do-it-yourself stuff.”
“This festival is not just a showcase of the talent of the artists,” added organizer and performer Marseau Maxwell. “It’s about building a movement and community in ways that I think are necessary to show that different types of people make art and that there’s a space for them and they should be celebrated. Those who came before us as well are also being celebrated.”
Judging from the festival’s line-up, organizers are definitely staying true to their vision. The festival kicks off with Glitter Bomb, an opening party featuring visual artists and live musical guests paying homage to electro, punk, Latin, reggaeton and experimental music. The festivities on Aug. 5 feature a speakeasy called Boudoir, a promising mix of live jazz, poetry from Ms. Wise, and burlesque and drag performances from the Liberty City Kings featuring Anastacia Beaverhausen and The Notorious OMG.
The two scheduled events for Aug. 6 are sure to be among the most talked about, with a late-afternoon queer country show entitled “Gay Ole Opry” and then “Homo-Rama,” a show featuring LGBT hip-hop, punk and DJ performers, later that night.
Karen Pittelman, of New York-based country group Karen and The Sorrows, said it’s rare to see a bill of gay country artists, which is why she jumped at the opportunity to help coordinate the Gay Ole Opry.
“A lot of times if it’s a country music festival, it’s never queer. And if it’s queer, it’s rarely country. As a queer person playing in a country band, I was just desperate to have some venue where I can play where I felt I was playing for my community, so this came out of that. Also I felt bad for [out country singer] Chely Wright. I was reading this article about her living in New York and I thought she could have known that there were other queer people making country music out there.
We normally don’t expect country musicians to come flowing out of the most urban of big cities, but Pittelman said there’s some down-home talent to be found in the Big Apple.
“People don’t think of New York as a hotbed of country music but there’s a really string scene there. You can go see a great country or Americana band in New York. It’s a very inspiring place to make music.”
Maxwell, better known in hip-hop circles as Benni E, said any fan of music festivals shouldn’t miss Homo-Rama, which also has Sgt. Sass, The Shondes and Finger Banger DJs on the bill.
“It’s going to be a really great mix,” Maxwell said. “Saturday night is a great event for artists of different styles coming from different parts of the city and the country. It will have myself and Sgt. Sass as well. We definitely represent queer hip-hop in Philadelphia.”
The festival winds down Aug. 7 with the free community day event, “Gay As a Picnic Basket,” at Liberty Lands, and the closing dance party, On Cue.
Both Gormley and Maxwell said they’d like the festival to be an annual event geared toward artists and the community.
“We’re going to definitely do this again,” Gormley said. “We want to start small this year and see what feedback we get from the community. There are just so many performers and artists that wanted to be a part of it. We couldn’t take everyone this year. But I think we have a better sense of what size we should be shooting for next year. Just the artist response to what we’ve been doing has just been wonderful. This year has been sort of trial and error but we will be doing this again in 2012.
“None of the proceeds go back to Phreak N’ Queer,” Maxwell added. “Everything we do is for the artists. The artists are taken care of by fundraisers and people paying for tickets. This is something we are definitely doing for our community.”
The Phreak N’ Queer festival runs Aug. 4-7. For event and venue details, visit www.wix.com/marseaumarseau/phreaknqueer.