In 2008, I received the prestigious Leeway Transformation Award — and it truly was transformational. The grant made it possible for me to travel to Spain for a screening of a short film I produced, a career highlight that included doing press, hanging out with the delightful Alan Cumming, and staying at the Axel — billed as the world’s first LGBTQIA hotel (its signage read “straight friendly”). It also allowed me to travel to South Korea to speak on a panel about women in film, and to invest in camera equipment at a time when it was far more expensive — iPhones had only just come out the year before. I was later able to pay it forward by lending that gear to other budding filmmakers.
Since its founding in 1993, the Leeway Foundation has focused on advancing women’s presence in the arts. Over time, its mission has grown to support women, trans, and gender-nonconforming artists and cultural producers whose work lives at the intersection of art, culture and social change. Leeway has been a quiet but powerful force behind a significant portion of the art and social justice work happening in our city. Many of the people I’ve interviewed over the years have been uplifted by Leeway’s grants or have participated in its programs and workshops.
I recently had the chance to speak with Leeway Communications Director Bee Knight. This interview was conducted jointly with Leeway Deputy Director Melissa Hamilton, but is presented here as a standalone conversation for clarity. We’ll present the interview with Hamilton at a later date.
Where do you hail from?
I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, seven hours from Philly by car. It’s in the complete opposite corner of the state.
What is Erie like? Everything I know is from a song about the Erie Canal I learned when I was in second grade!
Actually, I grew up technically right outside of Erie in Edinburgh, and it was very rural, very country. But Erie has its charm. It is on the Great Lake. I went to college in Erie, so my campus was right on the lake. You could see it from my dorm room. It was pretty nice. It’s quaint. It’s definitely been deeply impacted by the loss of industry in terms of things like production. GE used to be huge in Erie, and when they left, they took a lot of jobs with them.
Were there a lot of folks of color around there?
I mean, a lot is not a word I would use. There’s actually a really large Cambodian community in Erie, along with Sudanese, and I was lucky to be in community with them, both because of my upbringing in the church, and then after that, I worked at the art museum. It was really cool to be connected to a lot of the community in that way.
Tell me a little bit about your family and your background.
Well, I grew up in Erie/Edinburgh, but I was born in Opelika, Alabama. It’s right outside of Auburn, which you would know if you like college football. My parents moved the family to Erie right before I started school. I don’t really communicate with them anymore. Let’s just say they’re complex, complicated people. I do have a brother who’s five years younger than me — brilliant mind. We’re like yin and yang. I was the writer who loved art, and he played sports and was really great at math and science. Actually, I did some sports. Softball and competitive cheerleading were the two I did the most.
What was your best or most disastrous sports moment?
That’s a tough question. Oh, I did almost shatter my jaw in softball, and then with cheerleading, I did have someone fall on my face right before my senior pictures. I was a base, so I was the one throwing people in the air. And as you can imagine, that’s a very precarious place to be in, but also, people have to trust you very deeply to throw them in the air. So I truly, really liked cheerleading. Especially toward the end, when I got more competitive. We did two-a-days, where we would run in the morning and lift in the evening. I don’t think people realize the intensity of the sport and the strain it puts on your body. But I have a deep appreciation for it.
You said “as you can imagine…” which is not something to say to a writer. I just had a flash of you flipping somebody and them landing on spread-eagled on your face and you going, “Oh! I think I’m a lesbian!”
[Laughing] I was actually throwing a man that time! Some of our best tumblers were guys. We could throw them in the air and they were fearless. They would do whatever you wanted them to. It took me a little bit later to realize I was a lesbian.
How did you come to that revelation?
I met a lacrosse player in my freshman year. I started college, and I was away from home, which helped. I’m gonna be so honest, I don’t think I really knew what the word “lesbian” meant. I had gay men in my life and gay friends, and I knew bisexual women. But I was like, “Well, I’m not a gay man.” And bisexual didn’t feel like the right word. To me, it was associated with a very specific visual of a person. And I was like, “That’s not me.” Also, I admittedly was not attracted to any of the girls that I went to school with. I think it’s because I looked at relationships with other women in a very different way than they did. I grew up with so many women, like my family and friends, and I always viewed those relationships as very sacred and very important, I was like, “Friends over everything!”
In high school, everyone’s hormones are going crazy, and your friends are having crushes, but don’t really have self-esteem, and so they’re competing with each other for boys. And I’m like, “Gross! I just don’t get it. Why can’t ‘girls over everything’ be everyone’s mindset?” It was mine. Then in college, I met a lacrosse player, the first masc lesbian I ever met, and I went “hmmm.” Then they were like, “I think you’re gay.” And I was like, “No, no I’m not.” [Laughing] And then I was like, “Yeah, I am.” And for a while, I identified as queer and I loved that. I think it opened me up to also question gender. But fairly recently, I thought, “No, I’m a lesbian. That feels good. The community I’ve built feels good.” It reflects how I view lesbianism, and I think that’s important, too.
What did you study at school?
In undergrad, I studied theater and communications. It was a dual degree program at my school. It was really great, really hands on. It forced you to do all parts of theater. So you didn’t just get to be on stage. You had to do light design, set design, costume design, stage management — all of it. So you knew what went into you getting to be on stage, and I think that was really important. And then on the communication side, we had to take journalism courses. We had to do a news show. We had to create a short film and commercials. We had to, in real time, interview each other and be a part of the newspaper. We had to work for the state college radio station. So they really showed us, these are your professional options and that there was a large range of things to explore.
Which brings me to who is DJ Broadway B?
[Laughing] NO WAY! You found that? That is so funny. That was my radio name for 90.5 WERG, our college radio station. I needed a DJ name and since I studied theater, and everyone has always called me B, I became DJ Broadway B. Oh, my God, I haven’t heard that name in forever.
You’ve had a number of different jobs since graduating, including, I understand, doing singing Valentines.
Wow! Yes, we started that program in undergrad with, funny enough, my vocal director in college who was also my vocal director in high school. Roberta was one of the few people in high school that believed in my talent. So seeing her in college again was really great, and she’s one of the toughest people I’ve ever met. But tough in a way, like, if you don’t believe in you, no one else is going to. She was also one of the first people to say, “You’re not gonna stay here in Erie. You will be getting out.” So we did singing Valentines as a fundraiser. We would go around and sing Valentines a capella.
Let’s talk about Leeway and your role here.
Well, to get from Erie to Philly, I went to grad school at Drexel, and I did the Arts Administration program. At the time, everyone was using the term “creative place making,” and I was more interested in the idea of place keeping, or making a place and space for artists in general, whether it was physical space or monetary. I just wanted to be a part of that ecosystem in some way. I actually was working in the Knight Foundation and on a panel with Sara Zia, and she cornered me and said, “We’re hiring.” I had known of Leeway, and actually knew Melissa before then, because I had worked at the Greater Philadelphia Culture Alliance. So I knew of Leeway and their work, but I never saw myself on foundations at all. But when I landed at Knight, it was really a great working experience. I loved working with Patrick Morgan. He taught me a lot, and also allowed me a lot of space to mess up and ask a lot of questions.
And when I heard that Leeway was hiring, I applied and started here in June 2019 as the communications director. I’ve been here for six years. But who knew I would start and shortly after, a global pandemic would hit. I was just getting to know a lot of the community, and Leeway’s programming, and how they operated, and that had to immediately change.
In a lot of ways, I was responsible for a lot of that change. Like, being able to communicate with people in a digital way that Leeway hadn’t really done before. It was a foundation that has historically always met people in person and made space for people to meet each other in person. And so thankfully, at that time, I was so deep into social media that I was like, “I think that there are ways that we can do this.” I think that my skill set, oddly enough, lined up for this pandemic that at least we, everyday people, couldn’t have seen coming. I’ve learned a lot. And now we’re in another period of transition, which we refer to as Leeway. 3.0. Trying to bring back some of the ways in which we connected with people in person, and also utilize the tools that we were reliant on when we couldn’t be in person. I think my gender queerness allows a lot of space to be more expansive in life, so I try to apply that to everything.
OK, totally random questions now. Favorite LGBTQ movie? Or celebrity crush?
“Love Lies Bleeding.” I love Katy M. O’Brian, who would probably land in the celebrity crush category, along with a surprise guest, Dev Patel.
Go-to karaoke song?
Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”
Something on your bucket list?
I want to go to the island of Lesbos. I always said if I ever got married, that’s where I would get married. I mean is there a gayer thing that you can do then get married on the island of Lesbos?
Let’s wrap with a favorite saying or motto.
Mine is tattooed on my hands. It’s from a song called “Sun Hands” by Local Natives. The song is about this idea of holding the sun, which could be interpreted as holding someone you love. But the chorus is, “I’ll endure the night for the promise of light,” and it’s gotten me through a lot. And I’ve loved the song for so long that since November, it’s permanently on me.
For more information on the Leeway Foundation, visit leeway.org.