Location

GLBT Historical Society Museum, 4127 18th St., San Francisco, CA 94114

Admission

$5.00 | Free for members

RSVP and purchase tickets here

An impressive group of Latinx queer artists and performance artists will stage dances, enact theater scenes, read poetry and show short films celebrating the culture and diversity of the queer Latinx community. Performers include transgender artist Donna Personna; artist, oral historian, and activist Mason J.; drag queen Foxxy Blue Orchid; performance artist Xandra Ibarra; Chicana writer Natalia M. Vigil; activist, filmmaker and dancer Dulce; and writer and historian Juliana Delgado Lopera. This event is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Chosen Familias: Bay Area LGBTQ Latinx Histories,” opening at the GLBT Historical Society Museum on June 7.

Performers

Donna Personna is an artist and activist for transgender rights, who got her start with the Cockettes. She has served on the boards of Trans March and Transgender Day of Remembrance, and on the committees to name streets after Vicki Marlene and Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Transgender Cultural District. In 2018, she raised San Francisco’s first transgender flag at City Hall with Mayor London Breed.

Mason J. is an artist, oral historian and activist, inspired by life as a born, raised and displaced AfroLatinx San Francisco local and a sick/disabled queer, intersex and trans advocate. Their photos, poetry and social commentary on sexuality, gender, ableism, race, sex work and housing rights have been published in many zines, on the internet, and in print in many newspapers and magazines. Mason currently serves as the inaugural fellow of the San Francisco Public Library’s James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center.

Foxxy Blue Orchid is San Francisco’s newest gender-bending glam-bear queen. She is co-producer and emcee for the San Antonio Burlesque Festival, hostess of the Humboldt Burlesque Festival and is the newest member of Sin Sisters Burlesque! She has hosted and performed on stages across Texas and beyond. As her literary alter ego, Dino Foxx, she is the co-author of Tragic Bitches: An Experiment in Queer Xicanx Performance Poetry and When the Glitter Fades (Kórima Press).

Xandra Ibarra is Oakland-based performance artist from the Mexico-U.S. border of Juarez/El Paso who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom. Ibarra uses performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racial, gender and queer subjects. Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Colombia), the Broad Museum (Los Angeles), CITRU-Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (Mexico) and Joe’s Pub (New York).

Natalia M. Vigil is a queer Xicana writer, multimedia curator and big sister of six, born and raised in San Francisco. She is the proud co-founder of Still Here San Francisco for which she was honored as a Local Hero by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. She is a VONA Voices alum and a 2016 Lambda Literary Fellow. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and shows.

Dulce is a fierce queer Chicana fat femme. Born in Mexico City and raised in East Los Angeles, she is a California state-certified rape crisis counselor who provides holistic modes of healing and interactive educational trainings while integrating rape crisis services. As a sexual health educator, she advocates for self-empowerment though education that is fun, non-judgmental, and accessible to her audience. Her film “With Conviction” won the Audience Choice Award at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival and screened in Paris, France at the International Lesbian and Feminist Film Festival.

Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian, speaker and storyteller based in San Francisco. She’s the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press,  2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute, 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. She has received fellowships from Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for The Arts and The SF Grotto.

Image credit: ¡Aplauso! performers. Top row: Donna Persona, photo by Pomeroy Works; Dulce, photo by Apeh Calderon Clary; Foxxy Blue Orchid, photo by Julián P. Ledezma (JPL Productions); Mason J., photo by Meg Allen. Bottom row: Juliana Delgado Lopera, courtesy of Juliana Delgado Lopera; Xandra Ibarra, photo by C. Godoy; Natalia M. Vigil, photo by Fabian Echevarria, all used with permission.