NATIONAL QUEER ARTS FESTIVAL 2007

DIRECTOR’S WELCOME
Happy Birthday to the National Queer Arts Festival! We celebrate the 10th year of this amazing collection of performances, exhibitions, readings, marches and comedy. We celebrate bringing you 1,500 in these ten years of Festivals. And during this Festival we will look back and re-connect with our history: The Beats, The Cockettes, Claude Cahun and more; look around us to connect with our practicing artists: Dorothy Allison, Marga Gomez, Cherry Muhanji, Rudy Lemcke and Enrique Urueta; and look ahead to the emerging artists from Youth Speaks and the Bent Writing Institute.

We also mark this milestone with Web Director Rudy Lemcke’s re-design of Qcc’s website, making it a more accessible research tool and a fabulous place to visit. Rudy’s remarkable site is recognized as one of the major queer art websites in America. To insure that our artists take their places in the history of our community, he has created an online archive available for downloading of ten years of The National Queer Arts. A hard copy edition will be donated to The Gay & Lesbian Historical Society and the Hormel Center of the San Francisco Public Library.

And still we do this amazing work with the hardest working (and smallest) Board and Staff in show biz. I want to take this opportunity to thank former Board President and installer of every show we’ve done, Lenore Chinn, for her service above and way way beyond any job description we could’ve written; I want to remember Board Member Adrienne Fuzee for her dedication to the visual arts and her unflinching approach to insuring a place for queer art; and I want to thank the Board members from the past who set us on our feet, showed us how to take those first steps and who were so generous with their expertise: Greg Day, Freddie Niem, Osa Hidalgo de la Riva, Sini Anderson and Jonathan Katz. Our staff of curators, production managers and coordinators have enabled us to do far more than it seemed possible: once again, Sini Anderson and Jonathan Katz, Joe Williams, Matthew de Gumbia, Ann Aptaker, Killer Banshee’s Eliot Daughtry and Kriss De Jong, Ken McPherson, Kevin Schaub and Mark Menke.

Thanks to all our current Board and staff for providing the best support an Executive Director could have. And thanks to all of our audiences; we hope you and our artists will join us at our public meetings in the summer and fall to help us build an even better Queer Cultural Center and to plan for the next ten years.