Kopkind Colony

Pride month is every month when you live arms open to humanity. June is special, though, as we honor the memory, the audacity and the promise of liberation that the Stonewall Uprising represented, and still represents.

CineSlam, Kopkind’s annual Pride month festival of lgbtq short films, takes place this year on Saturday, June 29, at 4pm at the Latchis Theater, on Main Street in downtown Brattleboro. These short films – some narrative, some documentary, some experimental – draw from the well of queer experience. They are serious and moving, funny and fantastical. They are fabulous and real.

Please join us for films, fizzy drinks, Pride cake and celebration of all that’s been won and the ongoing work for liberation. For tickets, please go to https://filmfreeway.com/CineSLAM/tickets

This is a big year for anniversaries:
• 55 years since gay people said No to police repression and the closet, and Yes to life in full: those messages exploding in the streets of Greenwich Village around the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969.
• 30 years since the death of Andrew Kopkind, who, among much else, wrote the most beautiful summation of the politico-cultural meaning of the riots at the quarter-century mark. (Read on.)
• 25 years since Andy’s family and friends started Kopkind, a living memorial, which since the summer of 1999 has created space for left journalists, activists and documentary filmmakers to come together to exchange ideas and experience, workshop films, and follow in Andy’s spirit of thinking deeply, living expressively and extending the field for freedom, pleasure and imagination. 25 years of putting on not just the seminar/retreat sessions at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford but also a plethora of public events, including CineSlam.

We’ll be telling you more about this year’s project and our July events in a future post. On August 24, what would have been Andy’s 89th birthday, we are celebrating our 25th with an outdoor barbecue, speakers and celebration at Tree Frog Farm. Watch for more on that too!

For now, Andy gets the last word, from an article in The Nation’s issue of July 4, 1994:

“Craig Rodwell, a witness to the war in the streets, said in an interview for the documentary Before Stonewall that what was most magical about the Stonewall riots was that ‘everything came together that night.’ Somewhere in the existential depths of that brawl of screaming transvestites were all the freedom rides, the anti-war marches, the sit-ins, the smoke-is, the be-ins, the consciousness-raising, the bra-burning, the levitation of the Pentagon, the endless meetings and broken hearts. Not only that, but the years of gay men and lesbians locking themselves inside windowless, unnamed bars; writing dangerous, anonymous novels and articles; lying about their identity to their families, their bosses, the military; suffering silently when they were found out; hiding and seeking and winking at each other, or drinking and dying by themselves. And sometimes, not often, braving it out and surviving. It’s absolutely astonishing to think that on one early summer’s night in New York that world ended, and a new one began.”