In honor of LGBTQ History Month, and concerned for the dangers to LGBTQ rights, Family Pictures USA and Third World Newsreel and the Documentary Forum at CCNY are co-hosting Family & History Through Queer Eyes. This event will be streamed on the Family Pictures USA Facebook Group and the Family Pictures USA and Third World Newsreel Youtube Channels.

RSVP now to: https://bit.ly/35as5ME

Join us as filmmaker and host Thomas Allen Harris speaks with LGBTQ photographers, filmmakers, authors and cultural producers who are making history through their work and recording it through their films, archives and family photo albums. The guests include: photographer Lola Flash, performer Justin Clapp (a.k.a Vivica Coxx),and filmmakers Arthur Dong (Coming Out Under Fire; Licensed to Kill) and Jennie Livingston (Paris is Burning) and theater artist Christina Quintana (CQ).

The need to show and speak of our history and family stories - as part of the rich diversity of American life and culture - is more critical now than ever. In a few weeks, between decisions on a new Supreme Court justice and the elections - much is at stake for everyone - but especially people of color and LGBTQ communities. And as journalist Michelangelo Signorile recently stated on the Supreme Court nomination, “This is a five-alarm fire for LGBTQ Americans.”

This is the second episode in the Family Pictures USA ongoing series - Family Through Queer Eyes. In this broadcast we’ll look at images that our special guests are bringing with them to tell a story of LGBTQ History. The event will begin with a clip from Thomas Allen Harris’ 2010 award-winning film Marriage Equality, which will be available to stream for event registrants from 9 AM until midnight on October 26th.

Marriage Equality: Byron Rushing and the Fight for Fairness is a powerful documentary short that connects the Black civil rights movement with the same-sex marriage equality movement. The documentary illuminates from the perspective of African American participants and their families, the pivotal Massachusetts state constitutional convention on same sex marriage, which gave new momentum to the national gay marriage movement as a civil rights issue. At the center of the story is Massachusetts representative Byron Rushing, a veteran Black civil rights activist who took the campaign for same sex marriage into the Black community, confronting the hostility of the Black church and defining the right to same sex marriage as a civil rights issue on par with the campaigns of the 1960s.

Thomas Allen Harris uses film, video, photography, and performance to explore family and identity in a participatory model of filmmaking that he has been pioneering since 1990. Harris’s television series Family Pictures USA, which was broadcast on PBS in August 2019, explores America through the lens of the family photo album. The series grew out of Harris’ decade long socially engaged art project Digital Diaspora Family Reunion. Harris has received numerous awards including Guggenheim, Rockefeller and United States Artist Fellowships as well as an NAACP Image Award, an African Oscar and Emmy nominations. A member of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Harris is a Senior Lecturer at Yale University where he teaches courses around family narratives and community storytelling.

RSVP now to: https://bit.ly/35as5ME

Questions to workshop@twn.org