Market This!

By Erin Cass

I’m new to the whole blogging “thing”, so hopefully I can do TFP justice! Last night the CMC held an awesome film screening of Market This! Queer Radicals Respond to Gay Assimilation, which was sponsored by G-ville’s Queer Activist Coaltion (QAC).

Myself being a member of QAC, I was pretty excited. Aside from the fact that the speakers were broken and we were forced to watch the video on the good old small screen, it went really well. It was even kind of cozy gathering around the TV/VHS combo to watch a Paper Tiger Television video about Queeruption and radical queers. The movie is about the event Queeruption, held in NYC in 1999. The event was a follow up to the first Queeruption which was held in London, and it ran pretty smoothly for such a large gathering. During the day there were about 350-400 people there attending workshops, learning how to bring back new tools to help them in their activism and also in their daily lives. The event also features live music and poetry readings, which were both pretty cool. The film also makes a point of exposing the capitalist agenda behind “gay friendly” companies and products. Sure, it feels nice to see an ad with two women drinkin’ some BudLight and holding hands or whatever, but…. I don’t want to be another consumer market. Not to mention BudLight sucks. A lot.

Tonight, the Civic Media Center (CMC) is hosting a “Radical Rush Social” to kind of celebrate the culmination of the 2010 RadRush. A band called Blair and the Boyfriends will be playing, and the guy Blair is actually a national slam poet champion and has played with the likes of Cat Power and Stevie Wonder. The social is free, and it will be awesome! If anyone sees this before 9, come out to the CMC! Oh, and the social is a potluck, so there will be plenty of food and refreshments.