Growing up as a queer teenager in the South was very confusing and isolating. Often, I heard my parents refer to out of the ordinary members of our family as “black sheep.” A part of me always sided with the black sheep because a majority of the time I felt misunderstood. Fast forward 10 years later to present day when I am confident and proud of my identity. So much, in fact, that I started getting involved in LGBTQ activism and organized a night of film devoted to others who have been singled out as the black sheep… or pink sheep, rather.

Working Films is proud to be a sponsor at this year’s Pink Sheep Film Festival, held this Friday, June 10th, during Wilmington’s Pride Week. The Pink Sheep Festival showcases LGBTQ-themed films ranging from documentaries to fairy tales. The featured films of the evening will be two half hour documentaries, Put This on The Map and Whistlin’ Dixie. In Put This on The Map, twenty-six teenagers tell their experience of being queer in the suburbs of Seattle in East King County. Whistlin’ Dixie shifts the scenary to the South as filmmaker Meredith Heil gives spotlight to the many amazing musicians who call the South their home. The film features many bands from our very own state of North Carolina. Watch the trailers below:

The Media That Matters Film Festival is now accepting submissions for their 10th Annual Film Festival. The festival showcases short films on various social justice issues. This year they are particularly interested in films on Media Literacy, Human Rights, LGBTQ & Sexual Identity, Youth Activism and International issues.

Each year, Working Films presents the Changemaker Award to the film with the most potential to inspire activism. Last year, we presented the award to Exiled in America,  a film about five siblings struggling to support their American livelihoods after their mother is deported to Mexico.

Check out the Media That Matters website to review their criteria and submission guidelines. Deadline is January 22, 2010.

I just got back from the LGBT Blogger and Citizen Journalist Initiative Summit in Washington, DC which was sponsored by Jonathan Lewis, Human Rights Campaign, Bolthouse Farms, Victory Fund, Center for American Progress Action Fund, National Organizing Institute, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and many others.

I met many different kinds of bloggers and writers. Some were personal bloggers who did not consider themselves activists while others were hard core activists and politicos. We all shared one thing in common: We all identified as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and/or Queer although everyone had different experiences of writing and of life itself. We each had our own story which helped us to create visibility by personalizing the gay rights struggle. By writing about individual instances, we are able to address the bigger picture at hand.

On Saturday, there was a tense discussion about Proposition 8 which led us to the question “who is to blame?” Fellow blogger Alex Blaze wrote a post summarizing the Prop 8 discussion on the Bilerico project. The pro-Prop 8 campaigns were run incredibly well. They focused on issues that affected people emotionally such as family and children while the opposition created counter-ads that seemed defensive and, to a point, offensive. No wonder we lost as badly as we did; our message was not as tight and strategic as it could have been.

Instead of telling our own stories, we jumped on the back of the Civil Rights Movement claiming that our struggles are the same African Americans faced. Instead of defining what we truly want when we say “marriage”, we’ve just thrown around broad terms that can mean anything to anyone. We need to focus on OUR story. The story of being able to adopt children and have families of our own. The story of being able to visit our partners in the hospital. The story of young school children who are ashamed to have same-sex parents because everything they’ve ever learned outside of the home has told them their family is not normal.

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