Podcast

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Dr J – and I was the lead producer on Queerest of the Queer.

And now we have been through all of the post festival cold and emotional come down, and are starting to look at what worked and what didn’t I had the crazy/insane/brilliant idea to start a podcast about this.

Because we don’t talk in our community (that is the LGBTQ+/Queer community) about what it takes to put on events – especially the big ones.

So for a starter, I’ve been in London ten years and I’ve been working as a photographer on the queer scene for most of those ten years. I spent much of the last six or seven years working as part of the Bar Wotever crew. And I have a day job – which is pretty full on.

About a year ago, I had the idea to run a large club night. Why? Heavens only knows – it was one of my wide awake at 3am brilliant ideas that hung around the next day, and the next day. So I started to figure out what it would take to make this happen.

Rather than having this podcast become super long with me rambling in an unstructured way – I’m going to put a little bit of structure around this whole enterprise.

So this is the introduction about why and what my idea was.

Then we’ll go into the practicalities, including financial, and then we’ll start talking to other people on the team, like Maria who is the Assistant Producer, and Sian who headed up the Social Media team, and Elliot who did all the designs.

Once we’ve done the dissection of Queerest of the Queer we’ll start looking forward at what it will become, and what are plans are for it. This podcast will then possibly become more about talking with the co-collaborators about what is going on and talking up future plans.

But for now it is about the past and today it is about what the dream was.

The idea I had, was based on the realisation via a conversation that through my eclectic tastes and my desire never to stand still for a moment, I had a much wider view of the scene in London than other people I knew. I would rave about a band, a drag artist, a spoken word performer and a performance artist and most people on the scene would know of one, or maybe two of them.

So, what about bringing them together? Why not have the people who are into drag exposed to the awesome queer music scene? Why not have artists who are considered a bit more cabaret exposed to wider audiences? But it was more than than just about the artists, it was about bringing the audiences together – every week we are in little groups of 180 to 300 people in small bars and clubs, and we tend to only see those same faces and people, and so we think the scene is only that big. By bringing people together we would see this scene was much more – really really hugely more – and through that togetherness we would recognise a couple of things.

There are a lot of us
We are very diverse
We do matter
We are awesome!

So that was the dream. Drag rocking out to punk and rap with cabaret and burlesque and crazy performance art and spectacular circus and thoughtful spoken word. Or a bit of Wotever and Meth Lab and Boi Box and LGBT Underground.

So I set up a company called The Queer Embassy to make this happen.

Next time we’ll get into the journey of making it happen – some of the smart (and no so smart) and I wish we had known! decisions we made.

Find out more about us on queerest.co.uk or on twitter @queer_est and on Facebook /qoftq

This was the first episode, bound to be more. It’s always going to be short. And hope to see you soon.

Until then- Keep it fabulous! Keep it Queer!