January 11 - Free Screening of "Jay Dreams"

Catherine Pancake, the producer and director of Jay Dreams, submits the following post and invites you to see it free this Sunday.

Coming out in WV at the age of 17 in the late eighties was truly a marginal experience!!! I could & might devote a novel to that subject some day. However, like many readers, I experienced coming into my homo own as an opportunity to reject what the mainstream had to offer. I took time to explore the cultural fringe, became immersed in alternative music, and gave myself permission to become a creative person buffered from the rigid critique of "normalcy." After moving to a larger urban area in Baltimore, I was dismayed to find a pretty cold, clique-ish, shallow gay culture waiting for with me with... a huge amount of ambivalence - unlike my alterna-straight friends who were warm, open, and umm straight. I've struggled a lot to span white/straight experimental/alternative culture with piecing together an amazing gay/queer/diverse context as well. Sound familar?

Baltimore is experiencing a bit of a renaissance recently with its cultural underground thriving and Rolling Stone magazine naming Baltimore "Best Local Scene" last year - whatever that means. For the past year, I've been spending time with the Baltimore African American lesbian dom-fem scene working on a short, somewhat experimental film that we are pretty close to releasing. I'm interested personally in the cross pollination that can occur when folks from different local subcultures make a concerted effort to get together and collaborate. With the Prop 8 madness and the gay communities' on-going confusion about how to interact with its own ethnic minorities, I didn't know how timely our film would be. We are doing a work in progress screening sponsored by Women in the Life in DC at Busboys and Poets (full info on our website) this Sunday, January 11th at 8:00pm and the show is FREE. The film is humorous, sexy, a little bit silly, and also touches on some unique aspects of the group of women the film showcases. Feel free to come by, and see the piece, and join the conversation! We are already balancing festival requests with the film completion date sometime in the next few months.