The Queerfestival 2009 is slowly but surely taking shape and with less than two months left, we’re working full speed. We’re happy to announce that we managed to borrow the same place as the two previous years, so that we once again can have the festival in a central place, close to the harbour and the city, and with plenty of space to discuss, perform, sleep, party and evolve in. 

The official poster is out, and so is stickers and flyers, please help spread the propaganda!
The daytime workshop-program is under construction, and so is the performance/night-program, please contact this mail: info@queerfestival.org if youre interested in doing workshops or want to perform, everyone is welcome.

Sleepingspaces will, like last year, be limited, but not impossible. For practical reasons we will be very happy to receive a short mail from people who wants to participate. Please contact us if you have special needs for a sleeping-space: Illness, disabilities, kids, or anything which means that you need a more quiet/private accomodation. We will try our best to help you out. 

For people who wants to stay in town during the World Outgames, please contact us in time and we will try to provide housing after the festival.

Presenting this years theme: “Fuck money : Commercialization – Mainstreaming – Anticapitalism”

Copenhagen is this year hosting the World Outgames and the games are beginning the weekend that the Queerfestival is ending, on the 25.th. of july. The Outgames has gotten a lot of focus and media attention in Denmark, and Copenhagen has been busy labelling itself as “gay-friendly/pink-city”. We see this only as a capitalistic attempt to make money on the expected 5-10.000 participants, but at the same time the World Outgames is charging 2200 dkr(290 euros) just to participate in a conference. So we decided that its time for an anti-capitalistic queer perspective!

This years Copenhagen Queerfestival would therefore like to present a festival-theme that we chose to call “Fuck money: Commercialization – Mainstreaming – Anticapitalism”.

In the festivalgroup we will arrange some activities, workshops and a demonstration relating to the theme, but do let us know if you have suggestions or ideas for more.

Copenhagen Queermanifestival

With the Copenhagen queer festival we wish to create a queer space. But what is queer? How do we define it, use it, make it part of our lives? How do you define “queer” in relation to “non-queer”? these are just some of the questions we want to work on understanding during the festival. We wish to create a forum where people from all over the world can exchange impressions, viewpoints and ideas. Where we can play, learn, teach, move our boundaries and go places we didn’t know existed.

The festival is strictly D.I.Y. meaning that YOU as a participant must take an active part in making the festival successful. A few things have been planned in advance by the organizing group, but otherwise it is up to the participants to decide in unity how they want the festival to proceed. It is expected that everyone help out as much as they can to ensure that the festival will be a fun and enlightening experience for all.

Non-profit is another keyword for the festival. We wish to create a space which is not based on money, as we find this is the case in society today. The festival is open to all, whether or not they have money.

To create a place that is free for all it is important that we all try radically confront some, if not all(?) of the structures exiting in society today. We need to help each other to break free from structures and norms imposed on us by the capitalist, heteronormative, racist society. At the festival we need to respect each other, listen and think before we act and keep in mind that calling the festival “free” and “queer” doesn’t automatically make it so. We expect everyone to analyze their own actions and what effect they have on other people.

And even though the list is long, we still won’t tolerate racism, sexism, heterosexism, homo/bi/queer/hetero/trans –phobia, in other words No discrimination based on sexuality, age, gender, ethnicity, class and so on. There will be room for those who make room for others.

Despite our political agenda we must not forget that the festival is also about having fun and meeting new exiting people of all genders and sexualities

What is it all about?

In 2006 the first Queer Festival took place in Copenhagen and this year we do it for the 4. time. For a week artists, musicians, DJs, performers, social and political activists, drag kings, drag queens, and gender benders from many countries will get together and create an alternative to heteronormative culture, politics, and spaces.

During the week we will start up activities, culminating with a day and night program during the weekend.

Who is it for?

The festival is for anyone who takes interest in criticizing and transgressing the prevalent norms governing gender roles and sexual identity. So the festival is a space not only for familiar minorities such as gay men, lesbians, and transsexuals, but everyone who dislikes the rigid division into sexual identities and the categories man and woman.

How to participate

There is no fee for participating. For our guests from outside Copenhagen we provide a place to sleep at the festival venue and food to eat (free or inexpensive) for all activists. We hope to create a real community in the spirit of DIY (do-it-yourself) principles where everybody is both guests and activists.

DIY means we're all doing it

At the Queer Festival we believe in DIY as an organizing principle. Everybody lends a hand. We will hang posters in the café where you can sign up for a couple of hours in the kitchen, the café, cleaning etc.

Furthermore we will have a brief daily meeting at 11.30 (after breakfast) where we coordinate the tasks of the day.

The queer festival wants to create a space where we can/will unfold and explore queer culture, politics and activism.

The main principles of the festival is DIY (do-it-yourself) and non-profit. This means that everybody are actively responsible to the festival and are expected to participate in an active manner. No one will be excluded from activities on the festival because of lack of money. Everybody contributes as they can - practically as well as economically.

The queer festival is a festival for everybody with a queer perspective - regardless of gender or sexuality.

With the festival we want to challenge and make an alternative to the heteronormative culture, politics and space. We don't want to conform into a heteronormative and sexist society. Instead we want to empathize on gender and sexuality as social constructions that can be challenged and altered.

On the festival respectful behavior will be a keyword, and no forms of racism, heterosexism or sexism will be accepted nor tolerated.

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Downloads

	Self-defence is norml: Graffiti in the cruising area, Ørstedparken, in central Copenhagen, saying, “machopigs fuck off!” It was painted during the alternative gay pride. On this day we had a queer picnic in the park, when we heard that a group of machos were shouting at queers entering the park. We gathered up around twenty queers with bottles, belts and masks. Luckily, when we got to the entrance the machos had already left and we could return to drinking, laughing, smoking and cruising.
	Every now and then there are queer bashings - acts of violence against us as a queer community and as queer individuals. Mostly they leave us in fear and powerlessness. But every now and then we manage to stand together and find strength to fight back. Last summer there was a wave of queer bashings, setting in motion a wave of resistance in the forms of self-defence training, patrolling in the cruising areas and the general idea that queers have fists too. This picture is from last year’s festival when we made a demonstration to the city centre’s cruising area, where a gay man had recently been attacked. The demonstration this year will be on Saturday 25.7. at 14.00
	(text on the sticker says: “if you won’t assume, that we’re straight, we won’t assume, that you’re a dickhead”) In a straight society you are straight until you have proven otherwise. And sometimes you will be considered straight even after that. For non-straight people, that means being made invisible, secondary and illegitimate. It also means that there is a straight norm that is being established and that everything and everyone who doesn’t fit into that has to explain and defend themselves. Being queer and happy is the hardest attack you can launch on straight society. And thinking that people who force a straight norm onto you are dickheads (one of the few male curse words btw.) is not wrong.
	(Text on the sticker says: “are you man enough to take it up the ass?”) There are men who think it is unmanly to be fucked. They also think it is unmanly to be scared. Usually it is the same men who are scared of being fucked. That doesn’t fit. There are people who say that men and women were made for each other. They say that men have keys and women have keyholes. And they ask: how are you going to make two keys fit together? Well, how do you think??

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 Fuck money

More about this years theme

The preparations for the World Outgames have been going on for more than a year. In the queerscene it has risen some interesting discussions. The “Fuck Money”-theme is a broad and open theme, and the following is only meant as an inspiration and information about the thoughts and discussion we’we been having in the queerscene in Copenhagen:

• The fact that the state and the local bussines-owners is working hard on portraing Copenhagen as a gay-friendly “pink city” because they don’t want to miss out on the opportunity of making money on the expected 5-10.000 paricipants and guests. This stands in contrast to the increasing numbers of gay-bashings and hatecrimes that the city has experienced through the previous years, and the lack of will to deal with this issues on a political level. As an active part of the queerscene in Copenhagen, we also experience a huge contrast between the official picture that the municipals is trying to paint, and the daily-life diffilcuties and struggles that we deal with as radical activists.

• The fact that the Outgames itself has chose to base itself on a capitalistic concept where everything costs money and the fee for attending conferences is sky, which makes it impossible for low/non-income persons to participate, especially people attending from non-european countries. As a radical queerscene based on the left-wing, it brought up a conflict that the World Outgames seems so eager to adopt a capitalistic and racist aproach in setting up the event.

• The fact that one of the largest LGBT events in the world is taking place in Cph has risen a lot of interesting discussions about the “queerscene” versus the “LGBT-scene”(in the extend you can talk about, and define, such scenes): The differences betwen the two scenes, politics, capitalism, aestethics, activistculture, racism, mainstreaming of the queerscene etc.etc. These are on-going discussions that is relevant to us all and which can include a number of perspectives, and we would like to use the festival to explore these discussion further.

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