This week I’m featuring two projects that I believe merit your attention and support.
The first is Wendi Kali’s Butch Femme Photography Project. Â This is a labor of love for Wendi, an expression of her love for photography as well as of butches and femmes. Â Her collection of photos is growing all the time
Her words, “There is no one way to be butch or femme. Each one of us is our own unique and individual expression of the identity. Those expressions are what I am attempting to capture and document for future generations. This project is a photo-journalistic essay showing the diverse and unique expressions of both butch and femme. The photos in this project are mixed with personal statements from the participants.”
“Ever since coming out I’ve searched for images of other butch lesbians like me and haven’t been very successful. Back in 2010 I attended Butch Voices in Portland, Oregon and was suddenly surrounded by women I could finally relate to and with. I had felt like I finally found my place in the community. After doing a bit of research on Butch and Femme identities and the history of those identities, I fully embraced my Butch identity. From that discovery and from reading a couple of Butch/Femme anthologies, The Persistent Desire edited by Joan Nestle and Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman, I became inspired to create a photo-journalistic essay documenting the unique and individual expressions of Butch and Femme. My hope is that it will help create documentation of our part of the Queer community during this time that we live in and to show the community that we’re still here. We’re always going to be here. I also hope that it helps others feel not so alone and gives them a sense of belonging.
My goal is to photograph as many participants as I possibly can by traveling around the country and parts of Canada for a month. So far I hope to be making stops in New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona, California, Colorado, and Vancouver, BC! Because I’m kind of a regular Joe with a regular job that pays the bills, I’ll have to raise some funds to make that travel and that month off from work possible. In the next few weeks, once I get things a bit more organized, I will be starting a Kickstarter campaign so it’ll be an all or nothing fundraising campaign. My feeling is that if it’s meant to be, it will be funded fully. If it isn’t, then no one loses out.
As of Sunday I will have photographed 18 of the, so far, 81 people participating in the project! I get at least an email a day from people wanting to participate so the list is growing!
To read more about the project, check out the web page (http://astrangerinthisplace.blogspot.com/p/butchfemme-photo-project.html) and the facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ButchFemmePhotoProject). If you’d like to participate, please send me an email atbutchfemmephotoproject@gmail.com.
If you’re interested, email her using the above email address. Â She’ll send you a questionnaire asking you about what butch or femme means to you. Â If you would like to contribute to Wendi’s expenses related to this project, please click the ‘Donate‘ button and help out in any way you can. Â This is an important project, not just to the people involved directly, but also for our community and for future generations. Â The baby butches and baby femmes of the future need to know what it was like to be butch and femme right now, Â and we need to show and tell our interpretations of these vibrant identities — not leave others to document us when we’re gone.
The second Shout Out this week is an e-book by author June Sadler.  Sadler’s Scorpion:Sting / Dada Returns is available as a free download until November 18th through her website.  After that promotional period, it’s available through Amazon books for the low, low price of  $2.99, which is a screaming good deal.
June Sadler’s, Scorpion: Sting, is the super hero story you imagined under the covers, with your flashlight after your mother told you to go to bed. Â The super sexy cool essence of Scorpion lulls the reader into forgetting she’s here to save the world. Â June Sadler’s Scorpion: Sting is a queer dream come true.
If you like international spy thrillers, like the Bourne series or James Bond, you should check this out. Â The story starts quickly and continues with rich detail and plenty of tension both within and outside of the Consortium:
DADA, code name Scorpion, is head of a trio of rogue outcasts in a clandestine organization known as the Consortium. After years of being sequestered in a sub dwelling within the confines of Consortium headquarters unfairly punished for a case gone wrong her time has been spent creating the Burrow. Dada once thought she worked for a group that maintains the balance of good in the world, until she was set up as a scapegoat. A secret mentor on the inside has been steadily supplying her with equipment, gadgets and tools for the Burrow where Dada soon discovers multiple enemies in cahoots against her utilizing Consortium resources to destroy her once and for all.
This story introduces Scorpion, aka Dada, a hot, African-American lesbian superhero who has all the juicy complications of the best action heroes: Â trouble with authority, disciplinary issues, success in the field and a the tension of a romantic relationship with another member of her team.
To get your free download, go to this website and flip to page 6 (the website features an interactive online book, with the first couple of pages to preview as well as a preview of the audiobook version, additional information on the author and the project.   Author Sadler envisions this story as the first in a series and has plenty of other ambitious plans, such as a graphic novel based photo-realism that is in the works.  The story is a bundle of energy, barely contained within it’s electronic pages and, based on my emails with Sadler, so is she. Keep an eye on her, she’s going to make things happen.
This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.
