Case Studies And Examples

The weeklong festival offers Nigeria’s LGBTQ+ community a safe and empowering space to celebrate their identities through various events, including exhibitions, balls, and parties. Despite Nigerias legal environment, where homosexuality remains criminalized and punishable under the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, the festival represents a powerful and necessary step toward visibility, inclusion, and community-building for queer Nigerians.

--> Strategic partnership: The main sponsor of the event is Rainbow Railway, an NGO based in Canada and USA that helps at-risk LGBTQI+ people get to safety. Since the organisation's founding, it has helped over 13,000 LGBTQI+ individuals find safety through emergency relocation, crisis response, cash assistance, and other forms of assistance.

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Long read: Interview with Olaide Kayode Timileyin (Alumnus of Atelier Elefsina 2023 and artistic director Pride in Lagos) about Pride in Lagos 2024

“The Pride events began with a summit and awards, followed by a dinner for stakeholders and influencers to discuss how they could better use their platforms to promote queer rights and the work we want them to support. Then came the show. The show was scheduled as part of the final events for Pride in Lagos this year. We always focus on organizing performances by Queer artists. Last year’s performances featured a range of Nigerian artists, but this year we focused specifically on the drag community to encourage their visibility and growth.

It was an emotional experience because the room filled up with a lot of Queer creatives who came out to support their local drag scene. Plus, it was a rainy day. It’s been very rainy in Lagos, starting from around 3 a.m., and it hadn’t stopped. But the rain helped in terms of security because people who came in stayed inside, and those outside were eager to get in. Once inside, no one wanted to leave since it was so wet outside. Which meant we were able to manage a crowd of over 700 queer Nigerians under one roof for the show. Security didn’t require external assistance, as Mother Nature took care of it. It felt like the rain protected us, and we were able to enjoy the night safely.

We had five drag performers, one Queer comedian, a drag king, and a singer. As a producer, this was my first time organizing a drag event. Our first attempt at showcasing drag was back in 2022 with "Dragathon," which was supposed to be a competition to encourage participation. At the time, we were unsure how to create a show that was both relevant to the local community and safe but this years attendance number showed us that the collaboration with the drag queens was a success. Financially, it resulted in some loss. However, it was a great show overall.

TFA: You mentioned that part of the festival involves organizing a summit. Could you explain more about what the summit consists of, especially regarding influencing policymakers? I find it intriguing, as most festivals tend to focus more on the arts.

Timileyin: Sure. This year, we’ve started to recognize the need to separate audiences. We tailor-made different parts of the festival for different groups. The summit is more for corporate-minded individuals and policymakers, whereas the drag shows and balls are for the broader community. We also hosted a breakfast and dinner for influencers at a fancy restaurant so they could take photos and subtly show their support, without explicitly saying ‘Queer life matters’. It’s all about meeting people where they are and getting our message across in the safest and most effective way.

In Nigeria, we’re still at a point where the average Queer person doesn’t even know what it means to be Queer in terms of policy. Opportunities to learn about oneself have been blocked by years of homophobia. That’s where the summit comes in. It’s still growing, but this year we saw some progress. The summit tends to have a smaller turnout - around 200 people - compared to events like the drag show, which had over 700 attendees.

Policymakers aren’t interested in attending drag shows; they don’t want to be seen there. However, they are willing to come to spaces like the Alliance Française, where we can host these discussions. Even though we have to pay for the venue, it provides a safe space for the conversation.

Policymakers prefer corporate or diplomatic spaces where they can quietly engage with Queer issues. They don’t want to be seen as publicly supporting Queer life, but they’re willing to be in spaces that don’t loudly advertise their support. The setting is usually lavish; people enjoy champagne, snacks, and entertainment, which reflects the vanity of Lagos. It’s essential to understand the local culture and approach each audience accordingly if we want to get our message across.

But sometimes, there are also people there that you wouldn’t expect. For example, at this year’s summit, we had the first Queer teenager in attendance—an 18-year-old. During the summit, they asked how we’re helping younger Queer Nigerians. I was caught off guard and didn’t really have an answer, but it reminded me that our presence in these spaces is already significant. You never know who is watching or what impact we’re having.

TFA: And are you also trying to get politicians or other key figures to make public commitments, even if just symbolically?

Timi: The reality is that no Nigerian politician is going to openly support Queer people unless you’re handing them millions of dollars. Even then, they would probably deny it afterward. What we do instead is get them to present awards at our events. It’s a simple but effective commitment—they don’t have to say ‘Queer life matters,’ but by publicly presenting an award, they are indirectly supporting us.

It’s all about negotiating the space. We understand that not every space is safe for queer people, so we focus on finding ways to make it work for both sides. Sometimes that means doing things like sending wine or flowers to their office to keep the relationship strong. It’s about showing up at their events, even when you know you don’t really matter there, just to ensure they’ll show up at yours. It’s a lot of PR work—sometimes it’s about sending them coffee or just making sure they feel appreciated, so they’ll prioritize coming to our events.

And it is often very transactional, but in the end, it’s all for the community and the larger movement. It’s necessary to achieve the bigger goal.” (Part of a conversation in the regular meeting group between The Festival Academy and Alumni, 2024)

Queer Wave is the Cyprus LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. It was born through a pilot edition online in 2020, to address the need to experience community during the COVID times of isolation. Its long-term goal is to celebrate, empower, challenge and stimulate – within and beyond Queer circles, creating ripples through cinema and the arts.

By the end of its 4th edition in 2023, Queer Wave will have delivered over 150 local premieres of LGBTQIA+ titles from all over the world. While most of its activities take place in Nicosia, Queer Wave has taken up space south and north of the green line, within the buffer zone, and outside the capital, with the aim of bringing communities closer together, ‘one film at a time’. 

Queer Zagreb is a manifestation that takes place throughout the entire year. It questions aesthetics and social norms of a transitional society, combining activism with artistic expression that defies dominant practices in various art fields. The program was built in 2013, continuing and expanding the practice of Queer Zagreb Festival that has been happening since 2003. Queer Zagreb Festival activity was based on visibility and strengthening artistic practices and authors whose works deal with subjects of the Queer community and Queer culture in a general sense. In the 21st edition of the Season (2023), Queer Zagreb remains one of the most significant and innovative festival programs of the Croatian independent art scene. 

Plataforma Berlin is the decolonial and intersectional BIPoC, Latinx, FLINTA (Black Indigenous People of Colour, of Latin origin, female, lesbian, inter, non-binary, trans and agender people) showcase for, dance, performance, installation, documentary, discourse and screendance. Their unique approach centres around questions of multi-discrimination and diversity within the Queer community, trying to push for a more complex understanding of the nuances and layered-ness of Queer identities.   

OUTsider is an Austin-based transmedia nonprofit that celebrates the colourful originality and creative nonconformity of LGBTQ+ communities through the presentation of provocative, overlooked and out-of-the-box film, dance, theater, performance art, music, writing and visual art. Through its annual festival which includes a conference, OUTsider unites queer artists, audiences and scholars from around the globe to exchange ideas, spark conversations, overcome boundaries and experience new pleasures through artistic discovery.

Their approach includes several interesting activities:

Artist-in-residency for LGBTQ+ artists whose resources are limited or whose livelihoods are otherwise in danger.

Cross-sector and cross-disciplinary conversations between audiences, academics and artists.

Focus on mediation through panel discussions, participatory activities, casual get-togethers and scholarly presentations.

Interesting: “The name OUTsider is a reference to queerness, and specifically the act of refusing shame and living one’s life ‘out’, including living ‘out’ as an ally of the LGBTQ+ communities. ‘OUTsider’ also expresses an affinity with outsider sensibilities and people–those who take risks and dare to be different, and all marginalized folks who live and think outside the status quo. These various notions of the ‘OUTsider’ inform the festival’s structure and content.”

AMOR International LGBT+ Film Festival is an independent and inclusive event that aims to be a space for creating visibility. Since its founding in Santiago de Chile in 2016, the festival focuses on works that showcase diversity and invites different sectors of society to approach cinema focused on LGBT+ themes. With a feminist angle, it has also progressively increased the national presence and visibility of female filmmakers in each edition.

The programming is divided into five sections that seek to synthesize the diversity around the themes and problems of LGBT+ society. More than 30 films, including feature-length and short documentary, fiction and experimental films from all over the world are part of the programme each year, in addition to activities around the film industry, and social and political issues surrounding the community.

“Our conviction is that love is totally transversal to any sexuality, gender or identity, so we believe that through this contest we contribute to the inclusion of diversity, to strengthening respect and celebrating the visibility of our community through the seventh art.” 

TQAF was founded in 2017 and is a grassroots initiative that sets out to alter deeply entrenched misconceptions and prejudices toward the queer and LGBTQIA community through artistic and cultural practices. Each edition has a main thematic focus based on one question.Also the locations, duration, and concept vary from year to year. 

Strategical location: “Thessaloniki is strategically located between the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East, regions where LGBT and queer communities are often marginalised. As we develop strategies for addressing prejudice and resistance to queer inclusiveness in Greece, TQAF will serve as a political and inspirational link to neighbouring societies. As a breeding ground for queer discourse and artistic creation, we hope that the festival’s impact will extend beyond the borders of Greece.”

Insight into the festival themes throughout the years:

2018: What is Queer? As an 3 days arts exhibition including painting and installations, 

2019: What is Eros? As an 16 days festival at MOMUS EXPERIMENTAL CENTER FOR THE ARTS including exciting artistic and illuminating discussions, exhibitions, workshops, performances, public interventions, educational seminars, film screenings and events

2020: What is fear? As an 8-day Virtual Exhibition & Short Film Festival

2021: What is identity? As a 10-days mix of physical interventions in Thessaloniki, as well as through a curated series of social media, blog, and website posts and videos with a focus on themes of performed identity, colonialism, lived histories, trans experience and the ever-changing and dynamic construction of the self.

2023: What is diversity? In collaboration with Arnhem Queer Arts Festival. As an online conference between Artists, curators, educators, collectives and organisations.

2024: What is Eros? As QUEER GREEKS IN BERLIN VOL.1 presenting Greek queer artists residing in Berlin who bring “the renowned Greek God Eros from Mount Olympus to the German capital”. Zacharogianni Maro / Maria (Elefsina 2019) from Thessaloniki Queer Arts.

The Seoul Queer Culture Festival (SQCF) is a series of open cultural events hosted in Seoul every summer with the vision of “Creating a space where all people with diverse identities, including sexual orientation and gender identity, mingle equally and enjoy”. 

Since the first event in 2000 when it was called ‘Queer Culture Festival-Rainbow 2000’, the festival had taken place with different names like ‘Queer Culture Festival-Rainbow OOOO’ and ‘Queer Culture Festival’ before finally settling on ‘Seoul Queer Culture Festival’ in 2018 and continues under this name today.

The festival highlights include the Seoul Queer Parade and the Korea Queer Film Festival, as well as other diverse events during the festival period. It is hosted and organized by the Seoul Queer Culture Festival Organizing Committee, which consists of citizen volunteers. 

Vogue Nights Jozi celebrates its one-year anniversary in redefining South African queer culture into inclusive and intersectional spaces. VNJ is an event for the queer community who are seeking visibility, survival, and acceptance in a city that hardly acknowledges their existence. It’s a movement that is redefining culture, shifting norms and reimagining Johannesburg’s nightlife scene to allow diverse freedom of expression through dance, music, art and community.

The build-up to the debut Vogue Nights Jozi in June 2018 was an ode to the critically acclaimed 1991 LGBTQ+ documentary Paris Is Burning, and it tells a story of South Africa’s queer youth searching for more places to call ‘home’. It is then fitting that VNJozi’s one year anniversary celebration will host the legendary House of Ninja (Paris), bringing us full circle to our point of departure and cementing VNJozi in the global milieu of Vogue Nights hosted in leading cultural cities such as Paris, Berlin, Chicago and most famously New York City.

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Long read: Tutu Zondo (Film and Television Creator, Creative Directors of Vogue Nights Jozi and LGBTIQ+ rights advocate - South Africa)

“South Africa for a very long time has presented itself as a country that's progressive. We have an incredible constitution, one of the best in the world, that has laws that protect LGBTI people, but the reality of the lived experience is completely different. The work that incredible people like Bev Dietsi were doing in the late 80s and the early 90s is still being continued. We haven't found complete freedom; we haven't found this nirvana that sometimes even our government tries to present that we have.

A little bit of background about me: I'm 25 this year, and so I grew up in a—I was a born-free, I was born in the new democratic South Africa. But even my childhood was still very conservative. I grew up in a very strict Christian home, and for a long time, things weren't questioned. One of my earliest memories is that my grandmother would make clothes for us. She lived in a small village, and whenever we'd go visit, she'd make clothes for each of the kids. I was a kid who liked staying indoors; I loved reading, so I was always the child who would try on the clothes for the other cousins while they were playing. So, I have memories of me wearing dresses because my girl cousins would wear dresses, and that was okay until a point, until they saw that, wait, this dress thing is becoming too familiar on this boy child.

Things got a little more intense when I went to boarding school. I was about 13 years old, and I went to a very strict private school, a boarding school where we'd read the Bible every morning before going to class. That's where the binaries were really enforced: boy, girl, black, white even. So, all of those things were really enforced in me, and it wasn't until I was about 17 that I started figuring out what sexuality and gender were for myself. 

It's when I moved to Joburg for university that everything changed for myself. I found community, and through finding community, I found freedom. I found expression. I found words for things that I had never had before. I didn't understand that "gay," the word "gay," is not just a slur, because the first time I heard it, it was a bad thing. But when I was in university, I began to understand that this is an identity that is not a bad thing. I learned about the diversity in the world, that it is not just man or woman, that there is a plethora of things that you can be, and that you're allowed personal evolution as well.

It was at the same time that I started getting involved with not only activism but also creating events and spaces, which I think, for LGBTI people, it's always linked. Our activism and the spaces that we create are linked. That's where I even met Bev—I'm not even sure if she remembers—but the first time I ever met her, I was hosting an event with LGBTI artists. I think I was 21 at the time, and everybody had to be LGBTI and Black. We put on a show that I self-funded myself. I remember having a conversation with her that was extremely validating after the show, where we just spoke about the work that they had been doing since they were a teenager, quite literally, and how it was beautiful to see that work carrying on. That's how I see the work that I'm doing: we're carrying on the work that started all those many years ago, because today, we still face the same problems.

I do an event called Vogue Nights Jozi, which essentially takes the ballroom culture that was established in places like the U.S. and then later on in Europe and brings it onto the African continent. 

We still are struggling. We are still struggling to get funding, we're still struggling to get venues, we struggle to even advertise it because we still have to worry about things like safety. We're having our next Vogue Nights soon, and we are prioritizing a big part of our budget to security—not because we're afraid that the people who attend are going to be fighting or doing whatever it is, but we're afraid of what happens to them when they step outside. So we've got a dedicated fund for security guards who'll be waiting with our participants for Ubers so that we can make sure that they're at least getting home safe. That's a concern that we still have today.

Another consideration is the access. For us to continue making these events, we still need to be thinking of all the different intersectionalities that are important when creating events for communities that, for a very long time, have been pushed to the sides and the fringes of society. We still need to think about: can people get here? Are we excluding them if we put it into a suburb? So all of our events try to be as central as possible, which means that they're not as safe all the time, so we have to find ways around that consistently. It's a difficult challenge, but it's one that we welcome, because we have to be inclusive. We have to make sure that all our events can take people who are disabled or of different abilities as well. 

We have to make sure that these are events that prioritize the general safety of everybody in the community, which includes the most marginalized of us, which is trans women, etc. These are things that we think about all the time, even in the name of having fun. We have to be more intentional than our cis-het counterparts. We cannot have our events at a place where we know there's also a het event happening next to us, because we know walking down or past that event could have people saying things to you, and that changes your entire night; that changes your entire day, even.

Moving our experiences outside of nightlife has been something else that we've been deliberately trying to do, to have more daytime festivals and events. Unfortunately, being gay, lesbian, or trans during the day is not something that's been really accepted, right? We've been relegated to the nightlife. We've been relegated to the times of the day when we aren't seen, because we seem to offend some type of sensibility, that we offend families, we offend morality. A lot of the things that we do are in the nighttime, and it's been, for us as younger creators, a deliberate push to have things like brunches, to have things like film festivals—things that stimulate parts of us that aren't just the nightlife. It's a consistent battle, because as being mentioned earlier, our country is going through an incredibly dark period right now for LGBTI people, specifically living in the townships where they are—and this is a trigger warning—where they are being mutilated and burned and killed. For a big part of it, our government hasn't said anything, the institutions that we see, have not said anything. They have not put up any money for programs that would work against these violent crimes that are happening.

We have to be very aware of all of those things that are happening and still try to provide spaces, even in the midst of the darkness and the bad things that are happening, we still have to find ways of getting joy. I think that's been the LGBTI experience of the world—that even in our darkest times, we find ways of creating joy, and we find ways of sharing. 

The basis of why we create our events is for community. For a very long time, money for us came second because the main priority was always creating for this community that otherwise would not have spaces because the spaces are still so limited. I live in Joburg, which is probably the biggest city in our country, and I can count maybe on one and a half hands how many spaces are dedicated to the LGBTI community in probably one of the biggest cities on our continent. We are working consistently to push back at that and to make it better, because I always remember that young child who was then told that you're no longer allowed to wear dresses, that this thing that you are is a bad word, that this thing that you are is a sin against your creator.

How do we begin to create spaces for that young child so that they can feel validated in their experience? Because the truth of the matter is, when you're at an event or you're at a festival or you're at a party, you see people like you, and them shining their light gives you permission to do the same. So that's what we aim to do with all the events that we create.”

(Part of a Alumni working group meeting in 2021)