Between Two Pandemics, Ballroom Has Something to Say, a talk by Michael Roberson, happens at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts October 14
The activist, artist, and U.S. LGBTQ community leader discusses ballroom’s response to marginalization, presented by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement
Michael Roberson.
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement presents Between Two Pandemics, Ballroom Has Something to Say, a free talk by Michael Roberson in person at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts and live via YouTube on October 14 at 7 pm.
ONE WAY THAT transgender, lesbian, bisexual, and gay African-American men and women have surpassed marginalization and established welcoming communities is through the house ballroom scene, a Black/Latinx LGBTQ artistic collective and kinship system that has grown over the past 50 years.
Michael Roberson is a public-health practitioner, advocate, activist, artist, curator, and leader within the LGBTQ community in the United States. Roberson leads the free talk, Between Two Pandemics, Ballroom Has Something to Say, with respondents Henry Daniel, Justine A. Chambers, and Travis Salway.
The conversation will touch on the house/ball community as it sits between two pandemics: HIV/AIDS (1981), coupled with the crack drug epidemic (1984) emerging from the US neo-liberal political regime of President Ronald Reagan (1980–1988), and the present moment of the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the US crystal meth drug epidemic, rising from the return of global fascism and the politics of Trumpism.
Roberson is co-creator of the US’s only Black Gay Research group and National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition, as well as an adjunct professor at the New School University/Lang College NYC and Union Theological Seminary NYC. He is an international art and politics consultant and a member of the international sound art collective entitled “Ultra-red.” Roberson is a scholar-in-residence for the Center for Race, Religion, and Economic Democracy as well as recent TED Media Resident, where he performed a global TED talk about the underground Black/Latinx House/ball ballroom community, The enduring legacy of ballroom.
See here for more information.
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