This Saturday in Los Angeles, a particularly eager queer history aficionado could join a walking tour of downtown’s LGBTQ heritage, listen in on a conversation with Radical Faeries co-founder Don Kilhefner, catch a preview screening of a docuseries about feminist trailblazers, attend a talk about Long Beach’s LGBTQ past, and cap off the day at the never dull Tom of Finland House with readings on the cultural significance of kink and voguing.
It’s all part of Circa: Queer Histories Festival, which returns for a second edition of packing LGBTQ History Month — aka October — with events that explore and celebrate L.A.’s myriad queer legacies.
“Los Angeles is not just a big city, it’s like a small country,” said Tony Valenzuela, executive director of One Institute, Circa’s organizer. “There’s just so much diversity here, folks from all over the world, and it has a really vibrant — not just queer and trans community, but queer and trans history. That history has long been overshadowed by New York and San Francisco, but I think that’s really changing.”
At the forefront of that change is Circa itself, which debuted last October with an ambitious monthlong slate of 70-plus events to honor One Institute’s 70th anniversary.
“We wanted to be able to have a different time of the year where we could, as a community focus, on our culture — of course with the through line of history, but also to have sober-minded conversations and allow space for whatever issues might come up that may not seem like Pride Month issues,” Valenzuela said. “We didn’t know if that would resonate, and we found that it really did.”
One lesson Valenzuela and his programmers learned from the first Circa was that, in terms of significance, size isn’t everything.
“It doesn’t have to be events that fill an auditorium with 300 people,” he explained. “There are a lot of really robust smaller events where people are having rich conversation, or some other presentation that’s drawing 40 or 50 people, and that is still important. There isn’t anything that we do in LGBT communities that didn’t start with some small group of people talking about some issue in someone’s living room or in some community space.”
Valenzuela said the fact that many of Circa’s programs are mounted by the vanguard of the local LGBTQ community is paramount to the festival’s success.
“Folks are therefore having these conversations about issues that may be currently at the margins, but that we know in time will be moving to the center,” he said. “There’s just a lot of that at Circa, and we really take pride in that.”
The diverse lineup of nearly 70 events at this year’s Circa includes a panel on oral histories from L.A.’s Black LGBTQ community and a screening of the documentary “UNIDAD,” about the L.A. formation of Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos, the area’s first queer Latino organization, as well as workshops on HIV and Palestine, Risograph zine-making, and “whacking,” an under-acknowledged disco-era dance that originated in Los Angeles gay clubs.
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