12:15pm | For more than 30 years, The Center of Long Beach has been a central force and cultural hub for the LGBTIQ community in Southern California.
As part of its current renaissance, The Center of Long Beach continues this tradition with “QSpeak,” a lecture series that features university scholars, activists, artists and public figures in the LGBTIQ community once a month throughout 2011.
“QSpeak” will host academic talks, interviews and ethnographies on queer studies, art, culture and social justice while serving as a venue for open discussion to a broad and diverse audience in Southern California.
The series seeks to inspire, educate, challenge, and entertain its audience and aspires to re-energize the collective consciousness of the LGBTIQ community and their allies so that we may envision a future where there are spaces for everyone to exist and thrive.
Academic Speakers
June 25 – Dr. Marie Cartier
An artist, lecturer and author, Dr. Cartier will present “Baby You are My Religion: Butch Femme/Gay Women’s Bar Culture 1940s to 1980s,” where she will include the tales, testimonies and photos of pre-Stonewall gay women and men who considered the bar space as an alternative church. Cartier conducted more than 100 interviews for this presentation, many with local women from the Long Beach community.
July 30 – Dr. Judith Halberstam
Dr. Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at USC, will present “Pregnant Men, Heteroflexible Women, and the End of Gender as We Know It.” She discusses how, in the early years of the 21st century, the press thrilled to the images and testimony of the world’s “first pregnant man.” At the same time, the United States acknowledged a huge decrease in marriages and a rise in divorces. This talk is going to offer a map to the new terrain of gender, sexuality and pleasure in a post-marriage, post-heterosexual, post-gay, post-post world.