Bend-It is a collective of activists and artists working to empower, build community among, and create meaningful alternatives for queer young people and their friends. Headed by young people of diverse gender identities and sexual orientations, Bend-It is committed to creating safe and accessible spaces for queer youth to exchange ideas, learn skills, and take on positions of leadership. Sensitive to the danger of placing an exclusive focus on one particular form of oppression, we seek to work together with other marginalized populations as a way to combat segregation and to defend the view that all oppressions are interrelated.
For the past five years, Bend-It has had the exclusive goal of organizing a three-day arts festival during the weekend of the Seattle Pride Parade in June. We designed our festival as a meaningful, non-corporate, proactively inclusive alternative to Pride, hosting community artists-led workshops, concerts, photography exhibits, film festivals, fashion/drag/burlesque shows, and spoken poetry open mic nights. We have encouraged DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIT (do-it-together) mentalities by offering reciprocal skill-building workshops—as opposed to top-down, one-way interactions—and showcasing local youth bands, filmmakers, photographers, graphic designers, fashion designers, drag/burlesque performers, and poets. In addition, each of our events was a collaboration with a progressive community organization, including the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center; the Lambert House; The Vera Project; Seattle Youth Speaks; The Bent Writing Institute; Youth in Focus; QPOC (Queer People of Color); Home Alive; Seattle DIY; Northwest Film Forum; Three Dollar Bill Cinema; and the Lifelong AIDS Alliance. This past June the festival was a great success, with more than 400 people going through the registration process and many more attending the different events.
We are in a new year and we need new organizers to continue this tradition.
Check out a weekly Monday meeting
in the Community Room at Kaladi Brother's Coffee
511 E Pike St
@ 630 pm
PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
benditbandits.org
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
Three Dollar Bill Cinema (Producer of Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) *THE FISCAL SPONSORS OF BEND-IT
The Vera Project
Seattle Young People's Project