The state of present-day “pride” is dismal enough to depress any politically conscious queer, as cops march alongside mega-banks at corporate-sponsored parades, and Target peddles rainbow mugs while simultaneously rolling back DEI initiatives. What local Austin spaces can help us tap back into the revolutionary core of queerness?
Enter OUTsider, the LGBTQ+ transmedia festival launching into its 11th year of existence/resistance, which is no small feat as arts nonprofits continue to shutter nationwide. The fest’s 2025 theme – Monstrosity and the Obscene/Off-scene – arrives as attacks on queer, BIPOC, disabled, and immigrant community members intensify. While continually challenging the subhuman characterization of these groups, the theme emphasizes a mischievous pride in deviation from cultural norms. Freaks, monsters, and OUTsiders of all kinds are celebrated at the festival, with appearances from performance art duo Mirrored Fatality, queer punk documentarian Amina Cruz, pop princess p1nkstar, and returning fave Dorian Wood, among many others.
On this year’s monstrous theme, Artistic Director Laura Gutiérrez notes: “Beyond reveling in our queer, deviant, and non-normative sexualities during the five-day festival, thinking about this year’s theme and casting ourselves in the mold of monstrosity is a way for us to hold up a distorted mirror to the dominant society and have them see themselves as the real monsters through their hateful discourse and violent laws.”
Fitting, then, that queer Filipinx-Salvadoran interdisciplinary artist and longtime HIV/AIDS activist Julie Tolentino (she/they) arrives as this year’s Legacy Award winner. Although raised in San Francisco, their most formative years were spent in New York, where they studied modern dance and improvisational techniques while also organizing as a member of New York’s ACT UP chapter. In 1989, Tolentino posed for AIDS-activist artist collective Gran Fury’s iconic campaign Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, one of the most influential political art actions of the era. From 1990 to 2002, Tolentino co-founded and managed Clit Club, the infamous downtown Manhattan lesbian party noted for its wide representation of age, race, class, and gender presentations.
“That was the point – we needed to be together,” they say. “In those days, the Club was not only a party space, but also a grief space.”
In 2022, Tolentino, alongside Chinese-American artist/HIV survivor Ivy Kwan Arce, exhibited the durational piece Hold Tight Gently in the Whitney Biennial. The performance represented a full-circle moment for the collaborators: Three decades prior, Kwan Arce decided to receive an HIV test after viewing Tolentino’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill campaign. Tolentino says their piece – where a person in a sheath suspended from the ceiling is moved back and forth by her over eight hours – aims to “keep our attention on the subject of amazing caregiving.”
“Queerness is undeniable in the work, but not in that spectacular and glittery way,” they explain. “It’s more kind of a pedagogical, entrenched approach, where queer is literally at the core … It’s rethinking: What is time? What is it that we’re doing when we’re together? What is it to come together, to be either witness or participant?”
Calling from their Mojave Desert home, Tolentino says they feel honored to be included alongside the award’s legendary past recipients such as Kiki and Herb, Chavela Vargas, and Sandy Stone, to name a few. OUTsider’s Gutiérrez says the Legacy Award Tolentino’s earned functions as a way to “honor our queer and trans pathbreakers in art, activism, scholarly pursuits, and shapers of containers for radical expression and thought.” The artist themself adds: “If you’re living and moving through your life, you’re not really thinking about how it’s accumulating in a way that you can see in others. There’s something there [in the Legacy Award] that’s very moving to be part of.”
OUTsider Fest: Monstrosity and the Obscene/Off-scene
Feb. 19-23, the Vortex
This article appears in February 14 • 2025.