2022 LGBTQ+ Month

Gazal Dhaliwal is an Indian screenwriter who has written for some widely appreciated Hindi films and series over the past five years, including Lipstick Under My Burkha, Qarib Qarib Single, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga – India’s first mainstream film about a gay woman – and a popular Netflix India series Mismatched. Dhaliwal is also a public speaker and LGBTQ+ activist, who has spoken openly about being a transgender woman in several talks and in the media – most famously in an episode of the Indian superstar Aamir Khan-led talk show ‘Satyamev Jayate.

The Tribeca Film Festival, celebrating its 20th year since it was founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2002 in the wake of 9/11, is again featuring LGBTQ+ themed features, documentaries, and shorts this year. Tribeca is one of the country’s top film festivals that uplifts marginalized voices.

Manila-born fashion designer Francis Libiran first took up architecture at the University of Santo Tomas before he followed his heart and pursued fashion designing.  His father was against it at first.

The most interesting aspect of the fashion in the BBC series Gentleman Jack, which just aired its second season on HBO, is the style choices made by costume designer Tom Pye for actress Suranne Jones, playing 19th-century lesbian landowner Anne Lister, master of Shibden Hall in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Pye, who has also designed costumes for a TV movie also created by Sally Wainwright, To Walk Invisible (2016) about the Brontë sisters, has been inventive in showing class, power and trends of the times.

When the film Pride.

Frances “Franco” Stevens is the founder of the iconic lesbian Curve Magazine, which was launched in 1991 as Deneuve. As a broke young woman, who had been rejected by her family, when she came out as a lesbian and had briefly been homeless, Stevens did not take no for an answer when investors did not believe in her vision.

Gentleman Jack, the British series created by Sally Wainwright, is about the true-life story of Anne Lister (Suranne Jones), born in 1791, a landowner and entrepreneur in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Her historic home, Shibden Hall, is still standing and her extensive diaries, deciphered by her relative John Lister decades after her death, but kept hidden, because a portion of them, written in a secret code, described intimate details of her numerous lesbian relationships, were finally published in two volumes in 1988 and 1992.

John Waters was born in Baltimore in 1946. Raised Roman Catholic, he was a rather odd kid.

When the HFPA requested an interview to mark Pride month with Justice For My Sister (JFMS) founder, Kimberly Bautista, the executive director politely declined. Not because she wasn’t eager to promote the arts-based non-profit organization that receives grant support from the HFPA, but because she was taking a hiatus to produce her own short film about a genderqueer family and taking that opportunity to also employ participants from her organization’s PA (Production Assistant) Certification Program which would help set them up with a career in the film and TV industry.

The Nigerian activist Pamela Adie was the first person in Nigeria to make a documentary about coming out as a lesbian. Under the Rainbow, from 2018, follows her discovery of herself, her coming out to her family and friends, and the consequent alienation that followed.