Queer Family Festival

Queer Family Festival is an open access festival that accommodates anyone with the dedication to starting dialogues on queerness, being, growing, and becoming yourself. Centering families, community, and theater education, this festival will showcase family centered and queer friendly vendor expo, performers, interactive play stations, facilitated conversations, drag story hours, performances, and more.

Queer Family Festival’s Core Objectives:

• Assist the families who come to Queer Family Series to navigate what’s offered.
• Celebrate queer friendly family theater and what it stands for in Boston.
• Provide content and vendors that celebrate, create, and offer tools for engagement surrounding radical empathy and universal love.
• Educational Workshops: Meditations, Creation, and Devising
• Queer Family Portraits
• Drag Story Hours
• Educational Theater Performances

There will be programming available for anyone ages 3-18!

Text (617) 485-0558 to sign up for QFF alerts!

About Queer Family Series

Queer Family Series (QFS) offers produced and presented work centered on exploring all facets of queerness from as early as our first memories to our last. This program focuses on social education & awareness through transmedia productions and intergenerational community engagement– connecting queer children, families and elders with accessible art that captures the rigidness of heteronormativity and imagines a world where people can present as they wish. We wish to uplift the core value and belief that theater is an essential fabric and texture in how we communicate to each other, as well as how we communicate our creativity and desires.

QFS sprouted from a community need from Boston based queer elders that spoke to the lack of accessible, queer family programming during the ongoing pandemic. Our elders voiced their inability to leave their homes amid social and cultural organizing and protesting, but wanted to be involved and kept abreast. In addition to elders requests, during the pandemic we heard from queer caretakers and parents. They spoke about the shift to working from home -- being charged with not only their career workload, but teaching and instructing their children through online classes. Caretakers were looking for a respite in the storm, and reliable online programming to engage their young folks. QFS is TTO’s response to these needs!

Donate to The Theater Offensive & Boston Center for the Arts

Donate today to support us in creating life-affirming spaces for queer communities and in uplifting the cultural community in Boston.

Everyone who donates to TTO and BCA through the Queer Family Festival will be automatically entered to win:

• Two (2) tickets to the Boston Art Book Fair Preview Party at Boston Center for the Arts in November 2023,
• Two (2) tickets to As You Like It by Actor's Shakespeare Project and The Theater Offensive in June 2023,
• Fun merch from BCA and TTO.

Dear Valued Community Member --

We are excited to invite you all to The Theater Offensive’s inaugural Queer Family Festival, as part of our Queer Family Series (QFS)! The Queer Family Festival (QFF) is an open access festival that accommodates anyone with the dedication to starting dialogues on queerness, being, growing, and becoming yourself. Centering families, community, and theater education, this festival will showcase family centered and queer friendly vendor expo, performers, family meditation sessions, facilitated conversations, drag story hours, youth performances, and more.

At The Theater Offensive, we believe that community safety is a pillar to creating an inclusive environment. In the tradition of art made by Queer and Trans People of Color, we want to create an intentional, inclusive, and healing space for this event centered in radical empathy and universal love.

To create this sacred space we are setting some community standards to prevent further trauma and/or oppression to QTPOC community members.

We invite you –

to feel how you want to feel,

to speak from your own experience

to claim and own your emotions and struggles, and express your wants and needs as such

No bullying, xenophobic, homophobic, and/or transphobic behavior of any kind will be tolerated in this sacred and brave space. If such incidents happen we will remove said person(s) immediately so other folks can process their respective thoughts, emotions, connections, and questions while at the festival. TTO and BCA are committed to creating a place where individuals can come as they are, and engage with the art without risk of harm or trauma from any of our audience members. We thank you in advance for helping us maintain and defend this sacred space.

In partnership, Boston Center for the Arts and The Theater Offensive have created this FAQ page to answer questions and concerns around safety for this festival.

Ashe,

Tonasia Jones and Michaila Cowie

Host or Publisher The Theater Offensive