from the
Sins Invalid Kickstarter page, where you can support the film:
Sins Invalid is a San Francisco/Bay Area based performance project that celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists. Since 2006, our performances have explored themes of sexuality, embodiment, and the disabled body, impacting thousands through live performance.
We’ve consistently heard from people who can’t make it to the SF/Bay Area that they want to experience Sins Invalid. Enter Sins Invalid – The Film.
We are on the verge of completing a 41-minute film that reflects our groundbreaking performance work, weaving interviews of artists and co-founders alongside unreleased performance footage to serve as an entryway into the absurdly taboo topic of sexuality and disability – and we want YOU to walk through that door with us!
Why Sins Invalid? We know that the world of enforced and embodied norms constricts all of us, regardless of where we identify on the spectrums of sexuality, gender, or ability. In this project, people with disabilities are engaging in the wholeness of our bodies and our sexualities. When people experience our shows they are deeply impacted -- not only do people think differently about disability, they leave thinking differently about themselves:
“I am moved beyond words, moved to an emotional state that I can’t quite explain. Thank you for making this space possible!”
“Poignant, moving, REAL.”
“One of the most powerful shows I have been to ever. The creativity and expression and depth literally took my breath away.”
With this film, we can magnify our message that ALL people and communities are beautiful and valuable. Imagine how many more lives and communities would change if people engaged in that simple message!
What We Have and What We Need
We’re in the final stages of production. We are committed to completing the film – so committed in fact that we are donating personal resources to move it forward. As Kickstarter contributors, you know that artists stretch a dollar to make $100 worth of creativity happen. We’re stretching but we still need you to premiere this film!
Your contribution will help lead us through the end stages of film production:
sound editing and creating music
correcting the color
adjusting the titles
beginning the distribution launch
Our dream is that together we raise beyond our $15,000 goal so that this film is viewed as widely as possible and is accompanied by a educational packets and a speaker in as many venues as possible.
Please share in the truth that beauty always recognizes itself. Be a part of completing a groundbreaking film on disability, sexuality and beauty!!
Below are the bios of a few of Artists working with Sins Invalid:
- Juba Kalamka is most recognized as cofounder of "homohop" group Deep Dickollective (D/DC), development of the micro-label/distributor Sugartruck Recordings, and direction of PeaceOUT World Homohop Festival (2002 - 2007). He received a 2005 Creating Change Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for his activist work in queer music community. He recently appeared at Life Is LIVE 3 (Berlin, Germany) and is included in the lyric compendium The Anthology of Rap (Yale University Press, 2010).
- Nomy Lamm is a writer, musician, and activist whose work has been featured in magazines, anthologies and onstage across the U.S. She has toured with Sister Spit, the Sex Workers Art Show, and the cabaret showcase Dr. Frockrocket’s Menagerie and Medicine Show. She has released two solo albums (Anthem, 1999, and Effigy, 2002) and co-wrote, co-produced and performed in The Transfused, a post-apocalyptic rock opera about multigendered animal-human hybrids, in 2000. She teaches voice lessons, and is currently working on her first novel, The Best Part Comes After the End. (http://www.nomylamm.com/)
- Leroy F. Moore Jr. is a co-founder and performer for Sins Invalid shows. He is a Black disabled writer, poet, community activist and feminist. Leroy is the author of a spoken word CD and chapbook entitled Black Disabled Man with a Big Mouth & a High IQ, and his poems and articles have appeared in numerous publications. His film-based collaboration with Todd Herman on disability and sexuality resulted in the internationally award-winning work Forbidden Acts. Leroy lectures regularly on the intersection of race and disability and is the founder of the Krip-Hop Project, which produces hip-hop mixtapes featuring disabled hip-hop artists from around the world.
- seeley quest has been actively performing, organizing shows and m.c.'ing around the Bay Area since 2001, and has also featured at the last True Spirit Conference in D.C., at Trans/Giving in L.A., in Vancouver, Toronto, and many U.S. cities and colleges with the Tranny Roadshow.
- Aurora Levins Morales is a nationally known writer whose work has been widely anthologized and taught. She was a contributor to the groundbreaking 1981 collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Her fiction has appeared in Ms and The American Voice and four collections of Latina/o writing. She is also a frequent contributor to the Jewish feminist journal Bridges. Her first book, Getting Home Alive (Firebrand Books, 1986), written with her mother, Rosario Morales, was hailed as "a landmark in Puerto Rican literature" and "the most important book to come out of the diasporas in a generation." Her most recent books are Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas (Beacon Press, 1998) a prose poetry retelling of the history of the Atlantic world through the lives of Puerto Rican women and their kin, and Medicine Stories, (South End, 1998) a collection of essays. Her 9/11 poem Shema was broadcast on PacificaFlashpoints news magazine. She is currently working on a novel.
