To celebrate Cherry Jezebel, we have partnered with Homotopia – the UK’s longest running LGBTQIA arts and cultural festival – for a very special event charting the evolution of queer culture and the drag scene in Liverpool.
Homotopia has put together an intergenerational panel of speakers to chat about LGBTQIA life past and present, looking at the influence of drag, club culture and trans histories.
The panellists are Joan Burnett, Dan Chan, Roger Hill and Kolade T Ladipo, and the event will be chaired by Char Binns, Festival Director at Homotopia.
No ticket necessary, just turn up to the Everyman at 4pm on Saturday 19 March.
Joan Burnett
Joan is a Merseysider born and bred and has worked in customer service in arts venues for over 30 years, currently as visitor services manager at FACT. Former volunteer on Liverpool’s Outsiders Queer Film Festival from 2006, she later spent 9 years as a Director/Trustee of Liverpool Pride. She currently volunteers for Liverpool City Region Pride as a programmer for Film With Pride, focusing on new and classic films from around the world with the accent on making diverse voices heard. Joan is a member of the Homotopia board of trustees.
Dan Chan
Dan aka Thee Dan Nasty, is a Liverpool based visual and drag artist. Their work takes a playful approach to explore their identity by unpicking racial and queer stereotypes, as well as the gender binary. They create dreamscapes and fantasy beings as a way to bring an idyllic world to life, much of this is inspired by imagery seen in meditation and dreams. A main aspect of their work is to create representation they never saw growing up with the hope for queer British Chinese youth to see themselves.”. Dan is member of Homotopia’s QueerCore artist development programme.
Roger Hill
Roger Hill is a freelance director, performer, arts and education consultant, writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He has presented the nation’s longest running alternative music programme on BBC Radio Merseyside for 40 years in 2022. As a director he began his professional career at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in the 1980’s moving from running the Youth Theatre to Associate Director of the main theatre, after which he turned to freelance work creating a number of performance pieces with small independent companies. Since the turn of the Millennium, he has been performing his own material, much of it in association with his trans "other" Mandy Romero.
Kolade T Ladipo
Kolade is young black actor, dancer, photographer and creative. Who is a huge advocate when it comes to black lives and queer lives. The intersection is a big part of who he is. Kolade has started his own brand @noiregayze the focuses on this intersectionality whilst being apart of many other exciting projects that highlight his creative work.
Chaired by Char Binns
Char (she/her) is Festival Director at Homotopia. She has led Homotopia – the UK’s longest running LGBTQIA arts and cultural festival - through 5 successful festivals and grown the organisation's year-round programme, together with the organisation’s brilliant staff team. Char’s interest in people led her to study sociology and anthropology and she has an MA in the Study of Religions from SOAS, University of London. Char spends her spare time running really long distances and is currently training for her second 50-mile race.