LGBTQ+ festival fights back after Trump's cuts National Endowment for the Arts funding
A festival featuring the works of playwrights from countries where LGBTQ+ rights are suppressed is turning to fundraising after President Donald Trump's National Endowment for the Arts cut its grant to the group. The National Queer Theater said they have created a GoFundMe page where the community can support the Criminal Queerness Festival taking place during NYC Pride 2025, NBC News reports.
The Criminal Queerness Festival takes place at the HERE Art Center in NYC on June 11-28. According to its website, the festival 'showcases the works of international LGBTQ+ playwrights from countries where queer identities are criminalized or censored.' This year's festival features plays reflecting queer life in Cuba, Indonesia, and Uganda.
Related: Smithsonian Museum postpones LGBTQ+ African art show
The festival, which was created during WorldPride 2019, is the creation of Brooklyn's National Queer Theater. The group depended upon a $20,000 grant from the NEA to fund the festival, which represented 20 percent of the festival's budget for 2025.
The group was notified via email on Friday that their grants no longer aligned with Trump's priorities, and the request for this year's grant was denied.
'It's devastating and upsetting, because we're a very small organization,' Jess Ducey, co-chair of the company's board, told NBC News. 'That grant is absolutely integral to the funding.'
Related: Dem senators condemn plan to cut LGBTQ+ crisis hotline
While the news was devastating, Ducey and the National Queer Theater do not view it as fatal. The group has created a GoFundMe page (@national-queer-theater) to help cover the lost grant. So far, the page has raised over $8,000 of its $20,000 goal.
The three plays to be performed this year reflect a mix of queer identities set in places hostile to the LGBTQ+ communities, both in foreign countries and the U.S.
Tomorrow Never Came by Jedidiah Mugarura is set in Uganda and tells the story of a gay man in a heterosexual marriage and also a same-sex love affair. What Are You to Me by Dena Igusti is about a lesbian romance in Indonesia cut short by the Jakarta riots and crackdown in 1998. The story is discovered years later by an 'emerging zine writer in Queens' looking to share their story. frikiNATION by Krystal Ortiz explores the lives of young punks in Cuba of the early 1990s who injected themselves with tainted blood to acquire HIV, knowing they would live better lives isolated in state-run sanitariums than trying to survive under Fidel Castro's oppressive, homophobic regime.
Related: Sundance shines light on real-life LGBTQ+ stories
The National Theatre Group is party to the suit, Rhode Island Latino Arts v. National Endowment for the Arts, filed by the ACLU in a Rhode Island federal district court. The suit has unsuccessfully sought to reinstate funding cut from the NEA by Trump.
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