Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall continues to defy legal threats and issue same-sex marriage licenses — just as Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Clela Rorex did four decades ago. In his documentary Limited Partnership, the closing night film at this year’s Cinema Q film festival, filmmaker Tom Miller…
“Green chiles are important to me,” says gardener Letitia Salazar Monk. The Anaheim green chiles that she grows at the Eastside Growers Collective are a symbol of her heritage: Her ancestors were Yaki hunters in New Mexico, and her philosophy is rooted in indigenous food production and gathering. See also:…
With the booming Denver housing market and the influx of hipsters struggling to find meaning in a culture built on a bedrock of irony and flippant fashion, visiting Brooklyn — ground zero for vacuous aesthetes — is like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future Queen City of…
On the opening night of Residency): Process to Consumption back in May, the city’s arts arm, Create Denver, handed out empty four-by-four-foot wooden boxes to a group of selected artists. They were asked to use the back as a canvas and the inside to build something. “That’s why the word…
As the fight for marriage equality continues to amass victories, the formerly niche market of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender cinema has moved into the mainstream. LGBT identity is “becoming the new normal and reaching a broader audience,” says Matthew Campbell, programmer at the Sie FilmCenter, “but it still needs…
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender cinema is becoming the new norm, according to Denver Film Society programmer Matthew Campbell: Festivals such as Sundance now feature films about LGBT characters who are fully fleshed out and whose stories have less to do with their sexual identity, he points out. Marriage and…
Kelly Shortandqueer has been a staple in Denver’s creative community for over a decade. As a co-founder of the Denver Zine Library, a square dancer with the Rocky Mountain Rainbeaus, a victims’ advocate for the Colorado Anti-Violence Program and, most recently, an award-winning drag queen, he has no shortage of…
Anarchist playwright Benjamin Turk sees theater as more than entertainment. He believes plays can spark dialogue, transform community and attack systems of violence: capitalism, the police and prisons. Steeped in the work of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, who both resisted the idea that stories should help audiences connect with…
As you walk from northeast Park Hill across Martin Luther King Boulevard into Park Hill, the sidewalks narrow — when they exist at all. Shrubs jut out, tripping pedestrians and reminding them that the members of Park Hill’s gentry want to keep people off of their green, green lawns. See…
Raised as a Missionary Baptist in a Texas trailer park, Michael Mayes knew his share of roughnecks and racists; they were his friends. When he first saw Dead Man Walking, the opera based on Sister Helen Prejean’s book about her experiences accompanying two men toward state execution, Mayes realized he…
“Is it possible for a police officer to be a cop and a human being, or are all cops bastards?” asks playwright Benjamin Michael Turk of Insurgent Theater, who stars in the one-man interactive play Behind the Badge. “I play a cop who thinks of himself as a good person…
Decades ago, Dahlia Square was celebrated as the nation’s largest African-American-owned shopping center, a vibrant hub in northeast Park Hill, the poorer — and definitely blacker — counterpart to integrated, upscale Park Hill. But starting in the ’70s, businesses kept closing their doors, quitting for good or moving to other…
The thirty-plot community garden lies in the shadow of Liggins Towers, a brick high-rise full of Section 8 apartments in northeast Park Hill. The property is owned by Zion Baptist Church, the oldest African-American congregation west of the Mississippi, but the garden is relatively new; the Eastside Growers Collective came…
Despite all the hoopla about Hillary Hall issuing same-sex marriage licenses in Boulder, marriage equality is not a new concept in that town. As Westword has reported, Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Clela Rorex issued the first same-sex marriage licenses in the country in the mid-1970s. Although the effort was…
For its show, (Residency): Process to Consumption, the city’s arts arm, Create Denver, handed out empty four-foot-by-four-foot wooden boxes to a group of selected artists. They were asked to use the back as a canvas and the inside to build something. Some collaborated; others created alone. Tonight, the show opens…
Fans of dystopian novels and sci-fi/fantasy, look out: Young-adult fiction writers Margaret Stohl, author of Beautiful Creatures, and Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent series, will be talking about their work tonight at the Tattered Cover Highlands Ranch. Stohl’s newest book, Idols, is her sequel to Icons. “It’s an emotional…
Too often, anime enthusiasts hunker down in solitude, scouring the Internet for the newest Japanese animated release. “Anime fans have so many opportunities to stream it or just wait and get imported DVDs and Blu-rays and stuff like that. But the opportunity they’re missing, in a lot of places, is…
Growing up in an East Texas trailer park gave Michael Mayes an edge on the other singers trying out for the role of Joseph De Rocher, the convicted murderer and rapist in Terrence McNally and Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking. It’s a part Mayes knows well; he grew up…
With 200 craft breweries in Colorado, it’s no surprise that out-of-state outfits want to cash in on this state’s thriving beer culture. Tonight in City Park, the Boston Beer Company will host the Samuel Adams Brew & View, where audiences can play lawn games, graze food-truck offerings and sample beers,…
Tired of nostalgia, Uncle Sam and “The Star-Spangled Banner”? Check out Dark Junk Under Mile High Lights, the Itchy-O Marching Band Independence Day extravaganza in teh shadow of Sport Authority Fireld at Mile High. The 32-piece mob of drummers, exotic dancers, electro-trash musicians and even a Chinese lion entertains audiences…
July is a perfect time to bask under the stars at one of Denver’s many outdoor screenings or to cuddle up in an air-conditioned theater and get out of the heat. This month’s picks for movie events include throw-back classics, one queer festival and two killer new releases. See also:…
Denver Public Library’s Chris Loffelmacher wants people to see the DPL as “a community gathering spot where citizens can be with their ‘tribe.’ That has always been a goal of libraries, but it has become more and more important in the age of social media. We want to give our…
