After Dark: Pride in Our Future

What does a queer future look like? Pride celebrations typically highlight LGBTQ+ history, culture, and past accomplishments.Tonight at the Exploratorium take a look forward and celebrate the creative expression, scientific progress, and civic attitudes we need for a future influenced by and inclusive of LGBTQ+ perspectives and voices! Make yourself a customized pronoun button and get ready to take in a world of queer art, science, and culture. View short films from the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project; hear from queer scientists, writers, artists, and filmmakers; visit the Out & About bookmobile; and get your dance on with DJ Young EllaBaker.
Presented by the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project + Cinema Arts
This short film program showcases works that explore connections to our roots and finding pathways for growth. Collaboratively curated with the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP). The screening will be followed by a conversation featuring select filmmakers.
The Spores They Left Us by Jazmín Calderón (2018, 5 min.)
Colonizers must beware of our sonoluminescent bruja ancestors.
Chaac + Yum written by Snowflake Arizmendi and XAV SF and directed by Roberto Fatal and XAV SF (2022, 12 min.)
Two Mayan-descended 2 Spirits meet at a queer bar and realize that their connection with each other is more ancient than either could imagine.
Filmmakers in attendance.
When the Garden Comes by Jay Gash (2022, 17 min.)
The legacy of homeownership and gardening pumps through the veins of a Black family in North Oakland.
QWOCMAP creates, exhibits, and distributes high-impact new films that authentically reflect the lives of queer women of color both cisgender and transgender, and non-binary, gender-nonconforming, and transgender people of color of any orientation, and addresses the vital, intersecting social justice issues that concern our multiple communities.
With the Explainers
Create your own button showcasing your amazing pronouns! Use a template or blank slate to design, color, and embellish a free button. Then wear it proudly to let everyone know about you and to help normalize introducing your full self to everyone you meet. Our fabulous Explainers will be there to help you get your beautiful buttons made.
Blueprinting for Queer and Black Identities Through Science Fiction and Fantasy
With Duane Horton
As a technology, writing allows for us to memorialize and communicate our inner thoughts. Though writing can strive to document reality, it can also speculate, crafting entirely fictional lives and landscapes. Writer and educator Duane Horton delivers an essay on the importance of science fiction and fantasy as empowering foundations for liberation of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ readers and writers.
Duane Horton is an Oakland-based Black queer fantasy and science fiction writer and educator. His work has appeared in literary journals including Green Mountains Review and Sapphire Hues, and he has a forthcoming story appearing in Free Spirit magazine. He is currently working on a novel that explores his own identity as Black and queer through the lens of fantasy.
With Lauren Esposito, Oliver Nguyen, and Cesar O. Einstein
Join a panel of queer scientists as they share their visions for the future and how their work and research impacts decisions about how we move forward with justice and sustainability as our guiding lenses.
With Bev Yockelson
Gallery 1 Microcinema
Not quite science fiction, not quite satire, Bev Yockelson’s animated short Hold My Hand Tell Me That You Love Me (2020, 5 min) wryly opens the door for empathy with machines in the form of a monologue from a transgender computer named Tom Cruise.
Beverly “Bev” Yockelson is an artist and writer. Its body of work frequently revolves around themes of trans bodies and body horror, technology and transhumanism, Jewish identity and memory, or all of the above.
With LYRIC Center for LGBTQQ+ Youth
Artistic Resistance is a program run by LYRIC that allows queer participants between the ages of 18 and 24 to learn and explore the ways that art can be used as a tool for social change and work on creating their own personal art projects. This Spring ’23 cohort has produced projects spanning visual arts, short films, zines, and installations. These pieces cover various aspects of queer expression and bring awareness to the culture of the community without shying away from some of the darker adversaries they face. Their work shows the influence and importance of queer and diverse art made by and for LGBTQIA and TGNC people and helps carry the weight of intergenerational knowledge.
Featured artists:
Jeanea Ramirez (she/her), Nixxy Dewalt (she/her), Leif Ausman (they/them), Erik Mamanta (they/them), Zipporah Hinds (she/her), Kestrel Liu (they/them), Star Powe (she/her), Jasmine Liang (they/them)
Come join Out & About Bookshop’s owners Katy and Charlie as they envision a joyful queer future and bring it to life! Out & About Bookshop is a mobile LGBTQ+ bookstore connecting children and families in the Bay Area with affirming stories. They will invite museum guests to stop by their station to create a collaborative collage depicting the queer future they wish to see for the world. Katy and Charlie will also invite participants to write letters to queer youth which will be handed out at the museum’s Pride on Saturday. Let the bold imagining begin!
Imagining a world where Mexicano men celebrate their femininity, beauty, and coming of age with a Quinceañero, filmmaker and storyteller Roberto Fatal uses AI tools to craft haute couture portraits of marvelous gender expression. They instruct the machine learning algorithms through carefully selected keywords, manifesting a future computers have no reference for.
Roberto Fatal (they/them/ellos) comes from Rarámuri, Tewa Pueblo, Ute, and Spanish ancestors and Mexican-American culture. Their queer, gender-fluid, Mestize/Mixed identity informs their work, which centers on humans who sit at the intersections of time, space and culture. Fatal is a Sundance Film Institute Native Film Lab Fellow Alum and an Imagine Native Director's Lab feature film fellow alum. Their debut feature script, ELECTRIC HOMIES, was selected by GLAAD x The Black List as one of the best unproduced screenplays of 2022. Their latest short sci-fi drama, Do Digital Curanderas Use Eggs in Their Limpias? made its world premiere at the 2023 British Film Institute Flare festival and will have its US premiere at Frameline San Francisco.
With DJ Young EllaBaker
Get ready to dance your way through the night as DJ Young EllaBaker sets the vibe and keeps the party moving!
Musically, DJ Young EllaBaker has been part of the local and national entertainment scene for years. Her resume includes the Bay Area’s Life Is Living Festival, the Baltimore Pride Festival, Oakland and San Francisco Pride and she has curated Baltimore’s Issa Vibe Day. She is currently Resident DJ at Queer First Fridays and Sweet Spot in Oakland.
Food and drinks will be available for purchase at our Seaglass Restaurant and additional bar locations.