It's already been a great year for crowdfunding LGBT projects and with sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, there's always an opportunity to get your voice heard and find support for your cause. With every generation, we welcome new stories and perspectives that tell the truth about what life is like.
These four campaigns can speak, represent, and shape our inner voices to further reflect our potential in humanity. Art has the power to to change our world, and these artists and writers have done that.
Take a peak at the projects seeking crowdfunds that we think deserve nods this month.
FILM: The Shotgun Waltz
Lead by a group of New Orleans filmmakers, The Shotgun Waltz paints an authentic portrait of the Big Easy through music, narrative, and visual cinema.
Told through the eyes of a bicycle delivery boy on the search for his missing sister, audiences will watch as he speeds through the dark streets, meeting all sorts of characters with different agendas, including Luna (played by Vockah Redu), a beautiful transgender woman who acts as the protagonist's fairy Godmother, guiding him to his ultimate fate. Another memorable character is Grace, a fortune teller who" is gender-ambiguous and represents him/herself as such, not through physical transformation, but by essence of being."
Led by producer/writer/director, Ji Un Choi; director of music, Roland Guerin; and producers Milo Daemgen, Lexxi Broussard, Amanda Weir, and Christina Wollenberg, The Shotgun Waltz promises to capture the essence of psychological storytelling.
Click here to check out their Kickstarter campaign and watch the video below.
DOCUMENTARY: The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Abod brings you the life of her longtime partner Angela Bowen, a legendary black lesbian activist who overcame racism in the 1950s to become a classical ballerina, and later a beloved writer, educator, and speaker.
Today, Bowen has Alzheimer's disease and has since retired. The film is a decade in the making and addresses the universal themes of family, love, loss, disease, gender and sexuality. With proper funding, Abod hopes to finish the film by the year's end.
Check out their Indiegogo campaign and watch the video below.
FILM: Trans Person: A Story of Living Transgender in the USSR
In a poignant and vulnerable portrait of what it's like to be transgender, Trans Person uses experimental filmmaking innovations while telling the story of Olga, a Latvian transgender woman who was living openly during the times her country was under Soviet occupation.
In a unique structure of storytelling, the film begins by Olga telling her life story to her only friends: her guinea pigs. Yet as the plot moves forward we begin to see, through actors and archival footage, the real struggles that transgender men and women face every day in Eastern Europe.
Directed by Latvian filmmaker Una Celma, the film will also be comprised of Latvian actors and will be subtitled in English.
To donate, check out their Indiegogo campaign.
FUNDRAISER: Help Save Todd Heywood's Home and Health!
Todd Heywood is a respected, HIV-positive journalist who covers HIV and AIDS as well as LGBT issues for HIV Plus magazine and other media outlets, including his blog ViralAparteid.com. He also works full time as an investigative reporter for the American Independent News Network, though he's currently on medical leave. For a while now, Heywood has been struggling with issues regarding his immune system and as a result is vulnerable to certain infections. However, recently his doctor determined that a contributing factor to his declining health is his house -- a problem that requires thousands of dollars to fix. So he has turned to the public for help.
By donating anything you can, you are helping Heywood relieve the stress of having to decide whether to leave his home and face possible homelessness or stay in the house and face a rapid increase in health concerns and disabilities related to HIV.
To donate, check out his GoFundMe profile.
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