Thursday, January 21, 2010

Wise Thoughts

A very interesting meeting with Niranjan Kamatkar, who runs Wise Thoughts. We've known each other for a while - they used to be our neighbours in Chocolate Factory 2, and now they have an office above Wood Green Library. Wise Thoughts is an organisation for minority ethnic and minority sexuality people - and so particularly interesting to us as we prepare the Trilogy. Gabrielle from Polygon Arts (who is about to take some desk space in our office - making Wood Green more crowded than ever!) and I have been looking at creating outreach work around this, and we've had a chat with the Heritage Lottery Fund, who seem keen. Wise Thoughts are obvious partners, particularly since they run GFest every November - which could be a great platform for any work produced by people participating in the outreach project.

Niranjan is an incredibly committed activist. He tells me his priority for 2010 is called "LGBT Arts for All" - which translates as getting sexual minority work out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. Since all of our work is about opening up dialogues between the different groups in society, we can easily buy in to this.

I was wrong about China, by the way. The Mr Gay China event was closed down by the police. On a technicality.

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