Annual Glitter Gala
Saturday, October 29 from 8:00 PM – ??
Location: fifteenTWELVE Creative Compound
1512 Portland Ave
Louisville KY, 40203
SHOW US WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF!
Proud of your heritage or culture or the country your parents are from? SHOW US! Feel more like a mermaid than a human? SHOW US! Been dying to create a look around expressing a specific concept or emotion? SHOW US! We want to celebrate YOU!
Every year, LYG hosts the Glitter Gala, a combination celebration of cultural arts within the community and fundraising event. This year, our theme is Show Us What You’re Made Of. We constructed this theme out of several important aspects of our community’s current needs.
Our community is regularly ravaged by isolation, discrimination, and fear. The pandemic has only served to amplify these, at times life-threatening, experiences. Our community is in dire need of a celebration of who we are and what we represent. Show Us What You’re Made Of is a statement about removing the metaphorical masks we are forced to wear to survive in our heteronormative mainstream society and celebrating ourselves out loud. (While still physically masking up to protect our community!)
After surveying our community, it became apparent that one of the missing pieces to our communal spaces is a sense of multiculturalism. As an overwhelmingly white organization, we have been digging into how to approach this gap in support for our community while owning that we, ourselves, have contributed to that erasure and have so much work to do. Part of that work has been building a strategic plan for our organization, mapping out where we want to be and the steps we need to take to get there. We saw an opportunity to provide a representative and celebratory space that would also acknowledge the work our organization has left to do. We wanted to be careful to not be performative in offering such a space. Show Us What You’re Made Of is an opportunity for folks to celebrate their culture, race, ethnicity, etc. without LYG being performative in our efforts to provide that space.
Another important request that came out of surveying our community is for a sober space. The reality is that the culture of LGBTQIA+ spaces in Louisville is very alcohol and drugs centric. Unfortunately, that can create a lot of unsafe spaces for our community, especially considering that our focus is youth programming. One of our main goals for the event this year is to re-center the celebration of our city’s LGBTQIA+ cultural arts by removing (or at the very least de-centering) alcohol from the event. Show Us What You’re Made Of is an opportunity to reinvigorate a sense of safety into the act of celebrating who we are.
Finally, Show Us What You’re Made Of is an opportunity for LYG to show the community what we are made of. Throughout the evening, we will reveal our strategic plan, expressing to the community what our priorities are for the next 18 months – 2 years. Our staff and board have worked extremely hard this year to take communal feedback and build out a new future for LYG. Show Us What You’re Made Of is an opportunity for us to share our plans with the community.
Join us for a fun-filled event celebrating YOU! We will have a DJ, several outstanding performances, food trucks, prizes, a silent auction, and more!
Contact Rosey Green with any questions or concerns: [email protected].
Here are the event links, so you can get a feel for our theme for this year’s event.
Event link: https://secure.givelively.org/event/louisville-youth-group-inc/glitter-gala-2021/glitter-gala-2021
Donation link: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/louisville-youth-group-inc/glitter-gala-2021
Facebook event link: https://fb.me/e/WKCTwgpp
