Arts diary: Glasgay! | UK City of Culture | Quiz

IT’s been a good week for gay rights. Plans for equal marriage in England and Wales made it through the House of Commons (although they still need to get past the House of Lords) and the Church of Scotland voted to admit gay ministers.

Happening in quick succession, these two events felt a little like a watershed moment – and bodes well for plans for marital equality in Scotland. Good timing, then, for the Glasgay! festival to be announcing the first details of its 2013 programme. The festival is 20 years old this year, and intends to spend October and November “celebrating the legacy of 20 years of fighting, writing, performing, dancing and singing our way towards a better place in Scotland for our LGBTI community”.

Helping Glasgay! do that will be Jackie Kay, a name long associated with the festival, who’ll be revisiting and updating her 2009 show The Maw Broon Monologues, an exploration of “Scottish identity, female emancipation, motherhood, love, loss and life”.

There’s also a new play by Stef Smith, pictured, best known as the writer of Cora Bissett’s multi-award-winning sex trafficking drama Roadkill. Smith’s show is called Cured, and tells the story of a women who, just before her 40th birthday, walks into a clinic that claims it can cure her of her “homosexual tendencies”.

Glasgay! also announced two new patrons – the comedian Craig Hill, a familiar face at the festival for years, and the playwright Jo Clifford, whose 2009 Glasgay! show Jesus, Queen of Heaven, prompted a hysterical reaction from Christians who hadn’t bothered to see it. If they had, they’d have witnessed a deeply felt and respectful exploration of religion and sexual identity, rather than the God-bashing they presumably expected.

Glasgay! has certainly come a long way in 20 years. When I first began writing about it, it was a necessary but niche event; the mainstreaming of the festival reflects the way that gay life is increasingly so integrated into mainstream culture and values that a festival like this feels like part of the cultural furniture rather than a political statement – despite the best efforts of certain newspapers to demonise it and shamelessly mislead people about the amount of public money spent on it.

It’ll be interesting to see where Glasgay! goes in its next 20 years. Now that a lot of campaigning battles have been won, perhaps the focus shifts to telling more complex, difficult stories (not that that Glasgay! doesn’t do complex and difficult already) or addressing some of the fraught conflicts over gay identity that Bret Easton Ellis touched upon in his recent, provocative essay on gay “magical elves”. Interesting times, whatever happens.

SEABOUND PIlgrimage

IF you’re anywhere near Iona tomorrow, you could witness one of the opening events of Derry-Londonderry’s year as UK City of Culture.

“How is this possible?” you may ask. The connection to Iona is Saint Columba, who founded his famous monastery on Iona but was an Irishman, born in Donegal and known in Ireland as Colmcille. He set sail for Scotland at 42, having already founded monasteries in Derry, Durrow, and Kells.

Now – if only symbolically – he’s sailing back. Tomorrow a 40-foot canvas traditional boat with a crew of 13 rowers will leave Iona and travel for 14 days to arrive in Derry. The boat will carry a mysterious box, the contents of which will only be revealed once it lands in Derry in time for a weekend of events from 4-7 June.

The project is a collaboration between the writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, and the arts organisations Walk the Plank, LUXe and Conflux. Intrigued? Read more about the project, and follow the boat’s journey, at www.thereturnofcolmcille.com.

CREATIVE QUESTIONS

TIME for a fun – if perhaps slightly niche – quiz. If you know the answers to the following questions, please do get in touch, because at time of writing (4pm on Wednesday) – and like everyone else it seems – the Diary is a little bit stumped.

1. Why has Creative Scotland still not appointed its new chief executive, when interviews were concluded several weeks ago?

2. Why did several sources apparently tell a Scottish newspaper two weeks ago that a new chief executive had been chosen, and that this person was Robert Palmer, best known as the director of Glasgow City of Culture back in 1990?

3. Who gave this information to the newspaper in question, and why? What was their motivation in wanting to make it public?

4. If a decision hadn’t been made at that point, how did Palmer’s name end up printed in a newspaper?

5. If a decision had been made at that point, what’s changed since then, and why is it taking so long for this information to come out?

6. Who is the other potential candidate who has since been mentioned several times by several people – and why wasn’t this person’s name brought up before?

Is there a prize for getting all the answers right? Kind of. An organisation that has spent the past year taking a battering from artists and the media has its reputation restored. The booby prize? Another very public car crash. Scotland anxiously awaits an official announcement.
andrew Eaton-lewis