Last year, nearly 100 people crammed into Radial Café, many sitting on the floor, for WABE’s “Out & Out Loud” event featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people sharing their stories as part of the NPR affiliate’s StoryCorps program.
“The StoryCorps event was a smashing success — the idea of people gathering in a room to just listen to stories of other community members — that’s not really something you can do at [Atlanta Pride in October] and be effective,” said James Sheffield, executive director of Atlanta Pride.
This year’s free event is set for Wednesday, June 22. Food will be available from Radial Café and people will have the chance to sit in a more spacious setting at the recently expanded Phillip Rush Center.
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John Lemley, the host of WABE’s “City Café,” returns again to host this year’s “StoryCorps: Out & OutLoud” event. Lemley is an out and proud gay man, as he explained last year, saying people must be “headless” if they didn’t know already.
StoryCorps Atlanta has been actively seeking stories from the LGBT community, with numerous partners sharing their stories of how they met, transgender people sharing their experiences and even State Rep. Simone Bell talking to a YouthPride lesbian activist about being the first African-American out lesbian to serve in a state legislature.
Atlanta gay history project Touching Up Our Roots, along with Lambda Legal, will highlight 16 StoryCorps interviews it has conducted with people such as Diamond Lil, Berl Boykin, Shelley Emerson, Georgia Equality Executive Director Jeff Graham and Radial owner Frank Bragg.
Top photo: StoryCorps Atlanta participants are asked to interview each other, sharing stories from their LGBT experience. (Publicity photo)