Missing LA

What's wrong with LA? It's a major city, home to several universities, major music venues, and small performance spaces. So why do so many artists avoid it? I've noticed a lot of performances/bands that I'm interested in seeing, particularly queer ones, don't manage to get to LA when they tour. This seems to me to be a major oversight quite possibly demonstrating a serious lack in programing at local venues.

What brought this to my attention was the fact that Team Gina, a pair of queer women on their first tour and just releasing a CD (with a butch/femme song that I enjoy very much), had originally posted that they would be LA on Sunday, Jan. 28th with a venue TBD. It now seems that they've rescheduled to be in New Mexico instead. They're skipping LA completely.

And then, I looked at the just-announced tour dates for the Sex Workers' Art Show. They're performing in Claremont, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, but not in LA itself. I saw this show at UCLA last year, and even though it was an organizational and technical clusterf*ck, the show itself was amazing. I would gladly see this year's tour, but I'm pretty dubious about the two hours of driving in rush hour that it would take to get to any of these venues.

Similarly, SF-based Lipstick Conspiracy toured last summer and performed in San Diego but not LA. S. Bear Bergman is currently finishing up a week of performances and public appearances, but in the year or two I've known about hir, ze's never done a show in LA.

So what's wrong with us? Why don't the cool queer shows perform here? Is it a lack of organizing? Lack of opportunity? Lack of community? Audience? Is it a problem within the universities where we have the funding to bring these people? If anyone has the answers or speculation, I'd love to know.

I suspect with Highways, if a performer or group is local and thus assumed to have a local following, they're much more likely to get programmed than someone who has to come in from out of town. So you're likely to get a season like this most recent one where the butchlalis are the only thing I'm interested in seeing because they don't bother to bring in interesting things from out of town. The LA Gay and Lesbian Center seems mainly interested in big name performers appealing to upper middle class white gay men so they can charge lots of money for tickets. Transgiving is a great event, but I wonder if they'll be able to work things out and still get the major out of town talent now that its guiding light has moved on.

Someday, I'm going to program my own series of fabulous queer performances. In the mean time, I wish that the major city that I live in weren't a major black hole for out-of-town queer performers.