Write Out Proud

When we Write Out Proud, we share the love of who we are for the world to see, so the world can become better at loving us back.

The 2022 Pride season marks the inaugural season of the Write Out Proud Writers Workshop as part of the West Hollywood Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival. This no-cost four session writing workshop on Zoom is offered to LGBTQIA+ people.

Here are the workshop dates:

4 Wednesdays 6p-8p

June 1, 8, 15, 22

OR

4 Saturdays 1p-3p

June 4, 11, 18, 25

Public Reading

(optional)

Wednesday June 29th

6:30p-7:30p

In this workshop we will write the important life stories of our magical LGBTQIA+ cultural practices influenced by our traditional, nontraditional, and personal ideas of gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation. We will create and bring to light our untold stories of how these ideas influence ourselves and other people in social, political, economic, and creative ways. Empowering our personal identity and our sense of Self is the creative healing gift of this workshop as it facilities the erasure of stigma, guilt, and shame both inside and outside ourselves and our communities. In short, we write about who we f*ckin' are and what we f*ckin' do.

The work will focus on individual’s experiences, specifically how the representation of the classifications of the different LGBTQIA+ pride flags points to our stories of personal identity, growth, and freedom. These workshops will culminate in dynamic poetry, prose, essay & memoir that will pledge allegiance to their communities, each other, the reading audiences, and the various pride flags with which they identify. This heart moving experience punctuating the theme of the 2022 Weho Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival, With Liberty, Diversity, Inclusion, and Progress For All.

Write Out Proud is facilitated by artist Don Tinling. It is modeled after the HIV Writers Workshop which he has been conducting since 2007 as Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. After surviving full-blown AIDS in 1996, Don joined the AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop, created by Irene Borger, to bring him back into the world of the living. The healing traditions of that workshop continues to influence his work today. His purpose for creating Write Out Loud is to share the values of this work to benefit and strengthen the LGBTQIA+ communities and to engage deeper in his Social Art practice. Manifesting as Sister Miracle with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence fortifies these practices and enables him to participate more deeply with his art interferences such as The Pop-Up Post Office of Love as well as the Flag Festival happening in West Hollywood on June 5^th as part of Write Out Proud.

Don is a teaching artist, a visual artist, and a writer. He earned a BFA in Photography from CalState Long Beach and an MFA from CalArts. He lives with his “current boyfriend” of 17 years in West Hollywood, uses profanity as often as he dares and keeps a succulent garden.  Things he loves to do the most are gathering, making art, reading, writing, riding his bike, having leather sex, travelling, exploring spirituality, working out, having dinner parties, photographing people, painting his nails, pulling pranks, and eating dark chocolate (not a euphemism).  He likes these things not necessarily in that order and if he gets lucky, gets to do them in strange combinations with each other. Don likes giving people the benefit of the doubt yet somehow, has a suspicious nature, remnants of being a native New Yorker, no doubt.  He believes in the love found in humanity and the power of working towards the common good.