Story by Hannah Everman
Photos by Abby Sun

WOW Hall was a full house this past Friday and Saturday night for the tenth anniversary of OUT/LOUD, the largest queer women’s music festival in the Pacific Northwest.
UO junior and member of the queer community Lindsey Holman helped plan the event this year. “This being our tenth anniversary, it is a landmark event,” she says. “It really speaks to the LGBTQQI and allied community on campus and in the surrounding areas.” To this, Holman adds that despite the importance of OUT/LOUD “there is no place that is completely rid of discrimination and LGBTQQI students still face a great struggle.”
The festival aims to offer a safe environment those individuals and for allies of the queer community to come together to celebrate queer culture. All together there were seven performances over the two days. Heather Gold had the hall echoing with laughter from the audience with her award-winning comedy act “I Look like an Egg but I Identify as a Cookie.”
Gold connected with the audience by learning the names of a few members and asking them questions throughout the show such as: “Where are you from?” and “How long have you been in Eugene?” She had a few lucky volunteers come up on stage with her to help bake cookies, which she made during her act. She had all the materials for baking on stage with her, including a small oven. Not only did Gold leave the audience tearing up with laughter, but at the end she had cookies for everyone.
This year’s OUT/LOUD festival also featured a huge variety of great musicians. One such musician, Virginia Cohen, is a local singer/songwriter who dazzled the crowd with her acoustic guitar and lovely voice. She has performed at the festival for the past three years. “What I love about OUT/LOUD,” Cohen says, “is that it’s for us to come together and not be the minority for once. It’s so nice to come to a place where you just feel totally comfortable and know you’re accepted.”
UO graduate Nicole Sangsuree also fascinated the audience with her powerful voice and acoustic guitar. Sangsuree earned her bachelor’s in theatre arts and a minor in women’s and gender studies. She now resides in Portland with her wife where the couple runs a business and Sangsuree does gigs like OUT/LOUD.
“This is a guaranteed safe space,” Sangsuree says of the event, which she has played for the past three years. “We can come here and do whatever we want and we know we’re going to get love. When I come here I know it’s going to be a sanctuary of love, and I can sing whatever I want, speak my mind and no one is going to say ‘you’re too gay’. It’s extremely and overwhelmingly free.”
Later in the festival, the performance took flight, literally, as the extremely talented keyboardist, TENDER FOREVER, crowd surfed through the hall and back onto the stage. The artist is from France and gave the event a great mix of innovative music and comedy. Melissa Li and the Barely Theirs followed with “thirty minutes of pure rock.” Then, to spice things up a bit, Taina Asili y La Banda Rebelde performed. The self-described “international band” brought many different cultural aspects to life through their music. Finally, the two-day festival went out with a bang as God-Des and She performed the last act. They were a funky, hip-hop, rap group that had the crowd jumping until the very end.

Gallery • 1 Photos

Abby Sun

Since the age of thirteen, when she first learned how to play the guitar, the gutsy singer-songwriter Sangsuree has been composing and performing songs to captive and enamored audiences all along the west coast.