A proud marching band trumpet player in Miami Palmetto Senior High, JD went on to study communications at Boston University, absorbing as much as she could from her creative writing and film classes. After graduating she packed her bags, pointed her car toward Los Angeles and never looked back. That trip started what would become a long and storied career.

As a filmmaker credits include Eating Out 2, A Marine Story, Gay Propaganda, Elena Undone and the multi award-winning Shelter, which won a GLAAD Media Award for best feature film in limited release and in 2012 topped the list of The 100 Greatest Gay Movies Of All Time newnownext.com’s.

In 2009, JD was honored at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center’s An Evening With Women with a LACE Award for her work in the community, was featured in Go Magazine’s “100 Women We Love” and this past March was honored with a West Hollywood Women in Leadership Award. She was also on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, where she served a term as Vice President of the Board and was last President of the Board of Directors of the Frontiers Foundation.

JD’s love of film and writing skills extended to magazine and newspaper outlets including Clout, Curve, GayWired.com, PlanetOut.com, Gay.com, QTMagazine, Power Up and here! online in addition to her daily blog on Gay and Lesbian entertainment. JD was, by habit, a facilitator, linking her peers to collaborate and her mentees with mentors. Her love of connecting people came together with her enjoyment of a good cocktail in the creation of the very popular Smoking Cocktail, a monthly networking cocktail event to bring members of the LGBT film and film-loving community together.
It’s mathematically impossible to calculate all the hours JD logged for the causes she cared about, including Outfest, The Point Foundation and the East Valley Animal Shelter. For Outfest JD worked as Festival Manager in 1999 and 2000, continued to be actively involved as a volunteer and was a constant presence at events and functions with beloved camera in hand. In 2014, Outfest awarded JD with the Tom | Thom Award for her volunteer service throughout the years. Through the Point Foundation JD worked as a mentor to contribute to their mission to empower promising LGBTQ students to achieve their full potential. Always a passionate lover of animals, in the last few years, when cancer slowed her down in other ways, JD amped up her dedication and commitment of time and fundraising skills for her favorite cause of all – animals. If you were marginalized in any way or had four legs, JD had your back with a megaphone in hand.

JD leaves behind a large family of friends, her brother and sister Roanne and Carl DiSalvatore, and a grateful LBGT community. Her huge activist heart, passionate spirit for filmmaking and her indomitable, fighting spirit will not be forgotten.

A Memorial party will be planned for the near future.

If you would like to honor JD please donate money to Outfest, Point Foundation and/or the East Valley Animal Shelter.

The post Award-winning LGBTQ filmmaker JD Disalvatore lost her long battle with cancer first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Ari Fitz (Photo via Autostraddle)

Ari Fitz is already being celebrated as the most compelling member of the latest Real World cast after just two episodes on air, and she promises there’s a lot more to come as the show unfolds. Fitz, a Bay Area native who grew up in Vallejo and attended UC Berkeley as a Physics major before changing tracks and pursuing Information Technologies and entertainment, sold her first company at age 22, before becoming a model and horror movie filmmaker.

“I’m one of the few black queer persons working in the horror film industry,” said Fitz. “In the two projects that will go live in the next 6 months, you will see different types of characters—you will see people of color, and people with different ways of loving each other.”

“The Anniversary,” Fitz’ short film about the one year anniversary of a lesbian couple, is available on Vimeo.

Read more at dot429.com

The post Get to know Ari Fitz on ‘Real World: Ex-plosion’ first appeared on Lesbian.com.

BY KIM HOFFMAN

The relationship among Heather Tobin’s films is the presence of leading queers into a direction of awareness, change and total understanding. Director, producer, editor and writer, Tobin seeks to create lead queer roles onscreen. “To Each Her Own,” a 2008 love-drama title named after her company, To Each Her Own Films, is a coming out story about a girl named Jess (Hannah Hogan) who is no longer turned on by her husband Trevor (Shaughnessy Redden), but is still in agreement to have a baby. Conversely, Casey (Dre Carrington) is the life of the lesbian party scene and typically brings home different girls for casual hookups. Jess and Casey meet while Casey is working a job at Jess’s apartment complex and the two become inseparable, causing Jess to be dishonest to Casey, Trevor and especially herself.

Read more at AfterEllen.com

AfterEllen is the pop culture site that plays for your team

The post Filmmaker Heather Tobin gives queers the lead first appeared on Lesbian.com.

“My Best Day” filmmaker Erin Greenwell (Photo: Janis Vogel)

INTERVIEW BY DANA BRENKLIN
Lesbian.com

Erin Greenwell is the filmmaker behind the hilarious “My Best Day,” a small-town All-American lesbian comedy. She caught up with Lesbian.com’s Dana Brenklin to discuss the film, her inspirations and big plans for the future.

Would you please give the readers a brief summary of your latest film “My Best Day” in your own words?

“My Best Day” takes place on the 4th of July in a small town. Karen investigates a phone call from a man she thinks may be the father she never met (she works at a repair shop and a client calls with his name). She drags along a friend, Meagan, to pose as a mechanic to answer the call. When they get to the trailer park, her father isn’t home but everyone else is — a half-brother who is tormented by grade school bullies, a half-sister addicted to gambling and her father’s live-in closeted lover. Karen has until the end of the day to get to the truth and Meagan has to decide whether she is going to choose her stable but “boring” girlfriend or a new fling.

How old were you when you knew that film was something you wanted to get into and what triggered it?

I was a very shy kid in grammar school and we had to give a presentation on a historical figure for class one day. The night before I watched “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” with my father and…flash forward to the next day wherein I swaggered out from behind a cubicle wearing a cowboy vest and fake moustache and announced “Howdy! I’m Butch Cassidy! I’m from the Hole in the Wall Gang!” I remember everyone looking up completely surprised. As I kept my presentation going, a part of me floated out of my body and was thinking “I can’t believe this is working!” After that, I became the class mimic. Anything artistic became my way to communicate and be brave. Then when I saw “Some Like It Hot” I was blown away. I could see all the different components to the movie and wanted to be a person that could put that together. It seemed like one big magic trick mixed with storytelling.

How far in the future do you see the realization of your ultimate goal of creating a business/arts school for women?

Now that I teach at universities and colleges I realize how many administrative things need to be in place to put it all in motion. It’s still something that has been on my mind since I started teaching 15 years ago. I still think it’s important but I’m definitely thinking in decades not years. That said, stranger things have been known to happen more quickly.

What do we need to do to create an avenue for more lesbian and/or LGBTQ movies to be made and seen?

I think it starts with LGBTQ filmmakers being encouraged by mentors to follow their voices and not be afraid to fail big while they learn how to make movies. Being able to show your work to audience members is critical as well as being able to collaborate with other filmmakers. I’m old school and hope the tradition of going out to a movie, even if it’s in a parking lot or a on a rooftop, continues because an audience doesn’t lie. The best way to learn film, aside from simply doing it, is sitting with an audience and screening. You can feel it in the air while watching with an audience.

Of course, supporting LGBTQ distribution companies and press is important because it fuels the exposure they have always fought to bring to us. Although I love the romance of showing in a theater, it has been equally exciting to experience someone from my hometown downloading and watching my movie seconds after posting about it.

Do you enjoy teaching film or the doing the actual filmmaking more?

I need both to get better at the other and I love both equally but if I only did one I think I would burn out. Students remind me why filmmaking is exciting and making films helps me bring back new life experience to share. Both are housed under the same agenda for me: how can I get a bunch of talented people united to feel clever and happy and work independently towards something seemingly larger than themselves? In that process is already the success of collaboration.

Who are some filmmakers that have influenced you?

Too many and all the time, but Billy Wilder was the first director to really hook me as a kid. Out of respect for not leaving someone out accidentally, I’m going to stop at Billy Wilder.

Do you like being called a lesbian filmmaker or would you just prefer to be called a filmmaker?

I’m proud to be called both!

LGBTQ characters and storylines are still not always the most sought after in mainstream film. How does this impact your financing and what has been most successful for you?

Receiving financing for film is just tough in general, even if you are making a romantic-comedy-bank-robbery-heist with A-list stars. It’s just flat out hard and because distribution is changing so much and distribution dictates investment strategies, it’s even harder. What has been the most successful for me is getting obsessed with making a script, putting my blinders on and just doing it. Not a very practical business model, which has obviously given me angst and debt over the years, hence my desire to have a business/arts school for women. I would sit in on a class. But in all seriousness, it’s just competitive beyond belief, even if you are a “sell out.” The best advice I would give is to love what you are competing for.

What was your greatest moment at the Sundance Film Festival?

Going to the queer filmmaker’s brunch was powerful because while we were introducing our movies, I looked out and saw programmers from Outfest, Frameline and Newfest that have supported my work since I graduated as an undergrad from college. It made me realize how important mentorship is for LGBTQ filmmakers because if I didn’t have the chance to screen my work, I would never get exposure to better work from more experienced queer filmmakers, meet other filmmakers, and be supported by programmers who were slowly watching me grow over years and years. And again, filmmaking is hard for everyone but all of us there were in the same boat of being proud to be still standing. Most of us started with scrappy self-produced shorts and recognized each other from those festivals over the years.

How do you come up with some of the characters you have created? Are any of them based on real life experiences?

It’s always a mishmash of what happened, what I wished happened or what I could never imagine happening to me but would be interesting. Sometimes it will start with a line of dialogue, or a single scene or even an ending or a beginning. If the image or dialogue or character won’t go away, I slowly start looping scenarios in towards a larger structure.

What is next for you?

I am currently developing a script I will direct called “Somewhere Along the Way.” It’s a classic love triangle between two butches and one femme set against the lesbian bar scene in the 1950s. I recently work shopped it at Outfest’s Screenwriter’s Lab. I wrote the script in the 1990s actually and recently picked it back up. Again, I think in decades, not years, but stranger things have been known to happen quickly.

Check out Erin’s film “My Best Day” on demand.

Dana Brenklin is a Los Angeles based radio personality, award-winning poet and musician. Her radio show, “The Dana Brenklin Radio Show,” airs Thursdays at 9am pacific on kclaFM.com. Find out more at DanaBrenklin.com or listen To Dana’s shows on demand.

Dana Brenklin is a Los Angeles based musician, writer and radio personality. Her radio show, The Dana Brenklin Show, airs Thursdays at 9 AM PST on kclaFM.com

The post Lesbian film buffs, meet Erin Greenwell first appeared on Lesbian.com.