LGBTQ+ Student Group to Hold Inaugural Pride Music Festival

It was summer 2023 when Emma Whitney and her drag band, the Funcles, found themselves struggling to process several negative experiences while performing at venues across Boston. Many of these venues claimed to be safe spaces for members of the LGBTQ+ community, yet Emma and her bandmates felt that a focus on substances and alcohol was inhibiting their ability to feel comfortable and fully express themselves as musicians.

As a ninth-semester student majoring in professional music with a double minor in songwriting and music business, Whitney took matters into her own hands with an idea that started as a business proposal for a class. That project eventually became Lavanda, a student group focused on providing alcohol- and substance-free social and performance spaces for artists and music lovers of the LGBTQ+ community. Whitney recruited fellow students Grace Harkey, Isha Kinare, Kris McCarthy, Colleen Rhatigan, Shea Dewan, and Hannah Crouse (as well as Tufts student Stacey Brie) to get her vision off the ground, and this past March, Lavanda hosted its first DIY-style event, receiving an overwhelmingly positive response.

This Friday, June 28, Lavanda will punctuate the end of Pride Month by hosting the first-ever Camp Fest, an outdoor music festival and community celebration of camp, queerness, and music, taking place from 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common. The event will highlight a range of artists, including Kühlname, S and R, chrysalis, Christian Inman, and Lauren Jean, with vendors offering jewelry, pottery, craft kits, merchandise, and more. We spoke with Whitney ahead of Camp Fest to learn more about Lavanda and what festival attendees can expect to experience.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did Lavanda get started?

This past fall, I was taking The Artist Entrepreneur with Cristi Catt. The project for the class was to create a business plan. Cristi was encouraging us to do something realistic, something that we actually wanted to do so we would be motivated throughout. I have been working in live music for about three years as a supervisor for the box office and an event coordinator at the Red Room. I’m also in a drag band called the Funcles. Our band had a couple of negative experiences while performing last summer that really impacted me and made me rethink queer spaces in DIY music. It’s really necessary for us to have sober spaces because so many queer spaces that exist are focused on alcohol and substances. While I think there is a place for that, I think there is room for people who choose not to drink to have a community, especially for queer people. I ended up developing Lavanda in that class, and after it finished, Cristi encouraged me to go for it. I ended up reaching out to a couple of friends and we decided to start with a small DIY event in March to see how it went.

What kind of response did you get at that initial event?

We got a much better response than we anticipated. We capped the event at 50 people, because it was held in an apartment and it was a donation-based show. We ended up having to turn people away at the door because there were so many people showing up. We did not expect that at all. We had a really great response from the artists and the vendor as well; I think they really enjoyed it. One of the things we do at our events is make custom coloring pages that are themed to the event with pages of the artists as well. People can color while they’re at the show. It’s fun and a unique idea, and in a space that is not providing alcohol, if you provide an activity you can do with your hands, it can bring down the walls and lead to people connecting with each other. It created a sense of care and a community aspect to the performance.

What can performers and attendees look forward to at Camp Fest and how is it different from a typical outdoor concert event or festival?

We will have a lineup of amazingly talented artists, as well as several vendors offering merch and interactive items like craft kits. I think what makes this different from a regular music festival is not only the element of the crafting and the interactive activities but also the dedicated focus on this being a community event. We are celebrating the arts, things that are campy, queerness. It is not just to focus on queer people or the arts, but both together—it is about celebrating our specific community. The hope is that it is a social event, and that people are there to make friends in addition to enjoying great music.

We tend to hear the term “safe space” referenced frequently in the current culture. In the context of the queer community, what does it mean to have a safe space for artists?

We as a team have spent a lot of time identifying what this means to us. What we landed on is that it is inclusive and intersectional. We want to make sure we are not only representing queer people but our community as a whole. It is a range of people and we want to celebrate diversity. For our artists, we want to develop a space where they are safe enough for them to come to us if something happens that makes them feel uncomfortable. We also want them to feel that they can express themselves freely. We try to let audience members know exactly what the experience is intended to be to ensure that they are coming because they want to be there. We have security at our larger events to make sure everyone feels safe and comfortable. We also send an anonymous feedback form to our artists after each event. We are learning and the best way to learn is from the artists we are working with. We do our best to communicate as much as possible and support our artists because our job is to give them a platform to hear their voice.

What other Lavanda events and projects can we look forward to in the future?

We are currently restructuring because we did grow very quickly and we were not expecting it! We will be restructuring into departments rather than individual team members and will be starting to hire for that in July. These are volunteer positions since it’s a student group and all of the money goes back into supporting Lavanda and our events. Bigger picture, we are planning to switch to doing music events every three months while hosting community events once a month. Those will be things like open mics, craft circles, and networking events. We are going to do another Camp Fest for 2025. We plan to go a little bigger and are starting the planning process in August. In the really long term, eventually we would love to start branches in other cities following this same model to create this community space in other locations.