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 | | Scott Free | | | Inducted 2010 | | | Photo: SCOTT FREE | | Scott Free, 50, activist, musician, and founder of both Homolatte, the longest running queer performance series in the nation, and ALT Q, another of the nation’s longest running festivals for LGBTQ performers. | |
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| Chicago native Scott Free has been actively
involved with the city’s LGBT communities for more than 20 years.
Though he is best-known as a musician, his
involvements reach across production,
musicianship, photography, and activism in a broad
and impressive range of venues and commitments. | |
| As one of the leading openly gay male artists in the
United States, he continues to rack up awards and
honors, most recently as 2009 OUTMusician of the
Year at the OUTMusic Awards. His “Happy Again” video was among the Top 10
Videos of 2009 on Logo’s Click List. | |
| Free’s sometimes-funny, sometimes-angry, always-touching songs of queer life have
earned him acclaim nationally and worldwide. He was twice recognized as
OUTMusician of the Year by the OUTMusic Awards, and his many CDs have earned
glowing reviews in The Advocate, Out magazine, and numerous other LGBT
publications. | |
| In the 1990s, Free performed as Plaster of Paris in the art/drag show “Tuck” at Foxy’s
nightclub on North Halsted Street. In 1996 he debuted his hardcore punk songs, and the
following year he was a featured artist in the “Feast of Fools” cabaret. | |
| In the autumn of 2000, he founded Grinder at the Willow Café in Chicago’s eastern
Edgewater neighborhood, which evolved three years later into Homolatte. This twicea-
month series at Big Chicks and Tweet is the longest-running queer performance
series in the United States. It has recently expanded to include shows in St. Louis,
Missouri. | |
| Also in the autumn of 2000, Free began producing Queer Is Folk for Chicago’s Old
Town School of Folk Music, an annual LGBT music festival that has been known
since 2006 as Alt Q. Proceeds from the event have been donated to a wide range of
LGBT organizations, from Howard Brown Health Center and AIDS Foundation of
Chicago to the Gerber/Hart Library, Illinois Gender Advocates, Equality Illinois, Black
LGBT & Allies for Equality, and Haitian LGBT organizations. | |
| For years, Free has provided sound equipment for the OUTMusic Open Mic and TOUTMic,
the trans-run, all-inclusive open-mic series at Center on Halsted. He has
performed in many Chicago venues and at festivals across the continent, from
Northalsted Market Days to Camp Trans to Bearapalooza to Toronto’s Pride Week
festival. | |
| Free is a member of Chicago’s Gay Liberation Network and led protests of
performances by Jamaican musicians and the Chicago area’s Evil Incarnate band,
whose lyrics advocated anti-gay and -lesbian violence. For several years he has served
as opening performer for GLN’s annual Matthew Shepard March. He is also a member
of Black and White Men Together/Men of All Colors Together and in 1993 served as
director of arts programming for that organization’s national convention in Chicago. | |
| This biography is as of the induction date. It has not been updated. |
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