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“I tend to find myself shirtless and in my underwear,” Cameron Macleod laughs. The comedian has a humble approach to his performances that places him in such strange and wonderful positions. His comedy group, ManHussy, will be hosting the much beloved annual Victory Square Block Party this Sunday, which features musical acts and comedic interludes.

Born and raised in British Columbia, Macleod began stand-up comedy in Vancouver after finishing theatre school. “I don’t remember any of the jokes I told but I’m sure they were terrible,” he smiles. “You have to get that tough exterior. Even after you’ve done it for a long time, you have to be comfortable with the possibility of going out there and doing your worst.” Macleod exudes a relaxed manner on stage that ensures his audience is always in on the joke, no matter how nonsensical or far-fetched it may be.

After paying his dues on the stand-up circuit, Macleod gallivanted across Europe and began his involvement in Vancouver’s booming sketch comedy when he returned. Macleod has been highly involved in the growing alternative comedy community and now has his hand in many comedic pies. In addition to being a part of Manhussy, Macleod is one of the producers of Bronx Cheer’s weekly shows at the China Cloud, the comedy curator of the Olio Festival, and collaborates with many other alternative comedy groups such as Pump Trolley.

“It’s not for everybody. My mom didn’t get it until she read Steve Martin’s autobiography,” Macleod says. But we think he’s just being modest. Enjoy the end of summer celebration this Sunday with the charm of Macleod’s Sex Guy and his many other comedic characters!

Victory Square Block Party
Sunday, September 5th
Victory Square Park
2 pm – 9 pm
Free!
See the Facebook event

Photo by Tina Krueger-Kulic.

Sad Mag is celebrating one year of publishing magic on October 9, 2010!

We are proud to be graduating to a paid publication model in the Fall. After a year of dwelling on shop floors we are moving on up—to a shelf, even! Sad Mag will be reliably and conveniently available at Vancouver’s favourite book, magazine, clothing and music retailers for $3.95 + tax.

To help kick off our new year, we want the Sad Mag friends and family to join us for another year of magazine mayhem by subscribing to the magazine for just $12. You can subscribe conveniently online here.

Vancouver, BC subscribers that sign on between now and October 5 will be entered to win a $100 gift certificate to Burcu’s Angels on Main and 16th Ave. The first 50 subscribers between now and October 5 will also receive a special Sad Mag gift with their first issue.

Thank you for your support!

“The Owls” brings the phrase “lesbian drama” to hyperbolic heights. Cheryl Dunne directs lesbian superstars, VS Brodie and Guinevere Turner, among others, in a poignant film that explores lesbian stereotypes through Sarah Schulman’s self-deprecating script.

The film follows a group of four 40-something lesbians struggling in their unhealthy relationships amidst the boonies of the California desert. The group hides a horrifying secret, of which the audience is aware from the beginning, and which another lesbian attempts to uncover.

The actors fill their roles beautifully, especially Guinevere Turner, who flits effortlessly from her character’s hilariously egotistical self descriptions to her dramatic interactions with the other characters. The film is effectively shot documentary style – the characters give individual interviews with the camera and flashbacks are shown.

The individual interviews showcase the film’s strongest moments but it takes a strange turn when suddenly, in the middle of the film, the actors begin discussing their respective characters and concepts like “butch” and “femme.” It feels painfully self-conscious and contrived and would have been best reserved strictly for the end of the film, if necessary at all.

Overall, the film reveals important and funny points about the portrayal of lesbians in media. If only it would lighten up a little.

Rebecca Slaven is a contributor to Sad Mag.

Sad Mag is very proud to announce the winners of our Show Us Your Pride photo contest! Congratulations to REV and Tyler Bartoshyk, our first and second place finishers respectively. Check out their beautiful work:

love-winner — First place winner. Photo by REV.

queen-winner — Second place winner. Photo by Tyler Bartoshyk.

And look! Sad Mag and its family was so busy this Pride season, and we received so many fantastic submissions for the contest, that we made this really gay slideshow! Share and enjoy.

Sad Mag does Pride 2010 from SAD MAG on Vimeo.

Thank you to the contributors to the slideshow:

Michelle Ricketts
Rev
Tyler Bartoshyk
Tina Krueger-Kulic
Chris J.
Jonah Fheonix
Shauna Nero
Terry Beaupre
Shane Oosterhoff
Charles Troster
Carter-Ethan Rankin

Thank you to the contest sponsors:

It may look like a reality show and talk like a reality show, but “The Real World” it ain’t.

Familiar conflicts and entertaining dialogue make the documentary “Queer Prom,” screened Monday at Tinseltown as part of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, feel honest without indulging too heavily in saccharine feel-good moments or worse, slow-motion montages.

Directed by Nicky Forsman, who also directs the OUTTV series “Don’t Quit Your Gay Job,” the documentary follows a group of LGBT youth at the Qmunity GAB Youth Centre as they attempt to organize the annual Queer Prom: a homophobia-free event for queer 13-to-25-year-olds who may have graduated or are still in high school or college. Ultimately the event is a success, though the group doesn’t make it through unscathed.

TV Producers take note: Queer Prom is what happens when you put quip-heavy personalities in a meeting room deemed a furnace and tell them to plan a large-scale event. It’s also one of the profound secrets of people-based documentary filmmaking: when shit gets hot, the raised crankiness levels contribute to some really good dialogue.

“Nobody cares about fucking mocktails,” uttered by decorating committee member Taylor after an argument with GAB staff over the placement of Prom mocktail selection on that meeting’s agenda, was a laugh-winner, “It’s one of the top 4 or 5 best things ever. It’s pretty much better than the renaissance,” also care of Taylor, was another.

The list goes on, and it was a nice surprise Forsman avoided focusing on the teenage cultural obsession of drama, or should we say, da-rah-mahhhh, in favour of showing how humourously and amicably a group of youth interested in making a difference can work through problems without killing each other – though, threats are made. Friendships are tested during the film but are always resilient; every combatant inevitably reconciles over a fist bump with the other, in stark contrast to other documentary-style productions in North America that thrive on unresolved conflict (hello again, MTV).

Queer Prom reveals that the queer youth in Vancouver are, in a word, amazing, and can take care of each other in ways given families simply can’t, or worse, won’t.

To describe the documentary in one word would be the same way a GAB staff member describes Queer Prom, the event, at the end of the film: important.

Jeff Lawrence is a contributor to Sad Mag and V-Rag magazines.

Sad Mag is honoured to participate in the BC Association of Magazine Publishers’ Main Street Magazine Tour, taking place on Thursday, August 19 and starting at 6:00 p.m. We join local publishing legends Ricepaper Magazine, OCW, SubTerrain, Room, and Front in a shop-hop event led by local poets Jennica Harper and Elizabeth Bachinsky.

We will be at Mine:Stylesource talking about drag culture and the history of Main Street with some special guests. We will be also be giving away magazines, swag and a one-year subscription to one lucky winner.

For more information on the program, visit BCAMP’s website. While you’re at it, read our Main Street Magazine Tour profile at Vancouver is Awesome, penned by Lizzy Karp.

Sad Mag is proud to be counted among the Vancouver Queer Film Festival‘s community sponsors this year. With ninety films being screened at four major cinemas this year, the festival—now in its 22nd year—has grown to an impressive size. In a year of drastic cuts to government funding for the arts, a program of this quality and diversity is to be admired.

The festival kicks off tonight and runs until August 22. Sad Mag has a pair of tickets to give away to the Friday, August 20 screening of Cheryl Dunye’s “The Owls.” To enter, copy and paste the following into Twitter:

RT to enter to win 2 tix to the @queerfilmfest’s screening of “The Owls” from @sadmag http://ow.ly/2oqE9

The contest is now closed. Congratulations to our winner, @onewetfoot!

From the program:

THE OWLS

Fri | Aug 20 | 5:00 | Granville 7 Theatre

“The Owls” reunites Guinevere Turner and VS Brodie, the leading actors of the lesbian cult hit “Go Fish.” This iconic queer cinema couple is cast alongside a slate of lesbian film mavericks, including Skyler Cooper, Deak Evgenikos and director Cheryl Dunye (“The Watermelon Woman”).

This film can boast being a truly experimental, collaboratively created thriller, murder mystery, dyke drama. Sound alluring, yet hard to picture? Imagine “Mulholland Drive” meets “I Know What You Did Last Summer” meets a lesbian feminist collective meeting, all set in the stark California deserts outside of Beverly Hills. Made by The Parliament Film Collective, co-founded by Dunye to help queer filmmakers produce exciting and original work, “The Owls” employs a hybrid of drama and auto-documentary filmmaking. The action hones in on four older dykes (Older Wiser Lesbians = Owls), who seem to have learned very little about healthy relationships and living drama-free. They are barely keeping it together while hiding a dark secret.

The Owls | Cheryl Dunye | USA | 2010 | 66 min

Let’s state the obvious: sex sells. If you want proof that we live in a sex-saturated culture, I urge you to watch music videos for ten minutes and count the number of oiled-up, gyrating bodies. Or observe the popular (and admittedly hilarious) Old Spice ads featuring Isaiah Musafa, who immodestly advises while wrapped in a towel that women love a man who smells like Old Spice. Sex in advertising is absurd — no matter how good you smell, men, I can still tell the difference between a beer belly and a six-pack — but it’s omnipresent. Strange, then, that sex has been missing from selling, well, sex.

Sexual health, to be more specific. Think back to high school sex ed, which may be the last place anyone ever sat you down and talked to you about sex. Or maybe your parents gave you “the talk.” What I remember was a lengthy sermon about the various infections that might make you itchy and a recitation of statistics about unwanted teen pregnancy. It goes a lot smoother with school boards and parents if young people are taught about all the scary consequences of having sex, in (usually ineffective) attempts to dissuade them from following their hormones, rather than getting an education that talks about pleasure and enjoyment. We all know sex is awesome- we learned that from TV- but sexual health is marketed about as erotically as decongestants or laxatives. And yet your sexual health is essential to a positive sexual experience. The only carefree sex is safe sex, after all- you can’t be worry-free if you don’t know your body and trust your partner. And with that in mind, Options for Sexual Health decided that this is the summer to remind people all over BC that sexual health is sexy. At least as sexy as an Old Spice commercial (well, fingers crossed).

A new advertising campaign, which shows two young people making out in a clinic waiting room, is now on buses all over the province, and with it is the Sexy Summer Kissing Contest. The rules are simple: take a makeout photo with a partner. Bonus points for incorporating the theme of sexual health- that’s your cue to bring in some props. Send it in to contest@optbc.org. We’ll post it up on our Flickr page and give away prize packs that will make your summer safe and sexy, including a grand prize of a year’s supply of condoms (use them all yourself or share them generously like a Sexy Santa Claus). It’s easy, it’s fun, and it gives you an excuse for a midday summer makeout session- what’s not to love? It’s time that everyone remembered that taking care of their sexual health doesn’t have to be a drag- it’s something that can be done with a partner, that can be spiced up or experimented with, that can be fun, and, well, sexy.

For more details, visit Opt’s website at http://optionsforsexualhealth.org. If you have a burning question about sexual health or anything sex-related at all, call our 1-800-SEX-SENSE line and talk to a real, live expert in all things sexual.

Michelle Reid is a contributor to Sad Mag and loves it with all her heart. In her professional life, she likes to talk about sexy times over at Options for Sexual Health, and yes, if you’re at a party and you need a condom, she’s a good person to ask.

The Terminal City Rollergirls will be hosting the launch party for Sad Mag issue four on Wednesday, August 4! Check out this sneak peek at the latest issue, with an article from Ana Maria Kresina (AKA Risquee Biznatch).

When I square up on the jammer line waiting for the double whistle, I am conscious of the fans screaming in the stands, but more so, I am aware of what my body is about to do for me. As the momentum of the oval track pushes me outward and my feet slide within my tightly tied roller-skates, I can feel my left quad muscle supporting my body weight as I push hard with my right foot. I bite down on my mouthguard, and I feel sweat trickling down the side of my face. All I can think about is how great it feels to skate.

— Ana Maria Kresina

Cover photo: Sarah Race

We’re coming out! To the Pride Parade, that is. Watch for us on Sunday, August 1 with our BFF, Zee Zee Theatre, in the Vancouver Pride Parade along Robson Street, Denman Street and Beach Avenue. We will have stickers and buttons and other goodies for all!

While you’re out there, be sure to document the magic and get in on some great prizes from the Sad Mag Show Us Your Pride photo contest! We have lovely things from Sephora and Bang-On t-shirts to give away.

Victory Square Block Party

Subscribe to Sad Mag!

The Owls

Photo Contest Winners!

Prom Queen and Queen

The Main Drag

VQFF Ticket Give-Away

Kiss Me, You Fool

Hot Wheels

Sad Mag at Pride Sunday