CORRESPONDENCE: LETTERS OF QUEER RESISTANCE, LOVE & REVOLUTION
A Badge Of Pride Project in Partnership with The Writer’s Garret
Letters. Speeches. Manifestos. Desire. Defiance. History brought off the page and onto the stage—live, urgent, and unapologetically Queer. Three nights. Multiple generations. One continuum. CORRESPONDENCE: Letters Of Queer Resistance, Love and Revolution is where generations meet in real time, onstage.
Supported in part by the City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture
Presented at Bishop Arts Theatre Center in Oak Cliff
CORRESPONDENCE is a creative public-history project that brings Queer letters out of the archives and onto the stage—where they can breathe, provoke, and illuminate the lives behind them. Across decades, Queer people have written to survive, to connect, to confess, to demand. Their words carry the clarity of lived truth. Their voices still call out for action today.
In this three-part performance series—hosted at the Bishop Arts Theatre Center, a cornerstone of community storytelling in Oak Cliff—we activate historic letters, speeches, and statements from LGBTQ+ people across the past century and pair them with contemporary readers from across Dallas’s Queer community. Together, they reveal how personal writing becomes public testimony—how a letter transforms into a form of cultural inheritance.
Developed in collaboration with The Writer’s Garret, and supported in part by the City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture, CORRESPONDENCE blends history and art, archival practice and performance, civic dialogue and creative interpretation. Each staged reading is built as an encounter: audience and reader meeting across time, guided by the charge these writers carried when they set their words into the world.
CORRESPONDENCE is part of Badge Of Pride’s mission to make LGBTQ+ history visible, vital, and accessible. We treat letters as artifacts—evidence of our existence and imagination—and invite audiences to experience them not as relics, but as sparks that keep shaping our cultural life.
Across the three performances, we explore identity, desire, liberation, joy, rage, connection, and the conviction that Queer stories belong in public space.
Click show poster image for performance details and tickets:
With scripts curated and co-written by Adrian Cardwell (Badge Of Pride) and Aaron Glover (The Writer's Garret)—and Glover directing each performance—the series gathers a diverse ensemble of community readers: artists, activists, elders, youth, storytellers, and Queer neighbors. Their shared presence brings these historic voices forward and invites audiences to consider connection, lineage, and the cultural charge of personal writing.
CORRESPONDENCE is history in motion.
A bridge between generations.
A through-line which connects Queer voices and letters across time into a shared, living record.
CASTING
Casting for these performances is intentionally non-literal. Readers are not matched to the historical figures they voice by race, gender, or identity. Instead, they step into a shared lineage — embodying the truth that queer memory is communal rather than biological. CORRESPONDENCE is a remix, not a reenactment: an act of placing these voices in dialogue across eras, letting them collide, resonate, and carry forward.
This project treats the archive as something alive — passed from one generation to the next, reshaped by everyone brave enough to pick up the words and move them further.
Interested in joining the cast? Because this series activates Queer letters and histories, lived experience within the LGBTQ+ community is especially valued. Applicants of all identities are invited to apply. Please apply here.
