USA Projects

A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner's Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video incorporating the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project is a unique contemporary composition, an archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music by Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, Chateau featuring K8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN, Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Kinski and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge), and featuring original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin and Tri-State Area with AV Linton.

We would like to compensate the collaborators who worked with us to realize the project, as well as plan a tour of Community Action Center to LGBT centers across the U.S.  This work has been created with the generous support, time and creative energy of more than 50 visual artists, performers, musicians, composers, PA’s, advisors and technicians. Our fundraising effort will provide honoraria to these people, without whom this work would not have been possible. 

We view this work as an important political gesture regarding feminist politics and expanding the vocabulary of queer sexuality, thus our other primary goal is to be in dialogue with LGBTQ communities throughout the country. We will be screening the video at universities, film festivals, museums and galleries internationally who can independently fund our presentations, however there are thousands of additional members of the LGBTQ and extended communities whom we can reach via local screenings, but whom cannot fund our presentation. We screened Community Action Center at The LGBT Center in NYC last year, and the success of that powerful and empowering event highlighted the value of a series of screenings + live discussions in smaller urban and rural communities.

We feel deeply that this pivotal portrait gives voice, body and historical context to vibrant and viable queer communities.