The second annual RainbowCon, an LGBTQ multimedia conference, is underway at Tampa’s Holiday Inn Westshore. The four-day event kicked off Thursday, but there’s still plenty to experience and day passes available for attendees.
The festival got its start last year at the much smaller Embassy Suites by Busch Gardens, said Kris Piet, events coordinator. This year the event has twice as much space for programming, she said, so they’re able to bring in more panels, speakers and other events.
The conference has grown in other ways as well. Initially the QUILTBAG event — that stands for queer/questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, allied/asexual, gay/genderqueer, if you haven’t heard the term before — had a predominantly literary bent.
This year, while there are plenty of authors involved, it’s expanded into a multimedia conference, including television, movies, fandom and even web comics. In fact, this year’s guests of honor are Alex Woolfson and Adam DeKraker, the creator and illustrator, respectively, of the web comic The Young Protectors, which can be found for free online and is supported through Woolfson's Patreon page.
Piet said the conference’s organizers always intended for the event to become more than just a writers’ conference.
“We just wanted to get our foot in the door with the fiction community,” she said. “There’s lots of opportunity for visibility and advocacy through more visual media. TV plays a big role in everyday life. Essentially, it’s all storytelling, and we’re about finding visibility for our community in various forms of storytelling.”
Other LGBT conferences are usually much smaller, she said, and focus solely on one type of media. Often, the focus is also usually on partying, rather than learning.
“We wanted this to be more cerebral, an experience where people can come together, learn and discuss,” Piet said.
There were 150 attendees at last year’s conference, and this year she expects that number to grow significantly. In fact, authors, multimedia folks, and fans from all over the world have signed up to attend.
Swedish author Hans Hirschi, who wrote the gay novels The Fallen Angels of Karnataka and The Living Rainbow is attending the conference to present his first science fiction novel, Willem of the Tafel.
He said he signed up for the conference after hearing about the first one from another author friend, and didn’t think twice about making the trek from Europe to Tampa. It gives him a chance to meet readers personally and spread the word about his work, he said. Although he’s a European author, his work sells predominantly in the United States.
“I sell approximately nine of 10 books on the North American market, and probably another nine out of 10 of those in the U.S.,” Hirschi said. “In order to be visible to the readers here, you simply have to be present. If no one knows you exist and what you write (since what I do is pretty niched in a predominantly romance-based market), you won’t sell. It’s that simple. Every time I read from one of my books, I sell more. Readers seem to like my writing style and my stories, once they get to hear about them.”
Weekend passes are available for $50 and passes for just Saturday are $35.
A full schedule for the weekend can be found online here.
