In 2017, Babefest founder Angela Page moved her day-long celebration of diverse Gulf Coast music from its original home in Fort Myers to downtown St. Pete, where locals helped Page’s festival, Babefest, shut down the street and bring a strong lineup of bands to The 600 Block. Folks back home, however, felt a little left out.
“Last year, people in Fort Myers kept saying to me, ‘So you’re not doing a Fort Myers date this year?’ And it honestly kind of broke my heart to tell them ‘No,’” Page, 33, wrote to CL.
GULF COAST GIRLS ARE HIP
Babefest founder Angela Page on why she's bringing the noise north to St. Pete
So this year she’s throwing two parties on back-to-back days (June 1 at Ft. Myers’ Millennial Brewing, June 2 at The Bends in St. Petersburg). Page’s rock band, The Young Dead, will play the St. Pete date along with Fort Myers rock quartet Cobress and Tampa punk trio The Nervous Girls. Atlanta punk outfit The Txlips (a band that has visited Tampa Bay three times in the last year) comes in from out of town along with another ATL based group, dance-pop sextet Dots. The addition of non-Florida bands isn’t the only thing different about this year’s Babefest.
Since the 2017 event, Love Your Rebellion (LYR) — the feminist collective that paved the way for Babefest — became a nonprofit with a board of directors that includes past members and new voices from the community. One of those voices is Vicky Huddy, a behind-the-curtain Bay area music-scene staple who helped Page throw the event last year. According to Page, going nonprofit lets Love Your Rebellion expand on its mission to empower marginalized voices through the arts. It also lets LYR word towards a less-talked-about element of the feminist movement, intersectionality, which argues that women from every race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation should be a part of the conversation surrounding equality of sexes.
“Well, LYR shrank, then grew again. I had to pull back a bit with my original team so that I could re-envision LYR into a nonprofit with bigger goals, and therefore a different make up. I reached into the community for new folks from different backgrounds to better represent the mission,” Page wrote. “I am really excited that the LYR family has grown into what it is now.”
Music at Love Your Rebellion’s Babefest 2018 will kick off at 8 p.m. There is no cover, but they'll take donations at the door. More information on both shows — including the June 1 date in Fort Myers that includes St. Petersburg’s own Reality Asylum — is available via loveyourrebellion.org.
