Last evening the husband and I attended the 2016 Commonwealth Dinner in Richmond. It was an amazing event and coming to Richmond also gave us an opportunity to see friends - lunch at Can Can, a great French restaurant in Carytown and brunch today at another fun spot - and help support the effort to drag Virginia into the 21st century. We are fortunate that a friend let us use her beautiful, historic home in the Fan District for the weekend while she was out of town. The photo above is as we headed off to the event with a friend who lives in Richmond.
A highlight of the evening was when out friend Charles Ford was recognized as an Outstanding Virginian. Among his many activities, Charles has written a book:
A spin-off of his recent research is a pictorial history of LGBT life in Hampton Roads — written with his research partner, Dr. Jeffrey Littlejohn of Sam Houston State University, in Texas, and published in March 2016. It features images of local people and early public events. “It just scratches the surface of available pictures from local archives,” says Charles. Charles used some of these images, blown up to poster size, to celebrate local LGBT history in an exhibition for last year’s Norfolk Pride event, which also featured some panels from the AIDS quilt. As part of the exhibition, Charles led a tour of LGBT history sites in downtown Norfolk. “Most of the actual buildings are gone,” he says, “but it’s interesting to imagine LGBT life in Norfolk in the middle and late twentieth century when Norfolk lived to its long-standing reputation as the ‘wickedest city in America.’”Again, it was a great evening!
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