On a Saturday in early October, a pack of runners will gather in Manayunk and set off on a free 5K. By late morning, the block of Gay Street will fill with families for drag story time. By afternoon there will be an open-air drag show and a karaoke competition, and by evening the whole thing migrates to Venice Island Performing Arts Center, where a shadowcast troupe will do the Time Warp twice, at 6 and 9 p.m.
It is an unusual arc for a single day: a road race, a children's reading, a drag revue, and a cult-movie ritual, all tied to National Coming Out Day. But the shape of the schedule says something about how the event came to be, and about the neighborhood that hosts it.
Out & About in MNYK is timed to National Coming Out Day. The idea, as the organizers put it, was to host LGBTQ+ artists, performers, organizations and entertainment in order to promote Manayunk as a safe place that welcomes everyone.
It grew. By 2021, when the neighborhood staged its third annual edition, Out & About had stretched into a full weekend: drag bingo at Winnie's Manayunk on Friday night, a family-friendly street festival with vendors and LGBTQ+ organizations lining Main Street on Saturday, a sold-out Rocky Horror shadowcast at Venice Island, and a Saturday-night comedy show. There were workshops on binding health and on fitness routines for trans and gender nonconforming people. Restaurants hosted mini drag performances. The event had stopped being a gesture and started being a festival.
One constant across the years has been Philly Drag Mafia, the troupe founded and led by Brittany Lynn. Brittany Lynn is a Philadelphia institution in her own right. The drag persona of Ian Morrison, she is the creator and founder of Philly Drag Mafia and of the Miss Fancy Brigade, and she has been named Best Drag Queen by Philadelphia Gay News multiple times, as well as being called the city's "Hardest Working Drag Queen" by Philadelphia City Paper. She played Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a Philadelphia tour of The Rocky Horror Show at the old TLA on South Street, appeared on MTV's TRL with the band Korn, and organized the first Drag Brigade for the Mummers, leading the Miss Fancy Brigade down Broad Street in the 2013 Mummers Day Parade, where it still leads the parade each year.
At Out & About, Brittany Lynn hosts the drag story time and the karaoke, and the Drag Mafia performs the open-air show alongside DJ Da Boo Boo. The choice of Gay Street as the daytime stage is a piece of found poetry that the event has leaned into: a small Manayunk street whose name happens to be the word, hosting the neighborhood's most visible queer programming of the year.
The morning portion belongs to Queer Run, the Philadelphia running group. The Out & About 5K, led by Queer Run with Philadelphia Runner and Hoka, is free and open to all, and it is the event's way of starting the day with something that requires no costume and no ticket.
The evening belongs to Transylvanian Nipple Productions, the Philadelphia shadowcast that has been bringing Rocky Horror to life since 1997. Shadowcasting is a specific craft: performers act out the film in precise synchronization in front of the screen while the movie plays behind them, and the audience is not a passive one. TNP has performed across the region over nearly three decades, at venues including the Ritz Five, the Ritz theatres, the TLA, the Hard Rock Casino, the Levoy Theatre, and Monster-Mania Convention. The troupe describes its work as celebrating the character Tim Curry made legendary, and it has noted that for nearly 30 years it has been sharing that magic with generations of Rocky Horror fans. At Out & About, the group performs live shadowcasts during screenings at 6 and 9 p.m. at Venice Island Performing Arts Center. Organizers encourage costumes and audience participation, which is to say they encourage the shouting, the callbacks, the props, and the whole participatory apparatus that has kept the 1975 film in repertory for half a century.
Everything else on the schedule is free. The 5K, the story time, the drag show, and the karaoke competition cost nothing, and community organizations are on hand during select events. The neighborhood's pitch has been consistent: Manayunk, a National Historic District of renovated Victorian storefronts along the Schuylkill River, is a safe place that welcomes everyone, and it is willing to say so out loud for a full day each October.
What makes Out & About distinctive is not any single item on the schedule but the range of them, and the fact that they are stacked into one Saturday. A free community run in the morning and a cult-film shadowcast at night are not obviously the same audience. Drag story time and a karaoke competition are not obviously the same mood. The event's bet, year after year, is that they can be the same neighborhood, and that National Coming Out Day can be marked by a whole day of showing up as you are, in a place that has decided to make room.