OUTsider Festival

OUTsider Festival returns to The VORTEX from March 5 to 7, 2027, bringing together film, performance, music, and visual art over three days. It's the annual gathering from OUTsider, an Austin-based transmedia nonprofit that describes its mission as celebrating the bold originality and creative nonconformity of LGBTQ+ communities. They focus on provocative, overlooked, and out-of-the-box work, so the programming pulls from a wide range: film, dance, theatre, performance art, music, writing, and visual art all under one roof.

Beyond the screenings and performances, the festival includes a conference that brings together queer artists, audiences, and scholars from around the globe to exchange ideas, ignite conversations, and transcend boundaries. It's as much about the talking and the meeting as it is about the art on stage.

To get a sense of where this fits in the city, it helps to look at the queer landscape OUTsider is part of. Much of Austin's LGBTQ+ scene is anchored in the 4th Street gayborhood of the Warehouse District, a corridor that has sustained queer nightlife since the mid-1970s. The Manhattan Club, which opened on Congress Avenue in 1958, was the city's first documented gay bar; that stretch of road was renamed Bettie Naylor Street in 2018 in honor of the activist. The Red River Cultural District, home to the lesbian-owned Cheer Up Charlies, forms a second queer hub where live music and queer culture intersect. The VORTEX sits right in that mix.

OUTsider Festival runs March 5 through 7 at The VORTEX.