QFest St. Louis presents Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story

QFest St. Louis uses the art of contemporary gay cinema to spotlight the lives of LGBTQ people and to celebrate queer culture. The event will excite, entertain, and enlighten audiences of all identities. As a sci-fi-obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released the album “Keyboard Fantasies” in Huntsville, Ontario, in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realized far before its time. Three decades on, the musician — now Glenn Copeland — began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered. Courtesy of a rare-record collector in Japan, a reissue of “Keyboard Fantasies,” with support by such electronic musicians as Four Tet and Caribou, had finally found its audience two generations down the line. “Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story” tells an intimate coming-of-age story that transmutes the pain and suffering of prejudice into rhythm, hope, and joy. Half audiovisual history and half DIY tour video, the film provides a vehicle for this newly appointed queer elder to connect with youth across the globe and serves as a timely lullaby to soothe those souls struggling to make sense of the world.