Arts & Entertainment
Calendar: April 20
Concerts, plays, exhibits and more through April 27


Strathmore presents its spring gala on Saturday with singer Dionne Warwick. (Photo courtesy Strathmore)
TODAY (Friday)
Green Lantern (1335 Green Court) hosts “Pop Goes the World: International Dance Party,” starting at 10 p.m. with DJs Aaron Riggins, Della Volla and AVM. Cover is $5. For more information, visit greenlanterndc.com.
Grammy-nominated pop pianist Jim Brickman plays Wolf Trap (1645 Trap Rd., Vienna) tonight at 8 p.m. Tickets are $35 and available online at wolftrap.org.
Phase 1 (525 8th St., S.E.) and the D.C. Kings present “Lip Sync for Your Life,”a competition searching for the best lip sync performer in D.C. Up to 10 contestants will duke it out in the first round and only three will continue to the battle round. For more information, visit dckings.com or phase1dc.com. Doors open at 7 p.m., show begins at 9 p.m.
Mormon Stories presents “Circling the Wagons,” a conference for LGBT Mormons and their families, opening tonight with a social at Williams Residence (2501 N. Lincoln St., Arlington) with a poetry reading, appetizers, drinks and followed by a brief choir practice. The conference continues through Saturday, with interfaith services on Sunday. For more information, visit mormonstories.org.
The Bacon Brothers play Rams Head OnStage (33 West St., Annapolis) tonight at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $49.50 and available online at ramsheadonstage.com.
Saturday, April 21
Strathmore is celebrating its diversity in programming and community outreach at its 2012 spring gala “Wishin’ and Hopin'” with Dionne Warwick at the Music Center (5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda) starting with a cocktail reception at 5:30 p.m. Tickets for the whole event, including the reception, dinner, performance and after party range from $500 to $1,000 and tickets for just the performance and after party range from $35 and $85. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit strathmore.org.
Broadway star Jeri Sager performs at Wolf Trap (1645 Trap Rd., Vienna) tonight at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 and available online at wolftrap.org.
LURe presents “Bare: Military Night” with Servicemembers Legal Defense Network tonight at Cobalt (1639 R St., N.W.) from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. DJs Rosie and Keenan will be spinning with Dystruxion dancing all night. Admission is $7 before midnight and $10 after, but service members with ID get in free.
Maryland Stingers Women’s Rugby Club is having a fundraiser at Bottom Line (1716 I St., N.W.) tonight at 10 p.m. $10 gets unlimited keg beer until the bar closes or the keg runs out. This is a 21 and older event.
Kappa Psi Kappa is holding an information session today at the D.C. Center (1318 U St., N.W.) from 3 to 5 p.m. Kappa Psi Kappa is a non-collegiate service-social organization for progressive men regardless of sexual orientation. For more information, visit kappapiskappainc.org.
Sunday, April 22
Focus-In! Films presents “Howl” as its April Film of the Month and in celebration of National Poetry Month with a screening at Busboys & Poets’s 5th and K streets location (1025 5th St., N.W.) tonight at 7 p.m. The film stars James Franco as a young Allen Ginsberg. This is a free screening.
The band War plays Rams Head OnStage tonight at 5 and 8 p.m. Tickets are $39.50 each and available online at ramsheadonstage.com.
Monday, April 23
Khris Royal & Dark Matter, an alternative funk band with jazz flavors, plays Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage (2700 F St., N.W.) tonight at 6 p.m. This is a free event.
Busboys & Poets presents Monday night Open Mic Poetry hosted by Drew Law in at its Shirlington location (4251 S Campbell Ave., Arlington) at 8 p.m. There is a $5 cover charge.
Tuesday, April 24
Sam Sparro plays Rock and Roll Hotel (1353 H St., N.E.) tonight at 7 p.m. with Big/Bright. Tickets are $15 and available online at rockandrollhoteldc.com.
GLAA is having a membership meeting tonight in the second floor community room at the Reeves Center (2000 14th St., N.W.) from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday, April 25
Mova (2004 14th St., N.W.) presents iCandy tonight from 6:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. A weekly event, the night features a professional networking happy hour, “Taste of Culture” and dancing. For more information, contact [email protected].
HRC is having its monthly community night at Nellie’s (900 U St., N.W.) tonight from 5 to 8 p.m. There is no cover for this event.
The Lambda Bridge Club meets tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Dignity Center (721 8th St., SE — across from Marine Barracks) for duplicate bridge. No reservations needed; newcomers welcome. Visit lambdabridge.com if you need a partner.
Thursday, April 26
The Fridge (516 1/2 8th St., S.E.) presents “Mind Control: Four Feminist Perspectives through Poetry Prose and Performance Art” tonight featuring Molly Gaundry, Jessica Hirst, Sarah Lawson and Mindy Nettifee from 7 to 10:30 p.m. Tickets are $8. For more information, visit thefridgedc.com.
Baked & Wired (1052 Thomas Jefferson St., N.W.) is hosting the Capital Pride volunteer meet and greet tonight from 6 to 8 p.m.
Nellie’s (900 U St., N.W.) is hosting the kickoff party for AIDS Walk 2012 tonight from 6 to 9 p.m. Registration for the walk is free at this event and everyone who registers gets a free Nellie’s beer or soda and an order of fries.

Friday, July 11
“Center Aging Friday tea Time” will be at 2 p.m. in person at the DC Center for the LGBT Community’s new location at 1827 Wiltberger St., N.W. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more details, email [email protected].
Women in Their Twenties and Thirties will be at 8 p.m. on Zoom. This is a social discussion group for queer women in the Washington, D.C. area and a great way to make new friends and meet other queer women in a fun and friendly setting. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Happy Hour” at 7 p.m. at Firefly. This event is ideal for making new friends, professional networking, idea-sharing, and community building. This event is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Saturday, July 12
Go Gay DC will host “Family Fun Story Time” at 12 p.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. Join award-winning drag queen Tara Hoot for songs, stories, bubbles, puppets and dancing. It’s the feel-good event you didn’t know you needed. This event is perfect for kids and kids at heart. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Miss Capital Pride will host “DC Drag brunch on Rooftop – Penthouse” at 12 p.m. at MXDC Cocina Mexicana. Guests will experience a Mexican brunch infused with Baby Shank’s signature dishes, complemented by delicious margaritas and mimosas, all within the beautiful and spacious atmosphere of MXDC. There will also be outstanding performances by glamorous drag queens and celebrated celebrity impersonators, featuring Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, Whitney Houston, Cher, and many more. Tickets cost $30.65 and are available on Eventbrite.
Sunday, July 13
The National Portrait Gallery will host “Stormé at Stonewall” at 1:30 p.m. This is a gallery talk with LJ Roberts and Charlotte Ickes. This exhibition is a light-box portrait of activist Stormé DeLarverie, who is said to have thrown the first brick at Stonewall—the uprising credited with launching the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in 1969. Roberts created this unconventional portrait in response to DeLarverie’s absence in mainstream narratives about the history of the Stonewall rebellion. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Monday, July 14
“Center Aging Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more details, email [email protected].
Genderqueer DC will be at 7 p.m. in person at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. This is a support group for people who identify outside of the gender binary, whether you’re bigender, agender, genderfluid, or just know that you’re not 100% cis. For more details, visit genderqueerdc.org or Facebook.
Tuesday, July 15
Center Bi+ Roundtable will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is an opportunity for people to gather in order to discuss issues related to bisexuality or as bi individuals in a private setting.Visit Facebook or Meetup for more information.
Wednesday, July 16
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, July 17
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga with Charles M. will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a free weekly class focusing on yoga, breath work, and meditation. For more details, visit the DC Center for the LGBT Community’s website.
Lit Lovers: Book Club for Seniors will be at 2 p.m. on Zoom. The book selection for July is “Rubyfruit Jungle” by Rita Mae Brown. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Poly Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is an inclusive, welcoming, virtual safer space to talk about all things polyamorous — the rapturous, the confused, the pure YIKES, we want to hear them all. For more details, email [email protected].
Television
ICYMI: ‘Overcompensating’ a surprisingly sweet queer treat
A sweet, savvy show about breaking free to embrace your true self

Pride month 2025 is now behind us, and while it’s safe to say that this year’s celebrations had a darker edge than usual, it’s also true that they came with a particularly rich bounty of new queer movies and shows to entertain us – so many, in fact, that even if we are facing a lull until the fall another harvest of fresh content, there are still plenty of titles – which, for whatever reason, were off your radar – for you to catch up on in the meantime.
One of the most notable of these – the bingeworthy series “Overcompensating” (now streaming on Amazon Prime) – will most definitely have been ON the radar for the plentiful fans of creator and star Benito Skinner, the actor/comedian who rose to viral fame through his content on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. For anyone else, it might have easily slipped through the cracks.
Created and written by Skinner as a loosely autobiographical “college comedy,” it aims for the kind of raucous, explicitly sexed-up tone one expects from the genre as it centers on Benny (Skinner), newly arrived as a freshman at prestigious Yates University. A former football jock and “golden boy” at his midwestern high school, he’s the picture of idealized youthful masculinity; he’s also deep in the closet, struggling to keep his sexuality hidden and maintain his macho front under the intense scrutiny of the college’s social scene – and under the resentful eye of his older sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), who has already secured her own place at the top of the pecking order.
In the first episode, Benny’s difficulties are eased when he meets Carmen (Wally Baram), another freshman trying to navigate the politics of college life; a gamer from a home marred by tragedy, she’s an outsider who feels like she’s putting on an act, too, and they click – giving him the convenient “cover” of female companionship while providing them both with much-needed support and encouragement. He’s also befriended by a handsome film major from England (Rish Shah), who has already caught his eye, stirring other kinds of feelings and possibly even reciprocating them. Meanwhile, he’s being courted by the school’s “exclusive secret society” – headed by his sister’s aggressively “alpha” boyfriend Pete (Adam DiMarco) – and trying to stay interested in his studies, despite a growing realization that a career in business doesn’t actually appeal to him all that much.
That’s a lot to juggle for anybody, even an overachiever like Benny – whose “lucky” life so far has largely been the result of playing a role he is finding harder and harder to maintain. As the series goes on through its eight-episode arc, it becomes clear that he’s not the only one who is “keeping up appearances,” and he, along with the other confused and damaged young people in his orbit, begins the painful (but often hilarious) process of evolution that is required in order to become truly oneself.
Directed toward appealing to a younger demographic, “Overcompensating” is the kind of show that requires a few episodes worth of invested time to make an impression that feels like substance. Full of the bawdy farcical antics that go hand in hand with stories about hormonally charged college kids, it’s not above leaning into the formulas and tropes that have always driven these kinds of comedies. At first, while its broadly comedic strokes and frequently explicit sexual hijinks might elicit plenty of chuckles, the show might easily feel tiresome for more mature audiences; there’s a nostalgic fun to it, made even more appealing, somehow, by the “political incorrectness” of its frequently sexist and homophobic humor, but for a while things may feel like an unnecessary attempt to reinvent “Animal House” for the Gen Z crowd.
By the time the season reaches its halfway point, however, things have started to get real. The antics of these horny almost-adults take on a more pointed absurdity, informed by the increasingly tangled web of defensive deceit they weave among themselves – and, as things draw toward a cliffhanger climax, the consequences of maintaining it – until it achieves a sense of empathy toward them all. There’s a wisdom that smacks of lived authenticity underlying the whole affair, transforming it from the “sexploitative” teen comedy of its surface into something deeper. To be sure, things stay expectedly wacky, and the soap-operatic melodrama of its twists and reversals continue to maintain the show’s “mature YA” appeal; but beneath those trappings, by the end of the season a truer identity has begun to emerge, just as its characters have begun to find their own levels of self-actualization for themselves.
As creator, primary writer, and star, it’s obviously Skinner who deserves much of the credit. While it might be tempting, early on, to dismiss the show as an “ego project,” the internet-spawned sensation proves his talents quickly enough to get past such judgy suspicions, delivering a pitch-perfect blend of sauciness and sensitivity that extends its appeal toward both ends of the taste spectrum; just as crucially, he brings the same aforementioned “lived authenticity” to his winning performance – after all, he’s essentially playing himself in a fictionalized version of his own life – while also making sure that equal time (and compassion) is afforded all the other characters around him, each of whom are pushing at the boundaries of their own respective “closets,” too. It’s unavoidable to notice that – like most of his co-stars – he’s plainly a decade too old to be playing a college student; but by the time we reach that crucial halfway turning point, we’ve become too engaged by him to care.
The show is full of excellent performances, in fact. Relative newcomers Baram and Barone offer layers of complex nuance, while the more familiar DiMarco (“White Lotus”) is close to heartbreaking as the toxic BMOC clinging to the illusion of power as his life begins unraveling around him. Other standouts include the mononymic actress Holmes as Carmen’s “wild child” roommate, solidly likable turns as Benny’s parents from mature veterans Connie Britten and Kyle MacLachlan (whose presence, along with stylish elements in several key scenes, hints at an homage-ish nod to the late David Lynch), and podcaster Owen Thiele as an openly gay fellow student who has Benny “clocked” from the moment they meet. Finally, Lukas Gage makes a deep impression as a former high school teammate at the heart of Benny’s most haunting memory.
There’s no official word yet on whether “Overcompensating” will be renewed for a second season, despite the multiple loose ends left dangling at the end of its first; it has proven to be popular, and Skinner’s large fanbase makes it likely that the story will continue. Even if it doesn’t, the place of uncertainty in which it has left its characters rings true enough to serve as a satisfying endpoint.
As for us, we hope that won’t happen. For all its sophomoric humor, generic plot twists, and purposefully gratuitous sexual titillation, it’s one of the sweetest, kindest, and most savvy shows we’ve seen about breaking free from conformity to embrace your true self – and that’s a message that applies whether you’re queer, straight, or anywhere in between.
Photos
PHOTOS: Independence Day Weekend in Rehoboth
Wicked Green Pool Party, fireworks among festivities

Vacationers and residents alike enjoyed Independence Day Weekend activities in Rehoboth Beach, Del. The Wicked Green Pool Party drew hundreds to the CAMP Rehoboth fundraiser on Saturday. That evening, revelers went to the rooftops to watch the fireworks display.
(Washington Blade photos by Daniel Truitt)













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