The 2015 Out in the Tropics Festival, produced by FUNDarte, a Knight Arts grantee, runs from Tuesday, May 5th through Saturday, May 9th. The festival features work from innovative local, national and international GLBTQ artists, including Chely Lima, M. Lamar, Marga Gomez, Caridad Svich and John Moletress. M. Lamar. Photo by Michael Benabib. The festival opens on May 5th at 7 p.m. with an LGBTQ community panel and reception at the LGBT Visitor Center on Miami Beach. The panel, which is free and open to the public, is one my favorite events of the festival because it offers the community the opportunity to communicate and connect with the artists. On Wednesday, May 6th, poet Chely Lima will share work from his latest book, Urano Purpura, a collection of previously unpublished poems that narrates the complexity of the author’s experiences living as a trans and bisexual man. The event takes place at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden in collaboration with the University of Miami’s Department of Modern Languages. Multidisciplinary artist M. Lamar performs his musical theater piece, “Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche,” on Friday, May 8th at the Gleason Room Backstage at The Fillmore Miami Beach. The performance uses surveillance technology to reveal the violent and sexualized surveillance of the black male body. View Lamar’s performance online here. The festival closes with a double billing at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach on Saturday, May 9th. At 8 p.m., GLAAD award-winning comic Marga Gomez performs her tenth play, “Lovebirds.” “Lovebirds” is a comedic love quadrangle of sorts with characters that include a macho maitre d’, his daughter (who joins a coven), a tin-eared singer, and an LSD-fueled nightclub photographer. Later that same evening, “Jarman (all this maddening beauty)” opens at 9:30 p.m. “Jarman” is a performance piece based on the life of iconic queer artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. Based on the text of OBIE Lifetime Achievement Award-winning playwright Caridad Svich and performed by force/collision’s Founding Director John Moletress, “Jarman” is an intimate portrait of queerness, creativity and the symbiotic relationship between the two. Before you see “Jarman,” FUNDarte will host a screening of Derek Jarman’s classic film, Caravaggio, on Thursday, May 7th at O, Cinema Miami Beach. For detailed information on each of the events and ticket prices, visit FUNDarte.