Allegra Madsen has a Polaroid photo of her birth.

In this episode, meet and get to know Allegra. Today, she's the executive director of Frameline film fest, the biggest LGBTQIA+ movie event in the world. She might disagree, but Allegra is a big deal.

(Quick side note: As we kicked off our recording, Allegra expertly solved a Rubik's Cube. No bigs.)

We begin with the story of how her parents met. Allegra's dad is from Chicago originally. He taught transcendental meditation (TM) and moved all over the world. Eventually, he landed in Virginia, where he met Allegra's mom, who is from there and was just beginning to practice TM. The two met and settled down, and soon enough, they had a baby—Allegra. She was born in Virginia Beach, VA, to, as she puts it, "two hippies who were trying to change the world by sitting quietly."

A lot of Allegra's family is still in Virginia, from which, as she points out, the Supreme Court's Loving case originated. That was when the high court ruled unanimously that interracial marriages are, in fact, protected under the Constitution. Her parents are of different races, and not everyone in the family looked on approvingly.

Her parents never did get married. But they raised their biracial kid together. She was a fairly typical latch-key kid growing up in the Eighties, though she split her time between her parents' families. Schools were mostly segregated, too. By the time Allegra got to high school, though, local governments and school boards did what they could to integrate, at that level at least. But, she says, that meant that the students themselves segregated within the schools.

Going between the worlds of her mom's family and her dad's, Allegra says she felt at home in both, however differently. She was the only mixed-race kid though, and so, as much as she strived to fit in with any one group, it was difficult.

Allegra has been tall for a while, and she was urged to play basketball, which she did. She says she liked it, but her passion for the game outweighed her skill. As a teenager, she read a lot. She says that it was probably the main way that she discovered a broader world beyond her hometown. Books gave way to movies, and they all helped form in Allegra a curiosity about how people relate to one another and share space in the world.

This was around the time that VCRs really took off. In addition to local video rental shops, the expansion of Blockbuster stores nationwide made it easier to rent movies. Her mom had a job at a cable company, and when young Allegra would visit her at work, she had access to cable movies that many of her friends went without.

At this point in the recording, Allegra and I go on a sidebar about movies we used to love that don't hold up well nowadays. But at the time, movies and books were ways for her to escape The South.

Soon enough, something started calling Allegra to leave where she's from. She graduated high school after only three years and got a job in the office of the construction company her dad worked for, helping her earn a little money. She saved and funded a fledgeling scuba career. Yes, scuba diving. Her dream was to move to the Florida Keys to work as a dive instructor.

But that dream never came true. Instead, she spent the year that would've been her senior year in high school working at a music store. Her work provided Allegra with easy access to so much music. There was also a Ticketmaster counter inside the store. Being an employee, she and her coworkers were able to pull tickets for themselves before they went on sale to the public. I go on a tangent here about what a pain it used to be to buy concert tickets over landline phones. Allegra rattles off an impressive list of bands she saw back then—one that includes Missy Elliott and Bob Dylan.

When she figured out that the diving dream was dead, Allegra moved to Chicago to go to college. She had family there—aunts, uncles, grandparents. But they weren't especially close. It's not that her extended family wasn't accepting of her parents' interracial relationship, but more that they weren't prepared for it.

​And so Allegra turned to her peers. She found two people in her first week of college who turned out to be lifelong friends. She says her college experience was mostly a good one, but that, in hindsight, she still hadn't come into her own, per se. She studied film photography and design. Although she wasn't enrolled in the motion pictures program, Columbia College Chicago was and is known as a film school. And Allegra says that those friends she made early on helped her dive more deeply into the world of movies—it made her more of an active moviegoer.

Allegra says she always knew she was queer. She dated girls in high school, but never really talked with her parents about her budding sexuality. She never really talked with anyone about it, in fact. Instead, she simply dated women and that was that.

Check back next week for Part 2 and Allegra's eventual move to the Bay Area.

​We recorded this podcast at Frameline Film Fest's offices in South of Market in November 2024.

Photography by Dan Hernandez