TELL 2: SUMMER
2014-03-23 19:00 - 23:00 (America/New_York) | NY
TELL is an evening of story telling from the mouths and minds of queers in NYC hosted by Drae Campbell at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.
Summer is the theme of the second installment of TELL.
Featuring special guests:
Camille Atkinson
Susana Cook
Katrina del Mar
Marcus Hicks
This event is free. We will pass a hat on behalf of the performers.
The Bureau is not wheelchair accessible–up one flight of stairs.
The Bureau has a gender-neutral bathroom.
About the featured guests:

New York vocalist Camille Atkinson was born in the Midwest and raised in New Orleans. She preforms regularly in the New York area with rockNrollNsoul band Empire Beats , co-writing songs, and co-producing the monthly Juke Joint Revue at the Parkside Lounge with Mark Boquist. She’s become a popular hostess in the NY Burlesque scene, and is always looking to take It to the next level. She came in second this Year in Murray Hill’s Miss LEZ pageant and she wants to cook for you.

https://camillebatkinson.com

Born in Argentina, Susana Cook is a New York based performance artist who has been writing and producing original work for over 20 years. She has presented over 17 original plays in New York and around the world. Susana writes and directs all her shows and performs in them with her company . Her work is bold, cleverly tackling racism, homophobia and animal rights. Her cast is comprised mostly of minority and queer women. Her work has been presented in numerous performance spaces in New York City, including Dixon Place, PS. 122, W.O.W Cafe Theater, Ubu Rep, Theater for the New City, The Puffin Room and The Kitchen. She also performed internationally in Spain, France, India, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Canada and at several colleges and universities around the country.
Some of her latest plays are : We Are Caligula, The Funeral of the Cow, The Homophobes, The Fury of the Gods, Homeland Insecurities, The idiot King, The Values Horror Show, 100 Years of Attitude, Dykenstein, Hamletango, Prince of Butches, Gross National Product, Hot Tamale, Conga Guerrilla Forest, The Fraud, Butch Fashion Show in the Femme Auto Body Shop, Rats:The Fantasy of Extermination and Tango Lesbiango
Her work is archived at the Digital Video Library of The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics of New York University.

Photo by Daniel Jack Lyons

Katrina del Mar is a New York-based photographer, video artist, writer and award-winning film director. Her work has been described as “beautiful” exuding an “intimate chemistry” and also as “filth of the highest quality.” Katrina herself has been described as a “major league cutie,” “a wild woman,” “the Lesbian Russ Meyer,” and “apparently, the lesbian stepchild of Kenneth Anger.” Her solo exhibition GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS was presented in January 2013 at Participant Inc. in New York. Her solo exhibition, Gangs of New York was presented in 2010 at Wrong Weather Gallery in Porto, Portugal. Invited to teach at the University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, she conducted the first ever “Queer Trash Feminist Film Workshop,” also in 2010. In 2012, she presented a series of films and photographs from the Golden Age of Performance Art (1988-2000 with Dona Ann McAdams, On the Edge of Society: Moments in Live Art, at Warehouse 9, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work has shown at Deitch Projects, NY; Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France; American Fine Arts Company, NY; Binz 39, Zurich, Switzerland; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Miami Light Project; P.S.122, NY; FabLab, Berlin; and the University of Cardiff, Wales.
Her first film, Gang Girls 2000, shot entirely on super 8mm film, received a four and a half star review in Film Threat magazine, among other glowing reviews, inviting comparisons to the legendary Kenneth Anger. The follow up, Surf Gang, about a gang of women surfers from Rockaway Beach, landed del Mar a fellowship in video from the New York Foundation for the Arts, “Best Experimental Film” from the Planet Out Short Movie Awards announced at the Sundance Film Festival 2006, and was screened at the Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France.
Her latest film project, Hell on Wheels Gang Girls Forever, completes the Girl Gang Trilogy and was the recipient of the 2010 Accolade Award of Merit. Recent screenings include Girl Gang Trilogy, Nightingale Cinema, co-presented by Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2012; Super 8 Film Portraits, curated by Stephanie Gray, Millennium Film Workshop, NY, 2012; Surf Gang (excerpt), Sound & Light, and winner of Juried Competition, Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA, 2012; Girl Gang Trilogy, Fringe Film Festival, London, UK, 2012; and Girl Gang Trilogy, Bio Paradis, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2012.

Marcus Hicks is a designer/performer living in Brooklyn NY. Originally from Ca. SDNBrooklyn.com

Born After 1989
2014-03-28 20:00 - 23:55 | NY
Tonight’s poetry reading is in conjunction with the renowned exhibition, “Poetry Will be Made for All,” at the LUMA/Westbau exhibition space, within Löwenbräukunst, in Zurich, Switzerland curated by Kenneth Goldsmith, Danny Snelson and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Tonight’s reading will be hosted by Felix Bernstein, Skyped in to Zurich, photographed by ArtForum, with press from the Village Voice, Rhizome, Frieze, and n+1 in attendance. All of tonight’s readers will be profiled in jacket 2. Two of tonight’s readers will be selected by Obrist for profile pieces in Bomb Magazine. Several audience members will also be selected to participate in a roundtable discussion for Grey Room (MIT Press) on ‘audiences in the age of digital poetics.’

Readers:

Jameson Fitzpatrick lives in New York, where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awl, The American Reader, The Los Angeles Review, and POETRY, among elsewhere.
https://jameson-fitzpatrick.tumblr.com/
https://poetrywillbemadebyall.ch/book/morrisoe-erasures/

Deanna Havas was born in New York City in 1989, where she currently lives and works. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. In 2012 she exhibited in a solo exhibition at NP Contemporary Art/Envoy Enterprises in New York. Some of her recent exhibitions include a commissioned piece for Rhizome’s The Download and an e-book published through Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. She also recently completed a residency at the LUMA /Westbau as part of the 89+ project in Zürich.
www.deannahavas.com

Cornelia Barber is the author of ‘Before I Am Lost’ a critical novella. Her latest work is a set of poems, Grace Holes, on the dialectics of pleasure, god and form. “his ass holes running spectacular juices / moaning for affection as if / it is you that must cradle him / bandage his wounds that / he made himself. / Impulse will infiltrate the surface of whatever / form you find yourself consumed by.”

Gil Lawson is a writer from Santa Fe, NM. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, n+1, Triple Canopy, Metazen, KTBAFC, and others. He received the Bard College Written Arts Prize in May of 2013.

Paco Catart is a musician and writer. “KccLhhlckk- and there’s the hateful pink jelly / broken into bits / like a shattered bottle of frozen cough syrup / or human mucus. / There’s the jelly / beneath my sneaker.” pacocathcart.bandcamp.com

Joshua Kleinberg is a barback, an MFA candidate in Poetry & Translation at Columbia University and the curator (with Dana Jaye Cadman) of Banquet Reading Series in Brooklyn. His work has received awards from Ohio State University and The Academy of American Poets and has been anthologized in Chorus: A Literary Mixtape (2012, MTV Books).
gentleslant.net

Cassie Seltman’s book is called Palimpsest: Columbus. “A sneeze in my nose. Spit, mom says. I spit. Mom pokes at the spit with her fingers. She opens the tissue blown into, it’s definitely green. You have something. If you were healthy it would be paler. More yellow.”

Clara Lipfert is a writer and performer whose work has been featured in Illuminati Girl Gang, the Scrambler, and MIX NYC. As one half of the curatorial/performance project HAG, she has performed at Grace Exhibition Space and the Invisible Dog Art Center. She also writes reviews for the Helix Queer Performance Network. hagcollective.tumblr.com

The Bureau at the Rainbow Book Fair
2014-03-29 12:00 - 18:00 | NY
Join the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division at the 6th Annual New York Rainbow Book Fair! We’ll be at table 59.
Noon–6pm
Holiday Inn Midtown
440 W. 57th Street, NYC 10019
(between 9th and 10th Avenues)
$3 Admission suggested donation
The Rainbow Book Fair is seeking volunteers to help facilitate all of the activities of the day. If you would like to volunteer please fill out the online form.
Note: The Bureau will remain open for regular business hours, 1 to 7 PM, at our 83A Hester Street location.

DISCUSSION WITH ARTIST RENÉ SMITH
2014-03-30 16:00 - 19:00 | NY
Join artist René Smith at the Bureau for a conversation about her work.
We are pleased to announce that we have extended the exhibition Manorama – Collages & Drawings by René Smith through Thursday, April 10th.

“This body of work is a sincere ode to longing and the beauty of men’s bodies, but it also contains small jokes, ideas about history, and references to our relationship to photography. The project is about men’s bodies seen through a woman’s eyes – the woman’s gaze – the man’s body – the body as landscape with hills and valleys to roam. The collages are made from vintage magazines from the 60’s and 70’s – a time when the male nude in widely circulating publications was new, and the idea of a woman appreciating the male nude was radical. The paintings and drawings are based on my own photographs of friends and professional models and take on the same subject – still fairly uncommon from a woman’s point of view.” René Smith

René Smith lives and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. She was a Visiting Lecturer in Painting at Chiang Mai University in Thailand, and has also been an artist in residence at The Gil Society in Iceland and Vermont Studio Center. She has shown her work at The Bangkok Art & Culture Center, Koi Gallery (Bangkok), NoSpace Gallery (Bangkok), BKK Art House (Bangkok), The Chiang Mai University Art Museum (Thailand), and Aljira Contemporary Art Center (New Jersey). René Smith was born in Philadelphia and received her M.F.A. in Painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Rome and her B.A. in Painting from Bennington College in Vermont. She teaches painting at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

Featured image: René Smith, Keith with Leidy’s Painting. Pastel on Paper. 20 x 25”

A Future Feminist Tea Party to discuss "Angry Women" Part 1
2014-04-02 16:30 - 18:30 | NY
Organized by Quito Ziegler
Part 1: Wednesday, April 2, 4:30-6:30 pm
Part 2: Wednesday, April 9 4:30-6:30 pm
On April 3-6. the HERE Arts Center will present Angry Women REvisited, a fifteen-person ensemble multidisciplinary performance re-exploring the 1990s classic feminist text Angry Women, conceived and directed by J Dellecave.

Some of us were heavily influenced by the interviews in the original Angry Women text, released in the early 1990s. Some of us missed the boat entirely. All of us live in times that are rapidly changing, and the hope is these discussions will help us get our heads around it.
The Future Feminist Tea Party is an open learning space for feminists at all levels of experience, from remedial to academic, that values the intersection of ideas and lived experiences. We will come together over tea and cake for a hearty discussion of Angry Women, transfeminism, and the evolution of feminism. Participants are encouraged (but not required!) to make a 3-session commitment:
1) April 2 : Discuss selections from the original text (please come prepared with the questions it raised for you)
2) Go see the show on your own!
3) April 9 : Regroup, debrief, process
Tea and cakes will be served. Feel free to stop in late if you must.

5 bucks if you have it
(no worries if you don’t)
Info on the Angry Women performance + fundraiser below!
The Future Feminist Tea Parties are inspired by artist Kembra Pfahler’s idea of future feminism, where “alpha males and male sky gods no longer make all the rules” and binaries no longer exist.
Angry Women REvisited Indiegogo and show dates!
Angry Women REvisited, conceived and directed by J Dellecave, is a fifteen-person ensemble multi-disclipinary performance examining the interviews of badass (and sometimes problematic) activists/artists of the 1990s, through the lens of 2014 ideas about feminism, and grounding our inquiry in the pages of the classic feminist text, REsearch Journal’s Angry Women. We are a queer cast of dancers, filmmakers, theatre makers, theatre scholars, visual artists, puppeteers, animators, musicians, writers, and rabble rousers, across a wide spectrum of genders. The opportunity to work through important ideas with such a diverse cast is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We were fortunate to be selected for a performance at HERE, 145 6th Avenue, in Manhattan, April 3-6, 2014. The cast of Angry Women REvisited wants to be able to share all of our work with you and our audience, in its fullest professional capacity, and for that we need the funds to support this project.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/angry-women-revisited

Edie Fake presents Memory Palaces
2014-04-03 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Edie Fake presents Memory Palaces at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division. Chicago comics artist Edie Fake and Brooklyn publishers Secret Acres are pleased to debut a monograph of Edie’s recent gallery exhibition, Memory Palaces. Edie will present his drawings and discuss the origins and specifics of his project, a radical reimagining of queer spaces in Chicago.

Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the RISD in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. In 2011 he helped found the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) and writes reviews for the blog Book By Its Cover. He currently lives in Chicago and works as a comics sommelier for Quimby’s.

Northwest Press at the Bureau!
2014-04-05 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
Coinciding with the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) Arts Fest (April 5 and 6) in New York, Northwest Press and the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division are hosting a fun LGBT comics event for everyone! Come on down and have a beverage, meet other LGBT readers and artists, and maybe win a door prize!

Writing from the Third Perspective: a woman's POV
2014-04-06 15:00 - 17:00 | NY
Ann Herendeen talks about writing as a woman who likes MSM (men who have sex with men) and reads selections from her novels and stories. Warning: material contains humor.

Ann Herendeen is the author of two novels published by HarperCollins: Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (2008); and Pride/Prejudice (2010), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in the Bisexual Fiction category. The first chapter is Ann’s contribution to the forthcoming Best Bi Short Stories. Her short story, “A Charming Ménage,” appeared in Gay City anthology no. 4, At Second Glance (2011). Ann also has an ongoing series of e-books, “Lady Amalie’s memoirs,” which consists (so far) of four novels and two novellas.

Bureau at Second Tuesday Lecture Series for Robert Hofler's Reading from Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange—How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke all the Taboos
2014-04-08 18:30 - 21:00 | NY
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division will be at The LGBT Community Center for Robert Hofler‘s appearance at the Second Tuesday Lecture Series. We will be selling copies of Hofler’s new book Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange—How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke all the Taboos.
The six years between 1968 and 1973 saw more sexual taboos challenged than ever before. Film, literature, and theater simultaneously broke through barriers giving birth to what we still consider to be the height of sexual expression in pop culture: Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, Hair on Broadway, Andy Warhol and his superstars, Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Larry Kramer’s Women in Love, actors such as Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde, and the proto-reality celebrity Lance Loud.
In Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange—How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke all the Taboos, Robert Hofler weaves a lively narrative linking the writers, producers, and actors responsible for creating such controversial works, placing them within their cultural and social frameworks. While the Stonewall Riots were shaking Greenwich Village, a group of daring artists challenged the status quo and defined the country’s concept of sexual liberation. Hofler follows the creation of and reaction to these groundbreaking works, tracing their connections and influences on each another and the rest of the entertainment industry.
Robert Hofler has spent more than forty years as an entertainment journalist, at both Life and Us magazines, and most recently at Variety. His nonfiction works include the Henry Willson biography, The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson and Party Animals, a biography of Allan Carr. Hofler is the theater critic for The Wrap and lives in New York City.
Reception at 6:30
Presentation at 7
The Center is located at 208 W. 13th St., between 7th and 8th Avenues.

J James comes clean on coming out - Denial Deceit Discovery: Book Reading and signing
2014-04-08 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Meet the British author behind this year’s most compelling coming out story. J James will read from his debut book, Denial Deceit Discovery and will then be delighted to sign copies of the book for readers.
Please note: The Bureau is closed on Tuesdays, but we will open at 6 PM for this event, which will begin at 7.

After over a decade of teaching, educational management and administration, James needed to find an outlet to share his personal story. As a lifelong lover of literature and writing, James has dedicated his career to educating students, helping them develop the tools they’ll need to share their stories in the future.
His first manuscript was inspired by the response James received from the Catholic priest who officiated his marriage annulment. As part of the process, James was asked to submit a small document outlining his feelings about the events that culminated in the failure of his marriage. The priest commented that the piece was the most moving and impactful account he had ever read. He called it an “inspiration” to other men and women struggling with similar situations. After exploring many options, James realized that his story could help people to understand the complex issues facing gay men in denial – hopefully, helping to spare others from the heartache he and his loved ones experienced.
James currently lives and works in Southeast Asia. He enjoys the tropical climate, and the relaxed pace, which has provided him with the opportunity to continue developing ideas for his second novel.

A Future Feminist Tea Party to discuss "Angry Women" Part 2
2014-04-09 16:30 - 18:30 | NY

Fire in the Belly Reading Group
2014-04-09 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Join Visual AIDS for a robust conversation about the book, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz by C. Carr. Free. All are welcome. The book is available for purchase at the Bureau.
About the Book:
In December 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington made headlines when it responded to protests from the Catholic League by voluntarily censoring an excerpt of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from its show on American portraiture.
Why a work of art could stir such emotions is at the heart of Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly, the first biography of a beleaguered art-world figure who became one of the most important voices of his generation. Wojnarowicz emerged from a Dickensian childhood that included orphanages, abusive and absent parents, and a life of hustling on the street. He first found acclaim in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and ’80s for its abandoned buildings, junkies, and burgeoning art scene. Along with Keith Haring, Nan Goldin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wojnarowicz helped redefine art for the times.
As uptown art collectors looked downtown for the next big thing, this community of cultural outsiders was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. The ensuing culture war, the neighborhood’s gentrification, and the AIDS crisis then devastated the East Village scene. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven. Carr’s brilliant biography traces the untold story of a controversial and seminal figure at a pivotal moment in American culture.

Visual AIDS utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.

Poetry Reading: Charlie Bondhus, Steven Cordova, Walter Holland, and Jee Leong Koh
2014-04-10 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Poets Charlie Bondhus (All the Heat We Could Carry), Steven Cordova (Long Distance), Walter Holland (Circuit), and Jee Leong Koh (Equal to the Earth) read their work and sign books.
Charlie Bondhus’s second poetry book, All the Heat We Could Carry, won Main Street Rag’s Annual Poetry Book Award for 2013, and is currently a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry. Previously he published How the Boy Might See It (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), and two chapbooks, What We Have Learned to Love—which won Brickhouse Books’s 2008-2009 Stonewall Award—and Monsters and Victims (Gothic Press, 2010). His poetry appears or is set to appear in numerous periodicals, including Midwest Quarterly, The Hawai’i Review, CounterPunch, The Alabama Literary Review, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. He teaches at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey, and is the Poetry Editor at The Good Men Project (goodmenproject.com).

Steven Cordova is the 2012 first-place winner of the International Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize. His first full-length poetry collection, Long Distance, appeared in 2010 from Bilingual University Press. His works appear in many journals and anthologies and his poem, “Across a Table,” was recently set to music for the AIDS Quilt Songbook. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic, (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992) as well as a novel, The March (Chelsea Station Editions, 2011). His short stories have been published in Art and Understanding, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and Rebel Yell, Some of his poetry credits include: Antioch Review, Art and Understanding, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, The Cream City Review, Found Object, Pegasus, Phoebe, and Poets for Life:76 Poets Respond to AIDS. He lives in New York City.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of four books of poems, including Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press). His latest collection The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press) will be translated into Japanese and published by Awai Books in August 2014. He has a new book of poems forthcoming from Carcanet Press in 2015. Born in Singapore, Jee lives in New York City. A curator of the website Singapore Poetry, he is organizing the first Singapore Literature Festival in New York in October 2014.

Book launch: LOOK WHO’S MORPHING by Tom Cho and AFTER DELORES (25th Anniversary Edition) by Sarah Schulman
2014-04-13 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Join us for the dual book launch of Look Who’s Morphing by Tom Cho and After Delores (25th Anniversary Edition) by Sarah Schulman.
Special guest Sassafras Lowrey also reads from hir novel Roving Pack.
LOOK WHO’S MORPHING (Arsenal Pulp Press):
First published to great acclaim in Australia, writer Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing is a fresh, hilarious, and dazzingly contemporary collection of micro-fictions that explore the slipperiness of identity, race, and gender.
Like a mad-cap version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis set against the last 40 years of pop culture, each story in the collection features Cho’s narrator morphing into various familiar and iconic cultural figures from sitcoms, Hollywood movies, anime, music videos, Saturday-morning cartoons, daytime TV talk shows, Nintendo games, and literature.
AFTER DELORES (Arsenal Pulp Press):
In this new edition of Sarah Schulman’s acclaimed 1988 novel, the unnamed narrator is a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York’s bohemian Lower East Side who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her for another woman. This hilarious, unpredictable, sexy novel is a fast-paced flashback to the storefronts, underground clubs, and back alleys of the Lower East Side’s lesbian subculture in the 1980s―an electrifying chronicle of New York life featuring an edgy and totally original heroine. Includes a new introduction by Sarah Schulman.
ROVING PACK (Pomo Freakshow):
Click, a straight-edge transgender kid, is searching for hir place within a pack of newly sober gender rebels in the dilapidated punk houses of Portland, Oregon circa 2002. Ze embarks on a dizzying whirlwind of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests until hir gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn and the pack is sent reeling.www.RovingPack.com
TOM CHO is a fiction writer whose work has appeared widely, including in such publications as The Best Australian Stories series, Asia Literary Review and The New Quarterly. Like his favourite pop stars, Tom enjoys trying new guises on for size, and his work has been described as “transgenre, transgender and transcultural all at once.” He has performed his work on the stages of many festivals, from Singapore Writers Festival to Sydney Mardi Gras, and even at a Chinatown bar where he toured Hello Kitty, an award-winning show that combined literature with karaoke. Born and raised in Australia, Tom has applied for permanent residency in Canada. He has a PhD in Professional Writing and is currently writing a novel about the meaning of life. Visit his website at tomcho.com
SARAH SCHULMAN is the author of sixteen books, including the novels The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls, Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story. She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of the movies The Owls and Mommy is Coming, and co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
SASSAFRAS LOWREY is the editor of the two time American Library Association honored & Lambda Literary Finalist Kicked Out anthology, and Leather Ever After. Hir debut novel Roving Pack was honored by the American Library Association. Sassafras is the 2013 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Berzon Emerging Writer Award. Ze lives and writes in Brooklyn with hir partner, two dogs of dramatically different sizes, two bossy cats, and a kitten. www.SassafrasLowrey.com

A COCKTAIL OF GLAMOUR & ANARCHY
2014-04-17 19:00 - 23:00 | NY
A COCKTAIL OF GLAMOUR & ANARCHY with original Cockette RUMI MISSABU in person! Accompanied by AGOSTO MACHADO, JARVIS EARNSHAW & JOE E. JEFFREYS and Special Guests MAX STEELE, MARK GOLAMCO, & Rachel Mason.
Rumi Missabu, actor/male actress, performance artist, director-producer, mentor and original member and archivist for the gender-bending early 70s counterculture troupe The Cockettes, once described as like the Little Rascals in drag doing Busby Berkeley on acid, Rumi Missabu, hosts an evening of conversation, spoken word, film clips, and musical interludes withspecial guests. Guaranteed to be a fun-filled romp laced with pure nostalgia that bridges the gap between the Summer of Love and thetimes of Harvey Milk.

Rumi Missabu aka James Bartlett was born in Hollywood, CA in 1947. As a young actor he went from appearing in Disney films: BLACKBEARD’S GHOST, THE ONE AND ONLY ORIGINAL FAMILY BAND, to soft-core porn: ELEVATOR GIRLS IN BONDAGE in three short years following his brief but snazzy reign with the Cockettes(1970-1972). He continues to keep thespirit alive to this day with contributions to critically acclaimed recent exhibitions and events at: Envoy Gallery, NYC, Giorgi Gallery, Berkeley, CA, Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn NY, HOWL Festival, NYC, UKS Galleri in Oslo, Norway, The Gender-Bender Festival in Bologna, Italy, SFMOMA, SomArts, The Center for Sex & Culture, the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco, the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, TATE Liverpool and the New York Public Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center among many others.

Recent acting roles include stage productions of MARAT SADE, Brava Theater, TINSEL TARTS IN A HOT COMA and currently appearing in the Thrillpeddlers revival of the Cockettes 1970 opus; PEARLS OVER SHANGHAI reprising his original role as Madame Gin-Sling. In addition to hosting THE BLUE HOUR, a live variety show since 2009 at the Hypnodrome in SF, he also has appeared and co-produced in some cases a number of independent films including; ELEVATOR GIRLS IN BONDAGE, UNCLE BOB, TRIP BACK FORWARD, THE COCKETTES, THE GLITTER EMERGENCY, REVOLUTIONARY SEX, TIP-TOE PAST THE WITCH and RUMINATIONS. Rumi currently resides in Oakland, CA and enjoys touring NYC each April and October since 2007.

Special Guests:

Agosto Machado

Joe E. Jeffreys

Jarvis Earnshaw

Mark Galamco

Max Steele

Rachel Mason

Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion
2014-04-19 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
Since 2009, the Against Equality collective has been challenging the gay mainstream and revitalizing the queer political imagination. Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion is the collective’s opportunity to share its newest work with the world—a collection of all of the collective’s books in one concise edited volume to be published by AK Press in April 2014. Ryan Conrad, the co-founder of the Against Equality archive and editor of all of the collective’s anthologies, will join us at the Bureau for a reading and discussion of the new collection.

Opening Reception for Split + Growing: Synesthesia and Queer Thought, A New Show by Ketch Wehr
2014-04-20 18:00 - 21:00 | NY
Split + Growing is a new, highly personal exhibit of work from transfeminist painter and illustrator Ketch Wehr. Primarily illustrative gouache paintings, Wehr’s show explores his personal understanding of his gender and queerness from an early age through the lens of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition which, in his case, lends colors and flavors to all letters and words. Split + Growing is the visual display of an evolving queer selfhood through the colors Wehr knew to be part of his identity before he had the words to describe it.
Split + Growing runs from Sunday, April 20, through Sunday, May 25

Michael Nava: Reading and Signing for CITY OF PALACES
2014-04-22 18:30 - 21:00 | NY
Join Michael Nava for a reading and signing for his new novel City of Palaces
Please note: The Bureau is closed on Tuesdays, but we will open at 5:30 for this event, which will begin at 6:30.
Michael Nava, a third-generation Californian of Mexican descent, and the grandson of immigrants, was born in Sacramento. He was the first person in his family to attend college, graduating with a B.A. in history from the Colorado College. He later received his law degree from Stanford University.
He began writing when he was 12 years old, around the same time he recognized that he was gay. In his autobiographical essay Gardenland, a memoir of his childhood in the working-class Mexican neighborhood of the same name, he says he turned to writing because he was filled with words he was otherwise unable to express.
Until he was in his early twenties he studied and wrote poetry exclusively. A selection of his poems was awarded the 1981 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize given annually by the University of California, Irvine. He began writing what became his first novel as a third year law student at Stanford. That novel, The Little Death, was published in 1986 by Alyson Publications, a small gay press that accepted the book after 12 other publishers had rejected it.
The Little Death introduced readers to Henry Rios, a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer based primarily in Los Angeles. Six further Rios novels followed — Goldenboy (1988), Howtown (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1994), The Burning Plain (1996), and Rag and Bone (2000). Each new novel was greeted with wider and greater critical acclaim. The books were awarded a total of six Lambda Literary Awards and in 2000 Nava was given the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in gay and lesbian literature. With Rage and Bone, Nava announced the end of his career as a mystery writer.
Beginning in 1995, Nava started researching a novel about the life of silent film star Ramon Novarro, a Mexican immigrant who came to Hollywood in 1915 after his family fled their homeland during the Mexican Revolution. Novarro was one of the first generation of internationally famous movie stars, like Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Nava was drawn to Novarro not only because of their shared ethnic heritage but also because it was an open secret in Hollywood that Novarro was gay.
At the same time, he became interested in the Yaquis, an Indian tribe that inhabited the northwest state of Sonora along the border with Arizona. In the late nineteeth century, the Mexico government began to forcibly evict the Yaquis from their ancient homeland, a lush river valley at the edge of the Sonoran desert, to make way for Mexican settlers. But the Yaquis put up a fierce resistance and the Mexican government ultimately pursued a policy of extermination against the tribe that resulted in its virtual extinction. Nava’s great-grandparents were among the few Yaquis who had survived by escaping to Arizona where his grandfather, Ramón, was born in 1905.
Eventually, these interests converged and he began to write a novel that would tell the story of the Mexican Revolution, the near-genocide of the Yaquis, and the rise of silent film. Midway through his first draft, he recognized that this undertaking was too vast for a single book, so he conceived a series of novels called The Children of Eve, after the line in the Salve Regina addressed to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.” The first novel in that series is The City of Palaces, which is set in Mexico City in the years before and at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
In addition to his novels, Nava has had a distinguished career as an appellate lawyer working primarily in the California court system including the California Supreme Court. As a lawyer, he has been a tireless advocate for greater diversity in the legal profession. A fuller biography of Michael Nava is available on Wikipedia. See also profile on glbtq.com
Nava is currently at work on the second book – as yet untitled – in The Children of Eve series.

"Children and Fools:" Harry Hay and the Mattachine Society, 1930-1953. A talk by Ben Miller
2014-04-23 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
It wasn’t until the 1980s that John D’Emilio, Jonathan Ned Katz, and other scholars (many working independently) began to exhume and bring to life the vital history of American homosexual and homophile movements before the Stonewall rebellion. All serious considerations of that history feature as a central player Harry Hay: activist, troublemaker, theorist, founder of the Mattachine Society and “father” of the American gay rights movements. This talk retells the story of the founding of the Mattachine Society – America’s first gay rights organization, which activist Harry Hay founded in Los Angeles – with an eye towards that history’s relevance to the ideological development of Gay, and by extension LGBTQ, rights in America. Original research conducted using Hay’s personal papers and the papers of the Mattachine Society shows that Hay used Marxist cultural theory to fuse elements of folk music, medieval fooling, and Native American religious and gender traditions into a gay identity that could serve as the basis for political activism, radically challenging existing gender and sexual norms in ways that are too often forgotten in the mainstream literature of LGBTQ history.
Ben Miller will present a second talk on Harry Hay on the following Wednesday, April 30th:
“Children of the Brain:” Harry Hay’s Life, Theory, and Activism, 1953-1964

Ben Miller is a New York-based writer and student of history. Current projects include thesis research on early gay activist Harry Hay that has taken him to archives in California and conferences from Pennsylvania to New Mexico, an adaptation of an early Mozart libretto for performance at Carnegie Hall, and new short fiction influenced by his historical research. He is the 2014 winner of New York University’s Bessie and Louis Levy Prize for Excellence in American History, and the recipient of the Steffi Berne Research Scholarship in the Humanities from the same institution. His teachers in history and writing have included Linda Gordon, K. Kevyne Baar, Marcelle Clements, and Jonathan Safran Foer. His academic writing has appeared in Historian, College Film and Media Studies, and the Chicago Journal of History; and his short fiction has appeared in Brio, Studio on the Square, and West 10th. He is editor or co-editor of several publications, co-founder of Squid Ink Magazine (launching soon), and serves on the communications committee of the New York City Anti-Violence Project. He tweets @benwritesthings.

Photo: Reunion of living Mattachine founders, 1980s. From left: Jim Gruber, Dale Jennings, Konrad Stevens, Harry Hay. (San Francisco Public Library, Gay and Lesbian Center.)

TELL 3: Close Calls
2014-04-25 19:00 - 23:00 | NY
TELL is an evening of story telling from the mouths and minds of queers in NYC hosted by Drae Campbell at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.
Close Calls is the theme of the third installment of TELL.
Featuring special guests:
Silas Howard
Greg Newton
Jade Payne
Lady Quesa’Dilla

Drae Campbell is a writer, actor, director, story teller, dancer, and nightlife emcee. Besides winning the 2011 Miss LEZ title, Drae has been featured on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and on stages all over NYC. Drae’s directing work has appeared in Iceland, NYC, Budapest and in the San Francisco Fringe Festival. The short film Drae wrote and starred in, YOU MOVE ME won the Audience Award for Outstanding Narrative Short at OUTFEST 2010 and has been shown in fesivals globally. Drae was dubbed “the next lezzie comedian on the block” by AfterEllen.com for her comedic stylings on the interwebs. Campbell throws a monthly party in Brooklyn called PRIME. Check her out online and around town. www.draecampbell.com

Lady Quesa’Dilla AKA Alejandro Rodríguez– Alejandro is a native Tejan@ from the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez border. Their work is at the intersection of cultural identity, drag, and community. “The Brown Queen,” an autobiographical solo performance about growing up queer in the southwest, premiered at HERE Arts Center in the spring of 2010. Most recent solo performances include “My Tia Lupe” and “The Faggot in the Pink House”. He has performed in New York City, El Paso, Texas, and Chiapas, Mexico. Alejandro is a member of The House of Bushwig, as Lady Quesa’Dilla, duties include Volunteer Coordinator for the annual Bushwig Festival.
Alejandro can also be found as an Information and Referral Specialist at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in Manhattan; and as a Teaching Artist in The Bronx and Brooklyn.
Alejandro holds a BA in Theater from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and a MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and is an alum from The Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics.
Resides in Brooklyn.

SILAS HOWARD began his career in degeneracy by playing music with the legendary punk band Tribe8. Silas’s first feature film By Hook or By Crook, was a Sundance Film Festival premiere and five-time Best Feature winner. His documentary, What I Love About Dying, premiered at Sundance Film Festival and festivals internationally. Silas’s writing has been published in various anthologies and magazines. His second feature, Sunset Stories premiered at the SXSW film festival in 2012. Recently he directed Hudson Valley Ballers, a new webseries starring SNL veterans Paula Pell and James Anderson.

Failed academic Greg Newton earned his BA at Hunter College, majoring in religion and minoring in art history. He completed his coursework and examinations for a PhD in art history at CUNY Graduate Center before leaving academia to co-found the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division with his partner Donnie Jochum. He taught art history and writing at Parsons for 8 years while working on his dissertation on monochrome painting. He continues to pursue his profound interest in passivity, emptiness, silence, withdrawal, refusal, erasure, failure, uselesness, and negativity in general at the Bureau.

Jade Payne is a cosmic-mixed-race-diesel-femme, musician, and sound-sculptor/engineer. She plays guitar and electronic music in the two bands, Aye Nako and Holotropik. Jade enjoys geeking out about techy stuff, crystals, unknown pleasures, and the occult. She lives in Brooklyn with a chihuahua named Broccolini.

Poetry Benefit for Queer Detainee Empowerment Project
2014-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 | NY
Poets Stephen Boyer, Ariel Goldberg, and others will read their work in support of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project. Pay what you wish to donate at the door.

Stick around afterwards for Queers Got Talent Show: A Benefit for Queer Detainee Empowerment Project starting at 7:30!

QDEP is an Alternative-to-Detention program for queer, trans, and HIV+ detainees, asylees, and their families in NYC and New Jersey. QDEP supports folks in securing housing, food, education, travel, employment, healthcare, arts space, legal services, know-your-rights trainings, and community organizing.

qdep.org

For more information email hanugent1@gmail.com

Queers Got Talent Show: A Benefit for Queer Detainee Empowerment Project
2014-04-26 19:30 - 23:00 | NY
Come check out some of the hottest, most talented queers in NYC! Local burlesque dancers, musicians, filmmakers, and comedians will present short works in this fun-filled evening. Emceed by Drae Campbell and featuring fabulous raffle prizes from Trouble Films, Metropolitan Bar, The Pleasure Chest, Third Root Community Health Center, Tres Belle Petite Medi-Spa, Birds of Lace Press, and more! Awesome queer books plus wine and beer will all be available for sale! $5-$10 sliding scale admission fee benefits the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP) www.qdep.org. Email teresatheo@gmail.com for more information.
Confirmed performers:
Foxie Squire (burlesque)
Krissy Mahan (filmmaker)
Rose Hips (burlesque)
Ghostcat (musician)
Velvet Kensington (burlesque)
Elsa Waithe (comedian)
Jz Bich (burlesque)
Anna/Kate with Jayne Quan (musicians)
LeoVana (drag)
Michelle Brotman (musician)
Teresa Michele (burlesque)

26th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Finalist Reading at Leslie + Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art
2014-04-29 18:00 - 21:00 | Leslie + Lohman Musuem of Gay and Lesbian Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York, NY, 10013, United States
The Bureau will sell books that have been nominated for Lambda Literary Awards at the 26th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Finalist Reading at Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

Confirmed readers: Michael Klein, Cory Silverberg, Bushra Rehman, Larry Benjamin, Jane Hoppen, Richard Bowes, Jerry Rosco, Donna Minkowitz, Kathleen Warnock, Angelo Nikolopoulos, Jaime Woo, R. Erica Doyle, Stephen Mills, Roberta Degnore, Perry Halkitis, Annie Lanzillotto, Hilton Als, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Suzanne Parker, Alysia Abbott, Dominic Ambrose, Wally Lamb, Nell Stark, Ann Pellegrini, and Imogen Binnie.

For a complete list of the 26th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Finalists click here.

"Children of the Brain:" Harry Hay's Life, Theory, and Activism, 1953-1964. A talk by Ben Miller
2014-04-30 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Harry Hay’s life is typically presented in two chunks: the first covers his founding of the Mattachine Society, from approximately 1948 to his exit in 1953; the second, his involvement with and co-founding of the Radical Faeries in the 1970s and 1980s. Very little has been written about the time in between. While Hay’s biography spends only twenty-odd pages discussing the middle period of his life, new research demonstrates the importance of this period in his theory and activism, and the uniqueness of his ideas about identity and politics. Between 1953 and 1955, Hay fell into a deep political, emotional, and theoretical paralysis, as demonstrated by his withdrawal from homophile activism, unstable and dependent relationship with hat designer Jørn Kamgren, and often difficult-to-decipher and circular research notes. This paralysis was unlocked by developments in his research and theory. Fueled by research and an until-now unknown affair with a Tewa Native American man, Hay proposed a new social role for homophiles based on Native American traditions, in which they were responsible for producing intellectual and cultural capital and contributing to social development.

Ben Miller is a New York-based writer and student of history. Current projects include thesis research on early gay activist Harry Hay that has taken him to archives in California and conferences from Pennsylvania to New Mexico, an adaptation of an early Mozart libretto for performance at Carnegie Hall, and new short fiction influenced by his historical research. He is the 2014 winner of New York University’s Bessie and Louis Levy Prize for Excellence in American History, and the recipient of the Steffi Berne Research Scholarship in the Humanities from the same institution. His teachers in history and writing have included Linda Gordon, K. Kevyne Baar, Marcelle Clements, and Jonathan Safran Foer. His academic writing has appeared in Historian, College Film and Media Studies, and the Chicago Journal of History; and his short fiction has appeared in Brio, Studio on the Square, and West 10th. He is editor or co-editor of several publications, co-founder of Squid Ink Magazine (launching soon), and serves on the communications committee of the New York City Anti-Violence Project. He tweets @benwritesthings.
Photo: Harry Hay in Carmel, 1958. San Francisco Public Library Gay and Lesbian Center.

Kristiania Presents: The Queer Gaze
2014-05-01 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
Please join us for the first public event of Kristiania, an international anarcho-literary collective of politically minded writers. This will be a conversation around the subjects of queerness and subjectivity featuring the exciting authors and thinkers:

Samuel R. Delany
Ana Božičević
Saeed Jones
Trace Peterson

Moderated by Lonely Christopher
More on Kristiania: www.kristiania.org

Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous science fiction books including, Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, as well as the best-selling nonfiction study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and the memoir The Motion of Light In Water. His latest novel is Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. He lives in New York City and teaches at Temple University. The Lambda Book Report chose Delany as one of the fifty most significant men and women of the past hundred years to change our concept of gayness; he is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature; and, after winning four Nebula Awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him the 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.

Ana Božičević was born in Croatia in 1977 and emigrated to New York when she was nineteen. Her book of poems, Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC), were finalists for the 2010 and 2013 Lambda Literary Award. She completed her MFA at Hunter College and is now a PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she helps run the Annual Chapbook Festival, Lost&Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and the Transculturations Seminar. In Fall 2010, The Feminist Press honored her as one of their 40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism award recipients. Her translation of Zvonko Karanovi ́c’s Snow on Fire was awarded the PEN American Center/NYSCA grant. The anthology of translations The Day Lady Gaga Died: An Anthology of Newer New York Poets she co-edited with Željko Miti ́c appeared in Serbia in Fall 2011.

Saeed Jones is the author of the chapbook When the Only Light is Fire (2011, Sibling Rivalry Press) and the forthcoming poetry collection Prelude to Bruise (2014, Coffee House Press). His work has appeared in Best Gay Stories 2013, Guernica, Ebony Magazine, The Rumpus, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and West Branchamong other publications. Jones received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark and is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and Queer / Arts / Mentors. He works as the editor of Buzzfeed LGBT and lives in Brooklyn.

Trace Peterson’s two favorite things are sex and literary criticism. Author of the poetry book Since I Moved In(Chax Press) and numerous chapbooks of poems, she is also Editor / Publisher of EOAGH, co-editor of the new anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books) which is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award this year, and co-editor of the forthcoming Gil Ott: Collected Writings(Chax Press). From 2009-2012, she curated the TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice series inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she is currently a Ph.D. Candidate.

Lonely Christopher is a poet and filmmaker. He is the author of the poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (Monk Books, 2014) and the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, which was a 2011 selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books. His plays have been produced in New York City and China. He wrote and directed the feature film MOM (Cavazos Films, 2013) and his stories have been adapted for the screen in Canada and France. He lives in Brooklyn and is the programming director for the Kristiania Collective.

(dis)Assembly: Eileen Myles...Jennifer Natalya Fink...Iris Cushing
2014-05-02 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Three queer women writers of various genres read from their latest, taking apart and putting together an image of the world around them.
Moving between revelry in the parts, words, objects that piece together and the ultimate looming vision of the completed puzzle, these writers play with language in a way that gets to a sense of “reality” both within and beyond the words of their respective texts.

Eileen Myles is an poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. In 2012, she publishedSnowflake/different streets, a combination of two distinct poetry collections in one binding. Also in 2012, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog’s life.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is a mother of a hilarious and brilliant six-year-old girl, a professor of English at Georgetown University, a literacy activist, and an all-around hell-raiser. She is the author of three award-winning novels, The MIKVAH QUEEN, BURN, and V, and a short-story collection, THIRTEEN FUGUES.

Iris Cushing is the author of Wyoming, winner of the 2013 Furniture Press Poetry Prize. She lives in New York and is an editor at Argos Books and Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Ectoplasms
2014-05-03 20:00 - 23:00 | NY
Ectoplasm refers to a vomit-like substance produced by mediums during seances, supposedly as a manifestation of otherworldly spirits. For this performance salon and accompanying zine, we would like to use the phenomenon of ectoplasm as a way of thinking about the creation of the abject, what for Julia Kristeva constitutes that which has been discharged from the body, rendered excrement. How does the body function as a sight of transactions, of exits and entrances? In what ways is the abject haunted? What ghosts are coming out of you?
GIVE US UR BLOOD UR TEARS UR PUKE.

THE REAPPEARING ACT: BOOK PARTY
2014-05-06 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
Kate Fagan, a former Division 1 Basketball player and current ESPN writer, has written an honest and heartfelt memoir about coming out in sports. She is teaming up with two major local organizations and a few big names in sports including former NFL player, Wade Davis. Davis is the Executive Director of You Can Play Project and Nevin Caple, co-founder of Br{ache the Silence Campaign also played Division 1 Basketball.

PLEASE NOTE: THE BUREAU IS CLOSED ON TUESDAYS, BUT WE WILL OPEN AT 6 PM FOR THIS EVENT.

The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born Again Christians
It’s hard enough coming out, but playing basketball for a nationally ranked school and trying to figure out your sexual identity in the closeted and paranoid world of big-time college sports—that’s a challenge. In The Reappearing Act (Skyhorse Publishing; May 6, 2014) Kate Fagan tells her coming-of-age story about how she discovered her true self and slowly found the courage to live authentically.
Fagan’s love for basketball and for her religious teammates at the University of Colorado was tested by the gut-wrenching realization that she could no longer ignore the feelings of otherness inside her. In trying to blend in, Kate had created a hilariously incongruous world for herself in Boulder. Her best friends were part of Colorado’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes, where they ran weekly Bible studies and attended an Evangelical Free Church. For nearly a year, Kate joined them and learned all she could about Christianity—even holding their hands as they prayed for others “living a sinful lifestyle.” Each time the issue of homosexuality arose, she felt as if a neon sign appeared over her head, with a giant arrow pointed downward. During these prayer sessions, she would often keep her eyes open, looking around the circle at the closed eyelids of her friends, listening to the earnestness of their words.
Kate didn’t have a vocabulary for discussing who she really was and what she felt when she was younger; all she knew was that she had a secret. In The Reappearing Act, she brings the reader along for the ride as she slowly accepts her new reality and takes the first steps toward embracing her true self.

Kate Fagan is a columnist and feature writer for espnW, ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. She is also an in-studio contributor for The Word, a digital video segment that examines hot topics in sports. Previously, Fagan spent three seasons covering the 76ers for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her work was cited in the anthology of Best American Sports Writing 2013, and she has also been featured on Longreads, a site that curates the best in long-form journalism and fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Visit Kate Fagan’s Website
Follow Kate on Twitter

Wade Davis

NEWFANGLED 2: Robert Siek Introduces Joey De Jesus, Ryan Doyle May, & Roberto Montes
2014-05-09 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
NEWFANGLED returns to the Bureau! Robert Siek introduces poets Joey De Jesus, Ryan Doyle May, & Roberto Montes for a night of poetry readings.

JOEY DE JESUS is originally from the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. He received his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Devil’s Lake, Dislocate, Guernica, Kin Poetry Journal, LUMINA, Rhino, Versal, and elsewhere. He recently moved to Harlem.

RYAN DOYLE MAY’s work has appeared in various journals and performances. He is the author of the chapbook The Anatomy of Gray (Corresponding Society Press) and acted as the lead in the short film August, which was selected for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and is currently finishing a novel. He lives in Brooklyn.

ROBERTO MONTES is the author of I DON’T KNOW DO YOU and “HOW TO BE SINCERE IN YOUR POETRY” WORKSHOP, which is now available in full at napuniversityonline.com. He lives in Queens.

ROBERT SIEK is a poet who lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of the chapbook Clubbed Kid, published in 2002 by the New School, and the full-length collection of poetry Purpose and Devil Piss, published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013.

Bear Bards Read! NYC Book Launch for Hibernation, and other poems
2014-05-10 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
Join us for a fun and fur-filled evening of hirsute literary pursuit for the premiere reading and book launch for the new bear poetry anthology, Hibernation, and other poems by bear bards. Bear down to listen up as an outstanding group of authors reads from the book as well as other poems. Time allowing, we will open the mic to anyone who wants to read their bear-themed verse. This free event will be hosted by editor Ron J. Suresha and features contributing authors Scott Hightower, Daniel Lewiston, Rocco Russo, Jordan M. Shu, Chris Vaccaro, and Emanuel Xavier.
