BGSQD

Male Bodies Unmade: Author Jongwoo Jeremy Kim in conversation with Sharmistha Ray (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-09 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Male Bodies Unmade author Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and his colleague Sharmistha Ray for a conversation about representations of GWM (gay white male) beefcakes in art—and their significance for polyglot, POC queers. Critics are calling Male Bodies Unmade “witty and wise,” celebrating the book as “a gleaming example of queer critique.” Horny self-extinction and decolonial disidentification will be explored in relation to artists such as David Hockney and Robert Gober.
To reserve a copy of Male Bodies Unmade: Picturing Queer Selfhood (University of California Press, 2023, hardcover, $50), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Male Bodies Unmade for March 9th” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in Art History and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities, as well as Male Bodies Unmade: Picturing Queer Selfhood. Kim’s approach is informed by his own status as an immigrant—a polyglot queen drawn to extravagant fantasies of misbehaving bodies that are in truth foreign territories, colonies of misbeliefs.

Sharmistha Ray (they/them) is a visual artist, art critic, curator, and professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Art. Their artistic practice delves into the complex inheritance of multiple cultures through their queer identity and modes of abstraction. Reviews of their work have appeared in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, Hyperallergic, and many others.

It Was Her New York: True Stories and Snapshots (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-03 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
CELEBRATING THE RELEASE OF IT WAS HER NEW YORK (ROOTSTOCK PUBLISHING): true stories and accidental snapshots about undying love, old lesbians, all our fellow New Yorkers, and home.
3PM – Reading, Presentation and Conversation
COPIES OF IT WAS HER NEW YORK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE & SIGNING AFTER ARTIST TALK
A reading and presentation of excerpts from IT WAS HER NEW YORK, followed by a conversation with author C.O. Moed and Lesbian Herstory Archivette Paula Grant.
Through a mosaic of intimate photo-illustrated vignettes, IT WAS HER NEW YORK (Rootstock Publishing) celebrates the fierce moxie of New Yorkers, immigrants seeking the American Dream, a sixty-year-old hidden love story of two women, defiance against infuriating aging, the definition of home as it slowly disappears into gentrification and what it means to be family. This rare fusion brings visibility not only to underrepresented communities, but also highlight the men and women who keep America’s cities running.
Copies of IT WAS HER NEW YORK (2024, paperback, $36) will be available for purchase and signing. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of It Was Her New York” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

C.O. Moed grew up on New York’s Lower East Side when it was still a tough neighborhood. A recipient of the Elizabeth George Grant for Fiction and an alum of the infamous and groundbreaking WOW Cafe, her work has appeared in various presses and anthologies. Her 10-year blog (2006-2016) My Private Coney, about New York City, love, death and the meaning of home has been featured in Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York and excerpted in various online magazines and websites. She lives with fellow writer and fellow Mets fan, Ted Krever.

Paula Grant is a Lesbian Herstory Archivette and Elder. A social worker, activist and a great dancer, as well as a contributor to C.O. Moed’s blog My Private Coney, she is one of the coordinators at LHA and has been a volunteer since 1979. She was born in 1945 in Manhattan, grew up in the Bronx and is a longtime activist for human and civil rights. She trained as a social worker and in 2010 retired from a public agency in suburban New York State after forty years. She was a Dodger’s fan until they deserted New York.

LI CHENG’S JOSÉ (2018) (in person only)
2024-02-29 18:30 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us for a screening of Li Cheng’s José (2018) on Thursday, February 29, at 6:30 PM. José centers the experiences of a young gay Guatemalan man who lives with his mother. The coming-of-age film grapples with the realities of being an LGBTQ+ person searching for love in a highly religious and homophobic country.
Event hosted by filmmaker Fernando Vieira
About the Film:
19-year-old José lives with his mother in Guatemala. It’s a tough life in one of the most violent and religious countries. When he meets Luis, he’s thrust into new-found passion and pain.
Running time: 1 hour and 25 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles.

About the Director:
Li CHENG, writer, director, producer. Originally from China and moved to the USA in 1999 and now world-nomad since 2015. Key themes: society, struggle, crisis, hope. Cheng left biotechnology research in 2007 to focus on film, and his first feature, Joshua Tree (2014) is on the crisis of the American Dream – a critique of US American culture. His second feature, José (2018) premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival on 6 September 2018 and was awarded Queer Lion the following day – for the project he conducted research in 12 Latin American countries and lived in Guatemala for two years: a struggling place yet filled with youthful hope. Cheng holds a PhD from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.
About the Screening Curator:
Fernando VIEIRA is a New York-based filmmaker and performer. Works include the documentary Unlabeled (2021) and experimental film Frenetic Journey Toward Muddledness (2023). Vieira graduated from CUNY Graduate Center with a Masters in Liberal Studies, Film and Media Cultures concentration (2024).

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Virtual Craft Class & Reading with Mariam Bazeed (online only)
2024-02-24 11:00 - 13:30 | online class
Join us for a virtual Craft Class and Reading with Mariam Bazeed on Saturday, February 24th, 2024! This Craft Class is virtual and will run from 11:00 AM-1:00 PM and the reading from 1:00 PM.
Once you RSVP, you will receive a Zoom Link the day before the workshop. You will also have a chance to donate directly to the “tip jar.” All tips go directly to the instructor.
RSVP here

Once Upon a Pandemic: I attended a Zoom reading featuring Natalie Diaz, wherein she described some of her work as a native poet as a kind of writing through English, and the phrase stuck! In this generative workshop, we will consider poets whose work, though cloaked in English, challenges its archives, uncovers its erasures, and rewrites its invented histories through formal and semantic inter- and contraventions. I’ll prepare a packet including works by Jordan Abel, Jessica Abughattas, Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Marwa Helal, Noor Hindi, Cathy Park Hong, Noor Ibn Najam, and Layli Long Soldier, and we’ll discuss a subset to write from their prompt. For my reading, I’ll share some of my recent erasure and bilingual work, tracing the Arab as the Arab is effaced and erased in the landscape of American legacy media.
Mariam Bazeed is a multi–award winning Egyptian immigrant, poet, playwright, performance artist, actor, editor, translator, curator, and cook, living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed in festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Their first play, peace camp org, an autobiographical queer anti-Zionist musical(ish) comedy about summer camp, is published by Oberon Books, UK, and won them the Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award for creative promise in 2021. They are currently at work on their first novel, The Boy Made of Air, and on a new theatrical commission for Noor Theatre, NYC. To procrastinate from facing the blank page, Mariam curates and runs an occasional world-music salon and open mic in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music.

Opening Reception for LGBTIQ+ in the Jungle: A Solo Exhibition by Arturo Lizcano - DiAVolo
2024-02-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Please join us for the Opening Reception of:
LGBTIQ+ in the Jungle
A solo exhibition by Arturo Lizcano – DiAVolo
On view at the Bureau from February 23 – May 5, 2024

Artist’s statement:
“I’m interested in portraying members of the LGBTIQ+ community from another perspective. I wanted to portray people from the community who inspire me for the way they live. They are not famous, but they are powerful, brave, they accept themselves, and confront the world and its prejudices.
“For this particular series, I put them in the jungle. I selected birds, fish, and felines from the Amazon jungle and the entire Colombian Andean region. The plants in my maternal grandmother’s garden were the main source of inspiration – the greens and flowers found in Huila.”

Biography:
Arturo Lizcano – DiAVolo is a Colombian artist based in NYC. He graduated as an accountant, and for about 20 years worked in finance. 6 years ago he rediscovered the art in his life and now is living his dream as an artist doing illustration and murals, with nature as a main inspiration.
@forero.arturo

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle’s Reading Series, February Edition (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-21 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Publishing Triangle presents its monthly OUTspoken Reading Series as host Rob Byrnes welcomes Lisa Gitlin, Felice Picano, Carol Rosenfeld, Kate Rounds, Daniel Meltz, Jerome Ellison Murphy, and Kathi Wolfe. Join us as in-person or remotely to hear from some of queer literature’s most dynamic established and up-and-coming voices.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Second Tuesday Presents: Raquel Willis
2024-02-20 18:30 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
This event has been postponed! The new date is Tuesday, February 20th, at 6:30 pm!
The Center is proud to bring in the new year with a new Second Tuesday Lecture Series featuring the trail-blazing activist and author Raquel Willis. Willis will sit in conversation with Jordyn Jay to discuss her groundbreaking memoir The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation.
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division will host this event: room 210 of The LGBT Community Center.
Please note that the Bureau is closed on Tuesdays. We will open at 6:30 PM for this event.
Doors open at 6:30 PM. Event at 7 PM.
$10 Suggested Donation to The Center (register here)
Registration is encouraged, but not required.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

The Bureau will offer copies of The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation (St. Martin’s Press, 2023, hardcover, $29) for purchase. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of The Risk It Takes to Bloom” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

ABOUT RAQUEL WILLIS
Raquel Willis is an award-winning activist, journalist, and media strategist dedicated to collective liberation, especially for Black trans folks. She is an executive producer with iHeartMedia’s first-ever LGBTQ+ podcast network, Outspoken, and the host of Afterlives, a podcast centering the lives and legacies of trans folks lost too soon to violence. She is also the author of The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation.
Raquel has held groundbreaking posts, including director of communications for Ms. Foundation for Women, executive editor of Out magazine, and national organizer for Transgender Law Center. She co-founded Transgender Week of Visibility and Action with civil rights attorney Chase Strangio. She is the president of the Solutions Not Punishments Collaborative’s executive board and serves on the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art board.
She published the GLAAD Media Award-winning “Trans Obituaries Project,” in 2022, she executive-produced and hosted “The Trans Youth Town Hall” with Logo. The work was nominated for the GLAAD Awards and won Gold distinction in the Shorty Awards. She was also honored as a 2023 ADCOLOR Advocate. For a full bio please visit: raquelwillis.com
ABOUT THE RISK IT TAKES TO BLOOM
Born in Augusta, Georgia, to Black Catholic parents, Raquel spent years feeling isolated, even within a loving, close-knit family. There was little access to understanding what it meant to be queer and transgender. It wasn’t until she went to the University of Georgia that she found the LGBTQ+ community, fell in love, and explored her gender for the first time. But the unexpected death of her father forced her to examine her relationship with herself and those she loved. These years of grief, misunderstanding, and hard-won epiphanies seeped into the soil of her life, serving as fertilizer for growth and allowing her to bloom within.
Upon graduation, Raquel entered a career in journalism against the backdrop of the burgeoning Movement for Black Lives, intersectional feminism going mainstream, and unprecedented visibility of the trans community. After hiding her identity as a newspaper reporter, her increasing awareness of the epidemic of violence plaguing trans women of color and the heightened suicide of trans teens inspired her to come out publicly. Within just a few short years of community organizing in Atlanta, Oakland, and New York, Raquel emerged as one of the most formidable Black trans activists in history.
In The Risk It Takes to Bloom, Raquel Willis recounts with passion and candor her experiences straddling the Obama and Trump eras, the possibility of transformation after tragedy, and how complex moments can push us all to take necessary risks and bloom toward collective liberation. For more info visit: raquelwillis.com

Jordyn Jay (she/her/hers) is a visionary working to impact arts and culture by centering the voices and contributions of Black trans femmes. A brilliant and multi-talented change-maker, she is a director, writer, producer, public speaker and community leader.
Jordyn is the founder and executive director of the BTFA (Black Trans Femmes in the Arts) Collective and the executive producer of BTFA Productions– a worldwide movement that seeks to produce and preserve the artistic innovations and creations of Black trans femmes and address systemic inequality through advocacy and action. During global uprisings and calls for racial justice in June 2020, BTFA alongside the Black Trans Travel Fund, For the Gworls, and the Okra Project raised $1 million in one week to support Black trans protesters and organizations on the ground with support from influential voices including Laverne Cox, Indya Moore, Janet Mock, Charli XCX, Neil Patrick Harris, Troye Sivan, and Hunter Schaffer.
Jordyn is currently based in Brooklyn, New York where she received her master’s degree in Art Politics from New York University’s (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts and her B.A. in Imagining Abolition – a major she created at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study that focuses on how art can be used as a tool for building a world without police and prisons and prioritizes healing over punishment and disposability. But it was what she learned outside the classroom that counts. The lack of representation and meaningful inclusivity within her program pushed her to study and navigate the world off campus and begin the work of seeking out and protecting Black trans femme lives and contributions.
Jordyn’s Southern roots have allowed her to blossom into the leader she is today. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, she learned the value of collective care and community at an early age from her large and loving family. A proud graduate of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, which opened in 1922 as a primary school for Black students during The Segregation Era in America, Jordyn credits her experiences there as the gateway to helping her find her voice through theater while navigating and discovering her identity.
An advocate for real and meaningful social impact, Jordyn is an adamant believer in inspiring systemic and sociopolitical change. She maintains an active role in issues impacting Black trans communities from the criminal legal system to arts and culture.
Jordyn’s contributions to make an impact on the world have not gone unnoticed. She has been awarded the Octavia St. Laurent Vision of Excellence Award and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute Legacy Award. In 2023, she was selected as an LGBTQ+ Power Player by PoliticsNY, and was elected to the Brooklyn Arts Leadership Council. She has also served on the Innovation, Art, and Technology subcommittee for NYU BeTogether and hosted NYC PrideFest.
Jordyn has been featured in ESSENCE, Bloomberg Business Insider, Forbes, on The Grio TV, SiriusXM Radio, New York Public Radio, and more. She has led workshops and been a keynote speaker at New York University, Dartmouth University, the Tate Modern, The Ford Foundation, and SXSW.
She was also featured in the docuseries “Artistic Legacies” by Trans Lash and “Flowers” – a media project by Sage Dolan-Sandrino that celebrates Black trans women in New York City.
Jordyn not only dreams of Black trans liberation; she is bending the arc of justice to make it real.
Jordyn enjoys spending time with her family and listening to her favorite artists.

TELL 90: Take Heart (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-17 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
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 since February 2014–making this the 10th anniversary of TELL!
The theme of the 90th TELL is Take Heart. Featuring storytellers Gagarin, Jilberto Soto, Ky Dates, and Manatsu Tanaka.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
We ask all attendees to please wear a mask at this event. We will provide masks for those who need them. Thank you!

Suggested donation to benefit the storytellers and the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

DRAE CAMPBELL’s first performance was at age 5 in a nightclub opening for a punk band. Drae has a BFA in Theater from The University of Arts in Philadelphia. Some Theater credits include: The Nosebleed (Lincoln Center Theater), Only You Can Prevent Wildfires (Ricochet Collective), Non-Consensual Relationships with Ghosts (La MaMa), My Old Man (Dixon Place), Oph3lia(HERE). TV includes “New Amsterdam,” “Bull ” and “Dinette ” (web series, directed by Shaina Feinberg). Drae has been hosting and curating TELL for more than 9 years which is now a SILVER Signal Award-winning podcast of the same name. www.draecampbell.com

Jilberto Soto is a first gen. Mexican American stand up comedian. He began comedy in London and moved to NYC during the pandemic. He co-produces two shows: Purple Park Comedy- showcasing upcoming POC/female comics and Mariposas Comedy – a curated all queer line up. Alongside co-producing, he also hosts his own podcast: I hope this ages well, which centers around the interesting lives of senior members around NYC. In 2022, Jilberto was featured on three showcases for the New York Comedy Festival.

Ky Dates (they/them/he/him) is an interdisciplinary writer, director, comedian, actor, and experimental contemporary performance maker. They are a recent graduate from Muhlenberg College, receiving a B.A. in both Theatre and English. Recent performances include The Moth StorySLAM and Storytellers (curated by Caroline Dunn and Hope Woodard). Lastly, Ky is a pisces sun, libra moon, and Leo rising.

Manatsu Tanaka (they/them) is a bicultural multi-disciplinary artist, most fluent in dance, who grew up and has been performing in Japan and the US. They believe that it is our bodies that humanity should be able to seek shelter in, therefore, they pursue their creative practices for illustrating humanness through their physical canvas. At the core of their heart, Manatsu is committed to using their creativity and artistry to join the frontline of trans and gender non-conforming artists in the dance and theater world. Art is for the people, not for the “audiences”. “I dance to the heartbeat of our collective humanity.” @manatsu.tanaka

Gagarin is an actor, artist, and the Russian twink son of Tony Soprano and Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. With a passion for the classics and making queer art for queer people they largely live in the world of devised and wacky physical theatre. Gagarin is currently a curator with Hedgepig Ensemble Theatre and runs a low-cost community centered Movement Collective, keep up with their shenanigans on insta @hotcephalopodsinurarea

Outwright LTD: Rebel Poets (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-16 18:00 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Afro-American scholar James Wright and friends present the first of a three-part series on the radical poets of the 1960s & 1970s. Poets featured in this presentation include Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Diane Di Prima, Laini Mataka (formerly known as Wanda Robinson), Marge Piercy, and Calvin Hernton.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Watermelon Pink: The Crossroads Of Queerness and Arabness Through the Lens of Palestine (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-15 19:30 - 20:30 | Room 101 of The LGT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Rand (@officiallyjakegyllenhalal), Afeef (@afeefness) and Fouad (@fouaddict) tell stories about the intersection of queerness and Arabness in the context of advocating and documenting the movement for a Free Palestine. From covering drag queens in Beirut, working with refugee camps in Amman, protesting in the West Bank, and dealing the McCarthyism here in the United States, join us for a night of discussion of the past and organizing for the future.
This event will take place in person in room 101 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Please note: We are expecting a large audience for this event, and we do not accept reservations, so please arrive early to ensure that you are able to attend in person. Doors will open at 7 pm. The event will begin at 7:30 pm

Once we reach capacity (150 people) we will not be able to accommodate any more attendees. If you are unable to attend in person, we encourage you to watch the live-stream on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

A recording of the live-stream will remain on the Bureau’s YouTube channel, and can be viewed at anytime.
Masks required and provided!
We will collect donations on behalf of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
Afeef writes:
“UNRWA needs aid more than anyone right now. It is collective punishment to cut off millions of Gazans from aid for the claims that a few employees might or might not be involved with violence, and that is what we’re seeing in the news right now. We want to contribute to the UN agency because it employs over 3000 Gazans and … is the most helpful organization in Palestine and always has been.”

BIOS:
Afeef is a journalist who’s worked for Spotify, The Daily Show and The Wall Street Journal. He focuses on queer and Arab stories. Afeef lived through the 2006 Lebanon war and went to jail in Beirut for covering Palestine. He is now a content creator, professor and freelance journalist. @afeefness

Fouad is a global public health professional and advocate living in Washington, DC. Having grown up in Amman as a Palestinian Jordanian, he developed a passion for working with Palestinian refugee communities on issues of health and justice. @fouaddict

Rand is a queer Palestinian Muslim content creator and organizer who’s especially passionate about stories and storytelling as a means of resistance. If she could, she would spend the rest of her life interviewing every single person she wanted to and broadcasting their story to the world with the hopes of uniting us all in collective liberation. @officiallyjakegyllenhalal

VISION TWO book launch (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-11 16:00 - 18:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
VISION TWO BOOK LAUNCH

Artist/curator Nathan Rapport in conversation with Paul Soileau (Christeene)

CELEBRATING THE RELEASE OF THE SOPHOMORE VOLUME OF DREAM BROTHER GALLERY’S ONGOING ART BOOK SERIES, VISION, AIMED AT SHOWCASING AND GENERATING FUNDS FOR WORKING QUEER ARTISTS.
FEATURING THE WORK OF EIGHT QUEER VISUAL ARTISTS AND A FOREWORD BY MICHELLE TEA.
COPIES OF VISION ONE AND VISION TWO WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE & SIGNING.
GRAB ONE FOR YOUR SWEETHEART.
FREE ARTIST-MADE VALENTINE WITH BOOK PURCHASE.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Nathan Rapport is a California raised multimedia artist and gallery owner. Guided by formative years in San Francisco, his art celebrates the connectivity between the present experience and queer ancestral history.
Nathan is the founder of DREAM BROTHER GALLERY, a queer art platform dedicated to nurturing and generating funds for working Queer Artists.
Paul Soileau is a performance artist best known for his alter egos CHRISTEENE (christeenemusic.com), a sexually infused sewer of live rap and vile shamelessness, and cabaret crooning Rebecca Havemeyer, an ageless bastard heiress of the boozy bygone Hollywood years.

Peer Review: A Queer Publishing Roundtable Presented by WUSSY MAG and the Bureau (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-10 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Since 2014, WUSSY Mag, a DIY queer arts & culture organization and biannual print publication based in Atlanta, GA, has been a platform for emerging artists, subversive humor, community action, and unhinged digital discourse. In collaboration with the Bureau and their current exhibition Wussies Networking: Some Queer Sensibilities, curated by Tannon Reckling, WUSSY presents a live panel of writers, artists, editors, and organizers working through and beyond the precarious landscape of contemporary independent queer publishing, together in conversation about gay zine culture, collective resilience, industry gossip, the power of smut, and the future of print media.
Featuring:
Mikelle Street, Freelance Writer & Editor
Kamikaze Jones, Art Editor, WUSSY Mag
Sarah Burke, Editor-in-Chief, Them
Tyler Akers, Art Editor, Gayletter
Whitney Mallett, Editor-in-Chief, The Whitney Review of New Writing
Moderated by Rachel Garbus (Editor-in-Chief, WUSSY Mag)

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

MIKELLE STREET, Freelance Writer & Editor
Mikelle Street is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City. He is a former editorial director for Out and The Advocate magazines and has written for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vogue, GQ, New York Magazine, and Harper’s.

SARAH BURKE, Editor-in-Chief, Them
Sarah Burke joined Them in 2021 from VICE where she served as an editor since 2017. There, as special projects editor, Burke helped develop multimedia collaboration across departments and lead multi-format projects including: The Gender Spectrum Collection, an award-winning stock photo library featuring trans and nonbinary models; Queerly Beloved, an Ellie-nominated podcast telling remarkable stories of chosen family; and Transnational, a Peabody and GLAAD award-winning docuseries about transgender rights around the world. She is a queer, mixed Pilipinx and was born and raised on O’ahu. She currently lives in Bed-Stuy with her partner and her cat, Miso.

KAMIKAZE JONES, Art Editor, WUSSY Magazine
Kamikaze Jones is a writer, curator, erotic chanteuse, and regional filth correspondent. His work across mediums, often concerned with underground queer performance legacies and the ghosts of public sex, has been featured by Art Omi, Anthology Film Archives, BBC Radio 4, Black Mountain College Museum, Center For Performance Research, Montez Press Radio, Wave Farm, The Poetry Project, and Onassis USA. His arts & culture writing has been published by X-TRA, Screen Slate, The Brooklyn Rail, and LAMBDA Literary. He was a founding member of the poetry and performance collective The Anchoress Syndicate, and the host of the podcast “Pure Garbage: An Oral Examination of John Waters.” He is the current art editor of WUSSY Magazine.

WHITNEY MALLETT, Editor-in-Chief, The Whitney Review of New Writing
Whitney Mallett is the founding editor of The Whitney Review of New Writing and the co-editor of Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey. She contributes to The New York Times, Paris Review, and Interview, and also writes short fiction.

TYLER AKERS, Art Editor, Gayletter
Tyler Akers has served as Art Editor at Gayletter Magazine since 2017. Originally from West Virginia, he received a BFA in Art History from the Savannah of College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and he graduated with an MFA in Art Writing and Criticism from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2014. He writes about art regularly, and his interviews, essays, and criticism can be read in Hyperallergic, The Classic, and The Brooklyn Rail.

An Evening With Martin Duberman Hosted by Richard Schneider Jr. (virtual event-online only)
2024-02-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Martin Duberman discusses his latest book THE LINE OF DISSENT: Gay Outsiders and the Shaping of History hosted by Richard Schneider Jr.
To join this virtual event, you have two options:

Join Zoom Meeting at 7 PM EST on Thursday, February 8, 2024
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89415980537?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 894 1598 0537
Passcode: [REDACTED]
2. Or visit the Bureau’s YouTube channel to watch the livestream
(typically starts a few minutes after scheduled time, so please be patient):
YouTube.com/@bgsqd
Purchase The Line of Dissent from the Bureau’s online store:

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at CUNY, Martin Duberman is the author of some two dozen books, including Stonewall, Cures, Paul Robeson, Haymarket, and Jews Queers Germans. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award, three Lambda Literary Awards, a special award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for his contributions to literature, the 2007 lifetime achievement award from the American Historical Association, and the Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and has received honorary degrees from Amherst College and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

Richard Schneider Jr., editor, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (until 2000, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review), which he launched in 1994. Taking his doctorate in sociology at Harvard in the early 1980s, he was a university lecturer for the next decade before founding The G&LR as a sideline while working for a Boston consulting firm in the ’90s. The magazine has been his full-time job since 1999. He lives in Boston with his partner Stephen Hemrick.

OLNY Poly Movie Night: Anne+ (in person only)
2024-02-07 18:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Open Love NY presents Poly Movie Night, a FREE series of feature films that focus on the portrayal of consensual / ethical non-monogamy in cinema. This month we’ll be in person at our regular venue, the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.

Please join us for Anne+ (2021), directed by Valerie Bisscheroux and starring Hanna van Vliet, Jouman Fattal, and Thorn de Vries.

Wednesday, February 7 – 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
208 W 13th St, Rm 210
New York, NY 10011

We’ll meet at 6:30 pm at the Bureau (in room 210 of The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center at 208 West 13th Street) for pre-screening socializing and start the movie at 7 pm. The event is free, although a $10 suggested donation to help fund future events is much appreciated.

Synopsis: Anne, a young woman living in Amsterdam, struggles with the changes brought on by her partner’s move to Montreal for a job. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In Dutch with English subtitles.

New York Book Launch: Cuentos "Completos" by Manuel Ramos Otero (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-03 19:00 - 20:30 | The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, Room 101, New York, 10011, United States
Join an all-star lineup for the New York launch of legendary diasporic Puerto Rican writer Manuel Ramos Otero’s Cuentos “completos” in a new Spanish edition published by Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and Callejón, edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé. With a bilingual reading by authors Giannina Braschi, Gerard Cabrera, Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Lina Meruane, Huáscar Robles, and Emanuel Xavier, help celebrate the return of Ramos Otero’s work, after 30 years of being out of print, to the city where he lived, loved, and wrote from his arrival in 1968 at age 20 to his death from AIDS in 1990 at the age of 42.
Planning to purchase a copy of Cuentos “completos” (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and Callejón, 2024, paperback, $24.95)? Please reserve a copy by writing to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of Cuentos ‘completos'” in the subject line.
This will help us to make sure we have enough copies on hand.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Planning to attend in person? Please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-york-book-launch-cuentos-completos-by-manuel-ramos-otero-tickets-801478352327

Hosted by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Co-Sponsored by:
The New York City LGBT Community Center
The Publishing Triangle, OUTSpoken Series
Instituto De Cultura Puertorriqueña, Ediciones Callejón
Center for Puerto Rican Studies – Hunter College/CUNY

This event will take place in person at The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., Room 101, NYC, 10011.
Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Biographies:
Manuel Ramos Otero (1948-1990) influential Puerto Rican diasporic writer who migrated to New York City in 1968 to pursue advanced studies in theater, literature, and film, and life as an openly gay man. A queer, anticolonial, and feminist writer, Ramos Otero cultivated a self-reflexive, gender and genre-bending prose that was both confessional and historic, poetic and philosophical, campy, witty, and street-savvy. He is the author of the short story collections Concierto de metal para un recuerdo y otras orgías de soledad (1971), El cuento de la Mujer del Mar (1979), Página en blanco y staccato (1987) and Cuentos de buena tinta (1992); the experimental novel La novelabingo (1976), and the books of poetry Invitación al polvo (1991) y El libro de la muerte (1985). In 1990, at age 42, he died of AIDS complications, leaving behind a legacy that continues to grow in influence among the younger generations of Puerto Rican writers.

Giannina Braschi is an iconic Puerto Rican poet and Latinx philosopher who writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English. She is the author of Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing!, and United States of Banana. Her forthcoming title is PUTINOIKA.

Gerard Cabrera is a Massarican from Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the first American dictionary, Dr. Seuss, and basketball. His debut novel, Homo Novus, was published in October 2022. An attorney, he lives and works in New York City.

Arnaldo M. Cruz-Malavé is professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Fordham University. He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails; coeditor of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism; and editor of Cuentos “completos” de Manuel Ramos Otero (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and Callejón).

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His published fiction includes Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (Bilingual Press, 2009) and Abolición del pato (Terranova, 2013). He is also the author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Larry performs in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010 and has appeared in several episodes of the YouTube series Cooking with Drag Queens.

Lina Meruane is a Chilean writer residing in New York City since 2000. Her well recognized works of fiction include two collections of short stories, five novels, five essay books and two plays. She currently teaches creative writing as Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Huáscar Robles is a Puerto Rican author-journalist-photographer-musician who writes about social justice, economic, and LGBTQ+ issues in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean and the U.S. His 2023 debut novel, Demonios, was published by Secta de los perros in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Emanuel Xavier is the author of several poetry books including Pier Queen, Americano, If Jesus Were Gay, Nefarious, and Radiance. His latest collection is Love(ly) Child (Rebel Satori Press, 2023). He is recipient of a New York City Council Citation Award, an International Latino Book Award, and a Gay City Impact Award. His work has appeared in Poetry, A Gathering of the Tribes, and elsewhere.

OLD, QUEER, & KICKING: Jonathan Ned Katz: A Painter, His Paintings, His Life (in person & live-streaming)
2024-02-02 18:00 - 19:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Celebrating His 86th Birthday, Artist and Historian Jonathan Ned Katz
Discusses His Life-Long Career as a Visual Artist–and Shows the Pictures to Prove It!
Though best known as an award-winning, pioneering historian of LGBTQ US history, Jonathan Ned Katz has also had a life-long career as a visual artist.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

The World That Is Coming: A Do'ikayt Teach-in (in person only)
2024-01-31 18:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Wednesday January 31st, 6-9 PM, Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, in room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011 (doors close at 7 for a protected circle practice, attendance capped at 35, masks required and provided)
The conversation will NOT be recorded or shared publicly, to allow people to share freely, to be courageous, to integrate the new.
Do’ikayt is the yiddish word for “here-ness.” It describes a movement that came into being at the same time as, and in conversation with, the nascent zionist political project in the late 1800s, and it is based on the idea that wherever we are, that is our homeland; that our task as Jews is to build solidarity and fight for liberation in the places where we already live and work.
It’s difficult for many diasporic Jews to imagine a praxis that integrates all of the ancestral trauma that we carry with the drive for peace and justice for all peoples to which we are commanded. Do’ikayt offers as a possibility that tikkun olam (“repairing the world”) will come when ALL borders fall and ALL states dissolve.
We are in a climate of unbearable propaganda; we are being thrown bodily into the memories of generations of screaming ancestors who yearn for sanctuary. This is being crafted intentionally by agents of states who need us to be too dissociated, too triggered, and too terrified to connect across difference so that they can get on with their work of exploitation and domination. Our only job right now is to resist that, to push through the dissociation and the fear and the trauma to reach out for each other, to dismantle the borders and walls and protections that the fear and trauma spring up around us, to remember that we are not each other’s enemy.
When we tear down the walls around our hearts, we are making ourselves into channels through which olam haba’a (“the world to come“) can be born, and when we tear down the walls in the world, letting the sacred peace of Shabbat rush in like undammed water, letting the artificial mechanisms of the state be washed away by a river of solidarity, we are bringing it to pass.
If you want to open yourself to the possibility of do’ikayt as medicine, and want to do it in community, please join us to explore the history, tradition, and possibility of a way of being Jewish that does not accept the violence that we are being asked to tolerate in the name of our own safety.
************************************************************
Do’ikayt Teach-In: Community Agreements
Please read and agree to these before entering the space.

We are here to keep each other safe, and to let ourselves be uncomfortable.

“what does safety mean” is one of the things we’ll be exploring, but one of our responsibilities is to learn the difference between discomfort and danger. When we trust ourselves and each other enough to tolerate discomfort and open to the new, it opens up space for us to be brave together. Call for a time-out if you need to, and then try to dare to step back in. By choosing to enter this space, you’re agreeing to do your best to be brave.

Let yourself be guided.

If you are being overtly disruptive of the connections and conversations, a facilitator will ask you to stop. If you’re not able to stop when you’re asked to stop, you’ll be asked to step out or away. By choosing to enter this space, you’re agreeing that you’ll do your best to trust the facilitators and each other, stop when you’re asked to stop, and step out or away if you’re asked to.

We are not each other’s enemy.

You might be feeling angry, afraid, triggered, dissociated, or any of a million other things, and those feelings might make it hard for you to be kind. Whatever you’re feeling is welcome here, but no matter how hard it is, you have to do your best to be kind anyway. By choosing to enter this space, you’re agreeing that you’ll do your best to act with compassion towards the other people in this space no matter how you’re feeling.

Focus on here and now.

As Jews, our ancestral trauma is being intentionally triggered by propaganda machines that need us afraid and dissociated. We can only build a better world if we can distinguish between those triggers and the here-and-now, and we do that by coming back to the body. By choosing to enter this space, you’re agreeing that you’ll do your best to honor your ancestors and your living family by noticing those triggers, honoring them, and then returning to the here-and-now and to the body.

Another world is possible.

It’s okay if this feels distant, maybe even like fantasy. But by choosing to enter this space, you’re agreeing that you’ll do your best to at least be curious about if it’s true.

Psalm 27 ends with the following words: chazak veya’ametz libecha.
Be strong, and strengthen your heart.

***

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd
***

Biography of the event organizer and facilitator:
Andy is a Spinozan pantheist weirdo Jew, a time traveling transsexual, and an attorney, mediator, and facilitator of transformative justice processes with fifteen years of experience in protest support and radical lawyering with the National Lawyers Guild. Andy is on the board of their renewal synagogue, Kol Hai, and they live on a tranarchist intentional community in the Hudson Valley. Andy’s work explores the interplay between mystical diasporism, gender antinomianism, sadomasochism, and ancestor veneration with an eye towards the triumph of the forces of faggotry over the state.

Andy recommends the following titles if you want to learn more about the history and practice of radical Judaism and diasporism. Please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com if you’d like to purchase any of these at this event or at any other time and we’ll confirm that we have them in stock.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
The No State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, Daniel Boyarin (Yale University Press, 2023, hardcover, $30)
Revolutionary Yiddishland, Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg (Verso, 2017, paperback, $19.95)
There Is Nothing So Whole As A Broken Heart, Cindy Milstein, ed. (AK Press, 2021, paperback $23).
Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness In Solidarity With Palestinians, Atalia Omer (University of Chicago Press, 2019, paperback $38)
The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (Indiana University Press, 2007, paperback, $24.95)
To The Ghosts Who Are Still Living, Ami Weintraub (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, 2023, paperback, $20)

Scott Alexander Hess' A Season in Delhi in conversation with author Dana Burnell (in person & live-streaming)
2024-01-28 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Scott Alexander Hess will be reading from his new fiction A Season in Delhi, followed by a conversation with author Dana Burnell (The Tame Man). The novella was called “a queer poetic experience that is reminiscent of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, but much more erotic! “- Andrew Rimby.
Copies of A Season in Delhi (Rebel Satori Press, 2023, paperback, $14) will be available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve A Season in Delhi” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Scott Alexander Hess is the author of seven novels, including Skyscraper, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and The Butcher’s Sons, which was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015. His recent fiction The Root of Everything & Lightning is a #1 Amazon Bestseller and A Season in Delhi was released in 2023.

Dana Burnell has written for the London Times Sunday Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Time Out New York, Show Business Weekly and others. A former contributing associate for Harvard Review, co-founder of Firewater Films in NYC and arts editor for Inside New York, Dana was awarded a Mellon Foundation Grant for Fiction from Columbia University. Dana lives in New York City, and The Tame Man is her first novel. Her next novel, Remember the Night, about a woman obsessed with film noir star Barbara Stanwyck who finds herself living a noir, will be published in 2025.

Laughter in the Analytic Setting (registration required)
2024-01-26 19:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Colloquium Series of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis
January 26, 2024
Nuar Alsadir: “Laughter in the Analytic Setting”
Beginning with a moment in one of Freud’s case studies in which he bursts out laughing, this talk will explore the ways in which laughter can act as a form of unconscious communication. Because of the positive associations most people have to laughter, its meaning often flies beneath the social—and, often, analytic—radar, even as it has the potential to collapse the alliance between an analyst and an analysand.
Learning Objectives:
1. Participants will be able to identify different forms of laughter and how each communicates outside of language.
2. Participants will learn to identify unconscious communication, countertransference, and enactments.
3. Participants will learn how to use their understanding of laughter’s different modes of communication in the treatment.

CLICK HERE TO PAY AND REGISTER TO ATTEND IN PERSON
For in-person attendance you will receive an E-ticket through Eventbrite.

CLICK HERE TO PAY AND REGISTER TO ATTEND ONLINE
For online attendance you will receive a zoom link after you register.

$50

Free for MIP candidates (RSVP candidates only)

Continuing Education Hours: 2
The Manhattan Institute is a NY State approved provider of continuing education hours for: LCSW, LMSW, LCAT, LMHC and Licensed Psychologists.

The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After Author Lucas Hilderbrand in conversation with Nerve Macaspac (in person & live-streaming)
2024-01-21 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join The Bars Are Ours author Lucas Hilderbrand and scholar Nerve Macaspac for a conversation about the legacies of gay bars and nightclubs in New York City and nationally. They will discuss bars’ historical role in shaping gay male cultures, spaces, politics, and aesthetics. The New York Times described The Bars Are Ours as “sprawling, playful and rigorous.” Library Journal named it one of the best books of 2023.
Copies of The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After (Duke UP, 2023, paperback, $32.95) will be available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “reserve a copy of The Bars Are Ours” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Lucas Hilderbrand (he/him) is the author of The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After; Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic; and Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. He is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Nerve V. Macaspac (he/him) is a political geographer, cartographer, and filmmaker. His research focuses on the kinds of work required of marginalized communities in creating spaces of peace, safety, and security amid violence. He has published in Geopolitics, International Peacekeeping, Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence, Geography Compass, and Human Rights Review. He is Assistant Professor of Information Studies at Queens College’s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies and Doctoral Faculty at the Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle's Reading Series (in person & live-streaming)
2024-01-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Publishing Triangle presents its monthly OUTspoken Reading Series as host Rob Byrnes welcomes Ann Aptaker, Steve Berman, Felice Cohen, Gerard Cabrera, Michael Thomas Ford, and Joe Okonkwo. Join us as in-person or remotely to hear from some of queer literature’s most dynamic established and up-and-coming voices.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

Touching the Art: MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE IN CONVERSATION WITH MCKENZIE WARK (in person & live-streaming)
2024-01-17 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore‘s interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do. For this event, she will be joined in conversation by McKenzie Wark.
Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda’s work as “vulgar” and a “waste of talent” once it became unapologetically queer.
As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys’s paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys’s place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.
Sycamore writes, “Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations, a safety valve, an escape hatch, a sudden shift in the body, a clipboard full of flowers, a welcome mat flipped over and back, over and back, welcome.”
Refusing easy answers in search of an embodied truth, Sycamore upends propriety to touch the art and feel everything that comes through.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Please wear a mask to this event!
We will also have masks available at the Bureau.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the award-winning author of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, she’s the author of three novels and three nonfiction titles, and the editor of six nonfiction anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. Sycamore lives in Seattle, and her new book is Touching the Art, out now from Soft Skull Press.

McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso), Raving (Duke) and Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte).

Closed on December 31
2023-12-31 | NY
The Bureau will be closed on
December 24 and 31.
Happy holigays!

Closed on December 24
2023-12-24 | NY

TELL 89: Eating It (in person & live-streaming)
2023-12-16 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
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 since February 2014.
The theme of the 89th TELL is Eating It. Featuring storytellers Ashil Lee, Phoebe Brooks, Mindy Raf, and Buzz Slutzky.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

We ask all attendees to please wear a mask at this event. We will provide masks for those who need them. Thank you!

Suggested donation to benefit the storytellers and the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

DRAE CAMPBELL’s first performance was at age 5 in a nightclub opening for a punk band. Drae has a BFA in Theater from The University of Arts in Philadelphia. Some Theater credits include: The Nosebleed (Lincoln Center Theater), Only You Can Prevent Wildfires (Ricochet Collective), Non-Consensual Relationships with Ghosts (La MaMa), My Old Man (Dixon Place), Oph3lia(HERE). TV includes “New Amsterdam,” “Bull ” and “Dinette ” (web series, directed by Shaina Feinberg). Drae has been hosting and curating TELL for more than 9 years which is now a SILVER Signal Award-winning podcast of the same name. www.draecampbell.com

Ashil Lee (they/he/she) NYC-based actor, playwright, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, and bestie to blind dog Hux. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed) Selected acting credits: The Nosebleed (LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater, Woolly Mammoth), world premiere of Gina Femia’s The Virtuous Fall… in rep with Measure for Measure (Spicy Witch Productions), Juliet+Romeo (Pocket Universe), theatrical premiere of Dogville (dir.Robert O’Hara). Playwriting credits: Clubbed Thumb’s 2023-2024 Early Career Writer’s Group. Finalist: Playwright’s Realm Fellowship (23-24). Semi-finalist: Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship (23-24). Echoes Emerging Writer’s Group 2022-2023 (Primary Stages) and Pataphysics 2020, led by Clare Barron. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. In their spare time, Ashil squeezes in courses toward their Master’s in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com

Phoebe Brooks is a theatre creature interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike! Recent work includes Charles Ludlam’s Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, LOVE (Among Dreamers) by Greg Nanni and Jyoti’s Bridge by Kanika Vaish. Upcoming Projects: The Fantastical Fellowship: Final Quest for the Crisis Crystal XXVII (Frigid Fest), The Amazing Doctor She Medicine Show (Edinburgh Fringe). Phoebe is also a performer, a dramaturg-about-town, the recipient of a brand new MFA from Columbia University and the Programming Director for Spicy Witch Productions. Check out her interactive Chekhov adventure, Dyadya Vanya: Files From A Dacha With 26 Rooms, featuring Ashil Lee and available online at www.phoebebrooks.com.

Mindy Raf is a comedian, actress, writer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Mindy has contributed to MTV’s GIRL CODE, COLLEGEHUMOR, TNT, VH1, The Daily Comedy Network, and is a published author with Penguin Random House. Her critically acclaimed solo comedy show NOT THE ONE: a love story was named an “LGBT Best Bet” by Time OutNew York, “hilariously quirky” by Theatre Is Easy, “Barrier Breaking” by The Edinburgh Reporter, and “cheeky and infectious” by Ed Fest Magazine. Not The One has played to a sold out run Off Broadway at 59E59, garnered 4 star reviews the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and has sold out Brooklyn’s Cloud City as well as its guest production residency at NYC’s Theaterlab.

Buzz Slutzky is a non-binary transgender artist, writer, and performer whose practice incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture, and video. Their visual art and writing often play between autobiographical and historical content. Lately, they’ve been drawing mashups between instructional manuals. As a performer, Buzz has mixed stand-up comedy and musical comedy under the persona Stoni Butchell, among others. They currently teach film and art to 18 year olds at CUNY College of Staten Island and SUNY Purchase College.

Office Hours Fall 2023 Showcase Reading (hybrid in-person AND online event)
2023-12-15 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us Friday, December 15th, 2023 at 7:00 PM EST for the Office Hours Fall 2023 Showcase Reading, a hybrid event (both in person readers & virtual). In person readers will gather at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and virtual readers will appear on a screen. Fellows will give a brief reading in celebration of another strong semester of poetry making, community building, and surviving in difficult creative times.
Readers:
Dina Abdulhadi
Abba Belgrave
Ryan Dzelzkalns
J. Freeborn
Ashley Harris
Emily Hockaday
Carrie Hohmann
Holly Mitchell
Sarah M. Sala
Shakeema Smalls
Noel Sikorski
Ryan Dzelzkalns
To join the event on Zoom please click on the following link at 7 PM EST on Friday, December 15, 2023:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84592169421?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 845 9216 9421
Passcode: [REDACTED]
Or you can watch the livestream on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

If attending in person, no registration is necessary. Seating is first come first served. Any donations will go to Palestine Legal.
Office Hours Poetry Workshop is a community-based writing workshop for poets who show a demonstrated commitment to writing. The workshop fellowship culminates in a public reading each fall and spring to showcase sizzling new work. We welcome all poets, especially people of color, LGBTQ+, and those who are womxn-identified.

Second Tuesday presents: Queer Footprints A Guide to Uncovering London’s Fierce History (online only)
2023-12-12 19:00 - 21:00 | The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, Room 101, New York, 10011, United States
The Center in partnership with the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division welcomes Dan Glass to discuss his recently published work Queer Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Fierce History.
This event will take place online only! To join the event on Zoom, please click on the following link at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82380673724?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 823 8067 3724
Passcode: [REDACTED]

OR WATCH THE LIVESTREAM ON THE BUREAU’S YOUTUBE CHANNEL:
YOUTUBE.COM/@BGSQD.COM

ABOUT THE BOOK
This groundbreaking guide will take you through the city streets to uncover the scandalous, hilarious, and empowering events of London’s queerstory. Follow in the footprints of veteran activists, such as those who marched in London’s first Pride parade in 1972 or witnessed the 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho.
Accompanied by a chorus of voices of both iconic and unsung legends of the movement, readers can walk through parts of East, West, South, and North London, dipping into beautifully illustrated maps and extraordinary tales of LGBTQIA+ solidarity, protest, and pride. The shadows of gentrification, policing, homophobia and racism are time and again resisted.
From the Brixton Fairies to Notting Hill Carnival to world-changing protests in Trafalgar Square, Rebel Dykes to drag queen communes, Queer Footprints celebrates the hidden histories of struggle and joy. Including an accessibility guide and a list of these gems for your pleasure – queer spaces, clubs, networks and resources galore.

ABOUT DAN GLASS
​​Dan Glass is an AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) healthcare and human rights activist, performer, presenter, and writer. Dan has been recognized as ‘Activist of the Year’ with the Sexual Freedom Awards and was announced a ‘BBC Greater Londoner’ for founding Queer Tours of London – A Mince Through Time. His book United Queerdom: From the Legends of the Gay Liberation Front to the Queers of Tomorrow was Observer book of the week. Dan recently founded self-defense empowerment program Bender Defenders and Queer Night Pride to confront rising hate crime. Follow him @danglassmincer.

To purchase Dan Glass’s Queer Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Fierce History (Pluto Press, 2023, paperback, $19.95) from the Bureau, please write to us contact@bgsqd.com with your address and phone number and preferred payment method. We can take payment via Venmo, PayPal, or credit card over the phone.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Banned Books OUT LOUD Louffa Press 13th Anniversary Louffapalooza (in person & live-streaming)
2023-12-03 15:00 - 17:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
This event is a 13th anniversary celebration for Louffa Press and open forum on the epidemic of book-banning, and is hosted by Louffa Press on Sunday, December 3, at 3pm at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.
Participants* include:
BEATRIZ ALBUQUERQUE, ROBERT ANTHONY GIBBONS, JEE LEONG KOH, MATTHEW LANSBURGH, PACO MARQUEZ, CLAUDIA SEREA, TRIPHOBIA
Curated by DAVID MOSCOVICH
After the readings, we will have a dialogue with the audience centered on the current trend of book-banning, particularly the banning of books by LGBTQ or POC authors; the reason is that 41% of content being banned or challenged is LGBTQ, and 40% of the books have protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.
We need these your voice to help stop this.
(The source on these statistics and be found at the following link from PEN America: https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/)
*Author books will be available at the event.
This event is made possible in part through funding by Poets & Writers.
LOUFFA PRESS was founded in 2010. Based in Morningside/Harlem, New York City, LOUFFA PRESS is a micropress that focuses on printing limited edition chapbooks using letterpress technology.
THE MISSION behind Louffa Press is to foster a venue for limited edition, collectible, handmade chapbooks and art books by a wide array of authors and artists whose voices must be heard; to introduce new and innovative flash fiction, short stories, poetry, and those forms less easily classified; to put forth into the world precious artifacts that embody in their physical form a meticulously tailored and individualist aesthetic. www.louffapress.net

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

Beatriz Albuquerque has received numerous awards including the Breakthrough Award for the 17th Biennial Cerveira; Myers Art Prize Award from Columbia University, New York; and the Ambient Performance Series Award, PAC / edge Performance Festival, Chicago. Her written work has been published in Performatus, ArtCapital Magazine, Cerveira Nova Journal, Studies in Digital Heritage Journal, among others. She has been anthologized in several books, such as Internet y Performance, Negociaciones entre Cuerpo, Virtualidad y Telepresencia (2011), Ediciones Al Margen, NIAM Publications; The Growth of Art Anthology (2015) Columbia University Press; Art School Critique 2.0 (2017) Columbia University Press; Performances no Contemporaneo (2019), FLUP Press; O Lado oculto da investigação (2023) ESE Press and RoadWork, which is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She is the author of four books of research and non-fiction: Art + Internet + Performance = beginning of the 90s, Video Games + Glitch = Learning: Video Games Vs. Teachers, Super Mario World + Glitch = Adult Learning and Game Glitch + Learning = Aesthetics. Design. Preservation. (www.beatrizalbuquerque.com)

Robert Anthony Gibbons has been nominated for a Pushcart for his poem, “a self taught genius” by Great Weather for Media. Robert has been published in hundreds of literary magazines and in several notable anthologies. Recent publication credits includes Killens Review, Tribes, Involuntary Magazine,Peregrine, Expound, Promethean, Turtle Island Quarterly, Killer Whale, and Suisun Valley Review, Voices of Lefferts and the Bronx Memoir Project: Vol. 2 published by the Bronx Council of the Arts. Robert’s first collection, Close to the Tree was published by Three Rooms Press, 2012, and his chapbook, Flight, published by Poets Wear Prada in 2019. His latest is a collaboration between Brooklyn-based artist Amy Williams, titled, Some Little Words (2022). It is a collection of erasure and ekphrastic poems in tribute to Zora Neale Hurston.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the year by the Financial Times in the UK and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. His hybrid work of fiction Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. His latest book is Inspector Inspector from Carcanet.

Matthew Lansburgh’s collection of linked stories, Outside Is the Ocean, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His fiction has appeared (or is forthcoming) in journals such as One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and has been shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories series. He lives in Manhattan and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and MacDowell.

Paco Márquez is a poet based out of Manhattan, author of the chapbook Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in Fence, The Literary Review, Apogee, Philosophy and Global Affairs and Huizache, among others. As Spanish Editor, he assisted in translating Pablo Neruda’s initial book, Crepuscualrio, for the first time into English as Book of Twilight with William O’Daly (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Originally from León, México, Paco immigrated with his family to Sacramento, California at age 13. He studied philosophy and literature at UC Berkeley and, after working for over a decade in varied fields, acquired an MFA in creative writing at NYU. His work has been supported by The Center for Book Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York University. Paco has served as poetry editor at Washington Square and OccuPoetry, and currently at 128 Lit. www.pacomarquez.net

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-American poet, translator, and editor with work published in Consequence, The Southern Review, Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Oxford Poetry, among others, as well as featured on The Writer’s Almanac. She is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, 2023). Serea won a Pushcart Prize, the Joanne Scott Kennedy Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia, and the New Letters Readers Award for her poems. She is a founding editor of National Translation Month, serves on the board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets, and co-hosts their monthly readings.

Esther Marveta Neff is the founder of PPL. They are a performance-maker, organizer, librettist, and theorist. Publications include operating manual Embarrassed of the (W)Hole (Ugly Duckling Press, 2023) Institution is a Verb (Edited, The Operating System, 2022), Any Size Mirror is a Dictator (BAC/BIPAF, 2015) and many zines. Book chapters have been included in the Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (with Yelena Gluzman), The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminist Performance Art, In the Wake (LiveArt UK), and various of forms of writing have appeared in PAJ, Paradigm, CAESURA, Ice-Hole, AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, CONTENT, and elsewhere. Neff is currently an adjunct at Hunter College and a member of the group Triphobia with 3dward g sharp and Noah Ortega. https://estherneff.wordpress.com/

David Moscovich is publisher of Louffa Press and author of You Are Make Very Important Bathtime (JEF Books, 2013) and LIFE+70[Redacted], a print version of the single most expensive literary e-book ever to be hacked (Lit Fest Press, 2016.) His novels Blink If You Love Me (2019) and his newest, Manhattan Other (2023), are available from Adelaide Books. www.louffapress.net

Writing About, With, and Through AIDS (in person & live-streaming)
2023-12-02 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
As part of this year’s World AIDS Day programming, explore the continuing literary legacies of the AIDS crisis with us through readings of their own works and the poems of the late Haitian-born poet, Assotto Saint, whose Sacred Spells: Collected Works was recently published in August 2023, and the late working-class Italian-Polish-American poet, Walta Borawski, whose Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski won the Publishing Triangle 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.
How is rage, loss, grief, humor, love, and survival expressed? How does race, class, language, religion, and national origin play out in these works? How do we preserve the collective knowledge and experiences of our diverse communities? How do we define “survival” today?
Featuring Gerard Cabrera, Philip Clark, Reginald Harris, Charles Rice-González, and Steven Riel.
Co-Sponsored by The Publishing Triangle OUTSpoken Series

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Gerard Cabrera is from Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the first American dictionary, Dr. Seuss, and basketball. His debut novel, Homo Novus, was published in October 2022, by Rattling Good Yarns Press, and was supported by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Bread Loaf Bakeless Foundation fellowship at The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Other writing has appeared in Gay Community News, Acentos Review, Angel Rust, Apricity, JONATHAN, Kweli, and Digging Press. An attorney, he lives and works in New York City. Visit him at www.gerardcabrera.com.

Philip Clark is the co-editor of Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski (Rebel Satori, 2022), winner of the 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His previous books are Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS and In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton. The recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, he is completing a biography of H. Lynn Womack, a pioneering gay publisher from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. He lives near Washington, D.C.

Born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in Baltimore, poet and librarian Reginald Harris was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for his first book, 10 Tongues, and won the 2012 Cave Canem /Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and recipient of Individual Artist Awards for poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, his work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and online including Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Lambda Literary Review, Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Literature of the United States, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South and The Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS. He and his partner live in Brooklyn.

Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, LGBTQ activist, co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and an Assistant Professor at Hostos Community College. His novel, Chulito, received recognition from the American Library Association and the National Book Critics Circle, he co-edited From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction, and his play I Just Love Andy Gibb was published in Blacktino Queer Performance: A Critical Anthology. His writing’s been published in nearly a dozen anthologies including Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (University of Wisconsin Press 2011), Love, Christopher Street (Vantage Point 2012), QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (Syracuse University 2016), and his article on Culturally Relevant Pedgogy will appear in Teaching Black (University of Michigan Press 2020). His honors include the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award in 2014, an award from the New York City Council in 2016, the Men(cion) Award from 100 Hispanic Women in 2017 and a Gay City News Impact Award in 2017 for his activism and contributions to advancing the lives of LGBTQ people, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship in 2018. He’s the chair of the board for The Bronx Council on the Arts and The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and is on the advisory board of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop.

Steven Riel is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Edgemere and Fellow Odd Fellow. His chapbook Postcard from P-town was published as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review and International Poetry Review. He edits the Franco-American journal Résonance. Recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, Riel was also named the 2005 Robert Fraser Distinguished Visiting Poet at Bucks County (PA) Community College.

Allen Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories World AIDS Day Celebration (in person only)
2023-12-01 19:00 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Library of Homosexual Congress is proud to reissue Allen Barnett’s 1990 collection The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories. Among the finest short stories in the gay literary cannon in particular, and American fiction in general, Barnett’s record of the then-burgeoning AIDS crisis is unparalleled in its poignant humor amidst compounding loss. Please join an array of writers on World AIDS Day as we celebrate the return of Allen Barnett’s work to print for the first time in decades.
Copies of The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories (Rebel Satori Press, 2023, paperback, $19.95) will be available for purchase.
To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of The Body and Its Dangers for Dec. 1 event” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd

Christopher Bram is the author of twelve books including the novel that became the movie Gods and Monsters. He teaches at the Gallatin School of New York University.
Gerard Cabrera is the author of short fiction, poems, and the novel, Homo Novus, published by Rattling Good Yarns Press in 2022. His writing has appeared in literary journals such as the Acentos Review, JONATHAN, Kweli, Apricity, Digging Press, and Angel Rust. A naturalized Brooklynite, Gerard hails from the Puerto Rican community of Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Dr. Seuss, basketball, and the first American dictionary. He is a member of the Publishing Triangle Board of Directors.
JP Howard is a poet, educator, literary activist, curator, and community builder. JP is a Learn with Lambda Literary 2023 workshop facilitator and was the Spring 2023 Brooklyn College Tow Mentor-in-Residence. Her debut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System), was a Lambda Literary finalist. She is also the author of bury your love poems here (Belladonna*), Praise This Complicated Herstory: Legacy, Healing & Revolutionary Poems (Harlequin Creature) and co-editor of Sinister Wisdom Journal Black Lesbians–We Are the Revolution! JP has received fellowships and grants from Cave Canem, VONA, Lambda Literary Foundation, and Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). She curates Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon and her poetry is widely anthologized. JP is a general Poetry Editor for Women’s Studies Quarterly and Editor-At-Large of Mom Egg Review VOX online. http://www.jp-howard.com
Walter Holland is the author of four books of poetry “Reconstruction” (Finishing Line Press, 2022), “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). Some of his recent poetry credits include: “Exquisite Pandemic,” “HIV Here and Now,” “Cutbank Literary Journal,” “About Place Journal,” and “Mollyhouse.” His reviews appear regularly in “Rain Taxi,” both print and online editions. A three-part essay series on queer, Black, millennial poetry is forthcoming online on the “Lambda Literary Review” website. He lives in New York City. For more information visit: www.walterhollandwriter.com.
Ron Caldwell is a writer, editor, and educator who was born in Texas and studied English literature at Rice University. He received a Masters degree in Creative Writing: Poetry from Boston University, where his teachers were George Starbuck, Christopher Ricks, and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Ron has taught at Parsons School of Design since 1996, and is currently the coordinator of Integrative Seminar in the First Year program. He lives in Allen Barnett’s apartment.
