BGSQD

lesbian book club (in person only)
2024-10-12 11:00 - 12:00 (America/New_York) | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
We’ll be reading fiction and non-fiction — classic, contemporary, revealing and visionary. As a group we will decide what to read each month, focusing on lesbian authors and/or related topics. Co-founded by lesbian book lovers Judi Komaki and Piper Olsen.

For October 12th, the lesbian book club will read Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider.
Purchase Sister Outsider from the Bureau before October 12th and receive a 15% discount ($15.29 instead of $17.99)! Just mention the lesbian book club when you purchase the book.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

For our November 9th meeting, we’ll read Divagaciones II, by our very own member Jaqueline Jimenez Polanco! Copies will be available at the October 10th meeting and will remain available at the Bureau after the 10th.

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.

Representing Ourselves: Queer Short Stories (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-12 15:00 - 16:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Jarrod Campbell and Matthew Lansburgh for a reading from their story collections and a discussion about the importance of representing queerness in fiction, why this need for honest, varied representation has brought us here and where these bold portrayals will take us.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 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

Jarrod Campbell is a writer living in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. His fictions, essays, reviews and poetry have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Northwest Review, Modern Literature, Wicked Gay Ways, and Boner World (Berlin). His collection of short stories, The Reason I’m Here, (June 2023, Stalking Horse Press), was listed as an anticipated June LGBTQIA+ read by Lambda Literary.

Matthew Lansburgh‘s collection of linked stories, Outside Is the Ocean, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His fiction has appeared in journals such as One Story, VQR, New England Review, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, StoryQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Guernica, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and has been shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories series (in 2018 & 2022) and the Pushcart Prize series (in 2017).

Robert Raasch, author of The Summer Between, in conversation with Christopher Bram (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-13 15:00 - 16:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
A book launch in kind with National Coming Out Day. Christopher Bram is the acclaimed author of twelve books, including the novel that became the Academy-Award-winning movie, Gods and Monsters. He teaches at the Gallatin School of New York University. Christopher and Robert Raasch will read from Robert’s much-awaited debut novel, The Summer Between. Set in New York City’s vibrant Greenwich Village in 1978, The Summer Between is the bittersweet, unsparingly honest coming-of-age saga of Andrew Jackson Pollock. Christoper and Robert will read excerpts from the novel amidst conversation and questions and answers.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 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

Christopher Bram is the author of twelve books, including the novel that became the Academy-Award-winning movie, Gods and Monsters. He teaches at the Gallatin School of New York University.
Robert Raasch was raised in Northern New Jersey. He is a writer, architect/designer, and visual artist who is an active participant in 24PearlStreet and the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He divides his time between Southwest Florida, New York, and Copenhagen, where he is working on his second novel.

Donna Minkowitz's DONNAVILLE Launch! In Conversation with David Groff (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-17 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Come celebrate the launch of Donna Minkowitz’s hell-bent, boundary-busting novel DONNAVILLE, in which different parts of the author attack each other, fuck each other, and try to save each other from a terrifying jail inside.
Can they burn the prison down? Will anyone succeed at having sex with the Divine Mother?
A multi-gender, multi-sexuality, queer as f internal quest.
To reserve a copy of DONNAVILLE please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Donnaville for Oct. 17” in the subject line.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 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

Donna Minkowitz is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the memoirs Growing Up Golem and Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God, and Fury. She is the Village Voice’s former longtime columnist on queer politics and culture, and a former columnist for The Advocate. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Slate, and Salon, and she has frequently gone undercover to report on the far right. Minkowitz is the recipient of a GLAAD Media Award, an Exceptional Merit Media Award, and an award for outstanding journalism from NLGJA: the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists.
David Groff is a multi-award-winning poet, writer, and independent editor. He is the author of three books of poems, Live in Suspense, Clay, and Theory of Devolution. Groff is coeditor of the anthology Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, and is a founder of the Publishing Triangle.

In Care Of (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
In Care Of is intimate conversation between the curators of Art in Odd Places 2024 CARE, and a select group of its international and US artists about their 2024 CARE projects, artistic processes and the role of CARE in their life and work.
AiOP 2024 CARE is curated by Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek and is scheduled for October 18-20, 2024. AiOP 2024 CARE is the nineteenth edition of the iconic public visual and performance art festival that takes place along 14th Street in Manhattan every fall. The 70+ artists participating in AiOP 2024 CARE will enact actions, notions, considerations and representations of care along 14th Street and invite the public to stop, to rest, to consider, and, above all, care. AiOP CARE 2024 asks how art can create spaces and actions of compassionate fearless care. Can we offer and enter them with joy and love?

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 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

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) is an annual festival that presents visual and performance art in public spaces along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October. Active in New York City since 2005, AiOP aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations.
Curators Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek are NYC-based artists, curators, and educators. Miranda is the founder of the artist-run organizations The Crit Lab and MAPSpace, and works with donated, repurposed, lace and linens in site-responsive sculpture and installation. Kaczmarek’s work spans both experimental and traditional practices, including sculpture, site-specific installations, performance, video, built circuits, and solar-powered objects.
Founder and Director Ed Woodham, is a queer elder conceptual artist, curator, and educator based in Manhattan originally from Atlanta, Georgia where Art in Odd Places began.

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle's Reading Series, October Edition (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-23 19:00 - 21:00 | 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 McMan, John Copenhaver, Daniel Meltz, Gary Zebrun, Nicco Diaz, Jendi Reiter, and David S. Pederson.
Join us as in-person or watch the live-stream (see below) 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

Revisioning Democracy Podcast Episode 5: Stopping the Soft Coup (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Episode 5: Stopping the Soft Coup:
Resisting Project 2025’s extremist plan to destroy America’s government
On Episode 5 of Revisioning Democracy, we’ll dig into the progress – and challenges – of Stopping the Soft Coup: Resisting Project 2025’s extremist plan to destroy America’s government. Project 2025 calls for dismantling the federal government, mass firing federal employees, and replacing them with a Christian conservative government-in-waiting loyal only to the president. Join us for an urgent public conversation with three experts in the areas of federal policy and labor: Steve Lenkart, Executive Director of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE); James Goodwin, Executive Director of the Center for Progressive Reform; and progressive labor journalist, activist, and author Bill Fletcher.
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

Steve Lenkart has been the Executive Director of NFFE since 2016. Mr. Lenkart held senior leadership appointments under Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, and continues to maintain strong bipartisan relationships with the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch.

James Goodwin, J.D., M.P.P., is the Policy Director at the Center for Progressive Reform. He joined CPR in May of 2008. Prior to joining CPR, Mr. Goodwin worked as a legal intern for the Environmental Law Institute and EcoLogix Group, Inc.

Bill Fletcher is a journalist, labor advocate, and creative writer who has been raising public attention to Project 2025’s threats to labor and the economy. He is the author of ‘They’re Bankrupting us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions; and co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice (UC Press, Oct 2009). He has also co-edited a book of political essays and two mystery novels.

Heart Less Book Party (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-26 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Indolent Books author Carley Moore as she reads from her debut poetry collection, Heart Less, and celebrates the work of Julián Delgado Lopera, Megan Milks, and Miro Spinelli, who will also read from their work.
Heart Less is about the end of a marriage, coming out as bisexual, dating, and co-parenting in the midst of global catastrophe. Woven through the book are questions about the heart, heartache, heart break, and the complicated nature of grief and loss.
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

Carley Moore is the author of Heart Less, Panpocalypse, The Not Wives, 16 Pills, and The Stalker Chronicles. She’s a Clinical Professor of Writing and Creative Production at New York University and an Associate at The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. Carley lives in Brooklyn with her kid and two cats. Follow her on Instagram @fragmentedsky or find her blogging on Substack.
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press 2020), the Winner of the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary award; a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Julián currently resides in San Francisco. Their second novel is forthcoming from Liveright.
Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories, both published by Feminist Press; and Tori Amos Bootleg Webring, published by Instar Books as part of the Remember the Internet series.
Miro Spinelli is a Brazilian trans artist and scholar. They are a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU. They also hold a Master’s Degree from the Arts of the Scene Graduate Program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In their creative and intellectual production, Spinelli investigates how performance can establish radical connections with materiality, writing, and dissent. Since 2014, they have been developing the performance series “Gordura Trans” (“Trans Fat”), and since 2017, the installation series “All That You Touch You Change; All That You Change Changes You.” Their first poetry book, “pele ou pedra nothing heavy,” a bilingual work created between Brazil and New York City, will be released soon.

Reading and Telling Queer Secrets: Hugh Ryan and Keiko Lane in Conversation (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-27 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join writers Hugh Ryan and Keiko Lane as they read from their work and discuss writing about and telling queer secrets. As scholars, activists, artists, and survivors of the queer and HIV/AIDS activisms of the 1990s, they both explore questions about how narratives and subtext change through time. Are sexualities, relationships, and political actions that were taboo 20 or 30 years ago still embargoed stories? How do tell them now? What stories do we think the dead would tell if they were still alive? What do our ghosts want us to do now?
Keiko Lane will read from her new memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, and Hugh Ryan will read from new works-in-progress. Their conversation will be moderated by Joshua Gutterman Tranen.
The reading and conversation will be followed by a book signing and reception.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 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

Keiko Lane is an Okinawan American poet, essayist, memoirist, and psychotherapist writing about the intersections of queer culture, oppression resistance, liberation psychology, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization, and reproductive justice. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Feminist Porn Book, and Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art is her first book.

Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator, and most recently, the author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which won the Israel Fishman Stonewall Book Award from American Library Association and the biennial Wiliiam A. Percy award from the Warren Johansson Foundation. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association.

Joshua Gutterman Tranen is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. His essays on the cultural history of HIV/AIDS have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Poetry Project.

NOT EVEN NOMINATED: 40 OVERLOOKED COSTARS OF OSCAR-WINNING PERFORMANCES (in person & livestreaming)
2024-11-01 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
NOT EVEN NOMINATED:
40 OVERLOOKED COSTARS OF OSCAR-WINNING PERFORMANCES
Author John DiLeo will be discussing his 8th book on the subject of classic movies. John will do some reading, take questions, plus show clips from several of the 40 performances profiled in the book. He will also be signing copies of NOT EVEN NOMINATED after the presentation.
To reserve a copy of Not Even Nominated (2024, hardcover, G Letters, $35), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Not Even Nominated for November 1st 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.

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

John DiLeo is the author of seven other books about classic movies: And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies, 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember—But Probably Don’t, Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery, Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors, Screen Savers II: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies, Ten Movies at a Time: A 350-Film Journey Through Hollywood and America 1930-1970, and There Are No Small Parts: 100 Outstanding Film Performances with Screen Time of 10 Minutes or Less.
He has been an annual participant in the Black Bear Film Festival (Milford, PA), conducting onstage interviews with such notables as Farley Granger, Arlene Dahl, Marge Champion, Keir Dullea, Jane Powell, Rex Reed, Tab Hunter, Lorna Luft, and Jane Alexander.
DiLeo can be found on social media, including Facebook, Instagram (john.dileo.12), and his website is johndileo.com.

An Evening of Poetry: with Ruben Quesada, Emanuel Xavier, Rosebud Ben-Oni, and Jan Beatty (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-02 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Celebrate an evening of poetry with queer poets Ruben Quesada (Brutal Companion), Emanuel Xavier (Love(ly) Child), Rosebud Ben-Oni (If This is the Age We End Discovery), and Jan Beatty (Dragstripping) in conversation about their latest work.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 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

Ruben Quesada is the editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Lambda Literary Review, Harvard Review and elsewhere. He has served as poetry editor for AGNI, Poet Lore, Pleiades, Tab Journal, and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He currently teaches as Affiliate Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Emanuel Xavier is author of the poetry books Pier Queen, Americano, If Jesus Were Gay, Nefarious, Radiance, Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, and Love(ly) Child. He is recipient of a New York City Council Citation and a Gay City Impact Award for his many contributions to NYC arts culture. His books have been finalists for International Latino Book Awards and Lambda Literary Awards and his work has appeared in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Poetry, A Gathering of the Tribes, Hanging Loose Press, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is on the Board of The Publishing Triangle. www.emanuelxavier.org

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a national media campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, and her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11th Memorial. She performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs from The Holocaust.” Most recently, her poem “When You Are the Arrow of Time” was commissioned and filmed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. She has received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Queens Council for the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, Tin House, among others.

Jan Beatty’s eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, September, 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The Body Wars and a chapbook, Skydog (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022). Other work includes Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program. www.janbeatty.com

Restaging Sex and the Social: New Books from Fordham University Press (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-06 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
This talk features two new books on sex, sexuality, race and embodiment from Fordham University Press: Christopher Breu’s In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (Fall 2024) and Kirin Wachter-Grene‘s Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature (Fall 2025). Breu, Professor of English at Illinois State University, theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can complement recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and as a crucial form of social desire. It also theorizes the relationship between sex and the concept of flesh as it has been articulated within contemporary Black studies. Wachter Grene, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, considers the contradiction of Black kenosis—an act of self-emptying and self-determined sexual submission—in transgressive African American literature of the post-Civil Rights era. Hosting the event and serving as interlocutors will be Ann Pellegrini, psychoanalyst, queer theorist, and Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and Avgi Saketopoulou, a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC and a member of the faculty of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In addition to many other titles, Pelligrini and Saketopoulou are authors of the award-winning Gender without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023). Breu and Wachter-Grene will share brief overviews of their respective books before opening up into a four-way conversation with the moderators, which will engage and theorize questions of gender, race, sex, sexuality, kink, and embodiment. There will be time for questions and discussion with the audience. Books will be for sale and light refreshments will be served.
To reserve a copy of any of the books listed above, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve book for November 6 event” in the subject line. And please let us know which title you’d like us to hold.
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, 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

Christopher Breu is Professor English at Illinois State University where he teaches classes in contemporary literature and culture, critical and cultural theory, and gender and sexuality. In addition to the featured book tonight, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (Fordham, 2024), he is the author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minnesota, 2005), Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minnesota, 2014), coeditor of Noir Affect (Fordham, 2020). He is also the author of multiple articles theorizing intersex and his own history of medicalized embodiment.

Kirin Wachter-Grene (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches classes on African American and multiethnic American literatures, Black feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and queer history. Tonight she will be presenting from her forthcoming book with Fordham University Press, Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature.

Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis and Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. They are also a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their most recent book is Gender Without Identity (co-authored with Avgi Saketopoulou).

Avgi Saketopoulou is a practicing psychoanalyst and a faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) and co-author of Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023). She is at work on a new book manuscript provisionally titled Sadisms.

Revisioning Democracy Podcast Episode 6: Grassroots Resistance to the War on Gender: The Lessons of Florida (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-07 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
On Episode 6 of Revisioning Democracy, we’ll examine the Lessons of Florida and community intersectional strategies that LGBTQIA+ groups and activists used there to successfully fight back against the Ron DeSantis anti-gay and anti-diversity attacks – after the initial shock of the state “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Join special guest Nadine Smith, Executive Director of Equality Florida, and a dynamic activist and former journalist, in conversation with podcast co-hosts Anne-christine d’Adesky and Jay W. Walker. We’ll also talk about what didn’t happen. Tune in to this important conversation on what Florida can teach us all now about fighting the war on gender and community and NGO preparedness, resistance, and coalition-building with an eye on Project 2025’s unfolding agenda.

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

Nadine Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Equality Florida, the state’s largest organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
A former award-winning journalist turned organizer, Nadine was one of four national co-chairs of the 1993 March on Washington. She was part of the historic oval office meeting between then-President Clinton, the first such meeting between a sitting President and gay community leaders. She served on the founding board of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization, which celebrates 30 years in 2014.
She is a Florida Chamber Foundation Trustee, board member for Green Florida and served on President Obama’s National Finance Committee. In 2013, she was named one of the state’s “Most Powerful and Influential Women” by the Florida Diversity Council. She was also given the League of Women Voter’s Woman of Distinction Award earlier this year. She currently serves on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Florida Advisory Committee. Nadine also recently received the Keys to the City of Saint Petersburg in 2021.
Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith was included on TIME magazine’s 2022 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
She lives in St. Petersburg with her wife Andrea and son Logan.

lesbian book club
2024-11-09 11:00 - 12:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
We’ll be reading fiction and non-fiction — classic, contemporary, revealing and visionary. As a group we will decide what to read each month, focusing on lesbian authors and/or related topics. Co-founded by lesbian book lovers Judi Komaki and Piper Olsen.

For our November 9th meeting, we’ll read Divagaciones II, edited by our very own member, Jaqueline Jimenez Polanco (paperback, $15)! Copies are available at the Bureau. This title features texts in Spanish and English.
And for our December 14th meeting, we’ll read The Price of Salt/Carol by Patricia Highsmith (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024, paperback, $15.95). To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of The Price of Salt” in the subject line. Purchase the book before December 14th and receive 15% off ($13.56 instead of $15.95).
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.

You Left A Mark On Me: Live Figure Drawing Night (in person only)
2024-11-09 17:00 - 19:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
As part of programming for the You Left A Mark On Me exhibition, we are excited to present a live figure drawing night. In keeping with the show’s theme of queer tattoo exploration, our featured models Brad Carpenter and Himerosdisco are notably tattooed. Our aim is to present a space where the models unique ownership of their ink can combine and transform within the artists live drawings. Our host for the event is artist Kyle Anderson, co-founder of homoerotic art collective Doable Guys.
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.

Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-10 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join anthropologist and artist Shaka McGlotten & drag king Maxxx Pleasure for the launch of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life. Dragging is a book about artists and activists who use drag in Berlin, Israel/Palestine, and New York. It is also an autoethnographic account of illness, failing at being a good anthropologist, and losing out on love.
There will be a presentation that focuses on some of the Israeli and Palestinian figures featured in the book, followed by a discussion with drag king Maxxx Pleasure, and Q & A.

Anthropologist Esther Newton has described the book as “a fascinating mashup of memoir, interviews, ethnographic observation, and cultural theory, following on the work of José Munoz, Marlon Baily, Lauren Berlant, Eve Sedgwick and others.”

To reserve a copy of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2021, paperback, $49.99), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve copy of Dragging for Nov. 10th event.”
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.

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

Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of Media Studies and Gender Studies programs. An anthropologist and artist, their work stages encounters between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They have written and lectured widely on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with queer of color lifeworlds.
They are the author of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2021), Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (SUNY, 2013), and dozens of chapters and articles. They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis, Palgrave, 2012) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones, McFarland, 2014). Their work has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Data & Society.

Maxxx Pleasure is an award-winning drag king based in NYC. He shares advice for all kinds of drag performers and stories from his own drag journey (like performing at Bushwig, the Austin International Drag Festival, Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns, winning the Brooklyn Nightlife Award for Drag King of the Year, inspiring the short documentary MAXXX, and even more)! Maxxx also weighs in on LGBTQ+ issues and conversations, reviews tv shows, movies, books, and music videos, and can’t help but fangirl (fan-person?) over his favorite celebs.

Journals and Diaries: Life, Privacy, and Literature: 4 week Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Course (in person only - registration required)
2024-11-12 18:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary: “In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.” What is the relationship between a writer’s lived experience and the works they present, crafted and bound, to the public? For Virginia Woolf, the diary was a place to reckon with the “oil well” of stories bubbling up inside her; for Roland Barthes, a space apart to wrestle with private loss and grief; for Annie Ernaux, the diary harbored the “raw and dark” material behind her fictions; and for Anaïs Nin, the distinction between fiction-writing and diary-keeping was difficult even to discern. On what sort of terms, then, can we take the writer’s diary? What kinds of insight does it promise—regarding literary craft, literary politics, artistic scenes, and creative processes? And how shall we approach this literary object—as a genre unto itself, distinct from other forms of life-writing such as autobiography, memoir, and auto-fiction?
In this course, we will read selections from writers’ diaries, beginning in the early 20th century and closing with Sheila Heti’s recent experimental work Alphabetical Diaries. Moving through time and space—from Woolf and Franz Kafka to Barthes and Nin to Sontag and Ernaux, with forays into Augustine’s 5th century Confessions and Rousseau’s 18th century work of the same name—we will ask how writers utilize their diaries in both their fiction and their criticism. Avoiding the “reduction” to which Sontag is rightly averse, we will explore how the diary—taken on its own terms—at once encourages and works against linear narrativization, and how it, perhaps uniquely, articulates anxieties of remembrance just as much as it does the fear of being forgotten.
Instructor: Danielle Drori
Course Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
November 12 — December 10, 2024
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Tuesday, November 26th
$335.00
Click here to register for this course
Classes will meet at the
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Room 210 of The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street
NY, NY 10011

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle’s Reading Series, November Edition (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-14 19:00 - 21:00 | 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 Donna Minkowitz, Jenifer Levin, Ruben Quesada, Lauren Melissa Ellzey, Samy Nemir Olivares, Ken Harvey, Judith Barrington, and Mercedes Lewis.

Join us as in-person or watch the live-stream (see below) 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

The Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
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

HOTGLUE Pop Up Reading & Launch featuring Waltpaper with special introduction by Dianne Brill (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-15 18:00 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division invites you to join us for a very special Pop Up Reading & Launch for MORNING WHISPERS, the first installment of HOTGLUE, a new fiction series by celebrated artist and author, Waltpaper, who will be introduced by fashion and nightlife icon, Dianne Brill.
HOTGLUE explores the subcultural evolution of Generation X through the intimate stories of a gang of friends who meet at art school in 1990. As they move across multiple decades, drug, music and fashion trends shift their perception of themselves, each other and New York City.
Set against the backdrop of a raging nightlife turf war between Club Kids, Drag Queens and Transgender Voguers, MORNING WHISPERS introduces Hope Glennon, aka Hotglue, a gender queer street artist turned Club Kid, and their troubled but comical nightlife mentor, Sugar Skullz, on the morning after an apocalyptic night of clubbing. Their relationship dynamic and lifestyle is juxtaposed to Clarissa, an elaborate female fantasy creature that Hotglue is building on their balcony at The Dot, a run down bohemian residential hotel.

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 Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
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

Waltpaper is an author and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. As a subcultural diarist, his explorative and allegorical work is rooted in first hand experiences with interlocking themes of identity, gender, sexuality, drugs, trauma and healing. He has published the books, NEW YORK: CLUB KIDS and THE CLUB KIDS, and is considered one of the foremost voices on New York City’s vibrant nightlife, art and street culture.

Dianne Brill is a renowned American fashion icon, model, author and television personality. Celebrated for her influential role in New York City’s nightlife scene of the 1980s and 1990s. She was deemed “Queen of the Night” and became the muse to a number of top designers and photographers, noted for her extravagant, avant-garde style and magnetic personality. She published her fist book, BOOBS, BOYS and HIGH HEELS, in 1992, offering a glimpse into her glamorous life and the dynamic world of fashion and entertainment.

TELL: Crying Out Loud (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
TELL is a monthly queer storytelling show hosted and curated by Drae Campbell. It is the longest running event at the Bureau! 10 years and going. Each month there is a different theme and a different line up of queer artists who tell true stories from their lives on a theme.
The theme for November is Crying Out Loud, featuring storytellers Ronnie Mae Painter, rexylafemme, and Zo Tipp.

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 storytellers and 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

Drae Campbell is the host and curator of TELL, an award winning podcast that can be found anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Theater: The Nosebleed (Lincoln Center Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theater & National Tour, Lortel Nominated), Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train (Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater), Only You Can Prevent Wildfires (Teatro Circulo), My Old Man (Dixon Place), Storm.Still (DirectorFest, Drama League), La Cage Aux Folles (Barrington Stage Company)
Film and TV:Senior Escort Service, Blunderpuss, It’s Very Common, TOW.TV: Bull, New Amsterdam.BFA, The University Of The Arts. Ig @draebiz and @tellqueerz.

A native New Yorker born and raised in Astoria, Queens, Ronnie Mae Painter is a Brooklyn-based artist who’s primary media are painting on canvas and works on paper. She is also a published author and poet. Her literary works can be found in the anthology “Are Italians White”, edited by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno. Painter’s experiences growing up as a woman of African-American and Italian-American biracial descent during the 1970s are transcended through both her visual and literary works in energetic movements and a shouting tone.

rexylafemme (aka rex renée) is a trans, multi-gendered, multi-genre writer, actor, and healing practitioner from Jackson Heights, NYC. As a working class, gender-abundant artist, rexy’s work is a love letter to NYC and radical communities grounded in a politics of resistance, healing, and resilience. in all of rexy’s creative forms, he explores the power of revolutionary love in the face of loveless political structures. rexy is also a practitioner of multiple healing modalities and offers workshops and mentorship on spirituality and building intuition with a focus on healing as a revolutionary practice. rexy’s book of poems and illustrations, when there is no one and there is everyone is available from Magic Helicopter Press. They graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in 2024.

Zo Tipp (they/them) is a Jewish Japanese American performer. TV: Only Murders in the Building, American Horror Story, Dickinson. NY Theater credits include INTAR, Playwrights Horizons, Pan Asian Rep, Cherry Lane, CSC/OSF Play On! Fest, Redbull, Rattlestick. Workshops at Roundabout Theater, NYTW, Breaking the Binary, Playwrights Realm, Pride Plays, The Actors Fund, and many more. Independent film and webseries appearances screened at Newfest and Outfest. Audio narration work for The New Yorker and New York Mag on Apple News. Zo has sung with a few opera companies in NY, as well as at Birdland, and Spectrum. They also teach the Feldenkrais Method. www.zotipp.com

Journals and Diaries: Life, Privacy, and Literature: 4 week Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Course (in person only - registration required)
2024-11-19 18:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The November 19 class will be the second of four meetings.
See registration details below.
In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary: “In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.” What is the relationship between a writer’s lived experience and the works they present, crafted and bound, to the public? For Virginia Woolf, the diary was a place to reckon with the “oil well” of stories bubbling up inside her; for Roland Barthes, a space apart to wrestle with private loss and grief; for Annie Ernaux, the diary harbored the “raw and dark” material behind her fictions; and for Anaïs Nin, the distinction between fiction-writing and diary-keeping was difficult even to discern. On what sort of terms, then, can we take the writer’s diary? What kinds of insight does it promise—regarding literary craft, literary politics, artistic scenes, and creative processes? And how shall we approach this literary object—as a genre unto itself, distinct from other forms of life-writing such as autobiography, memoir, and auto-fiction?
In this course, we will read selections from writers’ diaries, beginning in the early 20th century and closing with Sheila Heti’s recent experimental work Alphabetical Diaries. Moving through time and space—from Woolf and Franz Kafka to Barthes and Nin to Sontag and Ernaux, with forays into Augustine’s 5th century Confessions and Rousseau’s 18th century work of the same name—we will ask how writers utilize their diaries in both their fiction and their criticism. Avoiding the “reduction” to which Sontag is rightly averse, we will explore how the diary—taken on its own terms—at once encourages and works against linear narrativization, and how it, perhaps uniquely, articulates anxieties of remembrance just as much as it does the fear of being forgotten.
Instructor: Danielle Drori
Course Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
November 12 — December 10, 2024
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Tuesday, November 26th
$335.00
Click here to register for this course
Classes will meet at the
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Room 210 of The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street
NY, NY 10011

The Queer Artist who created the Most Iconic “Lesbian & Gay New York Historical Landmark” (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-22 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Maria Teresa Cometto, author of Emma and the Angel of Central Park, in conversation with Allen Ellenzweig.
The Angel of the Waters was the cover of the Guide to Lesbian & Gay Historical Landmarks New York, published about 25 years ago, and it is featured in the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project‘s website. It is also the “favorite angel” of Prior Walter, the protagonist of Angels in America.
But almost nobody knows the queer artist who created the Angel of the Waters: the New Yorker Emma Stebbins. Maria Teresa will talk with Allen about the fascinating life of Emma: it was in the Rome of the Popes, between 1856 and 1870, that she created the Angel of the Waters, while living as the “wife” of the famous American actress Charlotte Cushman.
Emma was part of the “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock,” as Henry James called the eight American women sculptors working in Rome at that time: four of them lived with a woman companion.
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 Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
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

Maria Teresa Cometto, journalist, author, curator, was born in Novara, Italy. In 2000 she moved to New York with her family. She is a regular contributor to the leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera. She has written several books including the biography Emma and the Angel of Central Park, La Marchesa Colombi (Life, Novels and Passions of the First Woman Journalist of Corriere della Sera), Brothers of the Mountains (Arturo and Oreste Squinobal from the Alps to the Himalayas), and Tech and the City (the making of New York’s startup community).
Allen Ellenzweig has published arts criticism and cultural commentary in magazines such as Art in America, The Village Voice, and American Photographer. He is a regular Contributing Writer to the bi-monthly Gay & Lesbian Review. His first book, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, was a landmark historical study published by Columbia University Press. His recent biography, George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford University Press), is a life of the 20th Century gay American photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955).

BATHHOUSE.PPTX by Jesús I. Valles - Book Release (in person only)
2024-11-23 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Release of 2024 Hit Play, BATHHOUSE.PPTX by Jesús I. Valles!
Presented by The Flea
Come celebrate the publication of Jesús I. Valles’s epic new play BATHHOUSE.PPTX which follows Presenter, a queer Latiné student, whose powerpoint presentation on the history of cleanliness and bathing quickly starts to burst at the seams with appearances from the ghosts of a bathhouse at the end of the world, A Conquistador! Wearing One of Those Hats!, A Very Real Twink and even Laura Linney. Valles describes it as, “a group project for perverts. Somewhere between lecture, re-enactment and cruising ground. A meditation on queer longing, queer grief and all our queer worlds that will come to pass, that will come to be.”
This event will feature words from the playwright, The Flea’s Artistic Director, Niegel Smith, a theatrical reading of excerpts by the cast, and a book signing.
To reserve a copy of BATHHOUSE.PPTX please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve BATHHOUSE.PPTX for Nov 23rd” in the subject line.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Please reserve your spot in this google form: https://forms.gle/GFuzpeqTbQ6ijmhe6

The Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
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

Queering Palestinian Literature with Raji Bathish (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-24 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Palestinian author and cinema critic Raji Bathish comes to the Bureau to read from his genre-hopping texts that combine fiction, poetry and other forms, followed by a discussion with his translator Suneela Mubayi and Rutgers literature professor Ben Koerber in a far-ranging dialogue that will touch on language, translation, gender and sexuality, what it means to be a Palestinian artist amidst an ongoing genocide, and to approach Palestine as a fundamentally queer cause.

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

Rather than soliciting donations for the Bureau, we will collect donations on behalf of Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity. In their own words:
“We are volunteers with loved ones in Gaza. We give direct mutual aid to displaced & distressed families to meet their basic needs during these catastrophic times. Our main focus has been supporting multiple teams of our family members in providing clean water, food, tents, clothing, and direct cash to families in Gaza. We have also supplied clay ovens, repaired a sewer system, installed a water well, supported a revived school, and funded medical workers and civil defense crews. We are so grateful for the generous community support we have that has enabled us to continue to support these projects. Please keep pushing to stop the genocide, build community and organize to Free Palestine 🇵🇸”
Donate via GiveButter: https://givebutter.com/GazaSolidarity
or donate via GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-gz

Closed for Thanksgiving and Friday, November 29
2024-11-28 | NY
The Bureau will be closed on Thanksgiving Day,
Thursday, November 28
AND
Friday, November 29, 2024

The Bureau will be open on
Saturday, November 30, and
Sunday, December 1.

Closed for Thanksgiving and Friday, November 29th
2024-11-29 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Bureau will be closed on both Thursday, November 28, and Friday, November 29.
We will re-open on Saturday, November 30th.

The 3rd Annual Rebel Satori World AIDS Day Book Release and Reading (in person & live-streaming)
2024-12-01 15:00 - 16:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The 3rd Annual Rebel Satori World AIDS Day Book Release and Reading: the Rebel Satori imprint, The Library of Homosexual Congress, is honored to reprint the first American novel about the AIDS crisis, Facing It: A Novel About AIDS, by Paul Reed, from 1984. In addition to reading from Facing It, we will celebrate our initial World AIDS Day releases with memorial readings from Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, edited by Micheal Bronski and Philip Clark, winner of the 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry, and Allen Barnett’s classic short story collection, The Body and Its Dangers, from 1990.
Featuring readings by:
CHRISTOPHER BRAM
GERARD CABRERA
RON CALDWELL
PHILIP CLARK
PHILIP F. CLARK
DALE CORVINO
SCOTT HIGHTOWER
JP HOWARD
JERRY ROSCO

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 Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
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

Christopher Bram is the author of twelve books, including the novel that became the Academy-Award-winning 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.
Ron Caldwell is a writer, editor, and educator who was born in Texas and studied English literature at Rice University. He received a Master’s 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.
Philip Clark is the co-editor of Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, 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.
Philip F. Clark is the author of the poetry collection, The Carnival of Affection (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from City College in 2016, where he was an Adjunct Assistant Professor. His work is included in ‘On Becoming A Poet’, published by Marsh Hawk Press, 2020, and he has been published in various journals and anthologies.
Dale Corvino’s essays have appeared in Salon, the Rumpus, and the Gay & Lesbian Review. Bonds & Boundaries, his debut short story collection, was published in 2023 by Rebel Satori Press. His memoir of sex work, Afterlife of a Kept Boy, won the C&R Press Nonfiction Prize and is scheduled for publication in March 2025.
Scott Hightower’s newest collection of poems, Imperative to Spare, is from Rebel Satori, New Orleans. Part of the Bargain, his third book won the 2004 Hayden Carruth Award. Hightower lives in Manhattan and teaches at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
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
Jerry Rosco is author of the biography Glenway Wescott Personally and editor of the Wescott journals Continual Lessons and A Heaven of Words.

Journals and Diaries: Life, Privacy, and Literature: 4 week Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Course (in person only - registration required)
2024-12-03 18:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The December 3 class will be the third of four meetings.
See registration details below.
In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary: “In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.” What is the relationship between a writer’s lived experience and the works they present, crafted and bound, to the public? For Virginia Woolf, the diary was a place to reckon with the “oil well” of stories bubbling up inside her; for Roland Barthes, a space apart to wrestle with private loss and grief; for Annie Ernaux, the diary harbored the “raw and dark” material behind her fictions; and for Anaïs Nin, the distinction between fiction-writing and diary-keeping was difficult even to discern. On what sort of terms, then, can we take the writer’s diary? What kinds of insight does it promise—regarding literary craft, literary politics, artistic scenes, and creative processes? And how shall we approach this literary object—as a genre unto itself, distinct from other forms of life-writing such as autobiography, memoir, and auto-fiction?
In this course, we will read selections from writers’ diaries, beginning in the early 20th century and closing with Sheila Heti’s recent experimental work Alphabetical Diaries. Moving through time and space—from Woolf and Franz Kafka to Barthes and Nin to Sontag and Ernaux, with forays into Augustine’s 5th century Confessions and Rousseau’s 18th century work of the same name—we will ask how writers utilize their diaries in both their fiction and their criticism. Avoiding the “reduction” to which Sontag is rightly averse, we will explore how the diary—taken on its own terms—at once encourages and works against linear narrativization, and how it, perhaps uniquely, articulates anxieties of remembrance just as much as it does the fear of being forgotten.
Instructor: Danielle Drori
Course Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
November 12 — December 10, 2024
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Tuesday, November 26th
$335.00
Click here to register for this course
Classes will meet at the
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Room 210 of The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street
NY, NY 10011

Publishing Triangle OUTSpoken Series Special: Gary Indiana (in person & live-streaming)
2024-12-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Come join The Publishing Triangle as we read, reminisce, and admire the wide-ranging work of legendary gay writer, critic, and artist, Gary Indiana.
Featuring readings by Brian Alessandro, Christopher Bollen, Jason Napoli Brooks, Michael Bullock, Tobi Haslett, Sam McKinniss, Dale Peck, Nicole Rudick, and Christopher Stoddard.

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 Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
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

Brian Alessandro has written for Interview Magazine, Newsday, PANK (co-founded by Roxanne Gay), Huffington Post, Galerie (Wes Anderson’s cult film streaming app), Lambda Literary, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Kirkus Reviews, and The Florida Review, and has recently co-adapted Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions. Additionally, Brian co-edited Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs, an anthology of essays and interviews about Burroughs for Rebel Satori Press. Brian is also the co-founder and editor in chief of the literary journal, The New Engagement. His first novel, The Unmentionable Mann, was published in 2015 by Cairn Press and his first feature film, Afghan Hound, was produced by Maryea Media in 2011, and is streaming on Plex, Tubi, and Amazon. His second novel, Performer Non Grata, was published in 2023. Julian’s Debut, his new novel, will be published by Rebel Satori Press in March 2025. Brian also has a feature film and a limited series in development with an Academy Award-winning producer.

Christopher Bollen is a writer and editor based in New York City. He is the author of six novels, including his most recent, Havoc, out December 2024 from Harper. He contributes frequently to a number of publications, including Interview, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times.

Jason Napoli Brooks is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared in various journals, anthologies, and media outlets in the U.S. and abroad. He was the author of the queer-spy-fiction zine Cock of the Walk (2011-2013, currently being translated into Spanish for publication in Mexico) and the multimedia play Soundstage (2018, directed by Rob Roth and starring Rebecca Hall). With author Jim Freed, he is the co-founder of the long-running reading series Enclave, which took place at various Manhattan nightlife venues from 2006 to 2020. Brooks is currently at work on his serialized novel, Paranoid Lines, the first issue of which will be released in January 2025. @jasonnapolibrooks

Michael Bullock is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and documentary filmmaker focused on art, design and queer culture. He is the author of Roman Catholic Jacuzzi (Karma 2012) the editor of Peter Berlin: Artist, Icon, Photosexual (Damiani 2019), and co-editor of I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean Delear (Semiotext(e) 2023). Bullock serves as associate publisher of PIN–UP and The Whitney Review of New Writing and is a contributing editor to apartamento. For PIN–UP he co-directed Dream Homes, a commisioned work for the Cooper Hewitt’s Design Triennial, Making Home, currenlty on view through August 2025.

Tobi Haslett is a writer currently living in Berlin.

Sam McKinniss is an artist in New York and Connecticut. His paintings have been exhibited widely both stateside and abroad. His work has been written about everywhere, including an ARTFORUM cover story penned by Gary Indiana in 2019. McKinniss’s painting “Chrysanthemums (after Fantin-Latour)” graces the cover of Indiana’s novel Depraved Indifference, reissued by Semiotext(e) in 2020. In 2021, “Cop Car in Brooklyn” was used as cover art for Indiana’s collection Fire Season: selected essays 1984-2021 published by Seven Stories Press. The two men were close friends.

Dale Peck is the author of fourteen books, including Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, Sprout, and Visions and Revisions. He first wrote about Gary Indiana in 2015, when Gary released the memoir I Can Give You Anything but Love, and published a tribute to him in the Baffler on the occasion of his death. He was Gary’s neighbor in the East Village for almost twenty years, and once played Cards Against Humanity with him. It wasn’t as salacious as you might think.

Nicole Rudick is the author of What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Siglio) and the editor, most recently, of Joanna Russ: Novels and Stories (Library of America) and Spiral and Other Stories by Aidan Koch (New York Review Comics). Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Apollo, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and in exhibition catalogues for the Drawing Center; the New Museum; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; and Gagosian gallery. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade.

Christopher Stoddard is the founding editor of Itna Press, notable for first reintroducing Gary Indiana’s literary works to contemporary audiences, including the acclaimed novel Do Everything in the Dark. Stoddard is also the author of four novels, including At Night Only (2018), which garnered praise from Kirkus Reviews and The Paris Review. He lives in Los Angeles.

Journals and Diaries: Life, Privacy, and Literature: 4 week Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Course (in person only - registration required)
2024-12-10 18:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The December 10 class will be the fourth of four meetings.
See registration details below.
In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary: “In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.” What is the relationship between a writer’s lived experience and the works they present, crafted and bound, to the public? For Virginia Woolf, the diary was a place to reckon with the “oil well” of stories bubbling up inside her; for Roland Barthes, a space apart to wrestle with private loss and grief; for Annie Ernaux, the diary harbored the “raw and dark” material behind her fictions; and for Anaïs Nin, the distinction between fiction-writing and diary-keeping was difficult even to discern. On what sort of terms, then, can we take the writer’s diary? What kinds of insight does it promise—regarding literary craft, literary politics, artistic scenes, and creative processes? And how shall we approach this literary object—as a genre unto itself, distinct from other forms of life-writing such as autobiography, memoir, and auto-fiction?
In this course, we will read selections from writers’ diaries, beginning in the early 20th century and closing with Sheila Heti’s recent experimental work Alphabetical Diaries. Moving through time and space—from Woolf and Franz Kafka to Barthes and Nin to Sontag and Ernaux, with forays into Augustine’s 5th century Confessions and Rousseau’s 18th century work of the same name—we will ask how writers utilize their diaries in both their fiction and their criticism. Avoiding the “reduction” to which Sontag is rightly averse, we will explore how the diary—taken on its own terms—at once encourages and works against linear narrativization, and how it, perhaps uniquely, articulates anxieties of remembrance just as much as it does the fear of being forgotten.
Instructor: Danielle Drori
Course Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
November 12 — December 10, 2024
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Tuesday, November 26th
$335.00
Click here to register for this course
Classes will meet at the
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Room 210 of The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street
NY, NY 10011
