BGSQD

Office Hours Fall Showcase Reading
2019-12-17 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | NY
Office Hours Poetry Fellows from the Fall 2019 cohort will read the innovative poetry they’ve developed over the course of six workshop sessions. The Office Hours free workshop provides post-MFA poets access to continued support for manuscript-development and everyday writing. We welcome all poets, especially people of color, LGBTQ+, and those who are femme-identified. Our name derives from our side hustle. Many of us are freelance, adjunct instructors, who continue to thrive in the margins of academia.

Laura Cresté is the author of the forthcoming chapbook You Should Feel Bad, which was selected for a 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a BA from Bennington College. The winner of Breakwater Review’s 2016 Peseroff Prize, she has published poems in No Tokens Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Powder Keg, and Bodega. She lives in Brooklyn.

Sharon Her is a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker who comes from a non-profit and community organizing background. A 2001 Jerome Travel and Study Grant recipient and former instructor for the Loft Literary Center and SASE: the write place, Sharon brings a passion for multi-cultural and social equality programming and storytelling. She is currently a workshop leader with the New York Write’s Coalition and her work has been published in Asian Week, City Pages, New York Press, and the Hmong creative writing anthology, “Bamboo Among the Oaks” (Minnesota Historical Society Press).

Sophie Herron received an MFA in poetry from NYU, where they were a Goldwater Fellow. They work at the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center, live in Brooklyn, and love their cat. Their poetry can be found in Bodega and Cleaver Magazine.

Emily Hockaday is the author of five chapbooks, including the forthcoming Beach Vocabulary from Red Bird Chaps. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, most recently Newtown Literary, The Maine Review, and Salt Hill. She is the managing editor of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and she can be found on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com and @E_Hockaday.

Jen Levitt‘s debut collection is The Off-Season (Four Way Books, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Boston Review, The Literary Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City and teaches high school students.

Paco Márquez is a poet based out of Manhattan, author of the chapbook Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). He has poems forthcoming in Fence, and previously published in Apogee, Ostrich Review, Live Mag! and Huizache. As Spanish Editor for William O’Daly, he assisted in translating Pablo Neruda’s initial book, Crepuscualrio, for the first time into English as, Book of Twilight, (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). He is currently working with Mexican poet Coral Bracho to translate her work into English. Paco’s work has been supported by The Center for Book Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York University, where he acquired an MFA in creative writing and was poetry editor of Washington Square. Originally from León, México, Paco has spent most of his life in Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. pacomarquez.net

Holly Mitchell is a poet from Kentucky. A winner of the 2017 Amy Award from Poets & Writers and a 2012 Gertrude Claytor Prize from the Academy of American Poets, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poems have appeared in several journals including Baltimore Review, Day One, Juked, Narrative Magazine, and Paperbag. Holly first joined Office Hours in 2017.

Sarah Sala is a queer poet of Polish-Lebanese descent. Her debut collection, Devil’s Lake is forthcoming from Tolsun Books June 2020. She is the founder of the free poetry workshop, Office Hours, and Assistant Poetry Editor at the Bellevue Literary Review. Her work appears in BOMB, The Southampton Review, and The Los Angeles Review. Visit her at sarahsala.com and @sarahmsala.

Sucking Straight Dick and Fighting for Gay Rights
2019-12-19 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
A Rare and Very Important Intergenerational Dialogue Between August Bernadicou (25) and Gene Fedorko (77)

GENE FEDORKO participated in his first Civil Rights protest in 1963 and was a crucial member of ACT UP. He is a medical professional, caregiver, art collector, curator, sexual explorer and Downtown fixture.

AUGUST BERNADICOU is the founder of The LGBTQ History Project. Since he was 14 years old, August has been recording and transcribing interviews with gay elders from the 1950s through the AIDS Crisis. To date, he has done 200 interviews.

TELL 59: Turn On(s)
2019-12-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, 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.
Turn On(s) is the theme of the 59th TELL, on Saturday, December 21, 2019. Featuring stories by Cecilia Gentili, Diana Oh, and Nina Ki.
Photograph by Grace Chu

Drae Campbell is a writer, actor, director, story teller, dancer, and nightlife emcee. Drae has been featured on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and on stages all over NYC. Drae’s directing work has appeared in Iceland, NYC, Budapest and in the San Francisco Fringe Festival. The short film Drae wrote and starred in with Rebecca Drysdale, YOU MOVE ME won the Audience Award for Outstanding Narrative Short at OUTFEST 2010 and has been shown in festivals globally. Drae won the grand prize at the first annual San Miguel De Allende Storytelling Festival in Mexico. She once reigned as Miss LEZ and also got dubbed “the next lezzie comedian on the block” by AfterEllen.com for her comedic stylings on the interwebs. Campbell hosts and curates a monthly queer storytelling show called TELL at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division. Check her out online! www.draecampbell.com.

Nina Ki is a Queerean (Queer + Korean) American playwright who uses fantasy and magical realism to give voice to the communities that she belongs to. Originally from California, she now lives with her partner and three dogs in Brooklyn. She likes her dogs better than most people.

Diana Oh (they/she) is a multi-genre performer, singer, songwriter, musician, actor, and creator of performance, installation, concert-ritual, and party. An open channel to the art that feels good to their body. A feeder of the soul. A non-conforming free spirit. Passionate about decolonizing & queering processes, Diana is driven most by pleasure, mutual care, and keeping things heart-centered. As a Refinery29 Top LGBTQ Influencer, the First Queer Korean-American interviewed on Korean Broadcast Radio, a TOW Fellow (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre), Van Lier Fellow in Acting (Asian American Arts Alliance), Venturous Capital Fellow, Sundance Institute Fellow, writer with The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit and EWG, Williamstown Theatre Festival Artist-in-Residence, Oh tours with their art in unexpected spaces and enjoys not fitting into boxes. Oh is the creator and performer of {my lingerie play} with national underground installations and concert staged in an effort to provide a safer, more courageous world for women, queer, trans, and non-binary humans to live in, CLAIRVOYANCE (her yearlong installation and concert series in Harvard Yard, the Boston Public Library, Institute of Contemporary Art, Harvard Arboretum and A.R.T.), The Infinite Love Party: an intentional barefoot potluck dinner, dance party, and sleepover for QTPOC and Their Allies (Bushwick Starr), Asian People Are Not Magicians (mic.com) and My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre (The Public Theater). TV/FILM: Queering, How to Be Single, NY is Dead (Tribeca Film Fest), Hey Yun (feat. on Janet Mock), Unicornland. The New York Times calls Oh “irreverent,” her best friend calls her “the punk goddex,” you can call her “friend.”

Cecilia Gentili is the founder, principal and owner of Transgender Equity Consulting.
Originally from Argentina, Cecilia found her passion for advocacy and community service when she started working as an intern at the LGBT Community Center in New York City. She served on the staff of Apicha Community Health Center between 2012 to 2016, where she managed the Transgender Health Program. She then served as the Director of Policy at GMHC, the world’s first and leading provider of HIV/AIDS prevention, care and advocacy.
Cecilia is also contributor to Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, and a board member for Translatina Network. Throughout her career, Cecilia has trained more than 3,000 individuals on a range of issues that include LGBTQ inclusion, immigration, drug use, sexual health, trans sensitivity, and intersectionality. She has worked with city, state and federal governments, non and for profit organizations, helping organizations bring about lasting and meaningful change.
For fun, she loves performing at storytelling and stand-up comedy events where she talks about her life experiences as a Latina transgender woman. She played the role of Ms. Orlando on the acclaimed television series POSE, a drama on FX that follows the live of TGNCIQ New Yorkers in the ball room scene of the 1980s.
Cecilia has been a tremendous inspiration to our translatinx members and our TGNCIQ Justice organizing committees. She has helped us elevate the fight to decriminalize the sex trades in New York, to fight for undocu-trans communities' access to legal representation that is culturally competent, and to push for essential services in NYC that center Trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming and queer communities.

Book Launch: Playing Monogamy by Simon(e) van Saarloos
2020-01-08 19:30 - 21:00 | NY
Love is love, but not really. To recognize love as love we need comprehensible images. What are those contemporary images that help us identify love and how could we identify love differently, figuring it as less defined by safety procedures, measured commitment and feelings of ownership and entitlement? Playing Monogamy refuses to see personal relationships as safe havens where people can hide from the precarities of society, and instead proposes to make public life more intimate and romantic.

Through a contemporary rereading of the cult of monogamy, Van Saarloos playfully queers the way in which the structure of monogamy is upheld through social convention within Western contexts. Written for more of a lay audience, the book proposes an expanded and polyamorous engagement with intimacy and sexuality as a possible alternative.

After a tour through the US and Canada in September, writer Simon(e) van Saarloos now lands in NYC to launch their book at the Bureau. After an introductory talk, there will be ample time for a Q&A and an exchange.

Copies of Playing Monogamy will be available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

*

“Playing Monogamy pushes for the bolder and deeper challenges to our current systems of family, relationships and intimacy. The time is right for this book and this argument. Simon(e) van Saarloos’s elegant account of romance, love and sex outside of the couple form allows us to imagine life beyond the iron grip of monogamy.”
— Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism

“It is a thrill to live at a time when words and the ideologies that underpin them have re/entered the vernacular. Playing Monogamy puts patriarchy, capitalism, and monogamy – long unquestioned pillars of “the way things are” – to the test, unpacks them and declares them the faulty defaults they are. Simon(e) van Saarloos writes urgently and poignantly for all of us who refuse to play along with those defaults. Playing Monogamy teases out the privilege and the power that underpin assumptions of how intimacy should behave. It tempts and challenges those who have long chafed under them: come out and play!”
— Mona Eltahawy, author of The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls

“Monogamy and other prevailing models of romantic coupleship will be dethroned as biological ideals, must be disrupted as norms or we will continue to do harm within their default capitalist framework. We must love more, own less. Use this book as a deprogramming tool, use it quick.”
— Viva Ruiz, founder of Thank God For Abortion

Simon(e) van Saarloos (1990, Summit, New Jersey) is a writer, philosopher and performer living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. They published several books in Dutch including Ik deug / deug niet (a collection of columns originally published in the Dutch national news- paper NRC), De vrouw die (a novel about a molecular biologist running the NYC marathon in a burqa), Enz. Het Wildersproces (a feminist and queer report of the trial against the Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders) and Herdenken herdacht, a non-fiction work about queer forgetfulness, white erasure and embodied commemoration. Simon(e) also writes and performs theatre and regularly appears on stage as a lecturer and interviewer. Currently, they are a MA student at the Dutch Art Institute. Their recent artist residencies include the Deltaworkers in New Orleans, the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in Delft and at IKSV in Istanbul.

This book is printed by Publication Studio (founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2009) prints and binds books one at a time on-demand, creating original work with artists and writers we admire. “Working within an international network of eleven sister studios—who together share in the weight of global distribution—we use any means possible to help writers and artists reach a public: physical books, an online library, eBooks and unique social events with our writers and artists in many cities.”

Closing Reception: Queer|Art Karaoke Party
2020-01-09 18:00 - 21:00 | NY
To close out the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual, we invite you to join us for Queer|Art’s first-ever karaoke “recoupment” party, hosted by Candystore and Ripley Soprano. Make a donation, grab the mic, and ring in the new year with us—all proceeds will be shared among the graduating Fellows to help offset expenses incurred in the process of making their work this year!

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This event is part of the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual, curated by current Fellow Jeanne Vaccaro and titled “How do we know what we need you to know: Intimate access and collective care.” The exhibition will present across multiple formats and locations (including The LGBT Community Center, Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, Movement Research, and La MaMa E.T.C.) new work by the graduating Fellows of the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship program: J. Bouey, Candystore, Daniel Chew, Xandra Clark, Sarah Creagen, Cristóbal Guerra, Russell Perkins, Ripley Soprano, and Natalie Tsui. Learn more at www.queer-art.org/qam-annual

The New Masculine: Poetry Reading & Open Mic
2020-01-10 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
A poetry reading and discussion led by Robert Gibbons and Austin Alexis. Open mic for anyone who identifies as masculine or non-binary.

New York-based performance poet, native Floridian, recent MFA graduate and Cave Canem Fellow Robert Anthony Gibbons takes us on a transcontinental and transformative voyage, sweeping and spectacular, across the United States in search of America and self in his recent poetry collection FLIGHT published by Poets Wear Pradain 2019. His critically acclaimed debut collection Close to the Tree was released by Three Rooms Press in 2012.

Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues, winner of the 20th Annual Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and also two chapbooks, both published by Poets Wear Prada: Lovers and Drag Queens (2007) and For Lincoln and Other Poems (2010). His fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Barrow Street , The Journal, The Pedestal Magazine, The Big Spoon (Ireland), Red River Review, Candelabrum Poetry Magazine (Britain), The Arts Cure, Tuesday Shorts, Poetry Now, Lips, Danse Macabre and others.

"The Son Will Rise In December" with Eddie Pabon
2020-01-11 19:00 - 20:30 | NY
Meet Eddie Pabon, author of The Son Will Rise In December

Eddie Pabon has devoted over 15 years implementing, building, and sustaining behavioral health programs to diverse populations and communities in NYC. After a lifetime of homelessness, abandonment and abuse, Eddie became deeply passionate about connecting with and inspiring others to overcome health disparities, poor support systems and habitual self-destructive behavior.

As a peer educator at People of Color In Crisis from 2004-06, he traveled to the CDC in Atlanta twice to assist in the development of structural change initiatives for youth. Eddie has collaborated with Human Relations Media to produce an educational video for HIV/AIDS prevention hosted by rapper and actor Bow Wow. During this time he sat on the Planning Board for the official NYC Black Pride events.

As a Public Ally in 2007, he dedicated 1700 volunteer hours in 10 months for which he received the “Spirit of Diligence in Service Award”. From 2007 – 2015 he worked as a CASAC at Services For The Underserved. There he directly served in multiple substance abuse programs, managing homeless shelters, and providing care coordination in correctional settings in collaboration with the Department of Corrections and Department of Health.

Eddie noticed a clear correlation between lack of education and support and unhealthy mental and physical health practices in youth causing cyclic traumatic outcomes like incarceration, disease, homelessness, mental illness and early death.

In 2015 He suffered a traumatic car accident and changed the course of his life by creating LaLecheDelArte.com where he photographs light and love in the moment. In 2018 Eddie became an author releasing “The Son Will Rise in December” a hit memoir he shares to inspire anyone facing significant hardship and trauma. Recently Eddie became a member of the Bronx Borough President’s LGBT Policy Task Force. Additionally he is Chairman of the Board to Public Allies NY supporting the mission to create a just and equitable society and the diverse leadership to sustain it. Currently Eddie provides youth groups, bookclubs, and motivational workshops around the world promoting messages of self-empowerment and LOVE.

When Queens Collide: The Theater of the Ridiculous
2020-01-16 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
A Rare and Important Intergenerational Dialogue with the Theater of the Ridiculous: Tony Zanetta (73), Agosto Machado (70+?) and August Bernadicou (25).

The Theater of the Ridiculous was an early 60s Downtown NYC theater troupe whose impact shaped glam, rock, fashion and culture. Over 50 years later, Tony Zanetta and Agosto Machado are still ridiculous. The last of the radical actors, catch them while you can.

A Night of Poetry with Jasmin Gibson and Sam Corfman
2020-01-17 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Belladonna* presents a night of poetry with Jasmin Gibson and Sam Corfman.
Join Belladonna* at the Bureau for our first reading of 2020. Be there to welcome poets Jasmin Gibson and Sam Corfman, during a night of poetry and for the launch of two new chaplets on January 17th at 7pm.

Jasmine Gibson is a Philly jawn. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire, and freedom. She is the author of Drapetomania (Commune Editions, 2015) and Don’t Let Them See Me Like This (Nightboat Books, 2018). She is a part of the editorial collective Pinko, magazine for gay communism.

Sam Corfman is a nonbinary poet from Chicago, living in Pittsburgh. Their first book Luxury, Blue Lace came out this past March, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize; it received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it an “extraordinary debut…a work of rare beauty and thoughtfulness.” They are also the author of the letterpress chapbook, Meteorites (DoubleCross Press), an excerpt from a forthcoming second collection My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, chosen by Cathy Park Hong for the Fordham POL Prize and forthcoming in Fall 2020.

Discover Queer Jewish Buddhist Kabbalistic Tarot! Book Launch
2020-01-19 15:00 - 17:00 | NY
How can you use tarot cards to take a 49-day Kabbalistic inner spiritual journey to greater wholeness and spiritual connection?
Mark Horn’s new book, Tarot and the Gates of Light: A Kabbalistic Path to Liberation, is your guide to a highly unorthodox way to practice the traditional discipline of Counting the Omer. In this introductory discussion, you’ll learn how to use tarot cards to explore your inner blocks to free yourself from internalized homophobia, misogyny and racism. You’ll discover how to use the practice of counting days to gain insight into your personal life journey, so you can recognize and overcome any issues that hinder your growth and spiritual awakening (and if you count days in a 12-step practice, this will give you more tools deepen your journey). This will give you a new path for a greater connection to the Source of all life, no matter what spiritual tradition you practice.
Along the way, you’ll learn about the hidden historic connection between tarot and Kabbalah. We’ll look at how Pamela Colman Smith’s gender expression and sexuality in her life give us an unexpected way to relate to the images in the Waite-Smith deck. And we’ll look at how spiritual connection can lead to more effective political activism.

Copies of Tarot and the Gates of Light: A Kabbalistic Path to Liberation will be available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Photograph by Rachell Morillo

Author of Tarot and the Gates of Light, Mark Horn received his first tarot reading at age 16. He started studying and reading tarot immediately.
In 1970, he became an activist in the post-Stonewall LGBT movement as one of the youngest members of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance. He has served as a Peer Counselor and board member of Identity House, New York’s all volunteer LGBT mental health center. He has also served on the board of NewFest, New York’s largest LGBT Film Festival He is the editor/writer of the Stonewall Seder liturgy, a ritual dinner celebrating Jewish Queer Pride, which has been used and adapted by congregations around the United States, as well as in Europe and Australia.
Mark has studied Kabbalah with academic, religious and practical teachers of Kabbalah in organizations ranging from the highly respected to the highly unorthodox. And he has studied tarot with many of today’s leading teachers. He has led classes at tarot conferences and meet-ups.
He is available for private instruction and consultation. You can reach him through his website, GatesOfLightTarot.com

Leather Art Retrospective
2020-01-24 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
The Leather Art Retrospective has been extended through February 23, 2020!

The brothers of Excelsior M.C. invite you to the opening reception of a gallery style exhibition showcasing some of the most famous artwork and photos taken over the past 45 years held at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, in room 210 of The LGBT Community Center. Proceeds benefit New Alternatives for LGBT Homeless Youth. Ticket includes:

Event access
Complimentary admission to the Eagle NYC until 11pm
Complimentary drink ticket to The Cubbyhole
Variety of random prize drawings

$15 admission
Purchase tickets here.

New Alternatives increases the self-sufficiency of LGBTQ+ homeless youth and young adults by enabling them to transition out of the shelter system to stable adult lives. They do this by providing long-term support, weekly case management, education services, life skills training, community-building recreational activities, opportunities for self-expression, and programs for HIV+ youth. New Alternatives’ guiding principles are those of harm reduction, youth development, and empowerment.

Excelsior M.C.’s Leather Art Retrospective will remain on view at the Bureau from January 24 through February 9, 2020.
The Leather Art Retrospective has been extended through February 23, 2020!

Poems Are Not a Luxury: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich
2020-01-28 18:30 - 21:30, 2020-02-04 18:30 - 21:30, 2020-02-11 18:30 - 21:30, 2020-02-18 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
The Bureau is excited to partner again with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research to bring you:
Poems Are Not a Luxury: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich
Instructor: Amy Schiller
“Poetry is liberative language,” wrote Adrienne Rich. “Poems are not a luxury,” argued Audre Lorde. How can we understand these claims about the intersection of poetry and politics? This course delves into the lives and works of Rich and Lorde, as we explore their respective poetic oeuvres. To Rich and Lorde, liberation was a through-line of experience between eros, politics, and language. And both express in their works understandings of gender, sexuality, and the body. In a famous interview between the two writers, they discuss poetry as the language of the dark, the feminine, the unconscious; we will explore this tendency in their work and the ways in which their respective renderings of the feminine influenced the trajectory of feminist theory and politics in the mid and late-20th century. Their conversations with one another, and treatments of their legacies by Claudia Rankine, Lisa L. Moore, Marilyn Hacker and others, will inform our investigation of poetry as part of feminist theory. How do Rich and Lorde navigate antiracism and intersectionality among allies with different race and class affiliations? How does poetic form contribute to their political practice? Readings will include Diving Into The Wreck, The Fact of a Doorframe, Uses of the Erotic, Sister Outsider, and the Arts of the Possible, among others.

The Bureau sells copies of
Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into The Wreck and Arts of the Possible,
Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, which includes the essay “Uses of the Erotic,”
and other titles by both Lorde and Rich. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us! Thank you!

Course Schedule
January 28, February 4, 11, and 18, 2020
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm
4 sessions

$315.00*
Registration is required. Please click here.

*Three scholarship spaces are reserved in each course because we realize that not everyone can afford to pay the full fee for our courses. Students who cannot pay the full fee should email us at info@thebrooklyninstitute.com to learn about our scholarship options. We will not ask questions about your financial situation but we do ask that you use the system in good faith and consider the needs of other students and faculty members.

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is an independent, all-volunteer queer cultural center, bookstore, and event space hosted by The LGBT Community Center in Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an organization of young scholars in New York City, founded in November 2011 by a few then-graduate students at Columbia University with a shared interest in pedagogy and genuinely interdisciplinary conversation. We teach classes all over the city, record a regular podcast, run a digital humanities initiative to preserve rare and out-of-print academic texts, and in general work frantically at any given time on a broad range of other academic and para-academic projects. We are a nonprofit, 501(c)3 organization.

Open enchanting historical closets with three NY novelists
2020-01-30 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Author readings, with slides and videos; Q & A. Explore enchanting historical closets through the eyes of three local award-winning novelists Loretta Goldberg, Joshua Ian, & Christina Britton Conroy!

Australian-American Loretta Goldberg is an accomplished pianist with nine commercial CDs to her credit, a former financial advisor and now a published author. Her debut novel, The Reversible Mask, recounts the exploits of a sixteenth century bisexual spy, Edward Latham, and his work as a double agent for Queen Elizabeth I. Intrigue, lust, war, and betrayal fill its pages https://www.facebook.com/LorettaGoldbergAuthor.

Joshua Ian writes mostly historical and speculative fiction, all with a queer bent. The Harvest Moon is the first in his Darkly Enchanted Romance series, which takes inspiration from mythology, fairy tales, folklore, and legend. Witches, ghosts, and mythical creatures – you never know what you might fall in love with. Find his steampunk collection and upcoming works at https://www.moodyboxfan.com/ or on social @joshuaianauthor.

Novelist/ screenwriter/ singer/ actor/ Irish harpist/ Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, Christina Britton Conroy has many passions. Her 4-book Victorian novel series His Majesty’s Theatre is filled with the history of the British theatre and allusions to Shakespeare. Her characters are gay, straight, rich, poor, educated and illiterate. Professional rivalries, jilted lovers, and finally a murder bring them all together under one roof: His Majesty’s Theatre. https://www.facebook.com/ChrisBritConroy.

Oral History: A Queer Art: A Two-Day Workshop
2020-02-01 09:30 - 15:30 | NY
THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL. PLEASE SIGN UP FOR THE WAITLIST, AND WE WILL BE IN TOUCH IF SPACE OPENS UP.
Oral History, a Queer Art will follow the course of our usual immersive workshops by offering foundational oral history training–theory, method, practice– while inviting exploration into the way that oral history values and theory are arguably queer and/or well-positioned to support emergent complex queer narratives. This workshop will also seize upon the history and abundance of queer oral history projects, approaching this canon as both case study of “insider history” and as inspiration for future projects. We’ll challenge a purist oral history model, asking how it can/should be adapted with queer values and theory in mind.
This workshop is appropriate for those looking for foundation oral history training, those embarking (or currently working) on queer oral history projects and/or those who wish to learn in a queer-centered space. All are welcome.

More about Oral History Summer School: Our workshops are set up to bring together learners with a range of experience and motives, to think about how oral history’s best practices apple to their work and personal lives. We emphasize listening, collaboration, co-creation, ethics, trauma training, self-care, familiarity with archival practices and project design, though not all of these subjects will be covered at length in shorter (1 to 2-day) workshops.

Oral History, A Queer Art: NYC Trans Oral History Project: Public Event
2020-02-01 16:00 - 17:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
4 PM to 5:30 PM (Doors open at 3:45 PM)
Free and open to the public
Please join us as Michelle Esther O’Brien and Nico Fuentes present their work with the NYC Trans Oral History Project (NYC TOHP) in conversation with Suzanne Snider and the audience.
NYC TOHP is a public, online community archive devoted to the collection, preservation and sharing of trans histories, organized in collaboration with the New York Public Library. The NYC TOHP works to confront the erasure of trans lives and to record diverse histories of gender as intersecting with race and racism, poverty, dis/ability, aging, housing migration, sexism, and the AIDS crisis.
During the event, Fuentes and O’Brien will discuss some of the most challenging lessons related to the NYC Trans Oral History Project and the broader implications for rethinking best practices in oral history. This talk will address the Project’s and Collective’s emergent ideas around ownership, vulnerability, accessibility, fetishization of orality/aurality, compensation, mission-driven work and collective liberation.

Presenters:
Michelle Esther O’Brien is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at New York University. She is currently conducting dissertation research on LGBTQ social movements in New York City. Michelle also works as a Community Oral History Coordinator at the New York Public Library, where she helps lead the New York City Trans Oral History Project. The Project is gathering a growing online archive of personal oral histories from trans New Yorkers. Michelle received her Masters of Social Work from the Hunter College School of Social Work, CUNY (now Silberman School). She spent several years working in HIV/AIDS service agencies, as a community organizer, support group facilitator and case worker. She served as the Executive Director of Housing Here and Now, at the time the leading coalition of tenant rights organizations in New York City.
Nico Fuentes is a rank and file organizer, sex shop worker, listener and sometimes speaker. She is interested in trans political organizing, difference, and bridging class and identity politics. She most recently completed a two year contract campaign at the Pleasure Chest NY and is looking forward to continuing to work with the New York Trans Oral History Project as an interviewer.
Suzanne Snider is a writer, documentarian, and educator whose work is deeply influenced by oral history theory and practice. Her most recent projects have taken the shape of sound installation, essays, and archive design. In 2012, she founded Oral History Summer School, an interdisciplinary training program in upstate New York. She consults frequently for institutions and project teams; collaborations include the National Public Housing Museum, MoMA, Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Library of Kosovo. Her writing/audio work appear in The Guardian, The Believer and The Washington Post, along with several anthologies and artist catalogs. Snider teaches at The New School. With support from the Yaddo Corporation and the MacDowell Colony, she is completing her first book, The Revival.

Oral History: A Queer Art: A Two-Day Workshop
2020-02-02 09:30 - 17:00 | NY
THIS TWO-DAY WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL. PLEASE SIGN UP FOR THE WAITLIST, AND WE WILL BE IN TOUCH IF SPACE OPENS UP.
Oral History, a Queer Art will follow the course of our usual immersive workshops by offering foundational oral history training–theory, method, practice–while inviting exploration into the way that oral history values and theory are arguably queer and/or well-positioned to support emergent complex queer narratives. This workshop will also seize upon the history and abundance of queer oral history projects, approaching this canon as both case study of “insider history” and as inspiration for future projects. We’ll challenge a purist oral history model, asking how it can/should be adapted with queer values and theory in mind.
This workshop is appropriate for those looking for foundation oral history training, those embarking (or currently working) on queer oral history projects and/or those who wish to learn in a queer-centered space. All are welcome.

More about Oral History Summer School: Our workshops are set up to bring together learners with a range of experience and motives, to think about how oral history’s best practices apple to their work and personal lives. We emphasize listening, collaboration, co-creation, ethics, trauma training, self-care, familiarity with archival practices and project design, though not all of these subjects will be covered at length in shorter (1 to 2-day) workshops.

OLNY Poly Movie Night: Colette
2020-02-05 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
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. Our regular venue is the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.

On February 5th please join us for a viewing of Colette (2018), directed by Wash Westmoreland and starring Keira Knightly and Dominic West.

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: In 1893, 20-year-old Colette marries the writer Willy and moves to Paris. Willy introduces her to the intellectual and artistic life of the city, encourages her relationships with other women, and takes credit for her writing. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes.

Four Way Books Reading
2020-02-07 19:00 - 20:00 | NY
Join us for a poetry reading featuring the amazing Four Way Books authors Patrick Donnelly (Little-Known Operas), Rigoberto González (The Book of Ruin), Julia Guez (In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame), and Sam Ross (Company).

Books will be available for sale. To reserve a copy of any of these titles, please write to the Bureau at contact@bgsqd.com
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry. Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, and an associate editor of Poetry International. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan- U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award. He lives outside of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Rigoberto González is the author of 17 books of poetry and prose, most recently of the memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth. His awards include Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. A critic at large for The L.A. Times, he sits on the board of trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and is currently professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.

Julia Guez’s poetry, essays, interviews and translations have appeared in Poetry, the Guardian, PEN Poetry Series, the Kenyon Review, BOMB and the Brooklyn Rail. She has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation. Guez holds degrees from Rice and Columbia. For the last decade, she has worked with Teach For America; she’s currently a senior managing director of program implementation there. She also teaches creative writing at Rutgers and writes poetry reviews for Publishers Weekly. Guez lives in Brooklyn and online at www.juliaguez.net.

Sam Ross has received fellowships and support from Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Watermill Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. He grew up in Indiana and lives in New York City.

Office Hours Craft Class & Reading with Gregory Pardlo
2020-02-08 11:00 - 14:30 | NY
Join us Saturday February 8th, 2020 at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division for a FREE Craft Class and Reading with author Gregory Pardlo. Featured readers include Alexis Aceves Garcia, Darise JeanBaptiste, and Christina Quintana (CQ).

Office Hours Presents: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” with Gregory Pardlo!
In the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle craft class with Gregory Pardlo, Cliché is perhaps the only thing a poem cannot abide. Clichés are not just trite or overused phrases. They are the images, ideas, and narratives that make up the shared body of knowledge we call “common sense.” In the writing process, we poets often reach for clichés and common sense thinking in times of crisis or discomfort instead of boldly depicting the thing that likely inspired the poem in the first place. Language that is flat and unimaginative can signal, paradoxically, the very passages in a poem that are the most emotionally fraught. Rather than simply discarding them, we might consider ways to honor the original sentiments buried within that stale language. In this workshop, we will discuss strategies for getting at the useful emotionally raw material fossiled into such otherwise disposable language. We will dig through your printouts of failed poems, we will scroll through forgotten files on your laptop, and we will use this material to generate new work that is moving, surprising, maybe even a little discomforting, and above all fresh.

The craft class takes place from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM.
A public reading will follow from 1:30 PM-2:30 PM.

Spaces for the craft class are limited to 17 persons so please RSVP in advance to sarahmariesala@gmail.com and include your full name, relationship to writing, and a brief bio.

Office Hours Poetry Workshop provides post-MFA poets access to continued support for manuscript-development and everyday writing. The workshop 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 femme-identified. Our name derives from our side hustle. Many of us are freelance, adjunct instructors, who continue to thrive in the margins of academia.

Gregory Pardlo‘s ​collection​ Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors​ include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts for translation; his first collection Totem won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and Director of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays.

Alexis Aceves Garcia is a first-generation genderqueer Latinx and Indochinese poet from San Diego, CA. In 2019, they were awarded a full fellowship as the Teaching Assistant for Catapult’s inaugural 12-month Poetry Generator Workshop with Angel Nafis and the Cisneros Poetry Fellowship from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. You can find their poems in the June Jordan Poetry & Protest Anthology, Como Maracuya, Peptalk, and Cipactli with poems forthcoming in The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, Apogee Journal, and Selfish Magazine.They are currently working on their first book and living in Queens, NY.

Darise JeanBaptiste is a fiction writer born and raised in the Bronx. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark and her MA in English literature from Brooklyn College, where she began teaching English composition. Darise has written for The Press & Sun-Bulletin, The Ithaca Journal, and City Limits. Darise is a VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) alum and a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow. In her creative process, she aims to trace the trajectory toward a woman’s embrace of her intuitive power.

Christina Quintana (CQ) is a queer, cross-genre writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. She is the author of the full-length play Scissoring (Dramatists Play Service, 2019) and The Heart Wants, a chapbook of poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Most recently, CQ worked as staff writer for the upcoming ABC series, Baker and the Beauty. For more, visit cquintana.com.

Pasolini's Arabian Nights
2020-02-14 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
On Friday, February 14th, please join us for a viewing of Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte), (1974), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Please arrive at 6:30 pm at the Bureau for pre-screening socializing, buying drinks, and finding a seat.

At 6:45 pm Ara H. Merjian, Professor of Italian, New York University, and author of the forthcoming Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, April 2020), will introduce Arabian Nights.

At 7 pm sharp we will begin the screening.

The event is free, although a $10 suggested donation to support the Bureau is much appreciated!

Pasolini’s adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, tells the story of Nur ed Din and Zumurrud, two young lovers separated through error. Nur ed Din learns through stories within stories of love, betrayal, revenge and renewal to help guide him back to Zumurrud. Shot in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Yemen, Iran, India and Nepal, landscape beautifully expands each story. It is the third film of Pasolini’s “trilogy of life” series, which preceded his final film, Salò. Dreamlike and poetic, it opens one’s mind to life’s creative possibility and imaginative potential.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes
Subtitles: English

TELL 60: Queer Black Love
2020-02-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, 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. That makes this TELL the sixth anniversary edition!!!
Queer Black Love is the theme of the 60th TELL, on Saturday, February 15, 2020, with special guest host Elsa Waithe. Featuring stories by Calvin S. Cato, Lois Thompson, and Lamar Shambley.

Elsa Waithe is a Comedian, Actor, and Motivational Speaker from Norfolk, Virginia. She’s won the Virginia Beach Funnybone’s Clash of the Comics three times, has been featured on This American Life, and is a recurring guest on TELL.

Calvin S. Cato has performed all across the United States and has even crossed the border into Canada. His television appearances include the Game Show Network, Oxygen’s My Crazy Love, National Geographic’s Brain Games, and an unaired pilot for Vice Media called Emergency Black Meeting. His comedy has been featured in numerous festivals including San Francisco Sketchfest, Austin’s Out of Bounds Comedy Festival, Brooklyn Pride, and the Women in Comedy Festival. In addition, you may have heard him overshare on many podcasts including Keith and The Girl, The Beige Philip Show, RISK!, and Tinder Tales. In 2017, Calvin was named one of Time Out New York’s Queer Comics of Color to Watch Out For. You can catch Calvin every Monday as the host/producer of Ed Sullivan on Acid at Freddy’s Bar in Park Slope, one of the longest running free comedy shows in Brooklyn. Or you can check out the podcast he co-produces called Playable Characters Podcast, which has been featured in AV Club and Splitsider.

Lamar Shambley is a Brooklyn-born educator with experience teaching middle school math and high school Spanish. He’s the Founder and Executive Director of Teens of Color Abroad, a nonprofit program that provides local high school students of color with language immersion study abroad programs.

For the past seven years Lois Thompson has produced and hosted Blacklight Comedy Show at The Brooklyn Moon. Always an all-female line-up, Blacklight has become a must-do stage for NYC and visiting comedians alike. Since 2016, she has also produced the comedy portion of the Brooklyn Pride Celebration. When she not busy finding funny people, Lois helps people find their place in the world through real estate.

Papers will not protect us: fugitive alien voices | launch and celebration for "Intergalactic Travels: poems from a Fugitive Alien" by Alan Pelaez Lopez
2020-02-19 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
is there a noun for the type of energy
the Black body feels when it senses danger?;
is there an adjective for the type of sex
the Alienated wanna have in order to stop time?;
is there a verb for traveling into another dimension
to understand how the Self is surviving?;
is there the possibility of being Human once again?;

Please join The Operating System in celebrating the launch of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, the debut hybrid collection from Alan Pelaez Lopez. “Papers will not protect us” features the voices of Jess X. Snow, Alejandro Heredia, and Wo Chan, together with the author, in celebration, resistance, and visionary resilience, conjuring futures for bodies named alien by an imperial capital state.

Suggested donation of $10 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.

We ask that you please avoid wearing perfumes/scents so that those with allergies and sensitivity to scent can attend.

Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien will be available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Thanks you for supporting the Bureau by buying books from us!

‘Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien’ is an experimental poetry collection that renders an intimate portrait of growing up undocumented in the United States. Through the use of collages, photographs, emails, and immigration forms, Alan Pelaez Lopez formulates theories of fugitivity that position the Trans*Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession as root causes of undocumented immigration. Although themes of isolation and unbelonging are at the forefront of the book, the poet doesn’t see belonging to U.S. society as a liberatory practice. Instead, Pelaez Lopez urges readers to question their inheritance and acceptance of “settler rage, settler fear, and settler citizenship,” so that they can actively address their participation in everyday violences that often go unnoticed. As the title invokes, Intergalactic Travels breaks open a new galaxy where artists of color are the warriors that manifest the change that is needed not only to survive, but thrive.

Advance Praise:
“‘Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien’ brilliantly expands the conversation on undocumented migration by tracing the legacy of illegality. Claiming ‘every crossing becomes mine,’ Alan Pelaez Lopez, as fugitive alien, bravely takes on the task of traveling across galaxies to reach an elsewhere that is something more like a new holding. Against the failure of political language, this book of multimedia poems becomes a verb, an active imagining that takes the banality of papers and transforms it into poetry. This intergalactic traveling brings the ‘Black NDN’ migrant touchingly back to their mother’s arms, and to her vision for life. If illegality is to be their legacy, Alan reimagines that illegality as both disruptive of settler-futures and productive for black and indigenous futures. We should be immensely grateful for this vision.” – Javier O. Huerta, author of ‘American Copia: An Immigrant Epic’

“This is a stunning book. It’s history, it’s their story, it’s an archive and a hard drive with a playful vibe. Its sense of humor girds and grounds and gallops around the gravity of law and belonging and erasure and choosing words and narratives and modes that were made without people like us in the room. It revels in colonial language as it tells that language to sit the f down. There’s a new b on the scene. Take note and pay your respects.” – Tommy Pico, author of ‘Feed’

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. They are the author of the art and poetry collection, ‘Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien’ (The Operating System, 2020), and the chapbook, ‘to love and mourn in the age of displacement’ (Nomadic Press, 2020). Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” as well as published in Best New Poets, Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, Puerto Del Sol, Everyday Feminism, & elsewhere. Pelaez Lopez has received fellowships and/or residencies from Submittable, the Museum of the African Diaspora, VONA/Voices, and UC Berkeley. They live in Oakland, CA & the internet (as @MigrantScribble).

Wo Chan is a queer poet and drag performer living in Brooklyn. Wo has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a member of Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Check them out @theillustriouspearl.

Jess X. Snow is a queer migrant asian-canadian artist, filmmaker, and pushcart-nominated poet based in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, they are currently a MFA candidate at NYU Graduate Film. Through film, large-scale murals, poetry and art education, they are working to build a future where queer, trans and migrant people of color may see themselves heroic on the big screen and city walls & then can grow up with the agency to create their own. Their murals and political graphics have appeared on outdoor buildings across the country and on PBS Newshour, The LA Times, and in the permanent collection of the Ford Foundation and the Library of Congress. Their art and films have been used as organizing tools at protests such as the Women’s March on Washington, as a part of migrant rights organizing on both sides of the border, as well as on college campuses to support survivors and end rape culture. Their multi-disciplinary practice combines art and somatic healing practices to empower communities to discover inside their own bodies—a sanctuary of healing and collective liberation.

Alejandro Heredia is is a Queer Afro-Dominican writer from The Bronx. He is a member of Project X’s first Slam team, and national outreach coordinator for PEN Across America, where he develops literary advocacy and press freedom programming throughout the country. Since 2016, he has used his writing and organizing skills to create and support literary events in the Bronx, including efforts to resist gentrification in low-income communities. Heredia is passionate about the creative, intellectual, and social lives of Black LGBTQ people across the diaspora. In 2019, he launched a workshop and event series in the Bronx centering Black LGBTQ writers.

45 Years Behind the Leather Curtain - Community Panel
2020-02-21 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
An unforgettable community panel sharing the history, passion, and livelihood of men and women bonded through leather expressions.

Join the Brothers of Excelsior M.C. and notable panelists Witti Repartee, Richard Majewski, and Scott Erickson.

Witti Repartee
Witti Repartee is the Queen of the New York Leathermen. Currently, the Vice President and Show Director for Folsom Street East and board member of Delta Brotherhood International, she’s also the hostess for Continuum. She’s a former co-chair of Leather Pride Night, served as facilitator for GMSMA’s TNG Group, and has served on the boards of the Gay Activists Alliance in Morris County, Big Apple Performing Arts and the Imperial Court of New York. During the day she serves as the major gifts officer of the Stonewall Community Foundation and she’d love to know the hanky code for hot wax.

Richard Majewski
One of the founding members of Excelsior M.C., Richard will share the values lived and observed through the brotherhood of New York City’s leathermen.

Scott Erickson
After co-founding the Bay State Marauders in 2003, Scott currently serves as the club’s Historian and Atlantic Motorcycle Coordingin Council (AMCC) representative. He was co-chair of the New England Leather Alliance in 2007 and 2008 and remains active with the organization today. Scott was titled Mr. Boston Leather in 2004. In 2007, he won the Pantheon of Leather New England Regional Award. He has been active in the Boston leather community since 1990 and has shared his craft of knot tying for more than 40 years.

Purchase $10 ticket

Proceeds from tonight’s event benefit SAGE, New York City’s advocacy and service organization for LGBT elders.
Due to space capacity only 40 tickets will be available.

Book Launch with Jasmine Reid and Catherine Chen
2020-02-23 17:00 - 19:00 | NY
Catherine Chen & Jasmine Reid read from their debut poetry collections Manifesto, Or: Hysteria (Big Lucks) and Deus Ex Nigrum (Honeysuckle Press), the 2018 Winner of the Honeysuckle Chapbook Contest, selected by Danez Smith, at this stop along their Dykes of the Universe co-book tour. Catherine will reach into your soul & hold you in the mirrored reality of their poesis. Jasmine will invite you to find posterity & futurity in the blooming surround of human being. Together, in sky, these sibling comets arrive.

Copies of Manifesto, Or: Hysteria and Deus Ex Nigrum will be available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy/copies please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Catherine Chen is a poet, performer, and author of the chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks). Their writing has appeared in Slate, The Rumpus, Apogee, Anomaly, and Nat. Brut, among others. A recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Lambda Literary, and Sundress Academy for the Arts, they’re currently working on a libretto.

Jasmine Reid is a twice trans poet of flowers. She is the author of Deus Ex Nigrum, winner of the 2018 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, selected by Danez Smith. An MFA candidate at Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Poets House and Jack Jones Literary Arts, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, Apogee, the Shade Journal, and Pinwheel, among others. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated poet, Jasmine was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and is currently based in Ithaca, NY. Find her at reidjasmine.com

Romans/Snowmare Book Launch
2020-02-28 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Come celebrate the launch of Cam Scott‘s Romans/Snowmare—a daybook of anti-capitalist ideation, a homoerotic reinvention of the prairie long poem, a ludic experiment with language and duration.

Copies of Romans/Snowmare will be available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

CAM SCOTT is a poet, critic, and non-musician from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 territory. He is the author of WRESTLERS, a visual suite published by Greying Ghost in 2017, and ROMANS/SNOWMARE, published by ARP Books in 2019. In addition to his own writing and musical practice, he is artistic director of send + receive, a festival of sound art and experimental music based out of Winnipeg.

MIA KANG writes poems and other perversions. She is the author of City Poems (2020), a poetry pamphlet from ignitionpress. Mia was named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre, and her writing has appeared in journals including POETRY, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine, and PEN America. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, runner-up for the 2019 and 2017 Discovery Poetry Contests, and finalist for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Mia is a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, where she studies the contested rise of U.S. multiculturalism and its failures. www.miaadrikang.com

IAN DREIBLATT is a writer and translator interested in paganism, the ends of worlds, writing, and socialist mass culture. Recentish chapbooks include barishonah (DoubleCross Press) and how to hide by showing in the age of being alone with the universe (above/ground press); recentish translations include the prison letters of Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Comradely Greetings, Verso Books) and the poems of Pavel Arseniev (Reported Speech, Cicada Press). Forthcoming books include a translation of Dmitrii Furman’s Spiral (Verso Books) and a full-length poetry collection (forget thee, Ugly Duckling Presse). He is TV Commercials Correspondent at the Believer and edits Counter. If you but express mild interest, he will surely cook you soup.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Theory, Sexuality, and Subversion
2020-03-03 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
The Bureau is excited to partner again with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research to bring you:

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Theory, Sexuality, and Subversion

Instructor: Paige Sweet

1990 saw the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, a text that has become required reading for anyone interested in feminist theory, critical appraisals of gender, and the burgeoning field of queer theory. Central to Butler’s theory is the concept of performativity as a way to describe how we become gendered subjects, that is, how we come to enact gender in recognizable ways. The text is also well known for its account of how certain kinds of performative (gendered) practices—like drag—might become subversive; or how, as Butler says, it might be possible “to open up the field of possibility for gender.” Gender Trouble has proved surprisingly controversial, notably for its difficult prose, but also for its treatment of the body as discursively produced, as well as for its ambiguous “subversive” politics. How, 30 years after publication, does Gender Trouble complicate, or help us make sense of, contemporary problems of feminism, identity, queerness, and politics?

Whether one is a devotee of Gender Trouble or to some degree a skeptic, it remains a text to be reckoned with. This course will take Gender Trouble as the primary text and keep both approaches in mind—one appraising, one critical—as we pair it with select supplemental readings. We will consider its historical context and theoretical frameworks. In addition, we’ll grapple with the insights and limitations of its core arguments about gender and sexuality. Finally, we’ll consider how its politics resonate (or don’t) today. We will ask: Why was it written when it was? With what other texts and ideas was it in conversation? How does it understand the relation between language and categories of sex and sexuality? What polyvalent meanings of performativity, whether reverential or revisionary, did Gender Trouble originate and inspire? What is the legacy of Butler’s argument for shifting the subject of feminism away from “women” to “gender”—especially in view of Robin Weigman’s critique, or in view of more recent studies of trans subjectivity? How might we evaluate the political potentials or failures of parody today? Although some might come to the course curious about enduring relevance of this seminal text, the course also welcomes first-time readers of Butler’s work.

The Bureau sells copies of Judith Butler‘s Gender Trouble, among other titles by Butler. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us! Thank you!

Course Schedule
March 3, 10, 17, and 24, 2020
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:30pm
4 sessions

$315.00*
Registration is required. Please click here.

*Three scholarship spaces are reserved in each course because we realize that not everyone can afford to pay the full fee for our courses. Students who cannot pay the full fee should email us at info@thebrooklyninstitute.com to learn about our scholarship options. We will not ask questions about your financial situation but we do ask that you use the system in good faith and consider the needs of other students and faculty members.

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is an independent, all-volunteer queer cultural center, bookstore, and event space hosted by The LGBT Community Center in Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an organization of young scholars in New York City, founded in November 2011 by a few then-graduate students at Columbia University with a shared interest in pedagogy and genuinely interdisciplinary conversation. We teach classes all over the city, record a regular podcast, run a digital humanities initiative to preserve rare and out-of-print academic texts, and in general work frantically at any given time on a broad range of other academic and para-academic projects. We are a nonprofit, 501(c)3 organization.

Image: photograph by Elizabeth Ohlson Wallin

OLNY Poly Movie Night: Habana Eva
2020-03-04 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
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. Our regular venue is the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.

On March 4th please join us for a viewing of Habana Eva (2010), directed by Fina Torres and starring Prakriti Maduro, Yuliet Cruz, and Juan Carlos García.

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: Eva, a factory seamstress living with her parents in Havana, dreams of designing clothes and is frustrated by the rut her relationship with her boyfriend has fallen into, when she meets a wealthy visitor from Venezuela. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles.
