TELL 42: Pets
2018-03-10 19:00 - 21:30 (America/New_York) | 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.
Pets is the theme for the 42nd installment of TELL. Featuring Memphis, Kelli Dunham, Jesse Glasgow, and Pooya Mohseni.
$10 suggested donation to support the Bureau and the performers. No one turned away for lack of funds.

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 BGSQD. Check her out online! www.draecampbell.com.

Memphis is an Italian Greyhound mix and possibly a “Carolina Dog” from Tennessee. She is a great hunter and lives with her human, Drae, in Brooklyn. She is working on an autobiography about her life. Working title; Dramatic Paws, A Southern Gal in Brooklyn. Her first novel, “Chicken Bone Reality” is currently out of print.

Kelli Dunham is the ex-nun genderqueer nurse author storytelling nerd comic so common in modern Brooklyn. Kelli has appeared on Showtime and the Discovery Channel, the Cinderblock Comedy Festival, the Queerly Festival, Solocom, the Gotham Storytelling Festival, and nationwide at colleges, prides, fundraisers and even the occasional livestock auction. She is also the co-founder and producer of Queer Memoir and Organ Recital: A Festival of Stories About Bodies, Health & Healthcare. Kelli is the author of seven books of humorous non-fiction, including two children’s books inexplicably being used by Sonlight conservative home schooling association in their science curriculum and Freak of Nurture, a collection of humorous essays published by Topside Press. She is currently working on a slightly ludicrous self help book tentatively titled: “Shit This Hurts: An Irreverent Guide to Grief.”

Jesse Glasgow is an actor, writer, runner, and some other things too. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife, dogs, cat, and extensive collection of pants. She believes in you. And magic.

Pooya Mohseni is an Iranian/American actor, Transgender activist and writer.
Pooya appeared in an award winning one woman show, titled “One Woman”, in United Solo Festival at The Theatre Row, written by Cecilia Copeland & directed by Joan Kane. Her other recent stage performances include “The Good Muslim” by Zakiyyah Alexander, directed by William Carden at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Baltimore Center Stage’s “The White Snake”, directed by Natsu Onoda Power, Madame in The OUTLIERS’ production of “The Maids” directed by Ben Gunderson and the title role in “Death of a Persian Prince” at NYMITF & SAIPAF, directed by Dewey Moss.
She’s a recurring guest star on the new crime drama “Big Dogs” produced by Choice Films & Theatricals, directed by Mathew Penn and Tony Glazer, to be released in 2018. She’s also a recurring guest star in the first season of the USA network’s “Falling Water”.
Follow @Pooyaland on Twitter/Instagram

Joe Ovelman’s Affair W/ a Married Man
2018-03-11 14:00 - 16:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Book Launch “Pictures and Words” 2018

On Sunday, March 11th at 2:00 PM, celebrate with Joe Ovelman and the Bureau as we launch his new book, “Pictures and Words: The Sun Rises in the West and the Sun Sets in the East,” STH Editions, 2018. Rollick along with this sweet, sad, funny account of an all-too familiar romance. Ovelman will read from his book; a short Q&A will follow. You’ll want to come and get your signed copy!

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

Joe Ovelman lives and works in Philadelphia and New York City.
https://www.joeovelman.com/portfolios/1805/works/46918

Follow @joeovelman https://www.instagram.com/joeovelman/
https://www.connersmith.us.com/artists/joe-ovelman

Pop Gym Pop Up: Free Self-Defense Workshop at the Bureau
2018-03-14 19:00 - 21:00, 2018-05-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Palm Heels for the people! Don’t get that joke? No worries! Come by this FREE Pop Up workshop to learn some introductory skills that will keep you feeling safe. We’ll be covering the basics: stretching, conditioning, technique, and theory, with the hope that participants will leave with some super useful foundations that will aid them in the day-to-day. Mix that in with some sweat and some movement, and you’ll have an accessible and confidence-boosting good time for all. Whether you are a beginner, or someone with experience, come work it out with us!
Open to all ages! We’ll be moving around, so participants should wear clothing in which they are comfortable stretching and sweating.
#POPGym is a new project, working towards opening a physical space in Brooklyn that offers free self-defense, fitness, and skill share classes 7 days a week. As we continue planning, we invite you to come by any of our events this summer! Our workshops have been described as, “fun”, “holistic” and “empowering”, and for any questions, comments, or inquiries for future workshops for you or your organizations, email us at info@popgym.org #popup

Curating Arts and Public Health with South African Curatorial Resident MC Roodt
2018-03-22 19:00 - 20:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Visual AIDS’ sixth annual Curatorial Resident, MC Roodt, will present a culminating talk reflecting on his work in South Africa and his research in New York City, followed by a conversation with South African photographer Pippa Hetherington and public health scholar Ian Bradley-Perrin. MC has spent the month of March conducting research in Visual AIDS’ archives and activating our community through dialogues and studio visits. He works and lives in Bloemfontein, South Africa, a region particularly marked by the devastating effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic: 14% of the population in his hometown are living with HIV.
As part of his Curatorial Residency with Visual AIDS, MC is currently developing a transnational exhibition project that will be presented in South Africa at the Free States Arts Festival as well as on Visual AIDS’ website. MC will also discuss the Arts & Health Project Design Strategies workshop he will facilitate during his residency. Blending the disciplines and practices of community arts and community health, the workshop introduces participants to the design of public Arts & Health projects. Artists and community health practitioners will come together to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and partnerships in the realization of creative public health aspirations.

MC Roodt is an HIV-positive arts practicioner, writer and artist from Bloemfontein, South Africa. MC is the Arts & Health chair at the Public Health Association of South Africa and the Programme Director of Free State Arts & Health. He is a founding member of the gRRR Kollective—an intermedia arts collective—and has curated several exhibitions in South Africa. He frequently contributes as an arts writer on various platforms and is an activist for LGBTQIA rights in South Africa. To read more about MC’s work, see his introductory post on the Visual AIDS blog.

Pippa Hetherington is currently enrolled in the ICP-Bard MFA program, graduating in 2019. Pippa has been involved with Visual AIDS through the LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN initiative and has been assisting MC during his residency. Pippa’s work is heavily influenced by travels through Africa and her fifteen years of photographic work in the social development sector of Southern Africa. She is passionate about supporting projects in the civil society space and values the need for supporting the meeting point of art and HIV and AIDS.

Ian Bradley-Perrin is a PhD student in Sociomedical Science at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He is a fellow at the Lehman Center for American History, The Columbia Population Research Center and the Social Science and Research Council of Canada. His research focuses on the intersection of activism, the pharmaceutical industry, advertising and marketing, and public health. He has been an activist on HIV criminalization, needle exchange and harm reduction practices and vocal on distortions in the historiography of HIV/AIDS. He has also been an activist on campus organizing graduate workers to form a union and serving on Graduate Workers of Columbia bargaining committee.

Visual AIDS’ Curatorial Residency program is made possible through a collaboration with Residency Unlimited. Launched in 2012, the program offers a one-month residency for a curator, art historian, or arts writer interested in the intersection of visual art and HIV/AIDS. The curatorial residency encourages the development of exhibitions, programs, and scholarship about HIV/AIDS and contemporary art.

Opening reception for No Reason To Be Careful: A Solo Exhibition by Marco DaSilva
2018-03-23 18:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Please join us for the opening reception of Marco DaSilva‘s solo exhibition No Reason To Be Careful on Friday, March 23, from 6 to 9 PM.
No Reason To Be Careful will remain on view at the Bureau through June 10.

Marco DaSilva has developed a meticulous process of painting that was born after his manic episode in 2013. Applying house paint, limited color and sharpie markers through a pop context to canvas and other surfaces, this culmination of work evokes the duality of heaven and hell, deconstructing his lived experience during this era of his life. He provides a richly saturated landscape of his own world to the viewer and creates his own mythology in the process. Marco will be displaying MY QUAINT STRUGGLE a book of manic poetry and photographs alongside his paintings as well as SELFIE TABLEAU a book of collages that explore the idea of the ‘selfie’ as a contemporary self portrait.

Marco DaSilva is an artist born and raised in New York City. He holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY New Paltz and currently maintains a studio practice in Bedford- Stuyvesant. He creates his own symbology through his paintings and drawings which explore the notions of duality through the intersections of his multi racial queer experience. He has exhibited his work at IMAGE Gallery, Heath Gallery and The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art among others. He was an NYFA Artist as Entrepreneur Fellow and is currently a Visual Arts fellow for Queer Art Mentorship’s 2017-2018 cycle. https://marcodasilva.net/

Pushing the Limits: Ana Simo and Sarah Schulman in Conversation
2018-03-24 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Authors, activists, and co-founders of the Lesbian Avengers, Sarah Schulman talks with Ana Simo about her provocative first novel, Heartland, and much more.

Copies of Ana Simo’s Heartland (Restless Books, 2018) are 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!

Ana Simo is the author of a dozen plays, a short feature film, and countless articles. HEARTLAND, her debut novel, is an uproarious, word-drunk romp through an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States that blends elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire. A New Yorker most of her life, she came of age in a Cuba where a revolution’s sense of endless freedom was almost immediately replaced by iron-fisted censorship and rabidly homophobic witch-hunts that jailed or institutionalized LGBT people, forcing her and others to flee.

Sarah Schulman‘s work spans novels, plays, journalism, and nonfiction. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the College of Staten Island. Some of her recent works include the movie United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, and the nonfiction work Conflict is not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair. Her 19th book, MAGGIE TERRY, a novel of murder and intrigues, will be published in September, 2018 by The Feminist Press.

Book Launch: Tadzio Koelb's Trenton Makes with Vincent Virga
2018-03-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Please join Tadzio Koelb, author of TRENTON MAKES for a reading and conversation led by Vincent Virga.

A vivid, brutal, razor-sharp debut about a woman who carves out her share of the American Dream by living as a man.

1946: At the apogee of the American Century, the confidence inspired by victory in World War II has spawned a culture of suffocating conformity in thrall to the cult of masculine privilege.

In the hardscrabble industrial city of Trenton, New Jersey, a woman made strong by wartime factory work kills her army veteran husband in a domestic brawl, disposes of his body, and assumes his identity. As Abe Kunstler, he secures a job in a wire rope factory, buys a car, and successfully woos Inez, an alcoholic dime dancer. He makes a home with her, but for Abe, this is not enough: to complete his transformation, he needs a son.

1971: A very different war is under way. The certainties of mid-century triumphalism are a distant, bitter memory, and Trenton’s heyday as a factory town is long past. As the sign on the famous bridge says, “Trenton Makes, the World Takes.”

The family life Abe has so carefully constructed is crumbling under the intolerable pressures of his long ruse. Desperate to hold on to what he has left, Abe searches for solutions in the dying city.

Written in brilliantly stylized prose, this gripping narrative is a provocative and incisive exploration of the nature of identity, and a disturbing portrait of desperation. Tadzio Koelb has crafted a slim gut shot of a novel that heralds the arrival of a writer of startling talent and imagination.

Copies of Trenton Makes are 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!

TADZIO KOELB is a graduate of the prestigious writing program at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. He has translated André Gide’s work, and is an active reviewer and essayist for a variety of publications that include The New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement. He teaches writing at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

VINCENT VIRGA is the author of GAYWYCK, the first gay Gothic written to show that genres have no gender. He is the author of several novels and 28 non-fiction books. He is also a picture editor of 163 books, his latest is BOBBY KENNEDY by Chris Matthews.

Leather and Lust
2018-03-29 19:00 - 21:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Leather and Lust – Come One, Come All To An Evening Of Literature with Sassafras Lowrey, Laura Antoniou, D.L. King, and Nairne Holtz.

Sassafras Lowrey is a teenage runaway who grew up to become the 2013 winner of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award. Hir books—Lost Boi, A Little Queermas Carol, Roving Pack, Kicked Out and Leather Ever After—have been honored by organizations ranging from the National Leather Association to the American Library Association. Sassafras lives and writes in Brooklyn with hir partner, and their menagerie of dogs and cats. Learn more at www.SassafrasLowrey.com

Proud member of the Middle Aged Guard, Laura Antoniou has been writing erotica for over twenty-five years. Best known for her Marketplace series of erotic novels about a realistic slave training society. The 6th book, The Inheritor, was launched with an enormously successful Kickstarter featuring a limited leather-bound edition. The second volume of fan fiction set in the Marketplace world is due out in 2018. She has also edited and appeared in many anthologies, including Best Lesbian Erotica 2015, and is the author of Rainbow Award winning comedy kinky mystery, The Killer Wore Leather. Her website is LAntoniou.com; follow her on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

D. L. King (dlkingerotica.blogspot.com) has a literary-minded cat who begs for her 9:00 treats from about 8pm, on. However, while other cats like to sit on keyboards and sleaze their way in front of your monitor, Batgirl knows how important the work of writing and editing is and refuses to bother her during those times. (No, really, it’s true.) She must be a very patient cat as D. L. is almost always at the computer. D. L. King is the editor of fourteen anthologies, including a Lambda Literary Award Winner, The Harder She Comes: Butch/Femme Erotica, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Where the Girls Are: Urban Lesbian Erotica and five Independent Publisher Medalists, (two gold and three silver) Carnal Machines: Steampunk Erotica, The Harder She Comes: Butch/Femme Erotica, Under Her Thumb: Erotic Stories of Female Domination, The Big Book of Domination: Erotic Fantasies and Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year, Volume 1. Her short stories have been published in close to a hundred anthologies, including six volumes of Best Lesbian Erotica, as well as titles such as Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica, Girl Crazy: Coming Out Erotica, and Girl Fever: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians. D. L. King is also the editor of She Who Must Be Obeyed: Femme Dominant Lesbian Erotica. She has a couple of novels and a few novellas in print, as well as a collection of 21 of her own favorite femdom short stories.

Nairne Holtz began her writing career in the early 90s with the creation of a pansexual queer porn zine, Pornorama, that generated reviews and sales from around the world. A straight couple who ran a fetish group offered to back her financially and elevate Pornorama to magazine status. She pooh-poohed this offer she didn’t think was terribly practical: “Thanks, that’s sweet, but I’m going to library school.”
Today she manages a law library and is the author of several works of fiction. The Skin Beneath (Insomniac, 2007), was shortlisted for Quebec’s McAuslan Prize (rather respectable) and won the Alice B. Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction (she hadn’t heard of this award either until she received an email informing her she had won it). This One’s Going to Last Forever (Insomniac, 2009), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist (terribly thrilling). Her new novel, Femme Confidential, will be out in the fall of 2017.

Affirmative Laughter
2018-03-30 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Host Elsa Waithe brings some of NYC’s funniest non-straight non-White non-cis male comedians together for a night dedicated to diversity and hilarity.
The Bureau hosts Affirmative Laughter on the last Friday of every month.

The March 30th edition will feature:
Ashley Gavin
Sam Jay
Drae Campbell
Zilla Vodnas
Vivianne A. Njoku

NYC Queer Comic Fair 2018
2018-03-31 13:00 - 19:00, 2018-04-01 13:00 - 19:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
What is it: The NYC Queer Comic Fair the only fair in NYC geared entirely towards queer sequential art (comics, graphic novels, illustrated stories, photo-comics, or any other interesting take on the medium of still-visual narrative storytelling). The event is organized by WabiSabiZinez and Carmine Street Comics and hosted by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division . This year we are expanding to a two day event!
When is it: The event will be hosted by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division on Saturday, March 31st and Sunday, April 1st from 1-7pm each day.
Organizers:

• WabiSabiZinez – https://wabisabizinez.storenvy.com/
• Carmine Street Comics – https://www.carminestreetcomics.com/
• Comics by Patrick – https://comicsbypatrick.com/

Vendors:

• Adam David Bencomo – https://adamdavidbencomo.format.com/homepage
• Carlos Quispe – https://www.uranuscomics.tumblr.com/
• Doable Guys – https://www.instagram.com/doableguys/
• Drake Rogers – https://www.instagram.com/parisisburning_portraits/
• Granny Geek
• j______johnson – https://www.instagram.com/j______johnson
• Jean-Sebastien Coles – https://www.madeinbabas.com
• John Jenson – https://johnjennison.wixsite.com/illustration
• Khaleel – thisnumberisinvalid.tumblr.com
• Kyle’s Bed and Breakfast – https://kylesbnb.blogspot.com/
• luke kurtis – https://www.bd-studios.com/
• Lucky Sanford – https://www.instagram.com/luckysanford/
• Preternatch – https://preternatch.deviantart.com/gallery/
• Susse Soenderby Jensen – https://unteleported-tomatoes.net/
• SciFi Explosion – https://www.facebook.com/scifiexplosion/
• Square Bears – https://www.instagram.com/squarebears/
• #udonthave2banancy – https://www.instagram.com/stephenanton/
• Valmontgod – https://shipjumpercomic.com

Author Reading: Richard A. McKay's Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, with Sarah Schulman
2018-04-06 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Please join Richard A. McKay, author of Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, for a reading, followed by a conversation led by Sarah Schulman.

The search for a “Patient Zero”—popularly understood to be an epidemic’s first infected case—has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly exert a strong grip on the popular consciousness? In Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, Richard A. McKay demonstrates how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas—and fears—about contagion and social disorder.

McKay presents a carefully documented account of the life of Gaétan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the epidemic developed and who gained widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as Patient Zero of the North American outbreak. McKay shows how public health investigators inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of Patient Zero—adopting, challenging, and redirecting its powerful meanings—as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first fifteen years of an unfolding epidemic in Canada and the United States. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats.

Copies of Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic are 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!

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Richard A. McKay is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research has been published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and in Nature, and he is currently investigating the pre-AIDS history of sexual health and illness among gay men, other men who have sex with men, and trans people (https://www.beforehiv.hps.cam.ac.uk/share). Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic is his first book and has been nominated for the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. He lives in London, where he also works as a coach for academics, writers, and other creative thinkers.

Sarah Schulman’s work spans novels, plays, journalism, and nonfiction. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the College of Staten Island. Some of her recent works include the movie United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, and the nonfiction work Conflict is not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair. Her 19th book, Maggie Terry, a novel of murder and intrigues, will be published in September, 2018 by The Feminist Press. This year she was awarded the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Book Launch: Martin Duberman’s The Rest of It: Hustlers, Cocaine, Depression, and Then Some, 1976–1988, with Larry Mass
2018-04-07 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Join us for the launch of Martin Duberman’s The Rest of It: Hustlers, Cocaine, Depression, and Then Some, 1976–1988 (Duke University Press, March 2018). Following Duberman’s reading, he will be joined in conversation by Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) co-founder Larry Mass.

Copies of The Rest of It 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!

For many, the death of a parent marks a low point in their personal lives. For Martin Duberman—a major historian and a founding figure in the history of gay and lesbian studies—the death of his mother was just the beginning of what became a twelve-year period filled with despair, drug addiction, and debauchery. From his cocaine use, massive heart attack, and immersion into New York’s gay hustler scene to experiencing near-suicidal depression and attending rehab, The Rest of It is the previously untold and revealing story of how Duberman managed to survive his turbulent personal life while still playing leading roles in the gay community and the academy.

Despite the hardships, Duberman managed to be incredibly productive: he wrote his biography of Paul Robeson, rededicated himself to teaching, wrote plays, and coedited the prize-winning Hidden from History. His exploration of new paths of scholarship culminated in his founding of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, thereby inaugurating a new academic discipline. At the outset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic Duberman increased his political activism, and in these pages he also describes the tensions between the New Left and gay organizers, as well as the profound homophobia that created the conditions for queer radical activism. Filled with gossip, featuring cameo appearances by luminaries such as Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Vivian Gornick, Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millett, and Néstor Almendros, among many others, and most importantly, written with an unflinching and fearless honesty, The Rest of It provides scathing insights into a troubling decade of both personal and political history. It is a stimulating look into a key period of Duberman’s life, which until now had been too painful to share.

To read Larry Mass’s review of The Rest of It click here.

Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at City University of New York, where he founded and directed the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He is the author of numerous histories, biographies, memoirs, essays, plays, and novels, which include Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey; Paul Robeson; Stonewall; Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade, 1971–1981; Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community; The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein; Jews/Queers/Germans; and more than a dozen others. His biography of Charles Francis Adams won the Bancroft Prize, and his coedited anthology Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past won two Lambda Literary Awards. He won a third Lambda Award for Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS. Duberman received the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Historical Association, as well as two honorary degrees: Doctor of Humane Letters from Amherst College, and Doctor of Letters from Columbia University. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Duberman lives in New York City.

Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., wrote the first press reports on AIDS and is a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He is the author-editor of Dialogues of The Sexual Revolution, Volumes I and 2; We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer; and a memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America. His reviews and essays, and sequences of On the Future of Wagnerism, his in-progress sequel to Confessions, have appeared on Huffington Post.

An Evening at The Mudd Club with Richard Boch
2018-04-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Richard Boch, the author, is an artist who was the doorman of the legendary, New York City club. The place was more than just a venue for bands, it was a true ‘club’ for artists of all disciplines, and the relationships and collaborations made then still bear fruit today. Though it lasted only from 1978 to 1983, its influence is pervasive-it was, essentially, the birthplace of the Eighties.

Keith Haring was in charge of the ‘gallery.’ Anna Sui debuted her designs there. The Talking Heads, and other seminal no wave/new wave bands found their start at the Mudd Club.

Fab Five Freddy (Fred Braithwaite) said this about Richard and The Mudd Club: “More than the well-known doorman of the Mudd Club, Richard Boch played a pivotal role in why it was the coolest club in the world back then. Richard was the crowd curator, carefully only letting in the right mix of the wildly creative downtown movers and shakers who made it our hangout, leaving the squares and the unhip outside in the cold. Richard is now letting everyone into the Mudd Club by way of this well-written book that details the who’s who and all the fun we had while infiltrating, changing and disrupting pop culture.”

The Mudd Club is filled with anecdotes about and memories of coming to terms with sexuality, drugs, and how one becomes an artist in a time and place that is overripe with creative energy. Richard’s stories are personal yet are populated by the now famous (and infamous) denizens of New York’s artistic community.

Richard Boch will be introduced by Marc Jacobs.

Copies of The Mudd Club are 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!

Author photograph by Kate Simon.

Recent pieces about The Mudd Club:

NY Times- “A vivid tell-all”

Dazed & Confused

Bust Magazine- “The Mudd Club comes to life in a fascinating tell-all memoir.”

Merry Jane Magazine- “The book is a thing of wonder — funny, ferocious, masterfully written and assembled.”

Richard Boch is an artist, writer and lifelong New Yorker. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island and studied printmaking and painting at The University of Connecticut and the Parsons New School for Design.

In 2016 Boch narrated a slide presentation at HOWL Projects related to the New York club scene. Recent exhibitions of his work include a group show at McDaris Fine Art, a suite of multimedia prints titled A Throwback Thrown Forward, and a series of “Page Paintings” as part of No Wave Heroes. He was interviewed and quoted at length for High On Rebellion, the story of Max’s Kansas City by Yvonne Sewall Ruskin, New York in The 70s by Allan Tannenbaum, Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloé Griffin, Born This Way, the story of Gia Carrangi by Sacha Lanvin Baumann and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor by Tim Lawrence. In addition Boch is currently editing Bobby Grossman’s Low Fidelity: Still Photographs 1975 – 1983 and recently contributed a sidebar to Tannenbaum’s Grit and Glamour. In November 2015 he served on the host committee of the Mudd Club Rummage Sale Benefitting the Bowery Mission, the first Mudd-related event in over thirty years. The New York Times referred to Boch as making “live or die decisions” as the club’s “longtime alpha doorman.”

TELL 43: Higher Learning
2018-04-14 19:00 - 21:30 | 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.
Higher Learning is the theme for the 43rd installment of TELL. Featuring Jude Dry, Jimena Lucero, Mindy Raf, and Pauline Park.
$10 suggested donation to support the Bureau and the performers. No one turned away for lack of funds.

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 BGSQD. Check her out online! www.draecampbell.com.

Jude Dry is a writer and performer living in Brooklyn by way of Vermont. By day, Jude writes about queer film for IndieWire. By night, they ponder the meaning of a life well lived. Jude is currently single.

Jimena Lucero is a poet and activist born and raised in NYC. She was a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee.
She is co-organizer of the TransisMagick Collective which pushes for trans liberation through art & community building. Jimena’s work appears in EOAGH and Blueshift Journal.

Mindy Raf is a comedian, actress, writer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Mindy has contributed to MTV’s GIRL CODE, COLLEGEHUMOR, TNT, VH1, The Daily Comedy Network, and the MY PARENTS WERE AWESOME anthology. Mindy’s debut young adult novel The Symptoms of My Insanity (DIAL/Penguin) is out now. Her critically acclaimed solo comedy show NOT THE ONE: a love story was named an “LBGT Best Bet by Time OutNew York, “hilariously quirky” by Theatre Is Easy, “Barrier Breaking” by The Edinburgh Reporter, and “cheeky and infectious” by Ed Fest Magazine. Recently debuting Off Broadway at 59e59 Theatre and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it is now playing monthly in NYC at Theaterlab: next show April 18. For more info please visit: mindyraf.com

Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House, which she co-founded in 1997. Pauline also co-founded the Out People of Color Political Action Club, the first political club by and for LGBT people of color in New York City, which she co-founded in 2001, serving as co-president of the club from 2007-2010. And she co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997, which she served as coordinator of from 1997-1999. Pauline led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. In 2005, she became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. Pauline participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012 and was the keynote speaker at the Queer Korea Festival/Seoul Pride Parade, the largest event in the history of the LGBT community of Korea up until that point. Pauline did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European Studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Office Hours Spring Showcase Reading
2018-04-20 19:00 - 20:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Check out sizzling new writing at the Office Hours Spring Showcase! The workshop provides post-MFA poets access to continued support for manuscript-development and everyday writing, culminating in a public reading each fall and spring to showcase stellar new work. We welcome all poets, especially people of color, LGBTQ+, and those who are woman-identified. Our name derives from our side hustle. Many of us are freelance, adjunct instructors, who continue to thrive in the margins of academia.

Featuring: Marty Correia, Caitlin Grace McDonnell, Paco Márquez, Holly Mitchell, Sarah Sala, Sanj Nair, and Yanyi.

Marty Correia’s work has appeared in The Mailer Review, FUSE, Punk Soul Poet, Lady Business (Sibling Rivalry Press) and Flock. The New York Department of Cultural Affairs and Venus Biennale funded Marty to produce the reading series A Tribe Called Butch. Correia has worked a steady union job for the past twelve years while writing poetry, short stories and her first book, Bridgeport Con. Marty earned her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University and is now represented by Ellen Geiger at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. Marty has lived in the East Village with her spouse Kate Conroy since 1996.

Caitlin Grace McDonnell was a New York Times Fellow in poetry at NYU and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems and essays have been published widely, most recently in Salon, and she has two published books of poems, Dreaming the Tree (belladonna 2003) and Looking for Small Animals (2012). Currently, she’s an English teacher and lives in Brooklyn with her six-year-old daughter, Kaya Hope.

Paco Márquez is author of the chapbook Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). His work has appeared in Apogee,Ostrich Review, Live Mag! and Huizache, among others. As Spanish Editor for William O’Daly, he assisted in translating Pablo Neruda’s initial book, Crepusculario, for the first time into English, Book of Twilight, (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). One of his poems went up on a public mural through Sacramento’s Del Paso Words & Walls Project. His work has been supported by New York University, The Center for Book Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Originally from México and Northern California, Paco lives in New York City with his partner of 12 years.

Holly Mitchell is a poet from Kentucky. A winner of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers and a Gertrude Claytor Prize from the Academy of American Poets, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and a BA in English from Mount Holyoke College. Her manuscript Farm Centos was a finalist for the 2017 Atlas Review Chapbook Series, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Baltimore Review, Juked, Narrative Magazine, and Paperbag, among other journals.

Sarah Sala’s debut poetry collection, Devil’s Lake, was a finalist for the 2017 Subito Press Book Prize, and her chapbook The Ghost Assembly Line was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Her poem Hydrogen was featured in the Elements episode of NPR’s hit show Radiolab in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. Sarah is the series facilitator for Office Hours, a free poetry workshop for adjunct instructors and co-produces AmpLit Fest with Lamprophonic and Summer on the Hudson. Her poems appear in Atlas Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. Visit her at SarahSala.com.

Sanj Nair writes, paints and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter. Previously work has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review and Fence Magazine and she has work forthcoming in JuxtaProse Literary Magazine and The Equalizer, the former including a piece written in a new form she’s worked out. Part of a performative series in New York City called Emofru, she’s also written The Lady Apple, a collaboration between poet and composer that’s performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater as well as featured on NPR’s Soundcheck. Currently on Sabbatical, she’s a full-time professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice with CUNY.

Yanyi is the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in Poetry, awarded by Carl Philips, and his first book, THE YEAR OF BLUE WATER, will be published by Yale University Press in 2019. He is a 2017-2018 Asian American Writers Workshop Margins Fellow and associate editor at Foundry. The recipient of a 2015 Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House, Yanyi’s poems and criticism have recently appeared in The Margins, Memorious, and Model View Culture.

Patty Schemel Discusses and Reads from her Memoir, HIT SO HARD
2018-04-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Patty Schemel reads and discusses her recent memoir HIT SO HARD, described as a “stunningly candid and inspiring memoir of recovery from addiction and the ’90s.”

Patty Schemel was a drummer at the epicenter of the Seattle grunge scene in the early ’90s, best known for her work with the alternative rock band Hole.

Copies of Hit So Hard are 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 Darcy Hemley.https://darcyhemley.com
Hit So Hard begins with stories from a childhood informed by the AA meetings Schemel’s parents hosted in the family living room. Their divorce triggered her rebellious adolescence and first forays into drinking at age 11, which coincided with her passion for punk rock and playing drums. Her efforts to come to terms with her sexuality further drove her memorably hard playing, and by the late ’80s Schemel was performing regularly in well-regarded bands in Tacoma, Seattle, and Olympia. She met Kurt Cobain at a Melvins show, pre-Nirvana, and less than five years later she would be living with him and his wife, Hole front-woman Courtney Love, at the height of his fame and on the cusp of hers. As Hole’s new drummer, Schemel contributed memorable, driving drum parts to hits like “Beautiful Son,” “Violet,” “Doll Parts,” and “Miss World.” But the band was plagued by tragedy and addiction, and by the time Hole went on tour in support of their ironically titled and critically acclaimed album Live Through This in 1994, both Cobain and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff were dead at age 27.

With surprising candor and wit, Schemel intimately documents the events surrounding her exit from the band in 1998 that lead to her dramatic descent into a life of homelessness and crime on the streets of Los Angeles and the difficult but rewarding path to sobriety after over twenty serious attempts to get clean. Hit So Hard chronicles the extraordinary coming of age of a musician and an addict during the last great era of rock ‘n’ roll excess.

Let's Read: Pray The Gay Away
2018-04-22 15:00 - 17:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Join Michael and Zach Zakar for a reading and signing from their new book Pray the Gay Away
Copies of Pray the Gay Away are 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! The Zakar twins will happily sign your copy.

“Mom knows.” A simple text that would change two twin brothers’ lives forever. Coming out is hard. The struggle is ongoing, a daily part of life whether to a new friend, a co-worker, or most importantly yourself. Pray the Gay Away chronicles Michael and Zach as they face awkward sexual encounters, drug-fueled escapades, coming out to each other, and their biggest foe – Mom, a woman who gave birth to what she calls not just one regret – but two. The memoir hilariously and poignantly explores what it’s like growing up as gay, Iraqi twins in modern America. Pray the Gay Away was inspired the night Mom snuck into their bedroom and force fed them “holy grapes,” determined to “de-gay” them. The Zakar Twins are new voices speaking out against generations, particularly within the Iraqi culture, who look down on being gay. This book is not only for the LBGTQ community, but for young adults, looking to achieve normalcy.

Bespoke
2018-04-24 19:00 - 20:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Dressed smart like a London bloke, before he speak his suit bespoke. – Kanye West. Change “he” to “she” and “his” to “their,” and you’ve found the all-inclusive spirit of Bespoke at the Bureau.

Feeling a bit drab in your literary lifestyle? Craving some chic with your geek? Save the date: On Tuesday, April 24, the Bureau will feature Eileen Myles, Joe Okonkwo, Diana Oh and one “wild card” to inaugurate Bespoke, a bimonthly queer series where featured readers dress fun, fancy, or flirtatious, supporting the Bureau and resisting fascism. Our sinfully sartorial series presents fashionable femmes, dapper dykes, chic twinks, trendy trans* folk, & frothy FTMs. Featured writers are encouraged to suit up or dress down : readers’ choice.

Your hosts are the dangerously deviant trio Christina “CQ” Quintana (writer/playwright/dyke about town), Jerome Ellison Murphy (poet, critic and NYU Creative Writing Program administrator) and Tim Murphy (longtime LGBTQ journalist, activist and author of the novel Christodora), who invite you to turn out in your Tuesday best (dress up is welcome & encouraged, not mandatory) every other month for drinks and chat before & after our reading.

Writers! When else will you join a lineup of such stylish stature? Cast your name into the Bespoke rainbow top hat for your chance at being the featured “wild card” reader, and give your CV a makeover! Be ready with a short & sassy selection.

Coming down the runway:

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, performer and art EILEEN MYLES. Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, performer and art journalist who needs no introduction! Their twenty books include Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You and I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, and the Shelley Prize from the PSA. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. Currently they teach at NYU and Naropa University and live in Marfa, TX and New York.

Joe Okonkwo is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and editor, whose debut novel Jazz Moon won the Publishing Triangle’s prestigious 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction. Set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and glittering Jazz Age Paris, it was published by Kensington Books in 2016. Joe’s short stories have appeared in Promethean, Penumbra, CooperStreet, Storychord, LGBTsr.org, Chelsea Station, and Shotgun Honey. His work has been anthologized in Love Stories from Africa (his first fiction published outside the U.S.), Best Gay Love Stories 2009, and Best Gay Stories 2015.

Diana Oh is an actor/singer-songwriter/theatremaker/performing artist. She is the inaugural 2016 Van Lier Fellow in Acting with the Asian American Arts Alliance, one of Refinery 29’s Top 14 LGBTQ Influencers, the First Queer Korean American interviewed on Korean Broadcast Radio, Creator of #AsianPeopleareNotMagicians on Mic.com, Creator of {my lingerie play}: a concert & installation series in lingerie staged in an effort to provide a saner, safer, more respectful world for women to live in featured in People, on stage at EST, The Lark, Joe’s Pub, All For One, and on stage at Rattlestick Theatre September 2017 in co-pro with Ma-Yi. She will be in concert in April 2017 at The Center (www.gaycenter.org). The Wall Street Journal & Upworthy call her “badass.” mylingerieplay.com

Publishing Triangle Awards Finalists Reading
2018-04-25 19:00 - 20:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Join nine of the best LGBT writers of 2017 on Wednesday, April 25, at 7 PM, at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division as they read from their work, all of which are finalists for the prestigious Publishing Triangle and Ferro-Grumley awards to be announced on Thursday, April 26, at the Publishing Triangle Awards Ceremony & Reception, at New School’s Tishman Auditorium, 63 Fifth Avenue, in Greenwich Village, New York.

Copies of the nominated books are available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy of one or more of the books please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Featuring:

Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

Frankie Edozien, Lives of Great Men (Team Angelica Publishing), Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

Peter Gajdics, The Inheritance of Shame (Brown Paper Press), Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

Catherine Hernandez, Scarborough (Arsenal Pulp Press), Finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

Matthew Lansburgh, Outside is the Ocean (University of Iowa Press), Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction

Paula Martinac, The Ada Decades (Bywater Books), Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction

Maureen N. McLane, Some Say (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

Alistair McCartney, The Disintegrations (University of Wisconsin Press), Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction

Charif Shanahan, Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press), Finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

Pauline Gloss: Lullabies for the Psychotic and Other Recent Work
2018-04-26 19:00 - 21:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Literary sound-artist Pauline Gloss will present an evening of new and recent work in the text-sound / sound-poetry tradition. She will present her new cycle for solo voice, “Lullabies for the Psychotic” and screen her record (with accompanying video from Nicolas Bermeo) “Greetings from Here: Audio Postcards in Transition,” from 2016.

Pauline’s current body of work is concerned with how the smallest bits of language— in both their sonic and meaning-making dimensions— can, through repetition, variation, and syntactical rewiring, create temporary sonic and semantic meaning-making structures.

Her work investigates and foregrounds the physicality of language by rendering it architecturally. She makes of its discreet bits semantic and sonic building-blocks whose stability is always already in question.

With the character and reach of this tool set, she attempts to form a language in which the boundaries and traditional formations of selfhood are plied, questioned, and reformed.

Pauline Gloss is a writer and literary sound-artist based in Los Angeles. Her language-sound work attempts to dramatize and expand language in its timbral, rhythmic, textural, and meaning-making dimensions.

She runs Spoken Records, a label specializing in the release of work in the Text-Sound tradition. She has been written about favorably in art and music publications and has performed or had work shown in Los Angeles, London, and New York at institutions including MoCA Geffen, Cal Arts, Human Resources (LA), Resonance FM (London), Poetic Research Bureau, The Lambda Literary Festival, Automata, Betalevel, and others.

Cuarenta y Nueve book launch celebration in New York!
2018-04-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Cuarenta y Nueve‘s 3rd and final book launch party is in New York City. Please join us to celebrate this beautiful coffee table book dedicated to the 49 lives lost in the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre. Many of the 49 artistic contributors will attend. Readings, book signings, performers + celebrating the love and light of our rainbow community. Please join us on this ‘pride full’ occasion!
Cuarenta y Nueve means 49 in Spanish. This beautiful coffee table book is an artistic homage to the 49 lives lost on June 12, 2016, at the Pulse Nightclub massacre, in Orlando Florida. Writers of every discipline & genre, photographers, artists, and even an Executive Chef have come together to create this must have tribute. By 49 and for 49, Cuarenta y Nueve was the vision of (and curated by) best selling author Joie Lamar, who has also arranged for 100% of the proceeds to be donated to positive LGBTQ+ organizations, specifically Pride School Atlanta & GLAAD.

Beautiful to Look At But Painful to Touch: Marco DaSilva in conversation with Travis Chamberlain
2018-04-29 15:00 - 16:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Join Marco DaSilva for an intimate conversation about his artistic process with Travis Chamberlain, Managing Director at Queer|Art, where DaSilva is a fellow in QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP for 2017-2018. DaSilva’s paintings, collages, and sculptures are currently on view in No Reason To Be Careful through June 10th at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division. This program is free and open to the public.

Marco DaSilva is a native New Yorker whose symbol-based paintings explore hybridity through the intersections of his Brazilian-American, queer identity and manic experience. He has exhibited work at IMAGE Gallery, Heath Gallery, and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. He is also a NYFA Artist as Entrepreneur Fellow. He creates work at his studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Marco has a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY New Paltz.

Travis Chamberlain is a curator whose work encompasses performances, residencies, exhibitions, and community organizing, with a focus on the excavation of marginalized cultural histories and the advancement of emerging queer voices. Major projects have included work with artists Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dennis Cooper, Karen Finley, Julie Tolentino, Wu Tsang, Jack Ferver, Tina Satter, Young Jean Lee, and Jennifer Monson, among others. Formerly Associate Curator of Performance at the New Museum and Artistic Director of Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, Chamberlain is now Managing Director at Queer|Art, a New York-based non-profit that supports the creative and professional development of LGBTQ artists through models of mentorship and community exchange.

OLNY Poly Movie Night: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
2018-05-02 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. This month we’ll be at our regular venue, the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, and celebrating 2 years of Poly Movie Night!

Please join us for Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017), written and directed by Angela Robinson and starring Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, and Bella Heathcote. The movie was widely praised as one of the most positive portrayals of polyamory in modern American film to date.

Wednesday, May 2 – 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
208 W 13th St, Rm 210
New York, NY 10011

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

Synopsis: Based on the true story of the creator of the character Wonder Woman, Harvard psychologist Dr. William Marston’s polyamorous relationship with his wife and their lover was more provocative than any adventure he had ever written. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing that Occurs
2018-05-03 18:30 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Please join us Thursday, May 3 to celebrate Lyle Ashton Harris’ monograph Today I Shall Judge Nothing that Occurs with an evening of conversation with Lyle Ashton Harris, Thomas Allen Harris, and Alex Fialho.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, a radical cultural scene emerged across the globe, finding expression in the galleries, nightclubs, and bedrooms of New York, London, Los Angeles, and Rome. In Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs, the artist’s archive of 35mm Ektachrome images are presented alongside journal entries and recollections by additional contributors coalescing in a presentation of what Harris has described as “ephemeral moments and emblematic figures… against a backdrop of seismic shifts in the art world, the emergence of multiculturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and incipient globalization.” The Ektachrome Archive “constructs collective and private narratives to comment on identity, desire, sexuality, and loss” and was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Copies of Today I Shall Judge Nothing that Occurs (Aperture Foundation, 2017) are 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!

For more than two decades Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation and performance. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Known for his self-portraits and use of pop culture icons (such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson), Harris teases the viewers’ perceptions and expectations, resignifying cultural cursors and recalibrating the familiar with the extraordinary. Harris has exhibited work widely, including at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) and The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) among many others, as well as at international biennials (São Paulo, 2016; Busan, 2008; Venice, 2007; Seville, 2006; Gwangju, 2000). His work is represented in the permanent collections of major museums, most recently The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2014 Harris joined the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome and was recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.). In 2016 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was appointed a trustee of the Tiffany Foundation. Having studied at Wesleyan University, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, Harris is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Art Education at New York University.

Born in the Bronx and raised in New York City and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Thomas Allen Harris began his career as a photographer before producing for public television, for which he received several awards including two Emmy nominations (in 1991) for his work as a staff producer at WNET (New York’s PBS affiliate) on THE ELEVENTH HOUR. Harris is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a 2015 NAACP Image Award, United States Artist Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, A Blade of Grass Fellow as well as a Tribeca Film Institute’s Nelson Mandela Award. Harris has taught, written and lectured widely on media.<
Harris is the founder and President of Chimpanzee Productions, a company dedicated to producing unique audio-visual experiences that illuminate the Human Condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. Chimpanzee’s innovative and award-winning films have received critical acclaim at International film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, FESPACO, Outfest, Flaherty and Cape Town and have been broadcast on PBS, the Sundance Channel, ARTE, as well as CBC, Swedish Broadcasting Network and New Zealand Television. In addition, Harris’ videos and installations have been featured at museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Biennial, Corcoran Gallery, Reina Sophia, London Institute of the Arts and the Gwangju Biennale. He has held positions as Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University of California San Diego, and Visiting Professor of Film and New Media at Sarah Lawrence College.

Alex Fialho is a curator and arts writer based in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum, and Programs Director at Visual AIDS, where he facilitates projects around both the history and immediacy of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, with particular stakes intervening against recent widespread whitewashing of HIV/AIDS cultural narratives.
Fialho has worked closely with Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris in multiple capacities. In the context of Visual AIDS’ Day With(out) Art programs, Fialho collaborated to commission new short videos from the artists: Lyle Ashton Harris’ Selections from the Ektachrome Archive was featured in Day With(out) Art 2014 ALTERNATE ENDINGS and Thomas Allen Harris’ About Face: The Evolution of a Black Producer was featured in Day With(out) Art 2017 ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS, curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett. Fialho’s 6 hour oral history with Lyle Ashton Harris will be included in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s “Visual Art & The AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project” and Fialho covered Lyle Ashton Harris’ Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs: Selections from the Eckachrome Archive for Bookforum. Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris will be honored alongside Steed Taylor with the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award on May 21, 2018.

Wo Chan, Lonely Christopher, Rami Karim, & Emji Saint Spero!
2018-05-04 19:00 - 21:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Emji Saint Spero is in town from Oakland, which is more than enough reason to throw a Spring Thing at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division! Wo Chan, Lonely Christopher, and Rami Karim join the celebration.

Wo Chan is a nonbinary drag performer and poet based in Brooklyn. They are the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation of Arts, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. Their writing centers on personal narratives of immigration, race, and gender in text and stage performance. They are a standing member of Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play and currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University.

Lonely Christopher is the author of the poetry collections Death & Disaster Series (Monk Books, 2014) and The Resignation (Roof Books, forthcoming 2018). His short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse was a 2011 selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books and his first novel, THERE, was published by The Writers’ Collective of Kristiania in 2017. His plays have been presented in Canada, China, and the United States. His film credits include several international shorts and the feature MOM, which he wrote and directed. He lives in Brooklyn.

Rami Karim is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. They are a 2017 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and graduate of the Brooklyn College Creative Writing MFA, where they received the Rose Goldstein, Himan Brown, and Carole Lainoff awards in writing. Their work has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Apogee, Makhzin, The Margins, and Tagvverk, among others, and they are the author of Smile & Nod (Wendy’s Subway, 2018).

Emji Saint Spero is a queer performance artist and writer living in Oakland. They are an editor at Timeless, Infinite Light and the author of almost any shit will do. Their work occupies a hybrid space between poetry and prose, weaving together somatic ritual, performance, and collaborative experimentation. They work closely with other writers and artists, stretching the potential of creative intimacies, sociality, and the poetics of relation. They are currently working on the Exhaustion trilogy, a series of books obsessed with exploring and challenging Jose Muñoz’s notion that “utopia exists in the quotidian.”

Indie Presses Evening: Find Out How to Publish Your Book
2018-05-10 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Indie Presses Evening: Find Out How to Publish Your Book
Thursday, May 10, 2018, 7 pm
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 in The LGBT Community Center, 208 W 13th Street, New York, NY
Participating Presses: Gaudy Boy, Indolent Books, Poets Wear Prada, and Querelle Press

Indie publishers and editors speak about the exciting diversity of their presses and publications. They also read from representative published works of LGBT interest. The talks are followed by Q&A. Come and find out more about the writing and publishing scene.

Indolent Books publishes work by underrepresented voices writing innovative, provocative, and risky poetry addressing urgent racial, social, and economic justice themes. Indolent was founded in 2015 by Michael Broder, who now serves as board treasurer and managing editor. In 2017 the press became an imprint of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity Indolent Arts Foundation.

Querelle Press is an independent LGBT book publisher whose mission is to celebrate and challenge how we view our lives as LGBT people. Querelle’s namesake is Jean Genet’s bold and distinctive novel, and the press aspires to publish in the book’s outspoken spirit. Under the guidance of publisher and editor Don Weise, and in partnership with writer and philanthropist Chuck Forester, Querelle publishes two new titles per year.

Have you had your poetry today? Get your brain fuel from Poets Wear Prada. Publishing beautifully designed volumes of well-crafted poetry—and now, fiction—you want to read, since October 2006. Founded by former Wall Street banker Roxanne Hoffman with her late husband, retired Hollywood agent Herbert Fuerst. John “Jack” Edward Cooper took over for Herb as co-editor from October 2011. Based in Hoboken, New Jersey with European office in Salazac, France.

From Latin gaudium meaning joy, Gaudy Boy publishes books and media that delight readers and listeners with the various powers of art. Helmed by publisher Jee Leong Koh and managing editor Kimberley Lim, Gaudy Boy brings literary works by authors of Asian heritage to the attention of an American audience. We publish poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction of exceptional merit.

TELL 44: Intimacy
2018-05-12 19:00 - 21:30 | 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.
Intimacy is the theme for the 44th installment of TELL. Featuring Darlinda Just Darlinda, Mieke Dee, Sarah Fonseca, and Dylan Stephen Levers.
$10 suggested donation to support the Bureau and the performers. No one turned away for lack of funds.

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 BGSQD. Check her out online! www.draecampbell.com.

The Village Voice calls DARLINDA JUST DARLINDA a “Mastermind of Bizarre Extravaganza” and she has been working as a Burlesque Performer Performance Artist and Producer since 2004 locally (NYC) and internationally (Australia, China, Finland, Germany, France, England, Canada, and most of the USA including Alaska!) Darlinda is one half of the Burlesque duo The Schlep Sisters, co producing such shows as The 11th Annual Menorah Horah and The Burning Bush vs. The Second Coming. Darlinda has produced shows, The New York Times calls “shockingly explicit.” Darlinda has also performed Off Broadway and on television; she performed with Taylor Mac in The Lily’s Revenge (Obie), The 29th Annual Roots of American Music Festival at Lincoln Center,Celebrate Brooklyn and 24 Decades of Popular Music (Obie). She can be found on television, in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and The Other F Word Series. She’s lectured for Yale’s infamous Sex Week. She’s made performance art with her year long “life as art” projects Year in Dance and Year in Rainbow and is co-founder of LadyBox Theater currently creating Untitled Rainbow Project. Darlinda is a current faculty member at the New York School of Burlesque and also teaches internationally. The Sundance Channel made Darlinda a “Top 10 Badass Burlesque Babe,” she was voted in the Top 50 International Burlesque Industry Figures of 2011-2014! Darlinda is the recipient of the Golden Pastie Award for The Most Innovative and Creative and The first ever Brooklyn Nightlife Award Winner for Best Burlesque! USA Today says “It’s hard to top Darlinda.”

Mieke Dee

Sarah Fonseca is a publicly-educated writer who lives in New York City via the Georgia foothills. Her essays, criticism, filthy ideas, and their overlapping iterations have appeared in Best Lesbian Erotica 2018, The Lambda Literary Review, Math Magazine, Posture Magazine, and Slate. She’s currently working on a series of essays on women and strength pursuits.

Dylan Stephen Levers is an NYC-based filmmaker. His film “this is a film about Tom and Maddy.” was a Vimeo staff pick and can be seen on Short of the Week and NoBudge.com. Short shorts, his collection of minute-long films, can be seen at https://vimeo.com/shortshorts.

Annie Lanzillotto & Erica Cardwell Read
2018-05-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Pride Comes Early! Annie Rachele Lanzillotto reads from her new double book “Hard Candy” and “Pitch Roll Yaw.” Erica Cardwell reads new work. Special guests include: Gabriella Belfiglio, Clare Ultimo, Rosette Capotorto, Zhaleh Afshar.

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is the author of the books: Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light and Pitch, Roll, Yaw (Guernica World Editons 2018); L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY Albany Press 2013, LAMBDA Literary Award Finalist); and Schistsong, poems, (Bordighera Press 2013.) Lanzillotto is the singer/songwriter of the albums: Never Argue With a Jackass (2017); Swampjuice: Yankee with a Southern Peasant Soul (2016), Carry My Coffee (2012), Eleven Recitations (2011); and Blue Pill (2010.) For more info on her books, audiobooks, albums, films, and performance works, visit www.annielanzillotto.com.

Erica Cardwell is a writer and radical educator based in New York. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Believer, Rewire, and forthcoming for Green Mountain Review. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was awarded a nonfiction fellowship from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2015. She teaches English and Literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Erica lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their turtle, Smiley Mousa.
