BGSQD

The Fourth Annual Bisexual Book Awards at Westbeth Artists Housing and Center for the Arts
2016-06-03 06:30 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | NY
The Bi Writers Association presents A Multi-Arts Celebration of Bisexual Writing: The Fourth Annual Bisexual Book Awards at Westbeth Artists Housing and Center for the Arts

Readings by finalists of the Bisexual Book Awards, live music and a comic book art presentation capped off with the Bisexual Book Awards Ceremony and an after-party.
The Bureau will be will selling books!
Schedule: 6:30pm book signings, 7-10:30pm stage program, 10:30pm book signings, 11-1 after-party
Tickets: $15 in advance (seating is limited) or at the door
Program:
Host: Sheela Lambert, Director, Bi Writers Association
Author Readings-multiple genres:
Memoir: Kate Evans / Call It Wonder: An Odyssey of Love, Sex, Spirit, and Travel
Biography: Emily Bingham / Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham
Speculative Fiction (Fantasy): B.R. Sanders / Ariah
Romance: Francis Gideon / A Winter in Rome
Mystery: Michelle Moore & Reesa Herberth / Peripheral People
Erotic Fiction: Heidi Belleau & Sam Schooler / Dead Ringer
Romance: Megan Mulry / Bound with Honor
Teen/Young Adult: Erica Yang / Bad Idea
Fiction: Redfern Jon Barrett / Giddy Death of the Gays & Strange Demise of Straights
Non-fiction: Sheela Lambert / Bisexuality in Education, edited by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
Comic Book Art Presentation: Elizabeth Beier “Bisexual Trials & Errors”
Live Music: Michael David Gordon & “Honeybird” Monique Mizrahi
Bisexual Book Awards Ceremony: Presentation of Awards
After-party: Dinner & drinks at Malaparte Restaurant, 753 Washington St. @ Bethune St. (a few steps away from Westbeth) cash bar/food. No entrance fee.
More performer details
Directions: Option 1-Take A train to 14 St. Walk west to Washington Street. Turn L on Washington and walk down to Bethune. Make R on Bethune.
Option 2-Take #1 train to Christopher St../Sheridan Sq. Walk west on Christopher to Washington St. Make R on Washington and walk up to Bethune. Turn L on Bethune.
Need info on Advance tickets or other questions?
fuscialadybug (at) netzero (dot) com 917-583-1797

Persons of Interest
2016-06-02 18:00 - 21:00 | NY
PERSONS OF INTEREST, curated by Sam Gordon, features a wide cross section of Visual AIDS artist members and friends. The term, “person of interest” often identifies someone in an investigation that possesses characteristics that merit further attention. The investigation presented here is a collection of drawing, painting, photography, performance, video, and sculpture.
PERSONS OF INTEREST, presented by Visual AIDS at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division features the trained and self taught, long term survivors and the prematurely lost, and individuals who live for us very much in the present, some only in our hearts and minds.
The exhibition includes work by Raynes Birkbeck, Mark Carter, Ben Cuevas, Chloe Dzubilo, Arnold Fern, Tim Greathouse, Keith Haring, Hudson, Affrekka Jefferson, Jerry the Marble Faun, Joyce McDonald, Lucas Michael, Nicolas Moufarrege, Luna Luis Ortiz, Hugh Steers, Hunter Reynolds, Tseng Kwong Chi, Muna Tseng, and Frederick Weston.

The Bureau is a queer cultural center, bookstore, and event space hosted by The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City that seeks to excite and educate a self-confident, sex-positive, and supportive queer community by offering books, publications, and art and by hosting readings, performances, film screenings, book discussion groups, and workshops.
Visual AIDS is the only contemporary arts organization fully committed to raising AIDS awareness and creating dialogue around HIV issues today, by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums and publications – while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS.
Persons of Interest will remain on view at the Bureau through Sunday, September 4, 2016.
Event image: Raynes Birkbeck, Bad Billy, 2016, clay and mixed media

To Be Queer, Gifted and Black
2016-06-01 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Playwright Azure D. Osborne-Lee and Author and Poet Ashley Young present an evening of works-in-progress highlighting the experiences of Queer Black characters in fiction and non-fiction narratives. Join them in sharing the development of their work and celebrate their contributions to the queer community as writers of color.
Suggested donation of $10 to benefit the Bureau and the readers. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Azure D. Osborne-Lee is an award-winning writer and theatre maker from South of the Mason-Dixon Line. He earns a living working as an arts administrator, and lives in Brooklyn with one small cat named Cream Cheez and one flamboyant fish named Lucius.
Azure holds an M.A. in Advanced Theatre Practice from Royal Central School of Speech & Drama (2011), where he studied site-specific, experimental, and collaborative theatre. Azure also holds an M.A. in Women’s & Gender Studies (2008) and a B.A. in English & Spanish (2005) from The University of Texas at Austin.
Azure is an inaugural Field Leadership Fund Arts Manager Fellow (2015-2017) as well as a Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting (2015 & 2016). He is an alumnus of The Fire This Time Festival (2015), Rising Circle Theater Collective’s INKtank (2014), and EMERGENYC, the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program (2014).
Azure has held playwriting residences with Brooklyn Community Pride Center (2015), New Shoes Theatre (2011), and Freedom Train Productions (2010). He was recently awarded the 2015 Mario Fratti-Fred Newman Political Play Award for his first full-length play “Mirrors,” and has been a finalist for the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and The I Am Soul Playwright’s Residency at National Black Theatre as well as a semifinalist for Ars Nova’s Play Group and New York Theatre Workshop’s Emerging Artists Fellowship.
Azure’s short play “The Sandbox” has been published in Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy as well as the forthcoming anthology Emerge: 2015 Lambda Literary Fellows Anthology. Azure has written multiple articles for HowlRound.com on gender and theatre, and his short plays “Vector: Episode One” and “Vector: Episode Two” were produced at The Flea Theater as part of #serials@theflea this past December.
Azure has recently performed at BRIC, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), HERE Arts Center, and BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange. In the past year he has presented his writing at Fire & Ink IV: Witness, and has been invited to participate in panels at The Black Lavender Experience 2016 at Brown University and Bodies at Work: Performance, Labor, and ATHE, the upcoming Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2016 Conference.
Azure has a number of engagements this summer, including a reading at National Black Theatre on June 13th. You can keep up with Azure’s work at https://azureosbornelee.com. You can donate to Azure’s Lambda Literary Retreat Fundraiser at https://lambdaliterary.donorpages.com/WritersRetreat2016/AzureOsborneLee/.

Ashley Young is a Queer feminist poet, author and teacher. Her work has been published in three anthologies, Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press), All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press) and Glitter and Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (Portland Studio). She a contributor at Elixher magazine and has been featured in various online magazines, such as Autostraddle, Rvkvry Journal and more. She is a 2010 Voices of Our Nation’s Foundation Poetry Fellow and a 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation Nonfiction Fellow, to return summer of 2016. She has taught her biomythography workshop at the Fire and Ink Conference in 2015 and at the Northeast Queer and Trans Conference at NYU. She performs her work at various readings throughout the country and will be reading at her first solo show at Bluestockings Bookstore, Cafe and Activist Center in New York City. She is currently working on a collection of poetry and prose entitled Chronicles of Bipolar Living and is completing her first novel, a biomythography entitled The Liberation of the Black Unicorn. Ashley lives in New York City with her wife, four wild cats and her sweet service dog.

Union Square Slam Presents: Reparations
2016-05-31 19:30 - 21:30 | NY
Union Square Slam is excited for our Summer reading series, featuring an extended open mic and a phenom featured artist.
This week, come through to catch REPARATIONS in all their collective glory before they head out to compete at the Rustbelt Regional Slam in Columbus, Ohio June 3-4!!
6:00pm: Workshop w/ Taylor Steele
7:30pm: Sign-ups and Socialize
8:00pm: Open Mic
8:45pm: Featured Poet: Reparations Collective
All Ages // Wheelchair Accessible
Open Mic // $5
Workshop // $10

About our Feature:
Reparations is a poetic performance collective who will take over the world without the help of white folk. They don’t need you. Unless it’s monetary. Then, give it to them. These radical, black, queer poets perform and teach workshops around identity, activism, trauma, and healing. Reparations, comprised of Ashley August, Timothy DuWhite, Roya Marsh, and Taylor Steele, became a collective after winning the 2015 Northbeast Underground Tournament Slam.
Individually, they have performed at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Triad Broadway House, The Apollo, Cherry Lane Theatre, BAM, the United Nations, and many slam venues and universities across the nation. They have been published by such distinguished journals as Apogee Journal, Huffington Post, Blavity, The Body is Not an Apology, Blackberry: a magazine, The Rumpus, and many more. Their faces have been featured on Button Poetry, SlamFind, Def Jam, and “Orange is the New Black” — well, only one of them. They are ready to start a revolution. As a wise woman once said, “Pay me what you owe me!”

TELL 24: Open Mic
2016-05-28 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.
Queers! Bring Your favorite true five minute story about your self. Tell is having its first open mic slam!
7 PM Sign-up
7:30 PM Story-telling
$10 suggested donation – 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.

Five $ Fukt
2016-05-27 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Max Steele, Slava Mogutin, Billy Miller, Nicholas Gorham, and Walt Cessna will be reading brief bits from Cessna’s book Fukt 2 Start With & Slava Mogutin’s book Food Chain. Nicholas Gorham will be surprising us with a special performance. Cessna will also be introducing his friend Scott Osman (aka DJ Scotto) as he previews key pieces from his Studio 4312 collection of NASA swoosh shirts & hoodys, and yes there will be a couple of samples for purchase.
Very limited copies of FUKT for $5 will be available as well as a selection of random B&W limited edition 5 X 7 prints from Cessna’s WOLFPACK! (2012) photo book for $5 each. Signed & #’d. It will definitely be a chill evening. 4312 collection of NASA’s exclusive model, muse and extremely correct blue haired young man Scott Osman will be our special guest. Cessna has been collaborating with Scott Osman on images for NASA that will be running in Vaczine Magazine #3 and he’s excited to share the results. Friday May 27th 7-9 PM @ the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division/ Extremely casual. Come correct.
Photo credit: Stanley Stellar
Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.

CAPSID : Book Launch and Reading
2016-05-26 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Please join us for the book launch and party for Capsid : A Love Song by Joseph Osmundson.

Published in April by Indolent Books, Capsid is a hybrid essay that uses personal narrative and lyrical science writing to confront contemporary realities of living with HIV regardless of HIV status. After 30 years, HIV has fundamentally shifted how we understand bodies and health, sex and sexuality, activism and art. With pre- and post-diagnosis anti-retroviral therapy continuing to change the shape HIV infections, we badly need new HIV narratives that confront and explain our contemporary interactions with the virus.

Osmundson will be joined by Jennie Gruber and Darnell L. Moore in readings that will deal with bodies and health and sex and joy. Indolent Books founder Michael Broder will introduce the chapbook.

Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Darnell L. Moore is a Senior Correspondent at MicNews, Co-Managing/Editor at The Feminist Wire and writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University. Darnell’s advocacy centers on marginal identity, youth development and other social justice issues in the U.S. and abroad. A prolific writer, Darnell has been published in various media outlets including MSNBC, The Guardian, Huffington Post, EBONY, The Advocate, OUT Magazine, Gawker, Truth Out, VICE, Guernica, Mondoweiss, Thought Catalog, Good Men Project and others, as well as numerous academic journals including QED: A Journal in GLBTQ World Making, Women Studies Quarterly, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology, Transforming Anthropology, Black Theology: An International Journal, and Harvard Journal of African American Policy, among others.

Jennie Gruber is a writer, educator, media-maker, queer punk, and true karaoke believer. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. Her writing has appeared on Vice, Helix Queer Performance Network, Fleshbot, and Gaga Stigmata, in The Believer, AORTA, and Whore! magazines, and in several Cleis Press anthologies. Her workshops and readings have been featured at a variety of venues, including Red Umbrella Diaries, Perverts Put Out, Lesbian Sex Mafia, and the Feminist Porn Conference. Born in Northern California, Gruber now lives in Manhattan with a very sweet bear. Her books include Love Not Given Lightly and a recent how-to guide to sexting aptly titled Sexting.

Joseph Osmundson is a writer and scientist from rural Washington State. He is an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow in Systems Biology at NYU. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The LA Review of Books, Gawker, The Rumpus, Salon, and The Feminist Wire, where he is an Associate Editor.

An Oral History of Homosexuality in Croatia - Book Reading and Discussion
2016-05-25 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
An Oral History of Homosexuality in Croatia is the first book that collected the testimony of 25 LGBT people who lived in Croatia at the time when homosexuality was forbidden by law, when LGBT people were detained and subjected to public ridicule and nailed to the pillar of shame.
The main idea behind this research was to shed light on the existence of LGBTQ identities in Croatia in the period of 1945-2000; to reveal experiences of self-identifications, sexualities, behaviors and life styles which were mostly hidden and silent, denied, ignored or excluded by society and culture of those times. By producing this “unwritten history,” we wanted to testify to the ever-presence and historical continuity of our identities and expressions, and to confirm both uniqueness and commonality of LGBTQ experiences.
Nine years after its release, in collaboration with Dean Vuletić, a historian who specializes in the cultural and political history of modern Europe, Domino published an English translation of the first Oral History of Homosexuality in Croatia ever written. The original and English book was edited by Zvonimir Dobrovic and Gordan Bosanac, well known Croatian LGBTIQ activists and research was done by Amir Hodzic, Natasa Bodrozic and Karmen Ratkovic.
The book will be presented by Zvonimir Dobrovic.
Suggested donation of $10 to benefit the Bureau and the Queer New York International Festival. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Union Square Slam presents: JAYY DODD: Master Class and Feature
2016-05-24 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Union Square Slam is delighted to roll out our new summer reading series, featuring an extended open mic and a truly stellar featured artist.
This week, we welcome JAYY DODD!!!
Come join us for a special generative Master Class with Jayy before the show!!!
6:00pm: Master Class w/ Jayy Dodd
7:30pm: Sign-ups and Socialize
8:00pm: Open Mic
8:45pm: Featured Poet: Jayy Dodd
All Ages // Wheelchair Accessible
Open Mic // $5
Master Class // $10
About our Feature:
jayy dodd is a writer, editor and homeboy from Los Angeles, now based in New England. His work has appeared / will appear in Lambda Literary, Prelude, Assaracus, Guernica, Winter Tangerine and The Offing. He’s the author of [sugar in the tank] on Pizza Pi Press. You can find him on the internet talking trash about something. jayydodd.net

Newfangled 10: Robert Siek Hosts the Final Newfangled
2016-05-21 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Please join us for the tenth installment of NEWFANGLED, poetry readings by emerging poets hosted by Robert Siek. The tenth and final reading in the series will feature eight poets who read at one of the previous Newfangleds:
CHASE BERGGRUN, TOM CAPELONGA, RICARDO HERNANDEZ, LAWRENCE KAPLUN, PETER LABERGE, JAKE MATKOV, JAYSON P. SMITH, and NOMI STONE.
Creation of the collage of readers’ photos on this event page by Wo Chan–an artist of many talents!
CHASE BERGGRUN is a nonbinary trans poet and the author of Discontent and Its Civilizations: Poems of Erasure, winner of the 2012 jubilat Chapbook Contest, and their work has been published or is forthcoming in Jellyfish, The Offing, Prelude, inter|rupture, Apogee, No Tokens, Cosmonauts Avenue, BOAAT, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. They are Poetry Editor at Washington Square Review and Swarm Quarterly, and an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU.

TOM CAPELONGA is a twenty-eight-year-old native of New York City. His work has appeared in FourTwoNine Magazine, Podium, the HIV Here & Now Project, and the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight. He is working on completing his first chapbook, titled The Christopher Street Reader.

RICARDO HERNANDEZ is a recipient of fellowships from Poets House and Lambda Literary. His work has appeared in Newton Literary, Assaracus, and The Cortland Review. He lives in Queens.

LAWRENCE KAPLUN’s from Southern California. His poems have appeared in the Gay & Lesbian Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sonora Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Manhattan.

PETER LABERGE is the author of the chapbook Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), which is included on the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List. His recent work appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets 2014, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Washington Square Review, among others. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Bucknell University Stadler Center for Poetry, and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Adroit Journal. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

JAKE MATKOV writes poetry in Brooklyn, NY, where he teaches undergraduate courses in the English department at LIU Brooklyn. He is a cofounding editor of visceral brooklyn and cocurates its reading series of the same name. A 2015-16 Queer Art Mentorship fellow, his poems have been published in fields magazine, voicemail poems, Maudlin House, thosethatthis, and others.

JAYSON P. SMITH is a Bronx-born, Brooklyn-based writer. A Callaloo fellow & Urban Word NYC Mentor, Jayson’s work can be found in fields magazine, The Offing, Twelfth House, The Rumpus, & Day One. Jayson is also the Poetry Editor at Union Station Magazine.

NOMI STONE is the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook, an MFA Candidate at Warren Wilson, and hopefully finished her PhD in Anthropology at Columbia last week. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2016, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, Guernica, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere.

A Brief History of Gay Porn from "Boys in the Sand" to Bel Ami
2016-05-20 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Join Kyle Renick for a lecture on the history of gay porn from 1971 to 2016 with film excerpts.

Who knew that a history of gay porn would be so popular? We’re expecting a big crowd, so we’re moving things around to accommodate more people. We’ll be clearing out the store at 5:30 and opening doors for the event at 6 pm. First come, first seated (or offered a standing position). Once we reach capacity we’ll close the door. We’ll start at 7:05 sharp! See you tonight!

Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.
KYLE RENICK served as Executive Director of WPA Theatre (Workshop of the Players Art Foundation, Inc.) for 25 years, producing more than one hundred Off-Broadway plays and musicals, including such long-running successes as Little Shop of Horrors by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, and Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling. He produced new works by Charles Busch, Paul Rudnick, Doug Wright, Israel Horovitz and Reynolds Price, as well as revivals by Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman and Edward Albee. Born and raised in St. Louis, he attended Tufts University in Boston and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in Drama and Music. Mr. Renick has been a consultant for both the New York State Council on the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts, and served for 12 years on the Board of Directors of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York. He has written extensively on movie music for Film Score Monthly and has had articles published in Theatre Times and Back Stage, among other publications. Mr. Renick is a Charter Member of Early Music America, and a current member of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Film Forum, and the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film. He does volunteer work for the Boston Early Music Festival and the New York Asian Film Festival. Mr. Renick is currently writing a book about actors and artists he worked with at WPA Theatre.

Queerspawn in Love: A Memoir - Reading/Q&A
2016-05-19 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Despite growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area as the daughter of four lesbians, Kellen Kaiser envisioned her life working out, fairy tale–like, with a Prince Charming. When her possible prince did arrive, however, it was not without complications. Home on leave from the Israeli army, the man Kaiser picks doesn’t seem like a sure bet. Starting with some casual sex gone awry, they face a number of obstacles, not the least of which are war in the Middle East, long-distance romance, and differing views on sexuality and their approaching adulthood. But they find themselves most challenged by a more mundane concern: the upkeep of a relationship between two people. Funny and keenly observed, Queerspawn in Love is a story about identity, family, and figuring out, through loving someone else and failing, how to love yourself.
Join the author in a reading and Q&A celebration.
Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.
To reserve a copy of Queerspawn in Love, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Thank you!

Kellen Kaiser grew up in San Francisco, loved and supported by her four lesbian mothers and one younger brother. As a child she represented the gay community frequently as a speaker on panels and in the media. Her story has appeared on CNN, in Marie Claire, in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the Seattle Times. Online, her writing has been featured on XOJane, Role Reboot, Inculture Parent, Next Family and of course, KellenKaiser.com. When not writing, she also helps run her family’s cattle ranch. Follow her on Twitter: @momsandbombs

Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity: A Conversation with The Reverend Elizabeth M Edman
2016-05-18 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
LGBTQ people are a gift to the Church and have the potential to revitalize Christianity. Frustrated by the notion that “Christian love = tolerance,” the Reverend Elizabeth M. Edman argues that Christianity, at its scriptural core, is not a tradition that is hostile to queer people but is, in fact, itself inherently queer. Edman reveals how “queering” Christianity—that is, disrupting simplistic ways of thinking about gender and sexuality, and more broadly about self and other—can illuminate contemporary Christian faith and shows why queer Christians are gifts to the Church.
Eliel Cruz, founder of Faithfully LGBT, will join the Reverend Elizabeth M. Edman in conversation.
Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Photograph by Keryn Lowry
The Reverend Elizabeth M. Edman is an Episcopal priest and a political strategist who has been illuminating people’s understanding of Christianity and queer life for more than twenty-five years. She has worked on some of the most pressing contemporary issues in the intersection of religion and sexuality, serving as an inner-city hospital chaplain to people with HIV/AIDS, from 1989 to 1995; helping craft political strategy for marriage-equality efforts; and persevering for almost two decades to become an openly queer priest in the Episcopal Church. (New York, NY)

Eliel Cruz is the Executive Director of Faith In America, an organization dedicated to ending religious based bigotry towards LGBT people. He has worked on the intersections of faith, sexuality, and gender for five years. Cruz is a prolific speaker and writer on religion, (bi)sexuality, media, and culture as seen in the Huffington Post, Upworthy, Mic, Daily Dot, Everyday Feminism, Washington Post, Sojourners, DETAILS Magazine, Quartz, Rolling Stone. He’s the co-founder and former president of Intercollegiate Adventist Gay-Straight Alliance Coalition, an organization that advocates for safe spaces for LGBT students at Seventh-day Adventist colleges. He has a BBA & BA in International Business and French Studies from Andrews University.

Union Square Slam presents Michael Lee
2016-05-17 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Union Square Slam is delighted to roll out our new summer reading series, featuring an extended open mic and a truly stellar featured artist.
This week, we welcome Michael Lee!
Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer and author of the chapbook, “Secondly. Finally”, which won the 2014 David Blair Memorial Prize (Organic Weapon Arts). Having received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Phoebe, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, and The Carolina Quarterly among others. Remaining active on the stage, he is a Rust Belt Regional Poetry Slam Champion, a National Poetry Slam semi-finalist and an Individual World Poetry Slam Finalist, and was voted “Best Poet” and the 2012 College Unions Poetry Slam. Michael has worked as a dish washer, a farm hand, a traveling performer, a youth counselor and arts programming director. Currently, he attends the Harvard Graduate School of Education and lives with many books and a coffee pot.

All Ages // $5

Kaitlyn Greenidge and Sarah Schulman
2016-05-15 17:00 - 19:00 | NY
Kaitlyn Greenidge and Sarah Schulman will share their new novels and talk about the meaning of life, art, and whatever the audience wants to discuss.

Kaitlyn Greenidge’s first novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman was just published by Algonquin. Sarah Schulman’s latest novel, The Cosmopolitans is a new release from Feminist Press.

PRETTY BROKEN PUNKS: Martin Belk reads & performs from his NYC Memoir and homonymous London stage play
2016-05-14 19:00 - 20:30 | NY
New York City, 1988—2004. Bohemia’s last stand … Corporania™ taking over. The city you struggled to get to is slowly disappearing. First you hide out with the Danceteria crowd, at Pyramid and BoyBar while slugging your way through the great AIDS die-off. You ActUp on the youth outreach committee. Ultimately, you find yourself a producer of Squeezebox!, running an internet startup and manage the first NYC web concert starring Deborah Harry. Then comes an all-out culture war with NYC’s most hated mayor, a post-9/11 meltdown and relentless gentrification — a story which now resonates in urban centers around the world.

“They pimped-out Lady Gotham to the masses, instead of celebrating the fine call-girl she once was. Only problem is, we survived.”

Look back, don’t stare. If you could speak to your younger self, what would say? Can you handle the reply?

PRETTY BROKEN PUNKS: lipstick, leather jeans, a death of New York is Martin Belk’s literary memoir.

Please RSVP for this event here!

“A superb memoir about coming of age in the bright haze of NYC’s demimonde.”
–Junot Diaz

“I enjoyed the book a lot … full of great memories … it brought it all back. Don’t change a word.”
–Michael Musto, Village Voice

Martin Belk is an expat New Yorker, author and playwright. After burning out as an art director & tech geek, he went back to night school at SUNY Empire State College and got his B.A. In 2004 he sold everything, including his rent-controlled lease, and left the Big Apple for Scotland, where he earned a Master’s Degree from the University of Edinburgh, and wrote the first draft of Pretty Broken Punks.
From 2007-2015, Belk ran a prison writing workshop for the young men at Polmont Young Offender’s Institution — recognized by Her Majesty the Queen and First Minister Alex Salmond. He also published One Magazine & developed new work as a protégé of John Calder – Samuel Beckett’s publisher, and co-hosted the Prague Writers’ Festival.
Belk recently became archivist for Jim Haynes – co-founder of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Traverse Theatre; and edited Paris with Consequence, an historical memoir by Varda Ducovny, ‘wicked stepmother’ of actor David Duchovny, 1950s opening singer for Bob Dylan, and young cohort of Allen Ginsberg & Charlie Van Doren.
Currently, Belk is co-writing the memoirs of Marcus Leatherdale, photographer and former partner of Robert Mappelthorpe; writing a doctorate at Napier University and completing the stage adaptation of Pretty Broken Punks for the forthcoming London stage premiere.
He spends his time between London, Paris and Edinburgh. This BGSQD Big Apple event is a long-overdue homecoming.

PRONOUNCING THE SCENE OF TRAUMA
2016-05-13 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
A reading centered on how language is a constant healing force in dealing with trauma. Writers will read from work which explores, enacts, and/or responds to experienced traumas. The language of trauma, its silence, fragmentation, inheritance. How trauma settles on the page. How trauma settles in us.

CYNTHIA CRUZ is the author of four collections of poetry: Ruin, The Glimmering Room, and Wunderkammer. Her fourth collection, How the End Begins, was published in March of 2016. Her essays, interviews and art writing have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and Hyperallergic. Cruz has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual Arts.

JAKE MATKOV writes poetry in Brooklyn, NY where he teaches first year writing and is the coordinator of the English graduate programs at LIU Brooklyn. He is a co-founding editor of visceral brooklyn and co-curates its reading series of the same name. A 2015-16 Queer Art Mentorship fellow, his poems have been published in fields magazine, voicemail poems, Maudlin House, thosethatthis, Downtown Brooklyn and others.

HEIDI ANDREA RESTREPO RHODES is a queer, mixed-race, second-generation Colombian immigrant, writer, scholar, artist, and activist. Her creative work and performance has been seen in numerous places, including San Francisco’s SomArts, Galería de la Raza, the 2014 National Queer Arts Festival, As/Us, Decomp, Feminist Studies Journal, Write Bloody’s We Will Be Shelter, and others. Her chapbook, ‘The Inheritance of Haunting’ is due out by Raspa Press in fall 2016. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

CHARIF SHANAHAN is the author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, forthcoming in 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Apogee, Boston Review, Callaloo, Literary Hub, The New Republic, Phantom Books, and Prairie Schooner. His translations from Italian and German have appeared in A Public Space, Circumference, and RHINO Poetry, among other publications, and have been performed by the Vienna Art Orchestra. Formerly Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, he is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, the Starworks Foundation, and Stanford University, where he will be a ’16-’18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

Bi Book Club discusses A Winter in Rome, by Francis Gideon
2016-05-12 18:30 - 20:00 | NY
The Bi Book Club meets on the second Thursday of each month to discuss bi-themed books and the issues they raise.
Dinner after nearby (so far, we always go to Village Den.)
On May 12, The Bi Book Club will discuss:
A Winter in Rome, by Francis Gideon
Pick out some phrases, paragraphs or scenes that you’d like to discuss, give us your critique of the book: what worked, what didn’t, how was bisexuality represented? If you haven’t had the chance to read the book, come anyway because we read passages aloud for discussion. As usual, we’ll also be using the text as a jumping off point to further discussion of bisexual issues and personal experiences.
Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.
RSVP on meetup.com (not required)

Strange Bedfellows: A Conjugal Book Launch for Jason Schneiderman & Michael Broder
2016-05-11 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Book party for Michael Broder’s Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books) and Jason Schneiderman’s Primary Source (winner of Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Books), both of which debuted in April. Readings, signings, beer, wine, hors d’oeuvres, and go-go boys.

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free and This Life Now, a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Assaracus, BLOOM, ColumbiaPoetry Review, Court Green, OCHO, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2 (Windstorm Creative, 2004), edited by Rudy Kikel; My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (Terrace Books, 2009), edited by Michael Montlack; Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS (Third World Press, 2010), edited by Kelly Norman Ellis and ML Hunter; Divining Divas: 50 Gay Men on Their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012), edited by Michael Montlack; and Multilingual Anthology: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2015 (Artepoética Press, 2015), edited by Carlos Aguasaco and Yrene Santos. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

Jason Schneiderman is Associate Editor of Painted Bride Quarterly and Poetry Editor of Bellevue Literary Review. His poetry collection Primary Source (Red Hen Press) won the 2014 Benjamin Saltman award, and his poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry,The Poetry Review, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and lives in Brooklyn.

Union Square Slam presents CANDICE ILOH
2016-05-10 19:30 - 21:30 | NY
Union Square Slam is delighted to roll out our new summer reading series, featuring an extended open mic and a truly stellar featured artist.
This week, we welcome Candice Iloh!
Candice Iloh is a first-generation Nigerian-American writer, poet, and artist-educator residing in Brooklyn, NY whose writing has appeared in Fjords Review, The Grio, For Harriet, Blavity and elsewhere. A VONA fellowship recipient and Home School Lambda Literary Fellow, Candice also contributes to Lambda Literary. She is a MFA candidate in Writing for Young People and Poetry at Lesley University and is currently working on her first young adult novel in verse. When not writing or teaching, you can find her in a dance class in Bedstuy or follow her @becomer.
6:30-7:30pm: Sign-ups and Socialize
7:30-8:30pm: Open Mic
8:30pm: Feature
All Ages // $5

Normal Films Presents: Tiny Intersex Film Fest
2016-05-07 20:00 - 21:30 | NY
Please join us for the first ever Tiny Intersex Film Fest featuring two new documentary shorts titled, Mami y Yo y Mi Gallito/Mom and Me and My Little Rooster directed by Arisleyda Dilone (NYC), and The Son I Never Had directed by Pidgeon Pagonis (Chicago). Join both filmmakers afterwards for a discussion.

Mami y Yo y Mi Gallito/Mom and Me and My Little Rooster
Documentary Short
17 minutes/2015

Synopsis:

For the past five years, I have been pestering my mom to talk to me about my childhood, my body and past and future surgical decisions: all in front of a camera.
My mother is a hardworking immigrant, interested mainly in providing. I am the lazy offspring that asks too many questions. Parts of my identity have been shaped by a rebellion of the traditions she embraces, interlaced with a deep respect for her perseverance.
In Mami y Yo y Mi Gallito we finally sit down to talk about my body as a hermaphrodite.

The Son I Never Had
Documentary Short
27 minutes/2016

Synopsis:

My entire life I was lied to, and made to lie. I always felt different, but couldn’t quite figure out why. At 19, I discovered that I was born intersex, and whatever light was present in my life, vanished.
That discovery propelled me to uncover my past, in order to have a chance at having a future. Coincidentally, during that time I was in the habit of recording those around me.
10 years later, I collected those recordings and retrieved some of the most painful conversations I’ve ever had with my parents. The Son I Never Had is a love letter to my parents, my intersex self, and my community, as we try to survive in a world obsessed with binaries.
Suggested donation of $5. No one turned away for lack of funds.
Trigger Warning: One of the film includes memories of non-consensual genital surgery.

Arisleyda Dilone makes film work about her life and her family. Born in Santiago de Los de Caballeros, Dominican Republic, she spent her formative years in a hillside village outside of the city of Santiago. At the age of seven she was brought to New York and raised in a suburb of Long Island. Arisleyda pursued a life that would bring her immigrant parents pride while also being true to herself. She is the first in her family to attend and graduate college. Before films she worked in local NYC politics and international affairs.
As filmmaker, she was awarded a NALIP mentorship and she was a 2012 Jerome Foundation-Travel and Study Grant Fellow. Arisleyda was a 2014 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and a 2015 Queer Art/Mentorship/Program Fellow, in which she completed her short film, Mami y Yo y Mi Gallito /Mom and Me and My Little Rooster.

Arisleyda is a member of Diverse Filmmakers Alliance and Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.

Pidgeon Pagonis is an intersex filmmaker, activist and former Communications & Operations Manager and Youth Leadership Coordinator for interACT youth—the world’s first intersex youth project. They have a decade of experience researching, advocating and educating a wide range of audiences about intersex, and its respective movement for bodily autonomy and justice. They’ve recently been published in the academic journal Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, and were awarded by the White House as an LGBT Champion of Change. This fall, they’ll be featured on an episode of Amazon’s Transparent.

One Reading One Story, by Chavisa Woods (with special guest appearance by Erin Markey, reading as Tanya.) Featuring “Zombie,” a coming of age tale like no other.
2016-05-06 19:30 - 21:30 | NY
One Reading, One Story
By Chavisa Woods
Featuring “Zombie,”
(a coming of age tale like no other.)
While hanging out in the local cemetery, two young girls make a friend like none they ever could have imagined.
$8 suggested donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Instead of going to a movie, or watching a television show, come hear a story, in full, from beginning to end.
Have a glass of wine while you sit back and listen. Stay after for mingling and conversation.
Remember, being read to reduces stress levels and increases your attention span. Turn off your phone. Give up on the screen. Exercise your attention span, and enjoy some long-form art: LITERATURE.
“Zombie” provides a preview of the upcoming collection of short fiction, “Things To Do When You’re Goth in the Country,” by Chavisa Woods, upcoming from Seven Stories Press, January, 2017.

Chavisa Woods is the author of three books of fiction, “The Albino Album,” a novel, (550 pages) Seven Stories Press (Distributed by Random House), 2013; and Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind” full-length fiction (Fly by Night Press, 2009). The Second Edition of this book was released by Autonomedia Press under the Unbearables imprint in 2013. Her most recent work, “Things To Do When You’re Goth in the Country” will be released by Seven Stories Press in the spring of 2017.

Erin Markey is a New York based performance artist named a “magnetic diva” by the New York Times and a Time Out New York Top Ten Cabaret Performer 2013-2015. Her most recent work, A Ride On The Irish Cream, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in January 2016. Her work has been shown at BAM, Under The Radar Festival (Public Theater), New Museum, PS 122, Bard Spiegeltent, New York Comedy Festival, San Francisco Film Society, and regularly at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. She is the recipient of a 2014 Franklin Furnace Grant and a 2012 NYFA Cutting Edge Artist Award. She won an Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding Performance in 2013. In development for A Ride On The Irish Cream, she has been a resident artist at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Mount Tremper Arts and Baryshnikov Arts Center. She is co-composing music for and performing in Half Straddle’s Ghost Rings at New York Live Arts in April 2016.

Union Square Slam presents ANGEL NAFIS w/ special guests CRYSTAL VALENTINE and GABRIELLE SMITH and USS TEAM SELECTION FINALS
2016-05-03 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Union Square Slam presents ANGEL NAFIS w/ special guests CRYSTAL VALENTINE and GABRIELLE SMITH and USS TEAM SELECTION FINALS
6:00pm: Free Poetry Workshop with Sara Emily Kuntz
7:00pm Sign-ups and Socialize
7:30pm: Open Mic
8:00pm: Feature
8:25pm: Slam
$5 // All Ages

The Birthday Suit Reading
2016-04-30 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
A night of naked words in honor of poet Sarah Sala’s 30th birthday.
List of readers:
Abba Belgrave
Mary Block
Aimee Herman
Carrie Hohmann
Jen Hyde
Ricardo Maldonado
Amy Meng
Jerome Murphy
Peter Longofono
Christina Quintana
Anthony William Thornton
Aldrin Valdez
Sarah Sala
Suggested donation of $5 to support the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Sarah Sala is a native Michigander with an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Recently, her poem “Hydrogen” was featured in the “Elements” episode of NPR’s hit show Radio Lab in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. The Ghost Assembly Line, her first chapbook, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2016. Sarah’s poems also appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Atlas Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She is a 2016 Home School Fellow. www.sarahsala.com

Abba Belgrave was born elsewhere but calls Brooklyn her hometown. A graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program, she was published in Argos Books’ anthology Why I Am Not A Painter and Phantom Books. Her essay, “Self Censored: When Writing Isn’t Right” was featured on the VIDA website.

Mary Block‘s poems have been featured in Rattle, Conduit, Tampa Review, and Saw Palm, among other publications. Mary was a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and was a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee. She is originally from Miami, Florida, and she lives currently in New York City with her husband, her son, and her dog.

Aimee Herman is a queer performance artist and poet. Aimee teaches creative writing and composition in the Bronx. Biggest turn-ons include: farmers markets, gender non-conforming folks and the united states postal service.

Carrie Hohmann teaches writing at Edinboro University. She has degrees from Allegheny College and New York University and is the author of incongruent: someday (dancing girl press, 2014). Carrie lives on a 10-acre farm in Pennsylvania with several lively chickens, her pets, and her husband. Sarah Sala is one of her most favorite people in the world!

Jen Hyde is the author of Hua Shi Hua (画诗华) Drawings & Poems from China, forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Informed by the material culture of her environment, community, and heritage, her practice experiments with generative translation and new technology for the production of printed things. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU and is the recipient of writing fellowships from NYU Shanghai and Ithaca College.

Ricky Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral and a recipient of fellowships from Queer/Arts/Mentorship and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

Amy Meng’s poetry has appeared in the Indiana Review, The Literary Review, and Pleiades, among others. She is a Kundiman Fellow and poetry editor at Bodega Magazine. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and once held a baggie of stainless steel screws that had just been removed from Sarah Sala’s arm.

Jerome Ellison Murphy received an MFA in 2011 from the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where he currently serves as Undergraduate Programs Manager. His critical writing has been featured in LA Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Lambda Literary, American Poets and in the monthly column Outwords, which he authored for Next Magazine from 2010-2011, and he has frequently participated in the Emotive Fruition poetry performance series curated by Thomas Dooley. He currently serves on the board of Lambda Literary Foundation, the world’s foremost non-profit supporting LGBT literature.

Peter Longofono‘s poems have appeared in H_NGM_N, fields, Luna Luna Magazine, and Tenderloin, among others. He serves as the Reviews Editor at Coldfront and makes music with Big Figment and TH!CK. His chapbook, CHORDS, was published in March by the Operating System. He lives in Brooklyn.

Ben Purkert‘s first poetry collection, For the Love of Endings, is coming out from Four Way Books in March 2018. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Agni, Boston Review, Best New Poets 2012,and elsewhere. He currently teaches creative writing at Rutgers New Brunswick. More at benpurkert.com.

Christina Quintana is a New York-based writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal, Raspa Magazine, Foglifter, and Saw Palm, and her plays and musicals have been developed and produced in New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York City. For more information, visit cquintana.com

Anthony William Thornton is a New York-based poet, critic, and a 2016 Fellow of The Home School Miami. He has performed at numerous venues (Bar Thalia for Lamprophonic, Envoy Enterprises, Spectrum, The Bureau of General Services: Queer Division, Interstate Projects, etc.) and has written for the Bureau and Topical Cream. Previously published poems appear in the design monograph “Creating Worlds”, commissioned by Studio Edward Van Vliet in Amsterdam.

Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy poet and visual artist. They grew up in Manila and Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their work has been published in Art21 Magazine, ArtSlant, BRIC Blog, The Cortland Review, In the Flesh Magazine, and Uncompromising Tang.

Sex Positive
2016-04-29 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
In the early 1980s, as the AIDS epidemic ravage our community Richard Berkowitz, Michael Callan and Joseph Sonnabend had a revelation that AIDS is sexually transmitted. This meant that the practice of safe sex might help prevent it spreading. However, this insight was met with contempt by some in the gay community. Knowing what was at stake, they pressed on and educated folks on “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.” Berkowitz is the subject of Daryl Wein’s 2009 documentary, Sex Positive which won Best Documentary at OUTFEST. Please join us for a special screening of Sex Positive and Q&A with Richard Berkowitz and Brandon Cuicchi. We will discuss the evolution of safer sex from the beginning of the AIDS crisis to now. Organized by Sean Apparicio.
Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Richard Berkowitz is the author of Stayin’ Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex, A Personal History, his 2003 memoir about coming out amid the sexual exuberance of NYC in the 1970s. His collaboration with his physician, Dr. Joe Sonnabend and the late activist Michael Callen culminated in their May 1983 publication, “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” which is widely regarded as the invention of safe sex. Berkowitz is the subject of Daryl Wein’s 2009 documentary, Sex Positive which won Best Documentary at OUTFEST. He’s the last surviving co-founder of the PWA self-empowerment movement, which created the Denver Principles. He continues to live, write and protest in New York City.

Brandon Cuicchi was born and raised in a religious family in Memphis, TN. He has a BA in theater from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA in film/TV from the University of Miami. In 2007 he moved to Brooklyn, and in 2011 he joined Queer Occupy Wall Street. Since then he has been instrumental in growing the online and digital impact of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) while working in post-production for reality tv by day. He sees AIDS activism as intertwined with Black Lives Matter, criminal justice reform, homeless advocacy and LGB-and-especially-Transgender liberation, and he works to show solidarity with those struggles through street activism.

Sean Apparicio is the founder of One+Love. One+Love is a geo-local mobile LGBT community center—connecting users to local events, supportive online community, entertainment, lifestyle and news that reflect and celebrate diverse sexual and gender identities.
Before forming One+Love, Sean was multidisciplinary creative director specializing in digital media, commercial direction, Branding and Marketing Strategy. He has over 17 years of award winning industry experience. He’s re-launched multiple brands, strengthened their visual identity and introduced current trends in technology to develop solutions for his clients. Most notably, under his direction, the BET Redesign won 11 Tellys and a Promax/BDA Diverse Voices Award.
Sean has worked for over 26 years as an advocate and activist for LGBTQ issues. He’s done outreach and community organizing with the Audre Lorde Project, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and TransJustice. He has worked as a life coach at the Ali Forney Center; raised hell with ACT UP to raise HIV/AIDS awareness; mentored LGBTQ youth and lectured at UC Berkeley regarding coming out in the age of AIDS; provided safer sex education via the National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project; served in a harm reduction center for at-risk clients; and has worked to become a griot of U.S. LGBTQ history.

Union Square Slam presents OMAR HOLMON and the IRON POET SLAM
2016-04-26 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Join us for the legendary Omar Holmon and our super hilarious Iron Poet Slam!!
6:00pm: Free Poetry Workshop with Sara Emily Kuntz
7:00pm Sign-ups and Socialize
7:30pm: Open Mic
8:00pm: Feature
8:25pm: Slam
$5 // All Ages
About our Feature:
Omar Holmon is a guy that did things in slam on the Loserslam, Nuyorican and Urbana team. He enjoys wearing his Panda onesie and writing essays for Black Nerd Problems dealing with peak blackness. Omar has been on final stage, won some slam titles (4 in a row but who is counting right?) but the best thing he has been ever done is being his Mother’s son…. and joining the Steven Universe fandom.
About our Slam:
April 25th: Iron Poet Slam
Come get super silly with us as we test your slam poet chops in this our own version of Iron Chef. This slam is meant to push all of its competitors to their artistic and performative limits! Each round has secret rules that will only be revealed to the competitors at the beginning of each round. Are you game?

TELL 23: Origin Stories
2016-04-22 19:00 - 22:00 | 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.
Origin Stories is the theme of the twenty-third installment of TELL. Featuring Bobby Hankinson, Winter Laike, Victoria Libertore, and Parrish Turner.

$10 suggested donation – 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.

Brooklyn-based writer and comedian Bobby Hankinson is the host and producer of monthly LGBTQ comedy and storytelling show Kweendom. He’s immersed himself in the queer experience as a columnist for leading LGBTQ website Towleroad.com, as a nationally touring member of “Awkward Sex and the City” storytelling troupe and by banging dudes on the regular. His writing has also appeared in The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle and Brokelyn.com.

Winter Laike is a queer musician, storyteller, son, brother, future boyfriend, and less-notably Original Plumbing’s 2013 Mr. Transman NYC. His most recent work includes a collection of songs based on Craigslist missed connections, a rock opera inspired by a series of dreams, and television recaps for Vulture.com. When he’s not writing music, Winter enjoys riding his bike, making not-your-mother’s Rice Krispie treats, playing with puppies, and eating all of the pizza and donuts and ice cream.

Photograph by Jennifer Koltun
VICTORIA LIBERTORE is a performer, writer, teacher, emcee and curator. She is the creator of seven solo shows: Camille: The Forgotten Artist, stalk(her), The Should Dream, My Journey of Decay, GIRL MEAT, No Need for Seduction and This Is My Last Attempt At Fame. She has collaborated with Jennifer Tuttle, Ryan Kipp, Leigh Fondakowski, Rosalie Purvis, Jen-Scott Mobley, Shelley Butler-Hyler, Ryan Migge, Rebecca Feldman, Kimberly I. Kefgen, and Sara Laudonia. She has performed her work throughout NYC over the last 18 years in venues such as Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Carolines on Broadway, Dixon Place, Joyce Soho, New Dance Alliance, PS122 as well as in Boston, Chicago, Hastings, Montreal, Philadelphia, Provincetown, Toronto and Washington, D.C. Libertore teaches workshops in NYC and at colleges across the country on how to make your own original performance incorporating intuition, movement and archetypes. Libertore is passionate about encouraging other artists to create their own work and has curated dozens of local and a few international artists with backgrounds in performance, variety arts, music, comedy and dance. She has emceed in clubs, at events, on the boardwalk, in parks and at private parties as a faux Liza Minnelli where she utilizes her improvisational skills to make “people laugh so hard that their faces hurt.” She was a Humana Festival finalist for her short play Monster and Lola. Libertore was a 2008 – 2010 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Theater Artist in Residence and she has a BFA in theatre from Otterbein University where she recently received a Young Alumni Award for Creative Achievement. She is currently working on her first book entitled Should I Do My Laundry or Crawl into an Open Grave? A Guide for Living. www.howlingvic.com

Parrish Turner is the kind of guy who will tell you he knows what he is doing. That is until further questioning. But aren’t we all kind of making it up as we go along? Speaking of made up things, Parrish tends to write nonfiction. Although he is also a playwright because he likes putting words into other people’s mouths. He is a writer, essayist, playwright, occasional cook, and lover of terrible gay films. His credits include Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction in 2014 and four year participant in the Georgia Southern Ten-Minute Play Festival. He currently works in children’s publishing during the day and attends the New School in the evening for an MFA which will probably get him nowhere. But it did help him get out of Georgia, so there’s that.

Publishing Triangle Awards Finalists Reading
2016-04-20 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
The Publishing Triangle will hold their third annual Finalists Reading, featuring some of the nominees for the Publishing Triangle awards. This sterling batch of LGBT authors will read excerpts from their books, which represent the best in LGBT writing for 2015.

Participants include:

* Corrina Bain, author of Debridement; finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
* Marcia M. Gallo, author of “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy; finalist for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
* Tanwi Nandini Islam, author of Bright Lines; finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
* Rickey Laurentiis, author of Boy with Thorn; finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
* Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees; finalist for The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
* Ioannis Pappos, author of Hotel Living; finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
* Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
* Maggie Thrash, author of Honor Girl; finalist for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Union Square Slam presents ERICH HAYGUN and the LAST CHANCE SLAM
2016-04-19 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Erich Haygun is a 2015 National Poetry Slam Champion representing The House Slam, the first poetry slam venue located in his hometown Boston, MA. He has performed his writing throughout North America & Europe, and has shared stages with Mary Lambert, Patricia Smith and Richard Blanco. Erich’s work is forthcoming in The Dead Animal Handbook (University of Hell Press, 2016) and has been honored by the Massachusetts State Senate and House of Representatives. He is proud to be Program Director of the youth publishing non-profit Books Of Hope, as well as a facilitator & speaker for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. He lives in a mansion made of trash with a shaggy little dog.

Union Square Slam is a literary arts organization providing a space for poets to share their voices, develop their craft, and build a community celebrating poetry in all of its expressions. Based in New York City, U.S.S. produces a weekly reading series featuring contemporary poets with a focus on working artists and authors in the spoken word and slam tradition. Our features are primarily queer-identified and/or people of color and/or identify as disabled or alter-abled. Readings are followed by a PSi certified poetry slam. Union Square Slam hosts a weekly open mic and facilitates free workshops, encouraging poets to explore creatively.
In general, every show is preceded by a free poetry workshop by Sara Emily Kuntz. Participants are encouraged to bring a few copies of a work-in-progress to the workshop.
As always, our shows are $5, all ages and are wheelchair accessible.
Please note: the Bureau opens at 6 pm on Tuesdays for the Union Square Slam.

BEARINGS: WORKS ABOUT BOUNDARIES, reading & book party
2016-04-16 19:00 - 21:30 | NY
Bearings is an annual journal that publishes work about how individual people relate to their environments–internal, external, physical, imaginary. How do people define themselves in relation to these landscapes, and to the people in and outside of them?
Come to an evening of readings and musical performance by contributing writers and artists from issue no. 1!
Tess Brown-Lavoie
Isadora Reisner
Megan Stockton
Antonia Pinter
Olivia Durif
Alexandra Tatarsky

Timmy Straw

Suggested donation of $5 to benefit the Bureau. No one turned away for lack of funds.
