BGSQD

Game Over Books Queer Poetry Showcase ft. Myles Taylor, Dena Igusti, Liv Mammone, Mya Matteo Alexice (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-28 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us on March 28th at the Bureau for a reading from four emerging authors in partnership with Game Over Books. Myles Taylor, Dena Igusti, Mya Matteo Alexice, and Liv Mammone will be reading from their forthcoming or currently available titles. There will be time allotted to purchase and sign books after the reading.

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

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

Participants’ biographies:
Mya Matteo Alexice is a non-binary, Black and white graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA. Their poems can be found in or are forthcoming in publications such as Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Bennington Review, Barrelhouse, The Pinch, Cherry Tree, underblong, and elsewhere. They were the runner-up in the 2023 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest judged by Gary Soto. Their debut poetry collection, A Shape We’ve Yet to Name (March ’24), is forthcoming from Game Over Books. They enjoy video games where you can make the characters kiss.

Liv Mammone (she/her) is an editor and poet from Long Island. Her poetry has appeared with Button Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Medical Journal of Australia, and in many other places. In 2017, she competed for Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman to be on a New York national poetry slam team. She was also a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam in 2017. She has edited multiple books across genres, including the poetry collection They Called Her Goddess We Named her Girl by Uma Dwivedi, which was nominated for a Write Bloody Book Award. A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Zoeglossia fellow, she is currently an editor at Game Over Books. In 2022, hers was one of the top ten most read poems at Split This Rock’s poetry database, The Quarry. Her first collection is forthcoming in 2025. Follow her on Instagram @mammoneliv.

Dena Igusti is an Indonesian Muslim writer born and raised in Queens, New York. They are the author of CUT WOMAN (Game Over Books, 2020), which has been listed as a 2022 Perennial Award Winner, 2020 Harvard Bookstore Staff Pick, and Entropy Mag’s Best Of 2020-2021, and I NEED THIS TO NOT SWALLOW ME ALIVE (Gingerbug Press, 2021). They are the co-playwright of the wish: a manual for a last-ditch effort to save abortion in the united states through theater (2023 A is For… Winner). They are the Inaugural 2023 NYFA Ryan Hudak Playwright Award Winner. Their work has been featured in BOAAT Press, Peregrine Journal, Colorbloq, and several other publications. Their work has been produced and performed at LA Times, The Brooklyn Museum, The Apollo Theater, Women Deliver, the 2018 Teen Vogue Summit, Players Theatre (SHARUM, 2019), Prelude Festival (Cut Woman, 2020), Center At West Park (CON DOUGH, 2021), The Tank (First Sight 2021 at LimeFest), The Public (BLISS at Breaking The Binary Theatre Festival, 2023) and several other venues internationally.

Myles Taylor (they/he) is a transmasculine writer, organizer, educator, food service worker, Capricorn-Aquarius cusp, and glitter enthusiast. They are the current Producer of the historic Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge and former President and alum of the Emerson Poetry Project. They have represented Boston and Emerson College at the National Poetry Slam, FEMS Tournament, CUPSI, and others, and have been performing internationally for over 8 years. Their various publications and performance videos can be found at myles-taylor.com, and their neuroses can be found on social media @mylesdoespoems. They live amongst the rats of Allston, MA. Masculinity Parable (Game Over Books, 2023) is their first full-length collection.

BOOK LAUNCH: UNTENABLE MYSTIC CHARM by travis l. tate (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join UNTENABLE MYSTIC CHARM author travis l. tate and friends— Dom Martello, Jack Sullivan, Kyle Turner, & Omari K. Chancellor— for a night of readings from UNTENABLE MYSTIC CHARM, followed by a short Q&A.
UNTENABLE MYSTIC CHARM is a collection of eight short stories by travis I. tate ranging from the sensual to the humorous, and the vaguely historical to undeniably erotic told with poetic tenderness, a flair for the dramatic, and a love of the absurd.
To reserve a copy of Untenable Mystic Charm (Stanchion, February 27, 2024, paperback, $13), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Untenable Mystic Charm for March 27th” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

Dom Martello is a writer, performer, and visual artist based in NYC. Their work is rooted in queer magical realism and has been developed by The Elif Collective, Syracuse University, The Strides Collective, and The Workshop Theater.

Jack Sullivan is a queer writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY. His plays, performance texts, and video design have premiered at Dixon Place (NYC), The Tank (NYC), Belconnen Arts Centre (Canberra, Australia), and New Zealand Fringe Festival. His prose and poetry can be found / are forthcoming in BODEGA, JAKE, WHISKEY TIT, and GHOST CITY REVIEW. He is very in love with Travis.

Kyle Turner is a queer writer based in Brooklyn, NY. His writing on film, queerness, and culture has been featured in W Magazine, The Village Voice, Slate, GQ and the New York Times, and he is the author of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTQIA+ Stories from Smith Street Books and Rizzoli. He is relieved to know that he is not a golem.

Omari K. Chancellor is a Brooklyn based actor and writer. They can be seen in Peter Farrelly’s film, The Greatest Beer Run Ever on Apple+ after a world premiere at TIFF. Omari was seen in the world premieres of Soft by Donja R. Love and I Am a Walrus by MJ Kaufman at the Williamstown Theatre Festival as well as appearing in amani at Rattlestick. Omari’s writing can be found in American Chordata, SoftPunk magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn among others.

travis l. tate is a poet, playwright and performer living in Brooklyn, NY. Their plays have been seen at Breaking The Binary Theatre Festival, Theatre East, Victory Gardens, Dorset Theatre Festival and Luna Stage. Their poetry collection MAIDEN is out on V.A. Press. Their writing has appeared in Vassar Review, Joyland, 3views among others. Find more information at travisltate.com

Origami Vending Machine (in person only)
2024-03-24 13:00 - 15:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Origami artist and teacher Sok Song introduces an innovative Origami Vending Machine, appearing at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (the Bureau), Sunday, March 24th, from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. This interactive, site-specific sculpture/installation offers a unique time and performance-based experience, allowing participants to select their preferred paper and choose from various traditional origami models to receive a free folded object from the ingenious Origami Vending Machine.

● Website: http://origamivendingmachine.com or http://ovmnyc.com
About the Origami Vending Machine: The Origami Vending Machine (OVM) is a site-specific, interactive sculpture measuring 3 feet deep by 3 feet wide by 4 feet tall. Participants choose a sheet of patterned paper and feed it into the machine. Then they select the origami model they would like by pressing a button. Afterwards, an animation of the model being folded is displayed on a digital screen. In less than a minute, the finished origami creation is dispensed!
Current Locations:

Kinokuniya (Sun., Feb. 18, noon-4pm)
Manhattan Graphics Center (Sat., Mar. 2, noon-4pm)
92nd Street Y (Sat., Mar. 16, noon-4pm)
BGSQD (Sat., Mar. 24, 1-3pm)
CUNY Hunter College (TBA)
NYC Subway (TBA)

Suggestions for future locations can be sent to these OVM websites: http://origamivendingmachine.com and http://ovmnyc.com

About Sok Song:
Sok Song is a versatile interdisciplinary artist who incorporates traditional paper-folding along with his Korean heritage into various fine art forms such as sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, and painting. An award-winning multimedia creator, he’s the founder of Creased, Inc., and the Origami Meetup Group (OMGNYC), and the author of multiple publications, including Origami Chic and Crease + Fold. Sok currently teaches origami and printmaking at the 92nd Street Y and has taught at other esteemed institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, MoMA, CUNY Hunter, and the Manhattan Graphics Center, as well as at international conferences and various public and private schools. His inventive design work has been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, L’Uomo, Marie Claire, Pop, Icon, Self, and GQ. Sok has become the first individual ever to receive a degree in Origami, thanks to the CUNY Baccalaureate program. Sok’s artistic journey also encompasses many honors such as a residency at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, an Awesome Foundation Award for his Origami Vending Machine, and an NEA grant via the Vermont Studio Center. Sok is a 2024 artist-in-residence at Makerspace NYC, where he’s employing origami to address immigration, border conflicts, and militarized zones, for a public sculpture in MakerPark.
The Origami Vending Machine is made possible in part by the NYC chapter of the Awesome Foundation a.k.a. AwesomeNYC: https://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/chapters/nyc
For media inquiries, please contact Sok Song at soksong@gmail.com.
For more information, visit http://origamivendingmachine.com.

Girl Work: Book Launch and Celebration (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-23 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us for celebrating Zefyr Lisowski’s debut poetry collection, GIRL WORK, out from Noemi Books, with a short reading and conversation with poet and novelist John Manuel Arias.
GIRL WORK, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, GIRL WORK challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout GIRL WORK, a self is restored from the detritus of memory—flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.

To reserve a copy of Girl Work (Noemi Press, March 15, 2024, paperback, $18), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Girl Work for March 23rd” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican-American poet and writer. He is the author of the debut novel, Where There Was Fire (Flatiron, 2023). He is a Canto Mundo fellow and alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His prose and poetry have been published in PANK, The Rumpus, F(r)iction, Joyland Magazine, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.

Zefyr Lisowski is a poet and essayist from the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina. A poetry co-editor of the Whiting Award winning Apogee Journal, she’s the author of two poetry collections, Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Girl Work, winner of the 2022 Noemi Book Prize. A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, Zefyr has received further support from Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, the Center for the Humanities, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She’s seen grave robbers twice. Her essay collection about horror movies, exes, and love is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in Fall 2025.

BOOK LAUNCH Love the World or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland, with Penny Arcade (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Having been included in THEM’s, Ms. Magazine’s, Nylon’s, and SF Chronicle’s Most Anticipated books-lists for 2024 and receiving advanced praise from Torrey Peters, Kathleen Hanna, Jarett Kobek, Lydia Lunch, Susan Stryker, Rob Doyle, Eliot Duncan, and Publishers Weekly – it is time for the lyrical, literary, trans feminine LOVE THE WORLD OR GET KILLED TRYING by Alvina Chamberland to finally be released into the world and the wild.
Join us on Wednesday, March 20th, at 7 PM, for a special evening with Alvina Chamberland reading from the novel, and the performance icon Penny Arcade reading from her forthcoming memoir, followed by a discussion on art, literature, literary favorites, and creating political content that is also artistically deep and complex. LOVE THE WORLD OR GET KILLED TRYING will be for sale at the store, and the author will be available to sign your copy.
MORE ON LOVE THE WORLD OR GET KILLED TRYING:
WINNER OF THE 2022 NOEMI PRESS BOOK AWARD IN PROSE
“Perhaps some hearts are so big they must constantly burst and break.”
Through playful poetic prose, sharp social commentary and self-deprecating gallows humor Love the World or Get Killed Trying dives into the mind of Alvina, a trans woman on the eve of turning 30. The reader is invited to follow her journey through the breathtaking wilderness of Iceland and busy city boulevards of Berlin and Paris as she probes questions of eternity, sexuality, longing, death, love, and how hard it is to remain soft when you’re a ceaseless target of straight men’s secret lust and open disgust. This novel tackles universal issues through a trans woman’s specific lens – insisting on these experiences speaking to far more than just issues of sexuality and gender.
Reaching its climax through an urgent wildfire scream-of-consciousness, cry-of-love-manifesto, Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a raw and vulnerable work of magical brutalist autofiction; abstract in the sense of poetically digging beneath the surface, and experimental in the sense of trying to find out new things and express them in new ways, while concretely asserting that if trans women one day collectively outed every man who seeks them out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall.

To reserve a copy of Love the World or Get Killed Trying (Noemi Press, March 15, 2024, paperback, $18), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve copy of Love the World” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

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

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

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

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

A Thousand Paper Cranes for Palestine-An Open Mic For Disabled Palestinian and Yemeni Community (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-16 13:00 - 15:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Connecting Gaza: An afternoon of art, community, and accessibility supporting Palestinians with disabilities.
Saturday, March 16, 1 to 3 PM
Join us for an art event fundraising for e-sims for Palestinians, as well as several other orgs providing aid to Palestinian and Yemeni civilians. Disability is intersectional. This event aims to reflect that by facilitating connection on a literal and interpersonal level. The event will feature various performance art from Palestinian and SWANA artists including; monologues, poems, and more, as well as a communal origami crane-making station. Here is our working list of mutual aid/orgs we’ll have posters and qr codes for to amplify and support:
https://gazaesims.com/

https://lauricekhouryfoundation.org/
Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/gaza-emergency-aid/

https://www.gazasunbirds.org/
https://disabilityundersiege.org/
https://www.pcrf.net/
https://www.islamicreliefcanada.org/emergencies/yemen-appeal
https://palestinementalhealth.org/
https://donate.unrwa.org/-landing-page/en_EN

Please wear a mask!
We will have plenty of masks on hand for everyone.

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

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Building accessibility:
Take the street entrance ramp (to the right of The Center’s main entrance) and you will find an elevator behind the Information and Referral desk (to the left of the staircase). Take the elevator to the second floor and make a left when you exit, The Bureau is the last door on your left. A ramp leads into room 210, where the Bureau resides. Bureau volunteers are happy to assist visitors who need help reaching books and other merchandise. ADA accessible all-gender bathrooms are down the hall from the Bureau.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Sign up for the open mic:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1q3Edu8HgOvejRmkV6wnRKj6LjYIQjSPl7djCY0BoTUE/viewform

Book launch: Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography, Jessica Max Stein talking with Theodore Kerr (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-15 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Funny Boy author Jessica Max Stein and writer/organizer Ted Kerr for a conversation about the life of Muppet performer Richard Hunt, who brought to life beloved characters on Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock before dying at 40 of HIV-related causes. Stein and Kerr will discuss the hidden queer history behind this iconic pop culture and the often surprising experience of writing LGBTQ biography. Publishers Weekly described Funny Boy as “nuanced and perceptive”.

To reserve a copy of Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography (Rutgers University Press, 2024, hardcover, $34.95), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Funny Boy” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

Jessica Max Stein has been a New York-based queer writer since the early 90s. Her writing has received awards from Poets and Writers Magazine, the Independent Press Association, and the Biographers International Organization, as well as being published widely. She teaches writing and literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer and organizer. He co wrote We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, with Alexandra Juhasz (Duke University Press, 2022). He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle’s Reading Series, March Edition (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-13 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Publishing Triangle presents its monthly OUTspoken Reading Series as host Rob Byrnes welcomes Mary Burns, Wo Chan, Stephen Greco, Cheryl Head, Bill Konigsberg, Tim Stobierski, Kathleen Warnock, and Jerry L. Wheeler.
Join us as in-person or watch the live-stream (see below) to hear from some of queer literature’s most dynamic established and up-and-coming voices.

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

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

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

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

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

Second Tuesday: Mark S. King, My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor
2024-03-12 19:00 - 20:30 | The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, Room 101, New York, 10011, United States
The Center is proud to present a special reading of a selection of essays from activist and writer Mark S. King, author of My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor.
Room 101 of The LGBT Community Center
Door at 6:30 PM
Event at 7 PM
The Bureau will be on hand to sell copies of My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor (2023, paperback, $19.99). To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of My Fabulous Disease” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
ABOUT MY FABULOUS DISEASE
​​My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor is an anthology spanning four decades – in turns emotional, biting and hilarious – from activist and writer Mark S. King.
The sum of these chronicles is a manifesto of survival. But they also are a portrait of a man giggling through a graveyard. There is a sense of joyful gratitude that permeates even the darkest chapters, a throughline of cheeky optimism that makes the tragedy bearable and the humor uproarious.
My Fabulous Disease divulges King’s intimate triumphs and misfires along with glimpses of his Southern family coming to terms with a gay son, his harrowing drug addiction and eventual recovery, and a lifetime spent skating on the cracked ice of HIV.

ABOUT MARK S. KING
MARK S. KING is an award-winning blogger, author, speaker, and HIV/AIDS activist who has been involved in HIV causes since testing positive in 1985. King was named the 2020 LGBTQ Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association (NLGJA), which also awarded King their “Excellence in Blogging” honor in 2014, 2016 and 2020. My Fabulous Disease won the 2020 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Blog after five consecutive nominations, and was named one of 2020’s “OUT100” by OUT Magazine. King’s new collection of essays, My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor is available now to pre-order from online sites or your favorite bookstore. For full bio please visit marksking.com.

Book launch: WATCHNIGHT by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (in person & live-streaming)
2024-03-10 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us for a reading/conversation with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Joselia Hughes, Zefyr Lisowski, and Danilo Machado to celebrate the release of WATCHNIGHT (Nightboat Books).
In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnight—a churchy holiday of messianic tarrying—and steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacement—from countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.

Copies of WATCHNIGHT (Nightboat Books, 2024, paperback, $17.95) will be available for purchase and signing. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of Watchnight” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let yourself be guided.

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

We are not each other’s enemy.

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

Focus on here and now.

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

Another world is possible.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$50

Free for MIP candidates (RSVP candidates only)

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

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

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

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

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