BGSQD

RFD Reading + Celebration
2019-06-22 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | NY
RFD, the oldest continually published queer zine, is celebrating Stonewall 50 with its Summer issue. We will look to the future of LGBT activism while celebrating the events of the past. This evening will include readings from NYC-area contributors published in RFD in the recent past, including the current issue. We will be offering subscription deals and will have the new issue available. Come listen to the voices of local queer radicals reading from RFD!
Readers include: Robert Croonquist, Dale Corvino, Pauline Park, Summer Minerva, Chas Nol.
Keith Gemerek will present a slide show of his photography of faeries in the city and beyond.

Pride Monologues
2019-06-23 17:00 - 19:00 | NY
Queer Playwrights Collective Presents a series of monologues by LGBTQIA voices, just in time for World Pride. Curated by Jeffrey James Keyes

Featuring monologues by:
Clarence Coo
Paul Hagen
Merryn Johns
Jeffrey James Keyes
Peter Macklin
Rae Mariah MacCarthy
Daaimah Mubashshir
DeVo Nelson
Nilan
Christina Quintana
Gabriel Shanks

And featuring performances by:
Matt W. Cody
Nathaniel P. Claridad
Cherrye J. Davis

The Melting Queen NY Launch
2019-06-25 19:00 - 20:30 | NY
Please join Bruce Cinnamon to celebrate the publication of his debut novel, THE MELTING QUEEN.

About THE MELTING QUEEN:

Every year since 1904, when the ice breaks up on the North Saskatchewan River, Edmonton has crowned a Melting Queen—a woman who presides over the Melting Day spring carnival and who must keep the city’s spirits up over the following winter. But this year, something has changed: a genderfluid ex-frat brother called River Runson is named as Melting Queen. As River’s reign upends the city’s century-old traditions, Edmonton tears itself in two, with progressive and reactionary factions fighting a war for Edmonton’s soul. Ultimately, River must uncover the hidden history of Melting Day, forcing Edmonton to confront the dark underbelly of its traditions and leading the city into a new chapter in its history. Balancing satire with compassion, Bruce Cinnamon’s debut novel combines history and magic to weave a splendid future-looking tale.

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

Bruce Cinnamon was born in Edmonton and grew up just downstream in Fort Saskatchewan, along the banks of the North Saskatchewan River. He holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Alberta and a Master of Global Affairs from the University of Toronto. His favourite authors and literary influences include Garth Nix, Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges, Rachel Carson, Thomas King, Tomson Highway, and Italo Calvino. THE MELTING QUEEN is his first novel and is a part of the Nunatak First Fiction series.

Tired Selena: A Performance by Sebastián Castro Niculescu
2019-06-26 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
How, and where, do we remember sites of queer/trans history? Which bars are memorialized in history and which are bulldozed over? Fifty years on from the inceptive Stonewall Riots, do we sometimes get tired of remembering? Is this okay? In this performance, we will perform a dual kind-of mourning, for Selena and for the Midtown bar Sally’s. Selena, the Tejana pop star, performed her legendary last performance at the Houston Astrodome in 1995. And Sally’s Hideaway & Sally’s II, bars situated around Times Square and populated largely by trans women of color, are reported to have existed, in different locations, from 1986 to 1997. What do these two events and spaces have to do with each other, if anything? Moving within the possibilities and difficulties of remembering each, this performance proposes a space for fatigue, joy, exhaustion, desire – and all their messy complications.

Presented on the occasion of Y’all Better Quiet Down, a joint exhibition at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and the Leslie-Lohman Museum, curated by Jeanne Vaccaro and Nelson Santos.

Enby Spoken Histories: Storytelling Event
2019-06-27 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Celebrating Queer Excellence Through Storytelling!

Enby Spoken Histories is an archival storytelling project that aims to record, preserve, and amplify the rich, diverse stories of individuals whose genders don’t fall within the binary. We have partnered with StoryCorps to build a longstanding, historical archive at the Library of Congress. We hope our stories educate and normalize both our humanity and our existence. By creating space through storytelling, we aim to continue building safer spaces for TGNC folks to thrive!

There is a distinct and severe lack of information, research, and representation in literature—academic or otherwise—detailing transgender lives and identities. Even moreso, there is an absence of nonbinary recognition in recorded material. Seeing this need for documentation of non-binary livelihoods, we have partnered with StoryCorps to build a longstanding, historical archive at the Library of Congress. This is groundbreaking!!! Our content is being recognized by an official archival space that doesn’t normally pay notice to queer, let alone non-binary, experiences.

We would like to invite people of all identities to join us in honoring some of the stories that have been shared so far. Enby Spoken Histories is a developing project that started as a passion project and is now taking shape as a larger oral history collection. Come honor the stories we have cultivated, along with the live talks from our community members.

This is especially important right now as we fight the attempted erasure of our community.

Join us while we share some of the stories we have recorded with StoryCorps.

Special Guests: Lexie Bean, Nicole Sgarlato, Bobby Sanchez, and more!

ALL IDENTITIES WELCOME!!!

World Pride impac+NYC Book-Signing
2019-06-29 13:00 - 15:00 | NY
Join QGBT men from around the world for our book signing event at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division from 1-3 PM on Saturday June 29.

Kaz Senju – Shinjuku Story
Matthew Papa – Songs to the Siren
Michael Craft – Sweet Tooth
Michael McFadden – Borderlands

Impac+ NYC is a social community of queer, gay, bi, and trans men living with HIV that meet for weekly happy hours, monthly dinners, brunches, picnics, river cruises, and more!

Bureau closed for Pride! See you at the Queer Liberation March and Rally!
2019-06-30 | NY
The Bureau will be closed on Pride Sunday, June 30th. Please join us at the Queer Liberation March and Rally!
From the Reclaim Pride Coalition website:
The Queer Liberation March is a people’s political march—no corporate floats, and no police in our march. Please see our statement on Why We March. We honor the powerful legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion by highlighting the most marginalized members of our community, as we commit to addressing the ongoing struggles that we face.
Retracing the steps of the original Christopher Street Liberation Day March of 1970, the Reclaim Pride Coalition will gather in Sheridan Square, march all the way up 6th Avenue, and end with a rally in Central Park’s Great Lawn.
Everyone is welcome to join the march at any point. No pre-registration or wristbands are required.
We will gather on 7th Ave south of Christopher Street before stepping off at 9:30am.
We will march one block up 7th Avenue, take a right on West 10th Street over to 6th Avenue and then all the way up 6th Avenue into Central Park.
There will be a midpoint gathering in Bryant Park at 11am where we encourage folks who cannot make the early step off to join the march.
You can join the march at any point by stepping off of the sidewalks into the streets anywhere north of West 23rd Street on 6th Ave. (Below this point it might not be possible due to street blocking for the HOP Pride Parade).
The march will end with a Rally in Central Park’s Great Lawn with disability access on the corner of East 85th Street & 5th Ave. You are welcome to join us here.
Click here for details about accessibility, what to bring and what not to bring and other important information.

NYC Gay Guys' Book Club Discusses James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues: Bureau Opens at 6 PM
2019-07-02 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
NYC Gay Guys’ Book Club is a group of gay guys of all ages who meet the first Tuesday of every month. We usually meet at the Jefferson Market branch of the public library on 6th Avenue & West 10th Street, but we’ll meet at the Bureau while the library is being renovated. We read an eclectic range of books from classics to newly-released works. We don’t necessarily read books with a gay theme or characters and always open to suggestions. Very easy going; more social than academic. You don’t necessarily have to commit to coming every single month, just whenever your schedule or reading tastes permit.

On Tuesday, July 2, the NYC Gay Guys’ Book Club will discuss James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues.

Please note that the Bureau is closed on Tuesdays in July and August, but we will open for this event at 6 pm.

The Bureau’s hours in July and August: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 1 to 7 PM.

This event is free, but donations to support the Bureau are much appreciated!

Trans/Queer/Woman: Theory and Politics
2019-07-10 18:30 - 21:30, 2019-07-17 18:30 - 21:30, 2019-07-24 18:30 - 21:30, 2019-07-31 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
The Bureau is excited to partner with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research to bring you:
Trans/Queer/Woman: Theory and Politics
Instructor: Sophie Lewis
The course will meet at the Bureau on Wednesdays, July 10, 17, 24, and 31, from 6:30 to 9:30 PM
Transfeminine lives are often seen as having, in and of themselves, political consequences, theoretical limits, and some kind of relation to a ‘beyond’ of gender. While former sports celebrity Caitlyn Jenner has come to stand for the notion that ‘transgender’ is now a “respectable” identity, Olympic gold-star medalist Caster Semenya, despite not being transgender, is now caught up in a fraught and ugly fracas over the question of “what is a woman?” Some debates within both feminist and queer thought ask: How stable is the LGBTQ acronym as a concept? While some strains of feminism seek to exclude trans lives from a definition of womanhood on the grounds of “gender realism,” others explicitly reject any kind of gender naturalization. Similarly, some openly apolitical or conservative ‘queer’ and gay rights discourses question whether trans lives fit within a program of assimilation and advancement, while others claim that a structural transsexuality lies at the center of a politically-charged “gay communism” that unites queer theory with a critique of capitalism. In this context, theorists continue to differ on matters such as: the continued relevance of “queer” as a rubric, the utility of the figure of the “post-transsexual”; and the relation of trans embodiment to normativity, gender nonconformity, and the gender binary. Some have announced (already!) “the end of trans studies.” How can we understand, parse, and adjudicate these conflicting and overlapping questions?
In this course, we will read treatments of these questions by (predominantly) trans and intersex philosophers—as well as works by some trans-hostile ones such as Kathleen Stock—exploring, discussing and weighing a variety of dissenting opinions on trans gender ontology, epistemology, and liberation. What do ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ have to do with (and to) each other as rubrics? What has trans feminism been, and what might it be? What are the consequences of abstracting “trans”? Readings will include texts by Susan Stryker, Emi Koyama, Julia Serano, Jules Joanne Gleeson, Joni Cohen, Mario Mieli, Andrea Long Chu, Vivian K Namaste, Treva Ellison, Jack Halberstam, Jordy Rosenberg, and Marissa Brostoff, among others.
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is an independent, all-volunteer queer cultural center, bookstore, and event space hosted by The LGBT Community Center in Manhattan.
The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an organization of young scholars in New York City, founded in November 2011 by a few then-graduate students at Columbia University with a shared interest in pedagogy and genuinely interdisciplinary conversation. We teach classes all over the city, record a regular podcast, run a digital humanities initiative to preserve rare and out-of-print academic texts, and in general work frantically at any given time on a broad range of other academic and para-academic projects. We are a nonprofit, 501(c)3 organization.
Course Schedule
Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm
July 10 — July 31, 2019
4 weeks
$315.00*
Registration is required. Please click here.

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

Image: Christina Quarles, Grounded By Tha Side of Yew, 2017

Lesbian Allstars Switchboard Edition
2019-07-12 18:30 - 20:30 | NY
BELLADONNA* LESBIAN ALLSTARS
SWITCHBOARD EDITION

with Ariel Goldberg, Andriniki Mattis, Natalie Peart, LJ Roberts, Jeanne Thornton, and Jeanne Vaccaro

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Join us at the Bureau for the second installment of Belladonna* Lesbian Allstars, an intergenerational lesbian poetry reading. The reading will take place in the midst of Y’all Better Quiet Down, a group exhibition of art and ephemera in response to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. The exhibition is curated by Nelson Santos and Jeanne Vaccaro
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Ariel Goldberg is the author, most recently, of The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016).

Andriniki Mattis is a non-binary poet, who has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Poets House and The Poetry Project. They earned an M.A in Creative Writing and Education, from Goldsmiths University of London, and a B.A in Political and Poetic Resistance, from Brooklyn College. Their work has appeared in Wasafiri, Nepantla, The Felt and elsewhere. Andriniki is from and currently living in Brooklyn.

Natalie Peart brujas all day and writes fiction at Time’s witchiest hour. In addition to reading her work, she can read your cards and your charts. She also hosts the podcast Our Allowance, which centers the stories of Black and Brown people and our relationship to money. Her chaplet, Sixty-One, is published by Belladonna*.

LJ Roberts is an artist working in installation, textiles, collage, and text. Their work addresses queer and trans politics, material deviance, alternative kinship structures, archives, and narrative. LJ’s work has been shown in exhibitions at The Victoria and Albert Museum, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, The 8th Floor, Museum of Arts and Design, Vox Populi, Smack Mellon, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, The Powerhouse Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, The Oakland Museum of California, The DePaul Art Museum, The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at The University of Southern California, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art where their work is in the permanent collection. LJ has been the past recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, and residencies at IASPIS (International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden–Stockholm), Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, The Textile Arts Center, and The Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are a 2019-2020 Artist-in-Residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY.

In 2015, LJ was one of nine recipients of The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI artists. They also received the 2019 President’s Award for Art and Activism from the Women’s Caucus for Art. LJ’s first major museum commission is currently on view in Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall at the Brooklyn Museum. LJ lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Jeanne Thornton is the author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald, as well as one of the editors (with Tara Avery) of We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, all three Lambda Literary Award finalists. She is one of the publishers of Instar Books and the creator of the webcomics The Man Who Hates Fun and Bad Mother. She lives in Brooklyn. More information is available at https://fictioncircus.com/Jeanne.

Locked Up Boy Reading and Release
2019-07-26 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Author Jason Haaf will read from his new book, Locked Up Boy.
Locked Up Boy is an art diary, written by Jason Haaf and transcribed and illustrated by artist Zach Grear. A reflection of relationships, sex, dreams, the past and the future, Locked Up Boy invites the reader to engage. A voyeuristic experience. An intimate experience. An experimental experience. A Queer Experience.
Reading and Q&A to follow.

Jason Haaf is a non-fiction writer living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in “Hello Mr.” and “Warm Brothers” magazines. His Poem “Nineteen Six” is currently featured in “Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics and Poetry.” “Love Case,” his debut novella was published in February 2018.

Zach Grear is a self-taught artist living in Brooklyn. He finds inspiration from vintage queer erotica and punk aesthetics. His work has been featured in “SPUNK art & perspectives” zine, “Warm Brothers” magazine, “NYC Pride Guide” magazine, and “Starrfucker” magazine. He also designed the 2018 AIDS Memorial “What is Remembered Lives” T-shirt benefiting Housing Works.

NYC Gay Guys' Book Club Discusses In Search of Stonewall: Bureau Opens at 6 PM
2019-08-06 19:00 - 21:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
NYC Gay Guys’ Book Club is a group of gay guys of all ages who meet the first Tuesday of every month. We usually meet at the Jefferson Market branch of the public library on 6th Avenue & West 10th Street, but we’ll meet at the Bureau while the library is being renovated. We read an eclectic range of books from classics to newly-released works. We don’t necessarily read books with a gay theme or characters and always open to suggestions. Very easy going; more social than academic. You don’t necessarily have to commit to coming every single month, just whenever your schedule or reading tastes permit.

On Tuesday, August 6, the NYC Gay Guys’ Book Club will discuss In Search of Stonewall: The Riots at 50 The Gay & Lesbian Review at 25, Best Essays, 1994-2018
“The year was 1994. It was the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and, as luck would have it, the year in which a new magazine called The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review was publishing its first issue (Winter ’94).* The fact that The G&LR’s first year coincided with Stonewall’s 25th forever joined its fate with that of the founding event of the modern LGBT movement. This book commemorates the magazine’s 25th birthday with a collection of relevant articles selected from its 136 issues.”
-Richard Schneider Jr., Editor

Copies of In Search of Stonewall are available for purchase at the Bureau. Please support the Bureau by purchasing books from us. Thank you!
Please note that the Bureau is closed on Tuesdays in July and August, but we will open for this event at 6 pm.

The Bureau’s hours in July and August: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 1 to 7 PM.

This event is free, but donations to support the Bureau are much appreciated!

OLNY Poly Movie Night: Shortbus
2019-08-07 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
Open Love NY presents Poly Movie Night, a FREE series of feature films that focus on the portrayal of consensual / ethical non-monogamy in cinema. This month we’ll be at our regular venue, the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.
On August 7th please join us for a viewing of Shortbus (2006), written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell and starring Sook-Yin Lee, Peter Stickles, and PJ DeBoy.
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: Jamie and James are thinking of opening their relationship so they visit a relationship/sex therapist only to find out that she has her own problems. They all meet at a sex club called Shortbus looking for answers to their sexual and romantic dilemmas and encountering a host of interesting characters. Content Warning: attempted suicide. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.

New Work in Transgender Studies
2019-08-09 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
An evening of reading and conversation bringing together three pathbreaking recent works in Transgender Studies that center intersections of race, gender, and sexuality: Miriam J. Abelson’s Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America (Minnesota, 2019), Julian Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child (Minnesota, 2018), and Ann Travers’ The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution (NYU 2018).

Copies of Abelson’s, Gill-Peterson’s, and Travers’ books will be available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy/copies please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Miriam J. Abelson is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. Her book, Men in Place (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), demonstrates through a large and geographically diverse interview study with transgender men that contemporary U.S. masculinity, race, and sexuality are deeply embedded in the spaces and places men move through in their everyday lives. Her current research focuses on rural queer and trans lives in the U.S. inland Northwest.

Ann Travers is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Their recent book, The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution, situates trans kids in Canada and the US, white settler nations characterized by significant social inequality.

Julian Gill-Peterson is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book, Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), is the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction. Julian is currently at work on a book entitled “Gender Underground: A History of Trans DIY.”

Empowering Stories: An Evening of Compassionate and Meaningful Conversations
2019-08-15 19:15 - 20:45 | NY
Join author Johnson Chong and an esteemed panel of members of the gay community to celebrate the launch of his book Sage Sapien: From Karma to Dharma.

As LGBTQ people, we live in the shadows of marginalization. As a gay Chinese-American, Johnson Chong found himself in the minority of a minority, torn between strict eastern values of hetero-normalcy and western values of freedom and individualism. Join us for an evening panel discussion about cultural identity, sexual identity, spiritual identity, and identity as a limiting construct. Johnson Chong, author of Sage Sapien: From Karma to Dharma shares nuggets of wisdom from his book in a panel discussion where he is joined by respected members of the queer community: Joseph Reid (Language & Communications Expert), Drew Stevens (Artistic Director of the Feminist Press) & Yusef Miller (Award Winning Playwright).

The purpose of this evening is to celebrate our pain as an opportunity for healing in this polarized and emotionally traumatized chapter in American history. Join us for a fun, thought-provoking evening to re-enliven your spirit. The evening will culminate in a guided meditation for queer empowerment through queer spirituality.

Copies of Sage Sapien: From Karma to Dharma are available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Johnson Chong is a native New Yorker, yogi, meditation teacher and self-mastery guide. He founded Sagehouse based in Singapore with the intention to help people re-connect the mind, body and spirit. He is also the creator of Exodus Retreats, where he leads transformational retreats around the world. As a professionally trained actor and perpetual student of esoteric wisdom, he integrates his love of storytelling to empower life-changing shifts through his speaking engagements and workshops. His commitment to the global shift of humanity’s consciousness has inspired him to create live and online training programs, guided meditation audios, and mentorship programs. Sage Sapien: From Karma to Dharma is his first book. For more information and events, please visit www.johnsonchong.com

The Vagina Bible Talk and Book Signing
2019-08-28 19:00 - 20:30 | NY
The Bureau is excited to host an evening of conversation bringing together Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible (Kensington, 2019), and Amber Gavin of Abortion Access Front.
Dr. Gunter is a “fact evangelist in the fake-news era” (The Cut) and with Ms. Gavin they will discuss language, propaganda, and misinformation in medicine.
Copies of The Vagina Bible will be available for purchase at the Bureau.
To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Check out this July 25 profile of Dr. Jen Gunter in The Cut!
Jen Gunter, Photo Credit Jason LeCras

Dr. Jen Gunter is an obstetrician and gynecologist with nearly three decades of experience as a vulvar and vaginal diseases expert. She writes a regular column on women’s health for The New York Times called The Cycle, as well as a weekly Q&A, You Asked, which addresses women’s most press questions about their bodies. She has been called Twitter’s resident gynecologist, the Internet’s OB/GYN, and one of the fiercest advocate’s for women’s health.

Amber Gavin is Director of Programs for Abortion Access Front (formerly Lady Parts Justice). In that role, she leads the organization’s clinic outreach programs and she works to make every independent abortion clinic feel loved and supported by their local community for the tremendous care they provide. Amber proudly served on the Abortion Care Network’s 2019 Annual Conference and Gala Planning Committee.

OLNY Poly Movie Night: Y Tu Mamá También
2019-09-04 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
Open Love NY presents Poly Movie Night, a FREE series of feature films that focus on the portrayal of consensual / ethical non-monogamy in cinema. This month we’ll be at our regular venue, the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.
On September 4th, please join us for a viewing of Y Tu Mamá También , (2001), directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Maribel Verdú, Gael García Bernal, Daniel Giménez Cacho.
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: Best friends Tenoch and Julio, spending a last summer together before college while their girlfriends are traveling, try to impress Luisa, an older woman they meet, by inviting her to join them on a a road trip to a beautiful beach that they have invented. Unexpectedly, she agrees. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Reading the Iliad
2019-09-10 18:30 - 21:30, 2019-09-17 18:30 - 21:30, 2019-09-24 18:30 - 21:30 | NY
The Bureau is excited to partner with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research to bring you:
Reading the Iliad
Instructors: Bruce King, Laura Slatkin

The Iliad stands at the start of most histories of western literature, even as it remains enduringly strange—often, it seems, at odds with the very tradition it has been taken to inaugurate. In this course, we will read closely the entirety of Homer’s “poem of force,” attempting to recapture both some of its strangeness and its continued relevance. We’ll focus, too, on the following themes: the hero and his commemoration; the relations of men and women, of men and men, of humans, gods, and animals; exile and rebellion; violence and the making of epic art; the recompenses and failures of culture itself. How did an oral tradition of heroic poetry, enacted by singing bards for hundreds of years, coalesce into the written Iliad that we now know? How do the struggles of the Iliadic hero illuminate both consciousness itself and the borders of culture? How does the poem both commemorate and critique its own heroes? How might the struggle over the city of Troy illuminate our own national propensities toward war without end?
One of the strangest elements of the Iliad is its depiction of Achilles, who marks out a queer distance from the norms of heroic culture. Standing at the turbulent center of the poem, amidst great violence, deceit, and godly meddling, is Achilles’ love for his companion Patroclus. In Reading the Iliad, we’ll ask, among other questions: how are we to understand the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus? What, in the poem and in Homeric Greek culture, is the boundary between the homosocial and the homoerotic? What links eros and destruction? What, in reading the Iliad, is the content of a queer critique?
Our primary focus will be on the Iliad itself, but we will also take up a few key texts in Iliadic criticism: Plato, Aristotle, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, and Simone Weil.

Course Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm
September 10 — October 01, 2019
4 weeks
$315.00*
Registration is required. Please click here.
*Three scholarship spaces are reserved in each course because we realize that not everyone can afford to pay the full fee for our courses. Students who cannot pay the full fee should email us at info@thebrooklyninstitute.com to learn about our scholarship options. We will not ask questions about your financial situation but we do ask that you use the system in good faith and consider the needs of other students and faculty members.

Image: Exekias, Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game, 540-530 BCE, Detail of Terracotta amphora, Height 2 feet. Musei Vaticani, Rome.

Buy The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richard Lattimore, at the Bureau for only $15.
This translation will be used for the course.

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

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

Madden, Roxas-Chua, Schneiderman
2019-09-15 18:00 - 19:30 | NY
Join us for an evening of poetry with Ed Madden, Sam Roxas-Chua, and Jason Schneiderman.

Professor of English and director of gender studies at the University of South Carolina, Ed Madden is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Ark, a memoir in poems about his father’s last months in hospice care. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and other journals, as well as in Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry, and The Book of Irish American Poetry. In 2015 he was named poet laureate for the City of Columbia, SC, and in 2019 he was one of 13 poets nationwide to be named an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow.

Sam Roxas-Chua is the author of Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, Echolalia in Script, and Fawn Language. His poems, artworks, and asemic writings have appeared in journals including Narrative, December Magazine, Cream City Review and an essay/review of his two recent books appears in the Georgia Review and Rhino Poetry. His poetry sequence Diary of Collected Summers was awarded the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize and most recently he was interviewed by Gulf Coast Journal. In his writing process, Sam is interested in discovering the invisible poem. These are images and thoughts conjured up by asemic writing—a writing practice using non-sensical script. Here’s how he described it in an interview: “In between stanzas of a poem, or when I can’t quite get to an image or a phrase, I pull out a piece of paper and start writing this nonsensical script. When I do this script and feel the texture of my wrist on the page, images open like a deck of cards.” Eventually, this work became an art form on its own for Sam, one that exists in conversation with his poetry. His books talk to each other across mediums as well, with the poems in Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater resurfacing in the poem that concludes Echolalia in Script, which is made up of phrases drawn from the poems in that book, making a new thing. And each visual art piece in Echolalia is, in turn, in conversation with a line from that work. Sam is a quadrilingual speaker with a multinational background, an adoptee, and a maker open to what happens in the ineffable interstices, the between. Sam has exhibited his visual works and read for PEN International Philippines and most recently at the Performatura literature and arts festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of four books of poems: Hold Me Tight (Red Hen Press 2020), Primary Source (Red Hen Press 2016); Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press 2010); and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books 2004). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2016). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. An Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, he lives in Brooklyn with his husband Michael Broder. His next book of poems, Hold Me Tight, will be out from Red Hen in 2020.

Red Hen Press at BGSQD with special guests!
2019-09-19 19:00 - 20:30 | NY
Join fabulous Red Hen authors David Brendan Hopes, Jason Schneiderman, and Chloe Schwenke, alongside special guests Minnie-Bruce Pratt and Jerome Murphy, as they read their most recent work and celebrate queer literature!

TELL 56: Self Love and Riis Beach
2019-09-21 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.
Self Love and Riis Beach is the theme of the 56th TELL. Featuring stories by Sebastian J. Flowers aka Alkaline Sunboi, Kenny Hahn, and Jhani Miller.

Photograph by Grace Chu

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

Sebastian J. Flowers aka Alkaline Sunboi is a 1st generation immigrant and Brooklyn native, model, actor, and vegan in NYC. With indigenous roots in Belize and Honduras, Central America, practicing a life of peace, love, physical health and spiritual wellness has been a natural catalyst for his 15 years of activism in the LGBTQ and POC communities across the country. Despite incestuous sexual abuse as young as 7 years old, poverty, nearly dying twice due to gender affirming surgery, this female to male transgender has no sight of slowing down. Sebastian, 31 years old, has a large following on social media for his dance moves and positive messages and aspires to use it as a platform for his acting and modeling career. Sebastian dreams of being an international actor, successful philanthropist and investor. His most recent acting roles are on several episodes of POSE on FX (season 2), Law & Order: SVU on NBC, Blue Bloods on CBS, and independent short film Chasing Love. Feel free to check out Sebastian’s reality documentary series on YouTube, “LEGENDARY,” highlighting his life as an Afro Latino female to male transgender, dating, discussing mental health & wellness, cooking vegan on a low income, student financial advice, Vogue & Mua tips, traveling while Queer, and interviewing prominent Queer youth & Queer people of color in NYC and the world.
Instagram: @BelizeanVegan
Facebook: Facebook.com/BelizeanVegan
YouTube: Belizean Vegan

Kenny Hahn (he/She) is a queer actor, playwright, director, devised theatre-maker, comedian, and passionate pie-maker. His play, Love Me Tender, premiered at the Wild Project Theater in September 2018, he performed at NYWinterfest 2019 and the Prague Fringe Festival 2019 with the show “In The Woods Where the Men Work, and he will be competing in this years YAAASFest Comedy Festival at the Broadway Comedy Club. Her pies can be tasted at any Hahn family dinner, or if she likes you, your family dinner.
Instagram: @kennythehahn

photo credit: Alex Koones

Jhani Miller is an award winning scholar hailing from the south suburbs of Chicago. Their work relates to black femme existence, public service, and the millennial identity crisis. When they are not advocating for historically marginalized groups in libraries, they’re a pole-performance artist, lo-fi photographer, and geek culture researcher. You can find them at the Brooklyn Public Library where they are a Library Information Supervisor or reach out to them online on Instagram Librarian_shimmy.

Four Way Books & Friends Fall 2019 Reading
2019-09-22 19:00 - 20:00 | NY
Join us for a night of poetry featuring the amazing poets Jessica Jacobs (Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, Four Way Books 2019), Nickole Brown ( To Those Who Were Our First Gods, Rattle Magazine 2018), Philip Clark (The Carnival of Affection, Sibling Rivalry Press 2017) and Lauren Clark (Music for a Wedding, University of Pittsburgh Press 2017).

Jessica Jacobs is also the author of Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2016. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared widely. Jessica is now the Associate Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal and lives, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown in Asheville, North Carolina.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at a four different animal sanctuaries. A chapbook called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and a long sequence called The Donkey Elegies will be published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2019.

Philip F. Clark‘s debut collection ‘The Carnival of Affection,’ was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing/Poetry at City College, New York, where he received his M.F.A in 2016. His poetry and poetry reviews have appeared widely.

Lauren Clark is the author of MUSIC FOR A WEDDING (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

Perry Brass: 50 Years Of In Your Face Gay Liberation
2019-09-25 19:00 - 20:30 | NY
A Rare and Very Important Intergenerational Dialogue Between August Bernadicou (25) and Perry Brass (71).

August Bernadicou is the founder of the LGBTQ History Project. Since he was 14 years old, August has been recording and transcribing interviews with gay elders from the 1950s through the AIDS Crisis. To date, he has done 100 interviews (over 250 hours of recordings).

Perry Brass shaped our community and helped create LGBTQ life. Perry was an early member of the Gay Liberation Front and co-edited their revolutionary magazine, Come Out! Later, he co-founded The Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic (Callen-Lorde), the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast. He is a celebrated porn writer and author.

Edojah: Risking It All for Freedom
2019-09-26 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Edojah: Risking It All for Freedom is a play about Edafe, a gay man from Nigeria and his relationship with his grandmother was special. “There are several things that go unspoken between us, but in the silences, I feel that she gets me and believes in my ability. But if I flee Nigeria what will be the price I pay to save myself?” An African man’s journey to seek asylum in the United States.

Copies of Edojah: Risking It All for Freedom and Bed 26 will be available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!

Edafe Okporo, was born in Warri Delta state Nigeria, currently residing in New York City, Edafe is a Writer, and Orator, Author of Bed 26: Memoir of an African Man’s Asylum in the United States and the Executive Director of RDJ Refugee Shelter In Harlem. Edafe self identify as a member of the LGBT+ community that led to his displacement in 2016. Edafe is now a refugee of the United States of America and founder of The Pont LLC.

Opening Reception and Book Release: We collect together in a net
2019-09-27 18:00 - 21:00 | NY
We collect together in a net

Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Exhibition: September 20 – October 27, 2019
Opening Reception and Book Launch: September 27, 2019, 6 to 9 PM
With readings by Kerry Downey, Jaime Shearn Coan, and Shala Miller at 7 PM
Download press release.
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is proud to present We collect together in a net, a series of new works on paper and a publication by Kerry Downey. Concentrating countless operations at the surface—from rubbing to cutting, from sanding to pressing down, from embossment to chine collé—these works draw parallels between paper’s surface and our skin, playing at the intersection of materiality and identity. Like skin, the works are pocked and porous; they act as thresholds between the personal and the social, the psychological and the embodied. Paper is a site of encounter, one defined by material relations between subjects, objects, and bodies. Facture at the surface, or, paper’s fleshiness, indexes a repertoire of gestures enacted in the work’s production. Paper takes stock of these operations, of accumulated forms of touch, holding them in store as trace memories. Like a net—a central figure in Downey’s work—paper contains and disperses, locating our entanglements in the world, and reflecting the interdependent structures that produce the many ways we inhabit our bodies and access forms of power.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring works in the series alongside newly commissioned texts by Jaime Shearn Coan, Jeanne Vaccaro, Ryan Wong, and Layla Zami. Designed by Erik Freer and edited by Rachel Valinsky, the book is published by Brooklyn-based non-profit reading room, writing space, and independent publisher, Wendy’s Subway.

Kerry Downey (b.1979, Ft. Lauderdale) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York City. Downey’s work explores relationality through the many ways we inhabit our bodies and access forms of power. Downey’s practice includes video, printmaking, drawing, writing, and performance. They’ve recently had a solo show at CAVE in Detroit and two-person shows at Danspace Project, Knockdown Center and 20|20 Gallery in New York City. They have exhibited at the Queens Museum, Flushing, NY; the Hessel Museum at Bard College, Annandale, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Cooper Cole, Toronto, CA, and Taylor Macklin, Zurich, CH. Downey is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. Artist-in-residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; Triangle Arts Association, Brooklyn, NY; SHIFT at EFA Project Space, New York, NY; the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, New York, NY; Real Time and Space, Oakland, CA; and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Downey participated in the Queer/Art/Mentorship program in 2013. Their work has been in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Washington Post. Downey holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College.

Image: Kerry Downey, We collect together in a net, 2019, monotype, 11 x 15 in.
