BGSQD

Opening Reception for Common Threads: Martin Keehn
2013-05-02 18:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Common Threads: Martin Keehn brings together artists who have inspired his work over many years and who continue to inform his esthetic today. These are his friends, his mentors, and collectively they form a self-portrait of Martin Keehn the designer. The exhibition runs from Thursday, May 2, through Sunday, May 5.
The four-day show includes:
Jack Pierson Bieber Bags for Martin Keehn (signed, edition of 100)
Film by TJ Wilcox
T-shirts by Jared Buckhiester for Martin Keehn (signed, edition of 50)
Portrait of Farrah by Joe Mama-Nitzberg and Marc Swanson
“Oh no she di’ent” wig portrait booth by Jimmy Paul as photographed by Damani Moyd
Installations by David Yarritu and Paul Zumbo
Work and performances by Martyn Thompson
MAKE-IT-MARGIELA booth by Martin Keehn
Special appearance by The Crystal Ark DJs on opening night, Thursday, May 2, 6-9 PM

Rev. Dr. Caroline Addington Hall reads from her new book A Thorn in the Flesh: How Gay Sexuality Is Changing the Episcopal Church
2013-05-01 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
With the vote to bless same-sex marriages, the Episcopal Church becomes the largest U.S. denomination to officially sanction same-sex relationships. Homosexuality has become a flashpoint at the intersection of religion, family, and politics. A Thorn in the Flesh: How Gay Sexuality is Changing the Episcopal Church tells the story of how homosexuality has been used to further conservative political agendas, both here and abroad. This provocative book is not a history of the movement for gay inclusion, nor a history of the movement for a new, conservative Anglican church in the Americas. Instead, it is a comparison of the conservative and the liberal parts of the church. Hall explores the rapid changes that have happened in Western society in the past fifty years that have led to the acceptance of same-sex marriage and homosexuality. This change has not come easily and even after nearly four decades, gay marriage remains a politically divisive issue in the United States and England.
Rev. Dr.Caroline Addington Hall is priest-in-charge of St Benedict’s Episcopal Church in California and President of Integrity, the lesbian and gay ministry in the Episcopal Church. She is a frequent contributor to the blog Walking with Integrity. Hall and her spouse were among the first gay couples married in California when marriage became legal for same-sex couples in 2008.
Praise for A Thorn in the Flesh: How Gay Sexuality is Changing the Episcopal Church
“This is Episcopal history at its best and a compelling story that needs to be told. Hall narrates with intelligence and accuracy the past 50 years of prejudice and pride. Her wide vision encompasses the critical intersections of shifts in religion, politics and contemporary cultural awareness about homosexuality.”
–Fredrica Harris Thompsett, Ph.D., Mary Wolfe Professor of Historical Theology, Episcopal Divinity School
“For over fifty years, the Episcopal Church has struggled to appreciate faithfulness and holiness among LGBT Christians. Caroline Addington Hall has given us a richly informative account of this disturbing, provocative, and inspiring strand of our history. Reading this book is good background for those who would continue to move the Anglican Communion forward.”
—Reverend Canon Dr. Marilyn McCord Adams, formerly Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford
“The Anglican upheaval over homosexuality has found its historian. Caroline Addington Hall does not disclaim her own perspective on the debate, no credible commentator can as the earth still trembles with change, but she tells both sides of the story with remarkable and thorough care. A Thorn in the Flesh will be the benchmark against which later works on this subject will be measured.”
—Reverend Harry Knox, President and CEO, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

Lethe Press presents readings by Steve Berman, Richard Bowes, Tom Cardamone, and Sam J. Miller.
2013-04-28 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Steve Berman is a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for his editorial releases (including the annual HEIRESSES OF RUSS and WILDE STORIES series) and a finalist for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy for VINTAGE: A GHOST STORY. He has sold nearly a hundred articles, essays, and short stories. He is also the owner and publisher of Lethe Press, which began in 2001. He resides in southern New Jersey.
In 1992, Richard Bowes began writing a series of semi-autobiographical stories narrated by Kevin Grierson. These stories were published primarily in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and later became the novel MINIONS OF THE MOON. One story, “Streetcar Dreams,” won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. The novel itself won the Lambda Literary Award and has just been reissued (with a brand new Grierson story) by Lethe Press. His fiction has a decidedly “New York” sensibility.
Tom Cardamone‘s edgy weird fiction has earned him two spots as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Publishers Weekly wrote of his novella, GREEN THUMB: “evocative prose and detailed settings to capture the hypnotic rhythms of the sea, then takes a darker, more erotic and psychedelic turn….” His newest book is PACIFIC RIMMING from Chelsea Station Editions.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. A graduate of the 2012 Clarion Writers Workshop, he co-edited, with Aviva Briefel, HORROR AFTER 9/11, a critical anthology published by the University of Texas Press, which was included in the “Brilliant/Lowbrow” quadrant of New York Magazine’s famed “Approval Matrix.” His short stories have appeared in such venues as The Minnesota Review, Strange Horizons, Fiction International, Arts & Letters, The Rumpus, and the spring volume of Icarus: the Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction.

Divine Decadence: An Upcoming Collection by Domonique Echeverria
2013-04-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
On Saturday, April 27th, Domonique Echeverria will be previewing some select pieces for her upcoming collection, Divine Decadence; an ode to 1920s illustrator and designer Erte, Cabaret and late 60s, early 70s Rock n Roll. The preview will be presented by some of her most treasured New York City muses such as Kenny Kenny, Dylan Monroe, Mona Marlowe, Valerie Geffner, and Jeffrey Gaunt. The show will also feature facial structures and makeup by Ryan Burke.
Dj Primo Pitino spins disco and old rock n roll for this event!
Domonique Echeverria is a designer inspired by and fully carrying the flame of utter glamour and decadence—touchstones including Weimar Berlin, (and its most famous theatrical representation!) the feathered and jeweled arch elegance of old Hollywood, and the wildest expanses of disco and glam rock culture all comingle in her exquisite and extravagant creations. A longtime nightlife personality in her native San Francisco and current home of New York, Ms. Echeverria’s glorious mode draws further life from the jungle of drag queens, sex workers, and performers of all stripes with whom she prowls her nights and early mornings, all married to a deep appreciation and understanding of the aesthetics of surrealism. As a creator she is aggressively self-possessed, focused largely on the approach to all body types as potential art material and on the rich transformative and playfully performative aspects of experimental couture. In addition to her regular occupations as a party hostess, model and muse, Domonique’s own work has been enjoying a flowering ascent–she has been tireless in producing her own shows in NYC and has been increasingly tapped as a costumer of rigorous craft and volcanic imagination. Her work stands a bright young hope of chola rock & roll hedonism.

Queer Division IV: Johnson, Frost, Morrill
2013-04-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Andrew Durbin‘s reading series at the Bureau continues. The fourth installment will feature readings by Paul Foster Johnson, Jackqueline Frost, and Erin Morrill.

Paul Foster Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms and Refrains / Unworkings, as well as Quadriga, a chapbook he cowrote with E. Tracy Grinnell. From 2003 to 2006, he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He has served as a co-editor of Litmus Press/Aufgabe and is the editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Jackqueline Frost was born and raised in the Deep South, and now lives in Oakland, California. Her first full-length book, The Antidote, is forthcoming from Compline. Her poetry and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming in Rethinking Marxism, Lana Turner, The Death and Life of American Cities, Poetic Labor Project, What is Called Violence, Queer City, and LIES: a journal of materialist feminism. She works as an oyster-shucker and a research assistant in antique literatures.

Erin Morrill is the editor of Trafficker Press. She lives in New York.

Reception with Alesia Exum
2013-04-26 14:00 - 19:00 | NY
Join photographer Alesia Exum for an informal reception from 2 to 7 PM on Friday, April 26th.
Exum‘s exhibition Seconds runs from April 4-April 28.
Alesia Exum is a New York based artist. Her working method is interdisciplinary and recent projects take the form of photographic, text, lighting installations, super 8 film, sound sculptures, curating and collaborating. She is creative director and co-founder of Strange Loop Gallery, New York City.
Her photographs have been published in numerous magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, New York, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Exit, PDN. She has received commissions for projects with Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, Adidas, Kodak, Nike, MTV, Sony, Columbia, Atlantic Records, Warner Brothers, Knopf, Random House, Penguin.
Select group exhibitions: Jack Tilton Gallery, New York; Wessel O’Connor Gallery, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York; Aperture Gallery, New York; New York Art Directors Club

After the reception, please stay for Queer Division IV, featuring readings by Paul Foster Johnson, Jackqueline Frost, and Erin Morrill.

Queer Lives in Print: A Call to Authorship
2013-04-24 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Author and educator Hal W. Lanse, PhD (The Rainbow Curriculum) continues his popular series of writing workshops. Whether you want to publish professionally or just write and share your work with a small community of friends, this group is for you. Dr. Hal will provide writing prompts that will jolt your imagination and inspire written pieces about your rich set of personal experiences. For those of you who are interested, Dr. Hal is looking for new and undiscovered authors for his imprint Queer Street Books, Inc. But you need not have professional aspirations to join the group.
Bring a writing instrument (pen and notebook, laptop, whatever).
Suggested donation: $10 – but come even if you can’t pay. There will be a discrete box at the front of the shop for those who can afford to donate. Proceeds are divided between the teacher and BGSQD.
Future writing workshops: Wednesdays, May 15, May 29

NYC Comics Underground
2013-04-23 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Uranus Comics teams up with WW3 Illustrated Magazine to present a comics reading with presentations by 6 New York Underground cartoonists reading all new work:
Ethan Heitner – https://freedomfunnies.wordpress.com/
Katie Fricas – https://cartoonfricassee.com/
Jennifer Camper – https://www.jennifercamper.com/
Sabin Calbert – https://www.symptomcomics.com/
Mike Diana – https://www.mikedianacomix.com/mikediana/mikediana.html
Carlo Quispe – www.vranvs.blogspot.com

In the Flesh: Hold On
2013-04-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Queer online zine In the Flesh hosts its monthly reading at the Bureau for the sixth consecutive month! This month’s theme is:
HOLD ON
In the typing of this introduction many cigarettes were smoked. In the Flesh does not smoke, but bought a pack when it got locked outside of a friend’s apartment and all there was to do was sit on an orange crate and wait outside the building chainsmoking. That is what In the Flesh did. It waited, and looking cool made the waiting more bearable.
The difficulty with HOLDING ON is that it is about being stuck, or it is about not knowing, about trusting without evidence that trust is what’s called for. It is waiting for her to come back on the telephone, it is Wile E. Coyote running in mid-air. Lately, In the Flesh has been wondering: How do you forge ahead when there seems no clear way forward? How do you know when to cut your losses or re-double your efforts?
In the Flesh has a hunch that HOLDING ON comes down, not to truth, but to desire. We hold on to ideas, to things, to people, because we want what they represent to us to be true. Holding on can be an act of jealousy, of purest love, of fear, of deception, or simply, blindness. Sometimes we are rewarded, and sometimes we are punished, but we have no way of knowing in the moment of holding on itself.
Chicano writer José Villarreal writes, “All I can tell you is that you should have faith for the present, and when the time comes when you feel you do not need the belief, the doubts will help you discard it, forgetting the friend it once was to you.”
Come to In the Flesh at the Bureau and hear what contributors have to say about how they held on, how it shook them, and how it shook out.
Erica Cardwell is a queer romantic, educator, and activist. Recently, she served as co-organizer for an anti-violence week of action called, POC Rising– an intercultural, multi-gendered alliance within the platform of Vday’s One Billion Rising campaign. Check it out at –www.pocrising.tumblr.com. Her most recent essay on phonics and feelings entitled, victory,appeared in The Feminist Wire, in January of 2013. Erica lives in the land of make believe in Astoria, Queens. Follow her @theomnivorous
Ella Boureau is a writer, teacher and translator living in New York, Marseille and her own twisted little mind. She runs the monthly reading series and online magazine In the Flesh. She also has a reputation for turning people gay with her presence, at least temporarily. So if you weren’t before, you will be now!
Emily Skillings is a dancer poet poet dancer. She earned her BA from The New School in 2010. Recent poetry can be read in Bone Bouquet, Lingerpost, Stonecutter, La Fovea, and Maggy. Skillings dances with Saifan Shmerer, the A.O. Movement Collective and The Commons Choir (Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik). She lives in Brooklyn, where she is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective and event series. She is a co-curator of the Brooklyn reading series HOT TEXTS with Krystal Languell. In March 2012, she co-organized the festival HOW TO CONTINUE: John Ashbery Across the Arts at The New School with Adam Fitzgerald and Robert Polito.

Readings in Queer and Trans History by Justin Kim, Noah Lewis, Jerome Murphy, & Joey Plaster
2013-04-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Four New Yorkers bring queer and trans history alive by reading from primary source documents, and discussing what they love about ‘em. Spanning social, legal, literary, and art history, the readers draw on everything from court decisions to personal correspondence.
Come enjoy some soda, wine, beer, and cheese, and get your historical groove on.
Suggested donation of $5 to support Sylvia’s Place emergency shelter for LGBTQ youth. No one turned away.
Justin Kim is a painter who has exhibited primarily across the Northeast, and has taught at Yale, Dartmouth, Smith, and Deep Springs. See his work at justinkim71.blogspot.com.
Noah Lewis is a trans rights attorney who once played poker with Justice Elena Kagan while in law school.
Jerome Murphy is a writer with an MFA from New York University, where he is now Program Administrator of The Creative Writing Program.
Joey Plaster is an independent public historian, radio producer, and journalist. He won the 2010 Allan Bérubé Prize, and is in the American Studies Ph.D. program at Yale.

Hosted by Paul VanDeCarr, a random guy who likes to do these sorts of things.

Readings by Gil Cole and David Pratt presented by Chelsea Station Editions
2013-04-18 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Gil Cole, author of Fortune’s Bastard, or Love’s Pains Recounted, and David Pratt, author of Bob the Book and My Movie, read at the Bureau. Both authors will be introduced by their publisher, Jameson Currier of Chelsea Station Editions.
Please note that William Sterling Walker, originally scheduled to read, will not be able to read at this event.

Steven Mays Photography
Gil Cole graduated from the Juilliard School and acted in several plays of Shakespeare, as well as in many classic and contemporary plays. He currently resides in New York City where he works as a psychoanalyst. His first novel, Fortune’s Bastard, or Love’s Pains Recounted, is inspired by characters from Shakespeare.

David Pratt, photo by Eva Mueller

David Pratt won a 2011 Lambda Literary Award for his debut novel, Bob the Book. His story collection, My Movie, now out from Chelsea Station Editions, includes new work and draws on short fiction previously published in Christopher Street, The James White Review, Chelsea Station, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Velvet Mafia, Lodestar Quarterly and in the anthologies Men Seeking Men, His3 and Fresh Men 2. Recent anthology publications include The Dirty Diner (ed. Jerry Wheeler; Bold Strokes Books) and The Other Man (ed. Paul Alan Fahey; JMS Books). David has directed and performed his own work for the theater in New York City at the Cornelia Street Cafe, Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, the Dramatists Guild, the Flea (as part of a workshop directed by Karen Finley), on WBAI-FM and in the Eighth Annual New York International Fringe Festival. His collaborations with Rogerio M. Pinto include Os Tres Porquinhos, Chapeuzinho Vermelho, and Branca de Neve, Brazilian Portuguese versions of, respectively, The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White. In the 1980s, David was the first director of plays by the Canadian playwright John Mighton. David holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School. He is currently at work on two more novels and a young adult novella.

Up My Spot Steals Yr Move
2013-04-14 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Bureau is pleased to welcome back Up My Spot for a post-brunch reading. Up My Spot celebrates poetry that queers language, explores modes of representation, and creates sites of non-normative histories, identities, and intimacies. This reading features poems that borrow, revise, and re-appropriate the texts and authors that used us first. Readings by Mia Bruner, Audrey Zee Whitesides, and Nick Von Kleist. The Bureau will serve Bloody Marys and Mimosas in addition to wine, beer, and sparkling and still water for suggested donations of $5.

Mia Bruner grew up in Los Angeles and moved to New York in 2009 to attend The New School where she co-founded The Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading with Jamila Wimberly and Zee Whitesides. Her work has appeared in Belladonna Chaplet #148, Made of These (Belladonna*, 2013).

Audrey Zee Whitesides is a poet and musician born in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Her poetry and cultural writing has appeared or is forthcoming in/on Autostraddle.com, Jughead’s Basement, and Seven Stamps among others, and she’s the author of two handmade chapbooks. She also leads Brooklyn trans punk band Little Waist.

Nicholas Von Kleist is a poet and performer who dabbles in a little bit of it all. In immersive theatrics nvk combines poetry, sound, movement and sculpture to generate work that tickles all five senses. nvk’s poetry has been featured in online zines and has read at the Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading and was a regular reader at the Bow Wow at Bowery Poetry Club.

Luis Negrón and translator Suzanne Jill Levine read from Negrón's new collection of stories, Mundo Cruel
2013-04-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Luis Negrón and translator Suzanne Jill Levine read from Negrón’s new collection of stories, Mundo Cruel.
Read the interview with Negron by Bruce Benderson here:
https://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2013/02/18/mundo-cruel-luis-negron
And you can read the title story, Mundo Cruel, here:
https://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2013/02/18/mundo-cruel
LUIS NEGRÓN was born in the city of Guayama, Puerto Rico, in 1970. He is co-editor of Los Otros Cuerpos, an anthology of queer writing from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora. The original Spanish language edition of Mundo Cruel, first published in Puerto Rico in 2010 by Editorial La Secta de Los Perros, then by Libros AC in subsequent editions, is now in its third printing. It has never before appeared in English. Negrón lives in Santurce, Puerto Rico.

SUZANNE JILL LEVINE‘s acclaimed translations, which include works by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Three Trapped Tigers) and Manuel Puig (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), have helped introduce the world to some of the icons of contemporary Latin American literature. She is also editor of Penguin Classics’ essays and poetry of Jorge Luis Borges and the author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. She is the winner of PEN USA’s Translation Award 2012 for her translation of Jose Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale.

Queer Lives in Print: A Call to Authorship
2013-04-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Author and educator Hal W. Lanse, PhD (The Rainbow Curriculum) continues his popular series of writing workshops. Whether you want to publish professionally or just write and share your work with a small community of friends, this group is for you. Dr. Hal will provide writing prompts that will jolt your imagination and inspire written pieces about your rich set of personal experiences. For those of you who are interested, Dr. Hal is looking for new and undiscovered authors for his imprint Queer Street Books, Inc. But you need not have professional aspirations to join the group.
Bring a writing instrument (pen and notebook, laptop, whatever).
Suggested donation: $10 – but come even if you can’t pay. There will be a discrete box at the front of the shop for those who can afford to donate. Proceeds are divided between the teacher and BGSQD.
Future writing workshops: Wednesdays, April 24, May 15, May 29

Contributors to Who's Yer Daddy? Read at the Bureau
2013-04-07 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Readings by contributors to Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners
Readers: Peter Covino, David Groff (co-editor), Ben Grossberg, Dave King, Michael Klein, Brian Leung, Paul Lisicky, Timothy Liu, Charles Rice-Gonzalez, and Ellery Washington.

Peter Covino is the author of the poetry collections, both from Western Michigan University/New Issues Press, The Right Place to Jump (2012) and Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005), winner of the 2007 PEN/America Osterweil Award and a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. His chapbook, Straight Boyfriend (2001), won the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize; and recent poems have been published or are forthcoming both in America and Italy in such places as the American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Connecticut Review, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, tutteStorie, The Yale Review, and The Penguin Anthology of Italian-American Writing, among others. His translations of Italian poets have been featured in Atlanta Review, Italian Americana, Italoamericana, The Journal of Italian Translation, and the anthology New European Poets, Graywolf Press 2008. Covino is also one of the founding editors of the literary press, Barrow Street Inc., and the Barrow Street Books; and in 2009, he was appointed poetry editor for VIA: Voices in Italian Americana. He is an Associate Professor of Literature with Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island.

David Groff is an independent writer and poet, is author of Theory of Devolution and coeditor of Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS and Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers. Groff’s work was published in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Chicago Review, Christopher Street, Confrontation, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Men on Men 2, Men on Men 2000, Missouri Review, New York, North American Review, Northwest Review, Out, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Poz, Prairie Schooner, QW, Self, 7 Days, 7 Carmine, and Wigwag. Groff graduated from the University of Iowa, with an MFA, and MA. He has taught at University of Iowa, Rutgers University, and NYU, and at William Paterson University.

Benjamin S. Grossberg is an associate professor of English at University of Hartford. His books are Sweet Core Orchard (2009), winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (2007). His poems have appeared in many venues including New England Review, Paris Review, Southwest Review, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Space Travelor, his third collection, will be published in 2013.

Dave King holds a BFA in painting and film from Cooper Union and an MFA in writing from Columbia University; he taught English at Baruch College and Cultural Studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York before moving to New York University’s Gallatin School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Of his bestselling debut novel, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “The Ha-Ha is full of emotional truth and establishes King as a writer of consequence.” The Ha-Ha was a finalist for Book of the Month Club’s best Literary Fiction Award and the Quill Foundation’s award for Best Debut Fiction and was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2005. Several foreign language editions are in print, and a film version was optioned by Warner Brothers Pictures. In addition, The Ha-Ha earned Dave King the 2006 John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
King’s poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Village Voice and Big City Lit, and in the Italian literary journal Nuovi Argomenti. He divides his time between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley of New York. He is a translator of the Italian poet Massimo Gezzi, and a new novel, tentatively entitled The Beast and Beauty, is forthcoming.

Michael Klein has written three books of poetry, the most recent of which is “The Talking Day” (Sibling Rivalry Press). His first book, “1990” (Provincetown Arts Press) tied with James Schuyler to win a Lambda Literary Award in 1993. He is also the author of a memoir, “Track Conditions”, a Lambda finalist and “The End of Being Known” a book of linked essays about sex and friendship, both published by the University of Wisconsin Press. His poetry, essays and interviews with poets have been published in American Poetry Review, Provincetown Arts, Court Green, New England Review, Ploughshares , Tin House, Fence, Poets & Writers and many other publications. His collection of lyric essays, “States of Independence” won the inaugural BLOOM Chapbook prize judged by Rigoberto Gonzalez and he received a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he also taught poetry and memoir in their summer program for 15 years. He has also taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Binghamton University, Manhattanville and, since 1994, in the MFA Program at Goddard College, in Vermont. He lives in New York and Provincetown.

Brian Leung’s short story collection World Famous Love Acts won the Asian American Literary Award in 2005 and the Mary McCarthy Award for Short Fiction in 2002. He has published two novels Lost Men (Three Rivers Press) and Take Me Home (Harper Collins). Brian’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Story, Crazyhorse, Grain, Gulf Coast, Kinesis, The Barcelona Review, The Bellingham Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and in the short story anthology The Habit of Art. He is also the coauthor of the nonfiction humor title Not Another Feel Good Singles Book. Since 2000, Brian has taught in Cincinnati and Los Angeles, and now in Louisville, where he is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisville. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Brian earned his B.A. and MA. at California State University, and an M.F.A from Indiana University.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy (1999), Famous Builder (2002), The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His recent work appears in Fence, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Story Quarterly and elsewhere. He has taught in the writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is currently the New Voices Professor at Rutgers University. A memoir, The Narrow Door, is forthcoming in 2014.

Timothy Liu has three new books forthcoming: Kingdom Come: A Novel (Talisman House, 2013), Don’t Go Back To Sleep: Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2014) and Let It Ride: Poems (Station Hill, 2015). He lives in Manhattan with his husband.

Charles Rice-Gonzalez is a writer, LGBT activist and the co-founder and executive director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. His debut novel Chulito (Magnus Books) has received several awards including a 2013 Stonewall Book Awards – Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor from the American Library Association. He co-edited, From Macho To Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction with Charlie Vazquez and his work has appeared in several anthologies including Love, Christopher Street, Ambientes: New Gay Latino Writing also released by University of Wisconsin Press and Who’s Yer Daddy. His award-winning play, I Just Love Andy Gibb, will be published Blacktino Queer Performance: A Critical Anthology co-edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera. University of Michigan Press.

Ellery Washington teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of Buffulo, a novel, forthcoming from Creston Books. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, The International Review, The Frankfurter Allgemeine, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Out Magazine, the National Bestseller State by State—A Panoramic Portrait of America, and numerous literary journals and anthologies. As a screenwriter and script consultant, his credits include work with Paramount Pictures, Tristar and Fox Searchlight, as well as a wide variety of independent directors and producers. He is the recipient of a PEN Center West Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship and the IBWA Prize for short fiction. He currently divides his time between Oakland, CA, and New York.

Opening reception for Seconds, an exhibition of photographs by Alesia Exum
2013-04-04 18:00 - 21:00 | NY
Seconds is an exhibition by New York based photographer Alesia Exum. The exhibition runs from April 4-April 28.
In these instant portraits, Alesia captures a private moment in a public place, showing a quiet beauty amidst the chaos.
Alesia Exum is a New York based artist. Her working method is interdisciplinary and recent projects take the form of photographic, text, lighting installations, super 8 film, sound sculptures, curating and collaborating. She is creative director and co-founder of Strange Loop Gallery, New York City.
Her photographs have been published in numerous magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, New York, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Exit, PDN. She has received commissions for projects with Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, Adidas, Kodak, Nike, MTV, Sony, Columbia, Atlantic Records, Warner Brothers, Knopf, Random House, Penguin.
Select group exhibitions: Jack Tilton Gallery, New York; Wessel O’Connor Gallery, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York; Aperture Gallery, New York; New York Art Directors Club

Last day of Alice O'Malley: Kenny Kenny 13
2013-03-31 20:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
March 31 is the final day of the exhibition KENNY KENNY 13, photographs of Kenny Kenny by Alice O’Malley curated by Claire Fleury and Alesia Exum of Strange Loop Gallery.
Alice O’Malley lives and works in New York City. Her photographs have appeared in various publications including Art in America, I-D Magazine, Flash Art and New York Times Magazine. O’Malley’s first monograph, Community of Elsewheres, was published by Isis Editions in 2008 in conjunction with a solo exhibition by the same name.
She has exhibited at AIR, Participant, ICP and PS1, and other galleries in NYC.
Alice O’Malley on Kenny Kenny:
“Kenny Kenny assisted Leigh Bowery in London in the early eighties and he is a legendary stylist in his own right.
Like Bowery, his body is his palette. He also hosts the best nights in New York City. We did a series of portraits called ’13 looks’…a study of Kenny Kenny in his many guises.”

David McConnell Reading & in Conversation with Zachary Pace & Lonely Christopher
2013-03-31 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
David McConnell will be reading from his new book, American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men. He will be joined in conversation by Zachary Pace and Lonely Christopher.
—
In American Honor Killings, straight and gay guys cross paths, and the result is murder. But what really happened? What role did hatred play? What about bullying and abuse? What were the men involved really like, and what was going on between them when the murder occurred? American Honor Killings explores the truth behind squeamish reporting and uninformed political rants of the far right or fringe left. David McConnell, a New York-based novelist, researched cases from small-town Alabama to San Quentin’s death row. The book recounts some of the most notorious crimes of our era.
Beginning in 1999 and lasting until last year’s conviction of a youth in Queens, New York, the book shows how some murderers think they’re cleaning up society. Surprisingly, other killings feel almost preordained, not a matter of the victim’s personality or actions so much as a twisted display of a young man’s will to compete or dominate. We want to think these stories involve simple sexual conflict, either the killer’s internal struggle over his own identity or a fatally miscalculated proposition. They’re almost never that simple.
Together, the cases form a secret American history of rage and desire. McConnell cuts through cant and political special pleading to turn these cases into enduring literature. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives come breathtakingly alive. The result is more soulful, more sensitive, more artful than the sort of “true crime” writing the book was modeled on. A wealth of new detail has been woven into old cases, while new cases are plumbed for the first time. The resulting stories play out exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of events—grisly, touching, disturbing, sometimes even with moments of levity.
—
DAVID McCONNELL is the author of the acclaimed novels The Silver Hearted (a finalist for Lambda and Ferro-Grumley awards) and Firebrat. His short fiction and journalism have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including the Literary Review (UK), Granta, and Prospect magazine (UK). He is the former cochair of the Lambda Literary Foundation, and lives in New York City.
ZACHARY PACE works at Grove/Atlantic and lives in Brooklyn.
LONELY CHRISTOPHER is the author of the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse. He wrote and directed the forthcoming film MOM and lives in Brooklyn.

BAD GRAMMAR Zine reading
2013-03-28 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Taking its name from assumptions and stereotypes of inarticulacy surrounding Black English and culture, BAD GRAMMAR Zine provides a platform for queer artists of color to document and discuss the artwork of their peers on their own terms, with their own language and in relation to their own culture. Started by Yulan Grant, Justin Allen, and Brandon Owens as an in-house publication to accompany gallery shows at Culturefix bar and gallery in the Lower East Side, the zine is looking to branch out beyond the boundaries of the downtown NYC art world, publishing online and providing a limited edition of print copies of three of its issues at the zine’s showcase. The event will feature a reading of an interview from one of the issues by Justin Allen, a DJ Session by Brandon Owens, and Projections by Yulan Grant.
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Queer Playwrights Collective: Short Plays by Local Queer Playwrights
2013-03-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Queer Playwrights Collective presents a handful of 10-minute plays by Local Queer Playwrights. Organized by photographer and writer Jeffrey James Keyes.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT WILL BEGIN PROMPTLY AT 7 PM.
Works by the following playwrights will be presented:
Clarence Coo
Thirza Defoe
Paul Hagen
Jeffrey James Keyes
David Koteles
Mariah MacCarthy
Christopher Oscar Peña
Rob Rosiello
Actors:

Jody Christopherson
Matt W. Cody
Jon Cooper
Sanam Erfani
Andrew Glaszek
Yeauxlanda Kay
Joshua Levine
Libby Winters

Filip Noterdaeme presents his new book The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart, with Penny Arcade
2013-03-23 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Filip Noterdaeme reads from his new book The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart
This conceptual memoir written in the style of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was published in March 2013 by Outpost19.

Filip Noterdaeme is the founder and director of the Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), a pastiche of the contemporary art museum. He lives in New York City, where he teaches art history at the New School and CUNY, gives gallery lectures at the Guggenheim Museum, and writes a blog about art for The Huffington Post.
https://www.outpost19.com/Autobiography/index.html
https://www.homelessmuseum.org/
Penny Arcade reads from her forward to The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart and from her book Bad Reputation:
Performances, Essays, Interviews

Penny Arcade aka Susana Ventura is an internationally respected writer,poet, actress, director and one of the handful of artists who created and continue to define Performance Art for nearly three decades. Her unique voice and magnetic stage presence have given her mainstream career recognition far beyond America’s shores, from Brazil to Austria, Australia to Britain to Mexico.
Penny Arcade debuted with John Vaccaro’s explosive Playhouse of The Ridiculous at 18 years , and was a Warhol Factory superstar at 19, featured in the Warhol film Women In Revolt, available on DVD .
With an artistic career spanning 40 years, Penny Arcade occupies a unique position in the American counter-culture and the American Avant-Garde. HM Koutoukas referred to her as “The Little Sister of The Avant-garde” because of her long association with the architects of the American counter culture including Andy Warhol, Charles Henri Ford, John Vaccaro, Judith Malina, Ellen Stewart, Jackie Curtis, HM Koutukas, Taylor Mead, Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, Harry Smith, Tom O’Horgan, Charles Ludlam, among others.
Penny Arcade’s work has long focused on the other and the outsider, giving voice to those marginalized by society and her decades long focus on the creation of community and inclusion as the goals of performance. Her efforts to use performance as a transformative act mark her as a true original in American theatre and performance art. Many of her theatrical innovations have passed into the mainstream of both American and international theatre and performance.
In 1991 Quentin Crisp identified Ms Arcade as his soul mate and anima figure , the woman he most identified with and their friendship became professional and they presented performances together for close to a decade.
Her highly praised, award winning documentary project The LES Bio Project, “Stemming The Tide Of Cultural Amnesia” which she co-creates with long time collaborator video producer Steve Zehentner has been broadcasted weekly in NY since 1999 every Wednesday at 11pm on Ch 34 Time /Warner and RCN 112 and cybercasts each wed at 10:30 at www.mnn.org
Visit www.pennyarcde.tv , pennyarcadesuperstar FB
Twitter pennyarcadenyc

Queer Division III: celebrating the release of Rachel Levitsky's new book, The Story of My Accident Is Ours, just out from Futurepoem
2013-03-21 07:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Andrew Durbin presents Queer Division III: celebrating the release of Rachel Levitsky‘s new book, The Story of My Accident Is Ours, just out from Futurepoem
+ + + READERS + + +

Besides her first novel, brand spanking newly out from Futurepoem, and called The Story of My Accident is Ours, Rachel Levitsky is the author of two previous books called poetry, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003) NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009). She is the founder of the feminist avant-garde network, Belladonna* Collaborative. In 2010 with Christian Hawkey, she started The Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS.net), a mobile research unit variously located in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boulder, Brooklyn, Cambridge, NYC and the Universität Leipzig in Leipzig. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Pratt Institute.

erica kaufman is the author of censory impulse (Factory School 2009) as well as several chapbooks. her most recent project is called INSTANT CLASSIC. she lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Baruch College and the Institute for Writing & Thinking at Bard College.

Michelle Betters is a poet living in Brooklyn. She’s a student at Pratt Institute where she curates Ubiquitous, the literary and arts magazine. Since moving here from Georgia in 2010, she’s been involved in various projects with OWS, the Office of Recuperative Strategies, and Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok. Her most recent project was a chapbook entitled OCD the Vampire Slayer, which Joss Whedon has yet to respond to despite the multiple copies she’s sent to him.

In the Flesh monthly reading: Transitional Life
2013-03-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The queer online zine In the Flesh returns to the Bureau for its fifth consecutive monthly reading at the Bureau!

Transitional Life
Maybe you’ve just moved to a new city and are staying with your cousin in his one bedroom at the exact moment that he and his girlfriend are trying to get pregnant and you are frequently asked to leave the apartment because she is ovulating. “No problem. So, I’ll just step out for a half hour or so?”
Or perhaps you’ve started a temp job in Midtown and find yourself staring into a bowl of beernuts at PJ Moran’s with your co-workers, seriously considering going home with Awkward John, just to confirm your lesbianhood once and for all.
OR Maybe you finally worked up the nerve to wear those new stockings and short skirt out in public, and you notice there is a tiny hole in the stockings and how could that be possible because you just bought them so you are too busy being upset about that damn hole and how it could have gotten there to be nervous about whether you pass or not.
It’s a tricky business starting something new, and the force of change often pushes us into bed with strange fellows. Sometimes literally. The phrase “How did I get here” was made for such times, and at this month’s ITF you will hear ALL about those sweaty moments that helped our readers get them to where they are.
Readings will begin PROMPTLY at 7:30, so be sure to arrive early to grab a drink and find yourself a seat next to that special someone.
READERS:
Ariel “Speedwagon” Federow– is a performer whose work has been seen on Broadway, Lafayette, Chrystie, East 4th Street, Fulton, Vanderbilt, and other streets and avenues around New York City. She blogs for dapperQ.com and Velvet Park, was once Miss Jew-S-A, spent her youth as a ballerina, and can be tracked down at https://www.arielspeedwagon.com/.
Hana Malia
Aldrin Valdez– is an artist and writer who grew up in Manila and Long Island. He studied painting and writing at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. Aldrin’s writing has been published in Art:21 Blog, The Brooklyn Rail, BRIC Contemporary Art, Art Slant, and In the Flesh. He is a 2011-2012 Queer/Art/Mentorship fellow. Along with artist Ted Kerr, he organizes Foundational Sharing, a salon of performances, readings, and visual art. www.aldrinaldrin.com

Readings by Martin Hyatt, Luis Jaramillo, and Andrew Zornoza
2013-03-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Meet three of NYC’s freshest, most buzzed about, original literary voices when Martin Hyatt, Luis Jaramillo, and Andrew Zornoza take the stage at the Bureau to share their latest work.

Martin Hyatt is the recipient of an Edward F. Albee Writing Fellowship and The New School Chapbook Award for fiction. His debut novel, A Scarecrow’s Bible, was published May 2006. It was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association and won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. In addition, it was nominated for the Ferro-Grumley Award, a Lamda Literary Award, and the Violet Quill Award. He was named a “Star of Tomorrow” by NY Magazine. His new novel, Beautiful Gravity, is forthcoming. He is also currently completing a memoir entitled Greyhound Boy, 1976. His work has appeared in several award-winning anthologies. He has taught writing at such places at Hofstra, Parsons, and St. Francis College. He is currently Associate Professor and Founding Coordinator of The Writing Center at ASA College in NYC.

Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, an Oprah Book of the Week, and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012. Luis’s work has also appeared in Open City, Gamers (Soft Skull Press), and Tin House Magazine. He is the Associate Chair of the Writing Program at the New School, where he teaches courses in fiction and nonfiction, and is co-editor of the journal The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food.

Andrew Zornoza is the author of the novel Where I Stay. His short fiction, essays and photography have appeared in BOMB, the Poetry Foundation, Gastronomica, Sleepingfish, and CapGun, among many others. He has taught at Gotham Writers’ Workshop and in Parsons Design & Technology MFA program. Born in Houston, Texas, he currently works out of New York City.

Cynthia Carr reads from Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
2013-03-14 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Cynthia Carr was a columnist and arts reporter for the Village Voice from 1984 to 2003. Writing under the byline C. Carr, she specialized in experimental and cutting-edge art, especially performance art. Some of these pieces are now collected in On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. She is also the author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Bookforum, Modern Painters, the Drama Review, and other publications. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Carr lives in New York.

About Fire in the Belly
David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway who barely finished high school, but he emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. He found his tribe in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and ’80s for drugs, blight, and a burgeoning art scene. His creativity spilled out in paintings, photographs, films, texts, installations, and in his life and its recounting—creating a sort of mythos around himself. His circle of East Village artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance, and as right-wing culture warriors reared their heads. As Wojnarowicz’s reputation as an artist grew, so did his reputation as an agitator—because he dealt so openly with his homosexuality, so angrily with his circumstances as a Person With AIDS, and so fiercely with his would-be censors.Fire in the Belly is the untold story of a polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture—and one of the most highly acclaimed biographies of the year.

Reviews

“12 Best Books of 2012” – Newsday

“10 Favorite Books of 2012” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Carr’s biography is both sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s . . . [Carr] has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Heartbreaking and unflinchingly honest. Carr has managed to create not only an essential biography but required reading for anyone interested in the ‘80s art world” – Christopher Bollen, Interview

“A vivid portrait of the artist as a young man . . . It’s no surprise that Carr writes perceptively about Wojnarowicz’s art and the era’s ‘culture wars.’ But she also is exceptionally good at fleshing out her subject as a person . . . Carr has resurrected him . . . fully and hauntingly.” – Tom Beer, Newsday

“A beautifully written, sympathetic, unsentimental portrait of one of the most lastingly influential late 20th century New York artists.” – Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Times

Contributors to The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to Their Younger Selves
2013-03-13 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Readings by contributors to The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves, edited by Sarah Moon.

Confirmed readers:
Sarah Moon is a teacher, writer, and translator. She is a graduate of Smith College and Columbia University. She teaches at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn.
James Lecesne is an actor, writer, and activist. His Academy-Award winning short film, Trevor, inspired the founding o the The Trevor Project. In addition to his career as an actor, he has written for TV and he performed several of his own one-man shows, including Word of Mouth, which won a New York Drama Desk Award.
An essaysit and reporter, Paula Gilovich has contributed to the New York Times, Allure, and the Stranger. Her plays include Le Roy, Le Roy, Le Roy; Water to Breathe; and Queertopia. At About Face Theatre, she worked as a writer and director for the creation of new main-stage and touring plays about the lives and experiences of queer youth.
Linda Villarosa runs the journalism program at the City College of New York in Harlem. Her novel Passing for Black was published in 2008.

Description of The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves

Life-saving letters from a glittering wishlist of top authors. If you received a letter from your older self, what do you think it would say? What do you wish it would say?

That the boy you were crushing on in History turns out to be gay too, and that you become boyfriends in college? That the bully who is making your life miserable will one day become so insignificant that you won’t remember his name until he shows up at your book signing?
In this anthology, sixty-four award-winning authors such as Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline Woodson, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, and Armistead Maupin make imaginative journeys into their pasts, telling their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgendered people. Through stories, in pictures, with bracing honesty, these are words of love and understanding, reasons to hold on for the better future ahead. They will tell you things about your favorite authors that you never knew before. And they will tell you about yourself.

Poet Dean Kostos reads at the Bureau
2013-03-10 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Dean Kostos will read from his recent book of poetry, Rivering, and from a forthcoming book.
Dean Kostos’s collections include Rivering, Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma, and the chapbook Celestial Rust. He co-edited Mama’s Boy: Gay Men Write about Their Mothers (a Lambda Book Award finalist) and edited Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry (its debut reading was held at the United Nations). His poems have appeared in over 300 journals and anthologies, such as Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mediterranean Poetry (Sweden), Southwest Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Stranger at Home, Token Entry, Vanitas, Western Humanities Review, and on Oprah Winfrey’s Web site Oxygen.com. His choral text, Dialogue: Angel of War, Angel of Peace, was set to music by James Bassi and performed by Voices of Ascension. His literary criticism has appeared on the Harvard UP Web site, in Talisman, and elsewhere. He has taught at Wesleyan, The Gallatin School of NYU, The City University of New York, and he has served as literary judge for Columbia University’s Gold Crown Awards. A recipient of a Yaddo fellowship, he also serves on the editorial board of Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora. His poem “Subway Silk” was recently translated into a film by Canadian filmmaker Jill Clark.
Read Michael T. Young’s review of Rivering in Taos Journal of Poetry and Art.

Jillian McManemin and Rbt. Sps. hosted by Joseph Whitt
2013-03-09 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Jillian McManemin and Rbt. Sps.
An Evening of Recitation and Song
hosted by Joseph Whitt
Jillian McManemin (b.1989 Englewood, New Jersey) is a multimedia artist who utilizes spoken word, video, and performance. Her work investigates the emotional structure of specific, often colorful characters in an attempt to reveal the ubiquity of heartache within a society of desire and longing. She graduated with a BFA from Pratt Institute, and has presented work at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Brooklyn Fireproof (Brooklyn, NY), and Glasslands (Brooklyn, NY). She also starred in a feature film called “The Cruel Tale of The Medicine Man” (2012) written and produced by “The Slipper Room”’s James Habacker and directed by Maria Beatty. She is currently co-creating a play and short film under the alias “The Honeymoon Heart Revival.”
Rbt. Sps. (b. 1984, Paducah, Kentucky) is a multimedia artist, writer and performer. As a lifelong resident of the Deep South, Sps.’s work deals predominately with rural eccentricities and extremes viewed through an autobiographical lens. His work has been featured in the Wiener Künstlerhaus (Vienna, Austria), P.P.O.W. Gallery (NYC), Interstate Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Antena Gallery (Chicago, Illinois), and Space 204 at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee). His video series, This New Sitcom, will be featured in NYC’s Moving Image Contemporary Art Video Fair, March 7-10, 2013.
During the evening, Sps. will be offering his zine “Selected Video Stills 2004-2012” (signed/numbered in an edition of 50) for sale.

Opening reception for Alice O'Malley: Kenny Kenny 13
2013-03-08 18:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
KENNY KENNY 13 is an exhibition of photographs of Kenny Kenny by Alice O’Malley curated by Claire Fleury and Alesia Exum of Strange Loop Gallery. Opening reception on Friday, March 8, 6-9 PM.
Alice O’Malley lives and works in New York City. Her photographs have appeared in various publications including Art in America, I-D Magazine, Flash Art and New York Times Magazine. O’Malley’s first monograph, Community of Elsewheres, was published by Isis Editions in 2008 in conjunction with a solo exhibition by the same name.
She has exhibited at AIR, Participant, ICP and PS1, and other galleries in NYC.
Alice O’Malley on Kenny Kenny:
“Kenny Kenny assisted Leigh Bowery in London in the early eighties and he is a legendary stylist in his own right.
Like Bowery, his body is his palette. He also hosts the best nights in New York City. We did a series of portraits called ’13 looks’…a study of Kenny Kenny in his many guises.”

Janis Joplin tribute: Travis Laughlin does Pearl
2013-03-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Travis Laughlin has been paying tribute to Janis Joplin as Pearl for over 20 years. Pearl debuted at a high school drag show in Ossipee, North Carolina and she hasn’t looked back! Since that stunning debut Pearl has performed in such venues as the Wayne Newton Theatre in Las Vegas, Snug Harbor in Charlotte, Joe’s Pub, and, of course, The Cock. Pearl is about celebrating the legacy of Janis Joplin and, in Janis’ words, inspiring people to “get off [their] butt[s] and feel things!”
