BGSQD

Bi Book Club: Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men
2015-05-28 18:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
The Bi Book Club meets once a month to discuss bi-themed books and the issues they raise. People of all orientations and genders welcome! Dinner after nearby.
Our current book is Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men edited by Robyn Ochs & H. Sharif Williams (Dr. Herukhuti.) For our meeting in May we will discuss the final two sections of the book: Section 8: Traveling, and Section 9: Relationships. Pick out some phrases or paragraphs that you’d like to discuss, that inspired you, or that struck you because of their elegant turn of phrase or the meaning behind it. If you haven’t had time to finish the readings, come anyway because we read passages from the book aloud for discussion. As usual, we’ll also be using the text as a jumping off point to further discussion of bisexual issues and personal experiences.
Getting Books: We urge you to purchase your print copy at BGSQD and support the only LGBT bookstore in New York City. Especially since they are hosting us in their space! If you prefer e-books, just get them your usual way.
Deciding Books: The group votes on what book to read next.
The Bi Book Club meets at the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division on the last Thursday of each month.

Newfangled 6: Robert Siek hosts Chase Berggrun, Tom Capelonga, & Paul Tran
2015-05-29 19:00 - 22:00
Join us for the 6th installment of Newfangled, poetry readings by emerging poets hosted by Robert Siek. Newfangled 6 will feature Chase Berggrun, Tom Capelonga, & Paul Tran.

CHASE BERGGRUN is a genderqueer poet and the author of Discontent and Its Civilizations: Poems of Erasure, winner of the 2012 jubilat Chapbook Contest judged by Peter Gizzi, and their work has been published or is forthcoming in Apogee, No Tokens, The Cortland Review, Cutbank, BOAAT, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. They are Assistant Poetry Editor at Washington Square Review, and an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU.

TOM CAPELONGA is a 27-year-old native of New York City. His work has appeared in FourTwoNine magazine and Podium. He lives in Manhattan.

PAUL TRAN is a Vietnamese American historian and spoken word poet. He won “Best Poet” and “Pushing the Art Forward” at the national college poetry slam, as well as awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, Lambda Literary, Napa Valley, VONA, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work can be found in CURA, Nepantla, cream city review, and RHINO, which selected him for the 2015 Editor’s Prize. Since 2013, Paul has taught the Untitlement Project at New Urban Arts in Providence, Rhode Island, and coached the Brown University, Barnard College & Columbia University, and Providence youth slam teams. He currently lives in New York City, where he’s writing his first book and working at New York University.

ROBERT SIEK is the author of the poetry collection Purpose and Devil Piss (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013) and the chapbook Clubbed Kid (New School University, 2002). He works at a large publishing house in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn.

Dale Peck in conversation with Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon
2015-05-30 19:00 - 22:00
Dale Peck discusses his new memoir, Visions and Revisions, with critic and editor Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon. Visions and Revisions revisits Peck’s experience as an AIDS activist and writer from 1987, when ACT UP was founded, to 1996, when new treatments dramatically extended the life expectancy of people with AIDS.

Photograph by Gregg Evans
Dale Peck is the author of twelve books, including the novels Martin and John, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye, and Greenville, and the essay collection Hatchet Jobs. His novel Sprout when the inaugural Lambda Literary Award for young adult literature, and his stories have been included in the annual O. Henry Award and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Peck was a member of ACT UP in the early 90s and served on the steering committee of Downtown for Democracy, a arts-baed PAC that raised more than a million dollars for progressive candidates during the 2004 election. He co-founded Mischief + Mayhem, a publishing collective, and has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School since 1999.

Chapbook Release Party for Claudia Cortese’s Blood Medals
2015-05-31 18:00 - 21:00
Please join us to celebrate the release of Claudia Cortese’s chapbook Blood Medals. The poems in the book explore a girl named Lucy whom Winter Tangerine Review calls “a shitty little princess that we can’t help but adore.”

Poets Meghan Privitello, Aziza Barnes, and Alexis Pope will help Cortese celebrate her chap by reading their work, and then Cortese will perform her Lucy poems. The chapbook will be available at the party.

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About Blood Medals—

Claudia Cortese’s “Lucy” poems are treacherously alive and important. Cortese navigates Lucy’s interior world with gorgeous starkness, refusing to be saccharine; rather, Lucy churns with playful viscera and violent intelligence: she is the kind of girl who “demands Santa stitch her a skin of bees, that her screams be not sound but solid: a stinger that stings and stings.” These prose poems are raw and fanatically simple, yet every trope is electric-charged, hot to the touch.
—Rusty Morrison, author of Beyond the Chainlink

. . . Navigating through the hauntingly sensual language of tumors, shrieking, sores, and knives, Blood Medals reveals the sinister underbellies of this world while still managing to glitter with the hope of transcendence. Each poem holds you by the skin on the back of your neck and dares you to look at where your own darkness hides. Cortese’s voice is morbidly beautiful, brutally honest, and “brighter than fire and cardinal”. Blood Medals will leave you haunted and broken and begging for more.
—Meghan Privitello, author of A New Language for Falling out of Love

Claudia Cortese has two chapbooks—Blood Medals (Thrush Poetry Press) and The Red Essay and Other Histories (forthcoming from Horse Less Press). Her poems and lyric essays have found homes at Black Warrior Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, and Sixth Finch, among others. Cortese lives in New Jersey and is the poetry editor for Swarm (swarmlit.com).

Aziza Barnes is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Bedstuy, New York. You can find her work currently or forthcoming in PANK, pluck!, Muzzle, Callaloo, Union Station, Phantom Limb, The Rumpus and The Breakbeat Poets, among other journals and collections. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published from Button Poetry, available for purchase here: www.buttonpoetry.com She is a poetry & non-fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a Callaloo fellow, a graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a current candidate for her MFA in Poetry at University of Mississippi. She is a member of The Dance Cartel & the divine fabrics collective.

Meghan Privitello is the author of A New Language for Falling Out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015). Poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Best New Poets 2012, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, & elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2014 NJ State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Alexis Pope is the author of Soft Threat (Coconut Books, 2014), as well as three chapbooks. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Denver Quarterly, Poor Claudia, Powderkeg, Sink Review, and The Volta, among others. Pope lives in Brooklyn, is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, and teaches at Brooklyn College.

Trans Poetry Launch: Lilith Latini and Charles Theonia
2015-06-02 19:00 - 22:00
You are invited to the debut of our first books of poetry!
Help us welcome these titles into the world:
Improvise, Girl, Improvise by Lilith Latini
and
Which One Is The Bridge by Charles Theonia
Hosted by Cat Fitzpatrick and Sybil Lamb!
With readings by:
Reina Gossett
Morgan M Page
Olympia Perez
Séverine
Ivana Black
and others!
FREE!
(Author photos by Julieta Salgado ♥ ♥)
Venue is wheelchair accessible via an elevator
Please note that the Bureau is closed on Tuesdays. We will open at 6 PM for this event.

Book launch of Patrick E. Horrigan's PORTRAITS AT AN EXHIBITION (Lethe Press)
2015-06-03 19:00 - 22:00
A party and performance/reading to mark the publication of the novel PORTRAITS AT AN EXHIBITION (Lethe Press) by Patrick E. Horrigan.

Patrick E. Horrigan was born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania. He earned a BA from The Catholic University of America and a PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of the novel Portraits at an Exhibition (forthcoming May 2015 from Lethe Press), the memoir Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies, the play Messages for Gary: A Drama in Voicemail, and (with Eduardo Leanez) the solo show You Are Confused! With Mr. Leanez, he hosts Actors with Accents, a recurring variety show at Teatro Circulo in the East Village. He has also written catalogue essays for Ernesto Pujol’s Loss of Faith and Thion’s Limi-TATE: Drawings of Life and Dreams. In the late 1980s, he taught as a volunteer at the Harvey Milk High School for Gay and Lesbian Youth. In 1993 he joined the English Department at LIU Brooklyn, where he teaches courses on American literature, pop culture, LGBT studies, modernism and Virginia Woolf.

Ian Spencer Bell: Geography Solos & Holler
2015-06-04 19:00 - 22:00 | The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, Room 101, New York, 10011, United States
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center host dancer, choreographer, and poet Ian Spencer Bell in a solo performance of his blend of poetry and dance in room 101 of The Center on Thursday, June 4, at 7 PM.
Join Ian for a reception following the performance in the Bureau, room 210 of The Center at 8 PM
Suggested donation of $5
No one turned away for lack of funds

Bell danced a version of Geography Solos last spring in New York as part of his evening- length work Elsewhere. On March 11, 2015, Bell performed a new version of Geography Solos at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. For the premiere, Bell added three poems, “The Apostle,” “Beards,” and “For Those Who Come to San Francisco.” On the streets of New York City, in the hills of LA and San Francisco, and in a laundromat in Virginia, Bell contemplates place, self, and love. In his long poem Holler, Bell catalogues the contents of his childhood home near the Shenandoah Valley. This will be the New York premiere of Holler.
Historian Michael J. Kramer, in an essay for CultureRover.net about the Poetry Foundation performance, wrote that Bell danced “both outside the poems looking in at them and within their poetic and musical infrastructures … he neither merely illustrated his words, nor only accompanied the poems with dance—but instead lingered in a space between the two.”
Bell has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Summer Stages Dance, Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Jacob’s Pillow, where he performed with his group on the Inside/Out Stage. Bell trained at North Carolina School of the Arts, School of American Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied with New York State Poet Marie Howe.

ASSARACUS: A Journal of Gay Poetry—A Reading to Celebrate Issue 18
2015-06-06 19:00 - 22:00
Please join us to celebrate the latest issue of the beautiful and sexy gay male poetry magazine Assaracus 18 (Sibling Rivalry Press). Poets look at the world today from San Francisco to Greece and many points between, at memories brought to life, at fucking and drag, love and families, tricks, beaches, bathhouses, Grindr, even a god or two. Four widely published gay poets will read, William Leo Coakley (a New York Poetry Center Discovery series winner), Graham Coppin (Brooklyn poet and leadership coach born in South Africa), Joseph Harker (Assaracus editor and Poet Blogger), and Jee Long Koh (organizer of the NY Singapore Literature Festival and Singapore Poetry website).
Copies of the magazine are available for purchase at the Bureau.
Cover art by Carmine Santaniello
Please support the Bureau by purchasing your copy from the Bureau! Thank you!
Reception at 7
Reading at 7:30

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Photograph by Joseph Batista
William Leo Coakley, who recently won the Der-Hovanessian prize for a gay Cavafy translation, has appeared in many magazines and other publications here and abroad, including the Paris Review and the Gay and Lesbian Review. He often reads his work on the radio, at Day without Art programs, and at venues like the Leslie-Lohman Gay and Lesbian Art Museum.

Graham Coppin is a recovering mathematician and poet now working as a leadership coach and consultant. He was born and raised in South Africa and emigrated to the US just before his homeland’s first democratic elections in 1994. He first lived in Minnesota where he learned to love flannel and hate lutefisk. He currently resides in a not-so-gentrified-yet-thank-God part of Brooklyn.

Joseph Harker is a linguist and poet often found prowling the trains and cafés of the Northeast. Currently, he edits Assaracus, a journal of gay male poetry; his own work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Ganymede, Hobble Creek Review, qarrtsiluni, and others. He does the Twitter thing at @JHPoet, and the blog thing at https://namingconstellations.wordpress.com, which you are welcome to visit, if you promise to wipe your feet.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of four books of poems. A new collection titled Steep Tea is forthcoming from Carcanet Press in July. The organizer of the Singapore Literature Festival in New York, he runs the Singapore Poetry website and the Second Saturdays Reading Series.

book release and book signing party of the book Internal Landscapes by John Ollom MFA
2015-06-07 18:00 - 21:00
Internal Landscapes is the culmination of fourteen years of movement research, movement technique classes and personal introspection that have created the revolutionary methodology of Internal Landscapes. John Ollom’s practice is defined as archetypal movement that leads to art creation.
Many dancers, actors, performance artists and non-performers have come to work with John Ollom, the creator of the Internal Landscapes methodology and his company of Ollom Movement Artists. Peer into a book that not only educates but tells personal stories of unbelievable honesty. Issues of rape, homosexuality, and survival through trauma have been addressed in this methodology. Artists that have dared to have the courage to create art that is poignant and revelatory have found John Ollom’s practice to be the key to their process.

Come join us on Sunday June 7th at 6pm for this exciting book release and book signing party with John Ollom MFA.

The Vice President of Winning Writers, Jendi Reiter said,
“John Ollom is a healer. He binds up the internalized wounds of oppression that split body form soul, male from female, humanity from the natural world. His medicine is dance. But it’s a kind of dance you may have never seen before, arising from each performer’s inner truth rather than enforced conformity to an external ideal.”

John Ollom MFA is the author of the book Internal Landscapes.
John received his MFA from Goddard College and his BFA in Ballet from Texas Christian University where he trained under Stephanie McFarlane Rand, Li Chou Cheng of Beijiing Ballet and Fernando Bujones of American Ballet Theatre and the Royal Ballet.

He has been teaching in New York City and around the country since 2000. His methodology has been taught at the Eastern Michigan University, Kalani Retreat Center in Hawaii, Atmananda Yoga Sequence, Baruch College, CUNY Hostos, CUNY in the Heights, Easton Mountain Retreat Center and every summer at the Ollom Movement Art Summer Program at Smith College.

In 2010-2011, John Ollom was chosen as the Artist in Residence at the Eastern Michigan University Dance Department. Since 2002, John has served as the Artistic Director of Ollom Art/Prismatic Productions Inc./ where he has choreographed such works as The Catalyst, Love and Longing, The Journey, John Ollom’s The Journey, Anatomy of Woman, Dido and Aeneas, The Other Species, Love Stories, Internal Landscapes, Man of War, M.U.D. (Men Under Dirt), Kuan Yin’s Compassion, Nemetona, The Portal, and Prisoner of My Projection. His choreography and direction can also be seen in the film “Karpos and Kalamos”.

John’s work has been the subject of three documentary films: “Late Bloomers” by Annette Cyr, Professor of Art at the National University in San Diego; “The Making of M.U.D.: An Exploration of the Work of John Ollom and Ollom Movement Art” by Robert Kazmayer, MA; and, “There’s Something about John” by Emma McCagg.

Queer Collage Party
2015-06-10 19:00 - 22:00
Spring time is the right time to make collages! We provide the glue sticks and paper, you provide the pictures. Everyone who attends should bring at least one magazine or book or a bunch of pictures that you’ll contribute to the group. Each person can make their own collage(s), or team up with others! You can keep your own collage(s), but don’t expect to walk away with your magazine intact! The spirit here is fun and sharing. Attend for part or all of the evening. You are encouraged but not required to bring a little snack to share — chips, tangerines, grapes, hummus, whatever. We’ll have music playing (not live, though).
Facilitated by Paul VanDeCarr

Paul VanDeCarr is an arts and nonprofit writer in NYC, more info at www.paulvdc.com.

DEADLINE: Works-in-Progress from Cutting-Edge Queer Artists: June Edition!
2015-06-11 19:00 - 22:00
Sabrina Chap brings you this works-in-progress series featuring new work from cutting-edge queer artists. Built on the notion that there’s no greater inspiration than a deadline, this series forces renegade artists to bring new and developing work to an audience for the first time. Part experimentation + part guaranteed failure = 100% awesomeness.
The June edition of DEADLINE will feature:

Geoffrey Bridgman – Literature

Lauren Schleider – Visual Art

Jamila Reddy – Multi-DisciplinaryPerformance Art

Kyle Rogers – Theater

Interested in presenting your work in a future installment of Deadline? Fill out the form!
Artists of any kind are encouraged to submit.
https://goo.gl/forms/Z84O7GgVdB

Check out this article on the August edition of Deadline in Next Magazine: “BGSQD’s Deadline Gives Queer Artists Room To Create And Grow” by Chris Hernandez

Launch Party for VYM, the drag magazine!
2015-06-12 19:00 - 22:00
Celebrate the art of drag with the launch of VYM Magazine!
VYM, the drag magazine, celebrates its inaugural issue with an evening of readings and performances! VYM is a love letter to the art that exists in (and is inspired by) the world of Drag. Editors Johnny and Sasha Velour believe that a wonderful concept, such as drag, deserves an artful forum dedicated to all its incarnations — from camp and humor, fashion and art, to politics and theory. This new 100 page magazine features comics, essays, illustrations, interviews, photography, poetry, and more from more than 20 of todays most talented independent artists. To start with a bang, Johnny and Sasha asked their contributors to define the indefinable, “What is Drag?” Their answers are as varied and valid as the art itself, and their work reminds that there is no “right way” to do drag.

The evening will feature readings and performances by many of the issue’s contributors including: Crimson Kitty, Lady Winifred, Didi Panache, K. James, Wo Chan, Donald C. Shorter, Jr., and more!

Johnny Velour (Editorial Director) (a.k.a. John Jacob Lee) is a theatre artist and choreographer who has spent most of his career in one form of drag or another. He has toured internationally with Cats and The Wedding Singer.
Sasha Velour (Artistic Director) (a.k.a. Sasha Steinberg) is a comics artist, designer, and drag queen. Sasha holds a BA in Literature from Vassar College, an MFA in Cartooning from CCS, and studied queer arts on a Fulbright Fellowship in Moscow, Russia. He is the creator of the Stonewall comic series. ahsasha.com

Bureau Book Club Discusses Larry Kramer's The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart
2015-06-14 18:00 - 21:00
Join us for a discussion of Larry Kramer’s The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart
Larry Kramer’s first novel, Faggots, shocked a generation with its Swiftian indictment of ’70s clone sex culture on the West Side and Fire Island. His play The Normal Heart, a searing polemic against apathy and evil set during the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, has moved generations of audiences. For thirty years, he’s been at work on a multi-thousand-page epic attempting to situate queers at the center of American history. It takes us from Abraham Lincoln orgies to monkeys swapping AIDS before the dawn of human civilization, from a Jewish family outside Washington, DC to secret Nazi camps in North Dakota. Lawrence D. Mass, co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, says the book demands a reconsideration of “nothing less than the entirety of [American] history, calling it “Eloquent, powerful, epochal, defiant, relentlessly in your face and tough as shit on everyone and everything.” Volume 1 is ready. Are you?

The book was released April 5, and due to its length – 775 pages – we’re holding our discussion June 14. Buy it anytime at the Bureau. Don’t feel you need to have finished – or started – the book to join us. Stay tuned for news about possible special guests!

The discussion will be moderated by Ben Miller, a writer and researcher in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Learn more about him at benwritesthings.com, he tweets @benwritesthings

“He’s been struggling with this history for many years…How much did he find out? How much shame and horror at all that was and is being enacted and endured? Shame for whom?…He decides to finally belly up to this assignment on that day when he hears the President refer to ‘The American People’ and realizes that the president of the United States is not talking about him or his people, and that he, Fred Lemish, had best do something about it.” – the opening lines of The American People

Evening with West Village writer Kate Walter reading from her debut memoir: Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing (Heliotrope Books)
2015-06-19 19:00
Journalist and professor Kate Walter reads from her debut memoir: Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing (Heliotrope Books)

Reception at 7
Reading at 7:30

How long does it take to get over heartache? Journalist and teacher Kate Walter wondered if she’d ever feel whole again after her long term lesbian partnership ended.

A resident of Greenwich Village who spent years recording neighborhood life, Walter now releases her debut memoir Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing (Heliotrope Books, June 2015).

Dedicated to “women who have been dumped after 25 years,” Walter’s memoir describes her broke, brokenhearted state after being left by her partner of two decades. While many older women—gay and straight—experience divorce, Walter’s was more stressful since she was not legally married. But rather than dwelling in regret, Looking for Kiss carries a universal message about loss and recovery: you can heal your life and land up in a better place.

With brave and revealing details, Walter confesses her grief and rage and questions her past choices. Seeking answers and spiritual solace, she joins a gay-positive church, visits psychics, throws herself into yoga and chanting, and starts dating again at 60.

Like the urban landscape that serves as her backdrop, Walter’s fast-paced dialogue has a raspy realness and soulful edge. She describes loneliness and longing with humorous and poetic prose. Anyone seeking hope will cheer this funny, gutsy narrator who loses love but finds herself.

Kate Walter has been living in downtown Manhattan since 1975 when she escaped across the river from New Jersey. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Newsday, New York Daily News, AM-NY, the Advocate and many other outlets. She teaches writing at CUNY and NYU

Deeply Leisured with Queenie Bon Bon
2015-06-21 18:00 - 21:00
DEEPLY LEISURED is a hybrid performance that spans the genres of stand up comedy, performance, lecture, and consciousness-raising story telling. Queenie Bon Bon presents narratives detailing her deep love for her clients & coworkers, and the eternal joys and mysteries of working with bodies. She also shares stories on coming out as a sex worker to her mother, whorephobia and internet dating, and tips on covering up when you peed on the carpet at your workplace. A tender and true look into her lived experience as a sex worker, coworker solidarity, as well as social and political issues surrounding sex work, DEEPLY LEISURED is a performance full of intrigue and inspiration.
Suggested donation $5 to $15
Deeply Leisured premiered at Melbourne Fringe Festival and has since showed at Sydney’s infamous queer warehouse performance venue The Red Rattler, Hares and Hyenas Queer Bookshop as part of Scarlett Alliance’s National Sex Worker Forum, at Adelaide Fringe Festival and has also been performed as a fundraiser for the English prostitute’s collective in London. Queenie Bon Bon is an up and coming political comedic writer and performer. Aside from performing Deeply Leisured, she has done readings on the delights of being human furniture, fragmented realities and talked panels about the importance of decriminalisation and myth busting. Queenie is part of the Debbie’s (Australian sex worker art collective) and has spent several years working on a sex worker oral story telling archival project, and is now writing her first novel. Queenie has worked as a dancer, in massage parlours and in brothels over Australia as well as in the UK.

Rainbow Book Fair Readings: Lammy Winners 2015
2015-06-24 19:00 - 22:00
Before we say goodbye to June and Pride, let’s take a couple more hours to celebrate the winners of the 2015 Lambda Literary Awards with some of the winners who live right here in New York City. Readers will include Diana Cage, author of Lesbian Sex Bible: The New Guide to Sexual Love for Same-Sex Couples (winner for Lesbian Erotica), as well as Whitney Strub, a contributor to Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History (winner for LGBT Anthology) and some still to be determined guests.

Diana Cage was editor of the lesbian magazine On Our Backs and host of The Diana Cage Show on SiriusXM Radio. Her work has appeared in Curve, Girlfriends, Quartz, Shewired, The Advocate, Esquire, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Pratt Institute.

Whitney Strub is an associate professor of History and director of the Women’s & Gender Studies program at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (Columbia, 2011) and Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (Kansas, 2013).

Opening reception: Hunter Reynolds and Maxine Henryson: I-Dea The Goddess Within Gay Pride 1994
2015-06-26 19:00 - 22:00
Hunter Reynolds and Maxine Henryson
I-Dea The Goddess Within
Gay Pride 1994
June 18 to September 6, 2015
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
@The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street, Room 210
New York, NY 10011
contact@bgsqd.com
Opening Reception on Friday, June 26, 7 to 10 PM

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is pleased to present a selection of iconic photographs from I-DEA, The Goddess Within, a historic collaboration of the performance artist Hunter Reynolds, aka Patina du Prey, and documentary photographer Maxine Henryson. From 1993 to 2000, Henryson and Reynolds traveled to Berlin, Antwerp, Los Angeles, New York and other cities, creating guerrilla-like street performances and interventions. Spinning in a large white dress, Patina existed as a mythical dervish figure that deliberately disrupted gender norms in order to relate to the viewer as a shamanistic transgendered embodiment of fantasy and healing. I-DEA, The Goddess Within challenged notions of queer identity, performance art, and the social landscape of the 1990’s.

For this exhibition, the artists will present a selection of photographs from Gay Pride in New York on the 25th anniversary of Stonewall and the Gay Games in 1994. The years of 1993 and 1994 were two of the most devastating years of the AIDS epidemic. During this anniversary year there was a dispute between the organizers of the Pride Parade (Heritage of Pride), Mayor Giuliani, and the political activists participating in the annual parade, such as ACT UP, the Dykes on Bikes, and the Radical Faeries, who did not want to participate in the commercial marketing of the Gay Games or the changing of the Parade route to pass by the United Nations. The LGBTQ parade, for the first time, split into two parades: the official parade and the Radical Queers parade. The Dykes on Bikes led some 60,000 Radical Queers and Faeries from the Stonewall Inn up 5th Ave to Central Park. Many of the participants were naked and queers jerked off in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral. The community was fractured; the oppression of Giuliani era was beginning, and our parade was split.
Since 1992, Reynolds had been living in Berlin and returned to perform the Memorial Dress for Creative Time’s official Gay Games Art Event. Reynolds recalls that “I wanted to do a healing dervish dance on the steps of the NYPL under the pink triangle of the banner Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall, The New York Public Library’s groundbreaking 1994 exhibition, which was the largest and most extensive display of lesbian and gay history ever mounted in a museum or gallery space. It was spontaneous combustion. The parade stopped and thousands cheered. The naked Radical Faeries spun with me. It was a truly spectacular and moving moment in my life. I was so grateful to be alive and proud to be Queer.”

Hunter Reynolds has been using photography, performance and installation for over thirty years to express his experience as an HIV-positive gay man. He was an early member of ACT UP, and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT UP, to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. His work addresses issues of gender, identity, socio-politics, sexual histories, mourning, loss, survival, hope and healing. Hunter Reynolds was born in 1959 in Rochester, Minnesota. Reynolds is an AIDS activist and a Visual AIDS artist member and has been the recipient of grants and residencies, including several Pollock Krasner awards. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including: Iceberg Projects, IL; P.P.O.W Gallery, NY; Participant Inc., NY; Hallwalls, NY; White Columns, NY; Artist Space, NY; Simon Watson Gallery, NY; Creative Time, NY; Momenta, NY; Bernard Toale Gallery, MA; ICA Boston, MA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA; NGBK, Germany; and DOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany. His work is numerous public and private collections including The Society for Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA and The Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, MD. The Fales Library and Special Collections/New York University houses the archives of Hunter Reynolds in its Downtown Collection. Hunter Reynolds is represented by P.P.O.W. For more information about the artist please contact: info@ppowgallery.com

Maxine Henryson is an artist and bookmaker who creates sensual, poetic photographs of the seemingly every day. She explores perceptions of the feminine in the world, examining the differences and similarities between cultures. Her work traces evidence of divinity, rituals, place, memory and history in the West and East.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, she lives and works in New York. She studied sociology at Simmons College (B.S.) and University of London (Masters of Philosophy) and has an M.A.T. from the University of Chicago in studio arts and M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in photography. Her photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe and are in numerous public and private collections including the Celanese Photography Collection, the Russian Museum, Norton Museum of Art, and the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Selected group exhibitions include ARC Gallery, Chicago (The Body in Revue), Gallery Espace, New Delhi (Marvelous Reality/Lo Real Maravilloso), Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York (Lives of the Hudson), Unscharf (out of focus), after Gerhard Richter at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg Germany and O.K. Harris Gallery, New York (Illuminators). Her most recent solo exhibitions were at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn in 2014 (Ujjayi’s Journey.) and Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs, Wiesbaden, Germany. (Calculated Coincidence). Maxine Henryson taught photography at the International Center of Photography, New York, and Bennington College (1996-2006). Henryson’s artist books are Ujjayai’s Journey (Kehrer, 2012), Red Leaves and Golden Curtains (Kehrer, 2007) and Presence (Artist Publications, 2003). Henryson is represented by A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn.

Then, and Then, and Now: 2 Gay Memoirists from Different Generations Discuss Their Gay Histories
2015-06-27 19:00 - 22:00
Brad Gooch and David Crabb will read from and discuss their respective memoirs. Brad Gooch’s Smash Cut is a searing memoir of life in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, and Crabb’s Bad Kid is a hilarious, poignant story about a boy growing up gay (and Goth) in San Antonio, Texas at a time and place where it was hard to be one, near impossible to be the other.

Photograph By Henny Garfunkel
Brad Gooch is the author of the acclaimed biographies City Poet and Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as other nonfiction and three novels. The recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, he earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and is professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He lives in New York City.

Photograph By Julia Gillard
David Crabb is a performer, writer, teacher & storyteller in New York City. He is a Moth Story Slam host and three-time Moth Slam winner. His solo show “Bad Kid” was met with critical acclaim from The New York Times, MTV, Flavorpill, NY Metro and many others, and named a New York Times Critics’ Pick. The show has been performed in NYC since 2011 & completed a sold-out run in Virginia in 2013. “Bad Kid” will play in Texas and California in 2015.

Sharp Edges: Butcher’s Sons & Paris Demands
2015-07-01 19:00 - 22:00
The Sharp Edges book launch features new novels by Lethe Press’ Scott Alexander Hess (The Butcher’s Sons) and Mike Miksche (Paris Demands). These two authors will face off in a lively interview segment about their provocative books set respectively in the gritty streets of Hell’s Kitchen circa 1930 and in Paris’ glorious underbelly. It’ll be an evening of edgy conversations, live music, book giveaways, and of course French cheeses and Hell’s Kitchen (butchered) meats.

Reception @ 7PM, Interactive Interview @ 8PM

Scott Alexander Hess earned his MFA in creative writing from The New School. He blogs for The Huffington Post, and his writing has appeared in Genre Magazine, The Fix, and elsewhere. Hess co-wrote “Tom in America,” a short film starring Sally Kirkland and Burt Young. The Butcher’s Sons is his third novel. His debut novel Diary of a Sex Addict has been translated into German. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Hess now lives in Manhattan, New York.

Mike Miksche’s work has appeared in Instinct, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, and The Blue Lyra Review. He is the writer of Hole and Corner, a weekly column for Daily Xtra, which explores the profound connections forged through BDSM and public sex (https://www.dailyxtra.com/contributor/Mike%20Miksche). Paris Demands is his first novel.

DEADLINE: Works-in-Progress from Cutting-Edge Queer Artists: July Edition!
2015-07-02 19:00 - 22:00
Sabrina Chap brings you this works-in-progress series featuring new work from cutting-edge queer artists. Built on the notion that there’s no greater inspiration than a deadline, this series forces renegade artists to bring new and developing work to an audience for the first time. Part experimentation + part guaranteed failure = 100% awesomeness.
The July edition of DEADLINE will feature:

Jesse Phillips-Fein – Dance

Melody Jane – Performance Art

Taylor Derwin – Fiction

Kate Brandt – Film

Interested in presenting your work in a future installment of Deadline? Fill out the form!
Artists of any kind are encouraged to submit.
https://goo.gl/forms/Z84O7GgVdB

Check out this article on the August edition of Deadline in Next Magazine: “BGSQD’s Deadline Gives Queer Artists Room To Create And Grow” by Chris Hernandez

Bureau Closed For Independence Day Weekend
2015-07-03 - 2015-07-05
The Bureau will be closed on Friday, July 3rd, Saturday, July 4th, and Sunday, July 5th.

Together Again: Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellows Reunite
2015-07-09 19:00 - 21:30
Three fiction writers and two poets from the 2007 and 2008 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat read from their work.

Shelley Ettinger is a longtime activist in LGBTQ, anti-racist, anti-war and union struggles. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in dozens of literary journals. Vera’s Will is her first novel.

Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist, co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hostos Community College – CUNY. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His debut novel Chulito(Magnus Books 2011) has received nearly a dozen awards including a 2013 Stonewall Book Awards – Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor from the American Library Association and a “Small Press Highlights” mention from the National Book Critics Circle. He co-edited From Macho To Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Tincture/Lethe Press 2011) and his award-winning play I Just Love Andy Gibb will be published in Blacktino Queer Performance: A Critical Anthology (Duke Press 2016). He serves on the boards of the Bronx Council on the Arts and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.

Michael Montlack is the author of the poetry collection Cool Limbo (NYQ Books) and the editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work recently appeared in Cimarron Review, Barrow Street, Mudfish, The Cortland Review and Assaracus. He lives and teaches in New York City and has been awarded residencies/fellowships from VCCA, Ucross, Lambda Literary Foundation and Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Germany.

Carol Rosenfeld is a New York City-based writer and poet. Her short stories have appeared in several lesbian erotica and LGBT horror anthologies. Her debut novel, The One That Got Away, is being published in June 2015.

Ely Shipley’s first book, Boy with Flowers, won the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His chapbook, On Beards: A Memoir of Passing, is forthcoming from speCt! books. His poems and essays appear in the Western Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Florida Review, Phoebe, Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Witness, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Fugue, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD from the University of Utah. He is an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, CUNY.

For Sizakele Book Release: 14 Years In The Making
2015-07-10 19:00 - 22:00
Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene will read from her brand new book, For Sizakele. She will also perform electric, sugarcane-flavored poetry. Her performance will be followed by a question and answer session and book signing. This performance is a celebration of the over 14 years of love, work, sweat, passion and magic it has taken to bring forth this very necessary book. This event is part of the For Sizakele World Tour.
Suggested donation: $5

Please Note: To reserve your copy of For Sizakele in advance, please purchase your copy here: https://myloveisaverb.ticketleap.com/for-sizakele-bureau-nyc/ (Purchasing For Sizakele now reserves a copy for you. Your copy of the book will be available when you arrive at the event. This is the only way to ensure that you will have a copy before they sell out.) ￼

About the book: For Sizakele by Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene
Taylor, a queer Nigerian college student, is in a passionate relationship with Lee, a Black American basketball-playing pianist. When Taylor develops romantic feelings for Sy, a Cameroonian photographer whose similarities make them instant family, Taylor battles Lee’s jealousy. As Taylor encounters challenges to her femme and African identities, she finds ways, through the kinship of her friends, to define herself on her own terms. For Sizakele addresses transcontinental identity, intimate partner violence, queer gender and how we love as illuminators of who we are. ￼

Photograph By An Xiao
Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene is an Ijaw and Urhobo Nigerian dyke performance activist, poet, dancer, educator, actress and visual artist. She engages a radical vulnerability and candor in her artwork and uses storytelling to build an authentic human connection through passionate artistic expression. Etaghene is a mixed-media visual artist who has produced 4 solo art exhibitions and performed internationally. She is the founder of Sugarcane, an LGBTQ Of Color writing workshop based in the principles of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. She wrote and performed in two multi-media one-woman shows, Volcano’s Birthright{s} and GUAVA. Etaghene has published 4 chapbooks of poetry: afrocrown: fierce poetry (2000), write or die (2004), tongue twisted transcontinental sista (2006) and skin into verse (2014.) She released an album of poetry and music entitled liberty avenue, nigeria, usa (2004.) Etaghene is the author of For Sizakele, a novel that addresses transcontinental identity, intimate partner violence and how we love as illuminators of who we are. www.myloveisaverb.com, twitter: @myloveisaverb

Hand Crafted Art Fair @ BGSQD
2015-07-12 14:00 - 19:00
Art and crafts for sale by a diverse selection of local queer artisans. Please stop in to support the arts, meet the artists and hang at the bureau!

Sam Branman: Ten Yards Clothing is a queer sportswear label making bright, colorful sportswear. From custom leggings, singlets, wedding outfits, and drag, to harnesses, scarves, hats, cute crop tops, tees, tanks, and skirts, we got it all! Ten Yards Clothing also sells vintage 80’s jewelry for those who really want a conversation starter.

James McNally is a working artist living in the Brooklyn area . for most of his life.He has showed his work at coffee shops and east village bars and Clubs.he works usually mixed media on anything suitable he can find.Clothing .found objects smashed guitars or jusr oil on canvas.

Jerek Carper: Established in Chicago, based in Brooklyn. O’boros soaps are the products of adventurous fragrance blends and traditional home made hot process soap.

Daniel Casanova: All these earrings have been made using Japanese seed beads and Swarovski crystals and pearls. My partner and I have just started making these recently but we have had very good feedback.

Robin Crutchfield: As a performance artist/writer/musician in the 1970s, Robin found critical acclaim as part of the No Wave movement with bands DNA and Dark Day transitioning into solo work with trancelike harp and drone. He continued his creative pursuits in various arenas, including recent endeavors exploring the use of cotton crochet slipstitch methods. His whimsy includes pointy hats, dolls, and colorful catch-call bags. Also, some of his music CDS and books-“Eleven Faerie Tales” and “A,B,C, Desire” an erotic alphabet, will be available. Perhaps even some handwhittled wands.

Caleb Kruzel: Goon Soul specializes in leather accessories and altered clothing. At his table you will find harnesses, rings, customized digs, screen prints, and other handmade oddities.

Chioma Okotieuro: I have been making jewelry of one sort or another for the last 17 years. I started a non profit called Good Works and began to make bracelets to fund my endeavors to do “give” to people in need ‘just because’ and Chi Intentioned was born. I make earrings, bracelets, pendants, necklaces, rings, waistbeads and headpieces using crystals, stones, shells and good intentions.

Gemini: Bearly knits handmade scarves, cowls, and shawls are made by musician and former model, “Gemini.” Bearly knits crochet and knitwear utilizes only the best materials for its pieces and each design is completely one of a kind. Custom yarn options are also available upon request.​​
Don’t just standout…be unforgettable with Bearly Knits.

(DLOnLocation2015) Your Words Give Me a Headache
2015-07-13 19:00 - 22:00
Kajsa Dahlberg, Female Fist, 20 min, HD video, 2006
Dylan Mira, Untitled (Agua Viva), 13 min, HD video, 2013
Mariah Garnett, Picaresques, 20 min, 16mm transferred to HD video, 2011

Your Words Give Me A Headache is a group program that brings together the work of contemporary feminist filmmakers thinking about language, the fluxes between literature and moving image, matters of expression, experience, representation and communication’s failure. The films tackle social relationships and unconventional story-telling, ranging from the unlike relationship between a grown up filmmaker and the infant she’s trying to work with in her movie (Garnett), to family’s lack of communication mediated by Clarice Lispector’s master piece Agua Viva (Mira) and the unfulfilled promise of a feminist, anarchist, queer porn project that can’t even be represented on camera by a spokesperson (Dahlberg).

Curator: Clara López Ménendez

Dirty Looks: On Location is a series of queer intervention in New York City spaces. Over the course of July, artist film and video will appear in these queer social spaces and former sites of queer sociality (like shuttered bars, bathhouses, and former meeting zones). A new piece, a different setting on each night of July. The summer in New York is hot, sticky and social. Installing moving image works around the city in bars, centers and “haunted” venues allows for the free flow of viewers to engage and celebrate with work, in evening events that commemorate contemporary moving-image production and its precedents in queer culture.
Click here for a complete listing of Dirty Looks: On Location, July 1-31, 2015

What Makes a Queer Relationship Queer? The Queer Relationships Project Presentation and Discussion
2015-07-15 19:00 - 21:30
What makes a Queer Relationship Queer? What makes it successful? Our relationships challenge the heteronormative model, yet we don’t have common and visible alternatives.
The Queer Relationships Project is a new online resources archive and oral history project, aimed at making models, theories and practices easily accessible and visible. In this presentations, we would like to to share some things we learned so far, and to hear about your experiences, challenges, inspiration and dreams. In a culture where the dominant heteronormative model still reigns supreme in mainstream politics, and even gains more hold in the LGBT community (ie, the same-sex marriage agenda), this project has a strong political goal: we want this project to serve as a tool for our under-represented community, to keep these alternative and radical relationships and their structures visible, known and accessible, and to present them as viable and relevant.
Disco is a local activist and community organizer in the queer and Radical Faeries communities in New York City. Their personal journey of exploring different relationships has been an exciting part of living in a queer community. These experiences, together with multiple discussions with friends, lovers and family inspired them to create The Queer Relationships Project (https://www.queerrelationships.org), in hope to become better partners, lovers and friends, and to engage in a discussion on a topic that has great influence on our everyday lives as queers.

Book Launch and Reading of Try Me by Niel Rosenthalis (Deadly Chaps Press)
2015-07-16 19:00 - 21:30
This is the launch party and reading for Try Me (Deadly Chaps Press), a chapbook of poems by Niel Rosenthalis. Friends of the poet will read as well, including Rickey Laurentiis, Joanna C. Valente, Robert Whitehead, and Marni Ludwig.
Not just insight, but the strange detours consciousness must take to know itself–“I’m interested in the edge/I strive toward;” not just desire, but the strange ways it flashes in and out of time; there’s no one writing quite like Rosenthalis. “Buscando ser más,” said Paulo Freire, and this is poetry that demands more, from experience, the self, the poem itself. Then there’s the rueful elegance: “the decade was lit from behind”; “let me capitulate, O eyeless flies…” A deep sense of responsibility to the art shines through experiment and erasure. Try Me is an extraordinary debut.
— D. Nurkse
Rosenthalis’s Try Me is both a dare and a plea, as well as a meditation on time as it relates to questions of the body, sex, desire, and love, not as hierarchy, but in every thrilling combination and order. Rosenthalis blends the lyric with the conceptual both to get at “the specific, not the small,” and as a kind of balm or “heal-over of cruelty.” “I am a genius,” he writes, “I want to show the world true feeling,” and he does. Rosenthalis’s love poems wear philosophical masks, while his logic and its aesthetics fulfill the imperative of the title to “turn tomorrow on.”
— Marni Ludwig

Nathaniel Rosenthalis earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a candidate in the M.F.A. poetry program at Washington University in St. Louis. His poems have appeared in Yes, Poetry and Tinge. Essays appear or are forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review of Books, Essay Daily, and Jam Tarts Magazine.
Rickey Laurentiis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, September 2015). His poems appear in Poetry, The New Republic, Fence, Boston Review, among other journals. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Joanna C. Valente is sometimes a mermaid and sometimes a human. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014) and received her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her second collection Marys of the Sea is forthcoming from ELJ Publications in 2016. Some of her work appears or is forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Columbia Journal, Similar Peaks, The Paris-American, The Atlas Review, BORT Quarterly, among others. In 2011, she received the American Society of Poet’s Prize. She founded Yes, Poetry in 2010,and is the Managing Editor for Luna Luna Magazine. More can be found at joannavalente.com.
Robert Whitehead is a poet. He received his MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013, and has been a fellow at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Ashbery Home School, and The Rensing Center. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Assaracus, Gulf Coast, Vinyl, LIES/ISLES, Verse Daily, Upstart and elsewhere. He is currently the Grant Writing Associate at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Assistant Editor for Vinyl Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn, where he co-curates Shirley, a monthly reading series.
Marni Ludwig is the author of Pinwheel, selected by Jean Valentine for the 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize and Little Box of Cotton and Lightning, chosen by Susan Howe for a 2011 Poetry Society of America Chapbook fellowship. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. She’s from Brooklyn, NY.

Bi Book Club: The Summer of Sex
2015-07-23 18:30 - 20:30
The Bi Book Club meets once a month to discuss bi-themed books and the issues they raise. People of all orientations and genders welcome! Dinner after nearby.
The Bi Book Club theme for July & August is “The Summer of Sex.” Our book for July is The Prince of Punk Rock by Jenna Galicki (on sale now at the Bureau). This is a very sexy, very bisexual erotic romance.
I love her, but I also love him.
She’s everything to me.
He sets my world on fire.
It’s our dirty little secret, and it’s about to blow our record deal sky high.
I’m Tommy Blade, the Prince of Punk Rock, and this is our story.
What are your favorite sex scenes? Favorite dramatic scenes? Pick out some phrases or paragraphs that you’d like to discuss, that inspired you, or that struck you because of their elegant turn of phrase or the meaning behind it. Give us your critique of the book. What worked, what didnt, how was bisexuality represented? If you havent had time to finish the readings, come anyway because we read passages from the book aloud for discussion. As usual, we’ll also be using the text as a jumping off point to further discussion of bisexual issues and personal experiences.
Our next book: Memoirs of a Gigolo, by Livia Ellis, Omnibus Vol. 1-4 available at the Bureau.
We will be voting on what book we want to read after that, so check the list of Bisexual Book Award finalists for this year and last year for some ideas.
Getting Books: We urge you to purchase your print copy at the Bureau and support the only LGBT bookstore in New York City. Especially since they are hosting us in their space! If you prefer e-books, just get them your usual way.

RSVP on Bi Meetup

The Bi Book Club meets at the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division on the last Thursday of each month.

TELL 14: Vacations
2015-07-30 19:30 - 22:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
TELL is an evening of story telling from the mouths and minds of queers in NYC hosted by Drae Campbell at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division since February 2014.
Vacations is the theme of the fourteenth installment of TELL. Featuring Mizz June, Mariel Reyes, Jamila Hammami, & Larry Darnell Penn Whitfield.
$5-10 suggested donation – no one turned away for lack of funds

Drae Campbell is a writer, actor, director, story teller, dancer, and nightlife emcee. Besides winning the 2011 Miss LEZ title, 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, YOU MOVE ME won the Audience Award for Outstanding Narrative Short at OUTFEST 2010 and has been shown in fesivals globally. She just won the grand prize at the first annual San Miguel De Allende Storytelling Festival in Mexico. Drae was dubbed “the next lezzie comedian on the block” by AfterEllen.com for her comedic stylings on the interwebs. Campbell throws a monthly party in Brooklyn called PRIME. Check her out online (her reel and her website www.draecampbell.com) and around town.

Jamila Hammami is a queer first generation Tunisian Arab American woman of color community organizer & social worker from the south, now based in NYC. She is a hard high femme homo and a founder and Executive Director of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project and on the advisory board of the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP), a project of United We Dream (UWD). She comes to this work with a background in reproductive justice, working to center woman, specifically trans and queer, of color’s voices in movements, and witnessing the impacts of migration and racism in her formative years in Texas.

Photograph by Kelsey Dickey (2015)
From the planet of the Lower East Side….Mizz June got her start in activism and musical theater. She was the first out black transwoman to be a guest cast member on a daytime soap opera (“All My Children”). She has appeared in two music videos (Tamar-Kali’s “Pearl” (Album Version) and Justin Vivian Bond’s “Golden Age of Hustlers”). She has performed at multiple venues and she is about to be featured in a soon to be released independent musical titled “Wild Ponies”. She just released a demo version of her debut single, “Get Lifted”(https://www.reverbnation.com/mizzjune/song/22152061-get-lifted) and she will be releasing her debut EP “Who Is Mizz June” soon (Release date TBA).
www.facebook.com/the1theonlymizzjune
https://twitter.com/mizzjunemusic
youtube.com/mizzjunemusic

While somewhat of a shy performer and storyteller, Mariel Reyes has written & produced works for some of your favorite experimental theater spaces in NYC (Dixon Place, Brooklyn Arts Exchange) and has also appeared on screen in the film “Appropriate Behaviour” which premiered at Sundance in 2014.

Larry Darnell Penn Whitfield is a NYC based actor, writer, singer and aggressive mover. He is creator of Confessions of a Plussizetwink a one man cabaret series. Southern and sassy roots govern his everyday creativity. Live. Love. Create.

An Evening with Richard Stevenson and Mark Zubro
2015-08-05 19:00 - 21:00
Join us for a talk with and readings from two of the giants of the LGBT mystery genre.

Richard Stevenson is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez, author of fifteen books, including the Don Strachey private eye series. A former editorial writer at The Berkshire Eagle, Lipez contributed to Crimes of the Scene: A Mystery Novel Guide for the International Traveler and reviews mysteries for The Washington Post. His reporting, reviews, and fiction have appeared in Newsday, the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Four of the Strachey books have been filmed by HereTV. Red White Black and Blue, the twelfth Strachey book, won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery of 2011. Lipez grew up and was educated in Pennsylvania and as a Peace Corps volunteer taught English in Ethiopia. He is married to sculptor and video artist Joe Wheaton and lives in Becket, Massachusetts.

Mark Zubro is the author of thirty-two novels and five short stories. His book A Simple Suburban Murder won the lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men’s mystery. Dying to Play is his most recent mystery and features gay private eye Mike King. His latest book is the third and last volume in his epic gay science fiction trilogy Alien Victory. Mark spends his time reading, writing, napping, and eating chocolate.
