TELL: Return (in person and live-streaming)
2024-09-21 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
TELL is a monthly queer storytelling show hosted and curated by Drae Campbell. It is the longest running event at BGSQD. 10 years and going. Each month there is a different theme and a different line up of queer artists who tell true stories from their lives on a theme.
RACHEL LEVITSKY came out as a Lesbian in 1984 and as a poet in 1994. She-they is the author of The Story of My Accident Is Ours, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2013 & 2003) NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009, reissue 2020), Against Travel : Anti Voyage (Pamenar, with Pascal Poyet, 2020) and several other small press editions. In 1999, she-they founded the feminist avant-garde network Belladonna Series, and is a member of Belladonna* Collaborative, a non-hierarchical and variously organized collective making objects, thoughts, actions, events. Levitsky is a professor at Pratt Institute and lives in Woodstock, NY. She’s currently at work on a memoir without memory called Rachel Levitsky Has No Problems.
Jonté Jaurel Culpepper is a graduate from the University of New Mexico with his BA in Contemporary Dance and Minor in Vocal Performance. Some of his theatre credits include: (AC Slater) “Bayside the Musical” Off-Broadway, (Vulture/Garret Understudy) “Sirens Den” Off-Broadway, (Muscle) “Naked Boys Singing” National Tour, (Luke) “Altar Boyz”, “In The Heights” (Domingo),(Male Singer 2) “Epic Rock/Divas” Carnival Cruise Line, “Kinky Boots” (Angel/Dance Captain), “Rock Of Ages” (Joey Primo/Stacee Jaxx & Drew Understudy), “Dreamgirls” (Curtis Taylor Junior Understudy), “La Cage Aux Folles” (Bitelle). Film & TV: “Eleanor The Great” (Dante), (Final Contestant) “American Idol” Season 15, Target Pride Campaign & National Commercial. Instagram: @jontejaurel
Carly Ciarrocchi (she/her) is an Emmy-nominated host, writer, musician, and producer. She has spent most of her career in children’s media, making and hosting TV shows and podcasts with collaborators like Universal Kids, Disney+, Nick Jr, Tinkercast, Sesame Workshop and the LEGO Foundation. She’s a Moth Story Slam winner and has told tales with Generation Women, the Artichoke, The Tell, Soup and Stories and more. She teaches clown-theatre classes at the Brooklyn Comedy Collective.
Drae Campbell is the host and curator of TELL which is also an award winning podcast that can be found anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Theater: The Nosebleed (Lincoln Center Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theater & National Tour, Lortel Nominated), Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train (Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater), Only You Can Prevent Wildfires (Teatro Circulo), My Old Man (Dixon Place), Storm.Still (DirectorFest, Drama League), La Cage Aux Folles (Barrington Stage Company)
Film and TV: Senior Escort Service, Blunderpuss, It’s Very Common, TOW. TV: Bull, New Amsterdam. BFA, The University Of The Arts. Ig @draebiz and @tellqueerz.

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

Song of Myself, a Novel by Arnie Kantrowitz: Bill Goldstein in Conversation with Larry Mass (in person and live-streaming)
2024-09-22 15:00 - 17:00 | The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, Room 101, New York, 10011, United States
Song of Myself is the story of Daniel Dell Blake, a gay man navigating his way through a tumultuous twentieth-century America. In a world in which being gay is without social or legal status or even recognition, his rites of passage, of embracing his identity, garnering self-respect, and living with irrepressible creativity, will resonate for readers confronting today’s culture wars. Early on in this odyssey of self-discovery, Daniel is a given a gift of inspiration and guidance that will chart the course of his life: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, the Great Gay Poet of America, Democracy, Spirituality and The Body.
This event will take place in person at The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011. Room to be announced
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD

Arnie Kantrowitz (1940-2022) leaves behind a legacy as a true pioneer, sage and champion of the gay rights movement. He is the author of the gay classic, Under The Rainbow: Growing Up Gay; of a monograph, Walt Whitman; and was a notable writer and figure in gay and mainstream media. He became vice president of Gay Activists Alliance in 1970 and was a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) in 1985. He introduced one of the earliest gay studies courses and in 1999 became chair of the English department at the College of Staten Island CUNY, where he was a longstanding and beloved professor of English. He is survived by Larry Mass, his life partner of 40 years.
Bill Goldstein reviews books and interviews authors for NBC’s Weekend Today in New York, and was the founding editor of The New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown, and worked on the book as a 2019-2020 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. His book, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, was published in 2017. Bill Goldstein is a co-recipient of this year’s CUNY Graduate Center Alumni Achievement Award.
Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., is a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and was the first to write about AIDS in the press. In 2019 he was awarded GMHC’s Founders Activism Award. He is the author of Homosexuality and Sexuality: Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution, Volume 1, and Homosexuality as Behavior and Identity: Dialogues of The Sexual Revolution, Volume 2. He is the author/editor of an anthology, We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer. He is the author of a memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America; of the sequel to that memoir, On the Future of Wagnerism: Art, Intoxication, Addiction, Codependence and Recovery, and the forthcoming Wayfaring With Ned Rorem: A Nonfiction Novella. They form a trilogy Mass has designated as his Jewish Wagnerism Series. Mass has written widely on medicine, health and culture for mainstream and specialist publications. A recently retired physician specializing in addiction medicine, Mass resides in New York City and South Florida.

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle’s Reading Series, September Edition (in person & live-streaming)
2024-09-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Publishing Triangle presents its monthly OUTspoken Reading Series as host Rob Byrnes welcomes Trebor Healey, Gerard Cabrera, Drew Pisarra, Jim Berg, and Christopher Murray
Join us as in-person or watch the live-stream (see below) to hear from some of queer literature’s most dynamic established and up-and-coming voices.

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

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

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

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

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

Queer Craze 2.0: An Intergenerational Conversation and Centennial Celebration (in person only)
2024-09-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
One hundred years ago, New York City was in the midst of the so-called Pansy (Queer) Craze, which catalyzed the raucous eroticism of the Jazz Age. Prohibition revelers flocked to see queer performers at the Astor Hotel and the Cotton Club. Broadway stars rubbed elbows with Harlem Renaissance luminaries at the Hamilton Lodge Drag Ball. Shortly thereafter, there was a crackdown, not unlike the one alt-right conservatives are mounting against LGBTQ+ communities today. It’s a familiar pattern, characterized by advances in social rights followed by reactionary efforts to dial them back.
“Queer Craze 2.0: An Intergenerational Conversation and Centennial Celebration” will focus on historical parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s, using Margaret Vandenburg’s new novel, Craze, as a springboard. Then, as now, New York was teeming with gender-bending people from all walks of life. The two conversationalists will be Margaret Vandenburg (novelist, playwright, academic) and Temi George (writer, sound artist, Lesbian Herstory Archives affiliate). If past is prologue, revisiting the Queer Craze might help us navigate current culture wars.
Margaret Vandenburg is a novelist, playwright, and essayist whose new novel, Craze, ventures into the queer speakeasies and drag balls that catalyzed the raucous eroticism of the Roaring Twenties. Her previous novels include An American in Paris, a romp through the sapphic salons of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney, and The Home Front, a portrait of a family facing autism. Her plays include Roe v. Wade 2.0, the centerpiece of a theater-based reproductive rights coalition, and Belly of the Beast, a finalist for the Drama League Award for Outstanding Digital
Theater. Having completed her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Vandenburg spent her academic career as a Senior Lecturer at Barnard College, specializing in modernism, postmodernism, and gender studies.
Temi George is a writer and sound artist. She is involved at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, where she has worked with the newspaper, periodical, and photo collections. She studied English and philosophy at Barnard College. She is working on a chapbook of micro-poetry that manipulates language from Emily Dickinson’s letters to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. As a child, George would often stare at the sun. She once saw a sign that read “For blind use only” above some braille on a train ticket machine near Dallas. “If I touch this braille,” she thought, “I will go
blind.” She did not touch braille for a long time as a result. If she was that concerned about going blind, why did she stare at the sun? She is pursuing a career in psychiatry, in part, to figure this out.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD

Queer Love and Pain: An Evening with Novelists Ella Dawson and Jendi Reiter (in person and live-streaming)
2024-09-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Jendi Reiter and Ella Dawson for a reading from their new novels and a discussion of using humor and romance to leaven stories of healing from trauma.
Jendi Reiter’s second novel, Origin Story (Saddle Road Press), features a gay comic-book writer in 1990s New York City who unearths traumatic childhood memories through his art and breaks toxic family patterns with the help of his loving partner.
A bisexual love story with a theme of healing from intimate partner abuse, Ella Dawson’s witty novel But How Are You, Really (Dutton) is set at a 5th-year college reunion where journalist Charlotte Thorne must contend with her bullying boss, the friend group who wonders why she
ghosted on them, and the lovable almost-boyfriend who got away.
Jendi Reiter is the author of five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022); the story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings, 2018); and the novels Origin Story (Saddle Road Press, 2024) and Two
Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016). Origin Story was a finalist for the Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press and Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.
Ella Dawson is an NYC-based sex and culture critic and the author of But How Are You, Really, a novel about college reunions and queer millennial angst. She was once internet famous for having herpes, but that’s a whole other story. Ella is proudly bisexual, anxious, and aspires to adopt a kitten. Follow her on social media as @brosandprose.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD

Marwan Kaabour presents The Queer Arab Glossary (in person and live-streaming)
2024-09-29 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join journalist Afeef Nessouli, who will be in conversation with Marwan Kaabour, the editor of The Queer Arab Glossary, the first published collection of queer Arabic slang. Featuring fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Queer Arab Glossary contains more than 300 terms in both English and Arabic, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing. The book also includes insightful essays from leading queer Arab artists, academics, activists and writers which situate this groundbreaking glossary in a modern social and political context.
‘This gloriously confident book will be an eye-opening, often unashamedly sexual, revelation and education.’ –The Bookseller
‘The spicy guide to queer Arab slang.’ – The Guardian
‘A little masterpiece’ – Owen Jones
‘Language reflects and creates reality and Marwan Kaabour’s revolutionary volume insists on and makes possible a future rooted in the recognition of continuous histories.’ – Sarah Schulman
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD

Marwan Kaabour is a graphic designer, artist and writer. His interdisciplinary practice builds pathways between communication and publication design, curation, pedagogy and political activism. Alongside his independent projects, he works with non-profit institutions, companies and individuals in arts and culture sectors. In 2019, Marwan founded Takweer, an online platform and expanding archive of queer narratives in Arab history and popular culture. His debut book, The Queer Arab Glossary, was published in June 2024.
Marwan moved from his hometown Beirut to London in 2011 to pursue a master’s degree in Graphic Design from the London College of Communication, before joining renowned design agency Barnbrook. After more than six years of diverse experience with Barnbrook, first as Designer and later as Senior Designer, he founded his own studio in 2020.
His commissioned design work spans visual identities, publication and exhibition design, marketing campaigns, wayfinding systems and art direction, among others. He has worked with leading cultural institutions, including the V&A Museum, Phaidon, Art Basel, The National Gallery, Thames & Hudson, Serpentine Galleries, Hayward Gallery, Zaha Hadid Foundation and The Mosaic Rooms. He designed the Rihanna book, which was named as one of Time magazine’s best photo books of 2019.

Afeef Nessouli is a journalist who’s currently a producer for The Slow Factory and Everything is Political. He is also an adjunct professor for Parsons School of Design. He has previously worked for Spotify, The Daily Show and The Wall Street Journal. He focuses on queer and Arab stories. Afeef lived through the 2006 Lebanon war and went to jail in Beirut for covering Palestine. You can find his work on social media at @afeefness

Building Resilience through Writing; Exploring Trauma and Healing through a Queer Lens (in person and live-streaming)
2024-10-03 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join novelists Mala Kumar, author of What It Meant to Survive, and JD Glass, author of Fire Fall, for a conversation about intersectionality, queer resilience, and the art of sapphic literary fiction. Moderated by mental health expert and the author of Toxic Productivity (forthcoming), Israa Nasir. Hear select readings from Mala and JD. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD
Mala Kumar is the author of the 2014 novel, The Paths of Marriage. What it Meant to Survive is her second novel. Her op-eds, interviews, and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Advocate, TechCrunch, USA Today, India Abroad, The Aerogram, and Brown Girl Magazine. In her professional life, Mala is a global leader in tech for social good, having worked extensively for the United Nations and at GitHub, a Microsoft-owned software company. She is currently the Director of Program Management, AI Safety at MLCommons. Mala lives in New York City with her wife Cybel. Visit https://malakumar.com for more information about her writing and work.
Former Managing Editor for The Advocate, artist, musician, and author JD Glass is an American Library Association-Stonewall Finalist & Lambda Literary-Literature Finalist forher novel Punk Like Me, Lambda Literary Finalist for Red Light, with that and other titles earning Ben Franklin Literary Finalist, Rainbow Reads Award, and Golden Crown Literary Finalist and Award. A recipient of Columbia College Chicago’s Faculty Recognition Award, and Columbia Scholar Award, Glass’s visual work was selected for Chicago Manifest Art Showcase, InArt Gallery Virtual Exhibit, ISee Pixels exhibit, and OnBigDrawingsII Virtual Exhibit. Glass is also the writer and executive producer for the short film rom-com Her Curve, which has been earning laurels, as well as the upcoming feature, and for the series Punk Like Me–the B Sides,
currently in production.
Israa Nasir, MHC-LP, is a New York City based psychotherapist, author of Toxic Productivity, and the founder of WellGuide—a digital community for mental health awareness. Her work is centered on transforming the way we talk about mental health, taking it from a place of shame to a place of empowerment. A Pakistani-Canadian child of immigrants, she has a specific focus on mental health, identity formation, and healing for the AAPI immigrant (first and second generation) community. Israa has been featured in NBC, Vox, Huffpost, Teen Vogue, and other major publications and been invited to speak at corporations such as Google, Meta, and Yale.

Launch of Criminalized Lives: HIV and Legal Violence (in person and live-streaming)
2024-10-04 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
New York City Launch of Criminalized Lives: HIV and Legal Violence, Rutgers University Press. Using storytelling, theory, and comic illustrations, this book examines firsthand accounts of people living with HIV who have been criminalized because of their status. The book also traces activist social movement response working to counter the harms of HIV criminalization under the slogan #HIVISNOTACRIME.
Moderated by Blake Paskal of Visual AIDS, this event will be a discussion with Criminalized Lives author Alexander McClelland, along with activist and author Robert Suttle, who wrote the foreword to the book, and queer comic artist, Eric Kostiuk Williams, who did the illustrations for the book. Collectively, this panel will discuss the current realities of HIV criminalization in the US, and New York State, as well as the ways public health responses can drive criminalization efforts, recent successes in advocacy, and the role of art, archives, and activism in supporting movements for change.

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

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

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

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

Biographies of participants:

Alexander McClelland is an Associate Professor at Carleton University, and is the author of Criminalized Lives: HIV & Legal Violence.
Blake Paskal is an arts educator and is the Programs Manager for Visual AIDS.
Eric Kostiuk Williams is a queer cartoonist and illustrator, who’s work can be seen in 2am Eternal: a Decade of Queer Nightlife Posters + Comics (2023), and in Criminalized Lives: HIV & Legal Violence.
Robert Suttle is a leading global expert working to counter the harms of HIV criminalization, and author of the foreword to Criminalized Lives: HIV & Legal Violence.

Keith Haring Pop Up Book Release Party (in person only)
2024-10-06 15:00 - 16:00 | Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us for the release of the Keith Haring Pop-Up Book, featuring a special book talk and reception!
Schedule of events:
3:00 – 4:00 panel discussion at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (room 210 of The Center)
4:00 – 4:30 book signing in the Keith Haring bathroom
4:30 – 7:00 reception
Location: The LGBT Community Center, 208 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011
Celebrate with us as we delve into the world of Keith Haring’s art and the creation of this unique new pop-up book. Enjoy an insightful discussion in the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division between paper engineer Simon Arizpe, publisher Rosston Meyer, and Keith Haring Foundation Director Gil Vazquez as they discuss the creation of the pop-up book and the importance of upholding Haring’s legacy. Explore Haring’s “Once Upon A Time…..” mural bathroom, featured in the pop-up book, with a reception to follow.

The Bureau will have copies of the following items for sale:
Keith Haring Pop Up Book $60
Keith Haring Pop Up Book Altarpiece Edition (includes pop up of Once Upon a Time … bathroom) $350
Keith Haring Marriage of Heaven and Hell Pop Up Poster $60
Keith Haring Love Pop Up Cards $10
For product details and photos visit:
popositionpress.com/keith-haring-pop-up-book

To reserve any of the above items to purchase at the event, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “October 6 Keith Haring Pop Up” in the subject line.

Black Queer Dance: Gay Men and the Politics of Passing for Almost Straight (in person and live-streaming)
2024-10-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us for the launch of Black Queer Dance: Gay Men and the Politics of Passing for Almost Straight by Mark Broomfield with Carlos Jones and Vincent E. Thomas.

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

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

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

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

Mark Broomfield, PhD, MFA, Associate Professor of English and Founding Director of Performance as Social Change at SUNY Geneseo, is a London-born award-winning scholar and artist of Jamaican heritage.
Carlos Jones is Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at SUNY Brockport. He has a body of work that extends from the concert stage to theater to television and film.

Vincent E. Thomas, dancer, choreographer and teacher, (MFA in Dance from Florida State University and a BME in Music from the University of South Carolina) has danced with Dance Repertory Theatre (FSU), Randy James Dance Works (NY/NJ), EDGEWORKS Dance Theater (DC), and Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (MD). He is the Founder/Artistic Director of VTDance and Professor of Dance at Towson University.

Revisioning Democracy Podcast Episode 4: Opus Dei, Radical Catholics, Dark money (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-10 17:00 - 18:30 | NY
Revisioning Democracy Podcast Episode 4:
Opus Dei, radical Catholics, dark money – and Project 2025: a conversation with journalist Gareth Gore
Cohosts: Anne-christine d’Adesky and Jay W. Walker
Are radical Catholics in Opus Dei secretly funding a dark political agenda in the US and world? Join UK Financial Times Gareth Gore and cohosts Anne-christine d’Adesky and Jay W. Walker for another live podcast of Revisioning Democracy at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, on Thursday, October 10th at 5 pm EST.
We’ll talk about Gore’s new book, Opus, an investigative deep dive into Opus Dei’s secret history for the first time. Opus is a thrilling exposé revealing how the secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect has pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of Europe’s largest banks, Bano Popular in Spain. Gore exposing its role in bankrolling many right-wing causes globally, including the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. His book provides new details of the people and dark money ties between Opus Dei faithful and militant US Catholic activists including Leonard Leo, who is now bankrolling Project 2025, other US conservative architects of its Christian nationalist agenda. Opus comes out October 1 from Simon and Schuster.
The Bureau will have copies of Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church (Simon & Schuster, October 1, 2024, hardcover, $30.99) available for purchase at this event. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Opus for Oct. 10” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Gareth Gore is a financial journalist and editor with close to two decades of experience, who had reported from over twenty-five countries and covered some of the biggest financial stories. His writing has been published by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and International Financing Review. He is the host of The Syndicate, which tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the biggest financial deals in history

Celebrating Paperback Publications: Where There Was Fire and The Sea Elephants (in person and live-streaming)
2024-10-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Where There Was Fire and The Sea Elephants, novels by John Manuel Arias and Shastri Akella, share more than their publisher (Flatiron Books) and the DNA of being debut novels released in 2023. Set in international geographies (Costa Rica and India respectively), both stories look at the restorative power of community and queer resistance in the face of oppressive power.
Join the authors as they celebrate the release of the paperbacks editions of their debut novels this fall. They will read from their debuts, engage in conversations, about work old and new, and about being queer writers of color navigating the American publishing industry.
John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer, and the National Bestselling author of Where There Was Fire, published in the US and the UK and a Good Morning America Buzz Pick and Barnes & Noble Discover Pick. A Canto Mundo fellow & an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, his prose and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, PANK, The Rumpus, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
Shastri Akella is a queer, neurodivergent migrant of color who comes from a working-class background. His writing is/will be in Best American Short Fiction 2024, Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, CRAFT, Masters Review, World Literature Review and elsewhere. His stories became finalists for the Narrative Fiction Prize twice and he won the 2024 BLR Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, a 2023 Pushcart Prize ,and a 2022 Fiction Fellowship at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan State University. The Sea Elephants, his debut novel, published in the US (Flatiron
Books) and India (Penguin), was named a most-anticipated debut by Good Morning America, Electric Lit, Book Riot, and LGBTQ Reads, among others.

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

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

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

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

lesbian book club (in person only)
2024-10-12 11:00 - 12:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
We’ll be reading fiction and non-fiction — classic, contemporary, revealing and visionary. As a group we will decide what to read each month, focusing on lesbian authors and/or related topics. Co-founded by lesbian book lovers Judi Komaki and Piper Olsen.

For October 12th, the lesbian book club will read Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider.
Purchase Sister Outsider from the Bureau before October 12th and receive a 15% discount ($15.29 instead of $17.99)! Just mention the lesbian book club when you purchase the book.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

For our November 9th meeting, we’ll read Divagaciones II, by our very own member Jaqueline Jimenez Polanco! Copies will be available at the October 10th meeting and will remain available at the Bureau after the 10th.

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

Representing Ourselves: Queer Short Stories (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-12 15:00 - 16:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Jarrod Campbell and Matthew Lansburgh for a reading from their story collections and a discussion about the importance of representing queerness in fiction, why this need for honest, varied representation has brought us here and where these bold portrayals will take us.

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

Jarrod Campbell is a writer living in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. His fictions, essays, reviews and poetry have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Northwest Review, Modern Literature, Wicked Gay Ways, and Boner World (Berlin). His collection of short stories, The Reason I’m Here, (June 2023, Stalking Horse Press), was listed as an anticipated June LGBTQIA+ read by Lambda Literary.

Matthew Lansburgh‘s collection of linked stories, Outside Is the Ocean, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His fiction has appeared in journals such as One Story, VQR, New England Review, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, StoryQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Guernica, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and has been shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories series (in 2018 & 2022) and the Pushcart Prize series (in 2017).

Robert Raasch, author of The Summer Between, in conversation with Christopher Bram (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-13 15:00 - 16:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
A book launch in kind with National Coming Out Day. Christopher Bram is the acclaimed author of twelve books, including the novel that became the Academy-Award-winning movie, Gods and Monsters. He teaches at the Gallatin School of New York University. Christopher and Robert Raasch will read from Robert’s much-awaited debut novel, The Summer Between. Set in New York City’s vibrant Greenwich Village in 1978, The Summer Between is the bittersweet, unsparingly honest coming-of-age saga of Andrew Jackson Pollock. Christoper and Robert will read excerpts from the novel amidst conversation and questions and answers.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD

Christopher Bram is the author of twelve books, including the novel that became the Academy-Award-winning movie, Gods and Monsters. He teaches at the Gallatin School of New York University.
Robert Raasch was raised in Northern New Jersey. He is a writer, architect/designer, and visual artist who is an active participant in 24PearlStreet and the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He divides his time between Southwest Florida, New York, and Copenhagen, where he is working on his second novel.

Donna Minkowitz's DONNAVILLE Launch! In Conversation with David Groff (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-17 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Come celebrate the launch of Donna Minkowitz’s hell-bent, boundary-busting novel DONNAVILLE, in which different parts of the author attack each other, fuck each other, and try to save each other from a terrifying jail inside.
Can they burn the prison down? Will anyone succeed at having sex with the Divine Mother?
A multi-gender, multi-sexuality, queer as f internal quest.
To reserve a copy of DONNAVILLE please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Donnaville for Oct. 17” in the subject line.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Donna Minkowitz is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the memoirs Growing Up Golem and Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God, and Fury. She is the Village Voice’s former longtime columnist on queer politics and culture, and a former columnist for The Advocate. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Slate, and Salon, and she has frequently gone undercover to report on the far right. Minkowitz is the recipient of a GLAAD Media Award, an Exceptional Merit Media Award, and an award for outstanding journalism from NLGJA: the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists.
David Groff is a multi-award-winning poet, writer, and independent editor. He is the author of three books of poems, Live in Suspense, Clay, and Theory of Devolution. Groff is coeditor of the anthology Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, and is a founder of the Publishing Triangle.

In Care Of (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
In Care Of is intimate conversation between the curators of Art in Odd Places 2024 CARE, and a select group of its international and US artists about their 2024 CARE projects, artistic processes and the role of CARE in their life and work.
AiOP 2024 CARE is curated by Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek and is scheduled for October 18-20, 2024. AiOP 2024 CARE is the nineteenth edition of the iconic public visual and performance art festival that takes place along 14th Street in Manhattan every fall. The 70+ artists participating in AiOP 2024 CARE will enact actions, notions, considerations and representations of care along 14th Street and invite the public to stop, to rest, to consider, and, above all, care. AiOP CARE 2024 asks how art can create spaces and actions of compassionate fearless care. Can we offer and enter them with joy and love?

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

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) is an annual festival that presents visual and performance art in public spaces along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October. Active in New York City since 2005, AiOP aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations.
Curators Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek are NYC-based artists, curators, and educators. Miranda is the founder of the artist-run organizations The Crit Lab and MAPSpace, and works with donated, repurposed, lace and linens in site-responsive sculpture and installation. Kaczmarek’s work spans both experimental and traditional practices, including sculpture, site-specific installations, performance, video, built circuits, and solar-powered objects.
Founder and Director Ed Woodham, is a queer elder conceptual artist, curator, and educator based in Manhattan originally from Atlanta, Georgia where Art in Odd Places began.

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle's Reading Series, October Edition (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-23 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Publishing Triangle presents its monthly OUTspoken Reading Series as host Rob Byrnes welcomes Ann McMan, John Copenhaver, Daniel Meltz, Gary Zebrun, Nicco Diaz, Jendi Reiter, and David S. Pederson.
Join us as in-person or watch the live-stream (see below) to hear from some of queer literature’s most dynamic established and up-and-coming voices.

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

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

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

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

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

Revisioning Democracy Podcast Episode 5: Stopping the Soft Coup (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Episode 5: Stopping the Soft Coup:
Resisting Project 2025’s extremist plan to destroy America’s government
On Episode 5 of Revisioning Democracy, we’ll dig into the progress – and challenges – of Stopping the Soft Coup: Resisting Project 2025’s extremist plan to destroy America’s government. Project 2025 calls for dismantling the federal government, mass firing federal employees, and replacing them with a Christian conservative government-in-waiting loyal only to the president. Join us for an urgent public conversation with three experts in the areas of federal policy and labor: Steve Lenkart, Executive Director of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE); James Goodwin, Executive Director of the Center for Progressive Reform; and progressive labor journalist, activist, and author Bill Fletcher.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Steve Lenkart has been the Executive Director of NFFE since 2016. Mr. Lenkart held senior leadership appointments under Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, and continues to maintain strong bipartisan relationships with the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch.

James Goodwin, J.D., M.P.P., is the Policy Director at the Center for Progressive Reform. He joined CPR in May of 2008. Prior to joining CPR, Mr. Goodwin worked as a legal intern for the Environmental Law Institute and EcoLogix Group, Inc.

Bill Fletcher is a journalist, labor advocate, and creative writer who has been raising public attention to Project 2025’s threats to labor and the economy. He is the author of ‘They’re Bankrupting us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions; and co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice (UC Press, Oct 2009). He has also co-edited a book of political essays and two mystery novels.

Heart Less Book Party (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-26 15:00 - 16:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Indolent Books author Carley Moore as she reads from her debut poetry collection, Heart Less, and celebrates the work of Julián Delgado Lopera, Megan Milks, and Miro Spinelli, who will also read from their work.
Heart Less is about the end of a marriage, coming out as bisexual, dating, and co-parenting in the midst of global catastrophe. Woven through the book are questions about the heart, heartache, heart break, and the complicated nature of grief and loss.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

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

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

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

Carley Moore is the author of Heart Less, Panpocalypse, The Not Wives, 16 Pills, and The Stalker Chronicles. She’s a Clinical Professor of Writing and Creative Production at New York University and an Associate at The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. Carley lives in Brooklyn with her kid and two cats. Follow her on Instagram @fragmentedsky or find her blogging on Substack.
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press 2020), the Winner of the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary award; a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Julián currently resides in San Francisco. Their second novel is forthcoming from Liveright.
Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories, both published by Feminist Press; and Tori Amos Bootleg Webring, published by Instar Books as part of the Remember the Internet series.
Miro Spinelli is a Brazilian trans artist and scholar. They are a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU. They also hold a Master’s Degree from the Arts of the Scene Graduate Program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In their creative and intellectual production, Spinelli investigates how performance can establish radical connections with materiality, writing, and dissent. Since 2014, they have been developing the performance series “Gordura Trans” (“Trans Fat”), and since 2017, the installation series “All That You Touch You Change; All That You Change Changes You.” Their first poetry book, “pele ou pedra nothing heavy,” a bilingual work created between Brazil and New York City, will be released soon.

Reading and Telling Queer Secrets: Hugh Ryan and Keiko Lane in Conversation (in person & live-streaming)
2024-10-27 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join writers Hugh Ryan and Keiko Lane as they read from their work and discuss writing about and telling queer secrets. As scholars, activists, artists, and survivors of the queer and HIV/AIDS activisms of the 1990s, they both explore questions about how narratives and subtext change through time. Are sexualities, relationships, and political actions that were taboo 20 or 30 years ago still embargoed stories? How do tell them now? What stories do we think the dead would tell if they were still alive? What do our ghosts want us to do now?
Keiko Lane will read from her new memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, and Hugh Ryan will read from new works-in-progress. Their conversation will be moderated by Joshua Gutterman Tranen.
The reading and conversation will be followed by a book signing and reception.

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

Keiko Lane is an Okinawan American poet, essayist, memoirist, and psychotherapist writing about the intersections of queer culture, oppression resistance, liberation psychology, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization, and reproductive justice. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Feminist Porn Book, and Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art is her first book.

Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator, and most recently, the author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which won the Israel Fishman Stonewall Book Award from American Library Association and the biennial Wiliiam A. Percy award from the Warren Johansson Foundation. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association.

Joshua Gutterman Tranen is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. His essays on the cultural history of HIV/AIDS have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Poetry Project.

NOT EVEN NOMINATED: 40 OVERLOOKED COSTARS OF OSCAR-WINNING PERFORMANCES (in person & livestreaming)
2024-11-01 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
NOT EVEN NOMINATED:
40 OVERLOOKED COSTARS OF OSCAR-WINNING PERFORMANCES
Author John DiLeo will be discussing his 8th book on the subject of classic movies. John will do some reading, take questions, plus show clips from several of the 40 performances profiled in the book. He will also be signing copies of NOT EVEN NOMINATED after the presentation.
To reserve a copy of Not Even Nominated (2024, hardcover, G Letters, $35), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Not Even Nominated for November 1st event” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

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

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

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

John DiLeo is the author of seven other books about classic movies: And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies, 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember—But Probably Don’t, Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery, Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors, Screen Savers II: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies, Ten Movies at a Time: A 350-Film Journey Through Hollywood and America 1930-1970, and There Are No Small Parts: 100 Outstanding Film Performances with Screen Time of 10 Minutes or Less.
He has been an annual participant in the Black Bear Film Festival (Milford, PA), conducting onstage interviews with such notables as Farley Granger, Arlene Dahl, Marge Champion, Keir Dullea, Jane Powell, Rex Reed, Tab Hunter, Lorna Luft, and Jane Alexander.
DiLeo can be found on social media, including Facebook, Instagram (john.dileo.12), and his website is johndileo.com.

An Evening of Poetry: with Ruben Quesada, Emanuel Xavier, Rosebud Ben-Oni, and Jan Beatty (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-02 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Celebrate an evening of poetry with queer poets Ruben Quesada (Brutal Companion), Emanuel Xavier (Love(ly) Child), Rosebud Ben-Oni (If This is the Age We End Discovery), and Jan Beatty (Dragstripping) in conversation about their latest work.

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

Ruben Quesada is the editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Lambda Literary Review, Harvard Review and elsewhere. He has served as poetry editor for AGNI, Poet Lore, Pleiades, Tab Journal, and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He currently teaches as Affiliate Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Emanuel Xavier is author of the poetry books Pier Queen, Americano, If Jesus Were Gay, Nefarious, Radiance, Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, and Love(ly) Child. He is recipient of a New York City Council Citation and a Gay City Impact Award for his many contributions to NYC arts culture. His books have been finalists for International Latino Book Awards and Lambda Literary Awards and his work has appeared in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Poetry, A Gathering of the Tribes, Hanging Loose Press, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is on the Board of The Publishing Triangle. www.emanuelxavier.org

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a national media campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, and her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11th Memorial. She performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs from The Holocaust.” Most recently, her poem “When You Are the Arrow of Time” was commissioned and filmed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. She has received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Queens Council for the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, Tin House, among others.

Jan Beatty’s eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, September, 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The Body Wars and a chapbook, Skydog (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022). Other work includes Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program. www.janbeatty.com

Restaging Sex and the Social: New Books from Fordham University Press (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-06 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
This talk features two new books on sex, sexuality, race and embodiment from Fordham University Press: Christopher Breu’s In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (Fall 2024) and Kirin Wachter-Grene‘s Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature (Fall 2025). Breu, Professor of English at Illinois State University, theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can complement recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and as a crucial form of social desire. It also theorizes the relationship between sex and the concept of flesh as it has been articulated within contemporary Black studies. Wachter Grene, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, considers the contradiction of Black kenosis—an act of self-emptying and self-determined sexual submission—in transgressive African American literature of the post-Civil Rights era. Hosting the event and serving as interlocutors will be Ann Pellegrini, psychoanalyst, queer theorist, and Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and Avgi Saketopoulou, a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC and a member of the faculty of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In addition to many other titles, Pelligrini and Saketopoulou are authors of the award-winning Gender without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023). Breu and Wachter-Grene will share brief overviews of their respective books before opening up into a four-way conversation with the moderators, which will engage and theorize questions of gender, race, sex, sexuality, kink, and embodiment. There will be time for questions and discussion with the audience. Books will be for sale and light refreshments will be served.
To reserve a copy of any of the books listed above, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve book for November 6 event” in the subject line. And please let us know which title you’d like us to hold.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

Christopher Breu is Professor English at Illinois State University where he teaches classes in contemporary literature and culture, critical and cultural theory, and gender and sexuality. In addition to the featured book tonight, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (Fordham, 2024), he is the author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minnesota, 2005), Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minnesota, 2014), coeditor of Noir Affect (Fordham, 2020). He is also the author of multiple articles theorizing intersex and his own history of medicalized embodiment.

Kirin Wachter-Grene (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches classes on African American and multiethnic American literatures, Black feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and queer history. Tonight she will be presenting from her forthcoming book with Fordham University Press, Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature.

Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis and Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. They are also a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their most recent book is Gender Without Identity (co-authored with Avgi Saketopoulou).

Avgi Saketopoulou is a practicing psychoanalyst and a faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) and co-author of Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023). She is at work on a new book manuscript provisionally titled Sadisms.

Revisioning Democracy Podcast Episode 6: Grassroots Resistance to the War on Gender: The Lessons of Florida (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-07 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
On Episode 6 of Revisioning Democracy, we’ll examine the Lessons of Florida and community intersectional strategies that LGBTQIA+ groups and activists used there to successfully fight back against the Ron DeSantis anti-gay and anti-diversity attacks – after the initial shock of the state “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Join special guest Nadine Smith, Executive Director of Equality Florida, and a dynamic activist and former journalist, in conversation with podcast co-hosts Anne-christine d’Adesky and Jay W. Walker. We’ll also talk about what didn’t happen. Tune in to this important conversation on what Florida can teach us all now about fighting the war on gender and community and NGO preparedness, resistance, and coalition-building with an eye on Project 2025’s unfolding agenda.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@bgsqd

Nadine Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Equality Florida, the state’s largest organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
A former award-winning journalist turned organizer, Nadine was one of four national co-chairs of the 1993 March on Washington. She was part of the historic oval office meeting between then-President Clinton, the first such meeting between a sitting President and gay community leaders. She served on the founding board of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization, which celebrates 30 years in 2014.
She is a Florida Chamber Foundation Trustee, board member for Green Florida and served on President Obama’s National Finance Committee. In 2013, she was named one of the state’s “Most Powerful and Influential Women” by the Florida Diversity Council. She was also given the League of Women Voter’s Woman of Distinction Award earlier this year. She currently serves on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Florida Advisory Committee. Nadine also recently received the Keys to the City of Saint Petersburg in 2021.
Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith was included on TIME magazine’s 2022 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
She lives in St. Petersburg with her wife Andrea and son Logan.

lesbian book club
2024-11-09 11:00 - 12:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
We’ll be reading fiction and non-fiction — classic, contemporary, revealing and visionary. As a group we will decide what to read each month, focusing on lesbian authors and/or related topics. Co-founded by lesbian book lovers Judi Komaki and Piper Olsen.

For our November 9th meeting, we’ll read Divagaciones II, edited by our very own member, Jaqueline Jimenez Polanco (paperback, $15)! Copies are available at the Bureau. This title features texts in Spanish and English.
And for our December 14th meeting, we’ll read The Price of Salt/Carol by Patricia Highsmith (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024, paperback, $15.95). To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of The Price of Salt” in the subject line. Purchase the book before December 14th and receive 15% off ($13.56 instead of $15.95).
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

You Left A Mark On Me: Live Figure Drawing Night (in person only)
2024-11-09 17:00 - 19:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
As part of programming for the You Left A Mark On Me exhibition, we are excited to present a live figure drawing night. In keeping with the show’s theme of queer tattoo exploration, our featured models Brad Carpenter and Himerosdisco are notably tattooed. Our aim is to present a space where the models unique ownership of their ink can combine and transform within the artists live drawings. Our host for the event is artist Kyle Anderson, co-founder of homoerotic art collective Doable Guys.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

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

Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-10 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join anthropologist and artist Shaka McGlotten & drag king Maxxx Pleasure for the launch of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life. Dragging is a book about artists and activists who use drag in Berlin, Israel/Palestine, and New York. It is also an autoethnographic account of illness, failing at being a good anthropologist, and losing out on love.
There will be a presentation that focuses on some of the Israeli and Palestinian figures featured in the book, followed by a discussion with drag king Maxxx Pleasure, and Q & A.

Anthropologist Esther Newton has described the book as “a fascinating mashup of memoir, interviews, ethnographic observation, and cultural theory, following on the work of José Munoz, Marlon Baily, Lauren Berlant, Eve Sedgwick and others.”

To reserve a copy of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2021, paperback, $49.99), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve copy of Dragging for Nov. 10th event.”
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

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

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

Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of Media Studies and Gender Studies programs. An anthropologist and artist, their work stages encounters between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They have written and lectured widely on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with queer of color lifeworlds.
They are the author of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2021), Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (SUNY, 2013), and dozens of chapters and articles. They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis, Palgrave, 2012) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones, McFarland, 2014). Their work has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Data & Society.

Maxxx Pleasure is an award-winning drag king based in NYC. He shares advice for all kinds of drag performers and stories from his own drag journey (like performing at Bushwig, the Austin International Drag Festival, Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns, winning the Brooklyn Nightlife Award for Drag King of the Year, inspiring the short documentary MAXXX, and even more)! Maxxx also weighs in on LGBTQ+ issues and conversations, reviews tv shows, movies, books, and music videos, and can’t help but fangirl (fan-person?) over his favorite celebs.

Journals and Diaries: Life, Privacy, and Literature: 4 week Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Course (in person only - registration required)
2024-11-12 18:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary: “In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.” What is the relationship between a writer’s lived experience and the works they present, crafted and bound, to the public? For Virginia Woolf, the diary was a place to reckon with the “oil well” of stories bubbling up inside her; for Roland Barthes, a space apart to wrestle with private loss and grief; for Annie Ernaux, the diary harbored the “raw and dark” material behind her fictions; and for Anaïs Nin, the distinction between fiction-writing and diary-keeping was difficult even to discern. On what sort of terms, then, can we take the writer’s diary? What kinds of insight does it promise—regarding literary craft, literary politics, artistic scenes, and creative processes? And how shall we approach this literary object—as a genre unto itself, distinct from other forms of life-writing such as autobiography, memoir, and auto-fiction?
In this course, we will read selections from writers’ diaries, beginning in the early 20th century and closing with Sheila Heti’s recent experimental work Alphabetical Diaries. Moving through time and space—from Woolf and Franz Kafka to Barthes and Nin to Sontag and Ernaux, with forays into Augustine’s 5th century Confessions and Rousseau’s 18th century work of the same name—we will ask how writers utilize their diaries in both their fiction and their criticism. Avoiding the “reduction” to which Sontag is rightly averse, we will explore how the diary—taken on its own terms—at once encourages and works against linear narrativization, and how it, perhaps uniquely, articulates anxieties of remembrance just as much as it does the fear of being forgotten.
Instructor: Danielle Drori
Course Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
November 12 — December 10, 2024
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Tuesday, November 26th
$335.00
Click here to register for this course
Classes will meet at the
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Room 210 of The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street
NY, NY 10011

OUTspoken: The Publishing Triangle’s Reading Series, November Edition (in person & live-streaming)
2024-11-14 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Publishing Triangle presents its monthly OUTspoken Reading Series as host Rob Byrnes welcomes Donna Minkowitz, Jenifer Levin, Ruben Quesada, Lauren Melissa Ellzey, Samy Nemir Olivares, Ken Harvey, Judith Barrington, and Mercedes Lewis.

Join us as in-person or watch the live-stream (see below) to hear from some of queer literature’s most dynamic established and up-and-coming voices.

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

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

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

The Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

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