Rajiv Mohabir and Anastacia-Reneé at the Bureau (in person & live-streaming)
2022-09-15 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
If you’re in the NY area, come listen to Rajiv Mohabir read from his gorgeous, award-winning memoir Antiman (out now in paperback) at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division! The winner of our 2019 Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Antiman explores the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped Rajiv’s experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States. Rajiv will be in conversation with queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, speaker and podcaster, Anastacia-Reneé. Anastacia-Reneé’s forthcoming book of poems, Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins, March 2023), is a rich and beautiful collection of verse and image—a multi-part retrospective that traverses time, space, and reality to illuminate the expansiveness of Black femme lives.
Moderated by Chaelee Dalton
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
This event is free and open to all!
Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Copies of Antiman are also available at the Bureau’s physical store and can be purchased at the event. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of Cutlish (2021, Four Way Books, finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award), The Cowherd’s Son (2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His essays can be found in places like the Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and he has a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. Currently he is an assistant professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College. His debut memoir, Antiman, won the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Anastacia-Renee (She/They) is a queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, speaker and podcaster. She is the author of (v.) (Black Ocean) and Forget It (Black Radish) and, Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere and Sidenotes from the Archivist forthcoming from Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins). They were selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artists of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows.” Anastacia-Renee was former Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), Hugo House Poet-in-Residence (2015-2017), Arc Artist Fellow (2020) and Jack Straw Curator (2020).
Her work has been anthologized in: Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, Furious Flower Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Afrofuturism, Black Comics, And Superhero Poetry, Joy Has a Sound, Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, and Seismic: Seattle City of Literature. Her work has appeared in, Hobart, Foglifter, Auburn Avenue, Catapult, Alta, Torch, Poetry Northwest, A-Line, Cascadia Magazine, Hennepin Review, Ms. Magazine and others. Renee has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency.

Chae(lee) Dalton is a wintertime poet and summertime ice cream maker. They are the author of the chapbook Mother Tongue (Gold Line Press 2021) and their work appears in The Offing, Pinwheel, Penn Review, and elsewhere. A queer Korean adoptee, Dalton currently live in New York, where they teach kids science and make things with their friends.

Office Hours Broadside Exhibition
2022-09-16 18:30 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join us for the Office Hours Poetry Broadside Exhibition Opening Night Event on September 16th, 2022. We’ve paired up eight LGBTQ+ poets with eight visual artists to craft unique broadsides showcasing their remarkable poems. Doors open at 6:30 PM to peruse the broadsides and enjoy light refreshments. Poetry reading to follow at 7 PM. The exhibition features visual artists: Jihyun Hong, Sy Klipsch-Abudu, Jardley Jean-Louis, Lee Maxey, Brandon Menke, Meesh Nah, Luciana Pinchiero, and Mojdeh Rezaeipour. And features poets: Danielle Badra, Shangyang Fang, T’ai Freedom Ford, Jen Levitt, Holly Mitchell, James Fujinami Moore, Janelle Tan, and Paul Tran.
The reading will also be live-streamed on the Bureau’s YouTube channel starting at 7 PM.
Office Hours Poetry Broadside Exhibition will be on view at the Bureau from Wednesday, September 14th, through Sunday, September 18th.

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.

This event is free and open to all!
Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Office Hours Poetry Workshop is a community-based writing workshop for poets who show a demonstrated commitment to writing. We provide continued support for manuscript-development and everyday writing. The workshop culminates in a public reading each fall and spring to showcase sizzling new work.
We welcome all poets, especially people of color, LGBTQ+, and those who are womxn-identified. Our name derives from our side hustle. Many of us are freelance, adjunct instructors, who continue to thrive in the margins of academia.
The workshop fellowship meets every two weeks following the fall and spring academic calendar with optional sessions like book club and generative write ins. We charge zero fees to join. Interested writers should submit 6 pages of work to be reviewed by the workshop facilitator sarahmariesala@gmail.com or drop us a line to learn more!

The Bruising of Qilwa meets The Stardust Thief, live with the authors! (in person & live-streaming)
2022-09-18 17:00 - 19:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Mainstream speculative fiction has long borrowed elements from West Asian (Middle Eastern) storytelling, but only in recent years have West Asian authors themselves been brought into the fold to tell stories inspired by our cultures. In celebration of the launch of The Bruising of Qilwa, a debut novella set in a queernormative Persian-inspired world, Persian-Chicagoan author Naseem Jamnia will be in conversation with Chelsea Abdullah, Kuwaiti-American author of The Stardust Thief. After a brief reading, they’ll discuss their books, West Asian storytelling traditions, and bringing their cultures into a secondary world, with opportunity for a Q&A. Signing will be available after the event.
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

Both books will also be available for purchase at the event.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

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

Chelsea Abdullah is an American-Kuwaiti writer born and raised in Kuwait, where she grew up listening to stories about mysterious desert creatures and wily (only sometimes likable) heroes. Consumed by wanderlust, she has put down roots in various states. After earning her MA in English at Duquesne University, she moved to New York, where she currently lives. When not immersed in her own fictional worlds, she spends her free time playing video games, doodling characters, and hoarding books she doesn’t have the shelf space for.

Naseem Jamnia is a Persian-Chicagoan, former scientist, and fiction MFA graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno. Their work has appeared in The Washington Post, Bitch Media, Cosmopolitan, The Rumpus, The Writer’s Chronicle, and other venues. A Lambda Literary, Otherwise, and the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow, Naseem is the managing editor at Sword & Kettle Press and the author of The Bruising of Qilwa.

Paradise Regained: Black Queer Writers Read (in person and live-streaming)
2022-09-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Three Black gay writers, each of whom released a new book in 2022, gather for a fierce read. Hosted by the inimitable Pamela Sneed. Featuring Jafari Allen, David Ambrose Jackson, & Cary Alan Johnson.
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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register.
Cosponsored by:
Bloom International
and
Other Countries: Black Gay Men Writing
Books by all of the authors available on the Bureau’s online store and at our physical store. These books will also be available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy (copies) of any of these titles, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Jafari Allen is is Director of Africana Studies and Co-Director of the University of Miami Center for Global Black Studies. His monograph, There’s a disco ball between us: a Theory of Black Gay Life, was published by Duke University Press in 2022 .

David Ambrose Jackson was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for his debut novel, State of the Nation. His new novel, Unlawful DISorder, has been lauded as “…a cutting portrayal of the failings of America’s mental health system.”

Cary Alan Johnson is an author, activist, and Africanist and. founder of the Other Countries writer’s collective. His debut novel, Desire Lines, was published in September 2022 by Querelle Press.

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, performer, visual artist, and educator. She is the author of Funeral Diva (City Lights Books, 2020), Sweet Dreams (Belladonna*, 2018), KONG (Vintage Entity Press, 2009), Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery (Holt, 1998), and others. Sneed has performed the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, The High Line, the New Museum, and the Toronto Biennale. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poems,” and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.

Opening Reception: Satanic Panic, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz
2022-09-22 18:00 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Catalina Schliebener Muñoz from their series Satanic Panic, on view from September 22, 2022 – January 8, 2023, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 22, 2022, 6-8 pm. Additional programming to be announced during the exhibition.
This show, featuring small- and large-scale mixed media collages and a site-specific mural, draws on Catalina Schliebener Muñoz’s ongoing Satanic Panic series, which they began in 2019. This series references the moral panic that originated in the US in the 1980s, spreading through many parts of the world in the late 1990s, including their home country of Chile. This collective hysteria drew on cold war mythologies, misogynist ideas surrounding care work, racist tropes about outsiders, and conservative responses to the AIDS crisis. As a queer, brown, South American immigrant living in the US and working in the field of early childhood education, Schliebener Muñoz is particularly interested in the fact that many of those accused of crimes tied to this moral panic were queer and/or BIPOC childcare workers.
The Satanic Panic series comprises two primary types of work: large-format collages/murals, and installations of juxtaposed objects such as porcelain figurines and articulated plastic characters from different Disney/Pixar movies. The collages combine fragments of Disney books published in the 1990s with portions of pedagogical books created in the 1960s and 70s. Questions raised by the work center how the activities and games outlined in these books replicate the gender, sexuality, race, and class stereotypes of the adult world, and how those interact with the equally regulated fantasy world of Disney. In this series, Schliebener Muñoz explores the possibility of creating third images that in a subtle way bring all the narratives depicted in the original material into question.
Click here to download a PDF of the press release.
This event is free and open to all!
Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

This exhibition was made possible through a Visual Grant from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation.

Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, is a Sudamerican, Chilean-born visual artist who works primarily with collage, installation, and murals. Their work draws on images, objects, and narratives associated with childhood and explores gender, sexuality, and class. Their work has been exhibited in Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago, Chile), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY), Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, NY), Children’s Museum of Manhattan (New York, NY), Boston Center for the Arts (Boston, MA), Centro Cultural de España (Santiago, Chile), Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Center for Books Arts (New York, NY), Catalyst Arts (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn, NY), Hache Galería (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Galería Jardín Oculto (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Galería Metropolitana (Santiago, Chile), and Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (New York, NY), among others. A recipient of multiple FONDART Grants (Cultural and Arts Development Fund of the Government of Chile), Schliebener Muñoz also received grants from DIRAC (Board of Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Relations of Chile) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York, NY). They also received a Queer Artist Fellowship from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2017), and an Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Fellowship from the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2018).
In addition, Schliebener Muñoz has extensive teaching experience, from early childhood education to undergraduate education, on topics ranging from philosophy and art theory to art instruction in schools, studios, and museum settings. They are currently working as a teaching artist with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and The Queens Museum, and they facilitate gender and sexuality trainings for the Early Childhood Professional Development Institute at the City University of New York (CUNY). They received a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales (ARCIS; Santiago, Chile).

Featured image: Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, Satanic Panic Series, 2021 (detail) / Collage, graphite and thread on mat / 30 x 40 x 2 in

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY presents "What's Your Story?" (in person and live-streaming)
2022-09-23 18:00 - 19:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2022: STORY is scheduled for September 23-25, 2022, for its seventeenth annual public visual and performance art festival featuring 40+ local, national, and international artists’ projects from the Disabled, Incarcerated, Elder, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Allied communities taking place along 14th Street in Manhattan, NY – from Avenue C to the Hudson River. “What’s Your Story” is a selection of some of the artists telling their story. Hosted by the curator, Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn.
Featuring Nick Daniels, Jana Greiner, Juan Hernadez with Mai Tran, Vivek Sebastian, Heather Sincavage, and Yu-Ching Wang.
Photo credit: Yu-Ching Wang, Breathing in New York, March 2020
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
This event is free and open to all!
Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

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, founded by NYC artist Ed Woodham and led by Executive Director Furusho von Puttkammer, 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. AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange of ideas. Using 14th Street as a laboratory, this project continues AiOP’s work to locate cracks in public space policies and to inspire the popular imagination for new possibilities and engagement with civic space.

Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy at a young age. The muscle-wasting disease has left her as a wheelchair user. She uses living with a disability to inform her work and educate society about differences.

Office Hours Broadside Exhibition Artist Conversation (virtual event)
2022-09-24 15:00 - 17:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Join us for the Office Hours Poetry Broadside Exhibition Artists’ Conversation! Poets will read their broadside work and then dialogue with their visual artist about the process of designing a unique broadside from concept to design to installation at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (9/14-9/18/22).
View and purchase the broadsides here!
You can join on Zoom (and engage with the speakers) by registering on Eventbrite. AFTER you’ve registered, please return to the Eventbrite page at the event time (Saturday, 9/24, at 3 PM EDT) and click on “Access the event” (at right, below Tickets ).
This event will also be live-streamed via the Bureau’s YouTube Channel.
It’s free and open to the public!
Office Hours is a community-based writing workshop for poets who show a demonstrated commitment to writing. We office free Craft Classes, Manuscript Editing Workshops, and a weekly writing workshop for fellows. The workshop culminates in a public reading each fall and spring to showcase sizzling new work. For more, visit us at: http://sarahmsala.com/office-hours

Participants:
Jardley Jean-Louis is an NYC born award-winning artist, animator, art director, and filmmaker based in Queens, NY. Their work leans on their intersectional identities in Blackness, queerness, and the First (or Second) generation American experience.

Born in Arkansas, Lee Maxey lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include Be Not Afraid, a solo show at Olympia, NYC. Lee is an alumna of the Fire Island Artist Residency and the Hercules Studio/Art Program. She received her MFA in 2016 from Boston University and her BFA in 2011 from the University of Central Arkansas.

Brandon Menke is a queer poet, designer, and postdoctoral fellow in English at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from Yale and his MFA in poetry from NYU. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, Court Green, Post45: Contemporaries, Columbia Journal, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Meesh Nah is a multi-disciplinary artist currently working with flowers, watercolor, ink, and acrylic. She draws inspiration from the ground, the skies above, and the spaces in between. She’s currently based in London.

Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China. A Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, his works appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is the author of the poetry collection, Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).

James Fujinami Moore’s work has appeared in Barrow Street’s 4×2, The Brooklyn Rail, Guesthouse, The Margins, the Pacifica Literary Review, and Prelude. He has received support from Poets House, Bread Loaf, and the Frost Place, and received his MFA from Hunter College in 2016. He lives in Los Angeles.

Holly Mitchell is a poet from Kentucky, now based in New York. Holly’s debut collection, Mare’s Nest, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in Spring 2023.

Celebrating Joy - A reading from I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy (in person event)
2022-09-24 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
A reading and Q&A panel featuring Samantha Mann, the editor for I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy along with a few of the contributors. Featuring special guest R/B Mertz will be there to discuss their memoir Burning Butch.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Samantha Mann writes personal and nonfiction essays covering LGBTQ life, mental health, and feminism. Her work can be found on BUST, Emry’s Journal, The Establishment, Bustle, and Washington Post Magazine. Samantha lives with her wife in Brooklyn, NY.

MARKET OF VAIN DESIRE (in person event)
2022-09-25 17:00 - 19:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
A One Night Pop-Up Installation Of Queer History & Memorabilia from Visual Storyteller/Identity Curator Rumi Missabu Slated as a Donation to The LGBT Community Center National History Archive
Curated By Devlyn Camp
With Co-Hosts
Hucklefaery Ken
Fussy Lo Mein
Robert Croonquist
Agosto Machado
Jean Stevens
Daniel Ryan Johnson
& Joe E. Jeffreys
Plus Special Appearance By
Rumi Missabu Via Zoom!
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register.
Rumi’s photograph in the flyer is by Harry James Hanson & Devin Antheus for their book The Legends of Drag: Queens of a Certain Age, available from the Bureau’s online and physical stores!

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

A few examples of the donated materials included below!

Steven Thrasher and Linda Villarosa on The Viral Underclass and Under the Skin, Moderated by Hugh Ryan (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-09-30 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Please join Steven Thrasher and Linda Villarosa at the Bureau to discuss Dr. Thrasher’s debut book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll when Inequality and Disease Collide and Villarosa’s Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation. Moderated by Hugh Ryan. Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.
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

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

STEVEN W. THRASHER, PhD holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. A columnist for Scientific American, his writing has been widely published by The New York Times, Nation, The Atlantic, Journal of American History, BuzzFeed News, Esquire and New York Magazine. In 2019, Out Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential and impactful people of the year and the Ford Foundation awarded him a grant for Creativity and Free Expression. An alumnus of media jobs with Saturday Night Live, the HBO film The Laramie Project and the NPR StoryCorps project, Dr. Thrasher has also been a staff writer for The Village Voice and a columnist for The Guardian. He holds a PhD in American Studies and divides his time between Chicago and New York. The Viral Underclass is his first book. Twitter: @thrasherxy. Author photo by C. S. Muncy
Linda Villarosa is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, where she covers the intersection of race, inequality and health. She is a professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Hugh Ryan is a writer, historian, and curator. His recent book, The Women’s House of Detention, was named one of the best books of the year by Vulture / New York Magazine. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, 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, is a nonfiction faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and sits on the Board of the Stonewall National Museum and Archive.

Official Book Launch for The Certain Body (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-01 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Please join us for the official book launch for Julia Guez’s THE CERTAIN BODY (out this fall from Four Way Books). We hope to see you in-person or online that night; the event will be live-streamed. Very special guests include Francisco Márquez, t’ai freedom ford, Jenny Johnson and Mark Bibbins. You can buy books directly from the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division. Reception at seven. Reading at 7:30. Book signing at 8:30.
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

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Copies of The Certain Body and other books by our readers will be available for purchase at the event.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Mark Bibbins is the author of four poetry collections, most recently 13th Balloon (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His first book, Sky Lounge (Graywolf Press, 2003), received a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program.

t’ai freedom ford is the author of two poetry collections, how to get over from Red Hen Press and more black from Augury Books, winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020.
For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America, New York; she’s currently the senior managing director of design and implementation there. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers.
You can find more of her work online at www.juliaguez.net and if you are so inclined, can buy all of her books here at the Bureau. She would be happy to sign them for you(!)

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a NEA Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop. She lives in Pittsburgh.

Francisco Márquez is a poet from Maracaibo, Venezuela, born in Miami, Florida. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, his work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry anthology, among other publications. He has received support from the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, The Poetry Project, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was a 2019-2020 Poetry Fellow. He is Assistant Web Editor at Poets & Writers and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

First Consonants: John Whittier Treat with Sarah Van Arsdale & Stephen Greco (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-13 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 John Whittier Treat’s novel First Consonants.
Brian is an unremarkable child, until he isn’t. As other children start to babble, adding to their vocabularies day by day, Brian grows quieter with age, stumbling over the words he needs to lead a normal life: He is a stutterer. This speech disorder defines his formative years, filled with prejudice and bullying, as he creates his own scales of right and wrong, both justified and unjustified. He uses his fists whenever words fail him. As he increasingly fills with rage after life-changing abuse at the hands of a priest who takes advantage of his vulnerability, he resorts to ever greater acts of violence, risking everything he has worked hard for in life. Brian’s one hope for his redemption? Alaska. An elderly Brian moves to the Alaskan outback, and here he attempts to redeem himself and the world.
“A compelling, at times relentless novel that gives the term antihero a brand-new spin.” —Felice Picano, author of Like People in History, The Book of Lies, and Onyx
“A flame of rage burns at the core of Brian Moriarty, ignited by a traumatic birth and fueled by a lifetime of debasement and abuse because Brian stutters. Treat’s First Consonants is incendiary, placing the reader in the furious heart of Brian’s world. As we may decry his actions, we cannot help but want a balm for him, a cool soothing of his implacable ire, lest it consume and reduce him to ash.” —Terry Wolverton, the author of Stealing Angel
“First Consonants touches on the origins of violence, of love, and what it means to find one’s way through the maze that is the world. Here is a story that is engrossing, vulnerable and wise in a way that few books are these days.” —Jim Krusoe, author of The Sleep Garden
“Written in ludic, kinetic prose, at turns beautiful and harrowing, it has an expansiveness and ethical import that is rare.” —Alistair McCartney, author of The Disintegrations

First Consonants will also be available for purchase at the 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

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

John Whittier Treat has lived in the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska, for forty years. His fiction has won the Christopher Hewitt Prize, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Prize for Best Gay Fiction. A novella, Maid Service, was published in 2020 and his second novel, First Consonants, is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press in 2022. His opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times and the Huffington Post. Treat is currently at work on his third novel, set among survivalists in rural eastern Washington State, entitled The Sixth City of Refuge. johnwhittiertreat.com

Sarah Van Arsdale’s sixth book, Taken, a poetry collection, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. She is the author of four books of fiction including Toward Amnesia (Riverhead, 1995) and Blue (winner of the 2002 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel) and a single book-length poem, titled The Catamount (Nomadic Press, 2017), illustrated with her watercolors. She serves with the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction, teaches creative writing in the Antioch/LA Low-residency MFA Program, and works as a private manuscript consultant. sarahvanarsdale.com

Stephen Greco is Editorial Director of InsideRisk and Editor-at-Large of the magazine Upstate Diary. He has contributed to and/or served as editor for Air Mail, Elle Décor, Interview, MTV online, New York, The New York Times, Opera News, Stagebill, Trace, and The Village Voice, among others. Greco is author of the novel Now and Yesterday (Kensington, 2014). His most recent novel, Such Good Friends, based on the friendship of Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill, will be published by Kensington in May, 2023. For the stage, Greco has written Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood, an orchestral-theatrical work from Giants Are Small, the partnership of Edouard Getaz and Doug Fitch, that premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2017. With Fitch, Greco has written the multi-media works How Did We…? (2014; University of Buffalo Center for the Arts) and Punkitititi/Breakfast Included (2020; Salzburg Marionette Theater, Salzburg Mozarteum). Greco wrote the libretto for the Victoria Bond opera How Gulliver Returned Home in a Manner that was Very Not Direct, and is working on musical theater projects with composers Scott Wheeler and Douglas Cuomo.
Greco lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Finnegan Presents: Queer Underground Poetry (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-14 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Legendary New York City poet Finnegan and prolific street photographer Efrain Gonzalez present an evening of poetry and photography hosted by Johnny Art. Soak yourself in electric verse, ripped straight from the womb of your worst nightmares (or your darkest fantasies!) and coughed up on your mother’s dining room table. Enjoy an evening of radical queer poetry and candid behind-the-scenes photography from the heyday of Finnegan’s poetry troupe, Dark Star Crew. The evening will include interviews with Finnegan and Efrain talking about their adventures with Dark Star at CBGBs, the Knitting Factory and other infamous NYC venues.

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

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

Books of poetry by Finnegan will be available for purchase at the event.

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Finnegan has been performing his poetry in New York City and beyond for more than thirty years. He has performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Knitting Factory, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and CBGB’s and has been featured in the Village Voice, New York Times, Seven Days magazine and Vanity Fair.

New York City photographer Efrain John Gonzalez says he’s “not a professional photographer, just OCD.” He describes his work as telling “a story of people finding the path to their souls, finding their bliss with piercings, branding, cuttings, tattoos, latex, implants, leather, and a whole lot of radical sex and sexuality.”

John “JohnnyArt” Pavlou is a visual artist and songwriter based in Yonkers, New York. His sculptures have been in numerous shows and he has created several sculptural installations. He has also created a Youtube series in which he uploaded a spoken word piece every day for a year.

Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments & Queer Forgetting (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-16 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Who determines what is remembered and commemorated, and why? How can we commemorate something that is both in the past and a daily reality? In Take ‘Em Down, Simon(e) van Saarloos is inspired by the historically invisibilized lives of LGBT people and queers. They demonstrate the power of forgetting and wonder if and how it’s possible to live without a past. At the same time, Van Saarloos criticizes the way that a ‘white memory’—including their own—treats some stories as self-evident while other histories are erased. An afternoon of conversation, performance and an abundance of presence. hosted by Simon(e) van Saarloos and the Bureau with Megan Fernandes, Waqia Abdul-Kareem, and a video contribution by Claudia Rankine.
“I love the expansive nature of ways of thinking about commemoration in Take ’Em Down; the role of physicaland imaginative space. I also love that the essayistic form is informed by the process of adaptability, informed by Simon(e) van Saarloos’ childhood history, and that van Saarloos reflects the ability as a writer to know the limits of their own imagination. The notion of stumbling stones implies being tripped up and so becomes both commemorative and process-defining. There is so much to say and love about this book!” — Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric
“The scholarship that excites me the most is not only well- reasoned and accessible, but also synthesizes ideas that take multiple positionalities into account, and takes the courage to be outspoken and revolutionary. In Take ’Em Down, Simon(e) van Saarloos does all those things, incisively. It partakes of the act of radical allyship amongst the marginalized. A lovely book.” —Nalo Hopkinson, author, The Salt Roads
“Amidst a global pandemic that has fundamentally changed our world, along with Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Topple Monuments Movements and ongoing struggles for LGBTQIA liberation, Simon(e) van Saarloos’ Take ‘Em Down asks us to reenvision monuments and acts of commemoration. They also champion forms of Queer forgetting as acts of resistance. They call upon the work of some of the greatest thinkers, scholars and writers Arendt, Orwell, Halberstam, Rankine, Moten, Hartman and more to raise critical issues around memory, mourning and social justice. In this text Saarloos joins their ranks in creating important new visions and challenges for our world. It’s a text demanding to be contemplated and shared widely.” – Pamela Sneed, author of Funeral Diva, City Lights, 2020
Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting includes a foreword by Pamela Sneed and is published by Publication Studio.
Copies of Take ‘Em Down will soon be available on the Bureau’s online store, and will be available for purchase at the 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

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Waqia Abdul-Kareem is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist and interdisciplinary scholar. They hold an MFA in Performance and Performance Studies from Pratt Institute and are pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies at New York University. Their academic research considers the historical-ecological entanglement between blackness and the more-than-human in the South Carolina Lowcountry region. Relatedly, their art practice employs archival research, sound/music, video, performance, and storytelling. They have exhibited work at the Hirshhorn Museum, Abrons Art Center, Movement Research, Dixon Place, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Before their academic studies, they worked as an art educator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. Her most recent book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Saturnalia Poetry Prize, the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and was published with Tin House Books in 2020. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She is a Yaddo fellow and holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. In 2021, she was a book reviewer for the Poetry Foundation. Her forthcoming poetry collection, I Do Everything I’m Told, will also be published by Tin House Books in summer 2023.

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of four books in Dutch, including a novel and an ethnographic court report about the “discrimination trial” of Geert Wilders. Two of their books were translated into English: Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio, 2019) and most recently Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (Publication Studio, 2022). They are currently working on Against Ageism. A Queer Manifesto (Emily Carr University Press) and a theatre play about abortion for Ulrike Quade Company, premiering April 2023. Van Saarloos also work as an artist and curator. Their most recent projects include Cruising Gezi Park (with Kübra Uzun), the spread of a mo(nu)ment, and Through the Window an ongoing queer solidarity project between Turkey and the Netherlands, aimed to circulate funds among queer artists.They have participated in artist residencies such as the KAVLI Institute for Nanosciences, Deltaworkers New Orleans and Be Mobile Create Together at IKSV in Istanbul. Together with Vincent van Velsen, Van Saarloos curated the ABUNDANCE exhibition, (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it” – Denise Ferreira da Silva) at Het HEM, Amsterdam in 2022. Upcoming projects include their role as a curator for International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy. They currently pursue a PhD in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Author photo: Isabelle Janssen

Violet Hour (virtual event)
2022-10-20 19:00 - 20:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Join us for an evening of short readings by 2SLGBTQ writers from Canada. This special online edition will feature writers Christopher DiRaddo (The Family Way), Suzette Mayr (The Sleeping Car Porter), Matthew James Weigel (Whitemud Walking) and Jane Walsh (The Inconvenient Heiress).
To participate in the event on Zoom please register on the Eventbrite page.
AFTER you’ve registered, please return to the Eventbrite page at the time of the event and click on “Access link” under “When and Where/location.”
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

Suggested donation $5 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to join, with or without donation. You can make a donation when you register on the Eventbrite page, or make a tax-deductible donation on the Bureau’s Fractured Atlas page. Thank you for your support!

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

Christopher DiRaddo is the author of the novels The Family Way and The Geography of Pluto. In 2014, he created the Violet Hour reading series and book club, which has to date provided a platform for more than 200 LGBTQ writers. He is past president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. https://christopherdiraddo.com/

Suzette Mayr is the author of six novels, including her most recent, The Sleeping Car Porter, published in 2022. Her novels have won the ReLit Award and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize, and have twice been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her fiction has also been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Best First Book and Best Novel Awards, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. https://www.suzettemayr.com/

Matthew James Weigel is a Dene and Métis poet and artist born and raised in Edmonton. Currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Alberta, he holds a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences. He is the designer for Moon Jelly House press and his words and art have been published by people like Arc Poetry Magazine, Book*Hug, The Polyglot, and The Mamawi Project. Matthew is a Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize finalist, National Magazine Award finalist, Nelson Ball Prize finalist, Cécile E. Mactaggart award winner, and winner of both the 2020 Vallum Chapbook Award and 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award for his chapbook “It Was Treaty / It Was Me.” His debut full-length collection “Whitemud Walking” recently won the Alcuin Society Award for book design and is available now from Coach House Books. https://www.matthewjamesweigel.com/

Jane Walsh is a queer historical romance novelist who loves everything Regency. She is delighted to have the opportunity to put her studies in history and costume design to good use by writing love stories. She owes a great debt of gratitude to the local coffee shop for fueling her novel writing endeavors. Jane’s happily ever after is centered on her wife and their cat and their cozy home together in Canada. https://www.janewalshwrites.com/

ARMY OF LOVERS release. K.M. Soehnlein in Conversation with Maria Maggenti (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-22 18:30 - 21:30 | The LGBT Community Center Room 301, 208 West 13th Street Room 301, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Lambda Literary Award-winning novelist K.M. Soehnlein, in conversation with filmmaker Maria Maggenti, for the New York launch of his new novel, ARMY OF LOVERS, which follows a young gay man swept up in the excitement, fury, and poignancy of the AIDS activist group ACT UP. ​
Arriving in New York City full of idealism, Paul discovers the queer community gathering strength in the face of government inaction and social stigma. As he protests, parties, and makes a new home, he finds himself pulling away from his HIV-negative boyfriend to pursue an intense bond with a passionate, HIV-positive artist. Paul’s awakening parallels ACT UP’s rise, successes, and controversies. And then everything shifts again, as his family is thrust into their own life-and-death struggle that tests him even further.
Born out of the author’s activism inside the vibrant queer community of the ’80s and ’90s, ARMY OF LOVERS blends history and fiction into an exploration of memory, community, love, and justice.
Soehnlein and Maggenti were roommates in the East Village while members of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Join them for a public conversation about art, friendship and activism.
Presented by The LGBT Community Center and the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.
This event will take place in person at The LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, NY, NY 10011.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

Copies of Army of Lovers (Bywater Books, 2022, paperback $20.95) will soon be available on our online store and at our physical store. Copies will also be available at the event. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.
K.M. Soehnlein is the author of the novels THE WORLD OF NORMAL BOYS, YOU CAN SAY YOU KNEW ME WHEN, and ROBIN AND RUBY, along with essays and journalism in numerous publications. He is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award, Henfield Prize, and SFFILM Rainin Grant in Screenwriting. Raised in New Jersey, he lived in New York City in the late ’80s and early ’90s, participating in direct action with ACT UP and cofounding Queer Nation. These years were the inspiration for ARMY OF LOVERS, released by Amble Press in Oct. ’22.
Maria Maggenti is an activist, screenwriter (BEFORE I FALL) and director of the beloved indie films THE INCREDIBLY TRUE ADVENTURE OF TWO GIRLS IN LOVE and PUCCINI FOR BEGINNERS.

Emptying the Pews: Life after Conservative Christianity (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-23 15:00 - 17:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join Lauren O’Neal and Chrissy Stroop (coeditors of Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church) for a panel discussion about making art and living life after leaving conservative Christianity, featuring Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House), Daniel Lavery (Something That May Shock and Discredit You), and Maud Newton (Ancestor Trouble).

About Empty the Pews :
Following the 2016 election of President Trump, Stroop coined the hashtag #EmptyThePews on Twitter as a call to take a moral stance against the kind of fundamentalist, authoritarian, or otherwise conservative churches that helped bring about the current political situation and all its cruelty, division, and hate. The hashtag continues to circulate with the eye-opening and often heartbreaking stories of those who found the resolve to leave evangelical, Mormon, Catholic, and other religious communities. Empty the Pews continues this campaign by sharing the unflinchingly honest stories of those who escaped hardline religious ideology—and how it failed to crush their spirits.

Contributions include essays from a diverse group of established and up-and-coming writers, including Garrard Conley, Lyz Lenz, Juliana Delgado Lopera, Carmen Maria Machado, Isaac Marion, Maud Newton, Julia Scheeres, Linda Tirado, and more, as well as a foreword by Frank Schaeffer, the former Christian Right leader turned trenchant critic.

A provocative anthology of undeniable importance and power, Empty the Pews reflects upon the disoriented worldview of harmful, narrow-minded religious ideologies and also offers a clear call to action: to those who refuse to be complicit in the bigotry and abuse present in so many churches, now is the time to empty the pews.

Copies of Empty the Pews are also available at our physical store and will be available for purchase at the 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

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Daniel Lavery is the author of Texts From Jane Eyre and Something That May Shock and Discredit You, the co-founder of The Toast, and the former Dear Prudence at Slate.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, among others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Maud Newton is a writer and critic. Her first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House, March 2022), has been called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe. Excerpts from the book have appeared in Esquire, Time, and the Wall Street Journal. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. Maud grew up in Miami, lives in New York City, and has degrees in English and law.

Lauren O’Neal is a writer and editor in New York City. She is the coeditor, with Chrissy Stroop, of the essay anthology Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church, and the cohost of the podcast Sunday School Dropouts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Nylon, and a bunch of websites that don’t exist anymore.

The coeditor (with Lauren O’Neal) of Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church, an anthology of personal essays by former conservative Christians, Chrissy Stroop was raised evangelical and subjected to intense indoctrination in Christian schools. Now a vocal critic of the Christian Right and an atheist, Stroop is a senior correspondent for Religion Dispatches and a columnist for openDemocracy. She holds a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford University, and her work has also appeared in Foreign Policy, The Boston Globe, Playboy, DAME Magazine, Alternet, The Conversationalist, and other outlets, including peer-reviewed academic journals. An advocate for pluralist coexistence as an essential component of healthy democratic society, Stroop is proud of her record of working with both religious and secular organizations in pursuit of the common good. Stroop came out as a transgender woman in 2019 and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
John D’Emilio will discuss and read from his recently published memoir, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood. It describes how a boy raised in the Bronx in the 1950s in a politically and religiously conservative Italian family had his life reshaped in the sixties as he came to explore the hidden gay world of Manhattan; became an antiwar activist and conscientious objector while a student at Columbia; and made the decision to research and write U.S. history as a tool for social change.
Copies of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties will soon be available on the Bureau’s online store, and will be available for purchase at the 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

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

A pioneer in the field of LGBTQ studies and the history of sexuality, John D’Emilio has written or edited almost a dozen books, including Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority; Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America; and Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

HOMO NOVUS BOOK LAUNCH (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-10-29 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Join debut novelist Gerard Cabrera and author-musician-journalist Huascar Robles for the book launch of Homo Novus. It’s Holy Week 1987, and Fr. Linus Fitzgerald has just learned he has AIDS. Orlando Rosario, the Puerto Rican boy he seduced at fourteen, is now a man sitting by his bed, and studying for the priesthood. In alternating chapters, Linus and Orlando reflect on their desires and dreams, secrets and sins, hopes and faith, and the paths that brought them together. As the narrative progresses, each character reflects on their lives and how their histories have become inextricably bound together by their shared desires, secrets, sins, and faith. By the end of the story, the reader comes away with disturbing and powerful history of transgression and hope for redemption.
Copies of Homo Novus will be available for purchase at the 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

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

Safety protocol
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Gerard Cabrera is a Massarican who moved to New York City from Boston in 1989 with no job, no apartment, and no money! It can be done! Over the years he has written for, and served on, the board of directors of Gay Community News, has performed in drag as a member of the United Fruit Company, helped manage one of the first safe sex programs for people with mental disabilities, earned his Master’s degree in public health, competed in the 1994 Gay Games, and earned a law degree. Gerard has stocked shelves, washed dishes, worked in a plastic container factory and on an Old Spice assembly line. He has also represented people in housing court, family court, and probate court. Currently he works in the New York City Family Court. He is a past attendee of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Writers Studio, and was a Bread Loaf Camargo Foundation Fellow in Cassis, France. His fiction has appeared in various print and online journals. His novel, Homo Novus, has been called “stellar,” “emotionally bold and always arresting,” and treats his subject “with rare sensitivity, empathy, and intelligence.”

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

OLNY Poly Movie Night: Angels of Sex (in person event)
2022-11-02 18:30 - 21:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Open Love NY presents Poly Movie Night, a FREE series of feature films that focus on the portrayal of consensual / ethical non-monogamy in cinema. This month we’ll be IN PERSON at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.

Please join us for Angels of Sex/El sexo de los ángeles (2012), directed by Xavier Villaverde and starring Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Álvaro Cervantes, and Llorenç González.

We’ll meet at 6:30 pm at the Bureau (in room 210 of The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center at 208 West 13th Street) for pre-screening socializing and start the movie at 7 pm. The event is free, although a $5-$10 suggested donation to help fund future events is much appreciated.

You can send donations through Venmo to @Open-LoveNY.

Synopsis: Student photographer Carla struggles with the change in her relationship to boyfriend Bruno when he falls for another man, charming dancer/martial artist Rai. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine Patricia Grayhall with David Logan (online event)
2022-11-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Come celebrate the launch of Patricia Grayhall’ s memoir Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine.
Please note that this event is taking place online only.
To participate in the event on Zoom please register on the Eventbrite page.
AFTER you’ve registered, please return to the Eventbrite page at the time of the event and click on “Access link” under “When and Where/location.”
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

Defying expectations of a woman growing up in Arizona in the 1960s, Patricia Grayhall fled Phoenix at nineteen for the vibrant streets of San Francisco, determined to finally come out as a lesbian after years of trying to be a “normal” girl. Her dream of becoming a physician drew her back to college, and then on to medical school in conservative Salt Lake City.
Though Patricia enjoyed a supportive friendship with a male colleague, she longed for an equal, loving relationship with a woman. But her graduate medical training in Boston, with its emotional demands, long hours, lack of sleep, and social isolation, compounded by the free-wheeling sexual revolution of the 1970s, made finding that special relationship difficult. Often disappointed but never defeated, Patricia—armed with wit and determination—battled on against sexism in her male-dominated profession and against discrimination in a still largely homophobic nation, plunging herself into a life that was never boring and certainly never without passion.
A chronicle of coming of age during second-wave feminism and striving to have both love and career as a gay medical doctor, Making the Rounds is a well-paced and deeply humanizing memoir of what it means to seek belonging and love—and to find them, in the most surprising ways.
More information can be found at www.PatriciaGrayhall.com.

Suggested donation $5 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to join, with or without donation. You can make a donation when you register on the Eventbrite page, or make a tax-deductible donation on the Bureau’s Fractured Atlas page. Thank you for your support!

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

Review quotes:
“The author writes with a sense of blunt reality and warm humanity . . . The struggles, deeply felt emotions, and coming-of-age triumphs make this memoir touching and personal, and it will stir reflection in those who read it.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Memoirs like Grayhall’ s are important to us. The larger culture has owned the narrative forever and rendered us inconsequential if not invisible. Our untold stories need to be out there, and a story like Grayhall’s from a woman of her achievements is a vital contribution to our community and history.”
—Katherine V. Forrest, author of Curious Wine and the Kate Delafield Mystery Series

“Grayhall skillfully depicts the problems confronting any ambitious person in search of stable romantic relationships . . . those professional challenges resonate throughout this fast-paced, immersive, and weighty memoir that will resonate with anyone who has experienced the hardships of being true to yourself.”
—BookLife Reviews

“Patricia Grayhall has written a vital and thrilling memoir, the story of a woman figuring out who she is and who she is meant to be.
—Steve Almond, New York Times best-selling author of Candyfreak and Against Football

Patricia Grayhall is a medical doctor and author of Making the Rounds; Defying Norms in Love and Medicine as well as articles in Queer Forty and The Gay and Lesbian Review. After nearly forty years of medical practice, this is her debut, very personal, and frank memoir about coming out as a lesbian in the late 1960s and training to become a doctor when society disapproved of both for a woman. Patricia lives with the love of her life on an island in the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys other people’s dogs and the neighborhood wildlife including otters, seals, water birds and black bear.

David Logan grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming and graduated from Harvard College in 1970. He then returned to the west to attend medical school at the University of Utah where he met Patricia. This began a close and loving friendship that has lasted over 50 years. They supported each other through internships and residencies in Boston and eventually their first real jobs in Washington DC. David lives with his life partner on a seven acre wildlife refuge (house included) in Palmetto, Florida where they enjoy magnificent sunsets and amazing wildlife.

WE ARE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION NOW: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (online event)
2022-11-13 15:00 - 17:00 | Online event, New York, NY, United States
Join authors Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr, along with special guests Rev. Michael J. Crumpler, Cait McKinney, and Amy Sadao, for the launch of their book We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production.
To participate in the event on Zoom please register on Eventbrite.
AFTER you’ve registered, please return to the Eventbrite page at the time of the event and click on “Access link” under “When and Where/location.”
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel
Suggested donation $5 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to join, with or without donation. You can make a donation when you register on this page, or make a tax-deductible donation on the Bureau’s Fractured Atlas page. Thank you for your support!

Purchase We Are Having This Conversation Now from the Bureau’s online store (click on title).
Copies are also available at our physical store.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Please note that this event is taking place online only.
To participate in the event on Zoom please register on the Eventbrite page.
AFTER you’ve registered, please return to the Eventbrite page at the time of the event and click on “Access link” under “When and Where/location.”
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel

Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, and coeditor of AIDS and the Distribution of Crises and Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making, all also published by Duke University Press.

Theodore Kerr is a writer, organizer, artist, and Lecturer of Interdisciplinary Arts at The New School as well as a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?

Rev. Michael J. Crumpler works as the LGBTQ and Multicultural Programs Director at the Unitarian Universalist Association and is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Michael lives in Brooklyn, NY and is very active in social justice ministry at the historic Judson Memorial Church of New York City, where he served as President of the Board, 2016-2018. He is most passionate about intersectional ministry centered in blackness, queerness, HIV/AIDS, economic justice, and emotional well-being. Michael has been published in two groundbreaking works related to HIV and AIDS, OnCurating Issue 42: What You Don’t Know About AIDS Could Fill a Museum and Spiritual Care in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter.

Cait McKinney is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and the author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke, 2020), winner of the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ studies. They co-edited (with Allyson Mitchell) Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and other Lesbian Hauntings (UBC and AGYU, 2019), and a 2020 special issue of First Monday on HIV/AIDS and Digital Media (with Marika Cifor).

Amy Sadao is a nonprofit consultant and curator. She is a co-curator of FotoFest 2022’s “If I Had a Hammer” and recent Brooklyn Rail guest critic (July/August 2022). She was the Dietrich Director of ICA Philadelphia from 2012-2019, and directed Visual AIDS from 2002-2012. She serves on the board of the Leeway Foundation and lives in Philadelphia.

Are Bisexuals Just Greedy? Public Book Launch (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-11-18 18:30 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Come celebrate and enjoy a reading and Q & A with acclaimed author, Fiona Dawson, as she launches her nonfiction book, Are Bisexuals Just Greedy? Animated Answers for All People Who Simply Want to Understand the Spectrum of Being LGBTQ+, with special guest Hannah Simpson.
How is gender identity different from sexual orientation? Do our genitals predict our gender? Why is it important to use a person’s correct pronouns? Fiona Dawson (she/her) answers these questions and more in her candid picture book for people old enough to swear and talk about sex, Are Bisexuals Just Greedy?.
This book will be available for purchase, and Debi Jackson, the self-described “conservative Southern Baptist Republican from Alabama” now speaking on behalf of transgender children and their families around the world, has this to say …. “With compassion and humor, Fiona has created an easy and direct read for parents wanting to understand their kids’ LGBTQ+ identities. Definitely have this book at home over the holidays.”
Copies of Are Bisexuals Just Greedy? will be available for purchase at the event.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
This event is co-sponsored by GLAAD and DIVA Magazine.
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: youtube.com/@bgsqd

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

Fiona Dawson (she/her) is an Emmy®-nominated and award-winning filmmaker, speaker, and author who has been advocating for the LGBTQ+ community for over two decades. Her short film “Transgender, at War and in Love” (2015) for The New York Times and feature documentary “TransMilitary” (2018) helped elevate the stories of active-duty transgender service members to end their ban from the US military. Relating her personal experiences as a cisgender, gay, and then bisexual woman, Fiona dissolves stereotypes to reveal vulnerability, courage, and empathy in various media forms through her company, Free Lion Productions.

Hannah Simpson (she/her) is a nationally-known transgender and pansexual writer and speaker who believes not hiding her past will help others to stop hiding their futures. She has been featured by Refinery29, the Guardian, the Advocate, MSNBC, Fox 5 News, and on a segment of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Hannah was alongside US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the two rally speakers before the 2019 Women’s March Alliance March on New York City. In pandemic times, Hannah became a nurse’s aide in a COVID ICU, a morgue tech, and responded to Hurricane Ida in Louisiana with the Red Cross. Find her running her own business selling pride pins and Judaica on Etsy called ChangedMe, as in, “I didn’t change my gender. My gender changed me.”

TELL 82: Thanks for Nothing (in person & live-streaming)
2022-11-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
TELL is an evening of story telling from the mouths and minds of queers in NYC hosted by Drae Campbell at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division since February 2014.
Thanks for Nothing is the theme of the 82nd TELL, on Saturday, November 19, 2022, 7 PM IN PERSON at the Bureau! Featuring: Bell, Tom Cole, rexylafemme, & Maya Suess.
The event will also be live-streamed at youtube.com/@bgsqd
Suggested donation of $10 to benefit the Bureau and the storytellers.
We will pass a bag at the start of the event. Thank you for supporting the Bureau and TELL!
All are welcome to join, with or without a donation.
We ask that all attendees bring proof of vaccination and wear masks. Thank you!

Photograph by Grace Chu
Drae Campbell is an actor and performer who has appeared on stages all over NYC and on the internet, movies and tv. She’s been spotted on the tv shows New Amsterdam and Bull and on the web series Dinette directed by Shaina Feinberg. She can also be found online on Refinery29, IFC.Com and BRICTV to name a few. Some fave stage acting credits: Only You Can Prevent Wildfires, Ricochet Collective, Non-Consensual Relationships With Ghosts, La Mama, My Old Man, Dixon Place, Oph3lia at HERE, The Nosebleed at The Public Theatre. Drae also appeared as a radical lesbian in Taylor Mac’s 24 Decade History Of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Drae’s been hosting and curating TELL at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division for 7 plus years. If you like queer stories, TELL is also a Podcast! www.draecampbell.com

Bell is a multidisciplinary artist from Ireland working as a drag performer, visual artist, mediator & facilitator in Brooklyn, NY. They have a background in clown (Gaulier, Lecoq) and trained in Theatre of the Oppressed at Goldsmiths and with Ulex in Spain. Bell has performed throughout the UK and Europe, co-creating Womb With A View for Shambala Festival (Unique Festival Arena Award), creating and performing Spectrum, a show about revolutionary thinker and autistic advocate Temple Grandin for Edinburgh Fringe and performing in Dada for Girls where they won Most Outstanding Performance (London Fringe) and Most Groundbreaking Performance (Gothenburg Fringe). They are currently working on a series of portraits called People are the Worst, tattooing, performing with their drag / comedy groups Earls 2 Gearls and We’re 4 Men and writing a film.

Tom Cole is a writer and artist living in the Lower East Side. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Petit Versailles, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Dixon Place, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a three-time MacDowell Playwriting fellow and a 2015 Edward Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. He heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions, where he has commissioned new work by Heidi Schreck, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Craig Lucas, and Sheila Callaghan, among others. He co-curates Experiments and Disorders, a literary series at Dixon Place. He has collaborated extensively with Anohni, most recently appearing in She Who Saw Beautiful Things at The Kitchen. His work has been published in several antholgies, including Grove Atlantic’s PATHETIC LITERATURE edited by Eileen Myles.

rexylafemme (aka rex renée leonowicz) is a trans multi-gendered, multi-genre writer, visual + drag artist, performer, organizer, and healer from jackson heights, nyc. as a working class, gender-abundant femme, rexy’s work is a love letter to nyc and radical communities grounded in a politics of resistance, healing, and resilience. in all of rexy’s creative forms, s/he explores the power of revolutionary love in the face of loveless political structures. rexy is also a practicing witch and offers workshops and spiritual mentorship in divination, spellwork, and building intuition with a focus on healing as a revolutionary practice.

Maya Suess is a performer, writer and nonprofit arts professional who has worn all the hats. Most recently as the Director of Programs and Fellowship at apexart, and for many years as Managing Director of the residency and artist’s collective, Flux Factory. Her work has been shown at galleries, museums, film festivals, bars and more in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan. Maya produces and emcees Unprofessional, a quarterly variety show at the Parkside Lounge.
She was born on a small island off the coast of western Canada, is a member of a coop and ex-squat in the LES, and is committed to being a part of keeping queer art alive and thriving in New York City and beyond.

Closed for Thanksgiving, November 23-25
2022-11-23 - 2022-11-25 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
We will be open on Saturday, November 26, and Sunday, November 27.

Book Launch: WILDNESS by the Queer Critique Group at Baxter St. (in person event)
2022-11-27 17:30 - 19:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
On Sunday, Nov. 27th at 5:30pm (ET), the Bureau hosts members of the Queer Critique Group (QCG) at Baxter St. for a presentation and panel discussion of their new publication, WILDNESS. WILDNESS features work by Chris Berntsen, Ali Di Luccia, Liz Liguori, Michael McFadden, Ellie Musgrave, Marc Ohrem-Leclef, Dr. Picturesque, Kaz Senju, Jeanette Spicer, Bill Travis and Sam Zalutsky, as well as writing by renowned photographers, artists and curators Allen Frame, Katherine Hubbard, Duane Michals, Nandita Raman and Drew Sawyer. WILDNESS is inspired by Jack Halberstam’s book Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. In keeping with the spirit of the text, the contributors were encouraged to interpret wildness in their own creative ways. Join us for a panel discussion with contributing artists Kaz Senju, Bill Travis, and Michael McFadden.
Copies of Wildness will be available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

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

Suggested donation $5 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or via Venmo @bgsqd

The QUEER CRITIQUE GROUP at BAXTER ST:
Baxter St at CCNY launched a virtual, queer critique group in June of 2020. This group provides artists the opportunity to obtain critical feedback on lens-based work. It also provides ongoing support to a community of queer artists to learn, grow, and share resources.

World AIDS Day: Celebrating the Works of Walta Borawski and Robert Ferro (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-12-01 19:00 - 20:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Rebel Satori Press is proud to launch a new imprint, The Library of Homosexual Congress, curated by Tom Cardamone and Sven Davisson, dedicated to preserving and promoting provocative works of gay literature, with a focus on the AIDS crisis. It’s inaugural title, Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, edited by Philip Clark and Michael Bronski, is appropriately published on December 1st, World AIDS Day, returning the voice of a significant gay poet, Walta Borawski (1947 -1994) back into the public eye after decades of neglect.
Robert Ferro’s (1941 – 1988) novel of love and family during the early years of AIDS, Second Son, the last of four novels, was published in 1988 shortly before his death of AIDS, following the death of his partner, fellow writer Michael Grumley. This is the first time this seminal novel has returned to print. Anne Rice said “Second Son is transcendently beautiful; exquisitely written, exquisitely restrained.” Its publisher, ReQueered Tales, is dedicated to restoring to circulation a treasure trove of celebrated LGBTQ fiction, primarily from the 60s to the 90s, in new e-book and print editions.

Copies of Second Son and Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski will be available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy of either or both books, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com.
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 at youtube.com/@bgsqd

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

Charlotte Abbott is a book publishing professional with over 30 years of experience. She has been an editor for several top houses, a journalist covering the industry, and a publishing technology expert. She runs her own consultancy firm, FutureProof Content. She is also an enthusiastic swimmer.

Michael Bronski is an independent scholar, journalist, and activist who is the author of numerous books including Pulp Friction: The Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps and A Queer History of the United States. He is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Gerard Cabrera is a Massarican from Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the first American dictionary, Dr. Seuss, and basketball. His writing has appeared in Gay Community News, Acentos Review, Angel Rust, Apricity, JONATHAN, and Kweli. His novel, Homo Novus, was published in October 2022 by Rattling Good Yarns Press, and was supported in part by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Bread Loaf Bakeless Foundation fellowship, along with The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. He lives and works in New York City.

Tom Cardamone is the editor of Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book and co-editor of Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs. He is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning speculative novella Green Thumb as well as the erotic fantasy The Lurid Sea and other works of fiction, including two short story collections.

Philip Clark is the co-editor of Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS and In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton. The recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, he is currently completing a biography of 1960s gay publisher H. Lynn Womack. He lives near Washington, D.C.

Philip F. Clark is the author of The Carnival of Affection (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). He currently teaches at City College, New York, where he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 2016. His work has been published in Tiferet Journal, The Marsh Hawk Press Chapter One Series, Tampa Review, Vox Populi, and Lambda Literary. He has conducted poetry classes at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and his work has most recently been published in On Becoming A Poet: Essential Information About the Writing Craft (Marsh Hawk Press, 2020).

Roz Parr retired recently after almost 40 years in the book industry. She worked as a bookseller at Compendium (London), and Womanbooks, New Morning Books, and A Different Light (NYC). After stints at Oxford University Press and Viking Penguin, she spent 22 years with the Knopf division of Penguin Random House. Besides reading, she enjoys gardening, walking and keeping up with friends.

Eric Rasmussen is an actor, director and writer and was a founding member with Tina Ruan and the late Robbie McCauley of the performance group All Three.

Emanuel Xavier, Latinx poet and LGBTQ activist, was born in Brooklyn, New York. Xavier received a New York City Council Citation for his many cultural contributions to city arts and has also been recipient of an International Latino Book Award, Lambda Literary Award nominations, and American Library Association Over the Rainbow Books selections for his collections which include: Pier Queen, Americano, If Jesus Were Gay, Nefarious, Radiance, and Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier.

Holding Space: Life and Love Through a Queer Lens with Ryan Pfluger (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-12-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Photographer Ryan Pfluger will talk about his new book, Holding Space: Life and Love Through a Queer Lens. Throughout 2020 and 2021, during a time of intense personal and political upheaval, Pfluger set out to capture intimate images of queer, interracial couples, along with personal insight into their relationships in today’s world. Featured together for the first time in Holding Space, this unique collection of modern love in its many forms across the spectrum of race, sexuality, and gender identity and gives space to these couples to share short, revealing stories about their relationships.
Copies of Holding Space: Life and Love Through a Queer Lens are available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com.
Copies are also available on our online store:

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

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

Ryan Pfluger is an artist and photographer, whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Time, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. Ryan lives in Los Angeles, California, with their dog, Sarah Connor. Born and raised in New York, they received an MFA in Photography at School of Visual Arts. (Portrait photograph by Travis Chantar)

Poetry and Fiction from the End of the World (in person event & live-streaming)
2022-12-11 17:00 - 19:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Monica McClure, S. Galvin and Alexandrine Ogundimu read poetry and prose from recent years of life on Earth. Galvin and Ogundimu are also celebrating their recent moves to Brooklyn from Seattle and Chicago, respectively.
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

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

* Monica McClure is a writer and performer based in New York. She is the author of Tender Data (Birds LLC, 2015) and chapbooks Mala (Poor Claudia, 2014) and Mood Swing (Snacks Press, 2013).
Her poetry and critical writing can be found in Tin House, The Claudius App, Jubilat, Lambda Literary Review Spotlight Series, Emily Books, The Hairpin, The Huffington Post, The Awl, Spork Press, The Los Angeles Review, Intercourse Magazine, The Lit Review, and CultureStrike / The Margins.
McClure is a poetry and fiction editor for The Atlas Review. In 2014, she was chosen by Dorothea Lasky as the Summer Literary Seminar contest winner for Poetry. She has performed at Cage Gallery, Pioneer Works, Dixon Place Theatre, The Silent Barn, and &Now 2015.

* Sarah Galvin is a poet and essayist from Seattle who moved to Brooklyn a mere three months ago. They are the author of The Three Einsteins (Poor Claudia) The Best Party of Our Lives (Sasquatch) and Ugly Time (Gramma Poetry) now to be found in Black Ocean’s catalogue. Galvin has recently completed a yet-unnamed manuscript which they will be reading from at this event.
Galvin is a contributor to The Stranger, The Guardian, and Vice Magazine. Their poems have appeared in Anarchist Review of Books, WIDMA, The American Poetry Society, New Ohio Review, Pinwheel, and io.
They are the author of a series of reviews of food found on the ground called The Pedestretarian. Galvin was nominated for a James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award and considered for what would have been Washington State’s first Radio Flyer Wagon DUI.

*Alexandrine Ogundimu is a writer from New Jersey and Indiana. She lives in the zeitgeist.

WMN Pop Up at the Bureau
2022-12-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY, 10011, United States
Come visit the WMN pop up shop at the Bureau on Thursday, December 15, 2022, from 5 to 7 PM! Issues of WMN and merch will be available for purchase.

About WMN:
Venezuelan designer/artist Florencia Alvarado, American photographer Jeanette Spicer and Swedish designer Sara Duell, are the dykes behind WMN – a publication of lesbian art and poetry. We have individually come to identify ourselves as lesbian in different ways and at various times, but found commonality between our love for WMN, and interest in art and representation of marginalized communities.
When thinking of our own identifications, we realized that the term lesbian was in ways a signifier of the past, and could even be considered radical. This awareness sparked our inspiration and desire to gather and share work of other people identifying as lesbian, in order to create a conversation around different terms of identification, and how and why we use them. This zine is meant to provide a much needed space to show the intimacy, struggle, wonder and everything in between, of what it means to be a lesbian in this political climate and time.
WMN – lesbian art and poetry publication was founded in May 2019 in Brooklyn NY.
