BGSQDBureau of General Services—Queer Division
BGSQD
Join writers Hugh Ryan and Keiko Lane as they read from their work and discuss writing about and telling queer secrets. As scholars, activists, artists, and survivors of the queer and HIV/AIDS activisms of the 1990s, they both explore questions about how narratives and subtext change through time. Are sexualities, relationships, and political actions that were taboo 20 or 30 years ago still embargoed stories? How do tell them now? What stories do we think the dead would tell if they were still alive? What do our ghosts want us to do now?
Keiko Lane will read from her new memoir Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, and Hugh Ryan will read from new works-in-progress. Their conversation will be moderated by Joshua Gutterman Tranen.
The reading and conversation will be followed by a book signing and reception.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD
Keiko Lane is an Okinawan American poet, essayist, memoirist, and psychotherapist writing about the intersections of queer culture, oppression resistance, liberation psychology, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization, and reproductive justice. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Feminist Porn Book, and Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art is her first book.
Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator, and most recently, the author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which won the Israel Fishman Stonewall Book Award from American Library Association and the biennial Wiliiam A. Percy award from the Warren Johansson Foundation. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association.
Joshua Gutterman Tranen is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. His essays on the cultural history of HIV/AIDS have appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Poetry Project.