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.

Close Calls is the theme of the third installment of TELL.

Featuring special guests:

Silas Howard

Greg Newton

Jade Payne

Lady Quesa’Dilla

 

Lady Quesa’Dilla AKA Alejandro Rodríguez– Alejandro is a native Tejan@ from the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez border. Their work is at the intersection of cultural identity, drag, and community. “The Brown Queen,” an autobiographical solo performance about growing up queer in the southwest, premiered at HERE Arts Center in the spring of 2010. Most recent solo performances include “My Tia Lupe” and “The Faggot in the Pink House”. He has performed in New York City, El Paso, Texas, and Chiapas, Mexico. Alejandro is a member of The  House of Bushwig, as Lady Quesa’Dilla, duties include Volunteer Coordinator for the annual Bushwig Festival.

Alejandro can also be found as an Information and Referral Specialist at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in Manhattan; and as a Teaching Artist in The Bronx and Brooklyn.

Alejandro holds a BA in Theater from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and a MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and is an alum from The Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics.

Resides in Brooklyn.

SILAS HOWARD began his career in degeneracy by playing music with the legendary punk band Tribe8.  Silas’s first feature film By Hook or By Crook, was a Sundance Film Festival premiere and five-time Best Feature winner. His documentary, What I Love About Dying, premiered at Sundance Film Festival and festivals internationally. Silas’s writing has been published in various anthologies and magazines. His second feature, Sunset Stories premiered at the SXSW film festival in 2012. Recently he directed Hudson Valley Ballers, a new webseries starring SNL veterans Paula Pell and James Anderson.

Failed academic Greg Newton earned his BA at Hunter College, majoring in religion and minoring in art history. He completed his coursework and examinations for a PhD in art history at CUNY Graduate Center before leaving academia to co-found the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division with his partner Donnie Jochum. He taught art history and writing at Parsons for 8 years while working on his dissertation on monochrome painting. He continues to pursue his profound interest in passivity, emptiness, silence, withdrawal, refusal, erasure, failure, uselesness, and negativity in general at the Bureau.

Jade Payne is a cosmic-mixed-race-diesel-femme, musician, and sound-sculptor/engineer. She plays guitar and electronic music in the two bands, Aye Nako and Holotropik. Jade enjoys geeking out about techy stuff, crystals, unknown pleasures, and the occult. She lives in Brooklyn with a chihuahua named Broccolini.