BGSQDBureau of General Services—Queer Division
BGSQD
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.
FIRED! is the theme of the 81st TELL, on Saturday, June 4, 2022, 7 PM IN PERSON at the Bureau! Featuring: Heather Lynn Johnson, Elizabeth Koke, & Justin Sayre.
Safety protocol:
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:
Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.
If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.
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.
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.
Elizabeth Koke is a writer, performer, and organizer from NYC. She has participated in readings and performances at Dixon Place, Wild Project, Brooklyn Museum, Joe’s Pub, and other assorted venues, backyards, and dive bars. She is currently Creative Director for Housing Works where she enjoys a healthy balance of thrift shopping and hell raising. She lives in the Lower East Side where she spends time at her favorite local bar, the Parkside Lounge, with her rescue dog, Onyx.
Justin Elizabeth Sayre is a playwright and performer who Michael Musto called, “Oscar Wilde meets Whoopi Goldberg.” Sayre is a fixture of the Downtown Cabaret Scene in New York, first with their long-running variety show, The Meeting (Bistro Award-winning & 2 MAC nominations). They are currently in residency at Joe’s Pub at the Public with their new variety show, Assorted Fruit. As a playwright, Sayre’s work has appeared at Dixon Place, The Wild Project, The Celebration Theatre, Dynasty Typewriter, and La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Their 12-part-epic Ravenswood Manor, a Camp-Horror-Soap-Opera, called “a sharply written and well-acted exemplar of the horror-comedy genre,” by the LA Times and is currently being developed with Sony Television and Rupaul. Sayre has written a series of YA Novels, Husky, Pretty, and Mean, released by Penguin Books, and the book, From Gay to Z: A Compendium of Queer Culture just released by Chronicle Books. Sayre has written for Television, working with Michael Patrick King on his Hit CBS comedy, 2 Broke Girls and Fox’s The Cool Kids. Sayre also appeared on HBO’s The Comeback with Lisa Kudrow.
Heather Lynn Johnson is an artist and poet living in Brooklyn whose work is characterized by its lyricism and cultural critique. Heather’s formal approach to the narrative, whether visual or poetic, is distinguished by her willingness to lay bare her own existence. Centered around Black American liberation and culture with an emphasis on objectification and lost histories, Heather uses an autobiographical framework and considers her work self-portraits, imbued by her lived experience as a butch Black lesbian. The 2019 Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellow and 2017 Literary Fellow for Queer|Art|Mentorship, Heather is the author of “The Survival Guide For Queer Black Youth” (Inpatient Press, 2017).