queer

Queer Memoir: LEATHER

by Viviane on 03/02/2024

in Events, queer

QMLeather Queer Memoir: LEATHER

New York’s only queer storytelling event is back with a special guest curator, Sassafras Lowrey, editor of the Kicked Out anthology and nationally known storyteller. This Leather themed storytelling evening is a benefit for Boston’s Write Here Write Now founded by Toni Amato

Location: Queers For Economic Justice 147 W. 24th St NYC

Announcing the amazing line-up of storytellers:
Laura Antoniou
Sinclair Sexsmith
Emily Millay-Haddad
Kelli Dunham
Ignacio Rivera
Sara Vibes

Sassafras Lowrey

Laura Antoniou is the author of the well known Marketplace series of erotic novels. As a presenter, panelist, and keynote speaker, Laura has appeared at dozens of conferences over more than twenty years, both entertaining and delivering an occasional verbal indictment. She has also appeared at colleges and universities, including NYU, Rutgers, Columbia and the University of Washington. Laura lives in Queens, NY with her wife Karen, and happily serves as boy to Kim Attica. Friends have called her all sorts of names. Current favorites being “Renaissance Perv” by Midori, “Good Boy!” by Kim and of course, “best thing that ever happened to me” by Karen.

Sara Vibes a black, polyamorous, queer, kinky, dandy, macho femme princess born and raised in New York City. She is The 25th International Ms Leather 2011 and an active member in The Leather, BDSM, Poly, and LGBT communities in New York City and beyond. She has taught at Playhouse in Baltimore, Dark Odyssey, and International Mr. Leather and many other events and places during her title year. She will also be a contributor of the Perverts of Color Anthology and Salacious Magazine. Her mission is to make sex education accessible to everyone. She hopes to rip the veil off of the shame surrounding sex and sexuality through self love and exploration with people that care about each other.

Sinclair Sexsmith runs the award-winning personal online writing project Sugarbutch Chronicles: The Gender, and Relationship Adventures of a Kinky Queer Butch Top at sugarbutch.net. With work published in various anthologies and websites, including Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, she is the guest editor of Best Lesbian Erotica 2012, and her first full-length erotica anthology, Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica, will be published by Cleis Press in April 2012. Mr. Sexsmith writes, teaches, and performs focusing on the subjects of sex, gender, and relationships. More information on her at mrsexsmith.com.

KELLI DUNHAM is a ex-nun, genderqueerious stand-up nerd comic and author of four books of humorous non-fiction, including two children’s books being used by Sonlight conservative home schooling association in their science curriculum. She has appeared on Showtime, the Discovery Channel and was once asked to emcee a livestock auction. Her website is kellidunham.com. She is the co-founder, with Genne Murphy, of Queer Memoir. Her hilarious new family-secret revealing show, Normal at Nite: Good Times & Family Matters with Perfect Strangers (a collaboration with R Eric Thomas) is debuting February 18th at NYC’s Stonewall Inn.

Ignacio Rivera aka Papí Coxxx identifies as a Queer, Trans, gender-fluid, polyamorous, kinky, Black-Boricua. Ignacio, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun “they,” is a lecturer, activist, wanna-be-filmmaker, sex educator, sex worker, and performance artist, sharing spoken word, one-person shows, and storytelling internationally. Their work has appeared in ColorLines, Ebony, Yellow Medicine Review and in their chapbooks, Las Alas, co-authored by Maceo Cabrera Estévez; Ingridients; and Thoughts, Rants and What Some Might Call Poetry. A proud mom of a 21 year-old daughter, Ignacio is the recipient of a Marsha A. Gómez Cultural Heritage Award from LLEGÓ: The National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Organization. They are also the founder of Poly Patao Productions (P3), which is dedicated to producing sex-positive workshops, performances, educational opportunities and events that are specially geared toward queer women, transgender, multi-gender, gender queer, gender-non-conforming and gender variant folx of color. Ignacio has been facilitating workshops, doing lectures and creating events for kinky, kinky-curious Queer/Trans POC’s and their white queer and trans allies for over a decade. http://polypataoproductions.com/

Emily Millay Haddad is an independent filmmaker, writer, director, activist and media professional living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She had the words to call herself a “feminist” when she was five, a “white girl” when she was nine, a “lesbian” when she was 17, a “bisexual” shortly after that, and a “queer” when she was 19. At 20, she was “polyamorous;” at 21, she learned about “kiki” dykes in the butch/femme spectrum of 1950s dyke bars and finally had a word for her gender. By 24, she had the words for “kinky” and “switch.” And at 27, she learned the hard way that being “working class” was more than just her history or an economic label. She brings all these words and many more, as well as the life experiences they inadequately describe, to her labor and her yearning as an artist and a lover.

Sassafras Lowrey is an international award winning queer author, artist and activist and has been involved in leather community for nearly a decade. Sassafras’ prose have been included in numerous anthologies and ze tours to colleges, universities and community centers across the country facilitating workshops that support LGBTQ/leather people in telling their stories. Sassafras lives in Brooklyn, New York with hir Daddy. You can learn more about Sassafras at www.PoMoFreakshow.com.

Emily Photo credit: Kjerstin Rossi

Holland Cotter:

WASHINGTON — With the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” one of our federally funded museums, the National Portrait Gallery, here in the city of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” has gone where our big private museums apparently dare not tread, deep into the history of art by and about gay artists.

Over the last few years there has been plenty of speculation as to how this show would shape up, and when a copy of the catalog arrived, I felt a bit let down. All the artists were well known — stars — as was most of the work. The whole enterprise looked like an exercise in Hall of Fame-building, rather than like an effort to chip away at the very idea of hierarchy and exclusion. We were getting a “pride” display, an old model, very multicultural 1980s.

Then, when the Catholic League and several members of Congress demanded the removal of a piece — a video by David Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) that included an image of ants crawling on a crucifix — and the gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, said O.K., we really were in the 1980s, back in the culture wars. Which led me to understand the show in a somewhat different way.

On reconsideration, it seems more purposeful, as if specifically designed to avoid any controversy that might distract from the major point it was trying to make: namely, that work of gay artists was fundamental to the invention of American modernism. Or, put another way, difference had created the mainstream.

But how was the presence of difference defined in art? By subject matter? By style? By the sexual orientation of the artist? And isn’t gayness, the most familiar form of such difference, a period concept, inapplicable to life and art of a century ago? Today the very word is used for convenience rather than categorically, with “queer” often used. (One way to think of it: gay is something you are; queer is something you choose to be outside of the heterosexual norm.)

Clearly the exhibition covers a lot of ground and raises many questions. It also has wonderful art, and the art stays wonderful whether you ask the questions or not. Again this seems part of the plan devised by the curators, David. C. Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, and Jonathan D. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. They have assembled a historical show with a very specific slant, but with rewards for everyone.

Link

august10 Sideshow: The Queer Literary Carnival: Erotica

Sideshow: The Queer Literary Carnival
Hosted by Cheryl B. & Sinclair Sexsmith

Location: Phoenix, 447 East 13th Street @ Avenue A, NYC
Cost: Free
More info: http://www.queerliterarycarnival.com/
Twitter: @sideshowseries

sideshow april13 500x259 Sideshow: The Queer Literary Carnival

Hosted by Cheryl B. & Sinclair Sexsmith

Location:  The Phoenix, 447 East 13th Street (Avenue A), East Village
Doors open at 7pm. Reading: 8pm.
Cost: Free. $4 drink specials
Blog: http://sideshowreadingseries.wordpress.com
Twitter: @sideshowseries

This month’s theme is Secrets, starring:

  • Kate Bornstein (Hello, Cruel World)
  • Sam J. Miller (The Rumpus)
  • Seth Clark Silberman aka PhDJ (Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction)
  • Kathleen Warnock (Drunken! Careening! Writers!)

The Readers

Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright and performance artist whose work to date has been in service to sex positivity, gender anarchy, and the building a coalition of those who live on cultural margins. Her work recently earned her an award from the Stonewall Democrats of New York City, and two citations from New York City Council members. Her latest book, “Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives To Suicide For Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws,” is an underground best-seller. Other published works include the books “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”; and My Gender Workbook. Her books are taught in over 150 colleges around the world.

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His work has appeared in places like The Minnesota Review, Washington Square, Fiction International, and The Rumpus. For more info check out samjmiller.com or facebook.com/samjmiller

Seth Clark Silberman aka PhDJ is a fantastical NYC DJ Writer Photographer. He was the first junior faculty to teach lesbian and gay studies at Yale University, where he coordinated the first academic conference on Michael Jackson. His academic work has been included in the journals GLQ: A Journal for Lesbian and Gay Studies and Social Semiotics. His fiction has been included in the Lambda Award-winning anthology Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction, edited by Edmund White and Don Weise, and in Quickies: Short Short Fiction on Gay Male Desire, edited by James C. Johnstone.

Kathleen Warnock is a playwright and editor. Her plays have been seen in New York, Ireland, London and regionally. She is Playwrights Company manager of Emerging Artists Theatre, and director of the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Series for TOSOS Theatre. She is also editor of Best Lesbian Erotica. She is tired.

The Curators

Cheryl B. (cherylb.com) is an award-winning writer, poet and performer. Her work appears in dozens of print and online publications, including; Ping Pong, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution (Seal Press, 2007) and BLOOM, among many others. She has appeared at most major New York City literary evenings and toured throughout the U.S, Canada and the U.K.

Sinclair Sexsmith runs the award-winning personal online writing project Sugarbutch Chronicles: The Sex, Gender, and Relationship Adventures of a Kinky Queer Butch Top at sugarbutch.net. With work published in various anthologies, including the Best Lesbian Erotica series, Sometimes She Lets Me: Butch/Femme Erotica, and Visible: A Femmethology volume 2, Mr. Sexsmith enjoys whiskey, topping, the serial comma, political activism, and has been known to get on her knees in order to fix the strappy sandals of a queer femme. Sugarbutch Star chapbooks are available, if you ask nicely (and have ten bucks).

Location: Bluestockings Bookstore
Street: 172 Allen St., NYC

Body Heat is a fierce, sassy, irreverent Femme artist collective setting performance art communities ablaze and smashing Femme stereotypes. They’ll challenge your assumptions, entertain the hell out of you, and leave you panting and begging for more!

Armed with an arsenal of erotic song, dance, camp, poetry, smut, and prose Body Heat was hailed by the Center for Sex Positive Culture (Seattle, WA.) as “The best Femme porn writers in the country.” These `pull no punches,’ `it’s never too nasty,’ power femmes are touring to support and promote queer femmes and their contributions to erotica, the sex industry and the sex-positive movement. Thru the use of art and performance they are literally, visually, emotionally, psychologically and socially revealing a more complex sexual identity for queer femmes.

The line-up will feature :

  • Kathleen Delaney (Atlanta, GA.)–Body Heat founder and spoken-word performer
  • Meliza Bañales (San Francisco, CA)–Sister Spit vet, former slam champion, filmmaker, writer
  • Jen Cross (San Francisco, CA)–published author and sex-workshop facilitator
  • Nicky Click (Durham, NH)–Nationally renowned singer / performer
  • Alex Cafarelli (Oakland, CA.)–martial artist, writer, versatile performer, and Psycick Slutz co-founder
  • Vagina Jenkins (Atlanta, GA)–The Queen of Queer burlesque
  • with special guests:
  • Diana Cage (NYC)–former On Our Backs editor, radio personality, and acclaimed author
  • Gigi Frost (Boston, MA)–The Femme Show founder & performer
  • J. Dellecave (Riverside, CA)–dancer and performance artist extraordinaire