21st Feb
2013
2013
Cynthia Carr in conversation with Amy Scholder on The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
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Archive of ‘Queer Studies’ category
City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in conjunction with the San Francisco Art Institute and Bloomsbury Books present an evening with Cynthia Carr and Amy Scholder celebrating the release of Cythnia Carr’s new book Fire in the Belly : The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury Books), October 3, 2012.
In December 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington made headlines when it responded to protests from the Catholic League by voluntarily censoring an excerpt of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from its show on American portraiture. Why a work of art could stir such emotions is at the heart of Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, the first biography of a beleaguered art-world figure who became one of the most important voices of his generation. Wojnarowicz emerged from a Dickensian childhood that included orphanages, abusive and absent parents, and a life of hustling on the street. He first found acclaim in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and ’80s for its abandoned buildings, junkies, and burgeoning art scene. Along with Keith Haring, Nan Goldin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wojnarowicz helped redefine art for the times. As uptown art collectors looked downtown for the next big thing, this community of cultural outsiders was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. The ensuing culture war, the neighborhood’s gentrification, and the AIDS crisis then devastated the East Village scene. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven. Carr’s brilliant biography traces the untold story of a controversial and seminal figure at a pivotal moment in American culture.
Cynthia Carr is a writer and cultural critic living in New York City. She has served as staff writer for The Village Voice and has also written about performance art and culture for ArtForum, LA Weekly, Interview, and Mirabella. She is the author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century.
Amy Scholder is the editorial director of the Feminist Press. Over the past twenty-five years, she has worked with David Wojnarowicz, Sapphire, Kathy Acker, Karen Finley, Barbara Hammer, June Jordan, Joni Mitchell, Kate MIllett, Judith Butler, Mary Woronov, Kate Bornstein, Jill Johnston, Justin Vivian Bond, Laurie Weeks, and many more writers and artists. She divides her time between New York City and Los Angeles
On Wednesday, April 11, 2012, Michael Long discussed his new book I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters (City Lights) at City Lights Bookstore.
I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters
Published on the centennial of his birth, and in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington, here is Bayard Rustin’s life story told in his own words.
Bayard Rustin has been called the “lost prophet” of the civil rights movement. A master strategist and tireless activist, he is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the U.S. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement and played a deeply influential role in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolence.
Despite these achievements, Rustin often remained in the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era.
Here we have Rustin in his own words in a collection of over 150 of his letters; his correspondents include the major progressives of his day — for example, Eleanor Holmes Norton, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker, and of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bayard Rustin’s eloquent, impassioned voice, his ability to chart the path “from protest to politics,” is both timely and deeply informative. As the Occupy movement ushers America into a pivotal election year, and as politicians and citizens re-assess their goals and strategies, these letters provide direct access to the strategic thinking and tactical planning that led to the successes of one of America’s most transformative and historic social movements.
[A note from editor Michael Long: I thank Nancy D. Kates and Bennett Singer, co-producers/directors of Brother Outsider, for my use of material in their excellent documentary about Rustin. I am especially grateful to Question Why Films, co-owned by Kates and Singer, for my use of an interview that Kates conducted with Dr. Robert Ascher. -- ML]
With a foreword by Julian Bond.
Praise for I Must Resist:
“Rustin was a life-long agitator for justice. He changed America – and the world – for the better. This collection of his letters makes his life and his passions come vividly alive, and helps restore him to history, a century after his birth. I Must Resist makes for inspiring reading.” — John D’Emilio, author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
“Bayard Rustin’s courageously candid letters, most of which have never before been available to researchers, provide fascinating glimpses into the private life of one of history’s most reticent public figures.” — Clayborne Carson, Founding Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
“These letters – poetic, incisive, passionate, and above all political in the broadest meaning of the word – span almost four decades not only of Bayard Rustin’s life but of the emotional and spiritual life of America. There is hardly a social justice movement during this time in which Rustin was not involved from pacifism to ending poverty to battles for sexual freedom. Michael Long’s brilliant editing has created a compelling historical narrative and reading these letters is to be witness to the ever-evolving conscience that guides our country’s endangered, but surviving, commitment to freedom.” — Michael Bronksi, author of A Queer History of the United States
“Bayard Rustin was a committed but very complicated person. This marvelously annotated collection of letters explain the spirit, and evolution of the thoughts and actions of an often overlooked key figure in the 20th century civil and human rights movement.” — Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought, University of Pennsylvania, and former Chair United States Commission on Civil Rights
“I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters provides fascinating insights into Bayard Rustin’s activist life. It includes hundreds of letters in Rustin’s own words that reveal his tireless and brave efforts to promote American civil rights, as well as his personal tragedies. All aspects of Rustin’s experiences are captured in these letters, including his struggles with opponents dedicated to silencing him as an international symbol of nonviolent protests against racial injustice. This remarkable and deeply moving publication is a must-read.” — William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University.
12th Jun
2012
2012
An Interview with Michael Long, Editor of I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters
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On Wednesday, April 11, 2012, Michael Long spoke with City Lights Director of Marketing, Stacey Lewis, about his new book I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters (City Lights) at City Lights Bookstore.
I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters
Published on the centennial of his birth, and in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington, here is Bayard Rustin’s life story told in his own words.
Bayard Rustin has been called the “lost prophet” of the civil rights movement. A master strategist and tireless activist, he is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the U.S. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement and played a deeply influential role in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolence.
Despite these achievements, Rustin often remained in the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era.
Here we have Rustin in his own words in a collection of over 150 of his letters; his correspondents include the major progressives of his day — for example, Eleanor Holmes Norton, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker, and of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bayard Rustin’s eloquent, impassioned voice, his ability to chart the path “from protest to politics,” is both timely and deeply informative. As the Occupy movement ushers America into a pivotal election year, and as politicians and citizens re-assess their goals and strategies, these letters provide direct access to the strategic thinking and tactical planning that led to the successes of one of America’s most transformative and historic social movements.
[A note from editor Michael Long: I thank Nancy D. Kates and Bennett Singer, co-producers/directors of Brother Outsider, for my use of material in their excellent documentary about Rustin. I am especially grateful to Question Why Films, co-owned by Kates and Singer, for my use of an interview that Kates conducted with Dr. Robert Ascher. -- ML]
With a foreword by Julian Bond.
Praise for I Must Resist:
“Rustin was a life-long agitator for justice. He changed America – and the world – for the better. This collection of his letters makes his life and his passions come vividly alive, and helps restore him to history, a century after his birth. I Must Resist makes for inspiring reading.” — John D’Emilio, author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
“Bayard Rustin’s courageously candid letters, most of which have never before been available to researchers, provide fascinating glimpses into the private life of one of history’s most reticent public figures.” — Clayborne Carson, Founding Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
“These letters – poetic, incisive, passionate, and above all political in the broadest meaning of the word – span almost four decades not only of Bayard Rustin’s life but of the emotional and spiritual life of America. There is hardly a social justice movement during this time in which Rustin was not involved from pacifism to ending poverty to battles for sexual freedom. Michael Long’s brilliant editing has created a compelling historical narrative and reading these letters is to be witness to the ever-evolving conscience that guides our country’s endangered, but surviving, commitment to freedom.” — Michael Bronksi, author of A Queer History of the United States
“Bayard Rustin was a committed but very complicated person. This marvelously annotated collection of letters explain the spirit, and evolution of the thoughts and actions of an often overlooked key figure in the 20th century civil and human rights movement.” — Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought, University of Pennsylvania, and former Chair United States Commission on Civil Rights
“I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters provides fascinating insights into Bayard Rustin’s activist life. It includes hundreds of letters in Rustin’s own words that reveal his tireless and brave efforts to promote American civil rights, as well as his personal tragedies. All aspects of Rustin’s experiences are captured in these letters, including his struggles with opponents dedicated to silencing him as an international symbol of nonviolent protests against racial injustice. This remarkable and deeply moving publication is a must-read.” — William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University.
3rd May
2012
2012
Gayle Rubin reads from Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader
Filed in Queer Studies, San Francisco
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Gayle Rubin celebrated the release of Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press) on Thursday, February 23, 2012, 7:00 P.M. at the City Lights Bookstore.
Deviations is the definitive collection of writing by Gayle S. Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of “The Traffic in Women,” an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, “Thinking Sex,” she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory’s foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture.
Gayle S. Rubin is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is a cultural anthropologist and activist whose work has been influential in the areas of sex and gender studies. Rubin was a “pro-sex” activist during the Feminist Sex Wars of the 80′s and she co-founded the first known lesbian SM group, Samois.5th Apr
2012
2012
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reading from Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
Filed in Queer Studies
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On February 15, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore stopped by City Lights Bookstore to read from Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? (AKPress), joined by several of the book’s contributors: Debanuj DasGupta, Harris Kornstein, Booh Edouardo and Gina de Vries!
Gay culture has become the ultimate nightmare of consumerism, whether it’s an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! This anthology reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change.
“These essays—alternately moving and sprightly, contemplative and outraged—display the power of presenting an alternative to the mainstream: a world of greater tolerance, acceptance, support, and creativity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s coruscating eye and clear head is what queers need if we are to survive as anything other than a tamed branch of consumer society, based on assimilation, repression, and despair. These essays come like a plunge into a forest pool of revitalizing joy, honesty, and common sense. Read them. Now. No—not tomorrow. Now!”
—Samuel R. Delany, author of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
“You may have thought you understood human nature before you read this book; after reading it you will be humbled by all you failed to grasp until now. America invented identity politics but here those identities have been multiplied and articulated as never before.”
—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story
“Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots is a collection of essays that not only examine the intricacies of the current socio-political climate within the realm of the gay/queer/trans world, but also show how important it is for us to interface and aggressively seek to inform the world view of the culture at large… Thanks, Mattilda, for the insights, intellectual rigor and the glittering ammunition with which to destroy and rebuild.”
—Mx Justin Vivian Bond, singer/songwriter and author of Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels
“This book plumbs the most important question facing queers in the 21st century: how the hell did we go from forming a crucial part of the ’60s ‘lib’
rainbow, and from mastering, refining, and successfully deploying nonviolent resistance
with ACT UP, only to end up creating for ourselves a world of martial and marital law every bit as sterile, constricting, and amoral as the world we once fled like the plague?”
—Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men
“These essays excavate masculinity, unearthing the complex and pervasive structures that police and construct it and exposing the beautiful resilience of its self-avowed refusers and failures. These pieces telescope between analysis of the structures of gendered racialization that produce body norms and the daily physical and emotional traumas and toils of surviving and resisting, providing complex and badly needed ways to imagine and reimagine faggotry.”
—Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel, Pulling Taffy, and the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift, and Maximumrocknroll, and lives in San Francisco.
On Wednesday, February 1, 2012, noted author Edmund White was at City Lights Bookstore reading from Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel (Bloomsbury).
The tantalizing story of a decades-long friendship between two men that charts the sexual revolution from both gay and straight perspectives.
Jack Holmes is in love. Sadly for him, his feelings are not returned, at least not in the way he would like them to be. It doesn’t look as if there will ever be anyone else he falls for: the other men he takes to bed never last long.
Jack’s friend Will Wright comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer and, like Jack, works on the Northern Review. He is shy and lives alone, working on his novel. Jack will introduce Will to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry, but is discrete about his own adventures in love – for this is sixties New York, literary and intense, before gay liberation; a concoction of old society, bohemians rich and poor, sleek European immigrants and transplanted Midwesterners. Against this charged backdrop, the different lives of Jack and Will intertwine, and as their loves come and go, they will always be, at the very least, friends.
Edmund White’s startling perceptions of American society are here deployed to dazzling effect, as character after character is delicately and colorfully rendered and one social milieu after another brought vividly to life. White is a connoisseur of the nuances of personality and mood, and here unveils his very human cast in all their radical individuality. With fabulously on target insights, narrative daring and a gifted sense of the rueful rough-and-tumble of life, Jack Holmes and His Friend is a beautifully sculpted exploration of sexuality and sensibility.
Edmund White is the author of many books including A Boys’ Own Story and The Married Man. He has been made an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters and last year received a literary prize from the Festival of Deauville. Ten of his books have been translated into French, including his magisterial biography of Jean Genet. His novel, Hotel De Dream, is a deftly layered novel of longing, both gay and straight. Edmund White is also the author of The Flaneur which explores parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many locals, luring the reader into the fascinating and seductive backstreets of his personal Paris. City Boy: My Life During the 1960s and 1970s is Edmund White’s memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultous 1970s.
On Thursday, December 8, 2011 at City Lights Bookstore, William E. Jones read from Halsted Plays Himself (Semiotexte Books).
Fred Halsted‘s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy.
Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989.
In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted–to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time–and what it looked like when it collapsed.
William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who teaches film history at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many video installations. His films and videos were the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. He has worked in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox.
22nd Dec
2011
2011
Dennis Cooper and Dodie Bellamy celebrate the release of their new books, The Marbled Swarm and the buddhist
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On Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Dennis Cooper & Dodie Bellamy joined us at City Lights to celebrate the release of their new books, The Marbled Swarm and the buddhist.
The long-anticipated new novel from literary icon Dennis Cooper is a moody and foreboding tale of a son’s unwitting devotion to a possibly insane father. The Marbled Swarm (Harper Perennial) tells the story of a son raised by a charmingly psychopathic father and taught a private language only the two of them know. With its Parisian and French countryside setting; its trappings of high art, old money, and haute cuisine that obscure an unspeakable system of coercion and surrender; and its completely original, lilting voice; The Marbled Swarm may read as a departure from Cooper’s earlier work – a new beginning, of sorts. But once again – with secret passages, events that may or may not have happened, and a father-son relationship strangely heavy with sexual tension – readers will find themselves enveloped in a world only Dennis Cooper could create.
What is personal, what is public? In our electronic age, can anybody tell the difference? While ending an affair with a Buddhist teacher, Dodie Bellamy wrote about it simultaneously on her blog. In her experiment in writing through states of extremis, she explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and her confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. the buddhist (Allone Editions) becomes a celebration of marginalized subjectivity as enacted in the work of female artists from Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneeman, to Bhanu Kapil and Ariana Reines. This volume contains the essence of the blog, as well as more extended narratives too explicit to post on line. Like Duras’ The Lover, Bellamy’s writing glorifies the abject and the discarded; it is a passionate evocation of a love lost and a raw depth plumbed.
Dennis Cooper – called a “disquieting genius” by Vanity Fair – is the acclaimed author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France’s Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God, Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; Ugly Man; and Smothered in Hugs. His plays “Jerk” and “Them” are performed widely across Europe and the United States.
Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Dodie is the author of Feminine Hijinx, Broken English, The Letters of Mina Harker, and Pink Steam.
Judith Halberstam stopped by City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, November 3, 2011, to discuss her new book The Queer Art Of Failure (Duke University Press.)
The Queer Art Of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.
Judith Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press), as well as Female Masculinity and Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, both also published by Duke University Press.
