PANIC! is New York City’s only ongoing LGBT reading series, held every last Wednesday of the month at Nowhere in the East Village. Hosted by Charlie Vázquez, PANIC! offers changing themes and features writers from different sectors of New York City’s LGBT community. The New York Public Library is thrilled to present PANIC! @ the Library on Saturday, October 17th at 2:30pm at the Jefferson Market Library, 427 Avenue of the Americas at West 10th Street, 212.243.4334. The scheduled readers are: 

Charlie Vázquez is a writer of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent. His fiction and essays have been published in various anthologies such as the iconoclastic volumes Queer and Catholic and Best Gay Love Stories. His writings have appeared in Chelsea Clinton News, Mensbook Journal, Advocate.com, NYPress.com and many other print and online publications. Charlie hosts the monthly reading series called Panic! which focuses on unusual and original writing – from erotica to poetry to horror. His first fiction collection, Latino Bizarro and Corazón, will be published in November of 2009. 

Brandon Lacy Campos is a 31-year-old queer Afro-Boricua, African-American,Objibwe, and Euro poz kid with lots to say. His writing has appeared in Queer Codex, Chile Love, BlackPower.com, Mariposas, Under What Bandera and a number ofother anthologies and journals. In February, 2010 Summerfolk Press will release Brandon’s first solo work, It Ain’t Truth If It Doesn’t Hurt.

Rosalind Christine Lloyd is a contemporary fiction and erotica writer (and occasionalpoet) whose work has appeared in over 15 anthologies including the Best Lesbian Erotica and Best American Erotica series. Her latest piece was published last year in Spanked: Red Cheek Erotica and another is slated for publication in Bottoms Up in late summer2009. Rosalind is working on two e-books, a novel and a collection of her published short fiction. She lives in downtown New York with her queer version of a nuclear family. 

A New York based spoken word/performance artist, Karen Jaime is also a cultural activist and writer. From 2002 to 2005, she served as the host/curator of the Friday Night Slam at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café and can be seen along with Miguel Algarin in the 2006 spoken word documentary SPIT.

We hope you’ll join us and look out for the next PANIC! @ the Library reading in November at the Mott Haven Branch.

 
In July we were very happy to host the winners of the newly-created LGBT Visiting Scholars Program. Thanks to the program, each year the Library will appoint up to three Martin Duberman Visiting Scholars who will be provided with stipends to travel to New York City to conduct LGBT studies research in the Library’s collections. The fellowship is targeted to emerging scholars—those without permanent academic appointments. The fellowship has been generously supported by LGBT Committee Ambassador and eminent historian Martin Duberman and his partner Eli Zal. At the end of July, the winners met with Martin Duberman for lunch to discuss their research.  Above is a snapshot from the lunch, from left to right: Jason Baumann; Martin Duberman Visiting Scholars Whitney Strub, Jason Ezell, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Steven Fullwood; and Martin Duberman.

Jason Ezell researched Martin Duberman’s papers to explore his experience writing about Black Mountain College, an experimental school that operated from 1933 to 1957 near Asheville, North Carolina. His project will explore what drew Duberman to write Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972), and the role of history in the formation of queer communities. He eventually hopes to incorporate the research into a larger book length project tentatively titled Down There: Coming Into Queer Imagination in the American South. 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs pursued research for her doctoral dissertation, “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism.” Ms. Gumbs, a PhD candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University, investigated the publishing and poetics of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Barbara Smith, and Alexis De Veaux at the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Whitney Strub, an Assistant Professor in the American Studies, Women’s Studies and LGBT Studies Programs at Temple University, continued research on a forthcoming book for Columbia University Press, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Obscenity and Pornography in the Postwar United States.  He focused on the collections of several HIV/AIDS groups to explore how activist organizations dealt with attacks and restrictions on safe-sex educational materials, as well as the historical periodicals in the Library’s  International Gay Information Center Archive.For more information about the LGBT Visiting Scholars Program at the New York Public Library, please contact Jason Baumann at jbaumann@nypl.org. 

After a great run in the Stokes Gallery at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation exhibition is now available online.  The online exhibition includes selected images from the show, a complete checklist of the items that were on view, the full-text of the panels, and suggested reading. In addition, there is a panel version of the exhibition that will be traveling in the Library’s sites throughout the year.  You can see a preview of the panel exhibition online, and keep of with the exhibition schedule. The current schedule is as follows:

July 22–August 8: Grand Central Library

September 2–19: Hamilton Fish Library

September 23–October 10: Mulberry Street Library

October 14–31: 125th Street Library

November 4–21: Kips Bay Library

Interested in bringing this traveling version of 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation to your local library, school, hospital, organization, or other venues? Contact Susan Rabbiner, NYPL’s Assistant Director for Exhibitions, @ 212-930-0757 or srabbiner@nypl.org.