Tuesday, June 1, 2021; 12pm PST 40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK
Farrar, Straus and Giroux writers Sarah Schulman and Brontez Purnell engage in a conversation about queer histories, emotional landscapes, and Schulman's new book Let the Record Show. A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Schulman (a former San Francisco resident) will also deconstruct queer time lineage and gentrification of what the notion "queer utopia" has become. Please join us.
Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction (including The Cosmopolitans,Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry), nonfiction (including Stagestruck, Conflict is Not Abuse, and The Gentrification of the Mind), and theater (Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and more), and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films (The Owls, Mommy Is Coming, and United in Anger, among others). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock (created during his residency at The Lab). Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.
