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Monday May 16th, 7pm P.David Ebersole author of "99 Miles from L.A." |
A hard-boiled crime story with a bi-sexual love triangle peppered with double-crosses. A music professor, an unhappily married woman, and a Mexican bartender band together to steal a buried fortune.
Frank, a frustrated singer-turned-music professor finds himself entangled in a love affair with Shelley, a highly-educated, unhappily married woman. Jonging to quit his teaching gig, Frank jumps at the chance to implement his new girlfriend's scheme to steal the skimmed-cash treasure from her marijuana business tycoon husband. Feeling they need a third, she introduces him to Ramon, her go-to bartender, armed with a nomadic upbringing and a gun from behind the register, who likewise is all-in. But Shelley's well-thought-out heist gets more complicated when the men find themselves impossibly drawn to one another. |
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Wednesday, May 25th, 7pm
Specious Species Release Party featuring: Jon Longhi Lori Czosnyka Alan Kaufman Alvin Orloff Charlie Getter and possibly Erik Davis |
Species magazine is dedicated to the preservation of disciplined individual minds in an era of spiritual stagnation, cultural nihilism and pay-per-view warfare. Species is looking for soul. Let's have art that not only disturbs but inspires. Let's bring back good sex, decent drugs, difficult but meaningful spiritual practices and worthwhile work. Let's have mutual respect in the spirit of enlightened interdependence. Let's have love that doesn't resemble a Hallmark card or an After School Special and then let's not make the mistake of the hippy and well-meaning Christian and talk about it too much. Let's have dangerous fun. Let's not overuse the collective "We." I don't necessarily know what you are about and neither do you. Only liars have all the answers. The first conceit of Species is that some questions are more interesting than others. The second conceit of Species is the belief that mental cataracts can be removed.
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Sunday
May 29th 6pm Carlos Allende author of "Coffee, Shopping, Murder Love" |
The unapologetically wicked characters of Carlos Allende’s darkly comedic novel are beyond salvation, no matter the legal (or emotional) crimes they’re committing. But that’s the fun for us. Allende’s masterful comedy of errors comes out hot and reaches a frenetic pace by the climax of Jignesh’s and Charlie’s hijinks—but all’s well that ends well, even if it didn’t end well for those who crossed their paths. Funny, shocking, and depraved, this novel warns us about what happens when our darkest impulses drag themselves into the light.”
—Charles Jensen, author of Nanopedia |
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Wednesday June 1st, 7pm Matthew Clark Davison author of "Doubting Thomas" in conversation with Alia Volz author of "Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and The Stoning of San Francisco" |
Thomas McGurrin, an openly gay a fourth-grade teacher at a private primary school serving Portland's wealthy progressive elite when he is falsely accused of inappropriately touching a male student. The accusation comes just as Thomas is thrust back into the center of his unusual family by his younger brother's battle with cancer. Although cleared of the accusation, Thomas is forced to resign from a job he loves during a potentially life-changing family drama.
Davison's novel explores the discrepancy between progressive ideals and persistent negative stereotypes among the privileged regarding social status, race, and sexual orientation and the impact of that discrepancy on friendships and family relations. By turns rueful, humorous, angry, and wise, Doubting Thomas marks the debut of an important writer. |
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Tuesday,
June 7th, 7pm Toni Mirosevich author of "Spell Heaven and Other Stories" in conversation with Miah Jeffra author of "The Violence Almanac" |
In Spell Heaven, a linked story collection, a lesbian couple moves to a coast town and unexpectedly finds a sense of belonging with a group of outsiders. The narrator, raised in a working-class Croatian-American fishing family, chooses an early career in labor-oriented jobs. Years later, she finds herself in an academic position in a white-collar world "where the clothes are clean but the politics are dirty." She questions stereotypes about her neighbors and, eventually, her life-path. Spell Heaven celebrates those looking for a human connection in an increasingly isolated world.
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Tuesday,
June 14, 7pm David Eugene Perry author of "Upon This Rock" |
"An elegant, twisty thriller in which a gay couple investigates a mysterious suicide in a scenic Italian hill town. It's not hard to imagine that this book could do for Orvieto what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did for Savannah." –Armistead Maupin, author of "Tales of the City"
An American couple in Italy investigate the suicide of a cleric in the picturesque Italian city of Orvieto―and find themselves plunged into a conspiracy that may destroy the Catholic Church. In the stunning thriller Upon This Rock, San Francisco business executive Lee Maury and his husband Adriano come to Orvieto to soak in the city's beauty and rich history, but Lee becomes fascinated with a local tragedy, the suicide one year earlier of Deacon Andrea, a much-loved candidate for the priesthood. Obsessed with learning the truth, Lee and Adriano stumble upon a conspiracy of terrorism, human trafficking, and a plot to destroy one of the Church's most sacred shrines―all somehow linked across 500 years to Renaissance Pope Clement VII, who escaped to Orvieto after the sack of Rome in 1527. Before they know it, Lee and Adriano's dream vacation becomes a race to save innocent lives―and not get killed in the process. |
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Wednesday,
June 15th 7pm Justin Sayre author of "From Gay to Z A Queer Compendium" |
Do you know your gAyBCs? ABBA, ACT Up, Angels in America, James Baldwin, But I'm a Cheerleader, Joan Crawford, Laverne Cox . . . This illustrated celebration and exploration of queer history and culture-based on performer Justin Elizabeth Sayre's hit five-part show The gAyBCs-collects hundreds of witty readable short texts on pop culture moments, iconic figures, ongoing challenges in the LGBTQ+ community, and everything in between, all delivered in Sayre's lively and inimitable voice. Here to entertain, throw some shade, and bring some joy, this carefully curated (and absolutely not definitive) A-to-Z perspective on queer culture also aims to make you laugh, think, and act, and serves as a reminder that queer culture isn't just what we have been, but what we are.
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Wednesday,
June 16 7pm Ben Miller author of "Bad Gays: A Homosexual History" in conversation with Marke Bieschke author of "Queer: the ultimate LGBTQ Guide for Teens" |
We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked.
Based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes kings, fascist thugs such as Nazi founder Ernst Rohm, artists, and debauched bon viveurs. |
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Sun., June 19th 7pm
Release party for "HOUSE FIRE: Stories and Poems" by Jim Nawrocki hosted by Jason Wong |
Jim Nawrocki's work has appeared in Poetry, Kyoto Journal, Nimrod, Arroyo Literary Review, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Chelsea Station, poetrydaily.com, as well as many other journals. It has also been anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). The poems in this book, collected under the title House Fire, won the 2009 James White Poetry Prize, judged by Mark Doty. He passed away from cancer in 2018.
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Friday, June 24
7pm Jeremy Atherton Lin author of "Gay Bar: Why We Went Out" |
As gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what’s being lost in this indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of queer history.
Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? In Gay Bar, the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s; from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces; through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out—and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever. The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity—a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember. |
We are now accepting proposals for readings & book release parties. FYI: We don't hold events on Fridays or Saturdays, event organizers will be responsible for all publicity, and much as we'd like to host everybody, we must be very selective as we are a small space with a small staff. To discuss events, email or call the store and ask for Alvin.