Author: rconrad

Karma Chávez and I made our way to London, along with Yasmin Nair in digital form, for the Decolonizing Sexualities Network’s second roundtable event on November 29th.  Against Equality presented an overview of our activist and archival work to a packed room and got to meet lots of great activists and intellectuals from the UK including our gracious hosts Suhraiya Jivraj and Silvia Posocco.

Also, our chapter “Against Equality, Against Capitalism: Towards an Economic Critique of Gay Marriage” in the Australian anthology After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation (edited by Carolyn D’Cruz & Mark Pendleton) is set to launch in Melbourne at Hares & Hyenas on January 14th.

My chapter “Damn Right We’re Here to Destroy Marriage!” in The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity, and Justice (edited by Gerald Walton) is set to be published in early 2014.  Still no confirmed publishing date, but I’ve been told it should be out very soon.  This chapter argues against the politics of gay respectability and encourages queer activists to embrace rather than deflect the religious right’s worst fears about us—we are indeed to here to destroy marriage, the family, and the nation!

Curators from MIX MILANO have invited the collaborative team behind Does This Bother You?, of which I was a part, to recreate the exhibition in Milano in the Summer of June 2014.  This second iteration of our project is sure to scandalize the newly elected Pope and stuffy respectable gays alike.  More news to come…

things are different now… continue to have a life through another public screening at the Queer Lisboa 17 film festival this past September. The experimental short will be available for viewing online this winter once it completes its other festival screenings lined up this fall.

Est-ce que ça vous dérange? Does This Bother You?, a collaborative exhibition I worked on, opened at RATS9 Galerie on October 11th and ran through October 26th.  In addition to the opening I gave an artist talk with my collaborator on October 15th to a full house and it will be available as a video on the exhibition website shortly.  A digital version of the exhibition catalog featuring writing by journalist Matthew Hays and art historian Erin Silver is available here.

The short experimental Super 8mm film that I created in collaboration with Richard E. Bump will having its premiere (of sorts) in all its rich color-saturated glory at the 26th edition of MIXNYC on November 16th. Rituels Queer will be shown as a double projection with an original soundtrack by friend and co-conspirator Chadd Beverlin.  Rituels Queer is part of a larger program of twelve sexy steamy shorts not to be missed!

In mid-October I presented my paper “Revisiting AIDS and Its Metaphors” at the Universities Art Association of Canada‘s annual conference in Banff, Alberta.  The paper, which reviews the work of queer artists that framed the pre-protease inhibitor days of the AIDS crisis as a form of genocide, focuses in detail on the short film By Any Means Necessary by James Wentzy.  The paper has since been submitted to a number of academic journals and with any luck will be available publicly in the first half of 2014.

Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, an anthology of all the combined writing from our first three books along with a new introduction from the collective, is on schedule to hit the streets in March 2014.  This book will save the AE collective time, money, and work by alleviating our need to keep three books in print as opposed to just one. And all of this has been made possible by our wonderful pals over at AK Press who have been a supportive distributor for our first three book projects and have taken on the task of publishing this final anthology.

In other Against Equality news, Karma Chávez, Yasmin Nair, and I will be doing a roundtable talk in London with the Decolonizing Sexualities Network on the 29th of November.  At the roundtable we will be discussing our work with AE, focusing on the three sections of our archive: marriage, militarism, and prisons.  The event will be recorded and available on the DSN website soon after the event.

Lastly, I’ve been one of the co-coordinators of a fundraising effort to support the production of a film by LGBTQ identified Russians about the impact of the anti-gay propaganda bill recently signed into law by Putin.  This project differs from similar media attention in that the documentary film Children 404 is being made by Russian queers as opposed to other outsiders from the West.  You can check out the fundraising campaign that runs through November 15th here.

After being selected to show my work at the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival in San Francisco, I’ve pulled my short experimental film things are different now… in order to support the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.  Frameline has been targeted for it’s complicity with Israeli pinkwashing. The festival has been targeted by local queer activist groups like Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) and Gay Shame for over a decade.  I gave a short interview with ArtThreat over pulling my film and things are differnet now… will be screened alternatively at Periwinkle Cinema’s Rejected!!! on June 20th at the Artist Television Access in San Francisco instead.

things are different now… has also screened as part of NOT OVER: 25 Years of Visual AIDS in New York at LaMama gallery.  The show also includes a small print version of my broadsheet Down Is Not Up. The show, currated by Kris Nuzzi and Sur Rodney (Sur), is up for the entire month of June and features the work of lots of friends and colleagues.

Does This Bother You? a collaborative street based poster project that I participated in this spring will see a full scale exhibition and catalog in the fall of 2013 in Montréal.  More information about the project is forthcoming, but in the mean time the project has already provoked a bit of press both locally and nationally in Canada.

Also my You Must Marry posters, a pastiche based on the original Homocult poster, made there first appearance at Southern Maine Pride and will be coming with me for a special night of wheat pasting in NYC for Pride.  More details about this project forthcoming after I hit the streets for NYC Pride.

As for Against Equality news, I’ve been busily working away on the manuscript for a new unabridged addition of Against Equality’s three anthologies all in one along with some new material.  The new anthology will help us greatly reduce our printing and shipping costs while still providing free books to prisoners.  It is due out in the spring of 2014 through AK Press and AE members will be touring to support the launch of the new anthology

Also, the video from the Imagining Queer Justice panel I spoke at on behalf of Against Equality this past spring with Eric Stanley and Reina Gossett is now available online below.  Special thanks to Margot Weiss at Wesleyan University for making it all possible!

My short experimental film on HIV/AIDS and inter-generational memory loss, things are different now…, has shown in Berlin, New York, and London, and screenings in Prague, Copenhagen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Portland OR, and Providence RI are all in the works.  In fact, the short will be showing in Portland OR today as part of the Where Do We Go From Here exhibition.

I have a book review of Benjamin Heim Shepard‘s Play, Creativity, and Social Movements (2011) the most recent edition of the journal Socialism & Democracy and I am working on a review of Nicola Barker’s Not The Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-Sex Marriage (2012) for the soon-to-be-launched QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking.

I’ve also got an interview with New York City based prolific writer and agitator Sarah Schulman in the forthcoming issue of e-flux journal edited by Carlos Motta.  In it we discuss her most recent two book as well as the nature of queer collaborations, the rapidly changing publishing industry, queer mentorship, and the politics of always coming from the margins.

Against Equality also just got word that the book coming out of the After Homosexual conference I presented at a year ago finally got the green light. A co-authored piece between Yasmin Nair, Kárma Chavez, and myself titled, Against Equality, Against Capitalism: Towards an Economic Critique of Gay Marriage will appear there.  The three of us also co-authored the introduction to another forthcoming Australia-based book project called To The Exclusion of All Others where our piece titled, Against Equality: From the Belly of the Beast to the Land Down Under, will appear.

In other Against Equality news, I will be participating in a panel with Eric Stanley and Reina Gossett titled Imagining Queer Justice: Prison Abolition and LGBT Hate Crimes Legislation on April 26th at Wesleyan University.  On this panel organized by the wonderful Margot Weiss, I will be talking about Against Equality and or work challenging the logic of LGBT hate crime laws which is highlighted in our most recent anthology, Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.

My chapter “(Gay) Marriage and (Queer) Love”, which picks up where Emma Goldman’s searing critique of marriage titled “Marriage and Love” left off about 100 years ago, appears in the opening chapter of the new AK Press title Queering Anarchism edited by C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano.  This book is available in both print and as an ebook through AK Press.

Additionally my chapter exploring the work of and politics of Against Equality, “Damn Right We’re Here to Destroy Marriage!” will be in the forthcoming anthology The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity, and Justice, due out in the fall of 2013.

I have a forthcoming roundtable discussion with Eric A. Stanley and Chris E. Vargas about their film projects Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2012) in the forthcoming special issue on sex and gender in performance produced by APARTÉ Journal .

There is also a roundtable discussion with a few of us from Against Equality in the new issue of American Quarterly, “’Reinvigorating the Queer Political Imagination’: A Roundtable with Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, and Karma Chávez of Against Equality” in which we discuss our relationships to academia and activism.  This roundtable was conducted by one of the journal’s wonderful editors, Margot Weiss.

This fall I was asked to participate in the annual AIDS Action Now! Poster/VIRUS project.  I was tapped to design two posters for the series which debuted at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and at the VAV gallery in Montreal in and around world AIDS day.  The first poster titled “Fuck the Supreme Court*” focuses on the recent decision by the supreme court of Canada to further criminalize HIV non-disclosure while the second poster titled “Working Conditions” focuses on male sex workers and HIV/AIDS.  These posters channel the aesthetics and feminist politics of Barbara Kruger, the work of David Wojnarowicz, and the early aesthetic of sexually explicit HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns.

Lastly, my short film things are different now… had it’s American premiere at the 25th MIX experimental film fest in New York City this past November and will be screening for the first time in Canada early in the new year.  Stay tuned for details…

This summer I spent a lot of time in Portland Maine participating in the MECA Alumni Artist Residency program. For five weeks I caught up on my much much neglected studio practice and churned out a bunch of work including a gay marriage photo shoot for the folks at Dirty Queer Magazine.  The photos, made in collaboration with photographer Alexandra Silverthorn, along with an interview with me about my work with the Against Equality collective will appear in DQ#5 due out this fall.  While at MECA I also screen printed some of AE’s newest snarky merchandise.

Just before the residency got rolling I produced an oversized broadsheet titled Down Is Not Up that was posted on the streets the night before Portland’s gay pride parade.  The broadsheet was the size of an entire doorway and based on the work of the anonymous activist collective Pink Tank.  You can download and print the broadsheet yourself here.

Entzaubert, the radical queer d.i.y. film festival hosted at the queer wagenplatz Schwarzer Kanal in Berlin showed my experimental short things are different now… this past August.  This is the second time I’ve shown work at Entzaubert and the festival lineup looked really amazing.  This was the first time the video was shown in public!

Rituels Queer, another iteration of the three way collaborative super-8 film between Liam Michaud, Richard E. Bump, and myself was screened in Providence, RI at the Dirt Palace as part of Sweltering Shelves in late August.  Rituels Queer was a one time duel projection extravaganza organized by Richard E. Bump of Fanorama fame.

During this year’s Burdock Gathering I co-hosted a workshop and teach-in on the Quebec student strike.  While we were discussing neoliberalism and austerity with the participants we also made a solidarity banner which the three of us who hosted the workshop then marched with at the massive demonstration on August 22nd, 2012.

I also found out that some of my projects will be featured in a forthcoming anthology titled Maine Art New, which picks up where Edgar Allen Beem’s Maine Art Now left off in 1990.  My work will be featured alongside Derek Jackson‘s and others who do work about HIV/AIDS.  Maine Art New will be published by the University of Maine Press and is due out this fall.

And last but not least, the third and final book in the Against Equality pocket book series that I edited is due out this fall.  More information about Against Equality: Prisons will not protect you can be found online at the against equality website or on goodreads.com.

This fall I will join the teaching team with the HIV/AIDS Course at Concordia University for the second consecutive year.  This course, along with the accompanying Lecture Series and Art Exhibition, have been around for two decades or so and together comprise a really exciting and innovative project I couldn’t be more happy to be a part of.

Karma Chavez, Yasmin Nair, and I published an article together for Fifth Estate Magazine.  In the article we take a critical look at the imagery and rhetoric surrounding the recent repeal of DADT.  We mainly focus on the ways in which sexual violence is embedded within military culture both at home and abroad, and how we as queers might not want to invest our energy in seeking inclusion in such a sexually violent form of citizenship and national belonging.

I will be appearing at the New Museum in New York City on June 21st for the Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars book launch which is taking place as part of Carlos Motta‘s Museum as Hub Thursday Night Programs.  This will be the first American book launch (we already did Canada and Australia!) for the newer of the two A.E. anthologies and recordings of the event will be made available in the near future.

Disastrous Inclusion: Critical Reflections on the Legacy of DADT, the 2nd issue of the We Who Feel Differently journal, launched online this past May and will also be part of the dialog at the New Museum book launch event on the 21st of June.  You can check out the Journal for free online or download a pdf of it here.

I am currently in the middle of editing the third and final book in the A.E. pocket-book anthology series titled, Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.  This book critiques the demands by gay and lesbian organizations seeking LGBT inclusion in hate crimes laws and looks more broadly at the prison industrial complex as a site of harm and violence that disproportionately affects queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people.  Chris E. Vargas will be designing a fabulous cover for us once again and Dean Spade will lend his voice to do the book’s introduction.

A.E. put out a new series of postcards from our 2nd call for art including one that I designed.  The postcard was based on a poster I designed and printed in collaboration with Reyrey Castonguay for a workshop at the National Conference on Organized Resistance many years ago.  This postcard, along with the other great additions to the A.E. archives, are available for a few bucks through the online store on the A.E. webite.

Lastly, A.E. will host a panel this fall at Radically Gay: The Life & Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay, a conference hosted by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY from September 27th – 30th, 2012.  Our panel is titled “Eat Your Fetish!: Against Equality and the Politics of Queer Cultural Production and Appropriation” and features presentations from Karma Chavez, Yasmin Nair, and myself.  We are sure to ruffle at least a few tail feathers…

Soon I will be heading back to Maine to spend the rest of the spring and summer working diligently on all sorts of projects.  Between projects I will be on the road touring with the newest Against Equality (AE) book, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, but for the most part I will be back in the Pine Tree State.  Unfortunately I will be leaving Quebec’s maple spring behind, but it was a truly inspiring time!

In Maine I will once again stage manage Outright L/A‘s annual dragapalooza at Bates College.  This fundraiser event, which raises thousands of dollars for one of Maine’s only queer and trans youth drop in program in central Maine, has sold out every year and it’s likely it will be no different this year.  With a slew of local talent, first time youth performers, and international performers like Dave End, this years event promises to be even better than the last!

I will also appear on a panel about public sex at the University of Southern Maine on April 17th organized by the always inspiring Wendy Chapkis. At the Sex Politics panel I’ll be focusing on the history of gay male public sex cultures in southern Maine and the ways in which consensual gay sex is criminalized through disproportionate policing, surveillance, and sex offender registries.

I will be working on two written pieces: “Radical Queer Semaine & Pervers/Cité: Montréal’s Queer Autonomous Festivals” for a forthcoming anthology titled Queer Autonomous Space and “That’s Right, We’re Here to Destroy Marriage!” for the activist anthology The Gay Agenda: Creating Space, Identity, and Justice.  The first piece will be co-authored with fellow Montreal organizer Frank Suerich-Gulick and will offer up a brief history and reflections on Montreal’s two anti-corporate queer & trans festivals.  The second piece will be a reflection on my own work critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics and the energy that goes into denying the freaky, queer, anti-capitalist agenda some of us homos really do have.

In May the newest issue of We Who Feel Differently (WWFD) Journal will become available online.  I guest edited this issue of the digital journal which contains new and archival material reflecting on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  The journal includes new writing by Karma Chavez and others as well as some great archival gems like UltraViolet‘s Queers Out of Uniform counter-recruitment pamphlet and more.

Lastly, to catch up on Against Equality gossip…  The After Homo conference in Melbourne was amazing and AE folks will have a piece in a forthcoming anthology reflecting on the conference and Denis Altman’s broader work.  I will be launching the AE DADT anthology in New York City as part of Carlos Motta’s WWFD “Museum as Hub” series at the New Museum.  Our new postcard series will be up on our website soon.  Lastly, Karma Chavez, Yasmin Nair, and I will be hosting our first Against Equality panel in Chicago on April 21st at Mess Hall to kick off a small mid-western tour!

I’ve been settling in quite nicely here in Montreal where I’ve started contributing to the city’s fiercest fagrag, 2B Magazine.  I’ve contributed book and film reviews, interviews with other queer artists/activists, and even had my nearly naked body featured is series of photographs of emerging artists, activists, and writers.  Thanks to the sweet folks at 2B Mag and photographer César Ochoa, a 16″ x 20″ print of my portrait (see cropped head shot for a PG version) was auctioned off to support Against Equality!

Late this past summer I finally had my silence = death chest tattoo completed after four years of designing and reflection thanks to my friend and tattoo artist Gemma Borealis.  More detailed images and information about the work is available on the projects section of this website.

My newest experimental short video titled things are different now… is complete!  By collaging archival footage from ACT UP’s political funerals with super 8 portrait images of twenty of my peers, I try to imagine what it would feel like to lose all of them in a few years time to AIDS.  This video will premiere in Montreal sometime soon, stay tuned!

Against Equality‘s second archival anthology, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, is now available from AK Press and they have been flying off the selves!  I edited this book which features an introduction by the one and only Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and contributions from radical anti-war voices critical the gay and lesbian mainstream’s investment in militarism and overturning DADT.  This book, like our last one  Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, is also available at no cost to gay, queer and trans prisoners.

I am gearing up for an early February conference in Melbourne Australia honoring Dennis Altman titled, After Homosexual: the Legacy of Gay Liberation.  At this conference I will give a paper about the work and politics of Against Equality and how we, as a radical queer and trans community, might imagine what global solidarity might look like that doesn’t perpetuate the centrality of gay marriage as the primary goal of queer/trans activism.

Lastly, I will be guest editing the 2nd edition of the online journal launched by Carlos Motta as part of the We Who Feel Differently project.  This edition will focus critically on the fervor to undo Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and reflections on its aftermath.  Due out this Spring, it will be a good antidote to what is likely to be one of the most heinously uncritical forthcoming issues of the Journal of Homosexuality focused on DADT.

The Pervers/Cité festival in Montréal was a fantastic success this year.  I was honored to be part of the organizing collective this past August and to host two of the forty+ scheduled events over the duration of Montréal’s only anti-capitalist pride festival.  Looking forward to Montréal’s other radical queer & trans festival Radical Queer Semaine next Spring.

b. 1983, the short experimental video reflecting on my relationship to HIV and anti-queer violence, will be premiering in Japan (Osaka and Kyoto) at the Kansai Queer Film Festival.  Many thanks to Keiko Ofuji for the time and dedication to translate and subtitle the film.

The broadsheet version of b. 1983 was also shown as part of a group exhibition and fundraiser, Love in the Time of AIDS, for the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center in New York City.  The exhibition opened with a night of performances on September 16th at Le Petit Versailles Community Garden and raised over $500 for the organization’s harm reduction programs.

Against Equality will be releasing its second archival anthology, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, this fall.  The anthology which I edited features an introduction by the fierce and fabulous Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and contributions from radical anti-war voices critical the gay and lesbian mainstream’s investment in militarism and overturning DADT.  This book, like our last one  Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, will be available from the great folks at AK Press.

I will also be presenting Against Equality’s work in an international framework at the After Homosexual: The Legacy of Gay Liberation conference in Melbourne Australia at La Trobe University this coming winter.  Against Equality will also be contributing a additional piece to a conference publication, After Homosexual.