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Playwrights Leigh Curran and Richard Willett, longtime friends and colleagues, read from their first novels, each set back in time.
About Going Nowhere Sideways:
August, 1969. Molly Williams is young, conservative and inexperienced when she discovers her boyfriend necking with his male roommate in a Greenwich Village restaurant. She freaks out, hitches a ride to Woodstock, does drugs for the first time and winds up in a medical emergency tent in the arms of Johnson, a gentle, spiritual Asian-American. When things don’t work out with Johnson, Molly becomes emotionally, physically, and artistically involved with her former sister-in-law, Nancy, in a relationship full of fire. In Leigh Curran’s Going Nowhere Sideways, Molly survives twenty years of emotional adventure and emerges a full-blooded, middle-aged woman with her sense of humor and authenticity intact.
About: A Friend of Dorothy’s
It’s 1986 in New York City and 27-year-old Eric Summerfield knows that “yuppies” are supposed to be obnoxious, easily dismissed, but he envies the clarity of their delusions, their seeming ability to keep mortality at bay. He yearns, in fact, to be one of them. The catch: He’s no Wall Street insider, but instead the underpaid employee of a Canadian chain bookstore in Midtown Manhattan, a Canuck himself, and gay, and AIDS suddenly seems to be everywhere, including in the body of his flamboyant friend and coworker Dale, who inexplicably singles out a reluctant Eric to be his chief caregiver. It’s an experience that will change both of them. Richard Willett’s A Friend of Dorothy’s is a timeless, universal coming of age novel, in which the crucible of illness compels one young man to reach for something greater.
To reserve a copy of A Friend of Dorothy’s (Magic Show Press, June 15, 2025, paperback, $17.99), and/or Going Nowhere Sideways (Fithian Press, 1999, paperback, $14.95) please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a book(s) for July 13 event” in the subject line and specify titles in the body of the email.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
The Bureau will solicit donations at the beginning of the event—we especially encourage donations from those who do not plan to purchase any books.
All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD
Leigh Curran is an award-winning playwright, novelist, poet and teacher. Her first novel, Going Nowhere Sideways, looks at the coming of middle age when the struggle to stay the same is no longer an option. It was published by Fithian Press and is now available through on-line bookstores.
Canadian-American Richard Willett is best known as an award-winning playwright and screenwriter whose plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and internationally. He wrote his only novel, A Friend of Dorothy’s, when he was in his twenties. Excerpts appeared in the legendary gay literary magazine Christopher Street and in Permafrost at the University of Alaska, as well as being short-listed for New American Library’s Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction, but the novel itself was never published before now.