BGSQD presents Reclaiming the Past: LGBT Historical Fiction (in person & live-streaming)

Authors Stephanie Cowell, Lance Ringel, and Sebastian Dureaux-Russell read from their novels, each set in a different decade of the early 20th century, and all focusing on relationships between gay male protagonists.

Copies of Cowell’s The Boy in the Rain, Ringel’s Flower of Iowa, and Dureaux-Russell’s Burning with a Blue Flame will all be available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy of any of these books please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “Please reserve book for November 12 event” in the subject line. Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served. Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel: youtube.com/@bgsqd. Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work. All are welcome to attend, with or without 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

Stephanie Cowell has been an opera singer, balladeer, founder of Strawberry Opera and other arts venues including a Renaissance festival in NYC. She is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart, Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet and The Boy in the Rain.  Her work has been translated into nine languages and made into an opera. Stephanie is the recipient of an American Book Award. She has lived in NYC all her life.

Lance Ringel is a two-time Lammy nominee whose novels and plays bring gay history to life through vividly realized characters and meticulously researched detail. His debut novel, Flower of Iowa, about an American soldier and a British soldier who fall in love on the Western Front in World War 1, received multiple literary accolades, including the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award for War and Military Fiction. Floridian Nights, his second novel, is an intense, multifaceted love story that unfolds against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s. In consecutive years, each of these novels was named as a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Romance.

Ringel’s plays include In Love with the Arrow Collar Man, about famed illustrator J.C. Leyendecker and his model, muse and lover Charles Beach; and Flash/Frozen, a drama based on true events about two champion male skaters whose lives fatefully intersect around the tragic 1961 plane crash that killed the entire U.S. Figure Skating World Team. Both plays have enjoyed successful runs, to considerable acclaim, in New York.

Sebastian Dureaux-Russell was educated at Duke Ellington School of the Arts and The International Center of Photography. An award-winning photographer and speaker, his images traveled the globe in the 9/11 exhibition “Here is New York: A democracy of photographs.” He has penned for: Where Magazine, In New York, City Guide, Travel Weekly, City Info, and The New York Times. Burning with a Blue Flame is the first novel by Sebastian Dureaux-Russell. Instagram: Sebastian_Photographs.