RADAR SuperStar 2009
It’s RADAR’s sixth birthday! Come whoop it up with NYC lez author Sarah Schulman, author of queer classics After Delores and People in Trouble, and the recently published novel The Child; club kid turned literary sensation James St. James, whose gory tell-all Party Monster was made into a film starring Macauley Culkin and who recently authored the young adult novel Freak Show! Maybe you’ve seen him on America’s Next Top Model, too! From Los Angeles, Raquel Gutierrez, of the performance group Butchlalis de Panotchitlan, doing a solo sensation! And, Shawn Stewart Ruff, whose debut novel Finlater is super amazing. Michelle Tea will dole out extra special treats prepared by professionals!
Biographies
Photo by Amanda Brooks
James St. James, notorious club kid in Manhattan in the 1980s/early 1990s, wrote the excellent book Disco Bloodbath (now published under the title Party Monster). Which of course was made into a movie of the same name!
Shawn Stewart Ruff is author of the acclaimed novel Finlater, and the Lambda Literary Award-shortlisted editor of GO THE WAY YOUR BLOOD BEATS: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Fiction by African American Writers. His new novel Toss Whirl Pass debuts September 2009. Ruff calls home New York City.
Sarah Schulman is the author of 14 books including three forthcoming: THE MERE FUTURE, a novel about a futuristic New York in which the only career left is marketing (Arsenal Pulp, October 2009), TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (The New Press, November 2009) and THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: Supremacy Ideology Masquerading As Reality (University of California Press, Spring 2010). She is co-director of The ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org).
Raquel Gutierrez is a community based performance writer and cultural activist. She is a co-founding member of the queer performance art ensemble, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, and has written their first play currently in production called The Barber of East L.A., commissioned by a humanities initiative at USC that enabled the troupe to work with Luis Alfaro. Gutierrez has performed nationally with Butchlalis and is published in small poetry and academic journals such as Cipactli out of San Francisco State University and the anthology Izote Vos: Salvadoran American Literary and Visual Art (Pacific News, San Francisco). Currently working on her first solo performance called Malathion: Low Human Toxicity. This piece is homage to the communities of Huntington Park, Bell, Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Maywood and Vernon where Gutierrez spent her formative years, as well as a commentary on the absence of race and class in the mainstream green and environmental discourses. This delicate passage is shared through the striking lenses of memory, political failures and radical possibility.