Join Christian for this special book signing where he will interview Cassandra Wooten and Cheryl Mason-Dorman of The Ritchie Family, one of several Philadelphia-based groups featured in A Night at the Disco. Produced by Jacques Morali, The Ritchie Family scored three #1 disco hits during the 1970s: “Brazil,” “The Best Disco in Town,” and selections from their classic album African Queens.

A Night at the Disco is a celebration of groundbreaking dance music from 1970-’79. An unprecedented collection of photographs of more than 100 artists, illuminating the styles and sounds from a decade that sparked a global phenomenon in music and culture. Exclusive comments from Donna Summer, Barry Gibb, Debbie Harry, Giorgio Moroder, founding members of CHIC, Labelle, The Trammps, Village People, Earth, Wind & Fire, and dozens more artists, songwriters and producers, offering fascinating insights that tell the stories behind the beats. From underground New York clubs to discothèques across the globe, A Night at the Disco illustrates how artists spanning soul, pop, disco, funk, jazz and rock defined nightlife during the 1970s and influenced popular music to the present day.

With a foreword by Verdine White of Earth, Wind & Fire, this is a real treat for music, dance and disco fans everywhere.

Christian John Wikane is a NYC-based music journalist and essayist. Since 2003, he’s interviewed more than 600 recording artists, songwriters, and producers, including Paul McCartney, Janelle Monáe, Donna Summer, Pete Seeger, Annie Lennox, Maurice White, Jimmy Scott, Carly Simon, and Kenny Gamble. He and filmmaker Sekou Luke currently produce the video series “Unscripted: Conversations with Christian John Wikane,” which features his interviews with GRAMMY, Tony, and Emmy-winning artists, and have also produced “Unscripted Live” at the Apollo Theater, City Winery, and Lincoln Center (2024 “American Songbook” series). Christian’s also a contributing writer for PEOPLE Magazine and was Contributing Editor for PopMatters online magazine from 2006-2023. He was also credited as a consultant for HBO’s Emmynominated Tina Turner documentary, Tina (2021), as well as CNN’s Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over (2021) and HBO’s Love to Love You, Donna Summer (2022).

Christian’s had the distinct honor of curating and moderating several events on the main stage of the Apollo Theater for Apollo Education’s “Live Wire” series, including “Legendary: A Conversation with Dionne Warwick and Melba Moore,” “Bold Soul Sisters,” a panel discussion featuring Nona Hendryx, Ruth Pointer, Kathy Sledge, and Rochelle Fleming, and “She’s A Rebel: An Interview with Martha Reeves, Sarah Dash, and Joshie Jo Armstead.” He’s moderated two events for the Brooklyn Museum, “From Studio 54 to Number One” (2020) featuring Alfa Anderson, Linda Clifford, and Cory Daye, and “The Soulfulness of David Bowie” (2018) featuring Carlos Alomar and Robin Clark, and led an all-star panel for Stevens Institute of Technology’s screening of CNN Films’ Luther: Never Too Much (2024). He’s also conducted a live Q&A with disco legends D.C. LaRue and Felipe Rose (original co-founder and Native of Village People) for Queer/Art/Film’s screening of Thank God It’s Friday (1978) at IFC Center. 

Since 2010, Christian has authored extensive liner notes for more than 200 album reissues by major and independent record companies in the U.S. and U.K., including more than a dozen releases for the Estate of Donna Summer. He’s also conducted interviews for several BBC Radio documentaries, Sirius XM’s Studio 54 channel, Chase Bank (“Inside Access”), and hosted/produced more than a dozen concerts at Joe’s Pub (the Public Theater), the Blue Note, Iridium Jazz Club, and Wölffer Estate Vineyard. He’s guest lectured for Barnard College’s “Harlem Semester” Program (2017-2025) and has presented at EMP Pop Conference, the Parrish Art Museum, Apollo Education’s “Master Class” Series, and NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Music. He’s the sole author of Casablanca Records: Play It Again (2009), a 50,000-word oral history that documented the 35th anniversary of Casablanca Records and the co-author of A Night at the Disco (2026) and What the Band Wore: Fashion & Music (2023), published by ACC Art Books.

 

 

The groundbreaking guide to trans history in America, revised and updated for a new political era.

Transgender History is the modern classic on transgender life in America since the nineteenth century, encompassing the major movements, writings, and events that shape today’s gender revolution.

Susan Stryker’s sweeping, intersectional account charts more than a century of history, showing how rising acceptance in the 1960s and 2010s was met with waves of bigotry and intolerance that began in the ’70s and continue today.

Through her explanation of central concepts and terms, informative sidebars, and brief biographies of trans pioneers, Stryker reminds readers of one crucial truth: Transgender people have always been here. In good times and bad, they’ve built supportive and expansive communities, battled for freedom, and transformed American culture and society in the process.

Now completely revised and updated, including a longer, global history and a timely chronicle of the latest wave of anti-trans backlash, Transgender History remains both a vital resource and a powerful testament to the enduring legacy of trans lives.

Susan Stryker is a two-time Lambada Literary award nominee, and two-time winner, most recently for When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Duke University Press, 2024). She is an Emmy-Award-winning documentary filmmaker for Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (TVS 2005), and founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her most recently publication is Transgender History: A Resource for Today’s Struggle—and Tomorrow’s (Seal Press, 2026).

Zach Ozma is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. He is the author of Etiquette In The Arts (Spiral Editions), BLACK DOG DRINKING FROM AN OUTDOOR POOL (Sibling Rivalry Press), and with Ellis Martin co-edited WE BOTH LAUGHED IN PLEASURE: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (a 2020 Lambda Literary Award winner. Nightboat Books). He has exhibited at ArtYard, Zach’s Crab Shack, Root Division, 1122 Gallery, and CTRL+SHFT, and other locations. Raised by folk musicians in Seattle and the Santa Cruz mountains, he came of age as an artist in Oakland at California College of the Arts and in the East Bay experimental poetry scene. Ozma holds a BFA from CCA in Community Arts and lives in the Philadelphia area.

Come join us on the second to last Thursday of every month for Craft and Consciousness Raising!

Every month we will read out loud and discuss an excerpt from a different nonfiction book while we craft in community. Each session will focus on how queerness intersects with different identities and struggles, with an aim of centering collective liberation. The books will be on sale before the event, but if you don’t have a chance to read ahead of time, that is okay too! Bring a project you’re working on, or we have free craft and collage supplies available to use. We look forward to seeing you there!

The groundbreaking guide to trans history in America, revised and updated for a new political era .

Transgender History is the modern classic on transgender life in America since the nineteenth century, encompassing the major movements, writings, and events that shape today’s gender revolution.

Susan Stryker’s sweeping, intersectional account charts more than a century of history, showing how rising acceptance in the 1960s and 2010s was met with waves of bigotry and intolerance that began in the ’70s and continue today.

Through her explanation of central concepts and terms, informative sidebars, and brief biographies of trans pioneers, Stryker reminds readers of one crucial truth: Transgender people have always been here. In good times and bad, they’ve built supportive and expansive communities, battled for freedom, and transformed American culture and society in the process.

Now completely revised and updated, including a longer, global history and a timely chronicle of the latest wave of anti-trans backlash, Transgender History remains both a vital resource and a powerful testament to the enduring legacy of trans lives.

Please join us as Christian Bancroft, Niki Herd & Dino Enrique Piacentini their work with us!

Christian Bancroft received his PhD from the University of Houston and is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship. He is the author of a poetry collection, A Ghost Has No Fantasies (2026); a book of scholarship, Queering Modernist Translation: The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness (2020); and a co-edited collection (with Jenny Molberg), Adelaide Crapsey: The Life and Work of an American Master (2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Petrichor, and Prairie Schooner, among others.

Niki Herd is the author of The Stuff of Hollywood (2024), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and The Language of Shedding Skin (2011), as well as the chapbook _____ , don’t you weep (2022). Herd’s poetry and essays appear in Poem-a-Day, Adroit, Poetry Daily, the New England Review, Salon, and This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, among other journals and anthologies. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, and Cave Canem. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.

Dino Enrique Piacentini’s debut novel, Invasion of the Daffodils, about a Mexican-American family living on an island off the coast of California during the Korean War, was published by Astrophil Press in October 2024. His stories and essays have appeared in One Story, Pembroke, Gulf Coast, Confrontation, The Masters’ Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among other places. A native Californian, he currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

French Lesbian Icons – Mireille Best, Natalie Barney & Translators

Explore French lesbian icons Mireille Best & Natalie Barney with three translators in conversation at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia.

Mireille Best is the pseudonym of Mireille Lemarchand (1943-2005), who was born and raised in a working-class family in Le Havre, France.  Unable to pursue university studies due to health problems, Best worked in a plastics factory after high school and later as a civil servant.  Published by the prestigious French press Gallimard, Best wrote four volumes of short stories and three novels.

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) was born to a wealthy railroad car manufacturing family in Dayton, Ohio, though her circle of literary and artistic influence was transatlantic and spanned nearly a century. From the time she was a young girl, Barney had a strong sense of self and identified as a lesbian. She would go on to become an outspoken writer, artist, and host of literary salons for women in her Paris home throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Stephanie Schechner is a Professor Emerita of French at Widener University, Pennsylvania, and has published extensively on Mireille Best as well as on other French and Francophone women writers including Jovette Marchessault, Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Rachilde, Marguerite Duras and Jocelyne François. She has previously published a translation of Mireille Best’s novel Camille in October.

Suzanne Stroh is a translator, poet, performer, and award-winning screenwriter focused on introducing the life and work of Natalie Barney and her circle to new audiences. Her new book, I Remember Her (Headmistress Press, 2025), is the first English translation of Barney’s only known book-length prose poem. Additional titles include the audiobook productions of Francesco Rapazzini’s novel A Night at the Amazon’s, a drawing-room comedy set in Barney’s salon on her 50th birthday in 1926 (co-translated with Sally Hamilton), and Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, by Artemis Leontis (produced for Princeton Audio). Stroh maintains the grave of Natalie and Laura Barney at the Passy cemetery in Paris. Learn more on Instagram @NatalieBarneyRueJacob, or visit her website: NatalieCliffordBarney.com

Samantha Pious is a poet, translator, editor, and researcher interested in the long history of sapphic women’s writing. Her published translations are Renée Vivien, A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2015, revised 2017); Judith Teixeira, Cactus Flowers (2025); and Natalie Clifford Barney, Selected Poems (2025). A volume of her original poems, Sappho Is Dead, appeared in 2024. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Instagram @samantha.pious, or find her online at SamanthaPious.com

 

Originally published: 2012. In this memoir of the AIDS years (1981-1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism.

“The Gentrification of the Mind is best understood as a polemic, a passionate, provocative and at times scattergun account of disappearance, forgetfulness and untimely death. To her mind, the undigested, unacknowledged trauma of Aids has brought about a kind of cultural gentrification, a return to conservatism and conformity evident in everything from the decline of small presses to the shift of focus in the gay rights movement towards marriage equality.”

“To her [Schulman’s] mind, the undigested, unacknowledged trauma of AIDS has brought about a kind of cultural gentrification, a return to conservatism and conformity evident in everything from the decline of small presses to the shift of focus in the gay rights movement towards marriage equality. . . . The memory of this lost moment of accountability drives Schulman’s final, stirring call for degentrification, her dream of a time in which people realize not only that it’s healthier to live in complex, dynamic, mixed communities than uniform ones but also that happiness that depends on privilege and oppression cannot by any civilized terms be described as happiness at all.”– Olivia Laing – “New Statesman”

Sarah Schulman is Distinguished Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, USA. She is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, AIDS historian, journalist, and active participant citizen.

 

Steven Gellmann signing Somewhere in Nowhere

Coming out is hard, especially when you have two gay moms. At least it is for Simon Bugg. He doesn’t want the world to think that having gay parents has turned him gay. And he certainly doesn’t want anyone to know about the alien in his stomach that’s trying to kill him.

It’s Simon’s senior year and his world just turned upside down. When his mom scores a dream job, Simon lands at a new school away from the only friends he has ever known. Now, his mom is overworked and chronically stressed, and his deadbeat dad is back on the scene. Navigating a new school and new friends is a challenge for a neurotic overthinker, and Simon finds himself turning to his rescue cat and a local barista for support. But when Simon meets the handsome PJ in drama class, he gets talked into a date that he derails in spectacular fashion.

With a little help from his friends-new and old-Simon finds his way back to PJ. But how can he have a real relationship with the boy of his dreams when he’s convinced he’s going to die? No one knows about the nightly alien attacks at 11:22. Why then, and why do they keep getting worse? Simon must face a dark secret inside before he loses his chance with the boy he loves.

Steven Gellman is an award-winning songwriter turned author. Inspired by his early love for Judy Blume’s groundbreaking stories, Steven has found his passion for writing coming-of-age fiction that centers LGBTQ+voices and the real-life challenges of navigating adolescence in an ever-changing world.

Steven has long championed authentic queer storytelling — first through song, now through fiction. Billboard Magazine once praised him as one of the ‘out-queer tunesmiths […] making waves along the coffeehouse circuit.’ His debut album Photobook was nominated for Debut Album of the Year by the Gay/Lesbian American Music Awards (GLAMA). His latest release, All You Need, was a finalist for four Wammie Awards and earned a silver from the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest for “Twenty-Nine.” 

Come join us on the second to last Thursday of every month for Craft and Consciousness Raising!

Every month we will read out loud and discuss an excerpt from a different nonfiction book while we craft in community. Each session will focus on how queerness intersects with different identities and struggles, with an aim of centering collective liberation. The books will be on sale before the event, but if you don’t have a chance to read ahead of time, that is okay too! Bring a project you’re working on, or we have free craft and collage supplies available to use. We look forward to seeing you there!

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

Louis G. Sullivan (b. Milwaukee, 1951; d. San Francisco, 1991) was a writer, activist, typesetter, trans historian and ground breaking queer activist. Sullivan began writing his life in diaries as an adolescent and continued until his death from AIDS complications. The first publicly gay trans man to medically transition, Lou meticulously journaled his experiences (romantic, lascivious, challenging, quotidian, poetic, political). Sullivan left 8.4 cubic feet of archival material from his life and studies to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, of which he was a founding member.

The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.

Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers–collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms “an amputated man.” Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay’s novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the “stowaway era” of black cultural politics and McKay’s challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.

Claude McKay (1889-1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the United States in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. He also published two other novels Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica. In 2009, his lost manuscript for the 1930s novel Amiable with Big Teeth was discovered among the archived papers of Samuel Roth at Columbia University, and was published for the first time in 2017 by Penguin Classics.

In the 1970s, while communes bloomed like wildflowers across the land, most had no room for queer members. The so-called counterculture still clung to heterosexual norms, even as it preached freedom from traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. Juda Bennett’s engrossing memoir
follows his escape from suburbia into the back-to-the-land movement—and chronicles the efforts it took for him to “drop back in” to mainstream society and the ways in which he and his compatriots continued to honor their communal vision.

After enduring the hollow promises of “progressive” communes, Bennett finally found what he didn’t know he was looking for at Lavender Hill, a rural queer commune of visionaries carving out a life beyond heteronormativity, beyond capitalism, beyond shame. They didn’t just survive; they built something messy, luminous, and defiantly alive. And when the commune began to unravel, they didn’t vanish. They evolved. Qtopia is a story of
chosen family and radical transformation. It is a reminder that queer utopia isn’t behind us—it’s still out there on the horizon, singing its song of joy, defiance, and fabulousness.

Juda Bennett, a professor emeritus of English at the College of New Jersey, is the author of four academic books and numerous essays, short stories, and poems. He is a coauthor of the group memoir The Toni Morrison Book Club.

Davy Knittle is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His first book, Urbanist Desire: Queer and Trans Survival in the City, will be published by University of Minnesota Press in November 2026.