[Body Hack attendees, Halloween 2021. Images by Maxwell Vice]
The 15 Hour Party Will Fundraise To Protect Trans Rights Across the South
Queer|Art, NYC’s hub for connecting and empowering generations of LGBTQ+ artists, is pleased to announce the 2023 edition of Queer|Art|Pride—the 7th annual summer festival celebrating work by the organization’s vibrant community of more than 200 LGBTQ+ artists. This year, the organization partners with Body Hack, a collectively run party and mutual aid project that serves both as a community space and decentralized fundraising platform for trans and nonbinary BIPOC groups.
Kicking off New York City’s Pride weekend from 3–11 PM on Friday, June 23rd, Queer|Art and Body Hack will transform Nowadays’ 16,000-square-foot space located in Ridgewood along the Brooklyn/Queens border into an extravaganza of both indoor/outdoor festivities. This two-part public event will feature a daytime queer vendor fair (3-8PM) and an evening happy hour and dance party (8PM-6AM). The event will fundraise for three BIPOC trans-led organizations fighting to protect trans people in the states most impacted by anti-trans violence and new legislation: InTRANSitive (Little Rock, AK), The McKenzie Project (Miami, FL) and TKO Society (Selma, AL).
In the afternoon, the sprawling backyard will feature a queer vendor fair featuring work by local artisans and small queer and trans owned brands, where guests can browse clothing, zines, original artworks, on-site tattoo services, jewelry, tarot/astrology readings, and more from 3-8 PM. Indoor programming will include queer speed dating, where participants rotate through three minute dates and find some special matches! Black queer feminist scholar Alexis De Veaux will launch her new book, JesusDevil: The Parables, an anti-fiction work forthcoming within adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy Series this summer. The book launch will entail a live reading, a short discussion, and a special book signing.
Queer|Art also spotlights a collaboration with Clit Club—the queer nightclub and performance venue founded in 1990 and Julie Tolentino and Jaguar Mary that for twelve years championed sex-positivity and lesbian, gay, and trans belonging, blending nightlife with sex, art, and activism in a manner far ahead of its time. In addition, inaugural Illuminations Grant Winner Keioui Keijaun Thomas will deliver a live performance, and sensational DJ sets will be led by Critical Hit, Battyjack, Zolita, and more.
To close out the night, the event will transition into Body Hack’s hallmark happy hour and a late night party guaranteed to burn until daybreak. Organized through a mindset of abundance over scarcity, Body Hack seeks to model a world where trans communities can thrive interdependently. Hosted monthly at Nowadays, Body Hack creates dedicated spaces for trans people to gather, celebrate, and support one another. Each party doubles as a fundraiser for a trans-related initiative, raising over $300k since its formation in 2018.
Save the date here.
Donate to support our beneficiaries across the South here.
More event details, performers, and DJs to be announced soon at queer-art.org/pride.
About Body Hack
Body Hack is a collectively run party and mutual aid project that serves simultaneously as a community space and decentralized fundraising platform for trans and nonbinary BIPOC initiatives. Originally a happy hour for trans and nonbinary people set in a tiny Brooklyn dive bar, Body Hack has grown into a transnational project seeking to model a world where trans communities can thrive interdependently. Body Hack now throws monthly parties at Nowadays in Ridgewood (Queens), creating space for trans people to gather, celebrate, and extend support to one another. Each party doubles as a fundraiser for a trans-related initiative, and has raised over $300k in the last five years.
“We believe in prioritizing a mindset of abundance over scarcity. We believe that trans people are brilliantly resourceful, and that we don’t need to depend on people who don’t understand or value who we are and what we do in order to survive. We strive to build interdependence within our communities, we can get what we need by supporting one another. We refuse to be respectable in our fundraising, we can be our whole selves when we ask for support and when we give it. We believe organizing should be fun and feel fulfilling in order to be sustainable. We honor the long standing relationship our communities have to nightlife—as a refuge and space to seek pleasure and possibility.” – Body Hack Organizers
About Alexis De Veaux and JesusDevil: The Parables
Alexis De Veaux is a black queer feminist independent scholar whose internationally known work is published in six languages. She has been publishing fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, and children’s literature since 1973, and her work is anthologized in numerous collections. De Veaux is the author of Yabo and Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde; and was tenured faculty at the University at Buffalo, Department of Women’s Studies, for more than twenty years, mentoring a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars of black, feminist, and queer studies. She is a 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship Mentor, and was the the recipient of the 2022 Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art Mentorship Artists & Organizers.
Evocative and experimental, JesusDevil: The Parables is a nonlinear tale of black life and spiritual expression. Writing in a style she calls “afiction,” Alexis De Veaux expands and moves beyond traditional narrative, following the adventures of Fhill, a black, queer spirit who has taken human form. Neither male nor female, Fhill moves fluidly and disruptively across concepts of identity, passing through the nine “parables” that comprise this text. Examining aspects of what it means to be black and human—from a nonhuman perspective—Fhill’s liminal nature redefines social and literary categories, exploring social constructions of blackness as well as themes of desire, memory, sex, revenge, and more. The book is a daring new work and crowning achievement from a veteran storyteller.
About Clit Club
Founded in New York City in 1990, the Clit Club was a nightclub and performance venue that offered a sex-positive, racially, economically, and culturally-mixed queer space of encounter for self-identified lesbian, gay, and trans people for over twelve years. The party was conceived and initiated by Multi-Year QAM Mentor Julie Tolentino and ritual performance artist/filmmaker Jocelyn Taylor (aka Jaguar Mary). By 1991, Clit Club ran as a weekly party, known for its hot energetic vibe that blended nightlife with sex, art, and activism in a manner far ahead of its time.
“Clit Club was more than a party. Or, like the best parties, it was an ethos, a destination that lived inside its inhabitants—a roving home for dykes, sex workers, and unflappable misfits. A legendary safe house along the path of a malevolent journey,” says Editor-in-Chief of Artforum, David Velasco.
About Queer|Art
Queer|Art connects and empowers LGBTQ+ artists across generations and creative disciplines. Founded in 2009, we are an artist-led and community-centered organization—united by shared values of collective care, creative resilience, and the preservation and advancement of queer legacies and queer futures.
The devastating loss of a generation of artists to the ongoing AIDS pandemic has created a profound longing for cross-generational connections, mentorship, and community. Queer|Art serves as a ballast against this loss, seeking to highlight and address a continuing fundamental lack of both economic and institutional support for our community.
Ongoing programmatic initiatives include: our annual cornerstone program, the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship and a wide array of awards, grants, and offerings that provide direct support to LGBTQ+ artists.
Website: www.queer-art.org
Instagram: @queerart
Press contact: Matt Gross / Heart Spade PR, matt@heartspadepr.com, 347 804 6837.