Room: 1.75
1:00- 2:25pm: Queer Faith
Featuring:
Brian Murphy
Patrick Cheng
Steve Parelli
Hannah Simpson
2:30- 3:45pm: Queer Books, Queer Resistance
Featuring:
Lori Perkins
Christopher Soto
Amy Gall
Michael Klein
4:00-5:15pm: Queer Archives
Featuring:
Jim Hubbard
Red Washburn
Grete Miller
Maggie Schreiner
Steven Fullwood
PANELIST BIOS
The Rev. Dr. Patrick S. Cheng is an Episcopal priest and serves as an associate priest at The Church of the Transfiguration in midtown Manhattan. He also serves as the Affiliated Associate Professor of Theology at Chicago Theological Seminary. Fr. Cheng is the author or editor of four books on queer theology, including Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology, which has been published in Japanese and Chinese as well. He holds a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a B.A. from Yale College.
Steven G. Fullwood is an associate curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library where he directs the In the Life Archive, an initiative to collect and preserve materials created by and about LGBTQ people of African descent. Fullwood is the co-author of Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call (with Charles Stephens), co-editor of Think Again (with Colin Robinson), co-editor of To Be Left With the Body (with Cheryl Clarke) as well as the founder and publisher of Vintage Entity Press. He’s written for Library Journal, Black Issues Book Review, Vibe, and Lambda Book Report.
Amy Gall‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Vice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Brooklyn Magazine, Joyland and PANK, among others. She earned her MFA in fiction from The New School and is currently at work on a collection of essays about sex, violence, and the body.
Jim Hubbard has been making films since 1974 and has made over 25 films. He co-founded MIX – the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival in 1987. Under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, he created the AIDS Activist Video Collection at the New York Public Library. He curated the series Fever in the Archive: AIDS Activist Videotapes from the Royal S. Marks Collection for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The 8-program series took place December 1-8, 2000. In 2002, Sarah Schulman and he started the ACT UP Oral History Project. We have now completed 187 interviews. Complete transcripts and video excerpts are available on the website, www.actuporalhistory.org. The videos and transcripts are being preserved at the Harvard University Library.
He began cataloging moving images in 1991 at Anthology Film Archives under the auspices of the National Moving Image Database. He has also carried out cataloging and preservation projects for WNET/Thirteen, IMAP, the Kitchen, and the Experimental Television Center. He is the author of Meeting the Challenges of Video Preservation: A Progress Report on Initiatives with the Media Arts Field, published by Media Alliance in 1996. In 1996, he created the IMAP Cataloging Template, which allows for standardized cataloging of independent media collections.
MICHAEL KLEIN is a poet and writer and five-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, winning the award twice. His latest book is When I Was a Twin. He teaches at Hunter College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Goddard College in Vermont.
Grete Miller is a performer, writer, filmmaker and LGBTQ community advocate based in NYC. This spring she performed for The Generations Project’s Moving Forward show and collaboration with The Moth. In April she curated a digital installation of Barbara Gittings’ archival materials for the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps concert at Symphony Space. She is currently working on a feature documentary about Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen. On June 9th Grete will perform a live reading of Gittings’ work for the Free Library of Philadelphia’s ’30 Days of Gay.’ The reading benefits the Barbara Gittings Collection. In 2017 her short films Uncovered and Diem took gold and silver in experimental cinema at the Philadelphia Film Festival and Market. She will return this summer to screen her new queer work, ‘Hand Made,’ and will serve as one of their panelists. Grete remains active with SAGE, The Generations Project, LGBAC, Filmmakers’ Co-op and is an instructor for Techgrilz in Philadelphia. On June 17th she will direct a LGBT storytelling session for Lebanon PA’s first ever Pride event, ‘SLAM: A LGBT Colloquium’ at Lebanon Valley College.
Formerly an ordained evangelical Baptist minister who pastored in the states of New York and New Jersey, Rev. Stephen R. Parelli became the Executive Director of Other Sheep in 2005.
Other Sheep, founded in 1992 in Latin America by Rev. Dr. Tom Hanks, an American missionary, author, and contributor to the Queer Bible Commentary (Romans and Hebrews), is a multi-cultural, ecumenical Christian ministry that works worldwide for the full inclusion of LGBT people of faith within their respective faith traditions.
Since 2005, volunteering their summer time to Other Sheep, Steve and his husband Jose Ortiz have travelled to, and worked with, pro-LGBT organizations, clergy and individuals in more than 30 countries throughout the world, primarily in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Together they have distributed thousands of copies of the book The Children Are Free: Reexamining the Biblical Evidence on Same-sex Relationships (by Miner and Connoley) and have conducted seminars, peer training and small group studies on topics relating to the intersecting of homophobia and religion including studies on the Bible, psychology, religious freedom, contextualized homosexuality, and the “ex-gay” movement. They have been featured, or covered, on TV, radio, pod casts, and/or in the press throughout their travels in 16 countries.
Steve holds a BRE (Bachelor of Religious Education) and ThB (Bachelor of Theology) from Baptist Bible College, Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania; an MDiv (Master of Divinity) from Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan; and an MA (Master of Arts) in Applied Linguistics (TESOL) from Queens College, CUNY (City University of New York). He is currently enrolled in the DMin (Doctor of Ministry) program at The Lutheran Seminary at Philadelphia.
Having been defrocked as an ordained Baptist minister after coming out, in 2009 Steve received “extraordinary clergy credentials” from Rev. Nancy Wilson, the Moderator of Metropolitan Community Church.
Lori Perkins is a published author, book editor and literary agent with three decades experience in publishing newspapers and books. She was the owner and publisher of the Uptown Weekly News in Manhattan’s Washington Heights and Inwood in the 80’s, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at NYU. She has written or edited 30 books, 25 of which have been erotic romance anthologies. She was the editor of the very first zombie romance anthology, Hungry for Your Love, and the editor of the nonfiction collection of essays 50 Writers on 50 Shades of Grey, as well as the editor of 1984 in the 21st Century. She is the founder of both the L. Perkins Agency, an established New York literary agency with numerous books on the New York Times bestseller list, as well as the Publisher of Riverdale Avenue Books, an award-winning hybrid publisher. She is currently working on a series of naughty historicals with USA Today bestselling author Jamie Schmidt under the nom de plume Lorna James. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriPerkinsRAB.
Maggie Schreiner is an archivist, curator, and public historian. She is currently a Project Archivist at New York University, and also organizes with Interference Archive and Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. Maggie previously worked with Queens Memory, developing collaborative projects to document communities that are traditionally represented in the archive, and hosting community archiving workshops throughout the borough of Queens, NY. She has co-curated a number of exhibitions, including Queering Interference (2016) and We Won’t Move: Tenants Organize in NYC (2015). Maggie holds an MA in Archives and Public History and a BA in Central and Eastern European Studies.
Hannah Simpson is a young Jewish advocate, writer, educator, comedian, marathoner, traveler, supporter of Israel, and unabashed nerd based in New York City. She speaks to schools, businesses, synagogues, and even military bases on embracing transgender and nonbinary identities. Hannah was raised in a family strongly involved with Judaism’s Conservative movement and found that her faith could in fact justify and support, rather than prohibit and deny one’s need to transition. Simply put, she believes there is a place in religion for every transgender person who seeks it, it just might not be the sect you were assigned at birth. Hannah is has led three delegations of LGBTQ-identified Birthright Israel, having brought over a hundred Jewish young adults to Israel for the first time, so far. You might have seen her as a guest on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show or WNYW Fox 5’s Good Day New York. Follow her on Twitter @hannsimp or at HannahSimpson.com.
