From the haunted East Village of the AIDS crisis to the unruly freedoms and uneasy visibility of the queer nineties, Natalie Adler and Hugh Ryan trace how one era bleeds into the next. Adler’s debut novel, Waiting on a Friend, reimagines downtown New York at a moment of grief, defiance, and erasure, while Ryan’s My Bad maps the aftershocks of that loss through the clubs, chat rooms, activism, and self-inventions of the decade that followed. Together, their books ask how queer communities remember, rebuild, and carry the dead forward, and how the past continues to shape the freedoms and fractures of the present. This panel will be moderated by Brian Montopoli.
Date
Jun 21, 2:30pm to 3:30pm
Featuring
Natalie Adler
Natalie Adler has an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She was a Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction and is an editor at Lux magazine. She is from New Jersey and lives in New York City.
Hugh Ryan
Hugh Ryan is a writer, historian, curator, and host of Queer History 101, the book club and podcast from Allstora. He is the author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, winner of the Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction, and When Brooklyn Was Queer, a New York Times Editors’ Pick and winner of the New York City Book Award. His work has earned honors from the American Historical Association, the New York Public Library, and the Brooklyn Historical Society, and he teaches nonfiction in the MFA program at Bennington Writing Seminars. My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond is published by Hachette.
Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is currently producing and directing a documentary about the acclaimed gay novelist Edmund White. He also developed and is producing a documentary centered on Jamaican novelist Marlon James.
Brian spent 16 years working as a reporter and producer at CBS News and MSNBC, where he won two Emmy Awards. He has developed docu-series and films for numerous production companies, including Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions. He has bylines in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Republic, Slate, This American Life, On The Media, and many other outlets.
He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, Josh.
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