LOCATION
GLBT Historical Society Museum
4127 18th Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
ADMISSION
$10; Free for GLBT Historical Society Members
The GLBT Historical Society in partnership with the Bay Area Reporter and Litquake present a panel discussion as part of the 2026 Litquake festival!
What are the rules of engagement when telling historical tales about the lives of LGBTQ characters? Authors and scholars compare notes on their fictional and nonfiction works that resonate realistically, and even those that are completely fantastical yet set in the real world’s past. Featuring authors Mark Abramson, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Joey Cain, and Katie Gilmartin. Moderated by Bay Area Reporter arts editor and author Jim Provenzano.
SPEAKERS
MODERATOR: Jim Provenzano (he/him) is the author of seven novels, including the Lambda Literary Award winner Every Time I Think of You, and its sequel Message of Love (a Lambda finalist), his debut novel PINS and its award-winning commissioned stage adaptation. Other works include four audiobook adaptations, a short story collection and a novella. The guest-curator of Sporting Life, the world’s first gay athletics exhibit at the GLBT Historical Society Museum, he also wrote the syndicated Sports Complex column for ten years. A journalist, editor and photographer in LGBTQ media for more than three decades, he lives in San Francisco, and is the Arts Editor of the Bay Area Reporter. https://www.jimprovenzano.com/
Mark Abramson (he/him) is the author of eight volumes of “Beach Reading” – a mystery series set primarily in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, plus publishing nine non-fiction memoirs and diaries covering various chapters of his remarkable life story, including Sex, Drugs & Disco. As one of the mass migration of thousands of young gay men to San Francisco in the mid-1970s, he has witnessed and documented the times before, during, and after the worst of the AIDS pandemic. Abramson has also been involved in producing dance parties on the waterfront and AIDS fundraisers, including Men Behind Bars, which ran from 1984 to 1994. https://markabramson.net/
Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s (she/her) eighth novel, Tell the Rest, received starred reviews in both Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Times said her work “triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.” Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, three Pushcart nominations, a Yaddo Fellowship, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. She’s been a three-time finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award, and a six-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. https://www.lucyjanebledsoe.com/
Joey Cain (he/him) is an exhibition curator, activist and LGBT historian specializing in the history of Queer Men’s Consciousness and self-conception. He’s curated exhibits for the San Francisco Public Library and the GLBT Historical Society, and co-edits the Edward Carpenter Circle website. His writing has appeared in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, RFD Magazine, Out History website and the book The Fire in the Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries, edited by Mark Thompson. He is a longtime member of the Bound Together Anarchist Bookstore and served as board member and President of the SF LGBT Pride Celebration Committee.
Katie Gilmartin’s (she/her) checkered past includes stints as a buoyant union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and deeply engaged college professor. She cofounded City Art Cooperative Gallery, a still-thriving arts space on Valencia Street, and launched the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging sturdy relationships between young Queer and Trans artists and their ancestors. Her illustrated novel, Blackmail, My Love, won Lambda Literary and Indiefab Awards. Her second novel, Vice Academy, is a fictional account of an actual 1954 raid on a lesbian/trans bar in San Francisco’s North Beach, and is currently in search of a publisher. https://www.katiegilmartin.com/
Members Perks
Interested in becoming a member of the GLBT Historical Society? Members enjoy all sorts of perks, including free access to this event. Learn more.