Join us on Thursday, March 28th, at 7 PM at The Leather Archives for an author conversation with Dale Corvino and Michael Bullock, moderated by Stephen Patrick Bell!

The Leather Archives is located at 6418 N Greenview. Please note that this location is 18+ and requires the use of stairs to access the building.

Gen X Tropes: Dale Corvino (Bonds & Boundaries) & Michael Bullock (I Could Not Believe It)

Join us for the Chicago launch event for BONDS & BOUNDARIES, the debut short story collection by Dale Corvino, from Rebel Satori Press. Dale will be in conversation with Michael Bullock, co-editor of I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT: THE 1979 DIARIES OF SEAN DELEAR from Semoitext(e). The conversation and discussion will be moderated by author Stephen Patrick Bell. Discussion to be followed by a Q&A. Both titles will be available for sale.

BONDS & BOUNDARIES

A collection of short stories written over ten years, exploring those titular themes, queer longing, and digital estrangement. Among the bonds explored: two women, a starlet and a homemaker, admiring each other across the constraints of their roles (“Miss Bensonhurst”); a mother and her gay child reasserting their love after estrangement (“Great White”); queer friends protecting each other (“Drowned River”); a stripper sitting next to a gay man on a long bus ride (“More Sequins than Cloth”); lovers reuniting through displacement (“The Marielito”). Though the boundaries explored include national (“The Forty-Ninth Parallel”), social, and familial (“Donor Baby”), such externalities are revealed in how they push emotional and personal boundaries.

The recurrent theme of sex work interactions–ripe for explorations of bonds and boundaries alike–reflects the author’s past experience and genesis as a writer. Racial and cultural dynamics drive several stories, notably “Three-way Calls” and “Benny Aboard.” Several take on the particular despair of Gen X, a cohort largely formed in an analog context and thrust into a digitally-mediated reality, though none more pointedly than “Satellite Rules, Stranded Longings,” in which an aging salesman at a trade show grapples with intimacy while using a gay cruising app. As a collection, Bonds & Boundaries maps a queer journey from the moraine of our origins through the vectors of longing that form us towards the afterlives we must often build over displacement and loss.

“Dale Corvino gives us visceral access to his characters’ brains. Each of these pieces delivers something whole. You can tell he’s been around, and you’re bowled over by the humanity that has grown from it.”

—Bruce Benderson, Author of The Romanian

I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT

When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn. DeLear’s forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, “It wasn’t cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren’t even in the vocabulary.” I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, “is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid’s journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It’s not cognizant of being literature. It’s as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn’t written with the desire to be published so Sean didn’t hold back. Sean’s goal was to be true to himself.

In his review, Dale Corvino wrote: “For me—a fellow rebellious queer Gen Xer, having navigated a homophobic, white flight context—reading DeLear’s diaries had me reflecting upon my suppressed adolescent longings and marveling at DeLear’s self-assured, libidinous joy so intensely it summoned a braver teen self as if out of the metaverse, who has since replaced the one that was nearly flattened in suburban estrangement.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dale Corvino – A 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow, Dale Corvino found his voice at the underground literary salon “Dean Johnson’s Reading for Filth,” recounting his interactions with sex work.

Many of the short stories in his collection were workshopped right here in Chicago with Newtown Writers.

His memoir, Kept Boy in the Afterlife, won the 2023 Nonfiction Prize from C&R Press and is due out in September.

Michael Bullock is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and political organizer.

He’s the author of Roman Catholic Jacuzzi (2012) and the editor of Peter Berlin: Artist, Icon, Photosexual (2019).

Bullock is a regular contributor to BUTT, associate publisher for PIN-UP magazine and The Whitney Review of New Writing and a contributing editor for Apartamento.

Stephen Patrick Bell (he/him) is a writer raised in New York by Jamaican immigrants, currently based in Chicago where he produced The Moth StorySLAM.

A 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow in fiction and a Summer 2023 Tin House fellow, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Interview Magazine, The Rumpus, The Chicago Review of Books, The Lambda Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

He is currently working on a novel.