Inhabitants of the Gay Utopia

Suzanne Bachner is an award-winning playwright and director and a member of the Dramatists Guild. Plays include the Off Broadway hit, Circle, the cult comedy, Icons & Outcasts, and the interactive sex farce, BITE. Her new drama, We Call Her Benny, played to critical acclaim as part of the first-ever FRIGID New York Festival and will move uptown to The Michael Weller Theatre in April 2008. Her website is here.

Jennifer Baumgardner is a popular magazine writer and the author of four books, including Manifesta and Look Both Ways. She lives in Brooklyn with her three-year-old son, Skuli, and is working on a documentary about rape. Her website is www.soapboxinc.com. Her page is here.

Eric Berlatsky is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. He resides in Boynton Beach, FL with his wife Jennie, daughters Katie and Julia, and cat, Willow. For information on his academic "achievements," see his website.

Noah Berlatsky is a cultural dilettante. He is the editor of this forum. His blog is here.

Lilli Carré was born in Los Angeles in 1983 and has since moved to Chicago, where she's lived for the past six years. She makes comics and animations, and otherwise works as an illustrator and at a movie place. Her website is here.

Dame Darcy, the cartoonist of Meat Cake comix currently published on Fantagraphics is working on a graphic novel and feature film entitled Gasoline, (among other art/music projects). She lives in NY and LA. To contact her go to damedarcy.com.

EyeofSerpent: Born on the planet Earth in the late part of the 20th century, the author entered genre fiction in October 1999 with the notion that the internet needed more character-driven erotic fiction. Alas, nearly ten years later, it still needs more. Her website is here; her story archive is here.

Edie Fake is notoriously morally bankrupt and has an insatiable appetite for destruction. He lives in San Francisco where he is currently apprenticing in a tattoo shop. In the Spring of 2006, Edie performed in the PeaceCore Book Tour across the whole country with collaborator Dewayne Slightweight. In 2007 he and Dewayne unveiled a new work called “Rainbow Dawn” at Art In General in New York. He draws the queer mytho-log of Gaylord Phoenix, the food fetish zine Foie Gras, the comic Rico McTaco and the recently completed zine Unisex. His spirit animal is possibly a “rainbow colored weasel” and he is a Virgo-loving virgo. Both errorless heiress and myopic neurotic, he potentially has an FBI file and unreliable psychic ESPs. His old internet haunts are www.ediefake.com and ediefake@hotmail.com and he loves to trade.

Lelah Fern lives in Philadelphia. She once traveled with Noah Berlatsky and two other dashing young men to the far flung islands of Scotland. One time someone in a pub called Lelah "the lady singer," and the foursome realized that the locals had decided that they were a traveling rock n' roll band! Cool! But Lelah can't carry a tune, and no one has ever called her a lady again. This is her girlfriend's food blog for which she took the photographs.

Rebecca Field is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Mathematics at Reed College, and at Cambridge University, where she collaborates with Ian Grojnowski. Her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago computed the Chow ring of classifying space BSO2n. She is currently computing with the classifying space for the exceptional group G2. Her cat Lute is loud, deaf, subcutaneous-injection-dependent, and allergic to crunchies. But Lute, for all his faults, is exceedingly furry, plus his idiopathic vestibular syndrome produces a chronically winsome head tilt. Rebecca owns many pieces of rusty metal, and her wedding ring has a whopping great hunk of citrine on it. She and Anne Lorimer were married on May 20th, 2004, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Aide-de-Camp to Ivan the Terrible, covert adviser to Mao Tse-Tung, chief chef for Rasputin, secret lover of Francois Mitterand, Untier of Knots to the Burmese Ministry of the Interior and Tongan Prince Taufa'ahau Tupou II, and long-time advice columnist--the Giant Squid had many careers prior to joining the Poor Mojo's staff in 2000. He quickly rose to Editor-in-Chief, and the Almanac(k) has flourished under his magnanimous rule ever since.

Kinukitty lacks the discipline to even write a proper bio. Is it wrong? Her website is here.

Ursula K. Le Guin has been writing about gender and utopia (among other topics) for more than thirty years. Her writings include The Books of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and most recently, Powers. This is her website.

Anne Lorimer is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Reed College. In 2007, her article ‘The Cockpit’s Empty Chair’ appeared in the Teachers College Record, and her article ‘Raising Spectres’ appeared in Exhibition Experiment (New Interventions in Art History), edited by Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald. Her research interests include mass media production and reception, forms of agency generated by anti-sweatshop and fair trade movements, and the history of capitalist spectacle in Chicago. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and is currently revising her ethnography of linguistic and material practices among Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry visitors and staff, Reality World. She and Rebecca Field were married on May 20th, 2004, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Paul Mack is a visual artist and art educator working out of his garage. He is currently in exile in Arizona. He can be contacted at pjmack38@netzero.com.

Michael Manning is an animator, illustrator, tattoo designer and comix artist/writer. His best known works include Inamorata (Last Gasp) and The Spider Garden and Tranceptor graphic novel series (NBM). His artwork has been featured in galleries and museum exhibits both locally and internationally. Born in New York City, Manning studied film and animation at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He began self-publishing comix in 1987 while working as an animator/director of short films and music videos. A California resident since 1991, Manning currently lives in downtown Los Angeles. His artwork can be seen at www.thespidergarden.net.

Paul Mullins has busied himself for over a decade with producing 2D output centered upon his dissection of the rural American male animal. In work that over and over revisits things like flexing, fighting, fishing and fucking, an interested viewer could observe a small town guy who tackled but could never figure the class setup that awaits the aspirant in art. Mullins' work is and has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, etc. He is Associate Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. His work can be viewed at several gallery sites, including Heather Marx Gallery and Nathan Larramendy Gallery.

Nishizaka Hiromi. Born and raised in Kumamoto, Hiromi won the Yamato Waki Award in the Manga Koshien Book Version contest when she was a junior in high school. She graduated from Kyoto Seika University's Department of Comic Art in April 2007. "Okami" was produced as a play, directed by Kalma Streun, at the Thalia Theater in Halle, Germany, in May 2006. Her homepage is here.

Paul Nudd is a prolific maker of drawings, videos and collage. His most recent solo exhibitions include "Pus Lust" at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn (2006) and "Green Slug & Wet Filth: a Dog's Dream" at Bodybuilder & Sportsman in Chicago (2005). He curated two shows this summer, "The Paul Nudd Curatorial Experience" at Western Exhibitions and "KlUsterCRUsTS" at BSD. The Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago will be exhibiting five new large scale paintings in May, 2008. Paul Nudd received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001. He divides his time between Chicago and Cicero, Illinois. His website is here.

William J. O'Brien is an artist who lives and works in Chicago, Il. He spends most of his time making drawings, masturbating, eating curry, and praying to various deities. His website is here.

Lev Olsen is a writer. He lives in New York.

Ma Rainey was one of the great early female blues singers. More biographical information is available here.

Johnny Ryan was born in Boston in 1970. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife. His website is here.

Ariel Schrag is the author of the autobiographical graphic novels Awkward, Definition, and Potential, which chronicle her years at Berkeley High School. She was a Staff Writer and Story Editor for seasons three and four of the hit Showtime series, The L Word, and wrote the screen adaptation to Potential, which is currently being developed into a major motion picture by Killer Films. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster will publish Likewise, chronicling Schrag's final year of high school, in Fall 2008. Her website is here.

Julia Serano is a writer, spoken word artist, biologist, trans activist, and author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Her writings have also appeared in the anthologies Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, Desire: Women Write About Wanting, and Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. Her website is here.

Dewayne Slightweight lives in Chicago and makes drawings, music, and sculpture, often combining these into participatory performances with comic book souvenirs; his newest, "I Want to Know the Habits of Other Girls", premiered at Gallery 400 in Chicago and Orchard in New York. Other recent activities include making a chair out of vegetables at Art in General with Edie Fake, singing medleys at an old folks’ home with the Chicago Boys Choir, doing a human slide show with Sadie Benning, playing bass in the band Mayor Daley, and drawing comics for The Skeleton News.

Bert Stabler first corporeally manifested in a block of quartz within the wall of an ancient Zuni cryogenesis pit deep in the bowels of Arizona circa 700 BC, but was not discovered until his accidental release by trigger-happy eco-tourists in the years of America's mid to late innocence. He studied under and then feasted on the carcasses of sundry tenured polyglot dilettantes. After making his fortune in mind control videos and nutritional supplements, he was vanquished by a blinding light, and now speaks through dancing wasps and the rings of rotten trees. His website is here.

Alexander Stewart lives in Chicago, Illinois. His artwork involves animation, analog technologies and the materiality of media. His 2005 experimental film Errata has screened at film festivals and galleries in the US, Europe, and Japan. Alexander currently teaches at DePaul University, and curates work at Deadtech and Roots & Culture galleries in Chicago. His website is here.

Tabico is the pen name for a dubiously prolific author of mind control erotica. The woman behind the name is an academic biologist residing in Southern California. Her story archive is here.

Matt Thorn is a scholar of sequential art, best known for his work on shoujo manga (Japanese girls' and women's comics) and his translations of such manga as Ranma 1/2, Banana Fish, A, A', and They Were Eleven. He is an associate professor in the School of Manga Production at Kyoto Seika University. His web site is here.

Scott Treleaven lives and works in Paris. A new catalogue of his collages, films and sculptures has recently been published, entitled Some Boys Wander By Mistake. The book features an interview with Jack Pierson, an essay by Terence Hannum and five new poems by Dennis Cooper based on the work. His website is here.

Vom Marlowe lives in Missouri with her very large, very German dog, Pookie. Her website (such as it is), is here.

Neil Whitacre lived in Milwaukee and Chicago from 1996-2000, then moved to Miami and the Everglades and then New York. He now lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Naomi and 5 chickens that reside in the front yard in a blazing pink coop. His website is here.