Monday Sep 09, 2024
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality.
One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: “You into race play?” Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don’t laugh, you cry—or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester’s book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live?
Rage is one part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade. He contrasts his tragic-comedic love life with the ideals he had formed from bingeing (straight, white) Hollywood depictions. And he is quick to side-eye the misogyny and internalized homophobia that some people reveal in statements like “masc for masc” on dating profiles. Lester also dives deep into representations of queer life from RuPaul’s Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of James Baldwin, Whitney Houston, and Nina Simone.
Lester’s razor-sharp voice, coupled with his searing social commentary on topics such as dating, rejection, racism, sexuality, identity, and more, offer an increasingly divided world an engaging and original read.
About the Author.
Lester Fabian Brathwaite is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly and, for some masochistic reason known only to him and his therapist, has been a professional writer for almost fifteen years. He has contributed to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The Advocate, among other publications, and has also served as senior editor for Out magazine. Rage is his first book.
About the Moderator.
Stephen Winter is an award-winning filmmaker, producer and writer whose 1996 debut feature film Chocolate Babies was restored by UCLA/Outfest in 2023 and has been featured twice on the Criterion Channel. Stephen’s feature film Jason and Shirley (2015) was called “one of the year’s finest” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker), premiered at BAMCinemaFest, The Museum of Modern Art, Art Gallery Ontario and the Criterion Channel. The follow-up film Jason and Shirley: Revisited will premiere in 2025. In 2023 Stephen directed the science-fiction drama podcast The Space Within, starring and produced by Jessica Chastain, also starring Michael Shannon and Ellen Burstyn for Topic Studios, and Audible. In 2022, Stephen wrote the Jason King documentary podcast Sound Barrier: Sylvester, about the trailblazing Black and gay disco star Sylvester. Stephen co-created and directed the 2018-19 Afro-futuristic political satire podcast: Adventures in New America, which the New York Times compared to Boots Riley and Jordan Peele. As film producer Stephen produced Jonathan Caouette’s landmark 2004 documentary Tarnation, which premiered at Sundance, Cannes and NYFF. Other film collaborators include Lee Daniels, John Cameron Mitchell, Allan Hughes, Xan Cassavetes, Gus Van Sant, Patrik Ian Polk, Zoe Cassavetes and Bridey Elliott. As story editor, Stephen worked with David France on How To Survive A Plague (2013), which earned an Oscar nomination for Outstanding Documentary. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris has called Stephen “The father of modern Black Queer cinema.”