AGLA NY sets up “Emergency fund” and scholarship for LGBT people in Armenia and Diaspora

Some thirty guests came together on May 23rd at the home of Veken Gueyekian and Hrag Vartanian in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to celebrate Armenian gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered unity and to raise money for specific organisational goals.

Specifically, the benefit targeted three areas, Chairman and AGLA NY board member Christopher Atamian outlined: "We’re beginning a small 'Emergency Fund' to help LGBT people in need both in the Republic of Armenia and the diaspora—for example to help rebuild a bar like DIY which was firebombed in a recent hate crime, or to help with legal fees for LGBT people in need.” A second aim was simply to raise funds to help with the everyday expenses of running the organization and the many meetings, conferences and events such as New York's PRIDE March that it participates in. One of the night's guest speakers Maria Mähl, a Human Rights Advocate who currently works at the UN on women's security and peace building and SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) rights, commented on the importance of the work that AGLA NY does: “It is especially important now given the backlash against LGBT people that we have seen of late.”

A third and very exciting goal of the benefit was the creation of the George Stambolian Memorial Scholarship for students for LGBT students or those of Armenian origin.  Stambolian was a beloved professor of French literature at Wellesley College, one of the founders of LGBT Literature and the editor of the famed Men on Men writing series. Stambolian passed away from AIDS in 1991. The guests were truly lucky to have one of Stambolian's own former students Nancy Agabian talk affectionately about him: "[He was] aware of and appreciated the paradoxes of life and of literature...[he] embodied them and worked for them in a meaningful way.” Agabian read two excerpts from her own books where she mentions Stambolian: Princess Freak and Me As Her Again.

Atamian was upbeat about the event, which raised close to $2,000: "There are so many established benefits already in New York and in the Armenian community….but everyone reacted beautifully and understood the importance of our organization and its activities." The organization’s board members plan to build on this success: "Every year we'll build on the previous one," Gueyekian noted, "It's a first very important step."

Anyone interested in making a tax-deductible donation to the organization as a whole or to any of its specific programs—such as the Emergency Fund or the Stambolian Scholarship—can do so at http://aglany.org or by contacting a board member directly.  

***
George Stambolian was a scholar of French literature and became an early proponent of LGBT literature in academia and within the U.S. at large. Born in 1937 to an Armenian American family in Racine, Wisconsin, he attended Dartmouth College, then earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin.  Soon after, he become an expert and beloved professor of French literature at Wellesley College, and a noted figure in the literary scene of New York City, where he lived.  In the late 1980s and early 90s, he edited the groundbreaking anthology series Men on Men and helped to establish LGBT literature as a genre and field of study during the gay rights movement.  Stambolian was known for his quick wit, wry sense of humor and his remarkable humility.  Like many in his generation, his life was cut short by AIDS, in 1991.  AGLA-NY honors his legacy by establishing a scholarship in his memory.

Nancy Agabian is an author and a professor at NYU and Queens College. Her memoir, Me as her again, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a William Saroyan International Writing Prize.  Agabian has served as co-President of AGLA NY in 2005 and 2006 and currently sits on its Board of Trustees.  She was a student of George Stambolian at Wellesley College.

Queering Yerevan: “Meeting with remarkable women”

Guitar Boy "Love in the Desert"



"Love in the Desert" by Nancy Agabian, Ann Perich and Dan Day. Originally released in "Life History of a Star," Infected Films soundtrack. Produced by Jon Mattox & Guitar Boy. Recorded at Red Room Studios. Copyright 1999 Ampus Music/BMI.

*via Queering Yerevan

Two or Three Things She Knows About Shushanik



"Two or Three Things She Knows About Shushanik" (2005). A video by Tina Bastajian on the translation of Shushanik Kurghinian's (1876-1927) poetry into English (by Shushan Avagyan).

*Thanks to Lara for the link to this video. Reminds me of my Quote of the Moment:

"Do not love me as if I were a flower! I want to live a worthy life, as an atom in a mass of troubles, as a child of street mobs."
Shushanik Kurghinian

Queer Pride Armenian Reading, New York

Via Queering Yerevan, Gartal and the Armenian Gay and Lesbian Association of New York (AGLA NY) present "An Evening of Literary Pride" on 20 June 2009, at the LGBT Community Services Center in New York.

Gartal and AGLA NY have asked writers and poets to read selections related to the issue of pride, a loaded term for Armenians and queers alike. Hosted by Arthur Nersesian, famed East Village novelist of such books as The Fuckup, Chinese Takeout, Manhattan Loverboy and his most recent, The Sacrificial Circumcision of The Bronx. Introduced by Nancy Agabian, author of the new memoir Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter. Reception to follow.

Readings by:
David Ciminello
Amy Ouzoonian
Aaron Poochigian
Margarita Shalina
Hrag Vartanian

David Ciminello’s fiction has appeared in the literary journal Lumina. His short story "PD XOX" appears in the forthcoming anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest. His original screenplay Bruno (a finalist in the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting) was produced and occasionally appears on DVD as something vaguely resembling the original story. David has received his MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. He currently lives in New York City where he works as a writer and teaching artist.

Amy Ouzoonian is a writer, performance artist and editor. She is the author of Your Pill (Poems, Foothills Publishing), Editor of In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief (Poems, Sherman Asher Press). She is currently a graduate student at The New School and is working on a series of performance pieces that incorporates her work with music and dance called "Waiting Journey." She lives and creates in Queens, NY.

Aaron Poochigian attended Moorhead State University from where he studied under the poets Dave Mason, Alan Sullivan, and Tim Murphy. After traveling and doing research in Greece on fellowship, he earned his Phd in Classics from the University of Minnesota. Forthcoming translations include Sappho’s poems and fragments for Penguin Classics; Aeschylus, Aratus and Apollonius of Rhodes in the Norton Anthology of Greek Literature in Translation; and his edition of Aratus’ astronomical poem, The Phaenomena, from Johns Hopkins University Press. His original poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Arion, The Dark Horse, Poetry Magazine and Smartish Pace. He now lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.

Margarita Shalina was born in Leningrad and raised on New York’s Lower East Side. Her poetry has appeared in Poems for the Retired Nihilist V. 2 (Fortune Teller Press, UK, 2007), EvergreenReview.com, New York Nights, and as a broadside for Poetry Motel. She has written essays for ZEEK Magazine and Three Percent, the website that accompanies Open Letter Press. She was a contributing translator to Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press, 2007) and is the Independent Press Buyer for St. Marks Bookshop. She lives in New York.

Hrag Vartanian is an Armenian-Canadian writer, critic and cultural worker. He lives in New York and his work has appeared in the Art21 blog, AGBU News, the Brooklyn Rail, NYFA's Current, Huffington Post, Modern Painters and contributes a street art column, "Re:Public", to ArtCat Zine. He serves on the board of the Ararat Quarterly and the Triangle Arts Association. He also blogs daily at hragvartanian.com. He is gayly married and hopes that one day his marriage will be legally recognized across America and around the world.

Book review: "Me as her again" by Nancy Agabian

Me as Her Again: An utterly queer memoir
Reviewed by Shushan Avagyan

* The Armenian Reporter

I met Nancy Agabian for the first time in April 2001, after I read her book Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque, 2000), which greatly impressed me for its audacity. Her small, bold book, which fused poetry, creative nonfiction, and texts from performance art, was controversial for Armenian society because it explored the polymorphous and elusive nature of identity and dared to openly speak about sexuality - something that rarely surfaced in a literary tradition that was overwhelmingly dominated by male and heterosexual discourses.

Released in October, Agabian's new book, Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, was eagerly awaited by her fans in America, Europe, and Armenia. It is a memoir about identity and family history that Agabian worked on for over six years. It is also, perhaps in the vein of David Sedaris, a brazen examination of queerness - a deviation from the expected, the norm, and the conventional - through a discovery of a queer self, the hilarious attempt to deny it through self-banishment, and, finally, the recognition and acceptance of that "odd" self. [...]

Agabian's prose is playful, as it shifts from extremely serious to almost farcical. One of the strongest aspects of this book is the author's ability to take something as outrageous as, for example, being confronted by someone in the audience who has completely missed your art, and narrate it in such a way that is at once comical and ironic. Here is a classic Agabian, wearing a costume of thin white cotton pajamas, facing a packed house of Armenians in the tiny back room of a café in Pasadena: "They were close enough to hear my heart beating. Attempting to manufacture an emotional distance, I looked into the back row and announced in a stage voice, ‘This performance is called The Crochet Penis.' A woman in her late 40s, sitting to my right, our knees almost touching, said with an accent, ‘Ugh, why they have to call it that?' to no one in particular." Later in the performance the woman stands up and demonstratively leaves the room.

A few days later the same woman disrupts another performance titled WANT at the Glendale Public Library: "It was not serious poetry, it was more of a low-class comedy act... I am a literature professor!" she yells. "I know what I am talking about. I could have told you in private, but I wanted everyone to hear my opinion." As Agabian confesses, the woman's reaction is her "worst nightmare come true." Ironically, this outbreak is followed by an earnest discussion about taboos and the audience engages in an insightful conversation about silences surrounding sexuality in Armenian society. This all-too-familiar scene implicitly alludes to similar occasions when lectures or panels about the Armenian Genocide are disrupted by deniers in the audience and demonstrates the importance of a supportive community.

Nancy Agabian: "Me as her again"

Nancy Abagian's new book Me as her again is out now. There will be various events to mark its launch in LA and NY over October-November 2008. I wish there is one in London or Yerevan too.

This is one of the highly anticipated and talked about books within Armenian literary and LGBT communities. My congratulations to Nancy! Can't wait to get hold of it and start the reading.

"Untangling knots of personal identity and family history, Nancy Agabian deftly weaves a narrative alternately comical and wrenching. Moving between memories of growing up Armenian and American in Walpole, Massachusetts, and her later experiences at Wellesley College, then Hollywood and, finally, Turkey, Agabian offers an illuminating meditation on the sometimes bizarre entanglement of individual desire (sexual and otherwise) in the web of family life and history. At the heart of this unraveling is a grappling with the history of trauma and upheaval experienced by her paternal grandmother, who survived the Armenian Genocide, and the legacy of that wounding experience for Agabian and her extended family."
***

What’s so refreshing about Agabian’s prose is her marvelously open, daring, and honest inquiry into the self. Our “enfant terrible” — she has yet again managed to capture us with her quirky, brilliant stories.
– Shushan Avagyan, author of Girk-anvernagir; translator of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian

My favorite song from Nancy Agabian’s improbably vivid “Guitar Boy” punk rock period a decade ago was the genius anthem “I Don’t Want to be a Victim Anymore.” Though as she noted at the time, when you’re a mousily timid, family-mired, Armenian bisexual artist, not tending toward victimhood isn’t all that easy. But you know what? By the end of this splendidly engrossing memory chronicle, she’s pulled it off. She’s no victim. What she is is funny, smart, generous and wise. And she’s my hero.
—Lawrence Weschler, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences

http://nancyagabian.com/

(check out Nancy Agabian's new website. You won't regret it.)
***

As Nancy writes:
"You can also order it from Amazon, but I recommend buying directly from the publisher, Aunt Lute Books. Please give your support to an amazing multicultural, nonprofit women’s press."

Nancy Agabian: My Gay Family and The Crochet Penis (hit plays in New York)

Must see if you are in New York on 18-19 July 2008.

*source: Bread & Water Theatre and Indymedia (Rochester IMC)

Each one-woman show is a unique take on what it is to be a bisexual woman in the modern world. My Gay Family tells the coming-of-age story of a shy, funny, Armenian-American bisexual girl who flees her small town of Walpole, Massachusetts to tell the stories of her family of one gay brother, one lesbian sister and two homophobic parents. The Crochet Penis is a much more biting play as it deals with Nancy’s life in the wake of her grandmother’s death, a woman of courage who survived the Armenian Genocide. In this emotional time she confronts her issues of sexuality, love and loss.

After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in Studio Art in 1990, Nancy Agabian moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote and presented the poems and solo performance texts collected in Princess Freak. Her writing has also appeared in numerous anthologies. With Ann Perich she formed the folk-punk duo Guitar Boy, their CD Freaks Like Me was released in 2000. In that year she also received the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann fellowship to attend Columbia University’s writing program, from which she graduated in 2003. Her master’s thesis, Me as Her Again, is a memoir that explores the influence of her Armenian-American family on her coming-of-age and will be published by Aunt Lute Books in 2008. Since Dec. 2002, she has been coordinating Gartal, a literary reading series for Armenian-American writers at Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. In 2007, Ms. Agabian traveled to the Yerevan State University in Armenia where she conducted researched and lectured on the topic “Writing Armenia: Personal Stories” on a Fulbright Scholarship. She currently teaches creative non-fiction writing at Queens College in NYC.

The encore performances of The Crochet Penis and My Gay Family will be presented at 243 Rosedale St. (New Life Presbyterian Church) on July 18th and 19th, 2008 at 8:00pm.

Interview with Nancy Agabian: forthcoming book, poetry, family, Armenian community, bisexuality, gay rights and equality

Here is an opportunity to celebrate an achievement. I would like to recommend this interview with well known Armenian gay and women rights activist, former head of New York based Armenian gay rights group AGLA NY (HyeQs of New York), talented writer Nancy Agabian. She is the author of no longer updated (unfortunately!) One Armenian World blog, which was among my favourite blogs back then.

This interview was conducted by Hye Eli initiative. Nancy speaks about her poetry, family, life as bisexual Armenian woman, gay and lesbian Armenians, and her forthcoming book.

Nancy is the author of Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books, 2000), a collection of poems and performance art texts. Her writing has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including Birthmark: A Bilingual Anthology of Armenian-American Poetry (Open Letter Press, 1999), Scream When You Burn, an anthology from Caffeine Magazine (Incommunicado, 1998), and Hers 2: Brilliant New Fiction from Lesbian Writers (Faber & Faber, 1997). Her recently completed memoir, which will be published soon, Me as her again, explores her Armenian-American family’s influence on her coming-of-age, especially the stories of her feminist mother and survivor grandmother. Nancy lives in New York City, where she teaches writing and coordinates GARTAL, an Armenian literary reading series.

You may listen to the interview with Nancy Agabian here

AGLA NY started blogging

In a welcome move and in line with previously announced expansion of organisational activities, Armenian Gay & Lesbian Association of New York (AGLA NY) launched its blog, with the focus on life of LGBT Armenians in NY, US, as well as organisational news.

Here are some headlines from recent posts.

“Member spotlight” presents NY fashion designer Loris Diran and metalware designer Michael Aram

Nancy Agabian reports on a lecture by Vigen Guroian, Prof. of Theology at Loyola College (MD), entitled, “Homosexuality & Same-Sex Union” at the Armenian Prelacy (16 November 2007). “The main point of Professor Guroian’s talk was that same sex union goes against one of the Armenian Apostolic church’s sacraments, that of a marriage between a man and a woman, as stated in the bible.” However, as Nancy concluded, “The event wasn’t openly hostile towards gays and lesbians; rather, people seemed interested to listen and talk to teach other about the issue. This represents real progress, especially for those who remember when the word gay wouldn’t have even been understood within an Armenian religious context. Our queer Armenian voices were heard in connection with the church, and on the issue of gay marriage, which affects many of us.”

There is also announcement on a special Gartal event in NY on 17 February 2008 which featured reading of the new book (An)daratsutian Mej or In the (Un)space (Women’s Resource Center, Yerevan, 2007) in English, French and Armenian with authors Nancy Agabian, Lara Aharonian and Shushan Avagyan. “In writing about such topics as the domestic violence of upstairs neighbors, an absurd gynecological visit, and furtive reading in a grandmother’s library, the tri-authors create the “(un)space”, where each Armenian woman must interpret herself and translate others in order to find a place to more fully exist.” Hrag Vartanian has more details.

I will keep an eye on AGLA NY blog and will update here on new developments from NY LGBT Armenian community. You may access their blog at http://aglany.wordpress.com