On 30 July, beginning at 6:00pm, ABC Amsterdam will participate in the Amsterdam Pride Literary Route
Actors from Theaterworks will present live readings from queer literature:
- A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
- Lethal Affairs by Kim Baldwin & Xenia Alexiou
- Swish by Joel Derfner
- Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham
In between readings, our helpful hosts will help you win prizes as you Test Your Gaydar and find the answer to the all-important question in our How Gay are You? Quiz.
In addition, Happy 4 U, the annual Pride exhibition at the ABC Treehouse (Voetboogstraat 11, just across the square), will stay open to visitors until 9pm.
6:30PM: Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What ended Up Happening Instead, by Joel Derfner Read by Joost van Oosterhout
Joel Derfner is gayer than you. Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him-he’ll tell you himself). Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers-gay, straight, and in between.
7:00PM Lethal Affairs, by Kim Baldwin & Xenia Alexiou Read by Claartje van Swaaij
An anonymous entity sends journalist Hayley Ward an assassination videotape in an effort to bring down a covert group called the Elite Operatives Organization. When the operative on the tape, agent Domino, is sent to retrieve it, she is caught up in a web of political intrigue that tests her courage, ingenuity, and considerable skills. In this scene, Domino recalls one of her more challenging assignments.
7:30PM Flesh and Blood, by Michael Cunningham Read by Jan Doense
In Flesh and Blood, Michael Cunningham takes us on a masterful journey through four generations of the Stassos family as he examines the dynamics of a family struggling to “come of age” in the 20th century.
In 1950, Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant laborer, marries Mary Cuccio, an Italian-American girl, and together they produce three children: Susan, an ambitious beauty, Billy, a brilliant homosexual, and Zoe, a wild child. With the power of a Greek tragedy, the story builds to a heartbreaking crescendo, allowing a glimpse into contemporary life which will echo in one’s heart for years to come.
8:00PM A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster Read by Annemiek Lelyveld
Visiting Italy with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, Lucy Honeychurch meets the unconventional lower-class Mr. Emerson and his son, George. Upon her return to England she becomes engaged to the supercilious Cecil Vyse, but finds herself increasingly torn between the expectations of the world in which she moves and the passionate yearnings of her heart. As Forster writes, “You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.” More than a love story, A Room With a View is a perceptive examination of class structure and a penetrating social comedy.
Theaterworks Amsterdam develops and produces new work and ‘renewed’ classics that challenge us to look beyond individual experiences to the commonalities we all share. Celebrating the international character of the artists and audiences in the modern Netherlands, Theaterworks aims to produce theater without borders, whether those borders are in our hearts, or on the stage.
The American Book Center has been loud, proud, and celebrating literary diversity since its opening in 1972, and in 1978 opened the first gay bookstore in The Netherlands: Wilde. Wilde became the core of our gay literature and magazine sections when it moved home to our shelves, and today our gay and lesbian writers not only have dedicated shelves of their own, but you’ll find current and classic pink authors proudly integrated into all of our sections.
Tags: ABC Events, Gay & Lesbian, Gay Pride, gay Pride Literaire Route, gay Pride Literary Route
We had 4 posters with silhouettes hung around the store. Each poster had 4 or 5 bits of trivia and quotes on them, and the game was to figure out which of the 4 was straight. And extra credit went to whoever managed to guess who the men were. Most people got most of them right, amazingly enough! I’ll ask Sigrid for the files and post them.
@Sophie: Lol. I’ll let Hayley explain this one.
Gay silhouettes? How does that work? I don’t want to get my overactive imagination started by thinking about that too much.
It was a fun evening. Though I had a hard time recognizing the gay silhouettes. Guess my gaydar is pretty off these days