Slam poet Kit Yan.

A queer, transgender Asian American slam poet from Hawaii, Kit Yan performs at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 8, at the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Yan also facilitates a poetry workshop for writers and performers at all levels at 3 p.m. that day in the Mays Center. Sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student organization OUTfront, these events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact eponeman@bates.edu.

Hailed by New York Magazine as “knockout spoken-word,” Yan’s poetry can range from sweet and nostalgic to shockingly raunchy. His anecdotes on heartbreak and love convey his unconventional views on sexuality and identity politics.

Yan’s work has been reviewed in New York Magazine, Bitch, Curve and Hyphen. His poetry has been taught all over the world and he has performed at the San Francisco Pride Celebration, the National Equality March and numerous international poetry slams.

Yan has been commissioned by the Census Bureau and national queer visibility campaigns such as OUTmedia and Campus Pride’s joint “Be Queer Buy Queer” and “Queer It Up” campaigns.

He has toured internationally with Sister Spit, The Tranny Roadshow and Good Asian Drivers, and was featured in the HBO documentary “Asians Aloud.” His work appears in Flickr and Spark and Troubling the Line, two new queer and transgender anthologies.

Based in Brooklyn, Yan spends most of his year traveling the country. His forthcoming book will appear through Trans-Genre Press.

Susanne Salkind '90, managing director of the Human Rights Campaign.

A drag show featuring an acclaimed singer-songwriter, a discussion about LGBT activism including the head of a national civil rights campaign and a film about homophobia in athletics are among public offerings during Pride Week at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ taking place May 4-10.

The student group OUTfront hosts the second annual festival. Events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact Jarron Brady, OUTfront coordinator, at jbrady@bates.edu.

“Through these events, OUTfront hopes to bring awareness to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ campus and increase the recognition of LGBT voices at the school,” says Brady, a first-year student from St. Louis.

“We welcome the participation of LGBT organizations and persons from the local community, and we strongly encourage residents of Lewiston-Auburn to attend.”

Among performers in the May 5 drag show is acoustic singer-songwriter DavEnd, a Maine native and San Francisco resident described as a “tender-hearted, genderqueer, costume-designing, accordion-wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer.”

Related story: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has been named a top LGBT-friendly collegiate athletic program by Campus Pride.

Acclaimed performer DavEnd is featured in a drag show and a drag "werkshop" at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

DavEnd has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand and Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables, both on Olive Juice Music) and for the past five years has toured extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, festivals, colleges, theaters and back yards.

Between tours, DavEnd designs costumes, and most recently has been producing a new musical, designing costumes and dancing in production numbers for songwriter Kimya Dawson and appearing in Taylor Mac’s epic five-hour play, The Lily’s Revenge.

DavEnd’s current project, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!, brings together the worlds of music and radical performance art in a theatrical extravaganza, exploring the effects of heterosexism and street harassment on the development of queer identity.

Here’s the schedule of public events for Pride Week at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½:

• 4 p.m. Friday, May 4: Drag Werkshop with DavEnd. This werkshop will include a history/gender heroes discussion, hands-on make-up tips for any sort of drag transformation, basic costume design tips, safety tips, theory, etc. DavEnd’s approach to drag focuses on body/gender/identity positivity and transformation more than a conventional “impersonation” drag model. Room G21, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).
• 7 p.m. Saturday, May 5: “Lewistunning Dragapalooza,” drag show with student and professional performers including DavEnd. Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College Ave. $10.
• 1 p.m. Sunday, May 6: The panel discussion “Bobcats on the Front Lines: The World of Professional LGBT Activism.” Room 221-222, New Commons Building, 136 Central Ave. Panelists:  Susanne Salkind ’90, managing director for the Washington, D.C.-based , the largest civil rights organization working to achieve equality for LGBT Americans; Ali Vander Zanden ’06, political director for EqualityMaine; Stephen Engel, assistant professor of politics at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½; and moderator Heather Lindkvist, special assistant to the president of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for diversity and inclusion.
• 5 p.m. Tuesday, May 8: “Does HIV Look Like Me?” by Todd Murray, president and founder of , an advocacy organization for people with HIV and AIDS. Murray will address the stigma of HIV, share his story of being diagnosed and answer questions. Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.
• 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 10: , a 2009 documentary that uses the case of former Pennsylvania State University women’s basketball coach Rene Portland to examine homophobia in women’s sports. A panel discussion follows the hourlong film. Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Organized by the student organization OUTfront in collaboration with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Student Government, the rally comes near the end of Coming Out Week events at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. OUTfront is an advocacy organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer and questioning (LGBTIQQ) individuals.

The rally is a response to an incident early in the week in which an unknown party used hostile language to deface OUTfront messaging chalked on college walkways. Approved by the college administration, the original messaging was created to launch Coming Out Week.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ administration was quick to denounce the incident and to re-emphasize its commitment to maintaining a safe and accepting college community.

“Free expression is essential to our academic community, but defacing another’s presentation with demeaning language and offensive expression is not acceptable,” stated a message to the campus signed by President Nancy Cable; Dean of Students Tedd Goundie; Roland Davis, director of the Office of Intercultural Education; and Heather Lindkvist, special assistant to President Cable for diversity and inclusion.

“This type of incident affects all of us,” the statement said. “All members of our community should feel safe, and all of us can work together to achieve that goal.”

Last week, the college announced a “Safe Space” program in which faculty and staff designate their offices as sanctuaries for LGBTIQQ students, faculty and staff who might need confidential and compassionate support.

On Tuesday, National Coming Out Day, nearly 1,000 students, faculty and staff signed a “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Ally Pledge” committing the signer to help lead the campus community in becoming an even more respectful and welcoming place to all individuals regardless of real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.

The pledge drive was hosted by members of the Student Athlete Advisory Council and the Athletic Department.

The concert features the band Time Travelers; two student a cappella groups, the Crosstones and the Merimanders; and the Dynasty Step Team, a dance ensemble. The event includes a barbecue, face painting, T-shirt decorating and a table with information about organizations and resources for LGBT people and allies. The rain site is the Bunker, the 280 College St. basement. For more information, please contact nrankine@bates.edu.

The festival continues through May 12 with a poetry reading, a drag show, a campus-wide gathering to pledge solidarity and other programming. Except as noted, events are open to the public at no cost. Sponsoring the festival are the offices of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, the dean of students and Intercultural Studies; the women and gender studies program; and the politics department.

For festival information, please contact ddumayas@bates.edu or 808-398-9131.

“My hope is that the festival will promote greater visibility for queer students, faculty and staff, and will also create greater solidarity within the community and allies,” says Don Dumayas, a festival organizer and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior from Honolulu.

A “Pride Poetry Reading” is slated for 1 p.m. Saturday, May 7, at the Ronj, the student-run ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ coffeehouse at 32 Frye St. Students will read poetry expressing themes of pride, solidarity, visibility and diversity. Chai, tea and cookies will be served.

At 7 p.m. that day, the drag show “Lewistunning Dragapalooza” takes place in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St. Organized by Outright L/A with OUTFront, the performance features Miss Eon, Goldie Peacock, Kings of the Hill and others, including ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student performers. Tickets are $10/$5. For more information, please contact Outright L/A at 207-795-8956 or penny.sargent@outrightla.org.

This is the third annual “Lewistunning Dragapalooza” at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Dumayas said. “It’s a great way to bring together not only OUTfront and Outright L/A but also students and Maine residents. Drag shows are fun because they’re so campy and entertaining.”

A “Queer and Allies Dinner” will be held at 5 p.m. Monday, May 9, in Frye Street Union, 29 Frye St.

Ryan Conrad, a member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ class of 2005, leads the discussion “Against Equality” at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 10, in Room G21, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). Conrad will analyze from a queer perspective the rights-based discourse used by the national campaigns for gay marriage.

He examines how this mobilization collapses the queer political imagination into the narrow confines of contemporary gay pragmatism as espoused by gay and lesbian neoconservatives and so-called progressives alike. For more information, please contact rconrad@meca.edu.

The Pride Festival wraps up with an “Athlete Ally” event that will bring together the campus community, including student-athletes and coaches, at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 12, on the Library Quad behind Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ athletic department co-sponsors this event. For more information, please contact director of athletics Kevin McHugh at kmchugh@bates.edu.

Offering the opening address is Hudson Taylor, a former wrestler at the University of Maryland and now an assistant coach at Columbia University, who began an Athlete Allies initiative centered around athletes signing a pledge to respect and value individual differences both on and off the field. The event will include a panel discussion on the theme “Respect for All Individuals,” a group pledge signing and a barbecue for participants.

Samantha Hunt, who wrote a novel about the inventor Nikola Tesla, and Two Kinds of Decay author Sarah Manguso are among the writers reading from and discussing their work in a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College literary series during March.

• Monday, March 16 at 4:15 p.m.
• Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave

Sarah Manguso, author of the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay, reads from her prose at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College’s Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public at no cost. Manguso, whose memoir describes her affliction, as a college student, with a debilitating auto-immune disease (now in remission), appears as part of the yearlong Language Arts Live series at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Presenting nationally renowned writers, the series is sponsored by the English department, the programs in environmental studies and Asian studies, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Humanities Fund, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ OUTfront and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund.

“Contrary to the usual cliché, illness did not make Manguso a better person,” a Boston Globe reviewer wrote of The Two Kinds of Decay (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). “It made her a more thoughtful, self-aware person. In simple, unsentimental language, she describes her initial symptoms, her sudden attacks, her treatments, her suicidal depression, and her progress as a patient and, incidentally, as a person.”

Manguso’s other books include the short-story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s, 2007), and the poetry collections “Siste Viator” (Four Way Books, 2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James Books, 2002). Her writings and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The New Republic and The Boston Review. She received a Pushcart Prize and the Rome Prize in Literature for 2007-08.

Manguso’s profile as a poet is distinctive because “her primary artistic medium is prose poetry, a form that simultaneously departs from conventional discourses of the lyric and subverts our expectations of narrative prose,” explains Eden Osucha, an associate professor of English at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and one of the three organizers of the Language Arts Live series.

The others are Jonathan Skinner, assistant professor of environmental studies, and Rob Farnsworth, visiting professor of English.

The series is designed “to generate excitement about literature as both a living and a ‘live’ art form,” Osucha explains. It’s also intended to support literary creation as a community practice at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, “and to work toward creating a culture around those ideals — a culture of readings, of conversation, of inspiration, excitement and wonder.”

She adds, “We want to bring artists that connect the diverse interests and backgrounds of staff, faculty and students, and connect with the rich and varied poetics and literary traditions of the broader Maine community.”

Manguso has served as a learning associate at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ during the week of March 16, offering a poetry master class and visiting an English seminar to talk about The Two Kinds of Decay in addition to the public reading.

In 2009’s first installment in the Language Arts Live series at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, novelist Magdalena Zurawski and poet CAConrad will read from and discuss their works at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Avenue.

Sponsored by the college’s environmental studies program, English department, the student organization OUTfront, and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund, this event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6326.

The nationally acclaimed Zurawski is won the 2006 Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Prize for Innovative Fiction for her first novel, The Bruise (Fiction Collective 2, 2008). An exercise in voice and sensation, The Bruise follows a young woman, M—, who deals with the repercussions of an encounter with an angel, real or imagined, that leaves a permanent bruise on her forehead.

Zurawski’s previous work has been published in various magazines, including American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets and Talisman. She is a doctoral candidate in the English department of Duke University.

CAConrad’s most recent book of poetry, advanced ELVIS course, will be available in June 2009 from Soft Skull Press. In it, CAConrad explores his love for the King through vignettes and prose poetry. Barbara O’Dair, editor of Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, describes the collection as, “a set of deadpan, dreamy prose poems work like odd footnotes and musing afterthoughts to a trip to Memphis’s Graceland.”

In 2006, Publisher’s Weekly said that “though he invokes celebrities and poetic mentors from Robert Creeley to Kevin Killian to Courtney Love, the best analogy for the Philadelphia-based Conrad is Allen Ginsberg, who also shocked America with his frankness, denounced hypocrisy in prose poems and in verse declamation, and who also hoped to embody the queer life of his times.”

CAConrad’s poetic roots stem from the heart of Philadelphia, where he grew up as the self-described son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is also the author of The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009), which won the Gil Ott Book Award.

The singers who describe themselves as “America’s favorite dragapella beautyshop quartet” perform at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 17, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell Street. Sponsored by OUTfront, a campus advocacy and support group for issues of gender and sexuality, the concert is free and open to the public.

The four members of the Kinsey Sicks met as recreational musicians who ultimately left careers in other fields to pursue this venture. “Their first performance, if you could call it that, was on the corner of Market and Castro streets seven years ago, when friends and passersby tossed $37 in a hat,” The New York Times wrote last August. “Soon there were nationwide appearances, two CDs and rave reviews in publications as varied as The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, Billboard and Poz magazine.”

The members of the Kinsey Sicks are Ben Schatz, Maurice Kelly, Chris Dilley and Irwin Keller. They constitute one of the few drag ensembles who actually sing, rather than lip-synching. Their repertoire includes satirical takes on hits by Celine Dionne, Bobby McFerrin, Bette Midler and the Dixie Cups.

Their appearance — which the group terms “fright-wig garish glamour” — is as remarkable as their music. The foursome comes to Maine fresh from smash dates in Provincetown and the new cabaret space at New York’s Studio 54.

For more information about the performance, please call 207-786-6135.

The conference explores diversity in race, religion and sexuality. Presenters include Betsy Sweet, coordinator of curriculum development and training at the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence at the University of Southern Maine. Sweet makes the keynote speech at 10 a.m. March 2 in the Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall.

The conference also includes panels with faculty from the three colleges, as well as presentations and performances by students and residents from the colleges’ host communities.

“The conference began last year when a group of Colby students thought that a dialogue about diversity needed to be sustained among the three campuses,” says Katie Burke, a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ junior from Canton, Mass. “This year, we wanted an approach that included not only our campuses but the communities in which we live, and that looked more at ourselves and the world around us than at diversity as an object or some intangible idea.”

Among conference topics are Somali culture in Lewiston, sexuality on campus, the impact of college on students’ religious beliefs, race relations in schools, town-gown relations, and the effects of Sept. 11 on people of Muslim belief or Middle Eastern background.

The conference begins Friday evening with a drag show produced by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ advocacy group OUTfront at 7:30 p.m. in Chase Hall Lounge. Sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ literary journal SEED, the show will be followed by a gathering for poems and songs at 9 p.m. at the Ronj coffeehouse, 32 Frye St. Saturday’s activities begin with a reception in Perry Atrium at 9 a.m. and conclude with open-mic performances at the Ronj from 7 to 10 p.m.