Today’s Daily is edited by writer Isabel Waidner (We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff, Gaudy Bauble) and artist Richard Porter (Pilot Press), who together programme the ICA’s ongoing reading series Queers Read This. I sorely miss everything about these evenings – a regular feature of ICA’s Live programme since 2018 – and we’re hugely grateful for their continued collaboration.

During this time of solitude and mass death I have found comfort in watching highlights from performance artist David Hoyle’s illustrious stage and television career, many of which are available on YouTube. Targets of Hoyle’s acerbic wit and rallying monologues have included the ‘suicide cult’ of apolitical, consumerist gay men that emerged following the AIDS crisis, the tyranny of a publicly-funded Royal Family and in a 1990s TV sketch for Channel 4, the prophetic comparison of a construction site in pre-gentrified London to a huge mass grave.

This Book Work’s video commission features the first reading from my third novel, forthcoming with Peninsula Press in 2021. The novel is a book-length engagement with absurdity, precarity and inequality which may resonate with what some of us have been experiencing during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis.

Along with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Tai Shani, Harry Burgess, Rich and myself, Sophia Al-Maria is a reader at Queers Read This (5), originally scheduled in April, now postponed until ICA’s reopening. Al-Maria’s recent writing, particularly the three blogs she posted as Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery in 2018, are among the most interesting interdisciplinary texts I’ve read and they’ve been shaping my own writing during lockdown!

This 80-page special section of Oakland-based Tripwire Journal, celebrates poet, novelist, playwright, biographer and Top-100 Amazon reviewer Kevin Killian’s commitment to what editor David Buuck calls the ‘community-building, nonprofessional ethos’ and ‘slapdash aesthetic bravado’ of a singular brand of poets theatre. Contributions by Maxe Crandall, Eileen Myles and others.

This magical human and Queers Read This alumnus has started a blog of his writing. Timothy’s voice has been a light on the horizon during many dark moments in my life and with the ongoing brutality of the world I wonder if his voice might help others too. I also recommend his extraordinarily beautiful In Skyscraper Dawn (The Winter Olympics), the haunting A Very Short Introduction to Ghosts (Face Press) and his contributions to several of the queer anthologies published by Pilot Press.

This personal essay about Scottish-Nigerian writer Shola von Reinhold is published by 3:AM. Shola’s novel LOTE (Jacaranda Books, 2020) recruits literary innovation into the project of examining queerness, Blackness, class and archival absences like no other. Read about it, and see Shola in their signature lace veil which everyone who attended Queers Read This (4) will remember, evidenced here in several photos.

If you’re queer and in quarantine and have not yet listened to this podcast, what have you even been doing? BGP is about evil and complicated queers in history that is beautifully hosted by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Previously tackled subjects include convicted serial-killer Aileen Wuornos, commercial nightmare Andy Warhol and Morrissey.

Sign up to this Glasgow-based poet’s weekly newsletter on ‘contemporary(ish) poetry(ish)’. So far, we had critical writings on Nuar Alsadir and Hello Kitty, Hoa Nguyen and fucking up, and Nat Raha and perversion.

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