The End of the End of the World Literary Café Presents: Benjamin Heim Shephard and Lynn Breedlove

The End of the End of the World Literary Café Presents:
Benjamin Heim Shephard and Lynn Breedlove
Hosted by James Tracy, author of Dispatches Against Displacement (AK Press), Hillbilly Nationalists (Beacon Press) and the forthcoming (with Hilary Moore) No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements (City Lights)

Illuminations on Market Street is a heartbreaking, bitterly funny, and revelatory look back at a time of crisis in San Francisco, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. This roman à clef proves the personal is political. It was written with great insight and punishing honesty by veteran social justice and queer activist Benjamin Heim Shepard. The writer of several nonfiction books about politics and the counterculture, Shepard mined the contents of a personal journal from 30 years ago to create a slightly fictionalized saga of a city under siege and the souls in freefall who populated it.

45 Thought Crimes (Manic D Press) is Lynn Breedlove’s new book about spirituality for skeptics, in the body of the beloved. It’s church at a punk show, a letter to bees, a map in a crisis, a guidebook to histories, to love in a riot. Compassionate table flipping, commitment to the tactile, a swipe at the inevitable. Breedlove is also the author of the novel Godspeed, singer for the bands Tribe 8 / Homobiles / Commando, and writer/performer of Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show. His work won him the 2012 Harvey Milk LGBT Club Award for Activism.