Institute History
Description
How does a youngster from a Jewish home in suburbia become a gay activist in the East Village? Someone Else from Queens Is Queer is a potent and thought-provoking love story about activism, relationships, and death in the age of AIDS. Elovich tells the tale of Felix the Kat, a human cannonball shot out of Queens, and Gordie Benjamin, a stand-up “spritzer” who theorizes about everything from the outlaw queerness of William S. Burroughs to assimilation in the Munsters and the Addams Family, from heroin to Jewish law. As in any drama drawn from contemporary gay life, death is more than a bit player. Gordie learns he is HIV-positive and takes various treatments, but keeps going “on way too much coffee and self-denial.”
Elovich is a dynamic storyteller and this work, both comic and searing, is a composite of many stories and speeches shared with friends, yet it is neither strictly autobiography nor fiction. As a writer/performer, Elovich has garnered international attention and was honored with a Bessie, the New York Dance and Performance Award, in 1991. Someone Else from Queens Is Queer has been performed at P.S. 122 in New York and toured throughout the United States. Artforum said, “Sitting through Someone Else from Queens Is Queer is like having one’s emotions gathered up and fired into a pinball machine.” In November, the Sundance Screenplay Reading Series in New York premiered Spooky, Elovich’s feature-film adaptation of Someone Else from Queens Is Queer, which he began work on as a participant in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab