Live Art at Bill’s (LA@Bs) has been a regular part of the gallery’s curatorial program since opening in 2020. Arning is a product of museum thinking and culture in which hosting other art forms creates otherwise unforeseeable new meanings and serves the exhibiting visual artists desire to reach outside of the indoctrinated contemporary audience.
Upcoming events
Reading
Don Shewey Reads from Daddy-Lover-God
Sunday, September 7 at 5PM
DADDY LOVER GOD---A SACRED INTIMATE JOURNEY
What is sexual healing, besides being the name of Marvin Gaye’s last great record?
The goal of sacred intimacy is to facilitate self-knowledge through erotic pleasure. Sacred intimates approach sexuality with the understanding that it's related to spirituality. They help people identify, embrace, and practice desire as holy, to see sexual embodiment as an expression of the soul. They hold the body as sacred and view erotic energy as a crucial component of human life and spiritual health. Their primary intention is that of healing -- not just addressing the wounds to the spirit and the flesh caused by sexual abuse, addiction, or disease but also acknowledging that the fun and the pleasure, the vitality and the divine mystery of sex have nourishing properties in and of themselves.
Inspired by the visionary teachings of Joseph Kramer and the Body Electric School, Don Shewey shares his,journey of building a sacred intimate practice and cultivating the capacity to treat each client as a combination of Daddy, lover, and God. This unvarnished account of his unfolding discoveries will be both illuminating and validating to past, present, and future practitioners, to seekers of sexual healing, or simply to sentient beings with an interest in the varieties of human sexual experience.
“At once a deeply moving memoir and vivid instruction manual, Daddy Lover God reveals in startlingly honest and lucid prose what it means to answer the call to become a sexual healer. Whether his practice is called massage or sex work or sacred intimacy, for Don Shewey his vocation is never less than holy; his keen storytelling never less than gripping. He is a man on a mission to foster erotic abundance and pleasure in a world sorely in need of this tender medicine.”--Martin Moran (The Tricky Part, All the Rage)
“This is a memoir about one man’s journey from fear and ignorance to a full flowering of gay sexuality. After a successful career as an editor and journalist, Don Shewey was trained as a masseur who understands the link between the erotic and the divine. Citing many case histories, he explores the wounded psyches of his clients and his own spiritual and physical hesitations.”
--Edmund White (A Boy’s Own Story, States of Desire)
"Daddy Lover God is an intimate portrait of intimacy (physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual) that examines sex work through the lens of healing and sacred calling. Like sex itself, it is revealing, funny, sensual, sad, challenging, and beautiful, all at different times.”
--Hugh Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer)
“Daddy Lover God takes Don Shewey through a labyrinth of self-discovery. Donning and shedding the avatars of altar boy, erotic masseur, sex worker, psychotherapist, ‘good’ Roman Catholic, and pagan healer, Shewey imparts the explicit details of this circuitous true-life pilgrimage with clear-eyed honesty, wit, and devotion.
--Ishmael Houston-Jones (Fat and Other Stories: some writing about sex).
Don Shewey is a writer, therapist, and pleasure activist in New York City. As journalist and critic, he has published three books about theater and hundreds of articles for the New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and other publications. He has chronicled his psycho-sexual-spiritual adventures in The Paradox of Porn: Notes on Gay Male Sexual Cultureand in essays for numerous anthologies, including The Politics of Manhood and The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater. His most recent book is Daddy Lover God: a sacred intimate journey. He maintains an active Substack called “Another Eye Opens.” An archive of his writing is available online at donshewey.com.
Don Shewey
Past events
Reading
Willa Cather: Uncloseted, Unforgotten
Sunday, August 31 at 5PM
Join us for a reading of Willa Cather’s groundbreaking short story A Wagner Matinée (1904), in which a Nebraska woman’s return to Boston stirs long-buried memories of art, beauty, and the life she gave up. When first published, the story startled readers by upending the popular image of the American West: instead of celebrating expansion and opportunity, Cather portrayed the prairie as a place of cultural deprivation and quiet emotional erosion.
Performed by Stephen Lang
Curated by Peter Cipkowski
Stephen Lang is an American stage and screen actor. He gained fame for his role as main antagonist Colonel Miles Quartitch in Avatar (2009), or role he reprised in the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). Lang is also known for roles in films such as Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), Gettysburgand Tombstone (both 1993), Gods and Generals (2003), Public Enemies, The Men Who Stare at Goats (both 2009) Conan the Barbarian (2011), Don’t Breathe (2016) and its sequel Don’t Breathe 2 (2021). His television roles include Commander Nathaniel Taylor on Terra Nova (2011), Waldo on Into the Badlands (2015-18) and David Cord on The Good Fight (2021). Besides his film roles, Lang has had an extensive career on Broadway.
Peter Cipkowski is a literary and political historian at UCLA and the incoming president of the Board of Governors of the National Willa Cather Center. He has led programs across the country commemorating the sesquicentennial of Cather’s birth, with lectures and readings at the Boston Athenaeum, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Library of Congress, the New York Society Library, UCLA, USC, and countless public libraries nationwide.
Willa Cather (1873–1947) was one of the most distinctive and enduring queer voices in 20th-century American literature. A peer of Wharton, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, Cather chartered her own path through determination, struggle, and artistic vision. Her groundbreaking novels—including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, One of Ours, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop—helped shape the American canon and continue to resonate today.
Willa Cather
Stephen Lack
Reading
Roddy Bottum reads from his upcoming memoir The Royal We
Sunday, August 24 at 5PM
About The Royal We
THE ROYAL WE is a poetic survey of a time set in a magical city that once was and is no more. It is a memoir written by Roddy Bottum, a musician and artist, that documents through prose his coming of age and out of the closet in 1980s San Francisco, a charged era of bicycle messengers, punk rock, street witches, wheatgrass, and rebellion. The book follows his travels from Los Angeles, growing up gay with no role models, to San Francisco, where he formed Faith No More and went on to tour the world relentlessly, surviving heroin addiction and the plight of AIDS, to become a queer icon.
The book is an elevated wallop of tongue and insight, much more than a tell-all. There are personal tales of historical pinnacles like Kurt and Courtney, Guns N’ Roses, and recaps of gold records and arena rock—but it’s the testimonies of tragedy and addiction and preposterous life-spins that make this work so unique and intriguing. Bottum writes about his dark and harrowing past in a clear-eyed voice that is utterly devoid of self-pity, and his emboldened and confident pronouncements of achievement and unorthodox heroism flow in an unstoppable train that’s both captivating and inspirational.
A remarkable portrayal of a creative individual in emergence, a gay man figuring out how to be a gay man, and a detailed look at the nuance of 1980s pre–tech boom San Francisco, The Royal We will be greatly appreciated by people who loved Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Hua Hsu’s Stay True, and other memoirs about the artist’s life.
RODDY BOTTUM is a musician, writer, creator, and actor based in New York City. He started the band Faith No More in San Francisco in the early 1980s and toured the world, selling millions of records. In 1992, he came out of the closet and blew open the spectrum of what being gay in the world of rock music meant. That same year he also formed the critically acclaimed band Imperial Teen, cited as the original pioneers of alternative queer rock. Bottum moved to New York City in 2010 and has performed and created records with CRICKETS, Nastie Band, and MAN ON MAN, a band with his partner, Joey Holman. He is developing his Sasquatch opera project into a musical in New York City, where he continues to live.
Roddy Bottum
Poetry
Hymns & Incantations: A poetry reading by Mark Doty and Marie Howe
Sunday, July 6 at 5PM
Marie Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems, which has just won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry ( W.W. Norton 2024.) which includes poems from her four previous books.
From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State. She is the poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
“Marie Howe's poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”—Stanley Kunitz
Mark Doty’s ten books of poetry include Fire To Fire: New & Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 2008. He has also published five books of nonfiction prose, most recently What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, which NPR called “a celebration of gay manhood, queerness, and the power and elasticity of poetry,"
Mark Doty
Marie Howe
Performance with Music
David Mramor / Enid Ellen
Sunday, July 6 at 5PM
escaping the quotidian-Look at Miss Ohio
Listening to music on my headphones while riding the Citi Bike through the streets of NYC. No helmet I sing out loud. “Are you a dancer?” He asks me with a grin. I have them all fooled. Living out this fantasy with my rag top down. I wanna do right, but not right now.
escaping the quotidian- Look at Miss Ohio is the latest performance by artist David Mramor. Questioning ideas of private vs public, exploring the everyday through the fantasy of the imagination, voice and movement as well as aspects of drag vs the everyday drag will be incorporated evoking different time periods and people within queer history.
Mramor writes original songs under the Enid Ellen guise—a post-gender feminist singer-songwriter. With a background in theater, the artist’s performances include singing, movement, improvisation, and elements of dance, fitness and yoga.
David Mramor
Music
THE SHAKER
Sunday, July 6 at 5PM
THE SHAKER is the punk / folk /ambient noise project of Simi Stone, Philip Marshall & Nick Flynn— it shouldn’t work, but it does.
Theater
Austin Jennings A Gay Masseur’s Guide To Happy Endings
Sunday, June 22 at 5PM
A Gay Masseur’s Guide to Happy Endings is a biting, darkly funny, and unapologetically raw solo show from actor and comedian Austin Jennings Boykin (FX, HBO, CBS, Amazon). Based on his real-life experiences as a gay masseur, Austin invites audiences into a world that’s equal parts erotic, eccentric, and emotionally exposed.
A Gay Masseur’s Guide to Happy Endings is a darkly funny, biting, deeply personal solo show from actor/comedian Austin Jennings Boykin, that explores the intimate (and often ridiculous) world of gay massage. Based on true events, the piece blends memoir, stand-up, and monologue-driven theater to unpack how we navigate desire, boundaries, capitalism, and connection.
