Henry Gerber by Jeremy Sorese
October 17 through November 1, 2020
Distributed for free throughout Governors Island,
And online after the jump
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE UNABRIDGED, ONLINE VERSION OF JEREMY SORESE'S HENRY GERBER, LAUNCHED NOVEMBER 10, 2020!
From Saturday, October 17 through Saturday, November 1, you can pick up a free copy of current Shandaken: Governors Island resident Jeremy Sorese's Henry Gerber at information booths throughout Governors Island. At 1pm on Saturday, October 17 Sorese will give a brief introduction to the project at Building 6B in Nolan Park.
This broadsheet, developed as part biographical essay and part personal narrative, aims to weave together the life of Henry Gerber, the founder of the first gay rights organization in the United States, with that of the artist. Sorese attempts to fill in the gaps of Gerber’s history, including the time he lived on Governors Island while working for the Army. In honoring the life of someone he cannot fully grasp, Sorese also dissects his own: his personal biases as a gay man, the fear of losing one’s livelihood due to unforeseen circumstances, the struggle to comprehend how short and fraught lives are. Printed as a broadsheet not dissimilar from Gerber’s own short-lived newsletter Friendship and Freedom, of which no copies still exist, Henry Gerber is Sorese's tribute to a figure otherwise lost to history—and a hope that someone may, one day, do the same for him.
Jeremy Sorese is an artist who paints, draws short-form comics, long-form queer science fiction, and illustrated autobiographical prose based in Brooklyn, NY. His first book, Curveball, was published with Nobrow in 2015 and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. From 2012–2013, he lived and worked as a resident at La Maison des Auteurs, a comics-specific residency program in Angoulême, France. His second book, For The Short While, will be published with Archaia in 2021. He is currently a professor at Parsons School of Design and a Shandaken: Governors Island resident for 2019–2020.