Future Perfect

by Andrew Durbin (Editor)

A collection of essays and short stories by past visitors to the itinerant bookstore and public space, NYC's Bureau of General Services-Queer Division.

From their marketing for the book:

Edited by Andrew Durbin and published by Publication Studio, Future Perfect includes contributions from

Penny Arcade
Felix Bernstein
Stephen Boyer
Lonely Christopher
Nicole Eisenman
Bad Grammar
Bruce Hainley
Ed Halter
Juliana Huxtable
Ted Kerr
Kevin Killian
Wayne Koestenbaum
Rachel Levitsky
Trisha Low
Stephen Motika
Eileen Myles
Tim Trace Peterson
Luther Price
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Pamela Sneed
Max Steele
Laurie Weeks

173 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Andrew Durbin is the author of MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020), both from Nightboat Books. In 2018, MacArthur Park was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. His book about Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, The Wonderful World that Almost Was, is forthcoming from FSG and Granta in April 2026. He is the editor of Jacolby Satterwhite’s How lovely is me being as I am (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2021), Kevin Killian’s Fascination: Memoirs (Semiotexte, 2018), and the chapbook series Say bye to reason and hi to everything (Capricious, 2015). His fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. He lives in London and is the editor-in-chief of frieze magazine.

Reviews

[W. Stephen Breedlove · Rating 4 out of 5]

QUEERNESS IN A PENDAFLEX FOLDER

Future Perfect is a collection of writings published in 2014 by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, the bookstore/community space in New York City. The prose, poetry, and art that Andrew Durbin, the editor, includes in this collection do just what he says they will do: “[B]ear down and subvert, revise, romanticize, change, and even annihilate language, thinking and queerness.” Future Perfect is an unassuming, small red paperback with a cover made from a Pendaflex file folder, but the twenty-two writers and artists housed between its covers conjure up worlds that are large in theme and scope. Most of these creative folks are, unsurprisingly, based in New York City.

Ted Kerr’s beautifully written essay, “Luck and the Need for Queer Bookstores,” immediately grabbed my attention. Kerr writes that when he was growing up, he was lucky. Queer books fell in his path and he was smart enough to pick them up and read them. Kerr had one of his first significant sexual experiences with a man who brushed against him in Glad Day Books in Toronto. Kerr writes: “Bookstores are rich with erotic possibility and are crucial in the creation and evolution of city spaces and cultural moments.” He mentions Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, which for many years has been this reader’s refuge and home away from home. According to Kerr, “We need queer bookstores to help us make things happen, now more than ever.” He is so correct.

I loved Penny Arcade’s excerpt from Old Queen. She packs many quotable lines and memorable observations in this piece in which she compares the older gay world of conversation and wit and, yes, revolution, to the “sprawling suburbia called the Gay Community” of today. She writes: “Conversation was the engine of gay liberation, it’s where we discussed ideas. You went to gay bars to dance and to talk and you could do both.” According to Miss Arcade, “What they call the gay community today is just a remnant of the glorious gay world that once was.”

Intriguing and challenging poems by Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and other poets are included in Future Perfect. I particularly enjoyed Felix Bernstein’s witty, queeny poems from Dandyisms by Leopold Brant. Provocative artwork and photography by Nicole Eisenman and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, among others, is interspersed between the prose and poetry.

If Future Perfect crosses your path, consider yourself lucky. Pick it up and read it. You won’t be disappointed.

[Yasemin Smallens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some gems and some duds. Favorites were the pieces by Laurie Weeks, Penny Arcade and Ted Kerr. The Nicole Eisenman illustrations were great and silly as is her nature.