Michael Sullivan
Patrons browse through stacks of socialist literature in the Everyday Gay Holiday, a popup space that ended May 27.
Standing up on the catwalk mezzanine surrounded by rows of meticulously catalogued books, Oliver Baez Bendorf looks out over the space he’s poured his heart into for the past eight months. Downstairs, guests are browsing through tables stacked with books on socialist political theory and radical activism while a playlist of upbeat dance music plays from a stereo somewhere in the back room.
It’s the last time people will gather like this at Everyday Gay Holiday, the collaborative creative space on Atwood Avenue. Perhaps you’ve noticed it — it’s the storefront next to the Barrymore, a converted architecture office, with windows that have been filled with rotating displays of paintings, installations and protest signs. Since September, the space has been a home base for a group of seven artists and writers, all from the LGBTQ community, and has served as an event space, with film screenings, art openings, book and poetry readings and social justice-focused fundraisers. The final event, held May 26 and 27, was a pop-up radical book sale supporting Madison’s chapter of the International Socialist Organization.
It’s a bittersweet moment for Bendorf and his partner, Kim Charles Kay, who co-launched the space. “It happened somewhat organically,” Bendorf says of the collective’s formation. Now, its dissolution is happening organically as well, as Bendorf and Kay prepare for a move to Michigan, where Bendorf has a teaching position waiting. The other members — a photographer, a fiction writer, a comics artist and a performance artist — are dispersing, although there’s talk of rebooting a new version of the space elsewhere.
“We always knew going into it that it was going to be fleeting,” says Bendorf, who this spring completed a poetry fellowship at UW-Madison. “I definitely have mixed feelings about packing it up — there were so many dreams and good-vibe feelings here.”
While many of Madison’s artist studios and DIY creative spaces are tucked away in industrial buildings and inside people’s homes, EDGH occupies a prominent storefront in an up-and-coming commercial district, and its queer/trans-centered mission is noteworthy. But Kay, an interdisciplinary artist originally from Washington, insists what the collective is doing is not unusual — it’s just the result of outside-the-box thinking and motivated creators who share a similar vision.
“The last year has been a good reminder of the deep, deep need and importance of cultivating intergenerational queer spaces,” Kay says. “As you get older, there’s an isolation.” Her most recent project, a series of gravestone rubbings, covers the walls of the studio with messages from the dead.
“There’s this idea that the work of a poet has to be done in solitude,” says Bendorf, who finished a manuscript during the eight months the studio was running. “But there’s so much about it that can bring people together.”
Reflecting on the space — and the community it brought together — reminds Bendorf of a poem by Jack Gilbert. It was written about the end of a marriage, he says, but it captures some of what he’s feeling as he puts the studio to rest. He finds the volume and begins to read: “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last … I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
Everyday Gay Holiday: 2088 Atwood Ave.
Resident artists: Oliver Baez Bendorf, Kim Charles Kay, KC Councilor, Katie Barry, Tia Clark, Sylvia Johnson, Finn Enke
Disciplines: Visual art, poetry, comics, photography, fiction
Instagram: instagram.com/everydaygayholiday
Dates: Sept. 2017 - May 2018
See more of Michael Sullivan's photos from Everyday Gay Holiday at his website.
