Bodycount: The New Lesbian Pulp Salon

All persuasions welcome.

Only at BOYFRIEND co-op during Lesbian Visibility Week 2025.

When the going gets tough, lesbian pulp fiction gets going! Meet some of the queer Feminist Press authors reviving this risqué literary tradition in these risky times — and learn to write your own!

Facilitated by editors Sarah Fonseca & Octavia Saenz.

Featuring readings, discussions, and lit activities with: Grace Byron, Trae Higgs, and Nadine Santoro.

Plus: Special guests!

PARTICIPANT BIOS

GRACE BYRON is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Vogue, Bookforum, and other outlets. Her debut novel, Herculine, is forthcoming from Saga Press. Find her @emotrophywife.

SARAH FONSECA is a writer and editor based in New York City who has dispatched from Cannes, New York Film Festival, and Sundance. With one eye on queer cinema history and the other on its future potential, Sarah contributed a volume of interviews, reviews, and critical essays to LGBT and mainstream film publications, including Condé Nast’s them, The Advocate, Film Comment, and Museum of the Moving Image’s Reverse Shot. She has also published short fictionwith Evergreen Review, Bosie Magazine, Cleis Press, and Math. Currently, Sarah is pursuing graduate studies in history at The City College of New York.

TRAE HIGGS is a loud girl, queer writer, legal professional, event producer and community organizer. Originally from South Florida, she has written pieces on black womanhood, politics, queerness pieces on personal life experiences. Trae started her non-profit organization Blk Book Swap in 2020. She’s currently the Events and Programming Manager at a dyke bar and has lived in Brooklyn, NY for over a decade.

OCTAVIA SAENZ (she/they) is an editor and cartoonist based in El Paso, TX. She creates speculative fiction and visual narratives about queer life and temporality. Octavia grew up in Puerto Rico and has a BFA in Creative Writing and Illustrationfrom Ringling College, as well as a Lambda Fellowship. Find her on Twitter and

Instagram: @shrimpwonder.

NADINE SANTORO is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator. She is the Publicity Director at Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press and the curator and host of Patchwork Literary Salon, a monthly reading series. She also co-hosts the podcast Thinking Straight, a lesbian anthropological dig into the world of heterosexual romance novels. She lives in Brooklyn with her fiancée and their two senior dogs, Knives and Young Neil.

ABOUT BOYFRIEND CO-OP

BOYFRIEND took shape March 2022, when a couple best friends decided to make their dream of forming a lesbian co-op into a reality. Located in Bushwick, the space caters to the queer community and cares for the workers that build it. BOYFRIEND boasts accessible pricing, friendly vibes, fairly compensated bartenders/baristas, yummy drinks, and cutesy décor. It is casual but cute, friendly but sexy. It celebrates racial, sexual, and gender diversity in a comfortable and colorful setting. Learn more about BOYFRIEND’s vibes and values at boyfriend.coop.

ABOUT THE FEMINIST PRESS

The New Lesbian Pulp’s publisher was founded in 1970, The Feminist Press began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. The Feminist Press publishes feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. The publisher has become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. Learn more at feministpress.org.