• Gary in Your Pocket by Gary Fisher

• Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

• Various Works of Writing by Kathy Acker

• Various Works of Photography by Yukio Mishima

• Various Works of Music by Julian Eastman

Kathy Acker was an influential postmodernist writer and performance artist, whose many books include Blood and Guts in High School; Don Quixote; Literal Madness; Empire of the Senseless; In Memoriam to Identity; My Mother: Demonology; Pussy, King of the Pirates; Portrait of an Eye; and Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and the Burning Bombing of America. (Grove Atlantic Press)

A novelist and critic who taught literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts and Temple University, Samuel R. Delany had won four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award by the time he was 27. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002, by which time he'd also been chosen by the Lambda Literary Report as one of the 50 people who had done the most to change our view of gayness in the last half-century. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula-Award winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova and Dhalgren. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, and his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. All are available as both e-books and paperback editions. Delany is the author of several collections of critical essays. His interview in the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared in spring 2012. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Nicolas Guillén Award for philosophical fiction. His novella The Atheist in the Attic appeared in February 2018. Professor Delany retired from teaching at the end of 2015. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett. (samueldelany.com)

The incandescent African American writer Gary Fisher was completely unpublished when he died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of 32. Gary in Your Pocket, which includes all of Fisher’s stories and a generous selection from his journals, notebooks, and poems, introduces readers to a tender, graphic, extravagant, and unswervingly incisive talent. In Fisher’s writings the razor-sharp rage is equalled only by the enveloping sweetness; the raw eroticism by a dazzling writerly elegance. Evocations of a haunting and mobile childhood are mixed in Fisher’s stories with an X-ray view of the racialized sexual vernaculars of gay San Francisco; while the journals braid together the narratives of sexual exploration and discovery, a joyous and deepening vocation as a writer, a growing intimacy with death, and an engagement with racial problematics that becomes ever more gravely and probingly imaginative. A uniquely intimate, unflinching testimony of the experience of a young, African American gay man in the AIDS emergency, Gary in Your Pocket includes an introduction by Don Belton that describes Fisher’s achievement in the context of other work by Black gay men such as Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill, and a biographical afterword by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. (Duke University Press)

In 2015, Michael Johnson, also known as Tiger Mandingo in the media, was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a homophobic jury for allegedly not disclosing his HIV status to sexual partners. He was recently released 25 years short of his maximum possible prison stint. Johnson was a wrestler and student at Lindenwood University in Missouri. In 2013, he was accused of “recklessly infecting” multiple male partners with the HIV virus. His recent exoneration comes after the revelations that the jury during his trial was stacked with white heterosexuals, many of whom admitted they believed homosexuality was a sin. An appeals court subsequently ruled his original trial was “fundamentally unfair” and tainted with racism, homophobia, and a prosecuting attorney insistent on getting a harsher sentence than many who commit murder receive. The conviction reversal reinforces the claims of activists who have long claimed the United States’ HIV criminalization laws have ignored long-term medical science and fail to actually reduce infection rates. The legal system, according to statistics, also disproportionately punishes Black and brown communities. The American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America have condemned laws criminalizing HIV. Michael Johnson’s case is reportedly having an effect on legislation in Missouri. Currently, House Bill 167 has been proposed and would reduce the punishment for failing to disclose one’s HIV status from a felony to a misdemeanor. It would also take into consideration whether a person was taking medication or used a condom during sex. Johnson hopes that if there’s anything good that can come from his experience, it’s that the state will update its laws so a case like his doesn’t happen again. “Maybe my trial did happen in some way to motivate some change,” he told reporters after exiting the Boonville Correctional Center on Tuesday (July 9). “It’s good I had the support of everyone who wrote me letters. There are times when you get down, and it helps that people knew why I was fighting the system.” (BET)

Yukio Mishima is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, film director, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel. Mishima's work is characterized by its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death. Ideologically a right wing nationalist, Mishima formed the Tatenokai, an unarmed civilian militia, for the avowed purpose of restoring power to the Japanese Emperor. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took the commandant hostage, and attempted to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to overturn Japan's 1947 Constitution. When this was unsuccessful, Mishima committed seppuku. (Wikipedia)