Technically, the UB Gender Institute’s annual Gender Week begins on Monday at 10am with a liberation bake-off in the lobby of the Student Union. But the keynote speaker, activist and writer Sarah Schulman, will read from her new novel, The Child, at Hallwalls the night before. The litany of Schulman’s activist affiliations reaches back to the late 1970s: member of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse; cofounder of the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival; member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power; cofounder of the Lesbian Avengers. As a journalist, playwright and novelist, she documented New York’s legendary downtown arts scene of the 1980s and 1990s; plot elements for Rent were stolen from her 1990 novel, People in Trouble. Schulman finished The Child in 1999 but could not find a publisher until this year. Why? Not because her writing isn’t good; no less a light than Kinky Friedman says that Schulman “writes with a stumbling grace, and she looks at the world from a fragile, refreshingly jaded angle.” Maybe it’s because, in a nation spinning downward (and to the right) into crass, bland commercialism, queer literature has a hard time finding a home. Which is why we need things like Gender Week. Schulman delivers her keynmote address on Monday at 4pm at 120 Clemens Hall. Visit genderbuffalo.org for a complete list of Gender Week events.

Sunday, September 23 at 3pm. Hallwalls Cinema @ the Church,

341 Delaware Avenue (854-1694, hallwalls.org). FREE