A Night With New York’s Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League
New York City is full of urban legends. There are the alligators that supposedly stalk the sewers. There’s the pirate who’s said to have buried treasure on Liberty Island.
And then there’s the Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League. “I’d heard whispers of this game for so long,” says the photographer Kate Owen, 35.
For a year, she’d wondered where the mysterious tournament was held and who exactly was behind it. Then, on Valentine’s Day, she saw an Instagram post by the queer collective GayJoy calling for “a few more artsy gays to play backgammon” that evening.
At 7:30 that night she optimistically made her way to the third floor of Bortolami, the contemporary art gallery in TriBeCa, where she’d been directed after responding to the post. “I wasn’t sure if this was going to be the game,” she says. “But as soon as I walked in, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.
